Ntuple Indemnity

I have a number of posts on queue or in mind that are actually of substance, but this is not one of them. In their place, how about a spate of disjointed miscellany, loosely connected by waddling flightless birds:

First, with the addition of Georges Laraque and Gary Roberts to the lineup, the Pittsburgh Penguins are suddenly even more interesting than they were already. I mention them both in connection to something I want to say about Ryan Smyth, which is next. I appreciate seeing someone as entertaining as Laraque on a team I will actually root for of my own volition, and the idea of Roberts on the ice with Sidney Crosby blows my mind. Mind you, to see Laraque in a flaming C would have been downright awesome, but I’m almost inclined to think the citizenry here in Edmonton, which seems to live and die for the Oilers, has taken enough punishment for one day. Or one season.

As for the Oilers? Speaking as someone from Calgary, I like seeing a strong, healthy and respectable Oilers team worthy of a provincial rivalry. Without a heated Battle of Alberta (preferably one that we win), hockey can only be so interesting. I’ve been told from several corners that in terms of tangibles, Edmonton got plenty from the Islanders for Ryan Smyth, and basically came out on top. But in the context of Edmonton’s rotten year in the front office, and Smyth’s intangible value to his team and to the community at large in terms of morale, leadership and institutional memory, I wouldn’t blame a single Oilers fan for quitting on their team. I quit on the Flames, and hockey in general, for a span of about eight years. I can identify, within a reasonable margin of confidence, when the cracks started to show and the Flames started to quit on me: when they traded Al MacInnis to St. Louis.

It’s easy to console oneself with the mentality that such-and-such a superstar who has been with you for over a decade is 31 years old and won’t be improving anyway, but you start eating your words when said player stays on the other team for another decade without too considerable a decline, and they retire his jersey before you do and stick him in management. Meanwhile, back home you develop all these new faces for a couple of years, and the fan base goes, “Who are these guys?” before it makes like a tree and leafs. I don’t know if that will happen with Ryan Smyth, and it almost certainly won’t with the Islanders, but he doesn’t look like a guy on the decline to me. Then again, he’s never been a MacInnis-class player either, though I don’t want to start comparing apples and orangutans.

Not that I expect anybody in this city to really stop caring about their floundering team. Edmonton takes its hockey very, very seriously, even by Canadian standards. We’re talking about a Roch Carrier’s Le Chandail de Hockey magnitude of seriousness. They burn their owners in effigy around here. But in the oil-ridden backwaters of central to northern Alberta, there’s only so much to live for. (That’s what the Prongers found out.)

It’s incredible to me that we’re now over a decade removed from the time when Al MacInnis, Joe Nieuwendyk and Gary Roberts were, for all intents and purposes, established franchise players for the Flames. When play resumed after the lockout, all three were still on the ice. Remarkably, one of them still is, and it’s the one we practically lost to injury. An eight-year abandonment and a Stanley Cup run later, I got over it. Go Flames go.

Next: Scientists in China have leveraged the wonders of neuroscience to develop remote-controlled pigeons. My thoughts on carrier pigeons aside (I kind of love them), all I’ll say is this: forty years ago, this would have made for a killer episode of The Avengers.

Next: I’ve come to the conclusion that the Wii remote, turned sideways, is a phenomenal NES-style two-button controller. I’ve been using it as an NES and Genesis pad on the Virtual Console, and with emulated Game Boy titles on my Mac with the assistance of DarwiinRemote. At first, it’s a bit strange to hold a controller that wide when the left side is about half the width of the right, but the D-pad is superb and the 1/2 buttons (mapped to A/B, and horizontally arranged like the NES pad and unlike the Game Boy line) contour like a dream. I’ve been told that these are the same kind of buttons as the ones on the DS Lite. If so, I think I’m upgrading. It’s not just about the buttons, though. The form factor of the Wiimote, in all its lightweight, wireless glory, is such that you don’t grip the controller so much as you let it rest on your fingers and let it become a part of you.

As I was never a Sega man, for good reason – let’s face it, Nintendo won that era handily, even though the sales at the time made it look close – I did miss out on some genuinely terrific games for the Genesis. Well, one, anyway: Gunstar Heroes, the side-scrolling shoot-’em-up to end all side-scrolling shoot-’em-ups. It now resides on my Wii thanks to the Virtual Console service. This is all quite encouraging. In two generations, when Nintendo is still alive and kicking and Sony’s games division has gone under, I fully expect to be downloading and playing PS2 games on my Nintendo system. There are a handful I’ve always wanted to try, though I could never justify purchasing a console from that generation that wasn’t a GameCube.

Would it be impossible for Nintendo to somehow update the Wii firmware so a Nintendo DS could be used as an SNES controller? Given that any sort of DS-to-Wii connection would be over local Wi-Fi and not Bluetooth, I wonder if there are any problems in terms of responsiveness and reliability. Battery consumption really isn’t an issue.

Next: I’ve decided I’m not going to comment on the Oscars until I’ve seen The Departed again, primarily because the first time I saw it, my enthusiasm was deflated somewhat because in some very significant ways, Scorsese’s film fails to escape the shadow of Infernal Affairs. It’s a strong film, but not as good as Andy Lau’s, certainly nowhere near Scorsese’s best, and – upon initial impressions – not nearly as engaging as Babel, which was (in turn) a more intelligent film than last year’s winner, the structurally similar Crash. But I have a feeling that The Departed would improve on repeat viewings.

