March « 2010 « Spectre Collie

Sunday March 28 2010 Movies

How to Launch Your Franchise

I was surprised, but How To Train Your Dragon is a fantastic movie.

How to Train Your Dragon is a story about defying expectations and learning to accept a world in which everything you know turns out to be wrong. Like, for instance, a world in which Vikings and dragons can peacefully coexist. Or a world in which a 3D animated DreamWorks movie is something you’d make a point of seeing in the theaters, even if you don’t have children.

I was surprised to see several ex-coworkers raving about how great the movie was, and even more surprised to see the movie getting such a good reception on Rotten Tomatoes. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so skeptical: it was co-directed and co-written by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, and Lilo & Stitch remains my favorite Disney (non-Pixar) movie. There’s obviously a little bit of Stitch in the design of the titular dragon, and a good bit of Lilo & Stitch in the rest of the movie. It’s definitely a bigger-budget, bigger-scope action-oriented movie, but the heart of it is similar. Start with a personal story, and keep it close and familiar until it builds into something epic.

Plus they pretty much nail the tone. It’s all light enough to feel relevant instead of stuffy or self-important, but not so enamored of its own in-jokes and pop-culture references that it becomes Shrek-ified and dated seconds after you walk out of the theater. They move from the boy-and-his-pet moments to learning-to-become-a-man moments to father-son bonding moments to the obligatory “A Whole New World” flying sequence and on to the epic conclusion, and each moment works without seeming forced or unnatural. Just looking over the list I just wrote, I shudder to think how this script could’ve turned out if they hadn’t gotten the tone exactly right.

The character design is terrific as well. In stills, they look pleasant enough, but kind of generically cartoony — still a lot better than most of the early DreamWorks character design, which looked as if they’d made it different just for the sake of differentiating itself from Disney and Pixar. When you see them in motion, though, the cartoon just fades away and they seem completely natural. The best work is on the main character Hiccup, who’s perfectly expressive. I know what the voice actor looks like and instantly picture him when I hear his voice, but he completely disappeared after a few minutes and became a completely new character.

I called the post “How to Launch Your Franchise” because I’m all cynical like that, but it’s not really fair for this one. The DreamWorks marketing machine is going to be in full force, no doubt, but you’ll be missing out if you let the marketing turn you off what is actually a good, rousing, and genuinely heartfelt movie.

And sure, yeah, I did cry a little bit at the end. Which is a compliment, but it doesn’t take that much to make me cry at a movie. The more impressive achievement: I really had to go, but waited until after the credits because I was completely wrapped up in the ending. Which I guess is my new movie rating system. I give How To Train Your Dragon “One Bladder Held, Way Held!”

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Sunday March 28 2010 Videogames

Blendo

Flotilla is another perfectly weird game from Blendo Games. Everybody should buy it, even if you don’t think you’ll be into it.

Blendo Games is the studio name of Brendon Chung, and he is who I want to be when I grow up. He’s been cranking out brilliantly weird experimental games for years now, and Flotilla is the most polished and complete one yet.

You can download the demo for Windows, but I’ve been waiting for the Xbox 360 version, which went live last week. It’s in the Indie Games section, and is so far beyond any of the other games there, it’s almost embarrassing; it’s kind of like finding a complete draft of Kavalier and Clay buried in a thread on a comic book message board. Microsoft has done a noble job democratizing game development and distribution, but they kind of need a better filter on their Indie Games category, maybe a “No Really These Are Good” section.

In any case, the Xbox download will cost you five bucks, and the PC version is only ten. Even if you don’t think you’d be into the game, go ahead and buy it just to support the principle.

You can watch the demo video to get an idea of what the “core” gameplay is like — it’s a series of tactical battles in 3D space. Spaceships are more vulnerable on their backs and bottoms, so there’s a good bit of focus on flanking maneuvers and balancing ship speed and seriously this is all missing the point.

The point is that the game has a level of polish in the presentation and imagination in the storytelling that makes it abundantly clear this is one guy’s unique voice. There’s an attention to detail in all of the UI and graphic design that would be in the top tier of “professional” games, and is just plain overkill for an “indie” project. Even better, the tactical combat in Flotilla is part of a whole adventure mode, in which you’ll be encountering space rhinos, stowaway toucans, and psychic dogs. Like the previous Blendo project Gravity Bone [YouTube video of the first level], it’s not just that the whole is better than the sum of its parts, it’s that the whole is a self-contained package of genius that seems to come out of nowhere.

I’m not even any good at the tactical combat, and I can never survive past the second battle. I still bought the game without a second thought and I’m enjoying the hell out of it.

