A Review of the Jazz Singer, or Kevin Smith and Geoffrey Rush are Time Travelers

This was going to be a review of the first successful sound film, The Jazz Singer. I was going to talk about how it's enjoyable, especially if you love old jazz songs, but not quiet as enjoyable as the best silent films of the time. Still, it is a cultural milestone that set off a sea change in film making and is worth watching if only so that you'll get the next "get down on my knees and sing Mamie" reference that someone will no doubt drop in your everyday conversation. That was the plan, but it all got blown out of the water when I realized that two of the films co-stars are Kevin Smith and Geoffrey Rush. Allow me to explain.

The Jazz Singer is the story of a young Jewish kid who runs away from his family to try his luck at being a jazz singer. His father is the local Cantor, the singer of the holy songs on the holy days, and can't bear the thought of his song throwing away his voice on jazz music. Early on, the boy, Jakie (or Jack, as he goes by), is discovered singing in a jazz hall when Jack's father's friend, Moisha Yudelson, sees him on stage. This is Moisha Yudelson:

If you're thinking "Wait a minute, haven't I seen that guy before in multiple Oscar-nominated roles?" you're correct. Here's another shot of him:

Okay, so the second picture is from Shakespeare in Love, not The Jazz Singer. Whatever. Put a fedora on him and it's the same guy.

But wait, how can Geoffrey Rush be in a movie that came out twenty-four years before he was born? Is he a vampire along with Nicolas Cage, or an immortal along with Keanu Reeves? No, of course not. That's silly. He's a time traveler.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that time travelers have to operate in pairs; how else to maintain their sanity? So Rush must have had a partner. What did Jake's father look like again?

That's weird. Now, where have I seen that face before...

And who is that guy?

So, you should see The Jazz Singer because it is both a cultural milestone AND incontrovertible proof that Kevin Smith and Geoffrey Rush are time travelling partners who--and here I venture away from fact into conjecture--occasionally get bored with their careers and crank the clock back to early sound films when the cinema status quo was in such a state of upheaval that any actor with a pulse and a decent voice could walk into a studio and find work, regardless of whether or not they were from the future.

Rock of Ages (watch)

Inevitably in the discussion of whether Rock of Ages is a good movie or a bad movie, someone, in the style propagated by “predator dating” books, seminars, and the guy in the fuzzy top hat, will backhand the film with compliments, saying something along the lines of “It’s fun, but it’s a bad film” or “Sure I laughed, but that doesn’t make it good.”

To be fair, there are a number of people I imagine wouldn’t like Rock of Ages. It’s a musical staged around 80s rock songs, so people who don’t like 80s rock and/or musicals are right out. Some people have a blinding, seething hatred for Tom Cruise; they will probably not enjoy his spot-on-hyperbole of a performance. And then there are those who feel like anyone singing a song apart from the original band on the original recording are blasphemers; those people, too, should stay away.

Rock of Ages, simply put, is fun. It’s not subtle, but then subtle is not in the lexicon of musicals. It’s a comedy, really, that frequently bursts into song. Of the three love stories that wind their way through the film (that’s a joke about cassette tapes), only one, the young, amateur-singer couple, is played (ha!) with any sense of straightness. The other two are purely played for comedy. The humorous script and the performances, from Alec Baldwin’s and Russell Brand’s slightly inept bar owners, to Bryan Cranston’s adulterous husband/mayor of Los Angeles, to Tom Cruise’s Axl Rose/Gary Busey-hybrid rocksexgod save the film from being just an excuse to listen to 80s rock.

Some critics, no doubt, are going to attack the film for its ridiculous over-the-topness. And there’s no denying that it is way, way over the top, as well as hugely sex-obsessed. But these aren’t detriments to the film, they are necessary components. Fittingly, for a movie about 80s rock songs, the film itself becomes an 80s rock song. Bawdy, hyperbolic, lewd, loud, tongue-in-cheek; the kind of song you look forward to hearing again.

