A Beginner’s Guide to Classic Cinema Part II: Reading at the Theater

So now that you’ve no doubt been inspired to rush out and watch the entirety of AFI’s top 100 list what will you do with yourself? You no doubt have developed an insatiable thirst for increasing quantities of celluloid and you’re looking to branch out again.

Just sit right down here and we’ll have a little chat about films with subtitles. Despite what you may have been led to believe over the years movies are in fact made outside of Hollywood. In fact, one of my all time favorite film series’ is shot in jolly old England. For my English-speaking friends who, like me, have failed to learn any other language foreign films often present a hurdle in the fact they are filmed in said other languages. There are two ways to overcome this. Distributors can hire actors to re-dub the voice soundtrack in the target language, this is most common in Japanese and Chinese films, or the distributor can simply use subtitles, as is common in many European films.

Dumbing of Age: A second try at a normal-ish life

Once upon a time, there were a group of teenagers who were very excited to be heading off to college and on their own.  Sure, there were sacrifices that needed to be made.  Friends from high school left behind.  Social perils to be faced.  But for Danny and Joe, Joyce and Sarah and a wide cast of other minor and major characters, it was really a place to find out more about themselves.  To find out who they would become, and maybe who might be willing to grow old with them.

But then some shenanigans happened, and maybe an alien invasion or two.  And the story became less about college than it did about a very immature young man as he lead the fight against a full on, end of days scenario.  The tale outgrew itself, and the peaceful days at college were gone forever.

Or maybe not.  Dumbing of Age is the fifth web comic created by comic veteran David Willis, and is the first to deviate from that original universe or aliens, to hopefully find out what might have happened to our hapless scholars if those aliens hadn’t started abducting everyone.

Battlefield Bad Company 2

Call of Duty is the alpha dog.  Every other first person shooter is trying to capture the insane sales numbers.  I remember when I saw the advertisements for Battlefield 2 as it was released way back when….oh well it was almost exactly a year ago (damn games come out fast now!).  The commercials basically showed it as trying to be Call of Duty, and I quickly dismissed it as I didn’t really need two of the exact same game, and I already had a large group friends neck-deep into Modern Warfare 2.  However, I recently had the urge to play a good FPS I hadn’t tried before.  So on the basis of solid reviews throughout and it being twenty dollars cheaper than newly released game, I grabbed Battlefield 2.  To my surprise it is not just a Call of Duty clone, although it has that feeling at points.  It contains a single player offering that I thought is better than anything CoD has given us recently, and a much different multiplayer experience.  I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse than CoD in that respect, but it’s most assuredly not a clone.  These things combine make me question whether I should be getting MW3 or Battlefield 3 first come this holiday season…..I’m nerdy enough that I’ll probably end up getting them both eventually.

Infinite Space: The Energizer Bunny of extraterrestrial games

If you’re a regular reader here at Faceplant then you know that I’m not particularly fond of jRPGs. In fact, I’m relatively new to the whole RPG genre. But Infinite Space for the regular old Nintendo DS intrigued me. I read about it on a news post by one Tycho Brahe early last year, and finally got around to renting it from GameFly about a month ago. As I understand it, it isn’t your typical jRPG. You’re not running through a fantasy land stabbing blobs or fighting Cthulhu. Nope. You are the 16-year-old commander of a space fleet.

Goats: Two guys and a chicken walk into a bar…

Yes, that's a large angry broccoli man.

Jon Rosenberg has been in the web comic business for a long time.  In April of 1997, Rosenberg started Goats, which he refers to as a pseudo-autobiographical comic featuring himself and his friend Phillip, though you should be aware that apparently much of their life in 1997 was centered around booze and the consumption of booze.

I’m one of those fabled teetotalers you hear tales of whispered between alleys during the darkest of mardi gras festivals, so honestly booze related humor doesn’t really appeal to me.  However, what kept me reading Goats through the early years was the how the comic’s art style looked eerily similar to Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County, and how quickly Jon and Phillip’s boring life of consumption slipped into insanity, bizarre livestock animals and sci-fi shenanigans.

Fright Night

I’m usually not a fan of horror films because most of them I find to be terrible.  I had never even heard of Fright Night until about two weeks before I saw it, when I saw a trailer.  It went something like this:  Oh great another vampire movie….well at least he’s not sparkling but….wait a minute….is that Colin Farrell?  There is no way that’s him he would never do….wow it IS him.  What the hell is he doing in a vampire movie?  To be honest I’m not even a Colin Farrell fan, although I do think he’s a solid actor.  The casting choice just seemed SO strange that I was intrigued to see what would happen.  What happened is a horror movie that does not stumble where many others do:  taking itself too seriously.  There are some legitimate scares and creepy scenes to be found here, but there are just as many if not more laughs.  Laughs that the film does on purpose!  It’s a somewhat strange film both in tone, writing, and casting, but the end result is a truly enjoyable movie.

A Beginner’s Guide to Classic Cinema

Remember when these guys showed movies made before 1990?

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment the transition occurred, but at some point between junior high and marriage I traversed the divide between casual movie goer and hardcore film geek. There came a time when I realized that I was no longer satisfied with flavor of the week mentality that meant I took interest in what ever movie got the most talk time in the cafeteria. It started with a willingness to watch black and white films and before I knew it I was pouring through the classics like an addict downing every fermented drop in the house.

Black Blade Blues by J.A. Pitts

I was a little apprehensive about reading Black Blade Blues after I took it home from Borders, mainly because I knew absolutely nothing about it.  Of the three books I picked up that day, Black Blade Blues was the only one I didn’t even bother to read the back cover of.  I pulled it off the shelf at random and took it to the check out counter as a last, futile attempt to honor the dying chain bookstore.

I put off reading Black Blade Blues until last just to give my brain some time to open up to whatever this overly sexy, white haired blacksmith girl story had in store for me.  What I ended up with was a heaping helping of relationship drama, some confusing plot twists and some dragons, all of whom are total dicks.

On the upside, it also introduced Sarah Beauhall, who is probably one of the most well thought out female leads I’ve seen in a fiction book in quite some time.

Eternal Sonata

Japanese RPG’s having strange stories is nothing new.  Eternal Sonata, by developer Tri-Crescendo, has to be the winner of the most out there premise award though.  The idea;  Composer Frederic Francois Chopin, yes the real life famous pianist, remained in bed for days deathly ill before finally dying.  These are all historical facts.  So what if during this time, he was having a dream in which he was present in an entirely musical themed world, in which a fantastical adventure was taking place.  And what if he KNEW he was dying in real life, and KNEW he was dreaming up the world he was in, but just kind of went with it.  I wasn’t present at the pitch meeting, but whomever came up with this idea has to be one persuasive guy.  The game was made with that exact premise, which ends up being not only very unique in terms of story and setting, but makes for a very satisfying old school style RPG.

Trainspotting: The Scots and their heroin

Continuing with our British theme of late, I thought I’d come clean with you. Up until last week I had never seen Trainspotting. I know, I know. For shame. To be fair, I didn’t start watching rated R films with reckless abandon until the fall of 2002 and I had a lot of catching up to do. But Trainspotting had been on my list, near the top even, for at least five years. Oddly enough I saw Requiem for a Dream many years ago. It would be easy to compare the two films, but despite their mutual focus on drug addiction, and in particular heroin, they are vastly different. Trainspotting has a much firmer grip on reality with less emphasis on the trip itself and a tendency to be distasteful in a decidedly Scottish way, yet both maintain a horribly bleak anti-drug message. I imagine if either one of these films were shown to junior high schoolers heroin would not be seeing the come back it is today. But I digress.