Review :: Choke

When it came out in 1999, Fight Club seemed like a big deal. I was only 18 at the time, but after seeing that film, and after veraciously reading the Chuck Palahniuk novel upon which it was based, there came over me a sense that this - this schizo-social satire and savagely sardonic examination of masculinity coming out of the raggedy last breaths of a tormented millennium - was important. The film opened up a new world to me, the world of film as art, a world in which big questions could be asked, and maybe answered, on screen.* So I have a bit of a soft spot for that film. However, it struck me then, and it still strikes me now, that Fight Club, perhaps because of David Fincher's direction, perhaps because of the actors (I still can't see Edward Norton without thinking of Jack's smirking revenge), feels better suited to the cinematic medium than to the printed one. Now, nearly 10 years later, another Palahniuk adaptation, Choke, lurches forth and, having already read the novel, the same question swirls about in my head. Does Choke work as a movie? Well, sort of.

Choke, directed be one Clark Gregg, is the story of Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), a sex-addict and all around self-involved degenerate. His life is depressing: he and his best friend, a fellow sex-addict and chronic masturbater, Denny (Brad William Henke), work as "historical interpreters" in one of those lousy recreations of an early colonial village, which they both, of course, despise, despite being the default posture in this sorts of situations; his mother, Ida (Anjelica Houston), who apparently raised him while mostly on the run from the police, she being one of those anarchist, pseudo-revolutionary types who spend most of their time pulling mean-spirited pranks, has been hospitalized because of a rapidly deteriorating, and drug-fueled, mental condition and she only occasionally recognizes him; he compulsively has meaningless sex with strangers, though he is, well now this is just awkward, apparently unable to perform with people he might actually like, the self-loathing prick; and, just to top it all off, he and Denny, in a nihilistic tour de force, go from restaurant to restaurant staging chokes: Victor will deliberately choke on his food, you see, and then flail about the place, giving a stranger - preferably a wealthy one, wealthy people generally being the self-hating types who will always give away money in an effort to convince themselves that they are not, in fact, wretched people - the opportunity to "save" him. He is, in other words, hopelessly lost.

If this all sounds a bit overdone, if it sounds a bit like a Slothropian spiral into pointless deviance, that's because it is. Unlike Fight Club, in which deviance was used to treat the societal disease, the deviance being often more tolerable and appealing than the plastic and manufactured norm of a soulless and largely homogenized society, Choke uses deviance as an end unto itself, so that, as with Victor's friend's self-pleasuring addiction, the result is basically potency without creation. All the elements of a satiric roll in the cultural hay are here but none of them feel genuine, as if both Palahniuk and the filmmakers just decided to sit down and manufacture of sort of Thomas Pynchon-lite experience, one that on the surface seems meaningful and important but which is ultimately not much more than a hollow recitation of moral horrors and empty obscenities. If I may make a comparison, the appeal of the Tyler Durden character lay in his refusal to participate in, and his willingness to viciously exploit, the casual shallowness of post-modern society. Fight Club felt like a mythic restructuring of culture at the hands of cultural deviants, and it all appeared teleological - Durden was burning down society but in order to create another one. His actions had an end, a goal. Victor, on the other hand, is a character with no power (even though Rockwell is a powerful actor). He is neither the rallying, messianic figure of a post-modern cultural revolution nor is he an audience surrogate, a stand-in for some sort of shared cultural experiece. If this is some half-addled attempt at satire, it is lost on me because satire requires at least a few points of affinity, some touchstones with which we can say Yes, that's me or Yup, that's true. But there are no touchstones here. It seems too disconnected from ordinary experiance, too outrageous in its pruriance to be meaningful satire.



And yet, even after this heavy mountain of criticism, I'd be lying if I said that there's nothing here to like. Sam Rockwell, for instance, is fantastic. It always seems to me as if he is on the very edge of greatness but always fails to get the recognition he deserves. Also, tonally speaking, this movie is dramatically different than Fight Club, which I appreciated, and which is probably a good thing, both for director Clark Gregg and Palahniuk. (I keep bringing up Fight Club, and I feel bad about that, but that film/book really does cast quite a long and deep shadow over the rest of Palahniuk's work and over all other, but at this point largely hypothetical, Palahniuk adaptations (Edit: oh, I just checked IMDb and I guess another Palahniuk adaptation is on the way)... anyway, but so Fight Club had this iconoclastically epic feel to it, which was appropriate for a film about cultural apocalypse. Here, Gregg wisely steers the project into a much more subdued, and dare I say intimate, direction.) Though, returning to my earlier criticisms, I do think that an unintended, or probably unintended, consequence of this direction is that the film's subversive elements, if there are any here, are undercut by a sense of stylistic mediocrity, as if the movie's style and theme don't quite cooperate with each other.

So out of all of this can I pull a recommendation? Sure. It's not a bad movie. It just isn't great. But coming from Palahniuk, the man who gave us Fight Club, I want greatness, or at least I want meaningfulness. This just feels small, and not in a good way, but as if both he and this film are retreading already well-worn paths, and not treading them nearly as well as others, or as in Chuck's case, as well as he himself, have done in the past. It's satire unhinged, aimed at nothing, and in the end more nihilistic than useful.

Experto Crede: Choke isn't all bad. It's just not all that good either. If you are counter-cultural, or if like me you just enjoy every once in a while adopting a counter-cultural posture, you might like this. You just as likely won't, though.

* This has more to do with my own biography than with any innovation on Fight Club's part. I simply hadn't seen many "important" films at that time in my life.

Trailer :: Inglourious Basterds

Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 4

1300. Act III. A still and breathing silence and now is the only time in which you can hear footfalls in the emptiness... Heavy boots and occasional clattering of doggy toes sliding and scampering retreating bouncing barking. Easy calm in this silence... quiet; speech is smooth and relaxed now... but weighted with the expectation of dust and noise. Then: the whooshing roar white noise thick as water and just as wet A totalizing noise rushing out seeping into and filling everything - the noise of a tyrant or priest: demanding all and leaving no room for anything else. The constant inhale of lungs hungry for dust eventually blends effortlessly into the hum of blood Steady and unconscious invisible sound. It is backdrop, canvas. It blurs out of focus for the foreground sounds. A bumblebee mean and angry buzzing in my hand sliding and chattering over rough grain imposing a vision of sound leaving only a smooth trail, an easier surface. Into a deeper, darker sound now. The pure white rrriip of the hungry maw.  Modernity in microcosm. Teeth spinning, patiently ravenous, aggresive, howling, grinding, reducing, an arboreal holocaust producing: a perfect blank, prestine, stripped of the old self, made new, made ready. A conversion of wood. Mathematics - fractions and 16ths - now narrowing, now widening, planes arising and sliding out, the playful imperfections of nature rubbed down into human measurements. This is an act of imagination, human and holy: this sound, this over-bearing, splitting rip. A few decibals to the left now: the shriek. Ripper. Not a buzz but a spinning scream, a circle of knives cutting giant aural swatches through the air, a sound only immitated in grammar by blood veins bursting in the bvvvvvvvvvv of extreme mimesis. Drifting dust whirls, smoke sometimes rises, the hot teeth endlessly cycle. Beside this sound, the gentle swath of a beach in the wind with grains gently sliding. Warm dust floats and permeates, the finely ground atomies of maple and oak. The whisper of thighs on clean sheets. And above it all twining from sound to sound is the constant inhale of those hungry lungs. The suck: a rush of chips and dust, torn bits rattlesnaking up and through the tubes, unwilling, resistent, but compelled by vacuum authority. And it all, all of it, this clattering, shrieking apocalypse, comes from under water, each shriek each scream each groan each howl is muted, their razor's edge dulled, behind the gentle padding, foam and plastic, hugging my head. Inside the noise, I am silent.

