GTA V TRAILER RELEASED

Ho. Lee. Fuck.

GRAND THEFT AUTO AND THE MOVIES

Today is the 10th anniversary of the release of Grand Theft Auto III, and I'd like to observe this momentous date by talking a bit about the Grand Theft Auto series' contributions to film criticism. Not exclusively, of course; talking about GTA III without touching on gaming would (obviously) be amiss, and its impact on the culture at large was not insignificant either. But one cannot talk about GTA III, or any of the subsequent games in the franchise without talking about movies (at some point).

This was what initially drew me to it. I had topped out with the original NES, being annoyed that the SNES had no way of playing the old games—and not having any money to get a whole new system and a whole array of new games—and spent the majority of my teenage years immersed in art cinema and centuries-old novels. But my tweediness had limits; I still liked loud music, sports, and both movies and books where shit blows up and people get killed. And so it was that I read an article about GTA III when it came out for the PC and thought, “That sounds awesome.”

I'd first encountered the original Grand Theft Auto when I was in college and decidedly not playing video games. A friend of mine with a computer fancy enough to actually do stuff (not the given in the late 90s that it is today) showed me the game while I packed a bowl and gave a very excited, only partially embarrassed account of the game's wonders, involving the ability to run people over with cars and fuck them up with no lasting consequences. This was all fine, and I was interested, but we had limited time for some reason that now escapes me, and had to smoke that bowl else Western civilization collapse, so that was it for the GTA talk. But the memory of my friend's total geek-out over the game came back to me as I read the review of the new game, where the writer repeatedly assured anyone who might be worried that one could jump in with GTA III without missing anything. I was sold. Bought the game, installed it on my PC, let 'er rip, and haven't looked back since. I bought a PS2 with my '03 tax refund for the express purpose of buying GTA: Vice City. I ran all over lower Manhattan looking for a store that had GTA: San Andreas on the morning of my 26th birthday (the day the game was released, by happy coincidence), eventually finding one. And, once again, when GTA IV came out, I bought a PS3 for the sole (initial) purpose of playing it. To a very real extent, my playing other video games arose more from a feeling of “damn, I dropped a couple/few hundred bucks on this fucking game system, I should probably take advantage of that by playing some other games instead of just gluing GTA into the fucker.”

It was like games had caught up to what I wanted them to be. While I loved Super Mario Brothers back in the day, I could never beat it. I could beat Zelda, but swords and magic and shit was never my thing. My dad, an enthusiastic if not terribly good PC gamer, got one of the Police Quest games and we played through it together on the weekends I'd be over at his place, but still, there was something missing. “I want to design a game called Criminal Quest,” I said, causing my dad great emotional anguish (so easy to do, so much fun), “where you're the guy selling drugs, stealing shit, fucking shit up.” Dad grudgingly admitted that that might be fun given sufficient narrative quality that it wasn't just a bunch of nihilistic bullshit. And lo and fucking behold, Grand Theft Auto III: that very thing.

While it permitted the player freedom to screw around and do whatever s/he chose, the story of GTA III was a total quest narrative. Your guy who you control (not named in the game, but later confirmed by both fan communities and GTA: San Andreas to be named Claude) doesn't speak, and never changes out of his dark earth-toned clothes the whole game, because he has other priorities, to wit killing the living shit out of anything and everything he sees. Most of this is done in cars, hence the title.

The most attention-grabbing aspects of GTA III were things like the fact that you could kill as many cops as you like until they get their shit together and kill you, that one of the easiest ways to replenish your health meter was by picking up a prostitute, driving her to a quiet locale, and fucking her, and perhaps most notoriously that when the deed was done you could kill the prostitute and get your money back. Because of these elements, the GTA games have long been the target of moral watchdog groups up in arms over the desensitization of modern youth to sex, violence, and sexual violence—not to mention cop killing—and even the games' fans will say things like “it's indefensible,” even though they like and play them.

I never bought into this. For one thing, I maintain the best use for the kind of people who want to ban video games or music (or any art) is at the bottom of an oubliette serving as the appetizer course for hungry alligators before the main course of religious demagogues and evil white guys in suits (oh, how I do long for that day. . . .) For another, these moral objections ignore the fact that it's possible to play through the entire game without killing one cop or prostitute, or even patronizing prostitutes. And finally, even if one counters the previous objection with, “Well, the writers and designers put that in the game, so they're still sick fucks,” the nature of the medium is such that the game only exists in the way a given player plays that game. Ergo, if a player spends his/her (I'm not being PC, I knew a girl who absolutely adored killing cops and hookers in GTA III; she was out of her fucking mind, clearly, but she was awesome) time killing cops and hookers in GTA III, it's on the player for doing so. Quod erat demonstrandum.

(Caution: the discussion of the plot of GTA III contains spoilers)

The story of GTA III owes a fair bit to gangster pictures like Goodfellas and Scarface—one radio station is entirely devoted to songs from the Scarface soundtrack; the rest establishes the reputation the GTA games would continue to earn in spades for having outstanding soundtracks—as well as to a myriad other cops-and-robbers movies and TV shows. In an opening expository sequence Claude is shot and left for dead by his treacherous girlfriend Catalina during a bank heist, and is subsequently sprung from police custody along with a fellow criminal, bomb specialist 8-Ball, by means of a bomb that temporarily destroys the only bridge off the island on which the game's lengthy first act takes place. Confined to one third of Liberty City, a fictional American east coast metropolis that resembles each and all to varying degrees, Claude is introduced by 8-Ball to a low-level local Mafioso and begins to work his way up the ladder with his useful driving and murder skills. Over the course of this upward mobility, Claude meets the Don and the Don's younger girlfriend Maria, who takes a shine to Claude and even goes as far as to tell the Don that she's fucking him. (All this without his ever having said a word to her. . . .) The Don, pissed, puts a hit on Claude, but Maria hustles Claude off the island by boat, unlocking Liberty City's second island, roughly analogous to Manhattan.

This was the first point where the game threw me for a loop. I'd assumed the whole game would be Claude working for the Mafia, maybe working his way up to a position of power within the organization. Then, once he was on the run from the Mafia, I assumed the whole rest of the game would be Claude on the run from and in opposition to the Mafia. But just about the first thing he does for his new friend, Maria's S&M lesbian Yakuza girlfriend (doesn't everyone have one of those?) is go back to the Mafia neighborhood on the first island and whack the Don.

From there, Claude becomes the Yakuza's main gaijin, and gets involved with an array of rich and powerful scumbags, including media titan—and proof of the GTA games' firm grasp of the Evil White Guys In Suits Theory—Donald Love, who has Claude start a gang war between the Yakuza and the Colombian cartel (an organization of which Claude's treacherous ex-girlfriend is not only the president, but also a member), among other nasties, notably a bunch of Jamaicans like the kind Steven Seagal fucks up in Marked For Death except more competent.

Things come to a head, after the third and final island has been unlocked and a whole lot more crazy shit happens, when the Cartel kidnaps Maria and Claude has to go rescue her and ice his ex. This is something I've never been able to do on the PS2 version without cheat codes (there are a few other missions I found similarly impossible), but when you kill everyone and save the day, after all that shit Maria jabbers your ear off over the closing credits and the last thing you hear is a gunshot, signifying, one is left to assume, the last nerve of the almost comically taciturn Claude.

