Movie Review: Barry Lyndon

Herein is contained a review of the film Barry Lyndon, its title character’s rise and fall, its methods, and its view of the world.

Every once in a while during Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 costume drama, a title card like that will fade onto the screen, announcing the film’s intentions. The movie also has a narrator, a voice of calm British detachment who tells us what turns the plot will take long before they arrive. Clearly, the movie is not interested in keeping us in suspense, and even without the narrator’s help we sense the direction the story is taking. The movie chronicles several years in the life of its title character, observing his transformation from a penniless Irish nobody into a member of the 18th century British nobility and his subsequent return to his original status. But the events of the movie are not as important as the movie’s attitude towards them, and as observed by its director they are a long, empty endeavor devoid of any human warmth or meaning.

It’s definitely a Stanley Kubrick movie.

The movie’s bleakly ironic outlook is established in its first shot. Two men are seen in an extreme long shot, staring each other down from opposite edges of the screen. They are each pointing guns at the other. The narrator informs us that Barry Lyndon, born Redford Berry, was the son of a lawyer and was destined for a great future in the law… Pop! A shot rings out and one of the men falls dead. …had his father not been killed in a duel. Already, Kubrick has made clear how little value life has in this universe. We never see the men’s faces; their persons are tiny against the daytime horizon. We have only known Barry’s father for the space of a single shot, not long enough to sympathize with his fate. And even if we knew him better, the calmly mannered narration lets us know that his death is something to be observed rather than mourned. Kubrick will cultivate and encourage this level of detachment throughout the length of the film.

One of the principle ways he does this is through the photography. In the early stretches of the movie, Kubrick often shoots his characters from far away, isolating them within large, beautifully panoramic shots of the English and Irish country-sides. There are vast, foggy Irish moors and verdant English hills; the movie soaks up landscape. These shots are wonderful to look at, sometimes seeming more like paintings than moving images, but their austerity sets an example the characters in the story cannot quite live up to. The life of Barry Lyndon is one filled with power plays and petty grievances, and neither he nor anyone else seems to notice the natural beauty around them. In one early passage, Barry has an awkward lover’s quarrel with his cousin Nora, who is leaving him for an older, richer English captain. They squabble in one corner of the screen as we look past them to a lake so picturesque it might as well have been painted right onto the film. Kubrick always finds a way to prevent us from getting too involved in the character’s plights.

Barry uses one opportunistic trick after another to improve his status in life. He goes from an Irish farmhand to an English soldier, from an army deserter to a professional gambler and finally to a member of the English upper class after he woos and marries Lady Lyndon, an aristocrat’s daughter and heir to a large fortune. At this point the film leaves the wide-open spaces of the first half and retreats into interiors. Much has been made of the fact that many of these scenes, in particular those lit by candle-light, used no artificial lighting whatsoever. Perhaps because of the limitations inherent in using such low-light conditions, the actors in these shots are barely allowed to move but for small jerks of their heads and hands. As the earlier exterior shots resembled landscape paintings, so do these interiors resemble precisely arranged still-lifes. The characters are quite literally trapped in space, posed for our viewing pleasure. They have only their faces to express themselves.

Curious then that the actors seem to have been directed to look as blank as possible. Kubrick has chosen as his principal players Ryan O’Neil and Marisa Berenson, who play Barry and Lady Lyndon respectively. O’Neil was a heartthrob at the time the movie was made, and Kubrick uses his matinee good looks as a kind of mask to cover whatever thought might be stewing inside Barry’s head. The narrator tells us that Barry is angry, or sad, or in love, but O’Neil’s face doesn’t change very much, and his voice doesn’t rise. As Lady Lyndon, Marisa Berenson is even more an impassive figure. In one shot, Kubrick slowly zooms out on her face as she sits, elegantly posed in her period dress, on a sofa. The narrator tells us that she feels depressed because of Barry’s philandering, but we can’t help but think that she looks like nothing so much as part of the furniture.


If all of this talk of detachment sounds critical of the film, it is not meant to be. Most movies are fascinated with their characters. They want to get to know them, and they want the audience to sympathize with their problems. In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick all but dares the audience to keep as great an emotional distance from the characters as possible. The events of Barry Lyndon are the stuff of high adventure. Over the course of his life, Barry is robbed at gunpoint, participates in the Seven Years War, becomes a Prussian spy, marries into opulence and fights not one but two gentlemanly duels to the death. Yet all of it is regarded with as much interest as are cornfields passing outside of a car window. The movie discourages audience involvement to the point of being audacious.

So what does the movie gain by separating itself so thoroughly from the audience? It draws our attention to the sumptuously photographed environments, for one thing. But its main function, I think, is to present us with a certain point of view. By robbing us of suspense, by photographing the story so dispassionately, and by giving us performances more mannequin than method, Kubrick gives us no choice but to view the storied life of Barry Lyndon with cool indifference. It is an attitude that seeps into the audience throughout the movie, and perhaps even lingers afterward. It is an attitude that most movies, even most Kubrick movies, do not engender.

