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I loved Lego toys as a kid. (Who didn’t, really?)  They were awesome.  I still occasionally see ads for the new and improved sets that come out and think to myself: “why didn’t we have that when I was 10?  The fun I’d have had!”

So, I watched The Lego Movie hoping for a nostalgic love-letter to a great toy.  And I was not disappointed, either. It was a very cute movie, and they did a pretty good job of keeping the “look” of Lego intact.  It was awfully fast-paced but I suppose that’s par for the course for a children’s movie.  And it managed to be a film that adults could enjoy without having innuendo and double-entendre jokes thrown in. (Well, except for one line, but it was fairly mild.)

The only issue I had with it was that the name of the villain who wants to glue all the Lego-people in place forever, was “Lord Business”.  It seemed like an odd name for the character, given that Lego is, itself, a business.  You see, the movie has sort of a “meta” narrative, in which at the end, the characters are revealed to be the playthings of a child, who is basing the story on his father’s refusal to let him modify his carefully arranged Lego dioramas. So, his father is “Lord Business” wanting to keep everything “just so”, and the good characters are rebelling against this. Do I even need to say that it all ends happily and valuable lessons are learned?

As for the “Lord Business” name–I guess they were saying “business” as opposed to “play”; but all the same, it seemed peculiar. I read that a lot of conservative types complained about it–they felt it was an anti-capitalist message.  I don’t think it was, though–it was just a poor choice of words.

That aside, I thought the movie was very clever and entertaining. Morgan Freeman, Will Ferrell and Liam Neeson all give very funny performances.  The jokes are all too rapid-fire to really mention them–it’s more the cumulative effect than one joke. But I think my favorite bit was this (which was also in the trailer):

[The villains are attacking a gathering of assorted Lego heroes]

Batman: “To the Batmobile!”

[Villains blow up the Batmobile]

Batman: “Dang it!”

Wonder Woman: “To the invisible jet!”

[Villains blow up the invisible jet]

Wonder Woman: “Dang it!”

Batman: “Every man for himself!”

Something about hearing a superhero say “every man for himself” is pretty funny for some reason.  All in all, a very entertaining flick.

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I received an absolutely wonderful book as a gift from a friend today.  It is called The Empire Striketh Back, a re-telling of the story of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back as if it were written by William Shakespeare.  It is actually written by Ian Doescher, and I must say he did a marvelous job translating the film’s script into the language of the Bard.

There are so many things to love about this–it had me hooked from the “Dramatis Personae” page, done perfectly in the style of the plays.  And then the language–well! Let me quote a little bit of the first scene, just to give you an idea:

LUKE:  If flurries be the food of quests, snow on,

Belike upon this Hoth, this barren rock,

My next adventure waits.

It is really quite splendid.  Probably would have made the movies better if Lucas’s rather awkward dialogue had been re-written this way. I highly recommend it to anyone who has seen the movie (and who hasn’t?) I haven’t enjoyed a parody of Great Literature this much since reading The Classics Reclassified. I highly recommend it.

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I never thought I’d see the Twilight movie.  But I never thought I’d read the book either, and I did last year.  So here I am, like a boat borne back ceaselessly into lame teenage vampire fiction.

The movie was not as dull as the book, though it was still far from good.  I thought that Robert Pattinson, who plays the main vampire, did quite a good job with the role– in fact, the performance he gave was probably better than the role deserved.  Everybody else was nondescript. It is a pretty faithful adaptation of a fairly lame story, so it is doomed to be fairly lame itself.

The strangest thing about this movie was that the geography made absolutely no sense.  I’m not the sort of person who ordinarily notices this in movies, but it was obvious here.  At one point, the heroine goes into a rickety-looking bookstore seemingly perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean and accessible by a narrow alleyway that leads into a small city. Then a paved road suddenly appears from somewhere so the hero can show up in his car and save her from a group of thugs.  The layout of the place is impossible for me to understand.

The parking lot at the high school which the main characters attend seems to have no road leading into or out of it. Moreover, the cars in it are parked seemingly at random with no particular regard for lines or direction.  Also, the school itself is evidently located directly at the base of a massive and heavily forested mountain range.  The only reason for this seems to be so that couples have an easily accessible romantic location for their dates.

