Journey to Silius is balanced such that ammo is more valuable than health. This is the case because the player possesses 3 health bars to a continue and only 1 ammo bar*, though expending ammo rarely saves health in a 3:1 ratio. For ammo to be of greater or equal value to health, it would need on average to decrease the health lost to the enemy it was used upon by a factor of 3. Put differently, it would need to kill damage-dealing enemies 3x as quickly, below which rate it would not be useful against enemies with less than a 2/3 chance of dealing damage.
The "ammo" and "health" abstracts underpin a strategic decision presented to the player: to fire a weapon [consume ammo in exchange for advanced targeting or damage rate] or to accept a mechanical limitation [smaller attack zone, shorter action timers, longer conflicts] which creates varyingly a finer tuned style of play or a higher probability of error, dependent upon the enemy/layout at hand and the player's technical** skill. Where the prolonged conflicts (resulting from the slower damage rate of ammo conservation) exceed the full cycle of an enemy's actions, this puts especial pressure on the player's ability to repeat a single technique reliably.
Thence, Journey to Silius feels like a lot of doing the same thing over and over. In a way it's like a survival horror game where you can kill everything with the knife if you kite it properly, except that in Silius it's slightly easier and much more necessary to do so. Like if you took RE2 and gave the player only a knife and a shotgun with one bullet for every dozen zombies, then placed a dozen zombies at every bottleneck.
*Journey to Silius features ammo and health restoratives which should alter these ratios. However, as far as I have discovered, the rate of appearance of these items is completely random. This means the player can't rely on their presence and must plan/execute as though they will not appear - that, or accept a built-in failure probability even on a perfect execution.
** a "technique" here refers to the combination of a game input and a timing. A timing is the combination of a [feedback] trigger and a length of time.
Friday, December 27, 2019
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Godzilla: King of nothing much in particular
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at 1:55 AM |
Finally! caught up with this. It's not hard to see why everyone's already lost interest - I didn't think it was especially bad or good, just a hodgepodge of interesting ideas, fanservice, dumb politics and mediocre family drama, none given enough time to stand out. Particularly the loudly iterated but never explored themes of can we live alongside monsters, is there a natural order, who is responsible for making this decision, etc. These are good questions, and good questions for a Godzilla movie, but after the establishing 30 minutes everything is exploding so quickly that no one has a moment to think.
What works: Rodan looks better than ever, I loved the fiery redesign and trailing embers. Took an indistinguishable giant flying thing and made it into a true fire demon. Ghidorah's and Godzilla's designs are perfectly passable, although the new potbelly (a GMK reference?) does Godzilla no favors. The Mothra CGI is weak. The movie is full of incredibly striking frames of monsters-as-gods in conflict, clearly taking visual inspiration from mythological artwork and succeeding with flying colors. The most garish and also the coolest is Ghidorah atop a volcano with a leaning cross in the foreground. Oddly, each of the monsters gets an opportunity to menacingly emerge from darkness (ocean/ash/stormclouds//waterfall), and those individual shots are like lightning.
I liked most of the fanservice too (like a protest sign reading DESTROY ALL MONSTERS), and in that vein I'm glad that they recognized this was the correct moment to open up the floodgates and start bringing in the crazier genre elements of the franchise. If you'd told me at outset that this movie was going to end with a dozen monsters kneeling and bowing their heads in front of Godzilla's throne, I'd have said fuck you. After the return of the bird machine, the oxygen destroyer, G-Force (basically... Monarch even has a flying fortress, not called the Super X), Ghidorah being a confirmed alien, and best of all, thermal Godzilla, I still wasn't fully sold on the moment, but I was willing to nod and say okay.
The right visuals, the right elements, so what went wrong? The script is fine enough. It gets the roles the characters should be in, how to relate people to the monsters, and how to establish a rising threat. But the movie is incredibly busy and noisy, the perennial Hollywood shaky-keys in front of a crying baby. So much effort, energy, and animation is put into simple establishing action like "a helicopter lands and the characters get out" (already a rather loud way to open a scene) that the movie is bulldozed into a pile of atonal rubble. The camera is constantly swinging, the soundtrack is constantly blaring, the lighting is constantly shifting, all to the effect of a quickly tiresome movie wasted on moments where nothing spectacular is happening. I expect Godzilla movies to have boring parts, and I expect dumb characters and pointless conflicts, but I'd rather them be sleepy and sobering than blaring and melodramatic, because the way this movie is, the actual monster action I'm here to see doesn't stand out, and I have no time to process it.
Which is of course not helped by the incessant cutting. Jesus is this poorly edited action. Is it too much to ask for 30 uninterrupted seconds of a single shot? Or even 30 uninterrupted seconds without shifting locations? All of the fights are chopped up with asinine crap like landing a helicopter with no characters on it in an airplane that has unclear problems solved by an otherwise useless protagonist. The only thing as galling as the editing is any scene with the nonsensical Emma, a character that is maybe supposed to be a villain, or maybe supposed to be a hero, but I can't tell because the actress and/or mannequin in the role doesn't move a single part of her face or body during the entire film. Also, can anyone explain why Sally Hawkins is in these movies? It was so weird seeing her *yet again* show up to give a single scene of backstory exposition.
Given Michael Dougherty's history (I like Superman Returns and X2, but don't love either), I think he was just fine to write this film, and as with Superman and X-Men he seems to get the characters and make sure their traditional presence is maintained (Ghidorah is an intelligent evil alien, Mothra is a benevolent martyr who always loses her fights, Rodan is angry). I would've much rather seen Gareth Edward's take on that script, but as such, KoM doesn't do any real harm to the franchise.
What works: Rodan looks better than ever, I loved the fiery redesign and trailing embers. Took an indistinguishable giant flying thing and made it into a true fire demon. Ghidorah's and Godzilla's designs are perfectly passable, although the new potbelly (a GMK reference?) does Godzilla no favors. The Mothra CGI is weak. The movie is full of incredibly striking frames of monsters-as-gods in conflict, clearly taking visual inspiration from mythological artwork and succeeding with flying colors. The most garish and also the coolest is Ghidorah atop a volcano with a leaning cross in the foreground. Oddly, each of the monsters gets an opportunity to menacingly emerge from darkness (ocean/ash/stormclouds//waterfall), and those individual shots are like lightning.
I liked most of the fanservice too (like a protest sign reading DESTROY ALL MONSTERS), and in that vein I'm glad that they recognized this was the correct moment to open up the floodgates and start bringing in the crazier genre elements of the franchise. If you'd told me at outset that this movie was going to end with a dozen monsters kneeling and bowing their heads in front of Godzilla's throne, I'd have said fuck you. After the return of the bird machine, the oxygen destroyer, G-Force (basically... Monarch even has a flying fortress, not called the Super X), Ghidorah being a confirmed alien, and best of all, thermal Godzilla, I still wasn't fully sold on the moment, but I was willing to nod and say okay.
The right visuals, the right elements, so what went wrong? The script is fine enough. It gets the roles the characters should be in, how to relate people to the monsters, and how to establish a rising threat. But the movie is incredibly busy and noisy, the perennial Hollywood shaky-keys in front of a crying baby. So much effort, energy, and animation is put into simple establishing action like "a helicopter lands and the characters get out" (already a rather loud way to open a scene) that the movie is bulldozed into a pile of atonal rubble. The camera is constantly swinging, the soundtrack is constantly blaring, the lighting is constantly shifting, all to the effect of a quickly tiresome movie wasted on moments where nothing spectacular is happening. I expect Godzilla movies to have boring parts, and I expect dumb characters and pointless conflicts, but I'd rather them be sleepy and sobering than blaring and melodramatic, because the way this movie is, the actual monster action I'm here to see doesn't stand out, and I have no time to process it.
Which is of course not helped by the incessant cutting. Jesus is this poorly edited action. Is it too much to ask for 30 uninterrupted seconds of a single shot? Or even 30 uninterrupted seconds without shifting locations? All of the fights are chopped up with asinine crap like landing a helicopter with no characters on it in an airplane that has unclear problems solved by an otherwise useless protagonist. The only thing as galling as the editing is any scene with the nonsensical Emma, a character that is maybe supposed to be a villain, or maybe supposed to be a hero, but I can't tell because the actress and/or mannequin in the role doesn't move a single part of her face or body during the entire film. Also, can anyone explain why Sally Hawkins is in these movies? It was so weird seeing her *yet again* show up to give a single scene of backstory exposition.
Given Michael Dougherty's history (I like Superman Returns and X2, but don't love either), I think he was just fine to write this film, and as with Superman and X-Men he seems to get the characters and make sure their traditional presence is maintained (Ghidorah is an intelligent evil alien, Mothra is a benevolent martyr who always loses her fights, Rodan is angry). I would've much rather seen Gareth Edward's take on that script, but as such, KoM doesn't do any real harm to the franchise.