Everything that happens in GTA III does so in a manner that can only be described paradoxically as both utterly convincing and yet complete bullshit. Liberty City is so meticulously and skillfully rendered that I spent hours upon hours just getting in one of the faster, more luxurious cars among the dozens the game offers and driving around the city listening to the in-game radio, and it felt very much like driving around a real city. Of course there are differences, Liberty City being a place so thoroughly designed for violence that it has department-store sized gun stores called Ammu-Nation where you can tool up and go wreak havoc. And, most impressively, Liberty City has such astonishingly good healthcare that you can get shot with a bazooka that obliterates your car and the four others closest, and the only thing that happens is you wake up in the hospital a few hours later and a few thousand dollars light in the pocket. Seriously, GTAcare is the most amazing shit in this or any universe.

If the design of the city and the nature of so many of the game's missions—drive here, kill that guy, outrun the cops, etc—weren't enough to make GTA III feel like a playable action movie, the voice cast sealed the deal. The Mafia Don in the early part of the game was voiced by Billy Bats from Goodfellas. His lieutenants were Michael Madsen, Joe Pantoliano, and Michael Rapaport. When you get to the Manhattanish island, necrophiliac media baron Donald Love is Kyle MacLachlan (fucking great casting: if you need an evil white guy in a suit who fucks dead people and yet is still kind of charming, accept no substitutes). The crazy undercover cop you get a bunch of crazy missions from is Robert Loggia, and ho boy does he ever put in some awesome voice work (it's the greatest Robert Loggia part Robert Loggia never quite got the chance to play). And of course the hip-hop nerd in me loved that Guru from Gangstarr voiced 8-Ball.

The GTA series has taken many radical, ambitious steps forward since then. Vice City made the Scarface/Miami Vice 80s come alive (and has the greatest soundtrack in the history of soundtracks), San Andreas was a staggeringly vast narrative, using the early 90s “hood” movies like Boyz N The Hood and Menace II Society as a jumping-off point to explore the entirety of the American experience (even incorporating science fiction without breaking the spell). And GTA IV—Vice City and San Andreas were extended narratives that overlapped partially with the GTA III storyline, all set in the same universe, all built for the PS2, and thus not GTAs IV and V; the game called GTA IV was set in a separate universe, indicative of its having been designed for the next-gen PS3 console—is as special to me as GTA III once was, set in an only-slightly paraphrased New York City, a new Liberty City, that's just as fascinating to me now to drive around in as GTA III's Liberty City once was.

I started to mention at the beginning that the GTA games were, in a sense, elaborate exercises in film criticism, and after itemizing all the other countless glories contained within, it's time to address that. Each game takes its cinematic influences and manages to simultaneously pay deeply respectful homage while still deconstructing and satirizing. The method of the deconstruction is a particularly ingenious one, leaving it entirely up to the player to do all the heavy lifting, as it's the player's choices that ultimately make the game what it is. If all you do in a GTA game is drive around killing cops until you get your ass handed to you, that's the sum of the value that player creates. Someone like me who repeatedly and almost exclusively plays through the story mode of each game is clearly more interested in pulp narrative. And a player primarily concerned with creating video clips of them doing all kinds of cool, unique car stunts is concerned with the visuals and the cinematic aspect of each game, and by extension the movies from which the games draw.

It may seem like a stretch to ascribe this level of depth to the GTA games, and maybe it is, but I can say that GTA III made me look at gangster movies differently, with a more critical eye. Vice City gave me an entirely new and more vivid love for Scarface, as well as defining how I watched Miami Vice (a show I was too young to watch in its initial run, but managed to catch up with thanks to reruns, DVD, and online streaming). San Andreas gave me more of an appreciation for the “hood” movies upon further reflection—I could barely watch John Singleton's Boyz N The Hood after playing San Andreas, though it made me love Menace II Society all the more—as well as spurring all kinds of unexpected thoughts about race, ethnic and social isolation, and the importance of remembering one's roots even if ultimately one doesn't stay in the same physical or social place. I swear, I'm not doin' it wrong and reading too much into these games, this shit's all there. (Along with just about every conceivable dick joke the human mind can concoct . . . except that one. Con-cocked? You're welcome).

That, I submit, is the greatest legacy of the Grand Theft Auto games, all of which started with the massive and ambitious step forward that was GTA III: a massively sophisticated deconstruction of the violent impulses of the American people as wrought not only by games, but by gangster and action cinema. Actually, the greatest legacy of the GTA games is that they managed to do all that and still create ridiculously awesome and fun video games. That's my favorite kind of popular entertainment: as stimulating intellectually as it is viscerally. Happy 10th anniversary, GTA III.

ROLLIN WITH RICK

No, I'm not just Rickrolling you to get all misty and nostalgic about 2007 (or 1987 for that matter). This video is two things: 1) a coded message about what I was up to this afternoon, and 2) awesome. It didn't hurt that I'm replaying GTA IV for the zillionth time at the moment; that game is very special to me. But dig the choreography and editing in that joint, it'd be tight even if it wasn't machinima.

A VALUABLE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

My good friend Mike Criscuolo gave a fascinating interview recently about his work many moons ago on the movie version of Super Mario Bros. It's worth a read, for Mr. Criscuolo's refreshing candor as well as providing some insight into the (bad) filmmaking process. Now, if I can just get my friend Ian Hill to sit for an interview about being an extra on The Stepford Wives remake, I could start a whole "Fireside Chats About Shitty Movies" series. Actually, remember I said that in case someone else comes up with the idea, you all can be like, "Nuh uh, Bowes did it first, yo."

ONE MOGUL TO RULE THEM ALL

The greatest thing about unlimited power is the inevitability with which it reveals the true character of the holder thereof. People say it corrupts absolutely, but I say it corrupts the corruptible. Which is kind of the same thing but a little more cautiously optimistic. Thankfully life affords us few opportunities to play God with the attendant consequences (i.e. fucking up the entire universe), but what few there are can be immensely satisfying in an extremely retarded way.

I like video games where the player gets to act as the general manager, head coach, or whatever the proper terminology for the given sport. I do have fantasies of being the omnipotent Michael Jordan baller who can bend time with his mind and dunk on four dudes in traffic, or break off one of those Maradona “fuck the defense, I just snorted three grams, I can take these assholes” runs and inspire grown men to cry in Spanish, or take a handoff and Barry Sanders my ass through 97 yards of steroid redwoods for six, or be Babe Ruth and blast homers into the upper deck without spilling my drink. But in sports video games, I get the biggest kick out of assembling unbeatable rosters and laying waste to the opposition. It's kind of like being a producer; assembling a baseball team full of high OBP/40 doubles a year guys, or a football team full of fast, mean defensive players, or a futbol team full of athletic two-way players I can play 70s Dutch Total Football with, or a basketball team of brilliant passers and team defenders is like making a movie where you get a writer, director, cast, and crew that all function harmoniously and selflessly in the pursuit of the work. You know, if you were able to manipulate every inconvenient variable to work in your favor.

This is why I've always been fond of the Hollywood Mogul computer games. They're strategy games where the player is put in charge of a studio, tasked with developing, producing, and releasing profitable pictures, created by a screenwriter named Carey DeVuono after a bit of frustration trying to get one of his scripts produced by Fox. It's all text-based, so there's a certain amount of imagination involved on the player's part in visualizing just what their pictures would look and sound like.

The game's also customizable so you can play with “real” actors, directors, writers, and scripts. In the first version of the game I played, Hollywood Mogul 2.something, all the fake original screenplays, novels, and plays you could develop into movies had thumbnail synopses, or you could create your own, and a number of variables like where you wanted to shoot, with how much FX, with which actors, and so forth. After figuring out a fairly decent system for making money (making big FX pictures with an A-list star in the lead, releasing them in the summer, radical shit like that) I decided to start screwing around, much like in Football Manager when I test the patience of Chelsea's board of directors by selling Frank Lampard for a buck because he's a dick (unless Chelsea are winning, they usually overrule the decision and fire me, cuz Frankie Lamps is one sacred fuckin cow, boy, lemme tell ya).

