deepfriedmuppet

The Darkness

2009-05-22T11:41:00.000-07:00

It's Jackie Estacado's twenty-first birthday and the mafia assassin is about to receive the most unusual family heirloom imaginable. Jackie becomes host to a creature of literal darkness that seeks to puppeteer him as it has for generations of his ancestors. But Jackie isn't going to submit before he's revenged his girlfriend death and brought down the head of the Family that killed her.

The Darkness is a game which is difficult to pigeonhole. On the surface, it's a first person shooter with some demonic powers that augment the usual arsenal of weapons the genre has become known for. Sitting a shoulder button away from the usual assault rifle and shotgun are a whip-like tentacle, snake-like 'Creeping Dark', Darkness-powered handguns, and a literal black hole. These abilities unlock gradually, and by the time you're fully powered up, you have numerous options to tackle any given enemy encounter. You might start off by scoping out a room with the Creeping Dark, stealthily moving up a wall, through a vent, before slithering down behind an unsuspecting gangster and biting his face off. Now the other enemies are alerted, you might storm the room, using a tentacle to smash out the lights - the dark doesn't just provide a tactical advantage, it also powers your abilities. Seeing you're outnumbered, you might cast a black hole at the end of the room, sucking a half dozen guys into it, before switching to your Darkness Guns to pick off the rest. Figuring out such strategies on the fly is the most rewarding part of the combat, and if there's a criticism, it's that you often feel vastly overpowered compared to your foes, rather than being forced to use your powers as efficiently as possible to get out of trouble. When a room is finally cleared of enemies, the corpses provide the fuel needed to level up your powers. Standing over a dead body and hitting a button sends one of your Darkness tentacles burrowing into the chest cavity, emerging with a fresh heart to satisfyingly gulp down.

Though the general conceit is patently ridiculous, The Darkness manages to fall on just the right side of absurdity. The supernatural aspects of the narrative mesh well with the more traditional mafia revenge story, but it is the attempts made to ground the story in the real world that are most welcome. Instead of being just a generic, linear FPS, the game's developers, Starbreeze, have added a more open, adventure game element, that while nothing near the scale of a Grand Theft Auto, offers a version of New York that via streets and a working subway system, is open to explore. There's a distinct lack of handholding when it comes to navigating the city: simple tasks like being asked to meet your girlfriend at her apartment become enjoyable scavenger hunts as you need to use street signs, maps and even tourist information kiosks to find your way. The reward for finding your girlfriend is one of the most unique in video games, not because it is dramatic or thrilling, but because it is so simple and natural: She gives you a birthday cake and you have a chat. She invites you to sit on the couch with her. You throw your arms around each other and turn on the TV where, still in first person, you can flick through the channels, maybe watch an old episode of Flash Gordon; a couple of music videos; even To Kill a Mockingbird in its entirety. As game developers push the envelope of technology in the quest for greater fidelity to the real world, it's amazing to see a group of people go in a very different direction. To become immersed in this game world, it seems you don't need graphical tricks and programming advances, you need exceptional voice actors and a virtual cuddle.

The Darkness is by no means a perfect game. On a technical level it suffers from an erratic aiming system, and an agonisingly slow walking speed; on a narrative level, it descends into a muddle of comic book cliches that belie the game's source material; while the thrill of roaming the city and encountering its inhabitants is initially captivating, you'll quickly see the limited scope of the world, and simplistic side quests which merely serve to make you backtrack across familiar ground. None of these criticisms will stay with you for long after you've finished the game though. Instead, it will be those initial feelings of the unexpected, of a developer melding often stale genres to create something quite unlike anything else you've played. I've a feeling that when we look back on The Darkness in a few years, we'll see it as something special, something which didn't do everything right, but which pointed in the direction the medium was headed.

Call of Duty: World at War

2009-04-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

Derided as woefully short by some and nothing more than a bonus to the excellent multiplayer by many, for me there were moments in Call of Duty 4's single-player which I'd never experienced in a game, moments I felt genuinely pushed the medium forward in terms of storytelling and emotional involvement, moments that are sorely missed in its successor, Call of Duty: World at War.

