Well, It's One D Better, Isn't It?

As a coda to King's discussing the film Coraline, Colleen and I watched the movie yesterday. We both enjoyed it, me especially. After seeing so much recent movie fantasy skew epic, towards Tolkien or even C.S. Lewis, it's comforting to see such a dedicated treatment of fantasy of the Carrollean tradition: Stories that are personal and reflexive, placing the mundane in sharp relief against the wondrous.

Coraline is weird and wonderful. It isn't often you find a film that succeeds both in being perfectly intimate, and perfectly monomythic.

But! The same technology that King expounded upon, I found jarring and newfangled. Watching it on our tv at home, we found quickly that the benefits of 3D were strongly outweighed by the cons - namely, we found it loused up an otherwise fine colour palette, transforming the shabbilly beautiful shades of the film into a muddy smudge. After watching about 20 minutes, we switched to 2D... it may be one D worse, but we got by just fine.

Despite everything, I'm quite happy we got two pairs of rinky-dink glasses with the rental for free. Now, if I ever stumble across a re-run of "The Bots Master", I'll have 3D shades at the ready.

Or, more accurately, "3D Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaades."



Oh, look. It's my childhood. What can I say? I'm a sucker for jive-talking robots.


- Rook

Pod People!

Recently I was invited to present at the University of Bedfordshire's Under the Mask 2009, a conference on the relationship between player and character. Circumstances conspired such that I was unable to go in person, but, age of wonders that we live in, I was able to be broken down into pure digital information and transported through the tubes that comprise The Internet at THE SPEED OF LIGHT. * Thus I was able to be virtually present at an actual presentation on virtuality.

With the help of Bryan Piitz from Georgian Bay Video, I produced this video essay, entitled "Pod People and Swappable Selves: On the Buying an Selling of Avatar." It engages such questions as 'how do players achieve authentic experiences in massively-multiplayer spaces?', 'Can virtual bodies be understood as "genuine?"', and, 'My haircut: is it nice?'

Pod People and Swappable Selves: On the Buying and Selling of Avatar from VideoYEAH on Vimeo.

If you'd just rather have the questions spoiled, the answers are "It's complicated", "Sometimes", and "Sure?"

The paper essay can be read here as a .doc file, along with the other papers presented to the conference. There's some fascinating work on show, and it's my pleasure to have been able to contribute to it.


- Rook

* N.B.: I actually have no idea how the internet works.

Sweeeet Coraline, dah dah dah!

So I went to see Coraline the other day and was surprised to discover my ticket had smacked me for $15.50 instead of the usual $12.50. I was instantly excited that I would soon be learning all about the economy in university at which point this sort of bullshit would make sens- What. The. Fuck. I had just been handed 3D glasses.

I was shocked to say the least. I had come to see a magical children's story come to life on the big screen, not to dodge red and blue bat-dogs and button eyes flying off the screen into my face. Imagine my surprise then when I discovered what 3D movies were all about these days.

You could totally just wear these out to the mall.
Like, maybe with a nice hat?

Gone are the red and cyan cardboard glasses of days yore. Now they use Polarized glasses which create the illusion of 3d by limiting the amount of light that reaches each eye. The projector then projects two images, superimposed on each other, with opposite light levels and each lens of the glasses filters a different level of light tricking your brain into perceiving depth where there is none.

Science!

The result is a great effect. As the opening credits roll everything appears to be, for lack of a better analogy, in a fish tank. A mysterious pair of hands comprised of sewing needles is stitching together a rag doll. The hands appear to be occupying the space a fish would, the rag doll appearing just behind, the desk the doll is resting on would be the bank of the tank and the opening credit names look as though they were written directly onto the front of the tank.

We've come a long way.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that it's an extremely subtle effect which simply provides depth of picture. I can only recall two instances where something jumped out of the screen in an attempt to kill me. It is a testament to my awesome reflexes that I am here today to tell of it.

This new form of 3D is has also made it's way into video games with support from Nvidia, one of the major manufacturers of graphics cards. One of the things that easily fascilliatates games using polarized 3D is that they don't need to be designed with the feature in mind, it's relatively simple to add in later. And with other new discoveries in gaming technology who knows what the next generation of gaming, and movies could bring.

Until next time, may you see the sailboat

-King

The Second Coming: Who Watches the Watchmen watch Watchmen?

