Gaming the Perspective on Film Reviews

Describe a film as being ‘like a videogame’ and you’ll immediately set my alarm bells ringing. Positive, negative, it doesn’t matter, the comparison will almost always open up a can of troublesome associations, and I really have to fight the knee-jerk reflexes of my inner teenager from wailing ‘BUT YOU DON’T GET IT, MAN’. I obviously haven’t a clue how familiar any one critic is or is not with the medium, and I’ve gotten myself in hot water before by decrying those obviously not L337 enough to know what they’re talking about, when in actual fact they are more than qualified to their own readings. Channelling these teenage frustrations more constructively, it becomes clear the issue is rather how agonisingly fluid the descriptor is, and that using the term unqualified denies any meaningful signification beyond the surface of either medium. The term shouldn’t be limiting in its application, and by engaging with it beyond the clichés we can perhaps touch upon the strange morphology between the two.

To wit, some examples:

Enter the Void is just like a videogame. Not in the obvious frame of being like a run-and-gun action game with its’ fixed first, then third person perspective, but rather that it’s just like Tetris. No, it’s not about the arrangement of tessellating blocks into an orderly fashion to a thumping Russian electro-folk soundtrack [no, not even on a structural level] but rather it has a persistence of vision, sound and unconscious engagement which lingered well beyond the immediate experience of interaction. I say this as someone who consistently plays the Tetris (averaging maybe 5 minutes a day) and as a consequence I consistently experience the Tetris Effect. Which is to say that in moments of daydreaming or slight boredom I tend to unwittingly visualise the organisation of falling blocks. It’s not hallucinatory, nor disarming, it’s just handy half-conscious alarm bell for when something is starting to push my patience. I’m told it’s just another mode of half-conscious problem solving, much akin to how I’ve had the very question of this blog-post rattling about in my head for the last 24 hours. On another level it’s like that agonisingly persistent ear-worm, that bloody tune you just can’t get out of your head. Only I get it with Tetris, and blocks.

Again the glib reading here is that ‘Tetris brushes on the edges of hallucination, therefore it is like Enter The Void’, but that’s not it either. The comparison is that both pose an indirect problem, and that you leave the experience picking it apart in the back of your thoughts. A strangely pertinent scientific study has revealed that playing Tetris can reduce the risk of flashbacks for those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, and while traumatic is to exaggerate the effect of Enter the Void, it does at least underscore my point that both are functioning on levels which your average film doesn’t even come close to. For that I absolutely love the film, even if it is a bit of a slog in its unfettered 2 hours and 40 minutes runtime.

Next case in point is Ben Affleck’s rather zippy heist movie The Town, which again is just like a videogame. More precisely it’s just like any heist mission you care to mention from the Grand Theft Auto series. The dynamic between the central characters, the structure of the heists, the getaway car-chases with the tension of desperately trying to out-run cop cars in a sprawling urban environment. Or more succinctly still, a number of conflicts building in scale towards a rather disastrous and seemingly impossible final conflict, punctuated by scenes of internal group conflict, and bookended by a number of dead-end shoot-outs. The parallels may seem cursory, but the connection had a real resonance that fails the usual description of being ‘like a videogame’.

Of course the whole GTA series is ridiculously indebted to any number of crime films that have come before it, so it’s easy to say it’s just another regurgitation of the previous generation’s heist dramas. But this isn’t just Michael Mann through yet another prism, as he deals in quite a separate package of subtexts and narrative drives. To define the ‘feel’ of a film is always a slippery task, but The Town is definitely in the same sphere as GTA. To take the general barbs of criticism used in describing a film as being ‘like a videogame’ it didn’t feel or look like a cut-scene, and the narrative wasn’t subjugated to the Crash-Bang-Whollop of its action sequences. Perhaps on a simple level it comes down to the film being action-based and set in the working class ‘burbs of the US East Coast.

