Izgnanie (The Banishment)
I wanted to write about my teeth but I think this is probably slightly more interesting to read.
Anyone who’s followed this blog should know I am an enormous fan of the Russian film Vozvrashcheniye, also known as “The Return”. So when I heard that the director made his second film – Izgnanie (The Banishment) – and it was now being shown in Singapore, I snapped up the chance to go watch it.
I’m not sure what to think of it. The plot was based on a Pulitzer Prize winning book, but it really could be summed up in 4 words: Depressed Wife Commits Suicide. The book’s title was ironically named “The Laughing Matter”.
I suppose I still love Zvyagintsev for his masterful application of direction, but strangely enough, it’s the plot that throws the whole thing down. It’s beautiful scenery after scenery, with symbolism hidden in every nook and cranny – down to the choice of costume – and the scene setups are just absolutely breathtaking. The problem lies, I think, with attempting to be artistic while trying to tell a coherent story.
I’ve (briefly) mentioned this observation with another director, and I think it still falls quite true here. While Zvyagintsev’s techniques aren’t as invasive as Joe Wright’s, there always seems to be a clash between exposition and artistry. The ending in Izgnanie was an additional hour of flashback exposition stuck at the tail end of what-could-have-been-the-ending, which really didn’t make the movie “whole”, in a sense. It felt a bit like Lego – someone sticking a brick on an already completed piece and everything now looks lopsided.
Plot grievances aside, I did go in with high expectations and I was very, very satisfied. Despite the fact this was only the director’s second movie, you start to notice certain things that he enjoys sticking into his movies – the theme of water and life, for example, was very prominent in Vozvrashcheniye and is certainly prominent here, as well as the religious images and pieces of art he scatters through the movie. I absolutely love the techniques he uses to switch scenes (and time); it’s subtle, gradual and almost effortless. It doesn’t blast in your face like those spy thriller cop movies where the glaring subtitles go “2 WEEKS AGO, 11.30 AM, WHITE HOUSE LAWLZ”.
I know a lot of indie-type/art movies employ this, but what I absolutely love is the realistic acting. Emotions don’t get plastered in people’s faces like how Ilsa looked when she listened to “As Time Goes By”. I mean, in the real world, we don’t look dramatically wistful gazing off into the distance as we fantasize about how we could’ve lived in Paris with a dashing Christian Bale uh, guy, and movies that overdramatize emotions just look absolutely fake, in my opinion (see also: Dreamgirls. How the hell did that film get nominated?)
Alex, in Izgnanie, never has emotion on his face, even with he’s completely broken, and yet you still wholly throw your heart out to the poor guy. It’s not his face, but the actions he does that’s just heartbreaking – he stops driving in the middle of the street to pause for reflection; he sits outside his wife’s bedroom and stares at the door for eternity; he stumbles through the grass after he realizes his wife has had an affair. The only time his exterior breaks is when he discovers his wife is dead, and it’s so much more poignant (and so much more human).
I just ate dinner and I’ve lost track of what I wanted to say, but overall, I was impressed by the film, but just not as impressed as I was for Vozvrashcheniye. The plot in the latter, at least, could be analyzed (which I totally did for my Psychology of Personality class – the id, ego and superego anyone?) but this one was just ridiculously simple and dragged on for a bit too long.
Between Dignity and Despair – First Impressions
I didn’t like this book very much. I thought it was a rather unique book at first, as Marion Kaplan compiled a bunch of anecdotes from Holocaust survivors together and fitted them into this book, giving us a truly realistic and personal view of the Jewish life in Nazi Germany.
The anecdotes are heartbreaking, touching and celebratory all at once. You cheer when you read a German standing up to a Nazi soldier during the 1933 Jewish boycott, or Germans insisting on continuing their friendships with Jewish friends. And then there are stories of Jewish women having to perform sexual favours in order to get their immigration papers, or how Jews were slowly excluded from the most basic of clubs. It’s incredibly interesting to read, and the glimpse into Jewish life is fascinating and truly different from a normal ‘historic’ book.
The problem is Kaplan won’t stop hammering it in on how ‘brutal’ or ‘cruel’ or ‘painful’ it was for the Jewish people. Kaplan uses the word ‘brutal’ 4 times in 3 paragraphs, and by the end of the Introduction(!) I was already screaming ‘Yes, I know Jewish life was painful; everyone knows that, so stop using all these loaded words!’ Kaplan doesn’t need to tell us that it was horrible to live in Germany in the 1930s; the anecdotes she collected speak volumes already.