Kubrick never really made films that were autobiographical, but this one strikes me as one of his most personal. His movies were often criticized for being cold and lifeless. With Barry Lyndon, he admits that while this may be so, that does not make them any less worthwhile. It merely means that while most movies see the world one way, his movies see it another.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

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Long, long ago, in 1999, Konami released a game called Silent Hill. That game cast the player as everyman Harry Mason and followed him as he groped his way through the decrepit, fog-drenched titular town in search of his young daughter Cheryl, who he finds to have disappeared from his side following an unfortunate car crash. Eleven years, five games and one feature film later, and Konami is right back in the driver’s seat. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a unique horror game which recycles the set-up of the 1999 original while changing just about everything else. Some characters and set pieces are re-imagined while others are replaced or discarded altogether. The series’ well known otherworld of ruin and rust is replaced by a hell of ice and snow, and the game jettisons the clunky combat of its predecessors for a quieter, cleaner style of play. It’s not the Silent Hill players are used to. It’s a bold new vision for the town with its own cache of new ideas. It can still scare players sleepless, though; welcome back to Silent Hill.

I became a fan of the Silent Hill games in 2001 with the release of Silent Hill 2 for the Playstation 2. The moment I began a long walk down a quiet hillside and into a dense blanket of fog, something was different. Most horror games, Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, and more recently Dead Space among them, are content to startle the player. Every time you walk past a window, or a broken door, or a rickety grate, you know something foul and ferocious with teeth like razors is going to burst forth and start to claw at your face, and that’s scary. But it isn’t haunting. From the very beginning, Silent Hill didn’t just want to startle the player: it wanted to stick with him. The series was never shy about fucking with the player’s head, unleashing its unique brand of nightmare imagery right when it was least expected and making the player wonder whether any of it was really happening. It doesn’t just yell out “boo” and call it a day. Silent Hill wants to get to know you before it scares the shit out of you.

Shattered Memories takes that idea and runs with it. Most of the game plays like other entries in the series, with the player exploring the town of Silent Hill in all of its crumbling glory. But Shattered Memories adds several new wrinkles, not the least of which is when it literally subjects the player to psychotherapy. During these interludes, the player sits in a chair and stares immobile at the confines of a comfy office while a therapist wanders about talking of death, guilt, sex, and more. You will fill out questionnaires, play with a coloring book, answer personal queries and otherwise reveal yourself to the game. Or not. There’s no requirement that you be honest with your therapist, but the game keeps closer track of your answers than you might think, and it becomes quickly apparent that what you do in the doctor’s office is reflected outside of it. It’s an interesting layer, it’s not something games usually do, and it underscores something that has always been unique to the Silent Hill games: the horror here is personal.

That’s something Harry Mason learns the hard way, and his quest to find his missing daughter will take many a horrific turn before it concludes. Narrative has always been an important part of the Silent Hill games, and the best ones consist of slow but sure pacing, an atmosphere thick with uncertainly and a steady descent into the surreal. Shattered Memories keeps pace nicely with the best of its predecessors, presenting the town not so much as a damned place infested with Hell-spawn than as a mirror for Harry’s own fears. The series has always located horror in the familiar, in side-streets and shopping malls, in hospitals and family homes. We're not in a Gothic mansion or on a derelict spaceship; Silent Hill is a small town the likes of which many players might recognize, and that allows it to slide under the skin in a way that more fantastical games cannot. The plot unfolds elegantly, circling around questions never quite answered until the player has sunken deep into the mystery. Harry will interact with other characters who aren’t quite right; their identities merge, fall apart, and reconstruct themselves before Harry’s eyes. If the game weren’t paced so swiftly all of this ambiguity might begin to wear thin, but the developers are always nudging the player on to the next area or scene. When answers finally do come, and they do, time has passed quickly.

It also passes easily, thanks to some well-conceived and implemented gameplay ideas by developer Climax. It goes without saying that the game controls better than early entries in the series, which had characters that moved like broken tanks. Shattered Memories smartly locks the camera behind the player’s shoulder, allowing him free range of movement and the ability to look around the world at will. It is the innovation of this game to keep the player very firmly planted in that world. The game makes excellent use of the Wii Remote Controller, letting it stand in as the player’s perpetually useful flashlight. Want to see what’s in that dark corner? You need merely point to it. Want to read that sign? Wave the Wii-Mote at it and zoom in. The implementation is so natural and practical it’s a small miracle more developers haven’t tried it.

Also adding to the sense of immersion is Harry’s handy cell phone, which allows him to do everything from calling other characters to checking his whereabouts on a GPS map to saving the game. Like the flashlight, it’s a natural inclusion which both serves a vital gameplay purpose and makes sense within the context of the narrative. Thanks to smart design decisions like these, navigating through Silent Hill has never been easier.

Of course, the lack of any combat may have something to do with that. In a major break from Silent Hills past, Shattered Memories features absolutely no fighting. There are no monsters stalking the town's snowy streets, and for the most part Harry's only task is to weave his way through the haunted town on the lookout for new passageways to plumb and fresh puzzles to solve. Atmosphere takes center stage here, as the player is given ample opportunity to take in his lovingly detailed surroundings. The developers have filled their world with an assortment of eclectic clutter that gives the town real presence. Harry will come across ghostly visages he can reveal with his camera-phone. He can call up numbers scrawled on walls, manipulate objects with well-implemented Wii-controls and collect mementos left scattered across town. All of this interaction gives the town a wonderful sense of place that is indelibly creepy, monsters or no.

