So, I Guess That's That

As I said in this post, for years I have been soaking in a morass of shoddy prose, poorly researched science and arts stories, trivia so trivial it doesn't even deserve to be called trivia, and mean-spirited, transparently biased opinion from nasty men and women with empathy deficits so bad that I'm surprised they're not serial killers. And now, I am released.

Though my escape from this quicksand-pit of faux-knowledge has its downside (a very big downside, obviously), it also has a big upside too. I never have to read the Sunday Express ever again, or endure Peter Hitchens' deranged honking (though his 29th April ode to America was unexpectedly touching, despite some madness breaking out here and there), or stare goggle-eyed with disbelief at Christopher Booker's conspiracy theories. Even though I'm kinda curious to see who will win the gilded shit-crown belonging to the one-true Glenda Slagg (formerly owned by Lynda Lee-Potter), I'm done with Carole Malone and Allison Pearson, who can contradict themselves every week for the rest of time, for all I care. I'll also never get to find out if Sam Wollaston ever joins a writing class to jazz up the dreariest "funny" prose in England.


So now it's goodbye Richard Littlejohn, you blustering homosexuality-obsessed buffoon. Au revoir Julie "Mrs. Tony Parsons" Burchill, with your Martian logic and your reflexive/risible contrarian streak. Farewell Kelvin Mackenzie, you absurd curio from another age. Auf wiedersehen Garry Bushell, and all of your adamant - and unconvincing - denials of bigotry, not to mention your shitty, shitty jokes. Arrivederci Deborah Ross, you solipsistic word-fountain. No tears at our separation, Charles Moore, you inconsequential rattle-throwing windbag (looking forward to reading your missives from jail after your licence-fee martyrdom goes horribly wrong).


Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Amanda Platell, you repellent, small-minded phony/failure. So long Crazy Liz Jones and your equally awful ex-husband Nirpal Dhaliwal, and extra goodbyes to your attention-seeking, column-filling "feud", which allowed Fleet Street's assembled hacks to tongue-bathe themselves for a month or so. Never darken my door again Lowri Turner, responsible for some of the worst journalism in world history.

Take care out there, Catherine Townsend, tawdry fantasist sex columnist extraordinaire. Your increasingly outrageous sexual escapades have been sorely missed. Live long and don't prosper, Martin Kettle, you laughably biased Blairite. Don't try to get in touch, Rod Liddle, for I shall not miss you, nor your swinging-dick public image.


Adios Jon "Gunty" Gaunt. I shall not miss your ill-informed ravings, your attempts to become a cross between Jeremy Kyle, Rush Limbaugh, and a disembodied, yapping mouth connected to a bucket full of rattlesnake venom, plutonium, dark matter, pondscum, and dogshit. Get out of my life, Melanie Phillips, and take your defensive, ignorant, and belligerent worldview with you. And Simon Heffer? Forgive me for betraying my coarse manner in this way, but please go fuck your fucking self, you berserk oompa-loompa. It would be greatly appreciated by me and the rest of us here in the 21st century, who are enjoying modernity and don't need your screaming ab-dabs from the past. Thanks in advance.

Naturally, there were sapphires gleaming in the Everest-sized shitpile. I'll still be buying the Saturday Guardian, so I'll get to read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column, as well as The Brooker's Monday columns and Screen Burn (once he's finished justifying the licence fee with Newswipe, that is). Matthew Norman's nuclear-level sarcasm will keep me warm, as long as he doesn't leave the increasingly poor Independent (well done Roger Alton, you wrecked another newspaper). Every Friday I will check to see what's going on in the brains of Peter Bradshaw (5 stars for In The Loop! Good work, my son) and Nigel Andrews (Two stars? WTF?). I shall keep an eye on Sarah Dempster, who, eve since her tenure at the Scotsman, has been slowly been building a reputation for wit and passion that shames her colleague Wollaston.


I'm not sure I'll be able to keep reading George Monbiot's weekly column, simply because I'm already going to be feeling low and though he's a terrific journalist he can really ruin your day. There's a very very good chance I'll keep up with the magnificent Caitlin Moran, still the only journalist who can talk about celebrity culture without making me want to kill myself by dropping 300,000 copies of Top Santé onto my own head (though kudos also go to the highly entertaining Marina Hyde). I was also fond of Jeremy Clarkson's Sunday Times columns, but that might have been because they were an oasis of vibrant writing in the middle of an Arrakis-sized desert of nothing; outside that arena they might not stand up to scrutiny.

I might once have thought he was utterly without merit, but I've grown to enjoy Johann Hari's column; his recent piece on Dubai was chilling, essential reading. I'm also in two minds about Nick Cohen, whose slide into David-Aaronovitch-territory masks the fact that he can still be a fascinating, passionate writer. The same goes for Robert Fisk, whose rage can be intoxicating if you're not careful. Though I never really realised it at the time, I've enjoyed many columns by Deborah Orr, who has quietly been a sane voice in the Indie. Now that he has been (foolishly) let go by the Telegraph and (wisely) snapped up by the Guardian, I look forward to reading more by Sam Leith, who was the only reason to read that dreary Middle England rag.


