March 2010 – Page 3 – Blue Ink Alchemy

Month: March 2010 (page 3 of 7)

Why Iron Man Works

So I don’t know about you folks out there in the dark depths of the Interwebs, but I’m very excited about Iron Man 2 coming out in May. We’re thankfully living in a time when comic book adaptation films have emerged from the dark miasma of the previous attempts at Captain America and Spawn. But even with the mold-breaking excellence of X-Men and Spider-Man 2, Iron Man stands out. Like most stories for which I unabashedly sing praises, the Iron Man film wisely focuses on the characters and their relationships to one another rather than just wowing the audience with spectacle. Now, there’s plenty of spectacle to be had in Iron Man between the different suits of armor, the shiny supercars, the fighter jets and Gwenyth Paltrow in that fantastic dress. But it never exists for its own sake, and besides being damn cool to look at it has meaning because we care about the people involved. So let’s take a look at these characters and see where and how they worked, other than the fact that their actors improved their way through the entire story, according to this dude.

Speaking of the Dude, here the Oscar-winner is the bad guy. The nefariousness really doesn’t come into play until the second act, and up until that point he comes across as the number two guy in the multi-billion arms manufacturing company that really, really wishes he was number one. He worked with Tony’s dad, after all, and while the kid was working his way through MIT and impressing everybody with his genius, charm and good looks, Obie was doing the hard work of keeping the arms race going. Now that Tony’s come into his own and brought out a bunch of new ideas, Obie’s in danger of losing the position he’s built for himself. Under his various demeanors, this is a scared man. He’s afraid of becoming obsolete and forgotten. His motivations are less about taking over the world and more about the American dream of keeping the world safe from terror and violence by bringing terror and violence to those who perpetuate terror and violence. …wait…

Bridges plays Stane with equal parts flourish and humanity, being just one example of how the actors in Iron Man inhabit their characters. Given the apparent nature of the film’s script, the infamous ranting scene’s silence between his lines takes on a new dimension – did the other actors not see the shouting coming?

Tony Stark’s Girl Friday is a spicy and smart administrative assistant named Virginia “Pepper” Potts. The role of the girl in this sort of story could often have the beautiful actress du jour running around in skimpy outfits getting chased by a malevolent blob of CGI screaming to beat the band. Pepper, much to my delight, isn’t that kind of girl. She’s the kind of girl who’s willing to tell the hero when they’re being selfish or dumb, but does so out of a sense of compassion rather than for the sake of being ‘spunky.’ Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper has depth and nuance, and works not only as a perfect foil for Tony Stark’s various eccentricities but also as a standalone woman that neither becomes a shrinking violet in the light of the hero nor puts on war paint and hefts a big gun.

The crowning moment for her comes about two thirds of the way through the film where she takes it upon herself, albeit at Tony’s behest, to find out what Obediah’s up to. The entire sequence of events from Pepper entering the office to meeting up with the SHIELD agent after a confrontation with Stane is pitch-perfect. By “confrontation”, incidentally, I don’t mean there’s any sort of major over-dramatic standoff. The scene between Bridges and Paltrow is played quietly, diplomatically and with an air of palpable menace that both actors tie into effortlessly. More than just two characters sharing dialog, this is two arguable masters of their craft milking this scene for all of its dramatic worth without ever taking things over the top. It’s one of the many things that make Iron Man shine without a single special effect being involved.

Just like writers write what they know for the best results, sometimes you can cast an actor into a role they’ve already played in real life. Our hero is a flamboyant, decadent playboy who indulges in drinking, gambling and womanizing backed up by a substantial fortune and atypical celebrity status. He discovers that what he has been doing has been detrimental for others and resolves to make things better, even if it means continuing to do what he did before but in a slightly different but no less brilliant way.

I could be talking about Tony Stark, but I also could be talking about Robert Downey Jr..

