Listmania ’12! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Two

Posted on January 18, 2013 by admiralneck

I’m coming to the end of this latest round of reviews, though this post is less objective than the others I’ve written — quite an achievement considering how often I forcefully insert myself into these rambling monologues. This will inevitably strike many people as being obnoxiously reflective; narcissistic, even. Even though I aspire to keep myself out of these reviews — and fail utterly — this will have to be self-referential to the point of sounding like a diary entry. Forgive me, but sometimes my reactions to movies cannot just be reduced to whether I liked the photography or not. Sometimes they reveal things about myself as all good — or bad — art will, and to explain why this is the case I have to spend ::checks word count:: 5200 words talking about that least interesting of subjects: me. If that sounds like a slog, feel free to skip this. But I’m compelled to explain why 2012 was almost the year I left the internet for good, and what brought me back from the brink.

Biggest Gulf Between Critical Opinion and My Own Reaction of the Year: Amour

Lauded by most as a masterpiece, Michael Haneke’s sober depiction of the end of a relationship is certainly intelligent and powerfully wrought, but Amour left me unexpectedly cold. Considering how pretty much everyone else found it painfully moving — almost too much so — this perplexed me and made me wonder, as such things often do, if I was watching it wrong, or if I’m emotionally immature, or merely ignorant of some aspect of Haneke’s artistry. The latter may well be true; I’ve only seen Cache and thought it was a superb thriller, but this restricted awareness of his themes meant that the only thing that struck me as being “classic” Haneke, other than the stark production design and precise compositions — ten points to ace cinematographer Darius Khondji — were the hints that love is as much a corrupting influence on a person as it is a thing of wonder.

There were merely flashes of this, enough that I picked up on it but only in the sense that it gave me a misleading idea of where Haneke was going to take us. It ends with a shocking act that made me gasp, but even that didn’t cut to the core of me. Of course that’s not to say that the film ends with a decisive act that must affect all who see it, but consider this: I’m very very very very very very sensitive to tales of the inevitable unhappy resolution to even the longest-lasting relationships. There are two things that will make me cry within an instant of reflecting on them; animals being unaware of the deaths of their owners and searching / waiting for them (I refuse to watch Hachi: A Dog’s Tale), and the emotional devastation caused by the loss of a long-loved partner. I can’t listen to The Luckiest by Ben Folds, or I Will Follow You Into The Dark by Death Cab For Cutie without instantly breaking down.

You can imagine what the opening scene of Up did to me. I cried like I was suffering a seizure. However, when trying to figure out why Amour failed to do anything other than hold my attention for two hours (oh how disappointing, I was riveted by a film but didn’t have a nervous breakdown midway through, it must have been TERRIBLE), it was Up that I returned to. That did as good a job as Amour of giving us a window into a realistic relationship, of making us feel like we had a good idea of how much these characters loved each other, to the point that we want nothing more than for them to prevail, with bonus points to Up for doing so in such a short space of time. It’s a rare thing to be able to convey that depth of emotion compellingly and believably, so full marks to both movies for that.

And yet I’d take Up over Amour any day of the week, and not just because Pete Docter’s movie features far more talking dogs, chattery birds and zeppelins piloted by an evil amalgam of Kirk Douglas and Christopher Plummer than Haneke’s movie (though Amour does have a Pigeon Of Great Metaphorical Significance, which counts for something). The key difference, of course, is that the tragic death of a loved one is the inciting incident in Up, and the culmination of a film’s worth of slow, grinding pain in Amour. Which is fine. Both stories are perfectly valid, and both Docter and Haneke deserve all the critical plaudits they have received for their incredible work in these movies. No wonder audiences react so strongly to both stories, when they’re told with such skill.

But only one made me feel alive, made me run through a spectrum of emotions both good and bad, and told a story that chimed with me, and that’s the one with the balloons. Because no matter how skillful Haneke was, no matter how intelligent his approach, his story is basically “In a relationship in which two people love each other a lot, and one gets ill, the other will have to make a terrible sacrifice to bring peace to both of them.” Which is a good story, and done without flinching, even when it comes to its wrenching denouement. But Up‘s story is “Even the most awful ending can be the beginning of something wonderful”. More sentimental? Maybe so, though I think Docter does a damn good job in subverting easy emotional uplift, avoiding any kind of gloopy manipulation and creating something admirably level-headed, and more importantly this message is just as valid as the other one. Docter isn’t lying to the audience; he’s doing them a favour in pointing this out in vibrant, emotionally-honest style.

However I’m not going to find Haneke’s downbeat story anywhere near as compelling as Docter’s because I run through the bad scenario in my head literally every day, sometimes over and over again. I hear people hail Haneke’s courage in tackling this story in such a full-on way, that he is a brave soul for looking at our inevitably miserable and tortured final days with confidence, and yeah, compared to the rest of the output of all the film industries in the world, he’s achieved a minor miracle in getting it made and holding to his vision, with all of the ugliness and wonder and even more ugliness that is necessary to maintain his point’s integrity. But in the case of adding new thoughts to my head, this didn’t do it. I agonise over this scenario. I constantly have multiple panic attacks over it, day in and day out, and have done for decades. Seeing Amour was like returning to the office five minutes after I clocked off, and so all I experienced was a movie that told me, “you’re right, your life is going to end and end badly. You’re right to panic about it.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big boy. I know that life is a mix of wonder and horror. I can look at it and recognise it and occasionally even expand my awareness of it enough to feel a soul-deadening sense of paralysing existential dread all on my own, and when a work of art approaches that kind of terrifying power I can embrace it, even absorb it whole and keep it within me. I’m not afraid of that, and I don’t need fluffy palliative art to make the pain go away (well, okay, I do very occasionally, but most of the time I’m cool). But Up‘s message, that in life there are multiple endings and as many beginnings, that there is an alternative to the terror of oblivion, that there are enough years to find new wonders; that’s not something that I think very often. Up made me happy to be alive. Amour didn’t even tell me anything I didn’t already know. It just told me an obvious truth; a truth beautifully and sensitively rendered, but still a truth that I experienced with a shrug of bored recognition.

So basically I’m massively jaded. And I’m sure it could be said that loving Up‘s positive message over Amour‘s negative one is evidence that I am looking for solace. Fine, okay. But I’ll always respond to tales of the fight against nothingness (Up, The Grey) or the existence of some form of continuity of existence (Cloud Atlas, Enter The Void) with gratitude, because I’m under no illusion that horrible things await me. However, I’d argue that to start in a place of grieving terror at the worthlessness of it all and still tell a story offering a hope that’s smartly delivered, that’s not the easy consolatory message of Hallmark-level entertainment, that can look the horror of existence full in the face and still say, “I don’t think so, buster,” is actually harder to pull off than to just wallow in misery, even when the level of artistry involved in doing so is of such a high standard. In other words, while you’re crying at the incredible performances by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintingnant, I’ll be over here watching Liam Neeson taping broken bottles to his knuckles, thanks.

Film I Never Ever Ever Want To Fucking Talk About Ever Again: Prometheus

While Amour has generated very little in the way of debate — I’ve only seen one or two other people online who were similarly less-than-amazed by Haneke’s film — other movies have created a firestorm of passionate discourse. None moreso than Sir Ridley of Scott’s Prometheus, which was bafflingly expected to be some kind of sci-fi masterpiece right out of the gate, if some speculation was to be believed. The reaction against it was swift and unpleasant, meaning I couldn’t help but see it through a lens of expectation; will this really be the most appalling insult to the hearts and souls of the nerd culture that I have heard it is? My initial feelings were inevitably reactive, leading to this epic post which, I have to say, was the best thing to come out of watching Prometheus. It has led to me meeting and talking to a lot of very cool people, for which I’m eternally grateful.

There is inevitably a downside to this. In the weeks after Prometheus was released, online opinion seemed to become set in stone, with an overwhelming majority of people coming out in frothing hatred, while we few, we happy few, we band of brothers who admitted it wasn’t perfect but was worthy of attention beyond the relentless derision it inspired… well, we fought our corner as best we could, but all this did was ossify opinion on either side, leading to endless pointless arguments in which “mistakes” in the film were cited without reflection — as I said in my review, many of the things listed as errors are thematically consistent; thankfully I’ve seen a few others pick up on this as well– and those of us willing to give it a chance are dismissed outright.

Boo hoo, right? Poor Admiral Neck done got into an argument or two. Well, yes, but that’s not the problem. The discussions I’ve had about it have been, for the most part, quite civil and jocular; in fact as I write this another one has sprung up on Twitter. It’s been going on for about 9 hours now, meaning this post — which should have been finished this morning — is only now being completed, hours after I left in despair. Now, I’m extremely fond of all of the people involved in this discussion, and all of the other discussions I’ve participated in, so I’m not referring to any well-liked friends-of-the-blog when I say this, but after nearly seven months of seeing Prometheus referred to by numerous unknown film fans as an absolutely, undeniably, transparently awful and disastrous failure and Exhibit A in the case against the quality of cinema in 2012, I must declare BASTA! ENOUGH! I DON’T WANT TO ARGUE ABOUT PROMETHEUS EVER A-FUCKING-GAIN!

What broke me? I can’t pinpoint the moment, but I know I lasted longer than Anne Billson, who tweeted a while back that she was done with the relentless negativity about it, especially as she had quite liked it, again with the reservations we all had. I feel much the same way, finding myself constantly on the defensive about a film I think was merely okay. This is the crux of my problem, and why I’ve found myself as annoyed as I seem to be about this and not, say, The Dark Knight Rises or Django Unchained or Zero Dark Thirty, all films which have generated a ton of online conjecture, some of which I agree with and some of which I think misses various important points. The problem with Prometheus is that those who dislike it think it’s not just flawed but actually moronic and genuinely, indefensibly awful, and so to praise it for any reason is to seem similarly stupid.

You can see why this is a problem. Prometheus has generated a tidal wave of disgusted opprobrium from a large percentage of the people who watched it, more so than any other film I can think of this year, and that’s a consequence of its origins as a “prequel” to one of the most beloved film franchises of all time, made by the man who started it off. Unlike any other franchise this year, its success or failure would inevitably be compared to the success of the original Alien, a film that helped change the way films were conceived and made, a cultural artifact of immeasurable influence and importance. If Prometheus wasn’t 2001 x Dark Star x Halloween x Star Wars it was pretty much fucked, and when we got a bit of a misfire with some unexpected narrative choices, a lot of people turned their backs on it without a second thought. This wasn’t just a movie that was arguably good or bad; this was the worst and most catastrophic failure in the history of popular cinema, proof that classical filmmaking was gone forever, the nail in the coffin of an entire cinematic genre. Pack up your things, sci-fi. George Lucas stabbed you in the back and Ridley Scott finished you off.

Except it’s not anywhere near that bad, and I reckon those of us who have rallied around it are just trying to say look, give it another chance. There are things that can be salvaged from this movie if you’ll just let us explain why we think it has some interesting ideas. The last seven months has taught me that this is a fool’s errand, and the biggest casualty here won’t be the hours wasted in trying to make a case for this movie as Not As Stupid As Alien Vs. Predator (a truly worthless, franchise-ruining calamity of a film that generated a fraction of the loathing that Prometheus did, amazingly enough). The casualty will be the online reputations of those who dare to speak up. Admittedly this is not that big a deal, but all we have online is our reputation, and if you acquire the stink of worthlessness or cluelessness, it follows you around.

If the first thing you hear from me is that I quite liked Prometheus, and you hate it as much as many seem to, then you’re going to think that there’s something wrong with my brain. Among a significant proportion of the online film fan community, there is NO DOUBT that Prometheus is Plan 9-level awful, and to say that it has any kind of merit is not to have spotted a wrinkle that some might have missed, or to have a viewpoint that might shed positive light on choices made by the filmmakers that seem to be risible, but is evidence of a failure of critical thinking, or that one is ignorant of film lore; an unfortunate trend in a lot of online criticism recently which suggests that contravention of some unspoken set of artistic rules is enough to consign a movie to The Hell Of A Million Snarky Jokes, and ignorance of such rules means you shouldn’t be allowed to even talk about such matters.

Disclaimer: I have a very strict policy of not allowing insulting comments to get onto the site, mostly because letting them through means I kinda have to engage with them or they’ll just sit there like I’ve accepted them as fact, and time and time again, especially in the case of contentious nerd-bait subjects like Prometheus, BSG or Lost there is very little chance that I’m going to find common ground with someone anonymously telling me to go fuck myself. I regret this now for many reasons, but mostly because I’d love to link to the amazing comment I got under that Prometheus review by someone so incensed by the existence of this film and my defence that he or she wrote something like 5000 words (or, more accurately, cut-and-pasted 5000 words from their own takedown of Prometheus), impolitely telling me I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about films. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this, and it’s not like I was upset. It was too ridiculous and hilariously unhinged to be offended by.

But I didn’t let it through because by that point, and doubly so now, I’ve found there is nothing to be gained by sticking up for Prometheus. And that made me think that there’s nothing to be gained by talking about films in any capacity. I’m talking about not engaging on Twitter, not reading any reviews even by people I admire, and certainly not writing about films on here. Not because one comment got to me, but because seven months of this circular, combative chatter, much of which was spent merely repeating obnoxious, petty criticisms instead of bringing anything new to the conversation, felt like 150 years of screaming war, and it wearied me so completely, and put me off engaging with strangers — and occasionally friends — so much, that the grand experiment of online discourse as a way to meet like-minded people seemed like it would ultimately prove to be a waste of time. I might have met some cool new people who have agreed with me, but eventually we’re just going to disagree on something else and if the Saga of Prometheus is any indication, these differences of opinion might prove to be insurmountable, and could well jeopardise our nascent friendship, just like the incessant quibbling over Prometheus‘ flaws has threatened to. It’s no coincidence that since writing that review, and meeting a ton of great new people, I’ve nevertheless considered quitting online interaction about once every two weeks.

So I’ve got a bad case of whiny butthurt. Poor me, I didn’t change the world with my groundbreaking views on a movie based on Erich Von Daniken’s own-brand daftness. Honestly I didn’t expect to, but if ever I felt a sense that this blog was a waste of time, it was this year. It’s not just Prometheus; it’s the whole damn thing. People breeze in and out of your online life, attracted by an RT from a friend but so disgusted by your apparent stupidity that they have to tell you this immediately, because to keep such an ultimately useless thought to oneself is unacceptable. A couple of times this year I’ve been RTd by celebrities (fortuitous and accidental events every time), and the result is random abuse from strangers who object to… fuck, I don’t know. Just things. And this is a fraction of what those celebrities experience every day. I can’t imagine what it would be like to endure that, because I despair at the slightest point-missing stupidity, and a sustained blast of that from dawn ’til dusk would make me throw my laptop onto a skip.

Maybe it’s just this one film. Maybe I can sacrifice it, just forget about it and think of it as the dangerous place on the map. Here Be Dragons, the forbidden land which holds only misery for those who trespass. Perhaps I can live with that. I don’t love Prometheus anywhere near as much as the many other derided genre films that I’ve tried to defend in the past, like Speed Racer or Enter The Void or John Carter. The problem here is that it’s never going to be just one film, that I can ringfence Prometheus but some other unexpectedly inflammatory opinion is going to come up again, and I’m going to have to face those fleeting disparagements. How offputting is the knowledge that by sticking my neck out this blog risks becoming a pariah within this community, the equivalent of the house on the street that the kids love to TP because the person who lives there is some unapproachable weirdo. Maybe I should just give it up altogether. Maybe I should, in the words of Corporal Hicks, nuke the site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.

And yet… and yet…

Film That Might Just Show Me The Way To A Better Online Life: Looper

As I’ve said a number of times in my last ten or so posts, this year has been one of baffling frustration. A series of highly-anticipated films left me feeling disappointed and annoyed, emotions placed in stark contrast with the utterly uncomplicated joy provided by The Avengers, which was as pure a hit of euphoric pleasure as I’ve ever had in a cinema. Compared to that, the bursts of pleasure I anticipated from everything else has been stymied, and little has truly surprised me other than Wolf Children and a couple of others. Even genre films I thought would be slamdunks — The Raid, Dredd, Skyfall, The Hunger Games — were close-calls that would have made me happy any other year but, this time around, just didn’t slake my thirst for cinematic satisfaction.

Looper was the worst offender. Watching it on opening night was even more exasperating than my first viewing of Dredd or The Raid — why is this movie not sending me sky-rocketing into the air with joy? — and as infuriating as my first crack at Skyfall — not only did I miss the first few minutes because someone working at Odeon Swiss Cottage inexplicably and incorrectly told me the film was starting ten minutes after it actually began, but a woman sitting six rows behind us translated every line in the movie into Cantonese for her mother; Skyfall was ruined by sitting in a roomful of drunk and bored idiots with tiny bladders, not to mention kids who couldn’t figure out why there was so much talking instead of the shooting they’d been promised. Was this why I didn’t respond to Looper the same way everyone else did?