The way she writes is weak, and the anecdotes are the only things that hold this book together. Firstly, for all her attempts to show that the Jewish experiences were diverse, she does a fantastic job in colouring the German side the same shade of evil. All Germans – be it a civilian or a member of the SS – behave the same. There are the occasional hopeful stories, but it seems like the Germans are never human. They are simply grouped into a single word – ‘Germans’. Coupled with the loaded words Kaplan loves to scatter in what moments she can spare between anecdotes, the whole thing just smacks of bias.
Granted, Kaplan writes the book wholly from the viewpoint of the victims in Nazi Germany, and after some thought, I could let the German homogeneity and loaded words slide. What I cannot forgive, however, is speculation, and getting horrendously biased sources.
At times Kaplan attempts to give us a brief summary of the events that happened in a certain year, and the aftermath of said event. No historian in their right mind can ever say “Well, I have no sources on this, but I can say that…” You can’t do that. You are not a historian if you speculate on events that you have no proof for. Kaplan, unfortunately, speculates so eagerly and explicitly, and she actually used the phrase “There are no sources, but…” She seems to want to capitalize on the Jewish suffering so badly she winds up adding on more theories of how Jews suffered when she even lacks the evidence for it. I can assure you that the lack of proof is not going to add on my sympathy for what happened in the 1930s. It makes me pissed that I’m reading a completely biased source and now I have to take all the anecdotes I read with a grain of salt.
Also, getting data from German sources about almost anything Jewish in the 1930s would be biased. Percentages will be skewed, attempting to show progress, or just for propaganda. The same thing can be said for Jewish sources. Isn’t there a possibility that the percentages might have overinflated? I can’t remember which year the data was published, but either way, there is a possibility that it might be biased, simply because you’re taking Jewish data for Jewish suffering in WWII. There isn’t any comparison to German sources or even independent sources for balance. I cannot just take Jewish sources as fact and leave it there. Once again, Kaplan seems to want to bludgeon us on the head with the phrase ‘THE JEWS SUFFERED IN WWII!’
I KNOW. IT HURTS BAD, AND YOU’RE NOT EXACTLY HELPING MY SYMPATHY ANY.
I don’t think Kaplan wanted this to be a historical or accurate source. She has provided us with anecdotes, and we all know how tricky the memory can be. I can accept that, but when Kaplan switches to a summary of events that everyone knows (translation: turns historian), takes percentages from biased sources and conjures theories out of thin air, I have reason to disbelieve anything she says.
The Little Mermaid on Broadway
Having watched a boot of the Little Mermaid on Broadway, I managed to catch about 10 minutes of it before the audio syncing issues really got to me and I stopped. I’m sorry, but judging from those first 10 minutes (and intermittent glimpses of other scenes) I can’t help but feel like we’ve been shortchanged by having this nonsense on stage in place of Beauty and the Beast.
The first scene that I managed to get through was, quite predictably, ‘Fathoms Below’. You have an enormous, cheesy looking ship with blue chiffon at the bottom which are supposed to be waves. It felt like watching a bunch of high school kids doing a musical with a larger than average budget. I think they tried to make Eric look handsome by giving him a baggy shirt that shows off his chest every once in a while, but not with that hair (they gave Eric long hair, and in an attempt to keep some resemblance to the animated version, they decided to curl his fringe. He just looked hilarious).
Anyway, after the song, there’s dialogue. Eric talks of wanting to meet the girl of his dreams, the princely life is not for him, etc etc. His friends dissuade him, etc etc. Ariel’s disjointed voice then echoes from the speakers.
Then Eric goes, and I quote: “Follow that voice; to the ends of the earth if you have to!”
I burst out laughing when I heard that. Yeah, face treacherous waters, get shipwrecked, and have all your men drown because of a funny sounding voice you heard 5 seconds ago? Not happening.
I remember reading an article somewhere about TLM wanting to be more Italian(?) Opera-ish in terms of design and costuming. I’m not sure when that got kicked in the head, because the costumes look awful. Everything’s a shiny mess of sequins and satin, Ariel’s tail sticks out of her butt and looks like it was constructed for the Ghost Lantern Festival, Ursula’s tentacles are wires for an oversized wedding dress, and I’m not sure what they did with poor Sebastian. I think my eyes may have tricked me, but I think they gave Sebastian a Persian hat with eyeballs sticking out of it.
