"So you're still carrying that army .45, Cole."

L.A. Noire is an Important Game. Not, I don't think, because it is itself a masterpiece (except in comparison to previous attempts to do the same thing), but because it points the way to masterpieces that may be made in the future. This is a game that succeeds through its writing, acting and (sometimes second-hand) plotting. The action sequences are often simply less fun than searching crime scenes and interviewing suspects - although I did find the foot chases uniformly thrilling.

It's telling, to me, that the game's biggest problems - a dearth of likeable characters, bystanders who repeat the same quips over and over, and a lack of actual noir-ish sensibility - are all issues with the execution of its story, rather than issues with the mechanics it uses to tell that story in interactive form in the first place. And I was surprised to discover that the last few cases actually fix those three flaws anyway, which makes their existence either more or less of a missed opportunity depending on how you look at it.

For his final assignment at the L.A.P.D., our anti-hero detective Cole Phelps is partnered with Herschel Biggs, nicely played Keith Szarabajka (previously best known for "assuming direct control" in Mass Effect 2). Biggs is the first person Phelps actually seems to almost warm to, even as our protagonist finally crosses the moral event horizon from rude to full fledged bastard - an event which unexpectedly introduces another likeable character and turns the game into a proper jeu noir.

I don't want to spoil anything, but after completing the last three cases I couldn't help but wonder why the game wasn't like that the whole way through. Which, perhaps, does do a disservice to how much I enjoyed the police procedural aspects that made up the meat of the game until that point, but should also speak of how it found something else to do that was arguably more organic and human.

L.A. Noire's other big problem is genre confusion. Not within the game, but within players' expectations. L.A. Noire is set in an impressively detailed recreation of a swathe of late 1940s Los Angeles. In the language of contemporary video games, this implies that it's an "open world game", where you can abandon your objectives and go find fun things to do elsewhere in the city. Which is unfortunate, because there is very little to do in L.A. Noire's city at all, outside of your current case.

It's difficult to judge whether this is a misstep, because the game benefits so much from having this fantastic setting, with huge scope for interesting places to investigate, and endless streets and alleyways through which to chase and tail suspects. If you can unlearn what you've learned about large areas modelled in recent video games (perhaps thinking back to the cities of Syndicate, probably the first game to do this), then the L.A. on show here will suck you in and dazzle you. On the other hand, if you can't help but think of this as an "open world", it will seem almost comically flat, empty and robotic.


Another thing that people might dislike about L.A. Noire but which I thought worked well, is the way you can bumble through cases without really trying. Even if you mess up, other opportunities present themselves, and someone will usually end up in the slammer, if not necessarily the right person. Those who need games to be challenges that must be surmounted through blood, sweat and tears will probably foam at the mouth over this, but I really like it, for two reasons.

Firstly, the most frustrating moment in an adventure game (of which, yes, this is one) is when the whole thing grinds to a halt because you can't solve this one puzzle. It's especially frustrating in a genre historically known for its stories and characters because life doesn't work that way. If you can't find a way to do this one little thing, you're not stuck trying to do it for the rest of your life. You find an alternative way to achieve your goal, or find another goal altogether. L.A. Noire tries to model this, with the proviso that if you can't do things the best way, you'll lose out on a full understanding of the case, and may not even get a conviction out of your arrest.

The second reason I'm fine with L.A. Noire doing this is because it has a little trick up its sleeve called the star rating. At the end of each case you get a stamp with stars on it numbering between one and five. The number of stars you are awarded is basically dependent on how good a detective you are: how many clues you find, how many lies you disprove, how much you don't drive like someone playing a video game (I have problems with that last metric). If you are the right kind of person, the satisfaction of getting five stars is beyond words - as is the shame of getting just one. Of the three cases where I got a one star rating, I replayed two of them immediately - and I'm really looking forward to replaying the remaining one after I've had a little break from 1940s detecting.

Perhaps, finally, L.A. Noire's problem is that it really is that important milestone game, trying to do things that haven't really been done this way before. Because of that, it doesn't know how best to signal its intentions, sowing seeds of confusion among players looking for familiar landmarks. It looks like an open world game, but it's not. It looks like a game about the One Good Cop defeating the bad guys, but it's not.

This is the surprisingly small and personal story of a self-righteous man trying to readjust to civilian life after experiencing traumatic events at war, and the surprisingly small and personal stories of the crimes he investigates as a police officer. In today's market of big budget games, this is unexpected and weird and inevitably not done as well as it could have been. But its success in the video game charts is hopefully a sign to publishers and developers that in this direction lies fertile ground.

"The other therapist didn't work out for you."

Konami's Silent Hill series is essentially the classier, spookier cousin to Capcom's Resident Evil franchise, but although you may have noticed I'm a big Resi fanboy, I've never really had a chance to play a Silent Hill game until now. And I have to say that the series has never seemed more tempting. As Resident Evil devolves into standard shoot-em-up territory, Konami, having attempted to do something similar with Silent Hill, then decided to pull an about-face, getting British independent games studio Climax to make a Silent Hill game in which the protagonist can barely fight back at all.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories begins with Harry Mason driving through the snowbound and deserted summer holiday resort of Silent Hill, with his daughter Cheryl. When he skids off the road and crashes the car, he comes round to find that Cheryl is nowhere to be seen. Harry wanders off into the town in search of her, but as he explores and meets the few people around, he's confronted by facts that seem at odds with his own memories, and even his current experiences are frequently contradicted at a later point by other characters. And then there's the little matter of how, every time he seems to be getting close to the truth, the world twists and freezes over - strange, skinless beings appearing to pursue Harry relentlessly.

