"This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a tweet..."

Your Friends Close (2012)
Directed by Jocelyn Kelvin
Written by Brock Wilbur
Starring Jocelyn Kelvin, Brock Wilbur, Kovar McClure, Heather Wood, Laura Nicole Harrison, Blake Silver, Rob Ondarza, Ricky House, Michael Eliopolous, Lisa Renee Foiles, Ramsay Robinson and Yahtzee Croshaw [as well as many others]

[Disclaimer: I know Brock, Jocelyn and some of the other cast members from college. I also read an early draft of the script and served as an extra in a scene or two. That being said, I do not profit from this film, except the sense of pride someone gets from knowing about an awesome thing before other people and knowing the people involved in it]

Video game movies are pretty common at this point. Good video game movies are very very rare. Even rarer are movies that eschew adapting a video game to focusing on the people that make and play video games. Your Friends Close is not Super Mario Brothers or House of the Dead or Tomb Raider. It's not even Tron. It's more like The Bad and the Beautiful or Contempt. It's about awful, backstabbing people who somehow create something, for better or worse. As always, the question is whether that something is worth it.

Becca (Jocelyn Kelvin) and Jason (Brock Wilbur) are two up-and-coming game designers who happen to be married. They've just created a revolutionary new video game called "Your Friends Close" that basically turns the Turing Test into a multi-player strategy game. Users are put into a chatroom and must discover who is a real person and who is a computer. The winner could win anything from a rain forest named for them to a night with a porn star, depending on who the sponsor of the competition is.

Thing is, the game still needs to be developed and tested and Becca and Jason are about to fly to France to work on it. They're throwing a going away party the night before they leave, and they've invited their  best friends (a mix of family, friends, professional rivals, exes, current lovers and colleagues).

And the normal tension, regret and bitterness that crop up at any party are exacerbated by the fact that, just after the party starts, Randall Sconce (Michael Eliopolous), owner of the video game company developing YFC, wants Jason to stay in San Francisco to develop a tie-in TV show for YFC. Which means there's now a slot open for someone to fly to Paris with Becca and develop the game. It's the chance of a life-time, and Jason announces that the attendees are contestants who must convince him to give them the job.

Needless to say, this night will prove to be the end of relationships, maybe even Becca and Jason's.

The first thing to note is that Your Friends Close really understands that what makes a movie (or any story) interesting are interesting and complex characters. The script balances exposition and video game theory with the establishing of relationships and characterization while never breaking a sweat. This movie is extraordinarily quotable (there's a joke about Miles Davis and Secret of Monkey Island that cracks me up each time I think of it), but all the cleverness is in service of the characters and the story. The characters are mostly overly-intellectual nerds who delight in showing off their knowledge and their verbiage, and as the night drags on, it becomes apparent that even they cannot fend off disappointment, fear and despair with clever quips.

The direction by Jocelyn Kelvin (aided by DP Chad Nagel) is lively and restless, following the party from one corner of the house to another in extended Steadicam shots that impart a video game quality to the action. However, Kelvin knows when to pause on a moment, allowing us a tension-filled long take worthy of Rohmer when the story calls for it. Two long conversations between Becca and Kaylee (Jenni Melear), Jason's assistant and possibly his lover, unwind slowly and hypnotically, teasing us with violent resolution of the rivalry at any moment.

Of course, all of the technical skill would be for naught if the actors in front of the camera weren't equally skilled. Brock and Jocelyn each prove a match for their parts, with Brock slowly drawing out the childishness and fear underlying his manipulative ways and Jocelyn possessing a enigmatic and intelligent quality that reminds me of Lena Headey or Anna Karina. The rest of the cast is just as talented, with Blake Silver drawing out the nuances of a beta male trying to will himself into alpha male status, and Heather Anne Wood, as Jason's sister, slowly stripping away the disguise of a good girl with a secret life.  Finally, Yahtzee Croshaw deserves special notice for his voice acting on the titular video game, crafting a mix of charm and malevolence that is utterly entertaining and chilling.

