Ntuple Indemnity

Lately, I have been putting off the writing of those “movie review” things that certain readers ask me for when approaching me in person at those rare opportune moments when I emerge from my cavern to, among other activities, watch movies. I’ll present my reason, or excuse as the case may be, in the form of several premises.

Dispute these if you must, but let me propose the following. One who is most likely to benefit from a review in the traditional sense is one who has not seen a movie, which then allows me to exercise my relative position of discursive power to encourage or discourage the related expenditure that goes into said movie depending on whether it will lead to the betterment of one’s life and understanding of the much-ballyhooed “human condition” – or, alternatively, fund terrorist cells. Such reviews will normally consist of evaluating the different structural elements of production and how they add up, whilst approaching the narrative in vague terms so as to avoid spoiling the experience.

Reviewing a film, however, is not the same thing as critiquing it. The two are not mutually exclusive, but even when they work together, the former is just an extension of the latter, and reduces to the affixation of value judgments to certain interpretive products. The problem with these stickers that read “this is good” or “this is bad” is that not everything invites the label. As for everything that does, it gets tiresome after a while.

As a writer I far prefer engaging in critique removed from the judgment of whether or not something “works,” where I can tackle something and rationalize it for what it is, and only then go back to evaluate the argument’s validity.

At the level of critique, it is impossible to give a film – or any story, really – an adequate treatment without an examination of endings and spoilers. In other words, I much prefer to discuss movies with a certain audience in mind, that being the audience that has already watched the movie. Sometimes, that audience may never get to that stage without a prior recommendation, which is why I’ll occasionally tell people to get out, see the movie, come back and read the rest of the post.

Of course, there are always the party-crashers who read the whole post anyhow, either because of a slip of the vertical scrollbar or the fallback that “I won’t see it anyway.” So here’s my advice: don’t be a party-crasher. Go see Sin City.

I’d go into what an excellent film it is and justify that claim of excellence with one example after another, but that would get boring after a while. Here’s a capsule summary of my recommendation: Robert Rodriguez has just directed/”shot and cut” his landmark film, the performances driving the three protagonists (Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen) are endearing enough to draw one’s exclusive attention amidst the visual flourish, and as for that visual flourish, wow.

There. That’s your review. Get out, see the movie, come back and read the rest of the post. Now, let’s get a-critiquin’.

You will see a lot of people call Sin City a film noir genre piece and leave it at that. I would argue that it is on the whole quite a different beast, though I should clarify that this is not merely a semantic claim under some authoritative definition of noir, but my effort to draw attention to what makes Rodriguez’s movie unique in substance.

What interests me is how so many people will take a look at Rodriguez’s adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novels, admire it for its production design and say “that’s noir” without identifying any specific similarities beyond the presence of pulp archetypes like disenchanted detectives, pernicious prostitutes and corrupt coppers. Yet they make special note of the amplified comic-book physics as antique vehicles soar above the pavement and a landed punch sends a thug across the room. They cite the explicit violence and casual nudity as distinguishing marks of the film. They fail to notice that the obtuse, centrifugal expression to be found in Sin City places it at the other side of the world from what makes film noir tick.

Film noir is not about sex, booze and violence. It is about concealment and innuendo. The lines of noir dialogue you remember are the suggestive propositions. That is precisely why film noir flourished in the era of Hollywood censorship, its defining female archetype the femme fatale seductress with something to hide. It should tell you something that the narrative mode most closely associated with noir is the mystery, a story of secrecy and revelation. It’s when you don’t see sex, booze and violence that film noir is at its most effective.

Let’s take a look at the Howard Hawks film of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe (the 1946 theatrical cut, for the purposes of this discussion). In many ways, I consider both the film and book to be the defining noir story, even though they differ in some very significant ways, and even if it was The Maltese Falcon that “started it.” The Big Sleep was, at the time of its release, one of the most chilling thriller pictures on record. Promotional posters advertised it as “the violence screen’s all-time rocker-shocker.”

It’s hard to imagine this day and age, but it used to be that even one murder was a big deal. Casablanca was advertised as an action picture on the basis of the gunpoint threats and the grand total of two onscreen shootings. Nowadays we talk about the desensitizing effect of seeing the body count run into the double- and triple-digits within the span of a two-hour trip to the cineplex, but back in the day, every snuffing counted.

