November 30, 2009

Let The Right One In

Let The Right One In (2008)
Kare Hedebrant
Lina Leandersson
written by John Ajvide Lindqvist
directed by Tomas Alfredson

A story about a twelve year old boy who becomes friends with a same-aged girl, who is also a vampire. I’ve probably lost some of you already. This isn’t Romeo and Juliet with fangs. There is no scare factor or a light-heartedness of the familiar and currently overused monster theme. Instead of shock value the movie goes for a more subtle frightening idea of a bullied twelve year old boy living in a violent world where the adults are helpless, perhaps even unwilling. When the boy tells the girl how some of his classmates cut his cheek, she tells him to “hit harder than you dare, and they’ll stop.”

Of course, brutal is easy. It’s much more interesting to see believable intimacy that precedes the brutality. If you don’t care for the characters and the actors’ performances then nothing really matters and the movie fails.

If you saw the movie before its home release, then you probably know that Magnet fucked up the DVD and Blu-ray versions by not using the theatrical subtitles and instead going with an inferior translation.  A stellar look, that contains screenshot comparisons, can be found at Icons of Fright.

So up until last week I’ve been waiting for a rerelease, and while it has been out, the only way to distinguish the new from the old is the “theatrical subtitles” on the back.  Unwilling to hunt this down in stores – since Magnet doesn’t have an exchange program for people they assfucked with the inferior subtitles – I ordered the UK’s blu-ray version which has the theatrical subs and is region-free.  If you need to own a version, the UK is the way to go – though I’m not sure if the UK DVD is region-free.

And now I’m going to babble so SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE REST OF THIS POST.

-the scene that follows Eli bleeding out.  Oskar says “who are you”, and she replies with a camera cut to her saying “I’m like you”, her face still all bloody and holy shit that’s goddamn creepy.

-or that scene where Oskar’s father’s friend comes over.  Jesus, the hell was that scene about?  Cuz that dude looked all sorts of wrong.

-or that scene where Eli rings the doorbell.  She’s all cleaned up and then Oskar – at this point overly self-confident – starts taunting her.  The expression on her face when he taps on the imaginary wall; her looking down at his finger and then up at his eyes.  Kills me every time.

”But there’s three of them.”
“Then hit back harder.”

-or the scene where Eli is twisting the Rubik’s cube.  You can hear her hissing and mumbling to herself.  Even when Oskar says bye, she’s still preoccupied with the puzzle.

-or that same scene, Oskar says “you smell funny”; her expression – she arches her brow and gives a slight smile before going back to the puzzle.

-one day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game

-or how about that tracking shot when Conny and the other bullies enter the swimming pool area

-or that shot of Eli after pulling Oskar from underwater.  We only see her eyes and part of her nose, but it’s a perfect shot because the last time we saw her, the lower half of her face was covered in blood.  If we saw her entire face – and most likely bloody face – in the swimming pool scene, it would’ve been repetitive.  Besides, the image of a relatively clean face as her final shot ends on an intimate note as opposed to ending hers with a bloodied image. Sure the pool scene closes with the massacre, but the close-up shot of the girl’s eyes and smile is much more powerful than the gore. It’s the person responsible for the horror and her reason for the violence that turns the movie into something intimate instead of a movie going for shock value.

-or the deliberate shot of Martin’s sneakers (the kid who tricks Oskar into coming back to the school).  What’s so special about those sneakers?  And then later in the scene we see those same sneaks kicking in the pool as Eli murders the heck out of him.

-or how about that scene…oh hell, at this point I might as well start from the beginning.  Ok, so how about that scene right after the opening credits where….

There are a couple shots where it’s clear that the actress on the screen is not Lina Leandersson (her slurping up Oskar’s blood, her sitting on the tree, “be me for a little while”).  In the book, there is a bit where Oskar says something like “and for a second she looked like an older girl.”

What a fantastic movie.

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November 24, 2009

Only Took Forever

uh oh

me about to die

After 14hrs 57mins, 1900 kills and 1755 deaths – this is what happens when you constantly run into fully guarded Domination points – someone finally called me a little bitch. Not sure the reason; we were in the lobby, I don’t remember killing him repeatedly or getting murdered by him in previous matches. Maybe he didn’t like me because out of all the gamertags in the lobby, mine didn’t have brackets or numbers or numbers subbing for letters or every other consonant in caps. These names look like they should be passwords.

