At the time of writing GTA IV has a 99 on metacritic which is pretty unheard of.
To be able to consistently meet and surpass expectations of this kind is really quite extraordinary. Got mine on pre-order and will be zoning into Liberty City for a good few hours over the bank holiday weekend. My own expectations hinge on whether it is able to evoke the kind of emotional connection that tv and film can so easily provoke and video games have long promised.
All the graphical sophistication, all the realistic physics models, all the uncanny ai in the world doesn’t matter a damn if you don’t care about the characters.
We’ve been pretty excited about cloverfield ever since the trailer first leaked onto the internet. It’s probably enough to say that the film lives up to those seemingly impossible expectations and delivers a masterclass in how to make an intelligent, original popcorn movie.
It’s not perfect, the opening sections feels long (we’re just sitting around waiting for the monster to turn up and destroy everything!) and sometimes the reportage style conceit feels a little forced-but ultimately they are minor quibbles. Once it all kicks off (and btw you need to see this movie on the big screen!!) you get an incredibly visceral and affecting rollercoaster ride that manages to find it’s way past the patronizing cliches that plague many a mainstream movie.
The characters in the film are bystanders to the action, not the usual cookie cutter action heroes. It’s a film about the smallness of man, next to the enormity of their fate and the utter destruction
all around. Perhaps understandably the clear references to 9/11 have proven controversial- (I found the subway sections eerily reminiscent of the 7/7 phone tube footage) but the film never feels exploitative. Rather by defining the characters so early as powerless participants in the much larger drama happening all around, we arrive at a greater truth. That the best response to senseless violence is to draw closer to the ones we love, and so remain undefeated.
Via somekind of rare astral alignment, the subject of today’s post and the track I’m most into are perfectly suited for each other. Usually, either we write something then search for the appropriate soundtrack or we are so excited by a track that the text is just an expression of love for that particular bit of music. Today, therefore, is like some one-in-a-million meta-post, words and music in perfect harmony.
It’s also the day after ‘the keynote’, our seasonal excuse to appreciate all infinite loop has to offer.As stephen fry has so sagely noted, apple seems to have the uncanny ability to engineer products of such functional and aesthetic beauty that they provoke an almost emotional response. It’s this reaction that is the cause of such extreme opinions of mac products.
There is a whole beige world out there that can’t understand why people act the way they do about mac and the arguments almost always boil down to the irrationality of it all. Why someone would pay extra for something that is even slightly intangible, can’t be benchmarked and serves a seemingly ‘higher’ set of needs.
I read today at the bottom of a huge argument over why the macbook air was doomed fail/ guaranteed to succeed, one woman write that she wanted to buy one because she knew that everyday she would open it up and smile at owning something so beautiful.
It’s hard thing to put a price on.
Not for me, I still cling to my reason to save me from heartfelt overspending, but a powerful thing to argue against.
Oh and that track-just one letter from absolutely nailing it.
No Country for Old men is one of those films for which it’s very easy to start bandying around superlatives. It’s a contender for my film of the year (I saw it at the very end of 2007) but would still be in the running if I had seen it on January 1st. It is a film made by incredibly talented people at the very height of their abilities, from a book by one of America’s finest authors.
On the surface, it’s an old fashioned morality tale, good vs evil, set in the Texan/Mexico border familiar to readers of Cormac McCarthy’s wonderfully rich body of work. It’s a spare and brutal film, set in a world of random encounters of enormous coincidence and characters tossed around and buffeted by events way, way beyond their control. In short it’s a world which feels very much like reality.
Toning down their usual predilection for the surreal and absurd, the Coen brothers stay unerring true to the spirit of the work to deliver a taught, intensely focussed narrative which draws heavily on the expansive moral questions which underpin McCarthy’s work. Why good men fail and the wicked prosper, where justice seems absent, what hope remains ?
They are questions as old as questions themselves and fittingly, as McCarthy is oft compared to an old testament prophet, it feels like a contemporary retelling of the story of Job (but without the special fx heavy ending).
The answers to such questions, when they come, point to overarching truths hidden and divine, beyond our mortal understanding and out of view in our waking state but revealed to us partly in dreams and visions.
To quote Tommy Lee Jones’ character;
“It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. ‘Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”
One episode down and I’m unsure if I’m going to be able to enjoy the fifth, and final season, of The Wire. It’s not that the quality is down, (although I worry about how they can possibly find a way to give it a fitting finale) it’s just I have way too much invested in the characters and those wonderfully crafted, slowly to earth story arcs, that my enjoyment of the show is massively tempered by the growing realisation that this is it.
The clock is ticking.
Ten(?) hours and no more B-more.
Shheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!
I guess come spring I’m gonna need some serious, serious grief counseling. Till then, there is much to enjoy and plenty of time to plan way to ease the pain.
Three choices spring to mind.
Buy the Homicide box set (122 episodes of balitmore police-that’s 2008 booked then!)
Sit tight and wait till Generation Kill -(David Simon/Ed Burns latest project)
Try and get my quality US TV fix somewhere else-Mad Men or Kill Point are the most likely candidates at the moment.
More likely, I’m just going to have to ‘be an adult’ about all this.
Accepting the unavoidably finite nature of life and that the things we love will one day end is one of those healthily, difficult lessons that to pass is a baby step closer to what some people would call maturity.
There is an amazing (and humbling) what is the wire all about? discussion you should really read here (and make sure you read the comments !!!)
Fittingly for the swansong it’s Steve Earle doing the theme this time.
