Academy Awards

2012 was a very solid year for movies, with several viable Best Picture nominations and 2 of the best super hero movies ever made. Additionally I actually went to the trouble of seeing most of the major nominees and can give a decent projection as well as an informed opinion on who should have won. I've yet to see Argo or Django Unchained, but aside from Best Director snubs those shouldn't factor in too heavily. I don't have an opinion on every category, but I will provide what I can for most. The biggest thing to note this year is how arthousey and obscure most of the nominated films are; thus reducing public interest in the spectacle significantly.

Best Picture

What Should Win? Lincoln is the most complete film of the year with some of the best performances, it gives an insightful look into American politics past and the various wheeling and dealing necessary to defeat slavery in an all-North congress. James Spader and Tommy Lee Jones give the best comedic performances of the year alongside Daniel Day Lewis' always excellent presence as the man himself. Zero Dark Thirty is certainly a solid film worth seeing but it isn't all that memorable apart from historical context and will probably fade swiftly into distant memory.

Favorite: Lincoln, though Argo has a shot due to backlash over Best Director.

Snubs: Avengers, Skyfall, and The Dark Knight Rises. Well this is pretty simple, they expanded the nominee list for Best Picture so they could include peripheral films that wouldn't actually win, and these three movies literally carried the box office this year, without them it would have been absolutely disasterous and apart from just being solid movies they deserve recognition for saving the industry.

Best Actor

Who Should Win? Daniel Day Lewis of course, but that's not to knock several people who weren't even nominated. DDL is an academy favorite and always delivers compelling performances. If anything his not winning for Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York sealed his victory of the next 2 Oscars and maybe going forward in perpetuity. He's also not a huge celebrity and takes huge breaks between films, so he doesn't have to be nominated every year like Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in order to win several times.

Favorite: Daniel Day Lewis

Snubs: Ben Affleck for Argo, Javier Bardem for Skyfall; Skyfall has the best villain in Bond movie history and supporting actor is overcrowded (he also has fairly extensive screentime) so why not put him here in recognition of his efforts. Ideally we'd have another year where DDL and Javier won simultaneously; as both most certainly deserved it; but alas.

Best Actress

Who Should Win? Well I actually don't know, nor does 99.9% of the American populace; but it's safe to say Jessica Chastain is a solid choice. Even though her character is almost certainly fictional the constant juxtaposition of a male dominated profession and a female key participant works wonders in Zero Dark Thirty and makes her excellent performance all the more memorable.

Favorite: Jessica Chastain

Snubs: Marion Cotillard for The Dark Knight Rises, just a superb performance all around and delivers the key twist that almost no one saw coming. Of course post apocalyptic dystopian future movies are almost as unlikely to be nominated as superhero movies, if The Road is any indication.

Best Director

Who Should Win? At least one of the Snubs of course, most notable being Affleck and his continued hatred for the Academy continues to pay dividends. The direction is the weakest part of Lincoln as the film could have been 20 minutes shorter and been much tighter and engaging but Spielberg insisted on having completely extraneous seasons at the beginning and the end alongside historical speeches, that while effectively given, are completely unrelated to the plot. The Emancipation Proclamation is all that was needed to engage the audience and please historians alike.

Favorite: Steven Spielberg

Snubs: Hoo Boy, the category with more better deserving snubs than the entire list of nominees. Affleck, Bigelow, Nolan, Tarantino, Joss Whedon, Sam Mendes. Really it is unfortunate that Spielberg is going to win by default as this would have been the most interesting category to debate and any one of the above 6 would have been more interesting victors; even the assholes.

Best Cinematography

Who Should Win? Well this one's actually extremely debatable; Skyfall has some incredibly shot parts and combined with Javier Bardem's performance it is able to add a huge amount to the film and solidify it as one of the top 3 Bond movies depending on your preference. Roger Deakins is the best in the business and has yet to win this award, so why not pick Skyfall. However personally I was more interested in Lincoln's visuals, but that's probably a historical bias.

Favorite: Skyfall

Snubs: Zero Dark Thirty is the big one here; no clue why it isn't nominated as it would be yet another one that would be difficult to debate between alongside Skyfall and Lincoln. I haven't seen Life of Pi so I can't really comment on how that competes, but this is one of the best indicators of a rewatchable and interesting film as how a movie is shot determines quite a lot. Prometheus could also have been a potential nominee.

Overall not as good a year as 2010 and not nearly as good of choices for nominees, but certainly a fantastic year for film and snub discussion. Unfortunately the early spread this year, despite being massively overpopulated, has failed to deliver on almost all counts; the exception is Arnold's return in The Last Stand which sadly hasn't been a particular box office success.