Friday, April 5, 2019
Jordan Peele's THE US
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at 1:01 PM |
What a letdown. I missed GET OUT so this was my first look at Peele, and if this is the new face of horror I'm not sure where I fell off the bus. The last thing I was expecting was a reboot of mid-00's slasher reboots, complete with overplayed pop songs (sometimes used *ironically*!), explicit references to older horror movies, too many scenes set inside an SUV, a twist designed entirely not to make sense (explaining why the final girl and the killer are bound by fate), and flatly irritating expendable meat (who make our heroes look psychotic, both by being friends with these people and being happy when they die (and this extends into the core family - if any characters but the mother and son had any sympathetic traits, please fill me in)).
There's so much character-burning comic relief that this ends up significantly north of most Adult Swim shorts in a comedy/horror mapping. That's an even bigger problem when you're already riding the line with black humor (is the line "we're Americans" meant to get a big laugh, like it did in my theater?) and have drawn a clear SAFETY line around the main characters. Comedy is a black hole that sucks in everything close enough to count, why beg for laughs like that? Most of the third act plays like an SNL sketch. It all makes so absurdly little sense that I can't believe it draws attention to itself that way (you don't see SUSPIRIA trying to explain what the fuck just happened).
What's most disappointing is that the concept is so terrific and a small handful of shots so perfect (opening credits, a roadside accident) that I hated watching it wasted on just another slasher (parody?). Replace the clones with Michaels Myers and the whole thing plays out the same. Maybe the subtext falls off, but I ain't giving out subtext points til you can pass on surface text (and anyway, I'm really not sure it does need clones to make sense). I'm not even going to start listing the missed opportunities, because a doppelganger movie without a single case of mistaken identity says it all. The clones being kind of stupid and extra hard to kill makes them more like zombies anyway, and if I start comparing this to Night of the Living Dead I'm going to need to lie down.
Just terrible. At times almost so-bad-it's-good.
There's so much character-burning comic relief that this ends up significantly north of most Adult Swim shorts in a comedy/horror mapping. That's an even bigger problem when you're already riding the line with black humor (is the line "we're Americans" meant to get a big laugh, like it did in my theater?) and have drawn a clear SAFETY line around the main characters. Comedy is a black hole that sucks in everything close enough to count, why beg for laughs like that? Most of the third act plays like an SNL sketch. It all makes so absurdly little sense that I can't believe it draws attention to itself that way (you don't see SUSPIRIA trying to explain what the fuck just happened).
What's most disappointing is that the concept is so terrific and a small handful of shots so perfect (opening credits, a roadside accident) that I hated watching it wasted on just another slasher (parody?). Replace the clones with Michaels Myers and the whole thing plays out the same. Maybe the subtext falls off, but I ain't giving out subtext points til you can pass on surface text (and anyway, I'm really not sure it does need clones to make sense). I'm not even going to start listing the missed opportunities, because a doppelganger movie without a single case of mistaken identity says it all. The clones being kind of stupid and extra hard to kill makes them more like zombies anyway, and if I start comparing this to Night of the Living Dead I'm going to need to lie down.
Just terrible. At times almost so-bad-it's-good.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Come on, God of War isn't a brawler, don't be ridiculous
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at 10:00 AM | games god of war |
Sorry there are more enemies in God of War than grunt and minotaur? They must've been hiding behind the sheer millions of grunt and minotaur corpses when I was playing. You haven't even gotten to the part where it's two straight hours of grunt fights ("the whole game lol!" no you don't even know). Pretty much everything about God of War's brawling is wrong, so starting from enemy variation is far too high on the chain. I think that's one place where it's bad, but not unforgivably so. The fact it's so noticeable is more a symptom of the failure of everything else.
Why doesn't combat with a single enemy work? The omnidirectional i-framed-up dodge move means position doesn't matter, so the game space is reduced to one dimension. Then the grab trumps everything (if you haven't already discovered), so we're in a volitional difficulty situation. Survival is only challenging so long as the player voluntary limits their options. Feedback on moves is near impossible to read because the chain is just a giant swath that hits eight enemies at once and conflates all their states (plus might have different effects based on distance). Who fucking knows how much damage anything does. Not to mention every combo looks like the exact same noisy mess. Then dial-a-combos for button mashing heaven, but also free interrupts (dodge) because it started to get hard. Stuff like "there's a launcher" is typical "we don't understand what is happening in the combat and why it isn't fun, what's something else that Devil May Cry has?" I couldn't tell you exactly from game to game within the series, but I believe the launcher is completely useless almost always. You can dodge to get out of combos, why would you need to be in the air? 1D game space. I think the toughest the game ever gets is when there's a boss that has an attack you're supposed to block, and you have to remember what button is block again.
But all that is totally beside the point, because God of War doesn't expect the player to take initiative and explore offensive capabilities within the combat. God of War is a game about having violent semi-realistic animations applied to spectacular mythological creatures. Everything else about the game flows from that. You can contend that Devil May Cry is a game about having a cool anime guy do stylish sword swings at demons; granting that this is of course wrong, the difference is that Dante's "style" is his offense, it is the sequence of moves he performs and that the player controls. God of War is centered on the baddies. This is why its primary novelty is extended cutscene kills, and why executions are the only thing it bothers to incentivize. It's why the boss fights aren't even beat-em-up style half the time. It even kind of explains why grab is so OP (it has a unique animation). The button mashing is just there to connect the dots.
I've played a few dozen 3D beat-em-ups at this point, and I can fairly confidently say that God of War is the worst. The only thing giving me pause is that I can't clearly remember the story mode from Tekken 6. But I don't think God of War wants to be compared to Devil May Cry - in its mind, it belongs to the same genre as Uncharted. To be clear, I don't think it's successful as a cinematic experience either. There's no excuse for filler, and it has especially arbitrary quick-time events (on part with RE4). Asura's Wrath is basically the same idea done correctly, though I think GoW2 and GoW3 are a lot better too.
Why doesn't combat with a single enemy work? The omnidirectional i-framed-up dodge move means position doesn't matter, so the game space is reduced to one dimension. Then the grab trumps everything (if you haven't already discovered), so we're in a volitional difficulty situation. Survival is only challenging so long as the player voluntary limits their options. Feedback on moves is near impossible to read because the chain is just a giant swath that hits eight enemies at once and conflates all their states (plus might have different effects based on distance). Who fucking knows how much damage anything does. Not to mention every combo looks like the exact same noisy mess. Then dial-a-combos for button mashing heaven, but also free interrupts (dodge) because it started to get hard. Stuff like "there's a launcher" is typical "we don't understand what is happening in the combat and why it isn't fun, what's something else that Devil May Cry has?" I couldn't tell you exactly from game to game within the series, but I believe the launcher is completely useless almost always. You can dodge to get out of combos, why would you need to be in the air? 1D game space. I think the toughest the game ever gets is when there's a boss that has an attack you're supposed to block, and you have to remember what button is block again.
But all that is totally beside the point, because God of War doesn't expect the player to take initiative and explore offensive capabilities within the combat. God of War is a game about having violent semi-realistic animations applied to spectacular mythological creatures. Everything else about the game flows from that. You can contend that Devil May Cry is a game about having a cool anime guy do stylish sword swings at demons; granting that this is of course wrong, the difference is that Dante's "style" is his offense, it is the sequence of moves he performs and that the player controls. God of War is centered on the baddies. This is why its primary novelty is extended cutscene kills, and why executions are the only thing it bothers to incentivize. It's why the boss fights aren't even beat-em-up style half the time. It even kind of explains why grab is so OP (it has a unique animation). The button mashing is just there to connect the dots.
I've played a few dozen 3D beat-em-ups at this point, and I can fairly confidently say that God of War is the worst. The only thing giving me pause is that I can't clearly remember the story mode from Tekken 6. But I don't think God of War wants to be compared to Devil May Cry - in its mind, it belongs to the same genre as Uncharted. To be clear, I don't think it's successful as a cinematic experience either. There's no excuse for filler, and it has especially arbitrary quick-time events (on part with RE4). Asura's Wrath is basically the same idea done correctly, though I think GoW2 and GoW3 are a lot better too.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
A thought on strategy in Armored Core / Daemon X Machina
It occurred to me in considering Dick Terrell vs. Daemon X Machina that an appealing, if uselessly vague, way of describing strategy games is "puzzle games with statistics instead of rules". Decisions are weighted and evaluated in parallel rather than binary in series.
