Movie Review: The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie that comes with a pedigree, albeit not one rooted in straight-up horror. Director Drew Goddard was a writer for Alias, Lost, Angel and Buffy – The Vampire Slayer, the latter two being franchises created by his co-writer on this movie: Joss Whedon. As I have already declared my devotion to The Whedon recently, I am not getting into it again, but my expectation of snappy dialogue and inventive thrills was met. The movie’s release was massively delayed (by three years) because of bankruptcy of the studio that made it (MGM) and then by a later abandoned plan to convert it to 3D, so you’ll be seeing a surprisingly young, pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth.

The Cabin in the Woods is to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as Scream was to Halloween, although it is less afraid to completely break the format in the end. The viewer is tipped off straightaway that (s)he is watching more than just a generic teen slasher flick, by odd scenes of a couple of scientists who are gearing up for an important day at work. What that work is and how it relates to a small group of teenagers who are getting ready for a weekend of fate-tempting fun at a remote cabin, is not yet clear. I won’t reveal more to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that from then on, there be twist upon twist. Some critics have said that there are in fact a few twists too many and that the entire thing gets a bit ridiculous. Admittedly, I’d be hard-pressed to explain the logic and exact workings of what is going on in the finale and I suspect it doesn’t hang together all that well on closer inspection. But for me, the way that things get hysterical and unapologetically over-the-top near the end is the best thing about the movie. There is a satire here with some moral points to make, but mostly The Cabin in the Woods is about laughs, gore and gallons of blood. It doesn’t expect you to take it at all seriously, just to follow along until its goofy conclusion with a grin on your face. Scares are secondary, and there wasn’t a moment that made me jump in my seat.

If the movie has a fault apart from fuzzy logic, it’s that the constant overlay of irony keeps you at a distance from the characters. You don’t feel all that invested in keeping them alive. That it just as well as it is a given that most (potentially all) of them won’t make it to the finish line, but it does leave you observing more than feeling the horror. Which fits neatly with the framework of the movie, but makes it lack emotional impact. The first third or so of the movie sticks close to horror cliché, necessary to subvert those same cliché’s later on. But on their own, the scenes moving the teenagers into position for bloodshed would have been a bit boring, only holding the attention because of the assurance that something more complex is going on.

This movie is destined to be a classic along the lines of Evil Dead, be it with a bigger budget. The writers have set themselves a bit of a challenge should the studio ask for a sequel, but then I guess a prequel that addresses some of the many questions it leaves viewers with could be interesting. However, it may be better to leave this as a one-off; an innovative pallet cleanser that reminds us that horror doesn’t just have to be a repetitive string of meaningless deaths being dropped off the conveyor belt of entertainment into your local cinema. May The Cabin in the Woods serve as an axe to the atrophied brain of the mainstream torture-porn horror genre and leave it with a fresh perspective when it rises up again. As horror always must: to explore our fascination with death and dying.

Game Review: Saint's Row: The Third

I tend to have a hard time being a bad guy in video games. Whenever there is a choice between doing something moral and something immoral I tend to go with the first, because it helps my feeling of immersion: my character is acting close to the way I imagine I would in similar, far-fetched circumstances. (Even if in reality I’m more likely to hide under the bed hoping the problem will go away.) My aspirations to Heroism and being a Good Guy hold true even if the character I’m being handed is a morally dubious anti-hero, like Niko Bellic from Grand Theft Auto IV. Though the world of GTA IV is that of a gangster movie and definitely larger than life, there still is a kind of grittiness and realism to it. Because of that, I felt bad if my car swerved and accidentally hit an innocent bystander. For the rest of the time, you were mostly killing other criminals so the violence was justified. Sort of. However, any semblance of virtual morality went straight out the window while I was playing Saint’s Row: The Third.