Other than those examples, it's a lucky escape. I surely won't miss the transparent campaign against the BBC by News International's roster of worthless junk pamphlets, or the woeful research in the Observer, or the Independent's slide into even more irrelevance than it had already been sliding into. Even better, no more exposure to the most inept newspapers in the world, by which I of course mean the Northern and Shell disasters, the Express and the Star, which pollute the soul more completely than being employed as an assassin by Dick Cheney. Best of all, I can wave goodbye to the Mail and the Mail on Sunday, publications so evil and mendacious that reading them daily is like enduring serialisations of The Turner Diaries and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With swastika-shaped bells on.


So I can at least rejoice as I fly, like an eagle, out of the lovely old building that has been my workplace for ten years, safe in the knowledge that I don't have to put up with that shit any more. Long ago I had already begun to realise that I was not reading the credible opinions of hyper-educated denizens of Brainworld, but in fact was enduring the puddle-shallow witterings of a bunch of overworked shlubs whose hectic output was such that they would never be able to keep an eye on their views from week to week, meaning we, the readers, were never sure exactly what their consistent beliefs were. As a result, we could never trust a thing they wrote.

That's before we get to the piss-poor science reporting (as regularly exposed by my new hero Goldacre), or the generally shoddy practices of many journalists, editors, and proprietors, as revealed by Nick Davies in his superb book Flat Earth News. When I started reading newspapers for a living, I thought I was going to learn a lot about the world, and I did, but only because I was coming at it from such a position of ignorance. If I have learned anything truly substantive since those first few years, it's because I was intrigued by a subject and endeavoured to find out about it on my own time. Midway through the decade, I realised that trying to educate myself using newspapers was futile.


And so I turn my back on the British press, but not without singling out my other favourite pieces of the past few weeks, written by journalists not included in my Hall of Fame above. I was particularly pleased by Gaby Wood's article about In Treatment, bemoaning the fact that the UK has yet to pick up this wonderful series. As an In Treatment addict, I fully understand her frustration. When it eventually arrives on TV, please don't be put off watching it by the absurd protestations of former ITV director of TV Simon Shaps, whose howl of rage at how unfair it was that no one in the UK media press was willing to compare Lost in Austen and Whitechapel with The Sopranos made me simultaneously enraged and amused recently. In Treatment is the best performed, best written, best directed show on TV right now. It would be a crime to miss it.


Also pleasing was this Times blog post that dared to suggest that gaming is not necessarily as bad for kids as studies suggest, if by "suggest" you mean "are often distorted by lazy journalists who understand that scaremongering plays into prejudices and sells papers". It's rare that games are treated with any kind of respect, and articles are often written by journalists who know nothing about gaming, so this article from The Independent on Guitar Hero and Rock Band was hugely appreciated. Except for the odd lapse into hand-holding, it's a fun little piece with a lot of interesting little snippets from programmers and developers, not to mention fans and the obligatory critic. As I fear I will spend my next few days obsessively playing both games in order to drown out the dissonance in my brain at my new situation, it acts as a nice bridge between the two states. Let's just hope that second state is an improvement over the first.

Yes, Yes, I'm Aware I Never Shut Up About Guitar Hero...

...But Activision just announced that they're taking the fight to MTV and Harmonix with Guitar Hero World Tour.

Activision Inc (ATVI.O) is adding drums, bass guitar, and microphone to its popular "Guitar Hero" video game, a move aimed at winning away fans of MTV's rival musical title "Rock Band."

"Guitar Hero World Tour" will include the ability for two groups of four people each to compete online, as well as let players compose and play their own music.

That's just super-duper, and I love that they've done that. Okay, so it's derivative, and they remain in the shadow of Harmonix and their incredible innovations, but it's the only logical move they could make. Of course, this means nothing unless the music choices are incredible.

The game will feature songs from bands such as Van Halen, The Eagles, Linkin Park and Sublime...

Bollocks.

Actually, that is something that can change over time, though I really do hope the song packs come down in price. I resented having to spend literally billions of Microsoft Points (this is a lie) to buy three songs in the fourth Guitar Hero II pack when all I wanted was I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones (and OMG, I got 100% on it third time I played it on Medium setting, which makes it the first song I've got 100% on! Bless you, you three-chord-playing heroes). Still, there could well be some great finds on there. I've been enjoying playing the bonus tracks Mr. Fix-It by The Amazing Crowns, Soy Bomb by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, and Thunderhorse by Dethklok, though worryingly they were all on Guitar Hero II (i.e. the Harmonix game). Guitar Hero III's bonus tracks are nowhere near as interesting, but then I was less impressed with the track listing on that game already.

What I really want from Activision is to make robust peripherals that don't cost the earth, thus crushing MTV Games and forcing them to bring the price of the game down so I can get that too. This is the dream, anyway. I have more faith in Harmonix and their skills, and suspect I would prefer Rock Band (especially as you can buy single songs instead of packs full of boring songs you don't want), but what do I know? I can't afford Rock Band. Because it is horribly overpriced. And I'm still pissed about it.


Even if Santa ignores my pleas and the price war doesn't materialise, Guitar Hero World Tour does a bunch of stuff I really like the sound of. Not only does the drum kit look awesome, it does cool things too.

In addition to a newly designed more responsive guitar controller and microphone, Guitar Hero World Tour will deliver the most realistic drum experience ever in a video game with an authentic electronic drum kit. Featuring three drum pads, two raised cymbals and a bass kick pedal, the drum controller combines larger and quieter, velocity-sensitive drum heads with soft rubber construction to deliver authentic bounce back and is easy to set up, move, break down and store.

