TOM FRANCIS
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There Will Be Country For Old Men In Real Life, Baby

I’ve already seen more great films this year than in the entirety of last year, but 2008 can’t really take the credit – pretty much all of them came out in 2007 in the US. The films I expected to love turned out to be merely good, and the films I had little hope of enjoying, I loved. I’m at the stage now where I don’t think anyone can agree with me even on just these seven films, let alone my increasingly bizarre viewing history.

There Will Be Blood: I’m not sure I could say I enjoyed this. People who haven’t seen it keep asking me what it’s like. What’s it like? It’s a masterpiece. It’s an extraordinary piece of cinema, a phenomenal performance, a work of art. Did I like it? No, not really.

I’m just not that interested in cinema, or performances, or art. I was gripped all the way through, and as critics have said, what’s exciting about it is that you have no idea where it’s going. But by the end – which is macabre, surreal, comic, and utterly sick – I just thought “Oh. Nowhere, then.”

No Country For Old Men: This I did enjoy, a lot, but I still choke on my popcorn whenever someone calls it the Coens’ best. Are we talking about the same Coens? The Fargo, Lebowski, Fink, O Brother, Hudsucker Coens? Maybe there are other Coens.

Again, it’s extraordinarily cinematic and artistically beautiful in a whole set of ways I don’t care about. What I did love about its direction was the fetishistic attention to detail: the sweeping black scuff-marks on the police station floor from the cop thrashing as he choked, the burn-splatters around close-range gunshot-wounds when they’re stripped bare for treatment, the way one character’s fate is only communicated to us by whether or not another checks the soles of his shoes.

It’s also probably the most excruciatingly tense thriller I’ve ever seen – there are long scenes where you know precisely what will happen, but not precisely when, and I felt like I lost years of my heart-healthy life to each.

What I liked most about it was that it felt like how a thriller premise would play out in the real world: the major plot events are determined by brutal, random chance that doesn’t bias the hero or villain, and when a character dies, it’s not always a poetic defeat at the hands of his nemesis.

But unlike most of its fans, I didn’t think the ending was profound or interesting. I get it. I got it a while back. I got it from the title of the movie. I didn’t need the credits to roll on some absurd symbolic chin-stroking introspection to tell me what the point of the film was.

Gone Baby Gone: This absolutely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the above two, but rarely is. It’s a noir private-detective thriller starring Casey Affleck, who is a dramatically better actor than Ben in both sense of the word; and directed by Ben, who is a dramatically better director than actor, again in both senses.

It revolves around a missing child, and the length and breadth of dilemma they mine from that scenario is alarming. It culminates in a decision so tough that you’re left with no idea who you’re rooting for, even as it tears all the good guys apart. That’s the hardest part of noir to achieve: true moral ambiguity, a situation so sticky it’s no longer clear who’s doing the right thing. Gone has a resolution of sorts, but it’s so hard won that it feels sobering rather than victorious.

Charlie Wilson’s War: Very much liked this, but given that it was written by Aaron Sorkin and prominently featured Seymour Hoffman, I’d expected to love it. Hoffman is superb – a whole film about his character rather than Hanks’ would have been magnificent. I just didn’t care all that much about Wilson’s private life, or Roberts’ character’s subplot, and those took up a lot of the running time.

Knocked Up: This is the only one I did see last year, twice in fact. It’s the funniest I’ve seen in ages, and emotionally honest with it. The premise is cheap – “Ha ha what if an ugly guy got you pregnant? Lol.” – but then the film never flinches from the awkward, unhappy consequences of that.

It pays for that poster by having to tackle a really hard question: what do you do if it’s not working out but there’s a kid? And it doesn’t dodge it by having them magically turn out to be soulmates or by killing off the baby (you laugh, but it’s been done). It actually gives an answer, comes out and says “This unhappy compromise is slightly less unhappy than the other unhappy compromises.”

Also, lol. Jack and Jill – the network executives who alternately congratulate and neurotically demean Katherine Heigl’s character – are worth the ticket price alone. And the weird, slight-too-friendly relationship between Seth Rogen’s character and Paul Rudd’s – the only real soul-mates of the film – just gets funnier and funnier. There’s also a lot of good relationship philosophy, meditations on chairs, a fantastic performance from a kid, and the seriousness of Steve Martin vehicles. In fact, quotes:

“Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn’t last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.”