And then there are the moments when Harry has to run away from screeching, faceless terrors that want to rape him to death. Like past Silent Hill games, this one has an otherworld, a nightmarish mirror of what was already a pretty eerie area. Unlike past Silent Hill games, the player’s visits to this frightening realm are the only time when they will have to deal with any kind of external threat. They’re also one of the few times that the game stumbles. Because the angry creatures populating the otherworld are invincible, Harry has no choice but to run from them until the town regains some semblance of normalcy. And make no mistake: running in a blind panic from a horde of lumbering monstrosities is pretty damn scary. The problem is that the player too often doesn’t know which way to run and can only find out through trial and error. When that happens, fear can give way to frustration. These sequences don’t take up too much playtime and ultimately do what they’re supposed to do, but at their worst they feel like a chore.

One wonders if the game would have benefited if it were divided less discretely. When the otherworld takes over, you’ll know it. The music drops off, ungodly creatures begin to crawl out of the walls and the whole town is enveloped in sheets of blue ice. It’s a scary effect, but it lets the player know all too clearly that danger has arrived. The merely creepy town of Silent Hill begins to feel like a safe haven. Perhaps blending the two worlds a little more at the edges would have made both feel like more of a whole.

But considering how successful most of the innovations in this game are, I’d rather the developers experiment with new play styles than fall back on what has (and hasn’t) worked in the past. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a rousing success of a video game. It finds ingenious new ways to lock the player into the experience while staying firmly rooted in the world of the series. If the developer chooses to make another Silent Hill title in the same style as this one, I will eagerly await it. And yet if this is the series’ swan song, I think I’ll be just as pleased. Shattered Memories delivers on the central metaphor of the series more effectively than any game since Silent Hill 2: Silent Hill isn’t just a sleepy town infested with demons. It’s a dizzying nightscape sucked right from our heads and oozed onto a disc. It can scare us because it knows us and we it. You are now leaving Silent Hill, but you’ll be back. You’ll always be back, new game or not.

Movie Review: 8 ½

What most interests people? Other people, for one. Sex, violence, science, war, religion, history, and politics, for another. All of this is interesting. But nothing interests people quite as much as themselves. And so we come to 8 ½, a movie about a popular Italian film director given to intellectual flights of fancy on-screen and womanizing in his private life. 8 ½ was directed in 1963 by Federico Fellini, a popular Italian film director known for those same habits. It has been called alternatively an exercise in stylistic vanity and one of the best films ever made. The pertinent question perhaps is: why can’t it be both?

Whatever else the film may be, it is Fellini down to its bones. All of the director’s trademarks are here. There are dance sequence featuring exotic Italian beauties set to swinging salsa beats. The backgrounds of shots are as busy with actors moving in and out of frame as are the foregrounds, and the movie ends with the entirety of the very large cast joining hands and running around in a circle while a five-member brass band plays in the center. Fellini loved parades. Fellini loved the circus, and many of his best films have the same kind of chaotic energy to them. 8 ½ has a plot involving director Guido Anselmi’s attempt to come up with ideas on the fly for a film that technically is already in production, but the movie is at its best when its inside Guido’s head, following him on whatever indulgent fantasy currently has his attention. The movie weaves in and out of reality and fantasy so often that the viewer can be forgiven for not always knowing what is real and what is imagined, but this barely-there structure is exactly where Fellini is most at home. It allows for his ideas to breathe and for his images to emerge without constraint. The movie is not so much a story about Guido as a rumination on him and the people surrounding him.

But how vivid those ruminations are, and what interesting company he keeps. There are many characters, and while none besides Guido gets much attention, they all splash onto screen long enough to make an impression. There is Guido’s on-edge producer, desperate for a script, an idea, anything to appease the investors. There is a quibbling writer, forever criticizing Guido for his lack of focus and originality. To Fellini, making a movie is a maddening dance that saps the spirit and imagination. It is no wonder that Guido retreats into his fantasies, which are uniformly colorful and entertaining and far more easy to handle than his real life.

And then there are the multitude of women circling Guido’s star: his long-suffering wife, his self-deluding mistress, his ethereal muse. In a movie this unbound by any traditional structure, even figures from Guido’s past reach out to him. His devoutly Catholic mother disapproves of him from out of his childhood, and in one memorable sequence a young Guido and his schoolmates visit a full-bodied prostitute who lives on the beach, and she dances for them. Guido cares for all of these women but is incapable of committing to any of them. In what is arguably the movie’s best and certainly one of its most entertaining scenes, Guido imagines that he lives in a harem with all of his women, past and present, and that they give him whatever he needs. But even here reality intrudes. The women revolt, indignant over their split shares of affection, and Guido has to fend them off like a circus trainer does a pack of hungry lions. The sequence is absurd and funny and desperate and strangely moving. It is in brief what the movie tries and so often succeeds to be.

While in production, the working title for 8 ½ was The Beautiful Confusion. The film lives up to it. In the later years of his career, many criticized Fellini as his movies veered into self-indulgence, but 8 ½ proves that the director was fully capable of marrying stylistic excess with a beating heart. Guido has problems. He’s immature, he doesn’t know what he wants, and he prefers fantasy to reality. He has a beautiful brain, though. And he learns. Furthermore, he does it with style.

Are Video Games Art? The Eternal Struggle Continues.

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Moby Dick. The Mona Lisa. Citizen Kane. Super Mario World.

It’s not hard to look at this list and pick the odd man out. Books, paintings and movies have long pedigrees and critical acceptance. They are mediums of artistic expression, and they yield art.

