#or the quality is equal but the two 'different stories' are irreconcilable with each other

[justanothersxf]

Oh thank goodness, Spy x Family chapter 99 was way better than the previous two.

All because Endo finally added something new to the story that can be carried into the present day setting.

I was worried because in 97 and 98 he was repeating a lot of what he'd already shown/done in the older chapters, but in this chapter contrasting both the warfront and the "untouched" homeland against each other was finally a fresh depiction, as normally he focused on only one or the other. To put it another way, the story was weak when Martha and Henry were in the same place together and only started to find its footing once they were finally apart. Ironic.

Though I'll be honest, while the trenches being depicted under the narration was well put together, I could hardly focus on it because the fact that there's finally a more honest appeal from Donovan's own mouth is the uncontested highlight of the chapter. This is exactly what's needed to make this story relevant to the main cast in the current story (although there's a snag with that too, but I'll save that for later).

I did like a few other character moments, like how Martha was sniveling instead of brave when she volunteered since she thought to make her expected death count for something, and Henderson pressing his pen into the letter to depict what he was saying between the lines. But it's also very clear that Endo loves to portray scenes of war and brutality from the care put into the page layout of those combat and destruction scenes.

He's still a great visual artist, too. He illustrates everything neglected by Henderson just using a few panels of a jarringly disheveled appearance.

I really don't want to talk too much about Henry and Martha themselves though because I'd be a real nag about it. Their feelings for each other were depicted strongly, but man...when I really think about it Martha really messed them both up. At the very least they've reached a better point in the present, but so many things could've been avoided if she hadn't jumped the gun and enlisted. This is also kind of a retread from Twilight's past, where losing what was important to them and their future is what pushed them to enlist, but Martha had even less reason to do so here which is what makes it the more frustrating version to read. I wonder if Endo is trying to use it to further Donovan's arguments about pre-emptive fear of loss leading to conflicts no matter what, but I'll have to wait until the conclusion to see. Which is kind of crazy to think about since this "arc" is about as long as one of the earliest ones (i.e. dog, tennis).

But then when I see comments about how this flashback feels like a different story, I become disappointed again as the chapter being "good" doesn't really address the one sore ongoing issue the manga has. But that's a whole other discussion to talk about, I guess. It just depends on whether Endo will finally work on the family's relationships with each other and give them the same level of care he's done with the side characters, or if they'll just have more silly times together when we're finally through with this flashback...

[casualarsonist]

Until Dawn review (PS4)

David Cage: Frenchman, Legion of Honour recipient, and a video game visionary, he would consider himself a storyteller first and foremost and ostensibly popularised the ‘interactive drama’ genre with the narrative-heavy ‘Fahrenheit’, ‘Heavy Rain’, and ‘Beyond: Two Souls’. However, as well-known as he is for his artistic vision, his other claim to dubious fame is the fact that his abilities can never quite match his ambition. Make no mistake, Cage is no Peter Molyneux and doesn’t exactly misrepresent his games beyond overstating their importance, but they are as synonymous with their clunky gameplay as they are with powerful drama – an important discord in a genre in which the whole point is to tell a story with depth and resonance that players can immerse themselves in when the technical side of these products works against this very goal. However, a good interactive drama game can, like a good film, stand the test of time as a whole work, even if one of its component parts doesn’t. And this too is important because as players we expect older games to be ungainly and less refined than modern releases, so I suppose that if games like this were to have a flaw, clunky gameplay would be a far better one to have than an unengaging story or poor acting.

And thus we come to 2015’s ‘Until Dawn’ - not a David Cage game (and probably better for it), but one that draws from his work in the genre. A pastiche of teen-horror films, Until Dawn follows eight teenagers – the so-called ‘friends’ of twin sisters Hannah and Beth (Ella Lentini) who vanished into the woods surrounding their father’s isolated cabin after a cruel prank played on them the year before. On the first anniversary of their disappearance, the remaining gang are urged by the twins’ brother Josh (Rami Malek) to return to the cabin, ostensibly to commemorate the lives of the missing sisters with ‘the party of a lifetime’. But not all is what it seems, and on top of the creepy and desolate location, the teens will come face-to-face with everything in the encyclopaedia of horror-tropes but the cursed kitchen sink as they try to make it to dawn the next day.

