I haven’t been keeping up very well the past couple of months at mentioning what I’m posting over on Row Three (aside from the crossposting of the DVD Triage and Film on TV posts, which are always posts here and there at the same time), so there’s a good chunk of them here, some of them a wee bit out of date. Sorry about that. But just in case you missed any of these posts over there, here’s some of what I’m been yapping about.

This is a film I saw at Cinefamily back in August almost by accident – it was a Wednesday night so I was volunteering, but they were showing this as part of a Cinespia-co-sponsored series of trippy films instead of their usual Wednesday night silents (in fact, I think the Wednesday night silents may be pretty much dead at this point, except for the monthly Silent Treatment series). I was a bit put out by there not being a silent, and I was planning to leave as soon as the movie started and my volunteering duties were over, but I found out it was directed by Milos Forman, and I’ve liked his other films, so I decided to check it out. So very glad I did, because I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. I’ve been meaning to post this particular scene, of a young hippie showing a bunch of parents how to smoke marijuana.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim since I finished playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion back in, like, 2007. In other words, several years before Skyrim was even announced, I was dying to play this game. And so far, it’s pretty much everything I’d hoped it would be – almost exactly like Oblivion but with a few refinements (many of them pulled from Bethesda’s other major current-gen game, Fallout 3). I’ve been too busy with life to get much further in the game than I when I wrote this, but I’m no less eager to get home every night and try to spend a few hours in Skyrim.

Near the end of October, Cinefamily had a live band called Nilbog (presumably after the town in Troll 2) come in and perform their covers of classic horror scores, from John Carpenter to Bernard Herrmann to John Williams to Goblin, and after hearing them perform the music from Suspiria, I couldn’t get it out of my head and had to write this post about it. Mostly just an intro to the clip, though, which contains the first several minutes of Suspiria and already indicates just how important the Goblin score is to the feel of the film, and to the sound design of it in general.

I read this novel on Kurt’s suggestion, in a chat thread on Row Three about sci-fi novels. I had mentioned really enjoying Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and explained a bit about the plot, which involves a monastic order based on science rather than religion, but still incorporating a lot of elements from church history that I recognized and found fascinating. Kurt said I had to read A Canticle for Liebowitz stat, and he was totally right – this 1959 novel postulates a post-apocalyptic world in which a monastic order is the only thing saving the scientific writings of the twentieth century, and following it through the next several hundred years as the world rebuilds. Fascinating stuff for both sci-fi and history fans.

It’s easy to rail against remakes and despair that Hollywood never has any new ideas, but remakes have been around as long as movies have, and not all of them are bad! Here’s fifteen that are, in fact, not bad at all. They may not all be better than the originals, but I think they all deserve to be seen on their own terms, and they come from throughout Hollywood (and indeed, world cinema) history.

Rewatching Jaws recently reminded me how much I enjoy the quiet moments, the character-driven parts in between the shark attacks. Spielberg is so great on timing in his movies, but also at giving us something to care about and chew on besides the thrills and scares themselves. This scene with the three disparate shark-hunters in the boat drawn together (and to some degree, separated) by their scars is a perfect example of the vibe that Spielberg, Benchley, and the actors create so perfectly, making Jaws far more memorable than most creature features.

This evocative short played at Cinefamily before a Silent Treatment feature several weeks ago, and I was transfixed by it. It’s a very unique kind of animation that uses a box of thousands of pins that you can push in and out to create shapes when a light is shone on it from the side. I can’t imagine how difficult and time consuming creating this must’ve been, but it’s bizarre and gorgeous and creepy.

I told you some of these were really old – obviously we’re back at the beginning of October now, with a list of classic horror films that are light on gore, but heavy on atmospheric creepiness. I love horror films like this, and even though October is done for this year, it’s never too early to plan for next year!

It’s been a busy week or so over at Row Three. We’re trying to get some weekly columns in place, including three I posted in over the past ten days. Rank ‘Em does just what it says, takes an actor or director and ranks them in order of the author’s preference. It often ends up in some surprises, like when I did Milla Jovovich last week and put the much-loved Dazed and Confused almost at the bottom of my list. What can I say, I don’t care for it very much. I ended up with twelve Milla films altogether that I’d seen, including all the Resident Evil films as well as tonier fare like The Claim and Stone.

The Finite Focus series highlights a particular scene, including a clip of it if at all possible and discussing it, sometimes with quite in-depth analysis, other times just to gush about how much we love it. This series has been in place sporadically since long before I joined Row Three, and it’s always one I love. Hopefully setting it every week will encourage me to write more things for it. Goodness knows I have enough scenes I love! This week I chose to do one that’s been on my mind for quite a while – the brief but powerful dinner scene in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, when Joseph Cotten reveals his true inhumanity.

