See also:
The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26
The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
75. "Funeral Song" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney is my favorite rock band, but lead singer Corin Tucker's challenging dramatic soprano voice is off-putting for many. "Funeral Song" is one of their most accessible, with the vocal drama toned down, and the interaction of the melody and the rhythm is some of S-K's best.
74. "Surprise" - Gnarls Barkley
73. "The Jessica Numbers" - The New Pornographers
Both Gnarls Barkley and The New Pornographers exercise a disproportionate amount of influence over this list. Both groups are excellent song-crafters, while their albums may not get quite as much play. Gnarls Barkley sounds like both the past and the future of pop music, with a Zombies-like flair to the chorus of "Surprise" added to the spacey hip-hop/R&B the duo are best known for. The New Pornographers, by contrast, seem attached very much to the present, with a fairly conventional rock band setup expanding the form of the pop song.
72. "Wake Up" - The Walkmen
Here's another entry in the critically-acclaimed-bands-with-only-one-song-I-really-like category. See also: "Librarian" by My Morning Jacket.
71. "Bang!" - The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' debut EP was built around this anthemic banger, but I've been mostly disappointed by their slightly-less-energetic albums ever since. So it goes.
70. "A Day Like Today" - Tom McRae
Like Springsteen's "Magic," "A Day Like Today" is a case study in how to make a haunting, beautiful, but oddly catchy gem of a song.
69. "Since We Last Spoke" - RJD2
The only instrumental track on the list. A handful of DJs built their reputations releasing primarily instrumental hip-hop mix albums this decade, although RJD2 has since began playing instruments and singing, somewhat bizarrely.
68. "Going On" - Gnarls Barkley
67. "Crazy" - Gnarls Barkley
Has there ever been a group that achieved as much success and critical acclaim, while having an absolutely horrible name, as Gnarls Barkley?
66. "For Women" - Talib Kweli
At nearly eight minutes, "For Women" clocks in as the longest song in the list. Kweli's dense, affecting homage to Nina Simone's "Four Women" specifically - and women of color in general - helped cement his reputation as one of the best "socially conscious" rappers of his generation.
65. "Toxic" - Britney Spears
I mean, I guess I could have expected Britney to have a good song or two in her, but this good? This is a great song, for anyone, let alone a singer who'd made her reputation and money on pandering to the lowest common denominator.
64. "Here's Your Future" - The Thermals
Like The New Pornographers, The Thermals are something of an indie-rock supergroup whose combined fame and effect far exceeded that of their previous groups. But where The New Pornographers deal primarily in lush power pop, The Thermals are entirely driving dirty garage rock - extra sacreligious.
63. "Don't Feel Like Dancing" - Scissor Sisters
As disco has experienced something of a critical re-evaluation in recent years, it's also experienced something of a revival with the Scissor Sisters and Junior Senior making it cool. This song is unlike "Move Your Feet" in that its title is a blatant lie, and just like "Move Your Feet" in that it's hard not to at least tap and smile along with.
62. "Take Me Out" - Franz Ferdinand
Sure, the "neo-New Wave" movement was overplayed, and allowed a lot of crap onto the airwaves. But better this than nu-metal. And better this song than most any other pop-rock of the decade.
61. "Standing In The Way Of Control" - The Gossip
The Gossip somehow transitioned from dirty blues-rock to massively popular dance-punk, without seeming like they were selling out at all. And more power to them - I can only hope that Beth Ditto becomes the Gwen Stefani of the early twenty-teens.
60. "Ghost World" - Aimee Mann
Best song based on a comic book ever? I mean, I'll make the argument that David Bowie's "Oh! You Pretty Things" is about The X-Men, but I'm still not sure that it's a better song than this.
59. "99 Problems" - Dangermouse/Jay-Z
Dangermouse's The Grey Album launched him into superstardom, and helped move the mash-up from the novelty section into the realm of potentially great music. I'd argue that most of its tracks are better than the original Jay-Z tracks, especially this driving, intense combination of "99 Problems" with "Helter Skelter."
58. "Letter From An Occupant" - The New Pornographers
Music critics like to attempt to count just how many hooks can be fit into a single song. Some say "six" for this one. Go on, try and count.
57. "Clint Eastwood" - Gorillaz
I'm not sure how, but I'm both disbelieving that this song was from this decade, and that it was almost a decade ago that it came out.
56. "One Two Three Four" - Feist
Sure, it got overexposed, but damn if this ain't a great song.
55. "Rolling With Heat" - The Roots ft. Talib Kweli
I really want to get into The Roots. They're generally lumped in with a bunch of other hip-hop acts I really like (the Dave Chappelle's Block Party crews!). But I still haven't had any of their albums click with me. That doesn't mean that they can't turn out a great song, like this superb track.
54. "Combat Baby" - Metric
I kind of adopted Metric in the early part of the decade. I was amongst the first of my friends to hear them, and converted everyone I could. I don't think they've really musically transcended their initial steps into stardom, but I don't think they've regressed and I'm happy to see them becoming a bigger name.
53. "The Champ" - Ghostface Killah
While his Pretty Toney Album may have helped keep the Wu-Tang Clan in the public eye, Ghostface's Fishscale rocketed them back into the consciousness of hip-hop fans. An almost operatic saga of street life, featuring Wu-Tang members on several tracks. "The Champ" is Ghostface at his most combative, name-checking his previous successes but describing - and demonstrating - his continued drive.
52. "Silver Lining" - Rilo Kiley
Under The Blacklight took some flack for selling out from previous indie-rock darlings Rilo Kiley, but the thin veneer of pop shine only adds to the album's immense charms. Filled with catchy songs of quiet desperation and of lives gone horribly awry, it's one of the best albums of the decade.
51. "Overnight Celebrity" - Twista ft. Kanye West
How To Identify Chicago Hip-Hop: 1. Does it feature Kanye West or Twista? 2. Was it produced by Kanye West, or have his signature sped-up soul samples? 3. Do the vocals have a playful sneer? By this logic, "Overnight Celebrity" may be the signature Chicago hip-hop song of the decade.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The end of arbitrarily determined time frames means it's time for lists! Olé! My former bosses at The A.V. Club did a Best Albums of the Decade list, but in the era of the iPod, best albums aren't the entirety of music. Hell, my #1 song wasn't even released on a traditional album.
My criteria here are generally subjectively how I feel about the songs now, although there are some songs that I'm not so keen on now, but still felt needed to be on the list, and some weight was given to what I'll pretentiously call "cultural impact" although that really means popularity.
See also:
The Best Songs of the Decade: 75-51
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26
The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
Without further ado, the list:
100. "Who Taught You To Live Like That?" - Sloan
Canadian power-pop band Sloan is one of those fun-sounding groups where the members all switch instruments for different songs. In practice, this makes them fairly inconsistent, but when they're on, they're really on.
99. "Sensual Seduction" - Snoop Dogg
A couple of weeks ago, my sister was trying to argue that autotune was the worst thing ever to happen to music. Sorry, sister dearest, but while Puff Daddy still needs to atone for his crimes, autotune makes pop songs like this. Also, how great is it to see that Snoop "bitches ain't shit" Dogg is now making songs dedicated to the female orgasm? Aww, he's all grown up now.
98. "Sovay" - Andrew Bird
Andrew Bird whistles. This is what he's known for. Hey, it works.
97. "California Dreamer" - Wolf Parade
I'm not sure if it's my expanding musical vocabulary, or just something I'm intrigued by, but I've noticed a trend of responses to famous songs by modern artists. This response to "California Dreamin'" may be inflated in my head thanks to the original's prevalence in Chungking Express, but hey, still a great song.
96. "Sari" - Nellie McKay
Nellie McKay's debut album, Get Away From Me, showed hints of a fascinating talent, and helped trigger the chanteuse explosion of the later part of the decade. Unfortunately, she seems to have tilted towards musical comedy-style songs instead of bizarrely marvelous gems like this.
95. "Benzi Box" - Dangermouse & MF Doom ft. Cee-Lo
Dangerdoom's The Mouse and the Mask was a wonderful gateway into hip-hop for white nerds who liked Adult Swim. This may be the best track on the album, thanks largely to the smooth chorus provided by Cee-Lo - who later teamed up with Dangermouse in Gnarls Barkley and took over the world.
94. "Bring the Pain" - Missy Elliot ft. Method Man
The Wu-Tang Clan opened the decade on top of the hip-hop world, and you couldn't throw a stone without finding their influence somewhere, anywhere. Missy Elliot's interpolation of Method Man's earlier song of the same name brought together Missy's danceable hip-hop with Meth's grittier Wu-Tang past with excellent results.
93. "Tooken Back" - Ghostface Killah ft. Jacki-O
The Wu-Tang Clan went into a swift decline as the decade progressed (culminating the in death of Old Dirty Bastard), with critical and popular support dissolving. The main exception to this general trend was Ghostface Killah, whose stellar solo albums kept the Wu-Tang name alive as something other than a punchline. 2004's Pretty Toney Album was a bit of a foray into pop over hardcore, leading to this silly, touching, and catchy-as-hell song.
92. "I Might Be Wrong" - Radiohead
Hey, it's the first Radiohead track on the list!
91. "PJ & Rooster" - Outkast
Hey, it's the first Outkast track on the list!
90. "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" - The Arcade Fire
I like to describe my tastes in modern rock music as leaning towards shouty-girl pop-punk over fuzzy whiny boy indie rock. That said, full credit to the fuzzy whiny boy rockers in The Arcade Fire. This is a good stuff.
89. "Galang" - M.I.A.
Though her second album made the massive mainstream splash, M.I.A.'s debut showed more than flashes of the superstar-in-the-making, particularly on this track.
88. "Let It Ride" - Ryan Adams
There are a handful of critically acclaimed, fairly popular indie rockers who have single songs I love, even as I can't get into the rest of their catalog. This excellent country/rocker about youthful alienation and rebellion is that song for Ryan Adams. See also - "Bukowski" by Modest Mouse.
87. "Lose Yourself" - Eminem
Remember in 2001, when Eminem and Britney Spears were the biggest pop stars in the universe? They both managed to increase their hit quotient with songs in the short term, but the long term? Yeesh.
86. "Devil's Dance Floor" - Flogging Molly
I don't feel qualified to write much about it, but I kinda like the Irish-punk musical movement. I really, really like this particular example of it.
85. "Animal Rap" - Jedi Mind Tricks ft. Kool G Rap
In an alternate dimension of my own imagining, hip-hop gets its samples not from 70's soul or 80's pop or 90's rock, but from the giants of classical music. Jedi Mind Tricks arrived in our dimension from that place, and gave us songs like this.
84. "Oslo In The Summertime" - Of Montreal
I've heard Of Montreal compared most accurately to David Bowie, in that their music is comprised primarily of catchy little pop songs, but the subject matter and personas adapted are far, well, weirder than other catchy little pop songs, although the comparison does a good job of describing the feel of the music more than the sound. This song will get stuck in your head. Sorry. Ba b-b-b-ba ba ba-ba.
83. "Side to Side" - Blackalicious ft. Lateef & Pigeon John
Blackalicious' Blazing Arrow was one of the best hip-hop albums of the decade, and its follow-up, The Craft, was mostly a disappointment. I only say "mostly" largely because of this comedically catchy, eminently danceable tale of the drawbacks of club hook-ups.
82. "Blue Magic" - Jay-Z
I kind of feel bad about a relative lack of Jay-Z on the list. He has great songs, and he'd certainly be in the running for Artist of the Decade. But by-and-large, he seems, like the Beatles, to do consistently good-to-great songs more than mediocre-to-excellent as most others do. And that's not a bad thing at all - just means fewer-than-expected songs on lists like these.
81. "Radio Nowhere" - Bruce Springsteen
80. "Magic" - Bruce Springsteen
The Boss had something of a career renaissance, focused primarily on his 2007 album Magic. The first track, "Radio Nowhere," demonstrated just how much he can still rock. But perhaps more impressive is the sense of weariness and sadness in "Magic," despite its ostensible happy subject matter of magic tricks. (It also always makes me think of Gob from Arrested Development, and that's not a bad thing.)
79. "Old White Lincoln" - The Gaslight Anthem
Speaking of Bruce, here's a group of young men from Jersey who seem to enjoy his music. I've heard them described as what might happen if Springsteen had gone up to CBGBs and hung out with The Ramones, and I really can't argue that that's either false or a bad thing.
78. "Tell a Story" - Rhymefest
Rhymefest's infectious humor, sense of storytelling, combination of arrogance and humility, and Chicago sneer bring to mind his occasional collaborator, Kanye West, but without the narcissism. That he hasn't become a star may seem baffling, but perhaps not as much when you realize that he's been delaying his second album for the last two years.
77. "Smart Went Crazy" - Atmosphere
Atmosphere got most of their notice as the progenitors of the terribly-named subgenre "emo-rap" early in the decade, but their fifth album, You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having, may be their best. This dense, catchy song is one of several standouts from the second half of the album.
76. "Move Your Feet" - Junior Senior
It does what it says. Truth in song-labeling.
My criteria here are generally subjectively how I feel about the songs now, although there are some songs that I'm not so keen on now, but still felt needed to be on the list, and some weight was given to what I'll pretentiously call "cultural impact" although that really means popularity.
See also:
The Best Songs of the Decade: 75-51
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26
The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
Without further ado, the list:
100. "Who Taught You To Live Like That?" - Sloan
Canadian power-pop band Sloan is one of those fun-sounding groups where the members all switch instruments for different songs. In practice, this makes them fairly inconsistent, but when they're on, they're really on.
99. "Sensual Seduction" - Snoop Dogg
A couple of weeks ago, my sister was trying to argue that autotune was the worst thing ever to happen to music. Sorry, sister dearest, but while Puff Daddy still needs to atone for his crimes, autotune makes pop songs like this. Also, how great is it to see that Snoop "bitches ain't shit" Dogg is now making songs dedicated to the female orgasm? Aww, he's all grown up now.