The first of these occurs during the game's main title sequence, a scripted, on-rails scene that echoes the tram ride at the beginning of Half-Life. In first-person, unaware whom exactly you're inhabiting, and with only limited control of your character, you're thrown into the back of a taxi cab and driven off at high speed. Held captive by AK47-wielding men, you strain to look out of the car's windows. You see a Middle Eastern city, war ravaged. Sporadic gunfire echoes through streets. Civilians run through bombed out houses, clamber over mountains of rubble. You turn the right stick on your controller, trying to see what will happen to the group of men lined up against a wall. You move the left stick to try and escape as they're gunned down by a gang of soldiers. As you reach your destination, you're pulled from the car, dragged through a giant set of gates, into a town square. You look around you, watching as a baying mob screams with delight as you're tied to a post. At this point you figure you're probably a soldier, probably American. You look around you, trying to figure out where the exit is. You've played games before, you know how they work, you can second guess what's about to occur. Any moment, you think, a platoon of elite special forces will zip-line from a helicopter to rescue you. Or maybe they'll blow a hole in one of the walls and burst through, guns blazing. You expect the man holding the shiny gold Desert Eagle in front of you to take the first hit. Maybe you'll have to pick up his gun to fight your way out, maybe you'll be handed a different one. An M16 perhaps, or an M4 Carbine. You know the difference; you've played this type of game before. The man with the Desert Eagle raises the gun. You stare down the barrel. Any second, you think. Any second, and this guy is going to get it. You've played games... Then he pulls the trigger. The screen flashes white, black. Your jaw drops. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It's as close to death as you've ever felt in a game. This game sold ten million copies.

Martin Scorsese once referred to certain film makers as 'smugglers'. Directors like Samuel Fuller and Vincente Minnelli worked in the mainstream, producing movies that the masses wanted to watch and could enjoy, but all the time getting their own message across, smuggling it in. While much is written about the innovative storytelling devices of Braid or Bioshock, COD4 was a much more accessible and mainstream game which managed to smuggle in a genuinely surprising moment right at the start. Not only that, but it did it again, arguably even more effectively later on: After rescuing an injured comrade and rushing to escape an imminent nuclear blast, the bomb detonates, blowing your helicopter from the sky. You wake up in the wreckage of the burning Black Hawk. You try to stand, but fall over after a few steps. You manage to crawl out of what's left of the helicopter, emerging into near darkness. Dust and debris block out the sun; a blooming mushroom cloud envelopes the sky. You spend an agonising few minutes trying to figure out what you're supposed to do. You don't seem to be able to go anywhere, or do anything. You wonder whether the game has glitched, or whether you missed a clue. Gradually it dawns on you that the only thing you can do is die. Slowly. It's an incredibly powerful moment, one of the most touching I've experienced in any medium, not least because it's present in such an unexpected source: COD4 isn't a game which is sold as anything other than a blockbuster experience. It's presented as the kind of gung-ho, jingoistic, full on roller-coaster ride that Michael Bay would make if he was making computer games instead of movies.

So what of its successor? COD:WAW is the very definition of a game which ticks the boxes of expectation. From the multiplayer to the single-player, nearly everything in game has an analogue to its predecessor, yet none move the series forward and at times even regress it. Take the opening credits, for example: In COD:WAW, as the titles appear, you find yourself tied to a post. You watch as your fellow soldier's eye is burned out with a cigarette. You watch blood spray across the wall of the tent as his throat is slashed. Your captor looms over you, brandishing a bayonet. You're next... Then, the rest of your platoon bursts in. They kill the man that was about to kill you. They hand you a gun. You have to fight your way to escape. Whereas COD4 took your expectations of how a similar scene would play out and flipped them, surprising and moving you, COD:WAW merely reinforces every preconception you had and gives you the obvious. It's a problem that purveys the whole game: With only minor exception (the addition of an infinite flamethrower to your arsenal does change how you can approach some encounters), each level is an FPS cliche. There's the storming a beach level; the close quarters battle through some trenches level; the wide-open scramble from fox-hole to fox-hole while you're fired at by tanks level; the hold a position until reinforcements arrive level; the palette cleansing turret shooting and tank driving levels. Not every stage needed to be a revolution, but a near constant feeling of familiarity and the ability to second guess every 'surprise' event just keeps reminding you that this is very definitely a video game, and the result is that you feel detached from any of the dramatic incidents that occur.