To take the very same barbed club, a film which lives up to the criticisms of shallowness and general thick-headedness is the recent Resident Evil: Afterlife, which to it’s credit makes no apology for this, revelling merrily as it does in the use of some clever 3D. There is no plot, there is next to no drama for the actors to engage with, and even the action sequences don’t make much sense in the grander scheme of things. Which is not to say that the film isn’t shamelessly entertaining.

The complication then comes in that Resident Evil is still a work of adaptation, drawn from a recognised series of videogames, and by said measure is not really like the original videogames at all. It’s not a jittery-nerve journey of nigh abject terror, but a clumping great action film built on the husk of an otherwise brilliant game franchise. The brilliance of the games is not defined by a lack of plot or by godawful acting, but rather on running around a haunted house with only six bullets in the clip and two points to save your game. This doesn’t stop critics judging it in terms derivative of a videogame, but it would be just as false to judge the novelistic aspects of Blade Runner on the back of its own source material in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The abstraction is so distant that the moniker ‘like a videogame’ becomes too hollow to actually bear any significance, and it’s quite tiring having to defend a medium on the back of such a distant (and slightly inbred) cousin.

The interrogation behind describing a film as novel-like is however a bit more rigorous, and a formalist approach can provide genuine insight to how loyal the structure of a film adaptation is. Arch-Formalist David Bordwell does a very fine job of breaking down both The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Polanski’s The Ghost in terms of pacing, and how the four-act structure of each reflects the conventional pace each holds as page-turning thrillers. Yet transpose this thinking to discussing a videogame and it’s rare that discussions ever go beyond the usual sheen of what we see on screen.

Case in point, the wonderfully enjoyable Scott Pilgrim vs The World is (over)saturated in referents from the world of videogames, and even jumps through a few hoops of the save-die-reload logic that gamers know so well. Less discussed is its function as an adaptation, and author Bryan Lee O’Malley has said the books (and consequently the film) owe a considerable debt to the structure of shōnen manga; the comics of action and romance aimed at teenage boys, filled with love rivals, fights and ongoing grudges. Not to get stuck in the trap of pursuing ever more obscure frames of reference for it’s own sake, but describing Scott Pilgrim as being broken down into ‘stages’ or ‘levels’ has perhaps less to do with Super Mario and more to do with Naruto and Death Note. But enough with the increasingly oblique references, the point is still that you shouldn’t just settle with the first referent that comes tumbling along.

Gaming as a whole is defined by its diversity of output, and when the glibbest of critics use ‘video game-y’ as shorthand for films being plotless and CGI laden they’re really just flagging up their own ignorance. I’m not denying that gamers have to endure a lot of narrative-scant talking-mannequin dramas, just for pities sake don’t use that definition as the measure by which to critique other media.

Showing at the Showroom: When You’re Strange

[Major Correction: In the opening paragraph of this I state that the film opens with a Jim Morrison look-a-like stumbling around a desert, looking lost, hitching a ride from himself, and then hearing about his own death in Paris on the radio. I felt the whole thing seemed a bit anomalous to the rest of the film, but it turns out it was in fact Morrison in his own film HWY: American Pastoral, with ominous radio dialogue dubbed in by the documentary's director Tom DiCillo.

It's an inexcusable oversight on my part, fuelled by my own indignant pride at ignoring press-notes.

It's comforting to know that others found these sequences uncannily restored to the point of looking like the were shot last week, and I guess the whole thing felt a little anomalous to me. The fact that DiCillo recut Morrison's own film to suit the documentary's narrative purposes is also pretty questionable in my book.

Not that that matters, as it still doesn't excuse the fact that I fucked up.]

When batting around general truisms about documentaries it’s easy to just throw away the glib observation that ‘it’s all about the subject, sink or swim, it’s all about the subject’.  Which is true, as outside the realms of art cinema I have yet to hear or see anyone make a stunning hour and a half treatise on the story of paint drying. That said, part of me wonders why not?