98. "Sovay" - Andrew Bird
Andrew Bird whistles. This is what he's known for. Hey, it works.
97. "California Dreamer" - Wolf Parade
I'm not sure if it's my expanding musical vocabulary, or just something I'm intrigued by, but I've noticed a trend of responses to famous songs by modern artists. This response to "California Dreamin'" may be inflated in my head thanks to the original's prevalence in Chungking Express, but hey, still a great song.
96. "Sari" - Nellie McKay
Nellie McKay's debut album, Get Away From Me, showed hints of a fascinating talent, and helped trigger the chanteuse explosion of the later part of the decade. Unfortunately, she seems to have tilted towards musical comedy-style songs instead of bizarrely marvelous gems like this.
95. "Benzi Box" - Dangermouse & MF Doom ft. Cee-Lo
Dangerdoom's The Mouse and the Mask was a wonderful gateway into hip-hop for white nerds who liked Adult Swim. This may be the best track on the album, thanks largely to the smooth chorus provided by Cee-Lo - who later teamed up with Dangermouse in Gnarls Barkley and took over the world.
94. "Bring the Pain" - Missy Elliot ft. Method Man
The Wu-Tang Clan opened the decade on top of the hip-hop world, and you couldn't throw a stone without finding their influence somewhere, anywhere. Missy Elliot's interpolation of Method Man's earlier song of the same name brought together Missy's danceable hip-hop with Meth's grittier Wu-Tang past with excellent results.
93. "Tooken Back" - Ghostface Killah ft. Jacki-O
The Wu-Tang Clan went into a swift decline as the decade progressed (culminating the in death of Old Dirty Bastard), with critical and popular support dissolving. The main exception to this general trend was Ghostface Killah, whose stellar solo albums kept the Wu-Tang name alive as something other than a punchline. 2004's Pretty Toney Album was a bit of a foray into pop over hardcore, leading to this silly, touching, and catchy-as-hell song.
92. "I Might Be Wrong" - Radiohead
Hey, it's the first Radiohead track on the list!
91. "PJ & Rooster" - Outkast
Hey, it's the first Outkast track on the list!
90. "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" - The Arcade Fire
I like to describe my tastes in modern rock music as leaning towards shouty-girl pop-punk over fuzzy whiny boy indie rock. That said, full credit to the fuzzy whiny boy rockers in The Arcade Fire. This is a good stuff.
89. "Galang" - M.I.A.
Though her second album made the massive mainstream splash, M.I.A.'s debut showed more than flashes of the superstar-in-the-making, particularly on this track.
88. "Let It Ride" - Ryan Adams
There are a handful of critically acclaimed, fairly popular indie rockers who have single songs I love, even as I can't get into the rest of their catalog. This excellent country/rocker about youthful alienation and rebellion is that song for Ryan Adams. See also - "Bukowski" by Modest Mouse.
87. "Lose Yourself" - Eminem
Remember in 2001, when Eminem and Britney Spears were the biggest pop stars in the universe? They both managed to increase their hit quotient with songs in the short term, but the long term? Yeesh.
86. "Devil's Dance Floor" - Flogging Molly
I don't feel qualified to write much about it, but I kinda like the Irish-punk musical movement. I really, really like this particular example of it.
85. "Animal Rap" - Jedi Mind Tricks ft. Kool G Rap
In an alternate dimension of my own imagining, hip-hop gets its samples not from 70's soul or 80's pop or 90's rock, but from the giants of classical music. Jedi Mind Tricks arrived in our dimension from that place, and gave us songs like this.
84. "Oslo In The Summertime" - Of Montreal
I've heard Of Montreal compared most accurately to David Bowie, in that their music is comprised primarily of catchy little pop songs, but the subject matter and personas adapted are far, well, weirder than other catchy little pop songs, although the comparison does a good job of describing the feel of the music more than the sound. This song will get stuck in your head. Sorry. Ba b-b-b-ba ba ba-ba.
83. "Side to Side" - Blackalicious ft. Lateef & Pigeon John
Blackalicious' Blazing Arrow was one of the best hip-hop albums of the decade, and its follow-up, The Craft, was mostly a disappointment. I only say "mostly" largely because of this comedically catchy, eminently danceable tale of the drawbacks of club hook-ups.
82. "Blue Magic" - Jay-Z
I kind of feel bad about a relative lack of Jay-Z on the list. He has great songs, and he'd certainly be in the running for Artist of the Decade. But by-and-large, he seems, like the Beatles, to do consistently good-to-great songs more than mediocre-to-excellent as most others do. And that's not a bad thing at all - just means fewer-than-expected songs on lists like these.
81. "Radio Nowhere" - Bruce Springsteen
80. "Magic" - Bruce Springsteen
The Boss had something of a career renaissance, focused primarily on his 2007 album Magic. The first track, "Radio Nowhere," demonstrated just how much he can still rock. But perhaps more impressive is the sense of weariness and sadness in "Magic," despite its ostensible happy subject matter of magic tricks. (It also always makes me think of Gob from Arrested Development, and that's not a bad thing.)
79. "Old White Lincoln" - The Gaslight Anthem
Speaking of Bruce, here's a group of young men from Jersey who seem to enjoy his music. I've heard them described as what might happen if Springsteen had gone up to CBGBs and hung out with The Ramones, and I really can't argue that that's either false or a bad thing.
78. "Tell a Story" - Rhymefest
Rhymefest's infectious humor, sense of storytelling, combination of arrogance and humility, and Chicago sneer bring to mind his occasional collaborator, Kanye West, but without the narcissism. That he hasn't become a star may seem baffling, but perhaps not as much when you realize that he's been delaying his second album for the last two years.
77. "Smart Went Crazy" - Atmosphere
Atmosphere got most of their notice as the progenitors of the terribly-named subgenre "emo-rap" early in the decade, but their fifth album, You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having, may be their best. This dense, catchy song is one of several standouts from the second half of the album.
76. "Move Your Feet" - Junior Senior
It does what it says. Truth in song-labeling.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
The films of Wong Kar-Wai
In America, Hong Kong cinema is known for its martial arts or "gun fu" action movies, as exemplified by John Woo. In the mid-90's, Woo's crossover appeal and Hollywood successes helped, amongst other things, to bring more attention to Hong Kong cinema, including his compatriot Wong Kar-Wai. The irony is that while Wong may share a handful of stylistic similarities, the tone and focus of his films is almost entirely oppositional to the stereotype of the Hong Kong action flick.
Wong Kar-Wai deals with the realms of sense, memory, and longing more than storyline. The best way to describe them is that he's trying to recreate the feeling of sitting in a dimly-lit bar, nursing your favorite drink while a fantastic song plays on the jukebox, thinking of the one that got away. They're also extraordinarily difficult to describe literally in a complimentary fashion, but that doesn't stop fans from trying.
His two most accessible and probably best films are Chungking Express and In the Mood For Love. The former was Wong's breakthrough, released in 1994, focusing on an all-night food stand in the Chungking neighborhood of Hong Kong. A diptych, it focuses on the love lives of two local cops, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung (who would later reunite as the stars of Woo's Red Cliff). Kaneshiro stars in the first half. Having just gone through a terrible breakup, he desperately tries to reconnect with his ex, and failing that, finds a hitwoman who happens to be the only person he wants to talk to about the whole thing, while all she wants is sleep.
Tony Leung's second half is more memorable thanks to an indelible performance by Chinese pop star Faye Wong (most well-known in America for singing the theme to Final Fantasy VIII). Playing a proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she becomes obsessed with Leung's cypher of a character, breaking into his apartment, cleaning and replacing every part of it, even as he narrates that "I have an excellent memory." Later, Faye Wong's obsession leads to the defining scene of the film. She skips work to go to Leung's apartment using the excuse that she's paying the electricity bill, which never gets paid, causing the entire shop to lose power and get lit by candlelight. Wong Kar-Wai's obsession with light and lush, gorgeous city life create among the most beautiful shots you'll ever see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVSyDsMmbEo - the scene starts at around 9:10, and continues into the next segment. Although Chungking Express is, apparently, available on YouTube, Wong's sensual camerawork demands high-quality viewing. Unsurprisingly, Chungking Express was selected by Criterion as its first film to be released on Blu-Ray.
Chungking Express notably also helped, perhaps unfortunately, usher in the era of indie-quirk, where characters have defining habits as much as traits. Faye Wong's charming stalker is matched in the first half by Takeshi's obsessive purchasing of cans of pineapple with the expiration date of his attempts to rebuild his relationship.
In the Mood for Love is a simpler tale of connections nearly made and love nearly won and lost. Wong Kar-Wai uses perhaps his two most iconic actors, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, as the leads (like the Coen brothers, Wong has a stable of actors he dips into). They share an apartment complex, and discover that their spouses are having an affair with each other. They form a fumbling friendship with the shape of a romance, though never consummated, and in the end, they lose each other through their inability to make a move.
But a description of the storyline completely fails to measure the impact of the film. The camera caresses Maggie Cheung's wardrobe of cheongsams, and Tony Leung embodies the quiet desperation of his character. It's my favorite of Wong's films, and yet I'm virtually incapable of describing it.
Both of those films have more experimental pseudo-sequels. Chungking Express led to what was originally its third story, Fallen Angels, while In the Mood for Love spawned a somewhat more direct sequel, 2046. 2046 is arguably the most ambitious and least coherent of Wong's films. It follows Leung's character from In the Mood for Love as he fails to mend his broken heart with a string of women and authoring science fiction short stories taking place in the year 2046. The film bounces between his affair with a beautiful courtesan, his writing affair with his landlord's daughter, his memories of a female gambler who acted as his teacher, and his stories of a train in the future for the broken-hearted. It's a gorgeous, deeply affecting mess.
Fallen Angels follows a hitman and his agent as they become romantically entangled. Its scenes of extreme violence play out like a perfunctory action movie, as if Wong wanted the trenchcoats and badass without anything more than the minimum of the genre's attachments. It's arguably his most visceral, direct film, filled with fantastic images and moments, although it lacks some of the emotional resonance that Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love contain.
The idea that Wong Kar-Wai wants the accoutrements of a genre without the other expectations is even more true of Ashes of Time, his martial arts epic. Describing Ashes of Time as a "martial arts epic" is part of the problem - it's entirely personal in scope, and what little martial arts are shown exists more in effect than in cause or action. The film is about the idea that these men and women are near-superhuman swordsmen, but are crippled by their own lost loves and failures. Unsurprisingly, Wong focuses on the latter. It's another incoherent mess, but an affecting and beautiful one.
Wong Kar-Wai made his American debut a few years ago with the somewhat disappointing My Blueberry Nights. It's filmed in his signature style, with a broken-apart stories of lost loves in bars, casinos, and restaurants, but it never entirely coheres despite one fantastic segment with Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn, as well as a great performance from Natalie Portman. It's hard to say exactly why it doesn't work, but my guess is that Wong's work is so specific, so stylized, so artificial, so dependent on creating a mood, that any slight flaw makes the whole house of cards fall apart. It's not terrible, and may act as a gateway for Americans into Wong's works, but I find it one of his weakest films.
Wong is inextricably linked to his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. Wong's debut feature, As Tears Go By didn't include Doyle, and is considered a straightforward genre piece (it's the only one I haven't seen). His first film with Doyle, Days of Being Wild, includes several of his favorite actors (like Maggie Cheung and Leslie Cheung) and begins his run of odd, beautiful films, but still feels unfinished. The characterization is particularly weak, with the main character's womanizing being too-easily explained by his relationship with his horrifically manipulative mother.
Characterization is also the weak point of the last of Wong's films, Happy Together. Focused on a dysfunctional gay Hong Kong couple in Buenos Aires, both its subject matter and its cinematography are more jarring than most of his other films. Most of his characters have some level of darkness balanced by charm or kindness, but Happy Together lacks that all-around except for one minor character. It's easily his most difficult film.
Wong Kar-Wai deals with the realms of sense, memory, and longing more than storyline. The best way to describe them is that he's trying to recreate the feeling of sitting in a dimly-lit bar, nursing your favorite drink while a fantastic song plays on the jukebox, thinking of the one that got away. They're also extraordinarily difficult to describe literally in a complimentary fashion, but that doesn't stop fans from trying.
His two most accessible and probably best films are Chungking Express and In the Mood For Love. The former was Wong's breakthrough, released in 1994, focusing on an all-night food stand in the Chungking neighborhood of Hong Kong. A diptych, it focuses on the love lives of two local cops, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung (who would later reunite as the stars of Woo's Red Cliff). Kaneshiro stars in the first half. Having just gone through a terrible breakup, he desperately tries to reconnect with his ex, and failing that, finds a hitwoman who happens to be the only person he wants to talk to about the whole thing, while all she wants is sleep.
Tony Leung's second half is more memorable thanks to an indelible performance by Chinese pop star Faye Wong (most well-known in America for singing the theme to Final Fantasy VIII). Playing a proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she becomes obsessed with Leung's cypher of a character, breaking into his apartment, cleaning and replacing every part of it, even as he narrates that "I have an excellent memory." Later, Faye Wong's obsession leads to the defining scene of the film. She skips work to go to Leung's apartment using the excuse that she's paying the electricity bill, which never gets paid, causing the entire shop to lose power and get lit by candlelight. Wong Kar-Wai's obsession with light and lush, gorgeous city life create among the most beautiful shots you'll ever see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVSyDsMmbEo - the scene starts at around 9:10, and continues into the next segment. Although Chungking Express is, apparently, available on YouTube, Wong's sensual camerawork demands high-quality viewing. Unsurprisingly, Chungking Express was selected by Criterion as its first film to be released on Blu-Ray.