Over the last week I’ve been chatting with ace critic and all-round top chap Nathan Ditum about Looper, which he loves with a terrifying and persuasive intensity. This was the reaction I expected to have; I love the time travel genre like no other, it stars a number of my favourite actors (and Paul Dano), it’s made by an artist I think is touched by the hand of genius — my love of The Brothers Bloom often feels like a lonely cry in the wild — and who does things with the camera that no one else has even considered before & always, always pulls it off even though by all the laws of filmmaking he shouldn’t. He’s the anti-Tom Hooper, pretty much. All of this is why my grudging acceptance of the movie made me so annoyed.

Nathan gave me a passionate rundown of everything he thought Looper did right, and I responded by talking about the things that left me cold — mostly my frustrations with the way Rian Johnson keeps the mechanics of the time-travel rules unclear in order to give himself room to manoevre on an emotional level, and how this meant that the central conflict between the two Joes didn’t hit me as hard as it could have. Old Joe’s need to find and kill the Rainmaker only really works in the abstract, as his explanations of why this all-powerful and terrifying force is something to be feared made me wonder if maybe he was in the right. Of course this is a terrible thing to think, but if all we have to go on are the vague descriptions in Johnson’s script, all of which are done to keep the time travel conceit working, then it’s impossible to fully side with either Joe.

This wasn’t the only thing that bothered me; the drop in energy in the second half frustrated me, I found the child distracting and overwhelmingly horrible (thus skewing my feelings about his survival even more), and the inclusion of two disparate SF concepts in one film — time travel and telekinesis — felt clunky, a choice that felt like it was made only for the sake of adding spectacle and danger to the plot. If the emergence of TK had been linked to the beginning of the time loops, using even awful ST:TNG technobabble, I’d have bought it immediately. Merely adding TK so the film could have an Akira-esque telekinetic antagonist is not really that bad, but it felt like an arbitrary and pandering inclusion, instead of an essential element without which this fictional world would have collapsed.

All of these things could be filed under “nitpicking” (thanks to the ever-excellent Sam Binnie for giving me the heads-up on this Film Crit Hulk article), much like many of the criticisms leveled at Prometheus are almost comically trivial and tend only to be employed to bolster the argument that it is inherently worthless, but at least some of these criticisms feel like valid explanations for why I wasn’t as moved by Looper in the way I’d expected. The power of the story is blunted by these choices, especially the time travel rules one. I will happily admit I’m anal about time travel, thinking only Primer and Lost (and maybe Back To The Future 2) have told stories that adhere to believable time travel mechanics, and my hopes for Looper were raised sky-high when I heard Shane Carruth helped Johnson out.

And yet even if I drop my usual fixation on temporal, causal rigour, I still have to take an intellectual leap to swallow some of the motivations here. I don’t feel Old Joe’s pain in my gut; I have to use maths to get there, and this is going to take me out of the film no matter how good Bruce Willis is at depicting the regret and sadness of the aging assassin. I was already thinking hard all the way through, constantly checking my reaction to the film to see if I was having a good time, and then analysing every element in the film to figure out why it wasn’t giving me the uplift I had expected. As I said to Nathan, I had hoped this would slip down like a cool drink of water on a hot day, but I ended up spilling most of it before I got the glass to my mouth.

There’s the rub. After this conversation (not included here because it was quite long and I don’t have Nathan’s permission), I’ve come to realise I am overthinking it, especially as we found much common-ground regarding the brilliant use of the two Joes to dramatise the generation gap, with young and impetuous Young Joe learning to grow and take responsibility after coming up against the mournful Old Joe who is willing to do awful things to save the things he has lost as a result of his earlier poor judgements. The nebulousness of Johnson’s time-travel rules irked me then, but the more I talked about it with Nathan (and others on Twitter and Letterboxd) have made me think I’m being too hard on it, that if I’d just rolled with it I would have experienced something of great power instead of finicky complication. That intellectual leap was unnecessary on the day; I should have had faith in Johnson.

In much the same way that everyone should have more faith in Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof. Both men were set up for a fall with Prometheus. Fans of Alien were sceptical of the old man’s abilities, even though in recent years he’s given us Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven, both of which are not the work of someone phoning it in. Former fans of Lost, or those who didn’t watch it and based their opinions on what they heard about the show from highly vocal people who didn’t like how it developed, need no help in hating Lindelof, and any similarities between the Island-set fantasy and this sci-fi epic were bound to be taken as proof of his incompetence. As I argued in that original post, there are a number of significant overlapping themes, and they’re the ones that viewers of Lost didn’t respond to, so Prometheus didn’t stand a chance.

But if I’m going to argue that people should give Prometheus a chance, I have to be willing to do the same thing with one of the nerd kingdom’s causes célèbres, even if I don’t think I’ll ever be able to accept the make-up on Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or like that goddamn kid, or swallow moments that probably sounded great on paper but don’t work onscreen like Young Joe escaping death by shooting the floor to create a huge obscuring cloud of dust. I’m going to try Looper again, and I’m going to… well, not exactly turn my brain off, because that’s an insult to Johnson, who is obviously not trying to create some no-brainer here. But I’ll dial down my reservations, try to meet him halfway, because he deserves a second-chance as much as Scott and Lindelof do.

As for my ongoing internal debate about whether or not it’s worth my while to stay online, Nathan pretty much settled that one for me. There will come many a time when someone smart, with interesting views and something to add to a conversation, will wander past this blog or see me talking to someone on Twitter, and in a moment of unfortunate impulse tell me that I really should just go fuck myself. And that’ll be a shame. And a rare occurrence. More often it’ll be someone I’ll never really like, and they can go with whatever God they believe in. Because the important thing is that I’ve met many more people who are worth the effort to stay here, and even if they end up being the only people I meet here, then that’s a goddamn great thing, and these differences of opinion on Prometheus or Looper or anything else are no biggie, and can even, if this discussion about Looper is anything to go by, end up altering my viewpoint for the better. And that’s another point in the plus column for Looper.

Good news! Only one post left to go in Listmania!, and it’s the stupid one that won’t get bogged down in introspection. Now all I have to do is find 18883 photos on IMDb.

With Great Sadness Comes Great Introspection

Posted on July 4, 2012 by admiralneck

Perhaps it’s a good thing I’m only a blogger, and not a Sorkin-approved paid journalist with official opinion-having credentials, because if I had to review Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man for an actual publication, it would be my last. Sure, I could add a synopsis, which would account for about 52-67% of what I write, and I could talk about how much I like Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone as performers in general, and I could talk about the history of the character a bit, throw in some stats about how popular he is around the world, maybe draw a comparison with The Avengers or speculate about its chances against the impending behemoth that is The Dark Knight Rises, but other than that all I can write about is tiny tiny details, nitpicking and highlighting and basically turning the whole thing into a pro/con table. ^[1]

Is it bad? No, not really. I’ve been engaged in a Twitter chat with the very lovely friend-of-the-blog Gally Freya about Green Lantern this morning, which led to a repeat of my usual unedifying frothing rants about why that movie is the barrel-scrapings of the superhero genre, a betrayal of the character, a bone-headed focus-grouped overthought and cowardly monster of a movie that should never have been allowed onto the screen. Probably the only really bad thing I can say about The Amazing Spider-Man is that it’s way too long and a bit boring. Sadly, the best thing I can say about it is, “Hey, good work Columbia and Sony on doing the bare minimum to keep hold of those valuable Spidey film rights!”

It’s obvious that the movie was made with affection for and awareness of the character, and some effort has gone into it, into thinking about who Peter Parker is and what motivates him to become a hero, and for that we should be grateful, even if the studio’s motives for rebooting the series are a little shaky. What’s most egregious is the lack of life in the movie. For a character who is meant to be an expression of youthful exuberance, a way to release a young science geek’s inner confidence in the most obnoxious/lovable manner possible, this is a dour, slow movie that very rarely perks up. I do not relish the thought of watching it again.

It’s impossible to talk about Webb’s movie without comparing it to Sam Raimi’s incredibly successful trilogy. ^[2] Though generally thought of fondly, there are many dissenters (at least, in my Twitter timeline) who dislike Raimi’s Spider-Man series. If they think they were too goofy or too garish, this Spider-Man might be the version they have been waiting for. For the rest of us, this bleak movie runs counter to Raimi’s (and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s) vision, a bright and sunlit New York patrolled by an exuberant, colourful wise-ass in contrast to Webb’s shadow-coated city and the out-of-place flash of red-and-blue who spends an age deciding to look after the citizens; almost as long as Hal Jordan in that goddamn Green Lantern movie, in fact.

Even fans of Raimi’s movies would admit that his Three-Stooges-inspired wackiness could get in the way — even before we get to that dancing scene in Spider-Man 3 there’s the “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” montage in 2 and the Power-Rangers-iness of the Green Goblin’s costume in the first movie — but that heightened comedic tone worked because the character is inherently ridiculous. Not just in the sense that the idea of a man with the powers of a spider is daft, but that he’s meant to be jokey and irreverent. Considering Marvel’s popular Ultimate Spider-Man series features a modernised version of the character, Brian Michael Bendis eschewed any foolish ideas about ejecting Webhead’s comedic persona, keeping him silly instead of adopting a modish personality change, all without reducing the comic’s dramatic heft in any way. Spidey is fun; Raimi remembered that. ^[3]

Which is not to say Webb is wrong or fit for censure for trying something new with the character, especially as the history of Spidey includes many dark periods that can inform the reader’s mental image of the character as much as the early years with Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr. Even then the comics still featured the deaths of beloved characters from time to time, most notably Gwen Stacy. However the general air of melancholy in Webb’s movie, and the first half in which Parker is basically a total dick, are horribly stodgy. ^[4]

Things pick up later in the movie with some heroics, wisecracks, and gravity-defying FX sequences, but liking Parker is really hard work — a necessary narrative move to power the late-movie conversion to heroism, but a real slog to get through. It didn’t seem that hard when Raimi did it, and he still managed to create that powerful scene with Uncle Ben dying in Parker’s arms without abandoning the lighter tone. In fact the only thing that harks back to the tone of Raimi’s series comes near the end, when some citizens of New York rally around their hero and help him out, but it’s a trick that doesn’t have the same soaring effect as it did before. The laboured scene here is no match for the emotional aftermath of Spider-Man 2‘s train setpiece.

It doesn’t help that maintaining this down-to-earth tone is incompatible with the presence of an over-the-top villain. Just as Batman Begins‘ goal of breaking down its main character and rebuilding him in a more recognisably real world isn’t helped by adding a supervillain who uses a microwave weapon to activate a madness-generating gas, all of the effort put into grounding the Spider-Man mythos is damaged by introducing The Lizard and getting Rhys Ifans to intone every line with ALL THE DRAMA, like a parody of what a supervillain would sound like. While Garfield fills the screen with his quiet competence, Ifans tries very very hard and makes no impression at all.

Of course Dr. Curt Connors is meant to be a tragic figure undone by his own hubris, but even before that Ifans sounds like he’s doing a bad impersonation of a depressed Christopher Lee villain from a Hammer horror movie; portentous intonation and stony expressions, which later give way to cackling, speechifying, and convenient character-erasing insanity. His motivations are present and correct and yet mean nothing on an emotional level, mostly because The Lizard is a boring threat already, and a few gruff internal monologues to add direction where there was none isn’t satisfying. Connors wants to put an end to weakness, and luckily he has some handy weakness-destroying technology lying around, giving Spidey something to battle against in the finale.

Again, compare that to Willem Dafoe’s brilliant work as The Green Goblin. Dafoe played Osborn as a vain and foolish megalomaniac whose worst impulses are accentuated by magical sciencey things, but the motor for his evil — wounded pride and jealousy — is a richer motivation than Connors’ frustration over his weakness. It’s more of a leap for Connors — who seems decent enough, despite hints of past wrongdoing — to go from wanting to heal the sick to poisoning New York, than it is for the fundamentally flawed Osborn to go from wanting to control everything and wreak vengeance on the people who wronged him to wanting to control everything and wreak vengeance on the people who wronged him but this time using superpowers.

Dafoe also did a great job of shading his demented villainy with comic notes, a touch of pathos, and some wonderful physicality. Heartbreaking though it is that for the majority of the film he’s hidden behind that ridiculous mask, that voice, those movements, those funny little additions — the moment he melodramatically drinks the serum, smashes the vial, and then lets out a little complaint about the machine’s restraints being cold on his skin is utterly perfect – all of those things add up to something that transcends the suit. I’m already having difficulty remembering Ifans’ work in this movie and I only saw it four hours ago.

Andrew Garfield is a good enough actor that the decision to play him as sour and petulant for the first half of the movie and haunted but increasingly heroic in the second doesn’t obscure his work. It’s a direction I don’t much like, but within that framework Garfield is terrific, playing Peter Parker as an angry young man who accidentally finds his calling. And if that’s not enough for you, the script — credited to James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent (writer on the last two Spidey movies) and Steve Kloves — makes sure to stress that Parker’s character arc is his search for himself by having one character say to him, as he looks for a name badge, “ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE FINDING YOURSELF ZOMG THEMATIC MOMENT?” and finishing the movie with a teacher saying the only plot that exists is, “Who am I?” GEDDIT?? ^[5]

Even better is Emma Stone, despite getting to do very very little. She pops up every so often to ineptly flirt with Peter (very charming), get into trouble, and even get in a bit of Lizard-bashing, but her primary function is to be the object of Peter’s desire. It says a lot for Stone’s performance that I missed her whenever she wasn’t onscreen, even if being there meant she would just be Supportive Girlfriend, but anything would have been better than more interminable scenes with Ifans booming his lines at the walls, or Irrfan Khan making vague references to Norman Osborn, or Peter forgetting to buy eggs. Denis Leary is a nice surprise; his Captain Stacy is more interesting than his daughter, and makes a lot of what little screentime he has. His final scene is one of the highlights, giving some emotional charge to what is otherwise a ruck on top of a building while a doohickey counts down.

But the main crime of the film is that it wasn’t diverting enough or competent enough to make me turn off the part of my brain that was noticing a million trivial little things that pissed me off. How many scenes with Peter letting down Uncle Ben and Aunt May do we need? ^[6] Was the scene with him finding his powers on the train added later in the shoot, because he seems to go through another big discovery scene right after it? How did he get into the car when the car thief he’s ambushing needed a big technological doohickey to unlock the door? Is Peter Parker going to find Rodrigo Guevara and apologise to him for ruining his life? How did Connors get all of that equipment down into his sewer lair when he is, by that point, basically going, “Wibble madness blurg” all the time? A removal service? If I move to New York, I’ll use those guys.

How blind is Peter that he doesn’t notice the enormous patch of green skin on Connors’ neck during a long and boring conversation? Why does his Spidey-Sense only work about half the time? Do the filmmakers think we’re dense when they keep dangling Peter off the side of buildings as a big scary threat moment when we all know that he can just stick to the windows? Is that the most anti-climactic mid-credit scene ever? Will James Horner’s insipid soundtrack ever shut up? Will future Blu-Ray versions of the movie airbrush in whoever they cast as Norman Osborn in the sequel, considering the lengths they go to to include him while conveniently obscuring his face? Didn’t Gwen object to Peter turning up at her house covered in shit at one point? And why does she even like him? They spend about 15 minutes together before they’re in love. Garfield and Stone make it seem to work through charm alone, but looking back I realise I didn’t really buy it at all, certainly not as much as I did Tobey Maguire’s desperate longing for Kirsten Dunst, and her slow realisation that she loved him all along.

And my God, didn’t someone at Oscorp think it was a bit weird that some guy was ordering tons of their biocable cartridges, which I doubt come cheap? And even if they didn’t pick up on this ordering anomaly, wasn’t someone in the NYPD a bit curious about where all of the webbing left around the city was coming from? There were all sorts of controversies about the organic webshooters in Raimi’s movie (I’ve already seen people rejoicing at the inclusion of mechanical webshooters) but at least it simplified things. Here it’s just one of the many elements introduced that has to be jammed into place, like the costume and the growing sense of heroism ^[7] and his father’s work and Norman Osborn and Gwen and her dad and a poorly-designed lizard thing and a million other things.

None of this is organic. It’s all just pushed into place, with no narrative momentum to carry it. Koepp’s script for Raimi’s Spider-Man has lovely flow, and part of that was because Peter had a friend and romantic rival in Harry Osborn, a man who loves him and resents him for recognisably human reasons. The threat from Norman/Goblin — and Peter’s need to do the right thing to honour Ben — jeopardises his relationships with his aunt, his best friend and the woman he loves. Norman targets them knowing he can hurt Peter, and their confrontation at the end is only possible because he knows he can hurt Spider-Man most by using the tension between his heroism and his love of Mary-Jane Watson against him. All of the character work ties together, each choice builds to a crescendo in the last act and makes emotional sense. The big showdown in the new movie is between Spidey and a guy with a canister of gas. Who cares? Only the use of Captain Stacy makes this work at all, and even then it’s a shadow of the moment on the Queensboro Bridge, or Spidey dropping Norman’s body off at his house, thus turning Harry against him. ^[8]

There’s even a misguidedly similar moment between Gwen and Peter and Raimi’s final scene with Peter turning Mary-Jane away, but while Raimi and Koepp make this a grandiose, tragic choice on Peter’s behalf, Webb and whoever wrote that scene fluff it by making Peter exasperatingly quiet on why he has made his choice, giving Gwen enough smarts to see through Peter’s silence (negating the point of his exasperating silence), making her go along with it without question (guess she doesn’t really care for him after all), and then having Peter maybe possibly change his mind at the end, who knows? The narrative simplicity of Raimi and Koepp’s movie is one of its greatest strengths; this just feels like a lot of clumsy storytelling to make a malfunctioning plot work. Spider-Man was a smooth ride. The Amazing Spider-Man stalls and stalls and stalls.

