I kept seeing Leslie Nielsen invading David Lynch's 2006 digital video epic Inland Empire.
He's in-character as Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun.
Drebin kicks down the door leading into the room with the rabbit-head people,
and he fires and fires and fires his .38 service revolver into the rabbit-head people.
Those rabbit-head masks are magnificently squibbed-up, blasting fake blood, and fake cerebro-spinal fluid, and chunks of hamburger all over the place.
Later,
Drebin's chief is interrogating him about the motivation for shooting the rabbit-people to death,
"It is not this department's policy to condone careless use of force in the line of duty."
Drebin says, "When I see three rabbit-headed weirdos tormenting a kidnapped Polish girl trapped inside a Purgatory Hotel outside of our space-time continuum, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy!"
I tried to get this fan-film made for 8 years.
Just thought I'd share.
Showing posts with label 2006. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2006. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
Monday, April 8, 2019
The Lynch Meditations 23: Inland Empire (2006)
MAJOR FUCKING SPOILERS, PEOPLE.
OR MAYBE NOT.
WHEN IT COMES TO SUCH A BIZARRE MOVIE AS INLAND EMPIRE, I ACTUALLY DON'T REALLY KNOW IF I UNDERSTAND IT PROPERLY.
I THINK I DO.
I'LL PROCEED WITH CONFIDENCE I DON'T ACTUALLY POSSESS.
THAT USUALLY WORKS.
You know what?
I blame the Phantom.
For everything.
It's his manipulations of people's minds that create all the chaos and displacement and contortions of space/time inside this cinematic nightmare. He's like the Robert Blake character from Lost Highway. The difference is that here, the Phantom seems to have less godlike control over people's fates, and ultimately he is vanquished. The guy even seems relieved when Laura Dern dumps a clip in him at the climax. The Phantom's death is presented as a relief. The gunfire manifests as flashes of liberating light. And then his face distorts and ruptures into a frightening underwater bloodmouthed clown. And all is right with the world. The women trapped in Hotel Purgatory run free. Even Laura Dern's psycho hubby gets to go back home to Poland and be the working class father he was meant to be, as opposed to the wealthy Hollywood power spouse. All ascend to Heaven-which is a ballroom filled with beautiful women dancing and lip-synching to Nina Simone's Sinnerman, by the way.
Why not?
The nightmare becomes a dream.
Laura Dern's Nikki Grace-somehow-manages to remember she's in a dream which seemingly gives her access to the symbolic power-represented in the handgun-to see through the Phantom's lies-which have even seemingly ensnared him-and blast her way out of the nightmare labyrinth. I like that the villain seems to have forgotten his own identity. In his death, he remembers himself, and awakes into his own crazy clown time hell.
This is all great.
My only criticism is that I would've liked Nikki to shoot the creepy rabbit-head people,too.
She opens the door into their TV show world.
Why not sort them out, too?
Wasn't one of the rabbits also the heartless auditor who an alternate version of Nikki endlessly confessed to throughout the movie?
Fuck those creeps.
Not bad.
It's a hella decent film.
After this movie, David Lynch didn't do much. He supervised the official releases of deleted footage from Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I think he directed an expensive viral ad for some perfume company.
And then came 2017. And the third season of Twin Peaks. Also called Twin Peaks: The Return.
One more journey into the Black Lodge.
Another reboot, another excavation of pop culture past-you could almost call it a remake.
Just what we need, right?
It's probably gonna suck.
OR MAYBE NOT.
WHEN IT COMES TO SUCH A BIZARRE MOVIE AS INLAND EMPIRE, I ACTUALLY DON'T REALLY KNOW IF I UNDERSTAND IT PROPERLY.
I THINK I DO.
I'LL PROCEED WITH CONFIDENCE I DON'T ACTUALLY POSSESS.
THAT USUALLY WORKS.
You know what?
I blame the Phantom.
For everything.
It's his manipulations of people's minds that create all the chaos and displacement and contortions of space/time inside this cinematic nightmare. He's like the Robert Blake character from Lost Highway. The difference is that here, the Phantom seems to have less godlike control over people's fates, and ultimately he is vanquished. The guy even seems relieved when Laura Dern dumps a clip in him at the climax. The Phantom's death is presented as a relief. The gunfire manifests as flashes of liberating light. And then his face distorts and ruptures into a frightening underwater bloodmouthed clown. And all is right with the world. The women trapped in Hotel Purgatory run free. Even Laura Dern's psycho hubby gets to go back home to Poland and be the working class father he was meant to be, as opposed to the wealthy Hollywood power spouse. All ascend to Heaven-which is a ballroom filled with beautiful women dancing and lip-synching to Nina Simone's Sinnerman, by the way.
Why not?
The nightmare becomes a dream.
Laura Dern's Nikki Grace-somehow-manages to remember she's in a dream which seemingly gives her access to the symbolic power-represented in the handgun-to see through the Phantom's lies-which have even seemingly ensnared him-and blast her way out of the nightmare labyrinth. I like that the villain seems to have forgotten his own identity. In his death, he remembers himself, and awakes into his own crazy clown time hell.
This is all great.
My only criticism is that I would've liked Nikki to shoot the creepy rabbit-head people,too.
She opens the door into their TV show world.
Why not sort them out, too?
Wasn't one of the rabbits also the heartless auditor who an alternate version of Nikki endlessly confessed to throughout the movie?
Fuck those creeps.
Not bad.
It's a hella decent film.
After this movie, David Lynch didn't do much. He supervised the official releases of deleted footage from Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I think he directed an expensive viral ad for some perfume company.
And then came 2017. And the third season of Twin Peaks. Also called Twin Peaks: The Return.
One more journey into the Black Lodge.
Another reboot, another excavation of pop culture past-you could almost call it a remake.
Just what we need, right?
It's probably gonna suck.
The Lynch Meditations -23
Inland Empire was the second-and, to date, last-David Lynch movie I saw in an actual theater, on a decent sized screen, albeit with digital projection, which wasn't exactly the greatest back in 2007. I think they just set up a consumer-grade digital projector-the kind that many aspiring filmmakers and film buffs buy to stage their screenings anywhere they please. (At the same venue, this was better than a screening of an actual film print of Argento's Suspiria, which was so fucked-up that much of the film looked like it had been invaded by obnoxious demon fireflies.) The movie was murky. You had to squint. You needed a full night's rest and an empty bladder to make it through its shadowy 179 minutes. This is pre-HD, we're talking, but maybe this murkiness was intended to add to the atmosphere of mystery. My circa 2007 DVD copy of the movie actually looks pretty good playing on a Blu-Ray player hooked up to a decent-sized modern LED TV. It's murky, but in all the right places. The lo-fi video look is actually quite slick. And some moments really jump out at you in contrast to the SD-nightmare shadows. So, I guess that's a plug for the DVD release. No, I'm not on the David Lynch payroll.
And there's a sitcom starring people in giant rabbit-head masks that a kidnapped girl imprisoned within a purgatorial hotel in Poland is forced to watch. This does not alleviate her suffering.
But aren't so many movies unlikely fantasies that pander to our desire for everything to be okay in the end? Comic book movies. Space operas. Rom-coms. Hyper-simplified biodramas. Pandering Oscar bait flicks. A lot of these kinds of movies strike me as more absurd and fucked-up than Lynch's idiosyncratic nightmares. At least, with a Lynch movie, there's a name on the front you can blame or praise. There's an author. I guess that goes far with me.