So if you see me and my pronounceable handle in MW2 killing someone, your chances of dropping me are pretty good – destined, in fact.

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November 23, 2009

My Time with: Uncharted 2

tuck you

Even though I liked the first game, the only thing I remember about it is Drake’s sweater; it took quite a beating and still managed to have part of its hem caught on his belt. I also remember the Nazi submariner occupied by those men-creatures. Ooh, and I remember the final boss, Rico QTE.

Uncharted 2 is perhaps the only game where I can easily switch between – and enjoy, with satisfying rewards – the three approaches to combat. I can sneak around for stealth skills, squeeze the trigger or throw ow punchies. Like the rest of the game these transitions are fluid, with no added complexity to the button presses, and each approach has its benefits. With most game you’re provided a handful of ways to take down baddies yet the majority are superfluous so you end up performing the easiest one because it usually turns out to be the most efficient. In Uncharted 2 you can start off with stealth kills to lessen the baddie numbers, you can melee to conserve ammo, and you can go iron sights or fire blind. All of these are easy to perform, and each one pretty much has the same damage output; given you go for headshots, all the above approaches are one-hit kills.

The other half of Uncharted 2’s gameplay is just as entertaining. The jumps are easy to pull off, and missing one comes with barely noticeable load times and a respawn not too far away from the misstep.

gimme

The writing and performances – just as much fun as playing the game. The story is typical Baddie wants power, one man to save the day. But whatever. Execution is what’s important, and Uncharted 2 is a great escape. The banter between Drake and whoever happens to be the companion at the moment are enjoyable – like when you jump into the pool on the hotel roof. And not having the controls taken away from you during these moments are pluses. Not all conversations need to live in cutscenes.

Uncharted 2’s greatest strength is its pacing. The pattern is platforming-gunfight-platforming-gunfight. Both types of gameplay put you in interesting scenarios, mainly because the set pieces are fun to navigate and shoot through. A scene in particular: the first time you and Elena are alone. You have to jump on a post that consists of multiple signs pointing in different directions, and as you hang, baddies start pouring in from adjacent rooftops. Cover consists of the signs, where you have to constantly shuffle over and strafe to deal with the baddies coming from various directions. And this is also a great example of the game teaching you two different mechanics and combining them to give you a novel scenario; at this point you’ve already been platforming on signs, and obviously you already know how to fight. And it’s never repeated again, which makes the sequence stand out even more.

Another is a chase scene where you have to jump from truck to truck. In the hands of less proficient developers, you would be told which truck to jump on and when. For this game, your indicator is the truck on fire, and the truck you’re supposed to escape to, well, you better be looking in the right direction. It’s a frenetic sequence that doesn’t slow down to hold your hand.

And while the last boss was neither astounding or dull, at least the game ends on a humorous note – I can’t remember how the first game ended which most likely means it was either unimpressive or not offensive enough.

Actually, Uncharted 2’s last boss was a yawn-fest. The running sequence that follows – much more exciting. And it wasn’t even a QTE.

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November 20, 2009

Modern WarFare 2: Keep Moving Forward

my eyeballs are gonna vomit

So apparently MW2 has the same hidden intel items scattered across the game, something I didn’t realize until after I completed the campaign.

The game is so frantic: the way the story is told through cutscenes that bombard you with all kinds of military and surveillance flash; the way someone is always screaming at you during the missions, to either hurry up or inform you of contacts in whatever direction; the way the person you’re supposed to Follow gets farther and farther away as you hide behind a mailbox because russians are pouring out of a suburban house. Never has a game that for the most part doesn’t have timed missions bullied me to keep pushing forward i-dont-care-how-many-explosions-just-went-off-you-better-be-killing-baddies-while-running-you-useless-cretin. A lot of the missions are so exhausting because I feel like I don’t have time simply to stop and admire the environment.

Plus, it doesn’t help that when you’re getting shot, the screen goes even more apeshit, with its violent shaking and blood splatters.

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November 19, 2009

My Time With: No Russian

Did the airport scene in Modern Warfare offend me? Not at all. I’m not showing off. This kind of violence is hyper-real (am I using this term correctly?), but it’s also a mature video game, and an M-rated game is at best a PG-13 movie. Rape, child molestation – these are extremes that make me uncomfortable in any medium…

Take the movie Irreversible. SPOILERS AHEAD SO SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU NEED TO. Not only is Monica Bellucci’s character raped, her boyfriend and friend bash the skull of the person they believe is the rapist when actually the person they should be demolishing watches from the background. This is the most depressing and unbearable movie I’ve ever seen. It kills me every time I think about it – and it’s nothing but pretend.