Even better than that, Activision have responded to one of the pissiest complaints about Guitar Hero and Rock Band; that playing the game is a pale imitation of genuine creation, that mimicking the playing of music is no substitute for making something yourself. I don't think Guitar Hero and Rock Band stop people from branching out and doing that on their own, and in fact think it would inspire people to try playing instruments themselves (I've said this before; please forgive me). Anyway, it's slightly more moot now.

The game's innovative new Music Studio lets players express their musical creativity by giving them access to a full compliment [sic] of tools to create digital music from scratch, utilizing all of the instruments, and then play their compositions in the game. Music creators will also be able to share their recordings with their friends online through GHTunes where other gamers can download their unique compositions and play them.

I'm outrageously excited about that, even though I expect any compositions would be pretty unadventurous just because of the limitations of the soft/hardware, but it still appeals to me.


It links in to something I've been planning on blogging about for a while now, which touches on Be Kind Rewind, Video Sniffing, Rocky III, and Lewis Hyde's The Gift (a frustrating book that killed my enthusiasm 20 pages in, but still applies). In time I will, I'm sure. Before that, we hope to have a look at the various season finales that have been piling up over the last couple of weeks, if we can ever get this goddamn laptop to work long enough to write anything substantial. Apologies for any future Blog Slowdowns.

Adventures In Awesome: Want! Now! (1)

Note the (1) after the title of this post. I get the feeling I'm going to be doing this a lot, so totally plugged into the consumerist mindset am I. Every so often I rail against it, that ever-present unblinking pyramid eye that represents The Market, a monolithic soul-crushing generator of injustice every bit as invisible and dependent upon blind, unquestioning belief as all the myriad Sky-Gods of religion, and I worry that I'm nothing more than a brain-washed lever-pusher whose interaction with the economic machine amounts to little more than me chipping away at my own soul and handing over fragments of myself in exchange for fleeting moments of joy. It makes me sick to my guts. And then Activision announce (a month ago, but hey, I've been busy) they're releasing Guitar Hero for the DS, and look at the plastic rhythm-game pretty! ::enthusiastically pushes lever::


So purty! It will also include a special stylus pick to strum the screen, and other features include autograph signing in mid-song and using the mic to blow out onstage fires. And yes, it's all gimmicky surface stylings on a simple rhythm game, but it's the inventive use of the unique features of the DS that make it such a desirable object. The track line-up isn't announced yet (Nirvana and OK Go have been suggested, but that might be misreporting), and there will only be 20 songs, but I'm happy. I just hope the Guitar Grip peripheral fits into the clunky old non-Lite DS I have.

One thing I especially love about this is that it could be released at about the same time MTV Games finally releases the European version of Rock Band. Now, I'm angry that Activision have cynically blocked the patch that allows Guitar Hero peripherals to be used with Rock Band, and it's often little shitty manouevres like that that make me doubt the logic of allowing The Market to do what it wants. I mean, if the Market is the democracy-generating, self-regulating, benevolent and incorruptible God of Love that credulous evangelists like Thomas Friedman want you to think it is, how can Activision's mean-spirited anti-consumer move be good for anyone other than Activision's shareholders? Consumers get shafted, and somewhere in the world some corporate butt-nubbin gets to buy himself a brand new golf bag. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Here is an accurate visual representation of the actual relationship between The Market and the consumer.


And yet, I can't help but congratulate Activision on possibly spoiling MTV Games' rollout by bringing out a sensibly priced mini-alternative to Rock Band Europe, which is sickeningly, prohibitively, unfairly expensive. Even with Amazon knocking the price down, it's £40 for the game, and £100 for the peripherals (without Amazon's reductions, that's an RRP of £180!). That was the game I've been looking forward to most. Even more so than Lego Indiana Jones, Gears of War 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Okami for Wii, and Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution put together. Even more so than the summer cinema releases that make me so crazy with anticipation. However, I think I'll pass. In the US the same game costs $148 (Amazon price). Convert the bucks to quids, and you're looking at £75.14 (£86.31 if you go by the RRP). Here is an accurate visual representation of the actual relationship between MTV Games and my soul's finger.


Thanks for the assist, Johnny! I will say this, though. Harmonix, thank you a million times over for inventing these magnificent games that have given me and Canyon and many guests to our home so much joy (and yeah, your interpretations of the game are more fluid and intuitive than Neversoft's commendable but slightly inferior adaptation), but why, how, why, why, why, how, why?!??!!!?! Is it just VAT? Is that responsible for a £100 mark-up? How can that be possible? I tell you, if there was a computer game made where the player has to throw rattles out of prams, I would buy that instead as a protest. Instead, Activision get a few more of my pounds. Guitar Hero On Tour FTW!

(P.S. Sorry about linking to that appalling book earlier. If you followed that link and were tempted to buy that inept pamphlet, ignore that, go here and do your brain a favour by buying Thomas Frank's One Market Under God.


It'll change your perception of the world for the better.)