Saint’s Row: The Third is not surprisingly the third installment of a franchise, one which ran parallel to GTA for a while: in both series you play a gangster in a big, sprawling city that is your playground and you can engage in various criminal activities all over the place to your heart’s content. There is a storyline running through the main missions and there are optional activities that can also be played separately from the story as mini-challenges trying to beat your own initial score and to evolve your character while gaining assets. Most GTA games were somewhat serious even if they cracked more of a smile during the San Andreas and The Ballad of Gay Tony incarnations. Saint’s Row started out serious, got goofy in the second installment and in its third outing has cut ties with reality completely and exploded into an orgasmic celebration of absurdity. The game is crass, juvenile and a whole lot of fleeting fun.

It starts at full speed with a spectacular bank heist gone wrong, then sees you skydiving through the length of a plummeting plane and have a gunfight in midair while holding a teammate who is cussing you out for being an inconsiderate asshole. It plays like a parody on action movies. The story boiled down: you want to take over the city of Steelport with your gang and are eliminating competition while fighting the authorities who are trying to take you down. Absolutely no one cares about collateral damage, be it to property or civilians. To call the main concept a story - with a proper beginning, middle and end - is actually giving it too much credit; it’s more like a series of ludicrous vignettes strung together tenuously. Consequences of plot don’t impact your free-reign activities all that much. Early on you get a penthouse for you and your homies, which is later besieged and blown up. However, it is magically restored once the mission in question ends and you can still go out on the town without getting instantly apprehended.

As if the situations you end up in aren’t silly enough as-is, the game encourages you to keep pimping your character to look as odd as possible, making the cutscenes he is placed in look even more crazy. For most of the game, my counterpart was a shirtless, black muscleman with a big dragon tattoo on his chest, runny mascara under his eyes and an odd hat. He proved he could maintain a good sprint while in high heels and carrying a rocket launcher. You can also decide on the look of your gang, making them as outlandish as you feel like. However, the design of your main sidekicks, who follow you on the story missions and feature in the cutscenes, is non-negotiable and interestingly, the game does manage to make you care about them a little bit at least among the vague suggestions of a plot. This is because the voice-acting is decent and though some of the jokes fall flat, a lot of the dialogue is at least smile-worthy. I didn’t use the ‘default’ voice offered for my alter-ego, but selected one (‘Male Voice 2’) that seemed to fit better with my look as described, so I can’t judge on the quality of the other leads. The game offers three male options, three female ones and there is even a ‘zombie’ voice option, making you simply groan unintelligibly whenever you would normally speak. Have I mentioned yet that the game doesn’t take itself seriously? Special voice acting mention goes out to the woman playing the nasally radio newscaster who always reads out a drily comical synopsis of whatever crazy event just happened.

Identification with your alter-ego gets a bit complicated as he comes with a spinning moral compass. On the surface, he seems a charismatic and friendly guy who cares about and is loyal to his sidekicks. Undeniably, however, he is a drugs and arms dealing pimp and a gang leader who slaughters untold numbers of innocents in pursuit of his self-interest, without a second thought. Mass murdering psychopath just about covers it. The general populace in Steelport seems to have extremely mixed and fluid feelings about him and his gang The Saints: one moment he is a hero, the next a menace and back again. There are stores selling Saints merchandise in the game, which is likely supposed to be a cynical comment on fame.

Given the overall tone and the fact that you are being handed toys to cause mayhem on a grand scale at every turn, it is nearly impossible to resist the cathartic urge to cut loose and act like a supervillain. I bought the game during a Steam sale, bundled with some extra DLC. Among other things, I was handed a bonus car that sucks up people when you bump into them and then allows you to shoot them out from a cannon mounted to the top and a gun that shoots chum, causing a shark to burst out from the ground underneath, dragging whatever victim I was aiming at down implausibly. The game is good at delivering these short-lived visceral thrills, throwing as many of them at you as it can come up with, terrified that you will get bored. And indeed, you are always veering between excitement and boredom because a lot of it seems a bit pointless. The main missions keep throwing stuff at you as a reward, adding cars, planes, weapons, outfits, allies and strongholds to your inventory and some of these can be upgraded to be even more cool, but it starts to feel like overkill. There is much more stuff than there is use for. And the mini-challenges that are left for you to take part in all across the city once the main story runs out, lack a purpose. You’ll level up your character, take over more of the city and get even more money to buy even more stuff, but for what? The pacing seems off, the game giving you a bit too much, too soon. On the other hand, if you enjoy the game as just a violent, crazy sandbox with plenty of options to act out in, without any real context, that is what the game provides pretty much from the beginning.