Armored Core is in a sense the apotheosis of that idea, since there are so many decision points (equipment) weighted across so many variables (the stat sheet for a mech has a dozen or so parameters in the first game and probably 50ish by AC5), yet they are all codependent (since there's only one mech per mission). If you think about buying/loading gear as the fleet-building stage of Sins of a Solar Empire, with the choice of arm/leg/missile/etc corresponding to choice of frigates/cruisers/carriers/etc, I think they line up fairly well in terms of what the player ought to be calculating and trying to predict. There's more pressure in the action phase of Armored Core because the player is in full control of the mech, which is the advantage (design-wise) of unifying all the statistical parameters. The player needs to design a mech that they are also capable of piloting, and some decisions will be based on accomodating that (for instance, a novice might prefer a slow machine with higher armor because they find the controls clunky and can't take advantage of the ability to dodge). On the flipside, there's more pressure in the decision phase of Sins, because the entire game is played out in real-time. The action itself is almost completely automated, sheer number-crunching.
It makes me wonder what a mech game with real-time mech building would play like. Probably similar to a traditional RTS (StarCraft), since Sins and AC are kind of sitting at two extremes. StarCraft does have full unit control, it's just - there are so many independent elements that the technical bar for maximizing strategic efficiency is incredibly high, and the casual level of play relies on a lot of Sins-style automation. For the real-time element (in this theoretical mech game) to make sense, there'd probably need to be some kind of resource race, and the mech would need to be upgradeable on the fly (since there would be no additional/replacement units to build - otherwise resources would become irrelevant as soon as combat began).
Actually, if you took the standard RTS model (building drones and exploring a map to gather materials), this starts to look a lot like a MOBA. MOBAs after all were built from an experiment with WarCraft 3, asking what would happen if the player controlled just one powerful "hero" unit instead of a bunch of disposable little ones (the original Defense of the Ancients, if I'm not mistaken). MOBAs just tend to have really boring/convoluted combat, since they use an action model designed and for decades optimized for controlling dozens of independent units in parallel. They don't do nearly as good a job as Armored Core at taking the aforementioned advantage of unifying your parameters. The Dynasty Warriors/Musou games are somewhere in the middle here - only a few player units and combat more complex than League of Legends, but much simpler than Armored Core. They don't have much of a prep phase, though, and therefore play more like tactics-action than strategy-action.
Huh. So what really obvious game am I forgetting about that does exactly what I'm describing? What about if we add a metroidvania backtracking structure, roguelite procedurally generated encounters, and soulslike boss battles? Tune in tomorrow to find out.
It makes me wonder what a mech game with real-time mech building would play like. Probably similar to a traditional RTS (StarCraft), since Sins and AC are kind of sitting at two extremes. StarCraft does have full unit control, it's just - there are so many independent elements that the technical bar for maximizing strategic efficiency is incredibly high, and the casual level of play relies on a lot of Sins-style automation. For the real-time element (in this theoretical mech game) to make sense, there'd probably need to be some kind of resource race, and the mech would need to be upgradeable on the fly (since there would be no additional/replacement units to build - otherwise resources would become irrelevant as soon as combat began).
Actually, if you took the standard RTS model (building drones and exploring a map to gather materials), this starts to look a lot like a MOBA. MOBAs after all were built from an experiment with WarCraft 3, asking what would happen if the player controlled just one powerful "hero" unit instead of a bunch of disposable little ones (the original Defense of the Ancients, if I'm not mistaken). MOBAs just tend to have really boring/convoluted combat, since they use an action model designed and for decades optimized for controlling dozens of independent units in parallel. They don't do nearly as good a job as Armored Core at taking the aforementioned advantage of unifying your parameters. The Dynasty Warriors/Musou games are somewhere in the middle here - only a few player units and combat more complex than League of Legends, but much simpler than Armored Core. They don't have much of a prep phase, though, and therefore play more like tactics-action than strategy-action.
Huh. So what really obvious game am I forgetting about that does exactly what I'm describing? What about if we add a metroidvania backtracking structure, roguelite procedurally generated encounters, and soulslike boss battles? Tune in tomorrow to find out.
Monday, February 18, 2019
Back in the CCCR New Mario Revisited
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at 10:04 AM | cccr games super mario |
you can turn off the jump/twirl dual mapping by holding in the left control stick for a few seconds on the title screen
what the fuck
what the fuck
Monday, January 28, 2019
MYASS in the meantime: 2018 in movies
Brief reviews of movies you already should've seen, and ones I have. End of year 2018.
TOP FIVE:
1.) Pastoral, to Die in the Country
2.) Nashville
3.) Annihilation
4.) In Bruges
5.) Nightcrawler
Nightcrawler and Get Carter were tied for 5th, then I remembered the music from Nightcrawler.
BOTTOM FIVE :
64.) AVP: Requiem
63.) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
62.) Popeye
61.) Band of Outsiders
60.) City Hunter
If we were talking pure objective quality, Exorcist II and God's Not Dead would be here, but I'd rather rewatch them than any of these five.
STATISTICS
Total - 64
Writer/director ("auteur") movies - 27
Documentaries - 3 and 3/8 (of Ken Burns' Vietnam)
Most frequent director - Boorman/Altman/Herzog (4)
Most frequent writer - Werner Herzog (4)
Most frequent franchise - A Nightmare on Elm Street (3)
2018: 4
2010s: 10
2000s: 14
1990s: 10
1980s: 16
1970s: 9
1960s: 2
1950s: 3
SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006)
Bryan Singer / Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, Bryan Singer
"Much more even and likable than Man of Steel, with some fantastic saving-people (rather than punching-stuff) superheroics and a real mix of great, terrible, and fan-filmy casting"
CITY HUNTER (1993)
Jing Wong / Tsukasa Hojo, Jing Wong
"Too weird to miss, it goes more than all-in on being a live action manga, even if it ends up wasting Chan. Severely not funny for a comedy (terrible editing for punchlines), but whatever."
TAMMY AND THE T-REX (1994)
Stewart Rafill / Gary Brockette, Stewart Rafill
"Though hard to say whether this is a moronic children's comedy with way too much violence and sex or the dumbest erotic revenge thriller ever made, it's actually funny when it's supposed to be, even if largely by virtue of insanity."
GODZILLA: PLANET OF THE MONSTERS (2018)
Koubun Shizuno, Hiroyuki Seshita / Gen Urobuchi
"Builds a surprisingly robust world without much direct labor, quietly lacing in concepts forged in the '60s series while feeling entirely new, with a great primal setting for what limited monster action we get"
HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
Terence Fisher / Jimmy Sangster
"Very easily the best version of Dracula I know, still just kinda alright. Transfixing performances from Lee and Cushing, but neither man is present frequently enough, leaving everything else to wither under overwrought production design and violence more melodramatic than scary"
THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)
Val Guest / Richard Landau, Val Guest
"Between an unusually outre space invader and a magnificently suspenseful opening scene, this easily coasts past some awful performances to instill genuine terror in rote genre material"
FEAST (2005)
John Gulager / Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton
"For direct-to-video horror, it has a nice grungy aesthetic and solid natural passing-of-day lighting, the practical effects are great, and the cast makes a lot out of underwritten dialogue (Henry Rollins). It also has exactly as formulaic an Alien structure as one would expect, something that goes a long way in counteracting any puckishness in the choice of deaths. Not to mention it wasn't direct-to-video."
THE ROOM (2003)
Tommy Wiseau / Tommy Wiseau
"tbh not that funny, the highlight reels are all you need"
DEADPOOL (2016)
Tim Miller / Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
"The gore's good, the humor's pleasant if not laugh-out-loud, and the characters are better developed than expected. Solid fanservice too - I'd forgotten all about Blind Al and Weasel and both get plenty of screen-time. The plot doesn't diverge too far (or at all really) from superhero boilerplate, but by god is it refreshing to have a purely personal hero/villain conflict and stakes as low as one human life."
THE DARK CRYSTAL (1984)
Jim Henson, Frank Oz / David Odell
"If the central characters weren't so off-putting and unemotive, maybe the standard fantasy beats would have some identity, but the whole thing feels in such a hurry to get through the formula that there's nothing else to attach to, and it winds up boring. The dialogue is awful too, though we learned on this viewing that's because the film was originally intended to include no intelligible language!"
ANNIHILATION (2018)
Alex Garland / Alex Garland
"If cancer's this fun, sign me up for chemo!"
IN BRUGES (2008)
Martin McDonagh / Martin McDonagh
"A fairy tale of conflicting moral systems, men who can't stop being boys, and calmly precise spiritual metaphor"
ANNIHILATION (2018)
Alex Garland / Alex Garland
"The characters make a lot more sense the second time, and the declamatory dialogue cliches play as charmingly inept rather than hackily terrible"
PONYO (2008)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki
"Inventive action, beautiful animation, lovable characters, and a sleepily comfortable incarnation of childhood nostalgia. At the same time, a simple, nice, and pleasant story with a deeply insufficient final third that makes the experience feel largely without substance or pathos"
BLACK PANTHER (2017)
Ryan Coogler / Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
"High fantasy moreso than superhero story, just political enough to prove it isn't stupid, and the best cast of characters in any Marvel movie short of Guardians OTG. Definitely bloated with at least an unnecessary aerial battle, but makes the most out of the requisite car chase as penance."
