Hello! I've been doing some video game writing at various places. For the curious:
http://www.psuni.com/what-the-psp-did-right-and-wrong-10032/
http://www.psuni.com/l-a-noire-review-9700/
http://captainstarball.com/opinion/supreme-court-gets-it-right
http://captainstarball.com/opinion/more-devs-should-follow-la-noire-s-brilliant-use-motion-capture
Monday, July 18, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Immigration
This is a pretty spectacular story. This guy, Jose Vargas, is a prominent journalist with the Washington Post. He reveals in that article that he is an illegal immigrant. His parents sent him here illegally as a child, and he has been here ever since. He goes through his struggles as he tries to hide his immigration status from various employers and government agencies.
He ends up advocating for the Dream act, a bill proposed in Congress that would grant citizenship to any illegal immigrant who was taken here as a child, if they get a college degree or serve in the military, and have a clean criminal record, among other requirements. It makes sense. If your parents took you here when you were two years old, you are, for all intents and purposes, an American. The Constitution grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil, regardless of parental immigration status. Whether you were born here or were taken here as an infant appears to be a meaningless distinction. Deporting an adult who was taken here illegally as a child amounts to nothing more than punishing him for the mistakes of his parents.
On the other hand, I understand the reluctance to pass the Dream act. Maybe its passage would guarantee hundreds of thousands of children would be sent here illegally by their parents. After all, one thing all parents want for their children is a better life. And the Dream act would prompt many overseas parents to send their children here illegally, just for that small chance of gaining American citizenship.
Immigration is a difficult issue to grapple with. As someone lucky enough to be born on American soil, I've never had to worry about things like this. Vargas' article was a real mind-opener for me. I sympathize with his plight, but I understand the two sides of this coin.
He ends up advocating for the Dream act, a bill proposed in Congress that would grant citizenship to any illegal immigrant who was taken here as a child, if they get a college degree or serve in the military, and have a clean criminal record, among other requirements. It makes sense. If your parents took you here when you were two years old, you are, for all intents and purposes, an American. The Constitution grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil, regardless of parental immigration status. Whether you were born here or were taken here as an infant appears to be a meaningless distinction. Deporting an adult who was taken here illegally as a child amounts to nothing more than punishing him for the mistakes of his parents.
On the other hand, I understand the reluctance to pass the Dream act. Maybe its passage would guarantee hundreds of thousands of children would be sent here illegally by their parents. After all, one thing all parents want for their children is a better life. And the Dream act would prompt many overseas parents to send their children here illegally, just for that small chance of gaining American citizenship.
Immigration is a difficult issue to grapple with. As someone lucky enough to be born on American soil, I've never had to worry about things like this. Vargas' article was a real mind-opener for me. I sympathize with his plight, but I understand the two sides of this coin.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
You stink of human!
I normally don't like movies made before I was born. It's just not my thing. They're usually too slowly paced, with dumb stories, etc. However, there are a few exceptions. Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and the Planet of the Apes series. What an awesome science fiction franchise.
It all started with the novel La Planète des singes by French author Pierre Boulle. It concerned a French astronaut who landed on a planet populated by intelligent apes. It wasn't bad, but it's clear Boulle was more of a social satirist than a sci-fi writer. That was a pretty crazy nugget of a story, however, and a loose film adaptation was released a few years later.
The original Planet of the Apes film is the most famous Apes property, and for good reason. Charlton Heston starred as Taylor, an American astronaut who left Earth because he believed "there has to be something better than man." Due to the effects of time dilation, several thousand years have passed since he left Earth. He lands on what he thinks is another planet in orbit around a star light years away.
Soon enough, he's captured by intelligent apes who hunt humans for sport and scientific examination. Two chimpanzee scientists, Cornelius and Zira, take interest in Taylor for his ability to speak. The orangutan statesman Dr. Zaius, however, believes Taylor to be a threat, because he knows the true story of his planet. He knows man is a cruel animal, and he cannot allow Taylor to live if he wants to protect ape-kind.
Dr. Zaius is the best part of the movie. He's the best kind of villain - he's right. About everything. He's played as the film's antagonist, but he's only doing what he thinks is best for his species. His methods might be a little rough, but the only reason he's not the protagonist of this film is because of his species. Dr. Zaius is both the Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, which Taylor points out as being a contradiction. Talk about subtle references to creationism.
Rod Serling co-wrote the movie, and it really does feel like one long Twilight Zone episode. The early parts of the film have this kind of creepy "what the hell is going on here?" type of feel. The final, haunting image is also pure Serling. I also really like the division of species displayed in ape society, based on real ape characteristics. Chimpanzees are the scientists and intellectuals, orangutans are the statesmen and philosophers, and gorillas are the warriors and manual laborers.