Not only is RDJ perfect for this role, he plays it with both a deep understanding of the inner workings of a gearhead and the rambunctious abandon of a kid let loose on a playground. Tony Stark is a guy who fixes things. Even if it means tearing down something that’s broken only to rebuild it better than it was before, he’s a problem-solver with both his brain and his hands. More than that, however, he’s just a guy. He’s not bitten by a radioactive spider or an alien from another world, and he’s not even the product of a tragic past who dedicated his life to fighting evil while dressed up in a swishy cape. Downey shows us the humanity of the man inside the armor, and later in the film when he re-dons his tuxedo to attend a party, there’s a sense (at least for me) that he’s wearing it the same way he wears the Iron Man suit – it protects him from people around him getting to who he really is. While Tony learns a lot, and grows as a character from start to finish, there’s a foundation to his character – the narcissism and arrogance, the belief that he and he alone is the solution to the problems that arise – that never goes away and is apparently intact for the upcoming sequel.

So why does Iron Man work? It’s more than the suit, the special effects and the diehard fans. It’s these folks, along with director Jon Favreau, that catapulted this little movie from just another decent comic book flick to a memorable and fantastic film.

My copy’s loaned out to a friend, which is a shame, because after writing this up, I really want to watch it again.

“Faffing About” Creed Indeed

March 20, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 2 Comments

Yahtzee put it best. Released in 2007, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed is a decent game with an interesting concept and good story let down by a few things that I’m going to dive into right now. This isn’t really a review, though I’m filing it as such. It’s more of a ‘first impressions’ overview because I got about three hours into the game, realized how much tedium I’d have to repeat and decided I’d finished wasting my time with it and went back to wasting my time with World of Warcraft.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about the Prince of Persia games on the PS2 was the free running you could do, basically holding down two buttons in such a way that the rather charming and very human prince of thieves jumps, swings, runs and leaps across ancient palaces full of nasty traps and nastier enemies made of sand. However, you were always going from point A to B, so any sense of freedom engendered by this mode of transportation seemed to deflate once you arrived. Then again, it was also buoyed up by knowing exactly where you were going.

In Assassin’s Creed, you’re free to run, jump, swing and fall on your face anywhere in the 11th century Holy Land you damn well please. That is if the guards aren’t trying to turn you into chunky salsa. But let me back up and talk about the story.

From the promotional art and trailers it seemed that the game was an action-adventure-platformer set in the aforementioned Holy Land where you play an assassin dispatching some of those dirty amoral Christians everybody loves hating so much. But Ubisoft lied to us. Assassin’s Creed is really about this guy named Desmond, strapped to a table in a lab located twenty minutes into the future where an evil scientist who really isn’t Dr. Breen from Half-Life 2 wants to mine the genetic memories of his 11th century ancestor, Altaiir. Now, I have to give Ubisoft props for making an action protagonist who’s of Middle Eastern descent and not characterizing him as a crazed fundamental Jihadist. Then again, Altaiir was just a touch more bland and emotionless than Desmond himself, but at least he wasn’t pursuing his targets the way Glenn Beck pursues anybody with a functioning frontal lobe or decent sense of morality.

Ah, shit, I promised I’d keep politics & religion out of this blog, didn’t I. Dammit.

Anyway, the game. Altaiir is tasked with taking down a series of extremely nasty Crusaders who are making life miserable for pretty much everybody and begins to uncover an ancient battle between his people, the Assassins, and a rather well-organized secret order of amoral knights called Templars. The Templars tend to get the short end of the stick in historical fiction, big examples being Kingdom of Heaven and anything Dan Brown writes, while at other times they’re actually shown to be somewhat virtuous, i.e. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Knowing some of the members of their spiritual descendants, the Freemasons, I find it hard to believe that the Templars are as dirty and horrible as some like to characterize them. However, that’s the route Assassin’s Creed goes, and Altaiir has quite a few pseudo-pious throats to puncture.