These latter sequences are the game's weakest point. I certainly found them unnerving, but this very fact, combined with their frantic nature, simply made me solve them by running around in a blind panic. Initially I found these sequences extremely incongruous as well, but actually, as the game progressed I thought they acquired a better sense of purpose while becoming much better married to the other parts of the game - which in itself is a part of the wider progression of the story towards conveying exactly what is going on.

Still, the game's non-chase segments are more my preference, involving simply exploring the town of Silent Hill, interacting with characters and solving puzzles by manipulating objects semi-intuitively with the Wii remote. As much as the chase sequences gave me the heebie-jeebies, it was these more sedate and grounded scenes that I found by far more scary - from supernatural chills such as chasing a shadow Cheryl with your flashlight, to more mundane scares such as internal bleeding following a blow to the head (the latter being a part of a sequence that I found genuinely very upsetting).

The third set of scenes are where it gets really interesting: the game's framing narrative involves sitting on a psychiatrist's couch and answering his questions and tests. The rest of the game comprises the story that you are telling him. As the very first loading screen makes clear, these questions and tests are used to shape your experiences in the rest of the game (although your behaviour is also analysed elsewhere). For example, my Cybil was a homely police woman wearing a realistic cold-climate uniform. A player who showed more interest in getting sexual images out of the game would instead have found Cybil to be a blonde bombshell whose stripper-esque outfit can barely contain her cleavage.

This is really interesting to me as a development in interactive narrative. Although the events you experience can change, the story is generally linear. The interactive part of this story is rather in that it shapes itself to be the story that it thinks you should experience. Looking through the Silent Hill wiki, I'm surprised just how much the game got right for me - I definitely think I was much happier getting the events and characters that I got from the game compared to some of the others that it might have given me. Of the three different Dahlias, for example, I found the “punk” version I got to be much more my kind of gal than the “seductive” or “tomboy” versions.

And then there's the ending. Holy fucking shit. I don't know if any others saw this coming, but I found it to be the perfect culmination of misdirection and foreshadowing. It was so surprising and tragic, but hopeful (again, something that the game selected based on its psychological profiling of me), such a beautiful shock, that I actually started properly crying. Which is a first for me and a video game.

As someone with a penchant for interactive storytelling, I think Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is one of the most powerful and well devised examples of how to shape a story in tandem with your audience that I've yet encountered. Its chief flaw is that it perhaps tries a little too hard to be a video game. Although I enjoyed the puzzles, and the chase sequences did grow on me, ultimately they were never as powerful as the experience of exploring a convoluted and deeply psychological narrative. If you're interested in survival horror games, this may or may not be for you. But if you're interested in storytelling, then you owe it to yourself to check this out. You may not find the story as deeply moving as I did, but it will definitely teach you something about how it can be done.

DVD Review: Ergo Proxy (The Complete Series)

In the domed city of Romdo, strong emotions are frowned upon, waste is encouraged and everyone is accompanied - and monitored - by android 'autoreivs'. Simmering beneath the surface are countless threats to the pervading peace - the Cogito virus is spreading free will among the autoreivs, and the powers that be are keen to blame these rogues for a spate of mysterious killings.  

Re-L, an inspector in the Intelligence bureau and granddaughter of the city's regent, is not so sure that Cogito is responsible. Neither is Vincent, an immigrant hoping to become a Model Citizen as he works to hunt down infected autoreivs. Their attempts to investigate see them thrown together - much to Re-L's displeasure - eventually pushing them beyond the city and outside its dome.


On the way, they encounter Pino, a childlike autoreiv designed for those citizens who can't get a permit for a human child - now orphaned, infected with Cogito and following Vincent like a lost lamb. Pino's so impossibly cute that she should be annoying, but there's also a creepy edge to her character - in part actually due to her irrepressible good nature in the face of any event, however terrible.

And while these three journey through the ruins and failed societies of an eerie wasteland - a deserted dome where robots keep everything meticulously clean for their absent masters, a city where generations of cloned soldiers fight endlessly against an implacable enemy - intrigue continues in their wake back at Romdo. Daedalus - a perpetually pre-pubescent scientist with an unhealthy crush on Re-L - and Raul Creed - the increasingly unbalanced director of the Security Bureau - vie with and against one another to advance their aims, trying to subvert and further the society of Romdo while always under the watchful eye of the autoreivs created to maintain it.


Two words that I think perfectly describe Ergo Proxy are 'atmospheric' and 'thoughtful'. The unique art design, gentle pace and ambient music drew me into a world inhabited by ambiguous and compelling characters, and stalked by haunting, post-apocalyptic mysteries. The plotting is perhaps rather weak, but I think the best thing about Ergo Proxy is that it isn't really trying to be too weighty and meaningful. Certainly there are big themes and references to philosophy, but these are an embellishment to - rather than a distraction from or perversion of - the depiction of these characters in their carefully realised world.

In that sense I suppose the show is arguably admirably restrained, but it's also prepared to be quite bold in terms of where it takes the story. This extends as far as changing the entire format of the show - one episode begins as a Who Wants to be a Millionaire style game show where Vincent is bombarded with questions and answers whose relevance he doesn't yet understand. Another episode even mixes in a separate style of animation, when Pino finds herself lost in a bizarre amusement park where the staff look and behave exactly like characters from an old Disney cartoon.