When I first got interested in videogames, it was via the Atari 2600, in the days when most of the games were made by one or two people and then packaged up to support the Activision or Atari brand names. When I got interested in making games, though, was via the old “album cover” games of Electronic Arts, and later the LucasArts adventure games. What those games had in common was that they acknowledged they were creative works, not just a prepackaged toy or a piece of Commercial Entertainment Product. Over the years, having “A Game By Some Dude” on the front of the box became less cool and more a case of ego-tripping on the part of Mr. Dude, but for a while it was a huge deal: a reminder that a videogame can be a medium of expression, just as much as a comic book, or novel, or painting, or film.

That’s what I’m seeing when I browse through the Blendo Games site (although Chung doesn’t feel the need to paste his name all over everything; he mostly lets the games speak for themselves). I’d like to believe that games and the tools for making them have advanced to the point where we can reach that level of artistry and creativity of the late 80s/early 90s, where you don’t need a huge team or a publisher or an established franchise to make a videogame, you just need a good idea.

I’d like to believe that, anyway. It’s more likely that Chung is just crazy talented and/or too weird to talk himself out of making a game out of a novel idea.

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Wednesday March 24 2010 Lost

Hell is Exactly Two Other People

Lost is working its way back to my good side. Spoilers for episode “Ab Aeterno.”

Now that Lost is in its final season, I’ve seen more than a few people trying to get caught up, and I’ve taken it on myself to try and explain why the show has such an obsessive following (including myself). The last few times I’ve tried, I’ve mentioned numbers stations, smoke monsters, a dead-on accurate 70s educational movie aesthetic, urban legends, the creation of a genuinely modern mythology, Elizabeth Mitchell, non-linear storytelling, and polar bears.

Now I can just say “they’ve got an episode about a guy who’s on a slave ship that crashes into a statue and then he has to kill the Devil but gets talked out of it and is granted eternal life instead.”

When you think about it, there wasn’t a whole lot of new stuff we learned in this episode. (Except maybe that the Canary Islands in the late 1800s really needed to work on their service industries). But that doesn’t matter at all. It did confirm a good bit of stuff we already suspected — while still leaving plenty of ambiguity — but the most significant thing it did was confirm that Lost is capable of some of the best storytelling on television, when they feel like it. The hour flew by, and I was intrigued the whole time, each commercial break in exactly the right place, and each story development just off-kilter enough to be unexpected. With the way the season had been going up until tonight’s episode (and with the loss of Brian K. Vaughan), I was starting to get worried that they’d lost it.

That’s been the basic appeal all along: with the flashbacks and flash forwards and all the disparate influences, they had free rein to make basically an anthology series, telling whatever kind of story they could think of next. But they’d gotten so bogged down in attempting to form a continuity around everything, that the stories were starting to fizzle out to the point of Cop Haunted By His Past Never Learned How To Love. So we were way past due for a good, old-fashioned story about a poor man taking on the Devil. With ghosts and shipwrecks and horseback rides on stormy nights and all the other stuff they shouldn’t be able to do with a show set on a deserted island.

So now we know basically how old Richard Alpert is, kind of how the four-toed statue got destroyed and how the Black Rock ended up so far inland, the basic idea of why people keep ending up on the island, a reminder of what the black smoke is trying to do via Locke, and a reminder of why the story only remained interested in six of the castaways. And they threw in a little message about ineffability, which I guess is nice.

They also did a good job of ramping up the ambiguity around Jacob and the smoke monster (coming this Fall from Sid & Marty Krofft). Even with one dressed in white and the other dressed in black, they make a point of not explicitly saying who’s good and who’s evil. And in fact, they seemed to go out of their way to put an evil spin on Jacob and a good spin on the “man in black.” After all, the Devil would never admit to being the Devil, would he?

As for the big picture: if in the alternate reality we keep getting shown, the island is sunk; and if the island’s purpose was to keep evil from leaking out into the rest of the world; and if the black smoke’s leaving the island means “We all go to Hell,” then why hasn’t the alternate reality been significantly different? Everybody’s been more or less the same, and Jack and Locke ended up better off, arguably. This episode hasn’t done anything to convince me the “flash sideways” will all fit neatly into context at the end of the series. But it has reassured me that whatever they do for the end of the series, it’s going to be good television.

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Tuesday March 23 2010 Television

Darling Nikki

My infatuation with “Castle” continues with the two-parter “Tick tick tick… BOOM!”

