pubs
If you’ve been following our Game-Maker Archive series, you may recall a swell little Metroid-style adventure called Orb: The Derelict Planet. Thrown into an alien environment, you wander vast caverns, collect upgrades, and traverse hidden passages to deactivate an ancient, killer computer. As one of the better Game-Maker games, Orb has always been a mystery. It seemed to have been developed in a vacuum, and with an unusual amount of planning. It then appeared out of nowhere on the Game-Maker 3.0 CD-ROM, the only known game by its author. After a bit of detective work we managed to track down that author, the writer and illustrator Joshua Eric Turcotte.
(September 27th, 2010 @ 10:36am)
Nobody smokes in this film. At least, I never saw it. The closest we get are old advertisements shilling the medical value of one cigarette brand over another, a vague haze in some of the indoor scenes, and a nicotine tinge to the film processing.
Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, aka Harvey Dent/Two-Face) is a PR representative for the tobacco industry. His talent is debate, and his secret is that he doesn’t really care about his topic, his opponent, or the outcome of his argument. All that he cares about is that he not lose. For an industry with the bulk of public opinion against them, not losing is about as good a defense as Big Tobacco could want.
For Naylor’s part, there’s no more challenging or rewarding an argument than defending an indefensible position. It’s not that he’s amoral. It’s true that he meets with representatives of the alcohol and firearms lobbies, and jokes with them about which of their products kills the most Americans on a day-to-day basis. (Of the three, it’s cigarettes by a wide margin.) Throughout the movie, his actions, reactions, and manner portray him as warm, fascinated with life, even idealistic. It’s more that he feels that every perspective, even and perhaps especially the most ludicrous or amoral, needs an equal airing. So on the one hand this job allows him to defend some of the least loved opinions on the planet, and on the other the sheer impossibility of the task gives him a thrill not unlike a nicotine high.
The story skips along at a comfortable pace, and progresses logically from the characters’ personalities. The cast is mostly character actors, well-chosen and well-performed. The script is witty and nuanced, much of the dialog delivered either directly to camera or in voiceover. The cinematography is some of the best in recent years.
There are revelations later in the film which, as the movie currently stands, feel like they come from nowhere. Associated with those revelations are some apparently profound changes that, to the audience, never feel like changes at all.
It comes back to the cigarette thing; why, in this of all movies, do we never witness the characters smoking? Not even representatives of Big Tobacco? And as far as sacrifices go, is it possible to miss something that we’ve never known?
This is a smart movie. It avoids getting trapped in the specifics of its subject matter, preferring to observe characters, their motivations, and the way they present their claims, both to each other and to themselves. The cigarettes are there to give the characters something to form opinions and talk about. The story is there to give the characters a canvas in which to interact and explore their dynamics.
If you’ve seen the TV show Better off Ted, that is to Thank You For Smoking what Parker Lewis Can’t Lose is to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That is to say, it’s a TV adaptation in all but name. The movie lacks the smug desperation of the TV show, probably for the better.
(September 26th, 2010 @ 10:34am)
This is an odd one. It’s the third Dalek story in two years, and the third directed by Richard Martin. In the previous Dalek story (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) we saw the Doctor abandon his granddaughter Susan on a future post-apocalyptic Earth for what he felt was her own good. This time we say goodbye to the show’s original protagonists, schoolteachers Ian and Barbara, as they are granted an opportunity to return to mid-1960s Britain.
Whereas the Doctor started off hostile, even violent, toward the pair, and at best he treated his granddaughter with indifference, by now the Doctor had softened toward the pair and indeed become a more sympathetic character in general. He shows genuine distress at their choice to leave him, which he expresses with his usual petulance. From here on the Doctor remains a softer character yet he becomes rather melancholy, prone to musing about his losses.
On that level, and in the introduction of one of my favorite companions, Steven, the story is a success. And indeed the first two episodes are pretty solid stuff, despite some shaky studio work with the regulars casting shadows on matte paintings mere inches behind them, and despite the hilarious make-up of some incidental alien peoples. The final two episodes are passable as well, with an android duplicate Doctor and a fun dilemma where Vicki gets left behind by the TARDIS — and of course the introduction of Steven. In the Mechonoids we also see an unsuccessful, yet interesting, attempt at creating a nemesis to the Daleks.
It’s the middle two episodes that try on the patience. On paper they sound wonderfully bonkers; Daleks versus rednecks on the Empire State Building; Frankenstein’s monster lifting and pile-driving whole Daleks; a Dalek landing party causing the desertion of the Mary Celeste. There’s a year’s worth of comic strip material in these two episodes. Unfortunately none of it really comes off on-screen. Whether it’s a lack of comic timing on the actors’ part or proper framing of the action on the director’s, it all comes off as tedious and directionless. If it weren’t for the rather wonderful cliffhanger to part four, which results in Vicki’s travel predicament, I’d say it’s possible and desirable to just skip the middle two episodes entirely.
This is also the first Dalek story not to be adapted into a feature film starring Peter Cushing. Pervasive as the movies would later be on TV, apparently they weren’t such hot stuff at the box office. Also, the Dalekmania bubble was quickly deflating. The following year would be Hartnell’s last, and would very nearly be the end of Doctor Who — that is, until a new production team hit on the concept of regeneration. All the same, despite later ratings spikes in the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras, it took another forty years for the show to regain this height of popularity and cultural saturation.
This story sort of forms the middle block of a trilogy, with The Space Museum to the left and The Time Meddler to the right. The latter is one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who serials, and I think the first hint at something greater for the format. I think it’s fitting that with the departure of the original leads, and therefore the shift of loyalties to the Doctor himself, the show would immediately start in on hints at his personal background. But that’s a conversation for another review.
(September 25th, 2010 @ 10:41am)
We have previously discussed Sherwood Forest Software. They’re an outfit of two Pennsylvanians, Rob Sherwood and Dan Whalen, who latched onto Game-Maker early, pumped out game after game without ever really learning the tools or apparently play testing the results of their efforts, and then quickly vanished.
What is curious about Sherwood’s games is that often the concepts are, if not brilliant, unusual and full of potential. As they went on, some of their sprite and background design was even rather charismatic. Yet their actual design is bewilderingly slapdash, to the point where there’s a certain fascination, perhaps even an education, to poring over their catalog.
There is evidence of at least 11 games by the duo, most of which were released within about six months in 1992. The latest games seemed to trickle out somewhere in 1994. Previously we breezed over four of them: Big Bob’s Drive-In, Shootout at Dodge, Rocket Fighter, and Robo Wars. Thanks to some of the methods outlined in a subsequent chapter, we now have three more games to discuss, this time in a little more detail.
(September 23rd, 2010 @ 10:34am)
