Third time’s the charm…

The first review that I wrote for this blog was of a game called “the Blackwell Legacy,” a solid, independently-made adventure game. However, the content of the game was overshadowed by its novelty: with the game’s release, its designer, Dave Gilbert, boldly declared that he was going to make developing adventure games his job.  Now that Gilbert’s studio, Wadjet Eye Games, has become established in the independent gaming scene and released its fifth title, “the Blackwell Convergence,” the games’ novelty has been supplanted by their artistry.

In “the Blackwell Legacy,” players were introduced to Rosa Blackwell, a struggling young journalist who discovered that her family’s history was much more complicated than she thought. Most of the complication, however, stemmed from Joey, an easygoing and charmingly sarcastic spirit guide who haunted the Blackwell family. After a series of fainting-prone introductions, Joey exhorted Rosa to get out of her Lower East Side apartment and help the spirits of the recently departed find their way to the great beyond. Over the course of the game, Rosa succeeds in helping several ghosts, and solves a murder mystery, to boot.  Although being able to talk to the dead and solving a supernatural series of murders might not be anything out of the ordinary for a video game, “Legacy” distinguished itself by mining considerable humor out of Rosa’s awkward attempts to engage a spiritual world that only she can see, though talking to invisible people might not be anything out of the ordinary for New York City.

Where “Legacy” made much of Rosa’s difficult adjustment to her duties as a medium, “Convergence” has Rosa, with a little more experience, try fit her duties into a somewhat normal life. This results in just as many humorous situations, but the characters have become far more nuanced, and react to their circumstances in delightful, believable ways. Between the characters’ clever banter, Rosa and Joey have to solve a case that is adroitly weaved into both the Blackwell family’s travails and a classic mystery in New York City history.

Just as the writing has deepened and matured, every aspect of the game shows just a little more polish than the titles that preceded it.  The graphics pop off the screen, with colorful backgrounds that are sure to engage anyone who’s been to the Manhattan haunts that they depict.  Vivid sprites illustrate the action, and detailed, expressive portraits of the characters accompany the pitch-perfect voice acting. The whole experience plays out like an interactive novella, and it’s difficult to put the game down until you finish it.

Yet, because of all of the game’s great features, because the game is such a joy to play, when the end of the game comes, it’s hard to step away from it without wanting a little more. The story could be just a little longer, the puzzles a little more complex, and at the risk of offending adventure-gaming purists, the graphics could be just a little higher-resolution.  “Convergence” will NOT disappoint you; it’s a perfect way to spend an evening, and you may very well find yourself humming its score long after you’ve left your computer.  But thanks to Wadjet Eye’s impressive progress, it’s going to be even harder to wait for Rosa and Joey’s next great outing.

A Recommendation. A Question.

If anyone happened to miss it, I would highly recommend checking out the “Memos to Hollywood” article in yesterday’s (Sunday’s) New York Times.  It’s the front page of the Summer Movies section of the Arts & Leisure section. You can find it here if you don’t have a print copy.

The last sentence of the previous paragraph contains within it the seeds of a debate (or at least a few questions) that’s been on my mind of late.  My roommates and I recently invested in “the weekender” New York Times subscription.  Our rationale for doing so despite attempts to be eco-conscious and the reality of being poor, cheap graduate students/young careerists, was that there is something very “adult”, very “real person” about the tactile experience of reading a newspaper.  This was combined with a part-nostalgic, part-crotchety anti-change generational moment: “We’ll be one of the last generations to remember life with newspapers,” we said to ourselves.

Is there any merit to any of this?  All of this?  None of this?  Are print news media really a thing of the past or will they just take on a new role in the all-you-can-eat information buffet of today?  Is there any merit to the argument that there is something irreplaceable, irreducible, in the tactile experience of reading a printed newspaper or is this kind of thing just the wistful musing of a few like-minded 20-somethings caught between their irretrievable youth and their not-yet-formed adulthood?  Why are there so many hyphens in this post?

Semper Saladis.

The Social Networking Question

Facebook is to MySpace as Google is to Yahoo.

Is it true, or is it false?

Or is it both, with a little bit of who-gives-a-crap thrown in for good measure?

I would tweet the truth on Twitter but I’m no goddamn bird.

…

This is how people will write in the future, because everyone will be stupid, mad!, or, likely both. Everyone will be like me!

Obviously this is true.

…

Like a peek-a-boo glance at your bleeding 401k statement…

…ibiteyoureyes!