Okay, I’ll comment on one Oscar. Cars was robbed. Happy Feet was fun and ambitious, but Cars was playing in a different league altogether – Pixar’s league. It reminds me of the hysteria over Shrek when it was the first winner of the Animated Film statuette back in 2001, which only really manifested itself in the box-office performance of the sequel. Don’t get me wrong: Shrek is still the best we’ve seen from DreamWorks apart from their work with Aardman, and is undoubtedly the best of the spoof subgenre. But on repeat viewings, it’s become abundantly clear that its opponent that year, Monsters, Inc., is the finer film by almost every critical metric that should be applied to animation, even if it isn’t as immediately gratifying. Between Cars and Happy Feet, it’s not even that close. The care and attention to character and story design aren’t even comparable.

Moreover, I worry about the impact that the Happy Feet award will have on the decisions that are made at the level of the people with money, the ones who are in the position of treating animation like a business and not a craft. Again, Cartoon Brew is on the money: professional animators have something to fear. The success of a film driven by motion-capture techniques means that the kind of studio bosses who invested in Shrek clones to the point of market oversaturation are, at this very moment, gambling their “development” money on mo-cap.

And why not? From a business perspective, motion-capture provides an Oscar-tested avenue for the budget to be spent on post-production technology that already exists, as opposed to investing in animators, who are trained to sort out all the minutiae in the design and storyboarding process – a pre-production phase that spans several years. If you’re going to greenlight films based on economic forces in a high-stakes nine-figure market, you’re naturally going to be impatient. And in case anybody is still under the illusion that the Oscars don’t matter, consider why it is that the standard idiom in mainstream CG is built on pop-culture references and celebrity voices – material that appeals to the here-and-now, and not built to last. It all goes back to Shrek.

I’m not one to knock motion-capture as a legitimate technique: once animators play with the keyframing and refine the results, the wonders start coming, and there’s no better testament than Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and King Kong in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Remember that the harbinger of the CG revolution that first reached silver-screen audiences was also a similar live-action proof-of-concept, Jurassic Park. The real danger is when mo-cap is treated as a replacement for animators, which is a problematic strategy born of ignorance. A reliance on mo-cap as a time-saver and cost-saver, as opposed to a highly efficient modelling tool for animators to play with.

Take Happy Feet, for instance. Most of the animation in the film happens at the level of full bodies and, well, feet. When Mumble is confident, he puffs out his chest and struts around on his pair of tappity-tappers. When he’s sad, he hunches over and pitter-patters away. Fair enough. Can you think of a single memorable moment that involved, say, the eyes? Or even the flippers? If you look at a movie like Cars, almost every memorable shot is fundamentally defined by the “eyebrow” lines over the windshield. (I read somewhere that this was precisely why the animators decided to put the eyes in the windshield instead of the established standard of the headlights. It worked.)

Eyes are usually a dead giveaway when it comes to the apparent fluidity or stiffness of an animated character, and in Happy Feet, they’re not even designed to have any expressive power. They’re just there because penguins have eyes. The puppet-like rigidity in that paragon of Uncanny Valley mo-cap films, The Polar Express? It’s in the eyes, which are ostensibly only there because humans have eyes. When motion-capture actually works, like it did with Gollum, you get both natural body movements from your model (in this case, Andy Serkis) and the subtleties of facial expression (in particular, eye movements) from animators using keyframing techniques.

You can still get by without eyes and rely on full-body motion – hopping lamps, anyone? – but not if you have a pair of eyes just sitting on your character’s face waiting to be used.

I would add, on a final note, that motion-capture isn’t nearly as effective for films that are wholly animated as it is for CG elements in live-action movies. The utility of motion-capture, apart from its savings, is to make animated body movements look realistic enough to blend in with live-action ones. In feature animation, it’s not incumbent on anything to look realistic: the first priority is to be expressive, and often, that’s the opposite. (Happy Feet is a strange case in that while it is primarily CG, it does attempt to blend with live-action elements in its enthralling third act.) At the same time, the claim that motion-capture was meant for live-action films is an ironic one: the first major all-CG motion-capture character in live-action features was none other than the infamous Jar Jar Binks. By my account, the primary reason he was so harshly received was his “cartoonish” dynamism and lack of subtlety, which made The Phantom Menace feel like (shock and horror!) an animated film. I get the sense that George Lucas asked Ahmed Best to act like an animated character, and got exactly what he wanted: “Faster, more intense.”

Now that I can hardly ever find and justify the time to be as thorough as I used to be when writing about cinema (newcomers to the site can find examples here, here, here and here), capsule impressions will have to do. So here are a few brief thoughts on the five theatrical releases I’ve seen since my last summation of the sort. For a few words on the Oscars and my picks for the best films of 2006, skip to the end.

Pan’s Labyrinth: A masterpiece, the best film of 2006, and certainly in my top ten of the decade. Or is it? A second time through will confirm it. As a character study of fascist villainy, it’s on par with Schindler’s List. As a film about romance and fairytales crushed under the boot of a harsh and violent reality, yet resisting and persisting in a way that only the imagination can, I’m racking my brain and its repository of memories from hundreds of films for a treatment that operates at the same level of excellence as Guillermo del Toro’s, and the only one I can think of is Brazil. No small feat, considering that this has been one of the defining themes in all of literature since Don Quixote, or even further back, that Chinese wise guy who dreamed he was a butterfly (or however the story goes). It’s sad, it’s beautiful, it’s fantastic in a way that out-Narnias Narnia, and it’s resolutely human. I recommend it without any hesitation.