It’s unlikely that anyone will seriously compare the artistic merit of Mario to Macbeth. However, as the video game industry grows and changes, more developers release games that aspire to some level of artistic significance. Look at a game like Rez, a shooting game which is more about its luminous, pulsating visual world than its shooting mechanics. Or witness Bioshock, an action game in which the player is placed in a decaying undersea metropolis meant to represent the doomed application of philosopher Ayn Rand’s objectivist theory. Games like these definitely push the limits of what video gaming can be, but do they push them into the realm of art?

That’s a question few have been shy about answering, and pundits the internet over debate it with fierce conviction. A number of heavy-hitters have even joined the fray. In 2006, film critic Roger Ebert famously opined that video games were not and could never be art. Mr. Ebert was just as famously rebuked by British horror novelist and film director Clive Barker, who countered that games were art and that Mr. Ebert and his ilk had outdated notions of what art can and cannot be. The dust from that fight has settled, but the arguments continue.

Questions like these immediately lead to others. Just what is art? How should it be categorized? Who can and cannot make it? These questions are not new, and a debate over whether Miyamoto stacks up to Melville is unlikely to answer them. We can safely assume we’re in for a long haul, but until the day we wake up to find the matter settled, we’re happy to be along for the ride.

Views from the Top

Venerable film critics aren’t the only people making the case against video games as art. That opinion also sounds from an unlikely source: video game developers themselves. David Rodriguez, lead designer at development studio High Voltage, says that he realized he was not an artist once he recognized his place in the economic hierarchy of the biz. “…an artist gets to do what they want, how they want, when they want. That's not what I do. Someone comes to my company with a contract. They give us money to make something. I make it. They take it and sell it. I don't work in art. I work...in customer service.”

It’s an argument that has been made before. Video games, unlike books or even movies, are almost required to have significant commercial elements to them. A personal vision, so the argument goes, is very important to a piece of art. It’s difficult if not impossible to express a personal vision through a video game because every major release has to be backed by a giant studio more concerned with money than with artistic merit. Also consider that whatever personal vision may exist at the outset of a game’s creation can be lost as it is filtered through the minds of the designers, programmers, and other professionals essential to the making of a video game.

This argument is well-worn, but it has its limits. For example, couldn’t it apply just as well to Hollywood movies? Movies, at least most of those coming to a theater near you, need a large amount of financial backing to be successful. They also employ a great many people, from writers to actors to editors to sound engineers, through which the director must funnel his personal vision. And yet the movie industry has cranked out big budget films that are nonetheless heralded as high art. Is Schindler’s List looked down upon because it cost a bundle to make? Is Apocalypse Now any less a piece of art because it employed half of Hollywood during its production? The answer to both of these questions is no.

On an economic level, then, big-budget video games and big-budget movies are not very different. So why do video games continue to be labeled as mere toys while this year’s Oscar contenders get classified as art? Perhaps the question is one of intent.

Solid Snake: Philosopher King

As commonly understood, a piece of art is intended to illicit an emotion or explore a theme. Hate, love, death, life: these are themes works of art have tried to explore since before cavemen drew on rock walls. Even the most mindless summer blockbuster is out to make the audience think or feel, even if it’s only trying to make them feel like buying lunchboxes. Few would argue, for example, that Transformers 2 is great art, but it is intended to excite and move an audience, and because of that intent it is considered a work of art.

Not all video games can claim such intent. Many games are more concerned with simulating an experience than with exploring the meaning of that experience. For example, each yearly edition of the Madden series aims to simulate control over a football team, but makes precious few contributions beyond that. Numerous arcade games create large rigs to best simulate driving, skiing, snowboarding and more. Some of the most popular video games of recent years have been of an avowedly casual nature. Nintendo has been at the forefront of this revolution, releasing games like Wii Fit and Brain Training, which are intended to help maintain the player’s bodily and mental health respectively. None of the above games are intended to make the player think or feel to any significant extent, and in that they are missing a crucial component of what makes art artistic. If Wii Fit can be called an artwork, so can an aerobics class at your local gym.

However, there do exist video games intent on exploring the same themes as the best works of art. Every new Final Fantasy game has a twisting narrative intended to stir the player’s emotions. Series like Zelda and Grand Theft Auto have became successes because they built complete worlds from the ground up and urged players to joyfully explore their every corner. Games like these would seem to have intentions more in line with accepted works of art, but are those intentions enough to make them so?

As an example, take one the most conceptually ambitious video game series of the last several years: Metal Gear Solid. The premise is simple: players take control of Solid Snake, a grizzled operative of an elite paramilitary group, as he plumbs the depths of international espionage. However, ever since the first game in the series debuted in 1998, creator Hideo Kojima has made clear that he intended to use the series to explore the big questions. War, death, love, life. All were expounded upon, often at great length, by the many characters populating the series’ byzantine narrative. These characters moved through a world constructed with love and attention to detail. The series often set benchmarks for graphical excellence, and it took players on a journey through frozen military bases, lush jungles, mist-shrouded cityscapes and more, all the while mulling on the philosophical and political questions of the day. If any video game could be called a work of art, it would surely be this one.

