It's Time for Ashes of Time again

Upon In the Mood for Love's release in the UK I was lucky enough to stand in freezing cold winter weather for six hours, after which I got a standby ticket to watch Wong Kar Wai and Maggie Cheung present the premiere of said movie for the first time in the UK followed by a candid Q&A session. After the film I asked Wong if he had ever thought of reediting any of his films, given the infamous editorial periods that accompany his productions and the - at the time - new market for DVD which took the obscure Laserdisc into the mass market. Scary to think that at the time DVD was a new technology with an uncertain future. He genuinely paused for a long time, and said that he'd thought about it. And the only film he'd perhaps - lots of vagueness here - return to was Ashes of Time. Something that embedded itself in my Hong Kong cinema fanboy mind for nearly a decade now. Well here is the trailer for the rerelease of a beautifully reprinted Ashes of Time. Whether or not you found it too obtuse for a wuxia, there was never a production before or since in the golden age of Hong Kong filmmaking. Not only do they not make them like this any more, I doubt they ever will, again.

As far as that evening long ago, I remember Wong explaining why he did certain confusing things to Cheung that made her feel her character was very elusive. Right there on stage in front of everyone he explained his methodology of purposely affecting this dislocation of identity. Cheung was exasperated, "Why didn't you tell me this while we were shooting." As if she really had never heard this before. Wong paused hiding behind his sunglasses and said quietly "because then you wouldn't have done it that way."



Read everything you'd ever want to know about the rerelease including impressions from Cannes here.

Jetpacks and mantits

From Joe Cornish, one half of Adam of Joe, one of Britain's greatest ever comedy duos. Ten years before Robot Chicken they were doing parodies of movies with toys. Adam has done this proposed song for the new James Bond film which is for my money the best Bond song since the 70s. Whatever happened to jetpacks?



Here's their parody of Seven:

The Assasination of an underrated movie

How's this for underrated: a movie so unloved that the studio held back on it for two years and even critics could not appreciate. In retrospect, movies like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey were not appreciated critically upon release. Sometimes there's a movie that's so singular in purpose and intention that it even confounds that establishment, which can only be a good thing. But like anything worth something, it has peculiarities, and its not for everyone.

That movie is The Asssassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which to me is the greatest Western in nearly a decade. I avoided the movie for eons due to word of mouth and the suggestion that it was merely emulative of the worst aspects of Terence Malick. Given the absolute veneration I hold Malick with in my heart, it seemed like something doomed from the start.

What we have as released is an odd beast, an edit the result of two years bickering with a studio after a four hour cut was praised by those who saw it as a masterpiece. It does drag a little in places. There's some story compression in voiceover that's a little awkward. But it's a slow burn, and you have to give it a chance to wear down your defenses. It is not Malick lite, although interested in atmospheric cadences visually it isn't as lyrical as Malick and presents a more direct novelistic approach to theme.

What it is however is brilliant, a morally complicated investigation of an epic act of quintesstially mythic American values deconstructed into all its messy, vague, human bits and pieces. A single bullet revebrates through space and time in this movie, a single act becoming a part of the legend of America but the fallout in reality being eternal consequence. This is a movie that dares to show the silent clumsiness after a gunfight and linger upon it. That allows its characters to go to their darkest places willingly, but ultimately offers each the chance at some personal moments of true humanity. Casey Affleck is the true revelation here: the movie is his, and not Pitt's at all. At first his acting choices seem a little odd and disturbing. By the films' end however you see where it was all going and it's not exactly what you think. The film allows mercy and pity upon even the worst acts, but at the same time remaining a very lucid examination of the unconscious we've woven this country together from, collectively whether we'd like to or not.

This is a movie for those who don't mind lingering, or examining the sky or a field for what portents it might hold, for those who want to feel something complicated and uneasy when it strikes them. I think it's an absolutely ignored and shabby masterpiece, and it's a damn shame our own critical community would pillory an attempt to make art within the studio system, even if it isn't totally successful. Ultimately, the film cost next to nothing and features one of the world's biggest movie stars. And in the US, after sitting on a shelf for two years, was released only in major cities for a short period.

