A Year of Film: Mega-Movie Review

I'm awesome at keeping schedules. Let's get this road on the show.

Ponyo- viewed February 16, 2011.

I've only seen one other Miyazaki film all the way through, and that was "Howl's Moving Castle." I've seen parts of his other movies, and the animation never ceases to astonish. The plot for "Howl," however, was almost nonexistent and meandered for two hours before finally trudging to some end. It was gorgeous, but empty. "Ponyo" was much better. It followed the basic plot of "The Little Mermaid," but stood on its own as a unique movie. However, some things, be they cultural differences or just translation problems, kept the movie from being great for me. We're never given reasons why some things happen. They just happen and are glossed over as either Ponyo's magic or not being a big deal at all. There are a few things that never get any payoff, despite how important they're made out to be (Lisa's talk with Gran Mamare). Dire importance is also given to the fact that Sosuke and Ponyo MUST love each other, but we never find out why. However, from a visual standpoint, this movie is beautiful.

The Social Network- viewed March 1, 2011

"the Social Network," plot-wise, is pretty run of the mill. It has a few surprises, but it seems to be just a movie about something that could be forgotten in a few short years. Most (good) movies say something important that reaches beyond its subject matter, but if, in twenty years, someone remembers "That Facebook movie" as being one of the best films of 2010 I'll be incredibly surprised.
However, what makes this film good is its script. Not in the broad sense. In the "words people say" sense. It completely saves the movie from being about a douchebag nobody cares about and engages the audience with its funny, quick, and smart dialogue. In fact, from Zuckerberg's personal blog to the idea of Facebook, I'd say that this movie is more about writing than it is about the website. At what point does writing lose its power? If the information is there, what does it matter if only a few people read it (like the blog) or if everyone does (like Facebook)? The written word in "The Social Network" goes from an intimate, dangerous, useful thing to a homogenized, filtered, up-to-the-minute ticker that involves no thought and people can choose to skip over if they want to. Much like the rest of this review.

Take Me Home Tonight- viewed March 8, 2011

"Take Me Home Tonight" is the best film of 1987.
Let me explain.
The movie takes place in the late 80s, but also borrows heavily from the John Hughes era of using teenage caricatures to bring light to real human problems.
This movie got slammed by the critics, but if you go in knowing exactly what you're going to get--a goofy-yet-poignant look at post-high school life--you won't be disappointed at all. Director Michael Dowse and the crew borrow Hughes's playbook and hit all the right notes. The movie brings us back to that time where the mundane problems that everyone was going through were also the important ones. They seemed mundane because our whole social sphere had the same problems. Looking back, it's easy to see how those times influenced us, even if they didn't seem so big and scary at the time. The movie has great music, likable actors, and a great bathroom cocaine-and-molestation scene. If you go in expecting a throwback to the 80s and everything to be wrapped up nicely, this movie hits all the right notes.

Slither- viewed March 9, 2011

The well that horror movies were once fetched from has become dried up. That's a fact. When's the last time you saw a movie as great as "The Shining" or "The Exorcist" or "Evil Dead"? Now they all look like the self-parody that the "Child's Play" series has fallen into. Everything is tongue-in-cheek, so it makes it incredibly hard to take things seriously. People don't care about your story if you don't care about it. (Maybe that's why I liked "Take Me Home Tonight" so much, but that review's over).
So that's why I get so excited when I see a horror movie that is worth a damn. "Slither" toes the line between straight-up horror movie and horror movie parody expertly. It does the best job of this since "Evil Dead 2". The scary parts are still scary, the funny parts are hilarious, and both include a creepy deer. While "Scream" was a deconstruction of the slasher film, "Slither" takes all the commonalities in films like "The Thing" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and skewers them in the most loving way possible. They even named the mayor "MacReady." Plus, it's hard not to like Nathan Fillion. I like my humor, and I like my serious stories. Many movies try to mix them unsuccessfully (one of my major problems with the "Pirates of the Carribbean" series. I can't take Davy Jones seriously when he's standing in a bucket of water in a very important scene). "Slither" pulls it off perfectly.