DUNE (1984)
David Lynch / David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
"David Lynch? More like David Crynch, because this story is so violently smashed into a 2-hour filmic suitcase as to completely lack even the slightest hint of momentum; the classic case of the film that is so busy that it can't see farther than one scene ahead, and never really starts the plot as a result."
JURASSIC PARK (1993)
Steve Spielberg / Michael Crichton, David Koepp
"The 'bergian chase scene is effective, but how many of them do we need in a single movie? And the hand-holding endless tension and sentimentality ratcheting is annoying beyond belief - fine stuff for kids' film, but I don't know how adults don't go nuts slogging through. Fun fact: the famed T-Rex Jeep attack scene is about 8 minutes long, starting from where the T-Rex is first heard approaching. The T-Rex doesn't appear for 4 minutes, and then after a minute disappears for another two."
EL MARIACHI (1993)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Sing us a song, you're the mariachi man"
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)
Jonathan Demme / Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
"The best episode of X-Files never recorded, with a dash of Cape Fear here and a dash of Friday the 13th there, laced with some great face-to-face close-ups and stitched together with noticeably great editing."
BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)
Jean-Luc Godard / Jean-Luc Godard
"This is probably pretentious meta-schlock made for film enthusiasts who can point out all the weird techniques and rule-breaks Goddy uses along the way, and I don't really object to that any more than to horror schlock or romance schlock - the odd thing is, when it's at its most self-congratulatory and confrontational is when it's most entertaining, like a minute of silence imposed on the audience or the awkward layout of the credits that turns out to be setup for a joke where the director is credited as "Jean-Luc Cinema Godard". I audibly chuckled at the student in English class whose only purpose is to ask the camera "How do you say 'a big, one million dollar film'?" But, like, it's also terribly boring, with barely glimpsed superficial characters whose petulant personality shifts play like more schoolyard antics rather than recognizably human intricacies, and drama that isn't given even the faintest air of gravity, with characters playing dead (or actors playing dead????, I'm probably supposed to ask), nighttime scenes shot during the day, and an escape to South America that very obviously terminates 12 inches left of frame. Is it all worth it for those few excitingly surreal moments, like the trashy plot of a Godzilla movie is worth it for the few minutes of monster rampage? Am I missing literally everything? Maybe at 29 I'm just too old for this shit."
DESPERADO (1995)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Like El Mariachi, great for its means, but not particularly high impact. Heavily leaning into the cartoonish / spaghetti western side of things now. Very fun and inventive action scenes, but hurts that the movie starts at its peak and slides down (the bar) from there."
SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)
Billy Wilder / Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman Jr.
"A pair of titanic, one-of-a-kind character portraits paired with a pair of rote, generic ones, almost more Gothic than noir"
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson
"Delightfully precise and frothy, yet hang on I'm not using the word 'frothy'. Is this the origin of critic-speak? Artificial brevity? Even 'delightful' is pretty bad. I gotta stop writing things that I would never say in real life. Anyway, GBH is sorta like an imaginary period piece, a salute to the passing of an era that didn't really exist, one glorified but not exactly praised. It's really the perfect use for Anderson's dollhouse aesthetic. Dollhouse aesthetic. Dollhouse aesthetic!"
PORCO ROSSO (1992)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki
"Pigzapoppin'"
NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki, based on the manga by Hayao Miyazaki
"As much as I enjoy Miyazaki's typical fairy tales, his fantasy epics seem more like the point, channeling the flood of dreamlike detail into boundless vessels far exceeding the scale of a motion picture, too visionary to qualify as anything as prosaic as 'world-building'"
ED WOOD (1994)
Tim Burton / Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski
"Good enough to warrant a review!"
DOCTOR WHO vs. GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (1974)
David Maloney / Terry Nation
"It's definitely a BBC genre show from the 1970s, and exactly as exciting as that sounds, but there are just enough unique ideas and suspenseful situations to keep your attention, with Davros naturally transcending genre expectations and Tom Baker getting enough lines to remember he exists"
ED WOOD (1994)
Same
"Greg said he's not impressed, and after I was so nice to 'Genesis of the Daleks' too"
X2: X-MEN UNITED (2003)
Bryan Singer / Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, David Hayter
"Pretty clunky in the script department and not focused on any character well enough to feel like more than a TV episode, still does good service to the X-Men notion of gods among men, and even half-decent for riffing on The Once and Future King (if you know the plot of that novel. Just like the Phoenix stuff is decent if you know the plot of that comic arc - if you don't, it's like whaaat?)"
GORILLA INTERRUPTED (2003)
Mike Stoklasa / Mike Stoklasa with additional material by Garrett Gilchrist
"Going into this, I was perfectly aware - based on 1.) the remarks of the filmmakers and 2.) every other RLM film trailer or short - that it would be absolutely terrible. I also knew from those two sources that it came about very similarly to the movies my friends and I would make as teenagers, right around the same early '00s final pre-Youtube era, and that therefore it would make for a very potent injection of nostalgia. And it did. It even had a single, solitary funny joke! Perhaps the best and nostalgiaiest bit was That One Friend who obviously no one likes, no one even pretends to like, but you let them hang around because they have the camera or their parents don't care if you trash their house or whatever it may be in this case."
NIGHTCRAWLER (2014)
Dan Gilroy / Dan Gilroy
"A human experimentation project moreso than a character study, squeezing a weird near-psychopath to see what comes out. Simultaneously a black comedy exploring the evil side of Pursuit of Happyness-type rags-to-riches fables, though often more unpleasant (in a groaning, sickening way) than funny because of its hate-boner for newsmedia."
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson
"Lot of rewatches this year. Sharing is daring."
Here begins the oft-interrupted Summer Directrospective, in which we take a decades spanning summary tour of the works of John Boorman, Robert Altman, and Werner Herzog.
DELIVERANCE (1972)
John Boorman / James Dickey
"Like Sorcerer, it's tempting to describe this as just a really great thriller, but it's also working with the same kind of primal self-destructive masculine energy that whatever"
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (1988)
Renny Harlin / Brian Helgeland, Ken Wheat, Jim Wheat
"Well, things aren't completely terrible yet. A couple of the kills are kinda okay, not yet dragged into the elaborate 80-minute set pieces of the next couple movies, but the Dream Magic is now officially hardcore stupid, and the 'daring' decision to copy Psycho's mid-film twist completely destroys the story's momentum and ability to function"
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD (1989)
Stephen Hopkins / Leslie Bohem
"Just the fucking worst: screechingly loud, purely redundant, moronic in concept and execution, overplotted, and nothing at all like a horror film"
FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE (1991)
Rachel Talalay / Michael DeLuca
"Like The Final Friday, the '90s hurt this series bad, dragging it down to television production levels in script, scope, cast (featuring cameos by Tom Arnold and Roseanne!), and all but a handful of effects shots. Still, it's funny enough here and there to easily surpass part 5."
GODZILLA: CITY ON THE EDGE OF BATTLE (2018)
Kobun Shizuno, Hiroyuki Seshita / Gen Urobuchi
"Like Part 1, the ideas at play here are great, passing far beyond what we could ever expect to see in a live-action Godzilla (such as the bizarrely evil city of the title). Unfortunately, once this stuff is all up on screen, it fails to DO anything, feeling simultaneously uninspired and cheap, with Godzilla barely showing up on screen and M. City mostly just a bunch of gun emplacements. The third movie will have a lot to make up on the action front to compensate, and given that we know the always-tedious Mothra will be involved, it's hard to be excited at this point."
FATA MORGANA (1971)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"It is mostly just a bunch of landscape photography, but carefully selected and edited not to suggest an actual geographic space"
THE ROCKETEER (1991)
Joe Johnston / Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo
"A pretty fun movie, though somewhat ironically the airplane stunt sequences are much more engaging than the unfortunately dated rocket-pack effects. Jennifer Connolly is still the hottest actress ever, so there's that."
MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
Robert Altman / Robert Altman, Brian McKay
"A genre-typical story that's all weird in the details, from cases of anti-farcical mistaken identity to whores with hearts of drug addiction, despondent if not entirely hopeless, all shot with stand-up-and-notice cinematography shifting from smudgy realism to bleary-eyed nostalgia to neon lust. Not really ruined by the presence of Leonard Cohen songs, but harmed in some fairly irrevocable ways."
EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977)
John Boorman / William Goodhart (rewrites by John Boorman & Rospo Pallenberg)
"The weirdest thing here isn't that the movie is patently insane or hilarious, which is plain enough to see just reading the fact-sheet, but that many of the takes, bar bad acting, are genuinely well-done, from the soaring locust cam to the harrowing cliff face exorcism. It's just that there is no such thing as a good version of locust cam or a cliff face exorcism - 'made by a demented mind' indeed."
GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988)
Isao Takahata / Isao Takahata
"It's hard to call a movie like this brilliant or perfect. Sorta feels like it's so effective on an emotional level that it would be counterproductive or disempowering to turn that off to look at how it's creating that effect. Focus too hard on why things make you sad and you raise the cynicism water level. Idk, I don't feel that way about all emotionally challenging films. Either way, to describe GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES as 'a movie that makes you sad' is violently insufficient. Gonna have to go with consensus that everyone ought to see this, especially kids."
NASHVILLE (1975)
Robert Altman / Joan Tewkesbury
"The documentary-ish, 'cross-section' style of the film lends a great deal of weight to both its darkest moments and its ultimately optimistic outlook - each event is a sort of surprise at the same time as being a lightning strike"
TOKYO DRIFTER (1966)
Seijun Suzuki / Yasanori Kawauchi
"Real light on incident and character, but to my eyes the style is hard to distinguish from a lot of what was going on in the '60s, except maybe the overlapping music and impatient editing. Uh it's kind of like Band of Outsiders, so there's that - though that's an interesting comparison, because Tokyo D. is garishly fake and set-bound (in one particular scene the stage lights change from white to red to yellow, with no internal motivation), yet carries the same who-gives-a-fuck attitude. Maybe pop art just really sucks?"
PASTORAL, TO DIE IN THE COUNTRY (1974)
Shuji Terayama / Shuji Terayama
"Painfully lonely and personal, a dream-drama that never strays from its simple, infinitely complicated theme of owning one's identity. Not to mention the pretty obvious origin point of David Lynch's entire career."
EXCALIBUR (1981)
John Boorman / John Boorman, Rospo Pallenberg
"A perfect story for Boorman to tell, with his lusty bombast and skepticism of humanity, symbolic characters, and episodic structure"
ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (2007)
"The Brothers Strause" / Shane Salerno
"A pointlessly terrible film with a moronic setting, cringey human drama, and shit for brains. Good Predator scenes though, makes the character seem cooler and more competent than the previous film. Surprisingly, I'd rewatch Covenant far sooner than this, but it's too insubstantial to stoop to Prometheus levels."
POPEYE (1980)
Robert Altman / Jules Feifer
"Excruciating to sit through, though good evidence in Altman's (over)confidence in his own style, something that can't even casually be fitted to high-energy slapstick comedy. Shelley Duvall deserves an Oscar, though."
GIMME SHELTER (1970)
Albert and David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin / (documentary)
"The 'peace and love' ethos receives a challenge and shatters live on stage"
WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE (1980)
Les Blank / Werner Herzog (documentary)
"A lot less shoe-eating than could be desired, but Herzog's off-the-cuff musings about capitalist apocalypse, Coke ads, and the utility of garlic would make a lovely podcast"
FITZCARRALDO (1982)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"Kinda burns an opening hour without much to show but light comedy (and this ain't no Altman), but gets great once it arrives at the centerpiece stunt. Popol Vuh's noodling has never felt more appropriate and more unwelcome than atop the ethereal realism of the ascending steam vessel"
BURDEN OF DREAMS (1982)
Les Blank / (documentary)
"Interesting but incomplete - again, Herzog is a fascinating man to watch, but the glimpses we get of Kinski and others around him hint at parallel stories too tantalizing to ignore. The climax too skips off unobserved, leaving a giant hole in history and Herzog's story"
HOPE AND GLORY (1987)
John Boorman / John Boorman
"Boorman bends well to comedy, even if it's more often cheery than exactly funny. The dark edge of his primal obsession surfaces in teen pregnancies, destruction-happy boys, and despised senile grandfathers, but the whole thing wraps up with way too many bows on top (not unlike Deliverance, really)"
LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)
George A. Romero / George A. Romero
"Well goddamn if Romero doesn't follow his convictions. A much-needed 15-minute edit is the only thing keeping us from a zombie protagonist this time, and the weird, savage world is again something to behold. The bad news is the leads are too many and too shitty, and the crumbly action highlights just how threadbare the plot is."
GOSFORD PARK (2001)
Robert Altman / Julian Fellowes
"Really interestingly structured around a weekend in the country in a way that situates us as part of the events, susceptible to the same longings and boredoms and suspicions and melancholy of each of the characters, without losing how specifically this time lapse affects each of them"
DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004)
Zack Snyder / James Gunn
"A decent action flick with a few really clever ideas (the birth, the billboard friendship), very solid lead performances (and very weak supporting ones), and a lot of unfunny matzoh balls in the dialogue. It's not really less scary than Romero's movies (it's tenser than any but Day), but the horror (after the opening) feels watered down, not least due to the (comparative) absence of (practical) gore. ()"
RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)
Dan O'Bannon / Dan O'Bannon
"Never gets old"
POLICE STORY (1985)
Jackie Chan / Jackie Chan, Edward Tang
"A deathmatch between Chan, half a dozen cars, a mall, a shanty town, and all the plate glass money can buy."
BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (2009)
Werner Herzog / William F. Finkelstein
"Great first half with an oddly Evangelical second half. It is somewhat too effective at selling salvation through the grace of God and ends up at offputting, where the unsettling black humor of e.g. torturing and blackmailing senior citizens was working a lot better"
End Directrospective. And what a weird way to go.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)
Frank Oz / Howard Ashman, based on a stage show by Howard Ashman
"Feels incredibly rinky-dink and stagebound, like 120% of the budget went into the monster. The dentist song is great and the (DC) ending is highly correct, otherwise there isn't much to grab onto except grating performances and obnoxious humor"
ENTER THE NINJA (1981)
Menahem Golan / Dick Desmond
"Ninja Gaiden '04 starring Luigi"
GODZILLA: TOKYO S.O.S. (2003)
Masaaki Tezuka / Masaaki Tezuka, Masahiro Yokotani
"Pretty good explosions and overall somewhat better than X Mechagodzilla"
GET CARTER (1971)
Mike Hodges / Mike Hodges, based on a novel by Ted Lewis
"Fantastic and brutal, a revenge mystery that sets up the pieces with mathematical precision and then annihilates them point blank with a shotgun"
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)
Christopher Nolan / Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer
"Even less a superhero movie and even less good than the usual Batman, although Bane is kind of hilariously weird and terrible in a mostly good way"
GOD'S NOT DEAD (2014)
Harold Cronk / Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon
"Hercules time travels to the future to prove that God wasn't really there, he was just always listening"
TOP FIVE:
1.) Pastoral, to Die in the Country
2.) Nashville
3.) Annihilation
4.) In Bruges
5.) Nightcrawler
Nightcrawler and Get Carter were tied for 5th, then I remembered the music from Nightcrawler.
BOTTOM FIVE :
64.) AVP: Requiem
63.) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
62.) Popeye
61.) Band of Outsiders
60.) City Hunter
If we were talking pure objective quality, Exorcist II and God's Not Dead would be here, but I'd rather rewatch them than any of these five.
STATISTICS
Total - 64
Writer/director ("auteur") movies - 27
Documentaries - 3 and 3/8 (of Ken Burns' Vietnam)
Most frequent director - Boorman/Altman/Herzog (4)
Most frequent writer - Werner Herzog (4)
Most frequent franchise - A Nightmare on Elm Street (3)
2018: 4
2010s: 10
2000s: 14
1990s: 10
1980s: 16
1970s: 9
1960s: 2
1950s: 3
SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006)
Bryan Singer / Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, Bryan Singer
"Much more even and likable than Man of Steel, with some fantastic saving-people (rather than punching-stuff) superheroics and a real mix of great, terrible, and fan-filmy casting"
CITY HUNTER (1993)
Jing Wong / Tsukasa Hojo, Jing Wong
"Too weird to miss, it goes more than all-in on being a live action manga, even if it ends up wasting Chan. Severely not funny for a comedy (terrible editing for punchlines), but whatever."
TAMMY AND THE T-REX (1994)
Stewart Rafill / Gary Brockette, Stewart Rafill
"Though hard to say whether this is a moronic children's comedy with way too much violence and sex or the dumbest erotic revenge thriller ever made, it's actually funny when it's supposed to be, even if largely by virtue of insanity."
