Crash

On the surface, Crash is a movie about racism. Everyone in the film says, does, or thinks something racially motivated at some point during the movie. It is also about how racism, violence and hatred are so prevalent in our lives that they can become second nature. At one point on of the characters reflects "I wake up everyday feeling angry and I have no idea why."

An important scene in Crash.

This is the movie that Magnolia should have been. The events of Crash take place over a 24 hour period in the melting pot that is LA. Several characters lives and stories play out here and they intertwine frequently. It's a sometimes violent film, but it's more about the terrible things we say and think about each other and how isolated we can become. There are no clear cut heroes in this film; evil is not so easily defined. This is one of the film's best achievments. It'll have you hating characters one minute then wondering about them the next. It isn't very often I get to see a movie where my heroes and villains aren't neatly packaged and labelled for me. I enjoyed it.

Among the characters are a white cop (Matt Dillon) who pulls a couple over not so much because they're 'having a little adult fun' while driving but because the driver is black and his light skinned wife is mistaken for white. The cop then proceeds to humiliate and violate the couple in front of his shocked partner (Ryan Phillippe.) There is the black TV sitcom director who is told that one of his actors doesn't sound 'black enough.' Problem is, the director himself doesn't 'sound black' either. There's the rich, white housewife who insists to her husband that they have their locks changed again in the morning when she sees that the man changing their locks is a young hispanic man with tattoos and a shaved head. "Could you please ask them not to send a gang member next time?" she says. Whether or not he is a gang member isn't the relevant question. There's the pair of young black men who complain about how they're looked at and treated but eventually their behavior perpetuates that discrimination. He complains that the black waitress gave them bad service because she knows black people don't tip for shit. "Oh yeah? What kind of tip did you leave?" to which his friend replies "...I'm not tipping for that kind of service."

It's nice to see Sandra Bullock in a dramatic role. She plays her part well.

Every character in the story is both guilty of racism and a victim of it. Kudos to Paul Haggis for making a powerful film about racism that is neither preachy nor sappy. Crash is a powerful, effective piece of entertainment which will make most viewers think about themselves and the world around them. I wholly reccomend this movie.

Crash earns 4 wombats out of 4.

Game Review: Indigo Prophecy

Platform: Playstation 2, XBox, PC

From the early eighties to mid nineties, some of the best video games were adventure games. As video games became more and more mainstream entertainment featuring increasingly shiny graphics, adventure games have become a dying breed. Games such as Maniac Mansion, Grim Fandango, Myst and Shadowgate have been replaced by Halo, World of Warcraft and Madden football. Every now and again a fine adventure game rears its head and sells barely well enough to keep the struggling genre viable. The last such game was The Longest Journey. Indigo Prophecy is another such game.

Indigo Prophecy has a beautiful, melancholy atmosphere.

Indigo Prophecy has generally recieved positive reviews and has sold decently enough, though it is not on par with the other adventure games I mentioned. This is a sad fact, as it had the potential to be the best of the bunch. After the first couple of hours I was absolutely enamoured with this game, but the game's niggling little drawbacks kept picking at me until the game's end. The bad points certainly did add up, though the game has its good points, originality being chief among them.

First the good: The game opens on a brutal murder in the dirty bathroom in a small diner as the snow pours down outside the windows. You control the murderer who awakens as if from a trance to find a bloody knife in his hands and a dead body at his feet. Some 20 yards away, a cop sits at the counter nursing his coffee. You must find a way to get out of the diner without giving yourself away, and you must do so before anyone else enters the bathroom. After quicky cleaning things up as best I could, I calmly left the bathroom, left the payment for the bill on the table, walked out the door then took off like a bat out of hell down the street. My job was to avoid capture while trying to find out why this happened.

If you commit a murder, the first thing you should do is try to stuff the body down the toilet.

The game then puts you in control of the 2 investigators who come to check out the crime scene and look for clues. It's neat to see what you missed and what you gave away (my silly ass moved the body, washed my hands, mopped the blood up then left the bloody murder weapon on the floor for the cops to find.) The game has several options for interacting with your environments, as well as several dialogue options which are times and cannot be initiated more than once. There are many instances where a botched puzzle or boneheaded conversation simply alters the story rather than making the player redo it by trial and error. This is a wonderful game mechanic and it gives the feeling of being a part of a real, interactive world rather than a static one. The idea of playing both the criminal and his pursuers is likewise very well done and it creates sympathy for both sides. The game has some interesting minigames as well as some intriguing decisions to be made that give the game replay value. For example, you see a child fall into an icy river. No one else sees this, but you see two cops (including the one from the diner) approaching. Do you save the child and risk capture or do you save your hide and leave the child for dead?