Two Guns, A Toothpick, and Much 'Splodey

As is often the case, my mood-o-meter has swung from MustWatchFilms to MustPlayGames. Partly that's due to, you guessed it, Guitar Hero, an addiction-creating experience so potent that, if the US late night talk shows are anything to go by, would have already jeopardised their existence even if the writers had not balloted to strike. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both commented on its hold over the staff this week, David Letterman interviewed Slash and the Guitar Hero digression they went on ended up derailing the show, and last week Conan joyously gatecrashed a Rock Band session to play a real guitar and then sing Sabotage in the style of Edith Bunker. It was the TV highlight of the past few weeks.


Add to that Canyon's amazing Christmas coup; defying a Nintendo drought and buying a Wii for both of us to play Wii Sports (possibly the best free game ever offered with a new console) and Super Mario Galaxy, which is a hellishly addictive and scarily vertiginous masterpiece. It dominated Christmas almost totally. We only stopped playing so we could watch films (many of which were brilliant), or the Doctor Who Christmas special (which was anything but brilliant, and smelt like fried sewage). There's not many other Wii games I'm that interested in right now, but those two games (plus WarioWare: Smooth Moves) are plenty to go with for now. So yeah, with a controller glued to my hands, it's that much harder to blog, and the medium rarely lends itself to introspection. It's much easier to write about films, TV, or books (or magazines, as our new contributor Masticator will undoubtedly find). How can you write about a game? "I played Gears of War for five hours today and I totally shot a bunch of aliens in the face!" is a valid enough statement, but it's a more immersive and less nuanced experience, which makes commentary harder.

Still, let's try. This week has been devoted to John Woo's Stranglehold, a semi-sequel to Woo's bullet-ridden extravaganza Hard Boiled, which came out a few months ago. Thanks to the miracle of sales, I got it last week, along with Zhang Yimou's underrated courtly soap opera Curse of the Golden Flower, in a Chow Yun Fat double-bill. The game was received with a muted welcome, mostly because it's a pretty unambitious shooter released at around the same time as Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, The Orange Box, and many other big event games. However, I'm a sucker for shooters (I've lost count of the hours I've spent replaying Black), and this has a very big draw; Woo-style action, which is, of course, the best and sexiest kind.


With Chow Yun Fat onboard to recreate his toothpick chewing gun expert Tequila, you control him through an increasingly frenetic series of chaotic battles, using a variety of weapons to destroy everything in your path. As in Max Payne and the Matrix games you can enter a slo-mo mode called Tequila Time, but the fun comes when you use the left trigger to dive or interact with objects in the environment, such as sliding down bannisters. If a villain is in range, Tequila Time begins automatically, and killing your enemies at that moment gives you points for style, which are translated into special attacks, including Precision Aim, which triggers some gory cutscenes of guys staggering backwards with blood shooting out of their throats, and the room clearing Spin Attack, unleashing a slow-motion cut scene filled with death and doves and a manically shouting Tequila. It's awesome.

Perfect for fans of Woo; Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright would love it. That said, it triggered a burst of nostalgia for that wonderful period at the start of the 90s when Woo became known to Western audiences with The Killer and Bullet in the Head, something that I can imagine happened to many people when this game and the recent Dragon Dynasty Hard Boiled reissue came out. I had to have yet another copy of this amazing film! So I went internet shopping, and sadly found that despite its iconic status, its treatment on DVD is simultaneously reverent and appalling.


Criterion adapted their old Laserdisc, which included commentaries from Woo and others, along with documentaries and an old student film. Great stuff, but apparently the screen is not a proper anamorphic transfer, and the subtitles are actually dubtitles, meaning we're still getting the terrible translation of the dialogue that plagued the original releases. I hoped it would have a better treatment by Dragon Dynasty, a DVD distributor owned by the evil, callous Weinsteins, who have a terrible track record of delaying the release of edited versions of acclaimed Hong Kong films and then bitching about people in the West trying to find the originals. (For film distributors, they sure don't like people actually watching movies, do they?) This time the transfer is better, but not perfect, and still it has dubtitles. Plus, the extras aren't as good as the Criterion ones.

Though it's good to know the reputation of the film is such that it keeps getting reissued in new packages, why can't it get done 100% right? Here is a comparison of the many versions released, showing no one disc has the whole package. Dragon Dynasty seem to have done a fairly good job with it, though many of the other films in their library seem to be getting an even better treatment. As for Criterion, why they dropped the ball is beyond me. Every other set they've released is exceptional. Don't they realise it's a bad idea to piss off millions of John Woo fans who do nothing but rewatch his expertly edited and hyper-violent scenes over and over again?


So which DVD did I end up buying from Amazon Marketplace at a ridiculous price mark-up from some dodgy geezer with a 81% feedback rating over the past 12 months? Neither of them. What, am I made of money? Besides, my Woo-love was reignited to such a crazed extent that I couldn't wait another second to see it, and ended up in HMV just an hour after completing the game, where I bought the cheap-as-chips Tartan UK version with the proper anamorphic transfer, proper subtitles, and not even a single extra.