“Oh, Matthew Fox? The Lost guy? You know what’s interesting about him?”
“What?”
“NOTHING.”

“Where do babies come from?”
“Where do you think they come from?”
“Well. I think a stork, he umm, he drops it down and then, and then, a hole goes in your body and there’s blood everywhere, coming out of your head and then you push your belly button and then your butt falls off and then you hold your butt and you have to dig and you find the little baby.”
“That’s exactly right.”

Dan In Real Life: I don’t even know why I saw this, the best I’d heard was that it wasn’t as bad as it might seem. That’s true; it’s wonderful.

It’s so damn hard to make me care about a character, let alone root for them, but Dan (Steve Carrell) treads a tightrope between pathetic victim and jerk that just about keeps him clear of either – a rare feat.

Each time it builds excruciating emotional tension, it doesn’t so much diffuse it with humour as release it in a controlled explosion. I’m sure most of the things I laughed weren’t funny at all, the script just has an uncanny knack for poking me in the ribs when I’m most vulnerable.

Like Knocked Up, it takes a really tricky mess of plot points and doesn’t shy away from picking a line of best-fit through them, but its unflinching acceptance of the consequences of that doesn’t hold up all the way to the end. There’s just one, brief, tired old trope for resolving a love triangle that they roll out towards the end to keep everyone happy, and it does marr the otherwise impressive awkwardness of the whole ordeal.

Bee Movie: What the hell? Why did everyone tell me this sucked? I caught this on a plane, because one person of five had told me it was ‘okay’. It was great! I laughed ten times more than I did during Ratatouille, none of the characters were anything like as annoying, and it was actually rather original. There’s a bit where Jerry Seinfeld bee flies repeatedly into the same pane of glass about ten times before stopping, looking at it for the first time and muttering, “Oh that is just diabolical.”

Enchanted: I really thought I would loathe this, and I didn’t. It’s about a Disney princess who comes to life, so you can imagine what else was on the plane that I ended up watching it. But it’s sort of almost halfway charming. All I’d seen before was a clip of that awful “That’s How You Know” song on the Oscars, which Once rightly pounded into the dust and snatched the award from. But when that number actually came around in the film, with the slightly absurd way it starts, and the reggae buskers – I tried not to smile and was unsuccessful.

The Year In Forty Photos

I won’t bore you with any kind of account of my year, but here are some photos I took during it. I guess I didn’t take all of them since I’m in some of them, but I don’t remember so good about those ones.

I’ve been working my way through Said the Gramophone’s 75 tracks of the year with an odd cocktail of revulsion and delight. Among the delight, this wonderful song by Vic Chesnutt. Often songs that aren’t about what they seem to be about never let you in on the twist – it was years before I realised Belle & Sebastian’s Century of Elvis was about a cat. Vic’s is from the school of “Two minutes in, just come out and say it.” Continued

The World Of Goo Soundtrack Is Out, Free, And Amazing

A few things to say about this: Continued

The Witness

The Witness is a very pretty island with hundreds of puzzles on iPad things. Some of those puzzles are brilliant, most are decent, many are repetitious or boring, some are aggressively irritating. Luckily none of the good ones are locked off by bad ones. That’s my review, I’m mostly making this post to put up all the best screenshots I took. These are pretty spoiler-free, they only reveal that “There is a place that looks like this”, although a couple have solved puzzle panels in them so don’t look too closely if you have a photographic memory.

After the pretty shots, and a warning, I’m also gonna dump the scrawled-over shots I used to solve some of the trickier puzzles, in case that’s interesting. One of the game’s stranger quirks, to me, is that despite having 523 draw-a-line-on-an-iPad puzzles, its interface for doing this is not as good as a standard paint program, so I often fell back on one of those. Continued

The West Wing

Despite being utterly unlike anything else I like in theme or type (it’s a White House drama (you might think that’s obvious from the title, but if so you’re probably American – I’ve still never heard of the West Wing outside of this series)), it’s absolutely brilliant. One thing about it goes some way to explaining the anomaly, though – it’s a fantasy. I imagine people who keep up with politics could have a nasty experience trying to swallow its picture of a government in which a near-perfect tension between pure democracy and educated liberalism decides policy, and the people in power are all heartbreakingly good-willed and astonishingly talented. To call it arrogant for that is like accusing Star Trek of exaggerating our space-travel capabilities. Not a documentary! Fiction is where they tell you a story and, while knowing the story isn’t true, you follow the plot and maybe enjoy it. Where did we get this idea that art’s supposed to just record what things are like? That’s a talentless, menial task (says a journalist); art should be fantasy, it should use imagination to show how things could be and get people excited at the idea. Beyond entertainment, that’s its only task, and it’s a much loftier and more important calling than commenting on how things really are.