In The Big Sleep, the trail of corpses beats a lower bound of seven, in a bullet-ridden domino chain of crisscrossing motives and passions. And still, every snuffing counted. After Marlowe kills Canino, the one death he inflicts in the whole adventure, he feels and expresses a modicum of regret sufficient to warrant a kiss from Lauren Bacall.

The censorship regime did its own wonders for film noir’s self-assertion as a mode of storytelling specific to the cinematic medium. The central act of blackmail that sets the plot in motion – dirty pictures of Carmen Sternwood – is referred to in vague, implicit terms. Carmen is fully clothed when Marlowe finds her posing in front of the camera at Geiger’s residence. Marlowe’s amusing charade with Agnes in the bookstore is as someone with an interest in “rare books,” if you take my meaning. And then there’s the 1946 cut’s addition of that legendary dinner between Marlowe and Vivian, arguably Bogart and Bacall’s best scene together in all their collaborations, where they discuss sexual positions with the euphemistic vocabulary of equestrianism.

Chandler’s novel was itself was a rejection of chivalric ideals in favour of a new, gritty realism. Observe the scene (excised from the film, it goes without saying) in Chapter 24 where Marlowe discovers Carmen lying naked in his apartment, and notices an unsolved chess problem nearby:

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.

This, from the novel that defined the modern conception of hard-boiled private eye fiction beyond its foundations in Hammett’s Falcon. And to think that on film, yet more of it was left unsaid. Is concealment not what put the “film” in film noir? I hope I have dispensed with the notion with sufficient conviction.

With that out of the way, we lead ourselves back to Miller and Rodriguez with a blunt rhetorical question. Do Sin City and the words “realism” or “censorship” even belong in the same sentence? And I hope you’ve seen the film by now, because in answering that question, I’m going to spoil the film like crazy.

The case for the “no” side is obvious. The exaggerated sensationalism of sex and violence in Sin City places it in an ironic position antithetical to the realism inherent to its generic influence. This is not a negative criticism of the film, but of ignorant critics – both the proponents who will tell you what a good noir flick it is, and the detractors who see it as an exploitative abomination no more than a thin and pale mimetic imitation of the classic noir oeuvre. This is a film to be evaluated on its own terms, and any comparative study would do well to make note of differences instead of merely repeating the observable similarities.

That said, the observable similarities tend to appear in the film at its most critical heights of dramatic tension. For all the amputations, beheadings and castrations in the picture – and that’s just the ABC of Sin City‘s alphabet of gore – it is with the occasional, hardly-noticed spurt of concealment that it makes a brief return to the noir tradition, when what matters is not what you see, but what you don’t.

Perhaps the most noirish scene in all of Sin City is its opening scene, based on the story “The Customer is Always Right” and starring Josh Hartnett as a hitman unaware of his ultimate purpose. The composition exhibits a constructed whiff of nostalgia, and the characters are so fresh off the stock as to remain anonymous. The sudden, silenced jolt as he does away with his unsuspecting “customer” hearkens back to the decisive shot fired at the conclusion of the best noir mystery of the last few years, Spielberg’s Minority Report. Beyond the precision of the staging and the colour palette (black and white, a red dress and blue eyes), it all feels like an elevation of traditional noir conventions to a Platonic ideal. But the movie is just beginning, and something feels off about the scene beyond its manifest artificiality; later, we see that it is a deception in the face of the tone that follows.

The three stories that make up the movie proper aren’t nearly as subdued – what, with Kevin eating hookers and mounting their heads on the wall and Marv subsequently feeding his remains to the dogs in “The Hard Goodbye,” the entire Dwight chapter (“The Big Fat Kill”) centering on a game of hot-potato with Jack Rafferty’s severed head, and Hartigan ripping out a pair of pasty happy-sacks in “That Yellow Bastard.”

The violence does not provoke suspense, though – and it should be noted that it is altogether infrequent next to how some would describe the film. While it is in a sense extreme, it incites disgust at worst, but more often a sort of base and bloodthirsty pleasure. When the skinheaded thug played by Nicky Katt (the voice of Atton in the ending-free computer game Knights of the Old Republic II) is shot through the chest with an arrow, it’s damn funny.