What hit me the hardest in the No Russian mission was the part where, while the majority of the civilians are either running away or falling dead, there are a few that stand still, hands up, believing they will be spared.

Forgetting the controversy for a moment, the scene is simply well-executed; they way it starts off only with the sound of people suiting and gearing up in an elevator; the chorus line of police officers in riot gear. Even the game slowing you down to a crawl so you can absorb the chaos – or to make the situation more stylishly violent. yet this slowdown is also a good design decision because it prevents you from running through the level, running into the crowd and possibly interrupting scripts. Infinity Ward wants you to decide for yourself if you want to squeeze the trigger, and for them to tell you their story, they need to limit your playground. They simply don’t want you to play like an idiot for this particular mission.

Besides, the other highly structured solution would be to make the mission on rails. At that point you might as well turn it into a cutscene. And at that point you might as well cut the scene, at which point, we might as well continue with the mentality that all video games are kids toys.

Do I want to have an Irreversible video game experience? I wouldn’t want to play a game that took me through the movie’s plot but I wouldn’t outright damn a game that depresses me like Irreversible does. It’s like with books; I like to read books for fun, but I’m not adverse to a book that challenges me intellectually or emotionally. And I think video games can do the same; we each just have different thresholds.

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November 18, 2009

Bordering Insanity

Some things I don’t care for in Borderlands:

Backpack Upgrades – why is this an item I have to use? Why can’t it simply give me a message saying your inventory space has been increased as opposed to me having to go into my inventory and use the upgrade? Seems like an unnecessary step. I mean, unlocking weapon slots isn’t an item you use.

Unlocking Weapon Slots – why are half the weapon slots locked at the beginning? This doesn’t make any sense. What’s the purpose in restricting the number of weapons I can quickslot? Imagine if Fallout 3 restricted the number of weps you could assign to the d-pad. Having more weapon slots isn’t about making your character more powerful; it’s about giving the player convenience. Titan Quest had a similar issue, where after completing two quests you’re rewards with extra inventory space; the extra stash space I can forgive because you had to buy it. So essentially, put a price tag on extra space instead of handing it out as a quest reward.

Bruisers – heavy-type characters/units that force you to change the weight you put on your priorities; perhaps you want to unload everything into the heavy first or maybe you prefer to kill off the smaller opponents so you can deal with the tank in isolation. But the Bruisers in Borderlands don’t look like heavies. Well, they do in that they are bigger than everyone else, but all they wear are pants. I tire of games that have bullet sponge baddies, and it aggravates me more when their indication is simply thick bigness. Put some fucking tank plating on these motherfuckers or something. Just because you have more muscle doesn’t mean you’re bulletproof. This is just lazy design.

Untouchable Quest Items – this is just insanity. Send me off on fetch quests, I accept this as a game trope. But send me back to the same area over and over? Gimme a fucking break.

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November 15, 2009

My Time With: Borderlands

blands

I’ve always wanted to play a Diablo-type game set in a gunpowder world.

The story of Borderlands – does it really matter? I’m sure the quest descriptions are fine, but that’s not engaging me; I see it simply as information, unimportant since it’s not the facts that take me to the objective. If this game had a minimap on the HUD, I wouldn’t know what the game looks like.

The whole bazillion weapons aspect doesn’t bother me. After all this is a randomized item-drop game, and with this kind of play, a large variety is best. That’s the whole point. You want gear that’s different than what your friends have. You go on the same adventures but you want different rewards; maybe to brag, maybe to define your char. I’m not playing this game for the story or well-structured single-player experience. I want progressively better gear to kill mobs.

And while the randomness of the drops is entertaining Pandora is not, mainly because the world is static. I can always count on those three bandits that hop the fence just outside Fyrestone; that locker opposite the skag arena always has weapons with requirements greater than my character level. Sure Diablo 2 had fixtures, but their maps always had a randomized layout and to a lesser degree different monsters; seeing the same tile sets never bothered me, probably because from a technical point it’s more efficient to play with the arrangement of the map than have a giant catalog of cycling tile sets.