The film spawned four sequels, some of them good. The first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, concerned Heston lookalike Brent, who crash lands on the planet of the apes looking for Taylor. Taylor disappears under mysterious circumstances, and Brent has to find him. There are some heavy-handed references to the Vietnam War, with bloodthirsty gorilla warlord General Ursus giving a rousing speech early in the film. This was easily the best scene in the whole movie. It's eventually revealed that Taylor was captured by some human mutants who live underground and worship an atomic bomb. (!) Talk about WTF. The bomb is detonated at the end of the movie, destroying the world. This was supposedly a last-minute script revision by Heston, who wanted to prevent any further sequels. It didn't.
Beneath is a weird, weird movie. Mutants? Bomb worship? It's also kind of surprising they were able to get away with such a bleak ending in a mainstream Hollywood film. It also suffered from a significantly lower budget than the first movie, so it has special effects that were bad even by 1970 standards. Fans of the first movie will be entertained by this, but it didn't set the world on fire.
The next sequel starts with a deus ex machina. A lot of movie plots are resolved by deus ex machinas, but Escape from the Planet of the Apes sets its plot in motion by one. The chimpanzee scientists Cornelius and Zira have somehow retrieved the spaceship Taylor crash landed in, got it to work, and flew it through space and back in time to 1970s Los Angeles. So these apes, who were amazed at a paper airplane in the first movie, have somehow rediscovered space travel. Yeah, right. There's also this mysterious chimpanzee scientist Dr. Milo, described as the brains behind the whole operation, but he dies early in the film, so he never explains exactly how he accomplished this amazing feat. This premise also fails from a sci-fi perspective. The effects of time-dilation due to relativity, making Taylor travel forward in time, are explained readily enough in the first film, but going back in time makes no sense at all.
However, Escape is a pretty good movie once you get over the really dumb premise. It takes many of its cues from the original Pierre Boulle novel. The apes are first studied as curiosities, then paraded around as celebrities, and finally hunted as threats. More complexity is added when Zira gives birth. Dr. Otto Hasslein, played with some intensity by character actor Eric Braeden, does the Dr. Zaius thing this time around. Hasslein, the science adviser to the president, believes, rightly, that the apes come from Earth's future, and that either their descendants or apes they teach to talk will one day overpower man as Earth's dominant species. Thus, he believes the apes should be exterminated. Like all good villains, you can understand his perspective and his goals, even if you might disagree with some of his means.
The next film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, concerns Caesar, the ape born in the previous movie. Humans have begun to enslave apes, and as the only ape capable of speech, it's up to Caesar to start the revolution. It uses the old cliche of a randomly totalitarian government to create dramatic tension, but otherwise it's a pretty good movie.
Conquest is a dark, dark movie. There are some obvious parallels to the civil rights era and to various Communist revolutions in the intensity and nature of the apes' revolt. Nonetheless, it can be really uncomfortable to watch sometimes. Who, exactly, are we supposed to root for when an abused gorilla is shown murdering a police officer? This is a movie with no easy answers. Roddy McDowall played Cornelius in the previous movies, and he returns in Conquest as ape revolutionary Caesar. It's a very different performance. Caesar's final speech at the end of the movie is absolutely bone-chilling. It's not affected by some "now let's have compassion" lines hastily added in post-production.
The final film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, is about one final battle between humans and apes. Caesar is now the leader of ape society, and he leads the charge against some final bands of humans. There are short scenes set further in the future, about 1200 years before Taylor, at the beginning and end of Battle, that show the Lawgiver. The Lawgiver is sort of an ape prophet; the apes are shown bowing to statues of him in the first two movies. Here, he's preaching friendship and harmony, while in the first two movies the apes twist around his message and say he advocated hatred and killing of humans. It's a really interesting dichotomy.
Other than the Lawgiver scenes, however, Battle isn't a good movie. First, it's clear they were working with a bare-bones budget. The makeup and sets are laughable. The script is kind of dumb, and the whole thing just feels unnecessary. Only hardcore Apes fans need apply.
So that's the original Apes film series. It's pretty amazing that anyone new to the series can start with any film, keep watching them in order, and the last one will always tie in to the next one. No other film series does anything like that. The first movie is fantastic. It has everything you could want out of a sci-fi romp. The sequels are pretty good, especially Escape. They'll stand forever as one of the best sci-fi film series of all time.
But wait, the Apes saga was far from over. It's a valuable property, so it was resurrected in 2001 by Tim Burton. His "re-imagined" Planet of the Apes movie uses that core nugget of an idea from the novel and first movie to make a whole new story. Mark Wahlberg stars as Leo Davidson, the American astronaut, and also features Tim Roth as villainous chimpanzee General Thade, and a prominent Michael Clarke Duncan as a high-ranking military gorilla.