The thing that sticks with me from The West Wing is the culture of highly qualified people working incredibly hard out of dedication to what they do – not why they’re doing it. Sam and Toby are relentlessly perfectionist about their own and each other’s writing because they love writing and couldn’t bear to see bad writing used, not because of a sense of duty to their country. Writer Aaron Sorkin clearly models them on himself, and the fact that he works in entertainment while they run the country implies no difference in their passion and determination. He wrote virtually every episode of the show himself, right up to the end of series four (when it mysteriously lost all its wit and heart), and – let’s be honest here – frequently took drugs to do it. I’m not the same at all, of course, but occasionally I catch myself thinking like this – using my spare time to rework something sub-par even though I’m sure it would have been accepted. The profound thing about the West Wing is that it paints a fantasy so admirable it actually inspires you to improve yourself. It ingrains you with the idea that a thing is worth doing well at virtually any cost.

The characters talk as fast as air-traffic controllers, only the jargon is not so much jargon as a mix of brilliantly argued moral points and hilarious stupidity. The political situations are eerily like recent real ones, and the action taken is a compelling compromise between liberal and what people actually believe in: the Democrats are in power, and president Bartlett (played by Martin Sheen, incidentally) is a particularly left wing (and underlyingly geeky) one. Every issue is discussed with a thoroughness and fairness (not to mention articulacy and, an unavoidably recurring word, intelligence) that impresses even me, a sceptic philosopher derisive of the attempts of any other discipline to even argue coherently, let alone exhibit any kind of rational intelligence. The arguments for the ‘other side’ are alarmingly persuasive, and a couple of times it’s genuinely changed my stance on things.

But the issues are very much secondary to the characters, for me – there are perhaps five who aren’t fantastic and compelling and vividly human, so to do the others full justice, I will list ten of them by first name in descending order of greatness: Toby, Josh, Will, Sam, Donna, Margaret, Leo, CJ, Charlie. Detailing what I like so much about each of them would be a mammoth (though strangely tempting) task, so I’ll just skip over some highlights: Toby is just fantastic all the time – grouchy, brilliant, and absurdly restrained when he’s happy; Josh and Donna’s relationship is a horribly touching combination of superficial spite masking genuine affection; Margaret’s perfect deadpan conversations with her perpetually frowning boss Leo.

Series Notes: the first two series are relentlessly brilliant, with several of the best ever episodes in the second; but then the third starts off with three or four… not bad episodes as such, just a bit grim. It’s all struggle and hostility, whereas no other episodes before that had ever lost their good humour and multi-facetedness. Shortly into the series, though, it gets great again, and stays at the old stellar standard. Then the fourth series… wow. It’s like The West Wing Plus: everything about it is even better, and the energy and pace of it is completely exhilerating. As for the finalés, the first series’ was fantastic, the next two weren’t really cliff-hangers or even very interesting, but the fourth is another explosive one, taking four long-running plot-lines to breaking point and leaving them there, and also featuring two remarkable firsts: one of the characters running (it’s not usually a very athletic programme); and a white ending screen (every other episode has a black one).

Or, it would be if that was actually the last episode. I later discovered that the fourth series, inexplicably, has a twenty-third episode, which utterly breaks the cliffhanger and leaves the series at a boring stalemate, and doesn’t have the fade to white. After that, Sorkin no longer writes the show, and while it seems superficially similar, the heart is gone from it. Series five, as far as I could muster the interest to watch, focused on dramatic global events, turning it into a political thriller rather than a personal drama set within the political arena. I haven’t watched much of series six, again because I dislike what little I have: my problem with that one stemming from the characters. They were delicate things as Sorkin crafted them, more human and believable than we’re used to on TV, and in other writers’ comparitively clumsy hands they break. Their subtle internal logic has gone, and their actions become inconsistent – just slightly, way less than on any other show, but it ruins the illusion nonetheless.