My theatrical experience was at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta, GA. They had a table set up with some fun feelies: Inland Empire bumper stickers, promotional cards for David Lynch's brand of all-organic coffee beans, and lobby cards with the title of the movie printed on them. The Plaza Theater is quite a nice space. At the time-I don't know what the Plaza looks like now-it had the look of an old-fashioned theater, with curtains and balconies-kinda like the movie theater you see late in the film itself when the Laura Dern character starts to become aware that she-or some part of her-is living inside a movie.
Inland Empire was dense, impenetrable, and atmospheric. It had the heaviest mood of being absolutely lost in a confusing nightmare space of conflicting cinematic realities that have been fused and sutured together by sinister forces-using eldritch means-into a labyrinth of oppression. It seemed to be another extended meditation upon the corrupting, crazy-making experiences of trying to make movies in Hollywood in the vein of Mulholland Dr., but with an extra forty minutes on the running time, and fewer minutes overall devoted to clever dialogue exchanges and quirky moments of comic relief. Much time is spent stalking hallways and corridors and going up staircases and magically teleporting between the studios and sidewalks of Los Angeles, California and the snowy streets and well-appointed old-world interiors of Lodz, Poland.
Laura Dern seems to be playing a few different versions of herself: successful Hollywood actress Nikki Grace; the character she's playing in a movie called On High in Blue Tomorrows; and a kind of grim and gritty real life version of the character in the movie. Dern warps from one shard of fractured reality to another, guided only by the surreal nightmare logic of an allegedly cursed screenplay that seems to absorb and torment anyone who tries to produce it. Dern's Nikki Grace is also oppressed by a psycho jealous stalker of a husband who may or may not be possessed by a supernatural hypnotist known as the Phantom-who is sort of like a 1960s Marvel Comics villain-think the Miracle Man or the Ringmaster-imported into a Lynch movie.
At some point during her wander of the nightmare labyrinth, Dern's Nikki morphs into a dystopian version of the melodramatic Southern Lady she plays in the movie, and she ascends a series of staircases inside a derelict building, only to find herself seated before an emotionally depressed, passive-aggressive man-hunched, bespectacled, and puffy-cheeked-in a shabby suit seated behind a desk who comes across as a cursed bureaucrat straight out of Kafka. This version of Nikki proceeds to give a deposition in which she expresses her rage at being poor and a lifelong victim of rape and sexual harassment by an endless succession of men in a miserable, polluted industrial town. This expression of rage is broken up into several sequences throughout the movie, and it seems to represent another part of the fractured reality that Nikki wanders through. The character is just this side of over-the-top. At first, the community theater American South accent draws attention to itself, and we seem to be back in the grotesque caricature of Wild at Heart; but as this nightmare deposition continues, the authentic emotions of rage and despair elevate the character and performance into an almost unbearably raw level of intensity. The Kafkaesque auditor, after listening to Dern for some time with almost no expression on his face-except a vague, oily contempt-asks her if she cheated on the husband who beat and raped her repeatedly, the implication being that she deserved the sadism inflicted upon her. This is a nightmare realm of misogynistic cruelty without compassion, mercy, or justice.
Nikki is sometimes an active force in the narrative, as she stalks the mad maze, and at other times she becomes a bewildered observer of other people's personal hells. It reminded me of Martin Sheen's assassin-traveler in Apocalypse Now. Dern has an almost impossible task as an actor: endless variations of bewilderment, terror, confusion, and cataclysmic rage as she is confronted by a series of incomprehensibly weird dislocations and alienations from her identity, memory, and the space/time continuum itself.
Oh, and it's a kinda/sorta musical.
And there's a sitcom starring people in giant rabbit-head masks that a kidnapped girl imprisoned within a purgatorial hotel in Poland is forced to watch. This does not alleviate her suffering.
Dern and her psycho-husband morph into alternate, working poor versions of themselves, which seems to embody some kind of rich white people's terror at the thought of losing their comfortable, privileged lives, and becoming consumed with the minutiae of daily budgeting for food and bills and toilet paper.
There's a lot going on here. I'm not sure it all works. I'm not crazy about this Lynch trope of a brutal man being possessed by an evil spirit and, therefore, is not truly responsible for his actions. The Phantom is a variation on Killer Bob. Did we need all 179 of those minutes? Can this clusterfuck of space/time identity confusions and disruptions be so directly resolved by discharging a symbolic firearm into a comic book villain master manipulator? I mean . . . if it's all in a dream, right?
Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of playing with dream logic to the extent that David Lynch does in this movie. You do find yourself asking, What's the fucking point if it's all a dream or a hallucination or whatever?
But aren't so many movies unlikely fantasies that pander to our desire for everything to be okay in the end? Comic book movies. Space operas. Rom-coms. Hyper-simplified biodramas. Pandering Oscar bait flicks. A lot of these kinds of movies strike me as more absurd and fucked-up than Lynch's idiosyncratic nightmares. At least, with a Lynch movie, there's a name on the front you can blame or praise. There's an author. I guess that goes far with me.
I haven't watched Inland Empire in awhile.
Will I be able to make the epic sit?
Diving in . . .
Monday, September 19, 2011
BOOK REVIEW: SMARTBOMB: THE QUEST FOR ART, ENTERTAINMENT, AND BIG BUCKS IN THE VIDEOGAME REVOLUTION (2005)
by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby
Published 2005 and 2006 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Review by William D. Tucker
Smartbomb is an efficient mixture of original reporting and research on the state of video games as both an industry and a cultural phenomenon circa 2005-2006 when the book was originally published.
Authors Chaplin and Ruby are focused on how the video gaming phenomenon has evolved in the United States, starting with how accessible computing grew out of the hacker crew at MIT's legendary Building 20 in the early 1960s, and going on to give in-depth profiles of designers such as Gears of War creator Clifford "CliffyB" Bleszinski, the guru of all things Sim Will Wright, id Software's John Romero and John Carmack, and Atari's Nolan Bushnell; but they also go in-depth with Shigeru Miyamoto, the resident genius at Nintendo.
Miyamoto's creations, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Mario 64 insured Nintendo's dominance over console gaming in the 1980s and 1990s, and allowed them to stay relevant to American gaming into the first decade of the 21st century. The book's later chapters deal with the ominous convergence of gaming and the military-industrial complex's ambitions to more efficiently model "full spectrum dominance" and to better indoctrinate young soldiers with high end first person shooter games. Smartbomb closes with Microsoft's $500 million gala launch of the X-Box, which would go on to become the first console gaming system from an American developer to offer a serious challenge to the hegemony Sony, Sega, and Nintendo had enjoyed over the US and global console gaming markets throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
My favorite chapter was the chapter about Will Wright, founder of Maxis and all things Sim. Wright is portrayed as a kind of plain-speaking oracle: at conventions various aspiring game designers pitch him their gaming ideas, and Wright usually shoots them down. On his downtime, Wright participates in the Stupid Fun Club: an underground robot battling circuit. DIY robot builders meet in a seemingly abandoned warehouse to orchestrate rock'em sock 'em gladiatorial spectacles. He has also taught himself to fly planes, and obsessively collects junked out tech from the Soviet space program as a hobby.