In the future I'll be discussing a very interesting topic which is fairly new for this blog and additionally a comparison between Arkham City and Arkham Asylum; as I've recently gone back to them.

Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty is an excellent film/docu-drama. Every major event that happens in the movie is historical and it’s left to the audience to determine the rest of its historicity and accuracy. Since the vast majority of the characters are CIA operatives they all have dummy names and even the depictions of those in higher offices aren’t officially named in the movie at any point. Obama isn’t even mentioned by name and is simply titled “the President” the few times he’s mentioned (though there is an interview prominently displayed in the background of one of the scenes).

This film had an odd development route as it began pre-production before Osama Bin Laden was actually killed, thus there are basically 2 predominant story arcs and kind of 2 protagonists.  Ordinarily this would make such a film extremely disjointed but the way they handle the second protagonist makes it work and one might say it is convenient. We basically see the whole film from the eyes of said second protagonist, played by Jessica Chastain, while the first eventually fades into the background.

This film doesn’t really have any staggering surprises; there’s one extended setup in which the outcome is fairly obvious to anyone not aware of the historical event referenced (such as myself), and that’s maybe the film’s biggest weak point but it does provide a “killer” motivation to the main character. But again it’s all very convenient. Every character in this film seems to be based on an actual person, except for the main character. Now I’m sure there were about 5 different people that had her role in different situations and several of the things she says (and things that happen to her) were probably actually said at specific points, but overall her existence is a bit too plot convenient.

I do not think the protagonist being mostly fictional is bad for the film, In fact it probably drives the film’s plot forward the best way possible. However if Osama hadn’t died I do think the first protagonist is an actual person and thus made the character immensely more interesting in retrospect. It’s just a curious way to look at the film. Jessica Chastain may very well win an Oscar for her performance in this movie, which is certainly a solid choice; but a direct reflection of an actual person in a docu-drama appeals to me more. Apart from that the depiction of the assault on Bin Laden's compound seems to be roughly 95-99% historical with very little intrusion on the part of the director to either vilify or overly praise the participants; and is quite interesting in general.

Note: I still have to see Argo but other than that fairly prepared to write an Oscars post a la 2010, I also saw Drive recently which I think deserves a review and maybe some additional praise for 2011 as not quite as terrible as once believed.

Lincoln/Skyfall Discussion

For whatever reason I forgot to write a Skyfall review last month, not sure why. Despite this site traffic has increased immensely; again no idea why. But I will likely write an Academy Awards post this year predicting from the films I've seen (I'll see one or two more) since it's not a dreadful year like the last. So, Lincoln is a very impressive film and makes for a very interesting historical impression of how congress used to operate. Maybe a bit more like parliament where people insult each other with regularity and say "HOW DARE YOU!!" in the most amusing fashions. Also lots and lots of excellent facial hair styles. Skyfall is an extremely good Bond movie and just about as good as Casino Royale.

I think Joseph Gordon Levitt should win an honorary Oscar or a composite actor oscar for being in every damn movie made this year. A true hero and following Liam Neeson's example. Despite my praise for either film they both have flaws and somewhat similar strengths. Back in 2007 No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood came out and it was easily the closest competition for Best Picture in quite some time; Javier Bardem won Supporting Actor and Daniel Day Lewis (the man himself, Bill the fucking Butcher) won Best Actor. The Academy fucking loves DDL no matter what so he might well win it again; Bardem is sort of an outside candidate but I think he will be nominated.

Skyfall is basically the Dark Knight in Bondsian (you know, the 2nd or 3rd best player of all time that won't be elected to hall of fame; I digress) terms, it follows the plot very closely except for the odd ending sequence. Javier Bardem is the Joker with different makeup and a passion for weird extensive revenge plots. He's all powerful in the film more or less but for some reason chooses not to finish his objective or fails so the plot can follow a happy-acceptable-by-mass-audiences ending; and that's something that happens in movies with excellent villains and hell it even happened in Othello. Iago loses; who the hell knows why as everyone else was a dipshit manipulated to his every whim. The biggest issue with the film is the exclusion of Sean Connery in a cameo, which would have solidified that role and probably made the ending sequence a fair amount more awesome.

Lincoln is a Spielberg historical documentaryish film like Saving Private Ryan. Daniel Day Lewis is incredible as Lincoln and it would have been amusing to talk to him on the set I imagine as he told many random tales from his character's childhood. He only works like once every four years though and thus does not deserve a Joe Gordon oscar, but he'll probably get best actor. Tommy Lee Jones and James Spader deliver awesome supporting performances. The biggest issue is Spielbergian mistakes like having the film drag on for another 15 minutes when it could just end or including entirely irrelevant proceedings that are famous and identify-able to a larger audience (doing this once is fine to immerse the dumber folks; don't need to do it 5 or 6 times for sure). It's still probably the best Spielberg movie since Saving Private Ryan so that's something.