But to me, the violence with the greatest impact is that which is concealed or shrouded – and I don’t mean offscreen. Of all the gunshots fired in the course of this 126-minute thrill ride, the best was saved for last. And you’ll notice that when Hartigan does himself in, it occurs in reverse silhouette, in the same negative space as when Dwight is drowning in tar – backgrounded as what is not present, a white cutout in a blank canvas. It is onscreen, yet it is absent. Or, in the case of the Yellow Bastard’s own ignominious end as he is pounded into a pool of piss-toned gunk, the pounding is obscured, and Hartigan’s rage is all the more visible precisely because the audience is distanced from its expression.

Shot after shot, Sin City drowns you in imagery you cannot fail to notice, thrusting it into the foreground. Film noir doesn’t do that. But every now and then, when you’re not looking, it hits you. It hits you the hardest when you don’t see it hit you, and that’s when film noir rears its shadowy head.

My point, to sum it up, is that one would do Sin City an injustice to praise or dismiss it as merely a parasitic digital-age iteration of a timeless genre infused with the aesthetics of sequential art. It is a dialectic synthesis of different philosophies and as a result, something both original and special.

It’s three months into the calendar year, but the roster of films I already know I intend to see in 2005 has changed remarkably little since I first promised one a month ago. Of course, in my mind, the movie season is not officially underway until Sin City opens later this week, but then again, I have yet to catch Robots, and I still owe a Constantine review.

I’ll preface this by saying that “tentpole” pictures aside, it is usually hard to point out most of the films that will end up among the year’s best even in March. Aside from the big franchises, adaptations and years-in-the-making pet projects by high-profile directors, films worth getting excited about have developed a tendency to come out of the gates in November and December, preceded only by the buzz of the festival circuit and critical preview screenings no more than a month or two in advance. On the other end of the spectrum are films that get marked on the calendar years in advance; Cars and Watchmen are already sitting pretty atop my list for 2006, and there’s a certain release this year that has blocked off a weekend in May since it was officially announced in 1997.

Without further ado, let us proceed categorically.

Star Wars: It would be inaccurate to call Revenge of the Sith (19 May) the movie I’ve been dying to see. It is, properly, the movie I’ve been living to see. This is the film I have been waiting for ever since I started reading and writing about cinema all those years ago when the Prequels were just making it to the drawing board and nobody had any idea what to expect. This is the episode that will lay all the speculation to rest. This is the episode that binds the galaxy together. This is it, and it’s here in less than two months.

Big films by big directors: The biggest of them all is the last one on the release calendar, and that is Peter Jackson’s real dream project, King Kong (14 December). We already know what happened with his runner-up.

Before that, we have the most interesting traditional battle epic in sight, Ridley Scott’s Crusades picture Kingdom of Heaven (6 May). After putting up with several years of cheap imitators (and even failed expensive imitators that may or may not go by the name of Oliver Stone) trying to make their own Gladiator, I’m enthralled to see Scott come back and show them how it’s done – with an ambitious backdrop that has largely been unexplored, to boot.

Then there’s Ron Howard’s latest collaboration with Russell Crowe, the Jim Braddock bio-pic Cinderella Man (3 June). Yes, it’s yet another boxing movie, but yes, it looks like it could be really something. Maybe this is the personal fascination with the Depression era talking, or just an acknowledgment that Crowe is one of the finest actors this generation, and Howard is a good match for him.

Invasion of the literary nerds: Four major classics of the fantasy/sci-fi canon are coming to film this year, and one can only hope they all live up to their namesakes. First down the pipeline is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (29 April), which is this year’s The Phantom of the Opera in the sense that it has taken far, far too long to get here. But it is arriving at last, and while director Garth Jennings is a big question mark, at least the project is no longer in the hands of Jay Roach. Stephen Fry (the Guide), Warwick Davis (Marvin) and Alan Rickman (Marvin’s voice) are feats of perfect casting, The Vogons are positively full of, um, Vogonity. The trailers make the film look great, though hopefully it will stay true to the Britishness and wit of the source material. As far as actual point-by-point consistency with the book goes, one should expect nothing; even Douglas Adams contradicted himself constantly in every iteration of the story.