Who cares? I rewatched the teahouse scene last night, and it was as jawdropping as I remembered. Canyon was similarly impressed. During the lulls in the action she gasped, "Is it done yet?", and "No really, is it done yet?", not to mention, "Why does anyone consider Chow Yun Fat cool? All he does is jump through the air with two guns. Anyone can do that." [It's true!!!! -- Canyon] (I'm being a big meanie. She's looking forward to seeing the whole thing, especially as a big fan of Face/Off. Perhaps I shouldn't have hassled her moments after returning home from a nasty commute with, "Look at the 'splodey two-gun crazy!!!" Sorry Canyon! [I'd had enough of crazy on my commute, it's true. I do want to watch it, though. Btw, if Stranglehold really is a sequel to Hard Boiled, it should have been called Over Easy. No, I never get sick of saying that. -- Canyon])

One of the things I love most about his style is the way he is willing to move the camera right into the carnage. At times you get the feeling that the battle isn't just raging in front of the camera, but all around as well. Especially in Hard Boiled, which looks like a war has broken out and Woo happened to have ten cameras under his command. Also, they're not always ground-level, point-of-view shots. In the warehouse fight the omniscient camera cranes over the characters and follows them into fire and shrapnel and clouds of smoke. It's wonderfully effective. The shot below is one of my favourites. Tony Leung leaps through an exploding car to escape certain death at the hands of Tequila, and the camera tracks with him (well, his stuntman). It's a two-second shot, but it is more exciting than most movies in their entirety.


To anyone who has only seen his American movies, you really have seen nothing yet. Face/Off came fairly close, though it was on a thematic level that the movie worked so well as a John Woo film (not saying the action wasn't incredible too, but it still lacked that berserker edge his Hong Kong movies had). Broken Arrow and Hard Target are a guilty pleasure. Though they're not that great, at least John Travolta in the former and Lance Henriksen and Arnold Vosloo in the latter seem to be having fun. Worst of all, Mission Impossible II was a disaster. Whoever made the decision to hand the film over to Stuart Baird for re-editing at the end of the shoot knows nothing about filmmmaking. Okay, so apparently Woo's original cut of the movie was about 210 minutes long (that's a lot of doves), and even I would baulk at that, but getting Baird in is an insane move.

It's like hiring a modelmaker to construct a beautiful piece of art, getting as far as allowing him or her to sculpt all of the individual pieces, all of which, while beautiful, mean nothing without the other pieces attached to it, and then handing the project over to someone else who doesn't know how it was meant to be put together, but has his own ideas and just jams them together willy-nilly. And then goes on to direct Star Trek: Nemesis. I think you catch my drift.


Woo's action scenes have a very specific rhythm, and he shoots knowing how the editing will go when he gets there. If you look at his raw footage you'll wonder why on earth he has some minor shots in slow-motion instead of just focusing on the big dramatic shots, but that's because the rhythm of the scene would only work with certain shots moving at a certain speed. It's hard to explain, but look at a scene from one of Woo's other movies, such as the shootout in Gina Gershon's flat in Face/Off (couldn't find a good enough YouTube clip, so you'll have to watch your own copy, and if you don't have one, then I weep for you). The action flips from fast to slow in an unorthodox pattern that hits every correct emotional beat without drawing attention to what is being accomplished. Then look at any action scene from Mission Impossible II. They seem to be randomly cobbled together with no relation between shots, and any momentum that might have been generated keeps being interrupted. Oh man, I know what I'm talking about, even if I can't explain it. It's like that dancing about architecture thing. Just go and compare the two. His style works well in one film and not the other because Baird. The End.

Weirdly, one of the things I liked most about Stranglehold was that during the battle scenes, I could click on the right button and activate Tequila Time manually, adding slow-motion moments whenever I thought the action needed it. It is a useful addition to your game, but more than that it's an aesthetic one. Obviously I'm not saying I'm a better editor than Baird (who is usually excellent, when not asked to mess around with material by someone with so precise a vision as Woo), but I felt that the game replicated the experience of watching a Woo movie more effectively than watching Mission Impossible II even though it actually is a John Woo movie. Hell, I even liked Paycheck more than that. I've not seen Windtalkers, as a good friend has told me on several occasions it's the worst and most laughable film ever, but even if it's John Woo's worst movie, I doubt it is Nicolas Cage's.

If you're new to Woo, check out the clip below, from the beginning of Hard Boiled. As has been said many times, when it came out many Western action movies ended like this. Hard Boiled starts this big, gets bigger, and ends with a 30 minute action scene with babies peeing, buildings exploding, a duel with one of the best movie villains ever (the incredible Mad Dog), and a five minute unbroken shot in the middle of the carnage that should be taught at film schools.



Hardcore!

Worst Movies of 2007 Face/Off! (Results)

If you're wondering why the slight delay in this, it's not that I'm really crappy with numbers, but that I've spent the past two days playing Guitar Hero III (until I got as far as Cherub Rock on Hard and gave up, weeping), Super Mario Galaxy (a masterpiece), and John Woo's Stranglehold, which is not the best game ever made, but is the best gaming sequel to a legendary action movie masterpiece featuring Chow Yun Fat and cameo appearances by John Woo ever made, and as such is fully deserving of my time. As for the two movies, the scoring is as arbitrary as before, but with them I hope to give a sense of what watching both movies was like. Both movies are glossy and dumb, but only one will end up in my collection of bad movies.