I should’ve put a spoiler warning on this whole post, for the most recent episode of “Castle”

I already explained why I like “Castle” so much, and if you’ve been unfortunate enough to follow me on the Twitters, you’ve seen that turn into a full-blown new-favorite-TV-show infatuation. And there’s one bit from the first part of the recent “Major TV Event” that sums up everything I like about the series:

A serial killer is at work in New York, obsessed with Detective Beckett’s “alter-ego” Nikki Heat, calling her and taunting her to catch him before he kills again. The FBI arrives on the crime scene, with a tough expert profiler (played by Dana Delaney) claiming jurisdiction over the case and being dismissive of Castle and Beckett’s casework. She brings a ton of high-tech equipment and a cadre of FBI agents into the precinct and takes over the situation room…

…and then, they all cooperate and work together to try and solve the case. Everybody is friendly and supportive of each other. On a crime show! All it takes is one commercial break before they’re all making wisecracks at each other and gossiping.

Which proves that there’s no cliche they can’t deflate. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been getting older or what, but over the past few years, I’ve developed a lot more respect for creators who aren’t just obsessed with novelty, but can spin and rework formulas and genre tropes into something new. And this is exactly how you do genre fiction: be confident enough to acknowledge cliches and recognize why they’re useful, and then use them as tools instead of just crutches.

Take for instance the “Bones”- and “CSI”-like super-futuristic VR holo-screens they toted in for this episode, causing me to emit a pained groan. They brought them in, set them up, had Castle make a joke about them to make it clear they weren’t taking this stuff too seriously, and then took advantage of exactly what they’re good for: cramming a ton of pseudo-detective work into a limited amount of screen time. Basing a code on Castle’s books is a neat idea; having to crack the code could’ve been clumsy and tedious without an injection of TV-universe technology.

Another great touch was having Susan Sullivan reminiscing with an old episode of “The Incredible Hulk” she’d appeared in. It’s tough to hit just the right level of “meta” enough to acknowledge you’re in on the joke, but not so much that it makes the whole thing pointless (e.g. the Firefly reference earlier in the season that didn’t quite work as well).

The beauty of it is that if you’d described just the plot of this episode to me, I would’ve dismissed it as just another police procedural, and probably a hopelessly cliched one at that. But the plot is usually secondary on this show — why else would they put a “surprise” exploding apartment cliffhanger in an episode titled “Tick tick tick…” — because everything is driven by chemistry.

(And Beckett was totally in a different apartment, of course. That’s the one TV gimmick that’s been enabled by cell phones, instead of being ruined by them.)

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Sunday March 21 2010 Videogames

Oh I'm sorry, is this controller bothering you?

Early impressions of Final Fantasy XIII. Initial outlook is grim.

The joke about Final Fantasy X was that it was called Final Fantasy X because all you did was hit the X button over and over again. I’m a little over three hours into Final Fantasy XIII, and so far it seems like Square Enix has been spending the last eight years trying to find a way to dispense with even that level of meddlesome button-pressing.

Granted, I’d been warned about this. Most reviews hit the same points: it’s a lot more stripped down and linear than previous Final Fantasy games, with all the exploration jettisoned in favor of long tunnels leading up to a boss fight. But the only review I’d read that was actually negative was Chris Kohler’s on the GameLife blog. All the others I’d seen warned that the game takes fifteen hours to take off, but once it does, it has the most interesting combat system in the series to date.

I’ve played at least half of every Final Fantasy game since VII, so I figured it was inevitable I’d end up getting it. I just figured it’d be later rather than sooner, until Best Buy informed me that my store credit was about to expire and I’d best get to stimulating the economy, pronto. (Incidentally, at the store I was trying to decide between a videogame and a printer. Both were the same price. Did I miss some event that made the bottom drop out of the printer market? Or have I been so wrapped up in digital distribution that I didn’t notice that games have gotten crazy expensive?)

So I’ve just been taking it on faith that if I keep at it, the game is suddenly going to open up and reward me with a complex and interesting battle system. And so far, it’s just been testing my faith. They’ve stripped away all the stuff that makes Japanese RPGs compelling, in favor a barely interactive Japanese anime that’s every bit as over-produced and murky and vapid as the ones that made me stop watching anime after Cowboy Bebop.

I don’t mind their mixing up the formula; in fact, I’m all for it. This is of course the series that defines what Japanese RPGs are supposed to be, and if they want to try new stuff instead of just making the same game over and over again, more power to them. But it feels like they’ve jettisoned the core game in favor of all the surface presentational stuff. There’s no leveling up (yet), just a score and a star count at the end of each battle. The stars are good for… I’m not sure, exactly. The game will occasionally toss me a new weapon or piece of equipment, but there’s no real choice involved: this weapon goes with this character, and it’s better so use it now. And I’m being led through a two-hour-long series of tutorials that claim to be introducing more and more complexity, but in fact just have me pressing A more often. (I’m playing on the 360, or it’d be X).