I decided to “create an idea” and hire the lowest-rated $5 million-per-script writer in the game to develop it. I used the first draft because it sucked. Since there was only one actor in the movie—which was set at a science station in Antarctica, because Antarctica was the most expensive place to shoot in the game—I cast Tom Hanks because he was the most expensive available, and had him produce and direct. I gave auteur Hanks a $600 million budget and let him do his worst. I don't remember exactly how I did this, but I made sure none of the $600 million was spent on anything practical like infrastructure (or hiring a crew), so Hanks had shitloads of delays and overruns and special effects disasters because he had to operate the cameras, do the effects, handle catering, and so forth. I was never clear on exactly what the movie was about, but I remember even though Hanks was the only actor in the movie there were “graphic sex scenes” and his nudity rating was as high as it would go, so as best as I can tell I was spending $600 million for Tom Hanks to shoot a movie in Antarctica that consisted entirely of him butt-ass naked and whacking it.

Eventually, after about five in-game years, Hanks' opus (which, if memory serves, was titled Fuck You, Motherfucker) was ready for release. Due to the way DeVuono set up the rating system in the game, as well as there being the normal G-through-NC-17 ratings there was also an X, with which the computer MPAA, not buying my beautifully crafted rhetoric about the film being a statement about onanism as a fractal of every dimension of existence itself (Ed. Note: this is back when I used to smoke lots of weed), slapped the unfortunate Mr. Hanks. And so, his $600 million epic, that I was supporting with about $300 million in P&A—damn, America must have been sick of Tom Hanks whackin' it into their cornflakes every commercial break—ended up grossing about $10 million. My studio, almost a billion dollars in debt, went tits up, and I think the only reason I ended up not getting whacked was because DeVuono had yet to release the “Russian mobster patch.”

I had some massive successes with Hollywood Mogul 2.whatthefuck, including the massive hit franchise Holy Shit, It's a Fucking Earthquake parts 1-5, each of which grossed about a billion dollars. I loved the game dearly, but there was room for improvement. In 2006, after fielding hundreds of requests for features for the next game, DeVuono released Hollywood Mogul 3.

HM3 has a whole lot more detail and more closely resembles the actual development process in a lot of ways. The only thing that ever really bugged me about HM3 as opposed to the previous iteration, is the writing process. In the older game, sometimes no matter how hard you tried, some scripts just sucked and you were stuck with them. In HM3, if you're willing to wait an in-game year or two, your writer will invariably deliver you a literary masterpiece. However, the sacrifice in realism leads, as it so often does, to a gain in escapist value: you can be sitting there like “EVERY PICTURE I RELEASE IS A FUCKING MASTERPIECE.”

Because the customization in HM3 permits—kind of—directors to write their own scripts, I decided to replace George Lucas in one of the real-director files with one “Danny Bowes,” since I also, obviously, write. And, naturally, I put all my talent levels, things like “action, comedy, drama,” “visionary,” “authority,” “story sense,” and so forth to the maximum. Not only does this accurately reflect reality—seriously, I'm a fucking genius, people—it's a lot of fun to be like “Hey, I need a director for this $200 million adaptation of Voltron . . . let's get Danny Bowes, if I can pry him away from his five other incipient masterpieces.”

As a result, no matter what I'd hire “me” to direct, I ended up winning the Oscar for Best Director. I won Best Director for video game adaptations (I mean, not my $100 million-grossing big-screen Leisure Suit Larry, but I totally took home a statue for my three-hour adaptation of Red Dead Redemption even though it tanked like a fuck at the box office). I won Best Director for my big-screen version of The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist with Anne Hathaway in the lead (we did not win Best Costume Design, because Phoebe doesn't have a costume, of course), that despite being an NC-17 (the price one pays for having the heroine be nude for the whole picture) ended up grossing $100 mil because I went gonzo on P&A and got big-ass stars like Angelina Jolie to play the Amazon lesbian villainess (in a move that would enrage purists and add box-office, thus making it a perfectly cynical Hollywood move) and Daniel Craig to play the badass secret agent guy who gets killed five minutes after being introduced.

Just about everything you could possibly want to customize, you can in HM3. It offers over a dozen different kinds of properties you can acquire, from comic books to graphic novels (it differentiates) to foreign and domestic remakes (same) to short stories to novels to non-fiction books to original screenplays to plays to TV shows. Like its predecessor, you can cast these with “real” actors. It's an incredibly fucking geeky way to spend one's time (though it passes a long-ass train ride nicely) but like many incredibly fucking geeky things, potentially a lot of fun.

The Hollywood Mogul games also, weirdly, can serve as a critique of actual Hollywood. Originating as they did in DeVuono's “goddammit, is my fucking picture ever going to get made?” frustration with the studio system, the way the in-game system works, with dumb pieces of shit becoming enormous hits, the Oscars being really retarded and meaningless, and creative decisions being made capriciously by inscrutable entities for reasons other than the good of the work . . . why, it's almost like . . . no, that has nothing to do with the way Hollywood actually is. It's just a computer game. Cough cough. (Ed. Note: the author may want to do business with a studio some day).

However realistic though it may be, it's equally as much fun to fuck around and be like “I'm going to make a $600 million movie about Tom Hanks masturbating for six hours in black & white and only release it in New York and Los Angeles” (HM3, if anything, only adds to the genius of this project). I'm not ashamed of the hours I've spent hiring Michael Bay to direct the imaginary comic book movie Space Marines, nor of turning my own scripts into big Oscar-winning movie star things, nor even of the Hanks. Actually, especially not the Hanks. If liking Hollywood Mogul makes me a nerd, then you can take being cool and blow it out your ass. Especially next time I gotta Amtrak it somewhere.

AT LONG LAST L.A. NOIRE

The time has come, once again, to speak of video games. We're getting to the point where the title “Movies By Bowes” (™) is a bit of a catchall, covering TV and video games as well, as audiovisual entertainment is spreading its wings, and the formerly disrespected media of television and video games are getting their due as art forms rather than reliquaries of mindless entertainment. As a sophisticated cineaste, I say come on in, y'all, the water's fine. Grab a cocktail at the floating bar.

L.A. Noire was released on the 17th of May. I was delayed a week in buying it due to being away from my trusty PS3, but bought it immediately upon my return home and made up for lost time. I'd been looking forward to the release of L.A. Noire for years: in 2004, before Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had even come out, I heard about L.A. Noire and went “Holy fuck, a film noir video game? Tits! In a fully-reproduced 1940s Los Angeles? Bigger tits!” Then one thing led to another and the existing technology was insufficient to realize the designers' ambitions and San Andreas came out with a pretty-fucking-awesome replication of not only Los Angeles but all of California (well, Narnia California) and San Andreas was tits and then they were waiting for next-gen consoles to have hardware with enough swagger and then a few more years went by and all of a sudden “Holy fuck, L.A. Noire exists and is coming out!”

In honor of another long-awaited, just-released work, Terry Malick's Tree of Life (about which I may write more at some point if I'm feeling pretentious enough), let's flash way the fuck back for an origin story: back in the 80s when I was a much shorter Bowes, I played multiple NESs to death and even managed to be a fairly accomplished PC gamer even though I didn't own a computer (I'm still really fucking pissed that I can't play Bandit Kings of Ancient China, Police Quest, or Leisure Suit Larry on my so-called “modern” computer).

Around junior high school channel 9 started showing The Maltese Falcon nine zillion times a week, and I started watching it every single time it came on. That led to me reading the book, then seeing “oh shit another Humphrey Bogart movie, The Big Sleep, let's see how this one is,” then reading that book, and the next thing you know I was the only 13 year old in the known universe who was a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler fan, and I had progressed to James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, the heads of all the five families, and watched all the movies multiple times each. Then, a few years later, when I was in high school, came James Ellroy.

