Ben X

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Posts posted by Ben X

  1. Posted · Edited by bbX1138

    If you wrote the Half-Life movie, you wouldn't have a say in who would direct, or do the effects, or the score. That's how it works.

    I know that, ffs. I was talking about how I'd adapt the film overall, as if I were, say, a producer.

    And I don't think it's a futile and pointless exercise to discuss how we'd adapt certain games, just because we're not all film producers with the rights to those games. I think it's a fun and interesting exercise. Feel free to preserve your sanity by not joining in.

  3. Posted

    I think video game movies need to push boundaries and be a bit more bizarre, rather than try to crowbar their plot elements into a genre blueprint.

    Can we do a bit of an exercise? Let's suggest a game and how we'd adapt a film of it. I'll do Half-Life, as I've already written about it on the ZC forums :)

    If I wrote a Half-Life movie, I would have Freeman as the lead. He wouldn't speak at all, in the manner of a Sergio Leone anti-hero. The film would just be non-stop action so he wouldn't really have a reason to speak, I'd strip the plot and dialogue right down. It would be live-action, but with lots more CG backgrounds, and a mix of CG and proper Del Toro style creatures by Rob Bottin. Score by Clint Mansell. Directed by Gendy Tarkovsky. And I'd just jig around the timeline/conspiracy details so it could go straight from Black Mesa to City 17 to Xen.

  4. Posted

    I quite enjoyed Monsters Vs Aliens (so I guess my taste is utterly different to bbX1138 :P ).

    I quite enjoyed it too! I didn't really like the character design that much, though, except the Missing Link and perhaps the President. It all felt a bit... Jimmy Neutron. I can't explain it any further than that!

    On the tv front, Charlie Brooker's Newswipe has been really good (ep 3 is on bbc iplayer right now, although it's the least strong so far). Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is dreadful, which is a real shame as his stand-up is normally fantastic. Heroes continues to suck balls.

  5. Posted

    By the end of the film you wonder what the point of these numbers was. The people who were saved could have been saved without them

    I suppose it's because

    the aliens wanted to lead the kids to understanding what was going on and saying goodbye to their parents (whom they also led to realise and understand what was going on) rather than just space-nap them without warning - as Caleb says, 'they could have just taken us'.

    I wasn't too annoyed about the bad science. It's only there because the studio think they have to explain and dumb down stuff for the audience, but at least they got it out of the way quickly.

    Then it all turns into yet another apocalyptic disaster movie. With a scifi/religious ambiguity/pick-your-own-meaning so as not to offend anybody.

    I thought it had a pretty specific meaning

    (there is no God, only aliens that show up to give information/help Noah build an ark etc through human history)

    , but maybe that's just me!

  6. Posted · Edited by Ben X

    Knowing - I really enjoyed it. It was exciting and clever and scary, and I genuinely had no idea where it was going next. It's difficult not to associate Nic Cage with shit films these days and subconsciously decide the film is shit just because he's in it, but I managed to fight that urge. Cage is fine, and the film is a good choice on his part as far as goofy thrillers go. It goes completely mad towards the end, which a lot of people will hate. Don't let anyone spoil it for you, and get it on DVD for a fiver (or see it in the cinema for cheap if you can).

    Monsters Vs Aliens 3D - the film is okay, a few good gags but mostly predictable. The 3D tech is really interesting. It works very well these days, and gives a really nice sense of scale and depth. The trade-off is that it works a bit like parallax scrolling, so the actual layers, or fields of vision, are noticeably flat. That is: obviously a cinema screen is flat, but your brain ignores that and sees it as having depth; however, when they start to move different bits of it around seperately, your brain remembers that it's flat. It's still cool, and I can't wait to see what James Cameron, Peter Jackson et al do with it in live-action (I've only seen the horror film Scar 3D so far, and that didn't make use of it at all), but I can't imagine watching In The Bedroom or something in 3D without it being a distraction rather than a subtle enhancement.

    The Boat That Rocked - awful. Simply not funny, quite mean-hearted and with absolutely no plot. Richard Curtis having a wank.

    The Damned United - typical (and typically brilliant) Peter Morgan fare. Very well written and structured, great characterisation and performances. It even managed to make football exciting. But it's not terrifically cinematic despite being well-directed, and, focusing as it does on a short period of time in the characters' lives, it doesn't reach for the epic drama of a full-blown biopic.

  8. Posted

    Hi folks,

    Lemmy and Binky are a coder and artist who have just gone indie. They regularly help out on Zombie Cow games, and are very nice chaps, and they've started up an indie development forum, www.theindiestone.com.

    From their about page:

    theIndieStone.com is a community all about indie game development set up by three indie developers: Lemmy, Binky and MashPotato. Our aim is to ‘have a bit of a laugh’ with other indie developers or indie gamers. Also to share knowledge on the disciplines of art, code and design.

    They're putting up simple photoshop and coding tutorials regularly, and are trying to build a nice little community where everyone helps each other out.

