Ntuple Indemnity

Gentle readership, I humbly apologize for the lengthy hiatus. Aside from the many worldly distractions and commitments that have impaired my ability to sit down and crank out a good post of late, there is another reason for my absence that should not go ignored: there has simply been too much to write about.

It all started – the descent into a state of non-posting, that is – with an attempt to give the Garth Jennings film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, based on the absurdist discontinuity of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Phantom treatment – all the while geeking out about the obscure references to the BBC television series like the cameo by the original Marvin and the appearance of the “Journey of the Sorcerer” theme music with the introduction of the Guide, and singing the infectiously catchy “So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish” to the end of the earth (in about twelve minutes). By the way, AMPAS should realize by now that the Oscar for Original Song had better be kept under lock and key, because we have our first surely-should-win of the year, and I don’t imagine anything topping it. As for the rest of the experience, it was hit and miss, and for reasons that only erratically intersect with concerns for how close it was to Adams’ multiplicity of contradictory universes.

Before I was more than a paragraph into my scene-for-scene rant and roar, which I hoped would balloon into a critique as holistic as Dirk Gently’s detective agency, I had already thrust myself into yet another galaxy-spanning epic comedy of infinite philosophical resonance, only this one was twelve minutes long and sketched by Don Hertzfeldt. And that was only one highlight of many of The Animation Show 2005, which I wish I could spare the time to applaud in writing. Then there was Kung Fu Hustle, Stephen Chow’s over-the-top martial arts fantasy – not as outright funny as Shaolin Soccer, but more ambitious, and successfully so. It is likely to remain the best superhero film to see release this year.

Opening last weekend was Kingdom of Heaven, a refreshingly sober gentle brushing of the dead horse that pretend-epics spent all last year beating, and with another keeper of a Harry Gregson-Williams score beneath it. It’s not as fun as Gladiator and does not have the pulpish charm that will preserve it as well, but stakes out its own position as a very different sort of beast – indeed, a tamer one, and a thinking man’s history.

As far as books go, those into children’s literature should spend these precious remaining pre-Half-Blood Prince days with Eoin Colfer’s fourth Artemis Fowl, The Opal Deception. I’ve always thought the Irish techno-thriller fairytale series was a pleasant diversion, but this one goes well beyond the call of duty and plays off everything that has come before it so thoroughly that should Colfer write a fifth volume, it’s unlikely he could spin a yarn quite as all-encompassing. Deception takes all three of its predecessors and uses every part of the buffalo. I’m still not over what a gut-busting action-packed romp it is, and it makes me wonder why so-called adult sections don’t get escapist spy stories this good. Tom Clancy’s making video games – no, video game sequels, Dan Brown’s off in his own little world publishing prosaic Cliff Notes to Umberto Eco’s obscure waxings on historical secret societies, and here we have a children’s writer from Wexford stomping all over their turf. One can only hope he keeps on stomping.

I do not enjoy capsule-summary judgments that say nothing of value aside from what one recommends seeing or reading and what one decidedly does not. I wish I had time to talk about every last detail of all the blossoms of storytelling springtime I mentioned. But no – there’s just too much.

And beyond that, I haven’t had time to think about them. No, everything is bent towards one upcoming story right now, one chapter in a grander story decades in the making that is finally on the verge of congelation. I think we all know what I’m talking about.

I’ve been going back and seeing all the existing movies over the course of the week, and already I have a laundry list of essays to get through once the last piece of the jigsaw is in place, dissertations I’ve been waiting for the chance to dissert for the better part of the last seven years. I want to talk about modern divergences between philosophical and scientific thinking, particularly with regards to determinism, and discuss them in the context of the collapse of the Jedi Order. I want to return to the age-old question of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s success or failure as a Jedi Knight and infer from it a model of causality that applies to the operation of the Force. I want to whip out my copy of The Hero With A Thousand Faces and see how the Lucasian approximation of Joseph Campbell’s formalization of the monomyth holds up to its specification. I want to evaluate and possibly reinforce my claim that Vader was not in the suit when Luke sets it afire. I want to look away to the future (never my mind on where I am, what I am doing) and close the book on the canonicity debate now that the circle is at last complete. I want to watch the saga I-II-III-IV-V-VI after I complete my current cycle of watching it IV-V-VI-I-II-III (which I will of course repeat for the sake of reliable experimentation) and see how the story unfolds empirically and inductively – then maybe try something unorthodox like IV-I-V-II-III-VI, which would actually make a lot of sense now that I think about it.

