9

9 is the name/number of the main character, a burlap-covered creature who literally comes to life in the beginning of the film who must find his way through a landscape demolished by human war and sparsely populated by other numbered creatures and find a way to defeat the giant robotic machine that seems capable of sucking the soul out of whoever it encounters.

Anyone who saw the ads or posters for this movie might look at the funny-looking creatures on them and guess that this might be a kid’s film while they ignore the bleak backdrops these ragdolls occupy. This reflects the film quite accurately, in fact. This film dives into very heavy concepts: war, death, fear, humanity’s inner drive to create as well as destroy, even drug addiction, all serving as the setting for the adventure of these bizarrely cute little creatures.

The tone of this film is something you would expect from something with that involves Tim Burton (he executive produced) but it doesn’t feel like a film that would get the type of advertising exposure it has received. It’s a very atmospheric film, happy to let characters’ actions speak for them if at all possible. I like the fact that although they used many celebrities to provide voices (Elijah Wood as 9, Jennifer Connelly as 7, Christopher Plummer as 1, Crispin Glover as 6, John C. Reilly as 5), they are all very excellent actors who bring character to their roles and not just fall into the usual convention of ‘big-name actor lends voice to cartoon’.

When I was younger one of the major yearly events for me was when the animation festival would come to the local theater. It was always amazing to see the different styles and designs that animators could conjure onto the screen beyond what was fed to us on Saturday mornings and showed how truly versatile the art of animation was. However in doing so, the art could be raised above the story, which tended to be the most uneven part of the event. True, there was some brilliant pieces that could make me laugh much harder or reflect on concepts much more deeply than any live-action film could, but some films were so caught of in their visuals that the animators lost sight the story. I was reminded of these festivals when I was watching 9. This made even more sense when after doing some research I found that this was based on a short film from 2005 by director Shane Acker, one that most likely made the rounds in similar festivals, that served as the basis for this film (I’ve included the Youtube post of that film in this review). There’s a lot of questions about the characters and the world that both the short film and the feature film leave up in the air. While this works for the short film to keep focus on the main plot, it doesn’t quite work in the feature. There is a lot more room in the feature to expound on why things are the way they are so the audience doesn’t get lost and this room wasn’t used to it’s fullest capacity. A little mystery is good, of course, but I don’t think I had enough information or familiar ground to see why I should care about the creatures and their plight, and in one part of the story the characters’ actions actually made me lose quite a bit of sympathy for them and question why they would act this way in the first place.

This film is really beautiful, with a some imaginative visuals and some good action and distinctive characters, but I would have felt ripped off seeing this at evening price in the theater. It was worth seeing as a matinee and It might be worth the purchase of a download. However, this doesn’t really get beyond more than eye candy for me. It would have been nice to have an equally compelling story to match the visuals.

Gamer

TheJoe, DJ and I saw this Friday at the AMC in the Santa Monica Promenade.

Movies about video games suck. They’re either lackluster and disappointing adaptations of a game or a half-hearted attempt to ‘connect’ to the gaming culture by dropping a few gaming terms that Hollywood hopes will be enough to connect with the gaming crowd yet not be so alien as to confuse the average viewer.

Nothing about Gamer struck me as something that was going to impress me, either. The main plot about an inmate fighting for his life in a violent game against other inmates (It’s MORE than a game! It’s REEEAAAALLL!) has been done in other movies and games before, and the idea that the main character is being controlled in the game by someone else has also been explored before (and seems to be the trendy story hook used in upcoming movies like Surrogates and Avatar).

This is the mindset I had going into this movie. The most exciting thing I was looking forward to was checking out this theater I’d never been in and whether the popcorn was any good.

The story concerns a very dystopian world where the opiate of the masses is in the form of games where real people are willingly placed under direct neural control of a gamer with enough money to make they’re character do whatever they want. This takes the form of two games: “Slayers”, a massive first-person-like shooter where violent inmates use overpowered firearms to survive and make it to through enough matches to win their freedom, and it’s predecessor, “Society”, a very Sims/Second Life-like MMO where lower-class people fortunate enough to be pretty enough earn a living as ‘characters’ that follow the (usually) sexual whims of whatever gamer is in control.

When I got out of this movie I wanted to give it no thumbs up. As I was talking to TheJoe about the movie I talked about how gamers really weren’t put in the best light in this movie. There’s the cocky young gamer who controls are protagonist who talks trash and has a bloated ego from being the top player. There’s the wife of the protagonist working in “Society” that’s really controlled by an overweight male shut-in. There’s the juvenile, nonsensical names characters are given in “Society”. When I was complaining about all this to TheJoe, his response was basically, ‘isn’t that what gamers do right now?’ I realized that I was taking the material too personally. I also realized that this movie was made by people who understand the gaming world and I was giving a lot of thought to the concepts presented by a summer action movie.

This movie was written and directed by the team of Neveldine and Taylor, the same guys behind the Crank movies, which I thought of as movies about a video game character that had yet to be created, never mind the numerous video game references in the movie itself. These are definitely two people that understand the gaming culture (and the internet culture) and have more accurately portrayed it onscreen than anyone has done lately, giving it a future-tech sheen of 360-degree surround sound screens and ‘the-computer-just-translates-my-movement-into-action’ controller schemes. I wasn’t bored by this movie by any means. The story moves along OK, and it goes beyond it’s action movie shell to make statements about control and class. These people indeed DO behave the way gamers and internet surfers behave these days. The act of giving those actions real consequences to real humans tends to expose a mindset that some would consider very ugly. Like I said, I had to step back from this part of the movie. I play a LOT of first-person shooters.

I had no complaints about any of the acting in this film. Gerard Butler delivers as the top Slayer Kable trying to get out of the game and back to his wife (Amber Valletta) and daughter (Brighid Fleming). Michael C. Hall plays Ken Castle, the mastermind behind the technology driving the games and richer than God and Bill Gates. He plays him with a full evil and cockiness he doesn’t get to flex in his role as TV’s Dexter. Ludacris works well as the face and leader of the underground hacker group Humanz. An unexpected cameo is made by Milo Ventimiglia as “Society” character Rick Rape. Despite the name, his turn is actually amusing.

Not everyone is going to ‘get’ this movie. Although many more people play games now than in the past, some people might still get lost in the use of concepts like ping, mods, and memes. For those people this is a one thumbs up movie. For those that game like me, this could very well be a two-thumbs up. I’m glad I saw it in the theater and will definitely download it upon release. It’s one of those few movies that, for me, will actually be different upon repeated viewings.

Video game movies suck. But then comic book movies used to suck too. Then people who understood the culture of comics started making movies that took it as the legitimate art form it is and realized that there were real stories to be told from this medium. I don’t think this is the turning point for game movies, but it is a step in the right direction.

Does It Play On a Mac? – Deus Ex

For this episode, I check out Deus Ex, the classic game combining RPG elements with a first-person shooter set against a story touching on many major American conspiracies.