Treyarch's Call of Duty games have always been in a tough spot. Forum fanboys hold the developer up as the guys that make holiday season filler entries in a franchise, while the series' creators, Infinity Ward, toil away on the next 'proper' instalment. It seems rather harsh to totally dismiss Treyarch's games as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with either COD:WAW, COD3, or their earlier side-stories. COD:WAW retains many of the things that make the series so enjoyable to play (the spot-on aiming and feel of the weapons, for instance) but be it because of developer disinterest or inability, or publisher pressure, never strives or amounts to being anything more than generic.

London Film Festival: Anvil The Story of Anvil

2008-11-19T12:09:00.001-08:00

A former roadie for Canadian heavy metal group, Anvil, director Sacha Gervasi catches up with the band twenty years on as they make a last ditch attempt at success.

It's possible, if not probable that you've not heard of Anvil; I'm ashamed to say that I hadn't. Thankfully, right from the get-go Gervasi shows us how fucking awesome they were by having metal legend after metal legend sing their praises. Tom Araya from Slayer, Scott Ian from Anthrax, Lars Ulrich from Metallica; When people that cool tell you the band were good, you soon sit up and start paying attention. While archival footage shows Anvil playing a stadium in Tokyo, Japan, an audience going wild for their theatrical performance and extrordinary musicianship, the talking headbangers wonder what happened after, since Avil's album Metal on Metal was so influential on them. It turns out that the band carried on putting out music, but outside of a small, dedicated fanbase, no one was listening. While their progenitors thrived throughout the eighties and beyond, Anvil got by in blue collar jobs. Watching Steve "Lips" Kudlow, a man able to command the attention of a crowd of thousands making a living out of delivering school dinners reminds you just how fickle and luck based the entertainment industry is. What makes the film, and the band special though, is that there isn't an overwhelming sense of failure or regret. The band carried on with Lips and best friend and drummer Robb Reiner (we'll get to the irony of that name later) at their core. They scraped together the cash that wasn't being used to support their families to put out albums, all for the love of the music.

Lips and Reiner seem like genuinely nice guys, and they look like they're entertaining as hell to be around. For a start, they're Candaian, which gives them a fantastic accent and folksy charm, which when combined with the overblown histrionics of heavy metal results in comedy gold. This is probably the point to bring up the shadow that looms large of this documentary: This is Spinal Tap. It's pretty amazing just how many times this film reminds you of that mockumentary. It seems like it's both that the other Rob Reiner's movie was pretty much bang on in representing rock bands, but also that it's become such a cultural touchstone that the band feel like they should live up to the image; you're never sure where reality and knowing self-parody begin and end. Since it's pretty clear that most people will be thinking about Spinal Tap at some point, Gervasi embraces it, realising that scenes like Lips and Reiner talking about one of their early songs is errily reminiscent of a similar scene between Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, and going so far as to include a close up of an amp being turned up to eleven.

I really loved Anvil! The Story of Anvil. It's film that wears it's heart on its sleeve, daring you to feel anything but admiration and affection for its subjects. While a young teenager on a reality TV show might talk about deserving fame and fortune because they've worked hard for a few weeks and believe themselves to be on some kind of great journey, this is a film that shows what the genuine reality for most musicians is like. These are guys who've worked hard, struggled, and done it because they love being in a rock band. By the end of the documentary's brief running time, you're genuinely invested in seeing the band achieve some form of success, and what ends up happening is really poinagnt.