The Dame Wore Ruby Slippers

When I first saw the previews for Emerald City Confidential, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I’m a dedicated fan of adventure games, and I’ve enjoyed all of Dave Gilbert’s recent titles, but Emerald City Confidential seemed like a major departure from his previous works. Partly, this was because the game departed from the budding Blackwell series, instead featuring a new take on L. Frank Baum’s Oz universe, an endeavor that has previously met with varied degrees of success.  However, I was also unsure of how the game’s status as an avowedly “casual” title would affect the mechanics of play.  While some adventure games feature puzzles with solutions that are downright Byzantine, most adventure games can be controlled with leisurely clicks of the mouse; there isn’t much to simplify for the casual gamer.  Thankfully, the title proved a pleasant surprise on both accounts, and should appeal to fans and neophytes of both the Oz mythos and games alike.

Part of my initial unease stemmed from the recent and largely regrettable trend of revisiting children’s fare for adult consumption, from Transfomers to the destined-to-be-awful Land of the Lost.  However, a few gems have been mined from this nostalgic dross, particularly when writers have adopted a truly adult (in the mature sense) perspective on their source material,  such as in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.   Emerald City Confidential gains relevance by channeling a similarly creative spirit, peering into the world of Oz through the lens of film noir.

The Oz of Emerald City Confidential remains glamorous from a distance, but it is populated by characters that twist the originals in clever and anarchic ways. The Tin Man has gained a heart, only to have it broken and slowly washed away in drink; the Scarecrow may have the best brain in the land, yet his acumen has turned him into a walking koan; the Lion has gained courage, but uses it to profit from the unscrupulous pursuit of contract law. Thrust into the shoes of Petra, the Emerald City’s only private detective, the player gets to see the world of Oz as a land of considerable intrigue, and the plot is shot through with allusions to some of the more arcane bits of Ozian lore.  Given that the canon of Oz titles make the collected works of J. K. Rowling look laconic by comparison, this was no easy task.

Contra amorem, or Pro Lupercalia

The advent of Christianity led to the end of the  civic relationships which mediated between the gods and men, or rather elite males. The erosion of these structures was a gradual process which based itself on the ability of the individual of any class or sex to establish a relationship with the divine. Characteristic of this was the love of man for God, agape. Anyone who has ever read the works of St. Teresa will quickly realize both that her relationship with the divine gave her orgasms and that the sort of romantic love which our society now values is a result of the shifting of the objects of our affection from God to other human beings. Nothing emphasizes this shift in consciousness as well as the ancient predecessor of Valentine’s Day, the Lupercalia. The Lupercalia was an ancient civic fertility holiday, in which the patrician youth of Rome would sacrifice a goat and strip off its hide, then run around the city naked , whipping women with the strips to promote fertility. As a sidenote, the most famous celebration of these festivities took place when Antony offered Caesar a kingly crown, and he did thrice refuse. Hence, what was primarily a civic celebration in these days is understood as a celebration of the bond of individuals. For those who find this holiday to be miserable  and yearn to be waving strips of goat skin this charge, as so many others, can be lain at the doorstep of the Jews(Christians?).

You’ve got time, we’ve got podcasts

We’ve got a new podcast, featuring more of the Yesterday’s Salad crew.

Listen here:

Podcast magic!

List Madness!

Over at the LA Times, Scott Feinberg has a list of the 25 best movies of the last ten years not to get love from the Academy. These are movies that went completely unnominated, so they may be a bit low on your Netflix queue. Here’s his top 10:

1. “Dogville” (2003, d. Lars von Trier)
2. “Synecdoche, New York” (2008, d. Charlie Kaufman)
3. “Thank You for Smoking” (2006, d. Jason Reitman)
4. “The Virgin Suicides” (1999, d. Sofia Coppola)
5. “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” (2007, d. Sidney Lumet)
6. “The Company” (2003, d. Robert Altman)
7. “The Upside of Anger” (2005, d. Mike Binder)
8. “Three Kings” (1999, d. David O. Russell)
9. “Gran Torino” (2008, d. Clint Eastwood)
10. “The Station Agent” (2003, d. Tom McCarthy)

Use the link above to see the rest of the list.

I think The Station Agent and Three Kings are the strongest of his top 10. #14, Shattered Glass, and #21, Legally Blonde. are the other two films I’ll steal for my list. Three Kings is really an excellent movie, whose director is one of the most talented directors not working today (our thoughts on his breakout, “Spanking the Monkey”); I Heart Huckabees could probably be on this list too.

Feinberg states his omissions straight away:

“Something tells me we’ll see lots of cult-faves like “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days,” “Inside Man,” “Zodiac,”

Yep. All three are excellent films, especially 4 Months which is one of the most devastating movies I’ve ever seen. I’m tempted to say that it shouldn’t count since it’s a foreign movie and it’s so much harder for foreign movies to be nominated, but it was truly one of the best movies of the last decade, and as the Palm D’Or winner, was significantly high-profile. Similarly, Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher belongs as the winner of the Grand Prix du Festival and a BAFTA best film not in English nominee. Besides, it’s terrific.

