Terminally Incoherent

How would I describe this movie in one sentence? Let’s see. Maybe “Groundhog Day on Crack”? Hmmm… No that’s not it. In fact it’s not even close. The movie does bring up similar questions about time, chance, cause and effect and one man’s destiny and power to change it with small, seemingly insignificant action so I guess I’m bound to compare the two.

In both movies for example the protagonist loops around in time re-living the same events multiple times, and is allowed to experiment with cause and effect. But instead of a jaded and unpleasant weatherman, the hero of this movie is Lola, an attractive young girl with flaming red hair, and an attitude. Unlike Phil Connors (who found love because of the loop) she seems to loop out of love for her boyfriend. The setup is simple. Manni (Lola’s guy) gets in trouble with the local mafia, and must come up with $100k in less than 20 minutes or he will likely be killed. To save her man, Lola will have to come up with the cash, and quick.

We see Lola run through the city 3 times. Each time her path is almost exactly the same, but small variations inevitably sneak into the picture. On one run she bumps into someone, on the second she passes them by, and on the third they never meet and etc.. These small changes end up being significant because they allow Lola to gain pr lose precious seconds and each successive one can and will influence all the other ones that follow it.

We never find out why exactly is she looping around in time like this. I mean, you can figure out that it’s love and determination that pushes her forward. But we never learn why or how this happened to her and not someone else. Lola herself is largely unaware of this fact. She does not know she is looping back in time, however for some reason she does seem to retain some memory from previous runs. For example during her first loop Manni teaches her how to take the safety off a pistol. On the second run, she takes the safety off herself as if remembering it. This sets up a slightly different tone than the Groundhog Day.

There was a sort of logic to that movie - Bill Murray’s character knew that he is going to loop around each day, and retained all his memories. He could plan ahead, and through observation he could slowly gain a sort of omnipotence and exert more and more control over his fate. Lola doesn’t have that luxury. For her, each run is a first, there is never any guarantee that she will get another chance. Despite that Lola seems wiser, and more apt at exploiting using her environment during each subsequent loop.

Phil Connors broke out of the time look using logic, planning, and powers of observation. He could break down his day, plan his activities, and set everything up for success. Lola only has 20 minutes, and she is in a mad rush each time. Her world is one of raw emotion ruled not by logic but rather than fate, chance and destiny. In a way this story reminded me about this quote from Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist:

When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true.

Lola’s universe comes alive and indeed conspires to make her succeed. Unlike the cunning weatherman from Groundhog Day, Lola has little control over her situation. There are many variables that she can’t influence, and luck and chance play a big role in each loop. She has no other choice but to trust her luck and like Coelho’s protagonist hope that it will direct her steps toward the goal. When she ignores this magical conspiracy it becomes an obstacle. She trips, she falls, she is late or to early. Only when she starts noticing the events around her, and takes her cues from them she is able to make real progress. Phil Connors had to take his destiny in his own hands, and be the agent of change. Lola on the other hand, must let go and let her heart guide her to succeed. The agent of change is fate, and she is but a pawn with a mission. To succeed she must allow the universe to propel her towards the solution; she must put everything on the line and hope that the wheel of fortune will swing her way. Otherwise she is doomed.

Should you watch this movie? I think you should. I enjoyed it, and I think you will too. It is fun, entertaining a little bit campy and it will definitely keep you at the edge of your seat. Fair warning though - this movie has subtitles. The action takes place in Berlin I believe, and all the actors speak German. This didn’t bother me. In fact, the streets, cars and the architecture looked oddly familiar. I was never in Germany but I lived half of my life in Poland and it seems that the crappy cars, and run down buildings, and shitty supermarkets in both countries are oddly similar. I also remember using those funky phones that take plastic phone cards instead of change. So for me this was not only and entertaining flick but also a trip down the memory lane.

Get it, watch it, let me know what you think.

Some time ago, Freelancer recommended Primer to me somewhere in the comments of this blog. I don’t recall the exact post, but the movie landed on my “to watch” list. I just wanted to say, thanks a lot buddy - you practically broke my brain with this thing. I watched it few weeks ago and I still can’t figure out what in the Holy Fuck happened in that movie. Some movies suffer from plot holes - this one suffers from plot recursion. It is essentially a macro story, that overwrites itself in real time, recursively. Which is not really a bad thing - it is a good thing, but holly shit - it does take you a while to figure it all out.