However, there’s a lot standing between you and your targets. Every time you jump into a new memory, you begin at your home base, which is at the top of a mountain far from any sort of Western civilization. While I can appreciate this from a historical perspective, as Alamut was indeed used by the Hashshashins as a refuge and fortress, walking down from the peak all the way down to the stables every single time was pretty much the definition of tedium. When you do get to the stables, you have to resist the urge to gallop off to your next target, since the Crusaders who patrol the roads of the Holy Land don’t want you to hurt yourself by riding too fast, and why don’t you have any papers for that horse? You need to get your horse inspected and registered every 12 months, or they’ll slap you with a fine. And by ‘fine’ I mean ‘longsword up the ass.’

Anyway, so you’ve hiked all the way down Alamut and gotten to Jerusalem or whereever at a slightly faster pace than your own brisk walk by having your horse do a brisk walk. Time to get your stabbing on, right? Wrong! You need to ‘gather intelligence’. And by ‘gather intelligence’ I mean ‘run around doing chores at the behest of NPCs before someone will tell you where the damn target is.’ You deliver messages, beat up bad guys (but without killing them, that’d summon the legions of Crusaders waiting around the corner to slay you for Jesus), sweep chimneys, walk dogs, babysit, run to the store, help little old ladies across the street and generally do everything for everybody in sight like this is an 11th-century MMOG and you’re trying to grind your way up to a more impressive hood.

When you finally find out where your target is, Assassin’s Creed adds something to the ‘good’ column under ‘breathtaking environments’, ‘intuitive free-running’ and ‘original story-framing idea’. You plan your route to where the target’s hanging out to make sure you avoid being seen by his cronies, make your way there stealthily either by moving through the crowd or via a tricky Parkour sequence that belies the peacefulness of the scene, leap onto the bad guy and slam your retractable blade into their larynx. Awesome!

But wait – the target has something to say. In fact, these guys have a lot to say. Even after you’ve sprung your sharp implement of holy death and driven it home, they’ll clearly tell you something about the ongoing conspiracy or their apple-cheeked children or something, with nary a gurgle or spattering of blood. Are they telepathic or something? How can you soliloquize when you’ve got a gaping hole in your voice box?

Following a successful assassination you are rubber-banded back into Desmond, who has a near-future room to hang out in between the near-future experiments on his near-future brain. And once you’re strapped back into the Animus, whammo, you’re back on top of Alamut again. It was around the third time that this happened that my patience for the game ran out.

“It’s like you’re enjoying a nice (if somewhat bland) grilled cheese sandwich livened up by intermittent lumps of Branston pickle, when someone snatches it from your mouth and replaces it with a spoonful of watery ejaculate between two peices of wood.” – Yahtzee

I do consider that a bit of a shame, because Assassin’s Creed had a lot going for it. The story seemed interesting and the free-running and sealth-assassining was fun, but the tedium of going from one place to another, all of the crap I had to take care of before I could stab with impunity got on my nerves and the lepers and beggars who ran up to me begging for cash really tempted me to break the first rule of the Creed, which is ‘Never harm an innocent’. I harmed quite a few, only to get desynchronized (read: killed) when the Crusaders nearby jumped on me for giving the beggar a discouraging poke. With my hidden blade. In the face.

This turned into a bit more of a rant than I expected, but I wanted to revisit my thoughts on Assassin’s Creed because I’m playing the sequel when I’m not sinking more time into the Mass Effect universe. So how does Assassin’s Creed II stack up? I’ll let you know when I finish playing it. Yes, I’m going to finish it, which says something for it right there. And here’s something else.

You know how Yahtzee described Assassin’s Creed as, at first, a nice little grilled cheese & Branston sandwich? Assassin’s Creed II is, so far, the same sandwich with a nice thin layer of prosciutto added for extra deliciousness. And nobody’s come to snatch it yet, which is a good thing because I love prosciutto to pieces.