London Film Festival: Achilles and the Tortoise

2008-11-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

Following on from previous films, Takeshis' and Glory To the Filmmaker!, Achilles and the Tortoise sees Takeshi Kitano bring a more focused, semi-autobiographical slant to the absurdist comedy kick he's on right now. While the previous films were somewhat uneven, here a focus on character means that the experience is far more engaging and ultimately quite moving. That's not to say that it doesn't also have the same unhinged, not sure what's going to happen next streak running through it, just that it's more restrained, and makes the film feels much more of a whole.

Tracing the life of an artist, Machisu, from his early school days, through adolescence and into adulthood (where he is finally played by Kitano himself), the film does a wonderful job of conveying the idea that art and its creation should be about personal satisfaction, rather than financial or critical acclaim. Machisu begins as a young boy, drawing and painting at every opportunity, even when he should be listening in school or doing chores at home. By the time he's an adult, he's moved away from that pure love of creation and is desperate to be recognised as a successful artist. He tries to get his work exhibited in a gallery, but is repeatedly told that it's not what the curator is looking for. Machisu returns time and time again, constantly chasing acceptance by imitating a style that is apparently the hot thing in the gallery that week. Each visit is generally the culmination of a hilarious attempt to make something he can sell, but each visit is also a step further away from his art being infused with his own personality. From the surreal, almost child-like paintings that have become a staple of Kitano's films of the past decade (some even make reappearances here), to a failed attempt at graffiti, to directing his wife to ride a bike through some paint and onto a sheet, there's a sense of the absurd to it all, but also an underlying sense that Kitano genuinely dislikes any idea of pretentious modern art and it's fans.

Though it is often slapstick and surreal, like a lot of Kitano's comedy there's sometimes a slightly sadistic streak to it that can be quite uncomfortable. While it's generally because it's Kitano in the more dominant role that leads to this feeling, it's also true that any sense of him being a bully is somewhat offset by how self-deprecating he is. As the film progresses it becomes darker and possibly more autobiographical. Machisu works harder and harder to achieve recognition as an artist, but it is to the detriment of his family. It's easy to see Kitano as the man obsessed over a creative endeavour, taking his family for granted and lost as to how to deal with the consequences.

While the last few films Kitano has made have been more experimental, here he really seems to have figured out the balance of character, social realism and surreal comedy to make a much more cohesive movie. The clear love he has for painting and creating is infectious, and as someone who really likes his paintings and cinematic style, I felt like Achilles and the Tortoise was a genuine return to form for Kitano, even if it's again a let down that the score isn't by Joe Hisaishi.

London Film Festival: Largo

2008-11-04T08:43:00.000-08:00

Filmed over a period of months in the soon to be closed and relocated club in Los Angeles, Largo is a farewell film to a place that built a reputation as a seriously cool nightspot. Resident musician Jon Brion and owner Mark Flanagan filled the stage with all manner of musical artists, stand up comedians and cabaret acts, launching the careers of some and simply revelling in the talents of the rest. Largo by all accounts was an exclusive and intimate venue where the people in the audience were as likely to be as famous as those on the stage, with surprise guests a constant fixture.

Over the course of what is essentially a concert film, the breadth of performers that would play at the club really comes across. Ranging from Jon Brion himself and his circle of musical compadres like Michael Penn and Fiona Apple to comedy acts like Flight of the Conchords, Patton Oswald and probably the highlight of the whole film, John C. Reilly (his tale of Burt Reynolds thinking an Irish accent would suit his character in Boogie Nights is worth the price of admission alone), it seems like it must have been a pretty amazing place to spend your weekends in. And that's the problem. This is a film that feels like it was made for a very specific audience of people that used to frequent the club. The fact that the artists are only identified in the closing credits gives you the sense that if you're not cool enough to know who they are, you've no business watching the film. This isn't helped by what seems like a staunch refusal to show the club itself. Only at the end when the bar staff are clearing away the empty glasses of a departed audience do you get to see the space the film has taken place in. On the one hand, it's great that there's a focus on the artists themselves, but with the stage essentially a big black curtain, it could really have been anywhere; there's little sense of the kind of magical atmosphere the place is reported to have had. Though the sound recording is excellent and goes someway to capturing the feel of a live performance, you're still left with the feeling that you really had to be there to get it.