There is also a strange scene where the heroine and her father are eating by a window in a restaurant.  The light outside looks to be the light of early morning. Maybe it could be the light of evening, but it really looks more like early morning to me.  But the father alludes to it being “Friday night” and says something about going to sleep soon.  It was really quite weird. Also, the father’s car is parked out side the window for most of the scene (seemingly halfway inside a shrubbery, but that’s really nothing unusual for parking in this movie)  but then I swear it disappears in the last shot.

My impression of the movie was that the normal laws and logic of geometry do not apply in the town of Forks where the story is set.  Which would make for a much cooler premise than the one that is used in the stories–that is, that a family of immortal, demigod-like beings have chosen to spend eternity attending high school.

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[WARNING: This post contains spoilers for all four of the things mentioned in the title.]

About five years ago, I read Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness.  Then, last year, I played Spec Ops: The Line and Far Cry 2, which are based in part on that book.  And then, yesterday, I watched Apocalypse Now, the 1979 movie also based on that book, and which influenced both of those games.

As you may know, it has long been my contention that video games are an art form on a par with books and film.  And of these four works, it is my belief that one of the games–Spec Ops–is the best.  That said, it is also the most recent, and it uses the expectations built by the preceding tales to weave its narrative.

To begin with, I didn’t really like Conrad’s novella that much.  It wasn’t awful, but I didn’t see what was so great about it.  So there’s this guy, Kurtz; and this other guy Marlow, has been sent to find him in the Congo.  But, turns out, he’s gone nuts and is dying.  And the reason this happened to Kurtz is because being in the Congo was brutal, and he couldn’t take it.

It was never clear to me what the point was.  I guess it was that it was no fun being in the ivory business in the Congo, and that colonialism was awful, both for the colonized and the colonizers.  Well, yes–and I suppose that was more of a shocker in the era when “colonialism” was not a dirty word–but I didn’t really see any major moral depth to it.

Apocalypse Now is an adaptation of the story, set in the Vietnam War, in which Marlow is named “Willard” and has been sent by the U.S. military to assassinate Col. Kurtz who has gone mad.  And so he does.

A big problem I had with the movie was that it is really thin.  In the first 10 minutes, we are told that Kurtz is insane and ruling over a bunch of the natives.  And then, two hours later, we meet Kurtz and find out that, sure enough, he really is insane and ruling over a bunch of the natives. There is a strong implication along the way that the Vietnam war generally is also insane, but that wasn’t much of a revelation to me.

(Aside–the theme of “War Is Insane, And Makes Everyone In It Insane” was done much better, in my opinion, in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai.  It ends with the line “Madness, madness”, which would have fit Apocalypse Now as well.)

Kurtz has no character development. Neither does Willard, really: he starts off as a battle-hardened, PTSD soldier and finishes it as an even more battle-hardened PTSD solider. I guess his crew-mates on his boat are supposed to show the ravages of war taking their toll, but they all had “doomed” written all over them from scene one.

I read on Wikipedia that they considered a different ending, where Willard joins Kurtz and fights off an airstrike on the base.  While seemingly impossible logically, that ending would make more sense thematically.  Personally, I would have liked to see an ending where Kilgore showed up and destroyed Kurtz’s base.  It would at least justify why they spend so much time on his character early in the movie.

(Another aside: Wikipedia also says that “Coppola decided that the ending could be “‘the classic myth of the murderer who gets up the river, kills the king, and then himself becomes the king — it’s the Fisher King, from The Golden Bough'”.  For the record–this is the version of the story I remembered, not the one in the 1991 movie of the same name I wrote about a few months ago. But that’s mythology for you.)

(Last aside: this post has too many asides.  One of them should be removed.)

I already wrote about Far Cry 2 in this post pretty thoroughly, so I won’t dwell on it overmuch.  The short version is that it, like Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now before it, is well done, but empty. Although, I suppose it does sort of do what I criticized Apocalypse for not doing, in that there is some vague hint of character development in the sense that the player’s character is being sent to eliminate the Jackal in the beginning and winds up siding with him at the end.

To recap, in Heart of Darkness, we have this guy Kurtz.  Nobody is quite sure what his deal is, and we gradually find out that he went crazy in the jungle because everything was brutal.  Then, in  Apocalypse Now, we have this guy Kurtz who everybody thinks went crazy in the jungle because everything was so brutal–and indeed, so he did.  And then in Far Cry 2, we have this guy the Jackal, who goes crazy in the jungle because everything is so brutal.