Happy Feet: Surprisingly good. As a non-Pixar CG motion-capture film with generally indistinct character designs marketed for its celebrity voices and suffused with pop tunes (a manoeuvre that worked for Moulin Rouge! and nothing since), a movie like Happy Feet is a hard sell for a tough customer like yours truly. For the most part, I was sold: there is a tremendous level of visual craftsmanship on display here, and it would be unfair to dismiss the film based on its motion-capture tap-dancing alone, though one would be right to question how convincing tap-dancing is when applied to animals that don’t even have legs.

Thematically there’s nothing new – just a gravitation from the usual message to the kids about conformity to a hero-quest about environmental consciousness. The former is a wash; it takes a film smarter than this one (The Incredibles, perhaps) to say something with more substance than “being different is okay.” As for the latter, it fares better simply because in its final act, the film’s stunning visuals manage to convey the sense that Mumble, our fluffy footloose protagonist, is on an epic journey to save his homeland – and that furthermore, this is worth doing. The state of mainstream computer animation after Shrek is such that we’ve seen the emergence of a dominant paradigm. While that set of conventions should go straight out the window, and is finally showing signs of collapse, Happy Feet is about the best it has to offer.

Tideland: This is the anti-Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam at his most rebellious and esoteric. I hope none of those bigshot executives with Hollywood money saw it; if they did, they’ll never fund him again. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, Tideland is a film about a child protected from the outside world by a shell of fantasy and adventure, and everything about it that works can be traced to the strength of an outstanding child performance by Jodelle Ferland. The cinematography is lavish, the musical score is not to be ignored, and I was sufficiently familiar with Gilliam’s oeuvre that the story worked for me in a way it won’t for most. However, it would be dishonest of me to overlook the fact that the film’s perverse indulgence in its Faulknerian grotesqueries is so disturbing as to deter me from ever seeing it twice. Human taxidermy, for crying out loud.

Letters from Iwo Jima: Cinema, especially American cinema, is so saturated with images depicting the Second World War that the test for every new war movie has become, “Does this film have anything to add?” In an environment where every WWII film is reverent, patriotic or nominally anti-war, do Clint Eastwood and company have anything novel to say? Letters from Iwo Jima says they do. Setting aside the fact that it is a film told in Japanese and about the Japanese, Letters is in many ways conventional in style and structure, but that is hardly a fault when in recent years, Eastwood has demonstrated a complete mastery of orthodox filmmaking, always finding a way to apply its lessons to new stories and unexplored ideas.

If I were to sum up the organizing idea of the movie – the “point,” if you will – I would call it the failure of the Japanese to maintain a façade of ruthlessness, discipline and honour at all costs. We saw shades of this fifty years ago in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and we see it explored from a more concentrated angle in Letters. Obviously, a film that portrays the Japanese on the defensive is going to humanize “the enemy” in the American imagination, but I don’t consider it anti-American or apologetic. The subtle reprimands of the conduct of soldiers and officers apply to any flag in any period of history, and that lends the film its power – as do the strong performances, appropriately dry cinematography and erudite screenplay. Deserving of its Best Picture nomination, and an effective advertisement for Eastwood’s other Iwo Jima movie, Flags of Our Fathers, which I now intend to see.

Dreamgirls: It’s fundamentally nice to see that musicals are alive and well. I couldn’t have said that six years ago, before Moulin Rouge! arrived on the scene and revived a genre that was presumed dead for the better part of three decades. Here, Chicago screenwriter Bill Condon adapts a Broadway musical with which I was not already familiar, so I saw it without any preoccupation with adaptation issues. I admire how fluidly it flows in and out of the songs, and how smooth the apparent transitions are from one scene to another within the same number. The camera is active and dynamic, and in spite of being a musical about stage performers, the film never feels confined to the stage. As a motion picture, everything seems to be in place. If I have any reservations about Dreamgirls, it’s that it doesn’t appear to have been a terrific musical to begin with. It’s not even so much that it’s a shallow story about shallow showbiz folk; on a perfectly superficial level, most of the greatest musicals on stage and screen were about precisely that. I don’t find the music or lyrics as challenging, diverse or cohesive as I’ve come to expect from the best of the format.

Is it because I have a prejudice that favours more traditional showtune writing over soul and R&B? No: see Rent for details (and for an example of what I mean by great musical writing). Is it because I’m not familiar with the source material, and I’m therefore not predisposed to find the musical numbers memorable? No: I never saw Chicago onstage either, and it stuck with me just fine. Is it because the large ensemble cast, with no clear lead, leaves the characters ill-defined? Not in the least. The performances are exhilirating enough that each of the major characters hold their own. Never mind that Jamie Foxx spends most of his time grimacing and being very heartless and businesslike: Jennifer Hudson is a commanding presence; Beyoncé Knowles finally acts and sings, and almost makes up for that boneheaded decision to let her croon all the Oscar-nominated Original Songs two years ago; Eddie Murphy is full of life, though an Oscar winner he is not. There’s nothing specific about why the film didn’t blow me away: it just didn’t, on a simple, holistic level. Still, Dreamgirls is good, colourful fun, and it is not my intent to discourage anyone from seeing it. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

And that about wraps it up for 2006. Oscars are just over the horizon, and this year is too much of a crapshoot for me to do any thorough predictions; besides, I haven’t been following the precursor awards or the awards-season politics, neither of which can be ignored when placing bets. Of the five Best Picture nominees, Babel is my favourite. While I enjoyed all five, and they all deserve the accolade of being on the shortlist even if they’re not on mine, the only other one that I think would deserve to be elevated to the winners’ pantheon is Letters from Iwo Jima.