At one point in the movie, Jason talks about how big a jump movies made between the 1920s and the 1930s, from chase scenes and pie fights to meaning and romance, before saying that video games are about to make a similar jump. I can't speak to video games, but I can say that Your Friends Close shows that movies can still develop and advance even in the video game age.

In which JCVD kickboxes a giant penguin to death...

This weekend, I was watching Sudden Death, a really cheesy mid-90s action movie, where Jean Claude Van Damme is a firefighter who must rescue the Vice President from a scenery-chewing Powers Boothe during the 7th Game of the Stanley Cup. It's a master-class in cheap dramatic irony (Sudden Death refers to both the end of the game AND the situation Van Damme is in!), mainly notable for a sequence where JCVD must fight a woman in a giant penguin costume to the death. It makes Hard Target look even more eligible for a Criterion Collection edition.

It's very clear that the pitch for this must have been "Jean Claude Van Damme does Die Hard at a hockey rink". And while Die Hard has reached a level of relative acclaim (despite being a blockbuster and the birth of a franchise), there's a tendency to rope it off from the films it inspired (including some of its franchise). Die Hard 2, Under Siege 1 and 2, Sudden Death, and Air Force One (maybe even Speed and Con Air, if you squint a little) are some of the more notable successors.

It's pretty easy to state the formula: working class tough guy squares off against a highly-skilled, intellectual bad guy during a hostage situation in a contained setting, with the working class guy kicking the ass of the flamboyant/foreign/intellectual/wealthy bad guy.

But what I forgot, until I watched such a generic version of the formula as the JCVD version, are the differences from the action films that came before them and after them.

First of all, the 1980s action template is usually something like Cobra or Commando, where an over-muscled tough-guy guns down a million faceless bad guys. There's still occasionally a flamboyant bad guy, but the focus is on body-count and sheer destruction. The good guy might have a braying lieutenant or commanding officer, but there's no sense that that commander has any authority. The good guy(s) might even go vigilante at the end, with the authorities showing up and telling them good job. Michael Bay's films revived this trend, upping the superhero element, where the hero is basically invulnerable. The last two Die Hard movies have trended even further in this direction as well.

Whereas, in Die Hard and its descendents, the lesser villains are usually individualized. Even though they are usually two dimensional, multi-ethnic terrorists or Eurotrash, that's still one more dimension than Cobra or Bad Boys provides us. I still root for Theo to get knocked out, or the crazy earring guy in Sudden Death to get shot through a helicopter, but they're not just cannon fodder that feeds our blood-lust. On top of that, there's an emphasis of one on one combat. The bad guys have guns, but the good guys rarely start out with them, so there's usually a lot of very brutal hand-to-hand fighting. Our heroes are usually bruised and bloody at the end of each fight, even though they've won. Once again, compare this to Commando, where Ahnuld takes out an entire army and just gets a gnarly gash on his stomach.

Most importantly, the Die Hard template has a working class, if skilled, hero who faces off both against a corrupt or hidebound authority and the actual bad guys. While it's not that unusual to have a cop/secret agent having to take a dressing down from the boss, it's in the Die Hard template movies that the authority is actively working against the hero's goals. Agents Johnson and Johnson, for example, in Die Hard, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Under Siege cause almost as much destruction and death as the bad guys, even though they have good intentions.

Furthermore, this working class attitude extends to a nuts-and-bolts attitude towards work that has become rarer and rarer as cinema has progressed into the 21st Century and the focus of international capitalism has been turning everyone into interchangeable office temps. Die Hard takes place in a classy executive office building, but the environment that Bruce Willis mostly occupies is the blue-collar work-site of a building still under construction. In Under Siege, the kitchen and other living/working areas of the battleship are intimately explored and become sites of battle and conflict, not just the command center. And Sudden Death gives us a detailed look at the day-to-day, banal and prosaic operations of a hockey rink before blowing them up.

