jessecrust

[jessecrust]

I don't need your Civil War!

Towards the end of Civil War, we come across a giant field in Charlottesville, Virginia. It's a staging ground for a large invasion that's about to occur. There's a large white truck with "PRESS" emblazoned on the sides, the back door is open and a man lies in the seat dead. White coffins neatly dot the field in front of the truck, certainly containing the corpses of Western Forces soldiers who will be given a proper burial at some point in the future. Then, a coffin for the slain journalist is brought out and that's that. It's a well-shot scene, but I don't know what any of it means.

In fact, I don't know anything about the secessionist "Western Forces" or what remains of the United States. The WF appear to be a normal, professional, competent army, far from the violent racist rag-tag militiamen that dump corpses into a mass grave we saw just moments earlier. Are these groups fighting on the same side? Do they want to kill the president too? Beats me!

The WF show respect for the dead, they respect the press, what have you. What do they believe? At least I know the Jesse Plemons guy is racist. The only thing I know about the WF is that they want to kill the president. Who is the president? I don't know, he's just some guy, he doesn't even have a name. The first character you see in the movie is the president. What did he do to cause a Civil War? I don't know, but I swear to God, I saw him do a Trump style lip-purse as he practices his speech, but that may just be me reading too much into things.

Every story needs some amount of world building, especially speculative fiction. You can have a little, you can have a lot, but you have to have some. Civil War has almost none. None of the factions are explained, none of the characters besides the journalists have names, there's no backstory, only empty gestures towards salient, hot button political issues. Remember Charlottesville? Remember Antifa? Remember Abolish the FBI? This the world where that all happened, but worse. There was the "Antifa Massacre" but no one bothers to explain if Antifa did the massacring or were the massacred. At one point I think I heard someone say "Parkland Maoists". Did I mishear it? Is it Portland Maoists? No idea.

The only thing that anchors the movie is the reverence it has for the press and war journalism. I could not help but think of "The Hurt Locker" after I watched it, but instead of a bomb disposal guy getting high on defusing IEDs it's war correspondents getting horny for taking photos of mutilated corpses. Please don't accuse me of being immature here, one of the main characters, upon seeing a battle nearby their encampment for the night, proclaims that he is "rock hard" for whatever is going on over there and they should head over first thing in the morning to cover it. Like "The Hurt Locker," the war doesn't matter, the politics don't matter, it's all denatured space for the hero of the story to get their rocks off.

Back to the journalists, they're not even that likeable. I guess if I had to see people get necklaced for my job like the legendary Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) then maybe I'd be an unsentimental hard-ass, too, but it's taken to such dizzying extremes that I cannot really root for them. Is this the "free press" we are defending? The people who barely have a moment to mourn their summarily-executed friends because the need to take a photo of the president's corpse is way more important? Early in the movie, Lee reflects on her career with her with her mentor in one of the film's quiet moments. She tells him when she sent back those photos of war-torn countries, the stuff that made her famous, she thought it was a warning, but "here we are". I thought about this scene after watching the film's conclusion: a nearly half-hour, seamless action set-piece of the assault on the White House. It was exhilarating filmmaking, blending glorious ruined cityscapes and intimate handheld shots. We've seen small scale skirmishes, a sniper duel, and hella war crimes, but this is the money shot right here. It was great to watch, but this is where our hero is starting to have her doubts. Lee is reduced to a simpering mess for most of the scene, clearly having some sort of existential crisis over her life and career. All the while, her protégé, Jessie, a young girl who tagged along for their suicide mission to the nation's capitol is coming into her own as a Badass Motherfucking War Journalist.

Lee is Jessie's hero, and she's spent the movie gently guiding Jessie through seeing her first war crimes, her first cold blooded murders, her first mass grave, etc. But you know where this is going already, don't you? Of course you do, the young brash Jessie does something really stupid and it's up to Lee to save her life, jumping in front of bullets meant for her at the last moment. Throughout the film, Garland juxtaposes gunshots with camera shots, linking them together as equally powerful ways to change the world. The bullets tear though Lee, click, Jessie snaps her photo, click. And that's it, no one even mourns her, Lee's partner, Joel, presumably a man who has worked with her for a long time, quickly runs to the next room with Jessie and accomplishes his mission: to get a quote from the president. He begs for his life and is killed. Are these our heroes?

