Brian_McInnis Reviews

Lost Highway (1997)

A 50-Minute Masterpiece Followed by an 80-Minute B Movie

[8/10 · 21 February 2024]

Good god in heaven. That first fifty minutes is one of the most gorgeous stretches of cinema I've seen in my life. An experiment in underexposing objects and textures that so subtly, so strangely and so strongly brings back the mid and later '90s of my childhood, and is profoundly effective in the existential horror vein it mines. After that it gets jolted over into an utterly different movie made mostly in Lynch's usual Soap Opera 'n' Chaotic Screaming Idiocy mode.

'Parently there's some complex 'dissociative psychogenic fugue' Möbius strip business that makes the movie's two (or three?) parts more cogent than they first look if you have some understanding of it, but aesthetically it crashes and burns at the sixty-minute mark, apart from the basic visual texture which is still quite beautiful. My god those are some terrible music choices.

But that first hour is so transcendently good-looking I just bought two different Blu-ray editions that have different color and lighting values. That first hour I was asking where has this movie been all my life.

Jet Force Gemini (1999 Video Game)

One of the Great Games of All Time

[10/10 · 16 January 2024]

Among N64 games I place this behind only the two Zelda adventures. Every few years for twenty-five years now I've tried to figure out what exactly it is that made J. F. G. A masterpiece standing so completely outside of time despite being on the surface a game mostly about mowing down giant bipedal ants and collecting cutesy monkeyfolk. One key seems to be the score combined with the many vast landscapes and technoscapes, which together often speak what seem odes to a great and lost splendor. Sekhmet, Anubis and the Lost Island are among the best examples of this.

Another key is simply the scope and sheer beauty - often majesty - of its worlds. I don't know how it is that Rare excelled in lighting details, gradations and effects so far beyond any other gaming company and regardless whether they were working in Super Nintendo, N64 or their famously unparalleled promotional renders, but excel they did. And never more than here. They put in the extra grief and sweat to make every last hidden nook look totally unique. The game is a meditation on light and shade. I've also never seen lens-flare effects used anywhere skillfully as here. The Lost Island area alone should've won some sort of Oscar for breaking new ground in video-game beauty.

This game is one of desperate few games I can think of that were known well to everyone when they came to us, but now seem very nearly forgotten. And this a profound travesty, Jet Force being so much greater an achievement than the Banjo games and all else Rare made for the system. I've always thought a sequel made on GameCube graphics would've fit its fabric so well. May it be accomplished one day.

More would I, but life is short and words are cheap and great works like this one beckon us on in our shrinking time. Boom shanka.

Bomberman Hero (1998 Video Game)

The Funnest 3D Action Platformer in Gaming History

[10/10 · 19 May 2023]

This game got a rather poor reception from critics when it came out, largely due to its 'unpolished' nature and probably also to its not especially exciting or dynamic cut-scenes and story line in general (I think those last two in particular are highly overrated elements for a video game, but anyway). The other problem of course was that its main audience was Bomberman fans, and no previous Bomberman game was anything like an action platformer. The aggregate ratings it has today are actually not bad at all; basically average. Gamefaqs and Backloggd both have it at 3.5 out of 5. As for moiself, it has gradually grown and grown in my estimation over the twenty years since I picked it up, and at this point I've come to regard it as one of the greatest games I've ever played.

It's an unusual situation admittedly. The game isn't deep in the senses that the other games in my pantheon tend to be. The thing I started noticing was that it seemed to have just unlimited replay value for me. For one thing it's extremely, extremely fun. Throwing bombs in arcs is a mode of combat very unusual to see in games and Bomberman has this sort of moonwalk jump and it makes just going through the game a whole lotta fun. That and the superb and highly unusual, weirded-out technoesque score by renowned composer of Arabic music Jun Chikuma.

The structure of the game is a refreshing (especially for the time) throw-back to 2D games that were made of oodles of short levels, and this really seemed to fly in the face of the N64 platformers I was seeing at the time - Mario 64, the Banjo games, Donkey Kong 64 - almost all of which had a handful or so of huge levels that took for ever to get through (and in most of these games the levels all seemed to be basically round and with a great big towering structure in the centre). And the rest - whether it was the Zelda games, Bomberman 64, Quest 64, Jet Force Gemini - everything was just goddamn huge and took ages to get through and had no end of secrets you had to collect if you wanted to unlock the final world or whatever.

