“Be Kind Rewind” is a charming mess of a movie, but a mess nonetheless. It’s a typical story about how Jack Black’s magnetic urine—indie band name alert!—erases the entire inventory of VHS tapes in a small thrift store in Passaic, New Jersey, which forces Black and Mos Def to re-film every movie until the evil holders of copyright stomp out their creativity.
Director Michel Gondry is an inventive filmmaker and one of the most creative guys on the planet, but he needs a blacker soul like Charlie Kauffman to keeps his tendency toward icky whimsy in check. “Be Kind Rewind” feels like it’s mostly improvised, with Black doing his manic Jack Black thing, Mos Def mumbling a lot while trying to be a geek instead of a cool rapper, Danny Glover playing the Danny Glover character, and other people sort of coming and going. Its version of Passaic takes place in some sort of alternate universe, where there exists these kinds of perfectly quirky, idyllic neighborhoods full of contrived eccentric people who get along way too well. And it has a typical message about the evils of yuppies and condos and Starbucks.
Coming from a Hollywood movie that thanks companies like Apple in the credits, that rings a little hollow. Maybe if they replaced the ramshackle thrift store with an Apple store—all those poor people need iPods and Macbooks too!—everyone would be happy.
Ignoring the fact that they could probably re-purchase the entire stock of VHS movies for like $1, the re-filmed—or “Sweded,” as the movie calls them—movies are really funny. Gondry is known for his love of low-budget, analogue effects (see the extras on the “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” DVD), and some of the ways they re-create “Ghostbusters,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Rush Hour 2,” “The Lion King,” “Robocop,” “2001,” and others are incredibly cool and creative. I can’t wait to see the low-fi versions of them on BluRay.
(They missed out on an opportunity to Swede “Lethal Weapon,” though, with Black and Def doing Mel Gibson and Danny Glover… or maybe Danny Glover would do Danny Glover. Or better yet, he’d do Joe Pesci.)
Still, it’s hard to wrap your brain around how people recreating existing Hollywood blockbuster movies are an alternative to Hollywood blockbuster movies. But it makes it kind of a cousin to the other YouTube movie of the moment, “Cloverfield,” in that the YouTube generation is supposed to be making stuff and sharing it with others. The touching ending of “Be Kind Rewind”—where the neighborhood gets together to watch the first “original” film from the cast and neighborhood residents—is a stark contrast to the reality of showing original works. In the movie, everyone loves the amateurish creation; in the real world, someone posting something that lousy on YouTube would be savaged. Instead of supporting and rewarding originality—even if it’s kind of sucky—YouTubers are brutal. The criticism you get is just off-the-charts.
A friend of mine was doing a public access show in Vermont, and she edited together all sorts of things, created original segments using Barbie dolls and various other craziness, and started putting them up on YouTube to much derision. (And praise too, but I think the negativity took her by surprise.) People criticized her looks, complained about her being too old… it just got nasty.
Sensitivity to criticism and fear of sucking in public keeps me away from sharing most of the things I create, but my friend sticks with it because, as she says, you have to suck if you’re ever going to be good. And if there’s anything to take from “Be Kind Rewind,” it’s that if you’re going to suck, suck doing your own thing.
As some people who followed the Computer Games Magazine saga are aware, we finished our May 2007 issue in the first week of March, sent it to the printers, and were then told it wouldn’t be printed and were all laid off. (And by “all of us,” it was mainly myself and our art guy at that point. Other people stayed around longer to shut things down.)
Anyway, our featured review that month was of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the oh-so-controversial big MMO of early 2007. We had a tag-team, three-man review of the game, by myself, Tom Chick, and Kelly Wand.
I was rummaging through some files and found the text. I think it was a lot of fun to read. (It was especially fun to do; at least it was when Kelly wasn’t getting me killed.)
So, here it is (hah hah, Tom Chick gave it 4 stars): (more…)
Cloverfield is an an OK version of Godzilla, where the Japanese people are replaced by the most diverse collection of people assembled. We have generic 20-something hot guy, generic 20-something hot girl, generic 20-something hot girl 2, generic 20-something ethnic hot girl, and generic 20-something not-so hot but funny and endearingly goofy guy. There’s the 20-something athletic guy, the 20-something kind of athletic guy, the 20-something arty-looking but athletic and good looking guy…. These people probably exist in some alternate universe in Manhattan, but for the normal people of the world, this is an alien culture of attractiveness and perfect teeth. (There isn’t a single gap or yellowed bicuspid on display.)
The first 20 minutes are torturous. They’re literally watching someone’s home movie, which is as boring and mundane as the real thing. No one’s interesting, no one seems to have a brain, no one is particularly funny… it’s just, “Oh, Rob, you’re so cool.” “Oh, that girl is hot.” “They slept together.” “OMFG, NO WAY!” It’s like the movie version of The Real World or Laguna Beach, without the contrived drama.
And then the contrived drama shows up, in the form of a giant lizard thing that attacks Manhattan. (more…)
OK, more ground rules: I didn’t see (yet, if ever): Atonement (but I have read the book), The Savages, Sweeney Todd, 3:10 to Yuma, The Assassination of Jesse James By An Extremely Long Title, Michael Clayton, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and god knows what others I might have liked.
It’s hard for me to gauge my feelings on this game because I played it in its entirety after I’d started Crysis (but hadn’t reached its sucking bits). Its linear, heavily scripted gameplay—even when implemented with as much skill as Infinity Ward delivers here—feels tired and dull compared to the open-endedness of Crysis. Yeah, all of those in-engine scripted scenes are amazing. But we all get the same amazing scenes, and we all play it the same way. (I didn’t try multiplayer, and I’m told it’s fantastic. I also played it on the 360 instead of the PC, only because I borrowed it rather than bought it.)