The sheer number of acts that come and go means that if someone isn't really doing it for you (Gregg Proops, Zach Galifianakis? Not so much), there'll be someone along soon after that probably will (Jon Brion, Mark Everett? Oh hell yes), Even though there is something about the way the film is constructed that pushed me away from it a lot of the time, it is beautifully photographed and the sheer quality of some of the performances pulled me through, and had me revisiting some of the artists on my iPod immediately after; Aimee Mann on dark and rainy South Bank is highly recommended.

London Film Festival: Tyson

2008-11-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

Everyone thinks they know Iron Mike Tyson. We all know the tale of the delinquent teenager, saved by a natural talent for boxing that took him to the very top of the sport in flamboyant style. Then we know of the downfall: a conviction for rape, reports of domestic abuse, boxing matches spilling out of the ring and into the real world, and of course, the biting of Holyfield's ear. Tyson went from being seen as a masterful professional sportsman to a crazed animal on the path to self-destruction. James Toback's documentary attempts, if not to set the record straight, to at least allow Tyson to put his side of his story across. The direction is at times exhilarating, with snappily edited archival fight footage, but the way Toback pieces together the central interview with Tyson is often quite intrusive - Tyson is a mesmerising enough interviewee who doesn't need stylistic tricks like splitscreen shots and overlapping soundbites to keep an audience interested in listening to him.

This is wholly Tyson's film; no other interviewees are present, and save for the occasional newsreel and fight commentary, he's the singular voice. But what a voice it is. Tyson is a commanding speaker, articulating himself in a mix of street vernacular and new age philosophy, and though there's obviously a degree of worry in allowing such a controversial figure free reign, the film lays it's subjectivity right out there from the get-go, allowing the audience to ultimately decide where they feel the truth lies.

Tyson never portrays himself as a saint; he is as aware as the audience of his deficiencies, but clearly sees this film as an opportunity to set the record straight about people might perceive him. He alleges for instance that his biting of Evander Holyfield's ear was prompted by the inaction of the referee against Holyfield repeatedly headbutting him. He also vehemently denies that he was a rapist. The result is that this isn't always a comfortable watch, with affection and dislike for Tyson swinging from moment to moment (any moment when he discusses women or sex is particularly uncomfortable) but there's also the sense that this is someone who was shaped by an impoverished background, forced to carry its burden to this day. The child of a broken home in the housing projects of 70s Brooklyn, Tyson led a daily fight for survival where he had to learn to hit hardest or risk being killed. The fear of being back in that situation is one that continues to drive him and results in some painfully honest moments where Tyson allows us to see a side of him we didn't even know existed. He reveals a scared, insecure man, haunted by the loss of his mentor and trainer, Cus D'Amato just as he was hitting the big time and just when he needed him the most; The question of how Tyson might have developed as a person with this parental figure still present hangs over the film.

London Film Festival: Tokyo

2008-11-02T13:29:00.000-08:00

From New York Stories to Paris, je t'aime, from Four Rooms to Grindhouse, anthology films are always a mix of quality. While one or two stories in the group might hold your attention more than others, there's also the tendency for one to be absolutely atrocious. Tokyo! presents three such short films: Michel Gondry's tale of a struggling filmmaker and his long suffering girlfriend moving into a tiny apartment in the titular city is the kind of capricious, bittersweet tale you'd expect; Bong Joon-ho tells a twisted and melancholic love story between two hikikimori (a Japanese phenomenon where people retreat from the stresses of everyday society by living hermit-like existences, often supported by family members); Leos Carax gives us an ill-judged, borderline racist tale of a homeless lunatic that speaks in his own language of grunts and teeth flicking that goes wild with a box of hand grenades before being put on trial.

