Mid-Year Updates 2009

It's fourth of July weekend (American Independence Day) and I'm taking it easy; finally catching up on updating some old posts that I promised myself I'd get around to.

First off is my 2008 year-end list. I've seen more than a dozen 2008 films since then (I've had time, what with 2009's output merely sputtering along) and it's been enough for me to upgrade my assessment of the year. There are now excellent films like “Doubt,” “Milk” and “The Dark Knight” that I didn’t even have room for on my new top ten, whereas before I didn’t have a shred of anxiety about what to cut. In retrospect, I think “Synecdoche New York” was easily the best film of the year, and I’ll never doubt Charlie Kaufman again. I missed it in theaters because I’d read some negative reviews, by critics who I will utterly ignore in the future.

Here is the updated 2008 year-end top 10. Scroll to the bottom of it for the new material.

The biggest change has been to my year-by-year list of favorite science fiction films (The Golden Walruses: SF Edition). I’ve added more than 60 new films, bringing the total well over 500, and updated the rankings accordingly. The most noticeable batch is under 2008, which is now officially open. I’m also still [vainly] hoping to get some ballots from readers, so if you’re into SF and want to put together a list, I’m pathetically eager to peruse it!

I’ve also made watching films by female directors my latest obsessive focuses, and I’m looking forward to a potential blogathon on the topic near the end of August (to coincide with the anniversary of the 19th amendment). I’m made a bunch of updates to my list of personal favorite films directed by women, found at the end of this semi-recent post.

Some of the best new-comers include “Take Care of My Cat” (I stupidly missed a chance to see for free during a South Korean film series), “Fat Girl” (which manages to combine a bittersweet realist tone and an in-your-face controversy-courting attitude) and “Madchen in Uniform” (a 1930’s film that’s at least 40 years ahead of its time and gorgeous looking even on the scrappy transfers that survive). I also put “After the Wedding” on the list, as even though it might not be a masterpiece, Susanne Bier definitely strikes me as a director to watch. I’ve had a few disappointments: I was absolutely sure I would like Marguerite Dumas’s well-regarded but rarely-seen “India Song” (1975) and Samira Makhmalbaf’s brave “Blackboards” (2000), but neither really connected with me.

Lastly, for those who tolerate my sense of humor, I wrote a Grump Factory post a while back on one of the worst (or best?) videogames ever made.

Anyway, I hope everyone’s year is going well. And for those American readers out there, enjoy the holiday!

Cineplexity Board Game

When I’m not wasting my youth watching movies I often enjoy wasting it on videogames. I’ve been a proud gamer since my wee years and I’m convinced that, at their best, they represent the highest potential of art and entertainment. Some paragons have enough story to rival novels, design elements packed with inspiration and ingenuity and an interactive cinematic experience far beyond the limitations of the theater. Of course, most just involve shooting 12 trillion Nazi cyborgs, collecting a hundred of something arbitrary or clicking on jewels really fast.

If you dig through my archives to the early days, you’ll find [probably broken links to] a couple of videogame projects that I’ve programmed as hobbies. I also write the odd videogame review every once in a while, hosted on The Grump Factory.

I’m predominantly an offline gamer, but I still enjoy the mild social buzz of human contact and it finds an outlet in the related world of board games. I’m a diehard Eurogamer, preferring foreign imports with healthy doses of strategy, tactics and balance. Some of my favorites include Tigris and Euphrates, YINSH, Puerto Rico, Bug House (a four-player chess variant), Princes of Florence, Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan and Munchkin. I’ve recently been giving the zombie game Last Night on Earth a whirl.

Today I’m going to mention a newish (2007) board game, though since I haven’t bought or played it before, I won’t be doing an actual review. However, this one is probably a hell of a lot more fun than the last board game I reviewed.

Katie is the one who first told me about “Cineplexity,” a game by Out of the Box, the insanely successful creators of “Apples to Apples.” The idea is very simple: you flip two cards with things like settings, themes and actors and the first person who can name a movie with both elements wins a point. This concept has a lot of appeal for cinephiles like me, because I already play a simplified variant where people try to have relevant conversations with me and I keep saying things like, “That’s just like in Time Bandits,” or “If you like issuing speeding tickets so much, you should see Electra Glide in Blue.”