For those of you who don't know, an explanation, and for those of you who do, an exaltation: James Ellroy is fucking crazy. He's also unfathomably intelligent and possessed of what some might call focus and others, running the opposite direction, call obsession. After several years of writing relatively conventional above-average cop novels, Ellroy broke through to the level of Serious American Novelist with his so-called “L.A. Quartet”: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. These four novels amount to a metafictional secret history of post-war Los Angeles, containing many of the element of classic noir but with greater verisimilitude (many real people appear as characters, too) and—seemingly paradoxically—a breathtakingly epic grandeur. Ellroy's post-WWII Los Angeles is both painstakingly specific and universally American.

It's Ellroy more than classic noir cinema and fiction that influences L.A. Noire. The double entendre of the title makes its intent clear: it alludes to both Los Angeles and noir but literally just means “the black” in French. It's about darkness as specifically found in post-war Los Angeles and the crime fiction set there, but also universally, carrying the idea of moral ambiguity beyond the classically defined parameters of noir. Thus, the writing, plot, graphics, and gameplay attempt a greater naturalism than normally found in noir (a decidedly non-naturalistic form).

And here's where L.A. Noire's ambitions as a game come to the fore: it uses new technology to create human faces that transcend the stereotypically hollow-eyed emotionally blank ones that populate games. Specifically, this comes into play in the interrogation scenes, where as the cop, the player has to figure out whether the interviewee is telling the truth, holding back, or outright lying. Most of the time the difference between “holding back” and “lying” is hard to parse, but in those instances, the player has the advantage of all the collected evidence to date in the given case, so a quick perusal of same should yield the right answer. At worst, it yields some silent-movie-villain broad acting, but silent-movie-villain broad acting is fun. At best, it makes the interrogation scenes feel real.

The same ratio between ambition and realization is maintained throughout the game. L.A. Noire has its problems—the gameplay is a little repetitive, and I for one didn't even notice there was an overarching narrative until a little over halfway into the game—but overall its flaws are outweighed by its successes. For one, it looks fucking incredible. The people look like people, and really well-dressed people at that. The large-ish navigable chunk of Los Angeles at the player's disposal not only looks exactly like photographs of the period, it looks and feels like a living city. Sure, the traffic is laughably light for Los Angeles (which had its first massive traffic jam approximately five minutes after the invention of the automobile), and the people on the street one encounters outside of cutscenes seem to only know two sentences, one of which is “Hey, isn't that the cop from the papers?” But these are minor distractions. The awesome outweighs the problematic, throughout.

Once it becomes clear that there's one story unifying the whole thing, that story is a real grabber. I'm about to spoil the fuck out of it, so I'll put this here first:




You play for the vast majority of the game as policeman Cole Phelps, a decorated WWII veteran with a wife and kids. Cole's a Stanford grad prone to quoting Shakespeare; this erudition comes in handy later when a clue involving Percy Shelley leads to the discovery of a murderer. Starting as a patrolman (which basically serves as an introduction to the gameplay mechanics), Cole quickly rises up the ranks, first to plainclothes traffic duty, then quickly to homicide. Cole's cases in traffic serve to give him—and the player—experience with police work, and also to reveal his ambition as a character.

Upon being promoted to Homicide, Cole and his drunk I-don't-give-a-fuck fat guy partner (who, for obvious reasons, I loved) stumble upon what initially appear to be Black Dahlia copycat killings. The murdered women all kind of sort of resemble Elizabeth Short, and in each instance a very neat trail of evidence leads to a killer with a plausible motive. After about four of these, you start noticing a couple things: one, the evidence against the killers, no matter how solid, is circumstantial. Two, the narrative asides provided by newspapers one can find at various places throughout the game relate directly to Cole, his WWII tour, and the men he served with. Three, one dude is killing all the women and framing patsies each time.

Far-fetched? Sure. But that's noir for you. A little melodrama never hurt anyone except civilians. It turns out that all these Black Dahlia copycat killings are being done by the fucking Dahlia perp. This plot arc concludes with the Dahlia killer leading Cole and the fat man on a grand tour of Los Angeles landmarks, many of which are booby-trapped in some way—my personal favorites were when you lay waste to the chandelier in the Hall of Records, that apparently they repair in like five minutes and never bust your balls about it at all, and a straight-up no-bullshit labyrinth I totally had to cheat to get through because, well, put it this way, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when they talk about Marcus getting lost in his own museum, I was like, “finally, my people are represented in cinema”—and which ultimately lead you to a confrontation with the killer, who in classic movie psycho tradition is all on this “I'm smarter than the cops, so much so that I can give them clues that will lead them right to me because there's no way they're smart enough to figure this out.” And this is why bad guys are fucking stupid: if you're capable of committing a series of murders and successfully framing dudes for each one, why the hell would you lead a trail of breadcrumbs for the cops to nosh? Also, I mean, come on dude, if you really were an erudite urbane man of culture you could pick someone less banal than Shelley to use for your poetry clues. Fuck's wrong with Gerard Manley Hopkins, fancypants?

Anyway, once the killer—whom you've encountered a few murders ago as a bartender—announces his master plan, you chase him through the spooky catacombs of this abandoned church and you have to light his ass up before he blows you in half with his shotgun. Upon successfully sending the killer to the great freshman English class in the sky, Cole's Irish-accented superior officer (h/t Dudley Smith) shows up to tell the detectives, who are expecting commendations up the yin-yang and celebrity status and all that jazz, that the dead guy has massive political connections (just like the real Black Dahlia killer, who was never officially identified, and Jack the Ripper, among others; of course, non-civilians know that Jack the Ripper did the Black Dahlia, but that's a matter for after James Lock & Co. send me my new tinfoil hat). And because the dead guy was Earl Warren's nephew or whatever, the case is buried, all the framed perps are going to quietly get off on technicalities, and Cole is getting a lateral transfer to Administrative Vice.

Ellroy fans know what Ad Vice means: dope, hookers, and lots and lots of jazz. Cole and his sleazy, heavily-connected new partner investigate some OD deaths caused by too-pure morphine, being sold out of a popcorn stand called Black Caesar's (one of my favorite touches in the game is that the stand's sign totally fucking says SPQR, which is fucking awesome, and that's that). A bit of investigating, and proper adherence to the Law of Evil White Guys In Suits (“Behind every crime is a white man waiting for his cut.” —Chris Tucker) reveals the connection between the parallel narrative we've been piecing together through the newspapers and Cole's cases. It looks like the dudes in his old unit stole a fuckton of military-issue morphine and tried to sell it to Mickey Cohen, only Mickey's dipshit brother-in-law fucked everything up. Cole finds all this out as he succumbs to temptation and shtups the mysterious German jazz singer he's been crushing on since almost the beginning of the game. Of course, once Cole's investigation leads him too close to the actual evil white guys in suits, his extramarital cocksmanship is plastered all over the newspapers, and his ass is booted right the fuck out of Ad Vice.

In disgrace, Cole is shunted over to arson investigation, where he's partnered with the game's narrator (voiced by the one and only Keith Szarabajka, whom the anointed remember from being awesome as Mickey on The Equalizer, speaking of great TV shows from the 80s) and quickly stumbles onto a massive eminent domain scheme involving many of the richest and most powerful Evil White Guys In Suits Los Angeles has to offer, which is also tied into the drug business in which the guys in Cole's old unit are involved. It's a criminal conspiracy to make James Ellroy proud, dwarfing even the admittedly epic one concocted by Robert Towne in Chinatown. Shit, there are even shades of Judge Doom's “fuck the world and everyone in it” scheme in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The parallel narrative gets really interesting around this time, as we start seeing enough stuff from WWII to see that Cole didn't really do all that great a job and got his Silver Star under slightly false pretenses. And, on top of that, we see that supporting player Jack Kelso, who came up with Cole through OCS before flunking out, rises to sergeant via field commission and actually fucking totally owns and is awesome and a paragon of stubborn rectitude and all kinds of interesting shit.