I'm not entirely sure what the filmmakers wanted me to take from this movie. Presumably that it's bad to have a Civil War and bad to kill the president, but every single facet of this film is undercooked. The factions make no sense, simply being flimsy stand-ins for confused ideologies. The secessionists come in two flavors: racist and non-racist, and the loyalists don't exist on screen at all. The main characters are all stock and paper-thin. The orgiastic violence excites and thrills; it does not repel and horrify. What would we lose in a new American Civil War? I think of the movie's second scene: a hotel where journalists hang out in New York, and an annoyed Lee complaining about how slow the wi-fi is. That's the stakes, apparently. Without any overt or covert political messages, without any point of view, the movie cannot have much of an impact beyond the most tired liberal anti-polarization and pro-democracy aphorisms. Without round, interesting characters, the Hurt Locker-esque "war as drug" schtick just makes our protagonists seem like craven assholes, not tortured souls trying to find their way.

This is not a dark warning of a dystopian future, it's a half-peeled off COEXIST bumper sticker.

Final rating: 2/5 Canadian Dollars (apparently they're worth more than American dollars now? I don't know, man.)

tl;dr watch if you want to see a well-shot war film, just don't expect much out of the story or characters.

[jessecrust]

We must stop being surprised

The studio that made one of the best games ever is currently imploding. ZA/UM, the studio that made Disco Elysium, is laying off 25% of their staff, including the last remaining credited writer for the hit video game. It's rare for a game to move me as much as Disco Elysium did, it's even rarer for the main creative forces who made the game to thank Karl Marx at their acceptance speech at The Game Awards. It is a breathtakingly beautiful and gorgeous work of art that made me laugh, slip into depression, cry, and smile so big my entire face hurt. After struggling through so many overlong, pretentious, AAA slogs like The Last of Us and God of War sequels, I never wanted to leave doomed Revochol. And it seems that, once again, the reward for surprise success and bringing something unique and wonderful into the world is misery and ruin.

The point of this is not really to document the facts of this sordid business, the legal battles, the documentary made about the studio, the drama, etc. All of that matters, and I'm sure others will cover it, but what matters to me about this is how unsurprising it is. We must stop being surprised that this keeps happening. We can no longer be surprised when the next surprise work of genius made by passionate, idiosyncratic people is slowly and fatally smothered by the financial criminals. There's a basic incongruity between creatives and financiers that, in the best of times, seems like a mutually beneficial relationship. But please understand that these soulless piles of money are all scorpions that will inevitably dig its stinger into your frog back the first chance it gets. Netflix was always going to charge you more to watch ads. The line on the graph must only go one way, the system proposes infinity in a finite world and tasks CEOs, HR departments, and mangers to make the impossible possible.

What I find the most grating is the inevitable reply: "profit is the only reason that these things exist". I truly wish I could experience life through the brain stem of the person who believes this. It must be fascinating to be so dull. Even worse, there's a non-zero chance that the person saying this has downloaded--for free--a PC mod for one of their favorite unoptimized, unprofitable to patch, forgotten games that fixed most of the major bugs and issues. The money, hustle, profit, business obsessed mind cannot comprehend the joy and pleasure of creation for its own sake. Nor, I suspect, can it comprehend art, preservation, aesthetics, history, etc.

I wanted to end this with the Jonas Salk quote about patenting the sun, so I looked it up to make sure I wasn't misremembering it: " There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" And, sure enough, as if the universe reached out its fist to burying it into my gut, I stumble upon a Slate article titled "Jonas Salk: Good at Virology, Bad at Economics". The human race survived thousands of years without Economics, consultants, and private equity firms. If only we could go without them again.

[jessecrust]

I'm Tired of Staring at Backs

I don't really feel that I'm a hater; I don't really think I'm a negative person anymore. I definitely used to be and will totally own that now. Yet I've often found myself very lukewarm on things people seemed to love. I felt that way about God of War: Ragnarok. The 10/10 reviews of that game still mystify me. I had to force myself to even finish it. If I'd bought it with my own money rather than a gift card I received from work, I'd have probably hated it even more. It's everything wrong with modern games wrapped up in one overstuffed, pretentious, package. It's the epitome of a 7/10 game that everyone thinks is a masterpiece because they've forgotten what video games are supposed to be. The pretentious "One Shot" over-the-shoulder forced perspective that smothers the scenery, the forced helplessness sections where you hold forward and watch something that would have worked better as a cutscene happen, it's like video games made by people who are ashamed of video games and instead want to make a prestige TV show (The Last of Us TV series streaming now).

With Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2 coming out soon, I'm seeing more of those comparison shorts, reels, videos etc. floating around, and I can't help but feel the same feeling when I see every single one of those old PlayStation 1 pre-rendered backgrounds, maps, and sprites, many with unique camera placement and perspective, smashed with the Triple A Game hammer into the same exact mold. The same perspective. The same camera. The only thing that changes is sometimes you can stare at a different character's back for a while as you struggle to manipulate the camera to see something from a different perspective.