Bit of a half-assed way to get back on the saddle (think I’m in danger of mixing my metaphors like a mofo here) but this is image is so awesome I’ve used it twice. Part of the problem of running two blogs consecutively I guess. There is only so much awesomeness to go round and sometimes you find something that just blows you away so much you want to use it and use it.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a ‘something for the weekend‘ but since the party season is now officially on, I thought it would be a good time to dust it off and whilst basilika have the skinny on the new ulysses 82 goodness (as usual) we’re taking it deep and cosmic.
It sounds like the track carl craig would have made on the nostromo, whilst everyone else was sleeping.
Yesterday afternoon we were lucky enough to catch the Todd Haynes Dylan biopic, ‘I’m Not There‘ at a last minute addition to the wonderful (if slightly elusive) London Film Festival. On paper it’s the hl film of the year: Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale in movie about Dylan from the director of ‘Far from Heaven‘ ? We don’t have many more boxes to tick.
Unfortunately it’s a hard movie to recommend, though daring in both choice of cast and narrative structure, the film fails to delivery on the immense promise of the incredibly creative premise. It’s pretty clear from the offset that todd haynes is an enormous dylan fan and it’s to his credit that rather than try to deconstruct the enigma that dylan has created he lets his cinematic dylan personas weave their own abstract portrait of one of the 20th century’s great artists.
If only clever ideas were enough.
Modern art might be able to exist on the ethereal promise of good ideas alone(technique be damned) but thankfully film is at least partly restrained by the need to entertain as well as to creative stimulate and no amount of oscar worthy acting and chronologically flighty editing can disguise the lack of that most precious cinematic commodity: good writing.
Two and half hours later it feels like you’ve been the victim of an incredibly sophisticated con, that beneath the visual sheen and clever tricks there’s not much there. Edit the incessantly shifting scenes into thematic vignetes then only one or two of dylan’s personas have stories worth telling. The rest is sometimes beautiful, oft time frustratingly oblique, filmic riffs on familiar chapters of the dylan biography.
The assembled talent and dylan’s story both deserved more.
The Hl family are off to Paris for a couple of days to see my wonderful (and wonderfully talented) sister who is exhibiting at the galerie des arches (22 rue de Quatre Fils, 75003 Paris-if you happen to be in town)
It’s a chance to escape the endless boxes yet to be unpacked and to sample some of the many good things on offer in hl’s second favourite city.
Wifi permitting we may even post some ‘news as it happens’-if not see you later in the week, when our jaded London palates will have been refreshed by great art, wonderful culture and all the ham and cheese you could ever want.
last night i was looping a track- its not my usual sort of thing (even if it is somewhat traditional behaviour).
its led me to thinking about language and music and the inherent pre-babel power of music’s ability to communicate which its quite quite easy to forget as an english speaking, english girl with fairly english speaking tastes.
a friend of mine from the states commented when she arrived at my flat late one night to find me watching sex and the city (yep, i’m that sort of cliche too) and having just finished a frazier marathon weekend that she’d heard how ubiquitous us tv was around the world but not appreciated it.
and then i realised its practically all i watch. not that i watch that much tv but short of some apposite channel four news coverage and the occasional foray into grand designs or… if i’m feeling particularly home-y location, location, location or at the other end of the scale - sports, its the wire or arrested development. reruns of twin peaks or freaks and geeks or entourage or the sopranos. so it’s no wonder that i know the words to the oscar meyer wiener song without really knowing what an oscar meyer wiener is, that i could tell you the brand names for a whole bunch of american sodas i’ve never tasted, that i can run off a fair old list of us presidents and name several state capitals; its all been absorbed through tv and film and music. damn, even i find myself wishing they were all california girls, or being in a new york frame of mind or heading to galveston.
so when i meet a girl from venezuela whose english is impeccable and she tells me she mostly picked it up from watching beverly hills 90210 it makes so much sense. lots of my education came out of the same source - only it was the cultural flotsam & jetsam i clung onto and thankfully not the valley girl rising inflection.
which brings me back to my point, i was listening to mozart’s ave verum last night as i lay on my bed and read about moodymann and none of that was weird. and i kept hitting repeat because despite the fact my schoolgirl latin gets me by just fine with fading inscriptions in museums and working out word roots in spelling bees (ho, there goes another cultural phenomenon i’ve appropriated) i’ve never had an ear for it and all i can hear is the music; the swell of voices and the passion; the love and tenderness; the relief, joy and reverence which were written in 1791, in latin and still give me shivers today. and it doesn’t matter that its not glitchy or guitary or dubbed out. it’s not an issue that the bpm rate is way down and it’s not had a vocoder anywhere near it and it certainly doesn’t matter that it sounds better in latin because it still makes perfect sense.
i don’t know what recording this is from, in fact i can’t tell you anything about it except that when you least suspect it, it might well speak your language.
About halfway through my signed copy of william gibson’s excellent spook country, I stumbled across this amazing conversation between two of the characters, an ex-member of a band called The Curfew and her mysterious new employer;
“In the early 1920’s,” Bigend said, “there were still some people in this country who hadn’t yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That’s less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a ‘recording artist’-making the quote with his hands-”took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing what they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star as we knew her”-and here he bowed slightly, in her direction-”was actually an artifact of preubiquitious media”
Now when I say amazing I actually mean ‘very similar to something I wrote‘. So similar infact that I have started to wonder if I had actually read this bit somewhere before, forgotten all about it, then regurgitated as my own work.
Either that or me and Will are ‘on the same wavelength’ in this small way-something far too amazing to contemplate.
I would imagine that any kind of ‘original thought’ gets harder and harder with the massive movements of information in (and out) of our minds every day. The real gift it seems, is to connect seemingly disparate threads and make sense of it a little.
