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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
December 4, 2005
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Yours, Mine, and Aeon Flux; Videogames
Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball starred in the 1968 version of Yours, Mine, and
Ours. It was, believe it or not, based on a true story -- Helen North and Frank
Beardsley were real people.
But it was really just grist for the Hollywood high-concept comedy mill: The
single mom with eight kids marries a single dad with twelve kids. (Hi-jinks
ensue.)
Remake time! Now Dennis Quaid is in the Henry Fonda role, and Rene Russo
is in the Lucille Ball role, and the kids have been scaled back. Now the woman
has ten kids and the man has "only" eight -- but six of the woman's kids were
adopted. (They took in foster kids and couldn't let them go.)
The performances are delightful -- every actor, kid and adult, does at least an
adequate job, and some are quite charming. Dennis Quaid is an actor who has
always hovered just under first-rank stardom -- it may be that he always had
to make do with other actors' leavings and never got the break-through role.
This isn't it.
But his charm and talent sustain him through a movie that is so perfunctorily
written that it seems like they shot the story notes rather than an actual script.
Admittedly, it's hard to have eighteen kids on the screen and give them all their
"moment," but some subplots are so small they are almost laughable.
The oldest Beardsley boy's run for school president, for instance, uses up all of
sixty seconds of screen time, spread across three scenes. In one scene, the
"cool" Dylan North (Drake Bell) tells William Beardsley (Sean Faris, who stars
in Reunion this season) how to fix his campaign poster. Then we get a quick
montage of the kids putting up posters throughout the school. Then, in the
midst of something else, a kid runs up and out of the blue says, "You won the
election." Whoopee.
Later, when one of the kids asks William, "Aren't you going to tell your dad you
won the election?" I almost wanted to talk back to the screen: "Hey, when are
you going to tell us?"
And how many times in the same movie can you have the kids trash the same
house? How many times do we need elaborate set-ups that result in actors
getting covered with paint or slime or some other noxious substance? Does
somebody look seasick? Then you know he's going to puke, and somebody's
going to fall in the puke. Does the man tell the woman a little story about a
lighthouse keeper? Then you know the movie will end with her lighting the
light. Tick? Tock. Every time.
This writing is worse than bad. Bad writing is forgivable when it results from a
simple lack of talent -- you have to congratulate the writer for at least getting
work when he has no discernable ability. But this writing is worse because
nobody seems even to have tried.
And anything that was good was probably cut out when they ruthlessly
trimmed the script to bring the movie in under two hours. Longer would have
felt shorter because we might have gotten involved in something.
The same writing team also brought us the forgettable (and money-losing) Head
Over Heels back in 2001, thus proving that if you ever got a movie made, you
can get hired to write another, even if your first one stank.
Fortunately, the actors and the director made up for the shoddy script by
giving performances that made me almost believe that real people might
actually say and do the things the script made them say and do. Sean Faris,
Drake Bell, and Danielle Panabaker were the standouts among the kids,
though the twins and the littlest ones made the most of some genuinely cute
moments.
Look, you don't go to a movie like this to see great art. You're happy if you
pass a couple of hours pleasantly in the company of the people you brought
with you. The sailing shots sequences are great. And they found a really cool
old lighthouse to film it in.
We enjoyed it. It was fun.
*
Aeon Flux -- just one more installment in the ongoing effort to turn
videogames into movies.
Here's why it hasn't worked so far -- and never will work, until somebody gets
a clue.
In a videogame of the "action shooter" genre, the desired experience for the
gamer is nonstop tasks for him to perform. He has to shoot anything that
moves, think about different things to try to get past puzzles and surprises,
and try to remember all the moves available to him through his game
controller.
When, in the course of a game, there's some essential exposition, it has to be
as clipped as possible so it never leaves the gamer sitting there watching the
screen for more than a few moments at a time.
That's why Aeon Flux begins with a crawl explaining the background history.
The crawl probably wasn't in the script -- because the opening scenes tell us
exactly the same information. But apparently test screenings reported that the
audience was still confused. So the prologue was added. Make 'em sit through
it twice! They still may not understand it, but at least they won't ask for more!
And what is the precious background history? An "industrial disease" wiped
out all but four million of the humans on earth, and they all live together in
one city, protected by a vaccine developed by the family that now rules there. A
group of people are trying to overthrow the dictatorship.
They have technology that crosses over the line into magic -- like the pills you
swallow that allow you to talk telepathically with certain other people. Fighters
are able to leap tall buildings in a single bound without even being from an
alien planet.
When you're playing the videogame, this nonsense is all OK because you're so
busy solving problems that you don't waste much time thinking about the
story. It's enough if the game designers show you something new -- you say
"cool" and keep playing.
