Batrock

I was quite excited for In Bruges. I quite liked its outcome. Having seen it, though, I’m wondering how it’s going to get away with quite so wide a release in Australia: it’s sweary, it’s violent, it’s funny, but it’s also melancholy. It’s about a pair of hitmen, their hot-tempered boss, a drug dealer and a racist dwarf. It’s pretty good!

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I didn’t think that the first Hellboy feature was all that great, but I was excited for Hellboy II – probably because it seemed to Guillermo Del Toro appeared, in all of the promo materials, to have taken a leaf from his Pan’s Labyrinth book. That’s not to say, in the final breakdown, that The Golden Army is anywhere near the level of Pan’s Labyrinth, but it’s a good enough time.

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I think there’s some sort of unwritten rule that says “if you are a serious movie dude, you are not allowed to like Ben Stiller”. Which is fair enough if you consider some of his particularly excruciating catalogue, which I would say is merely one step above Adam Sandler but Adam Sandler had the good sense to stop churning out movies a little while back (possibly because the funding was no longer forthcoming, but that’s neither here nor there).

Thing is, Ben Stiller can sometimes have a rare comedic gift. He can be an oyster, distilling the excrement of the universe into a pearl of a movie, furnishing it with lashings of Robert Downey Jr. being a genius, and generally having a good time. There’s no room for a bad movie in here because it is, generally speaking, too fun: even if you hate Ben Stiller or Jack Black (although why you’d hate Jack Black for any reason other than his role in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, I’ll never know), this is pretty worthwhile! It’s not even stupid funny like Zoolander, which … oh God, is there any point in doing “comparative comedy”? Probably not. I was going to go into a massive detour into Will Ferrell there.

The point of the matter is that Tropic Thunder is a pretty dang funny meta-adventure into the world of film making, the vanity of “serious” actors, and the ruthlessness of studio executives. Some of it is too gross-out for my tastes, and there’s at least two nonsense dance scenes, but it’s ultimately worthwhile.

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The biographical graphic novel has proven, over the last thirty years or so, to be an effective way to tell a life story. Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor are grand, and greatly different accounts of their author’s lives; Art Spiegelman’s Maus blends Spiegelman’s own relationship with his father with his father’s account of World War II – with the twist that everyone is represented as an animal. Name recognition may stretch to two of those three titles, if I’m being optimistic, but I’m pretty sure that most people had never heard of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis before it became a film – and even then, most people still haven’t heard of it.

I don’t have particularly fond memories of American Splendor as a film, possibly because it was not so much personal as it was blazingly meta, but Persepolis benefits from a presumably direct translation into the animated form and, like Frank Miller’s Sin City, is co-directed by Satrapi herself. In black and white, Satrapi captures not just her own childhood, but the spirit of an age: Iran going from one peril to another, and how Europe reacted as outsiders looking in. In a few words, it’s pretty dang good.

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What you have to understand is that the idea of seeing a Pixar movie and then having a director Q&A afterwards – along with legendary sound designer Ben Burtt – is one of my ideas of Heaven. If I thought about it, Heaven would probably be an interconnecting series of cinema screens.
Wall-e, screening on August 25th, with special guests Andrew Stanton and Ben Burtt, reduced the pain of the three month release delay by a large margin. I just feel sorry for the poor saps who have to wait for the September 18 wide release.

Wall-e is a special movie: almost no dialogue, a pervading sense of duty in the face of loneliness, and characters who actually surprise us. It’s like I Am Legend if that movie had remained consistently good and was predominantly a love story. It’s also nice to know that the theme of “last robot on Earth” was a Science-Fiction conceit, rather than a damning indictment of humanity’s commitment to anti-environmentalism. This is not a movie about nature, but about human nature – and also the ways that it manifests in the limited AI of cute, beat up looking robots.

Not really spoilers within, but definite discussion of the “flavours of Wall-e“.

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This image of Rapture is not going to be sourced, for the protection of my mental health.

As I wandered the aisles of a game store yesterday, looking as always for rare or obscure games (to be played, of course, only when any relevance they once held has eroded into the mists of time), I was thinking, as you do, about the nature of the FPS and story driven gameplay. A lot of the games nowadays are FPS, and I was thinking that it must be hard to mess one up, at least on a very basic level: while level design, enemy design and AI, weapon balance are, of course, vital, we can accept that FPS are all basically the same – point and shoot games of varying elaborateness.

The thing is that all of those things that I listed above are what separates each FPS from the others: levels, enemies and weapons are all dependent on theme. If you don’t give an eff about the place that you’re running and gunning through, then why are you going to run and gun? Would Portal have become the hit it was, and apparently the only thing in the universe that channers don’t hate (excepting Ron Paul and green Guy Fawkes masks), were it not for GlaDOS? I posit that it would not. It’s a short game, with a story that is told in a relatively subtle way, with its very sterility a key to its seedy underbelly. Portal is not a great example because it has fundamentally different game play, because it’s more of a First Person Puzzler than it is a First Person Shooter.

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What do you mean, it’s the wrong Condemned?

