Thoughts and Views: Elephant

A movie I've been meaning to watch for a long time but never got around to it for whatever reason was Elephant by Gus Van Sant. I have now watched it and am left in thought, something that rarely happens with a movie. Not because it's a surrealistic movie with a complicated plot and artistic view, like Eraserhead, and not because of some message I have to try and figure out. It's more of an idea where I'm left just thinking about the characters and general tone of the movie.

If you don't know what this movie is, it's part of Gus Van Sant's "Death Trilogy" where he explores three different ideas of death based on real stories (although in fictionalized areas). This particular one is about a school shooting somewhat (obviously) based around the Columbine shooting. Flat out this is not a movie for everyone, it's actually almost more of a niche crowd. Not because of disturbing content or anything like that, but more because of how it's filmed and how the movie progresses. This is what I actually consider the most interesting part of the whole film and what, unfortunately, a lot of people just won't understand (to no fault of their own) and even if they do, may not care. The idea of it is simple enough, there really isn't any explanation needed as to where the plot is going or anything like that, it's how it's told that really drew me in.

To Gus Van Sant's credit, he does one of my favorite filming techniques that is extremely underused; long tracking shots.  Today directors prefer quick cuts in film because it's easier to make and you don't need as much acting talent to finish a scene (just look at any Michael Bay movie). It's extremely difficult to achieve because everyone must hit their mark or the whole shot is wasted, which can be up to 4 or 5 minutes of footage. In this respect, the tracking shots are amazing. Granted the acting isn't the best (everyone's an amateur) but they can still go up to 5 minutes without fucking up in a single sequence and how the tracking shots are presented is remarkable. They don't take place over a tiny area or room, they span an entire campus. the camera will follow a student from the outside yard, into the halls, through the lunch area, outside between areas, and finally at the character's destination without cutting at all. All of which have students doing whatever it is they do before school and during. It's really quite beautiful every time a sequence like this happens. They're also shot from different angles where you can see the tracking shot in the background of another character (which presents some continuity errors but they're forgivable).

This brings me to the characters. Sometimes after I watch a movie I read message boards (although I never talk on them) just to see what people thought or perhaps get different perspectives and the biggest complaint I saw was the lack of development. Some argued Gus just did a shitty job, some think there was enough. One argument I saw was that Gus wanted you to just see the characters as they were because in media when we hear things happen we don't see a personalization. I disagree with all of these. There is very little character development, that I agree to, but I feel Gus did this on purpose. I think he wanted to make the characters a stereotypical shell that you could inject people you knew into, which makes the story more personalized. Everyone's name is generic, but the point wasn't to assign names, it was for you to assign classmates you had to these people. The punk, the jock and his girlfriend, the girls that act like bitches to everyone, etc. If you think back to your high school days, you could probably assign every single one of these people a name based on someone you knew bringing the shooting home. For a subject matter such as this, I think it's genius, however, like I said earlier, not everyone will see that.

The part of this movie that will really pull people away from it is not the fact that there's little character development, the story is already known from the outset, or even bad acting. It's the fact that this is supposed to be filmed like an average day of school. Dialogue is completely irrelevant to what's going to happen for the most part; it's just regular teen conversations. As nice as the long takes are to look at, they aren't meant to end up somewhere specific, and there is no main character at all. And this all goes on for an hour (movie run time is 81 minutes). The shooting doesn't happen until the end and it's not a balls to the wall action like Rampage or something similar. Gus uses fairly realistic sounding weapons and paces it with no music, just the sound effects of the area being shot up. For me, this works in the films favor. It really gets the point across that everyone's just doing business as usual, no one suspects anything is going to be any different at the end of the day, then all of a sudden people start dying. It's supposed to lull you as a viewer where you know something terrible is going to happen, you are completely helpless to stop it, and none of the characters really deserve their fate. This last part in particular is painfully shown when the least deserving person is the first to be killed. If this sounds like it'd be boring to you, it probably will be. Like I said, it's a good movie, but it's for a niche audience.

If you do decide to check it out, do not expect their to be some underlying message as to why the massacre happened. Don't expect all of the character arcs to be tightly closed at the end, it's not that type of movie. It's not meant to explain why these kids shoot up the school, it's meant to make you feel the pain of it happening. Part of keeping some of the character arcs open is to show that in a chaotic situation, no one knows what the hell's going on. Who's dead, who made it out? Sometimes it's shown, other times it's assumed. to some degree I think this is a smart idea on Gus' part because he's admitting he doesn't have a clue why these kids would do it. All we can do is assume, make up scapegoats, and blame everything else but ourselves. Perhaps these kids could've had shitty childhoods, perhaps they were picked on at school, perhaps it was too many violent games and metal, or perhaps they were just born sociopaths and society doesn't understand why. This movie is a personal experience, not a tool used to explain anything about these situations.