And we’re finally calling the demise of our sister site MorePop, which hasn’t really been active for several months/years, even. But, phoenix-like, MorePop arises as a column on the Row Three main site, where we can talk about pop culture things NOT film-related. The first of those went live this week, as I talk about Portal 2, the game that has eaten my life for the past three weeks. Hopefully lots more awesome stuff to come from all of us in these columns, and that’s not even all we have in store!

The first BioShock game was a revelation of art design and blending philosophical complexity into a game story, and a great gameplay experience as well; I managed to miss BioShock 2 somehow (I think I was super-broke when it came out), but BioShock Infinite is gearing up to be pretty interesting itself. I’m going to have to go back and rent BioShock 2 before it comes out so I can be all caught up – though I’m not sure how much they interrelate. This is clearly a new location and a new main character. Instead of being set in the dark and grim under-sea world of Rapture, we’re in a bright and sunny floating city called Columbia, a sort of moveable World’s Fair. But there’s still a politically-charged story going on, as two factions in the city battle each other, one apparently oligarchic, the other popular, but both singleminded and destructive.

Here are a bunch of the trailers and featurettes released so far. The first teaser from nearly a year ago sets up a dark underwater world like what we’re used to from the previous games, with the first-person main character getting beaten up, but then he’s thrown out a window and it’s immediately obvious we’re not at all in the same world as the first two games. There are tall buildings and zeppelins everywhere, and a strange girl who can seemingly control the elements to keep you from falling. Intrigued? I am.

The next clip was run at E3 this year and focuses on the use of the skyline transportation system for getting around, and provides a carnival-esque feel to the world. I like the design, but I’m not wholly convinced by the skyline, which seems like it just puts a bunch of the game on rails. I could be wrong, though, since it seems everyone at E3 was batshit in love with this trailer, and everyone at E3 was also upset at all the Kinect games because they put action on rails. How is this different? I guess because you can jump off and travel other ways if you want, or fall off and have to grab another rail? It certainly looks way more kinetic (no pun intended) than the Kinect games, and way more fun, but the concept still has me a little wary.

More on the skyline system from the lead developer. I like the backstory, but I’m still not wholly convinced about how they’ll play.

This, on the other hand, was the thing that pushed me over the edge from “I’m not totally convinced about the game in general” to “HELL YEAH.” I admit, I’m a sucker for pop entertainment pulling in esoteric philosophical and scientific elements, and sounds like they’ve done exactly that, and with my current favorite element, the idea of multiple worlds. The girl in the first teaser can manipulate the world because she’s actually tapping into other worlds that are slightly different than ours, effecting a crossover effect that helps you. I think that is awesome. And however the skyline system works out, I think the game will be fun and thought-provoking as well, which is what I want from games.

I‘m starting to get back in the swing of reading other blogs again (I know, I’m a bad blog citizen), and wanted to start sharing some of my favorite things I’m reading – mostly film blogs, naturally, but if I find something in other areas that I think is particularly noteworthy I’ll probably give it a shout-out, too. Like this week, there’s one on gaming that I thought was pretty good. I’m gonna try to get some variety in there, but don’t be surprised if you see some of the same people popping up over and over. What can I say, some people just give good blog. So anyway, go check out these posts and bloggers and leave them some comment love if you like what you see!

Note: Photos and videos I particularly like may show up in my Tumblr rather than here, or at least earlier than here. The newest Tumblr entry is always showing at the bottom of my home page, but the rest is always there, waiting.

A prayer beneath the Tree of Life – Roger Ebert

A post on Roger Ebert’s personal blog rather than a review, this reverie on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life points out the film’s prayer-like attributes and discusses the very personal ways the film touched Ebert, and explores how well the film evokes one’s own memories. I don’t even have memories of growing up in the 1950s, and yet Malick’s film allows me the same “memories,” or similar ones – not as real as Ebert’s, of course, but nonetheless true. This is the power of Malick’s film.

Review: The Tree of Life – Jake at Not Just Movies

A more indepth look at The Tree of Life, and a review that said most of what I think without me having to formulate words (which I’m not sure I can do yet). I find most intriguing the effect that the film is having on non-religious people (which both Ebert and Jake are), because it’s not very different from the effect it had on me, in terms of being able to evoke a deep spirituality and even religiosity without actually having any dogmatic particulars at all. Jake compares it to a wordless piece of music, like Bach’s Mass in B minor, a comparison which makes an awful lot of sense.