For some reason the Osama movie Zero Dark Thirty is getting universal praise and love and is probably going to snake Best Picture, I'll see it and let you know what I think. To take a guess it will be like the Social Network; an excellent film but about a terrible topic so it is inherently inferior to just making a different film with the same cast and director. However there is some potential for me to be wrong in this.

Looper

Looper is a curious movie, personally I hadn’t even heard of it prior to randomly seeing that it had a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Generally this means you “have to see” a movie at all costs, but in this case I’m not so sure. Looper is a solid film to be sure and maybe has a lot of mass appeal, but it’s still flawed in such a way that it would behoove critics to analyze it. So why the 94%? I think it has enough random arthouse elements tossed in that make ancient people happy is the best I can come up with, but I truly don’t know.

Joseph Gordon Levitt stars as a man in the future… whose job it is to kill people sent from even further in the future. Once a day he walks out to a field and shoots an instantly appearing masked man, then collects his payment from the body and incinerates it. This is a really great premise I have to admit, but they could have done a lot more with it. Eventually “Loopers,” Joe Gordon’s job title, shoot their future selves and are released from service; receiving a much increased salary. Then the movie starts referencing a theoretical future villain who is “closing all the loops,” and this is your first logic hole. If the loops are being closed in the first place doesn’t it mean the system was already set up to do that? It’s Sci Fi, dumb stuff happens who cares.

Bruce Willis is Joe Gordon’s future self, and shockingly enough he doesn’t die within seconds of appearing. At this point they try to track down and kill the future antagonist, whatever shell he might inhabit. You might think this is just another character like it would be in a suspense film, but instead it’s a randomly introduced character some time later. Why? I guess so the film could be more artful? There’s plenty of things they could have done with already extant characters to make the film interesting, but instead you kind of continuously have new characters thrown in the mix up until the last 30 minutes. Each character is individually solid but it makes you wonder, what if they were solidified into just a few extremely interesting characters?

I won’t spoil the necessary elements, but suffice to say the movie is interesting throughout and certainly had a lot of potential to be fantastic. However, it isn’t. It’s a surprisingly good movie for when it was released in the Calendar year, August/September tend to be death knells and have been box office wise. The only extremely remarkable thing about this film is the universal praise and the solid chance that it will receive a Best Picture nomination, another casualty of the 10 selections process (Avengers and Dark Knight Rises will likely also receive them, if only to recognize how much they’re carrying the industry financially). Under-deserved praise, mayhap, but still a worthwhile picture.

Ain't nothing wrong with open world games

It occurred to me recently that 85-90% of games I've played in the past few years have been open world or some derivation of it; yet oddly I never seem to get bored with that aspect of said games. It's a fairly simple equation, 30-60 bucks for 5-10 hours of linear, paced gameplay or 20+ hours of non-linear only somewhat scripted gameplay. There are of course amazing exceptions like Uncharted 2 or the longer linear style of the original Demon's Souls and Bayonetta. Aside from ridiculously derivative FPS's I think the largest stamp on games from the present generation of consoles is open worldiness.

So why then is the simple quest hub > quests > advance plot > new quest hub repeat gameplay so ubiquitous and yet still continually satisfying. Well it's ubiquitous because it's super easy to design those sorts of quests. Borderlands has some of the most lazy atrocious quest design I have ever seen, literally every quest is either Kill, kill-collect, or fetch with very little dialogue or plot, but damn if it isn't extremely fun, addictive, and even somewhat immersive despite that. There's a lot to be said for atmospheric design in addition to fun gameplay with RPG-esque rewards to keep you continuously interested. The loot can be random and thus by design add replay value to the game, or it can be fixed and the first time around will likely be your most satisifying. A game doesn't really need replay value if its 20 hours or more long, unless its a deliberately paced game like a traditional JRPG.

Open World games are often more about the world and establishing it than they are about the inhabitants of said world; most often you're not going to find game developers as astonishing storytelling masterminds but they do have elementary level ideas that can be used to create enthralling landscapes. I don't know how many people have had this particular experience but I remember having all sorts of interesting ideas as a child that never fully developed into anything beyond simple ideas, maybe I didn't craft a masterpiece out of them but they all had promise. Your typical open-world game is generally a fruition of one of those simple ideas.