So by contrast the bite-sized-to-smallish levels in Bomberman Hero are really fun to bounce quickly along through (there are secrets and a hidden final world in Hero too, but it's not the same when it's little bitty levels somehow. Trust me on this). There are seventy-seven levels in the main story mode and the amazing thing is that all of them have their own shape (each one's got you running, climbing, winding around in a different direction) and their own visual palette and their own ideas and quirks going on. That's probably one main reason the game doesn't get old for me. And still more variety's added through Bomberman's four vehicular transformations (plus a couple rides on Louie's back).

And the 'unpolished' quality just makes it more charming and more unique. A stripped-down polygonal world is of course a stylization in itself even if it's not by intention. I've seen many shots of beta-version N64 and GameCube games that look more mysterious and alluring than the finished products. And the lower-density graphics just make the game that much lighter and quicker and more fun to play. Bomberman Hero's one of gaming's great overlooked - and unexpected - masterpieces.

Kairo (2012 Video Game)

One of the Great Experiences of My Life

[10/10 · 23 March 2023]

Absolutely no one knows about this game and it's *the* best first-person game I've ever seen. Made by this one single English guy Richard Perrin. Exploration, architecture, puzzles, unfathomable alien beauty. The way the musical elements resonate against the visual ones is beyond belief. I don't know where else in life I've experienced depths like this. Some world lost for ever and beyond all hope of retrieving.

There are a few brief glimpses of some sort of a history buried in the game's more secret corners, but they're extremely cryptic and I still haven't been able to piece much of it together myself. Most of the puzzles are of pretty reasonable difficulty and a lot of them are quite easy, but there are a few exceptions. Fortunately there's a hint system you can consult.

Everyone in the entire world has to play this game.

American Pop (1981)

Unrivalled

[10/10 · 15 January 2022]

Greatest animated film I've ever seen, hands-down. All the Don Bluth-type movies I saw as a kid feel like dim forerunners of what this movie finally succeeded in being. It was so good it felt like it was gonna be gone when I woke up the next morning. In a sense something like that did happen - I woke up in a world that wasn't filled with scores of these movies, where there wasn't a whole genre of animated movies this gorgeous and intelligent and realistic and inventive. Where nothing else its own creator made came close to matching it. Where it could perfectly well be the only one of its kind.

Our Time (2018)

One of the Greatest Films of the Young Century

[10/10 · 14 November 2019]

Carlos Reygadas has become one of the greatest film-makers of our time. All his films have been great works, but this is his first masterpiece, exploring most of the same central themes of marriage, fidelity, infidelity and ranching that his two previous films ('Silent Light' and 'Post Tenebras Lux') have, but with more coherence and focus than 'Post Tenebras Lux', and more depth than either of them.

Nothing about movies engages me as much as masterful cinematography, and I've encountered very, very few directors whose cameras have awed me with their grace, uniquity and creativity as much as Reygadas has with his more recent works. The visual texture of the Digital Cinema Package format is definitely a hindrance, but this is easily the most visually astounding film I've ever seen made with it. Over and over and over again, I found myself asking 'How in the hell does this man DO it?'

Mandy (I) (2018)

Likely the Best Goriest Film Ever Made

[10/10 · 14 September 2018]

'Mandy' is amazing. Amazing. Amazing. In all honesty, I'm more impressed by it than I was by Paul Thomas Anderson's newest film, because it's so much more original, so experimental and so fearless in its utter, bizarre, grating unusualness. It's not even really fearlessness; Panos simply doesn't seem to hold any awareness of cinematic conventions or formulae. I'd never, ever have dared intertwine tragedy and comedy so closely as he does here.

It's much less important, but I also felt like I was watching Cage's comeback in real time. He's magnificent, and a lengthy shot in a bathroom could easily be the best single shot of his career.

Of course, the one convention the movie does hew to is the revenge genre, and I feel like the encounters in the second half get slightly repetitive, and some of the gore feels just slightly juvenile to me personally. Also the music never quite jumps out and astounds us the way the rest of the movie does. But those are pretty minor complaints. It's one of the most atmospheric movies I've ever seen, and watching it really does feel more like visiting a place than watching scenes unspool.