Review :: Zack and Miri Make a Porno

What would happen if Boogie Nights knocked up American Pie? I don't know, but it would probably look a little bit like this:

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is Kevin Smith's latest film, following hot on the heels of the under-rated and savagely funny Clerks 2. Platonic roommates and best friends Zack (the very quickly going to wear out his welcome Seth Rogan) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are losers. Ahem, I mean slackers. They are both working dead-end jobs and are losing money fast. When their power and water get unexpectedly turned off (unexpected inasmuch as they didn't pay their bills), things begin to look bleak until Zack, brilliant mind that he is, stumbles upon the idea of making a porno together. So, rounding up some View Askew alumni (Jason Mewes and Jeff Anderson), they set out to make a few bucks - the dirty way. What they don't plan for, however, is their personal feelings getting in the way, as they always do in this situations, and they soon find themselves living every "sex is complicated" cliche that romantic comedies have been recycling for the past, oh I don't know... forever.

Now, let's get one thing out and in the open here: I've been a Kevin Smith fan for a while. Not a fanboy, mind you... just a fan. His particular blend of genuine heart, crass humour, and his normally sharp eye for interpersonal maneuvers and dynamics, a blend that was brilliantly delivered in such films as Chasing Amy and Clerks 2, has always appealed to me, even if some of his more over-the-top digressions into vulgarity have left me shaking my head. Zack and Miri, however, just feels empty, like an uninspired retread of material and themes he has developed (and developed much better) in other films. It feels more like we are watching a masturbatory fantasy play out than like a genuine cinematic experience. And that's a problem. It all comes across as adolescent, like school-boys giggling over strong language and naughty pictures. It's hard, in fact, to see much of the Chasing Amy Kevin Smith in here. Example:

(During interviews for the their porno)
Zack: What's your name?
Lester: Lester... Lester the Molester Cockenschtuff
Zack: Wow. That's a great porn name.
Lester: I get to pick a porn name? Then I want to be called... Pete Jones.

In Chasing Amy, the characters talked about dick and fart jokes in a very self-aware, very meta-fiction sort of way; in Zack and Miri, we just get American Pie-style dick and fart jokes with little-to-no awareness or tongue-in-cheek irony. But these aren't just American Pie-style jokes, oh no: they are the straight-to-video American Pie-style jokes, the kind which rely only on out-grossing the already gross. Take the above dialogue. That's a dumb joke. And that's about as clever, or as clean, as any of the jokes get here. Smith seems to think that simply ramping up the explicit and naughty nature of the story will make it funnier and more endearing. It doesn't. In fact, the two moments in the film that I think Smith thought would be the most hilarious and outrageous just feel disingenuous and soulless and very, very pre-pubescent.

(Uh, beware: this is the red band trailer, so it does have naughty language in it. But it gives you an idea of what the film is like.)


So the whole thing is disappointing. I like Kevin Smith. But it seems that for every Dogma or Clerks 2 that we get we also get a Mallrats or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Experto Crede: while it's not as bad as the Apatow school of comedy, it just doesn't live up to what I know Smith can do.

Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 3

1015. Act II is much like Act I. So is Act III, actually. Try as I might, I'm finding it hard to impose an actual trajectory or arc on any of this. Shop life basically consists of one task after another.

1020. Wait, I suppose I could talk about the life of an order. There's a bit of a trajectory there. A work order comes to us as a list of parts required for a job. If it's a railing order, and most of our orders are railing orders (the other kind of order we take being door orders), the list will look something like this: x feet of rail, x amounts of rail accessories (wall brackets, which hold the rail to the wall; goosenecks, piece of rail curved on one end that allows the rail to change directions vertically; elbows, like a gooseneck but which allows the rail to curve horizontally), x amount of stair accessories, x posts, etc, etc. We take the order, look at what me need to manufacture, and get to work. The first bit of business for nearly every part is grabbing an appropriate piece of wood. Wood comes to us as 10 or 11 foot lengths of various depths: 4/4 (i.e. an inch. Well, technically, about 15/16's of an inch but... whatever, that's a detail), 6/4, or 8/4. We work primarily in hardwoods, maple being the norm, but occasionally we get some more playful types of wood: rustic hickory, alder, beech, cherry, and oak. After we've grabbed the wood and made a nice big pile of it on a cart, we truck that cart over to the jointer (something like this) a-and grind it so that at least one of the edges is straight and smooth, allowing for a quick and easy cut on the tablesaw, which is usually the next step. After it's been sized on the tablesaw, depending on what its destiny is, the piece of wood gets run a few times through the planer (this), a sort of much more aggressive and no-nonsense version of the jointer, a howling banshee of a machine. Now, that sumbitch of a board is much smaller than it started out as and is ready to fulfill it's tree-ish destiny: i.e. it becomes whatever the hell we want it to become. If it's rail, we laminate it together with another piece, making it nice and strong; if it's wallbrackets, the part gets traced onto the board and cut out with a bandsaw; if it's parts for a post it gets sized on the circular saw and has either a male of female dado put into it; if it's... well, you get the point. It's putty in our hands. Hard, splintery, sliver happy, slam-your-fingers-in-it-and-regret-it putty. On their journey towards human convenience and luxury, most parts, not all but most, require routing. A router is essentially a motor with a spinning bit on the end that cuts a profile into a piece of wood. Some routers are small and whiny; some glare at you; others are demon possessed; and the biggest ones are filled with spite and malice and you don't put your hands anywhere near them but allow a power-feeder to do the work for you. So, for instance, with rail we rout the board four times, once on each edge, to create a nice, round (depending on the profile) piece of rail that anyone would want to hold onto and caress. After it's been routed (routered? I'm not all that sure about the verbiage here), it's ready for sanding, which is what I spend most of my time doing. All the above processes are hard on wood, you see. They leave marks, jaggies, tears, scratches, chatter, rips, and sometimes blood on the piece, all of which sanding is supposed to remove. After everything is smooth and ready for the prom, it, like Laura Palmer, gets wrapped in plastic, labelled and then stands around awaiting installation, which isn't our job.

1100. But so, let me tell you the story of my feet. For the past eight years, my feet have lived a comfortable, stress-free life, the extent of the demands leveled against them being nothing more strenuous than carrying me from one sitting position to another. They carried me to desks, chairs, couches, car seats, bus seats, movie theater seats, church pews, and, their favourite, the kitchen table chairs. Theirs was a life lived in innocence. Occasionally, they were forced to stand in a line somewhere, which they resented greatly, but they managed, they coped: their mostly pampered life out-weighed whatever small inconveniences they every so often encountered; they knew they had it made, and had it good, so they kept their mouths shut during those brief stints when actual participation was required. When they carried me out of the university last Christmas, however, they found themselves walking into a very different lifestyle. Now, instead of carrying me from sitting position to sitting position, they carry me from standing position to standing position. This is a terrible thing, I assure you, and they have voiced their protests most vehemently, drawing into their protestations my calves and lower back, all of who feel very put out by this change of affairs. It's a full-body mutiny. Their plan is to incapacitate me.

1130. Their plan may be working. Throughout most of the morning, I feel pretty good. Around 1130, though, which is the mid-point of the day, pain begins to set in. Remember, gentle reader, that I've been a slouch for nearly eight years, a slacker of the highest order. That it takes about four hours for fatigue to start setting in isn't embarrassing - it's an accomplishment.

1200. Lunch is nearly here.

1215. I've noticed that, in writing about the minutiae of my day-to-day life, I've created something of a paradox. In physics (or quantum physics, meta-physics, or something - I can't really recall), there is a law, or at least a principle, or maybe it's only a vague, effervescent notion (I'm talking out of my ass here, I know, but I swear to you I've heard this before... somewhere) that says simply measuring a thing actually changes that thing, so that the very act of observation defeats the purpose of observation, i.e. to see that thing as it really is. In writing about what I do at work, I've created a lovely little meta microcosm because at work I've begun thinking about writing about being at work. What's worse, I am at this moment writing about being at work thinking about writing about being at work. So I've now descended, perhaps irredeemably, into a post-modern miasma of self-consciousness. I've officially spilled over, blurred subject and object into an indistinguishable, indistinct mass of self-aware and rhetorical narcissism. I've kicked loose, lost balance. I've stumbled into a more frightening rabbit hole.