Strange that its creator thinks otherwise. When asked about Mr. Ebert’s view on video games as an art forms, Hideo Kojima sided with the film critic. “I don’t think they’re art either, videogames… a videogame is interactive, so it's something used by people… in that sense, it’s totally not art.” In the interview, Kojima opines that video games incorporate art, and that this art is created by the creators of the video game, but that video games are not themselves works of art.

That video games incorporate art is undisputed. A professional texture artist wields his mouse as skillfully as any painter his brush. The Metal Gear Solid series is packed to the gills with exquisitely crafted cinematic sequences spliced with the latest in Hollywood action filmmaking. The music in several of the games is composed by Harry Gregson-Williams, a composer whose credits include Hollywood films like The Rock and Shrek. How then can all of these elements combine to be something less than the sum of their parts? How can pieces of art, skillfully arranged, add up to anything less than art?

Mr. Kojima perhaps sums it up best. "Art is the stuff you find in the museum, whether it be a painting or a statue. What I'm doing, what videogame creators are doing, is running the museum--how do we light up things, where do we place things, how do we sell tickets? It's basically running the museum for those who come to the museum to look at the art.” Good art girds the foundations of any good videogame, but as Mr. Kojima points out, the most important participant in a video game is not the artist. The most important participant is the player.

The textures of a video game are art, and can be displayed on their own in Kojima’s museum. The same goes for the cinematic sequences and the music. However, the act of playing the video game, of choosing which textures to look at and deciding which cinemas to watch and which to skip, is up to the player. The principle of choice is inherent in video games and is what separates them from paintings or sculptures or books or movies. The player can walk through the museum. He can observe and even interact with the art on display, but his choices are his own. The artists behind the video game have worked hard to show things to the player, to express something to him, but the player’s choices are not subject to the artist’s authorial intent. The essence of art is that it express something about and through its author or authors, but in a video game the player is their own author, essentially giving birth to their own story as they play through the game.

Video games incorporate art. Video game designers employ great artistry in arranging those pieces of art, but because the essence of the video game relies on the ability of the player to make their own choices, video games as they exist today cannot be considered art. This does not mean that video games are not worthwhile. This does not mean that video games cannot move a person to tears or make them laugh or teach them important skills, but it does mean that they are not art.

Or at least, not yet. The technology behind video games is growing by leaps and bounds. Developers are becoming ever more ambitious in their rush to do something new. Is it possible that in the future some developer will solve the problem of authorial intent and finally make a video game that can be called a true work of art?

Welcome to Silent Hill

Video games aspire to be works of art. The essence of a video game is choice, yet choice is antithetical to the authorial nature of art. It’s a problem. If video game developers want to make works of art, their challenge is to construct the player’s choices such that those choices are still expressive of the author’s intent. It’s a conceptually tricky proposition, but many developers have tried to create games in which the player’s choices are central to the point the game is trying to make. Common example include games like Knights of the Old Republic and Fable, role-playing games wherein the actions a player takes determine whether the player’s in-game avatar is represented as good or evil.

These experiments with player choice are interesting but largely unsubtle. More often than not, the player is merely given the choice between becoming either a pious saint or a bloodthirsty murderer. If developers want to create games which can stand beside great works of art, they must explore the more subtle gradients of human experience. The industry being where it is, not many such games have emerged. However, there a few which point the way, chief among them Silent Hill 2.



Released by Konami in 2001, Silent Hill 2 tells the story of James Sunderland, a taciturn widower summoned to the game’s titular town by a mysterious letter from his late wife Mary. The game itself plays like many other horror games of its day. As James, the player wanders around the town solving puzzles, battling monsters, and fighting the game’s cumbersome controls in an attempt to find the source of the letter. Compared to most story-based video games, Silent Hill 2 is thematically rich. James is an unstable and unreliable avatar, and at different points the game looks at themes such as death, murder, and suicide with surprising subtlety. However, what differentiates Silent Hill 2 from games with similar ambitions is the way in which it folds the player’s choices into the outcome of the narrative.

James wants to find the source of the letter. James wants to find his wife. The player sympathizes and makes that mission his own, but over the course of the game James’ motivations become increasingly unclear. At one point in the narrative, the reason for James’ crusade is taken away from him. The player, having sympathized with James and his objective, is thus faced with a question almost no video game ever dares ask: why keep playing? Unbeknownst to the player, the game has been asking this question the entire way through, testing the player’s dedication to the mission through a series of camouflaged choices. How fervently has the player searched for Mary? Has he read her letter? Has he looked at her picture? Through these and other choices, the game decides where the player’s loyalties really lie, and it doles out its justice accordingly. It has guided the player’s choices so carefully that the player didn’t even know he was making them, and it is through this that the player reveals himself to the game.

More than any other video game of its generation, Silent Hill 2 takes what is unique to video games, the necessity of choice, and uses it to express something. The game’s graphical design drips with menace. Its narrative is precisely constructed to unhinge, but the whole is incomplete without the player’s choices. It is those choices, so quietly presented and made, which allow the game to hold up a mirror to the player. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it represents exactly the kind of subtle shading the video game industry must strive for if it wants to create something closer to a work of art.

The video game industry is not small. Not all developers will attempt the delicate touches and pinpoint ambition all but required to elevate their games closer to art, nor should they. The industry is more than big enough to accommodate the shoot-em-ups, the simulators, the storybooks and everything else in between. But those developers who try for something different should be commended, and their efforts should be watched for signs of the future. I agree with Roger Ebert that video games as they exist now are not art, but I’m not sure that they never can be. The wheels are already in motion, and it’s best for everybody that they continue to spin.