However, much like “Apples to Apples” the game is so simple there’s no reason to run yourself into the poorhouse by shelving out 25 bucks (an honestly very reasonable price). Katie and I have had a lot of DIY fun with a pack of index cards and a pen, creating our own Film-Walrus-skewed version of Cineplexity. We play our tailor-made copy without any real point system and with the only house rule that you can’t repeat any title until we’ve gone through the whole deck.

Aside from the usual genres, our deck has cards like Giallo, Eastern European, Iconic Hat, B-Movie, Memorable Mustache, Pretentiousness, Cast Against Type, Gorgeous Cinematography, Overt Symbolism, One-Word Titles, Directed by a Hack, Gore, Dream Sequence and Medical Thrills (along with their Psychological, Corporate, Legal and Erotic cousins). We’ve also thrown in a bunch of meta cards like “Embarrassed to have seen,” “Must start with the same letter as the last movie named,” “Can quote from memory,” “Must be able to name at least three cast members” and “Sounds like a porn title” (an admittedly debatable qualification).

For all I know some of these may already be part of the store-version Cineplexity. It has a truly impressive 500+ card deck, whereas my homemade edition runs just over 130.The game has gotten mixed reviews, but I’m sure it’s worthwhile for any fun-loving film ring out there. Its entertaining, scales easily with time and has all the social, interactive, creative, trivia-based and conversation-starting attributes that Amerigamers love and I usually scoff at (though not in this case). If anyone has already checked this out, or does so in the future, let me know if I should buy in.

Format War Ends: Blu-Ray Victorious

Early this morning, February 19th, 2007, Toshiba announced that it would discontinue making and marketing HD-DVD technology, thus officially ending what may be the last media format war in history. Church bells around the country ring out to celebrate the international digital media peace pact, but in the trenches and battlefields of the consumer market, many customers are left crippled or dying. For some, the news comes as a joy just to see the hostilities desist, regardless of the winner. For still others, the armistice has little meaning, signaling the end of a war almost as remote and vaguely-understood to the average person as the Persian Gulf Wars (there was more than one?).

Should you care? No. Well, yes… maybe a little. While the smoke clears and the corporate soldiers collect their spoils, I’d like to share some ruminations and remembrances.

The High-Definition Format War (HDFW) was notable less for its physical carnage, high body count and strategic maneuvering than for its devastating psychological effects on the hearts and minds of our nation. Die-hard enthusiasts led somewhat feeble armies against each other, emerging as heroes or martyrs in their own minds, but generally serving only to drive the civilian populace into the suburban hills, where they held out until the fighting had ceased. Most could hardly distinguish the red-coats from the blu-coats and didn’t care to get involved.

Blu-Ray was marginally technologically and tactically superior. HD-DVD had safer supply lines and more industrial backing, but suffered due to a recruitment and ally shortage. Blu-Ray had higher capacity per layer and faster bitrates for data transferring, but the cost per disc was slightly higher (on the order of about 10 cents) and the cost for switching over the manufacturing plants and menu/feature programmers added more. HD-DVD was smart enough to go region-free and was cheaper, but had no technological advantage.

It is thus somewhat surprising, though hardly sad, that Blu-Ray won out. Cheaper usually makes all the difference to the largely uncaring public. This is why there is a McDonald’s on every corner, but your Uncle’s burger joint went out of business. It’s why we were stuck squinting at Gameboys when the Lynx had backlighting, power-save, more colors and support for left-handed players (I’m still not over that one). Perhaps more relevantly, it’s why all we now have VHS’s gathering dust in our closet shelves when we could be having Betamaxes gathering moon-dust on our private space-yachts (OK, OK, it didn’t really set us back that much). The best news, though, is that Blu-Ray’s one major disadvantage is fleeting. The higher cost is largely transitional, and the second wave is expected to drop in price. (If we continue to get gouged it’s because Sony hates us, not because it is actually costing them a fortune.)

