Maps, I Don’t Love You Like They Love You

Those players who have purchased Call of Duty:  Black Ops (2010) for Playstation 3 (this guy) and/or X-Box 360 have essentially signed up to be victims of a Ponzi Scheme.  Essentially, upon release, publisher Activision sells consumers an incomplete game for $60 and then continues to bleed the same victims for $15, three times (for an additional $45, a total of $105) for downloadable content (DLC) in the form of “map packs.”   Now, Activision does provide a decent bang for the buck:  each map pack includes four newly designed multiplayer maps and one additional zombie mode map.  It’s not so much the quality of the additional content that I find frustrating.  Rather, it’s the method in which they are sold and the quality of the original content. 

The Guard (2011)

The shadow of the prolific Irish playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter Martin McDonagh looms large over his brother’s film The Guard (2011).  Martin, whose work for the stage has earned him four Tony Award nominations and his film career launched with the Academy Award winning short Six Shooter (2005) before he transitioned into features with the phenomenal In Bruges (2008), serves as producer on John Michael McDonagh’s debut film.  Yet, his influence reaches beyond the financial.  The casting Brendan Gleeson as the lead, an alcoholic cop that would give Nic Cage’s Bad Lieutenant a run for his money, and the nimble transitions from black comedy to shocking violence are both constant variables in Martin’s work (Gleeson was a lead in both Six Shooter and In Bruges).  The question is:  Does it succeed on its own terms? 

Cully Hamner on the Shades of RED and My Comic Book Syllabus

Cully Hamner carried this week's In Media Res topic of film and comic books into its second day (after Greg Smith's perfect opener on introducing comics to new readers).  His column looks at how his comic book collaboration with writer Warren Ellis became re-interpreted once it transitioned into the hands of director Robert Schwentke and became a film adaptation.  


I don't want to spoil his article, so I'll just direct you to the link above and leave you with two quotes before dropping into a digression on a comic book syllabus I prepared:  


"Faithfulness to form, literary or otherwise, is illusory: what matters is the equivalence in meaning of the forms."-Film theorist André Bazin


"No.  Not even in the face of Armageddon.  Never compromise."-Rorschach in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1986-1987).  


More after the jump!