Movie Review: AntiChrist

This is not a movie that believes in moderation. This is not a movie that believes that violent images are best left to the imagination or that less is more. Let us be clear: this is a movie that shows in extreme close-up a women cutting off her own clitoris.

It may seem petty to begin a review of a movie which definitely has serious issues on its mind by pointing to its most brutal moment, but that moment and others like it are what linger in the mind. Director Lars von Trier (Dogville, Dancer in the Dark) has a well-earned reputation for artistry, but he also has one for being a provocateur. He has never shied away from material that is uncomfortable, disturbing, and shocking. Does the material here merit images like that described above, or are they shown merely to provoke?

Antichrist does not lack for ideas. It takes as its subjects nothing less than grief, pain, despair, women, and the chaotic nature of the universe. The plot is bare-bones. In the beginning, a couple is making love. Their infant son crawls out of his crib, sees them, climbs onto a window-sill, and falls to his death. The couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg and referred to only as He and She respectively, are stricken with guilt and grief. They retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods so that they might work through their pain, but it is here that their relationship becomes increasingly violent and strange.

On one level, Antichrist is about two people punishing each other for their son’s death. He is a therapist and tackles the problem analytically, burying his own feelings to focus on his wife’s pain. He puts her through a battery of tests that are as much about exacting vengeance as they are about making her face her fears. She reacts more directly, becoming sullen and angry and getting him to engage in rough, painful sex. There is a lot of sex in the movie, and it is mostly graphic and violent. It is why She eventually does what she does to herself, to rid herself of the thing that cost her child’s life.

Or is it? Between all the interpersonal drama, von Trier weaves in a series of mythic images and themes. Acorns falling on the roof. A deer, a fox, a crow. It is eventually revealed that before her child died, She was doing research on feminine oppression throughout history, and the conclusions she draws may shed some light on what happens in and around that cabin. Is it the result of the bottled emotions of two wounded people? Is it the natural expression of her inherent evil, or is another presence at play, something more uncaring and omnipotent than either of them are prepared to deal with? The movie gives no clear answers, but it does get the mind humming and the senses pounding. It is difficult if not impossible to deduce what von Trier intended, but the movie’s most powerful images stay intact, to be picked at and probed, long after the final frames flicker away.

What is certain is that the movie is made with impeccable craft. Von Trier employs a number of techniques, from black-and-white film to slow motion sequences to handheld shots and more, to expertly tug our senses one way or another. Whatever its excesses, the movie is never boring to look at. Dafoe and Gainsbourg are both extremely good in a pair of nebulous roles that require them to engage in behavior many actors would balk at. He and She spend much of the movie stripped emotionally naked, but they are the only center we have in von Trier’s morally murky universe. Dafoe and Gainsbourg give risky, powerful performances both.

Gainsbourg’s performance is never riskier than when She mutilates herself. The movie has bided its time up to this point building a desolate and hopeless atmosphere. These people are not getting better. They are not getting over or even facing their problems. They are discovering horrible new sides to themselves and finding out just how much cruelty they are capable of. She’s mutilation is the final expression of this hopelessness, but it is merely the capper to a long and painful journey from which von Trier offers no reprieve. I stepped out of the theater exhausted. Antichrist is not a movie that believes in moderation. It believes only in extremes, but that means that it can affect an audience like few movies can, even if they aren’t ready for it. See it at your own risk.

War is Swell: Inglourious Basterds and The Hurt Locker

Two movies about war have recently debuted in theaters. One is set in the 21st century and takes place in Iraq. The other is set during World War II and takes place in Nazi-occupied France. One is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, probably best known for the Keanu Reeves cop movie Point Break, and the other is directed by Quentin Tarantino, probably best known for that scene in Kill Bill where Uma Thurman kills, like, a hundred ninjas. One is about the exhilarating, addictive nature of deadly situations and one soldier’s attempt to find meaning in life beyond the thrill of war. The other is about “killin’ knat-sies.” These films both approach war in their own way, but when one looks under the surface, are they really that different?

Yes. Yes they are. A lot.

The unhidden secret of Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s gleefully irreverent World War II film, is that it’s not about war at all. Like all of Tarantino’s work, it is about movies; the way they look, the way they move, and what they represent. This time Tarantino makes a movie about movies that are about war, but he makes little comment on the subject itself. His principle inspiration this go-around seems to be The Dirty Dozen and other “men with a mission” movies. The men are a group Jewish of soldiers named the Basterds, and their mission is to kill as many Nazis as possible as gruesomely as possible. Their commander is Aldo Raine, a Tennessee native played by Brad Pitt as a cross between John Wayne, George Patton and Ted Bundy. Other major players include Shosanna, a young Jewish cinema-owner with revenge on her mind, and Colonel Hans Landa, a ruthless and sardonic “Jew Hunter” who tries to stop them both. Eventually, even Hitler himself makes an appearance, and something happens to him that he surely did not see coming.

These characters spend most of their time talking, as Tarantino’s characters so often do. They talk about nicknames. They talk about Max Linder. They talk about King Kong and they talk about strudel. And then, usually, once they’ve talked a scene to the breaking point, they whip out guns and start to kill each other. This is Tarantino’s technique, to construct long, lovingly crafted conversations that finally explode in violence before the talking continues. Tarantino is interested in tension. Tarantino is interested in archetype. Tarantino is interested in violence but he is not particularly interested in war.

Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, the writer and director of The Hurt Locker respectively, are very interested in war. Boal, who served on a bomb squad in Iraq, writes from experience. The movie is about a man named William James, a staff sergeant who defuses bombs. James is very, very good at his job, but does it with a lust and recklessness that alarm the other members of his squad. The theme of The Hurt Locker is not, like so many war films before it, that “war is Hell,” but rather that “war is a drug,” and James is addicted. Boal shows other sides of James’ life. James is married, perhaps unhappily, to a woman back home. He has a young son in whom he is not very interested. The only time he seems to come alive is when he straps on a many-layered blast suit and gets to work.

These characters do not spend most of their time talking. Bigelow builds incredible tension in scenes where James, faced with a bomb on the road, approaches it slowly, watched by hovering bystanders who may or may not have put it there, and tries to disassemble it as quickly as he can, knowing that at any moment it could splatter him all over the street. Bigelow does not shy away from showing us the bloody consequences of a bomb, and every second one doesn’t go off is another second the audience will be watching the screen through shuttered fingers. When the violence finally explodes, it hits us in the gut.

Tarantino aims a little higher, hitting us in the funny bone. Inglorious Basterds features scenes of monstrous violence, but it has always been the talent of its director to turn a gruesome spectacle into a gruesomely comic one. Many recall the ear-slicing scene from Reservoir Dogs: there is a scene in this film, involving someone’s forehead, that tops it. There is something about the larger-than-life characters, the walls of too-clever dialogue, and the elegant sweeping of the camera that renders the violence in this film something other than violent. Around the time that Tarantino rewrites a monumental moment in world history, the audience begins to understand why that is, if they didn’t already. This film does not take place in Nazi-occupied France but rather in a place called Movieland, where the men are heroic, the women are beautiful, and every Nazi past and future deserves whatever horrendous punishment the most sadistic of screenwriters can come up with. In Movieland, violence can be funny or even beautiful, but it cannot draw real blood.

Inglorious Basterds is completely apolitical, which should stop absolutely no one from seeing and enjoying it. It is provocative and hypnotic in the tradition of Tarantino’s best work. Just don’t expect any sharp insights into history or politics. Odd, that this is where Tarantino and Bigelow’s films finally find common ground. For all of its gritty, grounds-eye view pyrotechnics, The Hurt Locker is a very personal story of one man and his bomb suit. Boal and Bigelow judiciously avoid commenting on why James is in Iraq and whether he should be there, instead focusing on what he does and what it feels like. In the end, this approach may say more about the situation than any amount of sermonizing could.

The films likewise feature impeccable technical credits and top-shelf acting, though the filmmakers employ them in drastically different styles and to markedly different ends. It would be remiss not to mention Christoph Waltz’s performance as Hans Landa, surely one of the most smugly entertaining Nazi bastards (sic… oh wait) of all time. The important thing to remember is that there is a pair of very satisfying war movies in theaters, and whether you see them apart or as part of one very surreal double feature, you need to go storm your local cinema as soon as possible.

Final Fantasy XII: A Reaming

Final Fantasy XII has no soul. By that I don’t mean that it’s poorly made or that it lacks a certain funky urban flavor. What I mean is that although most of the game is fully functional and user-friendly, it never makes the player care. Featuring a shallow narrative and backboned by some interesting but unsuccessful design decisions, Final Fantasy XII is a well-made game that just isn’t any fun.

Let’s begin with the combat, which is where you’ll be spending most of your time. As anyone who’s stumbled into this dark corner of the internet is bound to know, FF XII axes the turn based battle system used by its long line of predecessors in favor of a real-time system not unlike the one used in the massively multiplayer Final Fantasy XI. Whereas in past games the player would walk around an area only to be whisked randomly away into menu-driven, turn-based battles, players in XII see their enemies in the field, walk up to them, and kill them. Said killing is executed via the gambit system, an inventive approach whereby players ‘program’ the characters to act on their own. It takes some time to amass a list of truly useful gambits, but by the one-quarter mark you’ll have gotten the hang of it. As players work through the game, they'll find gambits in the field and buy them in shops. Sure, its unrealistic (you’re basically purchasing the knowledge of how to look at things), but obtaining new gambits lets you experiment with new strategies, and it’s fun to mix and match until you find one that works for you.

Since the gambits basically fight for you, your main responsibility is that of strategist, not brawler. Despite the option to micromanage your party should you choose, the whole scheme leaves the player feeling disconnected from the action. In past FFs, battles could come down to mashing the attack button over and over until everyone was dead.  That system could be irritating, but at least it invited the player to join the characters in the thick of things. In XII, the player is off to the side somewhere, watching and taking notes, or possibly making a sandwich.

Imperfect as the combat is, the game could have gotten away with its banality by lowering its frequency. Most RPG fans are familiar with the concept of grinding, killing monster after monster for the sole purpose of leveling up. In Final Fantasy XII, grinding isn’t just an idea--it’s a way of life. Players will simply not be able to make any meaningful progress without committing mass genocide on the flora and fauna of Ivalice. You’ll constantly find that you’re not strong enough for the next area, or that you don’t have enough money to buy the latest weapons and armor for your party. Players who enjoy denial can pretend that the monster-tracking sidequests, called hunts, are anything more than grind-a-thons in disguise, but after a dozen or so it all bleeds into a dull, violent blur. The combat may be functional, but it’s nowhere near compelling enough to shoulder the weight the game puts on it.