I don’t do Top Tens, though in the past I’ve occasionally done a February review of the year in film, like the one I did here for 2004. I’m not even going to bother justifying myself this time around – I’m just going to toss out the titles, and if I don’t feel the same way a month from now, tough. The order within the tiers is arbitrary… or is it?

The best of the best: Pan’s Labyrinth, The Fountain, Babel.

The best of the rest: Cars, Casino Royale, Brick, Children of Men, Letters from Iwo Jima, United 93.

Any questions?

Riddle me this: It’s December 1941 in Casablanca. What time is it in New York?

In the famous opening passage of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes the human species as “so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” In this way, I am only human. I have worn digital watches all my life. I cannot live without one. It’s easy to tell when I’m fidgeting, because I check the time compulsively. As far as I am able to remember, on only two or three occasions have I been without a digital watch for more than a day, and on every one of those occasions, I panicked like an abandoned child lost on a San Francisco pier (which, come to think of it, is something I’ve also been at least twice). I have probably been without my watch more often than that, but those memories lie safely repressed.

Over the past year or so, my wristwatch dependency has loosened its grip. It still follows me everywhere, and I am still disoriented without it, but I replaced the strap a year ago and never got used to it. It wasn’t because the strap was uncomfortable; it was because I took my watch off with increasing frequency, either to time my own speeches or to permit the unobstructed handling of keyboards (both QWERTY and black-and-white), and never got so accustomed to the strap that I would be at a loss without it. But in any and all circumstances, my watch was never far.

I find that it is just as vital to know when you are as it is to know where you are, if not more so. If you are lost in space, you can find your way out, or you can stay in that spot, and develop a plan from the inferred state of your observed environment. Not so with time – certainly not here, where the winter days are but a few days in length, and the moon and stars lay hidden.

My model of choice has traditionally been the Casio Databank DB35H, mostly because I got very accustomed to its interface, feature set and display after years of use in elementary school; the segment layout is easy to read and familiar to me. It has evolved over several incarnations, and the one I purchased in what must have been 1999 or thereabouts had electroluminescent backlighting, which my first one did not, though it too has had its features extended in the latest revision. That said, given that I don’t really use the databank features, I’m open to superior alternatives like this Waveceptor model. At the same time, my current model suits my needs just fine, and I see no reason to leave it for another. Maybe an obsession with time is born of a desire for stasis and a fifty-metre resistance to change.

After roughly eight years of long service – perhaps longer, as I do not recall with the utmost precision – my battery died last week. For some reason, I don’t remember this happening before. The technical specifications for the latest incarnation of this model estimate a battery life of two years, which simply can’t be right. Perhaps my extensive use of the stopwatch features accelerated its demise. Or perhaps it was nothing more than any old battery expiring of natural causes.

I was at the university when time abruptly decided to stop, so at first opportunity, I went to the Bookstore to buy a replacement cell. Then I realized I was uncertain what battery I required, so I borrowed a screwdriver from the staff and opened up my watch on a counter. As it was already open, I decided to purchase a battery and perform the replacement myself then and there. I’d never been in the guts of one of my own watches before, so this was an autodidactic experience from the get-go. The battery housing was a veritable fortress, and tinkering about in its innards was a dextrous exercise ripe for eliciting a calm eddy of introspection, even if the device was only a digital timing implement and nothing that required me to meddle with mechanics and grapple with gears.

But irrespective of the absence of moving parts, disassembling and reassembling an electronic device and voiding its associated warranties is something I recommend everybody do at least once in their lives. Changing a lousy 3-volt lithium disc may be no big deal to those of my peers who spent their childhoods overclocking their CPUs, coiling solenoids for electric motors, or downloading instructions for building cherry-bombs from a nascent, textual Internet (and actually following them, to the chagrin of the junior-high caretakers); to them, it must seem no greater a task than the humdrum routine of replacing a lightbulb. However, I happen to be a Software Guy, a hands-off theoretician comfortable in his bubble of machine-independent algorithms afloat in the soapy bathwater of Platonic, Turing-computable ideal forms. For me, playing with little springs and unscrewing little screws and jumpstarting circuits with unfolded staples delivers a welcome pretence of handymanliness. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

In a timely coincidence, on that very same day I read about Zack Snyder’s plans for the Watchmen film.

Anyone who has been following my blog for reasonably long knows that of all the movies presently in development, this is probably the one I care about the most. More than the last three Harry Potters. More than His Dark Materials, which actually seems to be coming along very well from a design standpoint, though the jury’s obviously out on the script and will remain that way until the opening day of The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights, if they’re releasing it under that title elsewhere). Maybe even more than Indiana Jones and the Spanish Inquisition or whatever Lucasian premise it is we’re not expecting. I do not exaggerate when I say that Watchmen is the Lord of the Rings of comic books, and it’s imperative that it’s done right. I’ve seen it pass from Aronofsky to Greengrass to Snyder, and 300 will hopefully give us a good indication of whether or not Snyder knows how to strike the right balance between aesthetic special effects and storytelling mojo.

All signs are good so far. Everything he says about the direction in which he’ll take the film is exactly as it should be; it’s just a matter of whether it can be done. For one thing, setting it in 1985 as a period piece is absolutely the right choice, if not a necessary one. Everything in the story revolves around the binaristic politics of the Cold War era, and the quest for a third way, a way to undo the Gordian knot. The organizing symbol of Doomsday Clock ticking down to midnight, and all of its consequent thematic material – Dr. Manhattan’s totalizing and reductivist perception of time, relativity’s coming of age with the ushering in of atomic physics, or the temporal suspension of the apocalypse – only resonate the way they do because of a very specific milieu that we now consider historical.