Until Dawn is, for all intents and purposes, a straight-forward success when it comes to achieving its mission statement, which is to say that it’s a faithful recreation of a tried-and-true horror formula with enough twists and turns to keep you engaged in the unfolding story, characters with enough depth and likability to largely transcend the archetypes within which they are cast, and a conceit that makes the best use of the simplistic gameplay. It is possibly the only game I’ve ever played in which I’ve enjoyed and seen as appropriate the inclusion of QTEs – so long has the mechanic been a refuge for lazy designers that I forgot that testing the players reflexes under threat of permadeath can actually be a tense and thrilling experience. It’s also, despite the shoulders upon which it so clearly stands, a unique enough experience that I find myself thinking about it long after it’s over (which is months ago now). You will find yourself becoming attached to the people you’re playing as along the way, feeling appropriately horrified should they fall prey to the many traps the game has to offer. You may also find yourself despising some of them, at which point the full potential of the genre comes to bear as you coax them into a brutal and cathartic death.

But I suspect that my assessment above will divide an audience that has played this game, for as solid as I feel the core of Until Dawn is it cannot escape the fact that, like the genre of film it tries to emulate, the game is a constant balancing act between engaging the audience and repelling them with silliness. Some may indeed find the characters vapid and hollow and I would understand that, because despite the effort to reinforce the importance of player choice in the unfolding narrative there are plenty of times in which you can feel the game take the reins and steer the characters toward a different path from which you took them simply to manufacture drama and keep the story moving. Likewise, I could understand it if you found the constant sexual innuendo unbearable, or the fact that the characters will simply wander around in their underwear during a Rocky Mountain winter, or that for the entirety of the night not once does anyone seek to turn the fucking lights on.

And while I think it was a wise thing to pair this genre of film with this type of game, it’s simply a fact that a good part of the enjoyment of teen horror comes from laughing at a film’s loose ends and frayed seams. The idea that a group of people should come together to commemorate the presumed death of two of their friends with a fucking party in the exact same location from which they went missing is retarded, as is the idea that anyone would crack a joke mere minutes after seeing a friend get minced in front of them, or that you’d prance around in their undies in an unlit, unheated wooden cabin buried in the deep, dark forest. Teen horror films are ridiculous by nature, the choices their characters make are borderline braindead, and so to attempt to recreate this experience for better and worse whilst simultaneously asking a player to engage and invest in the fate of the people making these dumb-ass decisions is a simply an irreconcilable goal. More than once I found myself groaning in genuine annoyance as characters did and said things that were deeply at odds with the things I had asked them to do and say up until that point, in a transparent effort to artificially extend the playtime. The most infuriating moment came with the only character death I experienced, which occurred not as a direct result of my choices but through an incidental and unpredictable series of events that the game told me related to a decision I had made 10 minutes before – a dialogue choice, to be specific, in which I agreed with another character’s plan of action, a plan that takes place regardless of your response. So the choice that kicked off the series of events that lead to the character’s death wasn’t actually a choice at all, it was simply an inconsequential piece of dialogue that the game decided to make a pivotal moment.

These moments of unfortunate incongruity do occur more than once throughout, although they’re rarely as egregious as this. Other missteps include bizarre, truncated conclusions for a couple of the eight characters, who disappear for almost the entire game with only a small epilogue of sorts in which the end of their stories are sorted out, as well as more than one Big Bad revealing itself to be a red herring. In any case, I wasn’t dissatisfied with the narrative overall, but it’s quite clear just how much the writers struggled to balance the need to provide content with the need to keep the player invested in the story.

That said, Until Dawn is easily the highest quality interactive drama I’ve ever played: the cast, led by Hayden Panettiere, perform superbly and manage to tease far more depth out of the characters than one might otherwise expect. Their performances single-handedly elevate the game as a whole, and form one of the crucial pillars upon which Until Dawn manages to stand above its flaws. The story is, for all my momentary criticisms, quite fun and interesting - the sheer amount of clichés within the horror genre offers a deep well from which Until Dawn can and does draw. From the moment you get your hands on the controls you’re left with a sense of dread and foreboding that doesn’t abate, and although your evolving understanding of the circumstances that haunt the characters does result in diminishing returns for the scares as the game winds on, there are still new and interesting plot elements revealed right up until the very final moments of play. An overabundance of jump-scares is mitigated by the fact that, despite how cheap they are, they do still manage to keep you on edge, and there are plenty of moments of genuine suspense provided equally by unsettlingly quiet moments, as well as the terrifying sequences in which you are chased by an unstoppable threat.

And it’s primarily through this quality and its single-minded dedication to providing a genre experience that Until Dawn comes out on top. Like all games of its ilk, it isn’t perfect, and ultimately one could reasonably accuse the ‘interactive drama’ genre of being one giant, coalescent gimmick, but the truly inspired decision here that separates Until Dawn from the others is that the creators chose a wonderfully gimmicky type of film to marry to this type of game. And while two gimmicks together don’t necessarily cancel each other out, in this case they certainly compliment each other to provide what is, in the end, a rather singular and unforgettable experience. 

Good

7/10 P.S.

