So long…

Just two months after the closure of the Parkway, the Cerrito Speakeasy is no more.

Being in-between

I just finished watching The Fountain, a film by Darren Aronofsky. My roommate warned me that he heard it was a horrible movie, an judgment based almost entirely on his opinion of the director alone and his past films (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) which he found boring and pretentious. Having never seen his previous films, I was primarily interested The Fountain for the cinematography and visuals alone, but the premise sounded intriguing as well: three parallel narratives from three different centuries, each in which a man seeks the promise of eternal life while facing his own mortality through the lens of his dying love.

Opinions about this film swing wildly across the spectrum. Some have called it middling, boring, and incomprehensible, while others hail it as an ambitious masterpiece, stunning and elegant. It’s no doubt that the film is a visual treat, especially any sequence within the nebula scenes, and the film’s detractors are usually willing to grant it that at least (though there’s surprisingly less CGI in this film than you’d think). The haunting score pulls the film forward as well, tying the three parallel stories together. But would I say this is a good film? I think the problem with that question is that my criteria for what makes for an enjoyable film doesn’t neccessarily apply here, as The Fountain isn’t so much a film story as it is a film experience.

I had trouble wrapping my mind around the plot presented, as I’m one to easily poke holes in a narrative that doesn’t hold up. Yet I found myself not caring in this case. Instead, I was overwhelmed not just by the presentation of the film, but the timeless themes it addressed, albeit rather incoherently. I’d classify it as a sort of cinematic poetry, in that it needn’t be standard prose to get the point across, but rather just a collection of emotive pinpricks that paints an ethereal picture unique to each individual. It was akin to waking up from a very powerful dream, one that in hindsight was not entirely comprehensible, but leaves a resonance that is unattainable by anything in reality.

So does this film make sense? Not in any way that could be fully explained away. There were delicate narrative strands that held the story together, but clearly they were not enough based on the film’s bipolar reception. As for myself, I came away from the film torn between my need for a concrete explanation to stand on, and the strange feelings of emotional kindling from the overall experience. But I suppose fulfillment isn’t neccessarily found just in getting the answers spoon-fed to you. There is great value to be found in just being immersed in the experience and reacting to what’s in front of you, whether you can grasp the answers or not.

—–

*I never got around to writing my thoughts about Synecdoche, New York, but thinking about it now, it would probably have sounded alot like this.

Makes me happy, part 2

I have been a Star Trek fan through the good times and the bad. I’ve seen all of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and even Enterprise. Admittedly I haven’t seen all of the Original Series, maybe just a third or so (and assuredly the noteworthy episodes). I’ve seen (and own) all the films, and have all seven seasons of DS9 on DVD. I’ve spent hours with Birth of the Federation and the Elite Force series. Of course it’s not all enjoyable, many of the iterations were downright boring and cringe-worthy. But even with the wildly varying quality of Star Trek over the last two decades, I’ve been there every step of the way.

So you can imagine my delight with all the accolades the new film Star Trek is now receiving. After seeing the film tonight, I can’t say I disagree. As many have already said before, this new film successfully honors the long-time old guard while welcoming a new generation of fans. But aside from being a fantastic part of the complete Star Trek saga, it was simply a great movie. It was funny, thrilling, emotional, dazzling, and hit all the right notes. So imagine my surprise when this film I had waited a decade for did not turn out to be the highlight of my night.

As I walked back to my car, I got a phone call from my parents. They had just arrived in Maui the night before, and wanted to call to say hello. They were sitting on the beach, watching a spectacular sunset as a luau went on behind them. This was after they had woken up that morning at 3am to drive out to catch the sunrise. As my parents described the spectacular view, I could tell by the tone of their voices that they were having an amazing time, and they wished I was there to enjoy it with them.

Just picturing my parents in such a state of happiness on their vacation made my heart swell up with joy that no film could ever hope to match.

New every morning

This I recall to my mind,
Therefore I have hope.
Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed,
Because His compassions fail not.
They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“Therefore I hope in Him!”

There is a hymn I can remember from when I was young, taken from this passage from Lamentations 3:21. In getting some greater context, 3:1-20 is some of the most depressing stuff you could ever read. To me, this passage has always been a rote message of comfort, a reminder that despite whatever afflictions or trials you are enduring, your hope will always be in God. However, something that struck me in just remembering this now, the sense of newness. In each translation I’ve read, alot of the language varies, but the one constant is the idea that what God provides for us is “new every morning.”