Even though it seems like this one aspect repeating itself in almost every genre and game type would get tiresome I don't really foresee that in the near future. Much like RPG elements you can slap an open world design on almost any game and it will work out. Dark Souls is a vast improvement over its predecessor thanks in large part to its new Metroidvania style of design which was considered quite a risk early on. Every game can be turned into a free to play MMO and fail, or it could be turned into a single player pseudo-MMO and succeed admirably.

Barry Bonds is a Hall of Famer

Bonds... Unfortunately I started delving deeper into baseball in 2004 so I wasn't paying all that much attention to advanced stats while Bonds was destroying every single season record conceivable. Bonds was so ludicrous that he was intentionally walked 120 times in a single season. So 1 out of 5 times he came to the plate the opposing team said "fuck it" and put him on. He ended the season with a .609 On Base Percentage(OBP); baseball is a game of failure where it is admirable to put up a .350 or so OBP, but not so much for Bonds. He had four consecutive seasons where he reached based more frequently than making outs, those four seasons being good for 4 of the best 11 seasons all time. There are only 19 seasons of a greater than 0.500 OBP, so the previous maxim generally holds true.

So, Bonds almost certainly used steroids, though to be fair it hasn't been conclusively proven. Does it matter? I mean you can probably argue Palmeiro down from 3000 hits and 500 HRs and wagging his finger like a dumbass and all that, Bonds is more than twice as valuable as Palmeiro over the course of his career. Bonds isn't just good, he's ridiculously, unfathomably amazing statistically. Keeping Bonds out of the Hall is just as absurd as keeping Babe Ruth out of the hall, there's a difference between debatable hall of famer and top 5 player all time. 7 MVPs isn't enough I suppose.

Now, for most educated readers you probably know most of this already, Bonds is indisputably great. But he probably used steroids, what a CHEATER! Unfortunately so did the vast majority of baseball under Bud Selig's good wishings or kind look-away. 1998 brought baseball out of the depths of the strike and it has been doing quite well financially since then. The fucking Dodgers sold for 2 billion, driving the prospective cost of every other franchise, even the Pirates, up considerably. The same Dodgers that haven't won a World Series since 1988, the year I was born. Steroids saved baseball and for some forever tainted an otherwise bulging enormous head era of Got Milk smiles.

So, when Bonds is not elected this year and falls short by 15-30% or what have you, remember that he's vastly superior to every other player since the Korean War. There's even a pretty good argument that he's the best of all time, though I won't sully Babe Ruth's good drunken shot calling name with such an admonishment. Even Pujols is a paltry normal sized human by comparison.

Bonds Youtube: 1 2

Total Recall

No I'm not reviewing the new at-best mediocre movie! This is a time for Arnold, for classics, for awesome quotes and fantastic memories. Total Recall is one of the best action movies ever made, but alongside the action is an extraordinarily interesting premise: what if your whole life was a false memory? There's quite a few ways the remake could have gone with it, but trying to make a carbon copy of the original is kind of doomed. Douglas Quaid finds himself in this situation, he's an average man's average man; after all who couldn't relate to Arnold and Sharon Stone.

I wouldn't quite say Stone is the ultimate femme fatale but she certainly makes a huge impact in only a handful of scenes in the film. I think the combination of her and Michael Ironside is next to impossible to beat, so they decided to put it all on Kate Beckinsale's shoulders instead. She's an okay actress but I don't think she has much campy entertainment value nor is she just plain as attractive as Sharon Stone was in the early 90s. But its egregious not including Michael Ironside in some way, he's in essentially every Science Fiction movie ever made so why not put him in the remake? No Richter? No Benny? Outrageous.

I think Arnold and Ronny Cox are basically unbeatable in their roles, but you could potentially have just remade the character of Douglas Quaid differently so it fit a decent modern action star. Jeremy Renner or even Tom Cruise could carry a solid divergent design of this plot; but instead they try to copy it with a supporting actor at best in Colin Farrell. Ronny Cox is the ultimate corporate asshole and I think you do need that sort of character regardless, so why not bring him back as well? Throwbacks are fine, making a trailer that copies a whole bunch of scenes and fails is not.

All in all there was very little chance of a remake being better than the original but we could have had a decent enough addition to the Sci-fi action genre. Instead we got a bad imitation that cost an absurd amount and will probably break even due to the all powerful overseas market. (Remember, Pirates 4 grossed over a billion solely due to worldwide audiences, the new Ice Age is even worse). All things considered the original Total Recall isn't even that old and is still absolutely spectacular so I don't really see the need for a remake of any kind, though maybe a differently title film based on the same short story would work.