There is a very real possibility that for several months, this could undergo a full conversion to being a Star Wars blog. If you can navigate your way through this or this, you should be fine, but otherwise, I make no claims to comprehensibility. You have been warned.

A few days ago, Jim Hill published a piece stirring up some rumblings of Disney reassessing traditional animation. Apparently, the box-office underperformance of the last few all-CG smash-hits-to-be from various studios is getting the Mouse House in a sweat – which is without question a good thing, because it’s about time someone realized that the post-Lion King fall of 2D and rise of CG had very little to do with one medium supplanting another, and more to do with the quality of the stories involved. (Then the diverging momenta were only kept on course by marketing practices, like Warner’s appalling mismarketing of traditional animation’s last stand, The Iron Giant.)

The bottom line is that you can’t drive a film with technology alone, and even mainstream audiences are beginning to realize it. Pixar continues to churn out hit after hit because their projects are propelled by creative artists, particularly those with a 2D background (as was the case with Brad Bird’s core team in The Incredibles), who understand that their technique is a means of signification and not an end. The best films have a vision that challenges and steers the market; they don’t come about because somebody is trying to game the market and predict where the money lies. Boardroom decisions and filmmaking make for an unhappy partnership. It says something that the animated films I am most interested in seeing this year, aside from the one I’m going to mention in a paragraph’s time, are both done in Claymation.

Is anybody of those in my readership well versed in children’s and young adult fiction familiar with the novels of Diana Wynne Jones? One of them, Howl’s Moving Castle, was the subject of a recent Hayao Miyazaki film that is being brought over to North America in June. Word is that it will see both a subtitled and dubbed release, which is welcome news. I passed on Spirited Away in theatres because of the lack of a subtitled release, which was a painful waiting game for one of the very best movies I’ve seen this decade.

I hear that dubbed Miyazaki releases are not half bad, given how John Lasseter supervised the one for Spirited Away and Pete Docter is doing the same for Howl’s Moving Castle; as directors of stellar animated films themselves who revere the work of Studio Ghibli, I’m sure they have no tolerance for subpar quality. Still, I avoid watching dubs whenever possible as a matter of principle.

Could you imagine watching a film like Downfall with the voices dubbed over? (That’s a hint to watch Downfall, by the way – it’s magnificent.) So much of Bruno Ganz’s outstandingly, terrifyingly mad performance as Adolf Hitler is how his voice distorts and projects the coarse, glottal utterances of the German language. It’s irreplaceable, and one instance of many where that is the case.

Now, my opposition is not to the idea of recording voices off the set and layering them over pre-existing footage – that would be silly, since so much film dialogue is done in ADR. Aunt Beru and Darth Vader had separate voice actors in Star Wars, as did most of the supporting Italian cast in just about every Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. Almost all musicals have separate vocal tracks, sometimes with different actors entirely – Natalie Wood did not sing her part in West Side Story, nor did Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady or Minnie Driver in The Phantom of the Opera.

But the use of language in those films preserves a sense of internal consistency; you couldn’t have The Good, the Bad the Ugly with both English and Italian, and subtitles translating the Italian. You can have entire foreign films in their original language instead of recording translated lines with out-of-character unsynchronized voices. Dubbing dumbs down the work and dilutes it. Given how that possibility is available, why throw it away? I do not find that animation merits an exception just because the mouth movements are abstracted and synchronization is less of an issue.

Film is thankfully returning to equilibrium after the growing pains of a new technology fetish, and it is marked by a revaluation of aesthetic integrity. Unfortunately, video games are not quite there yet, and most of the recent history of video gaming is a history of technology fetishism and oneupmanship. Of the major players, Nintendo is the only one actively resisting the trend, which is one of many reasons they receive my continued support. I do not simply refer to experimental interfaces like blowing clouds away on the Nintendo DS or controlling Donkey Kong with a pair of bongo drums, but to their first-party software’s refusal to play ball with the trend towards photorealism.

Bringing it back to the subtitling issue, some criticize Nintendo for its continued resistance to voice acting, aside from a few abortive stabs at it like the horrid opening cutscene to Super Mario Sunshine. There is a major fallacy in the logic of some of those who think adopting voice acting is inherently immersive, and that is the assumption that the delivery of a story by way of text boxes is a relic of the technical limitations of an age gone by. It isn’t.

