2015 movie log

I haven't posted anything here in a while and in continuing that tradition this is merely a list of all the films I watched in 2015.

January
Mission Impossible
The Imitation Game
Get the gringo
Sabotage
Leon: The Professional
The Last Stand
Automata
Stretch
Westworld
Predator
The Colony
Birdman

February
Horns
Jupiter Ascending
The French Connection
The Maltese Falcon
50 Shades of Grey 

March
Metropolis
RoboCop (2014)
What We Do In The Shadows
Snowpiercer
Killing Them Softly

April
Empire Records
Charlie Countryman
Best In Show
The Babadook
Noah
Othello (Seattle Shakespeare Company production)

May
Last Days On Mars
The Help
Mad Max
Pitch Perfect
Pitch Perfect 2
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome
Big Trouble in Little China

June
Mad Max: Fury Road

July
Magic Mike
Magic Mike
Tig
Trainwreck

August
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

September
Nightcrawler
Lucky Number Slevin
People, Places, Things
Rambo: First Blood Part II
Expendables 3
Rambo III
Wet Hot American Summer

October
Mulan
Highlander
Thor: The Dark World
Hook

November
The Gunman
Underworld
John Wick
Trailer Park Boys: Say Goodnight To The Bad Guys
Black Hawk Down

December
The Kingdom
Kingsman: The Secret Service
Magic Mike XXL
Fargo
The Usual Suspects
Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens
The Anatomy Of Monsters

The Long Line reading

Recently I held a small event in which a group of friends read out the dialogue from my latest story, The Long Line. From the outset I knew this book would be influenced by David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, based on Don DeLillo's book which I'm now reading. That influence takes the form of a series of verbose conversations about various abstract and theoretical topics ranging from economic theory to my race theory to ethics and philosophy of value.

While this story has always meant to be a novel the process of adapting it to script helped identify a number of flaws which would have otherwise gone unnoticed. It forced certain scenes and subplots to be lost and others added. In converting it back into prose novel form, all of these lost and added threads will be consolidated.

The reading also made me realise how great of an influence Eidos' 2000 title Deus Ex was on the dialogue, both the sudden ventures into deep or heavy or abstract territory as well as the style of language used. One thing I did not notice the first (/2nd/3rd) time playing that game was the avoidance of contractions. Apostrophes are almost never used in speech. I don't know whether this was an intentional stylistic choice by Warren Spector/Sheldon Pacotti or an error from somewhere along the line to the recording booth, but it was certainly effective in a subtle, unconscious way. This is something that I, without meaning, injected into the dialogue of The Long Line.

After the reading I had an overwhelming sense that the thing was over and done with. It seemed like a good type of workflow: project based, stressing out for a few weeks leading up to some big event, then once it's done washing your hands of the whole thing. Except this story is not done, there is still a lot of work to do. Conversations need to be rearranged, characters developed, holes plugged.

DeLillo's book so far is a very, very good combination of words.

50 Shades of Grey

There is a point in the story I’m currently working on where two characters have sex. I’d never written a sex scene before, and so as “research” I thought it’d be a good idea to read the E.L. James bestseller, 50 Shades of Grey. I had low expectations, and they were met. Except for the expectation of being aroused at any point.

I picked up the book for $1 from someone’s garage and read it over way too long a period of time. I had intended to hold on to it as reference for this review, but had to abandon it atop a luggage scale in the Qantas check-in section of Adelaide Airport, due to weight restrictions.

I only read the first volume. From talking to people it seems that this is unusual, and most go on to finish the trilogy. Why, I ask them. They don’t know. I’m writing this review under the assumption that you haven’t read any of it, and have no intention to or don’t care about spoilers.

Yes, the book does depict a very unhealthy, abusive relationship. When I reached the rape scene I thought, wow, this is pretty bad, and people still think it’s arousing? Only afterwards did I realize that that’s okay because it’s not a real depiction of a relationship, it is absolutely a fantasy. And fantasies are okay. Remember that lots of people have rape fantasies with no intention of actually experiencing them.