Opening Shots: The New World – David Nicol at scanners::blog

From the most recent Malick to the first Malick I personally saw. Jim Emerson has started up (or revived, to be more accurate) a series on his always-excellent scanners::blog analyzing opening scenes of movies, and invited others to submit their own analyses. This one from Dr. David Nicol gets a surprising amount of depth out of the very simple water-reflection shot that opens The New World.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme Seeks to End Language – Landon Palmer at Film School Rejects

With Godard’s latest opus coming out in theatres this month, we’re getting another rash of reviews, both positive and negative. Landon Palmer hits the nail on the head, I think, and in an eminently readable way.

George Stevens’ Giant, in One Scene – The Self-Styled Siren

The Siren provides a close reading on the diner fight scene Giant, which she convincingly argues incapsulates the whole of the film in its treatment of anti-Mexican bigotry and of main character Bick Benedict’s changing attitude toward it that comes to head in this scene. It’s been a long time since I saw Giant, and I wasn’t a huge fan, but this piece definitely makes me want to go give it another look. She also includes the YouTube clip of the scene.

Thumbnail Reviews: Douglas Fairbanks in 1916 – The Mythical Monkey Writes About the Movies

The Mythical Monkey has been going through the 1910s, providing tons of invaluable and well-presented information about the first decade of feature-length filmmaking. This post has short reviews of almost all of the dozen movies Douglas Fairbanks was in during 1916. I consider it a remarkable achievement to even see all these films (it’s also somewhat remarkable that only one is lost), and I’ve definitely added a couple to my list to check out if Cinefamily ever plays them.

Alignment, Allegiance, and Murder – David Bordwell

Bordwell takes a bit of time to introduce concepts of narrative point of view and character identification, which he recasts (following Murray Smith) as alignment and allegiance, then does a close reading with an abundance of screencaps of a scene from Fritz Lang’s House by the River, showing how the audience’s alignment and allegiance are subtly shifted from one character to another throughout the course of one scene, merely by how Lang sets up the shots and blocking. A great example of formalist criticism, showing how important composition is, even though we rarely realize it consciously while watching films.

The Forgotten: Negative Space/Capability/Attitude – David Cairns at Mubi

David watches Von Morgens Bis Mitternacht (From Morn to Midnight), a 1920 German Expressionist film that, judging by the screencaps, is pretty much the most extreme German Expressionist film I’ve ever seen. He also watched it without subtitles, yielding musings on “negative capability,” or the ability to enjoy things without fully understanding them. For that thought and for the glorious screencaps, I share this post.

What Adults Want From Games – Matthew Keast at GamesRadar

As the average age of gamers is now solidly in the mid-30s, I kind of wonder why so many games still seem steeped in immaturity and adolescent fantasies, and so does Matthew Keast. Well, he’s got a bunch of things that he’d like to see more of (or less of) as an adult gamer, and I agree with almost all of them, from better age controls for online play to more games based on story and character instead of violence and titillation. Several commenters on his piece pointed out that they are under 18 (thus not adult according to his criteria for the post) and agree with him, suggesting that the kinds of experiences he’s calling for are desired by even more of the population. Game developers, please listen!

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG. I don’t follow gaming news that closely, so I didn’t even realize they were making an Elder Scrolls V, and then this trailer drops and I’m kind of overwhelmed. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time – I can’t even tell you how much time I spent in that world. Certainly over 150 hours, possibly 200 if you include multiple playthroughs (I only played all the way through once, but I’ve jumped in to play a few hours here or there many times since then). I’m pretty much ecstatic at the thought of getting back into the Elder Scrolls world with a new story. November 11th, must buy.

Wow, how did I miss this when it was posted….two days ago?! (What, that’s like a lifetime on the internet.) Amazing might be a bit of a strong word for so little footage (and likely none of it in-game), but still. I’m just really happy to see it. Mass Effect is probably my favorite video game franchise, certainly my favorite currently being made. Carrying on the story from last year’s fantastic Mass Effect 2, looks like the Reapers are flat-out attacking Earth – and it ain’t pretty. A whole year to wait for this, and I’m already dying to get my hands on it.

I just started up my Gamefly subscription again, which means I’ll be going through a bunch of games in the next several months. I kind of use Gamefly as an extended demo system, trying out whatever looks interesting. If I don’t like a game at all, I send it back immediately; if I like it a lot, I send it back pretty quickly and plan to buy it; if I like it but don’t love it or don’t see myself replaying it a lot or spending a lot of time on it, I keep it until I’ve played as much of it as I want. In the interest of keeping my writing in gear, I’ll try to throw up some informal reactions to games as I play them, whether I play the whole thing or just pop it in and immediately decide it’s not for me.

