Isabelle (Ovidie) and the winged spirit (Sabine Lenoël)
Unlike Jess Franco, who — as regular readers will remember — has regressed as director, Jean Rollin seems to have quietly grown into an accomplished auteur. His penultimate film, La nuit des horloges (“the night of the clocks”), is an artistic tour de force and by far the best Rollin film I’ve seen. Indeed, by far the best exploitation film I’ve seen in a long while.
There's no tool in the crime-fighter's arsenal as important as a good iconic pose.
There is a truism in video game fandom and criticism that games based on movie and comic book licenses tend to be bad. Some a little bit bad and some mind-bogglingly bad (ET and Superman 64 being the classic examples). Trying to disprove this theory, Rocksteady teamed up with Batman: The Animated Series (among others) writer Paul Dini to create Batman: Arkham Asylum. According to Guinness, who certified Arkham Asylum “the most critically acclaimed super hero game ever”, they succeeded.
Safety first, that's my motto.
The first Skate, released in 2007, was a revelation — it turned the skateboarding game on its head, reinvigorating a genre that seemed doomed to consist of nothing more than increasingly tired Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater sequels. The analogue controls of Skate were fluid and intuitive and, combined with the open game-world, helped propel the game to the top of both sales charts and critics’ year-end lists.
Here, then, is its sequel. And, let’s get it out of the way early: it is a good game. But it’s also basically the same game. There are new features, of course, which range from the good — footplants — to the atrocious — walking. This latter surprised me, since you’d think Black Box would have learned from THPS‘s continually poor off-the-board controls that an engine designed for skating will never be good at walking.
Rorschach works out some of his issues with women.
Released in two parts — March and July 2009, respectively — The End is Nigh is something of a prequel to the Watchmen film and comic book series, set in 1972, before the passing of the Keane Act that outlawed masked vigilantes.
In the first part, Rorschach (voiced by Jackie Earle Haley) and Daniel “Nite Owl” Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) set out to quell a prison riot at Sing Sing. The riot turns out to be a diversion for the escape of crime lord The Underboss, and our caped crusaders end up fighting their way through criminals and cops alike trying to find him, and possibly stop the plot to kill two reporters at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The second part concerns the kidnapping of a girl named Violet Greene, and finds Nite Owl and Rorscach chasing Twilight Lady through strip clubs and brothels, fighting gangs, gimps, and dominatrices. (The voice acting of the gimps and doms is quite funny, especially the ball-gagged ones.)
Yeah. That's a lot of Helvetica.
I’ve studied design — I have a degree and everything — I’ve dabbled with typography (and with lettering), and, beneath my veneer of post-modernism and cyborg feminism, I’m a modernist at heart. So, I’ve always had a soft spot for Helvetica, the quintessential modernist typeface. Still, while its history and ubiquity are undoubtedly interesting, I wouldn’t have thought any typeface, even Helvetica, could generate enough material to fill a feature-length documentary.
My mother always talked to me a lot about the sky. She liked to watch the clouds in the day, and the stars at night. Especially the stars. We would play a game sometimes, a game called “What’s beyond the sky?” We would imagine darkness, or a blinding light, or something else that we didn’t know how to name.
John (Eric Close) shows that magic is all about misdirection. Misdirection and telekinesis.
In 1947, a military balloon, part of the top secret “Project Mogul”, crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Out of this single incident grew an entire mythos of alien crash landings and abductions. And it’s around this incident that writer Leslie Bohem builds his generation spanning alien contact saga, Taken.
John Oldman (David Lee Smith) ponders.
What if a man from the Upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?
What would he be like? Mortality is one of the defining characteristics of humanity; what would a man be like who will not die? A man who is fourteen thousand years old: he’s not only seen friends and lovers, wives and children come and go, he remembers the end of the last glacial period. He has, literally, forgotten more than any of us will ever know.
Jerome Bixby (1923–1998) was a science fiction writer, most famous for a handful of classic Trek episodes, including “Mirror, Mirror” which introduced the mirror universe, and for co-writing the story for Fantastic Voyage (1966). He began his last work, a screenplay called The Man from Earth, in the 1960s and finished it on his deathbed. Forty years is a long time to spend on a script, but it pays off in one of the most intelligent science fiction films I’ve seen.
One of Van Gogh's lesser known works: Crazy Woman and Sunflowers.
There are good directors, there are bad directors, and then there are directors like Jesús “Jess” Franco. I like Franco, but the man is a cipher: his œuvre consists of a great many bad films and a few gems; he seems often to be technically incompetent, but he was good enough to A.D. for Orson Welles; his films are often blatantly pornographic and shamelessly exploitative, but a very few of them are honest-to-god works of genius. You can watch ten of his movies, and nine of them will be awful. Then, just when you’re about to dismiss him as a hack, the tenth will be a weird, surreal, seemingly-accidental masterpiece. I honestly can’t decide if he’s just a hack who happened to make a few good films from some twisted law of probability or if he’s a good director who only occasionally cared enough, was given enough money, and free enough reins to put in some effort. My relationship with Franco’s work is a constant search for those aberrations in his œuvre.
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.
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.