1230. Lunch. Lunch will save me. Now I've got something solid onto which to hold. An empty, grumbling stomach pushes away all those Gordian concerns. Take that, post-modernity.

Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 2

0730. The work day has begun. I work at a small stairs and doors shop that sits, as if trying to avoid the bustle and intrusion of the metropolitan buzz, just outside the city of Saskatoon (a city without much buzz, sure, but the detachment is nice, if sometimes a little awkward), and we specialize in, as the logo says, Curved Stairs & Railing And Custom Doors, a strange little sign - one obviously amended at some point to include "And Custom Doors" - that I guess is geting the job done since business, even in this depression-panicked economy, has been steadily growing. It's a fairly new shop, only a few months old right now, but it's quickly established itself within Saskatoon's industrial milieu. Its production team consists of exactly my father, my brother, and me, and I'm a fairly recent addition at that. In addition to the three of us churning out product there are: three sometimes four installers, of which Boss is one; an office manager-type/customer relations person, Boss's Wife, who is our go-to person when a question comes up; and one very small, very energetic dog, a terrier/chihuahua-looking thing, named Bear, who spends most of his days in the office with Boss's Wife but who, immediately upon release during one of her many quick visits to the back in order to relay information, tears around the whole place, runs up to you, runs away from you, and is generally too adorable to believe. Besides this core team, every once in a while someone else will pop their head into the shop, fiddle around, and disappear, their actual contributions to this whole thing being a mystery to me. (EDIT: Ah now, some clarification: these are not employees that I'm talking about. Nope. An employee's contribution, especially in a business this size, where everyone's work is noticed, is not questionable or mysterious. Naw, I mean the random people, people unknown to me, who occasionally are present and seem to be doing... well, something, I'm not sure what. This happens in every shop I've worked in and seen.) But now so, in the silence before the day's labour of dust and noise begins, a small, impromptu meeting occurs. It's not really a meeting, though I'm sure some executive somewhere would insist on calling it a Power Meeting or something like that but really it is only a few words exchanged between Boss and the three of us to make sure that we are all pulling in the same direction. The factors influencing what work gets done in a day are various, some predictable, some incomprehensible, some occult. A white board calendar hangs over the shop desk, on which the month's schedule is only occasionally sketched out, but this rarely determines the day's actual events. Attempts to impose vision or order upon any of this are almost always futile gestures. Most of the time, the official-looking schedule is abandoned in order to deal with the sundry pressures at hand: railing orders that are suddenly due; orders that were modified are filled incorrectly (rarely our fault, but oh-well); completed orders that have been standing around for weeks, slowly being pirated for parts, all of sudden being demanded, requiring a hasty effort to once again fill in the now-pirated pieces. You see, the construction business is apparently not at all as devoted to schedule as you might imagine. When a half dozen companies or contractors are all involved in, say, putting up a house, a condominium, etc, juggling everyone's activities becomes an exercise best left for fuzzy thinkers and laid-back hippies. The truly anal retentive or highly organized person will quickly lose, or hurt, his or her mind in the confusion, cunning, and compromise involved in staying afloat here. So scheduling is often myopic and changes day-to-day. However, the day's (or at least the next few hours') schedules established, the actual work begins.

0735. I'm sanding. Like I said, I'm fairly new here, only one and half months full-time now, so my role is often that of sander. Nearly all parts produced need sanding, see, and sanding is, in terms of production difficulty, fairly easy and doesn't require a very deep knowledge of a whole lot. You stand in front of a bench for hours, holding a palm-or orbital-sander (think world's worst, and most aggressive, sex aid), running it back and forth over the piece, making sure all machine marks are gone, all chatter marks are removed, all rips smoothed over, etc, and basically making sure the part looks good. I actually like the work. Me, I'm a fairly obsessive guy, with just a hint of perfectionism - not the kind that manifests in odd compulsive behaviour but the kind that demands that I make sure things are done right. Sanding is all about getting it right. During production, parts are man-handled (sexist, I know, but this is the third shop I've worked in and I've only met a few women, okay one, who does this kind of work, so if it isn't politically correct it's at least a well-established commonplace), bumped, dumped, and generally treated like pieces of wood. So I'm left to clean them up and get them ready to ship. It's not quite as mind-numbing as it sounds. Obsessive behaviour aside, the job does require careful attention. Sure, you can doze off, hit automatic for a bit and enter the zone, but then you start to miss things, important little things like cross-grain scratches, or chips in the joints, or holes that should be filled with wood-filler and cleaned up. Basically, at any given moment, there are a half-dozen things for which you should be alert and watching. So, the sorts of things you start thinking of while you're sanding aren't very involved. You start singing to yourself old songs that you like but haven't listened to in months or even years; you begin going over your favourite scenes from movies, imagining yourself within them, striking impressive poses (in your head) and spouting menacing one-liners; you relive moments from you own life with a revisionist sweep - this is what I should have said to That Guy at That Time, or if I had done this then, maybe this would have happened. You know, things like that. None of these thoughts are very important and they blink away the moment something interrupts them, popped like evanescent mental bubbles, only a slight residue, a mental scum, left remaining afterward. A thousand of these thoughts develop and vanish over the course of a day. They are byproducts, really, side-effects of a mind occupied but not entirely occupied.

0845. I'm still sanding.

0900. 0900 is an important hour. It represents a cross-over, a step taken past the first moments of the day into the day proper. It's a mental thing, I guess. When you do the same thing over and over, you establish little goals.

1000. Coffee break. Our work day is divided thusly: 0730-1000, coffee break, 1015-1230, lunch, 1300-1500, coffee break, 1350-1600, home. I've taken to thinking of the day in terms of three acts and an epilogue. Or denouement. Act one is long. Long like a son of a bitch. But each following act is incrementally shorter, meaning that once you've pulled yourself across the threshold of Coffee Break 1, you can tell yourself that you are more or less done for the day and almost believe it. Coffee Break 1 is a good thing. After 2.5 hours of work, depending on what you've been doing (some jobs are less strenuous than others), you are still feeling pretty good. You have that satisfying newly worked feel. Later in the day, that feeling will disappear and be replaced by other, less pleasant feelings. Coffee break with my brother and father is, for the most part, much like breakfast, i.e. quiet. If someone else is in the coffee room, like Boss or Boss's Wife or anyone else, conversation tends either to be politely hollow or filled with minor bits of business. Generally not serious stuff. If it's just the three of us, though, it's mostly quiet. Fruit, yogurt and protein-rich energy bars are eaten; a few pages of books are read (reading a book exclusively during coffee breaks and lunches is unique - it gives you a strangely saturated feeling, like you've been soaking in the book a lot longer than you expected); newspapers are perused and either guffawed or huffed at; walls and ceilings are vacantly observed. Occasionally, a news story is picked up in brief conversation. Even more occasionally, a philosophical or theological query is offered, though the time limitations don't usually afford the kind of treatment any of us like for this sort of thing so usually we leave this for supper (or dinner, if you're an ass), where a full, lively debate can be unleashed. We are a family of debaters. Throughout most of my life, supper time has been a time not only of eating but of higher learning. When I moved away to go to college,* I found that in terms of critical thinking I was better equipped than most people my age. This isn't bragging, just noting. Most people, as you no doubt already know, are very hard to engage in serious conversation. In colleges and universities, where I've spent most of my time for the past eight years, it's not too hard. It's even expected. But outside those temples of thought, serious conversation is difficult. You certainly don't talk about predestination, or the fundamental differences between Left and Right, in the coffee room, so any talk like this usually breaks off, out of polite deference and not embarrassment, whenever someone else walks into the break room. But so anyway, the main thing I'm trying to say is that Coffee Break 1 is usually quiet, a time just to pause. All the machines are off, the dust collector silent, the door closed (installers or Boss might be working on something), and we just sit, eat, and read. It's nice.