The show has a nice knack for sketching out its minor characters, and pretty much everyone manages to seem likeable, flawed, admirable or sinister at some point in the series. One of my favourite characters was Raul's entourage autoreiv, Kristeva. At first she's little more than an elegant sounding-board for her master, but she goes on to show a noble investment in maintaining the society of Romdo, while always threatening to lean towards either malevolent loyalty to Raul or disobedient compassion.

The characters in Ergo Proxy definitely change and grow as events progress - and not always in a positive direction. By the end I definitely felt as though, even if the story could have been tied together and parcelled out better, I had been on a journey with characters I cared about, through a world that felt both very real and very strange.

DVD Review: The Good The Bad The Weird

At the start of Kim Ji-woon's The Good The Bad The Weird, three Korean misfits, their homeland occupied by the Japanese, converge on the same train in 1930s Manchuria. Following close in their wake are trouble and a whole hail of bullets. And that also happens to be what they're walking into as well.

First up, there's Yoon Tae-goo (played by Song Kang-ho, previously a bleach-haired and irresponsible father in The Host), a wreckless thief who just hopes to rob the train of its valuables. Next comes Park Chang-yi (played by Lee Byung-hun, the lead in Kim's earlier A Bittersweet Life) a vicious bandit on a mission to steal a mysterious map from the train. And pursuing Chang-yi is the bounty hunter Park Do-won - played by Jung Woo-sung, who I've never actually seen in anything before, but whose purpose here seems to be to look as non-threatening as possible while racking up the highest body count of any of these three anti-heroes.


Naturally Tae-goo, the Weird, winds up finding the map, forming a distrustful alliance with Do-won, the (relatively) Good, and then gallivanting across the Manchurian desert towards the map's destination with Chang-yi, the Bad, in hot pursuit. All three lead actors acquit themselves brilliantly. Song's comedic performance as the Weird could quite easily have stolen the whole film, but Lee's bandit exudes perfect, graceful menace, and Jung, while he may seem to get much less screen time than the other two, also gets to command the action scenes, cutting a swathe through Manchuria without batting an eyelid.

This film is an action-adventure, through-and-through. Every time you think that Kim must have surely reached a plateau and run out of ways to escalate the action, he pulls out the kitchen sink and throws it into the mix. By the final act, Tae-goo's motorcycle is being pursued by Chang-yi, Do-won and two rival gangs on horseback, while the whole lot of them are shelled and machine-gunned by the Japanese army. And while the eventual three-way showdown is far from unexpected, it still manages to feel fresh and bring a few interesting things to the table.


I've mentioned before that Kim has clearly taken inspiration from Leone in the past, but although this film does borrow a lot of the language of the western - amoral vagabonds embarking on violent misadventures in pursuit of riches - the biggest inspiration here seems to be classic Spielberg adventures like Indiana Jones. There's the treasure map, the huge real world sets that are inevitably blown to bits, the stunt-intensive chase with people leaping between vehicles and being dragged along the ground, and the general feeling that the film is doing everything it can to present you with adventure and spectacle at every turn.

Of those Korean films that are released in the west, it's almost routine to expect visual perfection, and Kim certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard here. The action direction's not quite as tight as in A Bittersweet Life, but events are always presented in a way that maximises their impact, be they moments of action or atmosphere. The sound design is excellent as well - not just because of the bombastic, multicultural, frequently anachronistic soundtrack, but because Kim knows when to let the action speak for itself, and also because he clearly understands that gunshots (of which there are plenty) should be loud and emphasised, rather than muffled or over-stylised as they often are in action films.


The Good The Bad The Weird is a rip-roaring, violent, characterful, colourful and sometimes hilarious action-adventure. It's a new entry in a genre that has been pretty poorly served so far this century, and watching it, it's strange to realise that. This is flat-out entertainment of the highest calibre, and anyone with an interest in chases, explosions, gunfights and gags should run out and find this film immediately.

DVD Review: Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir has one of cinema's more memorable openings, as we follow a ferocious pack of dogs tearing through a city at night-time. Although they terrify everyone they pass, they're single-minded in their objective: seeking out one window to gather beneath and bark.

This is Boaz's dream: that the twenty-six dogs he killed in the 1982 Lebanon war seek him out for revenge. He's relating it to Ari Folman, the director and main 'character' of this animated documentary, a film that perhaps takes a leaf from Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Folman, it transpires, twenty years after serving in the war, had difficulty remembering any of his experiences from that time, and Waltz with Bashir depicts his attempts to discern why.


I generally have a real issue with dramatised documentaries. The drama all too often results in the sacrifice of factual content by depicting events inaccurately and taking up too much time. But in animating Waltz with Bashir, Folman has made a bold statement: both an acknowledgement that, as we're told early on in the film, memories are highly interpretative, and a way of depicting the physical and emotional experiences of the people he interviews with equal weighting.

The style of animation - though gorgeous and very much inspired by modern graphic novels - can be quite stilted in places, with something of the appearance of shadow puppets. And yet, this strangely dream-like motion is entirely appropriate. Coupled with an intense musical score, the strong images, while as inaccurate as any live-action re-enactment, manage to inspire perhaps the shadowed, empathic equivalents of the life-changing emotions that Folman and these other soldiers experienced at the time.


The one part of the war that Folman experienced but is ultimately unable to recollect is the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Christian Philangists, an event that seems to be deeply tied to why Folman experienced amnesia in the first place. This necessarily becomes the focus of the film's last act, as Folman shows us the experiences of an Israeli soldier on the periphery of the camps, and a reporter who ventured within to see the aftermath. Considering the film as a whole, I found this to be the tiniest of missteps.

