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D&D is a sort of simulation. A simulation of living in a fantasy world where fearless heroes and dreadful monsters clash daily in spectacular battles. A world where you are a great champion, and the creator of the universe is frequently disorganized, highly distractable, and alarmingly vague on the rules of the universe he’s trying to run.
Yesterday I talked about how useless the subplot was in the Silent Hill movie. Actually, even though the scenes that take place in the “real world” have little value for the purposes of the plot, those scenes had a great deal of cinematic value.
The trick with the town of Silent Hill is how it shifts or changes, sometimes becoming spooky, sometimes becoming hellish. The main character is caught in “spooky” Silent Hill. It is decayed and foggy, and ash falls from the sky like snow. This is really unnerving at first, but eventually we get used to it. Then the view switches back to the real world and suddenly we can see sunlight and color again. A weight lifts and you can almost taste the fresh air. These cuts back to the real world help the spooky Silent Hill to hold its potency.
Having said that, it’s obviously decadent to burn up 40 minutes of screen time in order to provide a nice visual contrast. If it were up to me, I would keep the footage from where Christopher is exploring the town, and toss the rest of that story from the point where he leaves Silent Hill and goes digging for clues elsewhere. Having watched this movie a couple of times at home, this is what I ended up doing. It was very nice of them to set up the chapter break on the DVD to make it easy to jump to the Silent Hill stuff without needing to search.
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At one point the nature of the town is clearly shown to the viewer. (Much more clearly than was ever possible in the game, I might add.) Rose is running around in the school, which is now a hellish nightmare of caged horrors. Despite this, the place retains the layout of the normal school. There are still rooms and hallways and lockers. At the same moment, her husband Christopher is in the real world, in the same school, standing in the same hallway. The movie does a cut from one to the other without moving. It just shifts from one version of the scene to the other, which lets the audience (particularly people who never played the game) understand what is going on.
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I find this fascinating. This isn’t the same room with a new paint job. This looks like the same place, only constructed out of different materials. The check out the metal plate floor.
Just for fun, I made a composite image of the two:
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The contrast does make the evil Silent Hill more awful. It works really well, it it’s something that isn’t possible in a single-viewpoint game.
I really enjoy good movie reviews. I’m picky, though. Up until recently the only reviewer I could get into was Ebert, but he is sadly in the hospital right now and thus not writing any reviews.
99% of the reviewers out there get on my nerves. Newspaper movie critics, I swear, have some sort of “Mad Libs” style review generator:
So all the movie blurbs sound like this:
Talladega Nights is a slow-moving film that never gets out of second gear. It seems like director Adam McKay was asleep at the wheel on this one.
The Illusionist is a less-than-magical film that never materializes. Edward Norton was never able to pull the rabbit out of his hat on this one.
Titanic is a shipwreck of a film that never holds water. James Cameron was in over his head on this one.
And so reviews are filled with clumsy puns, statements of the blindingly obvious, and painful forced metaphors. Do these people really get paid for this stuff? These boilerplate reviews drone on, and it is clear the critic has no idea what movie reviews are for. The reader isn’t wading through this prose because they want to know what the critic thought of the movie. They can see that for themselves by looking at the thumbs up/down, number of stars, percentage rating, or whatever other system is used to distill complex subjective opinions into hard numbers. No, the reader is there to be entertained.
A writer who thinks that saying that “the movie Click! is a real turn-off!” is entertainment is someone who’s particular skill set might be more suited to other parts of the newspaper. I suggest they be given the job of writing wedding announcements, obituaries, and – when they are feeling particularly vivacious – maybe a few want ads.
Movie critics should not be erudite stiffs who would rather analyze a movie than enjoy it. They certainly shouldn’t be pompus elitists. They should be witty and interesting, even when the movie they are talking about isn’t. Especially then. People like Dave Barry or James Lileks would be perfect movie critics. It doesn’t matter one bit that they might not like the movies I do, or that they do not posses encyclopedic knowledge of every work ever put to celluloid. The important thing is that they can find new and clever ways of saying the same things over and over, because that is 90% of the job. The job has nothing to do with picking winners, predicting popular movies, or educating the great unwashed masses of dolts who watch Adam Sandler movies instead of attending Sundance. It has everything to do with making people want to read and maybe even talk about the reviews themselves.