This chapter also recounts a meeting between Wright and Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, over sushi with Rosedale picking up the tab. Rosedale and Wright are both in the business of trying to enhance gaming's capacity to colonize the consciousness of players by offering up complex multi-variable simulations. SimCity puts the player in charge of a complex evolving city. The player is a kind of super-mayor, who must anticipate the needs of the Sim people inhabiting the SimCity. The player must zone property for commercial, residential, and industrial zones, and then respond to the Sims' complaints about pollution, crime, jobs, and other factors. Occasionally, an earthquake or a giant radioactive lizard trashes things, and then the player must respond to the crisis with relief and reconstruction. Rosedale's Second Life is not so much a game as it is . . . well, a Second Life. In Second Life the goal isn't to beat scores of enemies or field an army, or even to play a godlike role lording over a complex simulation. It can be anything you want. The Second Life citizen can meticulously reconstruct prosaic reality, or they can transform themselves into a half-dragon bike punk with a mean tattoo. Men can become women, women can become men. Or you can forge your own bold new gender identity. Or you can re-fight famous battles of World War II. Or you can don the robes of the KKK and burn a cross. Or you can simulate all manner of sex acts.
Rosedale and Wright rap about "possibility spaces" and how the games aren't so much meant to be goals in and of themselves, but are rather an opportunity to do science. Specifically, Wright asserts that models and simulations are the new way to conduct science as opposed to experiments. Wright says, "Simulation is quickly replacing experimentation as the central test of a new theory." Wright's talent for constructing simulation programs has gotten him lucrative projects for hospitals, Chevron, and the Pentagon. Wright seems to have few moral or ethical qualms about his work being used for potentially lethal applications, such as designing autonomous vehicles for land based cruise missiles. In fact, he explicitly states that he is more bothered by the lost opportunity from failing to realize an application of a given technology, rather than the attendant moral hazards that come with creating something and implementing it.
Will Wright was seemingly born to be a game designer. He comes off as comfortable in the role of genius game creator. He all but says he prefers to interface with reality via simulation. After all, if you're the simulation designer, you get to decide what's important and what's not. Experiments are messy, and must be rigorously repeated and the results scrutinized and cross-referenced. Dead ends are legion. A sim designer can create his or her own world and come up with wholly new rules and realities. Will Wright has rather joyously carved out his own place in the industry.
But many people in the world of gaming have struggled with being passionate about their profession. They create successful product, and yet they do not wish to be perceived as geeks or shut-ins. Chaplin and Ruby explore these tangled desires with the character of CliffyB the lead designer of Epic Games and the creator of the Unreal FPS franchise. CliffyB would later go on to create the smash hit Gears of War, but Smartbomb covers his pre-Gears of War days. Chaplin and Ruby use CliffyB's ascent to illustrate the rise of the gaming industry overall: from the disreputable basements of skeptical moms and dads to the heights of celebrity, wealth, and worldwide cultural cachet. CliffyB started out as a hobbyist and evolved into a captain of the industry. Along the way, he shed his geek-grunge threads for a personal trainer and bling chic couture, strategically engaging with the pan-optic media culture of the early 21st century. CliffyB has his private doubts, in Chaplin and Ruby's telling, and heavy is the head that wears the crown. In some ways, CliffyB's transformation resonates with the alternate persona existences of those gamers who devote themselves to MMORPGs and Second Life. CliffyB has to step into his persona as a rock star game designer, and then steps out of it in private. Maybe it's more LARPing than MMORPing, but it's intriguing how the global success of gaming has necessitated sundry forms of gamesmanship and image management on the part of the industry leaders.
Chaplin and Ruby also touch on the phenomenon of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games through a riveting account of the launch of Star Wars Galaxies. Anticipation builds as the authors trace the technical trials and tribulations of the developers working out the bugs in the system prior to launch, and the outsize expectations of legions of Star Wars fans who have signed up for beta subscriptions and can't wait to dive into their new personae. In lesser hands, such an account could be muddled, tedious with technical detail, and of no obvious interest to non-specialist readers. But Chaplin and Ruby keep the high-tech business grounded in human emotions, ambitions, and expectations, and they illustrate the dramatic stakes for all involved. The gamers can't wait to escape meatspace, and the developers can't wait to see if their elaborate scenarios are a hit.
Once an MMORPG is launched, the troubles have just begun. Even if it is massively popular from its first launch, all sorts of bugs and kinks can only be worked out, sometimes painfully, via the gamers' contact with the game. The life of an MMORPG as both a cultural and business entity is one of constant adaptation, mutation, evolution, and transformation.
Smartbomb is five or so years behind the times, but it's a great place to start if one wants to pick up on the dominant currents of video gaming as both an industry and a culture. It's written with keen perception into the business, human drama, and cultural aspects of this multi-billion dollar industry. A solid volume for any library on the history of video games.
Smartbomb is an efficient mixture of original reporting and research on the state of video games as both an industry and a cultural phenomenon circa 2005-2006 when the book was originally published.
Authors Chaplin and Ruby are focused on how the video gaming phenomenon has evolved in the United States, starting with how accessible computing grew out of the hacker crew at MIT's legendary Building 20 in the early 1960s, and going on to give in-depth profiles of designers such as Gears of War creator Clifford "CliffyB" Bleszinski, the guru of all things Sim Will Wright, id Software's John Romero and John Carmack, and Atari's Nolan Bushnell; but they also go in-depth with Shigeru Miyamoto, the resident genius at Nintendo.
Miyamoto's creations, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Mario 64 insured Nintendo's dominance over console gaming in the 1980s and 1990s, and allowed them to stay relevant to American gaming into the first decade of the 21st century. The book's later chapters deal with the ominous convergence of gaming and the military-industrial complex's ambitions to more efficiently model "full spectrum dominance" and to better indoctrinate young soldiers with high end first person shooter games. Smartbomb closes with Microsoft's $500 million gala launch of the X-Box, which would go on to become the first console gaming system from an American developer to offer a serious challenge to the hegemony Sony, Sega, and Nintendo had enjoyed over the US and global console gaming markets throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
My favorite chapter was the chapter about Will Wright, founder of Maxis and all things Sim. Wright is portrayed as a kind of plain-speaking oracle: at conventions various aspiring game designers pitch him their gaming ideas, and Wright usually shoots them down. On his downtime, Wright participates in the Stupid Fun Club: an underground robot battling circuit. DIY robot builders meet in a seemingly abandoned warehouse to orchestrate rock'em sock 'em gladiatorial spectacles. He has also taught himself to fly planes, and obsessively collects junked out tech from the Soviet space program as a hobby.
This chapter also recounts a meeting between Wright and Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, over sushi with Rosedale picking up the tab. Rosedale and Wright are both in the business of trying to enhance gaming's capacity to colonize the consciousness of players by offering up complex multi-variable simulations. SimCity puts the player in charge of a complex evolving city. The player is a kind of super-mayor, who must anticipate the needs of the Sim people inhabiting the SimCity. The player must zone property for commercial, residential, and industrial zones, and then respond to the Sims' complaints about pollution, crime, jobs, and other factors. Occasionally, an earthquake or a giant radioactive lizard trashes things, and then the player must respond to the crisis with relief and reconstruction. Rosedale's Second Life is not so much a game as it is . . . well, a Second Life. In Second Life the goal isn't to beat scores of enemies or field an army, or even to play a godlike role lording over a complex simulation. It can be anything you want. The Second Life citizen can meticulously reconstruct prosaic reality, or they can transform themselves into a half-dragon bike punk with a mean tattoo. Men can become women, women can become men. Or you can forge your own bold new gender identity. Or you can re-fight famous battles of World War II. Or you can don the robes of the KKK and burn a cross. Or you can simulate all manner of sex acts.