This movie gets a lot of hatred on the Internet, but I don't think all of it is deserved. No, it's not as good as the original, but that's not a fair comparison. That was the first ever Planet of the Apes movie, nothing can ever repeat that. This one is not supposed to be a simple remake. It's just another loose adaptation of the novel, like the original movie. I think the world is big enough that more than one film adaptation of the same source material can coexist.
Okay, it was just kind of a dumb summer popcorn movie, but it did have some things going for it. First, except for Mark Wahlberg, the performances were pretty good. I especially like Tim Roth as General Thade. The original movie portrayed chimpanzees as being all-around smart and good, but chimps can be kind of nasty. Watch a documentary on chimpanzees, and you'll see that they kill their young and can be obsessed with sex and violence. Tim Roth was able to capture this creepy nastiness very well. Also good was Paul Giamatti as a sleazy orangutan slave-trader, Michael Clarke Duncan as Thade's right-hand ape, and Charlton Heston in a cameo role as Thade's father.
The makeup and ape movements were fantastic this time around, as well. The original film series just had humans acting human-like, but in ape makeup. This movie gets the actors to act ape-like - shrieking, sniffing, jumping, and walking on all fours. Someone did their homework. Plus, the makeup is very realistic in this movie.
That says nothing about the plot holes big enough to drive a car through, and the eye-rollingly bad action movie cliches. Like: the kid who wants to fight the apes, but as soon as he gets out there, his horse falls over and Mark Wahlberg has to go rescue him, which he does, just in time. Snore. Overall, the remake is good for some mindless fun, but not much more.
Can you tell I'm excited for the new movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Because I am.
It all started with the novel La Planète des singes by French author Pierre Boulle. It concerned a French astronaut who landed on a planet populated by intelligent apes. It wasn't bad, but it's clear Boulle was more of a social satirist than a sci-fi writer. That was a pretty crazy nugget of a story, however, and a loose film adaptation was released a few years later.
The original Planet of the Apes film is the most famous Apes property, and for good reason. Charlton Heston starred as Taylor, an American astronaut who left Earth because he believed "there has to be something better than man." Due to the effects of time dilation, several thousand years have passed since he left Earth. He lands on what he thinks is another planet in orbit around a star light years away.
Soon enough, he's captured by intelligent apes who hunt humans for sport and scientific examination. Two chimpanzee scientists, Cornelius and Zira, take interest in Taylor for his ability to speak. The orangutan statesman Dr. Zaius, however, believes Taylor to be a threat, because he knows the true story of his planet. He knows man is a cruel animal, and he cannot allow Taylor to live if he wants to protect ape-kind.
Dr. Zaius is the best part of the movie. He's the best kind of villain - he's right. About everything. He's played as the film's antagonist, but he's only doing what he thinks is best for his species. His methods might be a little rough, but the only reason he's not the protagonist of this film is because of his species. Dr. Zaius is both the Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, which Taylor points out as being a contradiction. Talk about subtle references to creationism.
Rod Serling co-wrote the movie, and it really does feel like one long Twilight Zone episode. The early parts of the film have this kind of creepy "what the hell is going on here?" type of feel. The final, haunting image is also pure Serling. I also really like the division of species displayed in ape society, based on real ape characteristics. Chimpanzees are the scientists and intellectuals, orangutans are the statesmen and philosophers, and gorillas are the warriors and manual laborers.
The film spawned four sequels, some of them good. The first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, concerned Heston lookalike Brent, who crash lands on the planet of the apes looking for Taylor. Taylor disappears under mysterious circumstances, and Brent has to find him. There are some heavy-handed references to the Vietnam War, with bloodthirsty gorilla warlord General Ursus giving a rousing speech early in the film. This was easily the best scene in the whole movie. It's eventually revealed that Taylor was captured by some human mutants who live underground and worship an atomic bomb. (!) Talk about WTF. The bomb is detonated at the end of the movie, destroying the world. This was supposedly a last-minute script revision by Heston, who wanted to prevent any further sequels. It didn't.
Beneath is a weird, weird movie. Mutants? Bomb worship? It's also kind of surprising they were able to get away with such a bleak ending in a mainstream Hollywood film. It also suffered from a significantly lower budget than the first movie, so it has special effects that were bad even by 1970 standards. Fans of the first movie will be entertained by this, but it didn't set the world on fire.
The next sequel starts with a deus ex machina. A lot of movie plots are resolved by deus ex machinas, but Escape from the Planet of the Apes sets its plot in motion by one. The chimpanzee scientists Cornelius and Zira have somehow retrieved the spaceship Taylor crash landed in, got it to work, and flew it through space and back in time to 1970s Los Angeles. So these apes, who were amazed at a paper airplane in the first movie, have somehow rediscovered space travel. Yeah, right. There's also this mysterious chimpanzee scientist Dr. Milo, described as the brains behind the whole operation, but he dies early in the film, so he never explains exactly how he accomplished this amazing feat. This premise also fails from a sci-fi perspective. The effects of time-dilation due to relativity, making Taylor travel forward in time, are explained readily enough in the first film, but going back in time makes no sense at all.
