Game Review - Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain (2010, Quantic Dream, PS3 only)

In 1999, I was very excited about the release of Shenmue on the Dreamcast console. The conceit behind that game was you were in a completely open world where you could interact with everything. That had me very interested, while the game's action mechanic didn't seem as appealing. For instance, if you were in a footchase with someone, buttons would flash on screen and you would have a couple seconds to press the corresponding one on your controller. At the time, I found that style of play a little stressful and not very fun. Heavy Rain doesn't have the freedom and openness, but makes that initially frustrating game play riveting.

Film Review - The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

The Heartbreak Kid (1972, dir. Elaine May)
Starring Charles Grodin, Cybil Shephard, Jeannie Berlin, Eddie Albert

If you have only seen the 2008 remake of this film, then you are missing out. Where the Ben Stiller-driven version works to make you actively dislike his bride and everything is wrapped up in a nice neat package, Elaine May's film makes Lenny a completely narcissistic prick. The result is a very dark, clever comedy that ends on a note of ambiguity. Unlike most comedies, this will remain in your head for a long time, thinking about what the result of this character's choices will be. This is also the best performance from Charles Grodin I have ever seen, turning his smarmy asshole persona up to high.

Director in Focus: Werner Herzog - Signs of Life

Signs of Life (1968)

Before we jump into this first film, some background on Werner Herzog. Werner Stipetic was born in Munich in 1942 in a house that was destroyed by Allied bombing a couple years later. The family migrated to the Alps, where the father left the family, causing 12 year old Werner to take his grandmother's last name, Herzog. Herzog showed a rebellious streak early on, when asked to sing in front of his class and refused. Till he was 18, as an act of defiance, he never sang, listened to music, or learned to play a single instrument. At the age of 14, Herzog encountered a simple encyclopedia entry on film making that infused the desire in him to create. He stole a 35mm camera from the Munich Film School in act he defends as a necessity for him to continue living. Herzog has been married three times, something you would expect based on his volatile personality. One more interesting note about the director, during a 2006 interview with BBC critic Mark Kermode, Herzog was shot by an unknown person with an air rifle. He seemed to brush it off and attempted to continue with the interview, despite Kermode freaking out over the incident.

Signs of Life is a war film without war, instead the soldiers are driven to madness through sheer boredom. Set on Crete during World War II, the film finds Strosek and two fellow German officers put in charge of a munitions depot nestled in ancient ruins. The main character here is the most blank canvas, while his compatriots, Becker and Maynard have more fully fleshed personalities. Strosek has ended up engaged to local Greek girl, Nora in a relationship that seems founded in their mutual lack of anything interesting to do. The film is narrated in a stoic, travelogue style that tempers the picture up until its last twenty minutes when Strosek becomes completely unhinged.

Signs of Life is cited as an inspiration for Kubrick's The Shining, however I saw a lot of similarities with Polanksi's Knife in the Water. Both films are of the same era and place their characters in a lifeless, desolate landscape where they are psychologically pushed to extremes. As we'll see with the majority of Herzog's work, he is incredibly interested in the psyche of men who have a break with reality and the role nature plays in that. Strosek is positioned against his desert setting as minuscule, he is insignificant, hence his position defending a post that is no danger of being attacked. Signs of Life is about humanity's innate need to believe they are useful. When we feel that our society has no use for us it will inevitable cause a break from the social expectations and mores.

Up next: Even Dwarfs Started Small

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Big Trouble

Big Trouble (1986)
Starring Alan Arkin, Peter Falk, Beverly D'Angelo, Robert Stack, Charles Durning

Big Trouble feels like a defeat. It's the defeat of an extremely independent personality who made films that he wanted to make, not caring about building a large audience. With Big Trouble, Cassavetes gives in to the studios and it seems poetically appropriate that he died after making this film. The picture is an unofficial follow up to Arthur Hiller's The In-Laws (1979), and Hiller was originally attached to direct until fights with the studio caused him to leave. Bring in Cassavetes (such a bizarre choice, but I suspect his friendship with Peter Falk played a part) and you have a film that is shredded so brutally in the editing bay by the studio that any humor that might have been gleaned from its piss poor script is lost.

Director in Focus: Werner Herzog

So, Mr. Werner Herzog will be the focus of my next spotlight, and has enough films that he will probably take up the rest of the year. Below is the list of films I'll be watching, in order:

Signs of Life
Even Dwarfs Started Small
Fate Morgana
Land of Silence and Darkness
Aguirre, Wrath of God
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Heart of Glass
Woyzeck
Fitzcarraldo
Cobra Verde
Scream of Stone
Lessons of Darkness
Little Dieter Needs to Fly
My Best Fiend
Invincible
Wheel of Time
The White Diamond
The Wild Blue Yonder
Rescue Dawn
Encounters at the End of the World

Film Review - The Social Network

The Social Network (2010, dir. David Fincher)
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rashida Jones, Brenda Song

In the middle of David Fincher's latest film a character sums up the current technology driven economy by saying this current generation creates jobs for themselves. In the past supply-demand was the dominating force; the people wanted something, then someone provided it. Now, we have products that are given to us and we are conditioned to need and want them. Facebook as one example. No one ever needed Facebook, but by preying on some very primitive psychological compulsions, it has become an addictive force. The Social Network rewinds back before there was Farmville or Poking or Mafia Wars, and focuses on the collegiate roots of Facebook. Here we see at its core the entire idea came from the exclusivity of Harvard's Final Clubs.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Love Streams

Love Streams (1984)
Starring John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel

As I've talked about before, Cassavetes focuses a lot on the psychological fragility of his characters. Often his main characters feel like Kerouac characters, they live life to self-destructive extremes, exploding like roman candles and inevitably fizzling when they can't handle things. In Love Streams, he spends the first half of the film exploring two separate figures that fit this bill, then bringing them together for the last sad, heartbreaking hour. And, as with so many of his films, Gena Rowlands is the force of nature that powers things forward. Cassavetes also holds his own and looks much older than his appearance in 1977's Opening Night. While I don't know the details, it wouldn't surprise me if this was when his health problems were starting.