I Know Who Killed Me

Cast: Lindsay Lohan: -7
Neal McDonough: -2
Julia Ormond: 1
Brian Geraghty: -4
Donovan Scott: -9
Paula Marshall: 4
Total: -17

A justifiably crappy score, with the professionals doing their best to keep things afloat while the director fiddles, and the amateurs running around putting even bigger holes in the boat. The filmboat. ::sigh:: Darn metaphors! All that said, bonus points for casting the likeable Paula Marshall in a smaller role. She's been notoriously bad at getting a job on shows that don't get cancelled mid-season or earlier, and I'm hoping that turning up in crud like this is the bottom of a curve and now her prospects will improve. Donovan Scott plays the sheriff of Bluetown, and though he's only in a couple of scenes, he's appalling, like a benevolent, Santa-like version of the sheriff in The Blair Witch Project 2: Post-Modernism Go Boom. Thank Crom Sivertson and Hammond had no idea what to do with the police, otherwise he would have been in it more.

Plot elements specific to these films:
Unintentional humour unsullied by nasty taste from subject matter: -4
Coherence: -1
Economical use of flashbacks: -1
Delivery of big audience-baiting moments: -6
Subtle use of motifs: -8
Avoidance of deus ex machina: 4

Total: -16

If you see this film, or have seen this film, then you know that that -8 for motifs is more than justified. There's no need to go on about the colour scheme any more, or the fact that I found it hard to laugh at due to the sleaziness (though the robot bits of Lohan certainly kept us entertained, but I will add that for all the incompetence on show, at least the film had an interesting internal logic (when it eschewed the nonsensical flashbacks). It was a definitely interesting idea, and had been worked out fairly well, at least at the script stage. Can you tell I'm trying to find something good to say about it? Erm, the strip club seemed like it was run fairly efficiently?

Miscellaneous:
Originality: 2
Liveliness: -3
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -7
Unique Selling Points: 3
Production values: 3
Total: 3

Finally, some positive numbers! A particularly good one for enthusiasm, because I believe Sivertson thought this was the big ticket, the stepping stone into the big time, and tried very hard to make an impression, throwing in semi-nudity and torture and colour and sex and look at me look at me I'm making a big movie bigger than anything Lucky McKee ever did! Unfortunately, it's crap. Still, again I have to take my hat off for the surprising payoff to the mystery.

I Know Who Killed Me overall total = -30

While Sivertson has managed to create a slasher thriller that has some kind of ambition, the sheer cynicism of it wrecks the project entirely. Who knows if Hammond's script could have been salvaged if given to someone who knows how to hold back on the symbolism, not to mention thinking twice about casting someone whose real life does not bear up well to comparisons with the main character's life. I just couldn't get past the sleaziness of the project; casting Lohan might have seemed like a great idea at the time, but in retrospect it's as if Sivertson and his cohorts were picking the last bits of dignity from the corpse of Lohan's career. As I said before, I really do hope this is not the case, and she can make a comeback. And not wear blue. With her pale skin, it really isn't her colour.

D-War

Cast: Jason Behr: -7
Amanda Brooks: -8
Robert Forster: 2
Chris Mulkey: -4
Craig Robinson: 1
Michael Shamus Wiles: -5
Total: -21

Dear God, where to begin? Only Craig Robinson and Robert Forster stand out at all here, and even then it's a close call. Forster in particular is asked to do some pretty silly things (meditating in mid-air, comedically faking a heart attack, pretending to be a martial-arts wizard), and phones it in pretty badly. Behr and Brooks, however, don't even manage that. Behr has zero charisma, and Brooks looks somnabulent, angry, frustrated, and disgusted with herself for getting the part. It's a monumentally feeble performance. I guess she has very little to work with, and might have been directed to act like someone who had just woken up whenever Shim said action, but I don't see why. As for Michael Shamus Wiles as Evil General, he was passably evil, in a pantomimey way. He was also okay at pretending to be in charge of a bunch of people. However, if the antagonist of your film is a big serpent, you really need to have a interesting human character to boo and hiss at, but he had no chemistry. You know, this film is so false and so empty it seems weird to judge it in this way. Did the actors hit their marks? I guess so. Did they fluff their lines? Not on the takes they used. That's as much as you could hope for.

Plot elements specific to these films:
Unintentional humour unsullied by nasty taste from subject matter: 8
Coherence: -7
Economical use of flashbacks: -5
Delivery of big audience-baiting moments: 6
Subtle use of motifs: 0
Avoidance of deus ex machina: -9

Total = -7

I think it was fairly obvious from the fact that I wrote twice as much about this film that I enjoyed it much more than I Know Who Killed Me. I laughed from beginning to end, mostly because I couldn't believe how inept it was. In a normal studio situation surely someone would have realised that the script was unusable, and have other writers come in. Here Shim was fully in charge with no oversight, and the result has to be seen to be believed. Robert McKee's theories of storytelling annoy as many people as they delight, but this is proof that he's onto something. Shim breaks almost all of McKee's rules, not because he has mastered them, but because he has no idea what they are, and has merely cobbled together bits from other films and stuck them together in some kind of order that resembles the movies he's stolen them from. As much as any writer should watch Chinatown or Casablanca (and my personal choice, Midnight Run), they should also see something like this, because it's a total failure, primarily because of the non-plot. Still, the big action scenes, the wow moments he built everything around, are wonderful. I may have hated most of the plotting and acting, but when a pilot pulled out a gun and started shooting at the dragon hanging off the side of his helicopter, I went a little crazy with excitement. Only some poor effects and filming ruin it, but still, for a dragon fan, it's the nuts.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: 0
Liveliness: 3
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -6
Unique Selling Points: 4
Production values: 6
Total = 12