Though this caricature world of bimbo’s and himbo’s is ultimately somewhat insubstantial, I did have a great time playing around in it. The fact that I finished the main missions, unlike during my GTA experiences, is an indication of that. I kept being curious about what weird stuff they would come up with next. Because it doesn’t take itself the least bit serious, I could feel guilt-free about giving in to my more Evil and destructive side. Fans of lamely funny, politically incorrect humor, bizarre flights of fancy and incoherent action will definitely get their money’s worth. It’s a shame that the narrative – such as it is – hits a brick wall ultimately: it ends with little advance warning and plenty of dangling plot threads. Probably the intent is to wrap it up in a sequel or with DLC. (EDIT: Actually, I just realized that there is an alternate ending (SPOILERS) that does provide more closure, but requires you to make a painful sacrifice.) As for how long you’ll stick around once you’ve finished the main campaign and tried all the different types of activities once or twice – probably not that long. But Saint’s Row: The Third makes for a fun and imaginative walk on the wild side while it lasts.

Movie Review: Prometheus

The scifi-horror movie Prometheus didn’t lack hype due to a very good trailer and the reunion of Ridley Scott with the Alien franchise he himself launched. What exactly the story would be was a source of much speculation. One early rumor had him rebooting the Alien-saga halfway by picking up where the second movie (James Cameron’s Aliens) left off, another had him making a prequel, explaining how the crashed spaceship that played a role in the first two movies ended up on the planet with the doomed colonists. As it happens, even after watching it, I still am not quite sure how exactly the movie ties in to the franchise. It’s indeed a prequel going by the year in which things happen and it does give some vague background on the species that crashed the spaceship, but for the rest, it’s speculation ahoy.

The condensed surface story, under which metaphors lurk: the ever-morally-ambiguous Weyland Corporation dispatches a team to investigate a faraway solar system which may give a clue on the origin of mankind. Two bright-eyed scientists whose discovery got the ball rolling, soon find out there is nefarious scheming going on and that on this mission scientific discovery is taking a back-seat or rather that it is clinging precariously to the back bumper. As one might suspect, soon everybody is in way over their heads and said heads start taking a fair amount of graphic abuse, thinning out the cast severely. In a way, the characters are asking for it as they seem to be averse to safety measures, taking off their helmets in an alien environment because it ‘seems’ safe (microbiologists will cringe), are not especially strict with quarantine and enjoy playfully teasing unknown local wildlife in a way that not surprisingly proves to be unwise. And there’s an android named David who delights in poking and prodding ancient devices without pondering the possible consequences even a little, or maybe he just doesn’t give a toss.

Prometheus starts off well and atmospheric, slowly building tension. It’s when things turns more action-packed later on that the story comes apart at the seams. I think there are two main problems. First off: the movie is bad at handling its characters. They often come across as empty vessels for the plot, behaving as they need to for the movie to end the way it does, rather than organically, taking into account logic and personality. Then again, a fair amount of the characters barely have a personality, some being so flat it’s surprising the actors manage to stay upright. The relationships between characters are also a bit sketchy. For instance, at one point noble sacrifices are made based on sparse information given by someone whose trust didn’t seem earned. (Spoilers prevent me from being more clear.) The person filling in the ‘Ripley’ role here, can’t live up to that iconic status and I am not at all sure why Guy Pearce is in the movie in dodgy old-person make-up, when it seems they could have just cast someone actually old. I’m sure there must have been a reason. As it stands, Michael Fassbender steals the show as the creepy but fascinating David, with corporate, cold-hearted Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and charming captain Janek (Idris Elba, television’s Luther) coming in not too far behind.

