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ryanmeft · 2 years

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Movie Review: Don't Look Up

If you intend to sway a skeptical audience, you need wisdom, cleverness and passion. When The Big Short did not just take aim at the housing crisis but argued that the entire system was broken on purpose, Adam McKay had all three of those things. Now he’s made Don’t Look Up, about…well, we will discuss what exactly it is about later. It does not have cleverness. It does not have wisdom. And the passion has dried into nothing but empty anger.

The film’s supporters, or rather supporters of the film’s message, will likely say that we should be angry, that the planet being doomed is a thing which must produce outrage. The form of the planet’s doom in this film comes in a comet bigger than the one which took out the dinos. The movie could just say that, but instead it chooses to refer to the Chixculub crater and Yucatan Peninsula.

I knew what that meant instantly, and that is of course why McKay did it that way: to allow people who knew it instantly to pat themselves on the back about how smart they are. This conclusion is delivered by a student (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio). Going forward I will use actor names, because the movie does not have characters, it has ciphers for McKay’s rants. Other ciphers include Meryl Streep as a very thinly veiled Trump stand-in, Jonah Hill as an equally transparent representation of the Trumplets, Mark Rylance as a mish-mash of the many tech billionaires who can talk to machines but not humans, Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as caricatures of TV talking heads, Timothee Chalamet as a very inaccurate representation of millennials, and Ron Perlman as the film’s lone redeeming feature, the love child of Hellboy and Chesty Puller.

Rarely has a film done so little with so much. DiCaprio turns in a career-worst performance that, out of respect, I’d like to move past without further comment, except to say the running asthma joke isn’t funny. Lawrence has been on a decline in terms of roles taken, with one or two worthy ones in about six years, and here gets the kind of character that could destroy a once-rocketing career. These two are McKay’s attempt to say that in our world, passion gets you destroyed while cynicism gets you ahead, but when you’ve got two of the finest popular actors of this century made to repeatedly deliver the same bad lines, your message isn’t effective. Hill plays the same stupid-but-also-cruel shtick he has in Wolf of Wall Street and War Dogs and a half dozen others, and it’s getting weak. Rylance is just weird. Rather than try to satirize Jobs, Zuckerberg and Musk all at once, McKay should have picked a target and aimed more carefully. Blanchett’s not actually capable of bad acting, and this script gets her so close to it that it proves that statement---if she can do this and just barely not fall over the edge, she can do anything. Chalamet’s skater boi is proof that McKay hasn’t updated his perception of The Rebel Youth since 1979. Streep, who seems to have recently decided she has turned in enough real work for one lifetime and begun phoning it in, gets the worst job in the whole film: to play Donald Trump in heels. The problem is that Trump is a thing beyond caricature, and since McKay’s entire film is just one big polemic, it doesn’t have anywhere near the patience or wit to find a way to do it. Ironically, in a movie with one of his worst performances, DiCaprio gets the only excellent scene, in which he has a simple dinner table conversation with his family and friends as disaster looms. Somehow, McKay missed the fact that this one long scene is more effective at conveying the message than the entire rest of his movie.

It’s impossible for a cast like this to all be bad at once, so the only logical conclusion is to blame McKay. By the time he made 2018’s Vice,he was already veering into rant territory. Now, he’s clearly developed Michael Moore Syndrome, where you forget you’re making a film and simply yell at people. I’ve been treated to a few bullhorn sermons by sidewalk prophets. The audience doesn’t know what the speaker is trying to say because the speaker does not know what the speaker is trying to say. They jump wildly from the Bible to Democrats to 5K, and by the end a tightrope walker would be dizzy.

That is how McKay’s film feels. I will summarize the things I believe he is mad about:

Environmental destruction

Old people not listening to young people

Lying politicians

News channels that are really just partisan entertainment

A lack of belief in science

The fact we don’t talk to each other

The idea we don’t value our families

Maybe spaceships? That one’s unclear

The thing about actual smart people is they don’t need to be told over and over again how smart they are, and this is the kind of movie made to remind the target audience of their superior intelligence every three to four minutes. I have been told that this is one of those films where if you don’t like it, you just didn’t Get It™. I can’t say if I got it or not. I do think I’m smart enough to note that a comet from outer space is not a good metaphor for anthropogenic climate change, that asthma is a serious medical condition and not shorthand for a person’s inadequacy, that a movie still needs to be engaging regardless of its message, and that just because someone doesn’t enjoy being yelled at for two hours doesn’t make them ignorant.