There's nothing inherently wrong with an over-the-shoulder camera, but there's something you lose when you commit to it. I think games like Resident Evil 4 (which helped start this whole craze) and the recent Alan Wake II are more suited to the perspective exactly because it's limiting and suffocating. When a shadow slides through your field of view, you feel the terror, is it behind me now? When that happens in an RPG, it can be a lot more frustrating and less fun.

It's a contradiction: by offering more freedom and control, you're actually given less. You're allowed to turn the camera however you want, but you're only allowed to see things one way for a majority of the game.

Someone else must have noticed how this felt because there's actually a mod for Final Fantasy VII Remake that re-creates the fixed camera of the original game and it's amazing seeing just the first area of the game with the old camera style. It's not just nostalgia, you get a much better feel of how massive the Mako Reactor is, how small you are, and how large the threat you're facing is. The perspective matters.

[jessecrust]

games as art, part 2: who cares?

An eternity ago, I wrote a blog about a game you might have heard of called Elden Ring and why it and other games like Hades are probably works of art. It's something I think about far too much on lonely car rides to and from work (my commute is roughly 10 minutes). And it's something I've been thinking about a lot more lately having spent a good deal of my free time actively avoiding any new games and trying to get games from the 90s and 2000s to run on my PC without crashing. Honestly, it's actually extremely easy to avoid playing new games because they're released at a rate of about 2.5 a year in a good year.

And yet it somehow feels like there's never been more video game content out there. There's your multiplayer shooters, your MMOs, your "live service" games, mobile games, remakes, re-releases, etc. etc. I'm not one of those people who think you can draw a line between "real" games like something on a major console or PC and "fake" games like this cute thing I have on my phone called "Cats&Soup", but if every video game is indeed art then it is a unfathomably broad category.

Why does any of this matter? Well, if you've ever spent any time on Wikipedia, you may have come across this, or a similar, sentence:

Deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, Die Hard was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017

One reason it's important to figure out what exactly we're talking about when we have these incredibly tedious conversations is so we can figure out what is worth preserving. I feel that in our Age of Content, as I'll call it, it's increasingly difficult to figure out what we should be preserving for future generations.

I don't think this is me being pretentious, although that word itself has come to mean something entirely different in the age of the never ending Battle Royale Multiplayer Shooter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A few nights ago, I saw someone say Quentin Tarantino was a pretentious director because he didn't want to make a Marvel movie. That idea really bothered me, that someone would see a guy who spent his career making eminently watchable popcorn movies and think "what a snob". Yes, I admit, I got sad about one guy writing a tweet, that's really dumb, I know. But go type Martin Scorsese into a Twitter search and you'll find he's not alone in thinking there's something pretentious about making movies that doesn't include a CGI raccoon.

But back to the pretentious art snobbery, it's not necessarily a question of "real" vs. fake or art vs. not art. I've had a good time watching movies like Spider-Man: Far From Home, The Batman (which I wrote about), and even that weird Dr. Strange movie that people can't really decide if they liked or not. These movies are probably not in any real danger of disappearing, but other movies are and most, if not all, video games are. And no one is seriously making the claim that none of them are worth preserving: The Dark Knight, a movie about Batman, is part of the National Film Registry.

Film lovers like Scorsese and other writers, directors, critics, etc. have worked hard to preserve their artform for future generations. I can't think of any director or writer or video games that is doing the same for games. It already requires extensive modding to get some games to run on modern PCs, let alone tracking down physical copies of classic games that could easily cost more than you make in a full eight hour shift at your job. Game directors and writers are not celebrities in the way film directors, actors, and musicians are. Try to name a video game director or think of a game you've played recently where you even bothered to find out who directed or wrote it. The most widely known director of video games is probably Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo and I doubt even he would be recognized by more than a quarter of the general population despite being responsible for over 75% of your childhood nostalgia. Yes, there are plenty of hobbyists, academics, etc. that are doing everything they can to preserve games, but we need those artist/advocates to really drive home the stakes. Who better to talk about the history, love, and preservations of this medium than their own creators?

As more technology is pushed to the wayside, as physical media continues to decline and copyright laws in the digital sphere get stranger and stranger, there's a real danger of not being able to immerse yourself in the history of games in the same way you can with every other piece of human culture. What good is a top 100 video games of all time list if I can't even play them? I can't even play the version of Overwatch I bought five years ago. To be sure, this project is also necessarily anti-capitalist, since the rights holders to these franchises and IPs will fight/have fought tooth and nail to stop it.