Perhaps that is what I find most unusual in this day and age in these films is this interest in establishing the prosaic and banal of day-to-day working life, an interest that is harder and harder to detect in more recent cinema. The protagonists of most blockbusters are either tech-savvy kids, specially-trained and well-to-do secret agents, or independently wealthy superheroes. Even when the protagonists are down-to-earth people like in Date Night (in which the bourgeois banality of the protagonists, contrasted with generic thriller trappings they are roped into, are played for laughs), we don't really see them at work. Perhaps the only notable exception, off the top of my head, is Machete, which intentionally politicized work and labor as elements of an ongoing class and ethnic struggle.

Die Hard and its followers, despite their faults and flaws, honored the idea of working class labor. The modern blockbuster now only honors the wealthy superhero, a demographic that is excluded from labor (teens/kids), specialized agents, or a combination of the three.

Primer on BUILDING STORIES & Chris Ware

Chris Ware's BUILDING STORIES is out, which means its time for media coverage to begin. Since a lot of media outlets generally don't have the time or knowledge to do in-depth research into "comic books", "graphic novels" or "those things kids like". So, for everyone out there just getting into Chris Ware, he's a simple guide to Chris Ware and his work.

Q: Who is Chris Ware?
A: Most people believe that Chris Ware is a sensitive writer-artist based out of the Chicago area. What most people don't realize is that this is a lie!

Chris Ware is actually an alias for Rob Liefeld, the controversial artist who broke into comics in the '80s with HAWK & DOVE and NEW MUTANTS. The "Chris Ware" persona was hatched over a drunken bull session with Gary Groth of The Comics Journal at the San Diego Comicon in 1995. Groth said that Liefeld would never create a comic book he liked. Liefeld said if he did, Groth would have to give every book he did under the pseudonym at least a week's worth of coverage. Groth lost the bet. And "Chris Ware" was born.

Industry folks also claim that "Dan Clowes" is another alias for Rob Liefeld. That is stupid. "Dan Clowes" is the name of the studio that Marc Silvestri and Jim Balent have founded.

Q: What is BUILDING STORIES about?
A: As always, where art is concerned, it depends on how you interpret the contents. Some people say that it is the story of a lonely woman, trying to connect with the world around her. Others say that it is a narrative about post-Modern America's disconnect from itself. All I can say is, it finally resolves what Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Boy on Earth, was doing during INFINITE CRISIS.


Q: I heard that Ware did something weird with the packaging. Is that true?
A: Yes. Chris Ware had trees chopped up and the resulting wood transformed into wood pulp. He then had giant machines transform that pulp into a regular shape, upon which it would be easy to imprint different colored-inks. Those flimsy pieces of pulp were then bound between slightly less flimsy pieces of pulp, put into containers, and shipped to different retail outlets and warehouses where they could be obtained by consumers. All in all, a very previous and artistic way to disseminate art in our modern age.

Also, there are slight variations in the way those piece of pulp are organized and combined, from one printing to another. This has never happened before in the history of comic books.

Q: Does this mean comics aren't for kids anymore? Can I add "Biff! Bang! Pow!" to the headline?
A: Comics have not been printed for kids since 1970. They are mostly consumed by rocks, sentient bacteria, and the Omni-Being from the Dark Galaxy of Quadrant 5.

But go ahead with the "Biff!" "Bang!" "Pow!" to your headline. No one has ever thought of that joke before.

Q: Have you even read BUILDING STORIES yet?
A: That's ridiculous. If I read BUILDING STORIES, I'd have to pick an order to read it in, and I might pick the wrong order!

Also, I hear Joss Whedon plans to make a movie version of it.