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Inglorious Basterds

March 19, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 4 Comments

[audio:http://www.blueinkalchemy.com/uploads/basterds.mp3]

The 2010 Academy Awards are a fading memory. By now most of the Internet has moved on to more interesting things, like porn stars playing D&D. However, if I might indulge your attention for a few minutes, I’d like to discuss one of the films that was in contention for best of the year. Now, I don’t wish to give the impression that I like The Hurt Locker any less. I still stand by everything I said in my review of that movie. However, comparing it to the film I’m about to discuss will require me to point out some things that fall on the negative side of things when it comes to Ms. Bigelow’s magnum opus to date. The Hurt Locker‘s a fantastic film, and I’m so glad a woman won Best Director for it because she deserves the hell out of that award. But I’m not here to talk about that film again. I’m here to talk about Inglorious Basterds.

What a bunch of basterds. The Americans can be a bit mean, too.

The film begins “once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France.” This sort of phrasing is par for the course when it comes to the film’s mastermind, Quentin Tarantino. I know there are a few people out there who just hear that name and immediately want to move on to something else, but bear with me, gentle readers. The trailers and adverts, for the most part, focused on the Basterds themselves, an octet of Jewish-American soldiers brought together by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) to form a covert resistance unit working behind enemy lines in France the way the Apaches worked along the frontier during America’s expansion westward. This includes brutal beatings, scalpings and other means of revenge that verge on the gruesome but are somewhat palatable due to the fact that, let’s face it, the Nazis are perhaps the greatest punching bags of all time.

However, these boys are only part of the film’s overall story, which encompasses the lives of disparate characters from all walks of life, from a Jewish refugee living incognito in Paris all the way up to der Fürher. The refugee, played excellently by Mélanie Laurent, owns a cinema that will be hosting a gala premiere of the latest Nazi war film created by infamous propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and when the guest list featuring most of the German high command is leaked to the Allies, the Basterds are tapped to provide on-the-ground support for an operation that could, if successful, alter the course of history by ending the war in a single evening. The biggest potential wrench in the works is a nefarious SS colonel played with flourish and poise by Christoph Waltz who is best known by his nickname, “The Jew Hunter.”

This was another Oscar well-deserved.

Back to Tarantino. Along with his apparent propensity for violence, he is known for taking parts of a film’s plot and mixing them up at the expense of linear progression for the sake of scene construction and character-building. When we see the first chapter heading, I think some could be excused for expecting the next ‘chapter’ to jump ahead only to have the one following jump back. However, the plot unfolds linearly, and the pacing of the story never feels schizophrenic or even rushed. As in all of his films, Tarantino leaves his scenes long, focusing us on the characters and the situations rather than the action or spectacle. Scenes of violence, in Inglorious Basterds, are handled with brutal speed and visceral cutting, and it never feels as if Tarantino is lingering on the violence for the sake of the violence. Instead, the violence happens, as it does in war, and we move on. The violence is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. While Tarantino is no stranger to violence being its own end, with Grindhouse under his belt, here as in some of his other films the violence is treated with brevity so that we can focus on perhaps the strongest aspect of his filmmaking: the characters.

This could be Brad Pitt’s funniest accent performance since Snatch.

With characters come dialog. Sometimes you can get away with establishing and building characters without it; Wall-E and Up being the best examples in recent memory. However, Tarantino is known for his dialog as much as he is for violence, if not moreso. Here, he definitely focuses on the words spoken by these characters, rather than simply their actions. Eli Roth’s Sgt. Donowitz is a bit of an exception, as he conveys a great deal without speaking, but he’s still part of an intricate network of characters who all have something to say. Even minor characters, like the farmer we meet in the beginning of the film and the refugee’s assistant in the cinema, are given tightly-written, well-acted dialog that helps draw us into the experience. Despite the overarching theme of the film, and the ways in which the Basterds exemplify it, the characters never feel artificial or cardboard. They feel real.