Chungking Express notably also helped, perhaps unfortunately, usher in the era of indie-quirk, where characters have defining habits as much as traits. Faye Wong's charming stalker is matched in the first half by Takeshi's obsessive purchasing of cans of pineapple with the expiration date of his attempts to rebuild his relationship.
In the Mood for Love is a simpler tale of connections nearly made and love nearly won and lost. Wong Kar-Wai uses perhaps his two most iconic actors, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, as the leads (like the Coen brothers, Wong has a stable of actors he dips into). They share an apartment complex, and discover that their spouses are having an affair with each other. They form a fumbling friendship with the shape of a romance, though never consummated, and in the end, they lose each other through their inability to make a move.
But a description of the storyline completely fails to measure the impact of the film. The camera caresses Maggie Cheung's wardrobe of cheongsams, and Tony Leung embodies the quiet desperation of his character. It's my favorite of Wong's films, and yet I'm virtually incapable of describing it.
Both of those films have more experimental pseudo-sequels. Chungking Express led to what was originally its third story, Fallen Angels, while In the Mood for Love spawned a somewhat more direct sequel, 2046. 2046 is arguably the most ambitious and least coherent of Wong's films. It follows Leung's character from In the Mood for Love as he fails to mend his broken heart with a string of women and authoring science fiction short stories taking place in the year 2046. The film bounces between his affair with a beautiful courtesan, his writing affair with his landlord's daughter, his memories of a female gambler who acted as his teacher, and his stories of a train in the future for the broken-hearted. It's a gorgeous, deeply affecting mess.
Fallen Angels follows a hitman and his agent as they become romantically entangled. Its scenes of extreme violence play out like a perfunctory action movie, as if Wong wanted the trenchcoats and badass without anything more than the minimum of the genre's attachments. It's arguably his most visceral, direct film, filled with fantastic images and moments, although it lacks some of the emotional resonance that Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love contain.
The idea that Wong Kar-Wai wants the accoutrements of a genre without the other expectations is even more true of Ashes of Time, his martial arts epic. Describing Ashes of Time as a "martial arts epic" is part of the problem - it's entirely personal in scope, and what little martial arts are shown exists more in effect than in cause or action. The film is about the idea that these men and women are near-superhuman swordsmen, but are crippled by their own lost loves and failures. Unsurprisingly, Wong focuses on the latter. It's another incoherent mess, but an affecting and beautiful one.
Wong Kar-Wai made his American debut a few years ago with the somewhat disappointing My Blueberry Nights. It's filmed in his signature style, with a broken-apart stories of lost loves in bars, casinos, and restaurants, but it never entirely coheres despite one fantastic segment with Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn, as well as a great performance from Natalie Portman. It's hard to say exactly why it doesn't work, but my guess is that Wong's work is so specific, so stylized, so artificial, so dependent on creating a mood, that any slight flaw makes the whole house of cards fall apart. It's not terrible, and may act as a gateway for Americans into Wong's works, but I find it one of his weakest films.
Wong is inextricably linked to his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. Wong's debut feature, As Tears Go By didn't include Doyle, and is considered a straightforward genre piece (it's the only one I haven't seen). His first film with Doyle, Days of Being Wild, includes several of his favorite actors (like Maggie Cheung and Leslie Cheung) and begins his run of odd, beautiful films, but still feels unfinished. The characterization is particularly weak, with the main character's womanizing being too-easily explained by his relationship with his horrifically manipulative mother.
Characterization is also the weak point of the last of Wong's films, Happy Together. Focused on a dysfunctional gay Hong Kong couple in Buenos Aires, both its subject matter and its cinematography are more jarring than most of his other films. Most of his characters have some level of darkness balanced by charm or kindness, but Happy Together lacks that all-around except for one minor character. It's easily his most difficult film.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Serialization and The Wire
The Wire is almost the very definition of a cult hit. Virtually everyone who has watched it says "This is the greatest show ever!" but virtually nobody has watched it. The latter makes sense - it's dense, slangy, unforgiving to new viewers, and difficult thematically. But hey, that's true for most good stuff. The former - the"best show ever stuff!" is far more interesting.
The reason The Wire succeeds is simple: it figured out a brilliant way to get around the perils of serialization. I've mentioned this somewhat in previous posts about Battlestar Galactica, but not entirely directly. Simply put, it is that the longer a serialized story runs, the more complex it becomes. Following that, the more complex a story, the more likely mistakes, inconsistencies, and retcons occur. Complex settings and mythologies also tend to turn potential new fans away. The most common serialized stories are TV shows and comic books, although long series of novels, video games, or movies can also show many of the characteristics.
Battlestar Galactica offers an extreme example of a story collapsing under its own weight, but that tends to be rare. More generally, the stories continue, though with less emotional resonance and more caveats, retcons, or "reboots:" major events which exist to clean up the complexity.
In a sense, The Wire successfully avoids the perils of serialization by rebooting every season. Each season has a different antagonist, similar to Buffy's "Big Bads," but the significant difference is that The Wire also changes the show's focus each season. In doing so, they introduce new characters and new challenges, and leave older characters behind. It also focuses on different aspects of life within the city of Baltimore.
The first season is fairly straightforward, with the cops and the drug dealers at the center of the story. The second season expands to include a group of dockworkers, bringing the economy into sharp focus. The third season expands the focus on politics, at City Hall and within the larger police and drug communities (leading to some hilarious moments of gangster ComCil). The fourth season makes arguably the most dramatic thematic shift, bringing education and the children of the drug game to the forefront. Finally, the fifth season (which I haven't seen) is supposed to build the media into the show's setting.
By altering the focus each season, the show's writers can construct satisfying character arcs as well as grand plot arcs. Instead of seven seasons of variations on Buffy feeling overwhelmed by her Slayer responsibilities, or Mulder a half-step away from being able to expose the conspiracy, we actually get endings. McNulty figures out a way around his martyr complex in season three, and then is quiet in season four. The European drug-runners of season two shut down their operations in response to massive police pressure, and they stay shut-down for well over a year.
It's a risky way to go about things - introducing characters and stories, then eliminating them when they're done, but it's a great way to ensure that a serialized story has satisfying endings.
The reason The Wire succeeds is simple: it figured out a brilliant way to get around the perils of serialization. I've mentioned this somewhat in previous posts about Battlestar Galactica, but not entirely directly. Simply put, it is that the longer a serialized story runs, the more complex it becomes. Following that, the more complex a story, the more likely mistakes, inconsistencies, and retcons occur. Complex settings and mythologies also tend to turn potential new fans away. The most common serialized stories are TV shows and comic books, although long series of novels, video games, or movies can also show many of the characteristics.
Battlestar Galactica offers an extreme example of a story collapsing under its own weight, but that tends to be rare. More generally, the stories continue, though with less emotional resonance and more caveats, retcons, or "reboots:" major events which exist to clean up the complexity.
In a sense, The Wire successfully avoids the perils of serialization by rebooting every season. Each season has a different antagonist, similar to Buffy's "Big Bads," but the significant difference is that The Wire also changes the show's focus each season. In doing so, they introduce new characters and new challenges, and leave older characters behind. It also focuses on different aspects of life within the city of Baltimore.
The first season is fairly straightforward, with the cops and the drug dealers at the center of the story. The second season expands to include a group of dockworkers, bringing the economy into sharp focus. The third season expands the focus on politics, at City Hall and within the larger police and drug communities (leading to some hilarious moments of gangster ComCil). The fourth season makes arguably the most dramatic thematic shift, bringing education and the children of the drug game to the forefront. Finally, the fifth season (which I haven't seen) is supposed to build the media into the show's setting.
By altering the focus each season, the show's writers can construct satisfying character arcs as well as grand plot arcs. Instead of seven seasons of variations on Buffy feeling overwhelmed by her Slayer responsibilities, or Mulder a half-step away from being able to expose the conspiracy, we actually get endings. McNulty figures out a way around his martyr complex in season three, and then is quiet in season four. The European drug-runners of season two shut down their operations in response to massive police pressure, and they stay shut-down for well over a year.
It's a risky way to go about things - introducing characters and stories, then eliminating them when they're done, but it's a great way to ensure that a serialized story has satisfying endings.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Tragedy, Spoilers, and The Wire
We've recently been watching HBO's critically acclaimed highbrow cops-and-robbers show, The Wire, and are about to finish the third season. Prior to this, my primary experience with The Wire was catching a few scenes when visiting my parents; my mother was a fan. While two of the scenes were nothing terribly important, another of them happened to be arguably the biggest event of the first three seasons.
Note that this will, of course, have major spoilers for that event.
The Wire is formally somewhat similar to Battlestar Galactica. Its ensemble cast weaves in and out of a master storyline, usually presented with individual episodes in media res, presented in a naturalistic directorial style. It focuses on a police unit assigned to heroic distributors and dealers in Baltimore. There are four main groups of characters: street-level cops, police administration, street-level dealers, and the drug bosses.
By the third season, the most important character is drug boss "Stringer" Bell. Stringer is the focus of the police investigation, internal politics in the drug world (including a hilarious council using Robert's Rules), the return of his former boss whom he has partially supplanted, the dredging up of his past crimes, and his attempts to go mainstream as a politician and real estate developer.
Stringer is, in many ways, a classic tragic hero perhaps most closely related to MacBeth. He's an extraordinarily competent, intelligent, ambitious man. He makes a few bad, violent choices as shortcuts on his path to achieving his ambitions, and eventually finds himself in over his head and unable to escape his brutal past. All this culminates with his assassination by two men out for vengeance, abetted by his former partner angered at Stringer's usurpation of his power.
The scene I saw and remembered was the assassination. I remembered one of the assassins as well.
Watching the entire series, several years later, and remembering this one scene actually, despite the spoily nature of it, added to my enjoyment of the show as much as not knowing might have. Knowing how important Stringer was; knowing how he died; seeing his ambitions to get out of the game; seeing his inability to stop playing the game; and watching his mistakes pile up all added to my reading of his character arc. It was almost Shakespearean, knowing the main character dies, but not knowing exactly how.
Note that this will, of course, have major spoilers for that event.
The Wire is formally somewhat similar to Battlestar Galactica. Its ensemble cast weaves in and out of a master storyline, usually presented with individual episodes in media res, presented in a naturalistic directorial style. It focuses on a police unit assigned to heroic distributors and dealers in Baltimore. There are four main groups of characters: street-level cops, police administration, street-level dealers, and the drug bosses.
By the third season, the most important character is drug boss "Stringer" Bell. Stringer is the focus of the police investigation, internal politics in the drug world (including a hilarious council using Robert's Rules), the return of his former boss whom he has partially supplanted, the dredging up of his past crimes, and his attempts to go mainstream as a politician and real estate developer.
Stringer is, in many ways, a classic tragic hero perhaps most closely related to MacBeth. He's an extraordinarily competent, intelligent, ambitious man. He makes a few bad, violent choices as shortcuts on his path to achieving his ambitions, and eventually finds himself in over his head and unable to escape his brutal past. All this culminates with his assassination by two men out for vengeance, abetted by his former partner angered at Stringer's usurpation of his power.
The scene I saw and remembered was the assassination. I remembered one of the assassins as well.
Watching the entire series, several years later, and remembering this one scene actually, despite the spoily nature of it, added to my enjoyment of the show as much as not knowing might have. Knowing how important Stringer was; knowing how he died; seeing his ambitions to get out of the game; seeing his inability to stop playing the game; and watching his mistakes pile up all added to my reading of his character arc. It was almost Shakespearean, knowing the main character dies, but not knowing exactly how.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Superhero Movies and Ang Lee's Hulk
There's something about the superhero movie that appeals to my nerdliness. I never was a comic book nerd as a kid, but they were always around my periphery. There were games or cartoons or friends with comic books that managed to appeal to me without ever actually getting me to make a serious effort to invest in them. So, in many ways, the recent spate of superhero movies was aimed at me. No massive backstory or continuity to learn, but good amounts of fun, right? Not entirely, it turns out. While I have liked most of the ones I've seen to some degree or another, I haven't actually watched one and said "Wow. That's really what I wanted to see, how I wanted to see it."
Last week, I saw Ang Lee's Hulk. This movie was much-derided, called "too slow" or "too boring" or just plain bad. Yet I thought it was the best comic-based movie I'd seen. I think it's because it actually managed to solve the comic book paradox.
Superhero comics depend on a kind of balancing act with the reader. The reader sees the action as, to a certain degree, absurd or humorous. But it's always supposed to be fun. On the other hand, the story inside the comic is almost always deathly serious for its characters. New York, their mother, the world, something is about to explode or die.
The modern superhero movie exists solely within its own context. They are treated as deathly serious. The Dark Knight may be the pinnacle of this, with its grimy city, growly Batman, and psychopathic Joker. Any humor that exists in the movies is firmly within the movie's context - we're laughing with the characters, not at the absurdity of the film.
This all sounds somewhat counter-intuitive at first glance. Don't we want our movies to be realistic? Isn't absurd usually used as a negative descriptor? Not really, when it comes to comic books. They derived their success from the '60's "Silver Age" by placing realistic characters in unrealistic situations. Spider-Man became the best-selling superhero because he was a nerdy wisecracker who had cool adventures, not because his spiderness was inherently marketable. Superhero teams like the X-Men get a lot of their popularity from their examination of small group dynamics in stressful situations. The push in films to have more action and be "darker" or more realistic results in a flip of the normal comics plan - comic book movies take unrealistic characters and put them in realistic settings. It might be cool, but it's not all that fun. Part of this is the medium. Comics allow for much more imagination and playfulness by their very design - they play with space - where movies are more linear - they deal with time.
Ang Lee's Hulk, on the other hand, keeps the absurdity of the comic book universe alive, while maintaining a level of seriousness with its characters. It does this primarily with Lee's directing and editing. The film regularly has parallel scenes in comic-book style panels, or it split-screens to show two halves of a scene. Most jarringly, Hulk sometimes suddenly reverses the angle of a scene, either flipping a person to a mirror image. These gimmicks serve to remind the viewer of the artificiality of it all, and they say "hey! I'm the director, and I'm having fun!" The director's playfulness manages to combine almost perfectly with the characters' problems.
