Thursday, January 22, 2009

The Only Oscar Nomination Worth Noticing

Usually, you can at least count on the screenwriters to know what the hell they're doing. When "Titanic" won 11 Oscars, "LA Confidential" won Best Adapted Screenplay; in 2005, when the Oscars were split down the middle between Clint Eastwood (doing solid work with "Million Dollar Baby") and Martin Scorcese (in the last gasp of his Miramax DiCaprio decadent period with "The Aviator"), the writing Oscars went to Charlie Kaufman for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the Payne/Taylor two-headed beast behind "Sideways." Almost without fail, the screenwriting Oscars are years ahead of everything else.

This year's a half fail. The Adapted Screenplay nominations are a flat-out abortion of history. Two of the nominees, "Frost/Nixon" and "Doubt," are playhouse retreads that didn't feel half as vivid onscreen. "The Reader" is the kind of Holocaust Oscar gloss we thought died years ago. "Slumdog Millionare" is awesome and will win, but one out of 5 sucks.

But thank god for the Original Screenplay nominations, and specifically, the nomination for "In Bruges," a film so dark and tiny and weird and malformed that it practically disappeared before it opened. "In Bruges" is such a thrilling old-fashioned character movie - good actors playing well-written roles in intriguing surroundings. It's got twists and turns, and funny sadness, and more swears than a season of "Deadwood." The decades-long journey from box office flop to cinema classic begins now.

Friday, January 16, 2009

BSG vs. Lost vs. 24

The new TV season is finally upon us again! Entertainment Weekly recently announced the end of the second Golden Age of Television - a good thing, since television abhors pomp the way nature abhors a vacuum. Every Golden Age is followed by a dark and weird unsettled deconstructive phase - think of Romanticism following the Enlightenment, or Modernism following Victoriana, or Godard following Hitchcock. Tonight's season premiere episode of "Battlestar Galactica" was maybe the most magnificent ode to existential despair to ever air in the fourth season of a television show. Certainly, it contains a few of the most memorable images yet captured on digi-film - the Chief's shadow merging with a nuclear silhouette on an ancient wall (the production design on the scorched earth suggests a more rugged, gritty revision of "Battle of the Planet of the Apes," another 70s compelling camp-sci failout deserving a more convincing redo), and Lee and Dualla reconnecting in a facing profile silhouette, and the grin on a face two milliseconds before messy death.

I wasn't a huge fan of the last half-season of Battlestar Galactica - it seemed to have lost all its old allegorical swagger, in service to a newly propulsive plot that seemed to be running in circles. The first few minutes of this premiere - all bleached monochrome and tight wide angles and eternal sadness - seemed to justify all of that. In my head, BSG is in constant conflict with Lost for the title of Great 21st Century Fantastical Television Quest Global Mystery Theater Masterpiece. They play out like yin and yang; the popular big-budget Technicolor broadcast channel show, shot on location in Hawaii (which stands in for the whole world past and present); and the barely-seen micro-budget underlit basic cable show, shot on sets in Vancouver (whose exurb landscape stands in occasionally for uninhabitable radiation-heavy planet spheres.)

Both feature multi-ethnic casts of underrated TV actors, playing characters trapped together by disastrous happenstance, both searching for a way home and ultimately doomed to find it. Both shows have pushed the accepted boundaries of television - flashforwards, megatwists, characters who turn homicidal, heroes becoming villains. There was a time when having these two shows both on TV made it seems like it was easy. Then "Heroes" came along, and made them both look slow. Then "Heroes" had a second season, "Invasion" and "Threshold" and "Surface" and "The 4400" and how many other god awful pretenders flamed out, and "BSG" and "Lost" looked like the wily elder statesman, biding their time until the youth group implosion.

The pretenders have disappeared. The dust is settled, awaiting battle. The real TV season is beginning - the January-June rush, when HBO and the cablers bring back all their non-summer shows (Mad Men waits in July, pondering a reality without Matthew Weiner as its benevolent tyrant god.) BSG is entering its final season - nine episodes to go, now, until immortality. Lost is entering its penultimate season, and must prove that its resurrected fourth season was a sign of things to come, and not a rehash of Season 1 (excitement, new beginnings) followed by a new season 2 (sedation, ossification, delayed action.) In the dark horse lane is "24," once the very definition of the new TV, now a symbol of everything that can go wrong with serialized television (one nuclear-sized misstep is all it takes.)

They couldn't be further apart in most obvious ways - it's almost as if the Jordan Bulls, the Bryant-Shaq Lakers, and the Bird Celtics were all in the game at once. Will they raise each other's game?