Verdict: Not Recommended

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

You can follow me on Twitter here, if you want more posts about film and video games and sometimes about manscaping:

https://twitter.com/RyanmEft

All images are property of the people what own the movie.

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pastel-angel15 · 3 years

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Credit: @mish--shticks

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kennedycatherine · 5 years

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it was mine.

I remember the first time I spent a weekend with my new best friend in the third grade.

She had these really kind of sweet, quiet parents. They were a little dull, very settled, very content, very routine. Every aspect of the weekend was scheduled and marked by these little “traditions” where everyone knew their role and exactly what was going to happen.

It was all so simple and kind of muted. Noiseless.

On Sunday my mom picked me up in the late morning and asked me how it was.

“Different.”

My childhood was not noiseless. It was boisterous and full and sometimes a little chaotic. There were always friends coming and going, chatting loudly with my mom at the kitchen table, smoking in the garage with my dad. My sister and I’d adapted to falling asleep on many a family friends couch after being told for the 7th time “just 30 more minutes, babies.” By the age of 8, I could hold a better conversation with most adults than I could kids.

It was charmed, entirely encased with love and because of that, I grew up with a lot of “pseudo parents.” People who were always there, undoubtedly, with a listening ear or open arms. They were my parents friends but they became my people too, in our own unique ways with our individual connections.

It’s how I found myself, on a Friday night, pulling up outside a family friends home for a dinner party. I was 16 years old and going through what felt like a never ending “love isn’t real” phase. My sexuality was a mystery to a lot of people, myself included. All I knew for certain was that the idea of marriage made me deeply uncomfortable and this idea of romance I’d been sold by the novels I tried to read and the movies my friends liked to watch made me nothing but anxious.

I wanted none of it.

I let myself through the door and said hello to my parents, the biological ones, then hugged the other set, Dennis and Andrea. Plopping myself onto the bench at their kitchen table, I mumbled on about 11th grade finals and summer plans and listened intently to whatever other conversation was going on between rum and cokes and drags of cigarettes.

Then Jane walked in.

I wish it didn’t sound cliche. Trust me, I wish it wasn’t fucking cliche. That’s the horror of my memories, it was all deeply, deeply cliche. And painfully obvious.

I’d heard of her but we’d never met because her kids were mostly grown so she and her husband spent most of their time travelling when they weren’t working. I don’t remember being introduced to her or if we exchanged many words at all. What I remember most is that she couldn’t have been less interested in me. She was there to discuss a recent trip to Egypt with the friends she’d missed and I was just some obnoxious teenager she’d never met.

But it was well and truly over for me that night.

The understanding that this was attraction was not clear to me, not immediately. She was just someone I thought was interesting, with a sort of reserved demeanour but wild stories and an incredibly successful career. I wanted to know more, I wanted her to tell me specifically, to look me in the eyes while she talked about whatever thing she’d be doing next.

But she did not see me at all. And it was making me insane.

I talked more loudly, I tried to make jokes, ask pointed questions. None of it mattered. I was annoyed. Being entertaining? Kind of my shtick! I was funny and charming and people noticed. She, however, did not give a shit.

I left that night, drove away in my beat up Jeep Grand Cherokee, very likely listening to some variation of Bonnie Tyler or Bob Marley, wondering who the fuck she thought she was?

Three days later, when I was still thinking about her, I decided it was because she’d injected a newness into a room that had become otherwise stale. And while that’s what I always craved, I was jealous. She was charming and engaging in a way that 16 year old me couldn’t be because I lacked the experiences she had. The ones I wanted. I just kind of wanted to be her.

Right?

Almost a year later, I was headed into my senior year of high school. I had no idea what life was going to look like for me but I had plans and dreams. I was thrilled. After my first week back at school, my dad planned a fishing trip for me, him and Dennis. One final hurrah before the end of summer weather and the real beginning of school and homework and part time jobs.

He was set to pick me up after my last class at 3:25 on Friday so I left that old Jeep, affectionally called Cher, back home for the day. But class ended and he was nowhere. I stood in the entrance of school, kicking rocks, calling and calling to no answer. My mom wasn’t picking up either. So I began what felt like the unreasonably long 45 minute walk home wondering what the fuck had happened to my dad and this supposed fishing trip we’d been talking about for days.