To be honest, I have no idea why this movie was so disliked. There's also plenty of action in Hulk - at least four distinct sequences - which is more than any other Marvel-based movie I've seen. It just seems to me to click in the way that a comic-based movie should.
Last week, I saw Ang Lee's Hulk. This movie was much-derided, called "too slow" or "too boring" or just plain bad. Yet I thought it was the best comic-based movie I'd seen. I think it's because it actually managed to solve the comic book paradox.
Superhero comics depend on a kind of balancing act with the reader. The reader sees the action as, to a certain degree, absurd or humorous. But it's always supposed to be fun. On the other hand, the story inside the comic is almost always deathly serious for its characters. New York, their mother, the world, something is about to explode or die.
The modern superhero movie exists solely within its own context. They are treated as deathly serious. The Dark Knight may be the pinnacle of this, with its grimy city, growly Batman, and psychopathic Joker. Any humor that exists in the movies is firmly within the movie's context - we're laughing with the characters, not at the absurdity of the film.
This all sounds somewhat counter-intuitive at first glance. Don't we want our movies to be realistic? Isn't absurd usually used as a negative descriptor? Not really, when it comes to comic books. They derived their success from the '60's "Silver Age" by placing realistic characters in unrealistic situations. Spider-Man became the best-selling superhero because he was a nerdy wisecracker who had cool adventures, not because his spiderness was inherently marketable. Superhero teams like the X-Men get a lot of their popularity from their examination of small group dynamics in stressful situations. The push in films to have more action and be "darker" or more realistic results in a flip of the normal comics plan - comic book movies take unrealistic characters and put them in realistic settings. It might be cool, but it's not all that fun. Part of this is the medium. Comics allow for much more imagination and playfulness by their very design - they play with space - where movies are more linear - they deal with time.
Ang Lee's Hulk, on the other hand, keeps the absurdity of the comic book universe alive, while maintaining a level of seriousness with its characters. It does this primarily with Lee's directing and editing. The film regularly has parallel scenes in comic-book style panels, or it split-screens to show two halves of a scene. Most jarringly, Hulk sometimes suddenly reverses the angle of a scene, either flipping a person to a mirror image. These gimmicks serve to remind the viewer of the artificiality of it all, and they say "hey! I'm the director, and I'm having fun!" The director's playfulness manages to combine almost perfectly with the characters' problems.
To be honest, I have no idea why this movie was so disliked. There's also plenty of action in Hulk - at least four distinct sequences - which is more than any other Marvel-based movie I've seen. It just seems to me to click in the way that a comic-based movie should.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica
After discussing the disappointment of Battlestar Galactica's ending and general story progression, the argument came up that any TV show was bound to disappoint in such a fashion, as the medium makes that sort of storytelling inevitable.
But Battlestar Galactica was not created in a vacuum, and had several different models of serialized storytelling to draw from, particularly in the fertile grounds of speculative fiction TV shows from the mid-90's to the early 2000's. Babylon 5 in particular demonstrates an entirely different method of storytelling.*
*The most relevant comparison might be Star Trek: Deep Space 9, as BSG's creator worked on that before BSG. Unfortunately, I'm almost totally unfamiliar with DS9.
Babylon 5 is perhaps the most ambitious television show ever, in terms of overarching plot. It is famous for being designed to tell a story over five years, and largely succeeds at this. But saying that it tells one story is something of a mislabeling. It would be more accurate to say that it tells multiple interweaving stories, each with its own tension and release. Each individual story is built slowly, but becomes a major focus of the show for somewhere between half of a season to a little over a season. For example, the second half of Season 2 deals largely with a war between two of the galaxy's races. By the end of the season, the war has come to an emotional, cathartic ending, in arguably the series' best episode. In its aftermath, a new storyline about the occupation of the defeated people begins to take precedence until it, too, is resolved, a little over a season later.
Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, is essentially a single story, focusing on several different characters. Its tension is rarely released, except in smaller, self-contained episodes such as the arrival of the Pegasus, the colonization of New Caprica, or the mutiny. Not surprisingly, these smaller, stand-alone sets of episodes are generally the series' best and most satisfying.
While this process may lead to Babylon 5 having more satisfying endings, it would be extremely difficult to actually say that B5 is better than BSG. Babylon 5 storyline development occurs much more slowly, leading to episodes that may be important later, but are often, well, boring, especially in its first season. Virtually every episode of the first season of B5 has something in it which becomes important later on, whether it's character-building, foreshadowing, storyline development, or details about the setting. But each episode also stands alone almost entirely, so the viewer may not know what's important, and may simply be, well, bored. On the other hand, Battlestar Galactica's first season and in media res storylines create an instant intensity. As I described last week, that intensity leads almost inevitably towards disappointing endings - but it may be worth it.
In an ideal world (which may also be achievable), some future TV show could take the best of both methods of storytelling - some combination of Battlestar Galactica's intensity with Babylon 5's forward planning. The key sticking point is that it would require a strong personality at the forefront. Babylon 5 is famously the brainchild of J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote 3/4's of the show's episodes, including the entirety of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season - an unprecedented run in television history, but also one which kept both the plot and characters developing under a single person's vision. The extraordinary confluence of events where a person was effective enough as a writer to accomplish this, effective enough as a producer to keep his show on the air in order to complete his five-year plan, and effective enough as a storytelling to develop an interesting long-form story, seems unlikely to occur again. Working show-by-show, and season-by-season, is much easier and more likely.
But who knows? With cable channels doing more formally interesting shows, those networks may be willing to deal with such an ambitious gamble. Or there's Joss Whedon, who claims to have a five-year plan for his Dollhouse, and its unaired (but now seen and viewable) episode indicates there's a lot more going on there than initially appeared in the first season. Good luck with that.
But Battlestar Galactica was not created in a vacuum, and had several different models of serialized storytelling to draw from, particularly in the fertile grounds of speculative fiction TV shows from the mid-90's to the early 2000's. Babylon 5 in particular demonstrates an entirely different method of storytelling.*
*The most relevant comparison might be Star Trek: Deep Space 9, as BSG's creator worked on that before BSG. Unfortunately, I'm almost totally unfamiliar with DS9.
Babylon 5 is perhaps the most ambitious television show ever, in terms of overarching plot. It is famous for being designed to tell a story over five years, and largely succeeds at this. But saying that it tells one story is something of a mislabeling. It would be more accurate to say that it tells multiple interweaving stories, each with its own tension and release. Each individual story is built slowly, but becomes a major focus of the show for somewhere between half of a season to a little over a season. For example, the second half of Season 2 deals largely with a war between two of the galaxy's races. By the end of the season, the war has come to an emotional, cathartic ending, in arguably the series' best episode. In its aftermath, a new storyline about the occupation of the defeated people begins to take precedence until it, too, is resolved, a little over a season later.
Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, is essentially a single story, focusing on several different characters. Its tension is rarely released, except in smaller, self-contained episodes such as the arrival of the Pegasus, the colonization of New Caprica, or the mutiny. Not surprisingly, these smaller, stand-alone sets of episodes are generally the series' best and most satisfying.
While this process may lead to Babylon 5 having more satisfying endings, it would be extremely difficult to actually say that B5 is better than BSG. Babylon 5 storyline development occurs much more slowly, leading to episodes that may be important later, but are often, well, boring, especially in its first season. Virtually every episode of the first season of B5 has something in it which becomes important later on, whether it's character-building, foreshadowing, storyline development, or details about the setting. But each episode also stands alone almost entirely, so the viewer may not know what's important, and may simply be, well, bored. On the other hand, Battlestar Galactica's first season and in media res storylines create an instant intensity. As I described last week, that intensity leads almost inevitably towards disappointing endings - but it may be worth it.
In an ideal world (which may also be achievable), some future TV show could take the best of both methods of storytelling - some combination of Battlestar Galactica's intensity with Babylon 5's forward planning. The key sticking point is that it would require a strong personality at the forefront. Babylon 5 is famously the brainchild of J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote 3/4's of the show's episodes, including the entirety of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season - an unprecedented run in television history, but also one which kept both the plot and characters developing under a single person's vision. The extraordinary confluence of events where a person was effective enough as a writer to accomplish this, effective enough as a producer to keep his show on the air in order to complete his five-year plan, and effective enough as a storytelling to develop an interesting long-form story, seems unlikely to occur again. Working show-by-show, and season-by-season, is much easier and more likely.
But who knows? With cable channels doing more formally interesting shows, those networks may be willing to deal with such an ambitious gamble. Or there's Joss Whedon, who claims to have a five-year plan for his Dollhouse, and its unaired (but now seen and viewable) episode indicates there's a lot more going on there than initially appeared in the first season. Good luck with that.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
"Previously on Battlestar Galactica..." - SF TV endings
Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and more importantly, science fiction-related blogger, has a long blog post which is going around the Internet about how the finale of Battlestar Galactica is "The worst ending in the history of on-screen science fiction." I cannot disagree with the premise, nor the massive amount of detail he includes in the post. However, I do think that the post's narrow focus on the massive mistakes of the final episode distracts from a larger, perhaps more interesting point: Battlestar Galactica's form of storytelling made it almost inevitable that the finale was going to be a disappointment.
The BSG episode form was built to increase dramatic intensity. Most television shows built their episodes as stand-alones, which include enough exposition at the start to explain their universes so that anyone can jump in and understand. This is often combined with references to the rest of the setting, so that they also can increase long-time viewers' knowledge of how the universe works. The storyline focuses on a handful of characters each episode, generally with two stories, a main A story and a secondary B story. The A story generally has the more important characters doing somewhat expected things, while the B story often has more intense, comic, or experimental things going on. The characters involved in the two (occasionally three) stories can intersect, but the themes almost always intertwine. The episode's storylines are resolved by the end of the episode. This familiar, procedural format tends to make surprises fairly unlikely.
Battlestar Galactica took a more fractured, ensemble-based form. Instead of each episode having a self-contained story, each episode tended to have one storyline specific to that episode, and a little bit of everything else shown in pieces. The most obvious example of this is the first season's story of Helo and Athena on occupied Caprica. Every episode in the first season had a few minutes worth of this storyline, which was totally unconnected to anything else going on in the series until the very end of the season. There was no particular reason why this couldn't have been done entirely in a single episode. Likewise, virtually every episode in the first season also had something about Tigh's alcoholism, the Chief's relationship with Boomer, Apollo's relationship with Starbuck, or Roslin's cancer.
By focusing on every character at once, the storyline became fragmented. These fragments do two things to a storyline: 1) they ratchet up the intensity, and 2) they make strong resolutions unlikely. The best parallel for this comes not from television, but instead from fiction, particularly the epic fantasy mega-series such as The Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire by Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin, respectively. Both of these series are built around narrative shock after narrative shock, a massive, world-shaking climax at least once per book, characters consistently dying (and then being resurrected - sound familiar?).
The books are massive - usually between 700-1000 pages, largely because they often have ten or more point-of-view characters, who often take part in, or discuss, the same events. The POVs change with each chapter, often ending with semi-cliffhangers, leading to a narrative intensity based around one character being in mortal danger, another about to receive an incredibly important piece of information, a third falling in love, while the one you happen to be reading about is doing research in a dusty library. It's a great way to maintain reader interest; a fantastic method for having large books with lots of sequels; a brilliant plan for creating a detailed, well-populated setting; and most importantly, a guaranteed, sure-fire method for being totally unable to finish a story well.
The essential problem with the fractured-POV approach, which both Galactica and the fantasy mega-series have, is twofold: first, it forces the writer to come up with situations of increasing intensity to hold the viewer's attention (Tigh has sex with Caprica! Gaeta turns evil and sings! Boomer turns evil and doesn't sing! Adama becomes an alkie!); and second, the increasing complexity and intensity leads to one of the greatest banes of serialized storytelling, the "retcon."
Retcon, short for "retroactive continuity," is a device by which the writer of a story changes an explanation of what happened in the past in order to tell the story they want to tell in the present. It's most common in comic books, which have their decades of plots, deaths, and resurrections. Perhaps the most famous example is the X-Men's Dark Phoenix Saga, in which Jean Grey becomes so powerful that she goes insane and threatens the universe, and ends up committing suicide. A few years later, writers wanted to bring Jean Grey back, so the storyline was retconned so that it wasn't her who became Dark Phoenix, but rather...well, I'm not really sure, but it was some kind of clone/embodiment who was like, but not, Jean Grey.
Retconning can be used in ways that benefit the story. The Warcraft video games, for example, began as virtually plotless strategy games, but as they progressed, they've become incredibly detailed complete universes. In order to make the detail of later games make sense, the storylines of the original games have been retconned to be filled with relative details. Retcons can also be used to explain apparent mistakes by the writers.
However, in general, retconning simply makes it look like the writers are making it up as they go along. They're changing the rules, and if they change the rules, the storyline loses emotional impact.
Battlestar Galactica, from the middle of the third season until the end, had a storyline which was dominated by retconning: the "Final Five." The problem which created the Final Five was simple: by the end of the New Caprica storyline, we'd seen seven Cylons, with no particular reason why we hadn't seen the last five of the promised twelve models. So Moore created an explanation: the Final Five were special, and not spoken of. Which is fair enough. But then Moore had to ratchet up the intensity. So several major and minor character were retconned into being Cylons. The history of the Cylons themselves was retconned into existing before the war against the Twelve Colonies 40+ years before. And the entire storyline of the show changed from a complex examination of the ethics of leadership in desparate situations and whether humanity deserved to survive into a simple good vs evil struggle, where one evil Cylon with mommy issues tries to destroy all humans and most Cylons.
