TrueGentleman

Not quite breaking news.

In my area, the round trip to travel to the nearest cinema still playing it would be almost as long as the movie's running time, while the ones near the local university, where one would think the natural audience would be found, are rotating through the dregs of the August releases. I have a feeling that SPvtW's national release was similarly misdirected.

At least SPvtW is remaining in selected theaters, where, one hopes, it will continue to draw good business per screen. This was, after all, the year of MacGruber and Jonah Hex, two films that were among the top five fastest yanked from cinemas (justifiably) of all time.

It must have been "unpublished" in last month's purge of the CHVC forum. You can always petition the mods for its restoration. Here's its Google cache meantime.

On the other hand, with Walking Dead's precedent for adapting a comics serial as a long-form television series, this may be better news than a conventional movie version - which Gaiman mentions Warner Bros. had also explored:
Now that Watchmen, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Lord of the Rings have finally seen movie versions to various degrees of critical and commercial success, is Sandman the last great geek property of the 20th century for Hollywood to redeem from Development Hell?

The 1968 original, of course.

Also:

Brazil

Blake's 7

Life of Brian

The Sopranos

The Third Man (which the excellent Miller's Crossing cribbed from shamelessly)

Twin Peaks ("How's Annie?")

Unfortunately, he's coming off a streak of underperforming movies: Youth in Revolt, Year One, and Paper Heart (the last one being a precious little indie flick that no-one saw). However much he's been hit by hipster backlash, the cinema owners are going to look at his track record if they're still deciding about keeping SPvtW in theaters. They're certainly not in my area.

C.f. similar sentiments in Sydney.

Meanwhile, the New York Times's video game critic has published a dissenting review of the film from his gaming perspective, lambasting it as "annoying, contrived and as emotionally meaningful as a chalupa" while the NYT's lead movie reviewer called it "the best video game movie ever." While the game reviewer admits he doesn't go to movies much, he seems pleased to have found mainstream entertainment that he can run down in order to build up contemporary video games: "The film also fails where today’s best video games succeed: in creating an emotional investment. {...} Today’s top game makers have learned an incredible amount from, and owe a great debt to, the storytelling vernacular of cinema. Perhaps it is time for the makers of 'video game movies' to catch up." (Ah well, it's a shame that a lot of critics have been reviewing videogame culture instead of the movie.)

Anyway, here's a mashup of the SPvtW trailer and Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Certainly, but this could be said of virtually any work in any medium if one tries hard enough (or just takes the easy route with critical sophistry like deconstruction). And there's nothing like a college seminar for making up hidden meanings.

The point is, Portal is the equivalent of an introductory text for this syllabus while all the other works are masterpieces. The instructor admitted that he considered more formally challenging games but decided on this one because it would be easier to receive permission to teach.

Leaving aside the school of reader response criticism, the greatest literary works are open to multiple interpretations and invite re-readings even if their narratives are technically closed and linear. A few writers are daring enough to explore non-linear and open narratives - e.g. Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch or the Oulipo group's experiments - but their works are formally just a level or two above the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series. The aesthetic advantage novels have in requiring concentrated imaginative effort from their readers turns out to be a significant obstacle in this goal.

For videogames, as Solos points out, interactivity really is the medium's message. They can pull off open and non-linear narratives more easily than any of the other lively arts if their creators set out with this in mind. Valve, however, specializes in plots on rails - sometimes literally - despite the polish they devote to gameplay mechanics and world-building. Even a character as striking as GLaDOS or a setting as atmospherically rich as the Aperture Science Enrichment Center can take a game only so far when the challenges are presented in a strict sequence with only one or two ways to beat each puzzle.