Now, you will immediately see where Spec Ops is really different–here we have this guy Konrad.  And nobody is quite sure what Konrad’s deal is… and he’s in a desert!

Just kidding, that’s not the difference.

(more…)

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I have not read Stephen King’s novel yet, so I cannot comment on how the film compares to it.  I have heard there are major differences.

The plot of The Shining is–oh, heck, you all know it: Jack Nicholson goes crazy and chases his family around with an axe in an isolated hotel.

A problem I noticed early on–and, I have read, something Stephen King also complained about–is that Nicholson seems insane from the first shot he’s in.  He looks absolutely crazed in an early scene where he’s driving his family to the hotel.  This sort of makes it less shocking when he does go crazy later on in the movie.

This is compounded by the fact that when he does go insane, he’s ridiculously easy to defeat.  Two of the most famous scenes of madness end with him being easily subdued by his screaming and frightened wife, Wendy.  The “All Work and No Play” scene ends with her somehow knocking him out, and the “Here’s Johnny” scene ends with her giving him what amounts to a minor cut that somehow completely stymies him long enough for her to escape. This makes him seem less menacing and more like a blundering, angry buffoon.

Speaking of Wendy: she does nothing to counter my belief that Kubrick was a misogynist, and incapable of having interesting female characters.  She goes to pieces constantly, and seems like an overwhelmed hysterical idiot all the time.  And somehow she’s still able to thwart Jack, apparently by panicked flailing. People criticize Shelley Duvall’s performance, but I think it was a problem of direction rather than acting.

The Shining is strongest in the quiet, mood-setting shots. It does an absolutely  excellent job conveying the eerie atmosphere of the haunted hotel.  There is a famous tracking shot of Jack and Wendy’s son Danny riding a Big Wheel around the interior, and its fame is justified.  I knew going in how that scene worked, and it still was effective.

Kubrick has a reputation for being a genius cinematographer and having  no ability to relate to people.  The Shining totally fits that.  The atmospherics are awesome, and the characters are ridiculous. The best performance is Philip Stone as Delbert Grady, the ghost of a previous caretaker of the hotel.  He has a long dialogue with Jack that is the scariest sequence in the movie.

It has some good elements, don’t get me wrong.  There is a Turn of the Screw-like ambiguity as to whether the ghosts are real or all in Jack’s imagination. (Though this is undercut in the finale.) In broadest strokes, the plot is similar to The Haunting: Jack Torrance and Eleanor Lance both go to the haunted house, feel the haunted house “wants” them, and ultimately die and are implied to be claimed by the house.

Bottom line: the movie has gorgeous visuals, good music, and some eerie concepts.  But it fails to be truly scary because the malevolent spirits have chosen as their agent an incompetent, drunken, abusive idiot.  It would have been scarier if they had tried to use Danny to carry out their plans.  Come to that, why on Earth didn’t they? He was psychic!  He should have been the one most prone to ghostly machinations. Granted, then it might just turn into The Exorcist or The Omen on ice, but still, it would be creepier.

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In a strange coincidence with Thingy’s post, there was some kind of Jimmy Stewart marathon on TV yesterday. I saw the end of Anatomy of a Murder and then Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I won’t comment much on Anatomy, since I didn’t see the whole thing, but what I did see was superbly acted.

The same was true of Mr. Smith. I knew the basic plot going in: A naive everyman goes to Washington and ends up fighting corruption in the Senate. The details are that the naive everyman is a Boy Scout Ranger leader who wants to establish a “Ranger”  camp on a piece of land in his state.  but the land is reserved for a graft scheme being run by Senator Joe Paine, Smith’s mentor, and the powerful political interests in his state.

As the political interest groups try to destroy Sen. Smith, Sen. Paine and the rest of the political machine fabricate evidence to have him expelled from the Senate.  It culminates in the famous filibuster scene, where Smith talks for nearly 24 hours to hold up the bill. (Aside: How different would the current political scene be if Senators had to abide by the strict filibuster rules that Mr. Smith did?)

Finally, Senator Paine is so overwhelmed by Mr. Smith’s last impassioned plea before collapsing on the Senate floor, that he admits to the whole corrupt scheme and Smith is vindicated.

As I said, the acting is excellent. Jimmy Stewart is naively earnest without ever being annoying, and his exhausted speech at the end and witty comments throughout his filibuster are quite good.  Jean Arthur is excellent as the cynical but  good-natured Senate secretary who helps Smith learn the inner-workings of Washington.