Rango- seen March 19, 2011

Nickelodeon has put out some real shit in the last few years. Like the Disney Channel, (remember when I covered them in that awesome article?) they've gone down the path of recycling their "pretty teenagers who sing" shtick ad nauseum, just in time to graduate your child from that show about teenage idiots to that show about twenty-something idiots on MTV. They're owned by the same company. Check it out.
Anyhoo, "Rango" undoes at least five years of that bullshit. It's a phenomenal movie. The CG is amazing, the music is catchy and fun, the actors are wonderfully cast, and the story, though borrowed, keeps you interested and entertained. In fact, since Pixar only has "Cars 2" coming out this year, I'm perfectly ok with "Rango" taking home the Oscar for best animated feature.
In my review of "True Grit" I complained that westerns weren't really my thing, though I've always loved the setting. "Rango" showed me why. It introduces us to a cast of characters so fun and vibrant and makes their world look so real that at times I forgot that I was watching a cartoon lizard. In fact, I'd argue that "Rango" is a better western than "True Grit." Like many great affectionate parodies (Those of Mel Brooks come to mind), "Rango" absolutely loves what its skewering. In this way it is a lot like "slither." It doesn't feel like a bid for money like all the terrible shows on Nickelodeon (or MTV). It feels like it has real heart. Like they gave a shit. And sometimes that's all it takes.

Paul- viewed March 19, 2011

And then there's "Paul." "Paul" is a strange case where the writers/actors clearly loved what they were parodying, but it just didn't work. While "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz" are both brilliant for what they do to their genres, "Paul" just seemed... phoned-in. Frost and Pegg tried to open up to a "wider audence" which I assume means "add more gay jokes and Seth Rogen." The reason the movie doesn't work is just because everything in it has been done before or seems to be tacked-on. The CIA plotline seems extraneous, which is a strange thing to say, seeing as it is a large part of the movie. All of the jokes fall flat simply because we've seen them before. Compare "Hot Fuzz"'s "This shit just got real" to Paul the alien wanting some Reese's Pieces. Both are from other popular movies. The first is ironic because it's so surreal and ridiculous and we know that Nick Frost's character has been waiting his whole life to say it. When Paul wants Reese's it's just derivative. There's no punchline. It's like a Dane Cook joke delivery.
This movie is really just "Fanboys" with a broader spectrum of jokes. The nerdy guys take a road trip in an RV across the U.S. The pop-culture gags are ok, but we've seen them all a million times before. Early in the movie we learn that our two main characters are UFO aficionados, but instead of taking the pseudoscience/alien conspiracy approach (which would have also been better for Kristen Wiig's character, the best character in the movie), we're given a barrage of pop culture gags. It's nice, but feels tired.
I know this duo has some great movies left in it. "Paul" just seems to be the junior slump.

Unsurprisingly, I Blame George Lucas

While hitting my regular sites on the internet (mostly pornography), I noticed people reporting on the Mark Twain classic, "Huckleberry Finn." Apparently they deem the words "nigger" and "injun" offensive enough to warrant editing the whole book. It's a growing trend, apparently. I guess that's why that porno I was watching had the woman saying "Fuck me with your African-American cock!" Gotta keep it P.C.

This is one of the problems with America. White Americans are trying to cover up the fact that racism ever happened by whitewashing (blackwashing? African-American-washing? Wait, I'm straying into racist grounds again) the past. But that doesn't really work when the effects are still being felt today.

Here's another problem with America; dumb people take the word "nigger" in the book at face value and immediately decide that it must be cleaned up. They aren't looking at the historical context of the book, they're not looking at what characters use it, they aren't even taking into account that Mark Twain was perhaps the best satirist of all time, so when he uses the word "nigger" he's got a motive behind it. All they know is that the word is offensive, and so their poor little kids should be sheltered from it. It sucks all the meaning out of the book. It's like removing the context of the Holocaust from "Diary of a Young Girl." You no longer know why the text is relevant, why it's important, and what made it as famous as it is today. Should we also make Lolita a consenting adult who is saving herself for marriage, wears a silver ring and will only do anal so it is more comfortable for American audiences? Remove the word "bitch" from "Babe," ignoring the true meaning of the word altogether? Make Jane Eyre a vampire? "Moby Whale"?

People invoke the "Nanny State" a lot when it comes to stuff like this. It's a little deeper than that. People are always telling us to "think of the children," almost as much as dissenters use the phrase to mock them. We can't make everything in this country child-friendly. Not everything is Justin-goddamned-Beiber. "Three's Company" was edgier than anything on TV now.