The second problem is that the movie is clumsy at imparting information. Towards the end, the viewer is getting clued in about the explanation for what it going on by various characters blurting out bits of exposition. It’s not always clear how they came about their information, other than making intuitive leaps or maybe attending a not-pictured general meeting in which the crew pieced things together. However, when all is said and done, the reveal doesn’t reveal nearly enough, leaving you with a multitude of questions, about both details and the big picture. ‘But if… then how….? And why…?’ To be fair: this may have been the intent. There is enough Obvious Symbolism scattered throughout, mostly concerning Religion and Good and Evil, that it invites looking beyond the surface and speculating. The first scene of the movie doesn’t even make sense unless you go beyond what you’re being told directly. However, a more coherent and convincing surface, would have inspired more motivation to look beyond it.

Despite me being so down on Prometheus, I do recommend it, especially on a large screen in 3D. There are beautiful visuals, there is some impressive action and there are interesting concepts. Just be prepared for the storytelling to be a bit of a mess, nowhere near as simple and creepy as that of Alien and, for that matter, nowhere near as tight and streamlined as that of Aliens. It is frustrating because it feels like there is a better movie hiding inside of this one. I suspect a lot was left on the cutting room floor (speaking in ancient celluloid terms) and that at some point there may be a (much) longer version which fleshes out characters and explains apparent lapses in logic and story. But even then, there will remain some crucial moments that teeter on the edge of silliness, in particular a scene involving a nigh-magical Operate-Thyself machine, which seemingly is able to perform almost any emergency surgical procedure without having a doctor around. It is mentioned only a few were made (Why? It was too useful and life-saving?) and it is also mentioned that it is configured for a man even though the owner is Theron’s character, presumably a woman. Or is she? Oh, so many unanswered questions…

Ps: if you have seen the movie and want some answers look here. (Contains spoilers of course.)

Movie Review: The Avengers

Before I start this review in earnest, I need to confess to something: I am a Whedonite. A follower of The Whedon and all things Whedonesque. Who is this Whedon, you ask? Oh, you silly agnostic. He is Joss Whedon, the semi-deity who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, spin-off Angel, the two short-lived series Firefly and Dollhouse and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. More recently he wrote the post-modern horror movie The Cabin in the Woods and directed some of his favorite buddy-actors in Much Ado About Nothing. Hallowed be his scripts. I am not following blindly however. I have to admit that I never quite swallowed the basic concept behind Dollhouse, for instance. (Why would you implant personalities in people when it would be easier to hire an expert for whatever task was at hand? And how were clients finding the Dollhouse, if it was so top-top secret that even government organizations couldn’t track it down? But I digress.) And I do have to admit that his characters tend to share one ‘voice’: they pretty much always have a quick wit and a snappy turn of phrase. But though a world full of cunning linguists doesn’t quite jibe with reality, it does make for very entertaining and quotable viewing.

He has had somewhat of an odd career, worshipped by a considerable if not huge amount of people but waylaid at crucial points by tv executives (who summarily executed his most loved project Firefly long before its time) and by movie-producers manhandling his drafts of scripts (as with Alien Resurrection and X-Men). On the basis of quality, his massive movie breakthrough should have been the scifi movie Serenity, which somewhat unusually wrapped up a story started in a tv-series (Firefly again), but could also be enjoyed as a stand-alone. It was everything the new Star Wars movies should have been but weren’t: funny, smart and full of interesting characters. Alas, it didn’t do so well at the box office, despite fanatic support from fans. A movie based on a failed tv series without major stars was apparently too hard a sell, Whedon attached or no.

I am not sure how he ended up writing the screenplay for and then directing The Avengers, but looking back on it, it makes oodles upon oodles of sense. Whedon is a confirmed pop culture nerd and has experience working on comics, writing and plotting for titles such as The Astonishing X-Men, Runaways, the comic book sequel to Buffy and his own creation Fray. He is great at bringing the funny, at fantastical stories and at juggling a lot of characters without short-changing any of them. He also know how to nail the core of a character with just a quick scene or two and a minimum of inelegant info-dumping, a big plus in the fast-paced superhero action-genre. And he has experience shooting a technically complex movie. Without him, The Avengers could easily have turned into one of those flat, boring exercises in kinetic energy along the lines of the truly bad Transformers sequels.