Right when you realize Kelso is actually a good guy and Cole is kind of a dick, the game shifts and you start playing as Kelso. Cole sends his German jazz singer girlfriend—with whom he's now living since his wife 86'd him post-scandal—to go be Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and convince Kelso to be Fred MacMurray, only without the whole getting him to kill people thing. Kelso does a little digging into the case and soon realizes “Holy fucking shit, evil white guys in suits are having people killed so they can make millions of dollars building a freeway!” and throws in with the good Fräulein, and Cole, though he's fucking pissed at Cole for not having the stones to just be like “Hey, Jack, help me take on the evil white guys.”

Kelso and Cole team up to take on the evil white guys, and there's a massive action climax where the evil white guys kidnap the German girlfriend (and oh hell yes a love triangle has formed; this story puts both m's in melodrama) and, because it's really dramatic and Rockstar Games has developed a massive boner for downer endings over the last few years (cases in point: Grand Theft Auto IV where you either have your cousin or your girlfriend die, and Red Dead Redemption where the protagonist lets the evil white guys in suits kill him so his family can escape), Cole sacrifices himself to save Kelso and the German girlfriend. The whole last mission, it's been raining like hell (because it's noir and subtlety is for limpdicks) and Cole drowns in a flooded tunnel after lifting Kelso to safety. He's given a modest funeral, but when the sleazy Ad Vice partner (who's up to his neck in the conspiracy) starts eulogizing smarmily, the German girlfriend calls him out and dramatically stomps out, leaving Kelso to muse on the inscrutability of man. Then, post-credits, there's a cinematic cutscene that clarifies the WWII morphine conspiracy and Kelso's non-role in the whole affair, tying the whole plot up neatly.

Once the totality of it becomes apparent, the story's a knockout. It invites replays, during which a lot more things will make sense. The first time through, things only really start to cohere in retrospect, which is a function of the narrative being a little clunky and opaque at first. Like I said earlier, I didn't even realize the game had a story beyond the individual cases until way late; I don't think it even fully dawned on me until Cole was in Ad Vice, and that was way over halfway through. Needless to say, that's a problem. If the game's going to have a story, it'd be nice to let the player in on it, especially when it's as interesting as this one. The cutscenes are all gorgeously composed and edited, and well-acted; those new-school facial expressions add a lot.

The gameplay is of lesser concern to me that the visuals and sound (which is stunning; the music score is great, but the effects, editing and mixing are just terrific), and just as well, because it's a little awkward in places. In any given crime scene, there are a number of clues to be found, and these can be investigated by pressing a button on the controller, which doesn't always respond unless Cole or Kelso is standing in just the right spot. And the interrogations, with their “truth/doubt/lie” trichotomy, don't always lend themselves to the nuance one might like as the player; not to mention anyone who's read L.A. Confidential and remembers the way Ed Exley went to town on motherfuckers can't help but be like, “this is all I get to do?” in places. It must be said, though, that in each of these cases, for every moment where the game reminds you of its limitations, there are several others where you're like, “Yeah, fuck you man, YOU'RE LYING! I CAN PUT YOU AT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, SUNSHINE, NOW UNLESS YOU WANT TO HUFF GAS AT QUENTIN I SUGGEST YOU GIVE ME SOME FUCKING ANSWERS!” Cuz, ya know, it's damn easy to get caught up in this world.

And that's what L.A. Noire succeeds, in solid A minus fashion, in doing: creating a world. It's PG-13 James Ellroy (well, with the violence, bad language, and nudity, it's objectively a fairly hard R, but Ellroy sexually violates his murder victims with wolverine teeth, okay? A couple “motherfuckers” is The Muppet Show compared to Ellroy), which is to say it's a great big epic that casts a powerful spell. Considering that I waited seven years for this game, the fact that it exceeded my expectations was a truly pleasant surprise. I'll certainly be replaying this one a lot, even if to just throw it on to hang out in the 40s for a bit. A time when men were men, cars were awesome, and thirty pedestrians in a row say “Hey, isn't that the cop from the papers?”

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE CIVILIANS

One of the most painful reminders of my own nerd-dom came this August, with the release of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It seemed like everyone I knew was geekfapping in anticipation for a good month beforehand, to the point where even I (or, um, especially I) addressed the issue. It was a new Edgar Wright picture, and everybody saw Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, right? Michael Cera was the lead, and everybody saw Arrested Development, right? (Ed. Note: bear with me here, I know you're getting suspicious). It's based on a comic . . . and everyone likes comics . . . right? It's in the style of a video game . . . and people . . . like video games . . . right . . .?

As it turned out, of course, Scott Pilgrim tanked at the box office, making back only about half its production budget. And yet . . . everyone I fucking know went to see it and loved it. HOW COULD THIS BE? Obviously, with magazine articles every fucking week about how this is the Age of the Nerd and so forth, Scott Pilgrim should have been a massive coming-out party, a victory lap. Well, obviously, it wasn't. So what gives?

I missed Scott Pilgrim in theaters, as its release pre-dated my lovely arrangement with Tor.com (aside from having the good taste to employ me, they have a lot of better and occasionally famous writers nerding out, so bookmark them if you're into SF and or fantasy). Thanks to Universal's evil white guys making the excellent business decision to release the DVD in time for Christpicuousconsumptionmas season, I finally got to see it. And yes, it is everything I could ever have expected. This is a picture by nerds, of nerds, and for nerds. I absolutely fucking loved it. I mean, wow. That is to say, holy shit. In other words, god DAMN.

On the other hand, I understand exactly why it flopped. First of all, although everyone naturally thinks of their people as being the whole world, I am objectively aware that nerds are a minority. One need look no further than high school: there are more dudes on a football team than a chess team, to be glib and reductive and right. Also, Scott Pilgrim is very specifically about nerds under the age of 30, with cultural references and assumptions it would be very hard to expect someone over 35 to get, leaving our older and grayer comrades potentially feeling left out in the cold (even though A.O. Scott, in one of his finest hours in recent memory, declared, “There are some movies about youth that just make you feel old, even if you aren't . . . Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has the opposite effect. Its speedy, funny, happy-sad spirit is so infectious that the movie makes you feel at home in its world even if the landscape is, at first glance, unfamiliar.” Sláinte, Tony). Then there's the matter of all but those nerds specifically of the cineaste variety preferring not to rub shoulders with the great, loud, candy-unwrapping, cell-phone using unwashed in movie theaters (minor aside: when I saw The Warrior's Way recently, there was a group of mentally challenged people on an outing, and they literally mooed throughout the whole movie. I'm not kidding, exaggerating, or distorting in the slightest. That's the 21st century movie theater experience in a nutshell, folks), instead waiting for the DVD. And hey, I'm totally guilty of that, so I guess I'm part of the problem.