But let me start from the beginning. Primer is a movie about a time machine. Yes, it is an overplayed cliche that was exploited by Hollywood millions of times. But Primer is not a Hollywood production. It is an indie movie with a a total budget of $7,000. With a budget that tight, you know that the story must be good for the film to make any kind of impact. You know that Primer made an impact, because it has been released on a DVD, it is on IMDB and it has it’s own Wikipedia page that was not taken down by the relevance natzis.

As you may expect, the time travel depicted in Primer does not look spectacular in any way. The time machine is essentially a box. You turn it on, wait 6 hours then crawl into it, wait another six hours. After that time you emerge from the box exactly 6 hours earlier and you get to re-live them. If you are confused, here is a picture I lifted from Wikipedia:

If you still don’t get it, re-read that sentence few times, and do few loops around the picture. It will get clear eventually. The gist is that the machine lets you go 6 hours back in time but only if it has been on for that 6 hours. The protagonists build it in their garage, and then decide to test it. At first their test are innocent - they buy some stocks, bet on a ball game or two and etc. They do it to see if it is even possible to change the future this way. And it turns out that it is. Then something happens in their personal lives, and one of the characters decides to use the machine to fix it. He also discovers that the machine can be stacked (box inside of a box) to travel even further in time. What follows is a logical but jumbled series of events caused by two protagonists using the time machine to independently modify the time line, back stab each other and try to figure out mysterious events caused by their own interferences. The problem is that what we see is the merely the latest “version” of the movie time line. There are things happening on screen that make no sense until you see the characters going “into the box” much later.

What compounds the problem is that at multiple points the protagonists catch onto their own meddling, and change their minds about it creating logical paradoxes. The time line is effectively fractured into at least 8 distinct continuities - if not more - each of which interacts with and modifies the previous. I’m still not sure what exactly happened in the movie but I sure as hell enjoyed the ride. I’m not the only one. Google for primer timeline and you will see just how many people out there are arguing over minutiae details of the plot, trying to piece the story together.

Or you can just look at this visual time line to see how incredibly complex and involved it is. You should be warned that it obviously contains major spoilers so I’m just gonna show you a blurry thumbnail here and you will need to click on it to read it:

click to enlarge; source

If you are one of those people who thinks that movies should be entertaining, and not thought provoking then this movie is not for you. In fact, this blog is probably not for you, cause I love movies that require me to pay attention, think and go online to argue with people about what it meant. Primer will twist your brain into a pretzel, and leave you dazed for days. I’d say it is a lot of value considering the extremely low budget.

I highly recommend it. Watch it with a like minded friend, or a significant other and I guarantee you that for the next 3-4 days you will be revisiting the plot, drawing continuity diagrams and arguing over exactly how many Aarons were coexisting in the movie in total. Or not. But sometimes it may be hard not to.

It is very easy to write an entertaining review of a really bad book, or a bad movie. Conversely it is hard to write anything meaningful about something that is really good without sounding a tad boring. Thus I am at a strange predicament here. I’d love to rip Life of Pi apart, and make fun of it but I can’t because it’s actually good. For that reason I’m going to skip plot synopsis since you can read that on Amazon, or on the back of the book. I’m going to talk about the guts of the book, and the ideas it contains because they are rather interesting - so they may sort of counterweight the lack of cruelty and toilet humor in this post.

The style of the novel is light, modern, eloquent and quite accessible. It sort of reminds me of Cory Doctorow in the way the author tackles certain subjects but Yann Martell seems to be more focused while Doctorow sometimes starts rambling and looses focus in a sea of pop culture, gadgetry and gimmicks. Let me give you an example - the book starts with tangential discussion of the habits and adaptations Sloths. Martel goes on for about 10 to 15 pages describing these animals in painstaking detail, and with a large dose of humor. Sloth’s are not really part of the story, but they are animals which made a big impression on the main character so we get so we learn quite a bit about them in the very first chapter. This sort of very in-depth, seemingly off-topic tangent was rather characteristic of Cory Doctorow’s style. Martel however seems to be much more adept at making his tangents an integral part of the story, and disguising their nature. I believe that the similarity here is completely incidental, and superficial - and probably completely in my head. But that was the first association that popped into my head when I started reading the book.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that these few initial pages about Sloths were what cemented my decision to buy this book. If the author could ramble about these particularly un-interesting animals in such an amusing and engrossing way, I definitely needed to check out the rest of the novel.