Dead Island (play)

In light of Deep Silver’s recent announcement of Dead Island: Riptide, I’ve been trying to figure out why I beat the first game. Story is the predominant determining factor in whether or not I even play a game, and aside from some interesting NPCs, Dead Island really had no story beyond GET OFF THE DAMN ISLAND (ZOMBIES). The whole game is one long fetch quest in exchange for four Golden Tickets (Zombie Chocolate Factory? Now that’s a game I’d play). Humorously, the four main characters pick up on the flimsiness of the plot, calling out the people you can’t trust way in advance, as if they too had seen this movie before. A great main character (or characters) can sometimes make up for a weak plot, but Dead Island’s four protagonists’ only glimmers of character are their weapon specialties and some mild bickering in about 90 seconds worth of cutscenes. At some point, I just started to refer to them as Knife, Gun, Phil LaMarr, and Texan.

But despite having almost no story, I enjoyed playing Dead Island, at least up until the sewers and the prison levels when fetch fatigue set in. I think it was because of a few simple gameplay elements: the loot/crafting system, the melee combat, and how death was handled. Loot was done as in most Diablo-esque loot games. There is loot out there that’s better than the loot you have; go get it. The crafting system was where the loot really shined though. Anything you picked up in the game could be crafted into a weapon provided you found the recipe for the weapon. This led to some great tongue-in-cheek moments as you barreled down hallways with a flaming machete or a deodorant bomb.  I looked forward to crafting things just to see what was possible, as opposed to, say, Skyrim’s crafting, which became a grind to get to Dragon Armor.

The Skyrim comparison also bears in melee combat. The Elder Scrolls games take some light heckling for their combat system being essentially two people hacking at each other with swords, axes, etc., until one of them falls down. But Techland has nailed first-person fighting. While the gun play just meets par, the melee is visceral, sharp, and reactive. Hit a zombie at the right angle and it loses an arm, or a leg, or a head. Miss with just a couple of swings or get distracted for a few seconds and you’re the one losing a head. This is how fighting should feel in a zombie game, like you could die at any minute. The developers balanced this propensity to die with a forgiving respawn. While you lose in-game resources in the form of cash, you only lose a few seconds of that most important of real-world resources, time. You’re punished, but not in the form of restarting half-a-mile away from where you died.

While I enjoyed most of my Dead Island playthrough, I know I’m never going to go back to it, nor can I say that I plan to pick up Riptide. On top of the lack of story and unending fetch structure, the leveling system, which is usually a major draw for me (I’ll play Magic Pony Sparkle Horse if I can upgrade my pony’s mane for more sparkle and his saddle to hold four rocket launchers instead of two), was weighed down by incremental improvements that didn’t have much impact on the gameplay. Oh cool, a +2% chance of a critical hit. Oh cool, an edged weapons +5% damage bonus. Leveling up was just something I did because a Level Up message kept popping on screen. The question of Riptide is the same as most sequels; can they hold onto the things that worked and improve upon the things that did not? Given the mediocre DLC released so far, I’m inclined to believe that Riptide will just be more of the same, not a 2.0 or 1.5 so much as a 1.1.

Das Boot

If war is Hell, then Hell largely consists of waiting. At least, that's what Das Boot suggests. The Wolfgang Petersen-directed German submarine film follows the Captain and crew of a German U-Boat as they attempt to disrupt British shipping lines. For the most part though, the viewer just hangs out on board. After an opening scene set at a drunken, lascivious party for the men about to ship out on subs, the camera descends down into the metal tube with them, and, excepting a few scenes, that's where the camera stays, in the long, crowded hallway that makes up the majority of the ship. Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano choose to keep things crowded and claustrophobic. With the ship interior lit naturally in harsh glares of white, blue, and red, the camera bangs into people, walls, and the food supplies that are stored throughout the ship, all the while executing impressive steady-cam shots following crewmen from one end of the ship and back. The camera practically becomes a member of the crew, and as such so does the viewer. The sound work adds to the feeling. Every groan of the U-96 as it sinks lower into the ocean, every radar "boop", every creek of a bolt giving in to pressure breaks the silence as you and the crew wait. The camera likes to wait as well, lingering on a shot after other more time conscious editors would have cut away. The lingering lets you see some quiet, more subdued character moments, while reinforcing the sense of boredom and frustration the crew feels as they wait for orders, wait to get to their destinations, and wait until it is safe to move. The crew starts out fresh-faced, clean-shaven, excited to head out to sea. By the end, they're bearded, covered in weeks of sweat and sea water, and while they've learned to wait, their excitement of war has drained away.