Despite the movie being nearly two-and-a-half hours, it never bores or feels long. Action sequences and character moments alternate and even merge with impeccable timing and when the superlative and destructive finale rolls around, you are invested in the mayhem because you like and feel for the characters who got caught up in it. Though all of the Avengers get enough attention, Iron Man clearly comes off best. This is not surprising, given that Robert Downey Jr. does well with fast and witty dialogue (also see his stint as Sherlock Holmes) and Joss Whedon loves to write it. Iron Man and members of the team who already had their backstory told in a previous movie, get a quick recap sneaked in and some extra character development, but nothing major. The movie properly introduces Black Widow (who had a supporting role in Iron Man 2) and arrow-slinging Hawkeye. I wouldn’t be surprised if a prequel giving us the alluded-to backstory on these two is already in the works. Mostly the film delights in having its cast of superpowered heroes bounce off each other (sometimes literally) and ultimately forming a team.

That’s not to say there are no weak spots. The bad guys are a bit *shrug*. Loki (imported from the Thor movie) admittedly makes for an entertaining baddie, even if the details of his plan remain somewhat vague. But his alien collaborators lack personality and don’t evolve beyond a visually pleasing narrative device needed to get the action going. But then, in an already long movie overstuffed with personalities, short-handing the bad guys’ evil scheme was the right call. This movie is about the team rather than the threat-of-the-day. And within its fantasy-action framework, the movie manages to be fairly believable. Ultimately, the only time I really rolled my eyes at something was when the Hulk turned out to simply need a pep-talk from Iron Man to get his transformations under control. But this was more than compensated for soon after by a short and mostly wordless scene in which the Hulk confronted Loki in his own unique way, which actually left me giggling helplessly in my seat. (Whedon is also known for setting up a scene in one way and then turning it on its head to surprise you or make you laugh, subverting your expectations.)

This team-movie does an impressive job of tying together the previous solo-movies without it seeming forced; it’s a neat trick that hasn’t been done before. Where the franchise goes from here will be interesting to see. And it will definitely be going somewhere as the movie is already close to becoming the highest-grossing movie ever. In the comics, there are various heroes on the roster who occasionally get switched out to shake things up and create a new dynamic. I foresee some members getting more solo-movies (Hawkeye & Black Widow, please) and a new member or two being added to the inevitable The Avengers sequel. For instance – both Spiderman and Wolverine were part of the team at some point in the printed universe. Iron Man, Spiderman and Wolverine, now there’s a combo I am sure Joss Whedon would love to write for and one that I would love to see.

PS: I have mentioned before that I don’t like extra scenes added at the end of the credits, which require you to hang around until the people coming in to clean for the next showing start giving you judgmental looks. (“Oh right, you’re one of those sad, completist nerds who keep informed about these things.”) A lot of the previous Marvel movies were guilty of this. However, it’s even worse when there turns out to actually be no extra scene. I duly stayed behind because I’d read that after the mid-credit bonus scene, there would be a second bonus scene at the very end. But alas, ‘my’ copy lacked this scene. (But at least there’s YouTube to show me the excitement I missed.)

Game Review: Mass Effect 3

So – my Shepard’s tale is done. The intrepid space hero wore a face I shaped for him, all throughout Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 and had his talents honed in accordance to my wishes. The decisions I made for him, followed him from one game to the next, impacting his own fate and that of the people around him, making his particular heroic journey (slightly) different than that of thousands of other Shepards. And like all those other Shepards – be they male or female, hard-ass renegade or noble paragon – he saved the universe. Sort of. It was under threat from something called the Reapers, you see, who had a nasty habit of wiping out all the advanced civilizations in the galaxy every once in a long while. The first game had me discovering their existence, in the second game I joined a shady organization to stop their first incursion and in the third game I inevitably ended up kicking the Reapers’ ass just as total extinction loomed.