Gondry's Interior Design paints a picture of a struggling film director, in love with the act of creating art, and with the moments of idiosyncratic charm that the city of Tokyo throws up on an almost constant basis, but someone who takes his partner for granted. This latter aspect feels the most autobiographical; It's easy to see Gondry as the artist, expecting his partner to understand his need for time and space to work, but also worried about the consequences of such neglect. The rather sinister outcome of the girlfriend's story feels like both wish-fulfilment and a feared possibility of the director. Though the film feels slightly uneven, there's enough of Gondry's quirky low-fi aesthetic and unusual sense of humour to keep it enjoyable throughout, with the artist's anarchic film premiere being a particular highlight.

Were it not for the prospect of Bong Joon-ho's third story coming on after (Memories of Murder is a modern masterpiece), Leos Carax's Merde would have had me leaving the cinema. It opens with a bedraggled weirdo emerging from a storm drain and wreaking havoc on a street full of the Japanese public. He marches down the pavement, stealing people's lunches, licking schoolgirls' armpits and generally scaring the shit out of everyone before returning down the nearest sewer. As a two minute short, there might be something darkly amusing in these unhinged, unexpected actions, but when the film carries on for another forty minutes, and as the man moves into murder, terrorism and eventual imprisonment, it becomes increasingly ill-judged, flip-flopping in tone to a truly incredible degree. There's a sense that the man is supposed to be quirky and amusing with his absurd invented language; the way the film portrays him in television news reports, even appears to suggest that we should see him as a misunderstood victim. The culmination of this is a trial with nods to Guantanamo Bay and an eventual execution that features Christ-like overtones. The reality is that it feels deeply offensive to have random acts of violence carried out on innocent Japanese civilians (especially when it's perpetrated and filmed by a team of outsiders) and then be asked to find it funny, no matter how eccentric a story it's wrapped up in.

The final story is thankfully far better and feels the most authentically Japanese of the three. Bong Joon-ho's Shaking Tokyo, takes the uniquely Japanese concept of hikikimori and turns it into a Brief Encounter-esque love story. A man who hasn't had any human contact for years, finally finds the courage to look at a girl delivering him pizza, instantly forming a bond with her. It's a film about courage, loneliness, and love being for everyone, and the result is the most human of the three films. Bong shows us a man's apartment filled with character; The stacks of books, magazines and obsessively arranged takeaway boxes tells it's own story of someone trying to stamp order on an unpredictable world. Watching someone force himself to set that kind of single-minded obsession aside in order to step outside because of his love for another person feels really quite special. As the story unfolds, it becomes more fabulist, pointing towards a nightmare scenario where current lifestyle patterns of overworked Japanese could have devastating consequences for the country as a whole. While it lacks the lightness of Gondry's film, Shaking Tokyo is probably the most even and successful of the three.

When viewed as a whole, the most surprising thing about Tokyo! is the lack of a sense of place, since although the idea of foreign filmmakers being inspired by such a vibrant city is an intoxicating one, the outcome is less successful. While the film manages to avoid the stereotypical landscapes of a bustling Shibuya or tranquil shots of Shinto temples, one can't help but think the narratives for some of these films were ideas the directors had at the back of their minds already, figuring this film would be a way of getting them made, rather than being inspired by the city directly; Only Bong's film really feels as though it's about something unique to this part of the world.

London Film Festival: The Class

2008-11-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

No doubt because the film's leading actor and writer Francois Begaudeau, is a former teacher playing a simulacra of himself, The Class is a film which absolutely reeks of authenticity. Following the progress of a class of French students in a multicultural Parisian high school, the narrative unfolds slowly, taking greater pleasure in observing and giving voice to a group of disadvantaged and often troubled teenagers. The film feels incredibly believable with a lot of the scenes obviously improvised to some degree; All the students feel totally natural, displaying many of the same loves and fears as any of us felt in our early teens, but they are also very much kids of a particular place and social background. This is a truly multicultural group of students that even thought many of them were born in France, are troubled by questions of identity - most brilliantly emphasized in an argument about which national football team people should support - and exist in an atmosphere of simmering racsism between not only themselves, but also the teachers.