Remember, it’s not bad. It has moments to celebrate — Stan Lee’s hilarious cameo, good performances here and there, a lovely line or funny line-reading, some perfect visual iconography, especially in the customary “I’m swinging around the city like crazy” scene before the credits — but the overall impression is that Webb either didn’t have enough of a coherent vision of what he wanted to do with the character, or he did and the studio got in the way too much. At times his approach works; taken as an intimate movie about a tortured boy it works okay, and Webb has a feel for creating male protagonists who are miserable (see also Tom from 500 Days of Summer), but to do that he has to lose something else, and that thing might have been what makes Spider-Man appealing in the first place.

This is obviously going to be one that the fanboys argue over for a very long time. ^[9] By not being an out-and-out calamity, and also by being so low-key and kind of anonymous, The Amazing Spider-Man will have its defenders, and it will generate a fanbase and money and sequels. But without a strong authorial voice, or more primal iconography such as that upside-down kiss, the memory of it is already fading. Raimi may have alienated some fans with the force of his zany vision, but at least his movies were vibrant, odd, memorable, flashy, weird, stirring, exciting, funny, confident and memorable. This Spider-Man movie is just a semi-competent film about Spider-Man, and that’s not enough.

Update: This morning I had a long conversation with blogger and fellow John Carter enthusiast Bassim El-Wakil, which can be found here for the sake of openness. If you don’t want to look at it the point of contention was with my use of Raimi’s Spider-Man as a comparison point with Webb’s reboot, and that I shouldn’t have damned TASM for not doing what another movie did. I argued that my problem was not that Webb failed for not making the same movie or the same choices as Raimi, but as Bassim said, “If Webb makes choices for angst vs Raimi for exuberance, it’s fallacious to then say ‘It fails because it’s not as exuberant’”. My intention in comparing these movies was simply borne of convenience, and I didn’t intend to say that Webb’s movie was a failure because it wasn’t the same as Raimi’s, or to say that if he had done the specific things I noted that Raimi did right or approached the movie from the same direction as Raimi, he would automatically have made a better movie. I apologise if I gave that impression.

As I said during the conversation, there were a number of things I think Webb did wrong, and have tried to express that. The script, also, is a tangled knot, and comparing it to Koepp’s script was merely a way of sorting out my thoughts. I don’t wish to imply that TASM‘s script is a disappointment because it doesn’t do what that one specific script did right; it’s just handy to have that comparison point around, especially as I only just watched the first Spider-Man again and it was fresh in my mind. I could’ve compared TASM‘s script to any number of films, or just said this: The script just doesn’t do a good enough job of creating emotional links between some of the characters, which is frustrating when some of them — Peter and Ben, for instance — work fine. The relationship between Gwen and Peter seemed almost arbitrary, though perhaps that was simply because early reviews hinted at a greater focus on this relationship, in a Twilight-audience-placating way, and I didn’t really feel that.

But the question of tone seemed to become the main sticking point, and the point I tried to make, and hoped that I had, was that Raimi’s vision of the character was more consistent with the idea I have of Spider-Man, but also that there are different takes on Spider-Man even in the comics: see my point about Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man, and the two visual takes on Spider-Man during J. Michael Straczynski’s run on the character. My focus was more on the movie because I was talking about the movies, but Peter Parker, in the traditional version of the character, is a light character — compare him to, say, The Punisher, or Daredevil — who suffers terrible tragedy and copes with it by donning a bright blue and red costume and becoming a sassy, confident version of himself.

Within the run of the character he has suffered further tragedy, and with different writers/artists has had different tones (look at the Venom period, with the black costume), but primarily he’s a wisecracker in a slice of the Marvel Universe that’s not particularly dour. He has ups and downs, but those are against a cheerier backdrop that doesn’t hang oppressively over him the way it does for some characters (Batman is the most obvious instance of that). I happen to think Raimi depicts that very well, but let’s ignore that now. As Bassim said, and I didn’t clearly express, this Spider-Man does indeed crack wise. He sasses Flash Thompson early on, and has many jokey moments throughout the film. One throwaway line — while swinging through New York he yells at a cab driver, “Hey, I’m swinging here!” — made me laugh heartily. Some of the jokes are great. But tone alters the context within which the jokes are received, and while Peter tells jokes, within this interpretation of the character, those jokes come off as more aggressive, more rooted in anger and frustration, than usual.

Again, I will stress, Webb is within his rights to take the character down this path. However, this Spider-Man may lack something that made the character so popular, as I stressed within the review. The key scene, which made me realise I just didn’t really like this Spider-Man, was the showdown with the car thief. Some of it is very funny — the knife joke was great — but having Spidey go so far as to cover the thief’s mouth and nose with webbing while ascertaining if he is the man who killed Uncle Ben troubled me. I get that Spidey is mad at the guy, but it’s sadistic, and his jokes suddenly seem like taunts. I’m not saying Webb turned Spider-Man into a monster; he’s still Webhead! Yay! But the decision to paint the character with darker colours means everything comes off differently.

I’m not even sure it’s the thing I disliked most about the movie — a movie I didn’t actually hate, but think is hollow and inelegant — and it’s not like Webb turned Spidey into Spawn or Rorschach, but it is the thing that stuck in my mind, and informed my review the most. I think I did enough to express that what Webb did — independent of Raimi’s movie — is come at the character from a place that I think distorts him, and makes him less appealing. So what I’m saying is that Webb’s movie fails for many reasons, but also because exuberance — an exuberance not confined to Raimi’s movie, but is intrinsic to what Spidey is — has been replaced with angst, not because that’s not like a movie I once liked, but because humour coming from a place of angst and aggression comes off more as sniping and arrogance than it does the chirpy, irreverent mocking of a Spidey I find more entertaining. My error was in drawing a direct comparison to Raimi’s version when in fact this is a widely recognised take on our wall-crawling hero, but I stand by my opinion that once you put Spidey in a darker context, be it in The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man 3, or any number of comic versions, the guy comes off as kind of an aggressive jerk. And I don’t like aggressive jerks.

Return 1. Synopsis: It’s another origin story for Webhead, but this time with The Lizard. Actors: I really like Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. They are great. The history: this is pretty loyal to the well-known origin of Spidey, though despite its punishing length much of the canonical detail (look, a wrestling ring!) feels shoe-horned into a plot that’s mostly interesting in pointing out just how depressed Peter Parker is. How popular is Spidey? Very! This movie is already packing them in the countries in which it opened early, despite inspiring numerous shrugging reviews and barely any noticeable excitement. How about them Avengers? Oh man, I loved that movie. What about The Dark Knight Rises? This movie has a couple of weeks to make its money and then it’s over.

Return 2. Before you ask, yes, this is significantly better than the appalling Spider-Man 3; easily the worst movie Raimi has ever made, and one of the very worst superhero movies ever inflicted on the world. And not just because of the dancing and the Hitler hair-do either. Nothing in it works. Fuck that movie.

Return 3. Still, saying that, Raimi’s movies are sadder than a lot of people seem willing to admit. There’s a tragic element to all versions of Peter Parker; there has to be, with an origin that includes being made an orphan and being indirectly responsible for the death of the man who raised him. Nevertheless, Raimi is assured enough to let that darkness play in the corner, allowing Maguire to come into his own in the foreground. Webb, on the other hand, swamps the film in blackness, almost smothering his lead actor. As I say, that’s a valid interpretation. It’s just one I find less interesting.

Return 4. If Raimi’s movie has a visual equivalent in comics, it’s John Romita Jr.’s bright work on Spidey back when J. Michael Straczynski was writing about Spider Totems. Webb’s movie, on the other hand, looks more like Mike Deodato Jr.’s gloomy issues with all of that malarkey with Norman Osborn fathering two super-powered children with Gwen before she died; a true low point for the character, aesthetically and narratively.

Return 5. If I were to believe this, it means The Amazing Spider-Man 2: 2 Amazing 2 Spider is kinda screwed already because Parker finds himself the end thanks to some graffiti or something. The end.

Return 6. Martin Sheen is so goddamn lovable and noble as Uncle Ben that I’m now torn on which is my favourite interpretation. He’s crabbier than Cliff Robertson’s version but as Garfield’s Parker is so much brattier than Maguire’s enthusiastic doofus I was grateful that someone was willing to call him on his crap. Sadly Sally Field’s Aunt May makes much less of an impression than Rosemary Harris, who was so perfect in that role that she basically owns it forever.

Return 7. Gotta give a shout out to the movie’s best scene, with a panicky Spider-Man struggling to save a young boy from a burning car which is seconds away from plummeting into the Hudson river. Garfield brings his A-game to the scene, and — as regular readers will be sick of hearing me mention — if there’s one thing I love about superhero movies it is unapologetic heroics. I don’t watch superhero movies to see superpowered individuals getting into tussles with each other. It’s not the “super” I’m interested in, it’s the “hero”. Any affection I will have for The Amazing Spider-Man will be from this scene, and Peter’s subsequent adoption of the hero’s persona, as he realises Ben was right about the responsibility of the good person. And yes I cried at that scene get off my back just be glad I had an emotion during the movie that wasn’t annoyance!

Return 8. If it seems unfair that I keep comparing this movie to the previous origin story, I’m sorry. But it’s hard not to, considering how often it treads on the same territory. Unavoidable for an origin story, yes, but even when it looks like it’s going to skew away from the Raimi version, Webb’s version just moves back toward it with some new narrative (but not tonal) similarity. Compare that with the Nolan reboot, which came eight years after Batman and Robin (the gap between Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man is only five years). Again we see something colourful (in the hands of Joel Schumacher, at least) replaced with “realistic” and dark, but as the four Burton/Schumacher Batman movies never directly addressed Batman’s origins, Nolan’s use of the same iconography didn’t seem as familiar, especially as he also brought in Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows; something very unfamiliar for many audiences. Webb, on the other hand, is at times replicating beats the audience knows all too well. Much as I watched this new movie in the spirit of it being a clean break from Raimi’s movies, coming home and writing about it just made me want to write about how much I liked Raimi’s first two movies, and why I thought they worked so well; not just as an interpretation of a certain superhero, but also as well-plotted character dramas with strong emotional cores. Raimi (and Koepp and Sargent) gets a lot right that I think Webb (and Vanderbilt, Sargent and Kloves) got wrong, and it’s worth putting the two approaches together for comparison. If that makes me seem like someone who walked into The Amazing Spider-Man determined to hate it for not being Raimi’s , I can only assure you, dear reader, that this was not the case. I really hoped this would be a new franchise that I could love. Maybe the sequel will be good enough to silence my doubts.

Return 9. If I were to compare The Amazing Spider-Man to anything in terms of quality it would be last year’s X-Men: First Class (which I wrote about here); another franchise reboot that contained the germ of a good movie but squandered it by hiding a simple story under too many ideas, too many characters, and a divisive tonal choice.

Lost, In Space: In Defence Of Prometheus

Posted on June 8, 2012 by admiralneck

(WARNING! Massive spoilers for Prometheus and all six seasons of Lost. Contains inessential footnotes that can be ignored if you want to leave this page with your sanity intact.)

It took about thirty seconds from the end of the first public screening of Sir Ridley Scott’s Prometheus before co-writer Damon Lindelof shared this tweet from an Alien fan:

And there were many more to come, which he “kindly” RTd to his followers. Those quote marks are there because Mr. Lindelof’s Twitter behaviour often feels like a self-flagellatory performance piece, as he attempts to engage with the many aggrieved fanboys who despise him for Lost, the Star Trek reboot and now this. With Lost at least he created his own accusatory and gallumphing anti-fanbase, but by working on the other two franchises he’s surely leaping into the path of endless butt-hurty bullets. I can’t help but respect that kind of courage. It’s testament to his inner nerd, that he would risk the barbs and complaints of the most easily-irked subcultures on Earth just to work on the things he loves. ^[1]

Going into Prometheus last Friday, days after it had aired for many of the critics I follow, as well as in some European countries, there were already rumblings that it was a failure, or a partial failure, or a “waste”, as Mr. Beaks from AICN bluntly put it on Twitter. I didn’t look any closer as I didn’t want to spoil the movie any more than the obscenely spoilery trailers had already done (wanna give a fuck you shout-out to Fox’s promotional campaign which effectively stripped every bit of mystery from this movie in a way even Robert Zemeckis would have considered extreme), but my concern was that even if there were legitimate concerns about the quality of Prometheus, some of the criticisms were evidence that the boring old rift between Alien and Aliens fans was being reopened.

There are many nerd debates that will never be resolved. Marvel vs. DC, Star Trek vs. Star Wars, Hunger Games vs. Twilight; none of them are as boring as the Alien wars. There are factions within the Alien fanbase who prefer the long, slow takes and exquisitely-paced suspense of the first Alien movie to the bombastic, militaristic rollercoaster of James Cameron’s sequel, and there are vicey-versa types who think Cameron’s beautifully structured sexy machine of kill is better than Ridley’s hesitant original. There are those who think David Fincher got close with his mangled but bold third installment, and there are even those who think Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French sensibilities reinstalled some of the original’s perversity back into the series. I’d like to think no one believes the two Alien Vs. Predator movies are on the same level as even the fourth movie. ^[2]

So was the initial burst of grumbling about Prometheus borne of the scars caused by this war, one that should have been ditched the moment Paul W.S. Anderson stepped behind a camera on the AVP set? Because seriously, fighting over the deckchairs on the Titanic while the iceberg that is PWSA’s monolithic ineptitude, crossed with the desperate short-sightedness of Fox, gets us nowhere. Alien and Aliens are different approaches to similar material; the very simple template for this series – space monster terrorises humans – is blank enough to be used as a canvas for experiments in differing tone and narrative approach. AVP, on the other hand, was a blunt knife that stabbed right through the canvas so nothing could ever be painted there again.

Even if this would end up fueling a new round of arguing about which approach was better, it would at least mean an objective viewer might enjoy Prometheus; the alternative was that the complaints were justified. Sadly, as the fans said, Prometheus has problems, mostly caused by its attempts to connect to the franchise, but there is still much to like in it, most significantly that it definitively removes the AVP movies from the canon. Even if Prometheus isn’t as innovative and beautifully-wrought as the original Alien, fan predictions that Scott would restore dignity to the Alien universe have proved true, just by excising the banal AVP and idiotic fratboy b-movie AVP: Requiem like a surgeon removing a tumour. For that alone, Prometheus should be lauded.

What else is there to love? Certainly some of the lead performances, especially Noomi Rapace as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the most resilient human being since John McClane, who spends much of the movie in either extreme emotional or physical turmoil. It’s arguable that her character is sidelined too often to act as a real centre, and her relationship with atheist Logan Marshall-Green isn’t as developed as it could have been; surely some room could have been found for it. This is a shame as her damaged faith, shredded by ill fortune and nauseating, psyche-shattering body horror is meant to be one of the central planks of the movie’s structure, but even if she’s not given enough screentime, she’s still good enough to be memorable.

Michael Fassbender is arguably even better as David, the Weyland Corporation android who tends to the crew of the Prometheus. As with Ash and Bishop in the other movies, David’s agenda is mysterious, setting up many of the movie’s most interesting moments and calling back to one of Lindelof’s finest creations, Ben Linus, as well as the infamous AI Hal 9000. Is David malevolent? Mischievous? Innocent? Vengeful? Badly programmed? It’s likely that much of the forthcoming debate about Prometheus will focus on his motives. Lindelof has a real talent for creating such ambiguous characters and situations which, if the tenor of his treatment online and elsewhere is anything to go by, annoys many who want certainty from their fiction.

The rest of the cast are fine enough, though many of them have little to do. Nice to see Red Road‘s Kate Dickie here, though she generally just imparts exposition, while Rafe Spall plays another eccentric. His reliability is a bit of a coin-toss, and for this movie we sadly got the “tails” that gave us his excruciating performance in One Day, and not the “heads” of The Shadow Line. Fans of DJ Big Driis will likely enjoy his performance as Captain Janek, with his accordion, scamp-like charm and fine habit of standing on the bridge, legs akimbo, like a big sexy legend; classic Elba typecasting. Guy Pearce is also in it, buried under so much latex I wasn’t sure what he was up to. I think I found him amusing? Certainly incongruous. A perpetual snarl on Charlize Theron’s face is also in it. Make of that what you will.