Word of mouth was another problem, as the non-nerds in the critical community and the handful of civilians who went to see Scott Pilgrim for whatever fucking reason (Ed. Note: Movies By Bowes ™ personally apologizes to alla y'all; this movie is just how our people roll) came away crinkling their noses and going “What in the sweet living fuck was that?” The best explanation I can give won't do any good: “It's a video game trapped in a movie's body.” Media eugenics is a difficult thing to pull off (literary tricks, for example, work in literature because they're literary tricks; they don't always read in movies) especially in the—in some ways—very similar media of cinema and video games. Both are audiovisual media, but there's an obvious, fundamental difference: the player controls the video game, where the audience for a movie is, a priori, passive. This is why the video game Heavy Rain, though it aroused the ire of hardcore gamers who didn't give a fuck about other media, worked as a movie trapped in a video game's body; the player could control the “movie.” A video game trapped in a movie's body has the problem of there being fewer movie people who are also gamers than there are gamers who also like movies. I mean, look, I thoroughly enjoyed taking bong hits on the couch and watching my friend Greg beat The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64, but I'm fundamentally predisposed to find video games interesting, Ocarina of Time might be the best video game ever made, and I get caught up in the narrative created by the player, even if I'm only watching. I was also high. But that's just me. As you may have gathered, I'm a little weird.

It isn't entirely clear at first that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is actually a video game masquerading as a movie. Set in a vividly, heroically portrayed Toronto, it starts out in High Indie Twee mode, with protagonist Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) faced with the mildly embarassing task of introducing his new girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) to his gay roommate/best friend Kieran Culkin and his bandmates in the gloriously titled garage band Sex Bob-Omb. She is, it transpires, 17 and still in high school. “Yeah, Catholic school, with the uniform and everything,” a facepalming Michael Cera tells disapproving, gossipy sister Anna Kendrick. Knives thinks Scott's the coolest, and she loves Sex Bob-Omb, but Michael Cera is awkward about the whole thing. What? Michael Cera, awkward? The deuce you say! Yes, it's true.
The whole thing feels like the ur-Michael Cera movie, the one where the audience is finally going to rise as one, kidnap the fucker and inject him with megadoses of testosterone, steroids, and PCP (the last because, hey, why the fuck not) and enforce manhood. Look, I like the guy, but seriously. Anyway, some stylish Edgar Wright direction aside, it totally feels like the proverbial Movie Michael Cera Has Made Nine Gajillion Times (even though it's really only like four) . . . UNTIL we have dream sequence. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) rollerblades through Michael Cera's dream, and then into his life. This is the most non-naturalistic thing yet to happen, even though we've gotten pretty broad hints that this isn't a non-naturalistic picture.

So Michael Cera, a ball-less whiny douche at the picture's outset, does the very ball-less and douche-y thing and fails to actually break up with Knives before wooing the initially reluctant Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a glamorous, mysterious (American!) woman, everything the sincere, guilelessly candid girl Knives isn't. Before Michael Cera is even officially dating MEW (too bad she's not Mary Elizabeth Ophelia Winstead, amirite?) he gets an e-mail from some guy claiming to be a member of a group called the Seven Evil Exes (of Ramona), who intends to fight Michael Cera to death, but Michael Cera is so distracted by thoughts of his new not-yet-even-really girlfriend and the Battle of the Bands that Sex Bob-Omb is entering that he pays it no mind.

Turns out, you should always read your fucking e-mail. A spooky Indian dude in some seriously gay clothes (my friend Steve's pal Satya Bhabha) shows up in the middle of the concert, interrupting the awkward first meeting of Knives and Ramona, and repeats his challenge to Michael Cera (part of which includes a faux-Bollywood number that flunked lovely and talented authority Filmigirl's sniff test so hard it bounced). Michael Cera immediately throws down and—shockingly—kicks ass in the finest video-game fashion. End of Act One, beginning of awesome. Michael Cera beats the shit out of the guy, who turns into a pile of coins as a score appears.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead explains at this point that Michael Cera might have to defeat seven of her Evil Exes. Not only is this a great metaphor for dealing with a new girlfriend's past (which, hey, I know it's ridiculous, but it's not something we're just magically okay with without a little effort) it provides Michael Cera with something to do for the rest of the movie, and it's a wonderfully video-game-y conceit.

In a nice bit of numerological significance, it's in the midst of Michael Cera's awkward second date (he's so nervous anticipating it his gay roommate calls him gay) that he encounters Evil Ex #2: American movie star Lucas Lee (Chris Evans), to whose crappy movies on the Spike Channel the gay roommate has been fapping (hey, the latter half of the phrase “gay guy” is “guy”) in anticipation of his coming to Toronto to shoot a movie. Turns out Mary Elizabeth Winstead dated him in middle school and he never quite got over it. So Michael Cera figures, I outfought the first Evil Ex, piece of cake. Except Chris Evans is an action movie star, which means he has lots of stunt men, all of whom gang up on Michael Cera and stomp the crap out of him (God I love this movie . . .) but Michael Cera prevails. Chris Evans, however, fights him to a standstill, until Michael Cera tricks him into doing a skateboard trick so fuckin dangerous Johnny Knoxville probably wouldn't do it, which leads to Chris Evans' explosive, coin-producing downfall.

Evil Ex #3 is my favorite of the bunch: a bleached-blonde Brandon Routh, who is not only Mary Elizabeth Winstead's ex, he's fucking Michael Cera's ex-who-he's-not-really-100%-over, big indie rock star Envy Adams (Brie Larson), for whom he plays bass. Just like Michael Cera. And, because Brandon Routh is a vegan, he's both telepathic and telekinetic (Ed. Note: FUCK YES) and so, when the two have their “bass battle”, Brandon Routh is able to predict his every move. The deus ex machina that saves Michael Cera's ass made me need to pause the movie for five minutes so I could laugh to the point of tears: the “vegan police” (Thomas Jane and Clifton Collins, Jr., aka the guy Catherine Zeta-Jones tells to “get out of the car and shoot him in the head” in Traffic) bust Brandon Routh for accidentally drinking half and half in a coffee Michael Cera sneakily hands him (“I put the half and half in that cup but I thought really really hard about putting it in this one”), as well as mistakenly eating gelato . . . and chicken parmesan. This last thoroughly disgusts Brie Larson, and is cause for the vegan police to strip him of his superpowers. Wait, hold on, sorry, give me a minute . . . HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA . . . HAHAHAHA . . . oh man, heh heh heh . . . hahaha . . . mmm mmm.

All this getting his ass handed to him left and right is starting to weigh on Michael Cera, who starts getting a bit snippy with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who following a battle with Evil Ex #4 (Mae Whitman, a product of MEW's “bi-curious” phase) that Michael Cera hilariously wins by exploiting an erogenous zone behind Mae Whitman's knee, takes some time apart. Michael Cera's determined to win her back though, and it turns out that evil exes #5 and 6 (“Did she date them at the same time?”) are a malevolent J-pop duo (Keita and Shota Saito) who Sex Bob-Omb have to defeat with RAWK, and do, winning Michael Cera a 1-up (also known as an extra life).

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is in the audience with her most recent ex, who turns out to be the record company douchebag (Jason Schwartzman, having more fun than is usually allowed within the law) who's sponsored the battle of the bands. He offers to sign Sex Bob-Omb, over Michael Cera's protests, which lead to him being replaced by #1 fan and bass understudy Young Neil. Not only that, but a confused and sad Mary Elizabeth Winstead has helplessly succumbed to Jason Schwartzman's charms (later revealed to be a microchip he's attached to her brainstem, a wonderful metaphor for the hold douchebag exes have over one) once more. He is thus revealed as the last Evil Ex (even if he's no longer an Ex, if she's with him, he's still Evil) . . . THE FINAL BOSS.