Steven Spielberg continues his whirlwind comeback tour of every nook and cranny of science fiction with War of the Worlds (29 June), starring Tom Cruise and penned by Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp. The contemporary take on H.G. Wells appears only loosely related to the novel, but it’s Spielberg doing an alien invasion movie – interestingly, the only kind of alien movie he hasn’t done.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (18 November) is a mixed bag of hype. As the book with the scenes that are most easily imaginable and translatable to pictures, be it the Quidditch World Cup, the Triwizard tasks or the cemetary showdown, it is one to see on opening day. But while director Mike Newell is sufficiently British, he still needs to convince me that he is capable of tackling something of this scope. The worst thing the franchise can do at this point is to turn away from Cuaron’s laudable visual overhauls in The Prisoner of Azkaban, yet it is doing exactly that with the costumes and effects.

Shrek director Andrew Adamson is more immediately convincing as the right man for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (9 December), especially when you consider that also attached to the project are composer Harry Gregson-Williams (Chicken Run and Shrek), Richard Taylor’s WETA dream team (fresh off The Lord of the Rings), and Tilda Swinton as the White Witch. This is a formula for enchantment if I ever saw one.

Comic books: There are three coming out this year that have really piqued my interest, and none of them are associated with Marvel. All of them, to some extent, represent a certain maturation in comic book adaptations to film. The first is Sin City (1 April), which already looks like the best translation of the graphic novel look to motion pictures in history, and possibly the most audacious adoption of a print aesthetic since Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy fifteen years ago. Even the best serious graphic novel adaptations to date, however stylish, have remained first and foremost motion pictures in the traditional vein – Road to Perdition comes to mind. Sin City looks to graft several stories from Frank Miller’s noirish underworld straight to film with an all-star cast.

For all his popularity, I still think Batman has not been given a proper cinematic treatment, and Batman Begins (17 June) may be the first. Directed by Memento‘s Christopher Nolan, starring a very fitting Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne and finally featuring the Scarecrow as a screen villain, this is the Warner/DC response to Marvel’s recent success in capturing the superhero mystique. It is a necessary and long-overdue reset of how the franchise has traditionally been treated. The one real concern, if it can be called that, is that Sin City makes Batman Begins look so standard and safe. The comparison is less than superficial, since Frank Miller practically created the modern conception of the character in The Dark Knight Returns and went on to revive interest in the early period with Year One.

Last but not least is V For Vendetta (4 November), the next title to fly the Vertigo banner and the latest attempt to do Alan Moore justice. As I discussed in an earlier post, if James McTeigue and company stay true to the British subtleties of the original and do not deviate too far in the direction of The Matrix, we should be in for a treat.

Feature animation: CG is now the talk of the town, but the most exciting prospects in the world of animation this year are both done in stop-motion Claymation. The biggest one to watch out for is the first Wallace & Gromit feature film, The Curse of the Wererabbit (7 October). Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Aardman Animation’s oeuvre should already be aware there is ample reason to plan the weekend around this movie. You should too.

Opening shortly before it is Tim Burton’s spiritual followup to The Nightmare Before Christmas, the early Hallowe’en treat Corpse Bride (23 September). Watch the trailer, and you will agree.

I won’t miss Madagascar (27 May), even if I am hardly a fan of the Dreamworks Animation approach. This one looks slick and stylized, and the penguins are great; and if there is any substance under the promise of fun, it would be a much-appreciated bonus. Hopefully, the topical-for-a-minute-only humour that plagued a certain attempt at a shark movie is kept to a minimum in favour of amusement that comes from the animation itself. To this end, note said penguins.

Finally there is Chicken Little (4 November), Disney’s maiden voyage into all-CG waters. I can’t say I expect this film to be any more significant than the standard offerings we are seeing from the major non-Pixar animation studios, but I really do hope it is a cut above the rest. The performance of Chicken Little is a double-edged sword in that if it succeeds, the possibility of traditional Disney animation coming back anytime soon is even more unlikely; yet if it does not succeed, then Disney’s long sickness will look all the more terminal. But on balance, I want to see a good movie.