Rosedale and Wright rap about "possibility spaces" and how the games aren't so much meant to be goals in and of themselves, but are rather an opportunity to do science. Specifically, Wright asserts that models and simulations are the new way to conduct science as opposed to experiments. Wright says, "Simulation is quickly replacing experimentation as the central test of a new theory." Wright's talent for constructing simulation programs has gotten him lucrative projects for hospitals, Chevron, and the Pentagon. Wright seems to have few moral or ethical qualms about his work being used for potentially lethal applications, such as designing autonomous vehicles for land based cruise missiles. In fact, he explicitly states that he is more bothered by the lost opportunity from failing to realize an application of a given technology, rather than the attendant moral hazards that come with creating something and implementing it.
Will Wright was seemingly born to be a game designer. He comes off as comfortable in the role of genius game creator. He all but says he prefers to interface with reality via simulation. After all, if you're the simulation designer, you get to decide what's important and what's not. Experiments are messy, and must be rigorously repeated and the results scrutinized and cross-referenced. Dead ends are legion. A sim designer can create his or her own world and come up with wholly new rules and realities. Will Wright has rather joyously carved out his own place in the industry.
But many people in the world of gaming have struggled with being passionate about their profession. They create successful product, and yet they do not wish to be perceived as geeks or shut-ins. Chaplin and Ruby explore these tangled desires with the character of CliffyB the lead designer of Epic Games and the creator of the Unreal FPS franchise. CliffyB would later go on to create the smash hit Gears of War, but Smartbomb covers his pre-Gears of War days. Chaplin and Ruby use CliffyB's ascent to illustrate the rise of the gaming industry overall: from the disreputable basements of skeptical moms and dads to the heights of celebrity, wealth, and worldwide cultural cachet. CliffyB started out as a hobbyist and evolved into a captain of the industry. Along the way, he shed his geek-grunge threads for a personal trainer and bling chic couture, strategically engaging with the pan-optic media culture of the early 21st century. CliffyB has his private doubts, in Chaplin and Ruby's telling, and heavy is the head that wears the crown. In some ways, CliffyB's transformation resonates with the alternate persona existences of those gamers who devote themselves to MMORPGs and Second Life. CliffyB has to step into his persona as a rock star game designer, and then steps out of it in private. Maybe it's more LARPing than MMORPing, but it's intriguing how the global success of gaming has necessitated sundry forms of gamesmanship and image management on the part of the industry leaders.
Chaplin and Ruby also touch on the phenomenon of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games through a riveting account of the launch of Star Wars Galaxies. Anticipation builds as the authors trace the technical trials and tribulations of the developers working out the bugs in the system prior to launch, and the outsize expectations of legions of Star Wars fans who have signed up for beta subscriptions and can't wait to dive into their new personae. In lesser hands, such an account could be muddled, tedious with technical detail, and of no obvious interest to non-specialist readers. But Chaplin and Ruby keep the high-tech business grounded in human emotions, ambitions, and expectations, and they illustrate the dramatic stakes for all involved. The gamers can't wait to escape meatspace, and the developers can't wait to see if their elaborate scenarios are a hit.
Once an MMORPG is launched, the troubles have just begun. Even if it is massively popular from its first launch, all sorts of bugs and kinks can only be worked out, sometimes painfully, via the gamers' contact with the game. The life of an MMORPG as both a cultural and business entity is one of constant adaptation, mutation, evolution, and transformation.
Smartbomb is five or so years behind the times, but it's a great place to start if one wants to pick up on the dominant currents of video gaming as both an industry and a culture. It's written with keen perception into the business, human drama, and cultural aspects of this multi-billion dollar industry. A solid volume for any library on the history of video games.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
BOOK REVIEW: THE CRIMSON LABYRINTH (2006)
Originally published in Japan in 1999.
English translation by Masami Isetani and Camellia Nieh
English edition published in 2006 by Vertical, Inc.
Review by William D. Tucker.
Fujiki wakes up in a canyon of red rock. He doesn't remember how he got there, but he remembers who he was: an unemployed salaryman who was down and out on the streets of Shinjuku, sleeping in a park, and dumpster diving meals from discarded bento boxes out behind a convenience store. Now, he's seemingly been transported to another world, or maybe another reality, by parties unknown.
Fujiki's abductors have left him with a box full of nutrition bars and a handheld gaming machine (think Game Boy) that tells Fujiki that he is trapped in the Mars Labyrinth and that the game has begun. What kind of game? The machine elaborates that Fujiki must survive in order to return to Earth and receive the prize money. Further, the machine states that the players of this game must make their way to various checkpoints and make decisions which could determine whether they live or die.
Is this some sort of elaborate prank? Is it a hallucination? Is Fujiki really on Mars? What kind of people would render you unconscious and toss you into the middle of an elaborately staged survival game? Reality television producers? Are these people even human? Or are they Martians?
Fujiki starts to find his way to the first checkpoint. But he's not alone. He encounters a woman named Ai Otomo, who has also been conscripted into this game. Back in Japan, she drew pornographic manga. Now, she stumbles around a maze of red rock, at just as much of a loss for explanations as Fujiki. Fujiki and Ai put their heads together and figure out how to count off their paces to find the first checkpoint as per the handheld gaming device's instructions, and they find the other Japanese citizens who've been conscripted to play this twisted game: all of them are people recently unemployed or forgotten in the wake of Japan's exploded bubble economy. Perhaps that's why they've been abducted. What's a few less jobless folks to worry about? No, these people will not be missed. And what else, if anything, does that say about the motivations of the unseen abductors?
Each player has been provided with a handheld gaming device. At the first checkpoint, where all the players are gathered, they are beamed more information about the nature of the game, including the following prohibitions: no climbing the canyon walls, no drawing large figures in the sand or on the rocks, no making multiple fires in close proximity, no making whistles to emit loud noises, and no signaling with mirror-like objects. Violators will be severely punished. The players are then presented with the following choice of initial paths:
"IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK SURVIVAL ITEMS, GO EAST. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK SELF-DEFENSE ITEMS, GO WEST. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK FOOD, GO SOUTH. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK INFORMATION, GO NORTH."
Wouldn't you know it? Fujiki and Ai end up going north. Fujiki, who specialized in game theory at college, reasons that the abductors must have some reason for offering up such a seemingly impractical choice as an initial opening move of the game. Fujiki also reasons that if this is indeed a game, then the very first choice will probably have far-reaching ramifications, maybe even life and death consequences, and so that first choice had better be a damned good one. Of course, as Fujiki also realizes, game theory depends on the rather huge assumption that all the actors in question are rational, which is scarcely a given in real life. Therefore, game theory as applied to real life is, as Fujiki puts it, "worse than useless." But why would the people behind the Mars Labyrinth design a game that could not be rationally solved? Even if Fujiki is wrong, surely there must be some design, some underlying logic to be figured out that one might win? But such thinking assumes that the game has been designed in such a way that actual victory is possible, that it has been constructed to be fair.
Hey, real life ain't fair. Games exist as a part of real life. Therefore . . .
. . . Fujiki and Ai set out along the northern path in search of information.
The Crimson Labyrinth is a lean but protein rich meal. It's one of those books you just about have to read in one sitting. It's all plot, and pacing, and suspense, with just enough precise characterization to keep you intrigued. The setting is rendered with enough detail to bring it to life, but not so much that it becomes a travelogue. It has one of those highly exploitative yet engaging premises that you just have to get to the bottom of, even if you suspect the conclusion might not be as satisfying as the journey. As it happens, author Yusuke Kishi knows how to parcel out the suspense even once he's tipped his hand. He's not just concerned with a big payoff, some out of left field shocker of an ending, but he also wants to ask some tough questions about human nature within the context of the survival game:
Are these players faced with a zero sum game, where only one can win? Or is there a possibility for a cooperative victory?