Series seven really perks up. Nothing like as good as a Sorkin series, but because it’s mostly new characters, and in a new environment, starting something new rather than trying to continue what was started in Sorkin’s episodes, it feels like a different show with a few familiar faces, and the mere-mortal writing is easier to swallow. It never got terribly exciting, and there were only a few touching or funny moments, but it was a nice way to go out.

Quotes:

(Donna is pressing Leo for official word on the news that the president crashed his* bicycle)
Leo: He was swerving to avoid a tree.
Donna: And what happened?
Leo: He was unsuccessful.**

Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Okay, I haven’t chaired in a while; what do we do next?
Agency Director At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Now’s when we usually start drinking.
Other Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Actually there is one thing I’d like to talk about before we start.
Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: If you’re going to try and get me to fund that idiot-ass airplane that can’t fly…
Other Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: It can fly.
Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Yeah, it can fly, it just can’t land.
Federal Judge At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: That’s a small price to pay for being able to fly.

Clips: hammer.avi (15MB) cat.avi (5MB)

The Team Fortress 2 Experience

The Suspicious Developments manifesto

After eight years as a games journalist and two as a part time developer, I have decided what I think of games: I like them. I’ve also figured out some of the reasons I like them, some of the reasons I sometimes don’t, and which of these things I really care about.

I’m far enough through making my own game, Gunpoint, to get a feel for which of these things I can actually do. But I’m still new at this. A lot of them are things I figured out during development, and Gunpoint itself doesn’t reflect them all. So this is a mission statement: a way for me to be specific and public about what I’d like to do in games, and how I plan to do it. Continued

The Sun Is Shining But We Stay Inside

A geek anthem for the summer if ever there was one. I usually only find out what bands look like when I write about them here, and scour Last.fm for something to draw attention away from this stretch of dry text, so I was amused to find that Born Ruffians look about twelve. Here’s what they sound like:

I suspect staring at this image while you listen probably won’t add to the experience the way it has with the last two posts.

The Social Network

Written by the West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin, directed by Fight Club’s David Fincher, starring Zombieland’s Jesse Eisenberg, produced by Kevin Spacey for some reason, and perhaps the first and only film to co-star Justin Timberlake as the founder of Napster.

The fact that it’s about the founding of Facebook, which I’m aware is controversial but have no actual knowledge of, is ideal. “I will feel like I’m being informed about something I’m interested in,” I thought, “and be unable to refute any liberties the film takes with the truth, allowing me to enjoy it entirely.” Continued

The Shadow Line Lines In The Shadow Line

The Shadow Line is finished now, and it was good until it got a bit wanky at the end. It’s nice to have something with a plot that genuinely requires some processing between episodes, and the cast has made me a fan of four of five actors I’d never seen before. Continued

The Saddest Goddamn Thing

I ordered my elf mage to move somewhere, accidentally told her to attack my dog. This kills the dog.

The Randomised Tactical Elegance Of Hoplite

I’ve been obsessed with iOS/Android randomised tactical combat game Hoplite ever since Zack Johnson told me about it at IndieCade last month. You’re a Greek spearman descending the randomly generated levels of the underworld, and you have to deal with the steadily increasing demonic population you find there by moving carefully across a hex grid turn by turn, calculating each move to slash, stab or stomp them without letting them get a hit in.

Each level has a shrine that grants a choice of upgrades, letting you incrementally design a perfect build of complimentary abilities until depth 16, at which point they run out completely and you just see how far you can get with what you’ve built.

As the difficulty ramps up from there, the way your chosen abilities play off each other to let you overcome the endlessly increasing challenge becomes elegant, then balletic, then sublime. These calculated chains of sweeps, leaps and thrusts let you dance through a minefield with precision and grace, felling everything around you. It’s hard to fully explain how neat, clever and satisfying it feels – so I made a GIF. Continued

The Prop Cigarettes You Smoke, They Show Who You Are

Eldridge Rodriguez is a bit of a discovery for me. I half-listen to a lot of net radio when I’ve forgotten to bring my MP3 player cable to work, and every now and then something catches my ear enough for me to extract my absent mind from what I’m writing and e-mail myself the track name. This saves me looking them up, buying anything of theirs or ever thinking about them again: I’ve got them on file now, no further action is required. But during this song:

I found myself performing the whole charade three times in a row.