I should note that I watched the Director's Cut version, which is about an hour longer than the theatrical version, but still an hour and a half shorter than the Uncut version. 

Gravity Bone (play)

I just finished an indie game called Gravity Bone, from Blendo Games, the makers of Atom Zombie Smasher. It is available for free download here: http://blendogames.com/files/gravitybone_v11.zip

When I say I just finished it, I should add that I started playing it 15 minutes ago. It's a short, short game that, except for one platforming sequence, should be beatable by everyone. I encourage you to give it a playthrough.

If I had to give it a genre, Gravity Bone would be a First Person (non)Shooter. It's all first person, but there are no weapons. Even the hammer you're given in your second mission can't be used on people. At no point in Gravity Bone will you be given any details as to your character, the plot, or why you have to snap pictures of five birds, who explode into fire afterwards. But along with the Iceberg Theory of storytelling, the game provides a unique, unified aesthetic. All of the graphics are blocky and pixelated, but with a strange sort of charm; big band music plays throughout. The game loves elevators for some reason. At the end of the second (and final) mission, your character has a couple of idiosyncratic flashbacks as he/she, well, you'll see.

I recommend the game because of its aesthetic, and also because of a chase sequence that occurs when someone (again, we're given little to go on, so it could be a spy, or a guard, or, perhaps, your character's babysitter from when he/she was 12 and really felt like he/she was far too old to have a babysitter, but would the parents listen, noooooooooooo, and so he/drove the baby sitter crazy all night and this is some sort of far-flung revenge plot on the babysitter's part. Far-fetched, perhaps, but not unfeasible) steals(!) the photos of exploding fire-birds you're painstakingly taken. Having no weapons, your only recourse is to chase her down, through air ducts and train tunnels, over steel piping and, memorably, up and down a Michael Keaton Bruce Wayne-esque dinner table.

The game is short, but memorable, coming across as a discarded good idea that just couldn't be made to fit properly into a full-form game.

Circus of Horrors

They don't make movies like this anymore. That's probably for the best.

Disgraced, scandalized plastic surgeon Dr. Schuler murders a cop and flees his country, only to murder a circus owner and...decide to make a fortune by taking over the circus and filling it full of beautiful women, women who were formerly prostitutes or thieves that agree to work in his circus if he performs plastic surgery on them to make them beautiful. As the years pass, he murders any one of his workers who threaten to I'm just going to stop here.

A cop-killer-plastic-surgeon decides to open a circus.

It's probably for the best.

The film does do a nice job of building tension in a couple of spots as performers do dangerous tricks and routines that Schuler has sabotaged. It closely mimics the tension the audience feels at a non-horror circus. It'd be interesting to know if the film was reacting against something in the 1950s, the rise of plastic surgery, the decline of circuses, a sudden surge of ex-plastic surgeon cop killers going into small business ventures.

Mario Climbing the Ivory Tower

In the recent debate as to whether or not video games can be considered art, there is one thing both sides can agree on: as a whole, video games have yet to be taken seriously by the academic community.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Video games have been looked at from an anthropological perspective, examining the cultures that build around specific games or genres. There have been psychological studies of gamers that looked to ascertain the effect of games on the player, or the relation between player and avatar. Game theorists have largely embraced games wholesale, as well as people interested in game design for game design’s sake. But works examining a game itself, looking at the story, the design, the theory, music, etc. etc., are limited to a few outliers. Any examination of the narrative of a game is largely restricted to one line questions, much like the ones that follow this colon: What does the Halo series say about organized religion’s place in modern society? What does Red Dead Redemption say about an increasingly politically divided America? How does Final Fantasy X exemplify and work out the disagreements between Freudian and Lacanian theory?

Of course, the average gamer probably won’t pay any more attention to a sudden surge of video game theory than the average reader would care about what academicians think about Stephanie Meyer’s latest work. And that’s perfectly fine. But the acceptance of video games into academia would signal (or signify, I always confuse the two) that video games are worthy of serious, prolonged thought, as I believe them to be. But before video games can be ushered into the elevator and fast-tracked to the Ivory Tower Penthouse, there are a few things that need to be worked out.