But in a movie, you aren't playing anything, you aren't twitching your fingers
and thumbs on a game controller, trying to solve a problem. Instead, you're
watching somebody else solve the problems -- and you quickly realize that the
problem is always solvable using the tools you already have, plus some off-the-wall "intuition" that in the game only comes to you after your character has
died nine times and you finally try truly weird stuff. In the movie, though, they
try the weird stuff right away, you so sit there thinking, What kind of person
would ever really think of that?
In the game, the scenes are all streamlined: Get together, say the things that
will tell the game what he has to know, and get back to the action. In the
movie, those streamlined scenes become laughable. The characters might as
well address the audience directly. "Hi. I'm really evil. I'm plotting to
overthrow my own brother in order to keep the human race sterile and
subjugated." In fact, they practically do -- the characters they are ostensibly
talking to are little more than placeholders, there to ask exactly the question to
elicit exactly the response to move us on to the next stage of the game.
The movie was very, very short. It felt very, very, very long.
And yet: Charlize Theron was so cool-yet-intense in her role that she made us
almost care; and Marton Csokas (veteran of thankless roles in Kingdom of
Heaven, The Bourne Supremacy, and Lord of the Rings) is powerful and real as
the misunderstood dictator. The evil brother is also played to perfection by
Jonny Lee Miller. In fact, all the performances were so much better than the
material deserved that I have to ask: Didn't anybody think of hiring a writer?
Oh, wait -- they had writers, the pair who brought us The Tuxedo. Yeah, that
was a masterpiece. They also wrote Crazy/Beautiful, but that was long ago,
and in a different movie universe.
Maybe the producers thought that to be successful, the movie needed to feel
like a videogame.
But nobody thinks anything that stupid when they make, say, a sports movie.
Nobody thinks we need to sit through every down in every football game,
because the movie audience knows that the game's outcome is not in jeopardy.
We get a few climactic game moments, but most of the screen time is spent on
characters and relationships, making us care what's going on.
Movies are, if anything, the opposite of videogames. You spend your time on
radically different aspects of the story. The game is all action, with as few
scenes as possible; movies are all scenes, with action only there for the
climactic moments, when the audience cares desperately about the outcome.
An all-climax movie is, in reality, a no-climax movie. It becomes a thank-heaven-it's-over movie, or even an I'm-going-to-the-bathroom-just-to-get-out-of-the-theater-for-a-couple-of-minutes movie.
And what about the setting? Games take place in endless corridors, each with
a different architectural style so you can tell at a glance where you are; when
there are rooms, they're huge, cavernous, so bad guys can keep pouring into
the room so you can shoot them all down. In the real world, what we call a
mostly-corridor building is "bad architecture."
Fifty-five million bucks they spent on this thing, and the main thrills come
from wondering how Charlize Theron's costumes stay on. (Which, by the way,
is another relic of the gaming world that they should have rethought before
making the movie. Women in videogames are clothed to accommodate the
dreams of fourteen-year-old boys. When a real woman actually has to wear
that stuff it makes you feel a little sad for her. It's almost as sad as the dresses
they wear at the Oscars.)
I don't know whom this movie is for. Those who have already played the game
obsessively already know everything; those who haven't, are never going to care
about it from what this film throws up onto the screen.
*
When it comes to videogames, you'll never see me review an action-shooter,
because I don't play them. I'm too old and too jaded -- I can't twitch fast
enough to win, and I don't care enough about the ordinary kind of game
storytelling.
But there are games that I love, and for my money, the best of this year is The
Movies.
That's right, a videogame in which you run a studio, trying to keep your stars
happy, your films within budget, and your offerings in line with what the public
wants.
Best of all, however: You actually make the movies.
When I heard this described, I was baffled. I thought I knew what computers
could do, and this seemed way beyond anything possible. But with Peter
Molyneux at the head of the company that made The Movies, I should have
known that the impossible was possible after all.
Molyneux was the creator of Populous, Black & White, and Fable, which took
games in directions that no one else conceived of.
The studio-running features of the game are fun, in a this-is-actually-too-much-like-work kind of way. It's the movies themselves that are almost
miraculous.
No, they're not real movies -- more like brief parodies of movies. Kind of like
the 30-second movies enacted by bunnies which I've reviewed here before. But
you really do see actors moving through scenes. They even talk to each other,
though the dialogue is not actually audible. The acting is execrable -- very
much like many real Oscar-winning performances -- but the effect of the films
is intriguing. Not train-wreck intriguing, more like almost-good intriguing.
Another game I saw recently is called Katamari Damacy (Playstation), which
has taken Japan by storm. When I describe it, it will sound so weird you'll
wonder how it could be fun. But I promise, it is.
It reminds me of nothing so much as a great scene from Robert Stoddard's
classic musical Giraffe Story, in which one of the characters says, "I had a
terrible dream last night. I dreamed that somebody had cut me into little
pieces, and I had to go around and pick them all up."