Every war does have its victims, but at least this time it wasn’t the children. Toshiba, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and countless consensual consumers can be counted amongst the causalities. Yet in the economic arena, war is often quite lucrative. Movie industry companies along the volatile HDFW border, like Netflix, Blockbuster and the studios HAD to choose sides (or at least bite the bullet and support both), but the civilian population was never drafted. For once the cowardly and the shell-shocked behaved exactly like the savvy and simply laid low. Meanwhile the arms race led to better arms, and we got all sorts of ancillary perks we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Forced to compete in a macabre fight to the death, technology continued to improve, new coatings increased durability and hardware costs dove. You just didn’t see that back in VHSnam where technological turnaround wasn’t fast or practical.

So if there is reason to care, I’d say there’s reason to celebrate. Proudly wave a flag, any flag, and don’t mind if a couple of jaded vets are still licking their wounds. Still… I’m guessing that the victory will be short-lived, that the fireworks will soon fizzle and that, a decade from now, the survivors will not bother to bore their grandchildren with war stories. The reason? Formats are becoming as irrelevant as swordsmen in a battle between satellites exchanging missiles.

Digital storage just means a pile of 1s and 0s. You can put those just about anywhere and exchange them rather quickly. They can skip just about every step that used to involve factories, warehouses, stores and computer drives. I suspect that before another format war can ravage the land, downloadable content will have pacified the proletariat and sent the warlords packing. Thumb-drives are already making HDFW capacity propaganda seem as silly as VD prevention videos in WWII. Sony should shower in gemstones why they can, because the decline of the format empire is just around the corner.

Ramble on 2007

2007 was a good year. I’m still putting together my top ten (there are two films still in theaters that I need to catch up on before I finish), but I can already tell that 2007’s crop has been better than the last few. Particularly exciting is that American films made a fine showing and, in my own opinion, genre films may an admirable comeback. There were luminaries in action, western, musical and comedy and some strong rumbles in sci-fi and horror. We’ll sort through all that later!

Anyway, the holiday found me traveling back home to Kansas to spend time with the family. The relaxation has extended past my return and I’ve been pleasantly immersed in my typical entertainment triforce: books, movies and videogames.

I’ve found that with limited free time, one can only have two obsessive hobbies running in full gear and for me the balance shifts around every few months. This is especially true when a programming project pops into my head and consumes all of my time and attention for several weeks (much to the dismay of Katie). I spent a weekend two weeks back writing a Bayesian spam filter that read movie reviews and DVD descriptions and tells me whether I will like the film. I’m still tweaking the guy a little bit, but I’ll try and write something up on it eventually. I’ve also been sucked into “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” and massive historical-fiction/fantasy novel about a pair of English magicians in Napoleonic era. It won just about universal praise including the Time book-of-the-year in 2004 and the Hugo award. If I can overcome the lack of momentum, I’ll write something for the Book Walrus.

However, my recent dip in movie watching and writing has been primarily due to a wave of videogame playing. If 2007 was a good year for films, it was a stellar year for games and almost every next generation system had some gems. After much deliberation, Katie and I got a Wii this year and we’ve been enjoying light fare like “Elebits,” simulated-surgery via “Trauma Center: Second Opinion” (courtesy of Mad Dog), hardcore puzzle-solving in “Mercury Meltdown Revolution” and the sublimely balanced and innovative platformer “Super Mario Galaxies.” The Xbox 360 and PS3 have seen, arguably, even bigger shares of great releases and I’m actually excited about titles on all the systems, especially “BioShock.”

I’ve also caught up with some slightly older games like “Zelda: Twilight Princess” and “God of War,” both superb games that probably had a wee bit too much hype. After missing the boat by a long shot, I’m now a hardcore acolyte of “Resident Evil 4” from a series that had always felt like a second-fiddle, light-weight “Silent Hill” in the past. I also got a chance to play “Portal” (part of the Orange Box) by Valve. It is puzzle FPS with no real enemies and while it was sadly on the short side, I loved its writing and sense of humor (best end credits song ever).

I’m excited about catching up on games and books so I might forewarn that I don’t intend to update the Film Walrus quite as often for a while. One of my New Years resolutions is to practice writing shorter pieces, which might help me keep up a better rate. I’ve come to realize that being concise is a skill, not a deficiency, and I think my reviews could be more digestible if it didn’t drone on so long. To keep my quill primed, I might do some videogame reviews as I go and you can expect them to land on the Grump Factory.