Grand Theft Auto IV in retrospect: it sucks, and a Pulitzer winning novelist agrees

The first and perhaps last videogame I ever went to pick up at midnight was Grand Theft Auto IV. While it would appear that GTA's success has hinged on its unchecked id raging away in a world without consequence, the real reason the Grand Theft Auto games became bona fide successes was that it truly set a new paradigm, the sandbox style of gameplay. GTA drops you in an open ended world where you are left to do for the most part as you please, constrained only by the geography and physics of that world. It was just as fun wasting hours harassing pedestrians or trying to jump a motorcycle between two skyscrapers or even for that matter obsessively stalking the landscape learning what might be hidden on a rooftop or alleyway - or heck, sometimes just to get a great view - as it was to advance the narrative. That's the real heart of GTA's success: it essentially gave us a set of action figures and a limitless playset to wreak havoc with, urban spaces so well defined we learned them like real cities.

It's this limitless set of possibilities that truly remains the reason for GTA's success. The bad boy aspects, with all that oft reported maiming of hookers and driving down innocent pedestrians we could sort of excuse for such beautiful gameplay. The crime milieu the game was set in was so crude and the satirical veneer painted over its pseudo America so over the top that one didn't have to take it so seriously.The height of the GTA series remains for me Vice City. By transposing the gameplay to a ludicrous and stylized cartoon combination of Scarface and Miami Vice everything cohered: the mass murdering your protagonist must take part in made sense with all the excess of the 80s around him, and the soundtrack was a work of genius.

But the gaming press, still adfit, still writing about quality as a subset of numerical values, they were praising GTA IV to high heaven. This game, they said, finally combined those aspects of the GTA series with something truly meaningful. This was videogaming's Godfather II, its Sopranos. The story resonated and forced you into hard moral choices. And the thing truly was a work of art. Artist Tom Sachs even went so far as to call it the defining artwork of our time despite never having played it and showing a limited sense of what turning on a videogame entails. Now that's lofty hyperbole.

But I was a believer, because three previous installments ranked not as my favorite games of all time but definitely as some of the most fun; a good time in GTA makes you impose narrative, not the other way around, a random adventure contained within the game rules becoming a boring story for your mates. And the gaming press, again, was ecstatic.

Having now completed the game a few months later, or at least finally closed the narrative that grounds it, I can say easily that I am even more embarassed I picked it up at midnight than ever before. And thankfully more sanity abounds. In what I can only call the first truly great piece of games criticism, Junot Diaz, he of the incredible The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao sets everyone straight.

Grand Theft Auto IV is the most incredible creation of an urban environment ever witnessed by humankind grafted onto some of the shoddiest, most backwards, confused, hypocritical gameplay and narrative. Game creator Sam Houser likes to repeatedly talk about how he's come to realize his games do one better than the movies or television at telling these stories. While its hard to argue with the series' financial success let's be honest while admitting the games offer fun... The storytelling in GTAIV is so shoddy, with a such a ridiculously stupid notion of free will and player choice that it doesn't even come close to the moral complexity of a single episode of the Sopranos. This is a game to wit in which a melodramatic scene plays out where one gets to take part in that long standing movie cliche: the hero who has the villain finally in his sights and has every great motivation to pull the trigger on them, but can be a better man and walk away. And if one does, and really thinks this has consequence, guess again, because the story is going to put you right afterwards into your character having no choice but executing hundreds. Even better, the game purposely defeats your choice with personal tragedy immediately thereafter, as if to say that your choice had no consequence other than furthering the shoddy story. And what a pretentious stab at crime epic this is, which does start rather promisingly enough, with you from the Balkans having come to America to take part in the immigrant experience and seek revenge. That angle quickly devolves into cliche as you yet again deal with the Italian mafia. Yawn.

What's apparent is that this hubristic view of having conquered the cinema business means that the games' designers have spent most of their time writing and creating cutscenes that combine the expletives of a Martin Scorcese crime epic with the aesthetic of a Thunderbirds puppet show. Imagine Team America World Police as directed by one of Tarantino's lesser clones from the mid 90s. Because it feels like an awful lot of effort went into that silliness while a lot of gameplay from the previous chapters has been removed. The art direction is fantastic, for certain, but there's a great disconnect with the adult nature of things from the rather hilarious motion capture grafted onto what look like wax mannequins designed by Ron Mucek. At least they're clothed.