And now comes word of the ultimate in retcons, the TV movie "The Plan," which is supposed to totally explain everything that the Cylons did at the start of the series, according to the crap that the writers made up at the end.
By the end of BSG, the show was almost completely different from its stellar starting point. Consistency, both in storyline and in characterization, had been thrown out the window. Is there any wonder, then, that the ending was a crushing disappointment? The methods that Battlestar Galactica used to maintain interest and build intensity were, just like the fantasy mega-epics, initially thrilling, but eventually tiresome. This kind of storytelling is the rough equivalent of a microwave dinner. It's fast, it requires very little work, and it's edible. But it's not likely to be anywhere near as good as a meal made with care.
So how could Battlestar Galactica have done better at unfolding its story? There are several other TV shows that may provide some kind of answer - a subject for a near-future post.
The BSG episode form was built to increase dramatic intensity. Most television shows built their episodes as stand-alones, which include enough exposition at the start to explain their universes so that anyone can jump in and understand. This is often combined with references to the rest of the setting, so that they also can increase long-time viewers' knowledge of how the universe works. The storyline focuses on a handful of characters each episode, generally with two stories, a main A story and a secondary B story. The A story generally has the more important characters doing somewhat expected things, while the B story often has more intense, comic, or experimental things going on. The characters involved in the two (occasionally three) stories can intersect, but the themes almost always intertwine. The episode's storylines are resolved by the end of the episode. This familiar, procedural format tends to make surprises fairly unlikely.
Battlestar Galactica took a more fractured, ensemble-based form. Instead of each episode having a self-contained story, each episode tended to have one storyline specific to that episode, and a little bit of everything else shown in pieces. The most obvious example of this is the first season's story of Helo and Athena on occupied Caprica. Every episode in the first season had a few minutes worth of this storyline, which was totally unconnected to anything else going on in the series until the very end of the season. There was no particular reason why this couldn't have been done entirely in a single episode. Likewise, virtually every episode in the first season also had something about Tigh's alcoholism, the Chief's relationship with Boomer, Apollo's relationship with Starbuck, or Roslin's cancer.
By focusing on every character at once, the storyline became fragmented. These fragments do two things to a storyline: 1) they ratchet up the intensity, and 2) they make strong resolutions unlikely. The best parallel for this comes not from television, but instead from fiction, particularly the epic fantasy mega-series such as The Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire by Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin, respectively. Both of these series are built around narrative shock after narrative shock, a massive, world-shaking climax at least once per book, characters consistently dying (and then being resurrected - sound familiar?).
The books are massive - usually between 700-1000 pages, largely because they often have ten or more point-of-view characters, who often take part in, or discuss, the same events. The POVs change with each chapter, often ending with semi-cliffhangers, leading to a narrative intensity based around one character being in mortal danger, another about to receive an incredibly important piece of information, a third falling in love, while the one you happen to be reading about is doing research in a dusty library. It's a great way to maintain reader interest; a fantastic method for having large books with lots of sequels; a brilliant plan for creating a detailed, well-populated setting; and most importantly, a guaranteed, sure-fire method for being totally unable to finish a story well.
The essential problem with the fractured-POV approach, which both Galactica and the fantasy mega-series have, is twofold: first, it forces the writer to come up with situations of increasing intensity to hold the viewer's attention (Tigh has sex with Caprica! Gaeta turns evil and sings! Boomer turns evil and doesn't sing! Adama becomes an alkie!); and second, the increasing complexity and intensity leads to one of the greatest banes of serialized storytelling, the "retcon."
Retcon, short for "retroactive continuity," is a device by which the writer of a story changes an explanation of what happened in the past in order to tell the story they want to tell in the present. It's most common in comic books, which have their decades of plots, deaths, and resurrections. Perhaps the most famous example is the X-Men's Dark Phoenix Saga, in which Jean Grey becomes so powerful that she goes insane and threatens the universe, and ends up committing suicide. A few years later, writers wanted to bring Jean Grey back, so the storyline was retconned so that it wasn't her who became Dark Phoenix, but rather...well, I'm not really sure, but it was some kind of clone/embodiment who was like, but not, Jean Grey.
Retconning can be used in ways that benefit the story. The Warcraft video games, for example, began as virtually plotless strategy games, but as they progressed, they've become incredibly detailed complete universes. In order to make the detail of later games make sense, the storylines of the original games have been retconned to be filled with relative details. Retcons can also be used to explain apparent mistakes by the writers.
However, in general, retconning simply makes it look like the writers are making it up as they go along. They're changing the rules, and if they change the rules, the storyline loses emotional impact.
Battlestar Galactica, from the middle of the third season until the end, had a storyline which was dominated by retconning: the "Final Five." The problem which created the Final Five was simple: by the end of the New Caprica storyline, we'd seen seven Cylons, with no particular reason why we hadn't seen the last five of the promised twelve models. So Moore created an explanation: the Final Five were special, and not spoken of. Which is fair enough. But then Moore had to ratchet up the intensity. So several major and minor character were retconned into being Cylons. The history of the Cylons themselves was retconned into existing before the war against the Twelve Colonies 40+ years before. And the entire storyline of the show changed from a complex examination of the ethics of leadership in desparate situations and whether humanity deserved to survive into a simple good vs evil struggle, where one evil Cylon with mommy issues tries to destroy all humans and most Cylons.
And now comes word of the ultimate in retcons, the TV movie "The Plan," which is supposed to totally explain everything that the Cylons did at the start of the series, according to the crap that the writers made up at the end.
By the end of BSG, the show was almost completely different from its stellar starting point. Consistency, both in storyline and in characterization, had been thrown out the window. Is there any wonder, then, that the ending was a crushing disappointment? The methods that Battlestar Galactica used to maintain interest and build intensity were, just like the fantasy mega-epics, initially thrilling, but eventually tiresome. This kind of storytelling is the rough equivalent of a microwave dinner. It's fast, it requires very little work, and it's edible. But it's not likely to be anywhere near as good as a meal made with care.
So how could Battlestar Galactica have done better at unfolding its story? There are several other TV shows that may provide some kind of answer - a subject for a near-future post.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Smile Time - Be Kind Rewind; After Life
I've been having several half-ideas which could be fleshed out on paper, but I haven't gotten them done just yet. I'm going to start trying to write something at least once per week, so look for something on Mondays. We'll see how it goes.
I have something of a reputation for preferring depressing movies. It's not necessarily because I actually prefer them, I think, but rather that I think that it often makes for more effective storytelling which breaks out of the tension-climax-resolution-happy! clichés. I may roll my eyes at a tacked-on happy ending, but I'm perfectly content to watch a movie which makes me smile.
Be Kind, Rewind, which was released within the last couple of years to a resounding thud, was just such a movie. Mos Def and Jack Black play video store employees who manage to delete the contents of all their videos. Their solution, such as it is, to the requests for movies which come in, is to reshoot the movies DIY and rent them to the customers the next day. The concept is a dangerous one, particularly with Jack Black ready and waiting to mug the movie in mediocrity, but it was written and directed by Michel Gondry. Gondry takes a DIY approach to his films and music videos. He does special-effects heavy flights of fancy like The Science of Sleep or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, while refusing to use CGI, leading to White Stripes music videos done painstakingly with LEGOs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q27BfBkRHbs
A famously playful DIY director making a movie about playful DIY movies of famous movies is ripe for a Baudrillardian analysis, particularly when Black and Def remake a documentary, When We Were Kings (Black is Ali). Yet the movie neither falls prey to pretension nor slapstick. It's exuberant, joyful, funny, and endlessly charming. Just watch the first remade (or "Sweded") movie-within-a-movie, Ghostbusters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMdwkpVV0QA
Perhaps it's the DIY concept which makes Be Kind Rewind so charming, as it has that in common with the Japanese film After Life. But where Be Kind Rewind has the initial plotline of a generic slapstick underdog comedy, After Life has a sweet, comforting story built around death.
The film is set in an isolated high school, staffed by twenty or so men and women in a very corporate environment. They have constant meetings, worry about meeting their quotas, and so forth. Then their clients are introduced, and the setting is further revealed. All of the clients are recently deceased, and the school is the first stage of their journey, where they pick out a memory that they wish to relive for the rest of their existence. The staff then uses their meager resources to recreate the scene. One man, a would-be pilot, wants to experience his first flight. The clouds are recreated by cotton balls dangling from a wire on a pully, a decidedly Gondry-esque touch.
Some dramatic tension is generated for the movie when a few of the clientele either cannot or will not choose a memory from their lives. This leads to revelations about the staff of the facility, which leads to either fascinating plot twists or unbelievable coincidences, the latter of which drags down the ending of the film. But the charm of the sequences where the memories are chosen, scripted, and most of all, produced and filmed, are what make After Life so memorable. It, like Be Kind Rewind, is in many ways, about the application of imagination to memory.
There aren't many clips from it online, but one, and a trailer, can be found by looking for it under its original name, Wandafuru Raifu. In this one, an adorable older woman talks about her memories of dancing and her older brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO5VuFzgu6A
I have something of a reputation for preferring depressing movies. It's not necessarily because I actually prefer them, I think, but rather that I think that it often makes for more effective storytelling which breaks out of the tension-climax-resolution-happy! clichés. I may roll my eyes at a tacked-on happy ending, but I'm perfectly content to watch a movie which makes me smile.
Be Kind, Rewind, which was released within the last couple of years to a resounding thud, was just such a movie. Mos Def and Jack Black play video store employees who manage to delete the contents of all their videos. Their solution, such as it is, to the requests for movies which come in, is to reshoot the movies DIY and rent them to the customers the next day. The concept is a dangerous one, particularly with Jack Black ready and waiting to mug the movie in mediocrity, but it was written and directed by Michel Gondry. Gondry takes a DIY approach to his films and music videos. He does special-effects heavy flights of fancy like The Science of Sleep or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, while refusing to use CGI, leading to White Stripes music videos done painstakingly with LEGOs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q27BfBkRHbs
A famously playful DIY director making a movie about playful DIY movies of famous movies is ripe for a Baudrillardian analysis, particularly when Black and Def remake a documentary, When We Were Kings (Black is Ali). Yet the movie neither falls prey to pretension nor slapstick. It's exuberant, joyful, funny, and endlessly charming. Just watch the first remade (or "Sweded") movie-within-a-movie, Ghostbusters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMdwkpVV0QA
Perhaps it's the DIY concept which makes Be Kind Rewind so charming, as it has that in common with the Japanese film After Life. But where Be Kind Rewind has the initial plotline of a generic slapstick underdog comedy, After Life has a sweet, comforting story built around death.
The film is set in an isolated high school, staffed by twenty or so men and women in a very corporate environment. They have constant meetings, worry about meeting their quotas, and so forth. Then their clients are introduced, and the setting is further revealed. All of the clients are recently deceased, and the school is the first stage of their journey, where they pick out a memory that they wish to relive for the rest of their existence. The staff then uses their meager resources to recreate the scene. One man, a would-be pilot, wants to experience his first flight. The clouds are recreated by cotton balls dangling from a wire on a pully, a decidedly Gondry-esque touch.
Some dramatic tension is generated for the movie when a few of the clientele either cannot or will not choose a memory from their lives. This leads to revelations about the staff of the facility, which leads to either fascinating plot twists or unbelievable coincidences, the latter of which drags down the ending of the film. But the charm of the sequences where the memories are chosen, scripted, and most of all, produced and filmed, are what make After Life so memorable. It, like Be Kind Rewind, is in many ways, about the application of imagination to memory.
There aren't many clips from it online, but one, and a trailer, can be found by looking for it under its original name, Wandafuru Raifu. In this one, an adorable older woman talks about her memories of dancing and her older brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO5VuFzgu6A
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
John Woo and Dynasty Warriors
A Better Tomorrow; Hard Boiled; Red Cliff
One of the things I've been attempting to do over the last year or so particularly is fill in the gaps in my movie knowledge. I've started trying to build my knowledge of Hong Kong cinema, and have been doing so by checking out two of its most well-known directors, Wong Kar-Wai and John Woo - ironically, near-total opposites in style. Where Wong's films are languid and beautiful, Woo is well-known for being the king of the action genre, the inventor of "gun fu." Woo recently returned to Hong Kong and Chinese cinema with an epic based on the Three Kingdoms, Red Cliff (or Dynasty Warriors, for the gamers out there).
Woo's breakthrough film was A Better Tomorrow, released in the mid-80's in Hong Kong. It was not only Woo's breakthrough, but also a very young Chow Yun-Fat. In a single scene (which the internet, unfortunately, cannot seem to provide a clip for), both demonstrate why they'd become huge stars later. Chow Yun-Fat, playing a Triad hitman, prepares for an assassination by dressing like a badass, then hiding a series of guns in several potted plants along the way to the back room where his target awaits. As he starts the hits, he fires all his bullets, moving back and pulling out the hidden guns so that he doesn't need to reload. Although the scene ends with a direct warning that crime doesn't pay - he gets shot through the shin and is crippled for the remainder of the movie - the badassness of both the director and the star are firmly established.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film is a regrettable melodrama, apart from that scene. The story concerns an older brother who works for the Triads and his younger brother who becomes a cop. There are several scenes of the former trying to reconcile with the latter, but he just keeps getting caught up in his sordid past in horribly uninteresting ways, at least until the hyper-violent yet surprisingly dull shootout finale.
Woo's last Hong Kong film before he left for Hollywood was 1992's Hard Boiled, which also stars Chow, alongside a new breakout star, Tony Leung. Hard Boiled is a much more accomplished action flick, with just enough character development to make the massive action sequences interesting. Chow plays a cop investigating a gun-running operation, which is also being infiltrated by Leung, an undercover policeman. Chow's police skills are rather questionable, as his only talent seems to be shooting the hell out of everything, but logic isn't really what you look for in an action movie.