It’s a sad fact that I have a natural affinity for cheap games. When I saw the PC version of Condemned sitting on a shelf, mocking me with its $5 pricetag, I couldn’t help but snap it up. I think that, falling victim to the siren song of “cheap” games, I may have spent three or four hundred dollars on video games across multiple platforms that week. Am I ever going to play them? I’ve got stuff I bought in 2004 that’s never been out of its packaging, so the jury is out!

The amazing thing about Condemned is that I bought it about seven weeks ago and have already completed it. I judge it: worth the $5 I pay for it. It has the distinction of being the first FPS that I’ve managed to complete with a mouse and keyboard set up. I have the original Half-Life on this computer (not Source) and it’s somehow impossible to play that way. At least now I have learned that it’s a valid control scheme for a game to take on.

As to the game itself? Basically, FBI Agent Ethan “Officer Matt Parkman” Thomas has to investigate a bunch of serial killers – but, mid investigation, some of his comrades get killed with his gun and he’s on the lam! Somehow his lab access isn’t cut off, though, so he teams up with Lab Tech Rosa (Klebb), digitally transfers fingerprints, blood and general DNA to her with technology, and busts all of his cold cases wide open.

There’s not that much to say about it, but it tells a fairly compelling story, has okay melee combat and is entirely too dark. I would like to play an FPS that features its share of brightly lit areas and has more colours in its pallet than brown, grey and black. When I say this, it does not mean that I want to play Perfect Dark Zero, because nothing could be further from the truth: no one in the history of humanity has ever wanted to play that game. Those of us who have would likely testify to having been caught up in a lost wave of brand loyalty to Rareware.

There are reasons to play Condemned: it made me wonder why anyone would play any given FPS over another, and that is something that I will tackle later. All you need to know is that I’m shallow enough that the price tag of a game can render it much better than it would have been at a higher price point – which makes you wonder how people who never pay for games can sleep at night, knowing full well that there are serial killers to be stopped and weird pseudo-mystical BS to tamper with their minds.

“Imagine one thousand!”

Put Angelina Jolie’s stunt arse in something, and you will make hundreds of millions of dollars. Place the gentle Scotsman James McAvoy in a movie as a pathetic and then ultra disgruntled American that you’re supposed to cheer and … I can’t speak for everyone else, but I know I was disturbed by the message of this piece: ultra macho posturing, and a meditation on what it means to be a man.
For those wondering what it means to be a man in today’s workaday world, it’s about bottling your rage and then letting it out in huge destructive bursts; it’s about not being a “pussy” and about “growing a pair”.
And they wonder why I despair of modern masculinity.

Some spoilers for this Godforsaken Hell hole!

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“Don’t need no credit card to ride this train.”

Easily the best thing about Pineapple Express is that the title song is written and performed by Huey Lewis and the News. Now, it’s no “The Power of Love” but it’s pretty good. The rest of the movie? Not so good. That’s not to say that it’s not without its moments, and I have no idea if it would be a better movie for a stoner to enjoy. I’ve never stoned, and I’m guessing that I never will – it just doesn’t interest me in the slightest. This is a stoner action movie from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the same team who wrote Superbad. Among the many good aspects of that film, one that particularly stood out was that it had no reference to marijuana at all – which had always been an important aspect of Rogen’s characters in other Apatow productions.
Pineapple Express is pretty much all of the violence and marijuana that wasn’t in Superbad, although it retains some of the homoeroticism (and adds to it bizarrely: “I want you inside me, Holmes.”), the theme of BFFF, and also involves a man saving another man by carrying him away from a scene of carnage. It basically turns into a stoner version of Hot Fuzz, deliberately styled after bad seventies movies, and isn’t particularly good in itself.

That said, it’s probably going to become some sort of huge cult movie, but not one for me.

Dale (Rogen) is a Process Server who spends his days disguising himself, serving subpoenas, and getting high. He goes to visit his dealer, Saul (James Franco, infinitely better here than in Spider-Man 3), and gets Pineapple Express, a weed so rare that it’s almost a shame to smoke it: “like killing a unicorn”. Joint in hand, Dale goes to deliver a subpoena only to witness a murder committed by Gary Cole and Lady Cop Rosie Perez – problem is Gary Cole recognises the taste of Pineapple Express and track its use down to Saul and, by connection, Dale – who go on the run and … uh, stone, and steal a car, and have a guy shot several times, and general violence ensues.

Pineapple Express has quite a few funny things in it but it’s really an awkward and unwieldy beast. I think a lot of this is quite deliberate, particularly the scenes between Cole and Perez – set in a very seventies style mansion, no less – but it’s not as fun as it should be when it tries to tackle genre (“Asian Commandoes! Check these explosions out!”) and the heart seems much more faked than it ever was in Superbad. The handling of Dale’s relationship with an eighteen year old is pretty good and realistic, and Cole’s henchmen are pretty funny as well … it’s just the movie doesn’t really click: it’s a collection of scenes that service a story but it’s not very easy to care about any of it. It’s certainly better than Drillbit Taylor, but frankly not a lot isn’t.

In many ways, it’s good that Pineapple Express got made. It’s a little smarter than other stoner fare like Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, and it hopefully means that Seth Rogen has got a very important message out to the world: he likes weed, he doesn’t care who knows it – and, dangit, now he can move onto something else.