As usual, the singers do a brilliant job, which isn’t surprising, seeing as this is a Broadway musical and Disney’s loaded with cash to hire said brilliant singers. What I was disappointed though, was the orchestrations for ‘Her Voice’ (the only song which I played through, next to ‘Fathoms Below’). Maybe I’ve been too used to the Concept Cast Recording, but the full orchestra took the mystic and romance away somewhat. It became just another loud, bombastic, kitschy song about love. There’s nothing ethereal about it anymore, and that aspect was something which I greatly loved about that song. I thought if they’d just keep it to that simple piano melody and throw in a couple of violins it’ll do just fine. It’s a minimalistic song, not a ‘Kiss the Girl’ remake!
Of course, take this at face value, given that I am a huge Beauty and the Beast fan, and TLM might have bittered my view somewhat. Also, I probably watched this about a month ago, so my memory will definitely play tricks on me. But whatever. I thought I should get this out.
ETA: Apparently the NY Times didn’t like it either.
Lair: First Impressions
Save for the fact that my cousins got me this game, everything else about it is crap, at least for the first 5 missions, because that was where I stopped. Lair is set in a fantasy-medieval era, where the Uruk-hai, sorry, Mokai are at war with the Asylians because of some volcano that blew up both their homelands and they decided to blame each other for it. You control Rohn, an elite member of the Asylian Sky Guard, which basically means that you sit on a dragon and let your pet do the fighting for you.
Factor 5 attempted to shoehorn the SixAxis’s motion sensor function by making the entire game control that way. In order to navigate your dragon around, the controller has to physically tilt left/right or up/down. It feels like they were rejected for developing the game for the Wii and they decided to project it onto the PS3 instead, with disastrous results. The controls are extremely sensitive, yet horrendously inaccurate. A brief tilt downwards would send my dragon diving to the bottom, and at one point, when I tilted my controller left, the dragon wound up going right. Maybe the up/down function messed with the left/right controls or something, so I suppose my controller was pointing UP while I was tilting LEFT, which probably made the dragon very confused, and decided to go RIGHT instead.
The whole ‘wrist-flick’ maneuvers were horrendous as well. Apparently if you want to make a 180 degree turn, you have to flick the controller… upwards? Not that the odd directional positioning mattered, at any rate. I was never able to flick my controller fast enough, and sometimes the dragon would make a speed dash instead, which put me even further away from where I was supposed to be.
I won’t gripe about the believability of the wide turns, but in essence, it’s a horrendous thing to navigate with when you’re in battle. There’s a dragon on your right! Okay, tuuuuurn… take your time, whatever. By that time you’ve actually lined that enemy up in your sight, he’s firebombed you and disappeared. The wide turns got even more annoying at the end of the last mission I played, which was killing off enemies on a straight, tiny bridge. Doing turns on that bridge was a nightmare.
It was incredibly hard to do accurate navigation, as a result. On one occasion I had to navigate my way through an arch, and apparently I didn’t dip low enough or a wing wasn’t in range of the hole or whatever, so I wound up bouncing off the damned architecture and had to circle my way around it instead. I was subsequently accosted by the wide turn problem again, where I had to fly off into the distance in order to properly position myself and come back facing the right direction.
After I had firebombed the dragon quota, they sent in a bunch of ‘Tauros’ on the bridge, and I was supposed to wipe them out. This was where the fault of the lock-on system came into play. I could not get a proper lock on any of the tiny Tauros on the bridge. The computer did the locking-on for me, and half the time I would swoop near a Tauros only to realize the computer had targeted a nearby catapult instead, and I would be faced with a big brick wall while the camera tried to get back into place. Other times had me attempting to target the Dark dragons, and having hit the ‘dive’ button, I would suddenly swoop 50 miles away from the bridge to target some shitty ice dragon. I then had to do the laborious wide turn and then fly all the way back, while my allies were shouting at what a moron I was for leaving the battleground.
The bugs in this game are of mention, seeing as bugs don’t bother me most of the time (I had freezing issues like everyone else on Assassin’s Creed, but unlike the other anal fanbois, I just reset the game and tried again) and I don’t actively try to break the game. These bugs were bad. I had some incredible screen tearing on the fourth mission that I couldn’t see where I was going (not like I knew where I was anyway), and the clincher came in the fifth mission.