Do you know why "you can run Doom on anything" became a meme? Partly because anyone can download its source code for free. Imagine if the same were true of every other game release on or before 1993.

To close, I'll tell another anecdote about a post I saw on the internet. I saw a comment somewhere, maybe YouTube, that said something to the effect of "I'm glad I'll get to play Silent Hill 2 when the remake comes out". This is a problem we have to solve quickly...

[jessecrust]

Oh no, they’ve woked the Batman!

Back in college, my friends and I used to love watching a handful of fringe, grifty YouTubers whom I will not name here. They were a lot more common back then and it took several years for most of them to get kicked off of whatever platforms or payment processors they were on. This was long before your aunts and uncles heard the word “incel” or “4chan” on cable TV.

The reason these people were so interesting to us was because they always had such insane things to say about movies and culture. They had the same basic political philosophy and belief system of a crusty neocon, but without the veil of respectability. All of their resentment, racism, and general bad vibes were out in the open in a way that was novel to people who had never been exposed to their corners of the internet. Years later, most people would recognize them as the “alt right”.

The things they said were despicable and terrible. Many would openly use racial slurs multiple times in each video. They sometimes analyzed media in a pseudo-Freudian manner, suggesting that, for example, Rey’s companion BB-8 droid in “The Force Awakens” represented a cuckolded white man (you know, because the male lead was black and the droid was white, duh!) It was bizarre, stupid, and wrong, but it was kind of entertaining in a dark way to see these people grapple with the growing diversity of Hollywood mega films and capital’s attempts to appeal to younger, more socially conscious consumers. At the end of the day, almost none of these movies, songs, shows, etc. were doing anything truly subversive. For all the talk of movies where “the villain was right”, I can’t recall a single one that isn’t arrested or killed at the end by the trademark copyright hero person. 

I must admit I feel a little nostalgia for this sort of insane rambling. It was like every week you got to stare into this little pocket of the world’s worst people openly talking about how fighting mad they were that the successful critically acclaimed action RPG game they just bought had the audacity to include a trans character. This was long before “woke Hollywood” or “woke video games” or “woke anything” was a massive industry that directly supported the sale of hundreds of thousands of T-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, etc. 

So I guess four paragraphs in, it’s time to talk about “The Batman”.

The first thing I found out about “The Batman” after I got home from seeing it was that it was just the latest victim of wokeness. I actually predicted it on the car ride home when I was trying to decide how much of it I loved and how much of it I hated. I knew there was gonna be articles and videos galore of how DC’s Warner’s AT&T’s “The Batman” had gone woke. In doing research for this blog, I decided to not read any of those articles or read more than a single Ben Shapiro tweet because I don’t really care about arguing with these people. 

Conservative “critics,” if you can even call them that, are so incredibly poor at media analysis that they think a single line of dialogue that Catwoman says somehow invalidates the core themes of the movie. “The Batman” is a thoroughly pro-cop movie (because pretty much all Batman movies are). It’s a movie that tells you explicitly that the best society is one with strong institutions that people trust. Literally. A character literally says that in the movie right after another character says, paraphrasing, “not all cops are bad”. It is a movie that, in a very conscious way, draws a distinction between the “good” rich people, cops, politicians, etc. and the “corrupt” ones. Without a doubt, legions of Republicans and Trump voters will love this movie and just role their eyes a little at Selina Kyle’s ham-fisted line about white privileged billionaires. After all, who do you know that is pro-corruption? 

“Backlash” at this point feels so manufactured and fake. Maybe that’s why I feel some weird sense of nostalgia for the insanity of those early 2010s YouTube losers and their amazingly terrible takes on massive corporate products. The conspiratorial part of my brain thinks it’s just factored into the marketing of every single giant media product now. It’s just so tired and routine and boring. Yeah, man, I’m sure you think “The Batman” is bad because of how woke it is and not because Selina Kyle is black and something about that doesn’t feel right to you. No, I won’t say it’s racism, but we all know what’s going on here, don’t we? This approach to marketing and art as a series of political signifiers and values leads to a world where we genuinely can’t discuss the positives and negatives of a film because if you didn’t like Marvel’s Disney’s pretty bad US Airforce propaganda film Captain Marvel you’re just sexist dudebro. Alternatively, if you enjoyed Marvel’s Disney’s pretty bad Star Wars fan fiction film “The Last Jedi” you’re a beta cuck soy boy. 

One reason this ecosystem of takes exists on the right is because conservatism has never been an ideology brimming with new, fresh ideas. If you need any further evidence of this, one of the two Ben Shapiro tweets I read before writing this was a link to his video review of “The Batman,” which was nothing more than a Trojan Horse advertisement for Ring Alarm Security:

Come for the hot take, stay for the 20% discount on bullshit home security you don’t need. Wokeness is the greatest gift Grift Conservatism has ever received. 