So it’s not a depiction of a real relationship, and that’s partly because it’s not a depiction of real humans or real emotions, either. I’m trying very hard not to criticize the author, because I think I’m of the opinion that we should critique texts for what they are without drawing inferences about the producer’s talent. That said, 50 Shades didn't really have a story arc. There was a point, maybe around ⅔ or ¾ through, where I realized that the story could end suddenly and I wouldn't worry about any of the characters. There was no tension or conflict that needed to be resolved. At any point the story could very easily have wrapped up and been neatly concluded. Usually that would mean it’s a poorly crafted tale, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps it’s actually pretty clever to be able to hold on to such a massive readership without creating the edge-of-seat tension that usually keeps people turning pages and buying sequels. It does it some other way, which, as mentioned above, I've failed to identify.

Another issue I’d like to bring up is a technique which I’m not sure is innovative or clumsy. The story is told through a range of different voices, all fighting amongst each other for page space. Though not actually communicating with each other because that would be too cool. I counted four:

• First person narration. The bulk of the text, this is Anastasia Steele’s Ego narrating the events in present tense. The tense, also, was surprising to me but was probably a stylistic choice to make the sex scenes more immersive.
• Anastasia’s thoughts. These are short statements or sometimes paragraphs in italics representing the protagonist’s immediate thoughts within the story. The exact difference between her italicized thoughts and the rest of her narration is difficult to identify, as the narration is restricted to her point of view and knowledge at that time, just like her character and her character’s thoughts.
• “My Subconscious” and “My Inner Goddess”. Discussed in third person among the usual narration, as if a different character entirely. At first I thought these two identities were the same, but it soon became clear that they were in opposition to each other. The Subconscious apparently represented Anastasia’s insecurities, while her Inner Goddess represented her... Beyonce? The former was cautious and (appropriately) wary of Mr. Grey and the latter was sexy and enthusiastic. Except for one occasion.

I was often confused, not by which of these was speaking at the time, but by their motivations and by the distinction between them. They are, after all, all supposed to be Anastasia Steele. Whether the character suffered a very real dissociative personality disorder or something similar was unclear. I trust this was clarified in the later books.

Three stars out of twenty for 50SoG.

*Ahem*

Now here’s an update on where I’m at. Recently awarded working rights within the US so I’m looking for a job. Published Analysis of Footprints, my satirical critical analysis of the Footprints in the Sand poem. It’s currently for sale on the Kindle store for $1 because that’s the minimum. Soon it’ll be available at almost every other ebook store for free. Still completing my third story titled The Long Line. After this draft gets done I’ll finalize the other thing on the backburner, which I think will be called The Retroact, and release that in paper and ebook. After all those are done I’m thinking I might turn the race theory and emergent storytelling ideas into a cohesive volume, but that’s a pretty long term project.

Peace.

Partypooping, my 2015 list

I feel like recently my ability to sit down and enjoy movies has diminished. Taking a little bit of inspiration from Soderbergh, here is a list of the last few movies I’ve watched for the first time:

• Gravity
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• 52 Tuesdays
• Priscilla Queen of the Desert
• Captain America: The First Avenger
• Interstellar
• 22 Jump Street
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
• Godzilla (2014)
• The Imitation Game

Although be aware that this isn’t an exhaustive list of 2014, it’s from around August to now, January 2015.

Only five of those ten (Gravity, GotG, 52T, PQotD, 22JS) I actually enjoyed and didn’t afterwards complain about to those unlucky enough to see it with me. This disappoints me. I’d like to be a person who enjoys all films, but instead I feel like a party pooper when everybody else really enjoys a thing and I then have to launch into all the reasons I didn’t. This is a formal apology to all my friends who watch movies with me and then have to deal with me being a downer afterwards.

Some of these films I saw in cinema, some on television, and some on those crap little screens in commercial airplanes. Some I saw alone and some with company. Unfortunately none of these variables correlates to how much I enjoyed the film.

I’m not going to give reviews of those films above because, honestly, I don’t remember what I complained about for most of them. I didn’t even dislike most of them, they were “fine”. Unfortunately when you’re around people who exit the cinema grinning and raving about the film you just watched together, and then you politely smile and say “eh, it was fine” it really sounds like you’re saying “why did you guys drag me here. I want to go home.”

As I look down the list of films I didn’t enjoy as much I realise it might be that I’m choosing the wrong films. I didn’t really expect much from TMNT (and was still let down). There are a bunch of new ones that I’ve wanted to see but haven’t had the chance: The Rover, The Babadook, Boyhood, Neighbors, Locke, and these might have helped the ratio a little.