The anger hit me square in the chest when I rounded the street and there, about 10 houses down, was my dads truck parked in our driveway.

When I finally reached the house, I allowed the door to slam behind me and dropped my bag in the entrance, pissed off, huffy and a bit more than a little sweaty. But stepping into the kitchen I saw my dad, a man I’d never seen cry, not even at his own fathers funeral, was trying to compose himself and his tear stained face.

“Dad?”

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Dennis. This morning, he died.”

I laughed. “No, he didn’t. He didn’t?”

“He did, babe. He went over to our cabin to get stuff ready and he just - they found him. He collapsed. Heart attack.”

What happened after that is a blur of days, really. Dark and empty and sort of scary. I’d known people who’d died before but this was the first loss that felt like mine too. The first time I hadn’t felt like a bystander to the significant grief of someone else. Because I felt it.

I remember walking into their house, still dressed in my sticky school clothes, so shocked by the people there. He’d been dead all of eight hours and there was already just - people? Milling, fussing, sitting, crying. It was sunny outside and none if it seemed to make any sort of fucking sense.

My dad was immediately gone from my side, busying himself with the inconvenient organization of death. My mom was out of sight, in the bedroom with the widow who’d been given so many pills she was nearly sedated. I didn’t know where to look or sit or how to contain my grief or how not to. Then I saw Jane, a familiar face.

She looked angry.

I felt angry.

So, I sat next to her.

We didn’t say hello because it wasn’t really the kind of occasion for pleasantries. The silence only lasted a few moments before someones sob pierced through the stillness and my own shock began to wear off. Then the tears came. For a moment, I forgot where I was, trying to find a way out of this waking nightmare when a hand grabbed mine.

“He loved you so much, you know?”

I looked to Jane. “What?”

“He always talked about you like one of his own girls. You write, right? He was really proud of you.”

Then I cried harder. She did too.

His death was shattering in ways I never expected. Probably because I never thought to expect it at all. Everyone kept on moving in this sort of fog, raw and changed. Andrea was often a person I didn’t recognize. My dad, a man who only knew strength and strong wit, was suddenly joyless and sort of aimless without his childhood best friend and lifelong companion. My mom was a bit frantic and a lot run down trying to keep the seams together for those who couldn’t really do it for themselves.

Then.

My dad had a heart attack too. Just four months later. He survived and the fog was lifted in favour of fear and we all clung. To each other, to life.

Those next few years, in some ways, became about renewal, reestablishing. We’d always felt like a bit of a rag tag, mish mosh “family” but it became even stronger, more defined. Sunday morning brunch at Andreas was no longer an option. It didn’t matter if I was hungover in a sweat suit, or my dad and the other guys wanted to be out hunting, we all crowded that table and passed our grief around with bacon and fruit salads. Friday nights were always spent on our deck, beers and joints and tequila bottles and stories. God, the stories. Sometimes I wonder if they all lied just to keep us entertained but if I’m being honest, I didn’t really care. We cried a lot in those years too.

As we all navigated this newfound territory of feeling far more bound and at times, obligated to one another, Jane was around more. Death does that. We commune.

At first, there was just too much. Too much pain, too much mandatory functioning that felt unnatural, a heavy burden when you just want to lie down and tell everyone to fuck off with the pleasantries. And for me, too much confusion. The reality that I was interested in and attracted to women was something I often overlooked in favour of believing that love was something that just wasn’t for me. Surely, I was just a lone wolf destined to be the family spinster. That felt much simpler.

But it was becoming hard to deny.

There was a birthday party. I can’t even remember who it was for. I was debating with my mom whether or not I had to go when she started rattling off the names of everyone she knew who’d be there. When I heard Janes name, the answer became clear to me.

I looked forward to that party for weeks. When the night came, I rolled in not so reasonably late as the careless college student I was.

Jane wasn’t there.

Minutes passed, then hours, the night was winding down and she wasn’t there. My heart was in my stomach. The disappointment seeped through every limb. I wanted so badly to ask someone where she was but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t know what I was feeling only that it wasn’t quite right and I was terrified that if I spoke her name, it would vibrate through my voice and someone would know.

That night, incredibly drunk and a little bit stoned, I cried into my pillow. Because I was disappointed I hadn’t seen her, because I didn’t know when I would again but most of all, because I had no idea what any of it meant.

