Monthly Archives: May 2015

Telltale’s Game of Thrones: Choice vs Narrative

Video Games

game of thrones telltale(The following article contains some spoilers from Telltale Games’s Game of Thrones series)

Ever since their first season of The Walking Dead, Telltale Games has been primarily known as the company that specializes in narrative-heavy, choice-driven games. While familiarity with their formula has led to slightly diminishing returns, and none of their recent titles have packed the emotional punch that the first season of their Walking Dead series did, they have been consistently entertaining and unique. The Wolf Among Us was a cool comic-based neo-noir fantasy piece, tied to the existing “Fables” property but also perfectly suited to the uninitiated. Tales from the Borderlands has nailed its parent series’ style and sense of humor, while crafting a story and cast of characters with a lot more complexity than its shooter-siblings would allow. Even the second season of The Walking Dead, while paling in comparison to the first, did a generally strong job of balancing player choice with a pre-ordained story.

However, four episodes in, their Game of Thrones series appears to be their first major misstep. This is for several reasons, but two stand out in particular. First is that, on a conceptual level, Game of Thrones was destined to run into trouble. Unlike The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, which utilize different sets of characters than their source material, and The Wolf Among Us, which is a prequel to the main series, Game of Thrones takes place during the same time period as the fourth season of the show. It also utilizes many of the same characters. The central families involved, the Forresters and the Whitehills, are inventions for the game, but are frequently interacting with characters whose fates are set in stone.

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Lucy Review

Movie Reviews

lucy

(This review contains spoilers. I think you should read it anyway)

One of the few complaints I remember seeing about Breaking Bad, while it was still on the air, was that it was too flashy for its own good, resorting to fancy novelty shots from time to time. Personally, this never bothered me about the series, and was something I quite enjoyed about it. Nobody was arguing that Breaking Bad didn’t have the depth of character, story, and theme to back it up, so why not throw some style into the mix? Stylistic flourishes should be used like a spice, adding a tiny bit more flavor to an already-satisfying dish.

Where it does become a problem is with a film like Lucy, in which there is nothing compelling for the visual flourishes to spice up. Every chance he gets, filmmaker Luc Besson tosses in cutaways to further emphasize already obvious points. While Morgan Freeman is explaining the drive for organisms to reproduce, he cuts away to multiple shots of animals having sex, just in case we had a momentary lapse in knowledge and needed to have the method of reproduction re-established for us. Earlier, when Lucy (played by a very game Scarlett Johansson) is being tricked by her boyfriend so that she’ll do a dangerous job for him, we’re shown an image of a mouse almost taking cheese from a mousetrap. Then, when she is captured by the bad guys for attempting to deliver her boyfriend’s package, we see a cheetah killing its prey. But wait, isn’t Lucy wearing a cheetah-fur jacket? Oh ho ho, dear viewer, a reversal of fortune is afoot!

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The Mad Men Finale Strikes the Balance Between Resolution and Ambiguity

Television

(This article contains spoilers)

mad men

Update: Between the time I wrote this piece and the time that it published, a Hollywood Reporter interview went live in which Matthew Weiner spoke more in-depth about the ending than he had before. That being said, the headline most websites are running with (that Weiner confirms the reason for the Coca-Cola commercial’s inclusion) is wildly misleading, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Weiner clarifying the comment in the near-future. He also pushes back against the pure-cynicism many critics are deriving from the ending, something I talk about below. You can find a link to that interview here. My original piece is below.

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If ever there was a show that trusted its audience to “get” its message, it’s Mad Men. The cast consists largely of characters who constantly say what they don’t mean. They lie to get accounts, they pretend to be people who they are not, and they manipulate their actual feelings to make them marketable and tie them to products. Even when characters say what they mean, like when Don and Peggy proselytize about moving past your problems, the show usually doesn’t stop in its tracks to explicitly agree or disagree. It is up to the audience to discover what the show is about.

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Mad Max: Fury Road Review

Movie Reviews

mad-max-fury-roadGeorge Miller is not a man who grew up in today’s climate of shoot-first-and-CGI-everything-later. This is a filmmaker who took less than half a million dollars in 1979 and turned it into a classic of vehicular action and destruction, and, with more than ten times that amount for a sequel, created the enduring spectacle that is Road Warrior only two years later. He knows better than anybody that the appeal of those films was the sense of actual danger and destruction, a feeling that can never truly be recreated solely through the use of computers and animation. So, going behind the camera for the first time since 1998, George Miller looked at modern technology and, instead of a crutch, he saw a toolset.

The most immediately apparent modern element in Mad Max: Fury Road is in its attention to color correction. Unlike the earlier films, Fury Road is set in a world oppressed by oranges and yellows, a deserted hellscape its inhabitants are eager to get away from. This is visually portrayed by the cultists’ otherworldly white-colored skin, which contrasts strikingly with its surroundings. The same can be said of the enormous geyser of water Immortan Joe temporarily showers over his followers at the start of the movie. The water is not only refreshing to the thirsty commoners, but to the viewer, replacing the red hues with cool whites and blues. There is a real sense of contrast here.

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P.T. and Art Revisionist History in the Age of Access

Movies, Television, Video Games

P.T.Last year, a free promotional game called P.T. hit the Playstation Store. It was a wildly inventive and terrifying experience, entirely set in a single repeating hallway. Unlike a lot of horror games, which rely on jump scares and enemy AI, P.T. felt intentionally and masterfully designed against your expectations. Complete game or not, it was a marvel of game design and, at least in my personal opinion, the most interesting video game released in 2014.

Enter today: Konami, the same company that published P.T., is trying to erase it from history. As I mentioned, P.T. was technically a promotional game, and the game it was promoting was Silent Hills, a reboot of the classic survival horror game series. That game (and P.T., by extension) was developed by legendary game designer Hideo Kojima and his team at Kojima Productions, in creative collaboration with Guillermo del Toro and starring Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead. Unfortunately, Konami has been on a roll of self-destructive decisions that ultimately led to the loss of Hideo Kojima from their company. While he’s staying on as a contractor to finish the nearly-complete (or, if you believe some rumors, the complete-but-standing-by-for-a-fall-release) Metal Gear Solid 5, his other projects are being killed. That includes Silent Hills.

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