1015. Act two begins. I've not yet figured out what sort of play this is. I doubt the metaphor actually works, but I like it.

*Maybe now is the time that I should mention that, yes, I'm living at home at the moment. I moved away for five years to go to college (5 years = two degrees) but then moved back home afterward in order to attend another university (2.5 years = third degree). Canadian student loans being what they are, the Saskatoon housing market being what it is, and me being me and determined to keep my grades up as high as possible, all meant that renting, much less buying, a place was a silly thought. I've only been out of school for two months now, and I plan to enter school again in about seven months, so I'm probably just gonna continue living at home, at least for the next year or two. It's not as bad as you'd think** and pretty damn convenient when three of you work at the same place.

**Sometimes it is.

Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 1

0625. I'm awake. My alarm doesn't go off till 0630, but I'm awake nevertheless. It's not full consciousness that I'm experiencing, just that fuzzy kind that's capable pretty much only of bemoaning the fact that it is stirring and not sleeping, slowly being pulled towards the day. The scattered remnants of the previous night's dreams are still drifting through my head. I'm a dreamer, yes. I don't normally remember my dreams but in the first few minutes of waking life I can still feel their impressions. These impressions will have mostly vanished by the time I'm dressed, fed, and out the door but for now they are there. If a dream has been particularly vivid, I might dwell on it for a moment or two. What makes one dream more vivid or memorable than another is a mystery, I suppose. Like take this one from last night. I dreamed about Aliens. Yup, the movie Aliens. This confuses me because I haven't watched any of those movies in a long while and I can identify no real reason why, seemingly for no reason, I would dream about it. As I lay puzzling about it, perfunctorily waiting for the alarm to sound (I on principle refuse to get up before 0630 even if I'm awake), I notice that I can't recall any of the dream's details. It's like knowing the title of movie but now knowing what happens in it: I know I had the dream but don't know what it was about. Was I Sigourney Weaver (this has happened before - this isn't the first time I've dreamt of Aliens); did the alien kill anyone; was it Aliens canon or an apocryphal tale? Why I remember it at all, why it didn't just roll back down into whatever subconscious vault it broke lose from, is a mystery to me. But it's one I'm not terribly concerned with solving at the moment. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out the best way to avoid 0630. Or, time manipulation options notwithstanding, how to avoid the implications of 0630. I do this everyday. Everyday I'm faced with 0630 and everyday I attempt to negotiate with it. Am I sick? No, not today. Is there any reasonable reason to stay in bed? Doesn't look like it. Can I quit my job? Yes, but I probably shouldn't. 0630 is drawing closer. I roll over, turning my back to the clock in one last, petulant effort to deny the reality before me. I'm warm, snug, but can't quite convince myself that I'm actually ignoring the clock. I'm sadly aware that I must soon face the cold. My house isn't heated by conventional methods, you see, but by a wood-burning furnace, which means that the house is only heated as long as someone is tending the fire, or is awake to start one for that matter. So it's always cold in the morning, which doesn't make 0630 any more appealing. Nevertheless, temperature and clocks and dreams aside, I'm milking every last damn second out of my time in bed.

0630. Negotiations have failed. I must rise. It's cold.

0640. Breakfast. Breakfast usually consists of a bowl of porridge and a ciabatta bun (it's a triangular piece of bread, not quite white, not quite brown, but hefty and filling and good with peanut butter and syrup (a condiment combo I've been eating since I starting eating solid food and still loving very much, thank you) and chicken, jam and cheese and just about anything you'd want, really). Some days I have cereal. I'm particularly partial to Golden Grahams. But since I started working again, and since the time between breakfast and lunch is considerable, I find cereal to be not quite enough, so porridge it is. After breakfast, I prepare my lunch bag, usually another ciabatta bun (today it's a turkey and cheese sandwich), some fruit, yogurt, pudding, and really whatever's at hand. I then grab my coffee and sit down in front of my computer for 10-15 minutes.

0713. I'm out the door. I'm now fully awake - and if I wasn't, the blast of the cold Saskatchewan morning ensures that I am. I drive to work with my brother and father, who I work with. I'm a big guy, but I usually take the back seat in my brother's car, which means that I have to squeeze my way past the folding front seat. Getting in is a pain in the ass but once in it's comfortable enough. In the front, my knees brace uncomfortably against the dash and I can't move my legs at all, one of the only physical sensations that actually has the potential to throw me into a semi-panicked state (for the same reason I can't sleep in a sleeping bag, which is something I discovered my first year as a camp counselor, after the first week of which I switched, with great relief, back to a sheet and blanket, making the rare "sleep out" nights rather interesting), but in the back the padded seat gently presses against them and I'm fine. I'm not one to indulge psychological myth interpretation, finding them too reductive and rather domineering, but, wrapped in winter wear, a scarf secured around my head so that my breath is warm and wet against my face, me folded into the back seat so precisely that a seat belt feels redundant, I'm aware that there may be something vaguely uterine going on here. I've actually thought about this, on the way to work. I haven't thought about it much, or bothered to parse what it means about me, it just crosses my mind every once in a while, more in an ironic and detached way than any other. Anyway. Once we are all in and underway, there is no conversation, just silence. It's the same during breakfast, actually. A few mumbled details about the coming day may escape, but that's about it. The silence isn't awkward or weird but the silence of people who for the most part get along well, already spend their days together, and have nothing much to say at the moment. Wait, that's not right. There may be no conversation in the car, but there sure isn't silence. There's my brother's car. It's nothing special, as far as cars go. It's a Cavalier ('99, I think) but he's done... something to it. We live a few kilometers out of a small town, but people in the small town can hear it. It's a muffler thing; he's very fond of it. But so, in the back of this small car, sitting above what could be the province's loudest after-market muffler for all I know, moving through the dark winter morning along with all the other unfortunate cars carrying people to work, I'm content. It's not a long drive, only about 15 minutes. The shop that we work in is only one town over, so there really is no commute to speak of. The day is going to be long. All the days are long now. But, at the moment, I'm not at work and I'm enjoying these last work-less moments.

0728. We arrive at work and I once again am forced to wrestle with the front seat. It's an inelegant sight. The shop is visible from the highway and I imagine motorists seeing me - legs twisting for footing, the car more birthing me than admitting me - and chuckling at my expense. The thought is more of a reflex than anything else. I've never really being laughed at that I recall but I've imagined through much of my life that someone, somewhere is laughing at me. It's a symptom of being too self-aware, and not the good kind of self-aware. Most of the time, these sorts of thoughts don't even register on a conscious lever but rather manifest as sort of mental tics, like someone (okay, me) constantly pulling at their shirt in an effort not to let it bunch up or tighten in a way that highlights one's (mine) unflattering figure. And so I'm finally out, and I tug at my jacket to get it back into place, that smirking seat having tried, since it couldn't hold me, to at least strip me. I walk into the shop, in which hangs that strange silence that's only found in those places normally cacophonous and aurally dangerous. It's the same kind of silence heard in schools after school and in churches during weekdays, the silence that shouldn't be. In minutes, it will be overwhelmed by a rush of engulfing noise, noise not only heard but felt, sound that moves through as well as around you. I stow my lunch in the small lunch room, and grab my gear. Someone, me or my brother or my father, turns on the dust collector, a sort of vacuum nervous system with arms and tentacles stretching throughout the shop - there is a second in which you can hear the metallic scraping as the motor spins up, the mechanical equivalent of taking a deep breath, and then a whooshing roar, a sort of sonic wave that sweeps through and takes hold of the shop, and the day has begun.

