The Last Candle

The post title is a Silent Hill reference…that I made up. Ha! But it sounds Hill-ish, does it not?

The Silent Hill movie isn’t release upon the real-world public until April 21st, and until that time, the quality of the film teeters roughly between an awesome horror spectacle or another outing of video game suck. While precendence points towards the latter, the completely mature and deep subject material (compared to, say, Tomb Raider) and the solid cast and crew behind it — Sean Bean, Christopher Gans, and the great Akira Yamaoka himself, for starters — is giving us Silent Hill fans some serious hope for a worthy translation.

But while the people behind it have proven themselves to be capable of their respective mediums before (Bean and Gans in film, Yamaoka for the Silent Hill games), there’s plenty of potential for failure: Can Gans’ directing reach the dirty, claustrophobic, jilted viewpoints from the games? Will the mature themes be filtered out and replaced with teen-slasher dreck? Will these films feel like Silent Hill at all — horror with atmosphere and a powerful subplot beneath everything?

April 21st for the real answers. In the meantime, however, my hope has been greatly garrisoned by a 1UP interview conducted with Gans and Yamaoka about the production and creation of the film. From the interview, it’s evident that Yamaoka understands the changes necessary to bring Silent Hill to the screen and isn’t trying to shoehorn the games onto film — but much more importantly is that director Christopher Gans is not only a huge fan of the games — Uwe Boll says he’s a big fan of the games he’s adapating to screen, after all, and we’re still waiting for one of those to be worthy of anything over a turkey — but he sounds like he understands what the games are about.

EGM: Did you feel a need to make elements of the mythology more concrete, to explain them to the audience?

CG: We can show precisely what Silent Hill is like in reality—we’ve never seen that before. In the game, there are two Silent Hills—the Silent Hill of darkness and the Silent Hill of fog. But when you have to tell a story about something that happened 30 years ago in a town, and that town suddenly became like the Bermuda Triangle, you have to add two more dimensions: the reality and Silent Hill from 30 years ago.

[…]

If we want to explain what happened with Alessa, we are dealing with the theme of doppelgangers. For every fan that has read the synopsis of the first game’s story in the strategy guide of Silent Hill 3, they all know that we are dealing with doppelgangers—and it’s a very cross-cultural concept, both Japan and Europe have this myth. But in Japan, it means that every character has aspects of a God and aspects of a devil inside them. It’s a very shocking concept if we attempt to transpose that into a North American, traditionally Christian perspective. The line between good and evil is much more clearly in North America, especially today. And here we are dealing with a character who has the capacity to split, and when you realize that Alessa is no longer one character, but many, it explains the story of the town. It’s interesting because the town itself mirrors this fractured psychology—different dimensions, different doubles of the same person. It’s very interesting, but I’m only the illustrator of this mythology that has been invented by this guy and his friend, and it was important to be true to it, and if possible, to expand it some direction—to make a Romanesque vision of Silent Hill.

That’s some serious — and accurate — reading in between the lines, there. After reading this interview, my confidence in the film being good has increased greatly knowing that someone educated in the Silent Hill undertow is behind the wheel. Considering video game films (and Hollywood, and horror films in general), it could have been entirely possible to get a director or writers who decided, “Well, it’s got monsters, guys with big knives, and people being chased already — it just needs a few teenagers and a punk-alternative score for big box-office success.” Big kudos to Konami for letting the property go to someone who understands the power and depth behind it; someone who sounds like he’s actually going to be able to pull off bringing the town of Silent Hill to the silver screen successfully.

Ooh, also. There’s a new Pyramid Head snapshot from the film that’s been been bouncing around, too. I’ve mirrored the image in all its nasty, bloody, exciting-disturbing, 1.2 MB quality glory.

Pyramid Head nouveau thoughts: I liked the fleshy head from the games more than the metal head displayed in the image, and the thinner look makes his stature slightly less imposing. The downsides are outweighed by other aspects of his movie design: I like the dull, drab, massive look of this Great Knife more than the games’ serrated razor blade-type weapon.

