Archive for 2009
A comparison of the new and the classic interfaces.
It’s hard to believe now, when they’re known mostly for rushing out one half-finished Star Wars game after another (for one Christmas season after another), but in the late eighties and early nineties, LucasArts were, along with Sierra On-Line, the première adventure game company in the business. For a period of some fifteen years, beginning with Maniac Mansion, they released some of the best-regarded point-and-click adventures of the era. In 1990, at the peak of their powers, they released The Secret of Monkey Island. For a generation of gamers, Monkey Island‘s combination of fourth-wall-breaking comedy and clever puzzles became the standard against which all later adventure games were measured. [...]
Tags: 1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Alexandra Boyd, Dave Grossman, Dominic Armato, Earl Boen, Games, Leilani Jones, LucasArts, Point and Click, Ron Gilbert, Secret of Monkey Island, Tim Schafer, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade
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Colonel Jack (Kurt Russell) and Action Jackson (James Spader) take in the atmosphere.
OK. Let’s get the opening confessions out of the way: I’m a Stargate SG-1 fan, and the last time I saw the feature was more than ten years ago, long before the series premièred. So, I won’t pretend I don’t see the series as the “real” version of the mythos, but I’ve tried to keep an open mind. [...]
Tags: 1990s, Action, Alexis Cruz, Brad Wright, Dean Devlin, Erick Avari, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Kurt Russell, Michael Shanks, Mili Avital, Richard Dean Anderson, Roland Emmerich, Science Fiction, Stargate
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101: New Girl in Town
Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols): New girl in town.
Special Agent Alvarez is found murdered, apparently the work of a serial killer she and the rest of the violent crimes unit (VCU) had been hunting. Her replacement is Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols), fresh from a stint as an analyst in Washington, DC. Locke was abducted when she was 10 years old and escaped after several months of captivity. It’s later revealed that the head of the VCU, Virgil “Web” Webster, was instrumental in getting her accepted to the FBI, because he thinks her childhood experience will be useful in catching serial offenders. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Adam Baldwin, Allan Kroeker, Crime, Howard Gordon, Jane Espenson, Katie Finneran, Mutant Enemy, Procedural, Rachel Nichols, The Inside, Tim Minear
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Slavoj admires a staircase.
According to the cover of Žižek!, Slovenian philosopher and psychologist Slavoj Žižek is “the Elvis of cultural theory,” and the film itself certainly seems to agree. Director Astra Taylor follows Žižek around the world (well, to Slovenia, New York, and Buenos Aires), as he lectures, gives interviews, and jokes around about his cultural theories. This is interspersed with graphics and archive footage, and with scenes of Žižek doing everyday things — talking with his son, eating dinner, buying DVDs.
And since Žižek is a charming man and fun to listen to, it’s rather an enjoyable journey, and the film manages some insights in his works. The problem is that there just isn’t enough time to fully explore or explain his ideas, and the film has an annoying tendency of leaving things unexplained so that it can cut to another clip of Žižek making jokes. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Astra Taylor, Cultural Theory, Documentary, Jacques Lacan, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Slavoj Žižek
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Esther, Anna, Johan: Objects in space
Two women, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), travel by train to a hotel in an unnamed foreign city along with Anna’s young son, Johan (Jörgen Lindström). Esther is dying and is left in the hotel room while Anna goes out to have sex with a waiter and Johan explores the hotel.
Like the two preceding films in Bergman’s “trilogy of faith” — Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light — The Silence is a series of failed communications, and continues the exploration of the search for meaning in a world where God is silent. So silent is he in this film that he is barely mentioned. A church is mentioned in passing as a cool place where Anna had sex with the waiter; the church in The Silence is a wholly corporeal place, devoid of grace, offering only bodily comfort. And like in Winter Light, the spectre of war hangs over The Silence: outside the train on their way to the city, they see lines and lines of tanks outside the window. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingmar Bergman, Ingrid Thulin, Jörgen Lindström, The Silence, Trilogy of Faith
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Thomas (Gunnar Björnstrand) and Märta (Ingrid Thulin).