Months later, by complete accident, we all ended up at the same place. The “family” was all there but I’d come without them, with my best friend. Late in the evening, I found myself at the bar at the same moment as Jane. The words that tumbled from my mouth all felt wrong and I grew more and more uneasy as the conversation went. But in no way did I want to walk away and I certainly didn’t want her to walk away.

When the moment did end and I brought the drinks back to my table, my friend asked who I’d been talking to. I gave a brief explanation, opting to bypass the part about the intense emotional turmoil over whether or not I was in deep, deep lesbian love or lust with this woman.

“Oh, she’s super pretty.”

“She is, right?” I asked, a little too forcefully, a bit too excitedly.

And later that night when we all ended up at a table together, talking for hours, she said it again.

“She’s super pretty and she’s like, super successful and cool? Can I be her when we grow up?”

I was so fucking relieved. Having someone else, someone who was straight and in a loving and committed relationship with a man, reaffirm that Jane was a person worth admiring suddenly absolved me of any anxiety. 16 year old me had been right, I just wanted to be her.

But 16 year old me hadn’t cried in a pillow over not seeing her either, had she?

It was very likely only months from that moment when the grand Coming Out happened. It was a long time coming and despite the emotional turmoil, was rather simple and calming. I was just one of those people who really had to say it out loud before I could fully deal with it. And I did.

At this point, the “Jane Cycle” had been turning for a few years. I’d convince myself it wasn’t love or something like it, I’d see her and I’d crumble. I mean, inconsolably upset for days and sometimes without even realizing why. I’d just be irritable and moody, upset with the world. But it was all because I’d had my hit of norepinephrine and dopamine just to have to walk away from it with no sense of when I’d get it again. It was painful.

In coming out, I allowed the mask to be pulled off these “ambiguous feelings” I had for Jane. It wasn’t confusing. It was just a fact. I loved her. Not entirely, not implicitly, but in my own sort of tragic, puppy dog way, I did.

The first time I saw her after the gay flag had been waved, I almost had to laugh. She was not nearly the terrifying, untouchable thing I’d been holding onto for years. She was just a person I was attracted to. Though a part of me was tempted to tell her, just as a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge silly kid, hey?” moment, I opted not to. Instead, I got drunk off jello shooters and tequila and flirted shamelessly with her.

Until her husband laughed and affectionately called me a tease, lightly putting me in my place. Hold your judgements, okay? I adored her husband, he adored me. They’d been married longer than I’d been alive and ultimately, he was just thrilled to finally get to tell Jane, “I fucking told you so!” Because as it turns out, teenaged me was definitely not pulling off my sapphic yearning as subtly as I thought I was.

Sometimes I become a bit sad for a younger me. The one who struggled through years of feeling very confused and kind of defective. Who wondered why she was incapable of feelings like everyone else. I hear stories and watch movies of teenagers going through these kind of shameless, embarrassing first fumbles in love with prom nights and adolescent movie dates. Then there’s the mandatory coming of age heart break with teenage girls eating ice cream and watching rom coms and trash talking the ex boyfriend of 2 weeks in the girls bathroom. It causes a momentary heartache for the girl who didn’t have that because for her, things felt more heavy and certainly a hell of a lot more complicated.

Then I remind myself, in someways, I did get that. I got the embarrassing first fumbles and the painful, dramatic, crying into the pillow first heartbreak. Just, for me, it looked a little different. It wasn’t Tyler from Trigonometry class, it was Jane from the dinner party.

And it was mine.

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whistlewhileiblogit · 6 years

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Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the Teen Titans Go! of the franchise.

I watched the leaked(?) first five episodes, which is enough to make a fair judgement imo. And I just...am clearly NOT the target audience. But the thing is, that doesn't matter. Or shouldn't. I haven't been the target audience of TMNT since I was a kid, and yet I have always loved it. I loved the Original 90's movie, the 2003 series (which I still say is the best of all the series interpretations), the 2007 movie (the best movie imo) and even enjoyed the 80's series. While the 2012 series wasn't my cup of tea, I could still appreciate it for what it was.