Oh, and I guess “The Batman” was an okay movie. Loved Pattinson!

[jessecrust]

Elden Ring is a video game. So, what is that?

Video games are a wildly misunderstood artform. The confusion over what is artistic about them and what they are supposed to accomplish has somehow only gotten worse over time. We’ve seen games that are basically just movies that you interact with and we’ve seen games that are essentially just creation engines for you to do whatever you want with. And yet I feel that we’re really no closer to an answer. Even if you feel like you personally know what video games are, ask yourself this: are video games supposed to be fun?

Of course they are, you say. They are games and games are fun. But that’s not true, is it? There are lots of games that are not that fun. There are even games that are not fun on purpose. So, here we are, again at an impasse. Saying games are supposed to be fun is as shallow as insisting music should always be played on a guitar.

The “Souls” series of video games that began in 2009 with Demon’s Souls has long been thought of as games that are brutally difficult for the sake of being difficult. The latest release in the series, Elden Ring, is explosively popular for a (sorta) single player action RPG in the year 2022. It’s enjoyed the most concurrent players on Steam of any Souls games by a factor of six and universal acclaim with perfect review scores from almost every outlet. So it’s naturally led to a bit more fear of missing out than usual for a Souls game.

The discourse around the game has been, frankly, a circus. There’s countless videos of people dying to a stronger enemy and calling it bad game design. There’s tweets about how it takes six buttons to summon your horse companion which is bad game design. And there’s the general complaints you’d expect like why would I want to play a game where I die all the time, that isn’t fun. The logic, far as I can tell, is that dying means you’ve done something wrong. Yet it is my contention that one of the things that distinguish video games as a medium and potentially an artform is exactly that this repetition of death and rebirth is possible.

The first time you played a Super Mario Bros game, you probably didn’t know that Goombas would kill you if you touched them. It’s something you picked up pretty quickly and if you didn’t know already, no one had to tell you. You’d figure it out on your own. I’d like to pretend like there’s some sort of hidden meaning or secret to games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but that’s really all there is to it. Believe me, I’d love to write paragraph after paragraph of how brilliant it was for Bloodborne to punish players for rolling backwards all the time by giving bosses attacks that hit really far in front of them because they were used to using that strategy in Dark Souls, but I don’t really need to. The games simply embrace the idea that experience is the best teacher and that death is inevitable and can be overcome. The thing that really decides if the Souls games are for you is your willingness to engage with the game, not how hard it is. I personally think Super Mario 64 is way harder than any Souls game. There were moments where I didn’t think it was all that fun, but I’ve found that’s more my ego getting in the way rather than Super Mario 64′s design decisions. Similarly, Elden Ring and the other Souls games are wildly fun when things are going well. I can’t think of another game that lets me, in the middle of a tense combat scenario, leap 15 feet in the air and slam down on my ass, causing a giant shockwave that stuns the hostile knight in front of me. 

Case in point: one of Elden Ring’s first bosses you can encounter is the Tree Sentinel. I don’t think you’re intended to fight him early, but you can. He’s just sorta roaming around on horseback and you can just walk around him. But if you do choose to engage, your only option is fighting him on foot. Since he’s mounted on horseback with huge weapons, you’ll likely get shredded trying to fight him in his own element. Later on, you can come back with your own mount and easily destroy him since his attacks are very slow and you’re not longer at a speed disadvantage. I lost at least six times before giving up. Once I was on horseback, I beat him in one try. 

Failure is the best teacher, as the inspirational quote generator says. The ability to die and then come back and try again armed with knowledge is only possible in games. I think the best games embrace this and maybe are worthy of being called art. Games like Elden Ring and, another favorite of mine, Hades work death into their core design, pushing you ever onward. Death isn’t always failure, it’s also a wellspring of knowledge and experience that can carry forward. It’s part of what makes video games unique. An idea that’s been around as long as Mario: don’t worry, friend, you’ve got four more lives to go. You’ll get it right this time! It’s something that novels, movies, and music can’t really do. 

There are people who aren’t willing to give Elden Ring the level of engagement that is required to enjoy the game. There is nothing wrong with that and it’s perfectly okay, but please do not mistake deliberate design choices for bad game design. If you’re not having a good time, you shouldn’t force yourself to play it. I didn’t like Skyrim, so I stopped playing it. I don’t think it’s a bad game, it’s just not for me. If you are willing to give Elden Ring the engagement it demands, then you’ll find that it’s not just a good game, but could be the best game ever made.