The strength of the earlier parts of the film lies in their personal and emotional nature. At this point, however, things become broader and more factual. But it is largely unavoidable, I think, and the main body of the movie could be seen as fostering the necessary engagement to make us really care about an atrocity that will typically be depicted as dry numbers and impersonal facts.


Waltz with Bashir is quite simply a striking film, documenting a more personal side of history - often ignored or sensationalised - with bold, affecting artistry. Seek it out at your first opportunity.

Lesser-Known Curio

I recently found myself compelled to try installing the PC version of Dino Crisis 2 on my Vista PC, and was pleasantly surprised to find it working nicely (I had less luck with Crimson Skies). It feels strange to admit it, but I've realised that I have a real soft spot for this game.


Dino Crisis 2 is perhaps best remembered as an evolutionary link in Capcom's survival horror games. The first Dino Crisis was notoriously just Resident Evil with velociraptors instead of zombies, and sparsely detailed three-dimensional backdrops instead of rich two-dimensional ones.

With the second game, however, things changed substantially – with a much stronger emphasis on arcade-style action. Suddenly series heroine Regina is running around with a machine pistol in each hand, slaughtering dinosaurs by the dozen and racking up combo multipliers for points that can be spent on weapons, ammo and upgrades. It's clearly a step beyond the later Resident Evil 4, and a step beyond anything that could be considered true horror. A step, in fact, into the realms of unrestrained action and (dare I say it) fun.

And that's part of the reason I like it.


One of the things that quickly becomes apparent about Dino Crisis 2 is that a fair bit of it has been lost in translation. The scrap of information above is a perfect example. It's supposed to convey the simple fact that our heroes and their ill-fated rescue party have arrived much too late. They're hoping to save survivors from a city that was accidentally catapulted through time into a jungle full of dinosaurs, but when time-travelling millions of years, a little inaccuracy can amount to a long period in human terms. This long-dead doctor was living alongside dinosaurs for at least ten years before they finally ate him.

Even given a proper translation, though, I think the story here would probably still be confused. I can believe that there was some coherent thinking behind the final plot-twist and reveal, but the basic narrative that you follow is illogical, coincidental and confusing. And bear with me, but we're starting to get at what I like about this game so much.


The setting of Dino Crisis 2 is desolate in a really singular way. In some respects, it's actually full of life: nimble dinosaurs attack you constantly from every direction, giant insects glide overhead, triceratops lumber in the background, and you're relentlessly stalked by a one-eyed Tyrannosaurus Rex. And yet the humans are all long dead, their buildings are overgrown and decayed, the thin threads of hope that they cling to in their diaries and notes are now all broken. And on top of that, they're writing in the unintentionally poetic fashion of someone who can neither translate from Japanese nor write in English with any great skill.

I've always thought that Dino Crisis 2 ends up conjuring a fantastically dream-like atmosphere (nightmarish, in some respects). The ordinary events might not make logical sense, but they feel right given the tone of the game - and the extraordinary events tie incoherently into our own oft-ignored fears about immense stretches of time and the fragility of all human existence.


Dino Crisis 2 made a really strong impressions on me with its surreal, bitter-sweet tone and bold, colourful backdrops. And it even manages to be great fun to play as well.

There's often a depressing unanimity of opinion and shortness of memory when it comes to video games. People's opinions tend towards the more recent and better known. So maybe I should start thinking of this game in the same terms as a lot of films I like. It may be a lesser-known curio, and it's probably not to everyone's taste, but it happens to be a personal favourite.

DVD Review: JCVD

Meet Jean-Claude Van Varenberg - better known as Jean-Claude Van Damme: martial artist and estranged father, an action man doomed to star in second-rate Hollywood action flicks for the rest of his dwindling career. On a sojourn to his native Belgium, Van Damme stops to pose for some photographs with the clerks of a small video store, and then goes into the local post office - desperate to transfer funds to the American lawyers fighting his custody battle. And then, out of nowhere, the post office erupts in gunfire. Is Jean-Claude Van Damme, as a shocked police officer reports, trying to rob a bank?


When actors play themselves in films, there are two obvious routes to go. The first, and least common route, is that of vanity. No actor wants to play themselves as a good guy, because that actually makes them look like, well, a bad guy. And so the more common route is vanity wrapped up in self-deprecation. Look at me, they cry, I know that I'm rubbish! Doesn't that make me great! JCVD, thankfully, avoids either obvious pole. Instead, it just tries to depict its lead in a neutral and natural way: no ridicule, no heroics, no apologies. This is, quite simply, a movie about Jean-Claude Van Damme. It might as well be a documentary. But it's all the better as a strange hybrid of fact and fiction.


It's difficult for me to write about this film, because there are so many great little scenes and deft touches that I want to share with you, and yet actually discussing them before you've seen the film would, I really feel, diminish what's so great about them. Even discussing the film's premise (which is described in more length in most reviews than I've done here) seems like a terrible spoiler.

JCVD is part hostage drama, part art house movie - both halves working on their own and also gelling well together. As events snowballed, I found that the tense storyline really had me on the edge of my seat, while I found the more biographical portions to be evocative, witty and touching - even, in one unexpected sequence, bringing me almost to tears.