On a technical level the movie is astounding, as you’d expect from the infamous stylist and detail-obsessive Sir Ridley, though the creatures in the movie are a mite disappointing, looking like waxy and unimaginative first drafts; passable in any other movie but unacceptable when sharing a universe with HR Giger’s nightmarish vision. One particularly annoying design failure has Noomi’s disgusting squid baby connected to her by an umbilical cord that juts out of the side of its head. The lengthy sequence in which Shaw gives herself a grisly automated abortion is unarguably the highlight of the movie, but I couldn’t stop looking at that stupid dangling umbilical cord. Who signed off on that distracting touch?

That said, the horror is already undercut by the confusing threat. Is the crew of the Prometheus threatened by a deadly virus? Zombies? A Lovecraftian Old God? A mutated version of the Trash Compactor monster from Star Wars? All of those things are upsetting on their own, but by not settling on any one thing it dissipates some of the tension as the viewer tries to match them up. Here’s where the Alien comparisons do the most damage. The elegant and rigorously thought-through reproductive cycle in Alien is now muddled, evolving from some ill-defined matter to become the Apexiest of Apex Predators, though it’s perversely pleasing to think that at some point in the evolutionary timeline of the Xenomorph, one of the most diabolical and primally terrifying creatures ever imagined, is a devout human woman struggling to hold onto her faith in the face of indescribable horrors.

There’s also the fact that this movie feels so familiar; something noted by Daisyhellcakes as we left the IMAX. ^[3] That’s mostly due to the central conceit regarding our origins that’s been used in other movies or books; At The Mountains of Madness, Chariots of the Gods, Stargate etc. have dealt with the same idea in differing ways. Additionally, David’s impenetrable behaviour evokes memories of 2001; not just his HAL-like unreliability but early scenes with him puttering around the ship and busying himself with chores resemble Dave Bowman’s relaxed moments on Discovery One. The weird alien special sauce that dooms the crew is, of all things, reminiscent of the organic meteor matter in Ivan Reitman’s Evolution. Its purpose is the biggest mystery of all. It accelerates evolution? It breaks down DNA?

Further muddying the waters, the Alien movies are overtly referenced throughout, thus making it hard to separate this from the previous films no matter how hard we’re told not to. The look of the movie directly reflects the other films, with the (remarkable) production design by Arthur Max evoking memories of Syd Mead’s work, but the script is where the main resemblances occur. Lindelof has peppered familiar scenarios and lines of dialogue from the previous Alien movies throughout Prometheus; so much so that Sir Ridley’s comments that the movie “shares Alien‘s DNA” is a wry comment on the DNA / RNA manipulations in the plot as well as an acknowledgement that this often feels like a rehash. The structure, apart from some significant diversions, is identical to the other movies:

Discovery of message > waking from cryo-sleep > introduction of characters > arrival on planet > visit alien object > find unpleasant things > attempt to return during storm > things go wrong on the ship involving unpleasant births > android / corporate stooge has shady agenda > chaos ensues > lifepod ejects in which a showdown with the antagonist occurs.

It’s worth noting that Prometheus also borrows thematic material from Blade Runner, to such a degree that for a confusing moment I wondered if Blade Runner also occurred in the Alien universe, and Weyland Corporation’s androids were merely following in the footsteps of Tyrell Corporation’s replicants. Prometheus feels more like the third part of a thematically-connected series a la Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy than the fifth/first part of a franchise, thanks to these concerns. The main characters are searching for answers to questions about their origins, and Weyland is also looking for extended longevity, just like the replicants in Scott’s other sci-fi favourite. The showdown with the Engineer is as disastrous as Roy Batty’s encounter with Eldon Tyrell, with a popped-off android head and some vanilla butt-kicking replacing Tyrell’s crushed noggin.

And what answers do the team find? Nothing satisfying, of course, because nothing can truly satiate the whole audience, even if the movie ended falling either on the side of Shaw (faith) or Holloway (science). Those of us who forgave Lost its “trespasses” will recognise Lindelof’s approach. Prometheus asks the question, “who made us, and who made the race that made us?”, but instead of God or benevolent celestial beings we’re given the possibility that we might be the subject of an experiment, the organic components of a long-played terraforming operation, or the accidental biological waste product of a botched suicide by an alien trapped on Earth after missing his ride. That Carl Sagan line, “We are all made of star stuff,” is only half right here. We’re also just clever human-shaped sludge. (In fact Prometheus is the anti-Contact. They’d make an interesting double bill.)

Viewers of Lost were led to believe that its central mystery – what the hell is going on with this crazy island, and what has it got to do with these chosen ones – would be answered by one of the regularly introduced characters who seemed to have the answers. This was not to be. The Oceanic survivors, especially poor Locke, expected answers from the leader of the Others – Ben Linus – but he too was in the dark. So the audience waited for his mentor Richard Alpert to provide answers, but he had none either. In fact, as a result of a time-travel accident he thinks it’s Locke who has answers; a brilliant joke played by Lindelof and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse, highlighting the point that we make fools of ourselves for looking to others — Messiahs — for answers.

After Richard we expect Jacob has the answers, or the Man in Black, or their “Mother”, but none of them had a clue. They only had their own humanity, for better or worse. The layers could be peeled back forever, and all we would ever find were more confused, stupid people bringing their own baggage to the mysterious island, which contained a glowing thingy that was basically a magical Maltese Falcon. Over the course of six seasons Lindelof and Cuse could fully explore this idea, and some people even seemed to get it, though most complained that with no answers the show was a failure, instead of the slyly subversive success it actually was. Prometheus, with a running time of only two hours and a lot of info to get through, can only suffer in comparison.

So why ask these questions if you have no interest in answering them? Because there are other things you can dramatise with these questions, and the late-movie revelation that the Engineers were actually on their way back to Earth to eradicate our species using toxic goop wrong-foots the audience in a way that is reminiscent of Lost‘s games with expectations, as well as being a nicely mundane counterpoint to the grandiose first half of the movie. This resembles the way Lost teased epic and supernatural answers to its mysteries that were almost always caused by trivial but recognisably human things like confusion, venality, greed, delusion and the hilariously panicky reactions of characters who feared that they would soon lose their tiny allotment of power. ^[4]

The juxtaposition of the importance of the questions and the triviality of the human drama was one of the most pleasurable aspects of Lost, creating an unexpected frisson that transformed what could have been a simple mystery show into a Vonnegut-inspired treatise on the absurdity and arrogance of the human quest for knowledge it cannot handle. Prometheus does a similar thing, but that comment on the futility of our quest for truth is wrapped up in the tropes of a horror movie, which threatens to overpower the cosmic joke. Perhaps there’s another story they could tell that fits squarely into the sci-fi genre without the need to adopt Alien‘s horrific genetics, giving that commentary on our hubris more room to breathe and/or be recognised.

That said, the thought that humanity is a mistake that needs to be eradicated by beings more powerful than us is a chilling one, and the atmosphere of existential dread experienced by the Prometheus crew as they realise they have have been rejected by their creator is its own reward. It even thematically matches the responses of David, daily reminded of — and seemingly disgusted by — the flawed nature of his creators. Does he poison Holloway because he wants to punish his creators, as Shaw does re: the Engineers in the film’s final moments, or is David hurt by Holloway’s dismissal of his sentience? The fact that he invades Shaw’s dreams suggests Holloway’s racist behaviour arrived too late to affect David’s actions. David may have been broken all along.

Is this a consequence of his programming by Weyland or Vickers, a flaw in his construction (as suggested by Burke in Aliens), or that he has manifested a dark soul of his own accord? ^[5] These questions are as interesting now as they were when first asked in Blade Runner, and are given extra power by Fassbender’s brilliant work and Lindelof’s commendable restraint in explaining things away. I’d expect nothing else from the man who created Ben Linus and Charles Widmore, though I wonder if pointing out that Prometheus is yet another tale of children struggling to understand, placate, or wreak vengeance upon their fathers will make former Lost fans turn against this as fiercely as they turned against the island show.

It can be argued that Prometheus strengthens Lost and vice versa. It’s easy to assume that Lindelof truly is the bad writer of popular myth, a man smart enough to ask big questions but too stupid to answer them. Some ugly exposition and leaden dialogue does little to dispel that argument, though this could be down to necessary editing choices. There are other complaints ready to be levelled at the filmmakers that don’t fit within my forgiving parameters, and my defence is not meant to be a blanket dismissal of reasonable, non-trolling complaints, or an excuse for the film’s flaws. But what if Lindelof’s actually smart enough to know there’s no satisfactory way to settle the science / faith debate, to understand that drama that aspires to profundity demands that these questions be asked despite the inevitable disappointment that follows when the answer given falls short of expectation?

The drama here isn’t resolving “Why?” It’s in showing how people react when given a chance to find the answers. Lindelof’s done this twice now. Why is it beyond the realms of possibility that he’s not just some idiot who doesn’t know how to end a story, but is making a point about the ineffable mysteries of the world, and the possibility that matters of great significance are actually mistakes or trivial events that show up the absurd randomness of existence? ^[6] Vonnegut and Philip K Dick would enjoy the cosmic jokes of Lindelof’s worldview, and how he uses the gulf between our expectations and the truth to illuminate the failings of humans when they believe that they are in the position to acquire the greatest commodity of them all — truth — showing us up as cowards, fools, villains or, occasionally, noble heroes willing to sacrifice themselves to prevent the extinction of what they love.

Most other creators would be given a break at this point but ill feeling towards him for not ending Lost the way people wanted ^[7] will probably follow him forever now (check out this terrific, revelatory interview where Lindelof reveals he suggested to Scott that they make the ending clearer as he was “still eating shit a year on from the end of Lost“). As a result Prometheus is viewed as a mistake, with him taking all of the blame; convenient that he gets all the flak when Sir Ridley is notorious for changing the direction of projects and, if that interview is anything to go by, was developed with much input from the great director who was, never forget, considered for the longest time to be the only one who could save a franchise sullied by pretenders to his crown.^[8]

What a shame that this couldn’t be a blank slate, to be approached with open minds ^[9], instead of being a failure for not being an Alien movie, a failure for being as inconclusive as Lost, a failure for appropriating beloved sci-fi tropes and treating them with a populist’s unsubtle touch, a failure for lacking the beautifully judged stillness and artistic tableaux of Blade Runner, a failure for not being as classically-wrought – or as gloriously obscure – as 2001; I’m not dismissing these points as automatically wrong or worthless but I don’t think they qualify as sufficient reason to reject a movie which should be considered on its own terms. It doesn’t matter. Fans love a big raging debate, and given years of practice arguing over the merit (or lack thereof) of each Alien film many will launch themselves at Prometheus with great hunger. New flesh to tear apart! Why isn’t this Alien? How dare they? Sellout Ridley! All movies suck now! I hate 3D! At least it’s better than Robin Hood I suppose! Etc. etc. ad infinitum.^[10]

Hopefully this will all settle down and people will eventually engage with it without baggage. Maybe further editions of it – and maybe even sequels, if its apparent success inspires Fox to fund more – will provide a clearer idea of Lindelof and Scott’s vision, and improve what even I, a fledgling defender of Prometheus, think of as an imperfect project that nevertheless doesn’t deserve to be thrown out of an airlock. The breathtakingly spoilery trailer also shows a moment in which Shaw prays after her grisly abortion scene. The film is already ill-served by the conflict between its lofty thematic goals and the need for distracting, grotesque horror; perhaps that scene – or other scenes about religion / science – would have unbalanced the film further, and maybe for the better.

But these possibilities, and the new battles over Prometheus‘ worth, are at least an evolution of those long-running skirmishes mentioned earlier. The fighting over the previous movies feels like quibbling over the individual threads in the tapestry of this surprisingly diverse franchise; Alien is classy/cold, Aliens is tacky/exhilarating, Alien 3 is uncompromising/cruel, Alien: Resurrection is inept/stupid, Alien 3 should’ve been the William Gibson version, Aliens should’ve been made by Ridley, Newt should’ve lived, Ripley should’ve stayed dead, Jean-Pierre Jeunet should not be allowed to direct movies ever again… The arguments are only about the movies as cinematic artefacts and not as narratives with metaphorical purpose, spats that are only of interest to cineastes, to be futilely rinsed-and-repeated forever, accomplishing nothing, changing no minds.

Prometheus, on the other hand, offers up a text that can be interpreted and debated on its own.^[11] Sure, fans of the franchise are raging about it, whether it should’ve been made or not, whether to build a guillotine for Lindelof, whether the design is a failure as HR Giger was not asked to participate, whether it’s just total shit and a shallow insult to the ambitious speculative ambitions of genuine hard sci-fi, etc. But, as with Lost, there are mysteries within the film that can be discussed by even those who don’t agonise about that loathsome fantasy, the “childhood raped by the uncaring creator”.^[12] Dear God/Grouchy Space Engineer, how do we impose a moratorium on that insensitive and ridiculous sense of entitlement?

Whether even those mysteries are worthy of discussion is another debate to be had, though as someone who greatly enjoyed thrashing out theories about Lost with fellow fans I think my mind about Prometheus is already made up, but it’s worth noting that Scott and Lindelof have intentionally given us something different than The Greatest Space Monster Series Of All Time; a puzzle box that may or may not become more complex and more interesting as time goes by. As Mr. Lindelof himself has said…

Dude, have a rest. You’ve earned it.

Return 1. Who knows what Sir Ridley thinks, as he doesn’t have a Twitter account, shockingly. I assume his response to the kind of abuse Lindelof is getting would be a pithy, “Go fuck yourselves”. I believe he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Return 2. And yes, I admit that these paragraphs, were they to appear on Wikipedia, would be covered in “Citation needed” warnings, but these wars are fought as much in pubs and nerd gatherings and comment sections and forums etc. as they are in scholarly publications or blogs. Stick two nerds in a room together and there will come a moment when this debate begins and immediately descends into acrimony and deeply-held opinion blurted out as fact. This paragraph, which asks you, the reader, to just go with me on it, is my tribute to that ephemeral dark cloud that hovers over fandom. ^[13]

Return 3. Warning: never sit in the front row for a 3D IMAX performance; the miserable trailer for The Amazing Reboot Of The Spider-Man was a black and red blob wiped across my eyeball, and the ickiest bits of Prometheus were thrust aggressively right into my face as if I was being assaulted by a cross between a drunken football fan and Yog-Sothoth itself.

Return 4. There are other aspects of Prometheus that seem familiar to a Lost fan. The black toxic sludge, when seen within its ampoule, floats within a green fluid; when tipped up it floats down like a black cloud. This substance must never reach Earth, much as the Man in Black, aka The Smoke Monster, must never escape the island or he/it would cause an event that would signal “the end of everything good”. Jack sacrifices himself to prevent this, as Holloway, Janek and, to a lesser extent Shaw, also do. Meredith is obviously horrified to think her father, Weyland, considers his mechanical son David to be more of an heir than she does, much as The Man in Black is jealous of Mother’s love of Jacob. Holloway and Shaw are a man of science and a woman of faith; Lindelof choosing to make them lovers here may be his way of getting some unpleasant Jack/Locke slash out of his system. I’m sure there are dozens of other parallels between the two tales.

Return 5. And does this evolution within David echo our own development beyond that which the Engineers had planned, thus prompting their decision to destroy us? What does the Engineer’s reaction to David mean? Is his burst of violence triggered by David’s use of his language, proving that we have the potential to become a threat to them?

Return 6. On this point, I’d like to stress that yes, it could be argued that this assumption — that Lindelof has no idea what he’s doing and is bluffing his way through these stories like a faker — is valid if you consider Lost‘s finale on its own, but the show made this point over and over again throughout its six season run, so we have enough evidence for this theory to at least consider it, instead of dismissing it because of Occam’s Razor or something. We’re talking about one of the main themes of the show, not just a couple of incidents. Who knows, perhaps if we look back through his other TV shows we might find further evidence for this theory, though somehow I can’t see Nash Bridges being a treatise on the unknowability of the great questions pondered by philosophers and scientists of times past, no matter how potent the chemistry between Don Johnson and Cheech Marin.

Return 7. Here’s yet another fantastic interview with Lindelof, who seems to be one of the most approachable and friendly of creators despite the torrent of bullshit that keeps getting poured over his head. Lots of good stuff there, but the comments made by the interviewer, asking why all the characters in Lost had been dead all along ^[14], and his hypothetical argument that a concrete answer at the end of the show along the lines of, “they were being experimented on by aliens all that time,” would have been more satisfying gives a depressing insight into the extent to which many of the show’s naysayers were prepared to engage with it. Seeing the interviewer talking about gadgets on a recent edition of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon made me so pathetically angry I pitched an undignified shitfit and nearly threw one of our cats through the TV.

Return 8. Note that Jon Spaihts, who was the original writer on the project, is also free from opprobrium, at least as far as I can see, even though he’s already been treated like a mound of bear scat by sci-fi fans for making the not-well-liked alien-invasion movie The Darkest Hour. That’s how much people hated Lost. Seriously, admitting that I love that show in public often makes me fear that it’ll trigger a flurry of movement and then suddenly everyone will be pointing a gun at my face like they do in the movies.