Character development is likewise a mixed bag. For the most part, development takes place on the license board, Final Fantasy XII’s lamer version of Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid. As you win battles, your characters gain license points which can be used to purchase new abilities that run the gamut from spells and other skills to HP increases. Any character can get any ability without much trouble, which means there’s a huge level of flexibility when building your party. The problem is that by the end of game, after you’ve slaughtered more monsters than there are stars in the sky, every character will have conquered the license board and will be largely the same. The complete lack of specialization makes character development feel pointless, and gives players little reason to become attached to the characters themselves.

And believe me, these characters don’t need the help. I could forgive a repetitive battle system and a flawed development design if I was invested in the game’s plot and characters. Hell, I did just that with Final Fantasy VIII. But the true failing of this game isn't the combat or the design--it’s the complete failure to get me even the least bit interested in the story. It’s important here to make a distinction between character and plot. The plot of Final Fantasy XII is serviceable, even though it’s basically the same tale the series has been telling since day one. An evil empire threatens the peace. A rag-tag gang of adventurers sets out on a grand journey to save the world and learn about themselves. To its credit, XII tells its tale with a few less ridiculous plot twists than its predecessors; there are no time-traveling witches or giant fish monsters/father figures here, but the framework is the same as ever.

The difference is that past FFs elevated themselves above their cookie-cutter plots with memorable characters and unique, detailed fantasy worlds. The world of Ivalice is not without its charms, but it lacks anything truly special or interesting. Warring kingdoms? Check. Quasi-medieval setting? Check. FF standbys like moogles and chocobos? Big ol’ check. When wandering the wide-open fields and bustling cities of Ivalice, one can’t shake the feeling that they’ve been here before. And they have, in dozens of other games, books, and shameful late-night D&D sessions.

So if the plot and world are only just up to snuff, that leaves the characters themselves to carry the day. It is my unfortunate duty to tell you that not only do said characters fail to carry said day, they drop it off a highrise into a pit of lava-squirting spikes. The cast of Final Fantasy XII is the dullest, most vacant-eyed group of walking dead the series has ever been saddled with.

Let's start at the beginning, with our teenage “hero” Vaan. Now there’s a backstory here somewhere: Vaan’s an orphan or an urchin or adopted or something, but that isn’t important, because Vaan is really just the latest in a series of harmless, charmless FF leading men without enough force of personality to make players remember him even when he's speaking about himself. Presumably the protagonist of the game, Vaan actually just hangs out in the background most of the time, occasionally squeaking about how he wants to be a sky pirate while the other characters ignore him. Their apathy is infectious.

Vaan’s gal-pal Penelo fills the cheery teenage girl quota for the game and is every bit as dull as her friend, but at least she makes no claim to be the lead. Later, the player will meet Basch, a stalwart knight fighting for his kingdom’s honor, and Fran, a mysterious bunny-eared woman of few words. Read that sentence again. Congratulations, you have just absorbed all the information the game will ever give you about these two characters. Oh, okay, they both have painfully brief segments of the story devoted to their backgrounds, but those segments are so anemic, and the game itself is so long, that any impact they may have had is completely blunted by the end.

There are two characters who come close to making an impression: Balthier the sky-pirate and Ashe the deposed princess. While Balthier can’t claim a subplot any more interesting than Basche’s or Fran’s, he is well-spoken and provides pretty much all of the game’s humor. In a game which conducts itself with all the seriousness of an especially tragic funeral, this is much appreciated. Ashe is special: she is the only character in the game with any sort of compelling internal conflict that isn’t just up and forgotten an hour in. Without giving away the plot, I’ll just say that Ashe has to decide whether to use her power for good or evil. The resolution of this dilemma is telegraphed well in advance, but its existence is all the game has to keep players from switching back to TV and channel-flipping during the cutscenes.

Admittedly, the failure of the game’s story to be at all, y’know, good, may have less to do with character and more to do with pacing. I’ll break it down for you: the game’s pacing is fucking atrocious. Virtually all of the notable events happen near the beginning, when the characters are introduced, and the end, when the bad guy dies. In between, there is walking.  The characters walk from one end of the continent to the other in search of some magic rocks, then they walk it back to look for some magic swords, and finally continue to walk on a quest to find another, bigger magic rock.  The overuse of magical macguffins is pretty shameless, and gives the impression that the characters are walking from nothing, to nothing, for nothing.  On the way, they’ll traverse lush forests, foreboding dungeons and other impressively realized environments Square-Enix has created to distract from the fact that the journey means little if the destination isn’t worth reaching.

At this point I could describe some of the game’s redeeming qualities. I could say things like “the graphics are detailed and well-realized” and “the soundtrack really pulls you into the setting.” I could say those things.  I just did, and they’re true, but they don’t make up for the fact that at its core this game is empty. It’s got a battle system that doesn’t involve the player, a development scheme that encourages redundancy, and a story so devoid of inspiration that after playing the game for one-hundred hours I can’t think of one nice thing to say about it.  I leave you with this advice: when you wake up tomorrow, hug your loved ones, do your work with pride, and for the love of God don’t play Final Fantasy XII.