The way the film manages to distill such large issues and use this class as a microcosm of wider social concerns in France and the rest of the world is one of its great successes. A greater success though is that while The Class might sound like a worthy and overwrought polemic, it is in fact eminently watchable and entertaining, in no small thanks to a brilliantly cast group of kids that manage to stamp their personalities on the scenes. Over the course of two hours the kids never blend into one and never seem like caricatures intended to voice an opinion of the filmmakers. In one particular moment of the film, a kid has to leave the room because he's got ink all over his hands. If this wasn't a direct reference to Truffaut's The 400 Blows, it certainly made me think that The Class shares a similar combination of social realism and entertaining, empathetic characters.

This is a film which asks some tough questions: Are these dysfunctional kids failures, too lazy to work hard and pull themselves out of the ghetto, or have they been failed by an educational and social system which hasn't drawn out the dormant talents they might possess? Francois as a character is a teacher who attempts to inspire his students, forcing them to think when they argue with him, looking to encourage when they display a gift for something, but at the same time is frustrated, feels unappreciated, and in the end isn't prepared to put his students education before his career. Francois as a writer makes it clear that everyone can make more of an effort, and no one should be abandoned.

London Film Festival: Adoration

2008-10-31T08:58:00.000-07:00

Atom Egoyan's latest film is a fractured and timely parable commenting on everything from terrorism, racism and religious intolerance, to education, an unchecked internet, and the exploitation of suffering. A lot to be sure, and maybe too much, because for me, the result is a film that works well as a tightly crafted dissertation, but one without the emotional heart and sense of reality to keep it from feeling like anything but a well constructed technical exercise.

The film begins with Simon, a teenage boy orphaned years before, being asked by his teacher to translate a newspaper article about a terrorist tricking his pregnant wife into boarding an aeroplane with a bomb in her luggage. Simon, with the help of his teacher convinces the rest of his class, and then the wider world that this is in fact remarkably similar to the story of his own parents. From the classroom, the story ripples out across the internet where Simon holds court in webcam chats with strangers, drawn to his story for their own myriad reasons. Gradually the truth of Simon's parents' life and death emerges and questions about which characters are manipulating which comes to the fore.

I personally found aspects of Adoration to be fascinating; From traditional news media using Wikipedia as a research tool, to Lonelygirl on YouTube being unmasked as an actor, there is a genuine concern with the reliability of information on the internet and this film taps right into it. Ideas of internet celebrity and unreliable blogging are tied into wider concerns about terrorism, post-9/11 paranoia and a more general sense of emotional distance - The characters that sit and listen to Simon are everything from racists, looking to go on a diatribe with a modicum of anonymity, to lost souls, desperately using Simon's story to fill an emotional hole in their own lives.

While such themes gave me a lot to think about, my patience with the film dwindled as it went on; As the narrative threads are drawn together a little too neatly to be believable, too often I felt like the characters were more like chess pieces being moved around to serve a function, rather than felling like real people. You could argue that this misses the point, that Adoration is more of an allegory than a traditional narrative, but for me Egoyan's earlier Exotica was a much more successful blending of character driven story and intelletual discussion than this.

London Film Festival: Frost/Nixon

2008-10-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

Telling the true story of TV presenter and sometime journalist, David Frost's attempt and subsequent success at getting the only television interview with disgraced former US President, Richard Nixon, Ron Howard has directed a thinking man's Rocky, a politically charged, but never polemic thriller that is in love with the idea that simply pointing a camera at someone can reach into their soul and reveal their true person.