    I wouldn't normally plug a forum on another forum, but this is totally different to what Idle Thumbs does. [Admin, if you take a look and disagree, please blast this thread out of existence.] In fact, I'll mostly be lurking on there and not understanding what the hell anyone's talking about, as my coding and computer art skills are zero.

    So, if there are any indie developers here who have questions or anecdotes or fancy joining in the weekly 'pixel-art in the shape' game, take a look:

    www.theindiestone.com

    Please pass it on to any non-Thumbs indie devs, experienced or fledgling, too! Cheers!

  12. Posted

    I generally try and turn things off at the plug.

    Is there any energy-saving benefit in doing this? Will my toaster be using up a little power simply by being plugged into an 'on' plug socket?

    Are there some items, like tellies or computers (assuming they're not on standby or hibernate, but properly off) that do even if most don't?

    And does it reduce fire-hazard in general?

  13. Posted

    Oh man, The Road. I got about two 3rds of the way through it before I just got bored. Wasn't really my cup of tea (or rather, I loved it at first, but it was just too much of the same).

    Phew! That's two people who have lowered my expectations of this book now - I might enjoy it a bit more than before when all I'd heard was that it's this unfilmable classic.

  15. Posted

    UNORIGINAL POINT ALERT:

    Also: Fuck, is Screenwipe back? I keep forgetting to look out for that sort of thing. Newswipe? Is that a spin-off affair?

    No Screenwipe, but yeah the spin-off Newswipe has just started. You can see the first ep on BBC iplayer, it's really good (although he repeats a fair bit of material from his Guardian column, as usual).

  16. Posted · Edited by bbX1138

    Thanks for the bump and the attention, guys! Glad you enjoyed it, noyb. Check out the zombie-cow site for updates on the sequel... I'm writing dialogue for it right now. Here's what I just wrote for 'talk to pile of straw':

    cBen.Say("I can't talk to it, it's not a straw man.");

    cDan.Say("I disagree, you can talk to things other than straw men.");

    Not sure if the gag comes across...

    gdc, a feature or review would be ace! Let me know if you need anything, and enjoy the game!

    You might spot Tremors and Shaun Of The Dead references, a Day Of The Dead reference, but no The Terminal or Dawn Of The Dead references....

  17. Posted

    Funny how forgiveness and a few politically expedient statements about being saddened raise Shilpa Shetty's profile vastly too.

    To be fair, Shetty was pretty graceful about that whole thing at the time. Besides, what's she going to say when the press aske her about Jade's cancer? 'Good, she was involved in some ambiguously racist conversations about me, I'm glad the bitch is dying'?

  22. Posted

    I'm going to chip in on the Watchmen debate while it's still going:

    I really disliked it. It's one of those films, like The Dark Knight, where there's so much stuff going on, all slickly presented, that I come out of thinking to myself that I probably did like it, until I start remembering all the bad stuff about it that adds up to make it actually not that good a film at all.

    [FULL OF SPOILERS:]

    As mentioned already, they're too afraid to cut things out, and so it's this very dense piece with no structure to hold onto. The comic manages the mix of flashbacks and present events perfectly, but the film isn't able to replicate it. The central whodunnit mystery gets lost, as does the Comedian/Laurie revelation; a lot of stuff could have been cut, eg Rorshach's origin, Nite Owl I.

    Also, it's full of those little inexplicable changes that suggest the director/screenwriter doesn't actually understand why certain setpieces are cool - young Rorshach eating the teen's face rather than stubbing the cigarette in his eye, pointlessly putting in the newsvendor and black kid for the nuclear explosion rather than the two cops whom we've actually seen before, Rorshach defeating the second Big Figure thug by smashing his head into the toilet with the electrocution merely an afterthought - that cropped up in Sin City too.

    Nixon's face is awful, Leonard Cohen over the sex scene makes it super-camp and unfortunately sounds like Rorschach was singing the vocals, the midnight clock metaphor is turned into a bad cardboard prop, there's no sense of nuclear terror, several beats are missed in the Dan/Laurie relationship, Dr Manhattan's schlong is like a third leg. Veidt was miscast and misinterpreted - he felt like a criminal mastermind from the get-go, rather than a cheesy, publicity hungry, savvy sell-out superhero. Also, the film doesn't feel grimy enough - everything outside has a CG sheen, and everything inside feels like a studio set. It's almost the same aesthetic as Mystery Men.

    Phew!

  23. Posted

    Oh yeah, I saw the first actual episode of Being Human. Poor. The actors had great chemistry in the pilot, but none at all in this one (because two were replaced).

    Apparently it got much better in the second half of the series, but I can't bring myself to catch up on iplayer.

  25. Posted

    Hahahah oh dear. It's like Alan Moore's worst nightmare come to life, and far too believable. Very clever in the nods to the relationships and personalities in the book (Rorschach: I'm wacky!).

    I hope nothing resembling this comes out of the movie. I'm optimistic about the movie itself, but the first executive to say the words "action figures" must be shot as an example.

    They seem to have realised that Watchmen isn't that kind of movie, thankfully.

    The cartoon is especially ace is you imagine it to be produced by Veidt to go with his toyline.