The word “amateur” has a bad connotation. You might look at an art’s student attempt to recreate the Mona Lisa, or a mod for Half-Life designed to make it look like Wolfenstien 3-D, or an Uwe Boll film and say “Ew, that’s completely amateur.” By that, you’re likely to mean “poorly designed, conceived or executed, and in those cases you might be right, though I for one would give props to the mod designers for using a flexible open-source shooter engine to hearken back to those bygone days where your arsenal wasn’t limited to two weapons and your health didn’t come back automatically if you just stood around a corner making sure your shoelaces were tied.
The real meaning of amateur, though, is based in its direct French translation – “lover of”. An amateur is someone who does something for the sheer love of it, not necessarily for the money. Now, I want to get paid for what I do as much as this shouty beard-faced fellow, but the fact that I’m not yet isn’t going to stop me from doing it. It’s just something I need to do on my own time until I can find a way to fool the monolithic corporate world at large into believing that what I do enhances productivity or shifts paradigms or some other such bullshit.
That’s part of the reason why this isn’t getting posted until almost 4 PM, and why it’s so short. That and I do have a day job that keeps me in the category of “struggling amateur” instead of shifting me to “starving amateur.”
Fair warning: this is a post that deals with my opinions, reflections and influences from growing up in the 80s. You may consider these the ramblings of a crazy old man if you like.
It’s also going to be picture-heavy, since I’m a bit strapped for time.
I grew up in the 80s. I was in my formative years during the Regean administration, the height of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, the tail end of the arcade’s heyday and the final years of the Cold War. I think it’s safe to say that, even from a young age, my tastes in entertainment verged towards escapism, especially speculative fiction in the form of movies. I watched a lot of movies.
Some of the movies I grew up loving and watching repeatedly to catch nuances and relive key moments have not, as they say, aged well. Some still hold up as entire moviegoing experiences while others look or feel a bit dated. I think there’s fertile ground for discussion in these films, especially if younger generations fail to understand why I consider them so influential. I don’t expect everybody to fall in love with these films the way I did. In fact, if I were to watch a couple of these films again I’m not sure my feelings about them would be as strong now as they were then. However, I think it’s safe to say that, for most of them, they can be considered classics in one regard or another.
I’d like to go in-depth on a few of these “nerd classics” another time, but for now, here’s some of the films that helped shape me as a movie geek and storyteller which some of you young whipper-snappers don’t respect, appreciate or even know about.
Spoiler
Feel free to discuss a bit here and now, and expect more from me on these in the future.
Some people are good at just one thing. There’s nothing wrong with this. While you don’t want to over-emphasize specialization in any endeavor, as you never know when something outside of your specialization is going to come along and topple your entire plan, trying to be good at everything usually means you’re just mediocre in most ways and don’t excel in any way.
Most, however, aren’t. They have passions, talents and drive that go beyond normal expectations. A good deal of sane people dedicate themselves to a particular career path – “I want to be the best cheese salesman in the history of dairy products!” – but it’s a vary rare individual who’s capable of selling cheese for every hour of every day they happen to be conscious. Humans need to have a break now and again, to eat or rest or use the lavatory. Even if one is so wired for selling cheese that they want to sell cheese every waking minute, others might not be inclined to buy cheese meaning those cheese wheels will be spinning with no forward motion for that period of time. And what if the cheese salesman really doesn’t want to be selling cheese? They might have to, just to make ends meet, but what they really want to be doing is following in the footsteps of Hunter S. Thompson even when they stumble about the place because he was hopped up on something. Or several somethings.
My point is, what we do with our time on a daily basis isn’t necessarily what we want to be doing or what we love doing. I know some people who are blessed to be able to do what they love every day all day as their vocation, even when it’s a struggle to do so. It shouldn’t be a struggle, in a perfect world, but it is and I think I have an inkling as to why.
The world in which we live isn’t based on doing what we love, but rather what makes us useful. The corporate machine needs many, many cogs to continue operating smoothly. A corporate executive needs an expensive car to drive in order to show his status. The car salesman is happy to sell that car because his wife is concerned about her appearance and frequents the local spa. The owner of the spa wants to get more salesmen’s wives in and knows they spend time on the Internet. The spa owner’s Internet company helps him maintain his site, and so on and so forth. If the salesman’s wife were suddenly to take up painting rather than frequenting the spa, for example, the whole system might collapse.
It wouldn’t, but it might, and so the system rails against this creative desire by advertising more distracting and degrading things. It distracts with shiny objects geared to be of interest to the audience, and degrades by suggesting that not owning said things makes the viewer less of a person. “Do the trick you’re required to do,” they say, “and you’ll be rewarded with these things. Do something else and not only will you be unable to enjoy these rewards, but society itself will conspire against you in the form of rising gas prices, exorbitant communication fees and unforgiving landlords.”
