Video games are a funny thing. To clarify, I don't mean solitaire or flash games on the internet. I'm talking about the full-on interactive experiences like the infamous Grand Theft Auto series. I actually think the phrase "interactive experience" nicely sums up my attitude towards video games. For lack of a better term, "games" are an emerging art form. "Interactive experience" sounds pretentious, but I think most games today have moved beyond being simple time-wasters, and a few have started to cross the line into the world of art.
Fallout 3 is one of those games. Set in Washington DC after a nuclear war has occurred, Fallout 3 is a simulation of what it would be like to walk out of a bomb shelter decades later and explore what has happened to the world. Regrettably, the marketing for the game plays up the adolescent male angle, showing people in menacing armor brandishing guns in front of desolate wastelands. This is especially frustrating to me. It's difficult to explain that games like Fallout 3 have artistic merit when 95% of games are advertised as if they were Arnold Schwarzeneggar movies. (more...)
|
November 9th, 2008
7287pwkr
I like to think of The World Without Us as "non-fiction lite." It's an interesting book that's also pretty easy to read, but (and this could be because I just got out of school) it seems a little light on facts and research, and heavy on speculation and assumption. But for a book that admits on the cover that it's basically a big "thought experiment", I don't necessarily mind being spared a little academic rigor.
The central concept behind the book is nothing more complicated than "let's look at the most interesting things that would happen if humans suddenly disappeared." Weisman doesn't waste much time speculating on how or why humans would disappear so suddenly, and he doesn't judge humanity based on how our human-made objects would live on without us. The book does skew a little towards the environmentalist side of things, but then I don't think it's possible to write a book about the legacy of 20th century humans (more...)
|
July 28th, 2008
7287pwkr
As a show, Mad Men is a lot like the characters it contains: layered, reserved, and real. Granted, being born in 1986, my grasp on what was "real" in the 1960's is pretty weak, but If the makers of Mad Men were going to create a heavily fictionalized version of the 60's, I have a hard time believing they would've ended up with such a dry, conflicted, occasionally dull portrayal.
Compared to other hour-long serial dramas like Lost where at least two characters die every episode (and are somehow reincarnated by the next), Mad Men is slow and deliberate. It's not for people with short attention spans. But in a culture where we are constantly bombarded with media designed for instant gratification, the fact that Mad Men holds back can be a good thing. It's a show that gives you what you want, but it does it bit by bit, on its own terms. It won't hook you in right away. I actually skipped over it the first few times I saw it while changing channels (more...)
|
July 28th, 2008
7287pwkr
Girl Talk is pop music, distilled. If you like pop music, you'll like Girl Talk. Of course, the that first statement doesn't mean much without qualifying what 'pop' means. To me, 'pop' is not so much a genre of music as a quality that all music possesses to varying degrees. 'Pop' is about having instant appeal to a wide variety of people, a quality which can exist independent of style or genre. So, to me pop music describes music made with the primary intention of being easily accessible, so there can just as easily be pop metal as pop-rap or pop-punk.
Greg Gillis (the guy behind Girl Talk) has a unique knack for picking the catchiest, most memorable parts of pop songs of all genres from the past 30 years. The remarkable thing about Girl Talk is how he can find the similarities between wildly different styles of music. The funny thing about the juxtaposition of all these various styles, while it's initially surprising to hear dirty rap lyrics over squeaky clean pop songs, is that there are far more similarities between all the samples than there are differences (more...)
|
July 25th, 2008
7287pwkr
Zodiac (2007) is one of the best movies I've seen in a while. I used to be the kind of person who found non-fiction boring, and there certainly is a lot of boring non-fiction out there. But as this movie shows, good non-fiction is hard to beat. Stories like this make all but the best fiction seem, for lack of a better word, contrived. Especially when the actors and director handle the material with such subtlety and nuance, the details and depth of character come to life in a way that very few fiction writers can manage.
I forget if I read this somewhere or if I made it up myself, but the best way I can describe Zodiac is that it's a movie about obsession. Where it differs from most crime dramas or documentaries I've seen is that it focuses not on the killer or the victims, but on the people trying to find the killer, and how that search affects their lives. Just as killing becomes an obsession for the Zodiac killer, the search for Zodiac becomes an obsession for the detectives and journalists on the case, and an entirely non-altruistic one at that. Everyone working on the case seems to be fighting to prove that (more...)
|
July 4th, 2008
7287pwkr
If you've never heard of Be Kind Rewind (2008) before, the most important thing I can tell you is that Michel Gondry made it. Whether you like him or not, Gondry's movies are unmistakably his. You have to give him credit for being one of the more creative, original directors making movies today.
But that's where my problem with Michel Gondry is, after having seen a handful of his movies, I get the feeling he's a little too proud of his own creativity. I think that carries over to his movies, which can feel like they're just vehicles for showing off how imaginative and original his ideas are. There was a documentary biography made about Gondry called I've Been Twelve Forever (2003), and the more I think about it, child-like is a great description of Gondry.
All the things I love and hate about children apply to Gondry's movies as well. They can be annoying, self-centered, and needy, but they can also be creative, innocent, cute, funny, (more...)
|
June 28th, 2008
7287pwkr
The Signal (2007) is a movie about a mysterious transmission that takes over telephones, radio and TV broadcasts, causing two out of three people to go murderously insane. Normally, I'm not a fan of slasher horror movies, and the premise to this movie originally sounded like a combination of The Ring and, well, any movie where people stab and kill each other a lot.
However, I happen to absolutely love zombie movies. There's something about zombies that gets me on a level horror movies don't. When I was looking at The Signal, it dawned on me that you can substitute "mysterious transmission" with "mysterious virus" and bam, you've got yourself a zombie movie.
So, along with recommendations from a couple friends, I watched it. The movie is separated into three sections. The movie also has three directors. I could be wrong, but if I had to guess, I'd say they each directed a section. This is where my biggest issue with the movie comes from; it feels disjointed. At times, the movie tries to be an homage to classic horror, an earnest love story, (more...)
|
June 22nd, 2008
7287pwkr
I have a funny relationship with Coldplay. I've heard a lot of criticisms of the band; they're bland, they were voted "most likely to put you to sleep" in a British survey, their lyrics are terrible, etc. Overwhelmingly, I agree with these criticisms, and yet I continue to listen to Coldplay (as a matter of fact, last.fm informs me that they are my 9th most listened to artist, though that seems a little high).
I first heard Parachutes (2000) in my freshman high school art class while we drew pictures of spare mannequin parts. I can remember hearing the track "Spies" and thinking it was unlike anything I'd heard before. Having grown up on alternative radio rock, "Spies" sounded unusually clean, ominous, and spacious in a way I wasn't used to (looking back, this was probably the beginning of my love affair with reverb). At the time, the idea of a rock song without distorted guitar or a snare drum hit on every 2 and 4 beat was something new and alien. Even then, though, I can recall hearing "Yellow" on the radio a few months later and thinking, 'well, this is boring.'
Their next few albums only increased the love-hate nature of our relationship. From A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002), I still think "Clocks" and "God Put A Smile On Your Face" are good songs, but "In My Place" crossed that line between being uncomplicated and being boring. Don't even get me started on X&Y (2005).
(more...)
|
June 16th, 2008
7287pwkr