Harry Carey is very likeable in the minor role of the bemused President of the Senate.  Edward Arnold is excellent as the jolly-but-heartless corrupt political boss. (Interestingly, Wikipedia says Arnold was actually considered as a possible Republican Senate candidate in the 1940s.)

But the best performance I think is that of Claude Rains.  I’ve written before about what a great actor he was,  and he is excellent as Senator Paine. He does a great job being both a corrupt career man who tries to rationalize compromising his principle, while still showing some genuine fatherly affection for Mr. Smith, that sets up his admission a the end.

The Senate was apparently not terribly thrilled with the movie when it came out.  They felt it would cause people to lose faith in the institution.  I’m guessing the most stinging part for wasn’t the over-the-top villainy of Boss Taylor, but rather Paine’s melancholy speech to Smith about how, in order to serve and do good for their state, he had to “compromise” certain things.  It’s a good speech, because he clearly means it as honest advice, but at the same time, it’s almost like he’s trying to persuade himself.

Ever since the movie came out, various politicians tried to paint themselves as “the real-life Mr. Smith.”  The “earnest outsider” card has been played too many times to count.  But the thing is, the whole fantasy of the movie is that someone like Smith could ever get to Washington.  (It requires a coin flip landing on “edge”.)

But the truth is, there are no Mr. Smiths in Washington–just endless, competing Senator Paines.

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Thingy blogged about the movie The Fisher King the other day and encouraged her readers to see it, so I made a mental note to check it out sometime soon. Then it so happened that it was on TV last night.  I missed the first half hour or so, but since I’d already read the plot synopsis I could follow it pretty well.

It was very weird–which I expected as soon as I heard Terry Gilliam was involved–but also very cute.  I missed the darkest part of the story, though they had occasional flashbacks to it.  The main characters, played by Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer are indeed excellent, and they work especially well together. Ruehl won the Academy Award for her performance, and Williams was nominated for his.

I think I’d heard of the myth of “the Fisher King“, probably in The Golden Bough or something, but the version I remembered was different than as told in this movie.  One thing I thought interesting was the “Red Knight” creature, which seemed to be used as an allegory for the trauma suffered by the Robin Williams character. It was very cool looking, yet at the same time, it did remind me strongly of the knight armor designs from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I suppose Gilliam designed.

One minor point: I couldn’t actually figure out why the Jeff Bridges character had to break into the castle and steal the “cup” the Robin Williams character thought was the Grail.  Maybe this was made more clear in the part I missed, (I’ll have to watch the whole thing) but it seemed like the point of the “Fisher King” story was that the Grail just gets grabbed by accident, not after a “quest”.

Even if it isn’t explained, it doesn’t matter, because even if it doesn’t make sense from a logic perspective, it completely works on an emotional level.  Important dramatic lesson: plot holes can be forgiven if they work for the characters and resonate with the audience.  I read that somewhere.

All in all, it’s a very enjoyable movie.  It was a bit strange, but very good.

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scary story

At this time  of year, I like to read scary books, watch scary movies, and play scary games. With that in mind, what follows is a list of some of my favorites of each type. I think I’ve blogged about all of these individually before, but I decided to compile them into a list for a convenient reference.