Review :: Let the Right One In

In my last post, I mentioned, after giving The Dark Knight top honours as my favourite picture of the year, that significant gaps existed in my experience of 2008's movies, which meant that my choice came with some heavy qualifiers. Let the Right One In was one of those gaps. Now that I've seen, I don't know if my choice has changed. It has been challenged, however. And this challenger comes with some damn sharp teeth.

What was the last good vampire movie? I mean the last really good vampire movie. 1922's Nosferatu? It could be reasonably argued, I think. F.W. Murnau might have single-handedly created and ended the vampire horror movie genre. Since then, nearly every creature of the night movie has tread the same path. After all, when it comes right down to it, the vampire mythos, with its convoluted rules and gimmicks, its well-worn and by now utterly tiresome tropes and conventions, are just not all that interesting. Sunlight. Garlic. Stakes. Blah, blah, blah. I mean, just look at this. Look at it. Look at it and try to resist the urge to find something sharp and pointed to drive through your own heart just to escape its soul-crushing banality. This is what vampires have become: icons for disaffected teenagers; once potent metaphors of human evil reduced to the boring cliches of high-school drama. But it's not just the recent spate of glossy, teen-marketed films. From Lestat to Blade to Buffy (which, the careful reader will know, I love), it's hard to find anything in vampire cinema to get excited about. (A few exceptions exist: Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht and E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire and... well, maybe that's it.) So, when I started hearing buzz about a new vampire film wowing festival audiences - and not just a new vampire film, a Swedish vampire film - I was initially skeptical. If there's one thing I don't need, it's to suffer through more imported, sub-titled Anne Rice style undead angst and sexual ennui. However, I did finally overcame those apprehensions and watched Let the Right One In. And I'm glad that I did. Let the Right One In isn't the new definitive vampire film; it probably won't enter the popular consciousness in the same way that the over-rated Interview with the Vampire did (at least not until the recently announced, and entirely pointless, American remake is set loose against us).* But, cinematic cynicism aside, it is the most haunting and beautiful vampire story told since Klaus Kinski donned his make-up.

Based on a novel of the same name, Let the Right One In (Lat den ratte komma in), directed by Tomas Alfredson, is the story of a bullied and lonely 12-year old boy, Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), who one day meets and befriends the young girl who has just moved in next to him, Eli (Lina Leandersson). But there is something a little... uh, off about this girl. By now, if you've heard anything about the film, or even seen the trailer, you know that this young girl is actually a vampire. But in meeting and falling in love with her, Oskar begins to gain confidence and stand up for himself. And really, that's it. That's the story. It sounds more like a coming-of-age** story than a vampire story, I know. But one of the things that the film does so beautifully is blend in a number of different elements and genre conventions in such a way as to make those conventions and their influence nearly invisible. There's a poignant adolescent love story here. There's also a revenge story here. There are nods towards slasher films and family dramas. Insufferable as some of these things normally are, in Let the Right One In none of these elements are allowed to become too strong; they are ghostly influences, subtly colouring the audience's lens; they are all wrapped tightly within and managed by a stark Swedish aesthetic and an ethereal and lyrical realism. It's an arthouse film, but one that has been stripped of pretensions, stripped of smugness, and stripped of affectation. There is a strict economy here - an economy of language, of effect, of style - and the result is an ominous, lonely film, drenched in a blighted aesthetic that is at once realistic and slightly dreamy. It's beautiful, in other words.

Vampire movies usually take one of two paths: either they are lurid, over-sexed affairs or they are bloody, gory massacres (and if you are really lucky, they are sometimes both). In either case, it's usually an exchange of fluids thing. Vampires are hot and messy; they are lightning rods of teen angst, which means, once you get past the morbidity and death-glamour of the whole thing, that they are dull, boring, usually obnoxiously self-aware atrocities. Let the Right One In avoids all of this by tracing a rather ambivalent path through the wreckage of vampire films past. It remains firmly committed to its vampire elements, presenting them with a savage eye that never blinks away from its murderous nature (the lengths that one character in particular will go to secure blood is both horrific and oddly affectionate) (though, I should point out, the film more gives the impression of violence than an actual portrayal of it); at the same time, however, the vampire side of the story never feels primal, that is, it never feels as if it is the film's central concern. There is something mundane about the film's horror. Its violence is neither sexy nor self-indulgent; it is bleak, barren and gorgeously unaffected, by which I mean that it de-glamorizes vampire life, presenting it not as a grand, romantic retreat into darkness, a la Interview with the Vampire, et al, but as a lonely, empty waste where every day is just another twist down a spiral of shame and self-loathing. There is something genuinely arresting about such a portrayal, about such an impoverished aesthetic. This ambivalence runs throughout the film, both in terms of narrative and cinematography. Extreme close-ups compliment long, barely moving tracking shots; motivations are sometimes a bit murky, but never unreasonable; entire stories are suggested by two-minutes scenes or single shots. And the film's final conflict, which resolves the film's action in a disturbingly satisfying way, is a master class on cinematic style: a nearly perfectly executed use of framing and off-camera action.

If Ingmar Bergman had made a vampire film, I think it would have looked an awful lot like Let the Right One In. Though this film isn't fraught with as much existential angst as that other Swedish master always seemed to prefer, and though it doesn't have people sitting around thinking about the meaning of their lives or the death of God, it does bear some striking resemblances, especially aesthetic and dramatic ones, to the works of Bergman. I don't know, maybe it's a Swedish thing. Outside of Bergman, I'm not very familiar with Scandinavian cinema, however, so I can't really comment on their entire industry without sounding reductive and ethnocentric. If Let the Right One In is any indication, however, some exciting things are happening there. Certainly this is the most exciting thing to happen to vampire films in a long time. If you are a vampire fan, or better yet, if you are a good movie fan, Let the Right One In deserves your immediate attention.

Experto crede: a heavy contender for best film of 2008. Forget that Twilight shit, this is the vampire movie of 2008. in fact, it might be the vampire movie of the last ten, twenty, or thirty years.

* I do not understand Hollywood's recent fascination with re-makes, especially foreign language horror re-makes. It all smacks a bit of xenophobia, if you ask me. Perfectly good films, like Ringu, which work so much better in their original milieu, get hacked and slashed into sterile and artistically bereft star vehicles. One of the more high-profile victims of this trend is Chan-wook Park's Oldboy, one of the more dark and twisted revenge flicks of recent memory, which, it was just recently announced, will soon be given the Hollywood treatment at the hands of Steven Spielberg and Will Smith. It should be so lucky. If you know anything about this film, you know how preposterous an idea this is. American horror is, for the most part, boring. If suffers from a strangely puritan impulse, a no-doubt studio mandated directive never to give audiences anything more than gore and titillation, never, in other words, to cross the line from opium cinema into intellectually or aesthetically vibrant filmmaking. It plays it safe, staying well within its permitted bounds. So, when Hollywood, roused from its stagnant slumber, notices that other brands of horror - be they Japanese, Korean, Swedish, whatever - are not only doing well but receiving actual critical attention, something American horror hasn't received for a long time, it gets jealous and decides, in a fit of terror and outrage (prompted by premonitions of its own irrelevance, no doubt), to grab those properties and subject them to the production line re-make procedure. This usually means that the re-make makes more money, if only because the anesthetized North American audience will apparently watch just about anything. But it also means that those very things that made the original films interesting are cut, or at least aggressively sanitized, to the point that no one wants to see them. Fans of the originals are left disappointed while new viewers, who never saw the originals' brilliance, pass them off as nothing more than just another boring horror film in a long string of recent boring horror films. It's artistic rape, really.

** The most pretentious and boring of all pretentious and boring cinema.

The List, 2008 Edition

Now that I got all that self-pitying out of the way, I can move on to what the end of the year is really about: lists!  Nothing sums of 365 days like reducing it all to easily digestable snippits of largely decontextualized information.  Ah, bullet point hermeneutics.  This isn't a themed list, however.  This isn't the top ten movies, or games, or albums.  Oh no.  This is The List.  The dcornelius list of top ten... things.  I just don't feel like being comprehensive this time around.  So, with drums rolling and crowds roaring, I present the definitive list of 2008.  Take that, John Cusack!

