Sam Kahn’s glorious return to the blogosphere
And Yet It Moves is an indie freeware game made by students in Vienna in 6 months using Torque Game Builder. It was a winner at the 2007 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase. It’s a platformer in which you can rotate the whole world, and physics respond accordingly, which is really awesome, but it’s only two levels long. I hope the developers expand it into a full game.
I found this gem on BoingBoing and thought I should share it. It’s a scene excerpt from Pulp Fiction reinterpreted as animated typography. It was made by Jarratt Moody, a student at the Savanna College of Art and Design. I’m assuming it was a Motion Graphics homework exercise, but it’s really brilliant work.
The German poster for Crank. It’s cooler than the American one.
In Crank, Jason Statham plays a hitman that has been poisoned with a fast acting toxin that he can counteract only by keeping his adrenaline levels high. If he slows down, he dies, and must keep moving to get his revenge before his heart stops.
The concept is really great, and should make for a non-stop action thrill ride, but unforuntately Crank wastes the opportunity. The movie actually manages to feel slow at times. It tries to make up for its lack of narrative momentum with shaky hand-held camerawork and a flashy visual style that isn’t especially well executed. The whole thing feels amateurish.
Crank has a couple of highlights, such as the hospital sequence and a scene featuring an exploding bird, but overall it’s not worth the time.
I still don’t understand why we never got any cool video game commercials stateside in the 80s and 90s. Here’s a commercial for Metroid II that I found on Kotaku.
Not as awesome as the Japanese commercial for Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but still cool stuff.
Overall, I’m pleased with tonight’s results. I actually applauded with Martin Scorcese finally won his first Oscar — a long delayed and much deserved honor. Out of the Best Picture nominees I’ve seen (all except for Letters from Iwo Jima), The Departed stood out, so I’m glad it won, and I’m sure that the four out of ten people that voted in my Best Picture poll are, too. Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, and Alan Arkin all deserved their Oscars as well.
My only real disappointment was that Children of Men was completely shut out. As happy as I am with all the awards that Pan’s Labyrinth won, Emmanuel Lubezki should have gotten the Oscar for Cinematography. I was also mildly disappointed that Rinko Kikuchi didn’t win in the Supporting Actress category for her fantastic role in Babel.
I always love the clip montages during the ceremony, and the highlight of the show for me tonight was the 50 Best Foreign Language Films montage. I’ll post the clip here once I find it on YouTube.
Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for a new poll. With three days left before the Oscars, I’ve decided to ask, “Which film will win best picture?”
Results of the previous poll after the jump.
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006. Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) was a member of the White Rose, a non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany, and as the film’s title tells us, it literally recounts the final days of her life, from just before her capture, through her interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, her show trial, and finally her execution.
This film isn’t classified as a biopic, but it’s emblematic of what I consider the best kind of biopic. Rather than covering the subject’s entire life, the movie selects one particularly interesting episode and creates sharp focus. We see Sophie’s idealism, convictions, and bravery more sharply thanks to the narrow scope of the film’s narrative, while being treated to great drama.
One highlight of the movie was the character of Inspector Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held), who interrogates Scholl. In him we see a subtle transformation as he becomes increasingly sympathetic to Sophie and her ideals, but remains too cowardly to break from the status quo. We also see some looks of regret in the faces of onlookers in the fantastic trial scene, but of course, they take no action. To sum up, I find the movie more interesting for it’s portrayal of Germans in Nazi Germany than for the story of Sophie Scholl.
Following my standard format for these Oscar season reviews, I’ll first list the six nominations for The Queen:
When watching The Queen, I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing something by not being British. Maybe it was just me, but I think that to really appreciate the movie you need a deeper understanding of British politics, culture, tradition, and ettiquette that the general American audience — sadly including myself in this case — just doesn’t have. There were times when a couple people in the audience were laughing and I didn’t really get why and felt slightly embarrased. I get that the movie portrays the royal family as stymied by tradition, and how that creates conflict for Queen Elizabeth, and I know that there’s a subtext of class relations and the cult of celebrity, but I don’t see much beyond that. I don’t quite understand just why this movie would receive a Best Picture nomination.
I didn’t find the movie terribly compelling, but it definitely is a great character study of Queen Elizabeth, by virtue of a stellar performance by Helen Mirren. I also particularly liked James Cromwell as Phillip.
I strongly doubt the movie would take Best Picture, mostly because of how small it feels. Something about it made me feel like it was made for television, and I don’t mean the inclusion of all the TV news footage. Overall it’s an excellent movie, but it’s not quite my cup of tea.
On a sidenote: I also saw Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut this week, but I haven’t quite finished gathering my thoughts for a review. I’m not sure if I’m going to write one now, or wait until I’ve had a chance to see the theatrical cut again, since last time I saw it was several years ago.
Portrait of Ruin is the latest Castlevania game for the Nintendo DS. It follows closely in the footsteps of all the Castlevania games since Symphony of the Night, the first in the series to introduce Metroid-like exploration adventure gameplay.
So far PoR is easier than its predecessors, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. It’s easy because of its two central gimmicks. First of all, you have two characters with distinct abilities and weapon types, who you can either swap at will or have one be computer-controlled. The fact that you can have two characters attacking simultaneously, with added combined special moves, gives you a lot of added firepower and the game doesn’t really compensate for this. The second gimmick is the game’s level design. Rather than having a huge connected environment like SotN, there is a large central level that has scattered portals to smaller stand-alone levels that are fairly linear. You don’t find yourself backtracking to these small levels very often, either, especially if you explore them thoroughly the first time through.
Despite the differences, it really is just more of the same. I’d recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played any of the GBA releases or Dawn of Sorrow for the DS. If you’ve played them before and you’re not a big Castlevania fan, then you can probably skip this game.
Forest Whitaker’s performance in The Last King of Scotland is definitely worthy of the film’s single nomination:
Whitaker’s compelling portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin drives the film, and without him it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting. The protagonist of the movie is really Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a young Scottish doctor who becomes Amin’s personal physician. McAvoy was good as well, but I found myself just waiting for Whitaker to come back onscreen whenever he wasn’t.
The question here is, why even include McAvoy’s character? The fact that we only see Amin through Garrigan’s eyes makes the movie far more interesting. Garrigan is a surrogate for the audience, only seeing through to Amin’s true persona in degrees, so we see a layered portrait of Amin that we wouldn’t see in most traditional biopics. What makes the film successful is this fragmentation of Amin, along with the limiting of the scope of the film by having it take place over Garrigan’s stay in Uganda and a focus on character over historical accuracy.
The movie is very good, but it shouldn’t be at the top of your “must watch” list this season.
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