They’ve just started to introduce some limited customization in the form of the big stat wheels from X and XII, but as in those games, it’s something that looks like interactivity but really isn’t. The characters are pretty much pre-defined, and I can only decide whether my obnoxiously twee pre-teen girl is a magic user with 400 HP or 420 HP. They’re clearly heading in the direction of more AI control, like the previous games, and let you do “paradigm shifts” to switch the whole party between attacking, defending, healing, etc. Which sounds fine at first, but results in less interesting choices: it’s as if they replaced a party of characters with just one character. No interesting experiments turning a ninja into a black mage or anything like that. Plus, it’s been almost three hours and I have yet to fight a fireball or an angry custard.

The visuals are outstanding, but that’s to be expected from these things. And worse, they’ve reached Star Wars-prequels levels of over-saturation: the opening has a big train escape sequence through a futuristic city with mechanized monsters with deadly scorpion tails and all kinds of airships and lasers and space tunnels and crumbling buildings. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what was actually happening, though. The cutscenes in Final Fantasy VII were amazing for their time — no doubt they’d look horribly dated now, but the one thing I do know is that they were used effectively. When the game cut to a full-motion video of a new city or a wide vista or the appearance of some huge monster, it was a big moment. Here, it’s all thrown at you at once.

And over the years I’ve developed a lot of patience for the weak characterization in these games — in fact, it’s usually part of the charm of them — but my attachment to these characters ranges from “don’t care” to “actively dislike and want to fall down a deep crevasse.” Final Fantasy XII did a good job of combining moderately annoying characters with a story that seemed pleasantly familiar: a brash backwoods kid teams up with a rogue pilot and his quiet, inhuman sidekick to save a beautiful princess from an evil Empire. Final Fantasy XIII seems familiar, too: there’s the taciturn ex-soldier with a troubled past, the wise-cracking black guy who’s a gun expert, the perky inappropriately dressed girl… hey, wait a second! For good measure, they added a sniveling little whiny boy who needs to die soon, and the lead singer from any given Japanese boy band.

It’s entirely possible that I’ve just outgrown these things. I still haven’t finished Final Fantasy XII, and that was one I was actually enjoying quite a bit. I suppose there’s a devoted (and much younger) audience who just loves poorly-defined characters and J-pop songs and scenes where everyone speaks in half sentences, and this is the game for them. But it seems that there used to be at least a stab at balancing the anime and the actual game. And I always got the sense that there was a little bit of humility on the part of the makers of the game, acknowledging that they’re passable storytellers but great game-makers. Here, it’s gotten Metal Gear Solidified: the cutscenes aren’t nearly as interminable, but they’re given every bit as much focus. The game seems like an afterthought.

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Saturday March 20 2010 Apple, Technology

Our Browsers, Ourselves

Using the healing power of blogging to rationalize an expensive and unnecessary purchase.

As one of the ~~idiots~~ loyal technology enthusiasts who bought an iPhone on day one, I was a little disappointed by the anti-climactic iPad pre-order event. In June a couple years ago, I was standing in line outside an AT&T store for an hour, chatting with the other ~~saps~~ fine people, only to be told at the last minute that they were sold out of the version I wanted. That led to my driving all over Marin county, eventually finding myself at an Apple Store, where I was welcomed by a double line of smiling Apple employees escorting me to the demo phones on display at their all-white tables, then putting a gentle hand on my back and leading me to the back of the store where they could take my credit card info. It was exciting and not at all creepy.

With the iPad, though, I just hit a button on a web form. Where’s the excitement? Or the exclusivity? It’s been over a week, and you can still order one online! You can even have it sent to your house, and miss out on all the energizing and totally not cult-like atmosphere of the Apple Store. I used the online form to reserve a pick-up at one of the stores in San Francisco. Conveniently, the very same form let me schedule a time and place outside the store to get mugged and have my iPad stolen from me.

I chose the WiFi 32 GB model, and I chose Darrel as my Forced Redistribution Representative. I figured that even the 64 GB model wouldn’t hold all of the music and video I’ve amassed over the decades, and the iPhone is a better music player anyway, so 32 GB could easily store a couple weeks’ worth of video and books until the next sync. And I liked that Darrel is a methadone addict who plans to re-sell the thing on Craigslist, so it felt like I was giving back to the community.

Now, I put a good bit of effort into talking myself out of wanting one of these things, and then calmly and rationally going through the pros and the cons, so that I could make an informed purchasing decision by the morning of the 12th. Apple ruined all that, by apparently having enough supply to meet the demand, but I hate to see all that thought process go to waste:

Cost-Effectiveness: When I moved into this apartment, I bought a couch for $600. It’s green and very comfortable. I also bought a chair from Office Depot for around $80. It’s oddly tilted and is bad for my back. When I get home after a grueling day of watching other people make videogames, I spend anywhere from two to four hours at my desk, reading news feeds and forum messages, starting and abandoning web posts such as this one, and obsessively checking Google for mentions of the game I’m working on. If it’s “Lost” or “Castle” night, or the day after “Community” and “30 Rock,” I might spend an hour on the couch in front of the TV. This means that every second I spend at my desk, I’m losing money that I spent on my couch. Being able to browse the web while reclined isn’t only more comfortable, it’s the right thing to do.