FAVOURITE MOVIE

The Dark Knight.  Between writing my initial and embarassingly glowing review of The Dark Knight and seeing it again this holiday season, a number of criticisms grew in my mind.  The movie was too long; it betrayed subtle story-telling; it was a bit too cartoony in some of its more extreme elements.  The second viewing, however, though it didn't completely erase those criticisms, eclipsed whatever objections I had to the point that they didn't really matter.  It is a great movie.  Runner Up: My Winnipeg. (Due to a variety of factors, I missed a lot this year. Synecdoche, New York, Man on Wire, and Let the Right One In are all movies that I still want to catch up with).

FAVOURITE TELEVISION SERIES

Dexter.  Season three is a wrap and it was brilliant.  Nothing really compares with the first season of this serial killer drama, but season three comes close.  Michael C. Hall can still make anything, any small and mundane activity, seem menacing, ironic, and chilling.  Runner's Up: Battlestar Galactica, The Shield.

FAVOURITE MOVIE THAT I SHOULD HAVE WATCHED LONG AGO BUT DIDN'T

L'Armee des Ombres (Army of Shadows).  Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 film about the French resistence during WWII is breathtaking.  It, along with several of Melville's other films, such as Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, completely transformed the way I watch movies and what I expect from the medium.  Runner Up: the films of Mario Bava.

FAVOURITE VIDEO GAME

Braid.  I can't so more than I already have about this game.  It still blows my mind. Runner Up: Dead Space.

FAVOURITE BOOK THAT I RE-READ

Gravity's Rainbow.  Okay, I didn't really read the whole thing again in 2008, but I did go back and re-read many, many passages.  It's bizarre, grotesque, hilarious, morbid, ironic, irreverent, terrifying, and obscene.  It's also brilliant.  I don't really know what the term "postmodern" means (and I suspect no one does) but if it means anything than that definition comes alive in Gravity's Rainbow.  

FAVOURITE BOOK/AUTHOR THAT I FINALLY READ

The poetry of William Butler Yeats.  Being a student often means that you end up reading things you don't want to read and not reading things you want to read.  I finally got to spend some time with Yeats, however, and I'm damn happy that I did.  Runner Up: Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

FAVOURITE ANACHRONISM

Silent Hill 2.  Yeah, it's that good. 

FAVOURITE ALBUM

The Slip and Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails.  Yes, a tie.  It was a good year for NIN fans. Runner Up: Vida La Vida by Coldplay.  

FAVOURITE BAND THAT I JUST NOW DISCOVERED BUT WHO HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR A WHILE

Sigur Ros.  Icelandic rock, post-rock, alt-rock, emo, whatever.  Their music is beautiful and haunting and for weeks I was transfixed by the song "Milano."  Sometimes, purely by accident, you discover things that you end up really loving.  This is one of those things.  Runner Up: Coheed and Cambria.

So there it is.  The highlights of an entire year's worth of watching, listening, reading, and playing summed up, dissected, and delivered in neat little, bloodless packages.  There is a sort of butchery involved in making lists.  It assumes that anything in life can be decontextualized, anatomized, and isolated.  A list is an autopsy.  How, for instance, can I talk about Sigur Ros without darkening the discussion with how I felt at the time and the emotional affinities it created?  How can I evaluate the sadness that I felt playing Silent Hill 2?  I can't.  I don't want to.  A list is just taking a step back, re-evaluating.  It assumes the largely fictional detached vantage point, which is probably something we need at the end of the year.  

Good Riddance

It's the end of the year. The end of... something. For me, it's the end of school.

For eight years, I've been an undergrad. Eight years. Hell. However, I've put three degrees in the can and I think I'm better for it. I started at Briercrest College, a small-ish Christian college in southern Saskatchewan, where I hammered out two bachelor's degrees, one in theology and one in the humanities (vague, I know). I spent five years there, and though it didn't really open the doors I'd hoped it would, the training that I received there - academic training, moral training, personal, spiritual, etc - has been invaluable. I am who I am in large part because of that place and so I am grateful. After that, I skipped over to the University of Saskatchewan with every intention of banging out an English Literature degree with as much haste, and posthaste, as possible. However... see above closed doors. The transfer credits didn't amount to squat, so I spent three years (well, two and a half, plus some summers) padding my educational resume and fulfilling the requirements. I am, as of now, and notwithstanding some as-of-yet still unpaid tuition fees, an English graduate. Degree number three, in the bag. Now, on to bigger and better things. Bigger, at least. Greener pastures, right?

So it's been a good year. And it's been shitty. Upon reflection (and what else is the end of the year for besides reflection? Oh right, booze. Well, I'm drinking wine as I write this so I've got that covered), every plan that I made, every hope that I laid, turned brittle, fragile, and pretty much crumbled at my feet. I graduated, but just barely. It was a fight to the finish. (I'm speaking financially, by the way. Academically, I nailed it.) A conspiracy, its tentacles seemingly stretching into all sectors of my life, both public and private, was launched against me. At every turn, and on every front, frustration bit me in the ass. Scholarships were denied. Loans were reduced to rubble. Jobs disappeared. Things that I had assumed were guaranteed turned out to be smoke, vapor. Life is fragile. Dreams are even more fragile. Both can be upset by the smallest decision of another. Both can be set back, darkened, and even snuffed out.

But I'm being dramatic. I'm indulging. I did get that third degree locked down, and I did it with style. I'm proud of the scholarship that I can produce. Academically, I'm no slouch. I may slouch in other areas of life, but not in school. No sir.

So 2008 is done. Good. Get rid of it. It was a stressful year. Highs and lows, ups and downs, cliche here, cliche there, etc, etc. All that proverbial knowledge, all those gnomic sayings and all their sickening banality, their tedious mundanity... they are all true. School is tiring, family is tiring, money is tiring, lack of money is tiring. Life is tiring. What I'm saying is I'm tired. I need a break. I have eight months to kill before I enter graduate school, which seems like a good thing but I honestly have no idea what I'm going to do and it's a bit scary. I thought I had a job lined up but... the conspiracy. Thwarted again, and at the very last minute, at just the moment when the conception becomes reality, where life is most fragile.

I'm not sure what's going to happen in 2009. Actually, I'm quite nervous about it, and that's not good. There are two things I can't deal with like an adult, being bored and being uncertain. Both tend to drive me towards unhealthy trespasses into my past: a renewed interest in the heavy metal music of my adolescence and re-runs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Both are comfort food to me, and they tend to appear, like not-so-subtle screaming klaxons, right when I'm most depressed.

Yes, lately I've been listening to Tourniquet and crushing on Sarah Michelle Gellar. Again. I'm in a state of emotional regression, I recognize that. Thanks again, 2008.

So here I am, on the raggedy edge. Graduated. Unemployed. Three degrees. Tired. Damn it. I need a new year, maybe one a little less fraught with peril and disappointment. Also, a miracle would be nice. Maybe a finger stretching out from the clouds, pointing the way. Yeah? Yeah? I know, probably not going to happen. It's not that I don't believe in intervention. I do. I just don't expect it, not for myself anyway.

Okay, enough. Like 2008, I'm done. This post is upsetting me now. It was supposed to be ironic catharsis. But now I'm not sure what it is. It's more sincere than I intended. That bit about Buffy... that's revealing more of myself than I'd planned. Of course I could delete all this. I'm considering it. But I won't. Maybe tomorrow I will.

Anyway. To 2009. I'd toast but I'm out of wine. Cheers anyway.

9

Okay, I'm intrigued.