In closing, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year. I know I did. There is nothing quite so exciting and pleasurable as a masterpiece deluge, and having a surfeit of prospects on three different mediums should continue to happily consume my free time.

To all my regular and semi-regular readers out there, thanks for your support and comments! You’ve helped drive me to work hard on the Film Walrus and I look forward to another year of blogging in 2008. Best wishes!

Free Puzzle Game Development Environment

This week has been a busy one for me, finishing up final projects for my last year of college. One of the biggest time investments has been for my class called “Motion Planning” (algorithms for robot guidance) for which I did a particularly interesting project: a development suite for playing and designing shortest path puzzles.

The program is called “Delivergrid” (I know, it’s an awful name) and they’ll be a link at the end of this post to download the zip file that includes the executable, an instruction manual, some example levels, a powerpoint presentation and an unpublished journal article.

Basically the game takes place on a grid (like most of my games) and you are presented with open space, walls, goals and a variety of other squares (like jumps and teleporters). Your job is to number the goals so that visiting all of them takes the least amount of time. You may also have inventory items that you can use to create faster routes. You can also design your own levels and save them for others to play.

Making the program was very cool, but designing levels is the part that is the most fun. Keeping that in mind, I’ve also included a folder of puzzles I’ve designed so far, but I encourage those who are interested to experiment with their own designs and send any good ones (in the default .map format) back to me to play.

Download Delivergrid

I Wouldn't Pay Those Taxi Drivers Either

While blogs are, ostensibly, an excellent way to keep track of personal data, upload photographs, exchange news, declare enlightened opinions and so forth, everybody knows that they were originally created for one lone reason: ranting. In keeping with the time honored tradition I am creating a label (“Shameless Rants”) where I can restrict my raving and foaming of the mouth. Readers should fill free to skip or indulge in a shared gripe. And now my first entry:

So many special effects seem dated within ten years of the film they were made in (or even when they were made), but none ever lasted so long, was used so much and is so obtrusive to witness as rear-projection backgrounds to give the "illusion" that vehicles are moving. It’s not just that everyone notices how fake the second layer looks, the problem is we can't concentrate on anything else.

When a movie uses a background that is moving out-of-sync with the foreground, projecting actual locations behind laughably obvious studio props or inconsistently matching the lighting, focus and angle, the audience can’t help but have their eyes affronted, their mind distracted and their mood disintegrated. If anyone in old movies ever wore their seatbelts there might at least be some excuse for how come nobody is experiencing the bumps and turns. Maybe the lack of any real travel explains why movie protagonists never pay for taxis when they get out.

We have rear-projection to thank for spoiling the suspended disbelief of countless chases, car-ride conversations, sailing excursions and plane trips. Even some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, fell victim again and again.

In the 1930's rear-projection actually won an award for best technical achievement and in its day it probably merited the excitement. If only we could have abandoned it sooner. Credit goes out to directors like Lars von Trier in "Zentropa" who managed to successfully revive the effect for his own artistically self-conscious purposes.

Urban Blight Videogame

A couple weekends ago I abandoned my homework and social life and dedicated several consecutive days to a flurry of programming. The result is Urban Blight, an urban planning and development videogame in the vein of classics like SimCity and Civilization.

I am attempting my first online distribution of game and so the zip file is available by clicking the link below.

Urban Blight

The game is a turn-based overhead strategy game on a grid that can be played multi-player or single (you'll have to keep track of records yourself for now). My hope is that players can figure out the gameplay by left-clicking and right-clicking around and experimenting. The tab control in the bottom right will help a lot. If you need more help go to the "Game" tab and press the "Hint" button. A random gameplay hint is generated each time. Contact me or leave a comment if further or specific help is needed.

Please keep in mind that this is version 1.0 and that there may be bugs and typos. Currently there is a problem with my visual themes so the interface is a bit ugly. I hope the game will be enjoyed anyway. Please email me or post a comment if you find any bugs are have any suggestions.