GODZILLA: PLANET OF THE MONSTERS (2018)
Koubun Shizuno, Hiroyuki Seshita / Gen Urobuchi
"Builds a surprisingly robust world without much direct labor, quietly lacing in concepts forged in the '60s series while feeling entirely new, with a great primal setting for what limited monster action we get"
HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
Terence Fisher / Jimmy Sangster
"Very easily the best version of Dracula I know, still just kinda alright. Transfixing performances from Lee and Cushing, but neither man is present frequently enough, leaving everything else to wither under overwrought production design and violence more melodramatic than scary"
THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)
Val Guest / Richard Landau, Val Guest
"Between an unusually outre space invader and a magnificently suspenseful opening scene, this easily coasts past some awful performances to instill genuine terror in rote genre material"
FEAST (2005)
John Gulager / Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton
"For direct-to-video horror, it has a nice grungy aesthetic and solid natural passing-of-day lighting, the practical effects are great, and the cast makes a lot out of underwritten dialogue (Henry Rollins). It also has exactly as formulaic an Alien structure as one would expect, something that goes a long way in counteracting any puckishness in the choice of deaths. Not to mention it wasn't direct-to-video."
THE ROOM (2003)
Tommy Wiseau / Tommy Wiseau
"tbh not that funny, the highlight reels are all you need"
DEADPOOL (2016)
Tim Miller / Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
"The gore's good, the humor's pleasant if not laugh-out-loud, and the characters are better developed than expected. Solid fanservice too - I'd forgotten all about Blind Al and Weasel and both get plenty of screen-time. The plot doesn't diverge too far (or at all really) from superhero boilerplate, but by god is it refreshing to have a purely personal hero/villain conflict and stakes as low as one human life."
THE DARK CRYSTAL (1984)
Jim Henson, Frank Oz / David Odell
"If the central characters weren't so off-putting and unemotive, maybe the standard fantasy beats would have some identity, but the whole thing feels in such a hurry to get through the formula that there's nothing else to attach to, and it winds up boring. The dialogue is awful too, though we learned on this viewing that's because the film was originally intended to include no intelligible language!"
ANNIHILATION (2018)
Alex Garland / Alex Garland
"If cancer's this fun, sign me up for chemo!"
IN BRUGES (2008)
Martin McDonagh / Martin McDonagh
"A fairy tale of conflicting moral systems, men who can't stop being boys, and calmly precise spiritual metaphor"
ANNIHILATION (2018)
Alex Garland / Alex Garland
"The characters make a lot more sense the second time, and the declamatory dialogue cliches play as charmingly inept rather than hackily terrible"
PONYO (2008)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki
"Inventive action, beautiful animation, lovable characters, and a sleepily comfortable incarnation of childhood nostalgia. At the same time, a simple, nice, and pleasant story with a deeply insufficient final third that makes the experience feel largely without substance or pathos"
BLACK PANTHER (2017)
Ryan Coogler / Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
"High fantasy moreso than superhero story, just political enough to prove it isn't stupid, and the best cast of characters in any Marvel movie short of Guardians OTG. Definitely bloated with at least an unnecessary aerial battle, but makes the most out of the requisite car chase as penance."
DUNE (1984)
David Lynch / David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
"David Lynch? More like David Crynch, because this story is so violently smashed into a 2-hour filmic suitcase as to completely lack even the slightest hint of momentum; the classic case of the film that is so busy that it can't see farther than one scene ahead, and never really starts the plot as a result."
JURASSIC PARK (1993)
Steve Spielberg / Michael Crichton, David Koepp
"The 'bergian chase scene is effective, but how many of them do we need in a single movie? And the hand-holding endless tension and sentimentality ratcheting is annoying beyond belief - fine stuff for kids' film, but I don't know how adults don't go nuts slogging through. Fun fact: the famed T-Rex Jeep attack scene is about 8 minutes long, starting from where the T-Rex is first heard approaching. The T-Rex doesn't appear for 4 minutes, and then after a minute disappears for another two."
EL MARIACHI (1993)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Sing us a song, you're the mariachi man"
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)
Jonathan Demme / Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
"The best episode of X-Files never recorded, with a dash of Cape Fear here and a dash of Friday the 13th there, laced with some great face-to-face close-ups and stitched together with noticeably great editing."
BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)
Jean-Luc Godard / Jean-Luc Godard
"This is probably pretentious meta-schlock made for film enthusiasts who can point out all the weird techniques and rule-breaks Goddy uses along the way, and I don't really object to that any more than to horror schlock or romance schlock - the odd thing is, when it's at its most self-congratulatory and confrontational is when it's most entertaining, like a minute of silence imposed on the audience or the awkward layout of the credits that turns out to be setup for a joke where the director is credited as "Jean-Luc Cinema Godard". I audibly chuckled at the student in English class whose only purpose is to ask the camera "How do you say 'a big, one million dollar film'?" But, like, it's also terribly boring, with barely glimpsed superficial characters whose petulant personality shifts play like more schoolyard antics rather than recognizably human intricacies, and drama that isn't given even the faintest air of gravity, with characters playing dead (or actors playing dead????, I'm probably supposed to ask), nighttime scenes shot during the day, and an escape to South America that very obviously terminates 12 inches left of frame. Is it all worth it for those few excitingly surreal moments, like the trashy plot of a Godzilla movie is worth it for the few minutes of monster rampage? Am I missing literally everything? Maybe at 29 I'm just too old for this shit."
DESPERADO (1995)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Like El Mariachi, great for its means, but not particularly high impact. Heavily leaning into the cartoonish / spaghetti western side of things now. Very fun and inventive action scenes, but hurts that the movie starts at its peak and slides down (the bar) from there."
SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)
Billy Wilder / Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman Jr.
"A pair of titanic, one-of-a-kind character portraits paired with a pair of rote, generic ones, almost more Gothic than noir"
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson
"Delightfully precise and frothy, yet hang on I'm not using the word 'frothy'. Is this the origin of critic-speak? Artificial brevity? Even 'delightful' is pretty bad. I gotta stop writing things that I would never say in real life. Anyway, GBH is sorta like an imaginary period piece, a salute to the passing of an era that didn't really exist, one glorified but not exactly praised. It's really the perfect use for Anderson's dollhouse aesthetic. Dollhouse aesthetic. Dollhouse aesthetic!"
PORCO ROSSO (1992)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki
"Pigzapoppin'"
NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki, based on the manga by Hayao Miyazaki
"As much as I enjoy Miyazaki's typical fairy tales, his fantasy epics seem more like the point, channeling the flood of dreamlike detail into boundless vessels far exceeding the scale of a motion picture, too visionary to qualify as anything as prosaic as 'world-building'"
ED WOOD (1994)
Tim Burton / Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski
"Good enough to warrant a review!"
DOCTOR WHO vs. GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (1974)
David Maloney / Terry Nation
"It's definitely a BBC genre show from the 1970s, and exactly as exciting as that sounds, but there are just enough unique ideas and suspenseful situations to keep your attention, with Davros naturally transcending genre expectations and Tom Baker getting enough lines to remember he exists"
ED WOOD (1994)
Same
"Greg said he's not impressed, and after I was so nice to 'Genesis of the Daleks' too"
X2: X-MEN UNITED (2003)
Bryan Singer / Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, David Hayter
"Pretty clunky in the script department and not focused on any character well enough to feel like more than a TV episode, still does good service to the X-Men notion of gods among men, and even half-decent for riffing on The Once and Future King (if you know the plot of that novel. Just like the Phoenix stuff is decent if you know the plot of that comic arc - if you don't, it's like whaaat?)"
GORILLA INTERRUPTED (2003)
Mike Stoklasa / Mike Stoklasa with additional material by Garrett Gilchrist
"Going into this, I was perfectly aware - based on 1.) the remarks of the filmmakers and 2.) every other RLM film trailer or short - that it would be absolutely terrible. I also knew from those two sources that it came about very similarly to the movies my friends and I would make as teenagers, right around the same early '00s final pre-Youtube era, and that therefore it would make for a very potent injection of nostalgia. And it did. It even had a single, solitary funny joke! Perhaps the best and nostalgiaiest bit was That One Friend who obviously no one likes, no one even pretends to like, but you let them hang around because they have the camera or their parents don't care if you trash their house or whatever it may be in this case."
NIGHTCRAWLER (2014)
Dan Gilroy / Dan Gilroy
"A human experimentation project moreso than a character study, squeezing a weird near-psychopath to see what comes out. Simultaneously a black comedy exploring the evil side of Pursuit of Happyness-type rags-to-riches fables, though often more unpleasant (in a groaning, sickening way) than funny because of its hate-boner for newsmedia."
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson
"Lot of rewatches this year. Sharing is daring."
Here begins the oft-interrupted Summer Directrospective, in which we take a decades spanning summary tour of the works of John Boorman, Robert Altman, and Werner Herzog.