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Patrick McGoohan Is Dead

Patrick McGoohan was "The Prisoner." He played the title role on that show, a 60s BBC spy-fi head-trip allegory that's half swinging-London, half bargain-Bunuel. He wrote and directed some of the show's finest episodes; one was practically without dialogue, one featured two men locked alone in a room driving each other insane, and one was the ambiguous finale to the whole series, which answers few questions and suggests that eternal loneliness and frustration and mystery are the only rewards granted to the Great. McGoohan created the show out of spite: he'd played the lead role on a show called "Danger Man," a James Bond rip-off, and he was tired of the unrewarding work. Or maybe he was morally opposed to the ethics of a spy thriller; McGoohan was a devout Catholic (who almost became a Priest). Or maybe he was a narcissist, and wanted to be his own boss; one of the co-creators of the show, George Markstein, would depart "The Prisoner" midway through production, and spent the rest of his life decrying McGoohan the egomaniac, McGoohan the Emperor with No Clothes, McGoohan the prisoner.

Whatever the reason, McGoohan told his bosses that he'd had enough of "Danger Man," and the result was "The Prisoner." Coincidentally, the character he plays on "The Prisoner," whose name is never revealed, begins the series loudly, obnoxiously, and forcefully quitting his job (lightning strikes several times on the soundtrack during the resignation - the scene is replayed in the credits sequence every episode.) He goes home, followed by a hearse. While McGoohan is packing things into a suitcase, a man gets out of the hearse and sprays knockout gas into his apartment. McGoohan falls over, fast asleep.

When he wakes up, he's in The Village, where everyone has a number (We'll know him as Number Six, a name he refuses) and where everyone he meets is after the same thing: Information. Why did he quit? Why does it matter? Why does anything matter?

Patrick McGoohan was the Prisoner, and his prison was "The Prisoner." He worked constantly for the rest of his life, but never found anything that remotely hinted at the mad depths of the final hours of "The Prisoner," which resemble nothing else in television, film, or narrative history (except perhaps the Satyricon and parts of the Socratic Dialogues - but they didn't have machine guns.) He was in two "Columbo" films, and "Escape from Alcatraz," and the father of the Phantom in "The Phantom," and he was the wily old King in "Braveheart." Anyone who knew who he was knew him because of "The Prisoner."

The precise themes of the series are difficult to pin down, and change radically from episode to episode. Maybe "The Prisoner" is about the triumph of the individual over the system, of morality over amorality, of humanity over the onrushing reign of technology, of privacy against a world of surveillance (in The Village, they can watch you everywhere; in modern-day London, there are cameras watching you on every block.) It is often ridiculous and occasionally sublime. McGoohan may have been a mad genius; he certainly was a fine actor; he never got a better chance than the one he got on British TV in the late 1960s; he was 80 years old when he died today.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

"Kingdom Hearts 2"

Kingdom Hearts 2 has to be the goofiest slice of steampunk kiddie meta mysticism to ever sell a million copies of itself in less than a month. If you've heard the setup, then you're already confused. Disney characters – that's icons Donald, Goofy, Mickey, and Pluto, mixing it up with the casts and visual aesthetics of random movies from the back catalogue like The Lion King to The Nightmare Before Christmas and Cinderella and shit-you-not Tron – walk around with characters from the Final Fantasy games - the hallmark fantasy cycle of the videogame era, a series that began with 2-D graphics and now creates three new dimensions every sequel. Every Final Fantasy game follows a different cast of characters on a different world, but they all encompass the same strange assortment of moods - epic cheese, adolescent picaresque, romantic sacrifice, Emersonian environmentalism, high-tech magic, characters who look like three misshapen legos enacting Freudian psychodramas using swords that fire energy bullets. None of those moods has anything to do with Disney, unless your whole experience of Disney was watching The Black Cauldron and Treasure Planet on repeat on acid.

For a number of reasons, though, the original Kingdom Hearts was a mind-warping slice of fun and bittersweet sorrow. You played as Sora, a kid so bland Haley Joel Osmont voiced him, yet so secretly awesome that his pubescent potential galpal was voiced by a way-pre-fame Hayden Panettiere. At the beginning of the game, you were living on a quiet, bright, shiny island. You played a few minigames to learn the basic controls - a common start tactic for RPGs. You ran around the island and met a few other kids - recognizable from Final Fantasy IX or X, (not to me, though - ceding four months of my freshman high school life to VII was enough for me.)

Your island had a beach, and a lush hillside, and a tree house, and only the barest hint of life - no parents, not even any sign of civilization. There was an obstacle course, and a palm tree, from which you could pick fruit. There was some indication that there was more to the world than just this island, but not much - and so, here at the beginning of the game, you had the impression that you had just awoken from a dream of your real life (or perhaps, just been freshly born) and lived here on this children's paradise your whole existence.

If you walked around long enough, you found a cave hidden behind a waterfall, and if you followed that cave back to its end, you found a few strange chalk drawings on the wall, and since this was a video game, you knew that they were important. There was also a door, and since this was a video game, you knew that eventually it would open.

After a short time, night falls, and strange black creatures attack, kidnapping your friends, tearing open the sky, not so much destroying your island as vacuuming it into nothingness. The door opens, and you follow it through, and that's the end of the prologue. The time you spent on this island was maybe about 1 half percent of the total gameplay - the vast majority of both iterations of Kingdom Hearts is spent running around levels modeled after old Disney movies. But the thrust of both games is about getting back to this tiny island, and about finding your friends to bring them with you. There's certain qualities of Campbell's Hero's Journey, and The Wizard of Oz, and of road movies and coming-of-age novels, not to mention other recursive mega-metamixes like Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Zelazny's A Night in Lonesome October.