If you look at the James Bond franchise, observe what a paucity of truly consequential political storytelling there was in the Pierce Brosnan era, in spite of the fact that they had possibly the very best actor in the “debonair gentleman Bond” mould at their disposal. Goldeneye is by far the best, and it’s fundamentally a Cold War film; in the other three, Bond was a fish out of water, though things started getting interesting again in the deliberately comical Die Another Day. What was compelling about Casino Royale, from an adaptation standpoint, was how the writers managed to graft a Cold War story into the immediate “post-9/11” (post-baccarat?) present, to give a media cliché another whack on the head. I’ve always thought that the Bond franchise should be grounded in Fleming’s day instead of evolving with our present technology and geopolitical climate, but Casino Royale somehow achieved precisely that effect without moving an inch away from 2006.

It worked for Bond, and I ate my words, but it would never work for Watchmen. Too much of its backdrop depends on the relative parity that exists between two well-defined state superpowers at the zenith of an arms race, and how the iconography of the American superhero grew out of a very specific ideological landscape particular to an era where the theoretical band-aid solution to all matters of military prowess was more atomic power. While I haven’t paid much attention to how the comic-book superhero has fared against terrorists and urban guerrilla warfare in the twenty-first century, I imagine our situation is somewhat different.

But for now, let’s hope that 300 is a good film and a glorious financial success. It will keep the suits off Snyder’s back. Hopefully this time, Watchmen will motor through the production pipeline and come to the silver screen without too many complications; last time around, they only got as far as putting up a teaser website. I’d hate the job to be rushed, but I’m an impatient fellow, and the clock is ticking.

Before I dispense my informed sentiments on Video Games Live, which I caught at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium on Monday, let’s get through a few brief notes about film.

As longtime readers know, I make a point of catching the Best of OIAF reel every year when they bring it to the Metro, mostly because I can’t justify going to Ottawa for the festival itself, and a digest is typically sufficient. That said, the 2006 selection was a mild disappointment. In the past two years, the touring programme has shown off films in competition in the various categories, but not necessarily the winners, and I think the decision shows. While some of the shorts exhibited some superb technique and story design – Stefan Mueller’s Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker and Chris Choy’s The Possum being my favourites – they were typically the most conventional of a field that was often almost too avant-garde for me (which is really saying something), or at the very least, heavier than usual on the cruelty dealt to furry little animals.

Oscar nominations are here, and they indicate possibly the most unpredictable race in recent memory. Part of that may be because the Oscars are early enough now that the guilds haven’t reported in yet with their own awards; the picture should be clearer going into awards night. But consider the statistical aberrations. I’m hardly one to mistake correlation for causation, but I do think – judging from this year and the last – that the Academy Awards have become considerably more interesting since they were bumped a month earlier, as the nomination deadline arrives before any consensus congeals on the table.

Glad to see six nominations for Pan’s Labyrinth, my tentative pick for the best film of 2006 (though it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, and I still haven’t seen a few major releases I’ve been meaning to catch, notably Letters from Iwo Jima and Dreamgirls). Nothing at all for The Fountain, which is flat-out ridiculous but not wholly unpredictable, though I would have at least liked to see Clint Mansell show up in the Original Score category. Of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, I would personally give it to Babel. As for who will win, I haven’t the foggiest.

I’m not going to offer any reasoning for the above. No time, no space, no space-time. Just heed my words and go see Pan’s Labyrinth.

Now let’s talk about video game music. It’s been awhile.

Last night’s performance of Video Games Live was the first symphonic video game concert in Alberta. That’s something to be celebrated, because damnit, it’s about time. Live concert performances of video game music have been going on in Japan for a decade and a half; North America didn’t wake up to the phenomenon until two years ago, with the original VGL performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005, followed by the 2006 debut of Play! A Video Game Symphony (a programme that, with only a handful of global playdates in cities that matter, isn’t going to be here anytime soon).

A matter of personal background and credentials: I’ve been following video game music for years now, as an avid collector and occasional contributor to the remix and arrangement “scene,” even if I haven’t gone so far as to do a Lancastrian study that one can find online. I’m really curious as to when Summoning of Spirits is going to be released, because I whipped up a track from Tales of Symphonia that has been sitting around for a year and a half. In many cases, I’m much more familiar with the music than the games themselves – including a few selections on the VGL programme, such as Kingdom Hearts and a number of the Final Fantasy games. (Several numbers, in fact.) I found some of the best games of all time, Chrono Trigger among them, out of musical curiosity.

Suffice to say, I’m into this stuff.

So to cut to the chase, did I find VGL enjoyable? Yes, very much so. Was it some sort of revelatory, religious experience? No, I wouldn’t say that.

If there’s one thing that really separates a concert like VGL from the sort that was circulating in Japan in the early ’90s (and I’m thinking very specifically of the Orchestral Game Concert series), it’s that we’re firmly out of the chiptune era. While many games, Nintendo titles in particular, still store their music as MIDI data to be rendered by the console hardware (not so much to save space as to leave open the possibility of dynamic, algorithmic manipulation of the music to correspond with in-game events), the big-budget heavyweights in today’s game industry deliver orchestrated music fully formed.