The Shadow of the Gunman and the Swordsman: Golgo 13 and Conan the Barbarian

Pop culture says a lot about a country, and the pop culture that best gives someone an idea about the country's mindset is rarely the culture that people praise. It's usually not the Pulitzer Prize winners or the Oscar winners that we look back on as time capsules of what America was like. It's the Valley of the Dolls and Dirty Harry.

Whenever people (usually conservatives) attack academia, it's for writing papers on TV or comic books or music or movies with little Harold Bloom-approved value. What's the value, your ivory tower-hating good ol' regular American pundit might say, of writing about the semiotics of Law and Order or the post-capitalist structuralism of Justin Bieber?

And I know this might seem like a straw-man kind of thing, but then again, take Naomi Schaefer Riley. Please.

Anyway, already-dated digs at blogosphere dust-ups aside, my point is, what we say in our trashy and/or guilty pleasures and what, more importantly, the public enjoys in their trashy and/or guilty pleasures tells the observer a lot about the public values. It hints at what is in their hearts, instead of what they claim to think.

Looking at Law and Order, for example, what's important is not the mild liberalism of the writers and producers. What is important is that we have the picture of a justice system that is incredibly perceptive and hands-on. The detectives, flawed or cynical as they might be, have a dogged determination and usually lay their hands on a suspect within a matter of days, if not hours. The prosecutors and defense attorneys are usually well-trained, highly-capable individuals, who fight out their battles in front of a jury, and win and lose their cases on the basis of savvy detective work and a keen grasp of the law.

You don't see the large number of cases that remain unsolved, the large number of cases that are quickly plea-bargained out, cops who are petty or mediocre, overworked and underpaid lawyers who offload a lot of their day-to-day duties onto paralegals. Have you ever seen a paralegal show up on Law and Order, or Criminal Minds or CSI: Whatever?

But yet, even at our most cynical, whatever our political background, we think that this is our ideal. This is how the system is supposed to work!

In the last couple of months, two of my trashier pleasures have been Conan the Barbarian (mostly the comics, though I also watched the first film) and Golgo 13 (the anime movies and TV episodes and a little bit of the manga). And on their surface, there are definitely a lot of similarities between the two works, at the generic level.

Conan the Barbarian is a muscle-bound, hard-fighting, hard-living quasi-Nordic warrior in a vaguely pre-medieval, post-Roman Eurasia, who wanders from town to town looking for wenches, wine, and chances to make money as either a thief or a soldier. The women he captures or rescues usually fall in love with him, for at least a little while.

Golgo 13 (a.k.a. Duke Togo) is a muscular Japanese assassin who travels around the world, shooting targets in incredibly impossible situations for money. When he's not killing people, he's usually bedding women in very manly ways.*

Both are clearly male empowerment fantasies, built around the idea that men express their manliness by killing/fighting and having sex with women. The most manly specimens are those that are paid for killing/fighting.

You don't have to look very far for other examples of this empowerment fantasy across genre and form of media. Almost all the Arnold Schwarzenegger protagonists, the Punisher, Wolverine, the Continental Op, most gangsta rappers, and so forth.**

I don't think it's necessary, at this point, to even discuss the fact that women are usually passive characters and victims, with their roles limited to mothers or whores.

But there is a deeper co-relation between Conan and Golgo 13 than that. Historically, culturally, and morally, they share a deeper kinship.

Conan was created by Robert E. Howard between 1929-1930, and his adventures first appeared in the 1930s. After Howard's suicide in 1936, his adventures were kept in print and republished by the executors of his estate, on and off, for the next three decades. However, it was not until the late sixties and early seventies that the character's success flowered with the publication of the Lancer/Ace paperbacks and the start of Marvel Comic's highly successful run of Conan comic books and black-and-white magazines.