Like any boss fight worth half a fuck, Michael Cera dies the first time, after getting Knives and Ramona thoroughly pissed at him for cheating each with the other, and getting his ass banjaxed by the thoroughly evil Jason Schwartzman. However, he still has that extra life, which he uses, and like any good gamer, he learns from the mistakes he made in the first boss fight (fighting for his own self-respect rather than his love for Ramona, which he never even properly expressed, instead using the L-word he thought his gay roommate was hinting at: “lesbians.” ie “I'm in lesbians with you.” Yep, go ahead and facepalm; also manning up and apologizing to Knives and Ramona before they can get pissed and turn on him, thus turning Knives into an ally, and holy fuck has she got martial arts moves) and this time wins.

Seeing the teamwork exhibited by Knives and Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes the “noble sacrifice” of letting the two of them be “happy” together and walks off. But, as Knives reminds Michael Cera, he's been fighting for Mary Elizabeth Winstead for the whole movie. She also completely casts aside the doormat role she's been consigned to for so much of the movie by affirming “I'm also way too cool for you,” which is true, and good on her for realizing that. Michael Cera, who has realized how fucked up he is in a lot of ways, deserves the also-fucked-up-in-a-lot-of-ways Mary Elizabeth Winstead. And so they set off to give their relationship another try. Game Over.

The basic plot, by its nature, is a bit repetitive, since it is, after all, a video game trapped in a movie's body. The only place it really starts to sag is after the staggering brilliance of the Brandon Routh battle. No movie, no matter how great, can help but dip a bit after the whole thing about veganism conferring superpowers, which I'm sorry, that's the funniest fucking thing like ever. Even that dip wasn't much of one. The sheer amount of energy this movie has overcomes all, including the imperfect scripting, the occasional partially- or not-fleshed out character, and the fact that it's tilting against the gigantic fucking windmill of being, at its core, an example of a different medium than the one it's presented as. As a member of the choir to whom Edgar Wright is preaching with Scott Pilgrim, I thoroughly enjoyed all the video game stuff, all the keenly observed details of nerd and hipster culture (the passwords to the club in the climactic sequence are “whatever” and a bored shrug), and goddammit, the journey Michael Cera has, gradually growing a legit pair of testicles by the third act, was satisfying. The way he confronts his mirror-image self, “Nega-Scott,” as the final “solo round” challenge in the “game” is particularly great: he sends Knives and Ramona away to confront his apparently evil doppelganger. So we cut to the girls waiting outside, and the doors open, and there's Michael Cera chatting away and making brunch plans with his dark side (“He's a pretty cool guy.”) Congratulations, son, you just became a real man. Well, kind of. In a very Michael Cera kind of way.

The music is goddamn fabulous. When fuzzy indie rock makes you want to get up and dance, you're dealing with some good fuzzy indie rock. The Sex Bob-Omb songs were all written by Beck and played by the actors, all of whom can kind of sort of play, just like their characters, giving them just the right blend of professional songcraft and scruffball enthusiasm that they need. It's the first soundtrack in at least a couple years that I said “I gotta own this,” and I said that about four bars into the first fucking song they play, during the opening credits.

Edgar Wright, in terms of raw filmmaking talent, has few peers. He's got great visual imagination, and increasingly, the control over his talent to realize that imagination. He also, whether from hanging out with Simon Pegg for all those years or on his own merits (almost certainly the latter), has a terrific sense of humor. And he has a nearly-perfect bead on the pop-cultural obsessions of nerds of his generation (which, being that he's only a couple years older than me, is basically mine). In Scott Pilgrim he's made a movie that will surely thrill nerds of almost my exact age for the rest of their lives. His one misstep, which isn't much of one, with this movie is that he is way too specific in who he's aiming to reach. It's certainly a noble gesture to say “I want to make a movie that will give nerds boners.” I certainly appreciate that. But Scott Pilgrim, a few outliers notwithstanding, is pretty much targeted directly at nerds 28-35. What, 27 and 36 year old nerds can't come to the party? It's not an artistic failing—I applaud anyone with the balls to make a $90 million movie this idiosyncratic—but it is the reason the picture flopped.

And, for that reason, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is one of those movies I'd be very cautious about recommending. As much as I, falling squarely within the picture's narrow target demographic, loved it, it appeals to a very specific part of me and it's always hard to tell who else has that shared very specific part. What I do know is that if I'm talking to someone and they mention this movie, and say “God, I loved it,” I know I'm talking to one of my people. And we will be very happy talking about how awesome this movie is, for far longer than is reasonable or tasteful. Because fuck you. We're nerds.

CECI N'EST PAS UN FILM

Some months ago, there was a bit of a to-do in the video gaming world, with the release of Heavy Rain. It was hailed as a heretofore unseen level of artistry in video games, a brave and radical experiment in interactive narrative, the second coming of sliced bread, et cetera. Even I, a dilettante gamer at best, heard about all this and thought, hey, cool, next time I have sixty bucks I'll pick it up.

Video game critics got a bit hot under the collar in re: Heavy Rain, but I noticed one common theme in a lot of the reviews—the thing they were all praising it for was, essentially, not being a video game. This is puzzling, to say the least; when was the last time you read a movie review sucking some movie's dick for not seeming like a movie? If a thing bears scant resemblance to the thing it is, is it that thing? Or, in less opaque/stoned terms, doesn't a video game that's not really a video game, ipso facto, suck?

I decided to take time out of my busy schedule of stalking Gina Gershon and quixotically attempting to impute philosophical depth to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to investigate this thorny question. Not having the money to shell out to buy the game—and not necessarily wanting to piss away sixty bucks on something that one of my critic icons said this about—I borrowed the game from my good friend and frequent collaborator Gyda Arber and got to work.

Now, the reason I'm writing about this game on a movie blog is because, as every critic in the fucking universe pointed out at the time, Heavy Rain really is more like a movie than a video game. Its plot—a serial killer is terrorizing an unnamed city (“shot” in Philadelphia), leaving behind origami animals, and ONLY ONE MAN (actually four: a really unlucky father, a grizzled private eye, a cracked-out FBI agent with some cool gadgets, and a sexy girl reporter) CAN STOP THE MADNESS—is just a smidge too hackneyed for any movie made after about 1995, but it has echoes of a lot of those movies (Se7en, for one, but I have to admit the one it really reminded me of was the one where Keanu plays a serial killer and James Spader has to catch him; an ex-girlfriend made me watch it and got pissed that I spent the whole picture giggling at how bad it was).

Where Heavy Rain rises above the tawdry retardation of its source material is in its execution. The visuals are stunning: the motion-capture acting is genuinely expressive and affecting, the environments are rendered meticulously, with exquisite attention to detail, and the “framing” of the “shots” is such that Robert Richardson, Chris Doyle, Emmanuel Lubezki, et al would nod approvingly. The way the expository cut scenes are “shot” and edited make you feel like you're watching a good movie, and the action scenes (where you, as the player, press buttons when prompted to get your character to do things like dodge bullets, smash lamps over bad guys' heads, kick dudes in the balls, etc) are edited like it's a movie. A really good movie.

But technique is only half the battle. It helps to be crazy, to have balls, to be a little pretentious . . . yes, my dear friends and loyal readers, it helps to be French. You might not guess from his name, but the game's writer/director David Cage is French. And oh my does it show. After the opening scene, it's literally raining for the entire rest of the game (“Puisque la pluie symbolise l'humeur des caractères, et est une métaphore pour les horreurs ils confrontent”), there's a whole bunch of gratuitous nudity (“Puisque seulement un Américain voudrait porter des vêtements toute l'heure”), and there's a particular way the French worship fucktarded American movies (“Puisque ce qui est assez bon pour Godard et Truffaut devrait être assez bon pour n'importe quel Français raisonnable”) that no one else could ever—or would ever want to—pull off. This is why France rules. They're not that great at soccer (this year) or war, but boy is their idea of a good American movie gloriously weird.