It’s from here that the struggle arises. We are not one-trick ponies meant to cantor for the amusement of those holding the golden strings of corporate purses, yet those purses often remain closed to those who refuse to entirely conform. Some willful and determined animals are capable of breaking from the pack and running free despite being hunted by the wranglers of corporate greed and soul-grinding utility billing. Some give up and wander with the pack with no real idea of where they’re going. And some struggle against their restraints because freedom is too precious a commodity to be purchased with money, fear or a twisted and warped vision of the self sponsored by cosmetics companies and beer distributors.
I’m probably blowing things out of proportion. I’m given to hyperbole, after all, since I tend to think in terms of fiction involving space ships, wizards, steam-powered robots and vampires that don’t sparkle in the sunlight. Still, the point I’ve been hysterically gesticulating verbally at remains that we are not one-trick ponies. No matter what the advertisements, status quo or your boss might say, there’s no need to tread the same ground over and over again after the whistle blows. Find the seed of your passion, place it in fertile ground and shelter it from the elements. If it happens to grow into your daily life to shore up what you do for most of the daylight hours (or nighttime for you third-shifters), so much the better. If it grows in a different direction, let it. It might lead you someplace wonderful.
You’ll never know unless you try, and once you start trying, don’t stop. The greatest disservice you could ever do to yourself is letting the thing that makes you come alive starve to death while you’re totaling up your billable hours.
I try to be a man of my word. I promised yesterday that after watching Inglorious Basterds last night, I’d have a throw down between it and The Hurt Locker. The challenge for me is to compare and contrast these two films without giving away some of the gems I have saved up for the BasterdsIT CAME FROM NETFLIX! feature, which might not get up until next week since I have at least one special request that needs watching (You know who you are, and thank you). Believe me, there’s a lot I want to talk about, both in terms of reviewing the movie and discussing both where it belongs as part of Quentin Tarantino’s portfolio and among the ranks of this year’s Best Picture race. Not that it matters, at this point, but I’m entitled to my opinion, dammit.
The problem with comparing these two is that they’re very different animals. However, a comparison is likely to prove interesting – we just might not have any shots with folded chairs or pile-drivers happening. So, apologies in advance for having this be less of a throw-down and more of an argument around a pub table. Insert your own punching sound effects if you like.
Setting
There’s a war on in both The Hurt Locker and Inglorious Basterds, and both films take the armed conflicts that serve as their settings seriously. Hurt Locker is focused squarely on the gritty, tense and all-too-real atmosphere of modern warfare. The film’s emotion, humor and drive come from that realism. While the World War II backdrop of Basterds is slightly different at tone in times, and even verges on romanticism now and again, there’s an undercurrent of realism to it, as well. The fact that it’s an undercurrent in Basterds is the biggest difference in terms of setting. Hurt Locker is shoulder-to-shoulder with the soldiers of Bravo Company, while Tarantino keeps the Basterds at cameras-length from us at all times. Sometimes the camera is very intimate, and sometimes it’s pointing out how awesome something is.
Characters
Compare our two male leads.
Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant James is very much an alpha male. He goes about his business his way. He doesn’t like hearing the word “No,” and things going wrong upsets him a great deal.
Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine is also very much an alpha male. He does things his own way (the Apache way, it seems), hearing the word “Nein” makes him mad, and plans going wrong are problematic especially when he points out the flaws in those plans.
See where I’m going with this? At first these two seem like pretty much the same character, only each has a different sort of edge, in keeping with the different films’ settings. Renner makes no concerted effort to make James heroic beyond the simple nature of his actions and attitudes. There’s some cowboy in him, to be sure, but this come across less as macho swaggering and more as simple deflective behavior, putting on a certain amount of airs to avoid dealing with people around him in a way that might get him hurt. He wears his emotions and attitude the same way he wears his bomb suits. Aldo Raine, on the other hand, is meant to be macho, and Pitt plays him that way, from the smirk that comes from his affected drawl to the way he sneers at Nazis. He’s having fun, in spite of the seriousness of the situation, and by extension, so are we.
Theme
The Hurt Locker tells us that “War is a drug” and uses that as the central thread around which the narrative is woven. Inglorious Basterds has a few thematic elements, the strongest of which is its focus on films and film-making. MovieBob has already touched on this in his ‘Escape to the Movies’ feature and I plan on doing the same, though from a slightly different perspective since the Oscars have come and gone.
So which is best? From a standpoint of watch-ability – ICFN spoiler alert! – they’re both worth your time, for different reasons. As for the rest… well, my thoughts on The Hurt Locker have already been documented, and Inglorious Basterds will get its turn.
The follow contains mostly my personal opinion and can probably be disregarded.
The game Halo and I have something of a history.