MovieBob has already discussed what I’m about to bring up at length, so let me just touch on it and then tie it into how I began this review. Quentin Tarantino, a man who’s never been ashamed of his deep love for film of all forms but especially for “lower” forms of the medium, has created a movie that is, among other things, a treatise on the power of movies. The Basterds especially show us what sort of people are inspired by the macho heroes often shown battling evil with their bare fists on the silver screen. The naive young Nazi war hero played by Daniel Brühl comes from the other end of the spectrum, a man haunted by what he’s done on the battlefield but willing to serve as that sort of macho inspiration to his country in Goebbels’ film. In the midst of the audience cheering his exaggerated exploits, he is visually disturbed by both what he’s seeing in the final cut and how people are reacting to it. With these characters, along with the German double-agent movie star, the British special ops soldier who’s also a published film critic, and all of the references to the films of the late 30’s and early 40’s, Tarantino makes the mission statement of Inglorious Basterds perfectly clear.

As much as I love the Basterds, this is your heroine. Right here.

Films are powerful things. They are often dismissed as mere escapist fodder, a waste of time and money indulged in by those with insufficient imagination to pick up a book or go for a walk instead. However, when a good filmmaker decides to tell a story in the mixed media of sound, sight, dialog and theme, a film can do more than simply wow the masses with shallow spectacle and beautiful stars. Inglorious Basterds sets out to not only tell us this is possible, but also shows us. Films can inspire, enrage and spur discussion and debate. Films can touch people from all walks of life in very different ways, and they can even change people. I’m not sure if a film has ever truly changed history the way Basterds‘s film-within-a-film does, but seeing this movie demonstrates how possible it really is, and speaks directly to the power of film.

This brings me to why I felt it necessary to bring up the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture. The Hurt Locker is a great film, as I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, but when you get right down to it, the narrative & theme are pretty straightforward. As involved as we are in the story as it happens, caught up in the visceral and intimate feel of the scenes, we’re not left thinking about much beyond what we just experienced. When you stop and think about it, it wasn’t overly complicated. This simplicity works for it, certainly, but beyond the lives of the characters and what it tells us about modern warfare there isn’t a lot more The Hurt Locker has to say. Inglorious Basterds, on the other hand, isn’t just a sprawling and involving cloak and dagger story set in World War 2, it’s a thought-provoking and well-crafted exploration of the true power of film. Considering that the Academy Awards strive to celebrate and promote the power of film, when they’re not playing politics or padding their ceremonies with musical numbers and extra advertisements, I’m afraid there’s only one conclusion I can draw given the outcome of this year’s Oscars.

When it comes to the award for Best Film of 2009, Inglorious Basterds was completely and totally robbed.

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

Her Twenty-First

March 18, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 1 Comment

In honor of my wife‘s birthday today, here’s a bit from one of my favorite posts of hers. We’re taking care of some errands and going out at least for dinner tonight, thanks to a generous gift card to our favorite restaurant. Guess what it is. Go on, guess.

Enjoy this little taste of an opinionated game review peppered with swearing.

Good Game, Shitty Story: The Mass Effect Experience

Look at that title. I just summed up everything I’m about to say and I don’t even have to say it. I could stand back, look proud of myself and just let the title speak for itself.

However, I’m not. I suspect I will have hundreds of fanboys raging all over the place here if I were to, so I’ll qualify what I just said with some experiences.

For most of the fights worth a damn I used Liara and Alenko, actually.

As I said, the game itself was really good, but I feel I should qualify that too: it was really good when I was playing a Soldier. When I first started up the game, I figured I’d probably play a Soldier because I’m boring and like killing things, but after looking at the classes I figured I’d go for something I don’t usually play, and chose the ~~mage~~ Adept. The combat controls were confusing at first (the game arbitrarily has different movement controls for combat and non-combat), especially since you can’t zoom out, so despite it being third person I still got that “no peripheral vision” feeling that comes with first person shooters. Anyway, I quickly discovered that you can’t keybind more than one ability — despite never using the D-pad for anything the entire game — so if you want to play something that relies as much on abilities as it does on shooting things, and you’re not playing on the PC, you’d better like pausing combat. A lot.