But most importantly, P-Head’s got the look: An entirely substantial, imposing and all-terrible figure, finely complemented by the bloody skinless corpse accessory he’s dangling at his side and the heavy, fleshy butcher’s robe meshing with the ruined muscle and skin of his extended arm. And the whole grotesque pointed snout-face, of course.

The real test of Pyramid Head’s film effectiveness will arrive within the film, where we’ll finally see if they kept his incredible strength, his immediate, unheralded appearances, and his terrible chase and tenacity that makes the player fear that pointed snout. I and all other fans have to wait until April 21st for the answers, but the material’s lookin’ pretty good at the moment.

I’ve not been churning through the Netflix rentals as much as I’d hoped: Three weeks, and I’ve only rented four movies. Still, that’s four chapters of entertainment waiting for the Chow Yun-Fat Meter treatment.

Since I watched (and enjoyed) Casablanca in a college film class several years ago, I’ve been looking to watch The Big Sleep, Bogart’s second most popular film after the aforementioned classic World War II story. Making this rental the first to kick-off the Netflix subscription seemed appropriate enough.

And happily The Big Sleep turned out to be a pretty good movie. It almost goes without saying that the acting was excellent: Bogart is the smoothest and most brilliantly low-key cool actor I’ve ever seen, by a long shot. The script was snappy enough, and the atmosphere was nice and thick to lend credibility to the private eye plot.

About that plot…it wasn’t so great. The film overall lacked a focus and almost seemed to change story scene-to-scene as the events unfolded. While things moved well per scene, having little idea what’s happening or where the film is even heading after several scenes allows little potential for intensity or impact that a film with a tighter telling might have had.

In spite of the plot shortcomings, The Big Sleep was still overall a very good film — cool and sharp, like viewing a vibrant painting through thick curls of smoke.

Given the complexity and breadth of the Clancy novel, I was wondering how the book would be translated onto film. I didn’t expect the writers and directors to be able to capture the scope and detail of the original work, but since The Hunt For The Red October’s flick turned out pretty well, I had fair hopes for the movie — even if I thought the book was pretty damn slow for the most part.

Patriot Games not only failed to capture the detail of the book — the expected part — it failed to make the reconfigured telling of Clancy’s work compelling or very interesting at all.

Chalk this failure up to lack of character development. Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan is the best of the lot, but he acts too much like…well, Harrison Ford, with the chin out and the Han Solo angry-face/happy-face thing going on. The wife and kid are pretty much completely ignorable due to not having any interesting or involving facets at all (the kid is excusable for the common reasons: she’s a kid actor); Sam Jack’s Robert is a far cry from the warm, brusk comrade of the novel; and enemy Sean is thrown so quickly into the ring of revenge that it’s difficult to see what exactly he’s doing there.

Even the important parts (read: action or real plot movement sequences) didn’t make it onto the script in decent form. In the book, the opening bombing sequence occurs suddenly, and the reader is thrust from a walk in the park to the scene of a violent terrorist crime within a few words; in the movie, the terrorists are shown before the event taking part in the operation, losing much of the dramatic effect caused by the sudden outburst in the book. Later on, the highway scene was an awful spectacle, of course, but still somehow ineffectual considering the consequences.

And the climax? I’m pretty sure I saw that scene in an Indiana Jones film before. It was better then.

I’ll give it to you straight, Jimmy: I thought Cinderella Man was okay. I liked it about the same as the epic but over-stuffed Gladiator, but not as much as the glorious Master and Commander. And them’s the news.

The movie was composed and presented very well, no doubt due in part to Ron Howard at the helm. Still, the film lacked impact (no pun intended). The only scenes I felt fairly excited or moved by in the movie were the boxing matches — especially the finale, a more nerve-racking scene than anything I’ve seen recently — with everything else seeming slick and polished but still missing an emotive connection. Russell Crowe, who I usually think as a pretty good actor, played an acceptable performance, but seemed to pull a Brad Pitt and display the same face and monotone attitude for the duration. Bo-ring.

And now, more about that ending.