The hard part in writing all this is that the environment of Liberty City is truly stunning and no one has ever created from scratch such an involved, lucid simulacra of a city ever in any medium. It's astounding. But that spell is broken by things that were not problems in lower tech iterations of the previous games. Cabbies and pedestrians convincingly go about their lives, making small talk. Until you hear the cabbie say the same thing every five seconds, and every cabbie nearby doing the same. Or the time I entered a building and everyone within looked exactly the same, which was at least surreally funny. Every time you flick to a different radio station odds are vast that you're likely to hear the exact same dj banter you heard only minutes ago.

Stupid gameplay decisions abound. You still have to hit the A button to run anywhere with any sense of convenience, which leads to carpal tunnel syndrome. You still have a tendency in firefights to target innocent pedestrians half a mile away from you when a thug is shooting you point blank in the face. And for whatever insane reason for a game called Grand Theft Auto, car handling is a nightmare in this one - perhaps it was meant to be mastered, but its just not fun to drive in this game. Or the fact that the story need be furthered by phone calls after every mission, calls that can get disrupted by random traffic or doing something innocuous like getting out of a car. And for all the majesty of every corner of Liberty City being tremendous, the place feels emptier and less involving than ever before, because so much is inaccessible and there are no real rewards for your own initiative. For every homicidal fantasy acted out there were people who play GTA like good samaritans, doing things like driving ambulances to hospitals with sick people. All of that has been stripped from the game.

Worst of all is the so called element that was supposed to expand and surpass the emotional involvement of a movie: the friends system. You meet characters and befriend them. You spend the majority of your time now in GTA, if you want to keep these friends, answering their calls in the middle of drive bys, having to take them at inopportune moments to the same pool hall for the fortieth time. It is constant and neverending. Pretty soon GTA IV has turned you into an embittered social curmudgeon who wishes your phone would stop ringing, just so you can, you know, play a fucking video game.

GTAIV is imbued with the worst kind of pretension: it believes in its grandiosity when offering mere churlish, childish approximations of older, slower less interactive mediums. A debate rages as to whether games require less cinematic story bits than ever before. GTAIV actually for the first time makes me agree. Games will not surpass cinema by doing what it does on its own terms - it has to surpass cinema by doing things cinema cannot. And never before has the moral confusion of the GTA games been so clearer than when it tries to impose a character upon you with silly plays at sentimentality and sympathy for its lead character. It's a stupidly jarring thing to watch "you" question all this violence only moments later to have to become a homicidal maniac in order to further the story. It's another thing on a whole other level entirely to ask for a true love interest with tragic dimensions in a world where you can go beat women up in a strip club or a mission which has you beating a kidnapped woman. This is what the gaming press would have the mainstream press believe one ups the movie theater. There isn't a single moment in GTAIV with the clarity of moral confusion exhibited currently in a movie about a millionaire who dresses up as a bat.

Saddest of all, GTAs strength, its city, is the result of an unashamed one hundred million dollars in production costs, minimum. Trumpeted loudly by its developer. That will buy you one great city. But as with other mediums, a ton of cash never buys a better story. In praising GTAIV endlessly the gaming community has backed Rockstar's dominance with a vote of consumer confidence that I dearly hope does not affect games to their detriment. It's a staggering narrative, moral, gameplay leap backwards that I can say is not ultimately worth your time. One can only hope that Rockstar can see past the rapturous praise and piles of cash to offer us a next iteration that spends less time forcing us to do and be things and more time letting us play.

Wii will rock you...

I'm guessing that most Giant Robot readers if they own a current games console, own a Nintendo Wii (or more likely, a DS). The Wii has been a juggernaut, still a difficult product to find that sells out everywhere it is stocked. It's success has been so staggering that it has created a new attitude in the business side of games, where expensive narrative heavy titles aimed at adults are now seen as hardcore and a niche market while it's much easier to make money off of what they call the casual gamer. Nintendo's success has bolstered this claim, and given that those niche titles cost a lot more money even in art development assets to create, one could say that their success is a staggering leap backwards. Grand Theft Auto IV cost admittedly around a hundred million dollars to develop, while Metal Gear Solid 4 was at least some 30 million. But there's an important distinction there, where Nintendo's vision has gaming something like playing with a toy, and those other titles aiming for a whole new medium.

Now, I know playing plastic instruments evokes in most people a response similar to what an episode of South Park did: that it makes you a total loser. But somehow Nintendo, with their aim at casual gamers, in which gaming is more like playing with a toy than becoming immersed in an experience, have made even playing Rock Band look cool if you ask me. From yesterday's E3 conference, a yearly event where games companies ply their wares to the media:



An event that most commentators flat out agree upon, Nintendo made the worst showing at.