Cosmatos is absolutely going to be one of the most fascinating film-makers to watch in our era (although, at this rate, it looks like we should probably expect a smaller oeuvre than most). Over and over and over again, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing had actually just been done.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Words, words, words.

[10/10 · 11 April 2018]

Over most of my life, I've studied this film and the conception of its story in both Arthur Clarke's scientific mind and in Kubrick's artistic mind, and I've learned about a great many subliminal themes and subconscious effects Kubrick wove into it. But I think that probably the most profound and unique effect of the film is this:

It begins in a place before language, where a profound but inexpressible truth is communicated nonverbally, - to the Australopithecines and to the audience. It then jumps ahead to a time where language is universal and compulsory, but where it is also consistently platitudinous, shallow, (Heywood Floyd and others) deceptive, cryptic, (Hal) or purely technical in nature. Nothing of any deep truth or impact is presented in the film verbally, and most of the dialogue is distinctly mundane and, the deeper one looks into the film, duplicitous. Hal is deceiving his two astronauts, and later they are presenting a false veneer of cooperation to him. Dr. Floyd has a conversation with Russian collaborators in which all are extremely polite and friendly even as Floyd refuses to actually answer any of his companions' questions (and in which he is slyly given a middle finger by Dr. Smyslov as Smyslov moves a drink on the table).

Floyd later gives a speech on the Lunar base in which he gives absolutely no actual information about the monolith, and in which are several quietly sinister references to the 'proper preparation and conditioning' of the public, the 'formal oaths' that need to be obtained and 'sacrifices' made by those privileged to be present at the meeting (Kubrick was greatly fixated on the secretive, Freemason-like enclaves of the rich and powerful). Floyd's small daughter (whose mother is currently away shopping) wants a telephone for her birthday, but he reminds her they've already got lots of telephones - so many ways to talk, but the girl still seems to desire real communication (communication and its failure is another recurring theme in Stanley's work). On and on it goes.

But when we finally arrive at Jupiter and its orbiting monolith, speech drops away completely for the last twenty-three minutes of the film (about the same length as the pre-verbal prologue). Bowman passes beyond speech into the most stupefying experience in the cinema - an experience of incomprehensible images and music, (and an experience whose connection with the audience is strengthened by the fact that Bowman isn't a Specific Character, with his own personal and emotional history the movie's supplied him with, but a blank, prototypical human we can read anything onto) and even more bewilderingly, he encounters himself at the end of this journey; and the movie itself seems to pass beyond its own logic.

The subconscious feeling one's left with from a full, uninterrupted viewing is of a film largely about the treachery and emptiness of speech in which we finally escape the verbal universe entirely and arrive at a place of profound but inexpressible truth; that nearly all the film before this has had a distinct falseness and superficiality about it, and we have finally found a great Secret far beyond any word. I've never seen another film that's achieved this feeling.

I've studied Kubrick's other films for some time now, and 'The Shining' and 'Eyes Wide Shut' may exceed '2001' in the richness of their subliminal thematic and aesthetic tapestries (and days before he died, Stanley himself said the latter would be his greatest contribution). But none of his other movies go nearly as far down the rabbit-hole of raw experience and mystery as the Odyssey does. Emily Dickinson wrote that 'Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.' Of the artists who've worked with film, Kubrick is the most skilled I've seen at haunting his houses.



Einstein -

'The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead - his eyes are closed.'

The Impossible (2012)

South-East Asian Catastrophe as Experienced by Incredibly Fortunate British People

[4/10 · 19 August 2013]

'The Impossible' is an absorbing, well-shot, well-acted film with convincing special effects. It is based on fact. It provides the experience of having one's family caught in a catastrophe with a vividness few other films have had. My qualm is with the film-makers' decision, faced with an event that killed an estimated eight thousand people in Thailand alone and devastated countless families, to take for their subject an extraordinarily fortunate family of British tourists who were violently separated and endured terrific trauma, but who managed to find each other and return home with every family member alive.

The story of this family is pretty inspiring, but should Bayona have considered making a film about a Thai family that did suffer loss, as innumerable families did? Is his message that when calamity strikes us we suffer great terror and difficulty, but it will all be O.K. in the end? And why are nearly all the other people we meet in this movie also European? Why are there so few Thai people? Why does nearly every one speak English? Amid so much destruction, why do we see barely any dead people? Did one of the only films made about this titanic South-East Asian cataclysm really have to star Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts?