Tag Archives: movies

Skip’s Quips: At Least They Didn’t Make a Movie About ‘Mr. Do!’

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Blog Sketch 082813Have we come to the end of the line for movies based on video games?

That’s certainly my hope. I don’t think I could sit through another installment of Mortal Kombat.

Guess I should be glad they didn’t make a flick about Frogger. Or should I bite my tongue?

I can see the tagline now: “The existential adventures of a frog who only wants to get to the other side.”

I wonder, though, if the moviegoing public has seen enough of this type of thing. After all, video games these days are more cinematic than ever, with plotlines and entire scenes developed through computer-generated animation. No one really needs a film based on a game that’s like a film anyway.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a video-game teetotaler. I actually grew up with them during their nascent days. Donkey Kong, Zaxxon. I even had a ColecoVision.

But I enjoyed them for their interactivity. That was a novel thing–to compete against your computer. Nowadays, video games are as much about watching the characters as much as playing them.

And I have to say, I find that interesting. Because the more, it seems, we gravitate toward a new technology and new experiences, the more we want the old incorporated into it.

Looking for movies in video games is perfectly natural. It’s like wanting to know more about Mozart and how he got his inspiration. The interest in the games spawns an interest in the characters.

Yet motion pictures based on these characters seem, for the most part, unsuccessful. There’s only so much we can get from a shoot-’em-up. Within the context of the games themselves, however, the cinematic qualities work. So perhaps that’s where they belong.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to check my officers’ progress in Star Trek Online. Exit, pursued by a joystick.

Setter’s ‘Spectives: Musings on Herzog, ‘Aguirre’ and General Zaniness

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Setter Drawing for Blog 082613I don’t love all of Werner Herzog’s movies, but I have to tell ya: He’s cut in a truly original mold.

A recent viewing of Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe on Turner Classic Movies got me thinking about the oft-brilliant, sometimes-obsessive and frequently zany director and his oeuvre, which includes one of my favorite films, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. It’s a movie that defines him in a sense–a superbly shot, hauntingly scored (the dreamlike, pulsating music was crafted by Popul Vuh) picture about megalomania and how it can carry, and ultimately destroy, human endeavors. The megalomaniac in question is Aguirre himself, a crazed, based-on-a-real-person conquistador played with frightening abandon by Klaus Kinski, who teeters, glowers and broods throughout the flick as he carries out a mutiny of a 16th-century Spanish expedition to find gold amid the Amazonian jungle. As I remembered the great moments that characterized this adventure, I wondered if only a person as mad as Aguirre himself could make it, capturing hallucinogenic images such as a line of soldiers and their retinue struggling to climb down a verdant, mist-covered mountain, a head continuing to count numbers even after its owner has been decapitated, and the final scenes in which Aguirre, his doomed raft overrun by monkeys, talks to no one about his plans for global domination…no one, because everyone in his party is dead, a fact revealed memorably by the famous, swooping shot at the end.

But Herzog isn’t mad. I think he’s quite sane, though I wonder if he likes the thought that people may think he’s mad. Really, he’s an old-fashioned showman with magnificent obsessions and a talent for promoting idea-rich films made on low budgets. And I value this image he’s cultivated, because we don’t see a lot of it. It’s a mix of Hitchcock’s talent for marketing with Kurosawa’s quest for perfection, and the stories Herzog tells about his exploits rival the great ones in the cinematic lexicon–including the one about Kurosawa ordering the set of Throne of Blood to be rebuilt because he saw a nail that wouldn’t have been there during the period in which the movie takes place.

That’s not madness, folks. It’s art, and it suggests a commitment to its creation that only the most dedicated craftsmen have.

I wish there were more filmmakers like Herzog around these days, filmmakers who take risks and know how to advertise themselves. Yet there’s only one Herzog, and I think we have to be content with that. I’m certainly pleased that he gave us Aguirre, though I realize that if there’s anything that defines its creator, it’s not madness but determination and a need to produce art.

Thank you, then, Werner Herzog.

Setter’s ‘Spective: The Slo-Mo and the Furious

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Setter Drawing for Blog 082613I blame you, Akira Kurosawa.

Remember: You started it. Or rather, you helped popularize the use of slow-motion photography in fight scenes–specifically via two different shots of villains dying in The Seven Samurai.

I adore your films, Akira. But I’m not happy with the seeds you’ve sown.

Ok, so you’re not responsible for all that ludicrous pseudo-Spartan posturing in 300. Or the (prolific) guts and glory in The Wild Bunch. But without those scenes in Samurai, we wouldn’t be so deluged with half-speed onscreen violence.

Granted, you used slow motion judiciously–and I think that’s what separates you from the rest. Peckinpah’s technique can hardly be called subtle, but his Bunch certainly packs a punch. Not so much all that silliness in 300, where the idea seemed to be showing how cool it is to kill ancient Persians with as much CGI blood as possible.

And I think that’s where all this slo-mo falls rather quickly on its face.

We’ve diluted its purpose, the whole point of its effectiveness. See it once in a while, and it’s as startling as a flower in snow. Yet watch it over and over again, and it loses its potential impact. Today, it seems to be de rigueur in “action” scenes, as if directors have forgotten how to film normally. So it has become showy instead of telling, obvious instead of shocking.

Frankly, I’d rather see My Dinner with Andre. That’s got more action than any Matrix pose-a-rama.

So Kurosawa, I’m going to take time out from praising you to gripe a bit, though with a heavy heart. Because I know as much as I loathe what slo-mo has become, without it we wouldn’t be what we are today.

Old man Sykes says in Peckinpah’s Bunch: “It ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do.”

I don’t think it should.