What are the penalties for violating any of the five prohibitions? Why have such prohibitions in the first place?
If you're faced with a zero sum game, where you have to compete with your fellow human beings for a single victory position, what are you willing to do to win? If it's a zero sum game, can Fujiki and Ai both win? Can Fujiki and Ai trust each other?
Who are the abductors? Are they human? Are they telling the truth? Why would they lie? Why would they be honest? Can the information provided by the handheld gaming units be trusted? Whoever the abductors are, they must be some sort of organization with considerable resources, perhaps even paranormal powers. What kind of an organization would put on a survival game of this nature? What are their ethics and/or morality, if any? Is there some larger agenda? Is it all just for kicks?
Maybe none of this is real. The point of view character is Fujiki. Can his perceptions be trusted?
How does one make an ethical choice within the context of a zero-sum game? Is it possible? Is ethical decision making entirely dependent upon context? That is to say, if we can only choose from the options that are known to us, and none of them are ethical, how do we decide what the most ethical of unethical choices is in a given situation?
What about good and evil? Are these things inherent in who we are? Or are they products of the choices we make? Are they woven into the fabric of reality, or are they just illusions we project onto our daily lives? We typically imagine ourselves to be good even when we do evil. Don't we typically let ourselves off the hook for transgressions large and small?
Does one have to play the game, or can you just walk away from it?
The Crimson Labyrinth is one of those books with such an over the top premise that it inspires all sorts of speculations as you read it.
Of course, I can't tell you what the Mars Labyrinth is. You have to read it for yourself . . .
----
Okay, digression time.
What is it about stories about sick games played with unwilling participants for life or death stakes?
The Crimson Labyrinth was published in 1999, the same year that saw the original publication of the notorious cult classic Battle Royale. BR was all about a group of young Japanese students who were pitted against each other in an elaborate death match for sinister purposes by the government.
I suppose it goes back to "The Most Dangerous Game," a short story by Richard Connell published in 1924 about a depraved aristocrat who sets up expeditions to go human hunting for fun and profit. This short story was knocked off in 1993 for the Jean Claude Van Damme epic Hard Target which reset the action from a remote Caribbean island to New Orleans and tossed in motor cycles, martial arts, and assault weapons.
In 1987 you had the Schwarzenegger classic The Running Man which was about a futuristic televised gladiator spectacle involving condemned prisoners going up against high tech assassins in a bombed out dystopian landscape--all set up by evil, Reaganomic corporations which had overrun America by that time.
In 1997 there was The Game, directed by David Fincher, which was about a wealthy man, played by Michael Douglas, who is conned into participating in what starts out as some kind of alternate reality LARP which turns into a deadly, all out assault on his financial assets and his life.
I've heard some people compare The Game to John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus about a man being manipulated by elaborate illusions that might threaten his life.
Then there are the Dream Park novels published throughout the 1980s and 1990s by Steven Barnes and Larry Niven which imagine a high tech theme park where the participants engage in LARPing scenarios writ large derived from world mythologies, sci-fi and sword and sorcery literature and gaming products. These novels intertwine murder mystery plots with unusual pastiches from sci-fi and fantasy literature and offer intriguing takes on the line between reality and fantasy. Unusually, the participants in these Dream Park games are willing participants. Do people like to have their reality toyed with from time to time?
Most all of these stories seemingly involve conspiracies of one kind or another. The players come to think of themselves as being persecuted, of being at the hands of heartless machinations by powerful evil forces. In the case of The Running Man and Battle Royale, the bloodsport is explicitly set up by the ruling classes for purposes of control and pacification of the general populace. In those works in particular the suspense doesn't derive so much from the unraveling of secret conspiracies as it does from the life and death struggles of who survives and who dies.
"The Most Dangerous Game" and Hard Target are about smaller scale operations. In the former, it's one Russian aristocrat, and in the latter it's a New Orleans based gang that hires itself out to wealthy degenerates who wish to hunt homeless people on the streets of the Big Easy. The cops don't exist on the crazy Russian's island, and in the New Orleans scenario they've been bought off, as per usual, by the criminal organization of interest. Depraved gamesmanship doesn't necessarily need the backing of oppressive governments or rapacious corporations. It just needs the desire and sadism within the human heart. Maybe a few bribes for the local gendarmes if the operation involves a couple dozen players or so.
Maybe these kinds of stories (if indeed they can be said to be of a kind, or kinds, I'm casting a wide net here), work on an author's and an audience's sense of fair play. Even when these stories seemingly cheat, it's within the context of the game. A betrayal of the rules within a game is that much more stinging. A gaming scenario is also a quick and dirty way of contriving drama, of manufacturing conflict.
Corruption of varying degrees figures into these sagas. Is a human life worth sacrificing for the sake of sport? Are we all just pawns in the gamesmanship which goes on between nations and transnational corporations?
Where do our true loyalties lie as humans? To Team A or Team B? What about Team C? Why Teams? Should we try to reach out to our fellow humans as humans, and discard such childish pursuits?
Is it possible to say no to the game, whatever that may be? Do we have to play?
What if you want to play? If everybody quits, and you're the last gamer, how does that position differ from its opposite? The lone quitter and the last gamer . . . are they that far apart?
Maybe there are more subtle grades of distinction to be made, but most of these stories, excepting the Dream Park books, deal with the terrors of bloodsports, of zero-sum games at their most naked and savage--stripped of all economic, nationalistic, and ideological posturing and hand-waving. In the end, those that make the games want you to play. They won't let you quit. They want to put you on a team, dictate the rules, and set the terms of victory. At most, the player might be able to choose their team or what weapon they'll use to kill the other guy.
You can't win if you don't play. But what price victory? Sometimes you lose even if you win.
Fujiki wakes up in a canyon of red rock. He doesn't remember how he got there, but he remembers who he was: an unemployed salaryman who was down and out on the streets of Shinjuku, sleeping in a park, and dumpster diving meals from discarded bento boxes out behind a convenience store. Now, he's seemingly been transported to another world, or maybe another reality, by parties unknown.
Fujiki's abductors have left him with a box full of nutrition bars and a handheld gaming machine (think Game Boy) that tells Fujiki that he is trapped in the Mars Labyrinth and that the game has begun. What kind of game? The machine elaborates that Fujiki must survive in order to return to Earth and receive the prize money. Further, the machine states that the players of this game must make their way to various checkpoints and make decisions which could determine whether they live or die.
Is this some sort of elaborate prank? Is it a hallucination? Is Fujiki really on Mars? What kind of people would render you unconscious and toss you into the middle of an elaborately staged survival game? Reality television producers? Are these people even human? Or are they Martians?
Fujiki starts to find his way to the first checkpoint. But he's not alone. He encounters a woman named Ai Otomo, who has also been conscripted into this game. Back in Japan, she drew pornographic manga. Now, she stumbles around a maze of red rock, at just as much of a loss for explanations as Fujiki. Fujiki and Ai put their heads together and figure out how to count off their paces to find the first checkpoint as per the handheld gaming device's instructions, and they find the other Japanese citizens who've been conscripted to play this twisted game: all of them are people recently unemployed or forgotten in the wake of Japan's exploded bubble economy. Perhaps that's why they've been abducted. What's a few less jobless folks to worry about? No, these people will not be missed. And what else, if anything, does that say about the motivations of the unseen abductors?