First up, I threw Resident Evil 5 in my queue, since it’s October and I figured, why not start off with a horror game, plus despite enjoying all the movies I’ve never tried any of the games, so I thought it’d be fun to check them out. (Note: Resident Evil 5 is the only RE game available for the Xbox360, at least that Gamefly had.)

Well, it wasn’t fun. I played basically one level, playing Chris Redfield and accompanying some girl through a banana republic type country, shooting a few zombie mutant things as we went. But the game mechanics, specifically the fact that as soon as you aim your gun you come to a dead halt and cannot move, were so frustrating that any enjoyment I hoped to get out of the game pretty much evaporated completely. Add into that the fact that you have to keep your partner alive (I hate escort missions in any game; hate ‘em) and I opted not to continue any further. There are too many games with mechanics that make sense to waste time on one where I’m frustrated beyond belief every five seconds.

It was nice to see the giant, axe/hammer-wielding mutant that showed up for no reason in Resident Evil: Afterlife in his original environment. I don’t know if they explained his existence or not, though. Finding out wasn’t worth the headache of continuing to play the game.

The ever-gracious Glen Campbell interviewed me for his podcast On Garner Road last week, and as I expected, he centered his questions on film. It was a good conversation, but there were a few things I wanted to clarify/expand because I tend to have difficulty composing my thoughts as well as I’d like when speaking as opposed to writing. So go listen to the episode first, because I’m going to jump right in to the same topics. It’s only about a half hour long.

Thanks so much to Glen for giving me the opportunity to be On Garner Road!

Best Sci-Fi Right Now

I answered this based on sci-fi films, which have become, in mainstream film, anyway, almost fully about sci-fi trappings – that is, action films that happen to be set on other planets or in space or have aliens rather than sci-fi that tackles questions of ethics and the limits of science or the role of technological advancement in society in the way that hard sci-fi does. Most of the time they’re not even particularly innovative in the way they incorporate futuristic elements into their stories. There are exceptions, which was what I was trying to get at with my awkward comments about people like Timur Bekmambetov who made interesting, even visionary films, before they came to Hollywood, and then ended up making much less intriguing things after. Bekmambetov was a weird name for me to come up with, though, because even though I do think there’s a lot to like about the Night Watch series he did in Russia (well, it was supposed to be a trilogy; the third one hasn’t gotten made yet), it’s got a lot of issues. But maybe that’s one of the things I like about sci-fi – it goes places that don’t exist yet or transmogrifies things that do exist into a new context that makes them otherworldly, and that can get messy. That good kind of messiness gets lost in Hollywood.

So to really answer this question, I’d say the best sci-fi in cinema is happening in other countries and in independent film – Mexico’s Sleep Dealer, the UK’s Moon and Monsters, Spain’s Timecrimes, Canada’s Splice, and indies like Primer. Hollywood mainstream is too safe, and sci-fi shouldn’t be safe. I was shocked when they gave Splice a wide release, because it’s a highly transgressive film that goes some very disturbing places. I didn’t love every choice Vincenzo Natali made in it, but I appreciated his bravado in making the choices he did. The elephant in the room talking about current sci-fi films, especially in the context of indie/foreign/Hollywood differences, is District 9, a film from a first-time South African director that straddled the line between indie and mainstream, both in its production and distribution. I can’t speak for sure as to Neill Blomkamp’s original intentions, but the film demonstrates my issue with indie and Hollywood sci-fi quite well. The first half or two thirds of the film is a really intriguing, if rather obvious, sci-fi-based inquiry into apartheid and its faux-documentary style was interesting. I loved that half – it was thoughtful and refreshing and not what you expect from a multiplex film. Then it took a turn both in style and story and turned into a big action movie, and I all but hated that part. It stopped being what it was and lost what made it unique. That’s what seems to happen when Hollywood gets ahold of sci-fi.

Avatar

Somehow we got into a brief Avatar discussion, because Glen asked me what were some recent overrated films, and Avatar was the first thing that sprung to mind. And I do hold to that, but I think I came down a little harsh on people who praised Avatar, which led to the little side note on elitism, which Glen was far too kind about. I get what he was trying to say, and I appreciate that, but I also know that a good portion of the vitriol I’ve hurled towards Avatar over the past year is reactionary and I don’t like being that way. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t think it’s that great a film, but it’s not the worst thing ever made, either, and being derivative of other works isn’t necessarily that bad – I like a lot of films that pull ideas from other films.

