Watchmen (2009)

"No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise."-Rorschach While Rorschach's (Jackie Earle Haley) proclamation may be possible to uphold as a superhero, the refusal to compromise on behalf of the filmmaker in the process of literary adaptation is impossible. As film theorist André Bazin wrote, "Faithfulness to form, literary or otherwise, is illusory: what matters is the equivalence in meaning of the forms." In other words, Bazin is arguing that each medium has its own modes of representation, thus the struggle for formal fidelity is a lost cause and that the main objective is that the adaptation should capture the original work's essence. Bazin continues, stating, "All it takes is for the filmmakers to have enough visual imagination to create the cinematic equivalent of the style of the original."

The Immortal Story (1968)

Orson Welles’s The Immortal Story (1968) is one of the films from his second bargain basement period as an outcast Hollywood director living in Europe.  The first period occurred after the domestic box office and critical failures of his plagued production of The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and the low budget Macbeth (1948 as well).   During the first period, he appeared in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and other films and directed Othello (1952) and the ultra-low budget Mr. Arkadin (1955).  Arkadin, for me, shares a primary quality with The Immortal Story, filmed for French television after Welles was once again unable to work in Hollywood after Touch of Evil (1958).  Essentially, both are about rich men, both played by Welles, who have grown obsessed with narrative, perception, and historical legacy. 

Is Donkey Kong Fun? Because I'm Feeling More Like a Donkey and Less Like King Kong.

"You know, he's gonna have to play it perfectly, he's at the hardest part of Donkey Kong, and it's not gonna get any easier. So we may have an exciting moment here, or you know, the pressure may get to him, one of those random elements might happen. Sounds like he just cleared another board, but we could have a wild barrel, or some aggressive fireballs. I thought I was gonna be the first FunSpot kill screen, and then I had three fireballs trap me, I had the hammer in my hand, they still got me. So anything can happen in Donkey Kong. So for someone else to be mean to the kill screen would be a letdown, but lets see what happens, maybe he'll crack under the pressure and maybe I'll get my chance to do it first."-Avid Donkey Kong player Brian Kuh in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007). 

His Kind of Woman (1951)

In his book Hollywood Genres, film scholar Thomas Schatz mobilizes an evolutionary model to describe film genres.  For simplicity sake, Schatz posits that a genre essentially moves from classical to baroque in its style and conventions as it ages. If we place the film noir genre (whose status as a genre has led to much dispute, but let’s table that as I don’t feel like taking an aspirin while writing this review) within this model, we would find Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) on the classical side of the scale and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) on the baroque. Yet there is a major problem with concept of linear development as it supposes that all films in a genre progress towards the end goal of the baroque and are in formal and thematic unison. The main reason I love John Farrow’s film noir His Kind of Woman (1951) is that it was self-reflexive and parodic roughly five years before the “baroque” stage in film noir’s development is often thought to of occurred with the release of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

Debating Roger Ebert on Video Games

Film critic Roger Ebert has been notorious amongst video gamers for writing off the form as being incapable of being art.  Last year, he elaborated on his position and I responded with the following article (which is reprinted here).   Now, I should note as a hopeful cinema studies scholar that Roger’s work pushed me to study film and I constantly find myself reflecting on his Great Movies books. However, I am also a hopeful media studies scholar, a field which includes video games, a form which I enjoy as both a player and a Ph.D. student (you can find a visual essay a produced on the Wii with two classmates here). That said, I disagree with Roger’s assessment of the medium and here are a few reasons why.

The Future (2011)

For the past five years, I had avoided the work of Miranda July, including her debut film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005).  July rose to prominence as my interest in quirk in all forms of art both bottomed out and became my oft-cited reason for ignoring that mode of art.  To be more specific, I still have yet to see Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and I have largely avoided the work of writer Dave Eggers after A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) made me want to punch a wall.*  I both realize and realized (at the time) that this was not necessarily a just or fair avoidance and not a beneficial trait for a critic to have.  Yet, criticism always involves some layer of subjectivity and personal taste (ex. Roger Ebert’s distaste of violence directed at children).  After all, that is one reason why we, as readers, are drawn to the work of particular critics.  It is counter-productive to try to hide these tastes behind objective statements.  But to bring us back to the issue at hand, after reading one too many Chuck Palahniuk novels, I needed a long vacation from excessive eccentricity. 

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