However, Escape is a pretty good movie once you get over the really dumb premise. It takes many of its cues from the original Pierre Boulle novel. The apes are first studied as curiosities, then paraded around as celebrities, and finally hunted as threats. More complexity is added when Zira gives birth. Dr. Otto Hasslein, played with some intensity by character actor Eric Braeden, does the Dr. Zaius thing this time around. Hasslein, the science adviser to the president, believes, rightly, that the apes come from Earth's future, and that either their descendants or apes they teach to talk will one day overpower man as Earth's dominant species. Thus, he believes the apes should be exterminated. Like all good villains, you can understand his perspective and his goals, even if you might disagree with some of his means.
The next film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, concerns Caesar, the ape born in the previous movie. Humans have begun to enslave apes, and as the only ape capable of speech, it's up to Caesar to start the revolution. It uses the old cliche of a randomly totalitarian government to create dramatic tension, but otherwise it's a pretty good movie.
Conquest is a dark, dark movie. There are some obvious parallels to the civil rights era and to various Communist revolutions in the intensity and nature of the apes' revolt. Nonetheless, it can be really uncomfortable to watch sometimes. Who, exactly, are we supposed to root for when an abused gorilla is shown murdering a police officer? This is a movie with no easy answers. Roddy McDowall played Cornelius in the previous movies, and he returns in Conquest as ape revolutionary Caesar. It's a very different performance. Caesar's final speech at the end of the movie is absolutely bone-chilling. It's not affected by some "now let's have compassion" lines hastily added in post-production.
The final film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, is about one final battle between humans and apes. Caesar is now the leader of ape society, and he leads the charge against some final bands of humans. There are short scenes set further in the future, about 1200 years before Taylor, at the beginning and end of Battle, that show the Lawgiver. The Lawgiver is sort of an ape prophet; the apes are shown bowing to statues of him in the first two movies. Here, he's preaching friendship and harmony, while in the first two movies the apes twist around his message and say he advocated hatred and killing of humans. It's a really interesting dichotomy.
Other than the Lawgiver scenes, however, Battle isn't a good movie. First, it's clear they were working with a bare-bones budget. The makeup and sets are laughable. The script is kind of dumb, and the whole thing just feels unnecessary. Only hardcore Apes fans need apply.
So that's the original Apes film series. It's pretty amazing that anyone new to the series can start with any film, keep watching them in order, and the last one will always tie in to the next one. No other film series does anything like that. The first movie is fantastic. It has everything you could want out of a sci-fi romp. The sequels are pretty good, especially Escape. They'll stand forever as one of the best sci-fi film series of all time.
But wait, the Apes saga was far from over. It's a valuable property, so it was resurrected in 2001 by Tim Burton. His "re-imagined" Planet of the Apes movie uses that core nugget of an idea from the novel and first movie to make a whole new story. Mark Wahlberg stars as Leo Davidson, the American astronaut, and also features Tim Roth as villainous chimpanzee General Thade, and a prominent Michael Clarke Duncan as a high-ranking military gorilla.
This movie gets a lot of hatred on the Internet, but I don't think all of it is deserved. No, it's not as good as the original, but that's not a fair comparison. That was the first ever Planet of the Apes movie, nothing can ever repeat that. This one is not supposed to be a simple remake. It's just another loose adaptation of the novel, like the original movie. I think the world is big enough that more than one film adaptation of the same source material can coexist.
Okay, it was just kind of a dumb summer popcorn movie, but it did have some things going for it. First, except for Mark Wahlberg, the performances were pretty good. I especially like Tim Roth as General Thade. The original movie portrayed chimpanzees as being all-around smart and good, but chimps can be kind of nasty. Watch a documentary on chimpanzees, and you'll see that they kill their young and can be obsessed with sex and violence. Tim Roth was able to capture this creepy nastiness very well. Also good was Paul Giamatti as a sleazy orangutan slave-trader, Michael Clarke Duncan as Thade's right-hand ape, and Charlton Heston in a cameo role as Thade's father.
The makeup and ape movements were fantastic this time around, as well. The original film series just had humans acting human-like, but in ape makeup. This movie gets the actors to act ape-like - shrieking, sniffing, jumping, and walking on all fours. Someone did their homework. Plus, the makeup is very realistic in this movie.
That says nothing about the plot holes big enough to drive a car through, and the eye-rollingly bad action movie cliches. Like: the kid who wants to fight the apes, but as soon as he gets out there, his horse falls over and Mark Wahlberg has to go rescue him, which he does, just in time. Snore. Overall, the remake is good for some mindless fun, but not much more.
Can you tell I'm excited for the new movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Because I am.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
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