Life of Pi is one of those stories that was designed from scratch to piss off the reviewers who like to categorize literature using easy to comprehend tags such as “drama”, “scifi”, “romance” and etc. There is really no easy way to easily categorize this book. It is part Robinson Cruzoe like survival story, part fairy tale, part religious story and finally part animal planet documentary. Martel has this amazing ability to shift between these completely different themes without you even noticing and weave them into a cohesive whole.

On top of that, the novel is chock full of interesting, thought provoking ideas. For example Martel makes a passionate defense of zoo system that made me change the way I think about these institutions. A lot of people consider consider zoo’s to be a bit cruel places where poor animals are imprisoned for our entertainment. They look at a lion in his enclosure and see a fallen king of the jungle, broken, enslaved and yearning to regain his freedom with the every fiber in his body. Martel on the other hand claims that the very same lion is absolutely happy and content to live in that enclosure simply because he never understood the abstract concept of freedom. Animals are usually very territorial and once they find a place they like, they are very reluctant to move. Out of necessity their territories in the wild end up being quite big because it is not very easy to find a spot that has both plenty of water, food, and a place to sleep. Usually these things are spatially separated, and thus every day the animal must trod around from the watering hole, to it’s favorite hunting/grazing spot and back.

Now if you take that territory, shrink it down in size you have a typical zoo enclosure. The animal has a place to sleep, a place to drink and a place to eat all within reach. On top of that, the food is plentiful, and magically appears out of nowhere every morning, the water is always clean and there are no dangerous predators in sight. Could an animal ask for a better accommodation? Freedom is an abstract concept has inherent value to us humans, but there is no reason to think that an animal would comprehend and understand it’s value - or desire it the same way we do if all it’s needs are being met.

You may or may not agree with this point of view but it is interesting angle, and it made me think. The book would be worth reading just to see this argument being presented by Martel. And trust me, he does it much better than me.

Another interesting topic tackled by the book is religion. The main character is a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim all at the same time. He gives all the religions equal time and mind share and considers them compatible and complimentary to each other. Each offers to him a different facet of religious experience, but only combined together they let him express his faith to the fullest. How does this work considering the fact that both Christianity and Islam are exclusive religions? I’m not even going to attempt to explain this. You will have to read the book - but Martel’s religious discussions are worth at least a cursory look. As with the zoo bit, his unique point of view makes you think, and re-evaluate your own preconceptions about religion.

Finally, there are the bizarre, loopy parts that really made an impression on me. I personally think that (note this is a spoiler) [ROT13: gur pneavibebhf vfynaq] an awesome concept. Completely unreal, original but also quite unsettling in a subtle way.

The ending is unconventional as well. It sort of killed me, but at the same time made the story more profound as it was. The way this ending implants a seed of doubt in you is insidious. It bothered me for days, until I realized it didn’t really matter what what actually happened to Pi. Important thing was that the story he told carried the messages it did - that it entertained me, amused me and made me think. So I will go ahead and agree with Pi - I like the story with animals much better, and I’m glad I read it.

Some people claim that good zombie movie is an oxymoron. In part I agree, because the concept of zombies in itself is a little bit cheesy to begin with, and let’s face it - most of the movies in this genre are less than ambitious. Nevertheless I love them all. I completely adore all Zombie movies no matter how silly and pathetic they are. So while I’d trash any other movie, and berate it for plot inconsistencies or stupidity, a zombie flick gets a much gentler treatment. I watch these movies knowing they will be really, really bad and every once in a while I get nicely surprised when something rises above the sea of mediocrity.