This is especially highlighted now, since for the first time in a long while, I am realizing something new. Something I have never known before, something that turns on its head the notion of what God expects of me. The feeling is scary, overwhelming, intriguing, and painful all at the same time. To think that “God is not done with me yet” is paradoxically both comforting and frightening.

Not sure where I’m going with this, but I guess that’s sort of the point right now.

Hope

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against cheap grace, and I warn now against cheap hope. Hope is not merely the optimistic view that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end if everyone just does as we do. Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don’t turn out all right and aren’t all right, we endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us.”

Finally getting around to reading The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus after picking it up last fall. So far, it’s a pretty painful read, the kind of pain you get after going to the gym for the first time in ever.

It means grapefruit in French

I bookmarked this band a while back and totally forgot about them until now. It’s hard to describe their sound, so just dive in. Pomplamoose.

The Adventures of Coraline

Coraline is an amazing film and a eye-popping visual spectacle. But it was not these aspects that held me rapt in the theater when I watched it. The same emotions the film evoked in me were the same as those I had not felt in over a decade. Fans of LucasFilm Games will resonate with this thought, that experiencing (not just watching) Coraline was akin to my first foray into classic adventure games.

Games like Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Zak McKracken, just to name a select few, cultivated my imagination and my senses as a young gamer. And while one could argue that point-and-click adventure games may be the most passive of all gaming genres, this allowed room for the game developers to prioritize specific game elements, most notably storytelling and art design. As gaming worlds began to expand into three dimensions, with that came the ability to get a close-up look at ugly textures and odd model clipping. But the graphic adventure games came to life atop painstakingly detailed environments, and the characters, while powered only by a finite set of emotive sprites, had a wider range of emotion than many of today’s gaming greats.

Maybe Dom (right) just has more trouble expressing his feelings as well as Bernard (middle) and Other Father (left).

Being at the pinnacle of decades of stop-motion film making, Coraline still “suffered” from the typical artifacts of the medium. The frame-rate was just smooth enough that you wouldn’t notice the hand-posed key frames the unless you trained your eye to notice it, but it was most assuredly there. It was most evident during the spectacular mouse circus scene, but the director himself said he chose not use CGI for the scene preserve that feel of stop-motion, a choice that made watching the film that much more memorable. And with adventure games, the method of animation was essentially the same. Capture the character in a few select poses, and squeeze as much emotion possible out of each and every frame. And rather than teeter on the edge of the uncanny valley, graphic adventures ran with the idea that we as an audience would be able to better identify with the heroes if they looked nothing like we did.

But even more breathtaking than the animation itself were the environments. It was difficult to fathom that everything was hand-crafted when scenes like the garden tour and the climactic “boss battle” pushed the envelope into dream-like territory. And while it the artistic investment into the environments of Coraline reminded me of such locales as Melee Island, Rubacava, or the sunken city of Atlantis (Indiana Jones verison), it wasn’t necessarily the sweeping nature of the settings that really hit me. While the narrative meandered along, we kept revisiting the same places over and over again. But given the parallel-world nature of the story, each place had different versions of itself, be it the drab and dusty real world versions, or their colorful and spatial-logic-defying fantasy counterparts. While this might immediately remind you of the common light-dark theme we’ve seen in a number of non-adventure games (i.e. Link to the Past), it instead reminded me of Dr. Fred Edison’s Mansion from Day of the Tentacle, and how while we never left the mansion itself, Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne explored a world within a world with pockets of its own alternate dimensions. Likewise, in the film everything revolved around the Pink Palace. Not only did Coraline explore every nook and cranny in and around the house, but she returned to the same locations again and again, fantasy world and not, when she had new insights or questions regarding her current situation. Being that the story rarely left the house in the film, there was definitely a slight sense of “being on a budget” when it came to locations, but you wouldn’t know it from seeing how far they stretched the sequences in the garden, circus, or theater.

Coraline, SCUMM-style.

(minor spoilers ahead) But with as much as there is to say about story and art design, a game isn’t a game without gameplay, in the case of the film, the clincher was in Coraline’s very own adventure. Glimpses of inventory management and puzzle solving hearkened back to that frame of mind I adopted when playing the classics. Elements like laying out the cheese for the button-mice, stacking the books to retrieve the key, the flashlight and the dog-bats, packing the garden shears for a purpose only to be realized later, and ultimately the final-level-like quality of the quest for the three hidden eyes, to be discovered with only the help of that trinket you received from your sagely allies, all added to the warm fuzzy feeling of being back in front of my old 386 with floppies in hand. And the quick thinking and resourcefulness Coraline demonstrated during the aforementioned “boss battle” was definitely more reminiscent of an ending sequence in an adventure game, light years more so than the typical boss fight that would be dependent on remembering a jumping pattern or shaving pixels off an elongated health bar.