So do I recommend the movie? Absolutely, but like I said, it's not for everyone. I got it for $6 at F.Y.E. and I got more than my money's worth out of it. Others may not be so lucky as to see the movie how I do. I do believe though that if you go into this movie and match up characters to people you knew, you'll get a lot more out of it through nostalgia of things you used to do during high school, and what you would've felt if you'd gone through the situation. Gus Van Sant did a great job on this film and I commend him, but I still can't forgive him for remaking Psycho.

You are an idiot. Good night.

This is not something about movies or games, this is actually a complaint about stupid people. Being where I work, I deal with technology on a constant basis, and being it's retail I am surrounded by items I want and cannot afford. While I was drooling on my lap over a Sony notebook for $1,200, I decided to read the customer reviews and see why it was rated at 4 stars instead of 5. I was shocked at the stupidity of the results.

To give you an idea of what this machine has, it is a 16.4" screen with a blue-ray player, 1GB DDR3 nVidia graphics card, 640GB hard drive, 6GB of DDR3 RAM (upgradeable to 8GB), 2 USB 3.0 ports and 1 USB 2.0 port, backlit keyboard, HDMI output (and SATA input), and most importantly an Intel i7 processor with Turbo-boost, and a shit battery life, but that should be expected for a quad core. If you're a gamer, specifically a PC gamer like me, you should be foaming at the mouth. Now lets look at comments some of these dipshits said about it.

So the first comment I came across that made me want to smash my head on a desk was someone who said it had poor performance. Apparently his Windows start up is very slow in comparison to a notebook that cost $200 from Black Friday. According to him it takes up to 5 minutes to load up. I won't argue the five minutes, I sincerely doubt it takes even remotely that long, but I'll give him the benefit of a doubt. Now why is he a dipshit? Because he has heavy aps running on it. First and for-most, he's running Norton Internet Security Suite. What this jackass doesn't realize is Norton ISS is running five programs at once that all have to boot up and check through the system. Norton ISS is a system hog no matter what kind of computer you put it on. You will never get full performance out of a machine using it. Strike 2 is he's also running Blackberry Desktop, another program that causes slow down. Strike three is this moron probably didn't turn off any of the start-up programs that are useless and has unlikely not taken any of the trial software off of it. Then you have iTunes (which doesn't take that much but still). So essentially he has one major system hog software running. Of course it's going to move fucking slow. He also complains about where the USB ports are, which isn't a valid complaint because you can see that in the store, so fuck him on that one.

The second complaint that always makes my blood boil with regard to any notebook is about the screen resolution. According to this idiot, Sony skimped on some things to make it a $1,200 laptop, namely, not making the screen 1080p. I challenge you to find a TV with a screen under 20" that has 1080p. Why? Because they don't fucking make them. There simply isn't enough space for a 1080p resolution. But lets say hypothetically you could some how magically cram that many pixels into that area, you aren't going to notice the fucking difference. A screen has to be a minimum of 32" before you will notice a difference between 1080p and 720p, and guess what, this fucking laptop does 720p. Something like this pisses me off on two levels. The first is just the general stupidity, the second is they clearly just know 1080p is a better resolution without understanding why and when it's actually useful. And as a side note, he spelled "throw" wrong, because lack of an ability to spell is a valid argument.

This actually goes along with a separate thing that pisses me off. A while ago I was looking at which version of Predator I wanted for Blue-Ray (the first release or second). The first release had really shitty reviews. Why? Because the picture was grainy and not super clear like new movies (such as Star Trek). This is another example of dipshits voicing a useless opinion. Just because a movie is upscaled to 1080p does not mean it's going to be absolutely perfect look, especially if you're using a shitty print. Why? Because 1080p upscaling simply means they blew the picture up while keeping the proportions the same to give you a more detailed picture. Why is the grain complaint stupid? Because it also means any grain in the film will be enhanced and made larger. People have this strange idea that some how being in 1080p means it will look absolutely perfect, but if you're working with 30 year old film that had grain to begin with, it's going to stay. You can get rid of it, sure. Basically you blur the picture, meaning you're losing the quality of the picture just because you're a jackass that doesn't like grain, rendering the blue-ray aspect of it useless.

To get back on track, the last comment that pissed me off was about the battery life. According to Captain Dipshit, Sony's site said the battery life is 2:30, but when he unplugs it, it only lasts about an hour. Either Captain Dipshit did not talk to someone that knew anything about computers, or he ordered online, because anyone who knows anything about laptops would be able to tell them there's not a chance in hell he's going to get that 2:30. It's a fucking quad-core with dedicated graphics and a Blue-Ray player. The battery life is going to be shit. Why can Sony claim it's 2:30? Because when they benchmark it they turn every option off (including wi-fi), and just let the computer sit with low brightness and no back-lit keyboard. The time you see on any of those is assuming you're doing fuck-all with it, but looking at it. But of course, this dumbass is going to return the battery in hopes a new one will fix the problem.