A widowed priest, Thomas (Gunnar Björnstrand), has lost his faith in God. After a sermon, a fisherman, Jonas (Max von Sydow), comes to see him, troubled by his own lack of faith and anxious about the state of the world — he saw a news story saying the Chinese are brought up to hate us, and that they’ll soon have the bomb. Thomas speaks to Jonas and thinks he was able to help, but Jonas shoots himself soon after their conversation. Meanwhile, the local schoolteacher, Märta (Ingrid Thulin), is in love with Thomas, who either is unable to love her back or is at least unable to admit to himself that he loves her. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingmar Bergman, Ingrid Thulin, Max von Sydow, Trilogy of Faith, Winter Light
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Karin (Harriet Andersson) finds God.
A second-rate author, David (Gunnar Björnstrand), his son and daughter, Minus (Lars Passgård) and Karin (Harriet Andersson), and the daughter’s husband, Martin (Max von Sydow), are staying on an island. Karin is a latent schizophrenic who has just gotten back from hospital, while David has just returned from Switzerland, where he fled to write when Karin fell ill. On the island, Karin’s condition worsens; she wakes in the night and goes up to the attic, where she hears voices talking from behind the frayed wallpaper. They tell her to read her father’s diary, where she learns that her condition is incurable and that her father is disgusted to find himself studying her as a subject for his writing. Meanwhile, Minus tries and fails to connect with his father, and Martin grows ever more desperate at his inability to help Karin. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnar Björnstrand, Harriet Andersson, Ingmar Bergman, Lars Passgård, Max von Sydow, Through a Glass Darkly, Trilogy of Faith
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The comedy stylings of Lewis and Morse.
Series 1
The Dead of Jericho (6 January 1987)
Written by Anthony Minghella (based on Colin Dexter’s novel). Directed by Alastair Reid.
Morse (John Thaw) meets a woman, Ann Staveley (Gemma Jones), in his choir. When she’s found dead of an apparent suicide, Morse suspects murder and, with the help of Sergeant Lewis (Kevin Whately), sets out to prove it.
Like most Morses, the plot in this début tends toward meandering a bit and, really, that’s the way it should be. Thaw is fantastic, as usual, and Minghella’s script captures the melancholy of Dexter’s novels well. Reid’s directing does the job just fine, though the 16mm grain does grate a bit. It’s amazing they got their eye in so quick. [...]
Tags: 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Amanda Hillwood, Crime, Inspector Morse, ITV, John Thaw, Kevin Whately, Mystery, Procedural
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Cinema is the ultimate pervert art; it doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.
You know, I don't remember Melanie having a beard.
In the wonderfully titled Pervert’s Guide to Cinema Slovenian sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher Slavoj Žižek looks at cinema, represented by a great number of disparate films, through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Divided in three parts, the film uses a kind of stream-of-consciousness structure, flowing from one subject to the next seemingly on Žižek’s whim. Director Fiennes uses the clever conceit of having Žižek appear on the locations or replicas of sets of the films he discusses — when he discusses The Birds he’s in Bodega Bay, when he discusses Psycho he’s in Norman Bates’s cellar, et c. — furthering Žižek idea that cinema at its purest is concerned with elevating reality to the realm of the magical; Žižek makes himself into a character in the films he’s discussing, fictionalising himself. As Žižek says, the choice between the blue pill and the red pill, between fiction and reality, is a false dilemma — fiction is reality. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Film Theory, Jacques Lacan, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Slavoj Žižek, Sophie Fiennes
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Harriet (Sally Faulkner) learns that everyone is a critic. Even lesbian vampires.
Before proceeding, I want to warn you that this review contains spoilers for the ending. But this is the internet and you’re probably here to be spoiled, so:
Vampyres opens on a day-for-night shot of a Victorian Gothic country house, then zooms in on a window. Inside the house, we find two naked women in bed together. A man climbs the stairs outside their room, enters, and shoots them to death. You have to admire the efficiency of that opening; it tells us right away what kind of film we’re watching: Zoom and day-for-night? OK, it’s a 1970s British horror film. Naked lesbians? Ah! It’s a 1970s lesbian horror film. [...]
Tags: 1970s, Anulka Dziubinska, Brian Deacon, D. Daubeney, Harry Waxman, José Ramón Larraz, Lesbian Horror, LGBT, Marianne Morris, Michael Byrne, Sally Faulkner, Thomas Owen, Vampire, Vampyres
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