I think George Carlin said it best when he said "Fuck the children!"
I'm worried that in the future this will be censored to "Fuck the children, provided they are 18 and you are married to them."

I like to call it the "Disneyfication of America." A place that exists outside of the real world where everyone is friendly, and attractive white kids dictate what kind of music and TV shows top the charts, and nobody ever gets offended because the same seven safe plots are used in all forms of media, ranging from "Oh no, I have two dates at the same time in the same place!" to "Men make a sexist gag, women challenge them to a gender-defined contest, women win, proving that the sexes are equal."

These "special editions" of books need to stop now. You get kids to care about literature by telling them how boundary-testing and interesting and revolutionary it is, not by cleaning it up so it's as vanilla as everything else in their lives. We need to do this before Twain, and Vonnegut, and Shakespeare, and Joyce are further maligned by literary masters like Snooki, and Spencer Pratt, and Kim Karashian, and Jenny McCarthy.

They've always said that knowledge is power. It's no coincidence that we're so content to lose both.

For the Love of the Game

I told myself that I wasn't experienced enough to write this yet, and I might be right, but it's something that has been in my head over the last few days.

Roger Ebert is a man I really admire in personal, professional, and intellectual aspects. He's a very smart man and is synonymous with movies in the same way Spielberg and Scorsese are. And for good reason. His makes his point articulately, usually spinning some kind of story through his reviews. He gives credence to the phrase "art criticism is art."
Recently Ebert wrote a blog in which he expounded on his claim that video games are not art. Not only are they not art, but "video games can never be art."
Obviously this enraged some gamers who, as Ebert was quick to point out, are "intensely concerned" that their hobbies be considered art.

Ebert was right in many ways. Obviously he is not an avid gamer, and some of the people posting on his blog say that he is "too old" to appreciate video games. Age clearly doesn't factor too much, as Ebert says he enjoyed the first Transformers movie and I hated it. And I'm much younger than he is. Ebert refutes the age argument by saying that "Not a one is too young to appreciate art," though a friend (also an English major) was quick to point out that a five-year-old can hardly appreciate Shakespeare. Of course people can be too young to appreciate art, but Ebert was clearly hyperbolic in his statement.

I can't help but to think that when Ebert makes these claims, he is thinking of games such as Pac-Man or Tetris. And he's right about that. Those are concepts. They are no more art than Plinko is. Concepts are used for problem solving. Tetris, at its minimum, helps you to see organization and patterns. This is not art. I'm sorry to say it's math. What can be considered an art in these games is something that Ebert, I think, is overlooking.

Video games aren't just concepts. The final product is the concept in action. All video games, at their cores, are problem solving games. Eat all the pellets; help the frog cross the street, hit the enemy's weak spot for massive damage. In between the genesis of the concept and the execution by the player comes the art.

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't believe that set design in a movie is not important. Costumes, mannerisms, lighting, and casting the right actor for a part are all a part of the illusion. They help you to suspend your disbelief so you can believe what you are seeing on the screen. The same is true of any video game. Before Frogger can cross the street, he has to exist. People design him in the same way one might design a costume for a movie.Video game characters don't just appear. They go through careful planning the same way any character from a novel or a movie would go through. They are important to the story and to the audience.

Secondly there is the music. I would find it difficult to tell Nobuo Uematsu that the 600+ tracks that he has composed for the Final Fantasy series alone are not art. Like the character design, the music is used to invoke feelings. The score of a film is one of the most important parts of a movie. Robert Zemeckis, on the Back to the Future special features DVD says that he told Alan Silvestri to think of the music as another character in the film, lending weight to the importance of music in the final product.

Perhaps more than any other genre, the role playing game (RPG) genre is the most like art. An important part of art is eliciting an emotional response. This is why art exists. This is why people like paintings, and music, and yes, film. RPGs are a literary genre. Take away the battles and the equipment and you have a cinematic and literary story unfolding in front of you. The game Final Fantasy IV for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, while dated, has the first truly emotional characters in a video game. We feel the self-loathing in Cecil, the jealousy and confusion in Kain, the need for revenge in Edge, and their love for each other. The story is one of forgiveness and retribution. There are character arcs for all 12 main characters, some admittedly better than others. The player feels loss when Tellah sacrifices himself and anger that his revenge was wasted.