Productivity: Whenever I’m sitting in this uncomfortable chair reading the internets, I invariably run across a recommendation of some Flash game that I end up playing for longer than it’s worth. The iPad doesn’t support Flash. Big win.

Literature: I’ve still got all these books piled up from back when I used to intend to read things. But what a hassle! Those pages! Finding a light source! All the opening and closing! On the floor of my apartment, I’ve got a big stack of unread books just sitting there, mocking me every time I sit down to play a videogame or watch a movie. Just think of all the space I could save if I could have all those books on a single device that’s a half inch thick, and not read them there!

Health Concerns: The books that I do still read are comics, and reading comic books means leaving the apartment to take a bus down to the comic book store. And that means exposing my body to unhealthy UV radiation. In the perfect world of 2010, I should be able to buy comic books without going outside. And without waiting for the trade paperbacks to come out.

My Concern for You, The Readers: The one thing the best writers all have in common is that they have a singular voice, a defining characteristic. The one thing that all my writing has in common is that there’s a lot of it. If I can make blog posts from a touchscreen keyboard with the iPhone OS’s auto-correction, then I’ll be encouraged to keep it short and sample.

The Lamentations of Bloggers: There have been several bloggers calling out the iPad for representing the Evils of Closed Systems, writing post after post decrying the “walled garden” of the App Store and Apple’s unfair business practices. They suggest that consumers are complicit in the death of open software, lured by the status of an Apple logo and a bright shiny piece of electronics instead of getting a more powerful and more user-empowering computer. So I’m buying an iPad to make a statement. And that statement is: “Fuck you.” With the additional statement: “I know what I’m doing, and how I spend my money is my own damn business. If Windows or Android or Linux or HP or LG or whoever had beaten Apple to the system with a superior product, then I would’ve bought that instead. So suck it.”

Research: There are plenty of other e-book readers and personal media players and netbooks out there already; I believe that the new thing that the iPad will bring to the market is genuinely social computing. As in: a direct, tactile connection to the content displayed on screen; and real, face-to-face communication with another person while sharing the contents of the screen. Apple mentioned both aspects during the iPad keynote, but the “sharing” part was kind of an afterthought. I believe that’s were it’s going to make a real difference, though. (It’s also what the Microsoft Surface project has been all about, but they got locked into the mindset of a big-ass table. Instead of a portable device, which they always tried to turn into just another Windows machine). Apple mentioned showing off pictures with an iPad, but I think that’s because Steve Jobs feels about games the same way George Bush feels about black people. Board games and card games are just a different experience than playing single-player or even multiplayer games online, and it’s an experience that I don’t think computers have been able to replicate yet.

I do honestly believe that there’s going to be a subtle shift in the way people think about computers once more of us can show someone else a web page or a photo or a video simply by handing them the screen. But I think the most exciting stuff on the iPad is going to come from two areas: online magazines, and social games. (And hopefully, we’ll be able to take the term “social games” back from all the people making Facebook games).

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Friday March 12 2010 Videogames

Psychic Powers Activate

Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse has been announced! No, really!

The game I’ve been working on since last summer has finally been announced for reals. It’s Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse, and it’s going to be out in April for PC, Mac, and the PlayStation Network (PS3).

The first episode is called The Penal Zone and it’s full of all the high-brow intellectual humor that the title implies. We’ve made a subtle shift to the puzzle-solving in this season: there’s a little bit less emphasis on using inventory items together and more emphasis on using Max’s new psychic powers and eventually, figuring out how they work together. The idea is that instead of a lot of random objects that have one specific use that you have to figure out, there’s a smaller set of powers that you can use in multiple places and multiple ways. I’ll be interested to see how people like it.

I already know how they’ll like the other change, which is all the improvements to the visuals. The artists did an obscene amount of work on the environments, characters, and character animation. Plus we got a bunch of lighting and rendering improvements, including real-time shadows.

Plus there’s an evil space gorilla named General Skun-ka’pe, you know, for the kids.

Check out the trailer in high definition because Telltaler Shaun Finney spent a lot of time on it and it came out really good and I’m not just saying that because he could kick me in the head without breaking a sweat. And then you can pre-order the whole season because really, you know you’re going to buy it anyway so why delay the inevitable?

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Wednesday March 10 2010 Lost

Not A Dream! Not An Imaginary Story!