Hard Boiled has three major action sequences, which include a few iconic moments: In the first scene, a shootout in a restaurant ends with Chow Yun-Fat sliding down a staircase with two pistols blazing setting the standard for the action. A second bit, in which he breaks up a gang war, alone, by rappelling into the middle of the action with a shotgun, seems rather ludicrous, but it does introduce him to Leung's character.
Chow and Leung eventually form something of a team, turning the second half of the film into more of a buddy movie. The final third of the movie is a massive shootout, illogically located in a hospital, which the characters destroy with gleeful abandon and seemingly endless ammunition. I'm not an action movie connoisseur, so take this with a grain of salt, but this may be the most exquisitely choreographed gunfight filmed. The most famous part of it is a 2 minute, forty-two second long shot which sees Chow and Leung fighting off thugs while moving down a corridor. Leung accidentally shoots a fellow policeman, after which he and Chow argue about it in an elevator, and as soon as the elevator arrives, the two jump back into action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bozxgVQ9m0
This is quickly followed by a duel between Leung and the chief enemy henchmen, whose breathless chase involves the two scampering down a hallway almost on their knees, firing at each other through overhead windows.
My final foray into Woo's filmography was his latest film, Red Cliff. When I found out this movie existed, I simply had to see it. I've been a fan of the Three Kingdoms saga ever since I was first introduced to Dynasty Warriors. I've read the novel as well as played many of the games. The battle of Red Cliff, or Chi Bi, is one of the major turning points of the Three Kingdoms story. This version is a no-expense-spared epic, filled with big stars, telling a story so big it was split into two different movies. To think of it as a Chinese Lord of the Rings would not be terribly far off the mark.
*Note: Red Cliff is supposed to be released as a single film for American audiences at some point soon. The Chinese version, with English subtitles, can still be acquired without looking too hard....)
One of the main things which separates the Three Kingdoms from many Western stories, such as Lord of the Rings, is that in the novels (and surprisingly, many of the games), the lines between good and evil are blurred. Cao Cao, the antagonist, is brilliant and ruthless, but he is also arguably the only man who can prevent China from totally collapsing with the end of the Han Dynasty. Most of his crimes are also committed by the ostensible "good guys" in their rise to power. The film removes these grey areas, and instead treats Cao Cao as merely ruthless, a horny old bully. The protagonists - in the film, Tony Leung's Zhao Yu and Takeshi Kaneshiro's Zhuge Liang - are treated as almost entirely good, even though their warmongering and rivalry in the novel are far less heroic. (Ironically, Leung and Kaneshiro were the two male leads in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express, playing characters almost opposite of Zhuge and Zhao's near-superheroes.)
In addition to a somewhat generic villain, Red Cliff also falls apart somewhat in the second part, as the multitude of characters start to change in importance. Like Lord of the Rings, Red Cliff diverges most from its source material by giving its female characters significantly more to do than the original medieval, or medievalist, authors had them doing. In this case, the tomboy Sun Shang Xiang (one of the best Dynasty Warriors!) is practically the star of the second half of the film, as she infiltrates the enemy camp and provides information to the strategists across the river. Zhao Yun's wife, Xiao Qiao (arguably the lamest Dynasty Warrior), is much less interesting, but ends up being the focus of the film's climax, as she takes it upon herself, thoroughly uninterestingly, to cross the river and distract Cao Cao so the final attack can succeed. Which she does. With tea, and obvious metaphors.
All that said, these disappointments are relatively minor for an extremely competent, occasionally gorgeous historical epic. Red Cliff's high point occurs towards the end of the first film, when master strategist Zhuge Liang lures Cao Cao's cavalry into the "yin yang" formation, a beautiful troop setup seemingly designed to allow historical superheroes to be their badass selves. One by one, Gan Ning, Zhao Yun, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhao Yun come out to take on Cao Cao's cavalry. The fight choreography is top-notch, and any Three Kingdoms or action fan should come out grinning. Happily, the yin yang scenes are on Youtube, in three parts (25 minutes - the main action starts at about 8:20 in the first part with Gan Ning.
part one
part two
part three
One of the things I've been attempting to do over the last year or so particularly is fill in the gaps in my movie knowledge. I've started trying to build my knowledge of Hong Kong cinema, and have been doing so by checking out two of its most well-known directors, Wong Kar-Wai and John Woo - ironically, near-total opposites in style. Where Wong's films are languid and beautiful, Woo is well-known for being the king of the action genre, the inventor of "gun fu." Woo recently returned to Hong Kong and Chinese cinema with an epic based on the Three Kingdoms, Red Cliff (or Dynasty Warriors, for the gamers out there).
Woo's breakthrough film was A Better Tomorrow, released in the mid-80's in Hong Kong. It was not only Woo's breakthrough, but also a very young Chow Yun-Fat. In a single scene (which the internet, unfortunately, cannot seem to provide a clip for), both demonstrate why they'd become huge stars later. Chow Yun-Fat, playing a Triad hitman, prepares for an assassination by dressing like a badass, then hiding a series of guns in several potted plants along the way to the back room where his target awaits. As he starts the hits, he fires all his bullets, moving back and pulling out the hidden guns so that he doesn't need to reload. Although the scene ends with a direct warning that crime doesn't pay - he gets shot through the shin and is crippled for the remainder of the movie - the badassness of both the director and the star are firmly established.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film is a regrettable melodrama, apart from that scene. The story concerns an older brother who works for the Triads and his younger brother who becomes a cop. There are several scenes of the former trying to reconcile with the latter, but he just keeps getting caught up in his sordid past in horribly uninteresting ways, at least until the hyper-violent yet surprisingly dull shootout finale.
Woo's last Hong Kong film before he left for Hollywood was 1992's Hard Boiled, which also stars Chow, alongside a new breakout star, Tony Leung. Hard Boiled is a much more accomplished action flick, with just enough character development to make the massive action sequences interesting. Chow plays a cop investigating a gun-running operation, which is also being infiltrated by Leung, an undercover policeman. Chow's police skills are rather questionable, as his only talent seems to be shooting the hell out of everything, but logic isn't really what you look for in an action movie.
Hard Boiled has three major action sequences, which include a few iconic moments: In the first scene, a shootout in a restaurant ends with Chow Yun-Fat sliding down a staircase with two pistols blazing setting the standard for the action. A second bit, in which he breaks up a gang war, alone, by rappelling into the middle of the action with a shotgun, seems rather ludicrous, but it does introduce him to Leung's character.
Chow and Leung eventually form something of a team, turning the second half of the film into more of a buddy movie. The final third of the movie is a massive shootout, illogically located in a hospital, which the characters destroy with gleeful abandon and seemingly endless ammunition. I'm not an action movie connoisseur, so take this with a grain of salt, but this may be the most exquisitely choreographed gunfight filmed. The most famous part of it is a 2 minute, forty-two second long shot which sees Chow and Leung fighting off thugs while moving down a corridor. Leung accidentally shoots a fellow policeman, after which he and Chow argue about it in an elevator, and as soon as the elevator arrives, the two jump back into action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bozxgVQ9m0
This is quickly followed by a duel between Leung and the chief enemy henchmen, whose breathless chase involves the two scampering down a hallway almost on their knees, firing at each other through overhead windows.
My final foray into Woo's filmography was his latest film, Red Cliff. When I found out this movie existed, I simply had to see it. I've been a fan of the Three Kingdoms saga ever since I was first introduced to Dynasty Warriors. I've read the novel as well as played many of the games. The battle of Red Cliff, or Chi Bi, is one of the major turning points of the Three Kingdoms story. This version is a no-expense-spared epic, filled with big stars, telling a story so big it was split into two different movies. To think of it as a Chinese Lord of the Rings would not be terribly far off the mark.
*Note: Red Cliff is supposed to be released as a single film for American audiences at some point soon. The Chinese version, with English subtitles, can still be acquired without looking too hard....)
One of the main things which separates the Three Kingdoms from many Western stories, such as Lord of the Rings, is that in the novels (and surprisingly, many of the games), the lines between good and evil are blurred. Cao Cao, the antagonist, is brilliant and ruthless, but he is also arguably the only man who can prevent China from totally collapsing with the end of the Han Dynasty. Most of his crimes are also committed by the ostensible "good guys" in their rise to power. The film removes these grey areas, and instead treats Cao Cao as merely ruthless, a horny old bully. The protagonists - in the film, Tony Leung's Zhao Yu and Takeshi Kaneshiro's Zhuge Liang - are treated as almost entirely good, even though their warmongering and rivalry in the novel are far less heroic. (Ironically, Leung and Kaneshiro were the two male leads in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express, playing characters almost opposite of Zhuge and Zhao's near-superheroes.)
In addition to a somewhat generic villain, Red Cliff also falls apart somewhat in the second part, as the multitude of characters start to change in importance. Like Lord of the Rings, Red Cliff diverges most from its source material by giving its female characters significantly more to do than the original medieval, or medievalist, authors had them doing. In this case, the tomboy Sun Shang Xiang (one of the best Dynasty Warriors!) is practically the star of the second half of the film, as she infiltrates the enemy camp and provides information to the strategists across the river. Zhao Yun's wife, Xiao Qiao (arguably the lamest Dynasty Warrior), is much less interesting, but ends up being the focus of the film's climax, as she takes it upon herself, thoroughly uninterestingly, to cross the river and distract Cao Cao so the final attack can succeed. Which she does. With tea, and obvious metaphors.
All that said, these disappointments are relatively minor for an extremely competent, occasionally gorgeous historical epic. Red Cliff's high point occurs towards the end of the first film, when master strategist Zhuge Liang lures Cao Cao's cavalry into the "yin yang" formation, a beautiful troop setup seemingly designed to allow historical superheroes to be their badass selves. One by one, Gan Ning, Zhao Yun, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhao Yun come out to take on Cao Cao's cavalry. The fight choreography is top-notch, and any Three Kingdoms or action fan should come out grinning. Happily, the yin yang scenes are on Youtube, in three parts (25 minutes - the main action starts at about 8:20 in the first part with Gan Ning.
part one
part two
part three
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Burn After Reading; Army of Shadows; Irma Vep
Having finished Battlestar Galactica (and I may post about the ending, presuming I can control my laughter) the Renaissance Poet and I have moved onto movies.
First up was last year's Burn After Reading, which I had desperately wanted to see ever since catching the trailer, which made it look like a new Big Lebowski: "Hey, it's a wacky Coen brothers comedy about people doing dumb shit for money!" I was somewhat disappointed in watching it, as it wasn't a genial comedy about blundering losers like The Big Lebowski, but rather more of a tragi-comic farce along the lines of Fargo - a film I admire, perhaps, instead of really enjoying. Still, Burn After Reading isn't without significant charms. George Clooney's charisma manages to turn a serially philandering sex-and-sex-toy addict into a likeable character, and Brad Pitt appears to enjoy himself immensely as an idiotic sidekick, well outside the normal confines of his usual Big Time Movie Star roles.
I'm a sucker for resistance stories, and who better to resist than the Nazis? So I was excited to check out the unearthed classic French Resistance film Army of Shadows. The Renaissance Poet's francophobia kept us from watching it for a while, but I finally convinced her in a moment of weakness/procrastination.
Army of Shadows is a stark character study of what would make a successful resistance fighter, and the end result is rather unpleasant. The hero of the film looks like a middling bureaucrat, but he is posessed with an opportunistic survivalism. Whenever he, or any other character in the film, displays anything other than survivalism, such as loyalty, heroism, love of family, or any kind of hesistance, they are punished. And perhaps most tellingly, the Resistance of the film spends far more time attempting to weed out traitors than it actually does successfully fighting the Nazis.
Ironically, the film was critically panned in France for its apparent Resistance sympathies (the director, Melville, was in the Resistance) at a time when Gaullism was at a low point in popularity. I'm not sure how people who actually saw this rather depressing movie came to that conclusion. Army of Shadows was perhaps not as excellent as I had hoped, but it is an intellectual success, if not an entertainment success.
One of the sources from which I'm picking out movies to watch is The New Cult Canon series at the Onion A.V. Club. Many of the films on the list are ones which I consider favorites (The Big Lebowski, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), and several other were interesting and well-worth seeing (Donnie Darko, Pi, ...uh, Manos: The Hands of Fate). So I was interested to check out Irma Vep, which appeared to promise some fun postmodern excitement.
It didn't deliver. Going back and rereading the writeup from The New Cult Canon, it appears to be about the film I saw. But it just never grabbed my interest. It appears to be more of a playful intellectual film for movie critics and movie makers. It has some assorted charms: Maggie Cheung plays a marvelous blank slate that every other character projects their desires onto; the wardrobe lady who befriends is a charming, charismatic, possible junkie; and the ending is so audacious and bizarre that it's almost impossible not to laugh. But those moments never really seem to cohere into a strong story.
The writeup indicated that Irma Vep is in many ways a spiritual successor to French New Wave cinema, which may help explain what I don't understand about it. I know little-to-nothing about New Wave, which is something I should probably rectify if I want to write about movies.
Next up, a far more entertaining set of films: Primer; Battle Royale; Chungking Express; and maybe A Better Tomorrow.
First up was last year's Burn After Reading, which I had desperately wanted to see ever since catching the trailer, which made it look like a new Big Lebowski: "Hey, it's a wacky Coen brothers comedy about people doing dumb shit for money!" I was somewhat disappointed in watching it, as it wasn't a genial comedy about blundering losers like The Big Lebowski, but rather more of a tragi-comic farce along the lines of Fargo - a film I admire, perhaps, instead of really enjoying. Still, Burn After Reading isn't without significant charms. George Clooney's charisma manages to turn a serially philandering sex-and-sex-toy addict into a likeable character, and Brad Pitt appears to enjoy himself immensely as an idiotic sidekick, well outside the normal confines of his usual Big Time Movie Star roles.