Return 9. I include myself in this assessment. Watching Prometheus was a horribly confusing experience as my own expectations kept getting in the way. Much as I’m frothing away throughout this epic post about the — as I see it — unfair criticism Prometheus is receiving, I can’t honestly justify my anger at fans for judging this movie in relation to the others, as the promotional material and the unconvincing statements by Scott and Lindelof did little to prevent the growth of these assumptions. There are no words for how inept the marketing onslaught of the past few months has been, though I can’t figure out a way they could have promoted this without making the same mistakes.

Return 10. Funny that Scott includes footage from Laurence of Arabia, in what is one of the movie’s most endearing moments. For a while it might have seemed that a filmmaker with such a feel for composition and epic scale, indeed a man who made Kingdom of Heaven (which is heavily indebted to David Lean’s movie), might be the next in line to claim Lean’s crown as King of Classical British Cinema, even despite beginning his days as a lowly commercial director, but that seems far less likely now, and some of the criticism of Prometheus is that it’s not as restrained as Alien. Perhaps not, but it’s made with commendable skill, and now he has more money that he can use fill the original movie’s money-saving suspenseful longueurs with cacophony and event, for better or worse. I guess once Jerry Bruckheimer’s had his claws in you, you can never go home.

Return 11. Three months after Lost finished, once I had recovered from the dehydration caused by my uncontrollable sobbing, and removed my black armband, I wrote these three posts — part 1, part 2 and part 3 — which outlined my theories about the show’s ultimate meaning (i.e. as a primer for atheists about what it is to experience faith in something for which there is no proof). In the midst of that was my rather pompous, meta-fanwanky description of the show’s “plotholes” as “interactive plot gaps” (yes I did, and I’m very serious about this being a real and good thing), which are basically intentionally positioned blank spaces within a story which can be filled in by the audience with theories and / or non-meta-fanwank. Prometheus has plenty of these holes, which have this week been the focus of much of the ire of those viewers in my Twitter timeline who were appalled at the movie’s “mistakes”. As I said earlier, there are plenty of things wrong with the movie that deserve censure, and I wouldn’t accuse anyone of being wrong for holding a negative opinion, but I do think what some see as errors or first-draft fuck-ups might be something more interesting and justifiable on second viewing.

Return 12. How about this for another take on the film. Is it also a sly commentary on the inevitable sense of dismay felt by the fanbase, as humanity / Alien fans return to the source of their existence and find something there that doesn’t live up to expectation, causing all kinds of aberrant behaviour? Maybe this is all just Lindelof’s response to the long-running anger directed at him over Lost, and his experience with being verbally assaulted by the angry former fans is akin to wrestling with a Lovecraftian proto-Facehugger and then getting an inseminating tentacle shoved down your throat, leading to the birth of a proto-Chestburster, which in the case of this strained metaphor would be Prometheus.

Return 13. I also appreciate that this post reads like a very direct assault on pretty much anyone who has ever held an opinion on the Alien movies, and might even seem like a declaration of war against anyone who didn’t like Prometheus, making my concerns about the creation of a new front in the Alien Wars seem rather cheeky. That’s not my intention at all, especially as I have spent literally years of my life arguing the toss over the first two movies.^[15] The inspiration for this post, the thing that has compelled me to write over 6000 words (my God!), is not so much the criticism of Prometheus, much of which I agree with to some extent or another, but the increasingly hostile attacks on the filmmakers for daring to sully something as perfect as Alien. We fans all bring baggage to this movie no matter what we say, and anyone else’s reactions are not necessarily invalid even if they dare to be different to my perfect opinion, obvs (joke). What galls me is that we are now in a post-”wow Internet” period, where the use of the net has become such a familiar way of life that we can finally settle down and inspect our behaviour. Unfortunately this means we’ve found that many people here are so badly brought-up that they feel it’s acceptable to direct untold splenetic rage and disgusting hatred upon others for putting their hearts and minds into creative endeavours. What’s most upsetting is that many of the worst offenders are those I would ordinarily consider my Nerd Brethren, people whose passion I can understand on some level, but whose love of these cultural objects and events has mutated until they become compelled to bombard a guy with cruel messages when all he did was, at worst, write a movie that isn’t as good as another movie. He didn’t rape any childhoods (yuk), he didn’t erase all copies of Alien, he didn’t mock the fanbase or set out to diminish the originals in any way. He just wrote something, with the input of some other people, that he thought was cool. He doesn’t deserve to be hunted across the Internet like a rat, for fuck’s sake. And that goes for George Lucas too. I don’t like the Star Wars prequels either but they didn’t ruin my life in any way.

Return 14. I mean really? There was a VERY CLEARLY EXPRESSED SPEECH by Christian that made it VERY CLEAR that the events on the island, everything we had seen outside of the season 6 afterlife HAD HAPPENED exactly the way we saw it, that they had NOT been dead all along, that nothing we had experienced as viewers was rendered meaningless by some moronic final St. Elsewhere-esque twist. This is why I’m continually spouting off about Lost, and why I decided to write this ridiculously long review of Prometheus, that will most probably only be read by about 12 people, many of whom will think I should just get over this and move on instead of having a serious of life-threatening embolisms over something that almost everybody has forgotten about by now, because if fans such as myself don’t take the time and effort to restate facts about stories that are rushed past by storytellers who don’t want to belabour a point for fear of burdening their work with extraneous explanations that would take more attentive audience members out of the story-experiencing spell they have worked so hard to create, then we end up with the “official” take on something being, “You haven’t seen Lost? Oh man, don’t bother. They were dead all along. How lame is that?” or, “You haven’t seen Prometheus? Oh man, don’t bother. They don’t really explain how the Xenomorphs were created. There’s just a bunch of plotholes and then it ends on this weird inconclusive note because the writer is some kind of idiot who doesn’t understand how to tell stories.” When did it become unfashionable to surrender yourself to a work of art? To have faith that maybe the creator has a greater awareness of his or her work than someone experiencing it for the first time? To just go with the flow and stop with the, “Well, I’d have done it differently because I know these things more deeply,” thoughts until the work is over and you’ve had time to process it? Jesus Christ, sometimes it feels like we have to retrain audiences to just shut the fuck up and absorb something in one go without thinking that any plot event that isn’t identical to a million other plot events from a million other stories is a mistake or evidence of “ignorance of storytelling rules” (my own personal bugbear), instead of an intentional choice to tell a story that’s different to all the carbon copy stories cluttering up the world. [/crazy rant over]

Return 15. For the record, just so you, the reader, can better frame my feelings about this franchise, my favourite of the two is Aliens, but the difference in preference between the two is infinitesimally small, like, a micron thick, and the only reason I argue so vehemently for Aliens against the literally psyche-changing cinema-shaking brilliance of the original is because many of the arguments against the sequel — it’s garish and manipulative and stupid — are arguments used to dismiss many of my favourite films, and I just happen to like movies like Aliens that wear their heart on their sleeves, especially as I honestly believe that those criticisms are wrong. Aliens is as hard as nails. It has a beautiful structure used in other notable action movies such as Assault on Precinct 13, 13 Assassins, and even future beloved classic The Avengers. It is also very loud, but it has an emotional charge more powerful than about 99.999999% of movies made to date. Loving something that makes me sit on the edge of my seat screaming at characters to move faster even though I’ve seen it 100 times is not a problem for me. I also don’t think James Cameron is the enemy of cinema that many others do, mostly because Aliens is perfect so there INFINITY no comebacks. #Iwin

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: Why I Won’t Name Individual Worst Episodes This Year

Posted on October 4, 2011 by admiralneck

For the last few years, the Caruso Awards have been presented with great pomp and fanfare to not only the best episodes of the TV year, but also the worst, which has been bad news for Torchwood, Heroes and Dexter. These awards have been given in a spirit of annoyance at wasted opportunities, laziness, or simple bone-headed stupidity. At the point of writing, I would feel a horrible, cathartic pleasure in having a dig at shows I thought deserved little pity, kicking them with hob-nailed boots of condensed supermeanness. As has been said in the past, rave reviews are difficult to write, but drubbings are fun.

This year will have to be different. A crisis of conscience has come over me, mostly because of the humanising nature of Twitter. Conversations with creators have made me question whether it’s fair to call out shows for being terrible when it has become clear to me that they are often initially realised with the best of intentions, but are compromised on the way to the screen. It’s a rare British writer who doesn’t have some horror story about how they had written something with one intent only to see it mangled and altered by interfering hands by the time it has reached the screen, usually by adding needless exposition, or the musical equivalent of seventeen soundtracks played simultaneously.

Other times a show can be aimed at a demographic that I am never going to be able to empathise with; I may have found No Ordinary Family a poorly-plotted padding-heavy waste of time for the most part (with some caveats), but it’s not really meant for me. It might be about superheroes, but it’s aimed at family audiences. It’s intentionally light and silly and undemanding. Hating it for those reasons is pointless (though hating it for being very often dull and filled with desperate nerd-pandering cameos is fine, I reckon).

Even worse when something I genuinely think is appalling on every level – i.e. Torchwood: Miracle Day – features one of my all-time writing heroes as an executive producer and writer. Jane Espenson has long been one of my idols, with credits on some of the best episodes of my favourite shows. Just this year she scripted a very satisfying episode of Game of Thrones (The Golden Crown), and was also credited on the delayed finale of Caprica. As ever, her work is entertaining, smart, unpredictable, and tight as a drum. It’s a joy to watch almost anything she has worked on.

And yet Torchwood: Miracle Day is arguably the low-point of the TV season. As much as I would love to jump on a single episode and see why I think it failed, I’m conflicted about directing any blame at Ms. Espenson. Her efforts to livetweet the UK broadcast of the show, while being bombarded with negative, aggressive tweets insulting her for “ruining” the show (impossible, as it has always been wretched), have made me respect her even more. Even this paragraph, noting my longstanding dislike of the programme, makes me feel bad. Why would I want to pile on her when she’s already had to put up with a ton of abuse?

My urge to snipe has been affected by other factors. Earlier this year a friend of the blog — a writer I consider to be a bit of a genius — wrote a funny article about British TV shows for A Newspaper that prompted the creator of one of those shows to react in an incredibly hostile and petty manner on Twitter. I won’t name names, as I don’t know if there was anything else going on there. Perhaps there was some DM conversation; for all I know, the feud has been laid to rest, and I don’t want to stir anything up.

Nevertheless, a show connected to this angry creator was a definite candidate for inclusion on my now-aborted list. After seeing his behaviour, the thought of sitting through that show’s entire run nauseated me; as far as I’m concerned, the output of that person’s production company is now and forever boycotted by me. I will have no truck with bullying, no matter how aggrieved the bully feels they are. How can I ever watch these shows with an open mind? I’m only ever going to be looking for flaws, which doesn’t help anyone.

More importantly — and I say this with a very heavy heart — I will regretfully admit I didn’t want to incur his considerable wrath, just in case he comes across this blog thanks to the joys of Google Alerts and/or Twitter Search (a function that led to my unfortunate run-in with a writer/actor earlier this year). Cowardly? You betcha. Even worse, another screenwriter I recently began to follow tweeted that anyone who ever wants to get into TV should never ever blog about the subject because that’s their career opportunities up in smoke.

A debate between writers ensued; some saying that constructive or detailed criticism is valid, while anyone engaged in negative whining with no content other than “this sucks” was doomed. Do I want to write for TV? Shit, I want to write for everything. I still hope that one day I’ll get to finish the Altered States musical/opera I’m always joking about. I want to write. That is the dream, be it writing novels, comics, screenplays, teleplays, radio plays, critiques for newspapers or magazines, an opera in which I try to rhyme “ischemic attack” with “monkey on my back”, even.

Should I really narrow down my options now, just to garner page hits that might or might not further my career? I’m not getting paid for this, after all. I use the blog as a way to work out my thoughts about what constitutes good and bad writing and directing. Trying to understand why V is terrible but Caprica is stimulating, or why Alphas was a pleasant surprise and Boardwalk Empire was such a disappointment, is all done in aid of my own work. Everything I’ve written off-blog since starting the Shades of Caruso Project has been informed by the observations I’ve made.

And so my customary Worst Episodes list will not happen this year, for all the reasons listed above. However, I’ve spent a lot of time this year watching some pretty crummy stuff, and engaging with even this dreck has taught me some lessons about storytelling, and how the audience relates to it. And so, to justify all of those hours watching Glee and the AMC remake of The Killing (for example), over the next few days I plan on writing about some of the things I think I’ve learned from watching bad TV this year.

Many of the lessons will appear obvious to most; some of them will seem awfully petty. Nevertheless, at some point in the past year these are the things that have informed my own writing, and my own theories about effective storytelling. I just hope I can do it without picking on individuals; my criticism is directed more at general misguided ideas that might have seemed right initially, but turned out to have been wrong in the long run. To any creators I diss during the next few days, it’s nothing personal.

BFI LFF 2010 – Self Made / Tabloid

Posted on November 29, 2010 by admiralneck

2009 was the first year I attended the London Film Festival — despite having lived in the capital for ten years – and the experience was so enjoyable the concentrated cinematic download instantly became my new secular Christmas. 2010 has been a less than ideal year for many reasons, the most trivial of which being the disappointing summer season, which has traditionally been a highpoint for me. This year the sting was removed: knowing I would be seeing far superior (and, as it turned out, inferior) movies in the first few weeks of October made the torment of enduring Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D almost bearable.

I won’t lie: part of it is the glamour — or should I say “glamour” – of seeing and/or meeting filmmakers and celebrities, though the resolutely dismal setting does tend to make the experience a lot more humble. It’s one thing to see tiny Michelle Williams in the flesh – a vision of indie-movie chic in her Erdem dress at the first screening of Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine – and another to cringe at the thought of her forced to eschew the comfort of the West End Vue cinema lobby due to a torrent of water pouring from a burst pipe in the ceiling, and thus ending up posing in a cramped alley outside, the sound of the paparazzi cameras drowned out by the noise of renovation work on the knackered old building next door. If she had ever wondered what the diametric opposite of La Croisette was, now she knows. (Imagine this alley half obstructed with bright blue panels.)

Nevertheless, for an amateur blogger / professional starfucker who has yet to be jaded by encounters with the creative people I admire, there is still a frisson of delight when your experience of watching a movie is enhanced by a quick introduction by Darren Aronofsky and an appearance by Mila Kunis and the impossibly cool Vincent Cassel, though I’m sure my enjoyment of Black Swan was down to the quality of the film (spoiler alert: it’s phenomenal). As I intend to make attendance of the LFF an annual thing (as long as I’m living in the UK, of course), I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but for now, please forgive me if I get annoyingly breathless recounting these little moments.

Luckily the festival started promisingly with Gillian Wearing’s debut movie Self Made, an almost uncategorisable experimental piece in which seven volunteers participate in a method-acting workshop that takes on a therapeutic aspect. Judging from comments made by acting coach Sam Rumbelow after the screening, there was never the intention of providing therapeutic help to the participants as learning the Method is not meant to double as therapy, but it seems to have been an inevitable by-product of the project, especially as Wearing selected the seven volunteers on the basis of the life stories they had described to her when applying to take part. As the film progresses we get an insight into the histories of these people, see what has shaped them. Uncomfortable truths are exposed, traumatic experiences unearthed, and in some cases a kind of catharsis is reached by addressing these psychic wounds via role-playing, method-acting exercises, and performances in small filmed scenes that force the participants to face the problems that are causing them so much pain.

It’s a description that makes the movie sound dry, but Wearing is more of a showman than you might think. She consciously plays with the audience’s expectations, melding the reality of the participant’s lives with the fictitious acting challenges, casting her subjects in “roles” that play with what we have previously discovered about them. She even manages to throw in one of the best shock-jump moments I’ve seen in years, superior to anything in Paranormal Activity 2 – a perversely funny directorial decision she can be proud of. She is also unafraid to show some almost unbearable scenes of revelation: scenes featuring participant Ash Akhtar are so raw it’s hard to watch. (Disclaimer: I know Ash via Twitter – and now real life – so it was always going to be tough to see him in such a vulnerable state, but I doubt that anyone watching the film will fail to be moved by his devastating scenes.)

It’s been said before that fiction gets closer to the truth of things than non-fiction, and Self Made shows Wearing playing with that idea. It’s possible she was inspired by Godard’s comment that ”Every film is a documentary of its actors”. She makes her participants recreate moments from their past, finding out more about them through this process, and then making them act out situations that mirror the events that have filled them with dread for the future. Lian Stewart, a young woman who is saddened by the absence of her father, plays out the role of Cordelia in King Lear, and consciously rejects a father figure. James Baron, a young man whose past was marred by bullying, acts out his own death at the hands of a group of “youths” (to use the emotive phrase employed by the Right-Wing press to demonise young people). Ash… well, that would be telling, and could likely ruin the startling opening scene.