Why I haven’t had much to say about “Lost” this season

For a while there, the recaps of “Lost” were the only thing keeping this weblog going. I haven’t had anything to say about Season 6 so far, and I was kind of hoping nobody would notice. There are three main reasons for that:

I haven’t had much free time.
The only character/actor I cared about any more left “Lost” for another series.
I don’t know what the hell is going on this season.

It bugs me to say “I don’t know what’s going on” because I get the creepy suspicion there’s some Echelon-style technology that some executive at ABC is using to scan the internet for “Lost” confusion and present a spreadsheet explaining exactly why the series should be dumbed down. I can’t think how else to explain the “pop-up videos” thing they do for the previous week’s rerun, which does nothing more than explain the scene that you just watched as you’re watching it. This is indeed a series that plays around with varying timelines and packs a ton of detail into each episode; that’s a big part of why people love it. And I’ve seen every episode of the series, and I still can’t remember all the details and side characters enough to pick up on all the call-backs and cameos (e.g. the “Always Sunny” guy was on “Lost” before, apparently). It’d be helpful to have something pop up and say “this guy appeared in season 3″ or “this is the book that was used in Juliet’s book club.” It’s not helpful to have something pop up and say “Claire is Jack’s half-sister!” or “Claire just killed a guy with an axe!”

But even though I’ve never been able to keep up with the details, I’ve at least been able to follow the meat of what was going on. And although the biggest complaint about the series has always been with how they withhold information, that’s also one of the best things about the series. (The other is the enormous range of reference material they draw from, including numbers stations and 70s science communes and horror fiction and introductory-level philosophy). They mastered the art of telling stories in parallel, and then went on to throw in a twist in subsequent seasons: the flashbacks turned into flash-forwards turned into outright time traveling.

With season 6, though, they’ve kind of broken it. Anybody could understand the concept of flashbacks to before they landed on the island. And the reveal of the flash-forwards was done with a brilliant season-end twist; we all started out the episode believing we were seeing more flashbacks, and then realized at the end of that episode that we’d jumped forward in time. And later, when they introduced the time traveling, there were a ton of complaints that the show had suddenly “gotten weird.” But it was easy enough to ask, “Where the heck have you been?” and point out that the show’s always been weird. Time traveling, I can handle, especially with weaselly Dr. Faraday (whose name I already had to look up, see above re: my faulty memory) acknowledging that that’s what’s going on.

Now, the big two remaining mysteries of the series, the only ones that we’re going to get real closure on, are: 1) Who are Jacob and the other guy, exactly? and 2) How do these flash-sideways connect to the ongoing storyline? Lindelof and Cuse have claimed, repeatedly, that we’re going to get answers to both questions, and I don’t doubt that. They also acknowledge that it’s a risky move, and it can be confusing, and that it’ll require patience, and that’s where I have a problem.

Not that it’s risky — I think a huge part of why the show is so successful is that they rarely let it get too conventional. Or that it’s confusing or requires patience — it’s too easy to counter with “they shouldn’t dumb the show down” or, if you prefer, “maybe you should go watch ‘NCIS’.” My problem is that it’s unnecessarily confusing; I think it’s withholding the wrong kind of information. When you strand people on an island and tell me that I’m going to have to wait to find out what the island is and why they’re there, that’s fine; I’m intrigued. When you hold out on the entire premise of the season, though, that’s where I just get annoyed, because I don’t have any context as to why I should care.

I make a habit of not reading too much of the online chatter on message boards or fansites, both because it tends to be kind of lame (that whole ARG that supposedly explained what the numbers were turned out to be a massive disappointment), and because I don’t care about the extraneous details and would rather let the show speak for itself. But this season, there’s a lot of stuff that’s relevant to the story that you can’t get just by watching the show. You’ve got to read interviews and watch extra-content videos, stuff that used to give an “extra dimension” to the show, but now is a prerequisite. In that Entertainment Weekly interview, they casually drop that alternate-Kate killed someone other than her stepfahter, which was revealed in some Comic-Con video. But then they claim that that’s not important. Well, yeah, guys, that’s pretty damn important if we’ve got any hope of making sense of what you’re expecting us to watch each week.

I’d seen a mention somewhere that they were refusing to call the flash-sideways an “alternate reality.” I took that to mean that it’s all part of one reality, that the bomb detonation had somehow rewritten history, and that the parallel storylines would converge in 2007. There’s a recurring theme of fate and determinism, so it seemed fitting that even wildly different histories could somehow play out to bring about the same events; e.g. even if Oceanic 815 hadn’t crashed, they all would’ve found themselves on that island somehow. It wasn’t until last week’s episode (“Sundown”) that suggested that wasn’t the case (Dogen’s story in the present conflicts with the version we saw at the piano recital), and then this week’s (“Dr. Linus”) all but confirms that’s not the case (Ben talks about stuff that happens in the “real” timeline that directly contradict things we saw in the “sideways” timeline).