DELIVERANCE (1972)
John Boorman / James Dickey
"Like Sorcerer, it's tempting to describe this as just a really great thriller, but it's also working with the same kind of primal self-destructive masculine energy that whatever"
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (1988)
Renny Harlin / Brian Helgeland, Ken Wheat, Jim Wheat
"Well, things aren't completely terrible yet. A couple of the kills are kinda okay, not yet dragged into the elaborate 80-minute set pieces of the next couple movies, but the Dream Magic is now officially hardcore stupid, and the 'daring' decision to copy Psycho's mid-film twist completely destroys the story's momentum and ability to function"
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD (1989)
Stephen Hopkins / Leslie Bohem
"Just the fucking worst: screechingly loud, purely redundant, moronic in concept and execution, overplotted, and nothing at all like a horror film"
FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE (1991)
Rachel Talalay / Michael DeLuca
"Like The Final Friday, the '90s hurt this series bad, dragging it down to television production levels in script, scope, cast (featuring cameos by Tom Arnold and Roseanne!), and all but a handful of effects shots. Still, it's funny enough here and there to easily surpass part 5."
GODZILLA: CITY ON THE EDGE OF BATTLE (2018)
Kobun Shizuno, Hiroyuki Seshita / Gen Urobuchi
"Like Part 1, the ideas at play here are great, passing far beyond what we could ever expect to see in a live-action Godzilla (such as the bizarrely evil city of the title). Unfortunately, once this stuff is all up on screen, it fails to DO anything, feeling simultaneously uninspired and cheap, with Godzilla barely showing up on screen and M. City mostly just a bunch of gun emplacements. The third movie will have a lot to make up on the action front to compensate, and given that we know the always-tedious Mothra will be involved, it's hard to be excited at this point."
FATA MORGANA (1971)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"It is mostly just a bunch of landscape photography, but carefully selected and edited not to suggest an actual geographic space"
THE ROCKETEER (1991)
Joe Johnston / Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo
"A pretty fun movie, though somewhat ironically the airplane stunt sequences are much more engaging than the unfortunately dated rocket-pack effects. Jennifer Connolly is still the hottest actress ever, so there's that."
MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
Robert Altman / Robert Altman, Brian McKay
"A genre-typical story that's all weird in the details, from cases of anti-farcical mistaken identity to whores with hearts of drug addiction, despondent if not entirely hopeless, all shot with stand-up-and-notice cinematography shifting from smudgy realism to bleary-eyed nostalgia to neon lust. Not really ruined by the presence of Leonard Cohen songs, but harmed in some fairly irrevocable ways."
EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977)
John Boorman / William Goodhart (rewrites by John Boorman & Rospo Pallenberg)
"The weirdest thing here isn't that the movie is patently insane or hilarious, which is plain enough to see just reading the fact-sheet, but that many of the takes, bar bad acting, are genuinely well-done, from the soaring locust cam to the harrowing cliff face exorcism. It's just that there is no such thing as a good version of locust cam or a cliff face exorcism - 'made by a demented mind' indeed."
GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988)
Isao Takahata / Isao Takahata
"It's hard to call a movie like this brilliant or perfect. Sorta feels like it's so effective on an emotional level that it would be counterproductive or disempowering to turn that off to look at how it's creating that effect. Focus too hard on why things make you sad and you raise the cynicism water level. Idk, I don't feel that way about all emotionally challenging films. Either way, to describe GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES as 'a movie that makes you sad' is violently insufficient. Gonna have to go with consensus that everyone ought to see this, especially kids."
NASHVILLE (1975)
Robert Altman / Joan Tewkesbury
"The documentary-ish, 'cross-section' style of the film lends a great deal of weight to both its darkest moments and its ultimately optimistic outlook - each event is a sort of surprise at the same time as being a lightning strike"
TOKYO DRIFTER (1966)
Seijun Suzuki / Yasanori Kawauchi
"Real light on incident and character, but to my eyes the style is hard to distinguish from a lot of what was going on in the '60s, except maybe the overlapping music and impatient editing. Uh it's kind of like Band of Outsiders, so there's that - though that's an interesting comparison, because Tokyo D. is garishly fake and set-bound (in one particular scene the stage lights change from white to red to yellow, with no internal motivation), yet carries the same who-gives-a-fuck attitude. Maybe pop art just really sucks?"
PASTORAL, TO DIE IN THE COUNTRY (1974)
Shuji Terayama / Shuji Terayama
"Painfully lonely and personal, a dream-drama that never strays from its simple, infinitely complicated theme of owning one's identity. Not to mention the pretty obvious origin point of David Lynch's entire career."
EXCALIBUR (1981)
John Boorman / John Boorman, Rospo Pallenberg
"A perfect story for Boorman to tell, with his lusty bombast and skepticism of humanity, symbolic characters, and episodic structure"
ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (2007)
"The Brothers Strause" / Shane Salerno
"A pointlessly terrible film with a moronic setting, cringey human drama, and shit for brains. Good Predator scenes though, makes the character seem cooler and more competent than the previous film. Surprisingly, I'd rewatch Covenant far sooner than this, but it's too insubstantial to stoop to Prometheus levels."
POPEYE (1980)
Robert Altman / Jules Feifer
"Excruciating to sit through, though good evidence in Altman's (over)confidence in his own style, something that can't even casually be fitted to high-energy slapstick comedy. Shelley Duvall deserves an Oscar, though."
GIMME SHELTER (1970)
Albert and David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin / (documentary)
"The 'peace and love' ethos receives a challenge and shatters live on stage"
WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE (1980)
Les Blank / Werner Herzog (documentary)
"A lot less shoe-eating than could be desired, but Herzog's off-the-cuff musings about capitalist apocalypse, Coke ads, and the utility of garlic would make a lovely podcast"
FITZCARRALDO (1982)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"Kinda burns an opening hour without much to show but light comedy (and this ain't no Altman), but gets great once it arrives at the centerpiece stunt. Popol Vuh's noodling has never felt more appropriate and more unwelcome than atop the ethereal realism of the ascending steam vessel"
BURDEN OF DREAMS (1982)
Les Blank / (documentary)
"Interesting but incomplete - again, Herzog is a fascinating man to watch, but the glimpses we get of Kinski and others around him hint at parallel stories too tantalizing to ignore. The climax too skips off unobserved, leaving a giant hole in history and Herzog's story"
HOPE AND GLORY (1987)
John Boorman / John Boorman
"Boorman bends well to comedy, even if it's more often cheery than exactly funny. The dark edge of his primal obsession surfaces in teen pregnancies, destruction-happy boys, and despised senile grandfathers, but the whole thing wraps up with way too many bows on top (not unlike Deliverance, really)"
LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)
George A. Romero / George A. Romero
"Well goddamn if Romero doesn't follow his convictions. A much-needed 15-minute edit is the only thing keeping us from a zombie protagonist this time, and the weird, savage world is again something to behold. The bad news is the leads are too many and too shitty, and the crumbly action highlights just how threadbare the plot is."
GOSFORD PARK (2001)
Robert Altman / Julian Fellowes
"Really interestingly structured around a weekend in the country in a way that situates us as part of the events, susceptible to the same longings and boredoms and suspicions and melancholy of each of the characters, without losing how specifically this time lapse affects each of them"
DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004)
Zack Snyder / James Gunn
"A decent action flick with a few really clever ideas (the birth, the billboard friendship), very solid lead performances (and very weak supporting ones), and a lot of unfunny matzoh balls in the dialogue. It's not really less scary than Romero's movies (it's tenser than any but Day), but the horror (after the opening) feels watered down, not least due to the (comparative) absence of (practical) gore. ()"
RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)
Dan O'Bannon / Dan O'Bannon
"Never gets old"
POLICE STORY (1985)
Jackie Chan / Jackie Chan, Edward Tang
"A deathmatch between Chan, half a dozen cars, a mall, a shanty town, and all the plate glass money can buy."
BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (2009)
Werner Herzog / William F. Finkelstein
"Great first half with an oddly Evangelical second half. It is somewhat too effective at selling salvation through the grace of God and ends up at offputting, where the unsettling black humor of e.g. torturing and blackmailing senior citizens was working a lot better"
End Directrospective. And what a weird way to go.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)
Frank Oz / Howard Ashman, based on a stage show by Howard Ashman
"Feels incredibly rinky-dink and stagebound, like 120% of the budget went into the monster. The dentist song is great and the (DC) ending is highly correct, otherwise there isn't much to grab onto except grating performances and obnoxious humor"
ENTER THE NINJA (1981)
Menahem Golan / Dick Desmond
"Ninja Gaiden '04 starring Luigi"
GODZILLA: TOKYO S.O.S. (2003)
Masaaki Tezuka / Masaaki Tezuka, Masahiro Yokotani
"Pretty good explosions and overall somewhat better than X Mechagodzilla"
GET CARTER (1971)
Mike Hodges / Mike Hodges, based on a novel by Ted Lewis
"Fantastic and brutal, a revenge mystery that sets up the pieces with mathematical precision and then annihilates them point blank with a shotgun"
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)
Christopher Nolan / Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer
"Even less a superhero movie and even less good than the usual Batman, although Bane is kind of hilariously weird and terrible in a mostly good way"
GOD'S NOT DEAD (2014)
Harold Cronk / Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon
"Hercules time travels to the future to prove that God wasn't really there, he was just always listening"
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Movies you already should've seen:
Monday, January 14, 2019
Back in the CCCR returns again: New Mario Wii U Luigi Deluxe
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at 6:00 AM | cccr games super mario |
Back in the CCCR, aka Control Customization Reviews Revisited, is a column where we review control customization options in video games.