What makes Wearing’s movie so fascinating is how these fictional scenes are informed by our understanding of who these people are, and the empathic knowledge that acting out these scenes is affecting the participants on an emotional level. It says much about the nature of acting, how we perceive the act of performing, and the nature of celebrity, in the sense that we often experience stories performed by people whose private lives are known to us, while also understanding that there’s a good chance those stories are unreal as well. We have to mentally shuffle through levels of emotional expectation when watching stories performed by actors, and Wearing cleverly makes us aware of that thought-process by providing a new perspective on the audience/performer line. It sounds like the sort of meta-commentary lampooned so brilliantly in the recent episode of Community (Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples), but it’s less self-conscious than that, and just as satisfying as any Charlie Kaufman thought-experiment. And Variety was right: Ash Akhtar should consider chasing this alternate career. ::fistbump::

While it’s hard to know whether to categorise Self Made as a documentary or a “reality” film, Errol Morris’ new film Tabloid is most definitely a documentary that follows his traditional themes of the shifting nature of truth and fiction, and would make an excellent companion-piece to Wearing’s experiment. Tabloid is much jauntier than his previous triumphs The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, but similarly focuses on (arguably) unreliable narrators. The stakes seem lower this time: though the tale of Joyce McKinney was once the centre of a tabloid storm in the UK, Morris smartly uses McKinney’s natural showmanship and good humour to crowdpleasing effect which was absent in those gloomy documentaries. The tale of the abduction and seduction of her Mormon lover begins weirdly and Morris beautifully edits the multiple testimonies for maximum audience pleasure: the reaction at our screening was delightfully raucous.

What’s most astonishing about the tale – at least for me – was that it happened during my lifetime, but entering the cinema I remembered nothing about it. Yes, I was a kid and can’t be expected to recall all of the things that happened in the 70s that didn’t involve Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, but as events progress you see that the story of the Manacled Mormon was pretty much inescapable for about a year, with market-leading tabloids the Mirror and the Express running constant updates on her exploits. That light and breezy tone hides a seriousness of purpose: Morris provides a useful insight into the fleeting “importance” of these sensational stories, as well as reminding us of the unscrupulousness of journalists chasing the scoop that will render their competitors’ exclusives mundane.

It’s not exactly a startling revelation that the furore surrounding Cat Bin Lady, or John Terry’s extra-marital exploits, or Gamu Nhengu’s visa troubles, will eventually amount to nothing more than a trivial distraction (though not for those involved, obviously), but just as experiencing the accelerated churn of the news cycle on Twitter shows up the gadfly nature of the media’s attention span, it’s healthy to see the long view as well, and Morris has found the perfect example of a scandal that keeps on giving. As a welcome contrast to the nonsense we find ourselves transfixed by in recent times, it’s great to experience a truly novel tabloid story: there is no way I’m going to spoil any of the twists and turns of McKinney’s life. Suffice it to say, she is a fantastically engaging and amusing individual, and some of the oddest moments of her life happened more recently than you would think. I saw “better” movies at the festival, but Tabloid is almost certainly the most amusing and infectiously enjoyable, and watching it with such an appreciative audience was an early highlight.

Why I Am In The Grip Of Something Similar To The Pon-Farr

Posted on December 16, 2009 by admiralneck

London is currently being coated in a veneer of snow, which means the usual travel screw-ups and delays, but fingers crossed they won’t affect tonight’s viewing experience. Myself and Daisyhellcakes should — weather, fatigue, and Acts of God notwithstanding — be seeing Avatar tonight. There’s always a chance something will go wrong, but if not, I’m hoping for an unforgettable experience. I’ve engaged in numerous Twitter conversations with people over the past few weeks, many of whom are terribly sceptical of James Cameron. Much of it seems to be aimed at his previous movies, with others just pushed past the limit of tolerance by all of the hype. I can see that, although as I’ve said before, susceptibility to hype is not a problem with the movie and wherever possible they should be viewed with as much resistance to the effect of the publicity onslaught as possible.

That said, it’s become clear that the overwhelming opinion people have of Cameron is that he is a shitty filmmaker and pretty much always has been, so there is no way Avatar can be any good. I can understand the anger people feel towards Cameron, as I will explain below, but I remember a time when Cameron’s movies were lauded and adored, with critical and popular acclaim for his first two movies, followed by a break for The Abyss, and then back again for Terminator 2. How soon we all forget how exciting and advanced those movies felt, how brilliantly Cameron edited and filmed the action scenes. After that he did True Lies — half of a good movie and half of an almost unwatchable one — and then Titanic, which was three halves of a good movie and seven halves of a bad one. I personally don’t think these two films were bad enough to invalidate his earlier, excellent work, but then Cameron made the terrible mistake of becoming very successful and very pleased with himself for becoming successful. As I say, I like the guy, but even I thought, “Shut up, you arrogant moron” when he started strutting around like King Shit.

It went beyond braggadocio. He does come across as an obnoxiously confident man and quite a bully, but then he did make a movie that grossed $1.9bn worldwide after a year of armchair critics laughing at his folly and predicting the fall of two studios. I’d be pretty obnoxious if I’d done that too. He is also willing to spend time and money developing new technologies, including new underwater 3D cameras, just to make the movies he wants to make. He’s a perfectionist who will not stop until he has done everything in his power to entertain audiences, even if that means pissing off his critics or yelling at anyone who gets in his way. It might be galling to hear him refer to himself as “King of the World” in an Oscar speech, or hear reports about appalling behaviour on set, but he delivers. I have to respect that, even though I’d hate to work for him.

As for his movies, Avatar has already been damned for presenting a simplistic moral quandary at the heart of his film (should we destroy native cultures in order to steal the resources on their land? Erm, yes? I mean no! No!), and for Cameron’s terrible dialogue. It’s impossible to argue against these. He cannot write a joke to save his life, but then many writer-directors are incapable of doing that (Guillermo Del Toro has yet to get the tone of his adventure movies 100% right, and no one seems to mind that). The messages in his movies are hammered home with little subtlety, but as Simon Pegg tweeted after he saw (and loved) Avatar, these are action movies. There is no time for vacillating with these messages. If you need to have characters break free of their normal behaviours and risk life and limb, you have to put them in situations where they are pushed as far as they can be. Life or death is a pretty good motivator for action heroes, and reflection ruins the one thing action movies have to do: move like a runaway train.

And hell, Cameron puts his action heroes through the bloody ringer. In the past he has created numerous beautifully edited and designed action scenes, like the truck/bike chase in T2, or the submersible chase in The Abyss, or the Harrier sequence at the end of True Lies, or the last forty minutes of Aliens (possibly the most thrillingly sustained suspense finale to any movie ever). At his best, Cameron can conjure up stunningly well executed action scenes. If the least he does in Avatar is come up with some great setpieces, I’ll be more than happy.

Therein lies the rub. The point of this post is to set some background to my own views on Cameron. I’m a fan, though fully aware that he has flaws. He writes bad dialogue, but then he’s a filmmaker and effects pioneer who is not making radio plays, so a few dodgy lines are tolerable. He’s an action filmmaker who seems to love military hardware but makes movies with clunky messages about environmentalism and nuclear disarmament. Okay, but I think his love of hardware is more to do with being a big kid who likes machines, rather than a gung-ho attitude to the military (many of his movies have had an ambivalent relationship with warmongering types, and T2 is a rare action movie that addresses the problem of dispatching human obstacles while also preserving life). He’s also very talented, very driven, and willing to go the extra thousand miles to get his vision onscreen.

So Avatar is right up my street already. Consider this a baseline, and now you can judge my opinion against that. Nevertheless, one review has rattled me. Keith Phipps doesn’t seem to be as big a fan of Cameron’s as I am, but even so his criticisms are more nuanced than the popular “Cameron writes bad dialogue” kind. My enthusiasm remains, but this one review has really made me question whether Avatar will indeed thrill me. If you’re approaching his movies from a position of respect and still don’t like this, there could well be a problem. If there is, I won’t apologise for him. Even filmmakers I adore will get both barrels if they make bad movies, even when it pains me (Superman Returns has left scars that have yet to heal over). We shall see whether Cameron will satisfy or disappoint in a few hours.

It’s Burke’s Law!

Posted on November 9, 2009 by admiralneck

Last Friday, while attempting to write yet another lengthy post about the London Film Festival, I was repeatedly distracted by Twitter. This is nothing new. However, one of the people I follow whose name escapes me now (sorry) linked to an article posted on the film discussion site The Auteurs. I’d heard of it before but stayed away as I thought it had something to do with the dreary Luke Haines band, but in fact it’s a nice way to completely waste hours of your time, rating and “favouriting” movies to create a Profile for yourself, complete with representative movie still selection so you can have an iconic image next to your name (I went with Gene Hackman in The Conversation). It was pleasantly pointless, though I did take enormous pleasure in giving Slumdog Millionaire and Happy-Go-Lucky one star each, and Kung Fu Panda the five stars it so richly deserves. Take that, Sight and Sound subscribers.

The article that directed me to this site via Twitter was this lovely little prose poem half-heartedly giving Michael Bay some credit while referring to “fascism” and suchlike. This is possibly the only even vaguely positive critique of Bay’s work I’ve seen on the Internet that hasn’t been written by a teenager with an apostrophe allergy, and as such deserves to be preserved in amber. It might never happen again. As I said earlier this year, my opinion of Bay is torn between fascination and revulsion, the latter becoming more pronounced after the casual (but no less odious) racial insensitivity of Transformers — with the breakdancing jive-talking African-American parody known as Jazz getting killed in the final act, as is sadly the norm in movies — “transformed” into the full-on indefensible racial stereotyping of Skids and Mudflap. Shades of Caruso reader and former Transformers fan Lindywasp (one of her noms de Net) once sent me a very passionate disavowal of the sequel after an upsetting experience at a screening where the audience went from excited to silence once the extent of the caricature settled in. I was concerned by Bay’s decision before, but after reading her heartfelt condemnation, I became furious.

Though I’ll not be able to think of Bay without thinking about that incredible cloth-eared arrogance, I have still long been fascinated — as Daisyhellcakes can attest, having listened to me go on about it at length — by his public persona as the Fratboy DeMille, a man who stomps around like an over-excited teenager while making canny backroom deals for profit points, keeping the cost of his (sill expensive) movies down with obnoxious product placement, and buying effects houses such as Digital Domain. This bravado is ripe for parody, most brilliantly by the faux-Twitterer Fake Michael Bay (sample tweet: “Dammit, if I had a dollar for every time I dropped my iphone out of a helicopter doing a barrel roll…”), though I suspect he’s in on the joke.

Even more fascinating to me than Bay the Man/Douchebag is that signature style of his. Like haphazardly edited two-hour-long trailers, his films are plot-light endurance tests; a relentless swarm of images that he hurls at the audience, seemingly not caring why image B must follow image A. As long as the barrage of glowing, flashing, swirling pictures and the cacophony of multi-tracked sound effects keeps audiences pinned to their seats, Bay seems to think “Job done!” and then returns to his swanky Bay-Cave to drink Crystal and watch Total Wipeout. Is this good filmmaking? Hell no, and as I’ve attempted to explain before, I would never be able to argue that it was (though Danny Boyle’s similar everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach wins critical approval and Oscars). However, he does create an experience that no one else has the studio backing, the technical know-how, and the obnoxious confidence to be able to pull off.

Examples: Transformers ends with a city being pulverised, complete with epic firefights on a main street that totals buildings and blows up cars. The destruction-gasm setpiece in Pearl Harbor — a wretched film of enormous ethical dubiousness — contains the single most expensive shot caught on film, which is ghoulish, wasteful, and logistically impressive all at the same time. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is capped off with a huge scene where an Egyptian village gets mashed into the ground, pretty much (I’m sure it was not a real village, but if it’s fake he still managed to get it built before blowing bits of it up). He shows aircraft carriers getting split in half as if it ain’t no thing. These are stereotypically big and dumb crowd-pleasing moments that I’m sure Eric Rohmer’s fanbase would consider utterly vulgar, but they look impressive in slices. It’s not in Bay’s interest to coral these images into a coherent narrative other than “Man go from point A to point B while the world explodes.” It’s enough for him to hint that there is a goal that his heroes are trying to achieve, and as long as it seems there is some kind of forward momentum while he stages bravura visual orgasms containing complicated visual and physical effects, that’s enough for him.

Again, I’m aware that this is not technically artistically valid on a large-scale level, but on a micro-level, I cannot look away. Every dumb populist miscalculation like his nasty treatment of women, or his blindness to the wrongness of using racial stereotypes for stupid lowest-common denominator jokes, or his infantile reliance on slapstick and screaming instead of nuance and character growth, or any number of other admittedly dreadful habits, run parallel to his facility with composition. There are so many shots he has created that make my eyes wobble with pleasure that I cannot forget them. His reliance on patriotic button-pushing aside, he can create stirring moments just through imagery in a way that would probably make propagandists salivate. That ability to capture an emotion through manipulative visuals, aided by the pounding music of Hans Zimmer or Steve Jablonsky, is unparalleled. He truly is Leni Riefenstahl with a baseball cap and a collection of sports-cars in his Beverly Hills mansion.

And yet, despite this facility with imagery — perhaps the one thing I think even his detractors should accept, even if really really really grudgingly — he is treated like the Boogeyman. Numerous people accuse Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen of being the worst film of the year. Granted, it’s not very good, but I’ve seen far far far worse movies released this year. Just a cursory flick through the Auteurs site sees a number of forum threads based around hating him, including Why is Michael Bay on Criterion?, Is Michael Bay the worst director of all time?, and Reasons to *HATE* Michael Bay. The thread NAME THE FILM MAKERS YOU THINK SHOULD RETIRED OR SHOULD NOT BELONG TO THIS INDUSTRY AT ALL is filled with calls for Bay’s immediate withdrawal from the film industry. I get the feeling that this is a running joke, though it is borne of genuine frustration at his movies and his success.

They’re not the only ones who dislike him, of course. Mainstream critics are revolted by his movies, and even on a site oft-visited by the people you would think comprise his most ardent fanbase (Ain’t It Cool News), Bay is treated like a pariah. “Damn You Michael Bay” is a long-running Internet joke that has become a mantra. Bay hatred appears to be reflexive, the last word in an argument. Why accuse any other filmmakers of crimes against decency? Isn’t it obvious that Bay is the worst of the worst, representing everything that is debased and evil about modern cinema? He’s an unpleasant man with poor taste who appeals to the slack-jawed yokels and the hoodies and the youths with their popcorn and their knives and their mobile phones and suchlike and so on and so on etc. ad infinitum.

He’s the Hitler of films. Mike Godwin postulated that the overuse of mentioning Hitler in online arguments was sadly inevitable (“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”) Well, I reckon that there is another law we can accept as fact by now. “As an online discussion about film or culture grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Michael Bay approaches 1.” I don’t think this law should be associated with my real life name, which doesn’t have the Ooomph that “Godwin” has (that’s the kind of name that belongs in front of the word “law”). Therefore I propose we refer to this as Burke’s Law, named after the TV series from the 60s that was revived in the 90s. Why Burke’s Law? Because I always hear that phrase said in the same way as in the 90s title sequence, i.e. with this voice…

…and there is nothing more awesome than that. Sex up that show title, Sexy-Voiced Lady. (Here’s the first part of a full episode, just to show it in amazing context.)

So yeah, whenever a discussion about sucky film directors inevitably begins to focus almost exclusively on the vapidity of Bay’s destructo-porn epics, feel free to mention Burke’s Law. If Bay is what people think represents the true nadir of modern filmmaking, that’s up to them, but if they’re not willing to expand their search to other far less talented individuals out there, then I just can’t take them seriously. I see Dr. Uwe Boll get mentioned a lot, and he’s certainly a candidate. He’s made a shit-ton of laughably awful movies in the past — many more than Bay — and he has now tried to make himself seem classier by making a film about Darfur. However, he’s filming real rape victims re-enacting their own rape for his camera. Making fun of his shitty output suddenly doesn’t seem so funny.

If we’re going to talk about directors who create deafening, poorly storyboarded and edited action scenes that substitute crashing, clashing cacophony for flow and plot momentum, how about Stephen Sommers? He combines Bay’s inability to understand the clear, unambiguous narrative progression of a movie or an action scene with a flat eye for visuals, as evidenced by the busy but tedious G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra? Or Rob Cohen, a man who has yet to make even a half-way decent action movie? Though I’ve not seen his most recent movie — Fast and Furious — I did endure Stealth (where some of the best visual effects ever committed to film were wasted on a farrago of galactic proportions) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which actually managed to be the worst film in the Mummy franchise. It takes a special kind of witless hack to out-Stephen-Sommers Stephen Sommers. I’d rather watch a Bay action scene than something by either of these guys any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I’d also like to make the case for Robert Luketic, who keeps pumping out the most artless dreck, seemingly with no understanding of what cinema can do. His last three films were lifeless committee-borne crowd-pleasers that couldn’t even be bothered to do anything pleasurable, rendered even more unbearable by being presented in a lifeless cavalcade of wretchedly awful compositions. As a bonus they also featured either reductive, retrograde gender-politics (Monster-In-Law and The Ugly Truth) or ethnic white-washing (the utterly worthless 21). Or what about Jon Avnet, aka the modern day Ed Wood? His last two movies — Righteous Kill and the incredible 88 Minutes — were among the most catastrophically misjudged movies I have ever seen, made by someone without a single artistic bone in his body. It’s so bad that I suspect he doesn’t even understand the scripts he adapts. No matter how hard he tries, he will never be able to come up with a single memorable or inspiring image in his entire career. Not counting this one with Leelee Sobieski taking aim, that is.