Now for the bad: The game is a fine interactive experience, and if they'd left it as strictly a dialogue/moral decisions/ solve puzzles adventure game, it would've been great. Instead, the game is full of on screen prompts which you have to mimic to advance through several areas of the game, almost constantly in fact. It is basically the equivalent of Dance Dance Revolution performed with 2 analog sticks. The other common one requires you to button mash the L1 and R1 buttons alternately. This sort of thing is simply irritating to have in an adventure game, it seemed like th game designers decided to arbitrarily throw in some fast paced button pushing to keep us from getting bored. Some areas it fits in context with the onscreen action (tapping the analog sticks to dodge things being thrown at you for example) but other times these onscreen prompts come up during dialogue or flashbacks. I was staring at the symbols on the screen and tapping my analog rather than being able to concentrate on the story and setting. This is unforgivable in a game that is all about immersion and story.

Cop and killer meet face to face for the first time.

Some of the minigames also seem forced. A basketball game? A boxing match? Two fucking STEALTH missions??? When I buy an adventure game, that's exactly what I want. Madden owners don't have side-scrolling action combat levels thrown in. Gran Turismo owners don't have to shoot terrorists during the course of the game. Give me what I paid for. Variety is good. Mixing genres isn't. Also, the story that starts out with so much promise eventually deteriorates into standard sci-fi crap, and the closer it gets to the end, the more the train goes off the track.

Indigo Prophecy is a unique, imaginitive, flawed game. This game makes me excited that there is still the possibility for art and imagination in the increasingly stagnant video game market. If Quantic Dream can build on this game and eliminate the negative points, they will give gamers something to be excited about. For the time being, however, Indigo Prophecy is a beautiful game with a lot of squandered potential.

Note: Indigo Prophecy is a fairly short game that could be finished in a weekend. I absolutely reccomend it as a rental.

Indigo Prophecy earns 2.5 wombats out of 4

The Assassination of Richard Nixon

Was Nixon assassinated? Nope. This movie tells us the true story of a man who tried. The main character, played by Sean Penn, is Sam Bicke. Sam Bicke is a furniture salesman. He is a moral, honest man who despises liars and dishonesty. Yes, he is in the wrong profession. At one point in the movie, he goes off on a tangent about how his boss was asking his salesmen to LIE by telling the customers that cutting 15% off the sales price was the absolute rock bottom price when in fact the markup was 30%. Scandal!!

Sam attempting to communicate with his wife Marie (played by Naomi Watts)

I was reminded over and over of the movie Falling Down. These two titles are very similar as are their main characters. The Assassination of Nixon is really about the American Dream which is, after all, a sales pitch. We see the events of Bicke's life unfold before him: He is a marginally talented salesman who is desperately trying to start his own business and to reunite with his estranged wife and children. It's obvious to the viewer that both attempts will fail, largely due to Bicke's bitterness in life. The more his life comes apart, the more resentful he becomes towards The System, the one that promised him the happy marriage, successful job, white picket fence and 2.4 kids. He gets caught in the trap of feeling that the world owes you a living, and the it's not doing its job of delivering. It doesn't help that the business he works in (or the boss he works for) is a microcosm of that false promise.

Where does Nixon fit into all of this? The story takes place in 1973, and it's interspersed with various television of Nixon's public addresses. Bicke's boss summed it up best: "You know who the world's best salesman is? Richard Nixon. In '68 he swore he'd end the war and we voted him in. What does he do? He sends more troops into Vietnam. In '72 what did he say? 'Re-elect me and I'll end the war.' And we made him president again. He made a promise, failed to deliver, promised us the same thing again and we believed him both times." In Bicke's mind, Nixon stands for dishonesty and the decline of morality and values in American life.

Assassination is not a fun or easy film to watch. Some viewers will be bored by it, as the film is heavy on character development and light on action and humor. It is the story of a man's descent into madness, bitterness and isolation. Some scenes are painful to watch such as when he gets his last big letdown in the film, we do not get a reaction of rage or fury, but the meek reaction of a man who has been defeated and cannot muster the will to lash out. Sean Penn is, as usual, outstanding. Don Cheadle and Jack Thompson turn in strong performances as well. If this sounds like your kind of movie, you'll probably enjoy it. If not, maybe not.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon recieves 3 wombats out of 4.