That sequence, in fact, had me thinking at first, “Holy crap, he can really act!” And then it struck me: “Wait. Maybe he's not acting.” Or maybe he's telling the truth and acting at the same time. Maybe, as in the rest of the movie, the boundaries between fiction and reality are hopelessly blurred. There's no way for the audience to know for sure, and that's an idea that JCVD quite happily embraces - plays with, even.

There are any number of reasons that you should pick up this movie. Whether it's the sheer novelty value of Jean-Claude Van Damme starring in a low-key drama made in his native country, the profound cinematography, the insightful take on being a star and a jobbing actor - or just because you want to see an interesting film that never strays too far from being about a gripping hostage situation... Well, it gets my seal of approval.

Surprising. Understated. And above all: memorable.

*One little footnote about this particular release: I'd say that 95% of this movie is in French with English subtitles, but there are no subtitles for the hearing impaired - meaning no captions for sound effects or English dialogue. And then there's the stereotypically 'Van Damme action movie' cover of the DVD, with explosions and roundhouse kicks. I can't work out if that's hopelessly cynical marketing or a very clever piece of intentional irony.

DVD Review: Resident Evil Degeneration

Well, this turned out pretty much as I expected it to. Resident Evil Degeneration is the canonical animated feature by Capcom, the makers of the Resident Evil video games themselves - an Advent Children style attempt to expand on the directorial skills that they've acquired while crafting cinematics for their games. Yep, Degeneration is basically a ninety minute Resident Evil cut-scene. I'm sure some of you have left the building already.

Rather bravely, Degeneration makes no bones about being completely for the fans. Those of us familiar with the series don't need to hear any exposition about the nature of the G and T viruses, and those unfamiliar are unlikely to particularly enjoy being subjected to it. Similarly, there's no attempt to rehash the background behind Leon and Claire's friendship, their experiences in Raccoon City during Resident Evil 2 (though there's a nice little flashback), or their adventures since. It's difficult to tell just how obscure this makes things for the uninitiated, but you can't fault the decision. The decision to still throw in a few cringe-worthy bits of emotional exposition from two new characters: tough girl Angela and Sherry Birkin substitute Rani, is a little more difficult to sympathise with.


If I ask myself what I like most about the Resident Evil games, it's their atmosphere: tense, desolate, eerie. But this atmosphere is cultivated primarily through participation - ruined environments that you explore yourself, spine-tingling vistas that you take in at your own pace, dark doorways that you enter only when you've plucked up enough courage. Necessarily, this aspect is drastically reduced in Degeneration, and instead we're left with all the other aspects of Resident Evil: the haphazard plotting, the impressive but slightly imperfect action sequences, the melodramatic moments of character.

Not that any of that is too disagreeable, or at all unexpected. If you're already engaged with this world, you'll be used to it, and consider it more than outweighed by the chance to see these strong yet paper-thin characters (who we've struggled alongside through such ordeals) battling against weird, inconsistent conspiracies once again. It's also nice that there's some attempt at creating stylish character designs beyond just making them look 'realistic' - in particular I liked the fat, rubbery senator and the nicely elfin depiction of Claire. The strangely flat-faced Leon and strong-jawed Angela, though, might be said to dip a toe or two into the uncanny valley.


Naturally, this release is tied into the upcoming arrival of Resident Evil 5. On the one hand, I think this works quite well. At first glance you might think that the idea of Leon and Claire stumbling into yet another zombie outbreak seems a bit much, but this is our introduction to a world where the collapse of Umbrella has made monster-making viruses the weapon du jour for terrorists around the world. Having two of the franchise's most popular characters experience such an incident first hand provides a nice window into this alternate history.

But on the other hand, the film inevitably leads up to an 'it's not all over yet, folks!' ending that falls rather flat. Merely referencing something not obviously sinister that will appear in RE5 is no kind of teaser or cliffhanger, and anyone who's not yet seen the trailers for the new game will probably be completely baffled.


As a fan of the Resident Evil series of games, I'm glad to own this movie, and I'll probably wind up watching it more times than are healthy. But if I ask myself honestly why any non-fan would be interested in this, I can't come up with anything. While a new game has the space to flesh out backstory and character history at a leisurely pace, a ninety minute film can only avoid it altogether or try and cram it down your throat by the fistful. Degeneration makes the right choice in that regard, but it means that if you're not sure if this movie is for you, it probably isn't.

DVD Review: La Antena

As you can probably gather from my interest in video games of all eras, I've never quite understood why, in those art forms more reliant on technology, the effective storytelling techniques of one generation are all too often abandoned completely once more advanced technology becomes available.

This is apparently something that Esteban Sapir has been thinking about. As far as he's concerned, a silent movie is a 'pure' movie - one where the moving pictures themselves must provide the emotional power and character, where every frame must be well composed and relevant. To that end, he wrote and directed La Antena ('The Aerial'), where all the computer-aided wizardry of the 21st Century is used to recreate (with a little embellishment) a silent movie in proper 1920s style.


La Antena tells us the story of a surreal city, where every citizen has lost their voice. Their words appear as comic-book captions that are mostly supposed to represent their lip-reading one another, but which at times also take a more solid presence, with characters moving their subtitles around, covering them up and crushing them in anger.* Following on from the likes of Fritz Lang (“the head and the hand” and so on), Sapir fills La Antena with strong, simplistic symbolism - creating a film where the story not only directly revolves around symbols, but where those symbols can be interacted with as physical objects.


