I didn’t see as much stuff as I wanted to this month. Bioshock 2 came out and the Splatcademy Awards work started. And I had the T-Virus for over a week, in which I would just randomly fall asleep all the time. What I lacked in time to watch feature lengths, I probably made up for with The Office and Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Easier to digest shorter TV entertainment than 2 hour movies sometimes.

Anyways, here’s what I watched in sequential order. Orange means worth your time, Red means essential viewing.

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Filed under: Commentary, MaT's Stuff, Reviews, Shit I Missed, Watch Lists | 10 Comments »

One of my favorite film sites is Senses of Cinema. It’s one of the only places on the internet where you can find real, interesting critical theory of films from really intelligent and knowledgeable people (there’s an article on Antichrist up right now). The writers and contributors to the site recently released their “World Poll” of the top films of 2009. Two of my film professors submitted their list and it’s always fun to find out the preferences of the people instructing you on film (unfortunately, the professor I’m most interested in just didn’t submit this year). So here you go:

Gwendolyn Foster’s picks

Wheeler Winston Dixon’s picks

Husband and wife unite in their dismissive attitudes towards Inglourious Basterds

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Filed under: Commentary, Movies, Random, Shit I Missed | 1 Comment »

A long time ago, in an internet far far away, Deadlantern used to be known as The Keyhole. That site was generally more “anything goes” rather than horror-centric, but we (meaning myself) used to do interviews with all sorts of horror celebrities and have odd features like the one which was a photo essay documenting myself as I dug for the treasure inside those gravel pyramids you can get at museums. Our interviews followed a basic template: half the questions would be “serious” and half would be random nonsensical stuff that most interviews never asked.

Alas, all of those interviews and features disappeared when Jeff built Deadlantern. However, as I was cleaning out my harddrive, I found one. Our interview with Debbie Rochon. This is probably a good 3-5 years old, so a lot of the info ain’t informative, but I present it here in its entirety.

There was a pretty emphatic “No” from the listeners when we inquired a while back about doing interviews on the Splattercast. I get that. But perhaps we might be able to revive these e-mail interviews that we used to do. Might be a good way for us to keep connected to the horror elites without having to change the Splattercast in a way that would upset many of the listeners. You’d kinda get the best of both worlds, I suppose. So anyway, here’s the interview with Debbie Rochon. It’s a blast from the past and a probably a new window into the world that we were inhabiting before DeadLantern came about. Leave a comment if you like it, hate it, good idea, bad idea, or  just tell us how good your mom’s muffins are.

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Filed under: Dead Lantern News, Friends, Interviews, News, Shit I Missed | 4 Comments »

I finished Bioshock (Xbox 360 version) last night. The game came out in August of 2007 and was a big hit. You’ve probably already played it.

The game is amazing and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who, like me, missed it when it first hit the scene. It’s a highbrow first-person-shooter with a heaping helping of horror trappings. Dead bodies everywhere and weirdos wearing bunny masks. Good stuff.

Since it was such a popular game, I couldn’t help but hear other people talking about it before I got my own chance to play it. One of the things I kept hearing was that the ending portion of the game was a big disappointment, both in terms of the final boss battle and the cinematic ending scene.

I was satsified by the endgame. There was a boss fight, complete with a little boss fight gimmick, and the ending cinematic was touching (I got the “good guy” ending). The ending was somewhat abrupt, but I don’t think it was bad in any way. The only thing I would have changed would be to maybe let the player walk around the game world after defeating the final boss instead of cutting directly to a cinematic ending scene.

Maybe this is just me, but I’ve often resented the final bosses that get crammed into some first-person-shooters. I don’t need some silly room-sized monster like that ridiculous crap at the end of Doom 2. I want something that fits with the rest of the game, that doesn’t feel like a gameplay non sequitur. Bioshock‘s final boss was ok by me.

GameSpot has a good interview with Bioshock developer Ken Levine that makes for a good read after finishing the game.

GS: Considering that the plot inhabits the gray areas of morality and you’ve included general condemnation of taking things to extremes, why give the player two endings that are on ridiculously opposite ends of the spectrum?

KL: I think that’s a fair question and honestly, it was never my intention to do two endings for the game. It sort of came very late and it was something that was requested by somebody up the food chain from me. It was a reasonable request because I think people want to just have a sense of the different consequences from doing that path.

