Major failure wrote:
MAJOR FAILURE PRESENTS:

“Who’s the real king of beasts?”

And so begins quite possibly the greatest post in the history of the internet. I implore you with every ounce of my sculpted physique to VISIT THIS PAGE NOW.

And laugh your tits off. Awesome.

* the image was a little something I whipped up to celebrate the madness

I’m here to set the record straight, as is my wont: Before Sunrise is not a great film. In fact, it’s mostly less than average. Yet over the past few days - starting at a gathering on Sunday where this problem was brought to my attention - I have become enlightened to the fact that many consider it a scintillating (”deliriously romantic”) piece of filmmaking. There’s this whole underground community that secretly worships this film. I was almost involved in a scuffle with several rather scary individuals who couldn’t believe I was criticising their beloved text. Sure, I’d be a little irked and moved to defend certain films if people were railing against them - but then my beloved films are so far above such criticism (obviously) that it would be the sheer idiocy of aiming criticism at them which would irritate me - not the criticism itself. These guys were getting annoyed when I said that Hawke fawned his way through it. Now, the nineties was a crazy time - but it wasn’t that crazy. So how was Before Sunrise elevated to the (seeming) cult status that it holds? 7.8 on IMDB.com? PLEASE. It’s all a bit ridiculous.

For starters it’s perilously close to self-parody. Here are two young, hip, intelligent stargazers… talking bullshit. Which is fine, to an extent. And yet on the one hand they continually quip ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy…’ and so on, and on the other the film wants to be taken seriously, as if these kids are really, actually, right about something. But they’re not! They talk bullshit, they express their bullshit opinions, and 90 minutes of bullshit doesn’t ever amount to anything. In comparison to my most treasured of pulp films, Pulp Fiction, where the dialogue is only seeming bullshit, this is a rather irritating element.

Secondly, Linklater aims for some kind of naturalistic realism, and yet ends up with the opposite - it seems like a theatre production, all dramatic pauses and gestures and giddy laughter, and ambling through cobbled streets, and so on. Certainly, if DV film had been around it would have helped to counter the sense of fictionality (used to powerful effect in recent films like Collateral), but one can’t use the lack-of-availability of DV film as an excuse - the film just feels fictional. This is partly in the way Hawke and Delpy speak their lines. Methinks they doth protest too much - there’s way too much expressiveness and galavanting around the scene for it to be real (or seem real). Again, in Pulp Fiction the fictionality has a profound purpose - to comment on the storytelling process - but in Before Sunrise it’s a massive detractor from the naturalism that the director aims for.

My other criticisms are part and parcel of the two already mentions. For brevity, the fact that the film is profoundly content-less is a bizarre intrusion into the film’s philosophy that these two star-crossed lovers have a great meeting of the minds. They don’t. They BARELY converse properly, most of the time merely espousing their particular juvenilia, and then getting the other persons take on the same situation. There’s no great romantic tryst - only the forced-upon one plot-wise (love at first sight would you believe).

And that, in several nutshells, is the content of several phone-calls worth of banter since Sunday evening. Welcome to my world :)

click to download - small .wmv file

“And your starter for ten.. Flaming sambuca plus idiot equals wha-”
BZZZZT!
“CAMBRIDGE, ROBOT!”
“A flaming idiot?”
“Cambridge you lose ten thousand for interrupting. But yes.”

Sporadical. That’s how Cher would have me describe my blogging style. But it’s all the more sweeter when it happens, right? (note to self: remember to open next post without mentioning previous lack of posting.)

Have been busy on ‘mah pro-jects’. Primarily mapping for Source/Half-Life 2. I’m struggling now to remember what game I first mapped for, but I’ve always assumed it was Quake. It must have been. Certainly most things seem to begin with that particular slice of genius. Memories flooding back now… hours spent editing nav files for Reaper bots (Reaper bots!)…the bots themselves…teamplay on the Fragtown maps (with which for a time I aided Herr Oberleitner in his devious plans). Ah, the Reaper bots. I’d be crouching somewhere at the top of a skyscraper, scribbling down some notes on their performance, when an ominous “UZI 9MM” and a glowing red eye would mark their arrival - a clinical rocket to the face would swiftly follow. Terrifying. Almost as terrifying as the look of the levels to my Source-drenched eyes. Jesus (shot actually from the Quake 2 remakes, because all other versions seems to have been lost to the void. Probably a good thing.).

After Quake I took a break from mapping. I hated Quake 2 like most people did (multiplayer wise). Half-Life’s arrival in 98 meant learning to map all over again (or so it seemed). I remember putting out some early deathmatch and TFC maps. I know I mapped for Sven Coop at some point, too. At some point I created some great maps for Quake 3 but I’m damned if I can remember what they were called. And that just about brings us upto the current point, minus a few escapades in Operation Flashpoint (that I’d call mapping if I’d actually had to create a map for it) and other lesser games that for my sins I’ve forgotten.

How are we doing? Lost some stragglers? Cool.

So, mapping. It’s brilliant. And Source is brilliant. QED, mapping in Source is brilliant. I’ve been really hammering out (if you’ll excuse the punnery) a load of test maps ever since the last release of the SDK, screwing around with physics and all the new entities. Every hour or so I let out an almightly giggle as I discover something new. At the end of last year things were a little shakey, but now the community is really coming together. Testament to this are the incredible three winning maps from the Valve competition - most especially dm_underpass. Every single inch of that map is textured beautifully, and it’s a riot to play it with a few other guys.

Just today I started on what I hope will be my first proper release, tentatively titled dm_hotel (what’s in a name? That’d be telling!). Dev textures shown above. At the end of that hall, a grand staircase, partly caved in, rain leaking through the roof, smashed windows. The job lot. Think the Beverly Hills, but dark and dirty and run-down and you’re someway there. Should be fun.

edit: almost forgot this. Thug life AIIIIIIGHT!

Considered momentarily just being sneaky and guilt tripping you all by sliding this post back to the 1st of this month when I should have posted! I think at the time I put it off til the next day for obvious reasons, not that it was particularly hoax worthy material, but that I was possibly afraid of more barefaced cheek if I didn’t. (I still got it, by the way. MSN is a tool of great evil.)

Alas, here is my embarrasingly late sing-song post about Word Matters, a little blog project that my friend Craig Gilmore and myself kicked together after several long chats around the subject (and several moments of fleeting genius - fleeting).

Word Matters is a new team blog where myself and others will post about whatever we happen to have just finished reading - and indeed focussing on reading two or books a month for the precise purpose of writing about them. Not in the manner of a chore, not against our will, but simply as the starting motivation behind grabbing them up and sitting down for a time. It’s all too easy to neglect reading at the moment, and indulge other forms of media, but it’s rather negligent when there’s so much fantastic, intelligent, sometimes awe-inspiring words which demand attention.

If you want to find out more - or even join us in our little experiment/adventure - take a look at the site here.