For all of his ineptitude, Shim (seen here impersonating Ricky Gervais) knows how to cover his back with some actual talent. He hired Bruckheimer/Bay regular Steve Jablonsky to handle the soundtrack, and Mark Mangini to work on sound design (he did some great work on The Mist this year, in a monster movie two-fer). They do good work here, and it definitely helps Shim create the illusion that he knows what he's doing, but even a little attention to what's going on shows him up as a chancer. His previous movie, Yonggary, was such a catastrophic flop and disaster (after he promised to turn the Korean film industry into a powerhouse to rival Hollywood) that he had to get it right this time. Seems he figured he could do that by filming in L.A. with an American crew, which is a hell of a screw-you to Korean filmmakers. Anyone who has seen recent Korean movies knows there are some incredibly talented people there, and Shim should have been alerted to the fact that even when you take a holiday, you can't take a holiday from yourself. Or something. What I'm trying to say is, Hyung-Rae Shim, your movies are always going to be shit until you fire yourself. Don't blame the caterers. We can tell who messed up.

D-War overall total = -16

So there you go. I Know Who Killed Me gets the lowest score, so can be safely filed in the Awful Bad Movie file. It's silly, it's pretentious, it's dreary, and it features some horrible performances from people who have a horrible aura of desperation around them that would sour you on the movie even if it wasn't so nasty. D-War, on the other hand, is a big silly disaster, with film-student errors, egregious plotholes, Saturday-morning-serial acting, and a huge FX blowout featuring monsters fighting the military. If you watch it in the wrong frame of mind you might think I'm mad for recommending it, but watch it with a bunch of friends knowing full well you're going to be watching a big turd of a movie, and it's up there with Dreamcatcher and Albert Pyun's Ticker. I hated it so much I loved it. And now, I'm going to see if I can find an Evil General action figure online. Wish me luck!

Puppet Angel PWNs Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock...

...All while being worshipped by his loyal fanbase comprising Daffy Duck, Hugo the Hippo, Remy the Rat, Gandalf the Grey, and Theoden, son of Thengel, First Marshall of the Mark, and King of Rohan.

Yes, we got back from our jaunt and bought another bit of pointless kit for the 360, but how could we not? I wager the 360 feels especially loved lately; after buying it I didn't use it for a few months as I never had time. Call of Duty 3, Dead Rising, and Viva Pinata sit unfinished either in a drawer or in a totally different house. Now the machine is on most of the time.


Canyon and her "band" Wall of Crazy are currently getting 100% on Cream's Sunshine of Your Love using her favourite guitar-playing avatar Lars Umlaut, and it's yet another song I'd begun to take for granted but which is now re-revealed through the illusion of interaction to be an astonishing work of art. That's another terrific side-effect of playing these games; while they're pretty much nothing more than a really well-designed rhythm attack game with a brilliant interface, they also make you appreciate music in a new way. I say that as someone with no musical training; I'm sure to musicians that doesn't apply, but to the skill-less bag of fingerless ears that is myself, I now have a different response to songs I know too well. Even Flow, School's Out, Anarchy In The UK, Sweet Child O' Mine and Misirlou from the previous game; I love them all over again, and in a new and deeper way.

That said, I'm still a bigger fan of Guitar Hero II over the new one. The band graphics might be more advanced in this, but the screen was livelier in the second, though they seems to be increasing in intensity as the game progresses. Also, even though the new game has some amazing songs (Holiday in Cambodia! Thank you thank you thank you!!!), the choices are often a little more obvious. It's a no-brainer to add Paranoid by Black Sabbath, or Rock and Roll All Nite by Kiss, but then it's ultimate funness to play them, so it seems churlish to complain.

Guitar Hero II had some real oddities; Laid to Rest, Psychobilly Freakout by the incomparable Reverend Horton Heat, Who Was In My Room Last Night?, Tattooed Love Boys, and many more. The new game seems to have less "finds", but as my knowledge of rock (and certainly more recent stuff) is not perfect, I'm still coming across new favourite songs. After playing When We Were Young and My Name is Jonas, I now want to get into these musical chaps The Killers and Weezer. Oy vey, I am an old fart. And hey, who are Priestess? Their song Lay Down has a very appealing lolloping bass line. My avatar Axel Steel agrees.


There are other things I've noticed:

