Nik Gregory » Flawed

Repo Men Again

nikgregory — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:48:37 +0000

My wife put on Repo Men on TV last night. I have to stand by my original review, it’s a good action movie but the Deus Ex Machina ending is utter bullshit. I don’t have a problem with a twist ending, but I have a problem when I feel I’ve been cheated out of a decent ending.

The final sex scene appears contrived solely to boost the MPAA rating. Alas, at least the action is decent enough.

Video Games are already art, Mr Ebert

nikgregory — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:23:04 +0000

Video Games are art, but apparently Roger Ebert cannot get with the times on this. He first made his opinion clear in 2005, and recently just cemented the evidence of his ignorance this April [see here]. For those out of the loop, Ebert is a world renowned film critic, he also isn’t a gamer and I question whether he’s ever played enough games to be eligible to comment (IE a single game, ever). He’s as ignorant of the medium as middle-america right-wing psycho-moms. If you’ve never played, you have no clue. If you’ve never seen a movie, you have no clue. If you’ve never read a book, you’re likely illiterate (or should be legally considered it) and have no clue. You cannot justifiably comment on something if you’ve never experienced it, Ebert of all people should know this.

If Ebert had sat down and played a good half-dozen of some of the highest rated games of all time and still say they’re not art, then at least he’s not ignorant and I could at least respect him for his beliefs. Right now, he’s garnered zero respect from me. In fact, due to his position as a respected reviewer he’s lost a significant amount of respect. I’d attest that many things are not art, however I’m not an indignant enough person to proclaim my opinion without something to base an opinion on. I give a movie review after I watch the movie, not before and Ebert is reviewing gaming as a whole based on a preconception.

Granted the majority of big-title games care little about telling an actual story (yes Halo, Half-life, you can stand up and be noted as having meaningful story) and merely use it to string together great action scenes. But then I saw the Matrix 2, and I fail to see a valid difference except that video games are more engaging as an art form. Read my review of Repo Men, it was little more than action scenes stitched together by sex scenes and poor plot. Has Ebert never seen a western? They’re little more than action scenes stitched together by modest story, yet they rank as some of the best films in the world. I would personally list The Dollars Trilogy amongst my favorite movies ever, yet by Eberts standard for ‘art’ they certainly are not.

Ebert seems overtly concerned about the aspect of ‘winning’ in a game as a disqualifying aspect for being art. At the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly I can tell you I won. At the end of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi I fucking won, and any Star Wars fan will tell you the same. At 8 years old, I beat the Empire, I won. I experienced the same feeling at the end of Avatar when Stephen Lang finally went down, similarly at the end of Alien when Ripley flushed the alien out of the airlock.

He condemns Braid for telling a story between the games level because it “exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.” To which I would respond Hemingways six-word novel (For sale: baby shoes, never used.), which exhibits prose on the level of a rather terse fortune cookie. If you want to talk about story, look at least at Halo, but please look at something by BioWare like Dragon Age or Mass Effect, or Knights of the Old Republic.

However, if we really want to talk about story let’s talk one of the true classics. Grim Fandango for one is a great story, but most gamers already know this for fact. Monkey Island or Space Quest, Kings Quest, the Legend of Kyrandia perhaps? No, I loved the story to all those games, however there’s one that will have the respect of every sci-fi fan with me on this, and they likely won’t know why until I explain why. The Dig.

What? That’s a game? Yes I can hear you. The Dig was the creation of Steven Spielberg, he came up with the story and realized it would take decades before he’d even be able to consider making it (hopefully he’s considering it now, it would be phenomenal) as a film. However, he was a regular to Lucas’ ranch and one of his favorite stops was Lucas Arts to see what they were developing, yet one time he came with an ulterior motive: The Dig.

There was another person at work on the game who commands great respect in their own right for their artistic works. None other than the creator of the Ender saga, Orson Scott Card who was brought on to flesh out the story and turn a film script into a video game script (the difference here is the typical 2 hour movie vs the typical 10 hour game). Simply put, as many Card fans will know, it was amazing. For those interested it is still available in Lucas Arts classics bundle (with Full Throttle, Sam & Max and Grim Fandango – their great story quadruplets). So let’s leave story out of this shall we Mr Ebert? No derisive comments please or I’ll make more too.

