The Welcoming Screen

Now I feel somewhat free to watch old movies since I finished my Best Of/Worst Of lists. And TV shows. I want to keep watching Fringe but Amazon gives me an error whenever I try to watch the next one. No clue why and by the time I settle down with my dinner to watch something I don't have the patience to wrestle with the technical problems. My internet is shit, especially when it comes to websites owned by Google. My provider is Softbank, a company with a good reputation in Japan but that doesn't stop them from being shady as hell. That's why it takes six hours for me to upload a three minute YouTube video (by the way, video versions of my Best Of/Worst Of lists are up on YouTube).

I've been dozing off at 12:30 or so with some old favourites on the screen. Chinatown, Videodrome, Wild at Heart, The 39 Steps. None of these movies should be comforting but they are. I guess The 39 Steps is kind of cosy. I love when Robert Donat checks into the hotel and orders whisky for himself and milk for the girl.

Being handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll seems like it would be nice.

I have been playing video games. Lately Metroid II, Kirby's Dreamland, Final Fantasy Legend II, and, of course, Skyrim. Here's my current character, Gwen:

I named her that because I have a mod that expands the dialogue of an NPC character, Serana, to be able to say certain names--there's a list of well over a hundred. This free mod has a professional voice actress and was covered in Forbes magazine. I'm taking my expanded Serana through another mod about rebuilding Helgen, a fort town that was destroyed at the beginning of the vanilla game. This mod is also fully voiced and totally free.

Since the last time I talked about the remarkable phenomenon of Skyrim mods, Bethesda has introduced new purchasable mods, which are causing controversy in the gaming community. I'd advise people not to worry, I think we all know nothing will come of them. It's funny, I believe in capitalism as a motivator for human achievement, except when it comes to art. More often than not, the profit motive has inhibited art rather than advanced it. The evidence is everywhere. Lousy movies make lots of money while hundreds of better achievements have to fight for funding and then end up losing money. Exceptions exist but are extremely rare--rarer than they might seem because they take up a lot of media space. And a lot of the best Skyrim mods are better than what people were paid to create for the vanilla game. Of course, this leaves the problem of the most creative people barely being able to afford basic necessities.

I heard recently that Miyazaki Hayao doesn't like video games, that he feels they're taking up too much space in children's lives. I've addressed the topic before of whether or not video games can be art and my position was always that they're not art but they can contain art. For example, the NPC mod I mentioned features lots of written and recorded dialogue. I consider that to be art but the interface for encountering that art, I'd still call a game. This comes from my definition of art as something created by a human mind to transmit an idea or feeling. For a game to achieve this, it has to utilise assets in a way that a communicated idea or feeling clearly comes through only because of player input, only because of an achievement or failure. Often, dialogue scenes in games feel detrimental to the gaming experience because the game really stops and becomes a movie. So when we're talking about art there, we're really talking about short films. I have yet to experience any kind of game dialogue that approaches the immersive experience of a movie. By and large, although I obviously like and play video games, it's always a shallower experience than a movie.

But on that note, I recommend watching video game designer Kojima Hideo's recent visit to the Criterion closet:

What he's saying about young people in Japan being unaware of Japan's great history of cinema is, unfortunately, quite accurate. Many of the teachers I work with, let alone the students, have never heard of Mizoguchi or Naruse and, though they may have heard of Kurosawa or Ozu, have never seen any of their movies. I was thinking of putting together a presentation on old Japanese films to show students but I knew if I didn't use a Japanese source some of the students wouldn't give credence to what I said. So I went to the bookstore to see if I could find a book about Japanese cinema. What I found were two walls of books about Hollywood, written in or translated into Japanese. They had a really lovely copy of Lulu Goes to Hollywood even, Louise Brooks' book of criticism. Then there were half a dozen books on Kurosawa, a couple on Ozu, all on the bottom shelf. Nothing comprehensive like what I wanted. I guess I wasn't surprised. Even Kurosawa complained in his lifetime about the lack of interest in Japan for the giants of '50s Japanese cinema, which is of course why he had to get funding from Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas for his '80s movies.

Anyway. Go watch some movies, kids.