• Choosing to include The Seeker by The Who over their more famous songs is a nice touch, though the CSI fan in me is a little annoyed.
• While a lot of the regular songs seem longer than the previous game, there don't seem to be any marathons like The Allman Brothers Band's Jessica, a personal favourite. How great it would have been to follow the Slash boss battle with November Rain instead of Welcome to the Jungle? Having everything around the same length is less interesting than the variation of the other game, but it's not a deal breaker (so far, none of my little complaints are. For God's sake, they've got Kool Thing by Sonic Youth on there! Woooord up!).
• The co-op career mode is great, but I think we're already on our way to completing it on Easy. I get that it only really works well with a fraction of the songs, but even so, if half an hour gets us to the final level, then it's a real shame.
• The Star Power phrases are generally much longer, which would probably piss off the first-time player but is good news for addicts as it rewards the higher skillset.
• I love the predominance of master material over cover versions, but often the song has a bad mix (Paint It Black) or seems too muted (Cherub Rock).
• Canyon hates Black Magic Woman by Santana, apparently. She's still got 100% on it, though.
• As psyched as I am that Tenacious D's The Metal is included, part of me weeps that the Godlike face-melter Master Exploder isn't included. There's a custom version out there, but God knows how to get hold of that.
• While playing the co-op career section (our joint name: Professor XS), Canyon chose Xavier Stone as an avatar and I swapped to Midori, the J-Popster. As I spent most of the mode playing bass, I was thrilled to see that Midori is programmed to dance just like Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads. It was like watching a Japanese remake of Stop Making Sense.
• Where's the surf guitar??!?!?!
• For that matter, where's the blues? The Stevie Ray Vaughan song is a fantastic inclusion, but some BB King or Robert Johnson would have gone down a treat, especially seeing as how the story arc of the game involves a deal with the Devil. There's a real gap in the game ready to be filled by other guitar genres. What about some Tito Larriva for a start? Hopefully some future download packs will deal with that.
• Actually, this version is weighted more towards the more recent songs, but then the previous versions did a lot of the old standards, so it's to be expected. It's just a shame that an opportunity to edumacate those dang youngsters shouldn't be passed up, is all.
• Easy is not as Easy as Guitar Hero II's Easy, not by a long shot. I heard people complaining about the difficulty of Barracuda, and thought it was the final song, but it's in the second level. I would have scoffed, but when we played it we realised it was way harder than anything in the corresponding spot in the previous game. As a beginner it would have really pissed us off.
• What is with Heart? In the previous game their Crazy On You drove me to Bruce-Lee-style knuckle-cracking distraction. I had thought they were nothing more than a ballady bland-rock band but by Crom, their arrangements are hellishly complicated and asynchronous.
• I'm not too sure about the boss battles just yet, but then that might be just because I don't really enjoy listening to Tom Morello's screechy gimmicky feedback nonsense, and never have.

An aside: we just watched him appraising air guitar as a judge at a contest in the mostly annoying but occasionally sweet documentary Air Guitar Nation, and it's hard to take him seriously now. And yes, I realise how ridiculous it is to compare an air-guitar-appreciating Tom Morello to a digitised boss-battle-having Tom Morello, but that's what the world has offered up to me, and I must make lemonade with it. It reminds me that the reflexively mean-spirited nodules posting on the Holy Moly talkbacks were complaining recently about Guitar Hero fans being useless for not trying to get a guitar of their own and learning to play it so that they can become creative instead of slavishly following notes on a screen. Firstly, at least we're not just playing air guitar in Finland (seriously, I got so angry at the absurdity of that frigging movie, even though it was nothing to get steamed about and the documentary itself was not bad), which is a good thing. Secondly, I can't hate on Holy Moly too much because another poster brings his angry typing guns to bear on those frigging Picture loan adverts that pollute TV like so much elephant poop.

Thirdly, Guitar Hero players are at least learning skills that might eventually translate into an artistic ability. Salon's Farhad Manjoo wrote an entertaining post recently claiming that it was an accidental teaching aid.

I've interviewed several guitar teachers about the game, and some speak of it as the most revolutionary thing to hit the world of guitar since Jack White learned his first scale. "Guitar Hero" is introducing millions of young people to the possibility of playing the instrument, and it's also teaching them important skills they'll need to play... I discussed "Guitar Hero" with a half-dozen guitar teachers across the nation; all said they'd never played the game, but many had heard of it from their students. "Personally I've made hundreds or maybe even a couple thousand dollars on it, just because kids see the game and they want to go do the real thing," says Rob Caviness, who teaches at Backbeat Music, a studio he co-founded just outside of Denver. "I think a lot of kids listen to music and they don't know what it is -- the game lets you pick out one particular instrument and it says, 'Hey, this is what you can do with it.'"

I also agree wholeheartedly with this:

Red Octane's Ted Lange argues that "Guitar Hero" instills two important guitar-playing fundamentals: sensitivity to rhythm as well as mastery over "independent hand usage -- the fact that you have to do something different with each hand."

I'm the least ambidextrous person in the world, and I've noticed Guitar Hero has changed that. I'm much better at that confounded rub-the-belly-pat-the-head thing, which is surely the official test for ambidexterity. And yes, I walked past a musical instrument shop the other day and stared longingly at a guitar for the first time in my life. I know it's hard because I've tried it before and sucked at it, and I don't expect to be able to play like Hendrix just because I played along with a game, but I honestly think that now, after months of using training frets, I can make another attempt at the real thing. Whether I do or not is another thing, partially because of the cost of guitars, and partially because I always figured I'd be better at keyboards. Where's Air Keyboard Nation? Or Air Drumming Nation, which would be right up my street?

In short, please buy the forthcoming debut album by Carusonic: Get Behind Me, Thewlis, featuring a 20-minute jazz version of The Future's So Bright, I've Gotta Wear (Crime-Fighting) Shades, with Ornette Coleman on sax and, in a gamble on my part, non-jazz player Philip Glass on keys. It will either be A Love Supreme for the 21st Century, or Jazz Odyssey all over again.