I'm a sucker for resistance stories, and who better to resist than the Nazis? So I was excited to check out the unearthed classic French Resistance film Army of Shadows. The Renaissance Poet's francophobia kept us from watching it for a while, but I finally convinced her in a moment of weakness/procrastination.
Army of Shadows is a stark character study of what would make a successful resistance fighter, and the end result is rather unpleasant. The hero of the film looks like a middling bureaucrat, but he is posessed with an opportunistic survivalism. Whenever he, or any other character in the film, displays anything other than survivalism, such as loyalty, heroism, love of family, or any kind of hesistance, they are punished. And perhaps most tellingly, the Resistance of the film spends far more time attempting to weed out traitors than it actually does successfully fighting the Nazis.
Ironically, the film was critically panned in France for its apparent Resistance sympathies (the director, Melville, was in the Resistance) at a time when Gaullism was at a low point in popularity. I'm not sure how people who actually saw this rather depressing movie came to that conclusion. Army of Shadows was perhaps not as excellent as I had hoped, but it is an intellectual success, if not an entertainment success.
One of the sources from which I'm picking out movies to watch is The New Cult Canon series at the Onion A.V. Club. Many of the films on the list are ones which I consider favorites (The Big Lebowski, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), and several other were interesting and well-worth seeing (Donnie Darko, Pi, ...uh, Manos: The Hands of Fate). So I was interested to check out Irma Vep, which appeared to promise some fun postmodern excitement.
It didn't deliver. Going back and rereading the writeup from The New Cult Canon, it appears to be about the film I saw. But it just never grabbed my interest. It appears to be more of a playful intellectual film for movie critics and movie makers. It has some assorted charms: Maggie Cheung plays a marvelous blank slate that every other character projects their desires onto; the wardrobe lady who befriends is a charming, charismatic, possible junkie; and the ending is so audacious and bizarre that it's almost impossible not to laugh. But those moments never really seem to cohere into a strong story.
The writeup indicated that Irma Vep is in many ways a spiritual successor to French New Wave cinema, which may help explain what I don't understand about it. I know little-to-nothing about New Wave, which is something I should probably rectify if I want to write about movies.
Next up, a far more entertaining set of films: Primer; Battle Royale; Chungking Express; and maybe A Better Tomorrow.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
NullDC
I have never known a video game system which has received as much love from gamers as the Sega Dreamcast. While many gamers like a system, or like many of the games on that system, or adopt it likes a sports team to become "fanboys" and cheer on their Xbox or Playstations, the Dreamcast is beloved almost as a pet. When they die, I have had friends bury them.
There are several reasons for this. Part of it is that the Dreamcast had a far larger number of classic games than it should have. Part of it is that those games were fun and interesting, and that got transferred to the system to some extent. Part of that is the system's design, which allowed for four controllers instead of two, making party games easier. The graphics card also seemed to be made for bright colors and enthusiastic animation, leading to a fun, cartoony style (a style duplicated to some extend by the Gamecube and Wii.) The system also had its somewhat charming flaws, most notably, it sounded like a small weedwacker when it was spinning CDs. Perhaps most importantly, it was an underdog from the beginning, and within a year, it was clear that it was going to fail financially. That, combined with the quality of the games themselves, made the system something of a cause celebré.
As time has gone by, it's also become lost. The Dreamcast itself was a finicky machine, and wore down fairly regularly. Its games didn't sell enough to be found in used stores for more than a few years afterwards. I'm one of those Dreamcast-lovers, but I haven't played one in five years, or owned one in seven. Many of the games have been ported to other system (like Space Channel 5 to PS2 or Ikaruga and Skies of Arcadia to Gamecube), or have surpassing sequels (like Soul Calibur 2). But some remained unplayable.
It was one of the happiest days in my recent life when I found NullDC. It's a Dreamcast emulator for PC. It works. It works well. Damn well. The interface is a bit clunky, and it doesn't have gamepad support (though 3rd party applications can add that) but...I don't have a Wii. But I have Samba de Amigo again. Actually, I have Samba de Amigo 2000, the Japanese sequel which was never released in the US. And just seeing Jet Grind Radio made me giggle happily, although it'll require more configuration to be playable.
But more than that, just seeing that Dreamcast logo and hearing the sound makes me gleeful. It'll make you happy too, if you have the Dreamcast love.
There are several reasons for this. Part of it is that the Dreamcast had a far larger number of classic games than it should have. Part of it is that those games were fun and interesting, and that got transferred to the system to some extent. Part of that is the system's design, which allowed for four controllers instead of two, making party games easier. The graphics card also seemed to be made for bright colors and enthusiastic animation, leading to a fun, cartoony style (a style duplicated to some extend by the Gamecube and Wii.) The system also had its somewhat charming flaws, most notably, it sounded like a small weedwacker when it was spinning CDs. Perhaps most importantly, it was an underdog from the beginning, and within a year, it was clear that it was going to fail financially. That, combined with the quality of the games themselves, made the system something of a cause celebré.
As time has gone by, it's also become lost. The Dreamcast itself was a finicky machine, and wore down fairly regularly. Its games didn't sell enough to be found in used stores for more than a few years afterwards. I'm one of those Dreamcast-lovers, but I haven't played one in five years, or owned one in seven. Many of the games have been ported to other system (like Space Channel 5 to PS2 or Ikaruga and Skies of Arcadia to Gamecube), or have surpassing sequels (like Soul Calibur 2). But some remained unplayable.
It was one of the happiest days in my recent life when I found NullDC. It's a Dreamcast emulator for PC. It works. It works well. Damn well. The interface is a bit clunky, and it doesn't have gamepad support (though 3rd party applications can add that) but...I don't have a Wii. But I have Samba de Amigo again. Actually, I have Samba de Amigo 2000, the Japanese sequel which was never released in the US. And just seeing Jet Grind Radio made me giggle happily, although it'll require more configuration to be playable.
But more than that, just seeing that Dreamcast logo and hearing the sound makes me gleeful. It'll make you happy too, if you have the Dreamcast love.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Nuggets
I have, in the past, been accused of being a Beatles-hater. This is somewhat unfair. I like the Beatles, I own most of their albums. Only one other band has more MP3s on my computer. Etc. The reason I get the accusation is that I don't go in for the Beatles-worship which seems to be almost mandatory. My pushback against this hagiography reached its high point with the release of Across The Universe, a film I had no interest in seeing.
"Look," I'll say, "The Beatles were a good band. They were a very good band. They had perhaps the longest run of consistently good new music in pop music history. But they're not the Only Band 'Gainst Whom All Others Must Be Judged (and Found Wanting)." To a certain extend, the music of the '60's has become, to music fans but not experts, a history of The Beatles, with The Rolling Stones and maybe Bob Dylan or Hendrix tossed in for good measure. Even groups like The Kinks, who actually had a similar musical trajectory as The Beatles, with poppy dance hits turning into increasingly bizarre but occasionally wonderful concept albums, appear dwarfed by the Fab Four. The Velvet Underground are held up as the counter to the mainstream groups like the Beatles. A group like The Zombies is still somewhat popular, and to be honest, I'd take their two best and most famous songs, "She's Not There" and "Time of the Season" against any two Beatles songs.
But bringing up The Kinks and The Zombies isn't exactly daring in saying that there was other, non-Beatles-based rock'n'roll in the 1960's. Which is where the Nuggets collections come in. The original Nuggets LP was released in the 1970's as a reissued collection of buried treasures from psychedelic and garage rock in the 1960's. It became a big influence on punk rock, if for no other reason than Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye helped put it together. In recent years, Elektra records reissued the original LP with three other full-length discs of American psychedelia. They followed that up with a British and foreign box set, Nuggets II, and more recent psychedelic songs, in Children of Nuggets.
I recently went through my music collection, trimming some places and filling in gaps. I added the Nuggets songs to my collection, to my almost universal enjoyment. It also gives me 60's-style rock music that's not the canonical Beatles and Stones, and in some cases, may almost be better.
Here's one from the original LP, The Knickerbockers' "Lies," which could almost pass a lost Beatles track.
(I have no idea if these embeds will transfer from the blog to Facebook. Only one way to find out!)
Here's another Nuggets I piece of British Invasion pop, The Remains' "Why Do I Cry"
Another notable thing about the bands in the collection is that they have the best band names. I guess it's from before they all got taken. The Primitives, The Smoke, The Sonics, or this one, The Poets, a Scottish group.
The Nuggets II collection from "the British Empire and beyond" has a different feel, which I somewhat prefer. The music seems deeper, darker, and a little more stripped-down. The Wimple Winch's "Save My Soul" is decidedly not a Beatles song.
The Children of Nuggets collection is a bit more hit-and-miss. Some of it sounds simply like old songs with more modern instrumentation, a combination which doesn't always work. One of the places where it works best, however, is in the odd XTC side project, The Dukes of Stratosphear. The Dukes are occasionally called a psychadelic rock parody, but that seems unfair. This is an homage. Maybe a winking one, but an homage nonetheless. (song should be playable on the right of this link)
The place where the Nuggets collection really fit into my own collection became clear when I heard the Them track from Nuggets II, "I Can Only Give You Everything." Them became famous primarily for introducing singer Van Morrison (of "Wild Nights," "Gloria," and "Brown Eyed Girl" fame) to the world, but the song became something of a punk anthem, covered by Richard Hell on his second album. As I mentioned in the "15 albums" meme, Richard Hell was one of my gateways into being a music fan, but my parents were also Van Morrison fans, so deep in my nonconscious mind, there are several Van Morrison tracks. This song brings it all together - proto-punk meets British invasion, Beatles meet Stones, pop meets rock.
"Look," I'll say, "The Beatles were a good band. They were a very good band. They had perhaps the longest run of consistently good new music in pop music history. But they're not the Only Band 'Gainst Whom All Others Must Be Judged (and Found Wanting)." To a certain extend, the music of the '60's has become, to music fans but not experts, a history of The Beatles, with The Rolling Stones and maybe Bob Dylan or Hendrix tossed in for good measure. Even groups like The Kinks, who actually had a similar musical trajectory as The Beatles, with poppy dance hits turning into increasingly bizarre but occasionally wonderful concept albums, appear dwarfed by the Fab Four. The Velvet Underground are held up as the counter to the mainstream groups like the Beatles. A group like The Zombies is still somewhat popular, and to be honest, I'd take their two best and most famous songs, "She's Not There" and "Time of the Season" against any two Beatles songs.
But bringing up The Kinks and The Zombies isn't exactly daring in saying that there was other, non-Beatles-based rock'n'roll in the 1960's. Which is where the Nuggets collections come in. The original Nuggets LP was released in the 1970's as a reissued collection of buried treasures from psychedelic and garage rock in the 1960's. It became a big influence on punk rock, if for no other reason than Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye helped put it together. In recent years, Elektra records reissued the original LP with three other full-length discs of American psychedelia. They followed that up with a British and foreign box set, Nuggets II, and more recent psychedelic songs, in Children of Nuggets.
I recently went through my music collection, trimming some places and filling in gaps. I added the Nuggets songs to my collection, to my almost universal enjoyment. It also gives me 60's-style rock music that's not the canonical Beatles and Stones, and in some cases, may almost be better.
Here's one from the original LP, The Knickerbockers' "Lies," which could almost pass a lost Beatles track.
(I have no idea if these embeds will transfer from the blog to Facebook. Only one way to find out!)
Here's another Nuggets I piece of British Invasion pop, The Remains' "Why Do I Cry"
Another notable thing about the bands in the collection is that they have the best band names. I guess it's from before they all got taken. The Primitives, The Smoke, The Sonics, or this one, The Poets, a Scottish group.
The Nuggets II collection from "the British Empire and beyond" has a different feel, which I somewhat prefer. The music seems deeper, darker, and a little more stripped-down. The Wimple Winch's "Save My Soul" is decidedly not a Beatles song.
The Children of Nuggets collection is a bit more hit-and-miss. Some of it sounds simply like old songs with more modern instrumentation, a combination which doesn't always work. One of the places where it works best, however, is in the odd XTC side project, The Dukes of Stratosphear. The Dukes are occasionally called a psychadelic rock parody, but that seems unfair. This is an homage. Maybe a winking one, but an homage nonetheless. (song should be playable on the right of this link)
The place where the Nuggets collection really fit into my own collection became clear when I heard the Them track from Nuggets II, "I Can Only Give You Everything." Them became famous primarily for introducing singer Van Morrison (of "Wild Nights," "Gloria," and "Brown Eyed Girl" fame) to the world, but the song became something of a punk anthem, covered by Richard Hell on his second album. As I mentioned in the "15 albums" meme, Richard Hell was one of my gateways into being a music fan, but my parents were also Van Morrison fans, so deep in my nonconscious mind, there are several Van Morrison tracks. This song brings it all together - proto-punk meets British invasion, Beatles meet Stones, pop meets rock.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Battlestar Galactica
We've starting watching Battlestar Galactica, timing it perfectly so we begin right after the last episode airs. I suppose there's an advantage in starting after the end, in that you rarely have to wait. Though you can't necessarily say "I was there from the start!" but that and a nickel will buy you a cup of coffee, I hear. By the way, this is the first blog post I'm linking to Facebook, which ought to increase my readership by approximately 10000%.
Note - we've watched the pilot miniseries and the first two seasons.
Battlestar Galactica is ridiculously intense at times, mostly when it focuses on the ship which gives the show its title. As a military space opera, it succeeds beyond, well, any other science fiction show I've seen. The three-episode arc where a second Battlestar shows up in the middle of the second season, for example, is nailbiting stuff, and well played by the producers, who build intensity with various characters' ethical choices, instead of just making them action hereos.
As soon as the show gets outside the strict confines of the military, it starts to either get bizarre, annoying, or just plain bad.
Supposedly, there's 50,000 civilians hanging out with the Galactica. They have a President, who apparently does things other than argue with the Commander/Admiral. They have elected representatives, who apparently do things other than argue with the President. They have a media, who apparently do things other than argue with, well, everybody. But other than that, what?