Diablo 2 had a flat map, pockets of baddies whose locations were randomized. In Borderlands, though the map is much larger and varied in elevation, you will always find the same pockets in the same areas. Farming consists mostly of opening chests. A baddie can drop anything; a weapons chest will always give you guns and ammo.

Diablo Diablo Diablo.

I’m also not fond of the vehicle. I do appreciate its purpose as a fast travel option – I don’t think a town portal scroll would work well since progression is not a straight line, one area to the next and no reason to look back. I just don’t like having to drive to a destination and then get out to fight. Which is strange since while I also got tired of Far Cry 2’s I didn’t mind the GTAs’. Perhaps it had something to do with the former being an FPS; perhaps it had something to do with the same issue as Borderlands, in that, there were always outposts on the roads that always had baddies, and while you could sometimes drive past them, it was always best to kill them. Nothing in GTA consistently blocked your path to the next mission other than traffic and the law, but nothing ever pulled you over without a reason.

Too bad. As an uncommon occurrence racial profiling could be entertaining.

And because I’ve started a playthrough with coop and everything is shared, I’ve been having to buy ammo from the vendors. When I have 0/1020 SMG rounds and can only buy in quantities of 72, that’s a lot of clicking that could be simplified to “click here to refill entire count.” I mean, come on – have you ever stopped short of buying all the ammo you could carry and say “that’s enough for me, I like being one clip light”?

I had fun the first time around. I just don’t see myself going through another playthrough because even though the loot will get better, killing the same type and number of baddies and navigating the static world are just tiresome.

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October 25, 2009

A Potent Mix

avatar_weaver

The Avatar trailer premiered in theaters last Friday, with the online version coming up Oct. 29 – why on Thursday instead of tomorrow doesn’t make sense to me. Cam versions have been up since Friday morning, but since I have standards in resolution, I refused to watch the bootlegs. Which means I had to buy tickets for Saw’s fifth sequel.

But man, it was worth spending 12 bucks to see the trailer.

At 3 minutes and change, the Avatar trailer is the longest I’ve seen – not including Extended trailers which I don’t really count as trailers since they’re cut for a particular venue and not for the general audience who I’m guessing see most if not all their movie previews in theaters.

Why is Avatar’s a minute longer than the average trailer? The movie is a science fiction epic that is comparable to a very few (Star Wars), a science fiction epic in a time when every other movie is either a sequel or remake. Yes, the movie makes use of new camera technology, which most people won’t realize or care to know (though they should because it has attracted directors like Steven Spielberg and Peter jackson). Yet Avatar is a movie event and James Cameron is the reason. The trailer makes damn sure to remind you he’s responsible for the best action movies and the highest grossing of all-time. They pretty much title card his entire filmography.

I’ve already gushed over the special effects and how the motion/emotion capture is what separates Avatar from other movies of its kind. There is a shot in the trailer where Neytiri pulls back on a bowstring; there is tension in her movements that gives her weight – and there should be weight because, again, beneath the computer renders the movements and expressions are still the actors. Look at that shot of her turning toward the camera, look at the way her upper lip moves. If she was an animator’s creation, I’d think the lip-twitch a nice touch; since it’s an actor’s performance, I like to think there was a reason behind the motion.

Perhaps my favorite shot is one of Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) drinking coffee as his gunships in the background unload their ordnance. In the hands of a lesser director, conveying the antagonist’s attitude toward human life would involve something that feels like comic-book knowledge. Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) might have the lines that show he views the Navi as nothing more than tribals in an industrial universe, and while your first impression of Lang is nail-tough general, by the end you’ll know he’s not only as heartless as Selfridge but also comfortable within the slaughter.

Sure, the story when reduced is Space Dances with Wolves, but that doesn’t bother me. I prefer simple premises over high-concept because they are the most reliable. The more complicated you make the premise the more difficult it will be for the audience to see the plot and make sense of the characters’ purposes and growth.
Even though the trailer is 3-minutes long, the first few seconds gives you all the information you need about Jake and his story – “I became a marine for the hardship, told myself I could pass any test a man could pass. All I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.”

And this is why James Cameron is the king of the world. He knows how to direct action. He knows how to tell a story – and despite the technology he created and the amount of detail he put into the world around Jake and Neytiri, he knows these ultimately serve the story – “Film-making is not about sprockets. It’s about ideas, it’s about images, it’s about imagination, and it’s about storytelling.”