But this....is just...hoo boy. It is such a mess. Each episode lacks any sort of coherent direction or purpose. While I have to give props to the animation and backgrounds themselves, the character designs are (for the most part) hideous. Raph and Master Splinter definitely suffer the worst from this. The others I could grow used to, and I always liked April's design. She's cute. Though I do hate the "April being a teenager" thing that they continued from the 2012 series, but I digress.

The voicework itself isn't bad, but just severely unfitting. Mikey doesn't have that classic raspy, Californian-style voice that he has always had, and honestly it just sounds too much like Leo, who has always had a more "basic" voice. Raph's is fine, but not the best. And April's is hit or miss.

But the worst thing of all, is just how the characters themselves are being portrayed.

Even if you aren't a TMNT fan, you could probably tell them apart just by their personalities alone. "The funny one" "the smart one", etc etc. It has been that way for years for a reason. It works. While the generalisation doesn't at all show the complexities and depth with each character, it shows that they are all unique.

But now, the turtles all sort of have a mish-mash of personalities, with no defining traits. The only exception to this is Donnie, who's one unique trait seems to be the blunt one with one-liners and snarky quips. I wouldn't mind this so much, if it wasn't his only shtick.

But at least he has one, as the other three turtles are pretty much only definable by their designs. If you had their "personalities" personified, they'd just be clones of each other.

There is little to no consequences of the turtles being out in the open. Being seen by humans is a non-issue (so why present it like it is one in the Pilot, then?).

I can't even put all my thoughts into a coherent way, which is how I imagine the writing team must feel all the time considering the mess that is the show.

I might go easier on it when more episodes are released, but at the moment...

#tmnt #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #tmnt 2018 #nickelodeon #ttg #teen titans go

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benjaminreevesart · 5 years

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WHY DOES FORTUNA DISAPPOINT ME SO?

In November of 2018 DE released its latest OpenWorldTM Fortuna, an update I had been waiting for with bated breath from the edge of my seat since its announcement last year. At the time of launch I was logging in every day just for the chance to be one of the first to experience it.

Now over a month later, I sit here struggling to convince myself to go back. Yes, even after the heist update. A sentiment seemingly shared among many others in the community. So as with all things in life we must ask ourselves… why?

-Aesthetic: they decided to drop this thing in November, so I guess instead of going outside to play in the snow users could stay inside log on to warframe and play… in the snow. Yay.

I find myself missing the familiar exotica of not-africa and its kind-of-alive-but-not-really-except-its-made of-flesh-and-you-can-eat-it-wtf-DE? tower. (that bothers me). Just standing in these updates’ respective hub-areas and listening to the ambiance of the environment speaks volumes. The plains has haggling traders, merchants announcing their wares, wind rustling through the many canopies and tent flaps of hand hade fabric, it feels alive where fortuna feels like a cold mechanical day job. If you say that’s intentional… well, I hardly think boredom is anything to aspire to.

I get that they’re going for a sci-fi-punk feel, but it just comes off as monotonous, hopeless, and impersonal.

-Personal connection: Sure Saya’s Vigil was stupid romantic melodrama, sure onko’s decision is lame, sure it was kinda dumb to give newby players a warframe blueprint they couldn’t build until after reaching the mid-game, but ya know what? It worked.

I know who saya and konzu are, i have been with them on their story, every time I see konzu standing there with his girl I know that is because of me. My journey, my struggle, my effort brought these people together. Its simple its small, its human.

I mean who the hell is eudico anyway, why does she fight? Why caste shade on biz’s origins, and are we just going to gloss over an innocent person getting their head chopped off and their organs harvested in the open fucking street???????? There are constant references to people being “brain-shelved” which I can only assume means they get their brain put in a jar and thrown in someone’s freezer, and we get ZERO resolution for that! I mean sure there are fragments to find and scan, but they don’t really tell us anything that couldn’t already have been inferred. With exception to the relationship between biz and little-duck, not that it seems to play into any of their interactions at all. The business does have his conservation thing, which is a part of his character, an old war veteran understand the fragility of life and working to preserve it through peaceful means. But the spirit of it is robbed when they give the same shtick to the random bird guy from cetus. Why? while I could buy Nef Anyo hunting whole species to extinction for profit, nothing about the setting of the plains suggests the animals are in any kind of danger from the grineer. Its just pointless. I mean you could’ve just used the business for both, maybe he’s building a zoo for critters from all over the system, I wouldn’t have questioned it. Heck, it could even have been a nice little unlock to see the place once you catch one of every animal.