This last comment isn't so much about someone complaining, but just wrong information. There were a bunch of people talking about how awesome the "8 core processor is." I'm sorry you think it's 8 cores, it's not. It's a quad-core with hyper threading, which makes it look like it has 8 cores. Neither AMD nor Intel has an 8 core processor. And before you think "LOL Mac has an 8 core!!!" No they don't. They have 2 Intel Quad Core processors because Intel are too fucking lazy to make the technology for a true 8 core processor. Any computer can technically have 8 cores so long as you have the pins for two processors. Or even 12 for that matter now that 6-core processors exist.

Man people suck.

First Post: First Complaint! Halo Reach

So the other day when I was at Best Buy I bought a new game. I was mildly intrigued by the fact that the original price for the game was $150 when it came out. Clearly since that time it has reduced and I purchased it for far less. That game is the Legendary Edition of Halo: Reach. That game is shit.

I've never been a big Halo fan to begin with. The first game bored me to tears and frankly I thought it looked like shit. The music was good, but that was about it. Halo 2 had far superior graphics, and personally I think it's the best out of the original trilogy. A lot of people thought it was shit, and I know why, but it was the only one that wasn't just a copy paste (which is now going into ODST). It actually had some new stuff in it. Halo 3 was $60 for a 5 hour campaign that was piss easy on the hardest difficulty and had a ton of bloom.

Then we come to Halo: Reach. The final game by Bungie in the only series that the Xbox 360 has going for it since they just lost Mass Effect to PS3 owners. This game is just crap, even for a Halo game.

The voice acting sucks, especially the asshole that gives you commands. He says everything with no emotion and sounds like he's reading from a script. Which is pretty much like everyone else, from the hardcore Marine girl in the squad to your character that sounds about as tough as a box of Puffs Plus tissue paper. More so, and something that surprised me, the music is terrible. Usually the one thing I can always say the Halo series had was a good, memorable, soundtrack. Not in this game. So far as I can tell, the main Halo theme is gone, or it's so low key you can't even hear it. The music has no idea when it's supposed to come in, and it's almost non-existent in action oriented areas.

The graphics compared to other games on the system look god awful. I have a 32" 1080p HD TV. Mass Effect 1 and 2, Killzone 2, Bioshock, all look fantastic on my TV. This game looks like a mess. Usually designers use bloom in a game to hide low res textures so you can't tell they skimped. That's basically what Halo 3 did. It seems to me Bungie did away with most of the bloom and now the shit shines through. Grass looks like crap. Textures are blurry and low res. Sure the general outlook of the world is kind of cool, but it still looks like a standard def picture that's been stretched. It's a bad sign when a game that's over 2 years old looks better and is by the same company. I admit, there are some cool things, like when you shoot a grunt and he starts spinning around in a circle from the exhaust on his backpack, but it's not enough.

The gameplay is still the same as it ever was. Weapons that take a million billion bullets to kill anything except grunts. The same weapons we've been using since Halo 2. The same enemies we've seen since Halo 2, do the same things they did in that game. All they really did was re-skin some of them (like the grunts), but they do exactly the same thing as their older looking versions so it doesn't matter. Did I have fun at all? Meh, kind of. But attaching a sticky grenade to someone and watching them run around before they explode got old after the first game. The new gameplay features, and by features, I mean the one thing that changed, is being able to mod your suit. You really only have two options though, speed and shield. Shield sounds nice, but upon use you realize that it's fucking stupid and go back to speed. What's the point of a shield if I can't move at all and can't fire? It makes me think of Serenity when Summer Glau is praying and says, "Please, God, make me a stone." Good, I'm a rock, now what? (And yes, I know there are other ones, but they're stupid, like the Hologram mod.)

As far as multiplayer, I don't care and if you want to whine about how it's a great multiplayer experience, piss off. A game cannot stand up on multiplayer alone unless it's specifically designed as such. Servers shut down after a while and people move onto the next game, rendering the game useless if the single player campaign sucks. And if you think Bungie cares more about the multiplayer than single player watch their interviews. The guys at Bungie actually think they have a fantastic story and talk more about their single player campaign than their multiplayer experience.

Over all I think Bungie is tired of this series. It seems like they tried slacking on this game so people will stop buying their games and they can go onto something new. But of course IGN gave it a 9.5 and every idiot out their thinks it's a 10/10 game with little to no justification. If you had fun with it, more power to you, but in general it's a bad game that's poorly designed. And if you're wondering why I didn't talk about the story at all, it's because it's still the same damn story except we already know what happens. Hey Bungie, it's usually shit story design when you tell us everyone is going to die in the beginning of the game. Kind of leaves no reason to feel anything for the characters. Just a pro tip.