Each player has been provided with a handheld gaming device. At the first checkpoint, where all the players are gathered, they are beamed more information about the nature of the game, including the following prohibitions: no climbing the canyon walls, no drawing large figures in the sand or on the rocks, no making multiple fires in close proximity, no making whistles to emit loud noises, and no signaling with mirror-like objects. Violators will be severely punished. The players are then presented with the following choice of initial paths:
"IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK SURVIVAL ITEMS, GO EAST. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK SELF-DEFENSE ITEMS, GO WEST. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK FOOD, GO SOUTH. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK INFORMATION, GO NORTH."
Wouldn't you know it? Fujiki and Ai end up going north. Fujiki, who specialized in game theory at college, reasons that the abductors must have some reason for offering up such a seemingly impractical choice as an initial opening move of the game. Fujiki also reasons that if this is indeed a game, then the very first choice will probably have far-reaching ramifications, maybe even life and death consequences, and so that first choice had better be a damned good one. Of course, as Fujiki also realizes, game theory depends on the rather huge assumption that all the actors in question are rational, which is scarcely a given in real life. Therefore, game theory as applied to real life is, as Fujiki puts it, "worse than useless." But why would the people behind the Mars Labyrinth design a game that could not be rationally solved? Even if Fujiki is wrong, surely there must be some design, some underlying logic to be figured out that one might win? But such thinking assumes that the game has been designed in such a way that actual victory is possible, that it has been constructed to be fair.
Hey, real life ain't fair. Games exist as a part of real life. Therefore . . .
. . . Fujiki and Ai set out along the northern path in search of information.
The Crimson Labyrinth is a lean but protein rich meal. It's one of those books you just about have to read in one sitting. It's all plot, and pacing, and suspense, with just enough precise characterization to keep you intrigued. The setting is rendered with enough detail to bring it to life, but not so much that it becomes a travelogue. It has one of those highly exploitative yet engaging premises that you just have to get to the bottom of, even if you suspect the conclusion might not be as satisfying as the journey. As it happens, author Yusuke Kishi knows how to parcel out the suspense even once he's tipped his hand. He's not just concerned with a big payoff, some out of left field shocker of an ending, but he also wants to ask some tough questions about human nature within the context of the survival game:
Are these players faced with a zero sum game, where only one can win? Or is there a possibility for a cooperative victory?
What are the penalties for violating any of the five prohibitions? Why have such prohibitions in the first place?
If you're faced with a zero sum game, where you have to compete with your fellow human beings for a single victory position, what are you willing to do to win? If it's a zero sum game, can Fujiki and Ai both win? Can Fujiki and Ai trust each other?
Who are the abductors? Are they human? Are they telling the truth? Why would they lie? Why would they be honest? Can the information provided by the handheld gaming units be trusted? Whoever the abductors are, they must be some sort of organization with considerable resources, perhaps even paranormal powers. What kind of an organization would put on a survival game of this nature? What are their ethics and/or morality, if any? Is there some larger agenda? Is it all just for kicks?
Maybe none of this is real. The point of view character is Fujiki. Can his perceptions be trusted?
How does one make an ethical choice within the context of a zero-sum game? Is it possible? Is ethical decision making entirely dependent upon context? That is to say, if we can only choose from the options that are known to us, and none of them are ethical, how do we decide what the most ethical of unethical choices is in a given situation?
What about good and evil? Are these things inherent in who we are? Or are they products of the choices we make? Are they woven into the fabric of reality, or are they just illusions we project onto our daily lives? We typically imagine ourselves to be good even when we do evil. Don't we typically let ourselves off the hook for transgressions large and small?
Does one have to play the game, or can you just walk away from it?
The Crimson Labyrinth is one of those books with such an over the top premise that it inspires all sorts of speculations as you read it.
Of course, I can't tell you what the Mars Labyrinth is. You have to read it for yourself . . .
----
Okay, digression time.
What is it about stories about sick games played with unwilling participants for life or death stakes?
The Crimson Labyrinth was published in 1999, the same year that saw the original publication of the notorious cult classic Battle Royale. BR was all about a group of young Japanese students who were pitted against each other in an elaborate death match for sinister purposes by the government.
I suppose it goes back to "The Most Dangerous Game," a short story by Richard Connell published in 1924 about a depraved aristocrat who sets up expeditions to go human hunting for fun and profit. This short story was knocked off in 1993 for the Jean Claude Van Damme epic Hard Target which reset the action from a remote Caribbean island to New Orleans and tossed in motor cycles, martial arts, and assault weapons.
In 1987 you had the Schwarzenegger classic The Running Man which was about a futuristic televised gladiator spectacle involving condemned prisoners going up against high tech assassins in a bombed out dystopian landscape--all set up by evil, Reaganomic corporations which had overrun America by that time.
In 1997 there was The Game, directed by David Fincher, which was about a wealthy man, played by Michael Douglas, who is conned into participating in what starts out as some kind of alternate reality LARP which turns into a deadly, all out assault on his financial assets and his life.
I've heard some people compare The Game to John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus about a man being manipulated by elaborate illusions that might threaten his life.
Then there are the Dream Park novels published throughout the 1980s and 1990s by Steven Barnes and Larry Niven which imagine a high tech theme park where the participants engage in LARPing scenarios writ large derived from world mythologies, sci-fi and sword and sorcery literature and gaming products. These novels intertwine murder mystery plots with unusual pastiches from sci-fi and fantasy literature and offer intriguing takes on the line between reality and fantasy. Unusually, the participants in these Dream Park games are willing participants. Do people like to have their reality toyed with from time to time?
Most all of these stories seemingly involve conspiracies of one kind or another. The players come to think of themselves as being persecuted, of being at the hands of heartless machinations by powerful evil forces. In the case of The Running Man and Battle Royale, the bloodsport is explicitly set up by the ruling classes for purposes of control and pacification of the general populace. In those works in particular the suspense doesn't derive so much from the unraveling of secret conspiracies as it does from the life and death struggles of who survives and who dies.
"The Most Dangerous Game" and Hard Target are about smaller scale operations. In the former, it's one Russian aristocrat, and in the latter it's a New Orleans based gang that hires itself out to wealthy degenerates who wish to hunt homeless people on the streets of the Big Easy. The cops don't exist on the crazy Russian's island, and in the New Orleans scenario they've been bought off, as per usual, by the criminal organization of interest. Depraved gamesmanship doesn't necessarily need the backing of oppressive governments or rapacious corporations. It just needs the desire and sadism within the human heart. Maybe a few bribes for the local gendarmes if the operation involves a couple dozen players or so.
Maybe these kinds of stories (if indeed they can be said to be of a kind, or kinds, I'm casting a wide net here), work on an author's and an audience's sense of fair play. Even when these stories seemingly cheat, it's within the context of the game. A betrayal of the rules within a game is that much more stinging. A gaming scenario is also a quick and dirty way of contriving drama, of manufacturing conflict.
Corruption of varying degrees figures into these sagas. Is a human life worth sacrificing for the sake of sport? Are we all just pawns in the gamesmanship which goes on between nations and transnational corporations?
Where do our true loyalties lie as humans? To Team A or Team B? What about Team C? Why Teams? Should we try to reach out to our fellow humans as humans, and discard such childish pursuits?