[Rec] came highly recommended, but since I knew it will be a zombie flick I watched it with that particular mindset. I didn’t need to. For a zombie movie it was abso-fucking-lutely brilliant. You could argue that there was nothing new in this movie and you would probably be right. But that’s not the point. Using old themes and plot elements is not a crime - otherwise all film makers would be in jails. The trick is using these elements together in a way which is either innovative or entertaining. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza did exactly that - took bunch of standard pieces and put together a puzzle that is more than just the sum of it’s parts. For once the end product of mathematical recycling is a polished, high quality little gem instead of a malformed turd with a piece of corn in the middle.

The plot is simple: a young TV reporter and her camera man tag along with a group of firemen as part of a show which I gather is a more serious version of Insomniac with Dave Attell. One of their fairly routine tasks that night is rescuing an elderly lady who is trapped in her apartment. Only the poor little lady is covered in blood from head to toe, and goes berserk biting people left and right. Next thing we know the police seals off the building threatening to shoot anyone who attempts to leave, trapping scared tenants, firefighters and the reporter inside. You know what is going to happen next. But that doesn’t change the fact that the movie is very well done.

If you watched way to many zombie movies, you can pretty much call the shots here and guess who dies when, and who gets infected with a good degree of accuracy. But this doesn’t mean the plot doesn’t suck you in, and keep you on the edge of your seat. This is not a Hollywood production and it shows. There is no sympathetic leading man with a military background who can blow away the zombies and sacrifice himself heroically. There is no female lead who plays a damsel in distress half of the time, only to show incredible amount of courage, self determination and sheer force of character to carry her through the ordeal unscratched. There is no silly heroism, no moving sacrifices, no cool headed leader to take control of the situation. What [Rec] shows you is bunch of absolutely, frightened ordinary people desperately trying to stay alive. You see chaos, fear, panic and desperation which feels real because these people seem real.

The whole movie is filmed using shaky cam method just like Blair Witch or Cloverfield. If you get motion sick easy, you may get annoyed. But the jerky motions and weird angles are limited here, and kept only for special circumstances. What we see on the screen is supposed to be filmed by a professional camera man using stabilized equipment meant to be used on the move. The camera moves erratically when he is running, or gets freaked out but for the most part he keeps it as stable as possible - just like a professional news person would do which is a benefit for us viewers. Other movies tend to give their cam-carrying characters brief appearances and screen time - [Rec] does not. We can hear him, but never see him and he technically functions as sort of avatar of the viewer. He is our Gordon Freeman - the faceless guy you identify with because he is the “lens” through which you view the portrayed world.

[Rec] does another cool thing - it explains why our protagonist doesn’t just leave the camera when shit hits the fan. I was totally annoyed with this when watching Cloverfield for example. Any normal person would stop filming at some point, survival being more important than making permanent record of the event. However they keep it rolling, because we, the audience, need to find out what happens next. In [Rec] we are dealing with an actual news crew - they have a much stronger incentive to keep filming than the dude in Cloverfield for example. This is essentially the story of their life and being able to capture it on film can not only make them famous, but also be used as evidence of horrible lack of regard for their lives shown by the police outside the building. They are not just some dude who decided to film things for a day - this is their job. Of course at some point all of this stops mattering to them but - as it would to you and me if we were put in a life threatening situation. Instead of just keep filming for the sake of filming [Rec] gives our protagonist new excuses to keep the cam around long after he stops caring about recording things. For example when the lights in the building go out they are forced to use the cam mounted spotlight for illumination. Wwhen that gets broken, they must rely on night-vision mode. Btw, night-vision segment at the very end of the movie is brilliant. I’m not going to spoil it for you - I’ll just say it is genuinely freaky, and incredibly well done.

The explanation for the Zombie outbreak is not mind blowing, but then again show me a movie that explains flesh eating corpses in a plausible and original way. Most of the time I don’t really care how it all started - once you seen one zombie origin story, you have seen them all - and skipping that part of the plot may save you the embarrassment, and make room for more drama. [Rec] gets points for at least trying to give us some obscure and cryptic scraps of info from which attempt to piece together how the infection got into the building and guess at it’s nature. Again, it’s nothing spectacular but it works withing the framework.

