Author: Alex Doenau

I’ll start by making the following perfectly clear: I do not recommend Burn After Reading. I found it hilarious practically from start to finish but I’m pretty sure that a lot of people will flat out hate it and, if you’re one of them, I don’t want you to pin it on me.
Of course, if you’re American, it’s done and dusted. In Australia, the fun is only beginning. My audience laughed a lot, and it was a pretty much sold out advance screening (seat E3, baby): but at the same time as the laughter was happening, some were heard to say “this is ridiculous!” And it is. It really is.

In lieu of me complaining about lacklustre video games, as I had planned to use this space, I’d like to take an opportunity to be depressed. It’s an article, right … but it’s an article with the following title:

Terry Pratchett: I’m slipping away a bit at a time… and all I can do is watch it happen

How is this not among the worst things in the world? True, thus has it ever been, but until it struck Pratchett it was little more than an abstraction. A person leading by example is a terrible thing in this sort of situation. Almost secretly, Pratchett’s first non-Discworld book since 1995’s Johnny and the Bomb, Nation, was published in the last month. I’ve read three Discworld books over the last two weeks (eighteen so far this year, that makes it – in order, for the first time since 2004), in between Adrian Mole tomes, but I feel I should put them on hold for a little bit so I can see what this book that “had to be written” is like. Saying this, I haven’t even read Wintersmith yet. I feel ashamed that I haven’t much liked the last few books in the series, either, but …
… now I just want to curl up in a corner and hide from the world. If you’ll excuse me.

I was quite excited for In Bruges. I quite liked its outcome. Having seen it, though, I’m wondering how it’s going to get away with quite so wide a release in Australia: it’s sweary, it’s violent, it’s funny, but it’s also melancholy. It’s about a pair of hitmen, their hot-tempered boss, a drug dealer and a racist dwarf. It’s pretty good!

I didn’t think that the first Hellboy feature was all that great, but I was excited for Hellboy II – probably because it seemed to Guillermo Del Toro appeared, in all of the promo materials, to have taken a leaf from his Pan’s Labyrinth book. That’s not to say, in the final breakdown, that The Golden Army is anywhere near the level of Pan’s Labyrinth, but it’s a good enough time.

The biographical graphic novel has proven, over the last thirty years or so, to be an effective way to tell a life story. Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor are grand, and greatly different accounts of their author’s lives; Art Spiegelman’s Maus blends Spiegelman’s own relationship with his father with his father’s account of World War II – with the twist that everyone is represented as an animal. Name recognition may stretch to two of those three titles, if I’m being optimistic, but I’m pretty sure that most people had never heard of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis before it became a film – and even then, most people still haven’t heard of it.

I don’t have particularly fond memories of American Splendor as a film, possibly because it was not so much personal as it was blazingly meta, but Persepolis benefits from a presumably direct translation into the animated form and, like Frank Miller’s Sin City, is co-directed by Satrapi herself. In black and white, Satrapi captures not just her own childhood, but the spirit of an age: Iran going from one peril to another, and how Europe reacted as outsiders looking in. In a few words, it’s pretty dang good.

What you have to understand is that the idea of seeing a Pixar movie and then having a director Q&A afterwards – along with legendary sound designer Ben Burtt – is one of my ideas of Heaven. If I thought about it, Heaven would probably be an interconnecting series of cinema screens.
Wall-e, screening on August 25th, with special guests Andrew Stanton and Ben Burtt, reduced the pain of the three month release delay by a large margin. I just feel sorry for the poor saps who have to wait for the September 18 wide release.

Wall-e is a special movie: almost no dialogue, a pervading sense of duty in the face of loneliness, and characters who actually surprise us. It’s like I Am Legend if that movie had remained consistently good and was predominantly a love story. It’s also nice to know that the theme of “last robot on Earth” was a Science-Fiction conceit, rather than a damning indictment of humanity’s commitment to anti-environmentalism. This is not a movie about nature, but about human nature – and also the ways that it manifests in the limited AI of cute, beat up looking robots.

Not really spoilers within, but definite discussion of the “flavours of Wall-e“.

What do you mean, it’s the wrong Condemned?

It’s a sad fact that I have a natural affinity for cheap games. When I saw the PC version of Condemned sitting on a shelf, mocking me with its $5 pricetag, I couldn’t help but snap it up. I think that, falling victim to the siren song of “cheap” games, I may have spent three or four hundred dollars on video games across multiple platforms that week. Am I ever going to play them? I’ve got stuff I bought in 2004 that’s never been out of its packaging, so the jury is out!

The amazing thing about Condemned is that I bought it about seven weeks ago and have already completed it. I judge it: worth the $5 I pay for it. It has the distinction of being the first FPS that I’ve managed to complete with a mouse and keyboard set up. I have the original Half-Life on this computer (not Source) and it’s somehow impossible to play that way. At least now I have learned that it’s a valid control scheme for a game to take on.

As to the game itself? Basically, FBI Agent Ethan “Officer Matt Parkman” Thomas has to investigate a bunch of serial killers – but, mid investigation, some of his comrades get killed with his gun and he’s on the lam! Somehow his lab access isn’t cut off, though, so he teams up with Lab Tech Rosa (Klebb), digitally transfers fingerprints, blood and general DNA to her with technology, and busts all of his cold cases wide open.

There’s not that much to say about it, but it tells a fairly compelling story, has okay melee combat and is entirely too dark. I would like to play an FPS that features its share of brightly lit areas and has more colours in its pallet than brown, grey and black. When I say this, it does not mean that I want to play Perfect Dark Zero, because nothing could be further from the truth: no one in the history of humanity has ever wanted to play that game. Those of us who have would likely testify to having been caught up in a lost wave of brand loyalty to Rareware.

There are reasons to play Condemned: it made me wonder why anyone would play any given FPS over another, and that is something that I will tackle later. All you need to know is that I’m shallow enough that the price tag of a game can render it much better than it would have been at a higher price point – which makes you wonder how people who never pay for games can sleep at night, knowing full well that there are serial killers to be stopped and weird pseudo-mystical BS to tamper with their minds.