I was flying under said archway when this dragon decided to attack me from behind. Apparently the game wasn’t prepared for that, because all of a sudden, I was stuck under the arch. After giving my controller a good shake my dragon broke free, but the camera wasn’t. I was still looking through the archway while my dragon flew off and merged with a bunch of other equally similar looking dragons in the distance. Whenever I tilted the controller left or right the camera would do the same, and I found myself staring at castle walls, or the camera would bypass the wall entirely and I’d be looking at the interior of the castle, which was a black screen. Soon after, for some inexplicable reason, I was reunited with Rohn and co. again. As usual, I was 50 miles off to sea after this shenanigan and everyone was yelling at me for being an idiot. The game then abruptly ended because I didn’t maul enough dragons on time or something (yeah, being stuck under a fucking archway would do that).
Speaking of which, there should have been some counter to note how many targets are left before you advance to the next level. I couldn’t see the Tauros at all, and I had to make a couple of passes on the bridge (coupled with horrendous navigation, wide turns, squinting and getting motion sickness) before I actually nailed every last one. The game congratulated me by having the enemy drop Rhinos on the bridge. They were dispatched in exactly the same way as the Tauros, except now you had to shake your controller up and down like you were having a seizure before the dragon finally picked him up and threw him into the sea.
Since this game was touted Blu-ray and supposedly plays fantastic on 1080i resolution, that automatically meant it would look like crap on my 14 inch TV screen. Everything is supposedly rendered in ‘gorgeous detail’, but the little soldiers on the ground just looked like shimmering dots on my screen. I had to adjust the damn screen size, and even the options menu seemed to insult me for it – they titled it ‘adjust frame size’, which I felt was a completely moronic choice of words. I scrolled up and down the options menu looking desperately for ’screen’, ‘resolution’ or ‘widescreen?’ and by luck I decided to try this frame size thing out. I didn’t have any display problems with Assassin’s Creed (save for the tiny font), so I’m just going to chalk it up to Lair being stupid.
I suppose my ‘first impressions’ has gotten way out of hand, so I’ll just stop here. Overall, I don’t like Lair. Nothing is good about it; not even the aesthetic side of it. The voice actors all sound gruff in varying degrees of deepness, the soundtrack sounds like Troy’s (complete with Incoherent Female Wailer), and the story is pretty much ‘we’re at war, go beat the bad guys’. I suppose if you like playing with a retarded version of the Wii you just might enjoy Lair.
Atonement
I managed to catch Atonement (which may or may not have been… y’know) and I’m not quite sure where to put my sentiments. I think it’s awesome because of the story, but then again, that wasn’t the product of Joe Wright’s genius, because the movie was based on a book.
Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorite movies. It had gorgeous countryside locations, the story was told well, and… it felt like every shot had a purpose. I think Atonement tried to be both an art film and a commercial one as well. You have odd details that are mentioned once and never mentioned again, flashbacks, movement patterns which are supposedly for aesthetic reasons, and finally there’s a long 4 and a half minute tracking shot of the evacuation at Dunkirk. Maybe it’s just the Film Studies geek in me that realized all this, so I probably should start watching Pride and Prejudice again with this new critical eye, but in short, I didn’t like Atonement as much as I liked Pride and Prejudice.
Maybe because the plot wasn’t linear, maybe because it was too much of an art film than a commercial one, or maybe I just came in with the wrong expectations. It’s sort of like going in to see Lost in Translation with more plot, I suppose. That film still bores me.
I think the whole point of the movie was to see it from Briony’s point of view, but that, as a result, pretty much left Cecilia and Robbie as empty shells you can’t identify with. I suppose I did feel a little cheated at the end, even if the movie did drop audio clues the whole way.
Anyway, I still recommend watching Atonement, simply because of the big twist at the end, and it’s JOE WRIGHT. Try to find subtitles, because you can’t make head or tail with those accents. Keira talks in a fast and clipped manner, and sometimes it’s just so fast you can’t decipher it at all (for me, anyway).
Kingdom Hearts I
I bought Kingdom Hearts a couple of months ago, simply because it was Final Fantasy and Disney all rolled into one. It couldn’t be anymore perfect.
It sucks.
I’m not sure how Squaresoft managed to achieve this level of game design, because the whole place looks so cheap and thrown together after a couple of hours in Maya or something and then they decided to pass it off as a level. Everything is Square, Block, Square, more Blocks and Big Ass Blocks. The spacecraft shooting levels seem to be just another way to waste more of your time, and the spacecraft itself looks like something out of a game you would’ve played in 1995.