Half the charm of Kingdom Hearts comes from the Disney characters. The characters from Final Fantasy are another story. From Cloud Strike to Squall Lionhart to Yuna the heterochromatic summoner, the FF characters you see in KH are little more than waxwork imitations of their original personae - they stop in for a cutesy dialogue, make a veiled allusion to the game they originally came from, and, if you're lucky, fight you for a couple seconds, but when you compare their minute game time here to the literal hundreds of game hours and storylines you find in an FF game, their appearances are kind of sad. At best, these cameos play like Falstaff's hello-I'm-dead scene in Henry V; at worst, they come off like characters on a TV show that stopped being good three seasons ago, like Grey's Anatomy or Nip/Tuck.

But the Disney characters. Oddly, it's not jarring at all to see Donald and Goofy battling Scar alongside Simba, or swimming through the water with Ariel, or riding a magic carpet with Aladdin. This may be because, via Disneyland and Disney on Ice and every Disney special since ever, we're used to thinking of every Disney character as co-existing along the same time-space continuum. It may also be because Disney plots tend toward the simple and uncomplicated, so it's not jarring at all that every "level" of the game basically re-enacts a whole Disney movie in about half an hour or less.

The other half of the charm of Kingdom Hearts requires a bit of explanation, and may not be charming at all. For a game which features a skateboarding mini-game and a tiny talking anthropomorphized duck wearing a wizard's outfit, the plotline for the Kingdom Hearts duology is surprisingly brainfucked. By which I mean, characters regularly turn into other characters, and in so doing, they create still more characters, and the reasons for these metamorphoses would be only a little bit convoluted if all the transmogrified people didn't keep imitating still other people and occasionally falling in love with other's people's alter egos. Whole universes are being created and destroyed at various parts of the game, often right in front of your eyes. And, while you fly from world to world in KH2, you slowly see a massive world beneath your universe grow brighter in the space-temporal mist.

There is also incredibly oversized machinery with higher functions so world-bending they may as well be demi-gods and emotional abstractions; strange men in black cowls whose goals and methods and powers are shrouded in mystery (they function kind of like the Others on Lost, except with more telekinesis and the ability to fire different-colored energy out of their hands); and wormholes, and doorways through time. Throughout the game, you're picking up pages from the journal of a mad scientist, but you pick them up out of order, so a Memento-like game of puzzle-narrative ensues. (You're also picking up lost Dalmatians - guess how many?)

Lost is similarly confusing, but that TV show, like most great hyper-complex genre fiction out of Neal Stephenson or William Gibson, usually manages to refocus the sci-fi histrionics through understandable emotional turmoil. Desmond's brain is skipping through time due to the radiation poisoning he suffered when the hatch's electromagnetic radiation matrix imploded upon the island's centrifugal centripetal whatever, but that just means he needs to find the love of his life. Kingdom Hearts focuses on Sora's search for his two friends, one of them the aforementioned Panettiere-voiced girl name Kairi, the other a dark-grinning silver-banged weirdo named Riku. (Sora means "Sky," Kairi means "Sea," and Riku means "Land." GET IT?)

But, like all relationships in Square games, Sora's friendship with both people regularly skips between obsession and utter disinterest. By which I mean, he spends two games (probably a hundred hours, if you're a player player) chasing these people, but when he finds them, they don't seem to be particularly friendly. Him and Kairi seem to be in love, but they're too young in 1 and awkwardly teenaged in 2 to do anything about it. In fact, in both games, Kairi the girl is found first, but with Riku the guy still missing, Sora becomes even more fervent in his search. It's not so much gay as it is Gatsby - Sora's whole purpose for being is to recreate the happy island life from the prologue of 1, and he's not satisfied until he knows that nothing will ever happen to disturb that life again.

I realize I'm generously/confusingly flipping back and forth between pronouns here - are "you" Sora, or is "he" you, or are "you" and "me" both "him" when we play the game? I'm doing this half out of laziness and half with purpose, because a running undercurrent in both games - it seems unintentional, and may just be due to bad translating - is a constant confusion over identity. At the beginning of "Kingdom Hearts 2, there's a lengthy prologue section, which serves a similar purpose to the island in the first game, except that it's longer, more involved, relocated to a multi-tiered urban cityscape, and makes you play as a character named Roxas who almost looks like Sora, who has dreams of a boy named Sora, and who, after a couple hours of gametime, goes to a mansion in the woods and appears to transmogrify INTO Sora. This aspect of the game is incredibly confusing and totally unremarked upon in the advertising. It's even more confusing when Sora spends the rest of the game trying to figure out who the hell is this Roxas kid who keeps appearing to him in nightmares.

So, when the game begins, you're playing as a character who thinks he's the character that you thought you were going to be, and then he becomes that character but the character spends the rest of the story trying to figure out who the character he isn't is. This is why video games are perpetually two steps away from discovering their inner Bergman and Beckett and Borges and Burroughs.