  • The Haunter of the Dark, by H.P. Lovecraft.  My favorite Lovecraft story.  I don’t know what it is exactly, but something about the setting, and the mysterious pull of the distant church that draws the protagonist’s eye really works for me.  I feel its one of his best for not over-explaining things.
  • The Omen, directed by Richard Donner. (1976) The scariest movie I have ever seen, and the only one that’s ever kept me awake at night. The opening music is, as I’ve said before, absolutely chilling.
  • Green Tea, by Sheridan Le Fanu. There are other good stories–notably Carmilla–in the collection “In a Glass Darkly”, but this is the one that stuck with me.  I like the idea of overdosing on a commonplace drink causing someone to be haunted.
  • The “We Don’t Go To Ravenholm” level of Half-Life 2. I’ve been critical of this game in the past, and even this level has its flaws.  Nevertheless, I have to give Valve credit for putting a survival-horror level in the middle of what is otherwise a sci-fi action game. That’s a great way to do horror: drop it in where the audience isn’t expecting it.
  • The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. The best example of a “weird tale” I have ever read.  It’s so good that I recommend it even though only the first four of ten stories are actually in the horror genre. They are that good.  “The Repairer of Reputations” is particularly memorable.
  • The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise. (1963) This is cheating a bit, since it’s based on a book.  But the movie is very good.  I didn’t like it when I first saw it, but it’s an acquired taste, and after repeated viewings I came to appreciate how subtle and ambiguous it is.
  • Quake. In terms of game play, this is just a Doom knock off, which means it’s basically all fighting and no suspense.  How does it get on this list, then? Two things: the artwork, though primitive by today’s standards, is very atmospheric and ominous.  And the intriguing level names, like “The Haunted Halls” and “The Tower of Despair” evoke a more subtle fear and deserve better than the mediocre gameplay within.
  • Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore. Did you think I could get through ten whole things without mentioning Gilbert and Sullivan?  You must be new here. Anyway, yes; this is technically a comic opera.  That doesn’t make the scene of the paintings coming to life or the Wagnerian “Ghosts’ High Noon” any less creepy. Gilbert complained that Sullivan’s “ghost music” was too scary for a comedy.  He was right–and that’s why it works.
  • The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce. Horror is what you don’t see and don’t understand.  This story probably packed a bigger punch when it was first written; the concept is old hat at this point.  Nevertheless, it’s still effective.
  • Spec Ops: The Line. I thought long and hard about whether to put this game on here.  Unlike everything else on this list, it contains no supernatural elements… or at least, no overt ones.  And also unlike everything else here, it is in no way “Gothic”.  But it is very dark, very disturbing and above all, a prime example of psychological horror.  It does share certain storytelling elements with The Haunting and “the Repairer of Reputations” and is just bizarre enough that I decided to include it.

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P.M. Prescott’s comment on this post reminded me about the concept of “fractal” structure for a piece of literature.  I was about to write a post about it, but then I remembered–as with the vampires a few weeks ago–that I’d already done so, two years ago, almost to the day.

He’s right that there’s a limit to how much complexity you can give a character before people will get bored of hearing about it.  That’s why the best character development is done through “showing, not telling”, as the old adage says, and having their complexity displayed through the plot-driving actions they take. And maybe best of all is having characters who are ambiguous–that way, the audience will start to make up their own explanations for their motivations–provided you give them enough material to work with.

It’s also true that you don’t need complex characters to have a good story.  The characters in Animal Farm, for example, are largely just allegorical caricatures of political figures and parties from the first half of the 20th century.  But it’s still a great book.

I guess the real key, whether your characters are nuanced and complex, or simply cut-outs who represent something else, is to make sure it all works together as part of the story you are telling. The characters and incidents need to somehow reflect or represent the larger story.

For example, one of the major of themes of the book Of Mice and Men is loneliness.  To quote the Wikipedia article:

Candy is lonely after his dog is gone. Curley’s wife is lonely because her husband is not the friend she hoped for —- she deals with her loneliness by flirting with the men on the ranch…  The companionship of George and Lennie is the result of loneliness. Crooks states the theme candidly as “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got anybody. Don’t make any difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you.”

Each of the characters and their major issues are somehow related to that theme. That’s what makes it a theme.

Another example of what I’m talking about–not so much with characters, but rather concerning the idea that the individual pieces reflect the whole, is in the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Many of them start out with Holmes and Watson talking about some minor curiosity.  Holmes then explains it to Watson by using his deductive powers, and shows how he was able to figure out what Watson (and everyone else) would miss.

Then the actual plot of the story, the central mystery, is introduced. It will be resolved in exactly the same way; with Holmes making deductions to solve the case.  This is called “foreshadowing”, but it’s just a matter of the micro-elements of the story resembling the macro-elements.

Needless to say, as P.M. noted, this is all really, really hard to write.

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So, I see they are making a new Harry Potter movie, with J.K. Rowling writing the screenplay.  It will be based on the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

The source material was amusing, though mostly due to the scribbled annotations purportedly by  the trio of Harry, Ron and Hermione.  Funny annotations will be difficult to translate to the screen, but maybe they could have them providing humorous voice-overs unrelated to the action.  It’d be like Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the Harry Potter universe.

It does sort of tie-in with what I talked about in this post, about needing an original story set in the Potter mythos.  it’s probably just as true for movies as for games.  Even though it’s still going to be written by Rowling, the fact that it’s about somebody else unrelated to the established characters of the series sets a good precedent for the Harry Potter “Expanded Universe”.