While I’m waiting for Roger Ebert to recover, I’m really enjoying the reviews Alex is putting up over at his new site. Unless this site is a web of lies and deception, then Alex is a mere 21 years old, which is pretty depressing for me. At 21 I would not have been capable of putting together a paragraph that would be worth anyone’s time, much less turning out interesting movie reviews.
Back in 1998-ish I used to read movie review site titled “Girls on Film”. The site was pink and (I guess) aimed at female readers, but their reviews were witty and interesting and I never really felt left out by the by-women-for-women intent of the site. Eventually the dot-com thing got underway and the site expanded. The staff grew, features were added (I can’t remember what the other stuff was now, since I ignored everything that wasn’t a movie review) the navigation became more convoluted, the site got less responsive, it was bathed in ads, newer (less interesting) critics came on board, and the whole thing went to crap. Googling around today, it looks like the thing is gone for good.
Good review sites are hard to come by. I tend to apply the same criteria to them as I do when looking for enjoyable blogs: I like clean, fast-loading sites with a personal voice, which is about as different from newspaper critics as you can get.
I just wrote, what? Eight or so paragraphs outlining how thousands of movie critics are doing their jobs wrong and how they sould change to better suit my tastes? That is hubris, right there.
I love the internet.
I caught this movie in the theaters, but it’s been on my mind lately so I took another look at it via Netflix. I was pleased to find that the movie is more impressive after a second viewing.
I still can’t believe it turned out as well as it did. The writer and director got a very clear bead on what makes Silent Hill tick, and they managed to capture it. This is hard enough for regular videogame-to-movie adaptations, and Silent Hill is a lot more difficult to nail down than most videogames.
The writer could have gone action movie on us. This would have been the worst. He could have done for Silent Hill what other writers did for Resident Evil and Doom: Make it big, loud, and stupid. This is really easy. Just lift names and locations from the original work, and throw everything else out. Then fill it with boilerplate dialog and action sequences. Just like that ridiculous hack, Uwe Boll.
They could easily have made Silent Hill about a group of teens that get stuck in this freaky town that picks them off one by one. That would have been the obvious “Hollywood” thing to do. Take a description of the game to a random writer / director, let them look at some of the concept art from the game, and a couple of years later this is exactly what you would get. Obvious. Derivative. Bland.
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| The hospital. Yes. That is exactly right. Perfect. |
The writer could have played the game and concluded that it was about defeating monsters. You certainly do enough of that during the course of the game. They could have made the movie more “Aliens” style – with the main character(s) facing increasingly strange and powerful nightmarish monsters, and learning how to confront and defeat them. At the end, they face and kill Pyramid Head. Again, a non-fan could easily play though one of the games – the second one in particular – and come up with this movie. It might be strange and frightening, but it would still miss the mark. It is really amazing that they didn’t do this.
So they didn’t turn Silent Hill into a dumb action movie, they didn’t adapt it into a slasher flick, and they didn’t make it a monster movie. That much is an accomplishment in itself. Most videogame adaptations don’t even make it to the point where the writer and director are both on the same page and both committed to capturing the essence of the original. Very few adaptations get this far, and even on those rare occasions when they do there is still the chance that they will try to capture the original and simply fail.
And even if they pull that off, there is always the chance that the movie will fail on perfectly technical grounds. Once they come up with a good script they still need good special effects, good acting, good cinematography. It is possible to get everything else right and still make a movie that just plain sucks.
Very few things make this trip from PC to the big screen without getting snagged by one of these problems along the way. Silent Hill made it, and after my second viewing I’m even more impressed. I still stand by my initial take on it: This is the best VG adaptation ever (it was certainly the most difficult) and a fascinating movie as well. While it is difficult for me to step back and view it through the eyes of someone who hasn’t played any of the games, I suspect that it will be hard to understand for non-fans. The biggest flaw of the movie is the subplot with the husband. It eats up a lot of screen time and never really goes anywhere. (Or at least, the meager revelations it has don’t justify the screen time spent on it.)