I'll never skip posting about Kubrick

You probably already caught this, but last night in the UK Channel 4 aired a new documentary about Kubrick's exhaustive archives, titled Stanley Kubrick's Boxes. They recreated in painstaking detail behind the scenes elements of The Shining to make this quite incredible promo to advertise the series. Funnily enough, one of the few genuine portraits we have of Mr. Kubrick is from his daughter Vivian's footage filmed during the Shining documenting the production...



...And this beautiful ad doesn't have the same atmosphere as that footage but it's interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, go to this link to find Youtube of the entire documentary, which isn't likely to be shown in the US any time soon.

Netflixbox360

Pictured above is an interface for the Xbox 360 that's starting this fall that will enable you to display on your tv any of the videos that you can stream from the Netflix service - all it requires is a Netflix subscription and the standard yearly Xbox Live fee. That adds thousands of instant on demand videos to the Xbox 360. Granted, they'll be in standard definition, but for those of us who choose Macs or Linux and subscribe to Netflix (and therefore can't access the streaming library), and are wondering what games machine to buy, this is pretty killer.

The future of music, plastic toys no longer

I spent long enough in the periphery of the music industry directing videos to get to know some people who are really well and truly part of the music business, and I've seen their dire prognostications, and I've also seen musicians laugh or mock... But the fact of the matter is the rhythm music game is here to stay, and not only that, it may be one of the true futures of the music industry.

Pictured above are the Ion drums for Rock Band 2. This time they're going beyond plastic toys to a whole other level. These are a stripped down electronic drum kit with an interface replacing the typical brain for a midi drum kit. It can be adapted and modified to do so and thus act as an actual electronic drum kit. The game also will feature drum lessons, a trainer to teach people the basic rhythmic patterns real drummers use. Fender are also modifying actual stratocaster bodies and replacing their electronics with Rock Band's. Rock Band 2 will also feature a new track from Guns N Roses Chinese Democracy.



At this point the lines become blurred. This morning it was announced that the next iteration of Guitar Hero (now completely upstaged by Rock Band to the point of Guitar Hero now copying what it can from Rock Band including a shabby drum kit) will feature the entirety of Metallica's next album day and date as the record release.

Most of the musicians I know don't care for these games, which I can understand on many levels. Other would say that the experience is beyond stupid and childish and for the time invested one could learn to play a real instrument. That's missing the point.

As Rock Band will have functionality with a close to low end electronic drum kit, and lessons, it's quite obvious that someday people will be plugging in their real instruments into their consoles. I think this is only a great thing: Rock Band is best when you play it with people, producing a communal experience that no other game has done before... It engages you and your friends into focusing on a piece of music together. Musicians should embrace this. It shares the joy of performance in an albeit stripped down format for the fans in a way, say, music videos never could. Who wouldn't want their fans to have an even deeper connection to music to the point where individual instrumentations are memorized? Anyone who's played Rock Band with friends knows exactly what I'm talking about - an exalted sensation of harmony that you share, not just with friends, but music you love. And to be proficient at Rock Band you don't need to invest the time necessary in a real instrument by any means. Dan-ah who claims no musical skill whatsoever moved up from easy to medium difficulty on the bass in a single day.

Anyway, here's the Rock Band 2 tracklist which now boasts AC/DC, Elvis Costello, Fleetwood Mac, Modest Mouse, Devo, and even freaking Bob Dylan. Did you know that the entirety of Pixies' Doolittle is now available?

Comeback, kid? A new focus for this blog.

Being absent from this blog for so long I have to admit any excuse or words wouldn't be worthwhile. Needless to say, sometimes real life intervenes heavily. Other times I find blogging inimical to the subconscious process required to write something. I did manage to file a big story about a portion of my trip to Cambodia for issue 54 which you can check out now. Martin had to laboriously cut down my original 4500 word draft to a manageable thousand for which he deserves a lot of credit. If any of you are interested though maybe I'll run the longer version here?