It has taken me fucking months to write this review. I got a new job and lost a lot of writing time, and thus lost my mojo, so please excuse the gap and any perceived dip in quality. I’ve played a lot of games lately, so I hope to post something for Titanfall 2, the Uncharted series, Far Cry Primal, Horizon: Zero Dawn, as well as a few films. Hopefully it shouldn’t take me quite as long to get around to that as it has this. Love, peace, and chicken grease. 

[mrmichaelchadler]

True/False 2019: Caballerango, American Factory, The Hottest August, Finding Frances

One of the best films at the festival, Juan Pablo González’s “Caballerango” captures spare haunted moments in Milpillas, a rural Mexican village that has been reeling from a series of suicides. A horse vacantly stares in the camera. A woman pulls the skin off chicken legs. Two men have a sprinting contest while a group places bets. People work while the world changes around them. The landscape remains the same.

These scenes have an indefinably eerie quality that stems from González’s choice to make his camera as invisible as possible. He lingers on events longer than most filmmakers, illustrating the passage of time as much as the action in the frame. He interviews people discussing the various losses that have affected them and their community—a son’s suicide, his sister’s miscarriage, his brother’s friends’ deaths—but the focus in “Caballerango” remains productively unstable. The suicides are treated as individual tragedies while also serving as microcosms for the economic deterioration in the area, an avenue that González would rather gesture towards than didactically explore.

González employs a creative rhythmic strategy to communicate his empathy towards the Milpillas community. He conditions his audience to observe the mundane at length, to “experience the frame instead of someone editing,” as he explained in Filmmaker Magazine to describe his short film “The Solitude of Memory.” Thus, when the unexpected invades the frame, it engenders surprise or awe, like a late-night vigil that stalks the streets. It’s an attempt to inure the audience into the pace of life in Milpillas while also demonstrating how ghosts, metaphoric and literal, permanently disrupt everyday lives. The spectral drives “Caballerango” while the people themselves reside at its center.

“American Factory”

Netflix bought Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s “American Factory” for under $3 million following its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year. This might be a drop in the bucket for a streaming service that essentially prints its own money, but it still ostensibly represents a belief that a documentary about a Chinese-owned car-glass manufacturing company in Dayton, Ohio can garner a sizable audience on their platform. Given that the film directly engages with Recession-sourced working class plight, unionization in face of indifferent corporate superstructures, and the difficulties of reconciling different cultures during the height of globalization, Netflix might have made a good bet.

In 2014, Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang opens up a Fuyao manufacturing plant in Dayton. For the locals, this represents a bright new opportunity, especially after General Motors shuttered their factory in 2008. At first, “American Factory” focuses on the humorous side of the culture clash: the Chinese workers, transplanted from the safety of their homes and families, learn about the nuances of their American peers in classroom settings, while the Americans deal with the Chinese workers’ hyper-detail-focused nature and staunch work ethic on the job. Yet, tensions quickly escalate as Chinese management become frustrated with their American counterparts as well as the country’s labor laws. Lax safety standards and the looming threat of automation spark union talks amongst the workers, which erodes all previous good will. The film becomes a chronicle of the age-old war between labor and management, only this time with easily drawn global implications vis-à-vis Chinese economic control and America’s bleak manufacturing future. The metaphors invent themselves when you’re watching irreconcilable worldviews engage with each other in real time.

Bognar and Reichert’s film maneuvers between different tones at ease. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy one moment and a searing indictment of hellacious corporate practices the next. This casual tonal shifts allows the film’s truly horrifying moments to pop, like when an American supervisor tells his Chinese peer that he wishes he could tape his workers’ mouths shut so they wouldn’t talk as much on the job, or Dewang’s underlings expressing disbelief at the idea of Americans not working weekends. There’s probably one too many threads at play in the film, but even the most digressive elements contribute to a modern portrait of American labor fighting upwind against a culture that has all but abandoned them.

What keeps me from wholly embracing “American Factory” lies in Bognar and Reichert’s macro-structural decision to provide everyone, from the factory workers to Dewang himself, an equal platform. On paper, the choice is sound, a necessary step to providing a full picture, but when the film shifts focus to the unionization efforts, it occasionally scans as a blatant attempt for obvious villains to save face. Bognar and Reichert provide a steady, neutral presence, which obviously helps with access and trust, but their inability to express a strong critical viewpoint becomes a liability. Everyone is human, yes, but when certain individuals have the expressed goal of continually putting workers in harm’s way to save a buck, maybe some are more human than others. 

I walked out of “American Factory” thinking that no one could possibly watch that film and come away believing that unions are anything less than a necessity. Sure enough, two people behind me were talking about how unions “made sense for a time,” but they ultimately bred laziness and stifled innovation. I don’t for a second doubt Bognar and Reichert’s intentions, but because “American Factory” plays to all time zones, it will inevitably confirm whatever pre-conceived biases you already hold. Granted, it’s not the job of “American Factory” to change minds, but at some point, the choice not to take a tougher political stance weakens the film.