Is it possible to say no to the game, whatever that may be? Do we have to play?
What if you want to play? If everybody quits, and you're the last gamer, how does that position differ from its opposite? The lone quitter and the last gamer . . . are they that far apart?
Maybe there are more subtle grades of distinction to be made, but most of these stories, excepting the Dream Park books, deal with the terrors of bloodsports, of zero-sum games at their most naked and savage--stripped of all economic, nationalistic, and ideological posturing and hand-waving. In the end, those that make the games want you to play. They won't let you quit. They want to put you on a team, dictate the rules, and set the terms of victory. At most, the player might be able to choose their team or what weapon they'll use to kill the other guy.
You can't win if you don't play. But what price victory? Sometimes you lose even if you win.
Friday, August 26, 2011
MOVIE REVIEW: ULTRAVIOLET (2006)
Starring
Milla Jovovich
Nick Chinlund
William Fichtner
Written and Directed by Kurt Wimmer
Review by William D. Tucker.
In the future, all of humanity is united as one. Individual nation states are a thing of the past, as is the lamentable phenomenon of nation-on-nation violence. So far so good. Ah, but this future utopia has a dark side: the hemophages, humans who have been infected with a blood disease that endows them with superhuman strength and speed and a reduced lifespan. They also sprout enhanced canines which gives them the appearance of olde tyme vampires. The hemophages are viewed as a threat by the human controllers of the planet, and so they are rounded up and put into concentration camps. Some of the hemophages evade capture, and form underground resistance cells. The hemophages conduct raids using ultra-technology and derring-do on government science facilities and learn about a plan to develop a virus that will wipe out the hemophages once and for all.
Milla Jovovich stars as a very pretty woman named Violet. She's the top hemophage operative whose mission it is to steal the anti-hemophage virus and save the day. She is opposed by a smarmy dude called Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund). You know if the dude's got a name like Daxus he must be evil. Beware names with Ds and Xs in them. There is also, apparently, some kind of theocratic dictatorship in place upon the planet, although this is only minimally established (late in the movie there's a giant, sinister building that's shaped like a cross). Daxus is a guy in an expensive suit who is seemingly intensely germophobic and fears infection by the hemophage virus. He's constantly using sanitary wipes to pick things up, and he wears some surprisingly fashionable nose filters. Overall, Daxus is way uptight.
Violet is much more hip. She wears dark glasses, skintight jeans, and halter tops and sallies forth into battle against scores of enemies who wear gas masks and riot armor. One might wonder, "Why would someone go into battle with a bare midriff? A bullet in the guts is no fun at all." The answer: it looks cool. Or maybe it's like why Batman has a big old bat symbol on his chest: to distract the enemy. In Batman's case, the bat symbol is bulletproof, so he gets the bad guys shooting at the bulletproof symbol, and not shooting at the exposed lower half of his face. Perhaps Violet's midriff is bulletproof? It is an impressive midriff. She must do a lot of crunches.
Milla Jovovich obviously put a lot of time in at the gym for this role. It's too bad she isn't given any dialogue that's worth a damn. She's saddled with all-too-bland threats and imprecations, "I'm gonna kill you!" kinds of stuff. The kind of dialogue a 10 year old could have have written. Jovovich, since the advent of the Resident Evil movies, has become the go-to lady for embodying video game heroines. Now and again, you see her in something like Stone where she displays some serious acting chops, but I'll leave it to you to figure out where the big paydays come from.
Violet also has this gyroscopic device that allows her to defy gravity and also creates pocket dimensions within her body where she can store a near-unlimited supply of weaponry and ammunition. Violet is a walking, running, motorcycle riding video game avatar. She can drive her bike up the sides of skyscrapers outrunning military-grade attack helicopters, while dodging volleys of military ammunition. When she needs a weapon she just exerts her will and full-auto handguns materialize out of the palms of her hands in a flourish of sparkling light and swirling gun components. She can also manifest a sword covered in mysterious runes, but this is science fiction, not sword-and-sorcery, so the runes are purely decorative.
How about that? Sheathing your sword in another dimension. I wonder, are there other intelligent beings who exist in those dimensions? Does Violet have to lease storage space for her equipment from these extra-dimensional beings? Or are we to understand that this is some new technology that literally makes space for the exponentially increasing amounts of stuff that people of the future will own? I don't know, but it's fun to speculate.
Maybe Violet's ultimate secret is that she is actually a Lenswoman and a top operative for the Galactic Patrol. Wouldn't that be a cool movie? "Milla Jovovich is LENSWOMAN!" I would pay to see that. Of course, I don't think E.E. Doc Smith approved of women serving in the Galactic Patrol. Dr. Smith was a product of his times.
But back to Ultraviolet. The movie takes place in a futuristic city that is a mixture of real world locations and copious CG. The CG looks pretty good. At times the movie seems to be flirting with some kind of transhumanist or extropian theme. This is a world where people carve out whole other dimensions just to use them as holsters and sheaths and ammo dumps. Why can't this same technology be used to forge new communities, a new frontier, new homelands for the expansive human population? Think of it: a network of trans-dimensional gateways where you can instantaneously zip from reality to reality, sampling different cultures and lifestyles. You could have whole dimensions devoted to producing food, curing disease, expanding human lifepsans, maintaining museums, creating live action fantasy role-playing theme parks, and the design and construction of spacecraft. And if the technology is so advanced that people can manipulate space-time, surely they can also alter their bodies at will. You could remake yourself as an elf, or a centaur, or a Milla Jovovich. You could change your skin color at will. You could make your hair retract into your body, and extrude itself as wiry tentacles. You could use your hair to type and do handicrafts.
But, no, this movie's not about any of that. In this movie, people use bleeding edge technology to shoot each other, infect each other with bioweapons, and put each other in concentration camps. These people carve out dimensions in space time just to have more places to dump their shit--their weapons, for Christ's sakes! Like we don't have enough assault rifles and attack choppers and miniguns and handguns and rocket-propelled grenades, and the assholes who worship these implements on our own planet we gotta create whole new worlds to accommodate this bullshit . . . but I'm probably reading too much into this movie. It's a dumb action movie with some intriguing notions and Milla Jovovich. It has laughable dialogue, a confusing plot, some decent action sequences, and some striking set design and costumes. The look of the movie put me in mind of some of Mario Bava's movies, like Danger! Diabolik and Planet of the Vampires. In some ways, Violet is kind of like Diabolik. She's heavily armed, she kills scores of people, she's engaged in a war against the government and the law--what about "Milla Jovovich is Diabolik!" Yeah, I know, Diabolik was a dude. So what? Jovovich could be Diabolik's sister or something. There's a Batwoman, right? We can have a Lady Diabolik.
Of course, Bava's movies are actually fun to watch, and were made at a fraction of the cost of 21st century cinematic potboilers with much cruder special effects technologies. What is it that Bava got right decades ago, that early 21st century spectacle movies keep bungling again and again? I will refrain from the usual CG and Hollywood bashing, because, strictly speaking, the CG is pretty decent in this flick, and I believe that this was an international production with funding from European nations, so all the blame can't fall on the usual suspects this time around. But Ultraviolet is undeniably influenced by Hollywood styles and approaches in its slickness and lack of intellectual substance.