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| While Rose (Radha Mitchell) is trapped in the evil part of the movie, Christopher (the wonderful and talented Sean Bean) is trapped in the dull part of the movie. Unlike Rose, Christopher has no hope of escape. |
No movie is perfect, but the accomplishments of this one outweigh its flaws. Nicely done.
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This is, of course, the most pervasive problem in D&D, and one which the rules have never addressed. The tension of many battles has been ruined by some smart-alec suggesting they use the Holy Hand Grenade. No fortress – no matter how impressive or dangerous – will ever seem foreboding after one of the players points out that, “It’s only a model”.
My own suggestion for the 4.0 edition rules: Anyone who quotes Holy Grail during a session should be made to eat their own character sheet.
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One thing about this that really kills the drama of space warfare is that fact that even if we had energy shields and phazor-beams and neutronium rays and quantum torpeoes and whatever other ridiculous gibberish space heroes use to battle space villians, people still wouldn’t fight in space because there is just no reason to do so.
We would need some sort of resources to fight over. The other planets in our solar system are worthless from a strategic standpoint. What if some rogue nation launched fleet and declared that they owned all of the space from here to Jupiter? Meh. Who cares? If they claimed Venus, what would we do? Fine, it’s all yours. We won’t intrude on your space. Have fun funding the forces to patrol it. For no reason. Humans aren’t any more likely to fight over space than they are to fight over Antarctica. Less, in fact, since fighting in space would require all new technologies and tools and would be preposterously expensive.
(And of course, claiming planets is pointless. I never understood why Star Trek portrayed the bulk of Earth’s defense as being positioned on Mars. That’s only useful if Earth and Mars happen to be on the same side of the Sun, and the bad guys go to the extra trouble of passing by Mars on the way in, instead of entering at some other angle. In defense of Starfleet, the bad guys do exactly this. They always blast their way past Mars Defense on the way in to Earth. Very sporting of them, really.)
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Personally I think we should take the Starcraft route: First we build huge orbital platforms. Then we load up the platforms with valuable resources. Presto! Now we have something over which we might wage war. Then we can build fleets and fight over the resources on the platforms. It’s a bit of a hack, and it is still unclear who would restock the platforms after each battle, but it might get the ball rolling. Perhaps the UN would be willing to do the restocking.
It’s either that or wait for aliens to invade. I’m beginning to worry that I might not get to pilot a spacefighter or even a mech before I die.
I see I misunderstood the purpose behind Fullmetal Alchemist – Conqueror of Shamballa. I watched it assuming the movie was intended to finish the story begun in the series. It does accomplish this, but it turns out that the primary purpose of the movie is to deliver highly concentrated doses of fanservice.
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Not that sort of fan service. I’m talking about in the more general sense of giving fans what they want. The plot isn’t so much a story as it is adhesive used to bind the various situations and images together. They started with a wishlist from the fans, and built their tale around it.
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| BEHOLD! Armstrong is still hilarious. I’ve never been able to figure out how he gets his shirt (not to mention his jacket and tie) off in one clean motion like that. |
The result is fun, but the story makes not the slightest bit of sense. There is a gate between parallel worlds: The world in which the main series took place, and our world. In our world the date is sometime in the 1920’s, between the two world wars. The seeds of World War II are being sown around them, and the protagonists get caught up in it.
The gate between these two worlds becomes the carpet under which all of the unanswered questions are swept. What happened to Al’s memories? How did Ed get his metal arm back? How can Ed speak German? How did envy become a dragon? What made the normal human soldiers in suits of armor into these invincible superthings covered in black goo? Ummmm… Must be the gate!
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The alternate world also gives the chance for main characters who died in the original series to make a cameo appearance. Their “other” selves appear quite often as common folks who bump into Ed for no other reason than the fact that it would please the fans.
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There is no reason in the world for people to watch this movie if they have not seen the show. The plot is gibberish, the villian is cut from the same cloth as Gauron, and the technology makes no sense. However, for fans of the show this is a must-see. The good guys kick Nazi butt, all the loose ends are resolved, and we get to see the mega-happy ending.
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
T w e n t y S i d e d