If you look at a recent game like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, a very text-heavy title, the use of text boxes in speech bubbles was an integral part of the storybook aesthetic. It was used to simulate ambient background speech, rapid-fire speech you can hardly pick up, angry speech in shaky bold letters, and a myriad of other effects. Saying that video games are inherently better off with voices is like saying that just because comic books can come with bundled audio tracks, they should abandon their distinct use of stylized onomatopoeic lettering and panel-to-panel dialogue balloon trickery.

There have been games with impressive voice acting of cinematic quality that one would not want to do without – the Tim Schafer classic Grim Fandango comes to mind, as do the recent Knights of the Old Republic titles. They are not by themselves a valid argument that all games should necessarily be cinematic, as attested to by the success of video game titles that opt for harnessing current-generation technology and techniques such as cel-shading to move towards cartoon visuals – Paper Mario being one, The Wind Waker and Viewtiful Joe being others of note. If we can accept that visuals need not move towards realism, we can accept that dialogue-by-text is here to stay.

Which begs the question of oddities like the next Zelda game, which clearly has graphics that return to the pseudo-real and look really good in doing so, but is reportedly still avoiding voice acting. This decision has come under fire from the usual suspects like Matt Casamassina of IGN, who says, “This new game promises to be so epic on so many levels. It’s a shame to see Nintendo skimping on production values where voice work is concerned… I’m not even suggesting that Link needs to talk. He can remain a mute, for all I care. But the story would flow better if the characters he encountered used speech.”

My response to that is this: production values be damned – it’s not a limitation, it’s a valid artistic decision. The thing about abstraction is that it presents some degree of universal interpretability along the spectrum between the designer’s and player’s imaginations. Games, by the very nature of being interactive, should involve both elements. As for this franchise in particular, the last thing I want to see and hear is a Zelda adventure with hokey American accents like the television episodes that aired with The Super Mario Bros. Super Show back in the day. (Excuuuuuse me, princess.)

Addendum to the previous entry: I have since purchased tickets for the first show of Revenge of the Sith at South Edmonton Common, marked 12:01am on the morning of Thursday, 19 May.

Join me, and together we can rule the cinema as father and son.

You know, over six years ago I swore that at around this precise moment – this month of April, 2005 – I would be in a tent on some Californian pavement, preferably the one outside Mann’s Chinese, like one of these guys – armed with Jedi robes, plastic lightsabres and absolutely no concept of personal hygiene. It is with profound disappointment that I have come to terms with the fact that I am not there, nor will I be there, nor will I ever in my life get another opportunity to tent for a new Star Wars movie.

But not all is lost. As I did in Calgary at Famous Players Coliseum in 1999 and Cineplex Odeon Sunridge Spectrum in 2002, this year I plan to be at the midnight screening of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith on the night of 18 May at the biggest and best moviehouse within reach. This effectively boils down to two choices, and it is a decision that needs to be made quickly.

SilverCity West Edmonton Mall – The biggest strike against this theatre is that as with all Famous Players screens, tickets do not go on sale until a week before the big show. I watched Episode I under similar conditions at what was then the biggest Famous Players in Calgary, and opening-night tickets drew a three-day line. The risk of not getting tickets is one I am reluctant to take, as that sort of line is just not possible for me this year. However, everything else speaks in its favour – it’s easy to get to (for both the show and the ticket purchase), it’s surrounded by other shops and fast-food establishments to draw your attention while somebody else in your party holds your spot, and if the weather is bad it probably won’t matter, as at least some of the line will trickle indoors. There’s also a certain prestige factor associated with this particular multiplex, one of the biggest box-office leaders on the continent.

South Edmonton Common – As part of the Cineplex Odeon chain, tickets for the opening show here are available right now, so you can see the urgency of this predicament. Given the architecture of the cinema, which is identical to Sunridge Spectrum three hours to the south, the line will almost certainly be outdoors – a good thing, weather permitting, because of the spaciousness in general, the furious lightsabre duels with total strangers and the stunned looks from passersby who just don’t get it. Two problems, though: first, the cinema stands tall in barren pavement in the middle of nowhere, a fair walk from anything to see, do or eat. Second, it’s an incredible pain to get to by public transit from the University area. (Ask me about Sin City sometime.) Now, I’m not so presumptuous as to use my blog to wink at people to offer me rides and stand in line for me at six in the morning so I don’t have to skip a whole day of work, but you get the picture.