I did get to hang out with Martin in L.A. a few weeks ago and I discussed doing one thing in particular with my blog going forward, which is focusing on one thing for the most part. I'll always be unable to avoid writing about movies on some level, especially when moved to (I can say that Wall-E deserves your time and money like few movies do, and if I were 8 years old it would probably be my favorite movie, and that Hellboy 2 contains the most outlandishly original production design and creature effects I've seen in years). For awhile I was really excited about sharing great clips, but look at the top videos on youtube any given day and it's fake porn, the same weird z axis non celebrities, and amateurish attempts at copying what tv already does. Music videos are so on the wane at this point that I've pretty much given up on them, so much so that I've left my production company as they aren't worth the psychic energy and investment of time and creativity I put into pursuing so many dead ends that won't even earn me a living.

I'm going to start writing here about video games. Before you flee, let me at least try to explain why I'd bother, given the amount of sheer text about said subject saturating the web.

Games are an ascendant, emerging art form, despite what wiser cultural commentaters would have you believe. All pop art, especially when it goes hand in hand with a technological advance, starts out being considered lowbrow junk for the masses. Movies started in county fairs with carnival hucksters.

But it took to some degree proper criticism to advance movies into true cultural legitimacy. That requires more than what constitutes game criticism today, which is either aimed at consumers and interested in attributes, or dry dissertation style papers on mechanics.

I am constantly arguing that what games need are a Lester Bangs, a Roger Ebert, a Griel Marcus, Denis Diderot, a Godard or a Truffaut. We need writers to start placing games within the context of culture - not just pop - as a whole. We have a few who are close, like the excellent N'gai Croal, but these are beat reporters. We need people who review games without the confines of consumer advice, who piss off or enlighten or give us a historical perspective to come, who suggest subtexts that may or not be there. And everyone in games talks about how they wish there was an arthouse cinema of games, freed from the financial pressures requied to make games today. That requires someone who can write about games in a way that any culturally invested person can read the review and come away with a thought about what gaming can be. We need writing about games, in other words, that's compelling to people who don't play games.

I do believe there's a very specific bit that's missing constantly in games criticism: discussing what it is about games that no other medium can do. That's a very important distinction, I believe. There are emotional depths and experiences to be plundered in games that have not yet been explored, while on the other hand I believe there are already games that show distinct auteurs at work, with themes, subtexts, and unique emotional properties.

I love ignored art, art on the margins, the bits of genius that get overlooked because of the medium its attempted in. Here's a great page from a never finished graphic novel by Alan Moore and the insanely underrated Bill Sienkiewicz (who is on a par with Ashley Wood in my book).



Click here to see the full page

I like to use this example a lot. Big Numbers has gone down in obscure comics lore as a lost mastepiece, but I believe that many overlooked what was so unyieldingly ambitious about the book which perhaps led to its dissolution... It did things with the arrangement of art and words that no other medium could do. Look at the panel with the people planning, an image as a whole that contains individual images that read left to right while telling the story. That's intrinsic to the medium, and despite our natural assumptions of adaptation in culture, I love this marginal stuff, the inherent bits and pieces that you couldn't do any other way.

I believe while playing games I've had similar experiences. Vastly dislocating, new emotional responses. They are far and few between, embedded in tiny little parcels of art on the margins, and no one seems to discuss them at large.

Games now earn equivalent sums in revenue and Nintendo have proven once and for all that games are not just for teenage boys, thankfully. When it comes to art direction I believe that games right now may be even more ambitious than the realm of films, as there are no physical production requirements and unifying aesthetic is easier to achieve. Several games have pushed at the boundaries of what that imagery is supposed to be, from stylized art deco ruin to graphically bold cel shading.

But again, it's that unique quality I hope to write about. And I'll still be discussing little bits of ephemera when it strikes me.

Where I've been

Why was I in Cambodia? It was one of several locations around the globe for this video I just co-directed with Shawn Kim for Death Cab for Cutie's new album Narrow Stairs. Shawn is for my money the best working cinematographer in music videos and has been for the past few years. I mean he's worked with all the greats, but most people instantly know his work when you say that he shot the Maps video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Feist's 1234. When I wrote this treatment I saw in my head that the band were photographed the way Shawn Kim would, so it made sense to have him do it, not just as a photographer but a director.

My crew of 2, an actress, and myself covered some 27977 miles in 13 days shooting this. The defining statement was "let's wrap cause I want to get the next snowmobile out of here". The experience was the best I've had in my life, though incredibly challenging. I've always felt that travel is a defining human experience that changes you forever, and hope that this depiction of wanderlust, obsessiveness, repetition, and loneliness conveys some of that.