That's Katamari. What you do is you move through the world rolling things
into an ever-larger ball. You start with little things -- scraps of paper, clips,
pens. They simply stick to your katamari ball as you roll over them. You
bounce off anything too big to pick up. But as the ball gets bigger, you can
pick up bigger things. So if you move through a school, for instance, you start
with scraps but end up rolling over (and picking up) desks, chairs, students.
The designer of Katamari, Keita Takahashi, made the game as a kind of parody
of or rebellion against videogames. It feels far more like play than most
videogames. Videogames, after all, are about solving the problems the designer
has laid out for you. Essentially, the game trains you. And while Katamari has
a bit of that, too, it mostly consists of garbage strewn about and it's your job to
pick it all up.
It really is like a kind of nightmare -- only you're the monster.
Another great game is Shadow of the Colossus (Playstation). This one is to
gaming as the Hayao Miyazaki films are to animated movies. It's first-rate
work, you can see that at a glance; but as you follow the story, it gets stranger
and stranger. You find yourself climbing up the bodies of giants that you
thought were part of the landscape or architecture, searching for vulnerable
points on their bodies.
And as you kill giant after giant (presuming they don't kill you first), you begin
to realize that maybe you aren't the good guy. That maybe these giants are
harmless or even benign, and you are in the service of an evil force that is
forcing you to destroy something beautiful.
Yet the game never asks you to decide to forgo the task. On the contrary -- it
rewards you for doing it. It is so morally ambiguous, so full of a kind of grim
triumph, that it truly feels like you've been transported into another moral
universe.
I also had a chance recently to preview a couple of games that are still under
wraps. All I can say without breaching confidentiality is that when Sims 2
comes out on the PSP (the little handheld game machine from Sony) it will be a
completely new and wonderful game, not the rather boring (in my opinion)
game that is so popular on the PC. It's more like the freak show version of
Sims -- still highly social, even more fun -- and endlessly surprising.
As for the PSP version of Pirates of the Caribbean 2, since it's based on the
movie we haven't seen yet, it's not likely they're going to let me talk about the
game. Let's just say that Jack Sparrow really moves like Johnny Depp's
character in the films, and the game has the whimsical, offbeat style that we
enjoyed in the movies. In short, we really get to be Jack Sparrow.
And having used the Sony PSP, that handheld version of the Playstation, I
must say that it's a great game machine and a surprisingly good movie-watching machine, too -- though it doesn't play regular DVDs, so you have to
buy your favorite movies a second time.
Though PSP faces an uphill battle against the Nintendo DS, which is also a
great game machine with different virtues. If anybody at your house gets either
machine this Christmas, you will have hit the gift-giving jackpot.
*
In case you really want an antidote to the Christmas spirit, you might want to
get online and check out Polly Toynbee's hate-filled review of Narnia in the
Manchester Guardian. Here's the link -- make sure you either type very
carefully, or just go to the Rhino or Hatrack website and click on the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1657942,00.html.
Think of it as an exercise in forcing yourself to be forgiving.
*
Normally when I put on a play here in Greensboro, I have no qualms about
inviting the general public. We may put it on at the local Mormon church
building, but our shows have been musicals and comedies from our shared
culture.
Tonight (Thursday, 8 December) will be the one night we're performing a play
with specifically LDS (Mormon) content. But that doesn't imply that only
Mormons will enjoy it. It's a historical play called Liberty Jail, about the six
months that Church founder Joseph Smith was imprisoned in the town of
Liberty, Missouri, along with five others, at a time when the main body of the
Church was being driven out of Missouri by mobs.
Of course there are resonances for Mormons in the audience, who will know
more about many of the characters than can be shown on the stage; but the
play itself focuses on the relationships among the prisoners and I believe it
might be interesting to many who are not LDS. (It is not a proselytizing play;
missionaries will not call.)
The play is enacted using only teenage actors, playing adult characters -- but
this is a superbly talented group, and they do a great job.
The play starts at seven p.m. tonight and runs a couple of hours. Admission is
free. (Please do not bring children under ten years of age -- they will not
understand the play, and you cannot keep them quiet enough to allow others
to enjoy the performance.)
Oh, yes ... almost forgot to mention: I'm the playwright, not the director on this
particular show.
*
And as long as I'm touting my own projects, I hope you'll check out Orson Scott
Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show (http://www.oscigms.com). It's a new
magazine of science fiction and fantasy, including stories and illustrations (of
course), a terrific group of columnists, a short comic book in every issue, and a
story set in the Ender's Game universe -- all for $2.50 (payable online through
PayPal).
It exists only online, not in print -- but that means we can (and do) keep
adding content to it even after you've bought the issue. And much of the
magazine is there for anyone to read, without even having to pay. So come
check it out. If you like it, it's not too late to order it as a holiday gift for the
fiction lovers in your life. At $2.50 a copy, it's the cheapest gift they'll ever love
...
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