If you’ve thought long and hard about it and have come to the conclusion that Bay is less talented than these directors, or that he represents something far greater than just bad filmmaking (i.e. he’s a mascot for the debasement of the culture at large), or that his Platinum Dunes production company is committing a terrible crime by making bland remakes of great horror movies, or that the compositions I love are just ugly but shiny commercialised parodies of actual art, or that he’s the worst kind of patriotism-spouting pro-military arrested adolescent, or even that he’s just an obnoxious douchebag (James Cameron without the brains or the talent), that’s perfectly understandable. I’m cool with that, if you show me your calculations. But don’t just say, “Michael Bay is the worst director ever” because that’s the accepted wisdom. That’s not film criticism. That’s letting someone else do your thinking for you.

What Now For Horror?

Posted on November 4, 2009 by admiralneck

For the first time in a long while, Halloween was a real event at Shades of Caruso HQ. Sure, we’ve had pumpkins and decorations before, which were fun, and absolutely no Trick-or-Treaters, which was even better, but this year I was hit with the sense that the day was imbued with some kind of unholy significance, far more so than usual. A pumpkin was carved…

…and horror movies were watched. Twitter greatly helped. Scary videos, photos of costumes, and blog articles celebrating Samhain were linked to, creating a real sense of event. Twitter does a few things really well, and being a sort of mini-aggregator of topical observations and relevant information is top of that list. It really tied the night together.

The one thing that let the whole experience down were the movies we decided to watch, which were either thoroughly awful or distractingly inconsistent. The best of them was the insane mega-hit Paranormal Activity, which has become the most profitable movie of all time after grossing $85m on a $15000 budget. It’s a terribly flawed movie, filled with banal dialogue and repetitive arguments, not to mention tortuous plot contrivances that keep the conceit floating. Some of the best moments are punctured by the behaviour of Micah, whose defiantly obnoxious confidence — a plot requisite, sadly — doesn’t sit well with the really quite terrifying events surrounding him. Special mention here to the amusement he greets an EVP recording of his girlfriend’s demon. As someone who has long been utterly terrified of the sound of unearthly events captured on tape (this book fucked me up as a kid), the moment should have been chilling, but having this doofy jerkbag giggling and goading the demon on ruined the moment.

And yet, and yet… Let’s just say that there are several moments in the film that gave me the fear, and one in particular nearly made me give up on the film entirely, it was so scary. Writer-director Oren Peli has hit on a magic formula that is effective and durable enough to survive the distracting necessities of the plot mechanics that hobble the movie, with help from committed performers Katie Featherston (this year’s Scream Queen for sure) and Micah Sloat. Who cares about the contrivance, or the unpleasant behaviour of Micah, or the late-movie YouTube exorcism silliness that complicates the hair-thin plot? None of that matters. When Micah’s camera switches on at night, and the creaking starts, you forget every annoying thing that you had to go through to get there, and you instantly put yourself in their position. You’re going to be asleep later, and you’re going to be unaware of what’s going on. The scares in the movie — manifested with absolute mastery of the craft — are one thing. What makes the movie so terrifying is knowing that you are going to bed later. It’s impossible not to imagine yourself in the same situation, and that’s the scariest thing of all.

Luckily for my sanity, the resolution of the film is more mundane than the build-up, which blunted the effect of the film. For most of the running time we can’t understand the motives of the demon haunting Katie. Terrorising her from childhood is one thing, and the thought that Katie will never be able to escape her psychic torture is more upsetting than the actual resolution, but as this is a movie with a finite running time, we have to have a resolution. I’m not sure what Peli could have done to fix this problem, and the fact that the movie has three different endings suggests he wasn’t sure either. A disappointment, then, but a disappointment that touches greatness at times, and lingers in the mind far longer than you would like.

Though Paranormal Activity invites comparison with 1999′s The Blair Witch Project, it’s still very much of its time. When considered alongside Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s magnificent [Rec], this kind of faux-subjective horror — with the line between onscreen participant and viewer blurred — has become one of the most significant innovations in horror cinema of the past twenty years, and has surprisingly been used rarely enough to still feel fresh. Certainly, though the genre seemed to be in a rut during that period, Blair Witch and [Rec] are two of the most effective horror movies around, arguably more so than almost all others, and have revitalised the traditional horror sub-genres (ghost story, zombie movie, monster attack).

That’s not to say the genre has been completely moribund. The other horror movies that have stood out – certainly in my view — are partially most effective for playing off real-world fears that have been ignored by numerous tedious slasher films, remakes of Japanese techno-ghost stories or “torture” movies. In a world where increasing automation and computerised interaction has made us less likely to wander out of our comfort zones, the best horror movies of recent times have worked on our fear of other people, where stressful situations make us turn on each other. While a lot of horror concerns the Fear of the Other, as the groups we ally ourselves with shrink in size we find The Other is not that alien any more. The Descent, The Ruins and The Mist all feature characters trapped in horrific environments, surrounded by unthinkable horror, but ultimately these movies are upsetting because of the way the protagonists react to these threats. In all three the most dangerous thing you can encounter is the person standing next to you, who is probably someone you have known all your life.

The thought that it is not the Other that could provide the horror, but maybe even you yourself if pushed the wrong way — by betrayal in the case of The Descent, politics and religious intolerance in The Mist, and allegorical Idiocracy-style selfishness and ignorance in The Ruins — is where the real horror lies. My other favourite horror movie of the past few years — James Watkins’ gut-wrenching Eden Lake — is as topical as The Ruins or The Mist, with two well-to-do UK city-folk undone by their inability to respect their countrified brethren. Their fate is sealed when they antagonise some children — The Other — but protagonist Jenny’s ultimate doom is provided by people who should be on her side. Hell really is other people. As we increasingly use the Internet to interact, and often realise that being physically present with other people is a mixed blessing, it’s tempting to think that the current popularity of the zombie genre is down to the cathartic pleasure of seeing hordes of “people” mown down. It’s the most misanthropic of horror sub-genres, and increasingly the one where the appeal of it seems to be watching the violence we can perpetrate upon surrogate humans without worrying about morality getting in the way as much as it is the thrill of being menaced by something unpleasant.

During our weekend of horror we also watched some endearing throwbacks to previous horror eras, though sadly they left us even more cold. Ti West’s House of The Devil has been attracting attention and rave reviews for its intentionally retrograde approach. Set in the 80s, West fills his movie with period detail: feathered haircuts, synth soundtrack, clunky Walkman etc. He also spends much time setting up an atmosphere instead of throwing a bunch of youngsters into a rusty basement to have their teeth pulled out. About 75% of the movie shows college student Samantha (played by Saffron Burrows lookalike Jocelyn Donahue) walking around a creepily deserted campus and an even creepier isolated house, as she babysits an old woman for Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. We’re talking about half an hour of walking around a campus, and then half an hour of walking around a house, with as little plot as a short movie expanded to feature length.

Though I certainly didn’t take against West’s movie, and though it had several pleasurable things to recommend it (casting Noonan and Woronov certainly makes up for a lot of the movie’s flaws), I suspect a lot of the praise heaped on House of the Devil is for what it isn’t, rather than for what it is. It’s not torture porn. It’s not a shitty remake of a slasher classic. It’s not edited into an incomprehensible, staccato mess. It generates atmosphere instead of relying too much on turning the volume up to jolt the viewer. It’s paying its respects to the horror movies adored by a certain sub-set of movie critics. It has charm and is made with reverent love, and never once feels like a cheap cash-in. For those reasons, it is to be applauded.

For the most part there is little dialogue and a couple of shock jump moments (in their defence, they’re earned), but also lots and lots of longueurs. West goes the extra mile in setting up an atmosphere of eerie stillness before things kick off in the final act, but as with a lot of average horror movies from the past, that involves having very little happen very slowly. The 95 minute running time feels a lot longer, and by the time the scares arrive, there’s a good chance you’ll be bored. Is this a result of eroded attention spans? Or has West balanced the film wrong? It doesn’t help that the finale is overplayed to the point of not being that scary after all, shooting past “effectively scary” to settle at the total opposite end of the horror spectrum.

As for West’s influences, sometimes they seem to have inspired him too literally. Like the runty child of Rosemary’s Baby and The Dunwich Horror (with a pinch of The Medusa Touch), it serves up something we’ve seen a million times before which, after the long wait to get there, is just not enough. I’d even argue that it’s got its eras mixed up. While the film goes out of its way to add 80s period details, the pace and subject matter of the movie feel more suited to the 70s, like something Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff would have made before The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came along and changed the rules of the genre. 80s horror movies were pacier and often sillier than this, and if you’re going to pay homage to that era, you need to have more going on.

As in Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, which was a proper 80s horror homage right down to its bones. Ostensibly an anthology of tales linked by a couple of common threads, Dougherty pays tribute to numerous horror classics while playfully subverting expectations. Hoary horror conventions that are given a sprucing up include the sexuality of the vampire, the vulnerability of young virgins, townsfolk trying to kill a group of undesirables who then come back from the grave, the pillar of the community who has a terrible secret, the Bad Seed, and the unstoppable killing machine seemingly intent on enforcing some bizarre rules. By the end of the film, the nods to other films were keeping me more entertained than the narrative tricks or the lacklustre scares: The Howling, The Thing, Fright Night, Pumpkinhead, The Evil Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street 1 and 2, Creepshow, Pet Sematery, The Company of Wolves, Halloween (obviously)… There’s almost too many to count. While House of the Devil serves up the familiar and hopes it will still scare us, here Dougherty simply tries to pay respectful homage.

This approach has its pros and cons. On the plus side Dougherty captures the look of 80s cinema with images full of rich golds, reds and oranges, not to mention leaf-strewn suburban streets, Bacchanalian fire-lit orgies of violence, and use of the frame that calls to mind vintage Carpenter and Dante. It’s a gorgeous movie, despite its low-budget, but as with House of the Devil it’s low on scares. The balance of the movie falls too heavily on the lighter side, which wouldn’t really be a problem at any other time of the year, but after seeing something as soil-yourself-scary as Paranormal Activity it couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a letdown. While the intertwined stories and narrative surprises are cleverly unravelled by the end, all four tales (and the two linking arcs) feel underdeveloped, even taking into account the bigger picture. It’s Love Actually Syndrome. Four two-act tales linked together do not replace one tale with three acts. As much fun as Trick ‘R Treat is (and it is a lot of fun), it can leave the viewer unsatisfied. Consider it recommended, however, especially if you grew up loving any of the movies listed above.

All three movies feel like throwbacks in one way or another (if you’re ungenerous and take Paranormal Activity to be a straight rip of Blair Witch), but the fourth movie we watched over the Halloween weekend was very much a modern mainstream horror movie. Jaume Collet-Serra’s demented Orphan was probably more thriller than horror movie, but with the various Catholic orphanages, wintery settings, bloody carnage and concerned nuns — not to mention that it is a Dark Castle Entertainment picture — it felt very much of a piece with everything else we had seen. Except terrible. Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard (resembling a pudgy, effeminate Keifer Sutherland with a bad case of narcolepsy) adopt a Russian child after Farmiga’s third pregnancy ends in disaster. Haunted by this, a previous alcohol dependence, and an accident that left her second child deaf, Farmiga puts all her hopes of recovering from her past on the new child, who sadly turns out to be a murderous psychopath who tears the family apart with psychological games, a can of lighter fluid, and a big hammer.

The movie starts unpleasant and stupid, and gets more unpleasant and stupid than you can possibly imagine. During its initial theatrical release, an internet meme appeared that claimed the murderous child (Esther, played with astonishing eerie skill by 12-year old Isabelle Fuhrman) was actually a Lithuanian hooker born with dwarfism. This rendered the movie impossible to take seriously, though the actual reveal at the end is just as silly and possibly even tackier, especially when taken with some absurd third-act loose-end-tying of breathtaking clunkiness (I’m thinking of the frozen pond, here).

It certainly seems odd… nay, depressing that something this catastrophic and tasteless can be made with a cast of talented actors such as Farmiga, Sarsgaard (in a career-worst performance filled with drowsy histrionics), Margo Martindale and poor CCH Pounder. What’s worse is that a far superior movie with a similar plot was released in 2007 to massive indifference. George Ratliff’s Joshua starred Hott Sam Rockwell and Farmiga as — again — parents dealing with the psychological manipulations of a devious child, and again hamstrung by their inability to deal with this threat due to the perceived vulnerability of their nemesis (echoes of Watkins’ Eden Lake there). Ratliff created an atmospheric and disturbing tale with almost no tricksiness, relying instead on talented actors portraying people at the end of their tether. Collet-Serra — who, let us not forget, is part of the Pointless Remake Brigade thanks to his astonishingly tedious Paris Hilton vehicle House of Wax — has no interest in creating something as challenging as this, despite his excellent cast, relying instead on cheap shock tricks, over-direction, gothic lighting and unsubtle musical cues. Luckily, it’s hilariously wrong, and littered with bizarre tonal and directorial mistakes. It’s not quite a failure along the lines of, say, Shyamalan’s The Happening, but it’s damn close.

When critics praise House of the Devil for being a breath of fresh air, it is garish, tawdry nonsense like Orphan that they’re comparing it to. After seeing it the other movies of the weekend seemed much better by comparison. It was particularly amusing to note that the frenetically edited Orphan generated not even a fraction of the tension created by Paranormal Activity which contains hardly any cuts at all, in defiance of Hitchcock’s theories on editing. Sadly none of these Halloween movies thrilled me as much as the movies I linked to a horror renaissance in this post (scroll down). Pastiche can be fun, but unless it has something else there, it can be little more than an empty exercise in playing off nostalgic feelings, and suggests a lack of imagination in the filmmaker. A working knowledge of the various developmental stages of a genre, allied with a vivid imagination, can give us something as respectfully constructed as Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage – which is a classic ghost story in the mold of The Haunting and The Innocents that pays homage to its forebears and then becomes its own thing — or something that bursts conventions like Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In. This year, pastiche had its pleasures, but didn’t take the next step. The closest we got was seeing Sam Raimi return to what he does best with Drag Me To Hell. It was pure joy, yet another wonderful amalgam of disturbing comedy and silly horror from the man who gave us Evil Dead II. Of course, when you’re making a pastiche of a sub-sub-genre of horror that you yourself invented, it’s going to be hard to fuck it up.

So is there cause for concern? I’d argue no. This year the only completely satisfying straight horror movie I’ve experienced is Lars Von Trier’s harrowing Antichrist, which is one of the most astonishing sensory assaults in recent memory. Doused in unpleasant atmosphere and featuring imagery that will probably haunt me for years to come, even if Von Trier’s intent was not to make a great horror movie — he’s more interested in parsing his recent depression, and exploring recurrent themes like violent misogyny and humanity’s destructive urges — he managed to create something that disturbs more than anything else released this year. That’s not just because of the now-notorious genital mutilation scene. That one moment — which is utterly horrifying but not exploitative — would not be anywhere near as effective if it were not for Von Trier’s command of mood up to that point.

While it certainly doesn’t look or feel like anything in the mainstream of the genre, there’s the hope that other filmmakers will see what Von Trier has done with the conventions of the genre, mixing fairy tale imagery, nightmarish atmospherics a la David Lynch, sustained suspense, extreme body horror, and an oppressive, Hideo-Nakata-esque dread to create something new, something chilling and unforgettable. Maybe Von Trier, who operates outside the sometimes claustrophobic and relentlessly self-referential confines of the world of horror cinema, will accidentally influence other horror filmmakers and bring about another evolution in the genre. It’s that or someone very very smart comes up with a new approach, just like Carpenter once did with Halloween. One can only hope.

Note: This blogpost was not written in an attempt to exorcise the memory of Paranormal Activity from my branes so I can get a decent night’s sleep. Anyone suggesting this is the case is dead wrong. ::whimpers::

Emulate The Blessed DJ

Posted on October 27, 2009 by admiralneck

For the first time in a couple of years, it seems we’ve taken a break from music gaming. With much of our spare time used up on TV shows that are failing to live up to their potential, attending the London Film Festival and having to brave the mosh-pit-simulator that is Leicester Square, or tweeting until 2 in the morning, we’ve not spent much time on Rock Band. Even The Beatles: Rock Band — a game I’ve been going on about for a while — only got a few hours of play, partially because we’ve not had a chance to use the extra mics we bought, and partially because while it’s been fun learning more about the band, it’s been less fun playing Paul’s songs.

