Many a drink or chat or pop culture discussion has been ruined, by me, with my admission that I'm not too keen on The Beatles. Such a statement appears to be like some kind of neuron-stripping destructo-meme, so virulent and so dangerous to those who experience it that it has the effect of instantly atrophying all parts of the brain not devoted to the reflexive and deafening defense of the lovable Scouse quartet from criticism by heretics. Even when I admit I like about half of Revolver, and think Tomorrow Never Knows is one of the most incredible pieces of music in the entire 20th Century, this is not enough. "But... but... you have to admit they are the most important popular artists of the 20th Century!" Well, I don't really, as I think you could make a case for Elvis or Dylan, but fine, if it makes you happy, The Beatles are the most important popular artists of the 20th Century, and I still don't have any urge to listen to their music.
What was it that triggered my sudden overwhelming, concentration-wrecking enthusiasm for a game revolving around a band I care so little about? Marketing, baby. Stunningly well-designed marketing. First, this gameplay trailer shows ten of the forty-five songs available on the original disc.
Though I've never been a big fan of the band, I do love the iconography, and am fully aware of the progression the band took, and how their sound evolved. Seeing that captured within the game thrills me, as does the inclusion of Taxman -- which transcends its whiny origins to be a fun track -- and Here Comes The Sun. I'm very much a George fan. Oh yes. That song gives me chills. As does this other trailer, which is beyond belief.
Recently we saw Julie Taymor's Across The Universe, and I'm not sure who was more disgusted by it. Canyon is a huge Beatles fan, and was horrified at the dreadful reimagining of those songs, especially when the juxtaposition of the songs and images was so completely wrong. She almost completely lost it when Happiness Is A Warm Gun was played over a hallucinogenic scene with one character suffering PTSD in a military hospital after being wounded in 'Nam, man.
My main gripe with it is that I'm not crazy about the songs anyway, but I'd much rather hear the original band sing them than Jim "Wet" Sturgess, or Bono, who makes I Am The Walrus even more unappealing than I already find it. In addition to that is the awful shoe-horning of Beatles song characters into the Hair-inspired narrative. When Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood are introduced as Jude and Lucy, I had to be restrained from turning the hellish thing off. There was much gnashing of teeth when a character called Prudence gets depressed and locks herself in a closet, which naturally means the other characters have to sing a song to coax her out. That song? Eleanor Rigby, of course. (This is a lie.)
The second trailer shown above does what Richard Lester once did, and what Taymor (and writers Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais, on a really really off day) completely failed to do: capture the essence of the Beatlesniverse. They had a public persona that remains appealing even after all these years, four scallywags running through life with pure joy fuelling them. They also created a weird inner space of imagery and mood, with their interest in psychedelia manifesting as that sinister and candy-coloured alternate universe of Blue Meanies, Buddhist and Hindi imagery, and swooning surrealism. Across The Universe tried to get at this and failed. That short trailer nailed it, and did something else; addressed the enormousness of what The Beatles were, and what they achieved. I came over all emotional when I saw it.
So yes, I cannot wait to play the game. The new peripherals, shown above, are not essential, but I'm a little in love with the drums, even though I doubt Ringo's drumming will pose the same challenge that mimicking Jimmy Chamberlin or Keith Moon has in the recent past. Even more interesting, the vocal game has been expanded to include harmonies. I've long wanted to get a mic stand so I can sing and play guitar at the same time, and now I see that you can play this with three mics as well as the other instruments. Imagine playing this as a four-player game, but with one drum, two guitars and three mics. Even more exciting is the knowledge that some bands that I've had no time for in the past have become firm favourites now that I've experienced their songs from "inside" via Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I expect the same thing to happen here. Ninth September 2009. It's scribbled on my calendar, and I'm ready to finally join the only band bigger than The Beatles: their enormous, hyper-passionate fanbase.
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.
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!