Developer BioWare did a great job of telling an epic scifi tale, spanning three games, that could be shaped by the player, even if all the tales moved through a lot of the same events and ultimately ended up in the same place. A giant roster of interesting and mostly likeable characters followed you along, their number growing as you progressed, some of them falling by the wayside as a result of decisions you made. Sometimes these decisions were made in an earlier game, meaning a serious investment of time if you’d want to go back and correct them. I was lucky in that the only comrades I lost all went by way of noble sacrifice rather than anything simply tragic. (For which there is ample opportunity, which I only realized after watching different possible outcomes of events on YouTube.) To be fair, the third game doesn’t add a lot of new characters, mostly reintroducing the survivors from the first game as playable ones and giving all – yes, ALL – of your surviving former squad mates from the second game a cameo and providing satisfying closure to their stories in one way or another. As I didn’t lose anyone from that second game, it turned into quite the reunion in my version of the story, familiar faces popping up at every turn.

The few new characters Mass Effect 3 adds are mostly a bit ‘meh’. There’s a gung-ho, boring muscleman, there’s a somewhat arrogant and obnoxious alien you can only acquire by buying separately as downloadable content and there’s an AI (artificial intellicence) who is the most interesting and funny (semi-)new addition. There are also new people on board of your trusty spaceship The Normandy whom you don’t control as part of your squad who but who you interact with and potentially romance through conversation. Among these is a first for the series: a gay male love interest. Your shuttle-pilot Steve Cortez lost a husband tragically and is yours to emotionally support and then to roll around with if you feel like it. Though you could romance a woman as a female Shepard (FemShep in fan-slang) in part 2, supposedly a gay male romance option couldn’t be worked in due to logistical and time-constraints according to BioWare. But giving in to the criticism that it can’t be that much work to switch around some pronouns in a cut-scene that for the rest just switches out participants, they have now remedied the situation. There is a second and more interesting gay male romance option as well: if Kaiden Alenko survived your version of Mass Effect 1, you can move on from comrade-in-arms bromance to full-on romance, despite him not showing any interest of the kind back then. Unlike Cortez he is not gay-all-the-way however and can also be romanced if playing as FemShep. There was a predictable outcry from sexually insecure gamers and right-wing, nutbag ‘family groups’ who felt violated somehow that a character would matter-of-factly state same-sex interest and when shown enough friendliness even make a polite pass at the player. Thankfully, there was an equally strong backlash telling these people to shut the fuck up and just not go down that completely optional path. Which actually rings true for real-life as well.

Though Mass Effect 3 is mostly the pay-off to part 2’s set-up and these two very similar parts are stronger when seen as a whole, there are some minor changes to the gameplay. There is no more boring scanning of planets, looking for rocks and minerals to upgrade your equipment, though the same galaxy map is now used to make you scan for War Assets, needed to increase your forces against the coming Reaper invasion. While somewhat amusing for a minute or two, it feels like padding and a waste of time. Further streamlining to just the best bits would have been welcome. The hacking mini-game was thankfully ditched and there are more options to upgrade weapons this go-around, bringing back elements from the more fiddly and RPG-oriented Mass Effect 1. There were also a few more minor recurring bugs to contend with: Shepard would occasionally ignore one of my commands and had a tendency to stick to cover unintentionally when moving around the battlefield.

A new multiplayer mode lets you fight with friends against hordes of enemies from the Mass Effect universe. As I tend to have zero interest in multiplayer unless it’s local split-screen, it was annoying that BioWare linked these modes to the single-player campaign. To get the highest score and therefore the ‘best’ ending to your tale, it helped to either play the multiplayer or to play one or two not-all-that-great side games available on the iOs operating system. Doing this gave you a score-multiplier in your single-player game. I can see how a developer would want to give players a gentle nudge to try out all aspects of their franchise and acquire add-ons, but it seems very wrong to practically force players into a multi-platform experience and to fuse a multiplayer element into their singleplayer game. I do hope that this mixing won’t become a trend: I mostly like my games to be a solo experience and presented as a complete, self-contained package.