The difference for me, and why I rate Avatar lower than pop-culture pastiche films like the ones Tarantino, Rodriguez, Edgar Wright, and others (back to Godard!) make is that Avatar doesn’t seem to be aware of what it’s doing, and is so totally earnest in tone that it turns me off. It plays it so straight while regurgitating every oppressed-people-liberated-by-hero story ever that I can’t tell whether Cameron is really oblivious to how much he’s thieving (it feels like theft rather than homage) or if he’s deliberately suppressing awareness to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes, and I can’t decide which would be worse. I do give Cameron credit for being a good storyteller, though (which is not to be confused with having a good story), because between the gorgeous visuals and the momentum of the plotting, you don’t really notice how thin the basic story here is until you get to the end and start thinking back over it. And that’s the step that most audiences don’t take, which is what I was sort of trying to get at with my comment about audiences being blinded by pretty visuals and not having the background knowledge to see the unoriginality – honestly, it’s fine with me if people want to enjoy their experience at the movies and not mull it over for weeks after. I do that often (hellllllo, Resident Evil series), but a movie being an impressive technical achievement or an engaging experience doesn’t necessarily make it a great film if other elements are mundane and derivative without any self-awareness that makes pastiche fun. And honestly, I prefer Resident Evil‘s campy B-movie fun to Avatar‘s overearnest self-important tone.

Adaptations

I’m not sure I really answered Glen’s question here, which was asking about adapting long-form novels into relatively brief movies, and whether the visual component made up for losing so many words. My general answer about adaptation stands, though, which is that the film adaptations that work are generally the ones where the director has their own vision for the story and brings something new to their interpretation of it. As far as adding visuals goes, of course you can save on a bunch of description when you throw in a visual, but sometimes that can backfire because just showing a landscape isn’t as necessarily as meaningful as the words an author uses to describe it (think how much E.M. Forster gets out of describing the caves in A Passage to India or in contrasting the houses in Howards End, or the feeling you get from Virginia Woolf’s descriptions of Mrs. Dalloway’s London or the way the countryside looked to the characters in The Voyage Out as they were falling in love – it’s really hard to get that subjective sense across in an unmediated image). Any adaptation from novel to film is going to be a reduction of some sort, so the question is how to reduce the novel to its core elements, stripping out subplots and characters that don’t support that core. You’re always going to piss some people off when you do that, so you’ve got to be confident in your vision for what the FILM should be apart from the book. And that’s the real issue – you’ve got to not think “how can I capture everything about this book” so much as “how can I make this the best film possible”. Adaptations can fail by being too faithful to the book just as easily as by deviating from it too much – Kubrick’s The Shining may not be extremely faithful to the King novel, but it’s a damn good movie, while the recent Chronicles of Narnia films are almost stiflingly faithful, with no vision of their own or trust in their own existence apart from the books.

Video Games as Art

Here’s where I have to almost totally recant something I said; even as I was saying that Red Dead Redemption wasn’t art, I was internally crying out, what am I saying?! Here’s the thing. “Art” is a notoriously slippy term, and I tend to prefer to take a broad view of it. The question as phrased, though, led me toward answering it with a narrow view of art. I’m not really interested in getting into an art vs. non-art debate, because I don’t find the distinction to be very useful. The line is too blurry and depends on too many pre-conceptions that are hardly ever articulated, if they even can be articulated. I think you can experience video games as non-art by focusing solely on the mechanics of the gameplay and completing the missions, but you can also experience it as art by focusing on other things – in Red Dead Redemption I found myself getting lost in just riding around delighting in the landscapes and the random encounters I’d have, even if I wasn’t actively engaged in doing something toward game completion – in other words, I wasn’t experiencing it primarily as a GAME, at that point, but as something else, though there were still elements of gameplay that allowed me to experience it at all. This can be turned into an argument that video games are not art for the exact reason that they are only experienced as art at the point when they cease to be experienced as games – I disagree with that argument, but it is fairly compelling in some ways. Similarly, you can experience things that are generally considered art, like paintings or classic novels, as non-art by using them merely as a means to an end. So generally, my feelings about art, at this point in time anyway, is that art is better defined by the way that a work (game, film, novel, painting, music, etc.) is experienced rather than by anything inherent in the work itself. I do think that some works lend themselves better to certain types experiences than others, so that some things are more likely to be considered art by more people than others, but I would try to avoid categorically deciding that one thing is art and another is not.

Side note on the uncanny valley – Amber reminded me that the major source of the uncanny valley effect is the fact that human faces are asymmetrical, and capturing asymmetry believably with a computer algorithm is really difficult. Computer-generated faces tend to be perfectly symmetrical, which subconsciously alerts us that something isn’t right, and it creeps us out. I still think there’s also something with the eyes, though, too. I’ve yet to see computer-generated eyes that don’t look vacant.