So in short (too late): each week, they’re broadcasting 30 minutes of clean-up on a series, mixed in with 30 minutes of a different series that I don’t really care about. The clean-up sections are still “Lost”-style frustrating — did we really need to introduce yet another character who refuses to answer questions? Haven’t the castaways learned by now that if you ask somebody a question and they don’t answer, you punch them repeatedly until they answer? And what possible reason could there be for not just looking to see whose name was on number 108 in the lighthouse?

The other series would be like if Marvel had replaced their entire comic line with “What If?” stories. What if Jack had a son with his own daddy issues?! What if Rose worked at an employment agency?! What if Ben had been a history teacher?! You can’t tell me that I’m going to care about these things, later on; I need to care what’s going on right now, when I’m trying to make sense of the whole thing.

I will say this, though: Emile de Ravin has been really good in her limited appearances. Claire was always in the running for least interesting character on the island, but as it turns out, she plays kind-of-crazy really well.

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Monday March 8 2010 Movies

Quite a Bit of Tsuris

A Serious Man is a brilliant movie, one of the Coen Brothers’ best.

A Serious Man is just a brilliant movie, that perfect combination of dialogue writing, cinematography, performance, and storytelling that only happens in movies by the Coen brothers. The fact it got passed over (as it were) at the Oscars is just more evidence of how Jews just can’t catch a break in Hollywood.

Or more likely, it’s evidence that not enough people watched it; this movie is a very tough sell. I can’t point fingers at anybody else, since I passed on seeing it in theaters, and I’ve let the Netflix disc sit on my table for a week as I dreaded having to watch it. I’m a huge fan of the Coen brothers, Miller’s Crossing is my favorite movie of all time, and if I were being honest with my list of favorite movies, it’d be full of their work. But “black comedy about a suburban Jewish physics professor in 1967 who’s besieged by personal and work problems” never called out to me as something I’d be excited to watch.

I’d imagined it as a more Hebrew version of The Man Who Wasn’t There, one of the only movies by the Coens that didn’t work for me at all. Instead, A Serious Man is a little bit like what you’d get if No Country for Old Men hadn’t taken itself so seriously. The latter movie was plodding, relentlessly bleak and humorless, but was brilliantly filmed and had a genius script. A Serious Man is plodding, bleak, brilliantly filmed and written, and very, very funny. Even to a total goy like me.

As soon as I finish watching a movie, I can’t help but check out the reviews. What’s remarkable about A Serious Man is that few of the reviews I’ve read — even the positive ones — seem to get it, or at least they’re not able to describe what makes it work. Every one trivializes it or diminishes it in some way, almost as if describing the thing out loud makes it lose its power. Scenes that work perfectly in the movie seem trite when described with a simple synopsis. Each of the characters can be described in a single sentence or even a short phrase, but doing that doesn’t explain how even the simplest and broadest character becomes more than just a caricature when combined with everything else. So I’m reluctant to say much about the movie for fear that it’d be like trying to describe a painting or a piece of music: you’ve got to see it for yourself.

I will say something about the negative reviews, though, because several of them are unintentionally hilarious.

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Saturday March 6 2010 Movies

Alice's Adventures in Neverland

The new Alice in Wonderland is perfectly fine as 3D spectacle, but it’s missing most of its muchness

Alice-mia-wasikowska-in-alice-in-wonderland_vf-480x570.jpg When Tim Burton’s new version of Alice in Wonderland was first announced, I heard a good bit of consternation — not quite outrage, but a pfsssh and a dismissal — spreading through the internets. And I was skeptical of how much of that consternation was genuine. I mean, let’s all be honest, internet: can anyone truthfully claim that Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass is an unassailable childhood treasure? It’s most definitely and deservedly a classic, but claiming it as a favorite is like claiming a favorite fever dream. Not only have the stories been interpreted and re-interpreted over and over again, but the language and the key scenes and, most of all, John Tenniel’s illustrations have become so lodged into public awareness that there’s nothing you or Tim Burton or American McGee or Jefferson Airplane could possibly do to screw them up.

That’s basically all Alice in Wonderland is: some memorable scenes and characters; a few great nonsensical turns of phrase; and some fantastic, unforgettable imagery. Add in Johnny Depp and a soundtrack by Danny Elfman and you’ve got all the necessary components of a Tim Burton movie. He’s practically spent his entire career looking for an excuse to string together a bunch of weird images without regard to a coherent story; Alice in Wonderland is such a perfect match that the only surprising thing is that he didn’t already do it years ago.