The new documentary When You’re Strange is a study of The Doors brief explosion, the dips, the peaks, and the eventual demise of frontman Jim Morrison. It’s brimming with some quite stunning archive footage of the band preparing, recording, performing, and just larking around, with nary a talking head in sight. The film opens with a pretty uncanny Morrison [look-a-like] stumbling about in the desert, getting a lift from himself(?) and then hearing the news about his own death in Paris on the radio. At which point Johnny Depp, the modern cicerone of the hedonistic Sixties (see – Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson) chimes in some flat, timeless yet instantly forgettable observation about ‘The Man’ Jim Morrison. Which as openings for documentaries go is pretty damn worrying in my book.

The film eventually cuts to the actual business of the band; formation; early beginnings; first performances; the first studio session, and so forth and so on. The early days at UCLA film school, the band members found in meditation class and the first performances with Jim keeping his back to the audience. Following the daft opening a creeping sense of ‘going through the motions’ almost set in, saved wholesale by the endless wash of superb archive material. Footage like this, be it from television recordings, or from home film collections has a nasty habit of looking awful when blown up. Grain, static flicker, crackly sound, and aspect ratios which refuse to stay put make for a documentary makers nightmare. When You’re Strange has miraculously ironed over all these issues, and produced a film for fans of the band to endlessly fawn over.

The reputation of The Door’s live is as big as the band itself, yet actually seeing the band’s frenzied performance, Morrison’s explosive presence, the army of police officers spread out unevenly on stage, managed exceed the over-hyped picture I had of these ‘happenings’. More Beatlemania than hippy-hippy-shake, but with an added twist of cruelty and occasional no-show. The film bumbles on with the over-arching narrative, Morrison’s comings and goings eclipsing the whole of the rest of the band. The myth of the band rolls on, weighed down by the clichés it helped reinforce. Jim Morrison dies, his legacy lives on, The End.

Simply put the film is as good as your love of The Doors. If you can’t abide the band, or Jim Morrison in particular then you’ll really struggle with it. If you love the band then you’ll just drown in all the footage the film serves up. Those in the middle will find the film pretty middling. In part this reflects the film’s success in telling the band’s tale without either overblown hagiography or excessive apology. On the flipside maybe this just reflects how dangerously married the film is to its’ subject matter. 

Of course most documentaries have to be precariously close to their subject to come into existence in the first place, but it’s tricky when you can’t quite place the authorial bias in relation to the material. Director Tom DiCillo must obviously be a fan, but his presence and the tone it applies to the film is filtered through the slightly stern, yet reverentially hushed tones of Johnny Depp. The brilliance of a good and unexpected documentary is the ability to take even the most unpeculiar subject and frame it in such a way that anyone and everyone can take something from it.

Font fetishist doc Helvetica immediately springs to mind in this sense, taking the definition of a flat subject and breathing focus into the subject, and it was served well by building on the passion and interest of those at the heart of typography design. A Fistful of Quarters also plumbed the dangerously fringe fields of retrogaming, pursuing the compulsive score chasing of cabinet arcade freaks. As a struggling Pac Man addict I was instantly drawn to this tale, and the film found a huge audience well beyond the limits of gaming-niche it inhabited with a story of a rivalry that matched any Hollywood fare you care to mention. It of course played very loose and ready with the facts to build an immaculate arc for this story, but this it would seem is par for the course in modern documentary making.

That said, selling a documentary on an unspectacular subject is [as the Swedes would say] like selling sand to the Bedouins. Both Helvetica and Fistful both held a kooky hook which could sell them to anyone with even the smallest vein of curiosity. That they were both great documentaries also helped. Speaking personally, the magic of a brilliant documentary is the unexpected one you stumble across at a film festival, or at the back end of the TV schedules. Sheffield’s own DocFest does a fine job of bombarding me with more peculiar things than I could shake a festival pass at, and the kinks of programming and personal availability has forced me into seeing films I wouldn’t otherwise touch with a barge pole. A few stinkers along the way, sure, but a few gems I wouldn’t ever have a chance of seeing again.