It's been many long winters since we've been Back in the CCCR, but I thought I'd buy a Mario with my Christmas money and got exactly what I deserved. If there's anything that fires me up to write, it's muddled and overmapped controls with duplicate buttons that offer no customization whatsover.
I should be honest, though, and admit that New Super Mario Luigi U Deluxe Wii Brothers does have one option, and it's quite a pickler. The face buttons of the Switch controller (A, B, Y, X in the SNES diamond layout) are mapped in pairs to two functions - run and jump. Actually, it's a whole lot more functions than that, but hang tight. By default, A/B jump and Y/X run. If you'd like, "Controls 2" will swap the functions of B and X. However, A must remain as jump and Y must remain as run. This doesn't bother me so much as that I just don't get it*. Why not also swap the other two? Or just put the same-function buttons opposite each other (B/X run, A/Y jump) so that the player can get any configuration just by laying their thumb differently. Isn't that the point of dual mapping anyway?
Anyway, am I the only one that feels like Super Mario controls are getting kind of crappy? First of all, after playing various 3D Mario games, pressing down midair to ground-pound feels awful, especially on the already subobtimal non-gated analog stick or C-buttons. It's a dual mapping of actions that for maximum precision need to be synced - a ground-pound is a targeted action, and the targeting is performed by moving the stick while Mario is midair. So there's a moment when the player has Mario in position and now needs to swing down to actually trigger the action, meaning there will always be a delay. Compare to 3D Mario, where the L/R button is an independent input and frame-perfect timing isn't all that hard.
Then there's spin jump. Oh, the terrible spin jump. The default mapping on R/ZR is sensible enough if you're going to dual-map the face buttons like described above. Pressing R/ZR in mid-air performs a mid-air twirl for a bit of extra air-time - this is even more sensible, since there will be situations when a player needs to hold run, hold jump, and be ready to twirl, and all three on face buttons would preclude this. But then they start throwing wrenches in the gears. As is, this was too simple? complicated? so pressing jump again in midair ALSO performs the twirl, I guess for when your elderly grandfather is over for Toadette co-op and can only remember one button. This is a problem, because holding A midair has a different function - it extends jump height and puts Mario into enemy-bounce state. And these too functions are occasionally at odds: for instance if the player wants to do a short hop onto an enemy and bounce off (a common setup for jumps just out of normal reach). The correct button input for this would be tap A (short jump) then press and hold A (bounce state) before landing on the enemy. In Nu Luigi Mario: Two Deluxe Wii Brothers, this input sequence will trigger a midair twirl, slowing Mario's descent and fucking with the timing of the landing. This point, you could argue, is not inherently bad. It's just increasing the technicality of the gameplay. If you want to short hop and bounce without a twirl, you now need to time the second A to exactly the landing on the enemy. But didn't we just get through discussing an example where the gameplay has become less technical? We can't go both these directions at once. And the short hop and bounce has been in Mario Brothers since day one - for over 30 years - so I don't know why it needs to change now**. Just leave twirl on the other input you already established for it.
As usual, this stuff wouldn't be so frustrating if it wasn't done correctly right next door. It shows, or reinforces, that their focus with these games isn't solid action, but loosely sorta getting the right idea so you can play with your newborn baby and dog. Why does it matter if you can't get a frame-perfect ground-pound? asks Miyadumbo. We made it so that you can set a controller on your pregnant wife's stomach and the baby can kick Mario through the levels! And if your child was born with no head they can still beat the game without looking at the screen! More than anything, what makes Nintendo weird isn't so much that they pick weird targets, but that they refuse to broaden their aim just by adding in some very simple configuration (which I suppose does fit into the mentality of not considering your customers adults - we're having peas for dinner because I said so). I mean, is it really going to fuck with kids' heads so terribly if you let them put spin jump on a face button? You don't even write manuals for your games anymore.
*Actually, it does grate an extra 50% because the same exact "swap B and X" was the only control option in Zelda: BoW, and was substantially more pointless and obstructive there.
**I can't be fucked to remember when in the New Mario canon twirl was introduced - I don't remember it before this, but these games are designed with forgettability in mind.
It's been many long winters since we've been Back in the CCCR, but I thought I'd buy a Mario with my Christmas money and got exactly what I deserved. If there's anything that fires me up to write, it's muddled and overmapped controls with duplicate buttons that offer no customization whatsover.
I should be honest, though, and admit that New Super Mario Luigi U Deluxe Wii Brothers does have one option, and it's quite a pickler. The face buttons of the Switch controller (A, B, Y, X in the SNES diamond layout) are mapped in pairs to two functions - run and jump. Actually, it's a whole lot more functions than that, but hang tight. By default, A/B jump and Y/X run. If you'd like, "Controls 2" will swap the functions of B and X. However, A must remain as jump and Y must remain as run. This doesn't bother me so much as that I just don't get it*. Why not also swap the other two? Or just put the same-function buttons opposite each other (B/X run, A/Y jump) so that the player can get any configuration just by laying their thumb differently. Isn't that the point of dual mapping anyway?
Anyway, am I the only one that feels like Super Mario controls are getting kind of crappy? First of all, after playing various 3D Mario games, pressing down midair to ground-pound feels awful, especially on the already subobtimal non-gated analog stick or C-buttons. It's a dual mapping of actions that for maximum precision need to be synced - a ground-pound is a targeted action, and the targeting is performed by moving the stick while Mario is midair. So there's a moment when the player has Mario in position and now needs to swing down to actually trigger the action, meaning there will always be a delay. Compare to 3D Mario, where the L/R button is an independent input and frame-perfect timing isn't all that hard.
Then there's spin jump. Oh, the terrible spin jump. The default mapping on R/ZR is sensible enough if you're going to dual-map the face buttons like described above. Pressing R/ZR in mid-air performs a mid-air twirl for a bit of extra air-time - this is even more sensible, since there will be situations when a player needs to hold run, hold jump, and be ready to twirl, and all three on face buttons would preclude this. But then they start throwing wrenches in the gears. As is, this was too simple? complicated? so pressing jump again in midair ALSO performs the twirl, I guess for when your elderly grandfather is over for Toadette co-op and can only remember one button. This is a problem, because holding A midair has a different function - it extends jump height and puts Mario into enemy-bounce state. And these too functions are occasionally at odds: for instance if the player wants to do a short hop onto an enemy and bounce off (a common setup for jumps just out of normal reach). The correct button input for this would be tap A (short jump) then press and hold A (bounce state) before landing on the enemy. In Nu Luigi Mario: Two Deluxe Wii Brothers, this input sequence will trigger a midair twirl, slowing Mario's descent and fucking with the timing of the landing. This point, you could argue, is not inherently bad. It's just increasing the technicality of the gameplay. If you want to short hop and bounce without a twirl, you now need to time the second A to exactly the landing on the enemy. But didn't we just get through discussing an example where the gameplay has become less technical? We can't go both these directions at once. And the short hop and bounce has been in Mario Brothers since day one - for over 30 years - so I don't know why it needs to change now**. Just leave twirl on the other input you already established for it.
As usual, this stuff wouldn't be so frustrating if it wasn't done correctly right next door. It shows, or reinforces, that their focus with these games isn't solid action, but loosely sorta getting the right idea so you can play with your newborn baby and dog. Why does it matter if you can't get a frame-perfect ground-pound? asks Miyadumbo. We made it so that you can set a controller on your pregnant wife's stomach and the baby can kick Mario through the levels! And if your child was born with no head they can still beat the game without looking at the screen! More than anything, what makes Nintendo weird isn't so much that they pick weird targets, but that they refuse to broaden their aim just by adding in some very simple configuration (which I suppose does fit into the mentality of not considering your customers adults - we're having peas for dinner because I said so). I mean, is it really going to fuck with kids' heads so terribly if you let them put spin jump on a face button? You don't even write manuals for your games anymore.
*Actually, it does grate an extra 50% because the same exact "swap B and X" was the only control option in Zelda: BoW, and was substantially more pointless and obstructive there.
**I can't be fucked to remember when in the New Mario canon twirl was introduced - I don't remember it before this, but these games are designed with forgettability in mind.
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