(Minor spoilers ahead — nothing major, but it will ruin some of the surprise.)

The lead-up tension towards the end of the film is that Braddock is entering the bout for the heavyweight championship against a guy who’s said to have “murdered two opponents” in his career. Baer, the carnivorous opponent, is made out prior to the fight to be someone the audience wants to lose: He’s a prententious jerk, covered in money during the Depression while the rest of the squalid masses writhe in poverty, a bawdy playboy, and then there’s the killing a couple of people without mercy or remorse. How can the viewer not want to cheer, Go, Braddock! Knock ‘im to the ground!

Baer shows up about halfway into the film, but there’s something about his anatagonist position that seems forced and false from the moment you see his half-sneer half-smile features. He just barely fits in as a guy who really seems bad. Rich? Well, okay, we’re in the middle of the Depression, but so what? How about being a prententious jerk? Not cool, but smacking around a sassy fellow doesn’t make for a very lofty climax.

Killing other boxers without remorse or mercy? Yep: That ranks as pretty evil and makes for a good target for Braddock’s ole’ one-two, to the great satisfaction of the audience. That’s what Cinderella Man makes Baer out to be for the most part — when Braddock steps into the ring for the heavyweight belt, he’s risking getting his brain pounded out of his skull.

Using Wikipedia and other sources, I learned that Baer did indeed mortally wound a man during one fight and hurt another boxer so badly that the boxer died in a subsequent match. Notwithstanding, there is no mention of him attempting to commit the injuries, at least as far as boxing is concerned, and certainly far less than the madman killer than Cinderella Man makes Max Baer out to be. As far as I can tell, Baer’s intentional demonization in Cinderalla Man is entirely to manufacture an anxious climax. That’s cheap, explotative writing — a low blow by the film’s writers and directors, indeed.

Still watching it, but it’s as good so far as everyone’s been saying an’ a little bit better.

I didn’t like the original GITS film at all because of the strenuous, completely overbearing philosophizing, but Stand Alone Complex meshes the mind-machine themes and meanderings much more fluidly and subtlely than the original film’s head-pounding narration. (I haven’t seen the second film, Innoncence).

I’d easily give the series four stars on what I’ve seen so far, but since that’d be only two episodes out of an entire 26-episode series, final judgement will be allayed for a while.

Yesterday was action sequences in adventure games, which was kinda wacky. Today brings more wackiness, so much that it eclipses the previous days: The PSP, which has roughly the processing power of a PS2 and no point-and-click interface, is getting a direct port of a 13-year old point-and-click adventure game — Myst, of course. (I’m expecting this story to turn out to be a joke within a couple days, but here goes anyway….)

When I first saw the story, I immediately thought, “Oh, cool! They’re finally making realMyst accessible again.” realMyst, released in 2000, was a full 3D recreation of the original game, and the visuals smoked anything else on the market at the time. My computer, less than smokin’, ran the game at about ten frames per second, but I was happy: realMyst was utterly gorgeous with the new tip-top graphical quality, the same excellent sound with real-time volume changes and panning, and the return of a totally engrossing, surreal world that was made fun again.

Strangely enough, realMyst is not being published anymore — even the recent 10th anniversary edition includes the original, static-image version of the game and not the much-superior realMyst. Total mystery to me, and I’ve been hoping for it to make a comeback somewhere along the line.

And then comes this news of Myst on the PSP! Ah, they must mean…realMyst! Of course!

Here’s a screenshot of the Mechanical Age from the PC version of realMyst from the year 2000:

Still looks pretty good. I always liked the Mechanical Age, putting it only behind the Channelwood Age and Myst.

Here’s a screenshot, circa 2006, from the PSP version taken in the same Age from roughly the same spot:

Regression! And no, that screenshot’s not a joke — it’s actually the one attributed to Myst PSP, swear on the D’ni. Also from the ‘shot, the new port also appears to be in a wide aspect-ratio. PSP gamers have that to look forward to, at least.