Like Howard's earlier Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon, is a film in which the outcome is already known - Apollo 13 makes it back safe and sound; Nixon apologises to the American people on TV - yet throughout remains thoroughly engaging, and at times edge of the seat exciting. Frost and his small team comprised of a pair of political outcasts and a television producer, are portrayed as the underdogs, granted an interview with Nixon because not only are they paying the most money, but because Nixon's team feel they can control the message. Michael Sheen's Frost is a charismatic playboy, wheeling and dealing and charming his way to success, not necessarily with the ability to make good on his promises; The question of whether he's in it for the ratings and his own fame, or as his team hope, to get a definitive character assassination of Nixon on tape, for everyone in the world to see is asked throughout the film.

Frank Langella's Nixon is a man of even greater depth; You can see in his eyes the constant scheming, thinking and outwitting. He is written and played as a man haunted by his past, lonely and isolated, consumed by self loathing and hatred, and undeniably human. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is just how empathetic one feels towards him; The film makers have managed to cut through thirty years worth of political anger and looked upon him as a person with failings like any one of us, yet never let us forget that his position meant those failings brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the loss of trust in the American political system for generations.

While both lead actors mimic some of the physical and oral mannerisms of their real life counterparts, these are both genuine performances, not mere impressions. The film portrays them as verbal boxers, sparring throughout the film, building to a final act showdown (which is even prefixed by a Rocky-esque training montage with books being hit instead of frozen meat) that is as tense and exhilarating as any car chase or gunfight. Indeed, this is a film that moves infinitely more briskly and with more vitality than Howard's plodding adaptatation of The Da Vinci Code and points at a director reinvigorated or at least returning to the form he's managed previously.

The essence of the film is that the camera can lay a person bare for all to see, that it can offer redemption and condemnation in equal measure. Frost/Nixon's script, direction and performances manage to capture this perfectly.

Call of Duty 3 Review

2008-09-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

With a number of games having already covered the most decisive and famous battles and theatres of World War II, Treyarch, the developers of Call of Duty 3, have had to ask how they can move the WWII FPS forward. Building on the character progression and storytelling of previous games like Big Red One, their attempted solution is to delve deeper into the squads themselves and make your band of AI brothers into well rounded characters with distinct personalities. This seems like it would be ripe with posibilites given that the series echoes the linear progression of a Half-Life and seeing the successes in that series, but unfortunately the writing and direction here simply isn't up to the task.

Even if the characters, - like the overbearing NCO who the rest of the American team don't really trust, or the Canadian radio-man insisting he's not a coward for trying to protect his radio in battle, - didn't seem like cliches, the way the game so often switches between one of four groups, means it's often difficult to remember who's who; You're simply never allowed enough time to build a sense of attachment to the men you're fighting alongside before the level ends and you're whisked off somewhere else. By switching between the American infantry, a Polish tank team, the British SAS and a Canadian Armoured Division, the idea is that you're seeing the same battle from multiple perspectives and witnessing a memorable and dramatic moment when the storylines finally converge, but it just tends to be confusing.

The levels themselves are often reminiscent of Call of Duty 2, but fall way short at generating the intensity of that game's battles. There's nothing here to rival the sheer panic you felt at defending the captured hill towards the end of COD2 for instance. Similarly epic set-pieces are often confusing and can lead to you hearing the same piece of dialogue uttered by your squad commander over and over until you realise what you're being instructed to do. Instead of feeling like you're genuinely under fire from an advancing army, you're often all too aware of the underlying game mechanics, looking for the glowing icon to go and click, or searching for the invisible series of trigger points that grant advancement through the level.

When the game scales things back and focuses on more close quarters combat, it's then that it's most enjoyable. Coralling you down an enemy trench or asking you to clear out an occupied house enables the solid aiming and blunt lethality of the weapons comes to the fore. The simple act of popping out of cover and firing your gun is fun enough to keep you playing the game. In these intimate environments, where you're able to hear the banter of your team and pick out individual comrades, you feel that the game could have achieved the level of character development it aspires to, if, instead of trying to live up to the intensity and blockbuster action of its predecessor, it focussed on following the same core group of men. This might have carved out its own distinct place in a crowded genre, but as it is, COD3 stands as disjointed and mediocre.