It's a feature-length adaptation of a short film by the same name, 9, directed by the same guy, one Mr. Shane Acker. Looks to me like he's got more than a little visual prowess, though I wouldn't yet call him a "visionary," an entirely over-used word in the film industry (I mean, come on. I liked 300, but I wouldn't call Zack Snyder a visionary, though the Watchmen trailer sure wants you to think he is). I'm not sure what to make of Russia's Timur Bekmambetov's involvement, though.  I liked the Night Watch and Day Watch movies, or at least I liked their visual style, and I'll confess to looking forward to the forthcoming Twilight Watch, but I kind of hated the obnoxious Wanted.  But since he's only producing here, I won't get too worried.  Also, as a final note, Burton, Acker and company, or at least their publicity department, have good taste. The song playing in the trailer's second half is "Welcome Home" by Coheed and Cambria.  

Here's the original, eleven minute-long short that Acker made, and it alone is enough to secure my anticipation of the feature adaptation. Enjoy.

Some Thoughts on Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

In my downtime, while I'm searching for things to do now that I'm no longer entrenched within the mud and blood of academics, I've been catching up on a few "last-gen" games that I missed. I know these games have been out for years but this is my blog, dammit, and I'll write about whatever I want to write about.

I had never played a Metal Gear Solid game before, so when Substance (the Xbox version of Sons of Liberty) arrived in the mail the other day, I was moderately excited, especially now that the semester is over, I'm officially finished my third, count 'em third, undergrad degree, and I have some extra time on my hands, which, I know, could be more profitably used - by, like, reading Joyce's Ulysses (honestly, I'm getting to it) or finally sitting down and writing something meaningful - but I'm tired of all that shit. I need a break. I've read enough and written enough in the last eight years that I really want to just lay about, mentally speaking, for a while. So game on, I say. Where was I? Oh, excited about Metal Gear. I'd say that in terms of anticipatory arousal I was about a 7, 10 being an almost undeniably urge to couple with the game, like with Silent Hill 2, and 1 being the flaccid disinterest I feel every time Square Enix announces yet another excursion into hermaphroditic heroism. There's an aura about the MGS franchise, a tone used when speaking of it usually reserved for religious ceremony. Solid Snake is one of those icons of gaming, one of those god-like figures apotheosized by millions of devoted (and, let's face it, probably sweaty, lonely, and sexually confused) fans. I knew a bit about the franchise. I knew, for instance, that the games are strangely fixated on Snake's ass, which in all the games have been very lovingly and carefully designed (see) so as almost to give players a whiff of Snake's musky greatness. I also, and more importantly, knew that the games have a tendency to be... um, bombastically dramatic. By which I mean incomprehensible. But, I was still excited, ready to feel up this franchise. Only an hour into my Metal Gear dalliance, I already knew two things: one, this game is old and two, it's still pretty fun. The mechanics are ancient. They were ancient, I fear, when they first launched. Just one year after Sons of Liberty's release, for instance, Ubisoft would launch Splinter Cell, which in terms of stealth gameplay absolutely eclipsed Metal Gear Solid. All the stealth aspects of MGS2 just feel like a game, as if mimicking anything approaching reality was the furthest thing from the designers' minds. Stealth in MGS2 is governed by very rigid sets of rules and parameters. You can run, flat out sprint, past a guard and unless his very short and limited field of vision is aimed at you, you are invisible and silent. So it all feels very contrived. But that's not all that wrong here. I'll make a list. The weapon combat is clumsy as all hell, basically requiring you to switch to a fixed first-person view if you want to hit anything. The hand-to-hand and sword combat (yes, a sword... stealthy) is even worse and basically only lets you fumble about in the dark, like a clumsy and desperate teen attempting to unclasp a bra and reach the promised land. But, worst of all, the camera seems to be alligned not with the player but with the terrorists as it continually refuses to show you anything. On top of all of that, the game is a clinic on how not to pace your game. Hideo Kojima, the mind behind Metal Gear, is apparently in love with every last freakin' word he writes and so makes you sit through hour after hour of exposition and talking heads. In the last 45 minutes of the game, I played for about five minutes, the time it took to beat the boss. The rest of the time was spent watching character after character pontificate, reveal plot twists, confess parentage, etc, etc, on and on, until the player is rendered comatose, which I'm taking as a mean-spirited gameplay mechanic: lull the player into torpor and then laugh when he tries to rouse himself to fight. But, despite these archaic limitations, despite gameplay that has been improved upon by almost every other entry into the stealth genre, despite the game's best efforts to leave me unconscious, despite my better judgment, I found myself having fun. There's a lot here that I don't like, and writing it all down I realize that I should not like this game. It's pretentious, over-written, and ludicrous, yet it also has something else, an X-factor if you will, some unquantifiable aspect that keeps all those criticisms from locking the game away forever in limbo somewhere. It's a fun game and, I assume based on this second entry alone, a fun franchise. Not by any stretch of this writer's imagination (and that imagination is stretchy, let me assure you) is this game art, which is what I'm always looking for these days. It didn't even fulfill the expectations I had for it, but it was a decent holiday distraction and I'm glad I finally caught up with this franchise, if for no other reason than that now I know what it's all about.

Flight of the Conchords

Okay, time to champion a little-known television series. Flight of the Conchords, an HBO sitcom just entering its second season, follows two independent (read: failing) New Zealand musicians and their dubiously credentialed manager as they try to launch a career in New York. It's like Once meets Napoleon Dynamite. While the stories are fun and clever, and usually feature more than enough humiliation and self-deprecation to suggest outright derangement on the creators' part, the real meat of the series lies in its songs. I don't know how to describe them without spiraling into meaningless cliche: they are "off-beat" (whatever that means, especially in a musical context), quirky (but not sickeningly so), self-referential (but not sickeningly so), and... well, just fun. I lack the grammar to intelligently talk about music, especially music so obviously odd, so I'll just show you what I mean.

Retrospective :: Silent Hill 2

This trend of reviewing or discussing games here is starting to upset me. Nevertheless...

For the past year, ever since I was made aware of its existence, I've been trying to hunt down a copy of Silent Hill 2 for the Xbox. Not one of the stores here in Saskatoon have stocked it in years, which isn't surprising, and I've been sitting on the Goozex queue for over a year, which is a bit more surprising. People who have it don't want to part with it, it seems. I finally got a used copy of it from Amazon.com. After a year of patiently waiting, I finally clutched it in my trembling hands. Reverently, I placed it in my Xbox. I felt like I was about to have a religious experience. I tingled all over. I shivered and quivered. I broke into a sweat. I was terrified that it wouldn't live up to its legendary reputation. I, in other words, was more excited to finally play this seven year old game than I was to play almost anything else released this year, including Gears of War 2 or Fallout 3. I closed my eyes, closed the tray, and played the game.

And it was nearly sublime, as sublime as a game can be I suppose. I thought I'd experienced most of what games have to offer at this time. I thought things like Braid and Bioshock represented the best argument for games as art. I knew that the medium's potential had been hinted at in the past but I had no idea that someone had actually crossed, with bold step and stern gaze, the invisible threshold separating entertainment and art upon which games always stumble. I thought I'd already seen the medium used as effectively as anyone knew how to use it yet. I was wrong. Silent Hill 2 is the single best argument for games as art. Or perhaps it's an argument for how games are not art, since its exceptional nature only casts all other attempts into shadow. I've always known that the series had some serious punch to it. I liked Origins, which was the first Silent Hill game I played (lame, I know), I liked the action-oriented Homecoming probably more than it deserves, and I loved The Room... but those games are nothing - and I mean nothing! - when compared with the genius of Silent Hill 2. (Okay, The Room is still damn brilliant. It is much, much better than either Origins or Homecoming.)