After dealing with the flow-breaking pausing, or just ignoring it and shooting things for the entire first mission, I finally said “fuck this” and re-rolled. Maybe it’s because I could dump all my points in assault rifles since I knew I wasn’t going to use anything else, maybe it was because I’d gotten the hang of the way combat worked, but I immediately had much more fun with the Soldier and went on with the game. I did get a couple abilities throughout the game (well, “a couple” isn’t accurate, I had almost as many as Liara by the end) but most of the time I forgot they existed and just shot things till one of us died. The only ones I ever really took advantage of were my party resurrect and the one that reset all my abilities so I could use the resurrect again. These two got used a lot, too, because the entire party liked to huddle around me, and if I was behind cover, instead of going off to find their own cover nearby, they’d stand in the open near me and get killed. Despite this, the way the fights are set up I was grateful to have party members, especially later on when Kaidan and Liara both got Lift.

Lift is awesome.

As for the non-combat parts… Well. I often found it stupid that one charm speech would cause people to rethink their entire diabolical plan/career choice/life, but I guess it’s better than requiring five conversation trees of the exact same thing. There was also one thing that bothered me with the reporter coming to talk to you sidequest… I knew it was the Renegade option to tell her to fuck off, and I was going for a Paragon, but I chose it anyway because I’d previously promised Emily Wong, another reporter and recurring quest NPC, that she would be the first to get an exclusive interview. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to remember this promise because it never comes up again and everyone acts like you’re an ass for not doing the interview, and there’s no way to tell people I refused in order to keep my promise to Wong (thereby doing the right thing). Why make things like that a dialogue option at all if you’re going to assume the player will completely forget about them?

Other than hiccups like that, I really enjoyed the dialogue parts. I’m one of those OCD types who will get as much information out of an NPC as possible, which often led to spending ridiculous amounts of time chatting, though. Rarely in a game am I so eager to get back to the action after spending time in town as I was in Mass Effect.

Continue…

Alchemist mac Sláine

March 17, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 1 Comment

My grandmother’s maiden name was Marilyn Slane. Like Saint Patrick, the family name was anglicized (it’s actually Saint Padraic if I am not mistaken) from the original Sláine. Now from what I understand, her family originated from Scotland and moved to Ireland before her parents emigrated to the United States. According to legend, however, Sláine was the family name of the first family of people to settle in Ireland after the Flood.

While we’re talking legends, Sláine mac Dela was apparently the first High King of Ireland. This actually would explain quite a bit, as when I was young, speaking to my grandmother often felt like having an audience with some legendary potentate. She moved in with my parents while my sisters and I were growing up, and often we were sent into the addition built for her when shenanigans were afoot.

She was a pretty heavy smoker, so when that door opened wide there was a mist-like fog of Marlboro smoke surrounding her favorite recliner. We sat at her feet like peasants before a queen mother, and she lectured us with equal parts patience and somewhat blunt honesty, telling us the proper ways to behave towards our hard-working long-suffering parents, who wanted nothing more than for us to lead good lives and do them proud.

Twenty years later, those lessons stay with me. I’ve had ups and downs in my life, times when things have been smooth sailing and times when dark and stormy waters have threatened to swallow me whole. I believe that, due at least in part to these lessons conveyed by my grandmother, I’ve shown respect and appreciation for those in my family who’ve gone before me, who’ve wrestled the same financial demons and trod the same fallen obstacles to get where they are. Rather than drag them down, I want to lift them up, ensuring they can move into a comfortable and proud retirement knowing they’ve raised their children well.

So when I toast for St. Paddy’s, be it tonight or this weekend, it will be my parents and my grandmother who’ll be in my thoughts and in my heart. I’d like to think they’ve raised me well and I’m eternally and deeply grateful for that.

Sorry to wax so sentimental. More on writing and stuff tomorrow.

Month: March 2010 (page 3 of 7)

Why Iron Man Works

“Faffing About” Creed Indeed

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Inglorious Basterds

Her Twenty-First

Good Game, Shitty Story: The Mass Effect Experience

Alchemist mac Sláine

Buy This Book!

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