Other movies I’d add: Ghost Dog: The way of the Samurai and The Limey.

So, the Yesterday’s Salad list of the Ten Best Movies of the Last 10 Years not nominated for anything:
1. 4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 Days

2. The Piano Teacher

3. Three Kings

4. Zodiac

5. The Station Agent

6. Ghost Dog

7. The Limey

8. Shattered Glass

9. Legally Blonde

10. Inside Man

“Dancer in the Dark” really needs to be on this list. It was nominated for “best song” but that should hardly count since it reinforces the fact that it wasn’t nominated for anything else. If we decide to count it, Dancer slides in at  number 8 and everything else slides down one.

I should say, once you exclude (most) foreign movies from consideration, it’s actually hard to come up with a long list of excellent movies that fail to be nominated. Most of the films on the list are terribly flawed. But for all the Academy’s stupidity, they do manage to find a way to nominate most above average to excellent films.

The Stimulus Does Not Provide Enough Funding for Transit (Or, More things we can blame on The Reader)

This was the year that the Holocaust film cohered as a genre. Fifteen years after the watershed Schindler’s List, the number of films about the Holocaust has grown so large that recurrent images have turned into conventions or even tropes. NY Mag offered a helpful chart for seeing which Holocaust movie was right for you and Slate published a Taxonomy of Holocaust films, crudely laying out the occasional simplicity of the films in a way that recalls the description of a wrestling film given to Barton Fink:

“Well…usually they’re simple morality tales. There’s a good wrestler and a bad wrestler whom he confronts at the end. In between, the good wrestler has a love interest or a small child he has to protect.”

While it’s redundant to adnumber texts on the formulaic nature of films (including my own review of The Great Debaters), I chose to cite Barton Fink because of how strange the movie is, how unclassifiable. Taking place at the outset of American intervention in World War II, the Holocaust is a theme of the movie: anti-Semitism is a current throughout, with Fink regularly called “kike,” and John Goodman’s character offers a “Heil Hitler” as the movie turns utterly surreal. The film even captures the reluctance of the Hollywood Jews to talk about what may be happening in the old country.

Barton Fink is a challenging film, the type that an A.O. Scott would endorse (though he may not put it in the category of Holocaust film). For Scott, the danger of Holocaust movies is not that they’ve become a permanent fixture like Westerns, but that they’re simplistic in their moralizing

It seems right that movies about a difficult subject should themselves be difficult. But the fate of difficult movies with subtitles, usually, is to slip in and out of American theaters without leaving much of a trace. The big Holocaust movies of the big movie season will make more of an impression, allowing audiences vicarious immersion in a history that they nonetheless keep at a safe, mediated difference, even as they risk bathos and overreach in the process. We don’t have to ask what the Holocaust means to us since the movies answer that question for us. more

Scott’s treatise was well-reasoned, and insightful, and it’s not at all surprising that it cut through and made the impact that it did. No one else had come close to ever articulating the discontents we feel with the genre, with capturing the repetitive and often troubling moral reasoning that categorizes so much Holocaust film. Certainly no one had ever done it as cogently and respectfully as Scott.

Sadly, his piece promises to be as topical in a year’s time. With The Reader nominated for Best Picture, I can’t help but worry about Eternal Return.

The Reader is not a terrible movie, just a mediocre one. The premise of the movie is actually quite intriguing: the onset of adolescence is retrospectively discovered to have meant something else as we learn more about the life of the other participant. It’s also one of the rare (only?) English movies about the experience of Germans who grew up with both guilt and mystification over what had happened. Some amazing novels have been written about the topic (anything by W.G. Sebald), and there will certainly be a great film made about the vicissitude of German experiences after the War. But this isn’t it.

It’s major problem is its shocking timidity. Winslet is naked for a good portion of the film, but the scenes are neither erotic nor traumatizing. She’s simply nude. Daldry, trying not to be sensationalist, veers too far in the opposite extreme. Yes there is the delicacy of depicting a relationship between a minor and an adult, but the film plays down all emotions attached to their lovemaking. Their love affair is muted to the point that Fiennes character’s repression is incomprehensible. We may understand the premise of why he becomes traumatized, but we don’t see it on film. There is no sexual politics, simply sex. This was the part of the film that had the greatest chance of doing something new and making an impact, and it was here that it’s failure is most disappointing.

It’s another example of a film limited in its scope.

On a final, different, note Ty Burr has some good thoughts on Slumdog Millionaire over at the Globe’s Movie blog. Burr’s blog is definitely one of the best film related blogs out there. My own thoughts on Slumdog here.