Looking through IMDB’s 2015 list I’m keen for:

• Blackhat - Michael Mann
• Maps to the Stars - Cronenberg
• Jupiter Ascending - Wachowskis.
• Project Almanac - PG rated teen time travel!
• Chappie - Blomkamp
• The Gunman
• Furious 7 - obviously
• Avengers: Age of Ultron
• Mad Max: Fury Road - Mad Maximum excitement for this one.
• Jurassic World
• Tomorrowland
• Terminator Genisys
• Magic Mike XXL
• The Man From U.N.C.L.E. - Guy Ritchie
• Everest
• Spectre - new James Bond one
• Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens
• The Hateful Eight - Tarantino
• The Forest
• The Fifth Wave

Some of these are included just because they’re continuations of big franchises, or by big name directors with fantastic work in the past, which basically means everybody has to see them, right?

I won’t see all of these, and I’ll probably accidentally see some I didn’t mean to, like the new Mission Impossible. I’ll probably accidentally see that like I accidentally saw the last two.

On The Merits Of Typewriters, I'm Still Here.

The posts on this blog have been less and less frequent lately, which I'm not very happy about. It's also starting to get a bit heavy on the social issues. Sure talking about feminism and misogyny and stuff gets me excited but I don't want to do it every damn time I do a blog post, and I don't want to subject you guys to the same old rhetoric. I'd rather tell stories.

Now the reason I haven't been putting up little tidbits and excerpts of stories is that I've gone old-school. For almost the past year I've been using a Smith Corona XD 5700 electric typewriter which I picked up for $10 in Vancouver. It was one of the last generations of typewriters before fully computerised word processors came about. It has a little screen and line-by-line memory, so you can go into the special mode and type a line into the memory and then hit print and it bangs it all out, centered or justified if you like. The memory also enables an erasing feature if you have the proper cartridges, which I don't. I prefer it to a computer for a couple of reasons. You instantly have hard copies of every page. The obnoxious clicky-clack keys and panicked smashing down of the hammer for each character carries a sense of commitment, as does the inability to backspace and revise. You learn to just run with it. Just type everything and worry about deleting crap bits or rearranging words later. It's liberating. There's also the lack of distractions. It's a solitary experience, there's no Facebook button, but it's also much easier to step away and interact with actual human's physically in the room with you. You can turn it off and on and resume exactly where you left off instantly. There are downsides, obviously. There are no cloud-based backups and research must be done on some other device. Afterwards you have to find a stack scanner to digitise all the pages, and hope that the software accurately recognises the characters on the page (it won't) so you can edit on a computer. The cartridges don't last long and are hard to come by.

In the past year I've also started a Facebook page and a Twitter, and connected the Instagram account to both, so it's becoming an interlinked spiderweb of social networking platforms, which is I think how social network marketing is supposed to work? I guess?

Na(tional)No(vel)Wri(ting)Mo(nth) is happening. I'm not participating in that. I don't intend to finish the one I'm currently working on within the next three weeks, and I started it well before November so I guess it doesn't count anyway. Like Movember, you've got to start afresh, right? So I'm currently living in Seattle, a legal resident of the US. In a little bit I'll put up a thing on here about my employment experiences in Vancouver, that might be a bit interesting.

Peace.

Sexuality in Horror and Halloween

As a newcomer to North America I’m still learning about Halloween culture. I spent most of my life in Australia, where the holiday is rarely observed. You might get a single pair of kids dressed up knocking on your door expecting sweet food, and you’ll have to run around the kitchen searching cupboards and drawers for something they might enjoy. Nuts? A block of cheese? An apple? It is certainly not something that most people prepare for. So my understanding of it was founded entirely on film and television shipped over from the States. I understood it to be a time where people dress up with the apparent goal of frightening others. Parents frighten children. Children frighten parents. Older siblings frighten younger siblings. Infants don’t know what’s going on. If children come to your door and curse you with “trick or treat” they’re basically holding the upkeep of your home exterior to ransom. Give us candy or the house gets it, they say, a carton of eggs and roll of toilet paper at the ready.