Like any novel, we have seen these characters meet and watched their friendships blossom. The game may not run as deeply as a novel, mostly due to the memory limitations of the time, but the emotions we feel are real. And as with any good film, the music does as much to set the tone as the characters, lighting, and environment. Final Fantasy IV is light on metaphor and deep meaning, but it tells a cohesive story. It was crafted so that the player cares about what is happening.

A more modern example is the Japanese game Mother 3. The series' creator, Shigesato Itoi, is a part-time essayist and philosopher, and like any novelist, constructs his games' scripts with his own outlook on life in mind. While Mother 2 (Earthbound in the west) used traumatic bits of his childhood for the final boss, Giygas, to haunting effect, Mother 3 is rich in metaphors about human consumption and destruction of ecosystems. If there's one thing Itoi knows, it's creating emotion. In a scene early in Mother 3, the main character's father, Flint, learns of his wife's death. His reaction, although it is in simple pixelated form, is one of the most heartbreaking scenes I have seen in the medium. And it is all done with no dialogue from Flint.

The idea of art comes up in other genres too. Though RPGs may be the easiest examples, we also have the story of Wander and his lover in Shadow of the Colossus, which has almost no dialogue, but still conveys the love Wander feels for his lost love, and sympathy for the main character and the noblest of steeds. The most touching moment may be when Agro, Wander's horse and sole companion, topples over a cliff, leaving Wander more alone than we was at the beginning of the game with his dead lover. The grief in the scene is palpable. The designs of the Colossi and the musical score are breathtaking as well.


Someone might argue that video games lack one thing that gives film and literature a leg up and an obvious claim to art, and that is the literary allusion. Milton's work is full of them, and Shakespeare reveled in them. Adaptations of Dante's Inferno aside, video game developers exist in a world where they can create allusions to the most literary of all texts and get them to a mass audience.

While Star Wars used the classic design of the samurai to inform its character Darth Vader, the game Portal used imagery and even a nod to the name of HAL 9000 in the design of its GLaDOS character.

While we're on the subject of Portal we have to give the idea of design a thought. Portal is a game that makes use of a portal gun to help the player solve puzzles to escape imprisonment. The placement of the pieces of the puzzle; turrets, platforms, weighted companion cubes, are all important to the way the game is played.

They are all vital to the movement of the character and the way she interacts with her world, and by moving a platform or a turret, you change the way the stage is played. Could this be an argument for the game as art? Maybe, but it illustrates the importance and planning that goes into the development of each level and obstacle.

This is where it gets tricky. I would argue that the creation of video games is an art. Enough designers, composers, character artists, and modelers use their craft to make the game possible. Without their care and careful attention, the game is broken. It will never have a chance. However, the act of playing a game is not art. As Ebert says, "Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009." I agree with him here. We don't see the reading of a book as art. Only the writing process. The viewing of a film isn't art. It's the production. Your sitting on your couch all day to play Call of Duty is not art. The people who put the artistic knowledge and skill into the game are the artists. Bobby fisher wasn't an artist, but I'm sure he had a well-made chess set.

There is a reason I chose Pixar's Toy Story as my example of concept art way up at the start of this article. Both Pixar and a company like Square (creator of the Final Fantasy series) use computers to make their product. They design their characters, they sculpt them on a computer, they hire voice actors to make those characters come to life, they hire orchestras and composers to create a soundtrack to their world. Yet, why is Pixar's work seen as artistic genius, and Final Fantasy as tripe? I don't have the answer. Ebert seems to hint that the fact that video games are made for consumption and by executive decree;

"I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case."

Disney is one of the largest corporations on the planet, but Pixar is undoubtedly still making art. Andy Warhol blurred the lines of consumerism and art in the 1960s and they have broken down further since then. Most art is made to be bought. The entire film industry is proof of that.

Perhaps my favorite part of this argument is the fact that a movie critic is saying that video games are not art. If you read that as a snide remark against Ebert, read it again because it certainly is not. While he sees film as an undeniable art, it was not so long ago that the same art critics were dismissing the artistic worth of photography (and by extension, motion pictures). The definition of art eventually had to be reconsidered to make room for photography.

Art critic Clive Bell said that the interpretation of art was up to the "significant form." More Americans are now playing video games than going to the movies. What could be more significant than that?

Thanks for everything, Ebert. I really mean that.