Although the characters are mute, the film also creates a deaf audience. As in a silent film, there are no sound effects, and only the most obvious noises are enacted by the instruments that create the film's entertaining and engrossing musical score. The sole exception to this deafness is also perhaps the most memorable - and tragic - symbol in the film: La Voz, 'The Voice', the one woman in the city who retains the ability to speak. In order to furnish her sightless son with a pair of eyes, La Voz has entered into a shady deal with Mr TV, a man who, with his television transmissions and TV meals seems to have complete control over the city. Once Mr TV has the power of La Voz's voice, however, his evil schemes will be able to take a drastic leap forward - and the only people who stand in his way are a downtrodden family of TV technicians.


Through strong characters and surreal settings, Sapir succeeds in creating a constant stream of visual poetry and unbounded imagination - but best of all, he creates a tangible sense of tension between that imagination and the crushing, unsympathetic boot of totalitarianism. At times, the soaring imagery gave me a spine-tingling sense of the potential of human imagination, but this sensation was never present without the reminder of our capacity to oppress and destroy the wonders that we create.

Some might think it strange to suggest that one of the most striking and memorable movies of the beginning of the 21st Century should be one which takes great pains to emulate the movies from a century beforehand. But I, for one, think that La Antena is a sumptuous reminder of everything wondrous and forgotten about the era of silent film-making, as well as a beautiful film in its own right.

*(For those of us not fluent in Spanish, this does mean two sets of subtitles to pay attention to, but the dialogue is always concise.)

DVD Review: [Rec]

Late at night, a reality TV crew traipse through a fire station, bored out of their minds and hoping for action. They get it - at least, on a small scale. Neighbours have reported an elderly woman screaming in her apartment, presumed trapped. Nothing too difficult to deal with. Accompanied by the TV crew and two surly police officers, the firemen bust down the door and find the woman inside to be both disturbed and dangerous. After she bites one of the cops, everyone beats a hasty retreat - only to find that the authorities have sealed off the whole apartment building. What is this, some kind of horror film?


As with The Host (which I reviewed here), Spanish POV horror film [Rec] is another movie that has significant hype surrounding it, hype that is largely justified.  It's not, as one review blurb on the cover overstates, the best film of the year, nor is it in any way ground-breaking.  Everything in [Rec] has been done before.  But I think that if you distil each of those elements down and look at its heritage, you'll see that [Rec] actually does these things better than previous horror movies, and incorporates them nicely into a coherent and straightforward whole.


Straightforward is a pretty good term to use to describe [Rec]. At an hour and a quarter in length, there's little beating about the bush, which leaves the characterisation broad and occasionally stereotypical, but allows you no respite from the fast pace. That's not to say that the film doesn't take every opportunity to cram in tense atmosphere and sinister foreshadowing. Much of the middle portion of the film is spent fostering a sense that the characters are just about staying on top of things - before, naturally, this façade dissolves into frantic and bloody chaos.


I mentioned The Host earlier. While that film has gone on to become one of my all time favourites, I'm not sure I'll be saying the same thing about [Rec] in a year's time, for the simple reason that I don't actually like being scared all that much. The Host wraps up a lot of different things into one big monster movie bundle, but [Rec] is quite simply an out-and-out horror film. Every second of its tightly-packed running time is used to suck you in, fill you full of foreboding and then shock you. If you're anything like me, your heart will be pounding even in the apparently safer scenes. If you have a stronger constitution you should absolutely run out right now and buy this film. If you don't, well... maybe you should anyway.

*Helpful hint: if you're in the US, the distributors won't let you see this until after the American remake has been shown in cinemas.

DVD Review: The Science of Sleep

Michel Gondry, who mastered surreal psychology in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind returns with this tenderly constructed portrait of an over-sensitive dreamer. Mexican Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) has moved to France, tempted by his Gallic mother's offer of a supposedly creative job at a calendar company. Staying in his childhood bedroom, he falls in love with his adorable neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsborough) – but not before casting a pall over their relationship with a mistake he makes due to his tendency to confuse imagination and reality.


The first thing that struck me about The Science of Sleep was its immediacy. Hand-held cameras and natural sound make reality seem just like reality – while steadicams, cardboard buildings and stop-motion animation denote the world of Stéphane's dreams. There's a glorious hand-made feel to these latter sequences, as if each car, cloud and building was created by Stéphane himself from loo rolls, cellophane and glue. If nothing else, it's nice to see some real craftsmanship in a contemporary movie, in the place of the often soulless barage of CGI.

As in Eternal Sunshine, Gondry shows a keen, almost painful ability to convey the ups and downs of love, from moments of energetic creative connection, to depressive, drunken jealousy. As an added dimension, flowing from that comes a perfect depiction of dream logic – barely coherent declarations of love, peculiar causes and effects, arguments based on semantics rather than actualities. At the collision of these two planes is Stéphane, able to imagine his hopes and fears with equal vividness, self-centred, self-defeating and moody – a lot like a certain blogging space cat you may know.


The Science of Sleep had me alternating between being on the verge of tears during Stéphane's painful waking moments of heartbreak, and laughing at the sheer brilliance of his imagination. In places these dream sequences betray Gondry's background as a music video director – but so what? If destroying the world with an enormous plasticine volcano isn't sufficient cause for a rock anthem, I don't think anything is.