I grew up with shooters in one hand and space flight sims & strategy games in the other. When I was fed up with the politicing of my AI opponents in Master of Orion and had rescued humanity from the clutches of the Kilrathi in Wing Commander, I fired up Wolfenstein 3-D or Doom. Now, neither of those games had anything approaching a complex narrative – “here are some Nazis/demons, go shoot them in the face” about sums it up – but this was long before motion capture, voice acting and model rendering had gotten to the point that video games could call their experiences “cinematic” with a straight face.
When I first played Halo, I liked it. I liked its control schemes, I liked its portrayal of the conflict between humanity and the Covenant, I liked the mystery behind the Halo itself, and I liked Cortana. Spunky AIs always appeal to me. Note that I’m talking about the single-player campaign, here. I did play multiplayer with a few friends, and was mostly reminded of deathmatches in Doom. I didn’t really see anything new other than the initial gee-whiz of the graphics. Still it was fun and hearkened back to simpler days when demons roared at me from within brownish spikey ghouls that seem laughably rendered by today’s standards. Even after a couple years, when I found out a place I was working was maintaining its own Halo server, I jumped in. Unfortunately, my boss never showed up – that guy needed a sticky grenade on his backside something fierce.
I played Halo 2 once, just to try and get the story. And while there were a couple “HOLY SHIT!” moments during the cutscenes, the gameplay felt vastly unchanged. Characters returned but really didn’t grow at all. It wasn’t necessarily bad by any means, it just felt like the story was beginning to take a backseat to the multiplayer. Again, it was fun to play split-screen with a couple of friends. But that was about the extent of my experience, and by that point, Half-Life 2 had come along and, in my opinion, completely blown Halo 2 out of the water.
I can’t come out and give a solid opinion on the Halo series as a whole, as I haven’t played Halo 3 or ODST. In terms of story and gameplay I have no idea how they stack up. They remain in shrink-wrap on the local GameStop’s shelf and I admit to a somewhat passing interest, since I do find myself curious as to the fate of Cortana and the experience of being an average Joe in generic space armor fighting the Covenant, instead of being a genetically engineered hyper-masculine superman in generic space armor fighting the Covenant.
Two things bug me about the Halo series that have nothing to do with the games. One is the parade of copies that have come in the wake of the franchise. Gears of War, Haze, Turok, and Too Human, just to name a few, all feature characters very similar to Master Chief: gruffly voiced manly men wearing futuristic (if not powered) armor, grimly facing down hordes of gruesome creatures, handfuls of hot heterosexual automatic fire in their grip. For the most part, though, I can ignore these things. I played a little bit of Gears of War 2 and immediately found myself wishing to play a different shooter with a more interesting premise, character or setting – like Painkiller, or BioShock, or Half-Life, or Mass Effect.*
But the advertisements for and attitude towards each new installment of Halo would have you believe that you will not have an experience even remotely resembling what you get out of that game. And that’s the other thing that really bothers me about the franchise. Call me out for being a dull gutless effeminate story-loving dweeb if you must, but the screaming cursing teabagging fist-bumping Beast-drinking backwards-baseball-cap-wearing hair-frosting (yet completely straight) core demographic of Halo’s multiplayer really turns me off of the game. I feel like I’m missing a point somewhere. Halo, to me, is a sci-fi shooter with limited weapons capacity, lots of guys in generic space armor and a couple of interesting weapons and maps. What’s the big deal? The story’s half-decent, the physics are all right, the weapons all feel very sci-fi and the vehicle sections are well done. Again, I’m only talking about the first two games here, so maybe the third one or ODST will suddenly start delivering Battlestar Galactica-scale narratives or reveal that Master Chief was a disenfranchised orphan who was driven into the Spartan program and defied the nay-sayers who said he’d never amount to anything by becoming the savior of humankind many times over. Or maybe both he and the story will remain on the bland side of things. I can’t say either way.
It sort of reminds me of a wine called Yellow Tail.
Yellow Tail is a mass-produced wine specifically designed to be sold at a reduced cost and be more palatable to most pedestrian drinkers than those who have discovered a particular pinot or cabarnet that they enjoy. I’ve tried Yellow Tail, and while it’s drinkable, it isn’t as good as wine from a vineyard. The advertisements for it, on the other hand, would have you believe that Yellow Tail is the sort of wine that tastes delicious, leaves you plenty of money for expensive aperitifs and will probably get you laid. Based on this scheme, Yellow Tail rakes in the cash, much like Halo does.
The original Halo did its shooting very well, had great vehicle sections that were fun to do with others and even had something resembling a story to tell. I feel that as the series goes on, there’s less story happening while the amount of gameplay and features remain largely the same. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t stop Halo in general and a generous portion of its fanbase from bothering me. Maybe if I pick up the Halo games for my wife and take some time to play them myself again I can form a more solid opinion on the matter. But that’d require money. And I need my money for other things.
Like food.
And Assassin’s Creed II.
* I know both Mass Effect games are more RPGs than shooters, but they still have solid sci-fi shooting action. And while Shepard and his team tend to wear space armor, especially in the first game, the characters have at least a little depth to them.