Usually, the best of the game soundtracks are easily on par with the best of what is occurring in contemporary cinema. Two of the most interesting film composers of the decade, Harry Gregson-Williams and Michael Giacchino, got off the ground with music to games like the Metal Gear Solid sequels and Medal of Honor, respectively – both of which were represented last night. There really is no longer a significant gap in audio fidelity and the quality of the composition.

At the same time, I wager that tunes such as the theme from Super Mario Bros. are burned into our collective consciousness precisely because they operated so effectively within severe technical constraints. Composers such as Koji Kondo were tasked with making something chirpy and repetitive not only bearable, but outright fun to listen to. In an orchestral setting, these melodies are primarily interesting for how they are expanded and arranged, and what kind of ideas emerge in the overhauled instrumentation. In the case of a medley – a format often necessary for giving a classic game due coverage and introducing variety to melodies designed to be played in neverending loops – one of the defining elements is also the fluidity of the transitions, and how the piece as a whole functions as a unified suite.

VGL was heavy on faithful renditions of music that was orchestrated to begin with. The chiptune era, the epoch that inspires nostalgia, had a relatively minor presence: there was the opening medley of classic arcade tracks, beginning with the bleeps and bloops of Pong; The Legend of Zelda; accompaniment underneath guests invited to play Space Invaders and Frogger onstage; Super Mario Bros.; and a solo piano medley consisting of music from Final Fantasy, both before the switch to recorded audio in VII and after.

The music from the orchestral era, I have no complaints about whatsoever. Seeing the ESO and the Kokopelli Choir performing Christopher Tin’s “Baba Yetu” from Civilization IV made me a very happy man, even if it did remind me of my, my… my problem. In terms of the audio setup, from where I was sitting off in the Left Terrace, there seemed to be a few balance issues between the choir and orchestra. But I’m being picky. Overall, it was a fine selection of fine music, and it was an especial treat to hear the premiere of the music from Jade Empire as a nod to the local boys over at Bioware.

In terms of video game music, I would characterize the chosen titles as part of the recognizable contemporary mainstream. The curious thing is that what constitutes the mainstream in today’s gaming environment is deeply fractured, given the divisions between the three major console manufacturers and even the PC: we no longer live in conditions that would permit the release of a game everybody knows, short of Grand Theft Auto (where all the music is licensed). You could make a case that in the past few years, World of Warcraft and Halo came about as close as you can get to ubiquity nowadays, but that’s still peanuts next to Super Mario Bros.

So while it was neat to see a cute orchestral translation of the arcade era of game music, where the dominant paradigm was to think more in terms of “sound effects” than “soundtracks” per se, I have to register my profound disappointment with the already scarce representation of the 8-bit and 16-bit generations, which are really the heart of nostalgia as far game music is concerned. And my problem is not with the scarcity: the programme covered the major bases – Koji Kondo (Mario and Zelda), Yuji Naka (Sonic), Nobuo Uematsu (early Final Fantasy). My problem is with the orchestration.

I can’t speak for the Sonic the Hedgehog medley, as I haven’t located its source, but the arrangements of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda were ripped directly from the ones performed in Japan’s Orchestral Game Concert. This is a bad thing for a number of reasons. First, I think these two particular arrangements are becoming standardized as the orchestral suites representing their respective games, and quite frankly, I don’t think they’re good enough for that to happen.

I don’t mind the Mario suite so much – I’ve always liked the inclusion of the woodblock to punctuate the overworld theme, and while I don’t think much of the transitions or the ending, it’s functional. If you’ve ever downloaded an MP3 file of the orchestral Super Mario Bros. misattributed to the Boston Pops, you’ve heard it.

The Zelda arrangement, however, is one that I’ve never liked. I can think of no other series that has delivered such a wealth of great melodies, and yet this arrangement chooses to dote on the familiar overworld theme (and not very well; I find it to be quite cliché and generally stale). And I’ve heard it often enough in various places over the years that I fear it is legitimately and dangerously close to being the “official” interpretation. If anything, concerts such as Video Games Live and Play! should be opportunities to commission new and inventive orchestral renditions of NES/SNES-era themes and motifs. There are so many talented composers in video games nowadays that would leap at the chance to do it, likely including Koji Kondo himself, that the absence of talent should not at all be an impediment.

I’m not a huge fan of Martin Leung’s piano arrangements of Mario and Final Fantasy, which were performed last night by his sister Lee Ann. I admire them for their accessibility, and from his videos I can tell that he has the technical gifts as a performer to conduct his position as one of video game music’s foremost ambassadors (and his sister has every bit of that classical musician’s discipline, even if she exhibited brief flashes of rhythmic sloppiness; as someone completely undisciplined who also indulges in rhythmic sloppiness, I’m one to talk). I don’t think he’s a terrific arranger, though: with the Mario series, he often opts for displacing the MIDI onto the keys, and with properties like Final Fantasy where there’s a little more invention, the hit-and-miss Final Fantasy Piano Collections were there a decade ago.

It’s like whenever I hear lounge pianists take on Henry Mancini or Andrew Lloyd Webber: they demonstrate a predilection for fanciful flourishes and grand arpeggiating cadenzas to make everything sound oh-so-romantic, and they’re all people who have clearly graduated from the rites of passage commonly associated with the name “Franz Liszt.” And that has made them virtuosic performers, but what separates them from bona fide composers in the standard Romantic repertoire is this: a decided absence of depth and interest when it comes to harmony. Amidst all the fireworks and legerdemain, it’s easy to overlook the harmonic complexity of the great European composers. Even we jazz people like to think that our fourth voicings and modal substitutions over Richard Rodgers are so inventive and hip, but for the most part we’re just lifting from Debussy with one hand and the blues with the other. It’s still an improvement on the easy-listenin’ aesthetic of sitting on major and minor triads and leaving it at that.