Manuela Velasco does an incredible job in portraying the frightened reporter. At the beginning she comes off as a self confident, a little cocky, vain and stuck up but pleasant person. She does multiple takes of a shot because her hair was covering her face, tries to trick or guide people’s interviews for a better effect. She gets bossy. When she is interviewing a little girl trapped in the building she totally milks it by putting words in her mouth for greater emotional effect. When she sees the magnitude of the story she has on her hands she pounces on it ferociously, taking risks and even putting her camera man in danger to get a better shot. And then as things get worse, you see her coming unglued. She is vulnerable, scared and completely helpless just like everyone else. She becomes the Alyx Vance to our Gordon Freeman - a strong emotional focus of the story. She is the vehicle through which we feel the sheer terror of the situation and her performance is superb.

I whole heatedly recommend this movie to anyone who loves Zombie flicks, or enjoys a zombie-style horror movie now and then. It is not terribly original, and it is not some masterpiece of cinematography. It does not try to be ambitious, it does not try to make you think, and it does not try to smuggle in a message about the evils of science, or human vanity. What it delivers is raw emotion, and edge of your seat thrills. It is a zombie movie but instead of mindlessly aping the existing works it takes their themes and setups and subtly subverts so that while predictable they seem new and original. In that it is unique and refreshing stab at the genre which seemed all but depleted by Hollywood lately. The plot is very simple, but solid and without major holes. Characters are simple and not terribly deep, but average and ordinary enough to be believable. Acting is superb all across the board, and the camera work tries not to be too annoying. It is a Zombie movie reanimated in style and with great deal of finesse.

Of course there is one issue here: the movie is in Spanish and if you don’t speak the language you will need to watch it subtitled which I hear is deal breaker for some people. I’d still recommend watching it, but if you refuse to read you will be happy to know that a Hollywood remake starring Jennifer Carpenter (aka Dexter’s Sister) will hit US theaters in October. I watched the trailer and it seems that they kept it pretty close to the original (almost scene by scene) up until zombies show up at which point I saw a lot of gun waving, testosterone fueled bravado, bunch of action sequences and cheep scare shots - in other words, standard Hollywood bullshit which was so gloriously absent from [Rec]. It seemed like they they were trying to “Hollywood up” something which worked great because it was filmed in a style that was intentionally different. The end product will likely suck, since they are going to miss the whole point of this film by a mile, without even knowing why. But that’s Hollywood for you - they’ll never miss an occasion to fuck up a good thing.

I realized that I never really posted conclusion to my KOTOR 2 ramblings which can be found here, here and here. I actually finished the game some time ago but never got around to putting my final thoughts about it on the interwebs. I was just so frustrated and disgusted with the ending I really did not want to talk about it. The game is a fucking tease - it builds this great storyline, does all kinds of crazy foreshadowing and makes you all excited for some mind blowing climax . Then just as things are about to get interesting, it simply goes “THE END”, then punches you in your face, films you cry and then posts it on Youtube. Or at least that’s how it feels when you first finish the game.

So I didn’t post anything about the ending for a while. And then I was like - wait! Why am I passing an occasion to totally trash a game with a really sucky ending. This is a perfect excuse to write some crazy, barely coherent bullshit and pass it of as humor. And this is what I’m doing right now. I’m not posting any screen shots, because the game was punitively removed from my hard drive after I finished it.

Do you remember how the first KOTOR had different ending for light and dark side? That was pretty cool, but I guess not cool enough to make it into the sequel. KOTOR 2 ends the same whether you have been a light side goody two-shoes pussy, or a ruthless dark side asshole. I mean, sure there is *some* slight variation at the end - you know, in the final line of the dialog or so. You pretty much get a choice of saying:

“Ha, I will now go and become the most powerful sith lord FUCKING EVAR”

or

“I will now go back to my exile LIKE A FUCKING LUSAR THAT I AM”.

To make things worse you get both options regardless of your alignment or how you played the game. Yup, you can sort of switch sides at the very last minute. After all, Vader did it so it must be cool, no? I personally think that it totally doesn’t FUCKING cheapen all the moral choices the game forced you to make up to this point, and totally doesn’t make the whole light/dark side thing meaningless.