“The Hottest August”

Brett Story’s “The Hottest August” technically focuses on the dark specter of the impending global climate disaster through the voices of New Yorkers over the span of a month, but its larger aim is to encapsulate the sense of dread that currently permeates the world. In August 2017, Story traveled across all five boroughs, either going to a specific event in the city or posting up at a single location, to film conversations about “the future.” Different anxieties fill the air—economic, social, racial, political—and the testimonies directly engage with the ineffable sense of catastrophe that feels like it’s lurking around the corner. Sometimes the responses are measured while others are tossed off. Trump’s recent inauguration hangs over the city, not to mention the violent aftermath of Unite the Right rally as well as the solar eclipse, which Story uses as a structural bookend. In between these interviews, actress Clare Coulter provides clinical, semi-otherworldly narration; she reads excerpts from Marx, Zadie Smith, and a “New Yorker” essay by Annie Dillard. Story’s film scans as a long-form exploration of the most chilling line from Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed”: “This social system isn’t built for multiple crises.”

Story and her editor Nels Bangerter visually and aurally communicate the low-grade terror that now fills our lives quite effectively. “The Hottest August” is freewheeling by its very nature, jumping from topic to topic similar to Story’s borough hopping. The collective fear, and the ways in which it’s expressed, mostly keeps the interviews connected. It’s how a young college graduate worried about job prospects can feel in line with middle-aged Staten Island bar patrons discussing racism, even if the expressed anxieties are diametrically opposed. Story lets her subjects talk freely and jumps in to further the conversation or question the answers. (The best example might be when she questions an art collecting hedge fund manager about the value of capitalism.) She encounters these New Yorkers at a critical point, and while all are self-aware about the respective despair, none feel particularly hopeless. Systemic collapse doesn’t necessarily crush individual hope.

Story clearly reverse-engineered “The Hottest August” from the numerous interviews she conducted, and though that’s a valid creative strategy, the project feels unproductively diffuse at times. It lives and dies by the charisma of her subjects, which vary wildly, and certain participants, like a futurist performance artist, just simply aren’t engaging enough to justify the time spent with them. I couldn’t help but wonder if the film would have a stronger impact on me if the scope were limited exclusively to climate change. At the same time, “The Hottest August” succeeds as a portrait of New York in crisis and I can easily see myself coming around to certain digressive elements on a second viewing. It’s a colossal film, one that I predict will be major if distributed, that bottles up our depressing zeitgeist with maximum insight, and yet I still felt underwhelmed. Maybe just living in this culture will do that to you sometimes. 

“Finding Frances”

Though it never occurred to me when it was airing, “Nathan For You,” the satirical docu-reality series co-created by and starring comedian Nathan Fielder, is a perfect fit for True/False. Fielder’s elaborate, counterintuitive marketing proposals for struggling businesses—offering a gas station rebate that’s almost impossible to claim; exploiting the fair use doctrine to rebrand a struggling coffee shop as Dumb Starbucks; using a theatrical construct to help a dive bar get around a smoking ban—always straddled the line between performance art and non-fiction storytelling. Fielder and his team employed many of the principles of documentary filmmaking to pull off their stunts, finding humor in the gaps between their noble-but-misguided intentions and the participants’ willingness to go along with them. “Nathan For You” raises many of the standard philosophical and ethical questions that “serious” documentarians grapple with during their own projects, plus some legal ones as well. (A friend pointed out that Fielder must have kept Comedy Central’s legal team very busy over the course of the series.) All of these qualities make “Nathan For You” pure, unfettered True/False bait.

I won’t restate the plot of “Nathan For You’s” brilliant series finale “Finding Frances” in this space; it’s readily available to stream and you can read multiple recaps or reviews if you wish, including one penned by Errol Morris. However, I will say that watching the film/episode (I’m not getting into this debate) in the Missouri Theatre, where all 1,200 seats were filled with either Fielder acolytes or curious newcomers, was a genuine event. In retrospect, it was a perfect fit for the festival: an audacious crowd-pleaser that not only pushes Fielder’s project to its limit but also vibes neatly with the rest of the programming lineup. It’s no surprise that True/False has apparently been trying to get Fielder to come out to Columbia for some time. Sure enough, the crowd treated Fielder like a rock star when he arrived for the Q&A (the guy sitting next to me jumped to his feet and screamed as if Mick Jagger strolled across the stage). He answered multiple questions in his wonderful deadpan cadence and screened some deleted scenes for the audience. “Finding Frances” illustrates that True/False can indulge in its populist side without abandoning its principles. 

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