Weirdly enough the one character I think is kind of done right here is ticker. Yeah, the kiosk guy above biz’s shop whose only purpose is to sell you debt bonds so you can increase your standing. Maybe its just a dumb stereotype but I like tickers flair for the theatrical, I find it charming. Plus, his first fragment is so terribly depressingly human it just makes me want to give the poor dude a hug.

But at least there’s plenty of snow in the sandbox… er…

-The sandbox is full: I may not be in the console market these days but there have been a lot of sandbox games as of late, like… ALOT! Its basically the only game Ubisoft makes anymore. A wide-open area filled to burst with pointless shallow time wasting minigames of no real importance. OpenWorldTM. The announcement said Orb Vallis would be twice the size of Eidolon and good god does it feel like it! The very construction of the map itself restricts you from moving around it. With its massive board blocking Tim Burton mountains, and how those same mountains prevent you from utilizing the full freedom of the hoverboard, a new vehicle introduced with the update. Sure, there’s a new pet and new guns, but we already had fishing, we had mining, we had a new faction of peaceful traders and merchants to interact with. Outside of new shooty-tubes and endo dumps I don’t really see what’s so special here, especially when the terrain itself renders the races more chore than a challenge without delivering on any significant or memorable locations. Which is weird since there are interesting set pieces in the Vallis that are just never used. Of all the bounties I did getting to “old mate” rank the only location used was a data vault spy mission. You know, the building with the profit taker on it, yeah, you know the one the worst part of the map. Its built like a maze, is too easy to get lost in, has too many BIG rooms going into tiny vents you need an eagle eye to find, and its just an unenjoyable mess. This is especially infuriating as there are numerous more interesting locals around the map, they could use for practically any of the bounties. But no, its never the big Nef Anyo statue we’re fighting under it’s that damn farm thing again. Its never that cool cavernous road through the mountains, its that same damn bridge right in front of Fortuna. Its never a big base filled with enemies and tons of vertical platforms, its always that one generic outpost just down the road.

-Environmental Story: what’s even worse for the environment is its total lack of connection to the rest of the universe. The Plains weren’t just some vaguely African safari area, it was a battlefield. Haunted with the remains of shattered sentient contained within a massive forcefield that also happened to protect it from the deadly radiation and poisons of the outside world. The strange rocks which dot the landscape are the remains of alien spacecraft and its soils are stuffed with all manner of deadly armaments and tools. So, it makes perfect sense that the grineer or other factions would covet this area for its agricultural and military resources. The vallis just looks like a giant sink of effort and resources that could be put to more productive use elsewhere, doubly so considering it’s the corpus funding the whole operation. Which is even more sad given that environmental stories are the one story telling mechanic exclusive to video games. There is no other medium which allows a reader or a viewer to experience its world at their own pace to seek information in their own ways. Making this literary opportunity not only a waste of warframes universe but of the medium itself.

This is naturally only compounded upon with how the resources of the vallis seem even more restricted to fortuna than the plains did to cetus. The toroids are the worst offence in this, but I think I’ll save my thoughts on this growing problem in warframe for when I get around to covering the jovian concord as the issue of resource gating is more blatant there.

-The warframes: so garuda and baruuk, while I find it strange that DE released two frames around the same time that where functionally immortal, I just find their acquisition boring. Garuda’s main blueprint is just handed to you after finishing the introduction mission, and baruuk is straight up just another item you buy. The only difference between buying baruuk for real money and buying him for in game currency is time, and a lot of it given how rare the resource to get him is. Now I know garas main was given at the end of sayas vigil too but there it was built up as an ancient relic of mystical origin. A man left his wife and home to keep this powerful artifact out of enemy hands, sacrificing his whole life and happiness to keep them safe. You weren’t building just another tank with tits; you were reviving a warrior of legend who slew giants and protected the innocent. Revenant as well, had a deific entity granting visions to a child guiding you to the grave of an ancient warrior who fought and eventually fell to the control of his hated enemy. This might sound like a re-tred of inaros for most of you but at least gara and revenent look their parts, rather than just a mish mash of infested gunk slapped onto a skeleton. Point is worldbuilding matters, especially for the warframes. Being the name-sake of the game they deserve some kind of gravitas behind them. Treating a new warframe like another commodity to be bought off a shelf or passed out like a gold star from kindergarden is just… condescending. At least hyldryn got a boss fight out of her release, which is more of a backhanded compliment when you realize almost every other warframe gets a boss fight by default. Soooo… yeah.