Assuming they see release: There are two films that have already made the rounds elsewhere but, to my knowledge, have yet to reach distribution deals that will bring them to Alberta screens anytime soon. The first is Downfall (Der Untergang), Germany’s 2004 Oscar nominee for the Foreign Language award, a story of the collapse of the Third Reich from Hitler’s perspective. Awhile back, Stephen wrote a fantastic post about why this is a film to watch out for, and I see no need to repeat him further. With any luck, the arthouses will pick it up soon.

The other significant film that has only been exhibited in a limited capacity, but should really go everywhere, is Dream On Silly Dreamer, a 40-minute documentary about the death of traditional animation at Walt Disney, as told by the animators themselves. There is still surprisingly little public awareness of the tragedy that has befallen the state of American animation, and it is a story that I would like to see told. Word on the film has been overwhelmingly positive, and I want to see the results for myself.

And everything else: As I said at the beginning of this piece, the landscape will probably look completely different by summer’s end. I still have to hear more about Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown and Steven Spielberg’s film about the Munich Olympics (tentatively entitled Vengeance), and who knows what else will come out of the woodwork. On the release calendar, I should take note of two more films. First is Kung Fu Hustle (22 April), the latest comedy from Shaolin Soccer director/star Stephen Chow, who is one of the few directors in the world who still understands how to pull off silly slapstick that not only gets you rolling on the floor laughing yourself to tears, but without being stupid. Well, not too stupid. Unlike Shaolin Soccer‘s Stateside release, which was handled by Miramax, Hustle is being carried by Sony Pictures Classics, which consistently has the balls to release Asian films unmolested.

Buried deep in the release schedule right before the onslaught of the Galactic Empire, but not to be overlooked, is Unleashed (13 May). It is my belief that Jet Li has yet to be given the respect he deserves in English-language film as an actor, not just a fancy-schmancy kung fu guy. From what I can tell, this time around he has a chance to stretch his legs as a performer working under a story premise that is actually compelling. The film is written by Luc Besson and directed by one of his stable of proteges, though as an aside, Besson should really return to directing himself. None of the pseudo-Bessons have ever produced anything on the level of Léon (The Professional) or The Fifth Element, even though they have his style down on the surface. But even though Besson has instead chosen the path of becoming a French Jerry Bruckheimer, even Bruckheimer delegated a good film or two, and Unleashed looks promising.

And that’s a wrap. I see a preview screening of Sin City tomorrow, so hopefully I will return with comments at some point in the near future. Until then, chide me for my unintended omissions.

One of the films I will mention in my forthcoming mega-post on the films to watch out for in 2005 – when it comes – is the adaptation of the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. If you have never read the original work, I highly recommend that you do so. While it’s no Watchmen – and let’s be honest, what comic book is? – it’s definitely a cut above the norm, and deviates enough from the typical Orwellian future-fascist clichés to be interesting. It has, with good reason, inspired many a serious academic study of its aesthetic and literary content – here, for instance, or here.

As much of a neat little gimmick as it is to target the release of the film for the weekend of Guy Fawkes Day (“Remember, remember the Fifth of November”), I do wonder if it is really that wise an idea to rush the production schedule to meet it. It has a lineup to dream of, with Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond and James McTeigue in the director’s chair. McTeigue is untried, but given his background as an Assistant Director under both the Wachowskis in The Matrix and George Lucas in the Prequels, I have faith in the guy, so long as he doesn’t let too many Wachowski fingerprints get all over his work. That is appropriate for some dystopian movies about post-apocalyptic fascists that rule over a complacent populace, but it would not necessarily be a good fit here.

My big concern – and the major question mark that hovers over the otherwise perfect casting of Natalie Portman – is that the film may lose some of the Britishness of the original source, which I think needs to be retained. Alan Moore is arguably the best living scriptwriter in the comics business, and his work is long overdue for some cinematic respect, especially after the disaster that was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Hopefully the film captures some of the more ingenious motifs, both visual and poetic, that lie in Moore’s book. The commodification of Fate and Justice as artificial feminine personifications that cheat on society and the powers that be is of particular note, as is the marvelous sequence in the third act when V, the anarchistic Guy Fawkes figure around whom the story revolves, conducts the destruction of the fascist regime’s power structures to the cannon-fire of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. As Robert Rodriguez will hopefully demonstrate with Sin City, which looks incredible, why reinvent the wheel when the original comic has already provided so much in the way of aesthetic guidance?