The show only focuses on the civilians when they behave bizarrely. For example, there's an evil reporter, or there's Cylon sympathizers sabotaging the fleet, or a black market apparently fulfilling the fleet's desparate need for child sex slaves. Seriously, there's a room full of children for sale, implying that the fleet is overrun with wealthy pedophiles above and beyond what might be expected from a relatively tiny population. Why? The point of the child market was to establish the black marketeers as people who were as evil as they could be, in such a way as made sense to a primarily American audience. An American black market for child slaves would be that evil, therefore, it's portrayed in that light, regardless of the logic of how that looks for a 50,000-person fleet on the run from an existential threat.
That is the basic logic of civilians on the show - their entire society is assumed to be basically American, and ignored until it interacts with the military. The President and Vice President are basically the only important civilians. The cartoonishly powerhungry former terrorist/anarchist, Tom Zarek, is the only civilian who ever demonstrates any kind of depth, largely because he's the only civilian other than the administration to appear more than once. He's also the only person to ever mention that recreating the former society might not be the most effective way to proceed.
An interesting story (though perhaps not intensely riveting television) could be told about the attempts to recreate society in a fleet on the run. Money would be worthless at first. The economy would start as barter, and slowly establish itself as goods were produced. What goods would be produced, when, where, and how. What recreation would come to exist. And what political structures would come to exist.
The last point became especially pertinent in the second season finale, which focused on the presidential election. An election in a tiny group of 50,000 voters (well, less, given that many are likely children) is not likely to be a media-driven, poll-based event, but more likely a small-town mayoral election, where visiting people and shaking their hands becomes more likely to win votes. This would be especially easy in a fleet where people are packed into ships.
As I mentioned during the episode, "My disbelief is not being suspended. It's very well pended right now." The effects of the election tripled that. The idea that the election was a referendum on living on a colonizable planet, with this decision entirely invested in a single person, the President, completely removed all vestiges of the the civilian fleet as anything other than a plot device for the show's writers. Checks and balances? Gone. The military's prediliction for coups and mutinies at the drop of a hat? Nowhere to be found. Instead, we get a clearly insane, suspected traitor being elected in order to sign a executive order, as the role of President somehow became that of totalitarian dictator.
As the show has progressed, the lack of logic behind anything except the military's main characters has become a bigger and bigger flaw. Examining this flaw seems to be making the awesomeness of the first season and much of the second seem more and more flawed itself - like its success is built on deliberately ignoring important plot points, which, as the show progresses, become more and more obvious. I've heard decidedly mixed reviews of Seasons 3 and 4, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was a large reason why.
Still, despite the silliness of the election and how the story got to this point, I do like the idea of seeing the surviving humans under Cylon occupation. I'm a sucker for resistance stories.
Note - we've watched the pilot miniseries and the first two seasons.
Battlestar Galactica is ridiculously intense at times, mostly when it focuses on the ship which gives the show its title. As a military space opera, it succeeds beyond, well, any other science fiction show I've seen. The three-episode arc where a second Battlestar shows up in the middle of the second season, for example, is nailbiting stuff, and well played by the producers, who build intensity with various characters' ethical choices, instead of just making them action hereos.
As soon as the show gets outside the strict confines of the military, it starts to either get bizarre, annoying, or just plain bad.
Supposedly, there's 50,000 civilians hanging out with the Galactica. They have a President, who apparently does things other than argue with the Commander/Admiral. They have elected representatives, who apparently do things other than argue with the President. They have a media, who apparently do things other than argue with, well, everybody. But other than that, what?
The show only focuses on the civilians when they behave bizarrely. For example, there's an evil reporter, or there's Cylon sympathizers sabotaging the fleet, or a black market apparently fulfilling the fleet's desparate need for child sex slaves. Seriously, there's a room full of children for sale, implying that the fleet is overrun with wealthy pedophiles above and beyond what might be expected from a relatively tiny population. Why? The point of the child market was to establish the black marketeers as people who were as evil as they could be, in such a way as made sense to a primarily American audience. An American black market for child slaves would be that evil, therefore, it's portrayed in that light, regardless of the logic of how that looks for a 50,000-person fleet on the run from an existential threat.
That is the basic logic of civilians on the show - their entire society is assumed to be basically American, and ignored until it interacts with the military. The President and Vice President are basically the only important civilians. The cartoonishly powerhungry former terrorist/anarchist, Tom Zarek, is the only civilian who ever demonstrates any kind of depth, largely because he's the only civilian other than the administration to appear more than once. He's also the only person to ever mention that recreating the former society might not be the most effective way to proceed.
An interesting story (though perhaps not intensely riveting television) could be told about the attempts to recreate society in a fleet on the run. Money would be worthless at first. The economy would start as barter, and slowly establish itself as goods were produced. What goods would be produced, when, where, and how. What recreation would come to exist. And what political structures would come to exist.
The last point became especially pertinent in the second season finale, which focused on the presidential election. An election in a tiny group of 50,000 voters (well, less, given that many are likely children) is not likely to be a media-driven, poll-based event, but more likely a small-town mayoral election, where visiting people and shaking their hands becomes more likely to win votes. This would be especially easy in a fleet where people are packed into ships.
As I mentioned during the episode, "My disbelief is not being suspended. It's very well pended right now." The effects of the election tripled that. The idea that the election was a referendum on living on a colonizable planet, with this decision entirely invested in a single person, the President, completely removed all vestiges of the the civilian fleet as anything other than a plot device for the show's writers. Checks and balances? Gone. The military's prediliction for coups and mutinies at the drop of a hat? Nowhere to be found. Instead, we get a clearly insane, suspected traitor being elected in order to sign a executive order, as the role of President somehow became that of totalitarian dictator.
As the show has progressed, the lack of logic behind anything except the military's main characters has become a bigger and bigger flaw. Examining this flaw seems to be making the awesomeness of the first season and much of the second seem more and more flawed itself - like its success is built on deliberately ignoring important plot points, which, as the show progresses, become more and more obvious. I've heard decidedly mixed reviews of Seasons 3 and 4, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was a large reason why.
Still, despite the silliness of the election and how the story got to this point, I do like the idea of seeing the surviving humans under Cylon occupation. I'm a sucker for resistance stories.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Dollhouse
I've been watching Dollhouse on Hulu since its premiere. Part of it is that I feel so left out by the Firefly fandom - catching up on it several years later, I realize it's a great show. But my outrage only goes so far, after all, I had no idea it existed when it actually aired.
Unfortunately, Dollhouse isn't half as interesting, though it's certainly not bad. I'm rather enjoying it so far, when I watch, but there's not much there after the episode. The show seems to be lacking a thematic core. Most successful science fiction shows have major themes which drive the concept of the show, as well as its individual episodes.
There are potential themes for exploration. In addition to those mentioned above, the show's premise is rife with possibilities for questioning the concepts of consent, rape, slavery. But it's avoided those like the plague in a thematic sense, even as they exist within the direct narrative. That's probably wise, given that it's on network television. I'm not sure I'd continue watching. So instead we're left with a show that appears to be primarily a fairly interesting story, with an amoral heart.
Unfortunately, Dollhouse isn't half as interesting, though it's certainly not bad. I'm rather enjoying it so far, when I watch, but there's not much there after the episode. The show seems to be lacking a thematic core. Most successful science fiction shows have major themes which drive the concept of the show, as well as its individual episodes.
- The X-Files was built around concepts of belief, knowledge, and faith. How do you know what you know, and why do you believe what you believe?
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon's biggest hit, was essentially an update of Spider-Man: a fantastical parable of what growing up meant, and how "with great power comes great responsibility."
- The new Battlestar Galactica focuses on the moral decisions of leaders, and when the ends justify the means, and when they don't.
- Firefly is subtler than the others, but I think it is at its best when it focuses on resistance against an extraordinary power. The show has a tinge of sadness - it's about what happens after the war is lost, not the war itself (which is another reason I find the Serenity movie disappointing, in that the war has suddenly appeared and become winnable, in 120 minutes.)
There are potential themes for exploration. In addition to those mentioned above, the show's premise is rife with possibilities for questioning the concepts of consent, rape, slavery. But it's avoided those like the plague in a thematic sense, even as they exist within the direct narrative. That's probably wise, given that it's on network television. I'm not sure I'd continue watching. So instead we're left with a show that appears to be primarily a fairly interesting story, with an amoral heart.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Stubbs the Zombie
Here's a game I came across, most interestingly, because of its soundtrack. It's a collection of indie-rockers who cover various 50's and 60's pop hits, like The Raveonettes doing "My Boyfriend's Back." The music meshes fairly well with the game's theme, a somewhat Fallout-like science fiction zombie holocaust based around bad sciffy movies. The game itself is fairly fun, but short and completely linear, meaning it's pretty well disposable.
The fascinating soundtrack, however, leads me to a question - why don't game designers hire commercial DJs or bands to create game music more often? Generally, they either choose licensing already popular songs, or having game composers make the music.
I'd love to see some DJs making music for games, especially if they're science fiction-oriented. If I had a massively budgeted game, I'd give RJD2 (or someone along those lines) a call. Music can be such a memorable, important part of a game that it seems a shame to not be more daring with it.
The fascinating soundtrack, however, leads me to a question - why don't game designers hire commercial DJs or bands to create game music more often? Generally, they either choose licensing already popular songs, or having game composers make the music.
I'd love to see some DJs making music for games, especially if they're science fiction-oriented. If I had a massively budgeted game, I'd give RJD2 (or someone along those lines) a call. Music can be such a memorable, important part of a game that it seems a shame to not be more daring with it.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Civilization IV, modding, and grand strategy
Epic strategy games (or, 4X games) tend to have a similar problem. The start of the game is significantly more difficult and interesting than the rest of the game. Every choice matters at the start, but once a certain level of infrastructure is reached within the game, the human player will almost always defeat the AI. I wish I could come up with a clever term for this problem, but it's the main reason that I end up being more frustrated with games that are otherwise exceptional, such as Rome: Total War.
Civilization, being the king of the 4X game, has this problem as well. But the main reason I keep returning to Civilization's recent incarnations is its customizability. Civilization IV, in particular, was made for modders to play with on multiple levels. It's not as user-friendly as its predecessor, but much more powerful. So you get mods like "Fall From Heaven," which posits itself as a sequel to Master of Magic, and the fascinating "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" (RFC).
"Rhye" is the screen name of the modder, and first achieved fame for his "Rhye's of Civilization," a Civ3 mod which demonstrated his gift of taking the basic concepts of the game, and making them more streamlined, historical, balanced, interesting, and, oddly, attractive.
The most important development for RFC, his Civ4 mod, is the concept of "stability." Stability, in-game, is basically the historically accurate acknowledgement that empires aren't always defeated by opposing empires, but often collapse themselves. The Mongol empire which exploded across Eurasia was not conquered by its rivals, but rather, broke into smaller pieces which were eventually absorbed by other political entities.
Stability also functions as a mechanism to keep the game interesting regardless of the player's power. Instead of merely competing with the insufficient AI, the player is forced to compete with the complex stability mechanism, which encourages infrastructure-building and measured expansion. In perhaps the cleverest aspect of stability, economic stability is tied to growth - and there's only so much growth possible short of founding or conquering new cities. Thus, a civilization has to keep growing (but not too fast) or end up stagnating. And if a teetering civilization happens to lose even a small border city, it can collapse.
There are still several problems. The stability model isn't terribly transparent. It can't be, really, otherwise it would be too easy. I do think that a happier medium could be found. New players especially are going to find it too abtruse.
The other major problem is that the penalties of collapsing stability are a bit off. Having a bad stability may mean that a city or two at random declares independence. Collapsed stability means that all cities, except the player's capital, declare independence or return to their original owner. There's not a whole lot of room between total collapse and slight annoyance.
Still, it's a major step towards solving the biggest 4x problem or being too easy after the initial part of the game.
Civilization, being the king of the 4X game, has this problem as well. But the main reason I keep returning to Civilization's recent incarnations is its customizability. Civilization IV, in particular, was made for modders to play with on multiple levels. It's not as user-friendly as its predecessor, but much more powerful. So you get mods like "Fall From Heaven," which posits itself as a sequel to Master of Magic, and the fascinating "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" (RFC).
"Rhye" is the screen name of the modder, and first achieved fame for his "Rhye's of Civilization," a Civ3 mod which demonstrated his gift of taking the basic concepts of the game, and making them more streamlined, historical, balanced, interesting, and, oddly, attractive.
The most important development for RFC, his Civ4 mod, is the concept of "stability." Stability, in-game, is basically the historically accurate acknowledgement that empires aren't always defeated by opposing empires, but often collapse themselves. The Mongol empire which exploded across Eurasia was not conquered by its rivals, but rather, broke into smaller pieces which were eventually absorbed by other political entities.
Stability also functions as a mechanism to keep the game interesting regardless of the player's power. Instead of merely competing with the insufficient AI, the player is forced to compete with the complex stability mechanism, which encourages infrastructure-building and measured expansion. In perhaps the cleverest aspect of stability, economic stability is tied to growth - and there's only so much growth possible short of founding or conquering new cities. Thus, a civilization has to keep growing (but not too fast) or end up stagnating. And if a teetering civilization happens to lose even a small border city, it can collapse.
There are still several problems. The stability model isn't terribly transparent. It can't be, really, otherwise it would be too easy. I do think that a happier medium could be found. New players especially are going to find it too abtruse.
The other major problem is that the penalties of collapsing stability are a bit off. Having a bad stability may mean that a city or two at random declares independence. Collapsed stability means that all cities, except the player's capital, declare independence or return to their original owner. There's not a whole lot of room between total collapse and slight annoyance.
Still, it's a major step towards solving the biggest 4x problem or being too easy after the initial part of the game.
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