Raiders of the Lost Ark, as a movie, never really “clicked” for me. Then, to mark the release of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on DVD, it was given a cinematic screening. Being minus four years of age at the time of its release I, of course, had never seen it that way. It was the right decision, because suddenly I realise that it is, in fact, a very good movie. It’s very different to the sorts of movies I’m used to (but what does that even mean? What sorts of movies am I “used to”?), but it hit the spot right on.

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.

At dinner tonight, I was heard to remark “I regret this evening.” One of my biggest clichés, and the reason I never really write, is “this movie is the reason I watch movies” or “this movie is the reason I love movies”. Watching Eagle Eye this evening, I was struck with a terrible dread: this is the reason I hate movies. Yes, I watched a movie tonight that turned me against the whole medium.

I had the choice between seeing Wall-e again or Eagle Eye. The invisible hand of the free market pointed me in the direction of Eagle Eye, then it slowly choked me to death. When I say slowly, I mean slowly. This is one of a handful of terrible films I’ve seen this year that has caused me to turn to Ajay and say “there’s still an hour to go.”
Then, six hours later, “forty minutes.”

Please don’t see Eagle Eye. It was one of the least crowded Friday night opening weekend major movies I can recall seeing, and in the credits I said “I hope no one goes to see this”. Ajay said “but we already have”.
… I stand before you a broken man.

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 think there’s some sort of unwritten rule that says “if you are a serious movie dude, you are not allowed to like Ben Stiller”. Which is fair enough if you consider some of his particularly excruciating catalogue, which I would say is merely one step above Adam Sandler but Adam Sandler had the good sense to stop churning out movies a little while back (possibly because the funding was no longer forthcoming, but that’s neither here nor there).

Thing is, Ben Stiller can sometimes have a rare comedic gift. He can be an oyster, distilling the excrement of the universe into a pearl of a movie, furnishing it with lashings of Robert Downey Jr. being a genius, and generally having a good time. There’s no room for a bad movie in here because it is, generally speaking, too fun: even if you hate Ben Stiller or Jack Black (although why you’d hate Jack Black for any reason other than his role in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, I’ll never know), this is pretty worthwhile! It’s not even stupid funny like Zoolander, which … oh God, is there any point in doing “comparative comedy”? Probably not. I was going to go into a massive detour into Will Ferrell there.

The point of the matter is that Tropic Thunder is a pretty dang funny meta-adventure into the world of film making, the vanity of “serious” actors, and the ruthlessness of studio executives. Some of it is too gross-out for my tastes, and there’s at least two nonsense dance scenes, but it’s ultimately worthwhile.

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.

This image of Rapture is not going to be sourced, for the protection of my mental health.

As I wandered the aisles of a game store yesterday, looking as always for rare or obscure games (to be played, of course, only when any relevance they once held has eroded into the mists of time), I was thinking, as you do, about the nature of the FPS and story driven gameplay. A lot of the games nowadays are FPS, and I was thinking that it must be hard to mess one up, at least on a very basic level: while level design, enemy design and AI, weapon balance are, of course, vital, we can accept that FPS are all basically the same – point and shoot games of varying elaborateness.

The thing is that all of those things that I listed above are what separates each FPS from the others: levels, enemies and weapons are all dependent on theme. If you don’t give an eff about the place that you’re running and gunning through, then why are you going to run and gun? Would Portal have become the hit it was, and apparently the only thing in the universe that channers don’t hate (excepting Ron Paul and green Guy Fawkes masks), were it not for GlaDOS? I posit that it would not. It’s a short game, with a story that is told in a relatively subtle way, with its very sterility a key to its seedy underbelly. Portal is not a great example because it has fundamentally different game play, because it’s more of a First Person Puzzler than it is a First Person Shooter.