Beyond story, and getting past Ebert’s fascination with ‘winning’ in games, what else is there to quantify as art? I don’t much feel like playing a words game, as neither does Ebert. You can argue what qualifies as art from dawn till dusk, however this is simply what Ebert is doing. He’s manipulating what he believes categorizes something as art to fit his own ideals.

Ebert is arguing the definition of art, or more simply asserting that video games will never, ever be art. As David Novitz said, these arguments are usually more about societal values than whether something is a piece of art or not.

“Why aren’t gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? . . . Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, “I’m studying a great form of art?” Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.”

Why, Mr Ebert, thank you for clearly displaying how abstract you are from the current times. I grew up playing video games with my parents, they never had a single problem with it. In fact I have many fond memories of playing Age of Empires with my dad. As I’m writing this my wife is eloquently displaying my point by rocking out on Guitar Hero to a Weezer song. My co-workers? Video games are a main avenue of conversation, as frequently (if not more frequently) brought up than movies. Also despite not having children, it doesn’t take any skill whatsoever in foresight to know that my children are going to be in a world much more socially accepting of games than this one currently is.

Do I need to justify to these people that I’m studying a great art form? No, I don’t need to justify anything to them, because they already know. Anyone who played through Final Fantasy 7 knows it triggered emotions just as good, if not better than many movies, when Aerith died. Is that not art? It is to me, and I know to all my generation it is.

Review: Repo Men

nikgregory — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:06:01 +0000

This was a strange one, not because of the whole sci-fi artificial organ repossession deal, which I can buy into. This was strange because of a random mixture of sex, gore and an odd twist for the end. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker made this an interesting action movie, but it was really little more than a good action movie.

What I liked (caveat edition):

Law and Whitaker made this fun, and funny, to watch. They played their parts well and were passable as life-long friends, which is what made the twist at the end believable – not worthwhile, just believable.

The story overall was good, however it seemed like there was a lot of avenues the story could have gone down that would have been potentially better, but didn’t. The story kept hitting intersections, but it never seemed apparent why it never took a left or a right. It had a plot similar to ‘The Island’ with Ewan McGregor, however it had neither Ewan McGregor nor a meaningful ending, just a bizarre twist that left me wondering why I’d bothered to sit through the last forty-minutes of action.

The action scenes were a Matrix part 2/3 affair with choreography spewing from every knife hole, which consumed a lot of time that could have been used for either more comedy or more story.

What I disliked (unfortunately without caveats):

A hallmark of a bad writer is the reliance on a Deus Ex Machina to resolve a plot problem. We’re not talking Lord of the Flies usage where the entire novel revolves around them trying to get rescued and right at the crucial time they do, I don’t have a problem with that – if anything it’s less of a plot twist because it’s now frequently expected and can in fact be a rewarding end. No, I’m talking this is a War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise movie) ending where there’s no mention of disease and suddenly all the aliens die from influenza like they’re a bunch of Red Indians dragged into a Pox House, it was sheer irrelevance. Aside from a pre-mention or two of the literal ‘machina’ the twist comes out of nowhere.

I suppose the writer didn’t want a happy ending to the movie, which I can give kudos for but his form of a tragic ending was as irrelevant to the story of the movie as if the movie Bambi had ended with the faun taking a shell of buckshot to the chest. As many can probably assume, the twist was so horrendous that I’m actually taking personal offence to it because not only I could have done better, but anyone reading this could have done better and a monkey hammering away gibberish on a typewriter would have produced a more sensible ending.

Another thing that bugged me was the random sex scenes that appeared to have been contrived solely for the purpose of upping the rating. Yes we get it the bible thumping rednecks at the MPAA can’t stand to see sex and violence in the same movie let alone the same scene, and a sure fire way to get the highest rating is to put sex and violence in the same scene. Of course instead of killing someone and harvesting their organs while they’re rolling around with a hooker in the sack to offend the MPAA, the writer and director for Repo Men decided it would be excellent to have the main characters have a sadomasochistic sex scene while they cut each other open for no apparent reason other than one of the many plot adventures of “well we can’t think of anything else” that this movie frequently took.

