So in an event unrelated to our normal cinemehtic experience, Brian and I watched Mad Max: Fury Road. I fucking love that movie. Don't get me wrong; Fury Road isn't in any way a cerebral film, but it is completely comfortable with that. Every shot, every costume, every line is designed to evoke the greatest amount of joyous badassitude in the audience.
I was nervous going into it, because the glut of nostalgia-exploitation is largely shameful and entirely disappointing, and too often "fun" action movies are just fucking meat-skulled, narcissistic masturbation. I was wrong, and I apologize. The primary antagonists are trying to be the bastard children of the psychos from Borderlands and straight up fucking vikings. They have a skald who's whole job is to hang from the front of a giant mobile stage and play sweet-ass riffs on his flamethrower/guitar, and its glorious. I have a warm and happy place in my heart for things that manage to pull off just being what they are. Pretension is too easy and "self-aware" becomes ham-fisted at great speed. So something like Fury Road that knows what it is and delivers precisely what it promises, is a light in the darkness. Watch this movie and let us know if you can think of any other things that are just perfectly honest about what they are, we don't get enough of that kind of thing.
Showing posts with label "Subtle Narrative". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Subtle Narrative". Show all posts
Monday, September 21, 2015
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Scratching An Itch
So I have been playing a lot of Dark Souls lately and it has been scratching an itch that I didn't know needed scratching. While not a perfect game, Dark Souls does a lot of things right. It has excellent atmosphere, well designed monsters and environments, and a lore that requires its players to piece things together rather than spoon feeding all of the information. Dark Souls doesn't hold the hand of the player and guide them through the game, it encourages exploration and clever thinking.
Most games will take a lot of time to make sure the player knows all the ins and outs of the game and the difficulty will slowly ramp up. This is good, but so many games follow this path its nice to play a game that assumes you can figure it out. Dark Souls tutorial is a bunch of signs in its first area, and that is it. Nothing forces you to read them, but they are glowing so they are hard to miss so its kinda your fault if you don't bother with them and can't figure the game out. After it tells you how to play it just lets you run free.
That's not to say that tutorials aren't good, god knows I wouldn't get through a lot of games without them, but making them a mandatory and drawn out part of the game seems excessive. Pokemon games for instance, haven't changed much, but they all make you go through a tutorial on how to catch pokemon. You can't say "no thanks, I know how to do that" you have to sit back and watch a NPC do a pokemon battle. I get that if you don't know how to play it, this is useful information, but forcing players to go through it seems like a waste of time.
Skyrim, a game that I also love, does the same thing with its tutorial. Its like 10-20 minutes long and unskippable. If I just want to wander around adventuring I need to go through a lot of shit just to do so. Luckily mods fix that issue, but it shouldn't have to be modded out.
I know this is a stupid thing to complain about, but the worst parts of many good games are the stuff like this. As I said before, Dark Souls is far from perfect, but I like that it doesn't guide you through the experience, it gives you a world and says "Explore!". Then it kills you over and over and over again.
By the by, if you want to know about another game that does the same thing: Dragon's Dogma. Its a fun game with some great monster design and has some of the best boss fights I have played in an action RPG (You can climb a dragon and stab it in the fucking heart, its balls out).
Most games will take a lot of time to make sure the player knows all the ins and outs of the game and the difficulty will slowly ramp up. This is good, but so many games follow this path its nice to play a game that assumes you can figure it out. Dark Souls tutorial is a bunch of signs in its first area, and that is it. Nothing forces you to read them, but they are glowing so they are hard to miss so its kinda your fault if you don't bother with them and can't figure the game out. After it tells you how to play it just lets you run free.
That's not to say that tutorials aren't good, god knows I wouldn't get through a lot of games without them, but making them a mandatory and drawn out part of the game seems excessive. Pokemon games for instance, haven't changed much, but they all make you go through a tutorial on how to catch pokemon. You can't say "no thanks, I know how to do that" you have to sit back and watch a NPC do a pokemon battle. I get that if you don't know how to play it, this is useful information, but forcing players to go through it seems like a waste of time.
Skyrim, a game that I also love, does the same thing with its tutorial. Its like 10-20 minutes long and unskippable. If I just want to wander around adventuring I need to go through a lot of shit just to do so. Luckily mods fix that issue, but it shouldn't have to be modded out.
I know this is a stupid thing to complain about, but the worst parts of many good games are the stuff like this. As I said before, Dark Souls is far from perfect, but I like that it doesn't guide you through the experience, it gives you a world and says "Explore!". Then it kills you over and over and over again.
By the by, if you want to know about another game that does the same thing: Dragon's Dogma. Its a fun game with some great monster design and has some of the best boss fights I have played in an action RPG (You can climb a dragon and stab it in the fucking heart, its balls out).
Monday, June 29, 2015
So Bad It's... Nope, Just Bad
I was coerced into watching The Stepford Wives yesterday, and boy was that not good. Christopher Walken didn't save this movie. Matthew Broderick was just as affectless and baffled as ever, Nicole Kidman's character was completely loathsome regardless of which completely different personality is presenting, and easily half the cast was superfluous. Glenn Close is in this fucking movie, and it doesn't seem to appreciate that.
The overall theme in this thing is probably feminism. I say "probably" not because I feel in any way ambiguous about it but because the way they handled feminism in the movie is so shit-fingered and pigeon-holey as to be insulting, and I say that from the depths of my pasty white, middle-class penis. Undeterred by circumstance or consequences, Kidman's character is kind of a cunt through the entire movie, only at the end does she seem to actually change. Not that she stops being a cunt, just that now she appreciates her manipulative, bitter, cowardly shit-pile of a husband.
The gay "wife" is, to quote Brian, "The gay version of a minstrel show," and that is apt. And where he is flashy and dramatic his partner plays the equally cliché constervative power-top. Actually, there is no subtlety in this movie at all. At all. Even if somehow the whole thing were some layers deep meta-cross-commentary arthouse fucking pretension, that would still be a shitty, shallow cliché.
The overall theme in this thing is probably feminism. I say "probably" not because I feel in any way ambiguous about it but because the way they handled feminism in the movie is so shit-fingered and pigeon-holey as to be insulting, and I say that from the depths of my pasty white, middle-class penis. Undeterred by circumstance or consequences, Kidman's character is kind of a cunt through the entire movie, only at the end does she seem to actually change. Not that she stops being a cunt, just that now she appreciates her manipulative, bitter, cowardly shit-pile of a husband.
The gay "wife" is, to quote Brian, "The gay version of a minstrel show," and that is apt. And where he is flashy and dramatic his partner plays the equally cliché constervative power-top. Actually, there is no subtlety in this movie at all. At all. Even if somehow the whole thing were some layers deep meta-cross-commentary arthouse fucking pretension, that would still be a shitty, shallow cliché.
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