The lack of distinct light/dark ending is a total buzzkil but it gets worse. As I said before, the game ends at the precise moment it was actually getting good. As you progress through the different locations, you find out that all your companions have some dark secrets and private agendas. You have a love triangle going on between your character, the Hanmaiden and Visas (and maybe even Mira if you make some effort and take her on some missions). You get a chance to convert (if you are playing light side) Visas and the Handmaiden finally reveals her name to you. There is betrayal afoot, people turn out not to be what they appear to be. Some of it is predictable, some is not. The two shifty dark aligned droids are both plotting and scheming cooking up something big behind your back. It is all building up to something big - it seems that your crew is about to implode on itself. The writing is good - maybe little spotty at places but you’re totally into it.

Then the game pretty much ends like this:

Look at that kid’s facial expression. He is really putting a lot of effort into flipping you off. This is the amount of sheer force with which the game tells you to FUCK OFF. Nothing gets resolved. In fact you can never be sure if your friends survived the crash-landing on Malachor. You spent most of the game leveling these fuckers up, talking to them, taking them on missions even though they are totally useless just to get some brownie points with them. And then you crash land on the planet, mysteriously survive and never get to see them again.

The locations in the game have mixed quality. Paragus is dull and boring for the most part. Telos is very open ended. Nar Shada is awesome. It’s huge, contains many open ended quests, gives you a sense of choice. It is really what the whole game should be like. Duxan and Isis are ok, but seem small and tad linear. Korriban…

Ok, let me talk about Korriban. It is a joke. Korriban is like 4 rooms you have to clear out of monsters, and around 50 minutes of exposition dished out in drawn out boring cut scenes. It is stupid, pointless and boring. It really seems like it was tacked on to the game just for shits and giggles.

Dantoine is better - on the par with Duxan and Isis bit, but much shorter. It also suffers from an annoying insurmountable waist high fence syndrome. I totally loved how I was able to see the Jedi Academy from the spaceport but had to go around using the longest possible route to get to it because my Jedi could not hop over the 6″ high curb that separated me from it. A+ for level design!

Finally Malachor V - the end-game area. Oh boy. If you can believe it, it is actually even worse than Korriban. First, you crash on it your ship gets permanently wedged between rock thousands of feet above the surface. Miraculously you somehow teleport yourself out of the ship and start wandering the surface of the planet without explanation on how you got there or whether or not your companions survived.

At this point the game devolves into a dungeon crawl - you clear the area of enemies, head to the next one, rinse, repeat. There is literally nothing to do there other than kill everything that moves and loot every box and body you can find until you reach the boss fight.

That point the action switches to Mira (who also mysteriously finds herself on the surface without any explanation) and you get to do a final face-off with Hanharr. Which is really the same final face off you did on Nar Shadda just with different background setting. People tell me recycling is good, so I guess I can fault them for trying it.

Once you are done with Mira a cut scene shows her heading the same way as your main character and you become Bao-Dur’s little floating probe drone. Naturally you are not told what happened to Bao-Dur himself because that would actually make sense, and be good storytelling. Your mission is to activate reactors in ruined ships on the surface or something like that. The final bit of good writing that somehow got smuggled to this location is the fact hat GOTO shows up and fucks things up because of his personal agenda which is actually kinda cool. I guess this would be a spoiler but I really don’t care at this point. Besides, you never find out what was GOTO’s plan so it’s not like I’m spoiling something awesome.

When you kill the final boss the cut scene shows the planet exploding. Another minor difference between light/dark endings is that in the light side version you see Ebon Hawk flying away at the last second and in the dark ending you don’t. Naturally you have no clue who is actually on the ship and what has happened to Mira, Bao-Dur’s drone and Goto who clearly were still on the surface of the planet and away from the ship last time you have seen them.

KOTOR 2 really needed 3-4 additional hours of solid game play to wrap up all the loose ends and flesh out the locations you visit later in the game. Supposedly it was rushed into production and it shows. KOTOR2 is clearly unfinished. It actually could have been a really good game just like it’s predecessor. But because of the ending, it is merely mediocre. I really enjoyed most of it, but I felt totally cheated by the lack of any kind of valid conclusion.