But these are the back-in-my-day gripes of a grizzled vet, after all, and I’m sure it’s all really cool if you’ve never heard acoustic performances of classic video game music before. It was probably neat for me too, the first time. I can’t quite remember. People seem to tip me better when, after a few drinks, I stop being professional and start treating the piano as a party trick (i.e. play video game music). If you’re not used to it, it might just be novel.

I haven’t commented much on the VGL production itself, with the smoke and coloured lights and onscreen video game footage and what have you. In most cases I don’t think it was particularly necessary, and perhaps it was even a distraction, but where it really shone was in the arcade-era games, where the music really doesn’t stand on its own (when it isn’t outright plagiarized from the Romantics, which it often was back in the day), and is only effective in juxtaposition with the images. Maybe it was the selection of the images themselves: virtually every scrap of footage predating the rise of the PlayStation was inherently in-game footage, whereas afterwards, the focus was on full-motion video introductions. (Let’s face it: Civilization IV may be hard, hard crack, but it’s not exactly stimulating to watch somebody else play.)

As a project to demonstrate to everyone just how much video game music has evolved, and how fertile a ground it is for film-quality scores today, I would call Video Games Live a wild success. And perhaps that’s consistent with their objectives to move game music towards a certain mass appeal, objectives you can read about in the FAQ on the VGL website. It’s an admirable task, and given VGL’s splash in the mainstream press, the producers are well on their way to achieving it. I may sound rather critical, but in general, it was an excellent programme with some great music that can be enjoyed whether you’ve played the games or not. I do think the retro elements, in particular the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, were given short shrift in terms of quality and quantity; again, it might just be a matter of perspective.

I’m not necessarily inclined to see the show again when it hits Calgary next November. (For one thing, what equivalent does Calgary have to the Kokopelli Choir? Cowtown may be the better city, but if anyone were to make a case defending Edmonton, said choir would be one of the chief exhibits.) But I wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing it, not by a long shot. Video Games Live is a worthwhile experience, and a positive step towards establishing mainstream recognition of where game music is today. The potential benefits are immense: every musician or budding composer-arranger who develops an interest in game music is a valuable addition to the community. But first, they need to know that the community is there. I could go on and on with analogies to the tremendous impact that Stefan Fatsis’ book Word Freak had on competitive Scrabble, but I’ve tread that ground many a time before. Take my word for it: the principles at work are the same.

I’m back from the World Universities Debating Championships in Vancouver. Maria and I finished on 13 points over nine rounds, the minimum of the range I expected (floor: 13; ceiling: 15), based on our performance on the third day and the knowledge that we had 10 points after the sixth round. Live coverage of the Grand Final can be found here and, over multiple posts dated 3 January, here. It appears I was not alone in thinking Oxford D (Closing Government) should have won, upon an initial assessment, though I discovered afterwards that I generally had a much higher opinion of the final round on the whole than most others did, thanks to the clarity of the argumentation, which could have very easily been mired in economic jargon. (The motion: “This house believes that economic growth is the solution to climate change.”) Unfortunately, those who actually have a clue about how economics work subsequently informed me that the participants in the round were evidently not of their tribe, and convinced me that nobody really knew what they were talking about. So let’s concede that I’m unqualified to offer a proper adjudication.

Scores by team here. Scores by speaker here. Scores by round MIA.

Since I’ve obviously been preoccupied this holiday, there hasn’t been much time to catch up on cinema. That said, let’s make another attempt at offering a few capsule impressions of what I’ve seen since the last film post, though I do want to engage in a more thorough discussion of Children of Men, which I saw tonight.

The Fountain: I’m usually reluctant to call something the best film of the year until I’ve seen it twice. So I reluctantly offer that The Fountain is the best film of 2006, noting that I still have a lot of catching up to do. This is Darren Aronofsky’s most digestible film, and probably his finest. Its tripartite structure delivers storytelling of the finest visual intricacy, and its mythic ambitions to be a tale of life and death undisplaced – a mortality play, if you will – elevate its soft, human underbelly to transcendent heights of splendour. While there isn’t anything quite as iconic as its predecessor, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the cosmic imagery (a microbial visual effect) is more emotionally grounded. After reading the online impressions of others, I have to say that I’m quite surprised at their fixation with what’s “real” and what’s not, as if that were central to understanding how the movie fit together. Personally, I don’t see how what the diegetic realities are or aren’t have any effect on the experience as a whole: besides, so much of The Fountain is about writing yourself into a fiction, and living it. I can’t wait to see it again.

The Queen: An admirable production, fuelled by a quintessentially British dignity. I feared it would take the easy way out and simply subvert the relevance of the royal family by humanizing them in the name of populist social critique. Instead, I find myself questioning the state of the Great British Public if their media-driven obsession with the former Princess of Wales empowered them to exert so much pressure on their fragile monarchy. Is this the result of a commanding manoeuvre to show that the Queen is only human for the subtle purpose of sympathizing with her threatened position of isolated privilege? Or is it evidence of an unintended failure to make a bold republican statement? It’s hard to tell. At any rate, historical dramas – good ones – have a way of making a news item, or an entry in a chronicle, a much bigger deal than you remember. To me, it is an interesting experience as a filmgoer to see events from my youth pass into historical subject matter, as they do in The Queen.