First, what is a video game? This isn’t something I ask flippantly; the term video game is given to a vast and varied array of works. Pong is a video game. So is Mass Effect. So is Farmville. One of the first things a good theoretician does is define his/her terms. So how do we define video games? I think we can agree that there is some sort of player interactivity, whether it’s pushing a button or making a choice. And to make it a video game, there would have to be some sort of technology involved. But beyond that? I don’t have the answers, but there are a few options I can imagine. We can leave the definition as is, which isn’t a great option, but is an option. We can set up different game design style genres: a puzzle game with no discernible plot could simply be a puzzle game; a puzzle game with a narrative could be a puzzle narrative. We could separate games into plot genres: Mass Effect would be a sci-fi space opera; Mirror’s Edge is a noir; Fable is a coming-of-age story, or a kind of bildungsroman. Entire papers have been devoted to arguing the genre of a particular work (No one thinks that Charles Chesnutt wrote in the Gothic tradition, but Aha! Have you considered this?), so that last one may not work. Or maybe it would. Or perhaps some combination of the second and third option. Or something someone else comes up with after much thought. Regardless, it is a question that has to be answered. Readers across the world may not agree on what makes a good novel and what makes a bad novel, but most could agree that any given novel is, indeed, a novel.

Secondly, how would a video game be cited? If I want to make a point about the scene in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby drinks a gin rickey, I put the page numbers at the end of the sentence in parenthesis, with the author’s last name (Fitzgerald 117-118). Likewise, if I want to talk about death and sexual awakening in Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game. If I want to cite a movie, I can give the points in the running time (at the 1:14:32 mark). I could do the same with a song. But all of those rely on a shared experience, an agreement about where things are located. We may completely disagree about what the first line of Dorianne Laux’s “Facts About the Moon” really “means”, but we at least agree that the first line is “The moon is backing away from us.” But video games, especially larger, longer ones, are not experienced in linearity. I might play a certain segment three hours in; you may have ignored that segment until you were nine hours in. Or maybe I played a mission that is only available if your avatar is a female, or only available if you’re playing the game in a cutthroat fashion. In some games, the experience of it drastically changes depending on how you play the game. So, how to cite it, so that the reader of the article can go to the exact part the critic is referencing? A partial solution to this is also the solution to the third problem.

A single word can change everything. There’s a deep canyon of difference between “He moaned” and “He whimpered” or “She demanded” and “She implored.” A critic’s argument can sometimes hinge on one or two words, or one or two plot points. Double checking whether the author (or singer, or poet) used “rafters” or “crossbars” when describing a house is as simple as turning to the page (or the line, or the point in time). With video games, it’s exponentially more problematic. I only have to flip a few pages to see if Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man starts with “I am an invisible man” or “I was an invisible man.” I may have to play through forty hours of Fallout 3 to check and see what the main character’s father says when he/she finally reaches him. And as long as that’s the way it is, video games’ journey to Academia Land will be stalled. But, this can be circumvented if developers could be convinced to release copies of all of a game’s dialogue. This could be a convoluted process, particularly in games such as Dragon Age, where the choices you make can alter the dialogue you experience. But if a system of organization could be figured out, this could greatly aid critics, especially if a critic wanted to examine the differences choice made in game experience. I imagine it wouldn’t be easy to convince developers to release full dialogs of the game, and some rules may have to be laid down to determine who could access them (for instance, you could only download the files if you had purchased a copy of the game or had a .edu email address), but without this ease of access, teachers and professors who have their hands full already with class loads, committee meetings, and departmental conferences are not going to have the time to look at games through a critical lens. I’m afraid there’s no way around it.

There are, of course, problems beyond these three. For instance, it could be argued that there is a world of difference between writing or reading the line “Saren can still be saved” and choosing the line “Saren can still be saved.” Those first steps into video game criticism will be murky, no doubt. What is the difference, if any, between playing the game and “reading” the game? Are sports games right out? Or could the argument be made that the career mode of, say, MLB 11: The Show, is a viable text?

Again, there are many questions that will have to be sorted through as the field of video game criticism is slowly opened up. But if we don’t start answering through them, now, then video games will never achieve the level of accepted art form that they deserve.