Charles Lieurance is an incredibly gifted writer and cultural critic, something that stems in part from his breathtaking intellect but equally in part from his intoxicatingly rich life.
I’d almost forgotten about this, but he asked me to list 5 desert island movies. My response:
Question: Why are we so obsessed with deserted islands? Answer: Because no one wants to be alone.
If I could take 5 movies with me (and none of them could be porn), I’d choose the following:
1) Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998)
I love this movie because it evokes some of the same multilinear feelings that I experience when playing a well-crafted video game. In a game, you often stop and save your progress at a specific point in the timeline. Then you can race forward, trying various tactics and exploring new areas. And if you die or if the exploration cost you too much in terms of resources, you can back up to the point in timeline where you saved then proceed again. Often, after backing up, you move forward optimally. (A side effect of the unique way players experience their own narrative in games.) As a result, when you get to the end of the game, you’ve got this long linear experience, right? Your memories of what happened from beginning to end. Except that what’s missing are all the moments when you advanced, then died and backed up to the point at which you saved your progress. Those are like moments that happened, but didn’t happen. At the end of the game, your memories cannot be untangled; you remembered the things that happened in the actual playthrough timeline and things that happened in the discarded, aborted side timelines. Run Lola Run left me feeling the same way. And I have an intense and inexplicable love for German women like Franka Potente.
2) Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
I love the nihilistic ethos of this film. And I love the music. Brando here is one of the great villains. I like the original version btw. The Redux version is too long and contains some side threads that I found largely irrelevant.
3) The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
There’s something about small, dying towns that I love. If I ever survive an apocalypse, I will probably choose to live in a small town rather than an urban center. Growing up, my great grandparents had a farm in Moulton, Texas, and it was already dying back then in the 1970s, so I’ve got an innate longing for the spirit of such places. So much happens in this movie, and the scenes and dialogue imply a lot more…years and generations of lives lived with partial success and the accompanying regrets.
4) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
It’s a cliché for someone of my generation and tastes to choose this movie, but it’s so undeniably great, such an obvious labor of love and vision, that I’ve got to include it. Roy Batty has some of the best lines ever delivered. There’s some lesson in here about a director or screenwriting elevating an actor. Half the movie’s appeal is the vision style and graphic design, but really all the elements serve the whole in a way that’s rarely accomplished. As a 16 year old boy, I wanted a Pris replicant of my very own. I’m actually torn on which version I’d take; I know what I’m supposed to say, but I feel there are strengths to both the original and the director’s cut. From the director’s cut, the darker, more ambiguous ending is a complete win for me. From the original, the monologue adds a lot of depth to Deckard’s character. Sure, we all loved the director’s cut *after* gaining familiarity with the original, but I have to ask: Would the more stripped down version have been as powerful without the context provided by the original, heavier-handed version? I hate it that Ridley Scott feels like he’s answered the question definitively about whether Deckard was a replicant, because—first—the director’s intentions are far less important to me than the audience interpretation, and—second—because the ambiguity and doubt that the character felt about the possibility of false memories, of not being *real* were more powerful than a definitive answer either way.
5) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
I’ll admit that I don’t normally like movies made before the 1970s. People like Scorsese, Cimino and Coppola brought so much grittiness and depth to film that it’s hard for me to go backward. Casablanca is one of the exceptions. I love fiction that focuses on a specific point in time, when a mixture of events and pressures up the ante for all the standard elements of human life. The love story still chokes me up.
I love Kubrick, and The Shining might have made the list except that if I had to watch it over and over on an island, the nights would be unpleasantly unnerving and I’d probably end up hanging myself from a coconut tree with a rope woven from my hair. And—for the mood, cinematography and sex—I might have included Eyes Wide Shut if, you know, anyone actually got properly laid in the movie.
Link to the original ILUVVIDEO post (and more responses to the desert movies question by others) at http://www.iluvvideo.com/content/view/63/10/
Since this thread appeared at NeoGAF, it’s gotten cooler by the day. It’s “…a theoretical series of video game releases for the more serious collectors (à la The Criterion Collection).” My favorite is the sepia-toned Bioshock box art. Brilliant thread. (Someone collected them all on one page.)
My own humble mockup.
KarmaStar App Store link.
Such a great experience, putting the project together. Everyone in games should make at least one mobile game.
Note: As of today, KarmaStar world record is 44. (Use wildcards, go for “the star” and try to stack up bonus scores.) And medium difficulty is more fun.
As a side project, I’ve been working with a small team on a card/board-style iPhone game called KarmaStar. The game is done and should be up on the App Store in a couple of weeks. (This is not my primary project with Arkane Studios…it’s something that I wrote up and we tested locally using marked up Uno cards and dice. I love the iPhone.)
I have a couple of things to say about this project:
First, it was completely rejuvenating to work with a tiny team on a small-budget project. I envy casual game developers in many ways. I had a really good time working with the people involved (directly or in support roles). I got to do a bit of everything, which reminded me of my skills (and deficiencies) and helped me sharpen up some.
Second, my respect for people who design strategy games just went through the roof. I mean, through the roof. Most of the time, we all just iterate on existing game rules. For KarmaStar, I didn’t start off using the (excellent, smart) design method of “taking an existing game and modifying it.” The structure was worked out without modeling it on something else exactly, mostly as a challenge. It was hard, even though this is a simple game.
http://fingergaming.com/2009/03/majesco-announces-karma-star-for-iphone/
I hope to post more on the project later…process, what-went-right/wrong, development quirks, details, etc.