Thankfully, by the time I came to North America, people have grown up enough not to be such vandalising dicks any more. However I still experienced my own Mean Girls moment when confronted with just how sexual the whole event is. Being actually frightening is almost shameful and it’s unusual for a girl not to dress as “sexy whatever”. I understand that adults want to distance themselves from the childishness that they engaged in as children. And I understand that Seattle is, for whatever reason, a pretty prudish place and Halloween presents a once a year opportunity for girls to dress as slutty as they want without fear of social prejudice.

For me, Halloween is supposed to be, and is for young kids, a time for being spooky. A time for fear. Now I’m going to talk about movies.

We’re all aware of the common trope in slasher films of hypsersexualisation of women. There’s excessive nudity to the point of blatant sexist objectification. You could argue that the primary audience of these films is adolescent males and for that reason the filmmakers add tits to cater to that demographic, which may be true in some cases. However, there’s also the observation that in many slasher films the sexually promiscuous are usually the first to die, presumably as some kind of punishment. This makes sense in films and stories released in a time when sexual promiscuity is heavily scorned by society but I’d like to think that the liberal sensibilities of modern filmmakers have matured to a point where we don’t need to punish people for being sluts. I mean, having a monster whose motivations are unexplained - who is basically acting as a piece of hazardous environment rather than a character, like a wild animal - mindlessly attack whoever is the first to take their clothes off sounds a lot like the absurd rape-victim-blaming attitudes held by folks who apparently never left the dark ages. I’d like to stay away from that discussion because I believe it’s already been done, and I just hope that if horror genre continues to kill sluts first it will do so for reasons other than attempting to curtail society to dress more conservatively and have less sex.

Note that above I’m talking about slasher films. The type of film that Cabin In The Woods sends up. Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, etc. I don’t strictly consider these films horror, they are a distinct genre or a subgenre of that. Actual, scary horror films sometimes also use sexuality though usually to enhance the discomforting effect. Rather than dismissing sexuality in horror as simply tacked on objectification, or some kind of social engineering I believe that sexual themes absolutely enhance the horrific experience. It’s (unfortunately) normal in society for humans to be uncomfortable with some aspects of their own sexuality and this discomfort can be exploited by crafty storytellers. Alien was loaded with imagery and themes suggesting bodily invasion, rape, and slimy penises, and this compounded to unsettle male and female viewers alike. I think part of the reason it was so effective was that it wasn't blatant, but just suggested. The idea of an enemy binding itself to your face, smothering you, shoving its appendage down your throat and into your belly, depositing a seed which then grows within you against your will, was allowed to slither about beneath the surface of our consciousness while we watched some space-miners get killed.

I’m also reminded of Hellraiser which was more explicitly about sexuality, specifically BDSM. For many, restraint or even pain during sex is a very alien idea. The acts themselves may even contain an element of fear. Bondage is something that necessarily requires a certain level of trust to be enjoyed, but when that trust is absent it becomes threatening and frightening - perhaps still sexy to some but scary nevertheless.

This is why, for my future Halloween costumes, I will be incorporating themes of bondage and restraint and those other aspects of sexuality that most people view as uncomfortable, combining the almost requisite sluttiness with discomfort and fear.

A Dark Room, interactive narrative, metaphors

A buddy introduced me to an online game called A Dark Room, which basically killed my entire day - I just sat on my bed playing it. That first sentence was written three hours before this one. I had to stop writing to play the damn game. Finished it. 

The first few minutes of this game are super interesting, arresting, even. You get a stark white screen with a timeline of events described in text, “the room is cold. the fire is dead.” You have a single button: “light fire”.

“the fire is burning.”

Things continue in this text-based, minimalist control fashion for a while, with no instruction on how to play the game or even what sort of game it is. There are occasional random events if you wait long enough. The fire will die down, you hear a scratching sound behind a wall. You’re soon introduced to a new character called “builder”. You stoke the fire to warm her up. Before long the game balloons into a survival, resource collection type thing, with combat and exploration.