Conclusion:

Maybe I’m jaded, just sick of snow, or maybe I’m projecting my exhaustion with the OpenWorldTM genre, I don’t know. There are a lot of reasons I find fortuna unfulfilling, but ultimately, I think its this; fortuna and the vallis were supposed to be an extension to the warframe universe, a playground to explore new perspectives and build on its mythos. It didn’t do that. We went from space travelling assassins trying to fight a war on many fronts to make the galaxy a better place, to a plucky resistance force against an evil conglomerate. It just doesn’t fit with the world we’ve already seen. everything “new” that was introduced here may be new to warframe but has been done much better within any title from the cyberpunk genre.

Its really a shame too as just looking a around can be breathtaking at times, some caves and structures are genuinely beautiful to look at. A lot of work was clearly put into this update, just not in the right places. Gameplay has a few upgrades, the environments are pretty if frustrating to traverse, but the story just comes up short. Sure, we can tolerate illogical grinds and only semi-complete mythologies for our new areas, but without a good story to keep us coming back, to tie everything together, its just disappointing.

-END OF LINE.

#warframe #game #fortuna #gaming #review #benjamineye #narrative #story #sci fi #cyberpunk #space ninja

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trevorbarre · 7 years

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Hauntology, Part Two

To continue our theme: I do think that hauntology is perhaps the reductio ad absurdum of genres, preoccupied as I am with the issue of genre. I spend a lot of time discussing this, in the particular world of free improvisation, in my two books on this subject. Cross-referring hauntology to related genres, I came up with Post Modernism itself, Retrofuturism, Deconstruction, Vaporwave ( a title which is inviting parody, if I ever saw one), Chillwave and Hypnogogic Pop (an equally facile nomenclature, imho, but this time originating from the States); these are a grab-bag of definitions worthy even of dance music distinctions (will we ever have Handbag Hauntology, I wonder?).

As I said earlier, this genre seems merely to be an extension of already long-established senior family members, but, inevitably, it has its own specific treasures. However, the much-lauded Broadcast & The Focus Group’s Witch Cults of the Radio Age, which I seem to remember winning a Wire Album of the Year award a few years back, left me entirely cold, with its pretentious collage of clever-clever samples, and rather fey free-folk Island Records circa 1970 feel. I could see what it was trying to do, but Boards of Canada had that childhood, backwards-glance shtick totally covered already, and much earlier, what’s more. BoC’s Geogaggi, from 2002, is a masterpiece of the form, (the brief track Dandelion, for example) but I would merely call it simply electronica. But if endless subdivisions is your thing, then hey.....Geogaggi is certainly ‘haunting’.

William Basinski’s Disintegration Tapes, surely a signature work of this genre, is moving in its glacial slowness and gradual erasure, but who can claim to listen to it much after its initial effect has worn off? The law of diminishing returns, ironically? For me, after Boards of Canada, the most interesting of the hauntology players (although he is far greater than this generic reductionism) is its very own Banksy, the artist known as Burial. I had cause, a few blogs ago, to cite Burial as a successor to Thomas Leer, another personal favourite, and was reminded of the former’s music on the latter’s recently released 1979. Both are masters of atmosphere and urban anomie, and both have a sinister edge which is absent in most other hauntology artists. Burial’s Night Bus, for example, in which one can almost hear and feel the top deck and the condensation (rather than condescension) on the windows and the underlying tension of the early hours of the morning. Ditto his peerless Rival Dealer 12″ EP, with the very moving transgender tribute Come Down To Us, which brings me to the edge of tears every time I listen to it. This is music that engages the heart and soul, which is very difficult to achieve in electronica, and which is something that hauntology seems to aspire to, with mixed success.

To conclude - I’m not sure whether hauntology is, for me, a genuine genre, or just a Frankenstein mish-mash of would-be taste makers. Interestingly, it appears to have ‘died’, as a genre, just as trip hop did by the late 1990s? I don’t think of its most creative players as belonging to this particular ‘bag’, but both Burial and Boards of Canada (why do so many of these band’s names begin with ‘b’? also see Belbury Poly, Basinski, Broadcast!!) still set a high bar for popular creative electronic music, and both remain vital reference points.

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