I just saw Watchmen (twice) and liked the movie, though it wasn’t perfect.
My observations:
Much of what I loved about the graphic novel was preserved, even with the changes. The heroes-as-flawed-people, lots of thematic points, etc.
Some of the characters are actually better in the film than they are in the graphic novel, which surprised me. Nite Owl II, Silk Spectre II, Rorschach…all great. The character-expansions for the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach, et al were just exceedingly well done.
Visually, the movie was gorgeous. And the music, to my surprise, added tremendously. It felt appropriate to the medium.
Halfway to three-fourths of the way through the movie I was giddy: “This can’t be this good…” The last quarter of the movie and the ending, which were weaker and rushed, brought me down some.
If you haven’t read the original, you should. The Watchmen graphic novel is brilliant like nothing else: Unlike most fiction, the world moves in a disturbingly real way, sometimes driven by emotional reactions, sometimes by chance. It’s subversive to its own genre and challenging (like deeper vs shallower music). It’s a fascinating “alt US history” due to one major imagined change: The development of a superhero during the Manhattan project that leads to US dominance, Nixon escaping his shame and defeat, victory in Viet Nam, and less humility for the US government. It’s a comic focused on the interpersonal conflict between (and within) characters. The book can be read as an argument against cowboy-mentality and unshakable faith in heroes, giving it a lot of theme to chew over. It handles sex and relationship doubt better than most (non-graphic) novels. The elements of the story and the artwork itself are massively over-connected and sort of internally hyperlinked in a way that requires multiple readings. The characters are much more complex than those in most comics (and even in most novels). Watchmen contains a story-inside-the-story that people are affected by years later and still discuss.
It’s just great and deserves to be read several times.
Zen Bound is an almost unbelievably innovative and interesting game.
Basically, you wrap a cord around a wooden object, which paints the object. Sessions feel half like a game and half like some kind of soothing knot-to-untie.
This game has vision; all the elements feel unified in a monastic, gothic way. But the game is not just cohesive aesthetically…the entire thing feels polished in a way that you rarely encounter. That alone adds some pleasurable quality to interacting with the game.
Part game, part toy, part puzzle, part relaxation fetish. I love this Zen Bound.
(Note: Jordan, this game is for you.)
I’ve been listening to Ivana XL’s EP and album (both of which seem to be called Ivana XL, but whatever). If you like creaky, quirky, semi-folksy stuff like Mazzy Star (from the 90’s), you’ll probably like this.
I have a love/hate relationship with puzzle games. (I’d rather engage with something that allows me to play expressively.) But I love strategy games and a few puzzle games.
Subway gameplay involves moving pieces around to open a path to the goal. Each level (01-91) gets increasingly difficult.
The part I find fascinating is my approach to solving the puzzles. There’s an interesting mental shift, where I “let go” of trying to solve the puzzle overall, focus on which moves I *can* currently make, take into account what has to happen (in the final move) to solve the puzzle, and *try to solve faster*. I find that I’m far more successful when I make this series of mental shifts than when I try to approach the puzzle as a whole, or in a systemic way. Hard to articulate.
Subway also has a super clean art style and implementation that I love.
This game has made it onto my list of iPhone favorites, along with Galcon and Drop7.
Zack Booth Simpson gave an interesting lecture last week at the Blanton Museum on UT campus…the Evolution of Evolutionary Design. I met Zack when he was technical director at Origin Systems, years ago. Since, he’s taken himself away from commercial games and into scientifically-influenced art and molecular biology, among other things.
At the talk, I got to see Richard Garriot for the first time since his return from space. (I got to say, “Welcome back to Earth, man.” Not something I get to say to friends often, except in the cases where I mean it figuratively, after someone has gone off on a delusional tirade or a severe bender.) We touched briefly on Ultima IV–due to recent commentary across the ‘net–which always gives me a thrill, imaging what a modern Ultima IV would look like.
The subject(s) of the Blanton talk were informed by Zack’s position at the nexus of science, art and bricklaying and the speech was excellent; catch it via video or repeat performance if you can. Pleasing nerds of all flavors, Zack covered, no lie:
Ornamentation, history of
Algorithms, genetic
Craftsmanship, death and rebirth of
Art, definition of
Culture, development of
DNA nano-technology
Robots, self-replicating
Affine programs
Whale sperm
Suburban architecture
Cell phone towers
Life, meaning of
Toward the end of the talk, Zack showed off some of his new procedural tech-tool-toys, which always fire the imagination.
(Technically, this post is a day or two late, but had I completed it the day following Zack’s speech–as I planned–the subject line would be accurate.)
After hearing about them for a while, I finally started listening to Glasvegas this week. One part melodrama, one part grit, I love their music entirely.
I’m playtesting my iPhone game a lot right now, near the end of the project. (This is, more or less, a regenerative side project I’m doing with a handful of other people, while working on longer-term first-person RPG-style stuff with Arkane Studios.) Out of many, many great qualities, one of the best things about the iPhone/iPod is that you can general pop on headphones, turn off the game’s music, and play to your own soundtrack. Not completely novel, but better supported than on any prior platform.
My favorite music while playing my iPhone game: Dan Deacon, Cut Copy and–more specifically–the Teenagers’ remake of a song by Vampire Weekend. Glasvegas works well too, it turns out.