And just as important to me, he knows how to frame performances. Cameron is known for his technical and logistical prowess as a director and his perfectionist attitude when it comes to the details. Yet he still understands the power of the actor’s performance – “When we unpack these shots, sometimes our jaws just drop at the verisimilitude to the actors. And that’s what thrills me most. I’m kind of over all the design stuff. That was the first two years. I’m kind of used to that stuff now, the floating mountains and thousand-foot trees. But when I see Sam Worthington captured exactly at a critical-performance moment – that still gets me.”

A story’s premise is the easy part, and for better or for worse, we already know the ending. The fun is how the story is executed and if it can deliver the dilemma’s without betraying our trust. And Cameron has never allowed gimmicks to define his storytelling.

…Ok, my favorite shot – the first appearance of Sigourney Weaver. She may not be Ripley of Aliens, but it’s Weaver in a Cameron movie.

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August 28, 2009

Eyes on Avatar

ava_closing

The more I hear, the more I read about people dismissing Avatar’s CG and expressing disappointment in the Navi – how they look like cartoons – makes me wonder if people know what makes a special effect stellar.

The designs of the Navi are subjective, so whatever on that point; although I do have strong, positive opinions about their designs, but at the moment, they’re not germane to my argument.

But their special effects – c’mon. If people want them to be a physical presence in front of the camera, then they’re most likely going to get stuff that looks like Tim Curry in Legend or everything larger than a midget but smaller than a house in the Hellboy movies. Curry and Perlman had less latex on their faces for expressions – which is always the mark of excellent make-up effects, because it’s easier to showcase empathy – but the rest of their appearance, they looked like giant action figures.

The Navi don’t suffer from a uniform plastic sheen. Look at the shot in the teaser where Jake wiggles his toes. His skin has pigmentation. It has a porous quality, that if you were to place a flashlight flush against their fingers, some light would reflect and some light would pass through as physics orders.

neytiri

Or how about the shot where Neytiri darts her eyes at those luminescent critters that flutter around Jake? Facial expressions, people.

And in a less seen scene – Avatar Day footage – Jake wrestles with a banshee so they can bond, and shuffling along the sidelines is Neytiri. The way she flexes and squats, but just as important, how her facial muscles twist that’s not out of alignment with the rest of her body maneuvers – you’re not gonna see that kind of lithe stretching if the actor is buried under latex and prosthetics. And even though everything you see onscreen is computer-generated – inhuman flesh and blood – the skeleton of the Navi, of Jake and Neytiri, is all human. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana; motion and emotion captured.

Probably the main reason for the underwhelming response to the Avatar teaser is the hype; that special effects anything but perfection are a failure. I think we’re at the point where texture detail is now only limited by the artists’ proficiencies. That isn’t going to make a difference if the lighting on the set doesn’t match with what will be digitally inserted later, or vice versa. This is the other important aspect of good special effects: lighting.

Let’s take for example the Pescadero escape scene in T2: when the T-1000 passes through the bars; when the T-1000 re-molds its head after taking a shotgun blast pointblank. Even after nearly two decades those effects still look amazing partly – or mainly – because of the lighting. The cold silver and blue lighting of the hospital matches the cool silver and blue on the T-1000.

t2_pesca

And another reason why those frames are a stellar example of CG: while his split head melds back into a whole, Robert Patrick’s eyes move.

Facial expressions, people.

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June 2, 2009

Checks and Balances for the Bullet Budget

Watching the new gameplay vid of Modern Warfare 2, I can’t help imagining how cool it would be if first-person shooters started to count clips instead of bullets. The habit gamers have formed when playing a FPS is “always be fully loaded,” that as soon as there are no more baddies to shoot, you reload your gun no matter how many bullets you just squeezed out. You see a baddie, double tap him and then reload even though your clip is still twenty-eight rounds heavy.

You have 150 rounds total, and in the extreme case, this is the equivalent of carrying 149 clips. Ammo management is simply keeping the counter from reaching zero – but I guess that’s an oversimplification since any kind of management is maintaining a supply.

If games counted clips, that 150 round total means you have, let’s say for example, 5 clips (30 rounds each). If you put three in someone’s center mass and then reload, you just threw away 27 rounds.

Forced to keep track of both counts would make you think about how you approach each exchange because the number of bullets remaining in the clip after the first fight will drastically affect how you approach subsequent executions.

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