As I was playing it, everything just felt right. The game mechanics, the dreamy sometimes atonal, sometimes discordant music, the ambiguous dialogue scenes, and yes even the dated graphics engine that powers this "last generation" title, all seemed to perfectly coalesce into an experience unlike any other. Silent Hill 2 transports you. You play as James Sunderland, an emotionally damaged man looking for his wife, Mary. Mary's been dead for three years, however, having died of a terminal illness. Yet inexplicably, James receives a letter from her saying that she is waiting for him in Silent Hill. So James sets out to find her, to discover the truth, and in doing so is propelled into a nightmare that is poignant, haunting, horrifying and absolutely beautiful.

The Silent Hill franchise is famed for its horror, and rightly so. Its twisted human shapes, dredged from the depths of eros and thanatos, can be truly disturbing projections of agony and despair. What the series is less famous for, though, is its beauty. The Room hints at this beauty but the American efforts at the series, Origins and Homecoming, basically banish it from town in favour of a constant sense of oppression that developers seem to think horror gamers require. Silent Hill 2 is beautiful, however. Tonally, it's like Braid meets Hellraiser. And shockingly, it retains the intelligence of both (and by Hellraiser I mean the Clive Barker film and not the bastardized sequels that followed in which, like the recent entries into the Silent Hill franchise, the parts that made it special were jettisoned to make room for the more spectacular parts that only made it conventional). Silent Hill 2 isn't just a survival horror game, you see. Like Braid, the game is an exploration of a theme. It is a psychological landscape translated into game mechanics. It is the projection of a troubled psyche. If you just want to be dropped into a town and be able to start blasting away at beasties, stay away from this. Play Resident Evil. Or Homecoming. Silent Hill 2 requires something more from the players, though. It requires human sympathy and a familiarity with the ambiguous. The game won't fill in all the pieces, won't launch into scenes of unnecessary exposition in which what you are seeing and doing is explained. The game doesn't interpret itself for you. It lets you feel the game. The metaphors are never mentioned, they are played. James rarely, if ever, comments on what he is doing. The player directly experiences the horror, the pathos, and the bright shining moments of insight, and the developers leave it up to the player to make of those moments what he can.

This sort of story-telling is rarely found in games. Developers almost always, and I don't know why, feel as if they need to spell out the game so explicitly that every single moron that picks up the game can follow it. Even Dead Space, my choice for Game of the Year, is pretty obvious on the story end of things, though it is admittedly more maturely crafted than most major releases. And I think that is what's missing in most games, maturity. Silent Hill 2 is mature. I don't mean "mature" as in Rated M (though it is); I mean mature as in grown up, sophisticated, self-aware, meta, etc. It feels like a game made for a truly adult audience, not the prurient adult audience that simply looks for blood, breasts and bad language.

2008 is being considered one of the best years for gaming in a long time. Aside from a few notable releases, however, most of the games currently being celebrated are the quivering fascinations of the moment - the shiny, hot, but ultimately shallow ephemera of an always insatiable market. Not one of the major developers show much interest in crafting compelling, introspective, thematically tense games. They are only after the spectacle. We have an entire industry scrambling to foist upon the market nothing more than summer blockbuster-style extravaganzas... and we have an audience gobbling it. Silent Hill 2 demands a higher standard.

A while back, I wrote that gaming grew up with Braid. I was wrong. Gaming grew up a long time ago with Silent Hill 2 but, outside a few of the upright heart and pure, nobody seemed to notice or care. You should care. Silent Hill 2 is a masterpiece, the type of game rarely attempted and even more rarely executed. It has flaws and limitations, but those are mostly matters of technology and software. In vision it is nearly perfect.

Trailer :: Star Trek

Geeking.  Out.  Now. 

4 November 2008 - It's Time for Change

The new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

And freely men confess that this world's spent,

When in the planets and the firmament

They seek so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out again to his atomies.

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply, and all relation:

Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,

For every man alone thinks he hath got

To be a phoenix, and that there can be

None of that kind, which he is, but he.

-John Donne, "The First Anniversary," lines 205-18.

The Zombie Expert

All my years of cinematic splatter and undead carnage are finally beginning to pay off.  My devotion to Romero and Fulci is being noticed. Now, not only am I among the very few who are actually prepared for the inevitable zombie outbreak (and the outbreak is coming, trust me, whether it be caused by voodoo mumbo-jumbo, rage-infected monkeys or alien interference) but other people are starting to recognize my expertise in the field. Yesterday, I, as a credible zombie expert, was interviewed by a reporter from The Sheaf. Sure, it's only a local university newspaper doing a Halloween special but at least the very real and important message of zombie preparedness is starting to be heard by the largely ignorant public. I can only hope that, when the zombie apocalypse does come and the undead begin to feast insatiably on all our juicy, fattened North American flesh, that people, in their darkest hours of horror and despair, will remember my words of wisdom - perhaps, just perhaps, they will save someone's life.  

I'll post a link to the article when it's published.  

UPDATE: Here's the link to the article.  It's on page two.  Enjoy.  And remember... you don't have to outrun the zombies, you just have to outrun your friends.

An Elaborate Excuse

I always wonder how much of myself I should bring to this blog. As people, we are always more then we present ourselves as. Whatever the context, whether it be a university class, a church pew or an internet forum, we pick and chose those aspects of ourselves that we want other people to perceive and so there is always a sense of theatricality embedded deeply within not only our social lives but our written lives as well. This isn't a matter of deception, however, and the at-this-point cliched notion that we all wear a variety of false masks, a piece of important-sounding psycho-vomit which seems to have been designed to suggest that we ritually select whatever personality fiction is most expedient at the moment and alter our actions accordingly, thus foregoing an "authentic" personality, is fundamentally flawed because those masks are not impositions of personality but rather manifestations of a personality too large to be constantly disclosed. We select the ways we represent ourselves not out of some deceptive agenda or because our "authentic" personalities are so stillborn as to receive whatever imprint stronger personalities may impress upon them (though I suppose both could be true in some cases, but not, I think, in most), but rather out of politeness and an unwillingness to burden others with forced intimacy. Full disclosure of a personality can be an awkward experience for everyone involved and so it is often best, and most simple, to present only those parts of yourself that a situation requires.

Anyway, when it comes to Babylon I've deliberately put certain restriction upon myself in an effort of guide my readership's perception of me (this readership is, I fear, largely illusory or at the very best rather small, which means all my efforts to guide others' perception of me has ended in a self-reflective knot in which I'm now discussing how I've deliberately shaped an audience's perceptions of me when I myself am in fact the audience. I am both perceiver and perceived and, I just noticed, both of me have a headache). I've kept gaming, a rather large element of my personality, and of my day, mostly hidden or at least I've relegated it mostly to the background, only letting that portion of myself out every once in a while to express either exasperation or affirmation in what I think are special situations. I've tried to keep the geek impulse in check, in other words, in order vainly to appear both knowledgeable and wise perhaps even charismatic (okay, some elements of self-representation are purely fictive) but also because personalities, despite their usually multiform natures, are so often judged on the basis of only one of their aspects and are thereafter slotted into prefabricated stereotypes. Personally, I'd much rather be sterotyped as an English student or a film critic than as a gamer. And since in the public consciousness one person can rarely occupy more than one stereotypical space, I often work very hard to ensure that some elements of my personality are privileged over others.

But now that I've rambled at length about it I feel it only appropriate to transgress my own self-imposed restrictions regarding personality disclosure, to transcend my self-fashioned self image by incorporating another image, one that might, it's true, damage that first so carefully laboured over image, which I can only hope is at this point strong enough to absorb such a decadent and low-brow disclosure as this (the fact that this post directly follows one on Dante has not gone unnoted). You see, all of this babbling has really been nothing more than an elaborate excuse to say that recently I've been playing Dead Space, an extremely violent and no-doubt violence inducing game, and that I love it so much I want to share this excellent trailer. Seriously, it's one of the best game trailers ever made. So, uh... enjoy. And hopefully whatever image of intelligence I've built up over the last year or so isn't about to be entirely reduced to rubble.