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The end times are upon us. Have you seen the signs? Whispered omens flit across the internets like sparrows taking flight, spooked by some looming and inscrutable presence. They bespeak a dark hour, drawing ever nearer. The world ends tonight! Or, no it doesn't.


But either way, the Watchmen movie finally touches down. So that's something.

Much is being made of the imminent release of Watchmen. It could be argued that this film packs a larger pop culture cache than any in recent memory, a nerd syzygy of comics canon-meets-slick Hollywood blockbuster-meets 9/11-meets Billy Corgan-Meets Cute. During its time, the comic was a lurching step away from the exact modernism of comicdom towards an ambivalent and hyperstatic place, a clamorous "SOD OFF" to superhero geekdom that, somehow, managed to be canonized faster than Mother Theresa.

For those unaccustomed to the inclinations of such cultural currents, here is a handy barometer: Alan Moore's Watchmen was a bid to produce high art within low art, but was received so well as to become emulated, producing low art that has gained enough momentum to be adapted as boffo action flicks, which everyone knows are low art except the flicks themselves, which insist that they are high art and be taken super seriously.

Every single time a comic book adaption hits the right notes, people are eager to claim that they have finally uncovered that most precious of Rosetta Stones: The code that will finally allows us to craft that perfect pop homunculus, the SUPERHERO MOVIE. And then, like Sysyphus, things reset, so it can be done all over again. And now, here is Watchmen, with its hypernarrative plot lines and quantum mans to present what could be called a unified field theory of sorts.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

As to what it all means is, apparently, up for grabs. We have a Tom Shone review dug up over at Slate, which blasphemously dares to suggest that Watchmen is no Ulysses, and in fact is only pretty okay. (To be more accurate, he seems to argue that Watchmen is Ulysses, but that Ulysses sucks and is lame.)

We have film buffs like Bill Emerson seriously mulling over whether he should re-read the comic before he sees the film, or whether that would render him useless as a critic (because what is the book is better, guys?!)

We have film data sites reporting that Watchman may break records, and that everyone and their kid sister may go and see it or maybe not. It is a quantum event, you see, Watchmen the Biggest Hit Ever and Watchmen the Historic Flop co-existing in Schrodinger's Box, waiting to collapse into a single movie.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Central to all of this is a peculiar fear - that if this Watchmen is not our Watchmen, or THE Watchmen, good, better, best, all Watchmen will suffer. The political Watchmen. The life-changing counter cultural Watchmen. The rollicking good read Watchmen. Our childhoods will suffer, and we will suffer. Such a task does not demand adaption, but transliteration.. best done by Gregorian scriveners in some arcane mountain retreat.

The boomers may have perfected nostalgia for childhood, but Gen X has one-upped them: We never got rid of our childhoods - they're safely tucked away, on eBay and Youtube and Wikipedia, still in mint condition, still in the original packaging. Yes, the only thing that can affect our collective pasts, coagulated together in a Jungian unconscious, is new stuff. Stuff that makes us pause, and say "Huh. Maybe.. maybe it wasn't so rad after all."



Perhaps it doesn't help that Mr. Moore himself is rushing about like a cultist fanatic, eager to spread the word that all that important stuff people drummed up about Watchmen was, in fact, all a dream. He has no plans to see the movie, you see, because it a perversion of his original vision. And if people had any sense at all, they would, of course, see that the message is clear: "Yes, Virginia, there ARE Superheroes. And they're nazi homo psycho punks." He helpfully explains that the sloppy, semi-literate teenage mouth-breather depicted in the book's final frames represents the reader, himself.

Par for the course for Mr. Moore, of course. But all the more reason that people are determined to take this so personally. They said it can't be filmed. They said it could never be adapted. Somehow, some way, they've got to be wrong... right?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

If you are the sort who gives a tinker's damn about what critics think, then let the record show that at least one critic doesn't know what to think. Roger Ebert, most unflappable of film goers, writes here that he is positively flapped. Not boggled, or baffled, or gobsmacked - these imply speechlessness, which of course Rodge is not - but simply an absence of meaning. He suggest it is good. It may be great. But, by george, he doesn't know why.

Could anything be more ominous? Even seasoned professionals, faced with such a looming horror, can only report that they saw it... and that they will need to see it again before it will begin to make sense.



Fandom has worked its magic on Watchmen for two decades, busy turning it from a book into a vast psychic exercise. And here to ruin it all is this blasted moving-picture, about to turn all the groupthink into so much hot air.