To my disappointment, I found out that Coraline got the typical kids movie video game treatment, as a minigame-platformer for the Wii/PS2/DS. I would like to think that had adventure games continued to develop to the present day beyond their premature demise in the late 90’s, they might have looked something like Coraline.

Yip-Yips @ Wondercon 2009

Back again this year, now with more orange:

So many ways to describe this. On one hand, it was sweaty, tiring, and mind-numbing to be walking around for hours spouting the same fifteen seconds worth of phrases over and over again. On the other hand, getting to make people smile and laugh (and little children cower in fear) is awesome. More pictures here and here (and probably elsewhere on the internet). Instructables on how to make your own here!

UPDATE: On the front of SFWeekly.com!

For Emma, Forever Ago

I’ve only recently discovered Bon Iver, who debuted just over a year ago. Since then I’ve purchased both For Emma, Forever Ago and their EP Blood Bank, and I can’t stop listening to them. La Blogotheque does some great video recording work of their performances, and the videos below do an amazing job of showcasing what they are all about. Check out their website to see the rest.

“A life, Jimmy, you know what that is?”

“…It’s the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”

(spoilers ahead) I finished up watching HBO’s The Wire last weekend, and this quote justly sums up the core of the show: watching life play out as we hope and wait for that which will never come. And while that sounds downright unfulfilling, it’s also what makes this show so brilliant. The Wire pulls no punches in challenging viewers in every episode with a very raw and real picture of the citizens of Baltimore. Whether it’s the race for the mayor’s office, the plight of the first-year school teacher, or the turf-war between rival gangs, the triumphs and defeats at every level of society are painstakingly detailed into existence. And almost every step of the way, the creator David Simon reminds us that this isn’t going to be the reality we’re expecting to escape to for television entertainment, this is the reality that is, that lives across the U.S. are experiencing every day.

Looking at the cast list gives only a glimpse of the tapestry of characters I’ve become attached to over five seasons, but it rarely ever gets boiled down to to simple cops and robbers. Neither are there ever any “main” characters. While one could argue about the centrality of Jimmy McNulty, he all but disappears during season four. And that’s part of the appeal, that each season is a self-contained chapter with it’s own stories and ambitions, yet cannot be fully appreciated until taken in the context of the other four. This is then in contrast to how characters’ specific story arcs are told, as they bubble in and out without any obligation to match typical episodic or seasonal storytelling. Until you see a bullet go through someone’s head, expect their story to continue, even if you think it’s over. This serves to build upon the realization that creeps up on you after the first season, that The Wire isn’t a show just about drugs, politics, crime, or schools. It’s a show that is simply about the citizens of Baltimore, the choices they make (or are made for them), and how this delicately weaves each individual into the same rich fabric of life, death, loyalty, greed, hopelessness, and justice, it all it’s varying forms.

And is there a payoff in the end? After investing hours and hours into a closer-than-you-think look at the city of Baltimore, can you walk away from The Wire feeling as if you’ve been given any sense of closure? Hardly. Marlo Stanfield, after achieving all the financial success and freedom that Stringer Bell sought for, ultimately returns to the street to hold on to the only thing he truly values, his name. Omar Little’s vengeance goes unfulfilled when he’s gunned down from behind by a child, and the only last rites he’ll ever receive is a coroner’s correction of a clerical error after recognizing his corpse. Randy Wagstaff (yes, he was Cheese’s son!) calmly resigns to his fate to have his innocence stripped away and chewed up by the foster care system. Even the happy ending for Reginald “Bubbles” Cousins ends on a somber note when following his odds-defying recovery from drug addiction (or “just doing what he’s supposed to do”), he is repulsed by the attention he gets knowing that there are others more deserving of praise who have conquered the same struggles he has.

But The Wire clearly doesn’t care about closure. With the end of each story arc, and ultimately the end of the series, we get the clear indication that for all these characters, life goes on. Nothing ends just because the bad guy has been locked up, the politician has been elected to office, or the detective has closed a case. Life will continue to trudge on with or without you, bearing the distinct scars and markings from all those who have come before, revealing the intricacies of how every one of us is connected to each other.

Sheeeeiit.

Bonus Link: Check out the abandoned soundstage from the final season!