The Good Shepherd: I’m not at all surprised that Eric Roth’s screenplay drifted in the flotsam of development hell for over a decade before Robert De Niro picked it up, because this is safe, old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking. I never say that as a pejorative, so don’t take it as one. The Good Shepherd is a film replete with gripping moments that stay with you long after the credits roll; De Niro is a capable visionary, and Matt Damon’s performance carries the day. It does, however, encounter some serious and perhaps crippling problems. The first is the shallowness of its supporting characters, which is not, by all indications, the fault of the cast. As for its complexity, there comes a saturation point when the plot’s capacity to baffle is no longer, I suspect, solely due to the audience’s interpretive inadequacies. Most problematic is the movie’s willingness to reduce history (the failure of the Bay of Pigs, for instance) to a coincidental series of individual happenstances that all conveniently lie within the main character’s personal orbit. It’s fiction, of course, and I’ll buy it if it’s done within reasonable bounds of plausibility. I bought it in Forrest Gump, where it was more of a joke.

Children of Men: I used to go on and on about how Terry Gilliam would be a great choice to direct one of the Harry Potter films. Then Alfonso Cuaron came along and made what is far and away the best of the Potter movies, The Prisoner of Azakaban. In Children of Men, Cuaron enters the realm of dystopia, which is very firmly Gilliam territory (please refer to Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, both of which I cherish). However, he does it quite differently. The film that Children of Men is closest to is, in many respects, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds: there’s the same logistical marvel of extended tracking shots that immerse you in a gritty anarchistic spectacle, and the same backgrounding of man’s destruction, self-destruction and miraculous renewal to a secondary concern that occupies little to no exposition. This movie is sublime in virtually every aspect of filmmaking technique.

But like War of the Worlds, it’s not enough for this movie to be sublimely visceral when it has to present the argument that a few individuals’ struggle for survival is a microcosm for the salvation of all mankind. The former must happen before the end credits, and the latter almost certainly can’t (though we are meant to believe it eventually will). Does anyone remember Reign of Fire, where we were meant to believe a global infestation of fire-breathing dragons would just bugger off and leave us alone as soon as the main characters blew up a particularly important dragon? Children of Men comes dangerously close to doing just that.

Like most dystopic speculative fiction, the science of Children of Men – an unexplained eighteen-year cataclysm of global infertility, redressed by a miraculous and similarly unexplained birth – disappears into a corner and pleads for suspension of disbelief. We’re implicitly told that we are not to concern ourselves with scientific causes, but political effects. That’s okay by me, mostly because everybody else does it. And in many cases, perhaps no explanation is preferable to a bogus one. It’s a concern, yes, but a relatively minor one.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap that the Turkey City Lexicon calls “As You Know, Bob”: since there is no need for the characters to speak to each other at length about the state of the world, which they already know and take for granted, the story’s speculative history has to be presented by other means. Indirectly, we are given a state of affairs in 2027 where widescreen LCD panels are cheap and ubiquitous, but man has made no other discernible progress because everyone is too busy rioting in the streets and making life miserable for everybody else, given how the species is going kaput anyway.

Do we buy this? Can we accept the idea that a two-to-three-generation extinction warning is sufficient cause for the human species to go completely bonkers? Children of Men never attempts to establish a causal connection, but I think it does so implicitly: if there’s no model of cause and effect, there’s no reason to put the infertility problem, the oncoming global apocalypse and the nightmare of a fascist Britain in the same movie instead of three separate ones, one of which is entitled V for Vendetta.

The logic, as far as I can discern it, is that as soon as people realized the human race was doomed, they did one of two things: a) without any long-term obligations to the prolongment of the species, they could act out of immediate self-interest alone, which does not entail happiness, but rather, the seizure and consolidation of power; or b) they turned to the eschatalogical reassurances of religion, which inherently devalues our material existence and therefore condones the collapse of earthly societal order. This is my own interpretation, but Children of Men comes off as a film that is intelligent enough to be conscious of it, if only just.

What about Britain’s sudden turn to fascist isolation and its refusal to accommodate the refugee crisis of the end times? If the Nazis proved anything, it’s that no government is incapable of abruptly becoming unimaginably horrifying. There are no limits to the political plausibility of what a reign of terror will do. However, we are also asked to buy the notion that the far right is so preoccupied with stuffing illegal immigrants into cages that the survival of the species is nothing to them, and a refugee baby is no baby at all. Then again, when the palace guards have traded in their bushy hats for the pointy hoods of the KKK, this isn’t so far-fetched. Autocracies are not known for making plans for long-term sustainability.

I haven’t read the P.D. James book on which the film is based, The Children of Men, but I’m quite interested in what it has to say on the subject. Obviously, Cuaron’s film is equally informed by what I would begrudgingly call post-9/11 politics, and overtly so; the novel, published in 1992, is not.

Since I only saw the film a few hours ago, I can’t guarantee that any opinion I harbour will still be true in the morning. Naturally, I recommend it quite highly; it remains to be seen how much. The scope of imagination in the visual narrative outstrips that of the actual content, and I think this is primarily responsible for my ambivalence. Children of Men dismisses considerable avenues of exposition in favour of confining itself to the perspective of Clive Owen’s character, Theo; I at least appreciate that this is done consistently. Like Theo, we can very easily get too caught up in the frantic action – which is terrific, by the way – to concern ourselves with the details of how and why.

Does it all make sense? And if the movie does just enough to open up a universe of causal possibilities, but too little to explicitly commit to anything, does it matter?

You’ll recall that upstairs in my capsule gushing over The Fountain, I said it didn’t. With respect to Children of Men, I haven’t decided yet.