Luckily, I didn't pay to see this movie (a friend loaned me the DVD insisting that I would find it to be cool), but I'm still willing to pay to see Jovovich in that Lenswoman movie. In fact, I probably would've been willing to pay to see Ultraviolet back when it came out if I hadn't been so disappointed by that Underworld movie that came first. What is it about Hollywood and high concept vampire movies that end up being punishingly lame? No wonder they've turned to the tweeny-bop boredom of the Twilight flicks. Women with guns and form-fitting couture are out, teen angst and thinly veiled parables of abstinence are in. I can't decide if it's an improvement or a new degeneration.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
VIDEO GAME REVIEW: THE SHIVAH (2006)
Designer/Developer/Script and Dialogue by Dave Gilbert
Original Music Composed by Peter Gresser
Backgrounds by Tom Scary
Character Animations by Shane Stevens
Featuring the voice talents of:
Abe Goldfarb as Rabbi Stone
Ruth Weber as Rajshree Lauder
Joe Rodriguez as Amos Zelig
with
John Swist
Francisco Gonzalez
Kim Lee
Dave Gilbert
Published by Wadjet Eye Games, 2006
Review by William D. Tucker.
The Shivah is a PC game after the style of the point-and-click mystery adventure games of the 1980s and 1990s. It tells the story of Rabbi Russell Stone who leads a synagogue on New York's Lower East Side. His temple has fallen on hard times. No one shows up to hear his services, save for a sleepy old lady. His email inbox is filled with angry and disappointed messages from former members of his congregation who have been alienated by his harsh, cynical sermons. The bills are piling up, and he expects to be evicted from the property any day now. That's when the homicide detective shows up to tell him that his old friend Jack Lauder has been murdered. The Rabbi is a suspect because Lauder has left Stone a sizable fortune. Of course, the detective has no hard evidence, and so Rabbi Stone, piloted by the player, must solve the mystery and clear his name.
The Shivah orchestrates an intriguing dramatic situation around the murder investigation. Like any good murder mystery there is much more to the case than meets the eye. There are also issues tied to Rabbi Stone's sense of his own identity as a religious leader. He has sacrificed much of his own personal happiness to his profound sense of what it means to be a rabbi. The game doesn't come right out and reveal every last detail of this sacrifice, but it starts out with the broad picture, a depressed and embittered rabbi in a fading synagogue, and gradually zooms in on the specifics of Stone's past and, by implication, the nature of his personality that has led him to the particular dilemma he faces in attempting to clear his own name. The mystery isn't just, "Who murdered Jack Lauder?" It is also, "Who is Rabbi Stone?" It is this second mystery that the game as a game allows players a certain degree of freedom to solve. The choices you make determine the game's ultimate outcome. There are several endings, each one dependent on key moral and ethical choices the player makes as they pilot the Rabbi through the game.
Another fascinating element about Rabbi Stone is the fact that he is a flawed character. Many video game protagonists are screwed-up people. First person shooters and RPGs are filled with violent, heavily armed sociopaths, mutilation and power obsessed barbarians, and brain-washed militarists. Rabbi Stone's flaw is also his strength: his unwavering commitment to his sense of identity, and the kernel of remorse that he seems to feel over a harsh decision he made a long time ago. A decision that affected the life of his old friend Jack Lauder. Rabbi Stone is a dramatic character in the way of great literary characters: Oedipus, Sam Spade, Hamlet, Othello, The Continental Op, and Antigone. He isn't just another ultraviolent cipher to pilot around a dungeon or field of battle. He actually comes off as someone who could conceivably exist in real life.
The dialogue is excellent, sharp, and is worthy of a stage play or film. There are some rather impressive one-liners, and some pitch-black humor as well. One of the key elements of Rabbi Stone's character is his questioning nature. It seems, depending on which dialogue options you follow, that he is always seeking to respond to whatever trials that reality or God or whatever sends his way with the right question. Rabbi Stone's identity is tied to this view of life as a constant inquiry. This outlook is also a great fit with a mystery-adventure gaming dynamic.
A strong cast of voice actors, led by Abe Goldfarb as Rabbi Stone, lends a massive amount of credibility to the characters and the story. I would like to say more about individual performances, but I don't want to give away too much of the story. Suffice it to say, that all of the voice actors do top-notch work, including designer Dave Gilbert in a cameo role.
The visuals are consciously retro--way retro. Like, King's Quest retro, but very carefully done. All of the locations by Tom Scary are rendered with pixelated precision. The game presents synagogues, bars, apartments, stores, and subway platforms that look like they've actually been inspired by genuine New York settings. It's hard to describe, but it's rather impressive that such locations and atmosphere are so effectively rendered with such limited graphics.
The character animations by Shane Stevens are also effective, and include some surprising events. Whenever there is dialogue, the characters' faces are rendered in boxes and display a pleasing array of emotions and nuances which are complimented by the strong voice acting. The effectiveness of the dialogue animations reminded me of Scott McCloud's breakdown of emotions and expressions in Understanding Comics. McCloud puts forward the notion that sometimes visual storytelling can achieve surprising depths and abiding effects by paring real life actions and emotions to their bare essence and then sequencing those essences correctly. It's just another example of how a retro-game can offer worthwhile, involving experiences in a world of ultra-tech gaming.
A state of the art 3-D gaming engine could, of course, deliver photo realism, physics, and a persistent world to get lost in--but would it offer such a concentrated dramatic experience? The Shivah is like an intriguing Off-Off-Broadway play in a black box performance space. Or maybe a memorable crime novella you might find in an old paperback collection of murder mysteries. The retro-charm runs deep.
The musical score by Peter Gresser is mournful, jazzy, and achieves some epic highs as the drama escalates. The mournful, contemplative opening theme is particularly effective, establishing a mood unlike what you would find in most video games. It isn't at all intrusive, and, in fact, it helps with the investigation. I found it to be the perfect underscore for a murder case. Although Gresser's score is more accomplished, it put me in mind of the underscores for the Kemco/Seika NES adaptations of the classic graphic adventures Deja Vu, Shadowgate, and Uninvited. The music in those games, for me, was also mood enhancing and conducive to ratiocination.
The gaming element which is most distinctive is the Clue Inventory. In adventure games, it is not uncommon to have inventory puzzles, wherein you must combine items in your possession in just the right way and use them on some key element of the environment. The Shivah uses a similar dynamic with clues-words and phrases that Rabbi Stone picks up on while questioning people and investigating the various locations. You can then click on a clue and drag it over other clues, click, and see if the ideas work together to offer new insights. The clues also figure into the dialogue options. Clues beget clues, and so the investigation proceeds. The game is much too brief to fully realize this intriguing gaming mechanic, however it does reinforce the cerebral and questioning nature of Rabbi Stone.
Another interesting feature is the Kibbitz Mode, which is a DVD-style commentary that you can choose to switch on while you play the game. In Kibbitz Mode, as you play through, Dave Gilbert, the game's creator, pops up as a charmingly animated talking head and talks you through how he made the game, and offers interesting insights into how, why, and when certain decisions were made. Gilbert is an enjoyable commentator who offers a generous amount of insight into how and why he made the game the way he did. It is strongly advised that you do not switch on the Kibbitz Mode until you've played through the game a few times, as it gives away most of the puzzles and plot twists.
The Shivah is not a very long game, nor is it difficult. But it offers a compelling and concise dramatic narrative with clever dialogue, effective music, and a strong thematic focus.The Shivah is offered through Wadjet Eye Games's website for near-instant download. I say near-instant because it took about an hour for the company to process the order. For $4.99, The Shivah is cheaper than a movie ticket, and much better scripted and acted than what you are likely to find at the summer multiplex.
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