On the other side of the literary world lies Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is an almost entirely linguistic experience aside from the great Helquist illustrations and the tag that follows every book offering clues as to the next one. I have now finished all eleven published books, and the series is due to conclude in the thirteenth volume. My original impression after reading the first three, if you will recollect, was that this was a series that dropped plot and story in favour of being very clever about the telling thereof. Well, that changes quite significantly as one progresses, and from about the fifth or sixth volume onwards, it becomes masterful episodic fiction in the serial tradition, with each successive adventure posing riddles that are answered with even more baffling oddities in the next one, capitalizing on everything that has come before. Even given how the author continues to unify each book with a set of idioms or literary devices that he deconstructs with scalpel precision, the series has shifted to the point where the unanswered mysteries in the plot are what generate anticipation for the next entry to come.

I must also admit a total agreement with the axis of good and evil that emerges as the series progresses. Every book has a library motif, and one of the characters in The Slippery Slope (whose identity I will not reveal) comes right out and says that well-read individuals are bound to be the good guys. All the decent people in the books respect knowledge, and amidst all the sobering melancholy in the series, one that explicitly deals with terrible things happening to undeserving innocent children, we see the promotion of what I think is a critical, yet oft-ignored value.

The antithesis of the printed page, and the mark of the enemy, is fire. When the villains employ fire, the tragic loss is always not so much material as it is a loss of knowledge. It’s an axis of conflict you don’t see every day, and certainly not in something promoted as children’s fiction.

Fiction is created, marketed and sold in a way that is completely different from the movie business. Book launches, Harry Potter aside, don’t have anything approaching the opening-weekend culture of movies that saw a revival after The Phantom Menace and reached its peak in the summer of 2001. It should really come as no surprise, then, that my most anticipated works of fiction to be published this calendar year are almost entirely sequels. Couple that with the fact that I have enough classic literature from years past to discover, and this list pales in comparison to what I can say about movies.

With that said, I want to make special mention of the four books coming out in 2005 that I intend to buy the moment they hit stores. Book the Twelfth of the Lemony Snicket series is one. Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception, which arrives 3 May, is another; I much enjoyed the first three, and this one promises to build on the dangling threads of the second whilst balancing them with the bittersweet ending of the third. Then there’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and its inclusion here should be obvious.

Not so obvious is the one non-sequel I already have marked down on my calendar, even considering that it does not have a hard release date beyond a vague promise of delivery in October (though its Amazon.co.uk entry now indicates a delay until 6 March, 2006). This would be Michael Chabon’s next novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, his first big piece since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay after having taken a break with the children’s baseball fantasy Summerland and the Sherlock Holmes tribute The Final Solution.

Chabon, as longtime devotees of this journal should be aware, is a literary wunderkind and one of my favourite novelists of all time. Not only does he write prose that can only be described as beautiful, he somehow never manages to let it overpower the stories underneath; and oh, what amazing stories he tells. All I know about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that it is apparently an alternate-history novel about a Jewish state established in what we know as Alaska, and I’m already dying to see where he goes with this.

I will finish this post with yet another empty promise of a detailed, extended orgasmic reaction to the new footage of Revenge of the Sith, and pop in an unrelated link or two. The first is an excellent Jim Hill feature article on Eric Idle’s new Broadway production, Spamalot. The second is an obscure, but surreal recording that fittingly, you can only order on the Internet; you know the sort. Or do you? I speak, after all, of The Rap Canterbury Tales. Its inclusion in one of my classes today made that particular course (English 300, “Social and Cultural History of the English Language”) all the more fun in a strange, delightful way. It is, after all, the same course where a recommended reading for an upcoming paper is Going Nucular, a book by Geoff Nunberg of Language Log fame.

This is going to be a summer to remember.

So, how did I do for predictions? Passing on the two Documentary awards leaves 22 categories, of which I managed to guess 15; curiously, I underestimated The Aviator in the technical categories, yet I incorrectly pegged it for Best Picture. In the eight “majors” (Picture, Director, acting and screenplays) I got everything but Picture and to some extent Supporting Actor, though I was definitely fence-sitting when it came to Owen and Freeman.