Still, a few segments stood out. The sniper mission is brilliant, beautifully capturing a feeling of dread and panic that you’ll be detected. (The fact that you and your companion look like Treebeard is a bonus.) The only goofy part is crawling under a parade of cars in the open; in a “real” scenario, you’d probably just go around the soldiers.
The second is an airborne attack, where sit in a plane high above the action coldly launching bombs, rockets, and various other implements of death at little white dots that scurry about. That those dots are people—and the fact your fellow soldiers in the plane are constantly offering accolades when you score a good hit—probably says more about modern war than any Hollywood polemic. And it was so obvious that there’d be collateral damage, though that’s never discussed.
Whether or not Infinity Ward designed it to be unsettling or not (and in the context of a game that’s mostly “rah rah, soldiers are fucking badass!” I’m going to go with “no”), it disturbed me. While the game makes it clear you’re fighting against “very bad people,” it made modern war seem horribly unfair, particularly when contrasted against most games being forced to “balance” the US versus its enemies for gameplay purposes.
With a week off, I figured I’d catch up on my backlog of games. Some old, some new. Some borrowed, some… blah
First up, Crysis.
Oh dear.
I wanted to love it, I really did.
My most anticipated game of the year turns out to be my biggest disappointment. The people that gave it such high reviews must either dig the multiplayer or have stopped playing about mid-way through the game. Because for its first half, it’s the greatest sandbox combat simulator ever, 100% worthy of its 98s and 5-stars, and 10/10 cups of drool.
You can create these amazing stories, like the time I was being chased by a helicopter, cloaked, ran into a building… and then the helicopter started launching rockets into all the buildings, eventually hitting mine, causing it to collapse on my head and kill me. That’s not a scripted scene like you find in Call of Duty 4. (More on that one later.) Another favorite was driving my Hummer into a village, hop out, let it roll into the middle, then shoot out its rather conveniently placed above-bumper-placed gas can and have the vehicle explode into a fiery ball, taking out half the soldiers. I did that twice.
But once it hits the “zero-g” segment, crikey. That entire stretch is a total momentum killer. (And to think I’d signed up a cover story just to reveal this segment; it would have been our June issue, I believe.) Poor controls, vague objectives, confusing and boring layouts. There’s even a stretch where you get to sit around for a few minutes waiting.
And once you emerge from this boring stretch, you’re hit with chaos. And not the good kind of chaos, like you get in a firefight. It’s the kind where you die and have no idea how or why. You also get stretches where your framerate dips into the single digits. You get boss fights that are comically bad. You get a horrible flying segment. You get… oh, forget it. It’s just terrible from start to finish. Some of the gameplay segments appear to be engine showcases more than good design decisions. (”Look, see? We can do that! Sign up our engine today!”)
Why doesn’t Crytek trust the brilliance of its core gameplay? This game could have been escalating military action from start to finish and been “Game of the Year” material. Instead, it’s just another shooter too obsessed with throwing “new stuff” at the player every hour.
Oh for fuck’s sake. I move away from Burlington and my future wife Neko Case rolls into town (in January) for a “let me preview some of my new material” concert. Sheesh.
There, I said it. I hate something about Super Mario Galaxy.
If I posted this on a forum, I’d be flamed. My opinions on gaming would no longer have any validity. I’d probably be called an anti-Semite racist for good measure too.
It’s amazing how much of a free pass people give Nintendo, especially a Mario game. If anyone else released this exact game, every review would be full of criticisms: Too little health, too much “try and die” gameplay, too linear, etc. Instead, it’s mostly, “Best Game Ever Made!”
Let’s use one example. You have three health, with an occasional red mushroom that doubles it. (These are usually found before a boss battle.) To offset the decrease in health, Galaxy has occasional save points within a galaxy, and there are plenty of ways to get an extra life. (By the end of any session, I’ll typically have twenty or more… of course they reset back to five every time you reload. Bah.)
But let’s say another game does this, say something with space marines or a dude with a gun. People would be screaming that repeatedly killing off the player isn’t gameplay or game design, it’s sadism. Why isn’t it more next-gen? What about letting the player save anywhere? Where’s the open-endedness? Why is there no player choice? Where’s the branching narrative?
None of these are particularly great criticisms of Super Mario Galaxy, but no one would dare raise any of these kinds of issues for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s never had these features. Of course it never was in 3D until Mario 64, so I’m not sure why we don’t expect it to evolve more with the times. Super Mario Galaxy isn’t exactly a re-imagining of the franchise for the Wii—it’s merely a better version of Super Mario Sunshine—but no one would accuse Nintendo of resting on its laurels, of not challenging its players, of not pushing gaming forward.
You don’t dare criticize a big Nintendo game. You would receive so much hate, threats, people saying you hate gaming (and possibly Jesus), and attacks on your overall credibility for daring to offer (possibly legitimate) criticism.
Like Spring Mario. I fucking hate Spring Mario. Yeah, a spring wrapped around Mario. It’s cute. But who thought it was a good idea to take the best thing about a Mario game—running! jumping!—and throwing it out to make the movement horrible, and the jumping even more horrible? And why would you build entire levels around horrible movement and jumping?
So can you love Super Mario Galaxy and hate Spring Mario? Probably not. Clearly I hate gaming. And freedom. The terrorists have won.
Once again, we have ground rules: I like three-minute pop songs. So, this isn’t exactly comprehensive and varied. I like what I like, that is all.