Publisher Electronic Arts (EA) and BioWare got flack for the above but also for some other dubious practices: Mass Effect 3 has an ’extra’ available character for your squad with associated missions, who could be bought as downloadable content the day the game was released. The base code for this content was already present in the released game. Admittedly, there is time between the development wrapping up and the distribution of a game and BioWare’s/EA’s defence has been that the time was needed to complete the programming on it. But if the content is integral (if not crucial) to the main game, it is not surprising that you alienate fans who bought the game full-price as soon as it was released and now have to shell out even more for the ‘complete’ experience straight away.

With Mass Effect 3, as with most other games these days, it seems that most loyal, eager fans actually got the worst deal. It’s common for gaming companies to reward early buyers, to make sure they buy the game full-price, rather than wait a few months to get it massively priced down (as generally happens with games). But it’s becoming pretty much standard practice that releases are rushed out the door while still containing a fair amount of bugs, which may do things like corrupt your game-saves or crash your game, requiring downloadable patches to be installed to fix them. In the case of Mass Effect 3 there was a bug that caused people who created their own look for the lead character in Mass Effect 1 and then carried it over to the other games, being unable to import ‘their’ face. (An odd oversight, considering that bringing along ‘your’ character through the entire trilogy was a big selling point.) I also ran into this problem and though it possibly shows how much of a nerd I am, I put off playing the game until the issue was (mostly) fixed, not willing to play on with a character who didn’t look like ‘my’ Shepard. By the time BioWare corrected the error, I could have bought the game a lot cheaper. The most logical thing gamers can do to not support this pay-the-most-get-the-worst system, is to wait out the inevitable bug fixes and then buy the game for less. However, as hype tends to rule and people are impatient, I don’t expect the system to change.

Business gripes aside, I love the mostly serious, sometimes silly and generally cheesy Mass Effect universe. There is a lot of attention to storytelling detail and effort made to build something that feels alive even outside of your own story. For example: as you walk around the space station called The Citadel, you will hear snippets of random conversations a you pass chatting couples. Each time you pass a particular set (who will remain lingering in the same place bizarrely even when you leave for a long period of time), the conversation will advance a little, until you’ve heard their whole story which possibly includes a surprise or twist. (After which, again somewhat bizarrely, the conversation loops back to the beginning.) You do have to be on your guard and take every chance you get to start up a conversation, be it with strangers or your crew. I accidentally dropped out of my by then ‘long-term relationship’ with the blue-skinned Liara, dating back to Mass Effect 1 (literally), because I missed a meeting in which I was supposed to reaffirm it and I was mightily confused when she started acting distant. I could only fix it by going back and replaying a few missons.

There has been backlash about the ending(s) to the main plot, which is being remedied by BioWare releasing free downloadable content to expand on it, explaining things a bit more. I am curious to see what they’ll do and have to agree that the entire climax narratively disintegrates when exposed to logic, but ‘my’ ending contained a visual so massively, lovingly cheesy in a sci-fi-from-the-50’s kind of way, that I was able to forgive the shortcomings. I am tempted to replay the games as a renegade kick-ass FemShep, instead of my paragon, noble male Shepard, making different decisions, but as I pretty much got the best result the first time around and it would be a massive time investment, I doubt I’ll get around to it. When it comes to exploring alternate outcomes in alternate realities, thankfully there are rabid fans who have put it all on YouTube. Farewell Shepard, it was great being you.