During the first part of the game I wasn’t sure how much of a “game” it actually was. It seemed more like a linear narrative relying on attentive prompts by the player to direct and advance the story. Would such a thing still be considered a game? Temporarily forgetting about my “every game is a race” argument from Race Design Theory, what differentiates a game from any other narrative text is the capacity for interaction. David Cage and his company Quantic Dream attempt to produce games that blur the line between games and movies, however they are unequivocally video games. The player is given choices which affect the action and storyline. Occasionally, during the early ‘training’ stages of QD games, the player is asked to control the player in menial tasks, without any decision-making on any level. If the text were to be made entirely of these interactions from the player it could be argued that it would not longer be a game at all, however this is pointless and irrelevant, as this text would basically be reduced to a movie that pauses itself and requires the viewer to continuously perform some simple and menial action to unpause and ‘advance’ the plot. That would be silly.

Consider also choose-your-own-adventure books, in which the reader (or player) does have some degree of influence over the story. They might contain multiple endings, or multiple paths to the same ending. If this sort of narrative were presented on a computer screen it might be labeled (or mislabeled) a video game. The prevalence of ereaders ie. Kindle, nook, with the capacity for in text hyperlinks further blurs the line between computers and books, between video games and novels. Admittedly the CYOA genre (if it is indeed a genre, otherwise, medium) has declined in popularity seemingly in time with the public acceptance of video game culture. Despite the fact that video games have existed in some primitive form or another since the 50s (debatable), one could say that these types of books were a precursor, at least in the popular sphere, to modern video games.

As were tabletop role playing games, and board games before them. TTRPGs generally follow a common structure involving one Game Master directing the action based on some prewritten script. Again, I ask where the boundary of the video game definition lies - what is the minimum amount of digitisation needed? There are online platforms for existing typically offline games, such as online casinos or scrabble clones played via Facebook. Are we supposed to call these video games or digital versions of traditional games? I don’t believe that there is a difference.

A significant portion of modern video games fall under the category of simulations of offline games (i.e. the FIFA series, aforementioned scrabble and online casinos,) while a wider category includes simulations of other offline activities (i.e. flight simulators, tactical combat, auto racing,) and all of these are merely approximations of their real-world counterparts. As technology increases they will obviously grow more and more accurate - I guess asymptotically. As they do so, performing given actions in the game will become more procedurally similar to performing them in the real world. Digital virtual cockpits will more and more resemble actual cockpits. Regardless of this, though, at any level of sophistication and accuracy these simulations will always remain such. They will exist solely as metaphors in the same way that their primitive predecessors did. By these predecessors I am talking about this:

Very early video games such as Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! are (by today’s standards) too far from real life to be considered accurate in any sense. Some might argue that to call Punch Out! a boxing simulator would be an insult to the sport of boxing. Nevertheless, it is in some way a simplified, primitive version of a hypothetical ‘perfect’ boxing simulator (perhaps utilising some futuristic The Matrix-style virtual reality) and therefore acts as a metaphor for boxing in the same capacity as the perfect simulator would.

The next point I would like to make concerns the fundamental structure of early video games, and, by extension, modern ones. Punch Out! is not that far removed from other games of its era, for instance Space Invaders. If one were to compare player inputs (control button sequences, timing, etc) from both games they might be indistinguishable - the only real difference between the games is their graphical presentation. In one a man moves around a boxing ring, executing specific attacks at specific times while evading opponents attacks. In the other a spaceship moves around a 2-dimensional space, performing the same (or at least comparable) timed attack and evasion maneuvers. Rather than presenting these games graphically as they are, let us imagine a text-based version. Obviously it would have to be slowed down since we can’t read as quickly as we can interpret images. It might look something like this:

Opponent moves left 2 spaces.

Opponent moves forward 1 space.

Opponent attacks.

Player takes 1 damage.

Note that this reads similarly to a TTRPG GM’s narration. The antithesis to this point revolves around complexity: Modern games of the same type still follow the same structural pattern, albeit with slightly more complexity. Space combat games now successfully utilise 3-dimensional movement rather than two. Boxing simulators now use a wide range of moves. The ways in which games handle dealing and receiving damage varies in complexity - compare different health systems across various popular modern shooters.

Obviously not every video game in existence, when reduced to this data-centric form, will be indistinguishable. Most puzzle games, for example, do not have enemies. Perhaps in the future someone, maybe myself or maybe not, will construct a list of categories of games which when described this way will be incompatible with each other - a list of fundamental genres.

5 out of 6 for A Dark Room. A strong first product by Doublespeak Games and a thoughtful reminder that games don’t need to be flashy to be great or interesting.