The plot is akin to The Lord of the Rings without the ring, they just travel to Mordor to say “fuck you viewer!” It’s good until you realize Frodo left the ring at home because he just wanted some alone time with Sam in a scary place to see if the whole fear-of-death aspect would help get them to share a sleeping bag like it seems to every woman in any Hollywood movie.

Overall: 6/10

This is my lowest review score so far for two reasons. One is because I usually can tell if a movie is going to suck out loud, and this one didn’t suck out loud per se, it just sucks in hindsight. The other reason is that while it was an entertaining romp with multiple action scenes that were enjoying to watch and Whitaker’s believability is the only reason this didn’t get a 4/10 for pissing me off.

A review is supposed to be impartial, and I am. I don’t judge on film makers past works, their reputation or anything I judge a movie solely on its merits and I believe I’d have been less annoyed if you’d have strung every pun against the British from every Simpson’s and Family Guy episode together – in fact I can see myself giving it a far higher review than this movie. Standing on its own merits, if they’d have followed their non-sense policy of ignoring all the crossroads available to them in plot development and followed it to its logical conclusion it would have probably hit around a 7.5/10, but after skipping many logical plot alternatives they decide to take a completely illogical plot twist at the end in a Douche Ex Machina move by the writer and director.

If I can recommend anything to anyone on this movie is that it likely isn’t worth the price to rent it from blockbuster, and probably isn’t worth wasting one of your Netflix discs on when you could get an actual good movie.

Judgement: Wait till it hits TV or a movie channel.

Game Review: Borderlands

nikgregory — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:57:29 +0000

I have hard feelings on this game, because I personally liked it very much, however despite being a great game and fun to play, it pissed me off beyond acceptability.

Here’s what I liked:

The game was fun to play. The graphics had a cartoonized edge that helped with the humour in the game. The non-serious environment really made it a delight to play the game, despite its flaws.

However, this is a game exclusively about its weapons. Most FPS games have, possibly, a dozen weapons, maybe you’ll get a thirty or so and a handful of mods thrown in if you’re lucky. The last I heard, Borderlands has over 17 million unique weapons, and likely counting with DLC. My favourite pistol in the game, for instance, managed a quad-shot. It may sound somewhat pointless to some that the game features so many weapons, or why people would care. However, it’s sort of like Pokemon, where the last iteration I played (Diamond) had almost five-hundred.

Now what I disliked:

I’m a man who when he says no, he means no. Borderlands however has no ability to understand the ‘no’ button included in its mission selection menus. When you get prompted with a new story mission, you have the option of choosing to take it or refusing, however if you refuse it you’re given the mission anyway. Not only is this frustrating, but it also introduces all the mission orientated bad guys to the level, most of which are way overpowered.

The games inability to recognize no only enhances another problem, which is that every boss is wholly overpowered. By the time side missions are introduced you’re fighting tooth and nail to win a fight. One mission I had to climb a rock where the enemy couldn’t reach me, jump up and down so their snipers couldn’t target me and pick them off. I was a sniper-orientated character, with the best sniper available and a damage bonus and I had to hit my opponents with several head shots to kill.

This wouldn’t have been such a problem if you could say no to the story and take some of the side missions. However you can’t, you have the choice of superpowered story bad guys running amok, or story bad guys and side-mission bad guys.

It seriously hurts the games experience when you can’t beat a single mission without retrying it a half-dozen times to whittle down the enemies, because thankfully most of your opponents don’t respawn. Most.

Overall: 7/10

This game had major potential, and as an avid gamer I can play it. However, most people won’t be able to play this game past the 10th mission without hitting the frustration wall. I’m a Strategy and RPG fan, the frustration wall is usually so far behind me when playing a game that I’ve ceased noticing it. However, I can’t in all good faith recommend a game that’s bat-shit crazy and takes no’s as yes’ so it can pit you against demonic bosses with ridiculous health, shields and a superior weapon. It also seriously doesn’t help that the grenades aren’t particularly useful compared to other games.

The good can outweigh the bad, however when you have so many noticeable flaws it might be worth reconsidering some parts. I’m unsure if Borderlands had some publisher pressure to release or what, but someone dropped the ball and released a game with great potential marred by so many flaws.

Judgement: Rent it, if you must.