on a lighter note...
Some things I just wanna post to help me remember them in the future:
1. I'm playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney right now and I haven't felt this way with any game before. It's some sort of excitement I can't explain. Snooping around for clues, debunking fishy testimonies, and ultimately getting your client a full acquittal is quite exhilarating. For a game that relies heavily on text (and gamers who are patient in reading between the lines), it's surprisingly not boring at all. It's made courtroom drama a lot more...well, not really fun, but perhaps more palatable to the average joe who normally doesn't have any interest in any legal mumbo-jumbo.
When you get down to it, the Ace Attorney games by Capcom are a little too controlling, story-wise, mostly because you know for a fact that your character is going to win in the end. It's very straight-forward in that sense. But the cases are still juicy and all the detective work you are forced to do just to make the plot move forward don't get too tiresome to solve. What's best about this game is that the characters are very likeable, and the personalities, although sometimes obviously just strange caricatures concocted for the story, are interesting enough. I'm actually a big fan of Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth, as their American counterparts are called. (Their names are better in Japanese though, and they match better too--heehee.)
2. I watched Sweeney Todd a couple of weeks ago, and it's still in my head. Something is off about that movie, but at the same time, something feels very, very right. Like maybe the fact that one of my dreams in life came true: Seeing Alan Rickman and Johnny Depp in a movie together. I almost had an apoplexy watching Sweeney Todd, where they didn't just act in the same scenes together, they even sang together. Ohohoho! It's just fan-fucking-tastic! And it induces such a terribly wonderful feeling in me that it's worth the cussing.
About the off part...well, maybe it's all the blood. I didn't expect it. The singing kinda softened it up, you know, the violence...but it was still very, very much violent. I think...maybe Tim Burton didn't want to dilute the wrongness of the whole story--the grave immoral acts committed and the social cancer that permeated and polluted every single character in that story--by editing out the gore, or holding back on the fake blood bags and the cgi. It's an interesting case of making the most out of the current media and technology to create the perfect story...or movie in this case. This is only my theory, of course, but I kinda like the idea that, for art, one doesn't hold back. Let loose the dogs of hell and all that, but the 'no compromise' policy in this case has an interesting effect--or at least, I think so. I think that, when done aptly and with dead-accurate instinct for aesthetics, the overt display of violence can be analyzed as a jarring reminder of the presence of evil, and the need for morality and goodness to reign in people. I mean, taking into consideration even the shock value--a factor that is often viewed negatively in any artwork--this can shake people back into the real world--not the bloody, dark world, but the world that can be, that ought to be. A world where goodness reigns.
Maybe I'm over-analyzing and just imposing my own ideals for this movie, but I'm just thinking of a possible future for film and art in general. It's just about all the time that we debate about ethics vs. aesthetics in art. How those two cannot mesh, and the artist's integrity suffers when either of the two is sacrificed. Maybe...maybe it's not really an issue of sacrificing one for the sake of the other. Maybe it's just that we ought to think out of the box, and to use what is viewed negatively and turn them into tools that can bring positive effects on the audience, on society.
Art doesn't have to take sides. Art, I believe, is naturally good. Creation is naturally good. When art is pure... well, it will take some time to finish that sentence.
For now, I'm just posting this for the record.
1. I'm playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney right now and I haven't felt this way with any game before. It's some sort of excitement I can't explain. Snooping around for clues, debunking fishy testimonies, and ultimately getting your client a full acquittal is quite exhilarating. For a game that relies heavily on text (and gamers who are patient in reading between the lines), it's surprisingly not boring at all. It's made courtroom drama a lot more...well, not really fun, but perhaps more palatable to the average joe who normally doesn't have any interest in any legal mumbo-jumbo.
When you get down to it, the Ace Attorney games by Capcom are a little too controlling, story-wise, mostly because you know for a fact that your character is going to win in the end. It's very straight-forward in that sense. But the cases are still juicy and all the detective work you are forced to do just to make the plot move forward don't get too tiresome to solve. What's best about this game is that the characters are very likeable, and the personalities, although sometimes obviously just strange caricatures concocted for the story, are interesting enough. I'm actually a big fan of Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth, as their American counterparts are called. (Their names are better in Japanese though, and they match better too--heehee.)
2. I watched Sweeney Todd a couple of weeks ago, and it's still in my head. Something is off about that movie, but at the same time, something feels very, very right. Like maybe the fact that one of my dreams in life came true: Seeing Alan Rickman and Johnny Depp in a movie together. I almost had an apoplexy watching Sweeney Todd, where they didn't just act in the same scenes together, they even sang together. Ohohoho! It's just fan-fucking-tastic! And it induces such a terribly wonderful feeling in me that it's worth the cussing.
About the off part...well, maybe it's all the blood. I didn't expect it. The singing kinda softened it up, you know, the violence...but it was still very, very much violent. I think...maybe Tim Burton didn't want to dilute the wrongness of the whole story--the grave immoral acts committed and the social cancer that permeated and polluted every single character in that story--by editing out the gore, or holding back on the fake blood bags and the cgi. It's an interesting case of making the most out of the current media and technology to create the perfect story...or movie in this case. This is only my theory, of course, but I kinda like the idea that, for art, one doesn't hold back. Let loose the dogs of hell and all that, but the 'no compromise' policy in this case has an interesting effect--or at least, I think so. I think that, when done aptly and with dead-accurate instinct for aesthetics, the overt display of violence can be analyzed as a jarring reminder of the presence of evil, and the need for morality and goodness to reign in people. I mean, taking into consideration even the shock value--a factor that is often viewed negatively in any artwork--this can shake people back into the real world--not the bloody, dark world, but the world that can be, that ought to be. A world where goodness reigns.
Maybe I'm over-analyzing and just imposing my own ideals for this movie, but I'm just thinking of a possible future for film and art in general. It's just about all the time that we debate about ethics vs. aesthetics in art. How those two cannot mesh, and the artist's integrity suffers when either of the two is sacrificed. Maybe...maybe it's not really an issue of sacrificing one for the sake of the other. Maybe it's just that we ought to think out of the box, and to use what is viewed negatively and turn them into tools that can bring positive effects on the audience, on society.
Art doesn't have to take sides. Art, I believe, is naturally good. Creation is naturally good. When art is pure... well, it will take some time to finish that sentence.
For now, I'm just posting this for the record.