Requiem For a Pickmaker: Oscars Confound Again

Nominations are in. For the third straight year, Yesterday’s Salad goes 4/5 picking Best Picture nominees. That sounds good, but it’s also disheartening. No matter how many numbers you crunch, you can never be exactly right. The Dark Knight, what we thought was the best picture of the year, failed to be nominated. Congratulations, you’re now the 4th movie to score over 3.5 on our scale not to be nominated for Best Picture. And congrats, Academy, on having picture and director match 5/5: you’ve made things easier on me and Nate, but at the expense of an individual talent like Christopher Nolan.

I feel pretty good about identifying The Reader as the movie most likely to sneak in:

Over the last 8 years, no movie nominated for Best Picture has been outside of the top 10 in our rankings, so we’ll restrict ourselves to those movies.

So what movies in the top 10 have directors with multiple Best Director nominees?

The Reader (1.69; 7) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Daldry was on the outside looking in in 2000, but Billy Elliot was nominated for director, and he was nominated again for The Hours. The Reader got a new shot of buzz when it was nominated by BAFTA last week, and this being the year of the Kate could help it immensely.

So, when all is said and done, I feel … more confident in picking The Dark Knight for the 5 slot, but if you gave me really good odds–really good–I might bet on The Reader.

No, my confidence wasn’t rewarded, but I think we’ve struck upon a good way to pick Best Picture upsets: films in our top-10 with multiple nominee directors. It sounds pretty intuitive, but it’s not. Gran Torino was everyone’s favourite to upset and sneak in, but we knew it was too low to get the nomination. Likewise, this system keeps us from betting on critically acclaimed upstarts (The Aronofskys of the world). At Best Picture time, the life of the reactionary is the life to lead.

(I was extremely plussed by the fact the Academy nominated Richard Jenkins for The Visitor, a YS favourite that “suffered” from early release syndrome)

Are these not the hallowed letters of that great man known as Chickpea? (In which I unveil new plans to post and fail miserably)

Salve, o loyal readers of the finest fakest fulsome fawning felicities! YS has in many ways grown without tirades and there are those who seem to believe that the greatest days of YS are long past. The question of true greatness is one that requires much caution and a mind not untouched by the brilliance known to the stars alone. Shall it not be said that in an hour in which a man who appears great to the masses, to the huddled ones lurching around on the lawns, drunk on their own power and misled by a foul band of miscreants that call themselves the political elite, that YS, a bastion of oligarchy and wit and whimsy, with a touch of snark, did not stand against these encroaching forces of populist joy? DS wishes us not to be an imagined community of right wing fantasy, but can we afford to be anything else? Will all these deliberative questions eventually be answered?
The question that brings us here tonight is one of slight. YS staff held a conference about various things of salady nature, such as movies, Obama, and inane literary criticism. While such things are inevitably not interesting to a Republican such as myself, I resent not being invited. But indeed who would wish to gather with such a clucking mob, salivating over such slight scraps? Well, perhaps I would, for I was at one point a haruspex myself and could doubtless have contributed to such a conversation. I can truly watch for birds and dismember livers in ways that are too great and shining to really express through even the glowing rhetoric to which I am accustomed. So, indeed, I was slighted and my invective shall not cease to ring until a formal apology is issued from those parties who perpetrate ills against their star orator.
Some surprise came upon me this day, when I heard commentators speaking about the unprecedented nature of the American handover of power. We did, after all, have the Civil War (Does it bother anyone else that the Civil War is capitalized as if there were no other civil wars? Clearly, the Union needs to vote on a better name. It could perhaps be more aptly merged with the Reconstruction and we could have just one long period of Northern restructuring of the South.) This is, like most things American, stolen from the Romans. Our inauguration was originally in March, patterned after the bizarre Roman calendar, in which the consuls took office March 15. This is possibly the result of Romulus’ strange construction which had only the months from March to December (Why December, November, October, and September are 10, 9, 8, 7). More convincingly, quite a bit of work, most noticeably Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, has remarked on the biological nature of the Roman war machine. Consuls came to power March 15, because crops would already be planted and it was time to kill. A law in 158 BC changed the assumption of consular duties to January 1st. We have gone through a similar shift, from March 4 to January 20th since the Twentieth Amendment. From now on, you can expect biting rhetoric combined with useful parallels between ourselves and the Romans which are not to be pushed too far, as well as some overcompensation for personal insecurities. I leave with the stunning statistic which illustrates the profound gap between our own nation and that great Republic of the Romani, it took 4 farmers to feed 1 urban dweller in the Roman empire. In America, the ratio is 1 to 70.