But you notice, whenever I do my interviews about the game, I never want to talk about the good and the evil choice. When we were developing the game, originally the icons about harvest and save had a neat little angel and a little devil, and I cut that out because I didn’t want that to be clear to the player when he did it in the sequence where Atlas and Tenenbaum are telling the player very different but equally compelling things. And it wasn’t clear what the morally right thing to do was.

I wanted to leave it more ambiguous. But I’m not sure if that would have been the right thing. At the end of the day, there are [aspects of games] that you collaborate on and agree upon.

One of the reasons I was opposed to multiple endings is I never want to do things that have multiple digital outcomes, versus analog outcomes. I want to do it like the weapons system in the combat in BioShock. There are a million different things you can do in every combat; you can play it a million different ways. Looking into the future for the franchise, that’s something I want to [figure out], that by the time you get to the ending of that choice path, you have a sense of your impact on the world through lots of little permutations rather than like a giant ending piece, if you follow my meaning.

And I think we did a reasonably good job with [the endings], but there are just two of them. And this is not a game about A and B. This is a game about one through 1 million, and all those permutations of choice. And as I think about the future of the franchise, that’s where I want to take that.

Filed under: Shit I Missed, Video Games | 10 Comments »

I finally finished reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves today. I’d been hearing about this book for years. I picked it up a while ago but only cracked it open recently. It took me a long time to get through. I’ve never been able to sit down and tear through a book in one sitting, much less something like this that ties your eyeballs up in knots.

But, anyway… Wow, this book is incredible. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I’d read a couple chapters and then be – it sounds silly – but I’d be scared to walk down the hallways of my own house in the dark. The premise is unlike anything I’ve ever read, and it’s just so damned creepy.

From critic Ted Gioia,

For someone like me, who doesn’t skim or speed read fiction, the only thing scarier than reading House of Leaves is the idea of re-reading it. Yet I am tempted to do so, if only to consider some of the alternative angles to this text. You could read this book as a savage commentary on literary and artistic criticism. You could read it as a verbal equivalent of a labyrinth, or as some sort of a Borgesian nightmare brought to life. You might look at the genre-oriented aspects of the story, and classify it as a horror tale or a romance or a Philip-K-Dick-sian exploration of a universe gone crazy. There are many doors into House of Leaves, although I am still unsure about the exits. Put simply, in an age that has a fetish over deconstructing the text, this is one text that will keep you busy for a long, long time.

Connoisseurs of “serious fiction” have mostly given this book the cold shoulder, but I think they might just be afraid. Who can blame them? House of Leaves runs counter to almost everything praised or promoted in the current literary environment, where even the most daring writers seem happy to follow the rules, stick to the established norms of narrative fiction. Danielewski has brought a unicorn to the dog show, and all the other pet owners are scowling.

From the wiki page,

Danielewski expands on this point in an interview: “I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, ‘You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.’ And she’s absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool.”

Mat was challenging us on notions of “genre” in a conversation the other day. You want to see a real genre-bender? Try House of Leaves. It’s in a league of its own.

Filed under: Books, Shit I Missed | 5 Comments »

I had yesterday off for Columbus Day (way to go, Chris!) and I chose to watch, of all things, Resident Evil: Extinction. I’ve always thought the first RE movie was above average, and I didn’t hate RE2 (maybe a faulty memory? I only watched it once, at the theater).

This third entry, though… woof. It should have been titled Resident Evil: Nothing Happens. Not even Ms. Jovovich’s considerable sauce levels can save this train wreck. Her character somehow has telekinetic powers which she uses… to fight birds.

Ali Larter does less than nothing, and Ashanti does even less than that. There are no interesting or likable characters, there’s no action, no real gore. There’s just no fun at all.

Man, this is like my second bitchy post today… what’s going on with me?

Filed under: Movies, Shit I Missed | 8 Comments »

I finally watched Feast tonight, a movie that I’ve had sitting around for a long time. Steve reviewed it back in 2006, and Mat also posted some positive comments on Steve’s review. I liked it a lot, maybe a bit less than Steve but probably more than Mat.

If Feast passed you by, like it did me, you may want to go back and give it a look. I think it’s a very cool modern horror flick.

Filed under: Movies, Shit I Missed | 4 Comments »