Movie Review: We Were Here

Imagine finding a vague and disturbing piece of paper stuck to the window of your local pharmacy, showing pictures of mysterious dark splotches on a man’s skin, warning you that something bad is doing the rounds. Imagine more and more people around you – friends, colleagues, partners, family, the guy serving you coffee at your local diner - starting to get these markings and dying soon thereafter. It’s unclear what is causing this sickness or how you get it, just that it seems to be mostly hitting the gay community you are part of. There is no cure, no treatment. If it turns out you are infected, you will inevitably end up in a medical facility, where a brave but desperate group of nurses and volunteer caretakers will try to ease your pain as you lie dying, wasting away to nothing. Paranoia reigns about any kind of intimate physical contact and you start to dread getting calls from friends, fearing to hear that yet another one of them is headed towards an early death, leaving you even more alone and reminding you that you may be next. This isn’t the plot to a horror movie, this is suddenly your life. It’s San Francisco during the eighties and something called AIDS – initially called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) - is turning into an epidemic.

The documentary We Were Here? tells the story of this traumatic period through interviews with people who each experienced it from their own unique perspective. There’s Daniel Goldstein, for instance, a man who lost countless friends and two lovers, got HIV himself but survived through luck and determination. There’s Ed Wolf, who by chance managed to dodge the disease and volunteered as a buddy for the dying. There’s Guy Clark, who owned a flower shop and ended up doing way too many funerals. The interviews are intercut with old film footage and pictures of men initially smiling and care-free, with no idea what is about to hit them.

Rather than getting too deeply into the medical details or the political aspects, the documentary is primarily a portrait of the San Francisco gay community as it got battered by the catastrophic epidemic, lost many of its members, pulled together stronger than ever before and ultimately managed to overcome. It puts a face on something that those who did not go through are tempted to repress, because AIDS and HIV put a damper on the still relatively new-found sexual liberation of gay men. Now that HIV is more a chronic disease rather than a quick killer, we want to forget how much this disease cost our community and get on with our lives. But it’s good that this documentary exists as a tribute to the generation of gay men who were hit the hardest, those who didn’t survive until the first retro-virals started to appear.

I saw this movie in a theater as part of a gay and lesbian movie festival and the audience and me were completely absorbed by it. There was deep silence as people listened intently, there were relieved bursts of laughter at the occasional sassy turn of phrase and there were a whole lot of barely contained sobs as the tale was told. We Were Here draws you in and puts you through the wringer, but you feel better for the experience. By the end you’ll want to hug the people who made themselves vulnerable and poured their heart out to you in the interviews. It’s a great documentary and should not be missed.

Movie Review: Skoonheid / Beauty

Skoonheid (Beauty)is a movie about South-African ‘Boer’ Francois van Heerden who forms an unhealthy obsession with his attractive, twenty-something nephew. The viewer follows Francois as he lives his frustrating life: saddled with a woman and a daughter he does not seem to particularly care for, working at the wood mill he owns, occasionally hooking up with other closeted gay men in the area for what is depicted as very mundane and depressing group sex. We see that he feels disconnected: both from his family life and from gay men who are open about their sexuality. The viewer gets a knot in his stomach watching his awkward attempts to get closer to his nephew, knowing that this is going to end badly for one or both of them.

Skoonheid is interesting and has a complex central character who holds you attention even as he ultimately repulses, but the movie is agonizingly slow. I checked my watch twice to see how close Skoonheid was getting to the end of its advertised 105 minutes runtime, which is not a good sign. When painting a mood picture, rather than putting together a heavily plotted piece, it’s not always clear when you’re ‘done’, because structure doesn’t provide much in the way of guidance. In this case, less would have been more: there are scenes that seem to hit the same notes a few too many times. Despite this, the movie manages to stay narratively vague: even though we are observing Francois up close and personal, what is going through his mind remains a mystery at some crucial points. And it’s not just what’s happening in his mind that is sometimes unclear. There are a few ambiguous scenes at the end of the movie, that leave you guessing as to what is actually going on because you are deliberately not being given complete information.

Art-house movies sometimes get a bad rep for being boring and pretentious and up to a certain point, Skoonheid is guilty of these sins. But it offers up an interesting character study and gives more food for thought than your average generic blockbuster. Its open-to-interpretation later scenes may frustrate, but it’s worth seeing once. And then likely never again.