Given that the back of the DVD case promises a film about 'imagination vs logic' it's refreshing to see the film take an entirely positive approach to science – musing pseudo-scientifically on black holes and brain chemistry. You have to understand how things work, be able to appreciate the peculiar and surprising before you can create; have to understand a little chaos theory and electronics to make a tiny robot horse – though whether Stéphane actually does make a tiny robot horse is debatable. Stéphane's inability to distinguish reality from dreams overflows into the film itself, especially where he sucks Stéphanie into his flights of fancy – making cotton wool clouds float in the air with a resonant note played on the piano.


With its combination of everyday ambience and out-of-this-world imagination, The Science of Sleep is perhaps the film for the hopeless dreamers among us. While it may not efface Eternal Sunshine in the eyes of many, I found it to be one of the most touching films I can name.

DVD Review: The Man with the Screaming Brain

Bruce Campbell is America's most famous jobbing actor. George Clooney regularly spends his millions on developing worthy but unprofitable films. Brad Pitt sunk the relatively low-budget Fight Club by demanding a huge pay cheque. But most actors can't choose projects they like, or make demands. They take small roles in shit films, because they need to put food on the table. Although he may be something of a household name, Campbell identifies strongly with these actors, still belongs among them in many ways. He's also written, in his autobiography If Chins Could Kill, about the importance of actors understanding what happens behind the camera as well. It's no good giving the performance of your life, he argues, if you're not even in the frame.

Reflecting on this, it's hard not to have relatively high hopes for The Man with the Screaming Brain, Campbell's directorial début. The results, however, while they hint at better things to come, are not so great that I could happily recommend this film to anyone but ardent Campbellites.


In interviews, Campbell has shown a far better grasp of plot and character than your typical A-list Hollywood screenwriter, so it comes as a surprise to be faced with the peculiar lack of tension and motivation to Screaming Brain. I think figuring out why might be clearer when you consider that after years of trying to crack the mainstream, Campbell only seems to have recently noticed that he's an icon among alternative and indie film fans. Screaming Brain seems like an attempt to emulate indie films that focus on character and ambience more than plot and special effects, but by someone not all that familiar with how such movies actually work. The situations depicted may be well devised, but all too often the result is more made-for-TV than made-for-Sundance.

The film certainly doesn't work as a whole, nor in most scenes, but it still has moments – often moments that rely either on Campbell's skills as an actor or as a physical comedian. A scene in which his character – a ruthless industrialist who has the brain of a former KGB agent grafted onto his – orders at a restaurant while arguing with the voice in his head and confusing the waitress is particularly well done. Another sequence, which simply involves Campbell staggering through Bulgarian landmarks like a possessed maniac, also displays some rather striking cinematography. Other than that, things hang together pretty poorly, with no real flow to proceedings, either in plot or in tone – a problem exacerbated by the odd bit of sloppy editing.


I like the idea of The Man with the Screaming Brain, and it certainly gets an A+ for effort. I'll be back for Campbell's next effort as actor-director, but I don't expect to pass many people back-tracking to his début while on my way there.

And finally, for once I will actually review the DVD disc in question. Importantly for me, there were no subtitles, whether for the hard of hearing or otherwise. Meanwhile, lurking in the extras is a nice little feature about how Campbell and his co-writer raised the money for the film – a straightforward short that I found more entertaining than the feature itself.

DVD Review: Russian Ark

In the 18th century, Catherine the Great purchased a considerable collection of Western European artwork, the act that would lead to the creation of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersberg. One of the largest museums in the world, it centres on the Winter Palace, the historical home of the Russian tsars.

What am I going on about? Well, imagine someone said, “Hey, let's make the State Hermitage Museum into a movie!” Huh? Make a museum into a movie? Books, yes, plays, TV series, comics, radio shows, poems, historical events, even (no, please don't) computer games – but a museum? And yet, that is perhaps the best way to explain Russian Ark: that it is the cinematic adaptation of a museum: its history, its exhibits, its atmosphere, its purpose. Hollywood did something like that, and it was a trite kids' film starring Adam Sandler and Robin Williams. Russians did it, and it was visual poetry.


Following an accident, a contemporary Russian finds himself adrift in time and space. Outside the Hermitage in the 18th century, he wanders inside, finding each part of the museum at a different period of history. A ghostlike presence in these events, his only constant companion is a cynical marquis from Western Europe (Sergei Dontsov). Refined and reserved, the marquis is quick to put down Russian culture and its unrequited obsession with Europe, but he is also a deeply sensual man, unable to resist the delights of high culture.


Russian Ark takes the form of a continuous point-of-view shot from the, well, point-of-view of this drifting Russian, as he follows the marquis through three-hundred years of history, moving from the private moments of royals, to the silence of a communist museum, to opulent balls, to the Siege of Stalingrad. On the way, we pause to look at the paintings and sculptures, suffer the marquis' frequent distraction by 'unescorted' women, and get thrown out of a historical ceremony. I say 'we' because, although this lost (probably either dreaming or dead) Russian often shares his thoughts with us and the marquis, the style of the film unequivocally puts the audience into his shoes. I said this was a continuous POV, and boy did I mean it. Russian Ark was filmed in a single unedited take on a digital Steadicam. At no point do we cut away, spoiling the illusion of our guided tour through the history of the Hermitage Museum. As a result, a cast of two-thousand costumed actors and three live orchestras must perform perfectly, and an unfortunate German Steadicam operator (Tilman Büttner, responsible for the iconic shots of Lola running in Run, Lola, Run) is half-killed by having to lug his equipment on a journey of almost one and a half kilometres.


