BP Movie Journal 6/16/16

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11 Responses

  1. FictionIsntReal says:

    Where is the audio file? I just see a list of titles.

    • Battleship Pretension says:

      The audio player is there. Can you tell me how you’re viewing the page?

      • FictionIsntReal says:

        It’s there now. Could have been something wrong with my system, but even when I used “view source” I wasn’t seeing it earlier.

  2. Juhani Kenttä says:

    Damn, I wish I had heard Tyler’s opinion of The Neon Demon a week before. I skipped it out of fear that it would have been a too similar experience to Only God Forgives. And now it has already left my city.

  3. Dan Roy says:

    Speaking of Kung-Fu Master, here’s The Lonely Island’s “Nintendo Cartoon Hour” from about 2003

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93KLGQatPmU

  4. FictionIsntReal says:

    Marina de Van’s “In My Skin” is very effective in its aims, which ensure
    I will never watch it again! I think I enjoyed her later film “Don’t Look Back” (starring Sophie Marceau & Monica Belluci as the same character) more, although that was more poorly reviewed.

    Paula Patton has gotten some negative reviews for Warcraft. I think none of the performances were terrible, or very good.

  5. Ray (@RaySquirrel) says:

    Good show guys.

    On the topic of Indie Game: The Movie, there have been some interesting developments with the subjects of the film which could be material for a sequel.

    Phil Fish, the developer of Fez, has gotten into some hot water. Apparently the fame had gotten to the guys head. He started saying a lot of incendiary things which brought a lot of negative backlash on him. This has lead him to cancelling Fez 2 and quitting the games industry entirely. But that is only the beginning.

    Hackers hacked into the database of Fish’s company Polytron Entertainement and found that many of the biggest investors in the game Fez were also judges in a independent games copetition sponsored by the IDGA (Indiependant Game Developers Association). That way they were able to award Fez top prizes in a competition a month prior to the game’s mass-market release. To make a long story short, I won’t be surprised if Polytron and its investors have charges of insider trading brought against them.

    Since making millions off Super Meat Boy, Edward McMillon has made a new game. It’s called The Binding of Isaac, and as you could assume by he name it is loaded with disturbing Christian imagery. Tyler I’m sure you’d find it interesting. (I’d recommend watching the Game Theory episode on the game.)

    Since appearing in the Indie Game doc, McMillon has made public statements on the indie gaming scene and how it is loaded with pretentious, self-absorbed, hipsters who care nothing about games and crave only status and attention. He has also mentioned how these indie game competitions are rigged, that the quality of the games don’t matter as much as your standing among an insider clique of games journalists and developers.

    • Dan Roy says:

      This is why I don’t like Indie Game The Movie. I don’t understand why the chubby smiling one is supposed to not only be a better person than the snarling hipster, but by implication a better game designer; or why Super Meat Boy is supposed to be a better game than Fez (or for that matter what a Christian is supposed to get out of Binding of Isaac other than being offended). I think that movie did a lot of real-world damage by officially making a good guy and a bad guy out of two real people, one of whom gave up on games and another who now apparently fancies himself a statesman.

      I’ve played both games, SMB is not anything special; it’s like the game N with some extra features. Fez is more interesting even if I don’t think it achieves what he was aiming for. Neither of them is really all that grown up or artistically mature (unlike say BINDING OF THEMES ISAAC), but I guess we’re supposed to distrust the striving one and embrace the cartoony one.

      • Battleship Pretension says:

        How odd. I didn’t get the “bad guy” vibe from Phil Fish at all. It really felt like the filmmakers had a heart for what he was going throughout, and that the audience was meant to take joy in his achievements. I really didn’t feel like the filmmakers were trying to impose a narrative on what was happening. Nor did I get a sense that they were implying that Super Meat Boy was a better game than Fez. In fact, the film really seemed to try to emphasize that both creators put a lot of themselves into their respective games.
        You and I came away from the film with very different interpretations, it would seem.

        -Tyler

        • Dan Roy says:

          No that’s true, it treats them both with respect, I shouldn’t have put it like that. However, it seems often when I hear the movie being referenced (usually recommended), it’s set up as the story of a good modest indie game designer versus a pretentious asshole. The movie has been used as an opportunity to moralize, which is evident in Ray’s comment. I’m not going to defend Phil, but he and McMillon don’t have a lot in common and IMO shouldn’t be set against each other.

  6. Caleb McCandless says:

    Thanks for not spending too much time talking about how filmmakers like Tarantino are wrong for fetishizing the imperfections in grindhouse films 😉 (seriously though, for all the tribute you pay to how a work of art becomes something else once an individual/audience experiences it, I don’t quite get why Tyler seems to single out the excerpted and/or damaged footage in grindhouse prints as the exception. Tarantino experienced those movies a certain way, just like David experienced Where the Sidewalk Ends on a DCP, or we all watched certain movies in crappy quality on pan-and-scan VHS: those were not the way those films were intended to be seen, but that’s how we’ll remember seeing them. I think the re-creation of those imperfections opens up interesting conversations about how we experience, and remember our experience of, cinema.)

    I continue to be baffled by Tyler’s appreciation for Jurassic World. I feel any subtext to that film comes about from a purely nihilistic, box-office perspective, i.e. attempting to ape Spielberg while halfheartedly acknowledging that Trevorrow isn’t quarter of the filmmaker Spielberg is. It’s almost as if anything interesting in that movie came about because Trevorrow doesn’t know how to make a compelling film and because he relies to heavily on Spielberg’s original, he cribs some interesting themes and ideas while managing to contribute nothing himself. Still, I like hearing Tyler’s defense of it, even if I’m exasperatingly shaking my head most of the time.

    Good on Tyler for continuing his experiments with editing! I’m glad that episode with Eric ’13’ hasn’t dissuaded him from continuing to do it. You’re editing projects are perfectly valid as artistic expressions, no matter that they’re can’t legally be distributed to the public. You’re in the right for not showing them around (now matter how much I’d love to check them out), but to say you can’t, or shouldn’t, experiment artistically merely because it’s already been made “officially” and can’t legally be shared is completely antithetical to any kind of true definition of artistic freedom. Love hearing about them and hope to hear about more.

    Great ep guys!

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