Read/reading: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion.

Extremely Loud is an odd book. It’s kind of fragmented, which is how I read it - short bursts over a month, because I’m sometimes terrible at committing to books and this one was definitely challenging at points. But it’s rewarding - the protagonist, nine-year-old Oskar Schell, is a fascinating character and it felt almost painful to be torn away from him by the alternative perspectives presented throughout the novel. It’s not perfect - some of the more experimental sections border on the banal - but it’s fascinating in a way that few books have been lately.

I’m not expecting much from Warm Bodies - I know it’s unabashedly populist, a YA novel, and the film was middling to good(ish). I just need something lighter after that mammoth.

Watched: Whip It

Observations:

• Aww. No, really! This was very sweet, and just shy of cloying.
• This deserves pointing out (and will continue to deserve it until there’s a bit more parity on this front), but this film aces the Bechdel test throughout. Yes, there’s a romantic subplot, but it’s a subplot - there is a lot more going on, and it’s more important than all that kissin’.
• Can any Texans verify if Ellen Page can pass as one or not? I heard the odd “y’all” here and there, but for the most part she sounded a bit… refined? Not that that’s a problem. And Marcia Gay Harden (which, sorry, is a hilarious name) is sublime.
• It’s also a big fuck you to Hollywood execs who talk about appealing to core demographics, because you know what? This is relatable on a few huge levels, and interesting, and I didn’t need some blond-haired-blue-eyed-betesticled proxy to get that effect.
• It was billed as a comedy when it came out, and I’m not sure about that - there are laughs, but most of them come from feel-good places. There are emotional points, but it’s generally all quite light and fluffy. Which is fine! You don’t have to kill off your characters to create emotional investment!
• Generally, besides the automatic points for breaking gender conventions (and, seriously. That shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is) this was solid, and pretty good. Not a classic, but fun to watch.

Watched: Fright Night

Observations:

• The 2011 one, not the original. It sounds awful, but I’m really not that interested in seeing the original.
• This was so fun. Incredibly stupid (even though there were some funny lines), but it knew it was and decided it was going to have a good time. It wasn’t that scary, either, but that’s fine - there was enough tension to tie the plot together, and it still felt like a rollercoaster. Just, you know, a fun one.
• David Tennant. Unf. Sorry, just… those leather pants. And the eyeliner. Holy shit. I don’t think I’ve ever been more attracted to a man in a film.
• Everyone in this was really fun to watch, if sometimes gratuitous. Anton Yelchin is a brilliant actor (Charlie Bartlett still remains one of my favourite films, and why wouldn’t it), Colin Farrell does a good job (by no means a given these days), and the supporting cast are all solid. Even Dave Franco was pretty good, if totally deplorable.
• Thinking back on it, this is a film that mostly takes place in two locations, but it feels suitably epic considering that’s the case - there’s so much going on, you don’t necessarily notice the background. Occasionally, it feels like egos battling for space on the screen (even Yelchin’s straight man is pretty intense), but for the most part it’s just really enjoyable acting. Did I mention David Tennant?
• More fun than I thought it would be, not nearly as scary as something like Drag Me To Hell (tonally, though, it’s a decent match), and fantastically schlocky if you want to switch your brain off for a hundred minutes. That doesn’t mean it’s mindless entertainment - there’s enough going on - but it’s not aggressively demanding on either your stomach or your head.

Watched: The Amazing Spider-Man

Observations:

• This film really got the fluidity of a character like Spider-Man and ran/swung/flew with it. I think this is the first time where a bunch of workmen turning cranes around has ever made me cry.
• Andrew Garfield definitely lends a humanity to the character, but his face began to unnerve me after a while. It never stops moving. It’s hard to harness emotional significance when you’re always in a constant duel between smiling and frowning.
• They could have done more with Rhys Ifans’s character, too - he gradually faded from view in favour of The Origin Story - which, while good, is a bit of a tired formula by now. That said, it’s hard to really lend character development to a giant lizard with an English accent.
• Uncle Ben! (Martin Sheen was really good when he was around.)
• Emma Stone somehow turned a fairly one-dimensional part into something with depth, too - most of her role is hanging around, waiting for Peter to show up, but she has some good lines and leaps off the screen.
• The music was really good, and was really part of the tapestry of the film - at times, there was the impression that it was trying to create a mood that wasn’t there, but for the most part it worked in synchronicity with the rest of the film.
• Side note: I haven’t seen, nor do I intend to see, any of the Tobey Maguire Spidey films. The man’s face terrifies me. Just… yep.