The controls are shoddily designed, where instead of using the right analog stick to rotate the camera around, you use the L2 and R2 buttons instead. There’s no option to look up or down, unless you want to move into first person camera (which is still a piece of shit; you can’t move around in first person). The camera itself never fucking points where you want it to. Everytime you get thrown into an obligatory platform puzzle, you can be sure that you’ll fall a minimum of 6 times before you finally make it all the way to Point B. You have to manually rotate the camera around whenever Sora jumps from one place to another, and God forbid if you don’t rotate the camera in time, or you’ll see Sora land straight to the ground and you’ll start pulling out your hair in frustration. Sometimes the platforms you’re supposed to land on are so ridiculously small you’ll instantly lose your balance when Goofy or Donald decide to become clever and think that there’s enough room for all three of you on that tiny motherfucking mushroom.
The music is incredibly annoying. The background music that plays whenever you enter a world simply blasts into your ears on repeat. The loop was so short that I could traverse one single area (not level, AREA) and hear it on replay at least 3 times. You’ll hear the same melody over and over again anytime you enter any world, and it’ll drive you insane. I wouldn’t have minded if the music was softer, or to give some sort of ambiance, but the music seems to want to be a very annoying third character in the game, and the melodies sound exactly alike, only differing in the instrumentation.
Another thing, really, is the lack of a objective marker. I put down Kingdom Hearts a few weeks ago to take up FFXII, and I had completely forgotten what I was supposed to do when I picked it back up again. I had to fight wave after wave of bad guys before realizing I was supposed to be delivering a package to some shitface in the cellar. And you know what? I reminded myself. The game gave no inkling of what I was supposed to do, and I had to remember it. Another occasion had me platforming the blocky rooftops of Agrabah with no destination in mind, except that I knew I had to get to the Sultan’s Palace. I had probably traversed the whole of Agrabah about 7 goddamn times with no idea how to reach the palace before going ‘fuck this shit’ and quitting the game.
Not to mention that everyone is rendered the same, except for the three main human characters, Sora, Riku and whatsherface. If you’ve watched Disney animation as much as I have, you’ll notice the style of drawing differs from movie to movie. Mulan has the more ‘chinese-brushstroke’ kind of art, where everything is sharp and in smooth strokes, while Aladdin has more rounded edges, giving a more comical effect. In Kingdom Hearts, everyone looks the same. Put Jane in Jasmine’s clothing, dye her hair black and you’ll get Jasmine. I don’t think this is a major gripe, since I understand that they are all rendered by the same 1995 graphics engine that Squaresoft pulled out of their closet to develop, and honestly, if they did look different, I’d probably still be complaining anyway.
I suppose the bigger plotline is pretty much motivation enough for me to slave through the game (plus, I haven’t met Belle yet), but the individual worlds that you visit just feels like the game is obligingly giving you as many Disney characters as it can. Also, the game contradicts canon wherever it goes, and it makes the Disney fan in me a little disappointed.
The combat system also sucks a great big load of crap. I suppose this game was the predecessor to FFXII’s combat system, and you can see it’s not as finely tuned. Firstly, you can’t enter the menu whenever you’re in battle, so when you realize Goofy’s out of potions, you can’t go back to the menu to restock. You wind up sitting there getting killed by the big boss because you have 50 potions in stock but the game won’t let you use it.
Secondly, combat is fast. I honestly don’t know why magic is a necessity in this game, because you have to move your cursor to the menu, click on whatever magic you want to cast, and then cast it at your target, all the while having enemies raining crap on your ass. Before you know it, you’ve lost half your health just searching for the damn Gravity spell. Sure, there are shortcuts, but what the hell, three shortcuts? What if the boss is immune to elemental damage or something, and all I have are elemental magics in the shortcuts? I can’t go to the menu BECAUSE THE GAME WON’T LET ME, and I wind up having to refer to GameFAQs to prepare myself.
Thirdly, whenever there are enormous waves of bad guys for me to maim, I’m never able to see what I’m hitting. My screen is blocked with silhouettes of Heartless, and especially so when those big fat round guys show up. Most of the time I just hit the lock-on button and mash X blindly. This really all calls back to the camera issues, because I can’t really have a bird’s eye view of what I’m fighting against, since the camera just likes to stay at Sora’s height, who probably is about a meter tall.
I suppose Kingdom Hearts II might make up for it; hopefully by then they’d have worked out what worked and what didn’t. Of course, that’s assuming I’d even get through KH1 in the first place.