Television however is the real home of the cold-calling documentary. A highlight in recent memory was The Man With the Golden Gavel, about A-list art auctioneer Simon de Pury, which I caught late on BBC4 and somehow managed to keep me hooked well past my bed time. Its’ subject, while charming to excess, is not particularly likeable, and more than a little cut-throat. It’s hard to curry interest in the struggles of a man who can only be described as obscenely rich, but the film skipped along with a swift pace and was packed with plentiful detail about the large auction houses of the world. I had absolutely zero interest in the subject, but stuck watching I was.

Whether When You’re Strange will have this effect on the unsuspecting cine-goer I couldn’t  tell you, as author and viewer are too enthused about the subject to begin with.

When You’re Strange is showing at the Showroom cinema in Sheffield from the 1st of July 2010

Doc/fest – Bastardy + Granddad

Bastardy

A character portrait that stretches over 8 years is by it’s very nature quite epic in scope, yet the emotional depths that Bastardy touches upon are of a level rarely witnessed in your standard ‘follow-a-junky’ doc. An orphaned child of the ‘stolen generation,’ forcefully extracted from aboriginal communities in Australia, Jack Charles struggled to find his place in the world. A founding member of the first Aboriginal Theatre company in the seventies, Jack found a home of sorts in the embodiment of others, performing as an actor on both stage and screen and gaining certain recognition for his work.

But our introduction to Jack comes in the contemporary world, where the now old man has dipped into a half-way house to cook up his hit for the day. His expletive peppered words insist that the filmmaker shows his life up front, and that the audience sees his personal focus on the needle right from the get go. It’s his cross to bear, and the doc thankfully eschews any attempts to justify his need, or even coerce him to go straight.

The film initially stumbles around with the subject, as he looks for audiences to play guitar to, or later searching for quiet corners to bed down in. There is no grand introduction, and Jack’s past only becomes clear throughout the course of the film, at the same pace it became clear to the filmmaker following him. His cat burgling past is introduced as a chance drive around the affluent parts of Melbourne sees Jack pointing out the dozens of houses he’s burgled. ‘I never break in. I just walk in wherever’s open’ he says almost glibly ‘if there’s any confrontation, I’m out like a light.’

The subject’s charm and quick-when-not-high wit does a lot to hold the momentum of the film. His appearance varies wildly throughout the film, and intercut photos and clips from his past reinforce the mercurial nature of the man. A blur of outward identity which contrasts a resolute, but tired, voice of experience. The swathes of friends he has found and lost are only hinted at in a short montage of endless hugs, yet the focus remains on the addiction fuelled kleptomania which awkwardly gets in the way of these friendships. His eventual reflection on the one love he found in life cuts through the film in a heartrending way, evincing quite how far the film has drawn the viewer into the film.

A vivid sequence at the end of the film shows Jack going backwards through time in a series of police mug shots, from capture in 2003, with a photo for almost every other year right back to 1961 when Jack was caught on his first charge at the tender age of 18. His hair and beard balloon in and out over time, each cut heralding the nigh endless cycle of addiction, theft, capture, release, addiction, theft, capture, release, addiction…

Seeing him cheerily Q&A the film after the screening I saw felt like seeing a man stand naked before the audience. One particularly uncharitable commentator in Australia felt obliged to post a reflection on the internet that “Regardless of the artistic representation, the man is a criminal.” Art does of course not excuse the man, but you’d need a heart of granite to conclude such from portrait as pointed and revealing as this.

Grandad

A brief note for an incredibly brief documentary. A student project where director Scott Dawe tracks down members of his extended family to discuss his grandfather’s home movies. A mysterious woman appears in one, and the grand patriarch’s infidelity and fledgling commitment to his family are quick laid bare. Emotional interviews intercut with almost ghost-like super8 footage make for punchy if somewhat clipped film.