Watched: Another Earth

Observations:

• This was very different. In a good way.
• Also massively mis-marketed, which I already knew about, but don’t go into this expecting science fiction. Sure, there are elements, but really the science fiction elements are a plot device rather than a huge texture. It’s a small, highly charged drama that’s principally between two characters (co-writer Brit Marling, and Willam Mapother, who is stunningly brilliant in this and completely erases Ethan from Lost from your memory), and all the better for it.
• It’s funny that this is the first time that my complaints about a film have been solely technical: the camerawork could have done with being a bit more measured (it’s principally hand-held, and loses the meditative touch a little as a result) and the closing music wasn’t great in that it mirrored the opening (which was tonally hugely different). Aside from that, though, it’s very impressive, especially as an independent feature.
• The script, in particular, is perfectly minimalist, bravely choosing silence over filling the air with waffle. Marling’s character, on reflection, probably only has a few pages of dialogue, but she feels solidly grounded as a character; Mapother’s role could have been an exercise in melodrama, but he handles it perfectly. Apparently he’s a cousin of Tom Cruise, which is bizarre.
• See this. Expect something small, and you’ll walk away thinking you’ve seen something enormous.

Watched: Reality Bites

Observations:

• This somehow managed to simultaneously feel surprisingly fresh and aggressively dated at the same time. It’s not just the VHS generation loss and the very 90s soundtrack - there’s a sensibility to this that we’ve kind of lost, even though the same issues (jobless arts grads struggling to find meaningful work) persist. Nowadays, though, it’s taken as read on most fronts that if you want to do the job you want, you work at something you hate first; here, there’s a fierce resistance to that attitude that seems both naive and visionary at once.
• Interesting, too, how the focus narrows over time rather than immediately seizing on the eventual love triangle. In the opening few minutes, it’s hard to tell who the real subject of the film is, which lends the whole affair the feeling that this is just a glimpse of a culture.
• Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder are electrifying in this - the latter didn’t surprise me, but Hawke can be very hit (Gattaca, Dead Poets Society) and miss (Daybreakers). This was good. He steals the last scene. Stiller was less impressive, though I suppose it’s tough when you’re essentially directing yourself.
• Not too philosophical (despite deliberately twee allusions to the contrary), but fun and heartwarming. Somehow paints so-called slackers in a positive light, which is nice (and rare) to see.

Confusing media roundup: Grand Theft Auto IV, Halcyon, Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!

Because I’ve been watching and playing a lot of stuff, but splitting thoughts into three individual posts would be exhausting.

Halcyon (in addition to being a really good book by Casey Morell) is an iPad game by Zach Gage (of Ridiculous Fishing fame) and therefore probably isn’t that interesting to about 90% of my readership. (Maybe I’m wrong - maybe you all have iPads. I’ve never done any research.)

It’s a curious title, though - the gameplay is visually unassuming and aggressively repetitive, but a combination of stunning soundscapes and a slightly meditative tone put it in the same group as games like Super Hexagon - aggressively addictive without relying on microtransactions and powerups (I’m looking at you, brilliant-but-otherwise-infuriating Jetpack Joyride). Basically, how arcade games should be, but for some reason aren’t anymore.

Chuunibyou was one of those shows I shouldn’t really have liked. It’s cutesy, has a few too many upskirt shots for a show about a group of young teenagers and deals with a phenomenon I’m not too familiar with (so-called “8th-grade syndrome”, where the sufferers generally act like fantasy characters and engage in delusional activities okay it’s basically LARPing as a way of life).

But it’s weird - although it stays along the line of genuinely funny but a little bit trite for a few episodes, things take a turn about halfway through and cast the show in a whole new light. The humour isn’t lost when it’s grappling with bigger issues, but it lends the whole thing a sense of humanity I didn’t quite expect. It’s funny - I think the reason I feel like anime as a medium hasn’t yet won me over is because of my total lack of exposure prior to a few months ago, because so far there hasn’t been one show (or film) I’ve disliked. I have a couple in mind for the next on my list (either Shin Sekai Yori, which looks interesting in a oh-woah-this-subject-matter-is-different sense, and Revolutionary Girl Utena, which apparently left a huge impression on Arden so my hunch is that it’s probably pretty good).

That leaves Grand Theft Auto IV, which… well. It’s such a videogame. Filled to the teeth with lazy misogyny, characterisation that ignores gameplay and a story that’s less engaging than Captain Picard’s junkie meltdown, but still fun because the radio stations are funny and the open world (despite a shitty PC port) feels palpably alive.

My one complaint about Saints Row: The Third (a far superior game in most respects) is that the world at times feels a little cut-and-pasted, the suburbs punctuated by things that don’t really fit in for the sake of cost-cutting. It’s fine - SR3’s priority is fun rather than coherency, and it delivers bucketfuls on that front - but Liberty City feels aggressively real. Now that I’ve completed the story, I’m having fun just wandering around and seeing what I discover. I’ve been throwing myself off tall buildings a lot. Not sure what that says about me (or the game). It’s made me want to get Grand Theft Auto V when it comes out, blaze through the story as fast as possible, and revel in what’s left. There is enough here to excuse the awful shittiness the writers left at the front door.