They still made a token attempt to provide some kind of continuity to the movie, so a story occasionally asserts itself. It’s not a particularly interesting story — it’s just a straight line from a rabbit hole to the Jabberwocky — but it’s more substantial than just the “a bunch of weird stuff happens and it looks cool” story of the Disney animated version.

Unfortunately, even a marginally substantial story is not Alice in Wonderland, which was, intentionally and happily, a bunch of clever nonsense. This movie is a version of Alice that’s been Peter Panified and Narniated. Now Alice is 19 and runs after the white rabbit to escape the demands of Proper Society, and she finds herself in the dreamworld of her childhood, where she has to find the vorpal sword and become the Champion of the White Queen to defeat the Jabberwock. (So I suppose the story’s been Wizard of Ozzed as well). The original seems like a dream a little girl in England in the 1800s might have; the new version seems like a dream a Hollywood executive who’d just fallen asleep watching a bunch of big-budget children’s movies back to back might have.

But again, you don’t go into Alice in Wonderland expecting a solid story, and you definitely don’t go into a Tim Burton movie expecting a solid story. It’s all about the imagery, and the movie does a fine job. I can’t imagine wanting to see it in 2D, since the whole thing is pure spectacle and you want to pile on as much gimmickry as you can. And the 3D is done well, as are all the animation and effects. There are more talking animals than a compilation reel of Superbowl commercials, and that’s just the “base level” of effects work going on. They’ve got a main character who changes size randomly throughout the movie, and almost every other character is digitally manipulated in one way or another. And then, they throw them all together in the same shot just because they can. So you end up with Giant Alice sitting down next to a table held up by monkeys while an animated pig lies down at the feet of the tiny body/digitally-enlarged head of Helena Bonham Carter while Crispin Glover walks in on digitally-lengthened legs (watch out, David Letterman) and kisses her hand. It’s really just an excuse for the effects guys to show off.

Which is the other big problem with the movie. The backdrops and costumes are impeccably done, and the look of the main characters is imaginative and memorable, and it’s the job of the effects to take all these disparate fantastic things and combine them with live actors to make them look real. Which means: it probably cost them as much money as I make in a year to make the shot where the Red Knight kisses the hand of the Red Queen, but that moment was pretty inconsequential to the rest of the movie. The same goes for the shots of Alice riding the back of the Bandersnatch (oh yeah, it got Never Ending Storied, too), or fighting the Jabberwock, both of which ended up being fairly straightforward fantasy movie monsters. Alice in Prince Caspian armor is a much more interesting and memorable image than the fantastic things she’s interacting with.

And there aren’t enough new fantastic things to interact with. Everything becomes either a main character or a major plot point, and is referenced repeatedly — there’s an awful lot of dialogue dedicated to how big the Red Queen’s head is, so I’m assuming that was the most expensive and difficult effect in the movie. Apart from a couple of rocking-horseflies early in the movie, there’s not much that exists just for its own sake. There’s not quite enough wonder in Wonderland.

While the movie and the marketing materials are desperate to convince you otherwise, the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen aren’t the standout characters of the movie. That would be the Cheshire Cat, and Alice herself. The Cheshire Cat has a great design, is full of little flourishes in the animation (my favorite is how he kneads the Mad Hatter’s hat, as a cat would), and almost imperceptibly solid voice work from Stephen Fry. I picked up on Alan Rickman’s and Christopher Lee’s voices immediately, but didn’t recognize Fry until the credits at the end. And Mia Wasikowska takes a pretty thankless part — Alice is kind of boring, to be honest — and keeps the audience’s attention and sympathy. Everybody else is fine, but they’re all trying a little to hard. You can always see the wheels turning: I am a highly-paid movie star who embraces quirky character roles and I will be the most distinctive thing in this scene, dammit!

In the end, I’d give it a “good but not great.” I enjoyed almost all of it as I was watching it, and I got my requisite amount of spectacle out of it. (Plus, there were 3D trailers for Toy Story 3 and Tron Legacy). I liked it more than the last few Tim Burton movies I’ve seen, and the last few Disney family blockbusters as well. There are several interesting images in there, and the overall design of the movie is beautiful, and there are enough small touches of dark humor to keep things moving, and there’s a tone of female empowerment that’s probably more healthy for little girls to be seeing than the typical Disney princesses. But more often than not, it feels more like a demo reel for a special effects house than like a timeless classic.

I have to wonder if it would’ve been more amazing if it’d just sprung up out of nowhere, and we hadn’t been bombarded with marketing images of the main characters for the past year. But then, I have to wonder if not having Disney’s marketing budget behind it, it would’ve been made at all.

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