“Ooh, I like this. Who is it? Eldridge Rodriguez, Get What You Want. Got it.”

“Man, I like this song too, who’s this? Still Eldridge Rodriguez, Get What You Want. Okay, I’ll write it down this time.”

“Oh wow, what’s this one? Still Eldridge Rodriguez, still Get What You Want. Okay, okay, I’m buying it.”

He was apparently in a band some people have heard of, called The Beatings, but what I’ve heard of theirs doesn’t grab me the same way. To me, his value is in answering the burning question: What would it sound like if Jarvis Cocker joined A Silver Mt Zion?”

The Prime Minister Of Sinister

The new unlock system -whereby players are awarded a random weapon they may or may not already have every few hours – is terrible. I love it. Because very suddenly, it awarded me the Huntsman. I certainly lust more fiercely after some of the Spy unlocks, but the bow and arrow is probably the newest thing in this update. I punctured a few Scouts on Arena: Sawmill before a friendly Pyro happened to run past flaming wildly, and caught my arrow on fire. Ace! I shot a Scout with it. Ace! He caught light. Ace! He burned to death. Ace!

The Huntsman taunt involves thrusting an arrow rather nastily upside an imaginary victim’s guts. I plan to engineer a situation in which this victim is not imaginary.

It really grates not being able to work my way towards the unlocks I want, though. It undermines the main driving force unlocks bring to the game: progression. Since it came up in the comments to the last post, my ideal system would let players pick an unlock to work towards, and tell them how many points they have to score to earn it – 500 for the Huntsman, say. Then there’d be a little toggleable bar on the HUD showing their cumulative progress towards achieving it.

The sneaky Spy buffs in this update make him worth spamming even without the new unlocks: dressing as an enemy Spy, now that you appear to be wearing a mask, genuinely fools most players right now. It won’t last to that extent, but it’s nice that only one of his disguises is truly fallible now. Even their health is beyond suspicion, now: he appears as injured as the person he’s pretending to be, so no more blasting team-mates for being conspicuously half-dead.

I’m looking forward to using enemy teleporters, though I’d still love an unlock that let me use them in reverse: jaunt from the exit to the entrance. Speaking of which, Doctor Disaster’s Spurious Sentry Spraypaint is still better than anything Valve came up with for the Spy.

It is a source of sadness to me that the Spy’s killing joke – his fatal taunt animation – is the swishy knife fencing one. I’d suggested his flicked cigarette should permanently ignite anyone it hits, because it just seems classier. It is a source of some glee, though, that his murderous fencing can be performed invisibly: I taunt-stabbed a Sentry, then its Engineer, without being revealed.

This, too, makes me beam. Taunt a few times with your disguise kit out.

It’s early to judge, but I’ve taken a powerful enough dislike to Pipeline that I’m actively avoiding servers running it. It seems to have some uncircumnavigable chokepoints and the open areas don’t inspire me somehow.

Arena, on the other hand, is not as hateful as I remember. I can still never forgive a system that asks anyone, ever, to sit out a round. But it’s only happened once, and so far I’m really liking the two new maps: Sawmill and Nucleus. As I said before Arena first revealed itself to be terrible, the map format fundamentally appeals to me: last man standing deathmatch, with a single time-release capture point to bring things to a head if they drag on. The server we played on at lunch permitted teams of at least 11, so no whole team had to sit out, but individual players still did, and the next time that’s me, my renewed tolerance for this nonsense will end.

The Potato ‘Paradox’

I just learned about ‘The Potato Paradox‘, which refers to this surprising maths result:

Q: You have 100kg of potatoes, which are 99 percent water by weight. You let them dehydrate until they’re 98 percent water by weight. How much do they weigh now?
A: 50kg

It’s not a riddle or a trick, it’s literally true and the terms mean what they seem to mean. The Wikipedia page has some good explanations and diagrams of why the answer is right, which persuaded me that it was, but that didn’t solve the problem for me. To me the problem is: why am I so wrong about this? Continued