Russian Ark has no real story, plot or drama. It really is as if someone decided to make a film adaptation of a historical museum. The pleasure in watching, assuming you can do without the aforementioned story, plot or drama, comes from experiencing the history of the Hermitage: discussing paintings with the marquis, chasing Catherine the Great through the snow, watching an officer try to steal a dancing partner at a Winter Palace ball. Russian Ark feels as real as any dream - compelling, surreal and evocative.

DVD Review: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig: Volume 7: Colon Explosion

So I've finally seen all of the second series (or 2nd Gig, as it's known) of Stand Alone Complex, the episodic spin-off from the cyberpunk Ghost in the Shell franchise. Given that the concluding TV movie Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society has been released in the UK just this week (to the sound of ':' keys breaking across the nation), I thought it would be an apt time to review the final volume of 2nd Gig, and try to express my conflicting opinions on Stand Alone Complex as a whole.


Looking back on the first series (1st Gig, I guess you could call it, although no-one really does), the recurring 'Laughing Man' storyline was several orders of magnitude better than the episodes which tried to shoehorn a single story into their twenty-five minute running time (often resorting to exposition and coincidence to do so). As a huge fan of Mamoru Oshii's 1995 Ghost in the Shell feature film, I would even say that the Laughing Man episodes can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his work, even if they aren't quite up to the same standard. For this reason, 2nd Gig understandably focuses most of its episodes on a central mystery, and, less understandably, does pretty badly at it.

Writer-director Kenji Kamiyama apparently took this over-arching storyline as an excuse to ignore the individual worth of any single episode. Many episodes, rather than possessing any kind of climax or cliffhanger, instead finish with us being parcelled out some small nugget of information about the central mystery, or some mechanically plotted piece of foreshadowing. Some of the episodes consist almost entirely of exposition that could have easily been more interestingly or more succinctly presented. And, apparently unable to work the main characters of Security Section 9 into all the important events, Kamiyama instead has our heroes watch many of the most dramatic parts of the story on TV (I can, at least, identify with them quite well in this respect). Whenever Section 9 actually do seem to do something of worth, we're then treated to shadowy villain Gohda smiling evilly and remarking that they reacted exactly as he had planned them to. Rather than protagonists struggling against adversity, 2nd Gig all too often seems to be merely presenting us with a bunch of stuff that happens.


It's not all bad, of course. Thanks to the success of the first series, 2nd Gig has seriously ramped up the production values, constantly providing luscious, atmospheric visuals and smooth, dynamic movement. If I tend to be a little harsh on action films that fail to measure up, it's only because Stand Alone Complex has absolutely spoiled me rotten with its fluid, perfectly choreographed, perfectly framed, perfectly paced action scenes.

As with the first season, there are also those episodes that avoid the recurring storyline. And, in a complete reversal, these are the ones that stand out as particularly excellent. The problem of fitting a whole plot into twenty-five minutes has been solved by instead making these episodes simple vignettes that focus on a particular character. Motoko stumbles upon hidden memories from her childhood; taciturn Paz is stalked by a former lover who has stolen his appearance; mysterious Saito relates how he met Motoko and lost his eye (unsurprisingly in the same incident). These episodes are exciting, moving, atmospheric, occasionally even understated. I'd go so far as to say that the episode about Motoko's childhood is easily one of the most affecting pieces of animation I've seen.


The final three episodes, of course, do not include such a vignette. And if I was hoping that all the exposition and foreshadowing we were subjected to in previous episodes meant that we would now get a stonking, all-action, all-drama finale, I was also disappointed. Where these last three episodes do best is not in giving us relentless action or emotional development, but instead in reminding us of the nifty ideas and themes underlying the main storyline. Immigration, terrorism and democratic disaffection are all dealt with as part of a situation that develops as a direct allegory for Japan's (and many other nations', I would add) involvement in the Iraq war. At it's most obvious, we see a mostly civilian area being bombarded with shells and missiles before cutting to a television journalist calmly reporting the event to us as if it were all civilised and unavoidable.

Moments like this are what work best about the main storyline, especially with regard to prime anti-hero Hideo Kuze. The result of a mental computer virus designed to create 'heroes' - with the intention that they will actually be considered terrorists and unwittingly aid a sinister right-wing agenda – Kuze is apparently the one-in-a-million real hero: a man of enormous charisma who will fight when it is necessary but otherwise eschews violence. Of course, it's easy for Kuze to be sanguine, with his bulletproof, military-issue 'prosthetic body'. Many of the desperate, impoverished refugees who flock to him, however, are a little more jittery on the trigger, and the way that Kuze's almost romantic heroism is reinterpreted, misunderstood and twisted by his followers is another nifty part of the series. I'm reminded of the contrast between Jesus and many Christians. Kuze even acquires some stigmata when he's shot through the hand.

2nd Gig, while we're on the subject, is keen to try and achieve the weightiness of Oshii's feature film, heaping on the symbolism to little actual effect. At one point, Motoko hands Kuze an apple while her perennial admirer Batou tries to literally bash his way into the scene with a giant crucifix. Those who come to Stand Alone Complex seeking subtlety will leave quite empty handed.


Probably the best example of all the missed chances I saw in this show is the light suddenly cast on very minor character Proto. A delicate, reticent, slightly sad fellow with a quiet dedication, he's utterly unlike any of the other members of Section 9. Why then is such an interesting personality given only scant seconds of screen time before stepping forward in the final three episodes? And yet, I can't complain entirely, because he is an interesting character, and he is given some focus in these last episodes. As with everything else to do with Stand Alone Complex, it's a case of brilliant ideas with mixed execution.