Finally, I am aware that both of these theatres will likely offer four or five post-midnight screenings at once, including shows labeled for 12:02am, 12:05am, et cetera. These are unacceptable. Traditionally, We of the First Line have looked upon Those of the Second Line with earned derision, and had the battle scars inflicted from the scramble for midnight-show tickets to justify it. It may not be a very practical distinction, but I value my pride, thank you very much.

So – and here’s where you, my readership, enters the fray – what works for you guys? I’d love to see you at the ritual – er, I mean, movie.

Here’s a predictive reference for those of you who have never done this before. For a city like Edmonton, here’s what I predict: the first party in line for the midnight show will arrive either the night of the 17th or by 6am the next morning – perhaps before that if they were already in line for tickets a week before, but they won’t be significantly joined. You can expect thirty to fifty people by noon, which will balloon threefold as most of them are holding spots for others. Arriving at 6pm will put you at about the hundredth spot, which may double by the time you are let in to grab your seats, typically between 7pm and 8pm. (For a party of greater than two to four, don’t expect decent seats if you don’t have a representative firmly in line hours before then.) Arriving after 10pm, less than two hours in advance, is not recommended – that’s when gaps fill in and the ushers start scrunching people together, and saving seats is damn near impossible.

So, any recommendations?

My regular readership is in all likelihood aware that I spend an arguably unhealthy proportion of my time feeding my nostalgic interest in video game music. It is with much pleasure that I encountered a video of an a cappella choir’s live performance of several signature tunes from the 8-bit era – yes, including thematically relevant stage choreography. Now I know what an abstract interpretive human rendition of falling Tetris blocks looks like.

There is often some measure of debate on whether or not the music to Tetris should properly be considered a video game tune, as it pertains to what is by convention admissible on remix and arrangement communities like VGMix. There is no doubt that it is through the classic puzzle game that the Russian folk song “Korobeiniki” (“The Peddler”) has seen the most widespread exposure in the Western world, but many are unaware of its roots. For those interested, I would advise a look at some traditional Russian folk dance videos, specifically this one.

It’s amazing how every time there’s a clip like the aforementioned choir performance that spreads memetically over the Web, people swell with nostalgia and perhaps recollect other gems they’ve found – most often the orchestrated medley from Super Mario Bros. from Orchestral Game Concert that is commonly misattributed to the Boston Pops – yet they have nary a clue how big a video game music community is out there, constantly taking the bleeps and bloops of yore and endowing them with near-professional quality across all musical styles. I think there’s a huge audience out there for game remixes that remains untapped, simply because the publicity for these independent niche-genre covers relies almost entirely on word-of-mouth.

I now turn my attention to written media and two posthumous literary treasure troves of note. The first is Runny Babbit, a billy sook by Shel Silverstein – essentially, a book of never-before-published spoonerisms by the master himself. If you grew up on his work, you would understand the warmth of this assurance that his death six years ago was, indeed, not where the sidewalk ends. The second is an archaeological breakthrough that has unlocked an archive of classical texts too unbelievable in scope for words… my words, anyhow. I’ll let this article do the talking.

Speaking of archaeology, I got around to catching the Matthew McConaughey-starring film of Clive Cussler’s novel Sahara. It’s good, clean popcorn fun once it gets past the awkward beginning, albeit nothing special. Intriguingly, one of the things holding it back is that it plays it too safe and doesn’t quite capture the extent of Cussler’s outrageous strokes of revisionist history, which elevate the Dirk Pitt stories to an almost unimpeachably ridiculous degree of escapism (and which, I might add, he pulls off a lot more successfully than the likes of Dan Brown). Although my recollection of the novel is rustier than a decommissioned ironclad – the one time I read it was several years ago – I do recall much of it focusing on a delightfully far-fetched premise involving Abraham Lincoln and a well-placed doppelganger, which was omitted in the adaptation and, to my surprise, somewhat missed.

As far as prospects for a Dirk Pitt film franchise go, it’s hard to say; let’s not forget that Dr. No sucked, but that didn’t stop Bond. And Sahara is far from terrible – it’s more of a one-time pleasure not quite guilty enough to harp on, aside from a number of pesky annoyances. The best compliment that I can offer the movie is this: at least it buries Raise the Titanic! for good.