Although Portal is unquestionably one of the best games of all time, and one of the most hilarious, too, the Wabash instructor could just as easily have assigned, say, Philip K. Dick's UBIK to explore the theme of the self and everyday life in a science-fiction setting. (I don't see any mention in his blog post of the issue of Chell's identity and GLaDOS's allusions to Enrichment Center androids - that's an intriguing philosophical element but, ultimately, not significant to the gameplay.) Admittedly, he wanted to expose his non-gamer colleagues to a thoughtful videogame, which Portal definitely is, in order to accustom them to the medium. While they've conceded the videogame "could provoke thoughtful reflection and vigorous conversation", those are some rather soft expectations.

Perhaps for the advance course he can move them up to Going Rogue for a proper intellectual challenge.

Hamlet might make an interesting videogame if the game mechanics factored in multiple outcomes while leaving the possibility of losing the game if Claudius turns out to be innocent after all (or maybe simply accumulating penalties for Hamlet killing the wrong characters along the way). Hamlet as a sandbox game, however, would stink.

That said, I disagree with the syllabus's choice of videogame. While plenty of games challenge the players with puzzles, if the narrative itself is linear, it doesn't count as "thought-provoking" for undergraduate credit. For this course to work, Wabash's professor needs to decide on a game with (a) an array of choices for the player and (b) multiple outcomes determined by them.

Besides, how much philosophical exploration can there be when an independent panel of ethicists has absolved the Enrichment Center, Aperture Science employees, and all test subjects for all moral responsibility for the Companion Cube euthanizing process?

Edgar Wright makes consistently excellent choices for his soundtracks (even if on the CDs dialogue from the movies tends to overlap the tracks). And O'Malley has his own lo-fi solo project, Kupek, to bolster his indie rock cred. Their collaboration on the SPvtW soundtrack makes for good fun.

While I'll inevitably Netflix the final season, I'll be fast-forwarding through all the flashsideways scenes.

This is colloquially known in some circles as "getting Joss'ed"

Or as Nathan Fillion observed, "People are always surprised when Joss kills characters. Come on man, look at the history; that guy loves to kill people! He loves to get you invested, he loves to get you all worked up, and rootin' for people, and then bam."

Personally, I prefer a touch of ruthlessness in my hack auteurs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Agonus Total gross for Pilgrim so far is a over 21 million worldwide (1 million foreign? Ouch.) after 2 weeks.

SPvtW hasn’t received a proper foreign opening yet – it’s barely in release in Australia/New Zealand. At this point, August 25th, when it’s released in the UK, is the make-or-break date. Edgar Wright’s films have always done better in England than America. In the case of his previous one, Hot Fuzz, the UK box office was almost twice as much as the US.

The movie will then see rolling openings across Europe for the next two months (no word on Asia). Maybe it will wind up big in Japan…

Zero penetration in the contradiction in terms that is "the mainstream geekosphere"? Production news for SPvtW blanketed the moviegeek sites from AintItCool and CHUD on down since it was greenlit; the final cut received a standing ovation at Comic Con last month; and O'Malley has won both the Eisner and Harvey awards, among many cartoonists' accolades, for his graphic novel series (which has made best-of lists from Wizard to Entertainment Weekly). If anything, over-saturation is more likely to have contributed to the movie's disappointment at the box office.

In the case of the extensive preview screenings, Universal may have been hoping to create a word-of-mouth groundswell going into the opening weekend. Instead, this strategy seems to have backfired by giving the movie away for free to its core audience, who then either outright scared off their mainstream friends by geeking out over it or were simply unable to convey their enthusiasm when describing this unusual film. Certainly in my own case, I haven't been able to rouse my peers' interest and have found myself stumbling when trying to pitch it to them (really, what is a videogame-magic-realism-twentysomething-Canadian-slacker-indie-rock-romance movie anyway?). The Expendables's "beefsteak and bullets" formula is much easier to get across when deciding on movie night.

It's entirely possible, of course, that SPvtW will put to rest the received idea that geek culture has truly penetrated the mainstream. The overlap on the Venn diagram between the two may turn out to be much slimmer than expected.

How about the extra alliteration of "beefsteak and bullets"?