He seems to be a kickass bass player, but his songs are the worst kind of mawkish tripe. I mean, Hello Goodbye has nineteen actual words in it (not counting the three nonsense words at the end), repeated over and over again in combinations of varying meaning but persistent insignificance. This Spitting Image sketch once struck me as cruel, but no longer:

Luckily, with other songs, The Beatles: Rock Band has done exactly what I had hoped: given me a better understanding of the appeal of the Fab Four. The unbearable repetition of their songs on the radio during my childhood was enough to create a mental block between me and the band, but that Rock Band magic has worked again, with the interaction between the player and the song breaking down that mental barrier so that I can finally get “into” the songs to experience their beautiful structure. McCartney’s bass lines are surprisingly complex, Ringo’s drumming occasionally much stronger than myth would have have it, and the songs by Lennon and Harrison are all inspiring and complex. Simultaneously playing guitar and singing on Here Comes the Sun is guaranteed to cheer me up.

And yet we’ve let it gather dust for now, and even Rock Band itself has been played infrequently. This, despite the recent DLC addition of ten Queen songs, including Under Pressure and Somebody To Love (my two favourite Queen tracks), a Raconteurs track-pack, and The Metal by Tenacious D (previously on Guitar Hero 3 but now given full Rock Band attention). This busy-ness — plus lack of funds — means I’ve paid little attention to the forthcoming release of Activision’s DJ Hero, which is expensive, potentially time-consuming, and based on dance music. As I have little interest in dance music or culture, this indifference was inevitable, but the real killing blow was the baffling gameplay videos (here’s one)…

…and the perplexing turntable peripheral. The actual experience of using the peripheral and seeing your actions keep the song going are not adequately conveyed by the information given out thus far. The Rock Band and Guitar Hero controllers are pretty self-explanatory. Strum, hit and bellow, and the lights on the screen do the happy thing yay. In contrast, how does that turntable controller enable you to do the things on the screen? It made no sense to me. Until today.

An impulsive trip to my local branch of Game paid off nicely this morning. The turntable controller had been set-up with a demo of DJ Hero, and no one else in the shop seemed even slightly interested. Maybe it was that alienating peripheral, with its peculiar buttons and knobs. Whereas my first try at Guitar Hero 2 had been intuitive, here I had to go through a series of tutorials hosted by Grandmaster Flash which quickly explained the basics of the game with enormous enthusiasm. Following that were three easy game tracks: Marvin Gaye – “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” vs. Gorillaz – “Feel Good Inc.”, Gwen Stefani – “Hollaback Girl” vs. Rick James – “Give It To Me”, and Black Eyed Peas – “Boom Boom Pow” vs. Benny Benassi – “Satisfaction”. Either the songs got easier as I went along, or the learning curve has been worked out well, as I went from three stars on track one to four on track two and five on the last one. In Easy mode there is no cross-fading or complicated scratching. You just push the buttons when necessary and half-ass the scratching. Simple.

Well, simple-ish. The scratching is not as easy as I’d hoped. For a start you’re supposed to let go of the button as soon as the scratching symbols have passed through the active area on screen, but if you’re holding the button and using that for leverage you can’t let go without the turntable getting away from you: disastrous if another scratch symbol is coming up. The other problem is caused by physics. Scratching while holding down the green button is easy enough as it is at the edge of the circular turntable, but the blue button is nearer the center, so it’s harder to push and pull the circle around, thanks to Pi or some other geometry thing. My struggles with Blue Scratching rocked the display around enough to attract the unhappy-seeming attentions of the shop owner. This was not good: he is so grizzled and rugged that I suspect he is actually the Authentic Battle Damage version of some other guy.

Even more annoying, the cross-fader switch has three positions, but the default position in the middle is very tough to hit. There is a slight click when you get it into position, but when swiping back and forth quickly, it’s easy to go too far without feeling that tactile reminder. I suspect this is something that will become second nature in time, but on advanced levels, with rapid cross-fader spikes zipping around, there will be many points lost, and much frustration added. A stronger bit of feedback from the controller would have really helped. I would also have liked to know what the purpose of the middle “effects” button is. As far as I could tell it was there to send out the odd “ZORB!” sound when pushed. The effects dial allows you to change the effect, so for a while there I was sending out a series of ear-scritching “PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW” sounds that made the entire shop’s energy turn against me. It was much more fun during the third song, where pressing the middle button makes an androidal lady intone “Sat-is. Fack. Shun” over and over again. No one seemed to mind that as much.

Other than choosing lasers over booms, the basic tutorial didn’t give a hint as to what the effects dial does, but apparently you use this in the same way you use the Whammy Bar on a Rock Band/Guitar Hero controller, to “customise” the sound on screen. As with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, all this pointless distortion does is ruin the song, and from what I can tell from other tutorials posted on YouTube, it doesn’t even serve a purpose with charging up the “Euphoria” bar. Maybe it does and we’re not privvy to that info just yet, but the Whammy Bar at least allows you to gain more Star Power / Overdrive points if you rattle it around as hard as you can, further ruining the song you’re playing.

As for Euphoria, it doubles multipliers just like with the rock games, but it doesn’t generate the sense of satisfaction you get in the rock games. Star Power or Overdrive are triggered by the Guitar Neck Tilt Move, the Drum Fill Move, or the Eccentric Microphone Scat Singing Move, which effectively — and entertainingly — mimic the show-off actions of a typical rock douche. Triggering this score multiplying mode by just pushing a button lacks that translation of action and effect that makes Rock Band and Guitar Hero feel even more like a replication of the live music experience. That said, how could DJ Hero trigger Euphoria otherwise? Have you wave a Wii-mote style Glowstick peripheral over your head? Require you to chew on an E peripheral? There’s no easy way around it, I guess.

Though the display had a guitar controller hooked up to it for the DJ Hero/Guitar Hero mash-up game mode, there was no one around to play it with. The shop owner was too busy giving me stinkeye, and the four kids who congregated behind me to watch as I demolished Benny Benassi’s infectious monstrosity looked too scared of the flashing lights and raving avatars to join in. (It was definitely the game that scared them. Not me. Honest.) I guess that co-op mode would be a lot of fun, and would probably be the thing that tips me over into buying the game, but I note that the only other party gameplay modes are just using multiple turntables to battle against each other. That made sense back in the days when the only peripherals around were guitars, so you could have boring face-offs in Guitar Hero 3 (no amount of complicated Snapped String weaponry could make that mode any less of a failure), but here it shows up the biggest problem with DJ Hero: it might be a great solo player game, and it might be an even more entertaining turntable/guitar co-op game, but it will never be able to replicate that amazing four-player co-op that makes Rock Band the best party game in the world.

It has been proven again and again that if you get a large enough group of people into a room and start playing Rock Band at midday, you will still be going at midnight with only the occasional break to eat Pringles. DJ Hero isn’t going to have that, and it isn’t going to have that instant click of cognitive understanding that Guitar Hero and Rock Band has. Once you get going on DJ Hero, it’s enormous fun. The demo I played was way way way too short, and I’m sure I would’ve stayed there all day if I’d had the chance. It even made me tap my foot, which is a big deal for someone as dance-averse as me, no counting that Megadog/Eat Static gig I went to that very very nearly converted me to rave culture because it was so fucking out-of-the-body AWESOME to the extent that even to this day I’m convinced someone slipped me a mickey early in the night and had a right old laugh watching me stomp around the dance-floor like a malfunctioning Cyberman. However, I’m not sure that’s enough. When I win the lottery, I’ll get it. Until then, maybe I should go and practice Fat Bottomed Girls, now that I’ve paid for it an’ all.

Rock Band Wish List #4: I Am PWNed by Activision

Posted on August 5, 2009 by admiralneck

Like Orly Taitz in the grip of another craziness-burp on national TV, I’ve gone on about Rock Band with off-putting regularity over recent months, which makes me feel bad after Canyon was kind enough to buy me Guitar Hero World Tour for Christmas. For the record, I think Neversoft have done a terrific job of taking over the Guitar Hero brand from Harmonix, though their note-placements on some tracks are kinda weird, especially on Guitar Hero III. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it can ruin a song. That said, I think their Medium level is more of a challenge, which is nice for me at my current skill level (bored by Rock Band Medium, taxed almost too much by Rock Band Hard), and there are some innovations on Guitar Hero World Tour that Harmonix should seriously consider adopting. Having a five-second pause after you restart a level is a brilliant move (how many times have I had to pause a Rock Band level and then missed six notes when I pressed Resume?), and I found their noteless Beginners level very useful for getting used to the drums. Also, the Music Studio is a superb addition, and though I’ve not had enough time to really give it a workout, even just a cursory attempt shows how much depth it has. My kudos to all involved. I’m sure they will all appreciate my fragrant and robust kudos.

Still, Rock Band is my ~~religion~~ music game of choice. The interface is cleaner, the flow of the note-placements is far smoother, and the songs available for download are incredible. At least one guest to our house has been converted to the Rock Band cause after seeing the awe-inspiring selection. Guitar Hero‘s selection is deeply disappointing, apart from the odd highlight: Born to Run and My Lucky Day by The Boss, an Eagles of Death Metal pack containing Cherry Cola, lots of Jimi. That’s fine, but some of their selections are utterly overshadowed by Rock Band. Example: You can get Debaser and Monkey Gone To Heaven, but with Rock Band you can get all of Doolittle. Rock Band FTW. Even so, I know I’ll be getting Guitar Hero 5, because the song selection is genuinely surprising, and has given the franchise a shot in the arm. The final list was released last week, and some inspired choices have made me very excited.

3 Doors Down – “Kryptonite”
A Perfect Circle – “Judith”
AFI – “Medicate”
Arctic Monkeys – “Brianstorm”
Attack! Attack! UK – “You And Me”
Band Of Horses – “Cigarettes, Wedding Bands”
Beastie Boys – “Gratitude”
Beck – “Gamma Ray”
Billy Idol – “Dancing With Myself”
Billy Squier – “Lonely Is The Night”
Blink-182 – “The Rock Show”
Blur – “Song 2″
Bob Dylan – “All Along The Watchtower”
Bon Jovi – “You Give Love A Bad Name”
Brand New – “Sowing Season (Yeah)”
The Bronx – “Six Days A Week”
Bush – “Comedown”
Children Of Bodom – “Done With Everything, Die For Nothing”
Coldplay – “In My Place”
Darker My Love – “Blue Day”
Darkest Hour – “Demon(s)”
David Bowie – “Fame”
Deep Purple – “Woman From Tokyo (’99 Remix)”
The Derek Trucks Band – “Younk Funk”
Dire Straits – “Sultans Of Swing”
The Duke Spirit – “Send A Little Love Token”
Duran Duran – “Hungry Like The Wolf”
Eagles Of Death Metal – “Wannabe In L.A.”
Elliott Smith – “L.A.”
Elton John – “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)”
Face To Face – “Disconnected”
Garbage – “Only Happy When It Rains”
Gorillaz – “Feel Good Inc.”
Gov’t Mule – “Streamline Woman”
Grand Funk Railroad – “We’re An American Band”
Iggy Pop – “Lust For Life (Live)”
Iron Maiden – “2 Minutes To Midnight”
Jeff Beck – “Scatterbrain (Live)”
Jimmy Eat World – “Bleed American”
John Mellencamp – “Hurts So Good”
Johnny Cash – “Ring Of Fire”
Kaiser Chiefs – “Never Miss A Beat”
King Crimson – “21st Century Schizoid Man”
Kings Of Leon – “Sex On Fire”
Kiss – “Shout It Out Loud”
Love and Rockets – “Mirror People”
Megadeth – “Sweating Bullets”
Motley Crue – “Looks That Kill”
Muse – “Plug In Baby”
My Morning Jacket – “One Big Holiday”
Nirvana – “Lithium (Live)”
Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
No Doubt – “Ex-Girlfriend”
Peter Frampton – “Do You Feel Like We Do? (Live)”
The Police – “So Lonely”
Public Enemy Featuring Zakk Wylde – “Bring the Noise 20XX”
Queen & David Bowie – “Under Pressure”
Queens Of The Stone Age – “Make It Wit Chu”
Rammstein – “Du Hast”
The Rolling Stones – “Sympathy For The Devil”
Rose Hill Drive – “Sneak Out”
Rush – “The Spirit Of Radio (Live)”
Santana – “No One To Depend On (Live)”
Scars On Broadway – “They Say”
Screaming Trees – “Nearly Lost You”
Smashing Pumpkins – “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
Sonic Youth – “Incinerate”
Spacehog – “In The Meantime”
Stevie Wonder – “Superstition”
Sublime – “What I Got”
Sunny Day Real Estate – “Seven”
T. Rex – “20th Century Boy”
The Killers – “All The Pretty Faces”
The Raconteurs – “Steady As She Goes”
The Sword – “Maiden, Mother & Crone”
Thin Lizzy – “Jailbreak”
Thrice – “Deadbolt”
Tom Petty – “Runnin’ Down A Dream”
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – “American Girl”
TV On The Radio – “Wolf Like Me”
Vampire Weekend – “A-Punk”
Weezer – “Why Bother?”
The White Stripes – “Blue Orchid”
Wild Cherry – “Play That Funky Music”
Wolfmother – “Back Round”

Of course, while that’s a tasty list, Rock Band has already stolen some of the thunder by releasing some of those songs as download content. Over the last year, we have downloaded Nearly Lost You by Screaming Trees, Wolf Like Me by TV On The Radio and Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, and The Rock Show by Blink-182 came out last week (how long until we get all of Dude Ranch or Enema of the State, sans stupid “comedy” tracks?). Many more of these songs will become available soon, I’m sure. Still, hats off to Activision for making Guitar Hero more inclusive than it has been in the past. As I’ve always maintained, these games can do more than rock out. They can bring different genres of popular music into the fold, and Guitar Hero 5 is definitely doing that.

I cannot even begin to express my joy at seeing Stevie Wonder represented in a game so often determined to plough a very boring pure rock format. It makes me wonder if there’s any way to get all of Talking Book into the game or, even better, all of Innervisions (my favourite Stevie album). Indie nerds everywhere must be psyched at the appearances by Band of Horses — with a track from their incredibly moving sophomore album — and Elliott Smith. Actually, someone questioned the inclusion of the latter on the AV Club, worrying that Smith’s family have become lax in holding onto the rights of his songs. To be honest, while that commenter has a point, I’d hope his family gets a chance to profit from his songwriting genius in a way he never really got a chance to. It’s not because I’m eager to “play” one of his songs. Honest.

Other highly anticipated tracks in that list (for me, at least) include Bullet With Butterfly Wings by the Pumpkins¹ and Incinerate by Sonic Youth (the highlight of their last Geffen album Rather Ripped), but the songs that inspired the title of this Wish List post are Plug In Baby by Muse, Blue Orchid by The White Stripes, and A-Punk by Vampire Weekend. Muse are a band with a sound that usually makes me want to remove my skin and stamp on it, I hate it that much. Nevertheless, Plug In Baby is a madness-inspiring rock anthem I am unable to resist, even if I were to use protective enchantments from ancient Cimmeria, and had planned a Wish List entry about it. I’d even found the video out and everything. Here it is. It’s a monster song.

I’m not sure I would have picked those songs by The Stripes and The Weekend – I’d plump for Seven Nation Army and Oxford Comma – but I’m thrilled anyway, especially by Blue Orchid. So far the only Jack White songs available are his Bond theme with Alicia Keys (and it’s great fun to play), some Raconteurs stuff, and three songs from the Dead Weather album Horehound. Treat You Like A Mother is like Bohemian Rhapsody re-written and performed by a sleazy old tramp who has broken into your house and hides under the stairs with his collection of doll hair, and thus is one of the greatest songs of our time. The other two are excessively boring. That’s why we need primo Jack White music in our music games, thank you. Preferably White Stripes stuff. What with The White Stripes being the best band in the world, and all. Just sayin’.

So, where next for the Wish List? As a lazy way to maintain the blog while I work on other stuff (by which I do not mean using Twitter to bitch about bad movies), I intend to keep going, especially because — in these days where laziness and stress battle it out for dominion of my soul — the game that once was just a pastime has now become a passion, so much so that I will almost certainly be buying DJ Hero even though dance music doesn’t excite me as much as a well-gamified bit of Silversun Pickups². More than that, I see further scope for expansion of the songs available for download, branching out into unexpected genres. More on this as the year progresses.

¹ This song was included because eleven out of ten rock fans polled expressed a wish to whine the lyric “Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage” in a voice that sounds just like an angry rat in a cage. A bald angry rat in a cage. A bald angry rat in a cage wearing an ELO t-shirt and being chased around said cage by Courtney Love.

² That said, DJ Shadow worked on the mixes, the song list includes Herbie Hancock’s Rockit (!!!!), and you can play the game as Grandmaster Flash or DJ Jazzy Jeff. If that doesn’t make you want to play the game, well, fair enough. But it should make you want to play the game.

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

Category Archives: Twitter