In retrospect, as much as I enjoyed Million Dollar Baby, I do stand disappointed that Scorsese and The Aviator did not take home the top two. Once again, the Academy went for the safe, perhaps even slightly compensatory choice. Honestly, what does Martin Scorsese have to do to win an Oscar? But then one thinks of the usual stable of examples – Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock – and quite frankly, this is the Academy’s loss.

The best acceptance speech of the evening was, without question, Jorge Drexler singing after winning for “Al Otro Lado Del Rio” – a deserving winner.

Film clips were by and large absent, and nowhere was this more noticeable than in the Animated Short category. Chris Landreth had to accept his award in the aisle instead of onstage, and I wonder if some technical budgets were slashed this year. Speaking of which, it has come to my attention that the National Film Board has Ryan available on its website for viewing online. Take fifteen minutes out of your busy schedule and watch it.

And that closes the book on 2004, minus any straggling films I did not catch, of which the most notable is Hotel Rwanda. But given that March consists of exactly one and only one new release that strikes me as interesting – Robots – I have plenty of time.

I want to discuss Oscars of a different sort: the Rainbow Oscars that are the centrepiece of the wacky film-spoofing video game Viewtiful Joe 2. Well, not the Rainbow Oscars themselves, but what you need to do to get them; as with most video games, it involves the systematic defeating of what a Campbellian mythologist would call “threshold guardians” – in vulgar terms, bosses.

The original Viewtiful Joe was, in terms of a niche GameCube action title that was somehow enough of a sleeper hit to be named the best game of 2003 by USA Today, legendary in many ways. As a 2D side-scrolling anime-styled beat-em-up in a market favouring photorealistic 3D environments, it was a daring and unique blend of old-school values and modern technology. What really made it stand out, though, was its rogue’s gallery. If I were to name the most exhilirating, albeit frustrating boss battles of the past five years, Viewtiful Joe would claim at least three of them.

One of the toughest challenges in the original Joe was the sixth chapter of seven, “The Magnificent Five.” Basically, it was a slap in the face of anyone who might have emerged from the first few boss battles scathed, but self-satisfied. This chapter pitted you against the Raging Stones, tougher versions of the first four bosses in the game in back-to-back succession with no saving or powering up in between. Not only did you have to beat them all over again, you had to do it cleanly and without taking a whole lot of pain, or start from the very beginning. Then you were rewarded with a duel against none other than Fire Leo, a nine-foot flaming beast in a volcanic cavern, who had a tendency to dispose of you in about ten seconds until you figured out how to exploit his weakness, after which he would dispose of you in the more gracious span of two minutes. On the standard Adults difficulty, Fire Leo dragged me to the “Game Over” screen kicking and screaming no less than thirty times. He gave my delicate piano hands cramps.

Viewtiful Joe 2 is in many ways as great a game as the original, boasting a selection of bosses that have a lot more personality – the squid-like mad scientist Dr. Cranken, for example, or Fire Leo’s brother Frost Tiger, a cool-as-ice samurai who punctuates his entrance with lyric poetry in the style of Basho. (The exception to the rule is the rocket-powered Egyptian sphinx Flinty Stone, who spends half his showdown asleep.) It also has a similar sixth chapter where you fight your way through iterations of four earlier bosses that move faster and take a lot more punishment before yielding. The problem is that the sequel, unlike its predecessor, is merciful; you get a chance to save and heal between every battle, which turns the entire exercise into a purely temporal endurance test as opposed to an attritional one. This is Viewtiful Joe, for crying out loud! I expect to be punished. Every point of damage should strike terror in my heart.

I should note that this is one of the few irritations in an otherwise phenomenal game that was sadly ignored when it was released in November (thanks to the blitz of Halo 2, Metroid Prime: Echoes, Half-Life 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and World of Warcraft), but I do find it a concern when such a fast-paced game repeats itself for such a long stretch. Really, though, if you have a GameCube, there is absolutely no excuse to not have the two Viewtiful Joe titles in your collection.

Still to come: a preview of film in what looks to be a busy 2005, and Students’ Union election coverage in tandem with the campaign season kickoff this morning. Disappointingly, both Katz and Bazin pulled out, leaving the Presidential race as the only one of interest.