Furthermore, post-Howard, a large part of Conan's image as a character was shaped by a series of collaborators, artists and editors with either a loose affiliation with Howard or no connection with him at all. A "studio system" aesthetic evolved, where writers like L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg and Roy Thomas, and artists like Boris Vallejo, Barry Windsor-Smith, and John Buscema, added significant portions to the Conan mythos or rewrote other non-Conan stories by Howard to become Conan stories. Roy Thomas, in a quest to create content for Marvel's comics and magazines, even appropriated and licensed the non-Conan works of other fantasy writers!***

Though there was mercenary element at work here, the creators intended to serve Conan (or at least their vision of Conan). This was no egotistical attempt by upstart crows to beautify themselves with another's feathers, as might characterize August Derleth's appropriation of H.P. Lovecraft's work.

Golgo 13 was created by Takao Saito in the late 1960s and was first published in 1969. Though Takao Saito was Golgo's creator, the art and writing duties of the series are generally handled by a studio under his supervision. Though Saito's role in the day-to-day operations of the studio are certainly open to speculation, his name is the only one that appears in the credits for the manga.

Furthermore, the live action movies and the anime movies and TV series are under the control of others, though they draw on the comics for inspiration.

What's important to emphasize here is that the late 1960s and early 1970s was the first time either of these characters could command mass appeal. Leaving aside the gore and gruesomeness of their adventures (with extreme violence becoming more mainstream thanks to film and the TV news), both characters possessed a sexual rapaciousness that was only starting to become acceptable toward the end of the 1960s.

However, at the same time, both characters occupy a space of protest against the hippie/protest movements of the time. Their sexual appetites might seem part of the "Summer of Love", but their attitudes towards women are not progressive or feminist. Both characters are satisfied with a market economy and have no qualms with positioning themselves as commodities. Insofar as they display a political consciousness, it could be characterized as conservative, though they are rather apolitical. And though neither is racist or nationalist, their adventures and interactions usually express chauvinism towards cultures than their own.

I will deal more with these characterizations of Conan and Golgo in my next post.

I also wish to say, as a disclaimer, that I am not trying to characterize the political convictions of the writers/artists/editors working on these characters. Roy Thomas, at the very least, strikes me as a relatively progressive writer from his other comic book work. The tenor of these characters' adventures, however, definitely are on the conservative end of the spectrum, and the generic conventions work against progressive or leftist influences.

Anyway, next time: what Golgo says about Japan and what Conan says about America. Yup, I'm aiming big!

*(For a more detailed history of Golgo 13 than I would ever be capable of writing, visit Joe McCulloch's detailed write-up of Golgo here, here and here.)

** However, from my point of view, these characters are not law enforcement and they are not government agents. James Bond might be the one exception. But all of these characters, though they might have a moral system, are not constrained by law or (usually) a chain of command. John McClane, for example, is very different from John Matrix (from Commando). While both kill bad guys,  McClane is functioning as a protector of society. Matrix only cares about his daughter and enforcing his own sense of justice. McClane goes back to being a cop. Matrix rejects the idea of going back to be a soldier.

*** Norvell Page's Flame Winds, which was originally about Prester John in China, became a Conan adventure!

Why I hate MEN WHO HATE WOMEN

I've been blogging a lot more at the Tumblr. I just posted a pretty in-depth thing about David Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

I should say, I think David Fincher is a talented director. But not only does this movie have an awful attitude about sex and feminism (while pretending to be progressive), it's a long and rather boring movie.

Thoughts inspired by "Shutter Island"

Do you think that the trend of praising competent work as classic is a recent trend or something that has happened in all ages?

It could be Sturgeon's Law, and the 90% that is crap from previous eras is forgotten as footnotes. Or it could be the things that craftsmen valued in previous times are not the same thing businessmen value in these times.

Because Shutter Island is a decent movie and well-made. It's not great and doesn't deserve such praise for having a few really good performances, a well-sketched plot and some vivid cinematography. I would hope those would be starting points for a decent film, not grounds for effusive praise.

On the other hand, next to a trifle like Up In the Air, I can see why people like it so much. But that's not necessarily saying it's Goodfellas or even the King of Comedy.