But wait — there’s more! Jeux France, who broke the images of the incoming port (in a most Frenchy fashion, too), notes that “Rhyme,” a bonus Age, will be included in addition to the original game’s content. There’s a quick glimpse of Rime (the correct spelling — Wikipedia backs me up) in this screenshot on Jeux France.

That’s pretty cool — except that “Rhyme” first made an appearance in realMyst. Wikipedia, which is always right, backs up me on this one, too: “An addition of the realMyst game over the original Myst version, [Rime], also referred to as Snow Age, was hidden in a new puzzle on Myst Island.” Booya!

So, to recap: If Rime will be in the the PSP port, and assuming all this goofiness is true, the developers appear to be completely ignoring the highly-superior realMyst tech while still recognizing the extra content, and the team is currently busy downcoverting the Age to 1990’s-era 2D. Buh?

Why not just bring over all of the gorgeous 3D stuff and actually give the PSP a little more of a workout than throwing up compressed images every two seconds? And doesn’t this game make much more sense to be on the DS, which offers a beautiful point-and-click interface, instead of the PSP in the first place?

Sony doesn’t seem to be handling the whole game side of the PSP very well at the moment.

From a preview at Gamespy for Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, sequel to The Longest Jour — uh, the previous game:

Watching the movements of her head, I could tell when I was approaching something she could interact with, and a click of the action button allowed me to use it, examine it, or where appropriate, talk to it. Just in case I missed anything, pressing down on the analog stick turns on a “focus field,” a vertical strip of light that lights anything interactive in the room that the player might otherwise have missed. According to Tharaldsen, the idea to make sure the player isn’t artificially hampered from making progress in the game because they missed the one tiny little item they needed to get past a puzzle.

Emphasis mine, all mine! And yes, the preview is from two months ago, but I’m catching up.

Just from that little snippet, I like the devs behind the game for two reasons:

1. This “focus field” business signals an advancement to be rid of the Pixel Hunting age of adventure games. No more throwing the mouse across every screen to see if the cursor lights up to find that hairpin or tiny nail to pick the lock on that one door. Fabulous!

   An immediate downside to “focus fields” is that the time length of adventure games are going to be cut in half, since the player isn’t going to be wandering around for hours trying to find objects and levers.

2. These dudes made The Longest Journey, which was a good game. Smashing good.

I’m playing through Broken Sword 1 right now, and while the story, characters, and environments are excellent, I still get stuck hunting for items or things to activate to move the story along. I visited one room over seven times before I found a little knobby needed to continue that had the hotspot area of roughly twenty pixels.

Adventure games are expected to have a slowish progression at times due to the puzzles (or not, if the game is particularly easy). However, when the progression comes to a dead halt because I haven’t sniped that eggshell piece in the bowl of broken glass I need to poison the duck that’s blocking my path to the observatory, the plot ceases to be interesting.

But while we’re vaguely talking about Dreamfall, here’s reason numero uno why this game might fall flat:

1. Action sequences.

   No, really — you might be walking along trying to push chess pieces into a grapefruit when you’ll suddenly have to get all Devil May Cry.

   Call me skeptical on this one, but putting in action sequences in an adventure game sounds like…not such a great way to make an adventure game. I don’t think the old LucasArts Indiana Jones games even had action sequences — seemed to work out okay, even if the films had plenty of ‘em.

The game looks quite good in the graphics region, humming a few bars possibly reminiscent of Syberia: gorgeous all around, but has a bunch of simps and drones for characters. But I did play through that one, too.

Adventure games can go a long way on looks and environments, moreso than any other genre, but a few good characters and a narration worth following can elevate an adventure game to “ooh, pretty” to “this is the greatest book I’ve ever played”; it’s sad that the latter form is so rare these days.

Utterly disgraceful, and toeing the line into the realm of dangerous.

Since 9/11, this is the closest on American soil that the war on Islamic Terrorism has ever been, and we’re not fighting against it very well. At all.

If you haven’t seen the Mohammad cartoons yet (since they’ve likely not been shown in your local — or wide — paper or newsstation), Muhammad Cartoons.com is happy to oblige.