See now, I remember back in 2013 I saw the trailer for The Lego Movie. I had seen Jump Street at that point, but not Cloudy and Lord and Miller weren’t really a directorial team that I was following. I didn’t know if the film was going to be any good, but I knew I had to see it on the big screen. There just wasn’t anything else ever made that looked like it. There was nothing that moved in the same way.
Just imagine being Rachel McAdams for a second.
There are like a bunch of really good movies that I don’t really have an interest in watching because of their proximity to dads. Like, I love a lot of Rob Reiner films but have little to no interest in watching Stand By Me because it amounts to the favourite film of like half of all boring white middle-aged men. That and Shawshank, I guess the non-scary King adaptations draw them in. In fact a good half of Bob Zemeckis’ filmography is a no go zone nowadays. I’m sure that Rocky is a good film, I’m sure I’ll get to it eventually, but for now age has given it proximity to the most boring parts of our society.
At university I wrote my dissertation on the similarities between postmodern theatre and video games. Sort of taking what Auslander wrote about in Liveness and reflecting it back; analysing how design is being increasingly influenced by the performative desire of players. As a part of that I looked at Alternate Reality Games, comparing their successes to the continued failure of the modernist design ideals inherent in virtual reality. In short, the gameplay of an ARG is only tangentially connected to the actual puzzle design work of its creator — the real play comes in the interaction between the community trying to solve it.
So, in the movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 there’s a scene where the hypoglycemic hero has a drop in his blood sugar level and collapses on the ground. Kevin James, giving an unconvincing physical performance, must flail around the lobby of the Vegas hotel where the film takes place until a child’s melting ice cream drips into his open mouth. You can find this scene on youtube.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, I always did before but now that I drive to my new job having to concentrate on the road means that I’m not able to skip the adverts. There’s one app that is being pimped everywhere recently called robinhood, a cursory search informs me that it is stylised without a space or a capital because of course. It claims to be opening up trading to all, allowing commoners access into the rarified world of capital. It is of course outside of its marketing puff one of the most petit-bourgeois concepts imaginable nobody without any money is gonna get rich off their fucking backs. And in the most self-congratulatory liberal way possible they brag about having an option to only invest in companies with female CEOs — so proud, a part of me dies every time.
So, here’s what happened: somebody, at some point, played Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies. Or maybe Wolfenstein. Most probably both and decided, “Yeah, I could do that.” Then they went and did it.