Because the final horror of the ominous doppelganger that looms before us, is that, once Watchmen: The Best Movie Ever and Watchmen: The Worst Movie Ever come crashing together, all that quantum entanglement will be gone. All that will remain will be Watchmen: A Movie, Once. And for many of us, perhaps that can never be enough.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There is that Warshow axiom, quoted endlessly, about how "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be willing to admit he is a man." Here is it turned on its head. A critic must be willing to admit he is going to a movie. Not a grand-mal-memestorm. Not a repudiation or validation of your entire cultural cache. A movie.

This may be the cure for these fever dreams. Take ten deep breaths. Click your heels together, for good measure. And repeat after me:

It is only a movie.

It is only a movie.

It is only a movie.



Now take a flipping chill pill.


- Rook

Let's talk about sex, baby

You've probably heard about Grand Theft Auto's 'Hot Coffee' scandal, even if you don't follow games. It made news shows and headlines for months and still remains the go to poster child for why games are worse than rock and roll. There are two sides to the argument, and about a dozen sub-sides to each. From 'There's nothing wrong with it since the game was rated mature at the time anyway' to 'It wasn't actually part of the game, simply code on a disk', to 'Satan has made his most recent move to devour the souls of our youth'. But as I said, it's already been debated.

More recently 2008's Mass Effect was making the headlines after it converted the Xbox 360 into a 'Sexbox.' What I'm going to rant about today is the generality of sex in video games and how a game with a sex scene takes a much harder hit than a movie. Let's start with Subject A) the Mass Effect scene in question I now follow with Subject B) The love scene from Meet Joe Black. Now Meet Joe Black's scene is quite a bit longer and slightly more explicit, but I think you'll agree that they're fairly comparable.

Sadly, this Salarian doesn't get any play.

Mass Effect received an M rating from the ESRB for Blood, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, and Violence. The ESRB rating of M is defined as follows: "Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language." I would say that's fair. Meet Joe Black received a PG-13 rating from the MPAA "for an accident scene, some sexuality and brief strong language." Now the MPAA's description for what PG-13 Means is somewhat bulkier but the gist is that kids 13 and over can see it and kids under 13 can see it if it's cool with their parents. But let's keep in mind that nobody has ever in the history of mankind asked a kid if he's 13 when renting a PG-13 movie or buying a theatre ticket. If it's rated R then they do card you and SWAT teams drop from the ceiling and pistol whip you if you're lying, but that's neither here nor there.

The real Gem of the PG-13 rating is "More than brief nudity will require at least a PG-13 rating, but such nudity in a PG-13 rated motion picture generally will not be sexually oriented." Really? Because I'm pretty sure Brad Pitt just had an orgasm in that scene.

King and Rook is now officially PG-13

So why is it that games are held to a much stricter standard than movies? Because kids actually have input? It's not like they're tapping up and down rapidly to get their moves on (Except God of War, but that should have a higher rating than even it's M in my opinion). The only input the player of mass effect has on the sex scene is whether or not to have it. That's right, there is no sex scene unless you make an effort to pursue the romantic subplot. Meet Joe Black doesn't give you much choice. A dude gets bounced off a couple of cars when you're least expecting it and then comes back to life and bangs Claire Forlani. Unless you turn off the movie that stuff is going to happen.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Mass Effect should have a lower rating. It shouldn't, It does in fact have scenes of violence and brief nudity. My problem is that parents, teachers and Baby Jesus think Mass effect shouldn't exist and that the game designers and publishers are a cult of devil worshipping heathens when any 10 year old can pay 5 bucks to watch Brad Pitt blow his wad (If he can sit through 2 and a half hours of Mr. Pitt being confused by Peanut Butter and Swimming Pools) It's a double standard and it shouldn't be.

While this may appear to be a jpg it's actually an embedded video
streaming 3/4's of the footage from Meet Joe Black

When it comes down to it there are about 30 games (not counting the slews of 18+ adult dating sims the Japanese pound out) that have sex scenes in them, and most of those simply have a screen fade to black to imply the act. Meanwhile, hundreds of movies below the R rating toss that stuff into every other scene.

So maybe before these parents get upset at what they're kids aren't supposed to be playing in the first place they should take a double look at the movies they rent for them. Iron Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, and a good many others.

Until next time, don't be afraid to sit your kids down and talk about sex,

-King