That's how the single stupidest cliché in cinema, the serial killer, is elevated from crippling handicap (seriously, there are a total of two good movies ever made about serial killers: Silence of the Lambs, and Se7en. That's it, end of debate. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was a good movie but it's in a different category, title notwithstanding) to, amazingly, an asset. Because David Cage is French. The spin on stuff—the forensic procedural part of the plot with the FBI agent has him collecting fingerprints and DNA and shit, but doing so with a futuristic pair of sunglasses that gives him a Terminator-style computer readout of the info, for example—makes otherwise stale material fresh.

Another (not exclusively, although they do this quite well) French asset in Heavy Rain is that a lot of the dramatic elements are carried to extremes only a nation of largely atheist Catholic intellectuals could imagine. The main character, Ethan Mars (note also, weird nomenclature with an utterly non sequitur reference to a Howard Hawks movie) is, at the beginning of the game, a happily married architect with two cheerful, rambunctious sons. Before you even figure out how the controls work, however, Ethan loses one of his sons in a crowded mall and then watches as he's hit by a car and killed. Cut to montage of rainfall, urban squalor, grim-faced people with rain on their faces, over the credits. Two years later, Ethan is divorced, unshaven, depressed, late picking his surviving son up from school. Ethan's also going to a shrink and experiencing weird blackouts, during which he has no idea what he's doing. During one of these blackouts, his surviving son disappears. Could it be the “Origami Killer”?

We're then introduced to asthmatic, low-rent private investigator Scott Shelby (modeled after and voiced by the guy who played the cop in the Clive Owen/Vincent Cassel disappointment Derailed) and FBI profiler/possessor of awesome gadgets Norman Jayden, who is (barely) hiding an addiction to fictional drug Triptocane, aptly named in that its effects seem to split the difference between LSD and cocaine. Here be more Frenchness: layered characters, even if those layers are fucking stupid.

As Scott, you go around collecting evidence on behalf (you claim) of the victims' families. As Norman, you collect evidence, butt heads with the local PD (whose lone avatars are a violent, rule-averse sociopathic prick and a preening political lizard captain) and every five minutes or so have to wade through withdrawal-induced hallucinations where you have to decide whether or not to get high.

A ways into the narrative, for no apparent reason, Madison Paige, an extremely attractive female character, is introduced (more Frenchness: they do love ze byootifal wooman) who, two seconds after you gain control of her, you can actually have her go take a shower, where you can actually get her naked, and where she stays and luxuriates for quite some time.

Her purpose in the grand scheme of things remains mysterious almost until the end, where she's revealed to be an investigative journalist. This does nothing to make her seem less redundant or dispel any of those “Is she only in this game to show tit . . .?” questions you inevitably ask yourself, but she is extremely attractive. She's curvy in a way that's kind of a naturalistic version of an anime fetish object (this is, after all a video game, and a video game designed by French people), is very pretty, and in the lowest blow of all, she has short hair and rides a motorcycle, leaving me in the awkward position of being like, “No, she absolutely belongs in this game! She's not superfluous at all! In fact, Madison's boards are my favorite boards in the game, and it's not even because of the gratuitous nudity!” and leaving myself open to the customary facepalms and accusations of pubic cognition that trail me everywhere I go.

Ethan is given a series of increasingly brutal tasks by the Origami Killer to demonstrate how far he'll go to save his son (who is being held in a storm drain; with all the rain, he'll drown in a couple days if Ethan fucks up), and each time he passes the test, he gets more of the address where his son is being held, so if you pass with full marks you get the complete address. Since these tasks are so brutal (in one, Ethan has to crawl on his hands and knees through broken glass and then navigate a labyrinth of live high voltage electrical wires; in another he has to chop off one of his own fingers, Yakuza-style) Ethan is pretty fucked up afterward, leaving Madison, who just happens to have checked into the same motel as Ethan because she has some kind of insomnia that only lets her sleep in motels (which is so fucking stupid I'm almost impressed), to nurse him to health, bandage his wounds, develop a crush on him, and eventually, as Ice-T so poignantly phrased it, get butt naked and fuck. If you choose to.

That's another much-hyped aspect to Heavy Rain, the ability to affect the narrative by making choices. Like, you can decide as Scott to intervene when the convenience store where you're buying your asthma inhaler gets robbed. You can decide, as Norman, to get high or not (though if you get high every time you have a chance, as I of course did the first time through, you OD before solving the case), you can decide to keep your clothes on or not as Madison, and you can decide whether or not to chop your finger off as Ethan. Among many many other choices. Generally, though, the choices are between “Are you an unobservant, lazy, unscrupulous shithead?” and “Are you aware, alert, and a non-shithead?” except in the case of Madison and her tits, where your choices are “Do you like tits?” and “Wait, what the fuck is wrong with you, everybody likes tits.”

You can fuck up and get killed as any of the four playable characters. One of them is the Origami Killer. There are all kinds of stupid heavy-handed hints early on that it's Ethan, but since the first rule of whodunits is, it's never the obvious culprit, we know it's not Ethan. Even though Norman is otherworldly and a drug addict, he fights with the killer at one point, so it's not him. And since during that fight, Norman didn't get smacked in the face with a bare tit, the killer isn't Madison. And since Scott is in the other room when the nice old pawnshop geezer gets killed by the Origami Killer, and since a whole bunch of Scott's inner monologues, his own thoughts, with no one else listening in or anything, express surprise at turns the case is taking, it can't be Scott.

Except . . . it is Scott. This is the one narrative flaw that I can't write off to French people being aliens. Playing through the game subsequent to having Scott be unmasked as the killer, you can see how his actions can be interpreted as him gathering up all the evidence that he's the Origami Killer to have it be destroyed. His wild goose chase subplot where he's “convinced” that some zonked rich kid is the Origami Killer comes out of nowhere. Falling for the hooker (whose son he fucking killed) is weird. The montage where you're shown how it is that, in spite of saving babies and showing genuine kindness and stuff, he's the killer kind of reminds me of the episode where Nikki and Paulo were killed on Lost, where there are all these scenes from things that happened seasons 1 and 2 where they were retrofitted into the scenes as if they'd actually been there the first time around. No. They weren't there. It didn't happen like that, just because the writer(s) decided it did.

Oddly enough, I would have been fine with Scott's backstory—having to watch his twin brother die because his father was a putz—if it was what had motivated him to be a PI. Except he isn't really a PI, he's an ex-cop who's a fucking serial killer. Goddammit man.

Still, even the sub-Shyalamanic twist of having Scott be the killer doesn't negate the genuine entertainment to be found in Heavy Rain. And, in spite of what all the critics (and its creator) said, it doesn't fuck up the experience going through a second time. Even though David Cage said, in an interview:

“I would like people to play it once…because that’s life. Life you can only play once...I would like people to have this experience that way. . . I'm fine with [reloading to avoid a bad result], but the right way to enjoy Heavy Rain is really to make one thing because it's going to be your story. It's going to be unique to you. It's really the story you decided to write . . . I think playing it several times is also a way to kill the magic of it.”

he nonetheless made a game that withstands multiple replays. Maybe this is just where he and I differ. I like exploring all the different possibilities arising from one moral (or otherwise) choice. I tried once through where all the good guys were either dead or in jail and the kid died; that one had an interesting denouement, because I'd forgotten to let the hooker die and she ended up blowing Scott's brains out right before the closing credits.

The disappointment of the killer's identity notwithstanding, Heavy Rain is a massive achievement. Not because it's some kind of revolutionary video game (which it's not), but because it is the single most French thing ever created. It sounds better in theory than it is in reality. It's kind of pretentious. There are tits. It's basically a ten-hour serial killer movie where the audience is, to varying degrees, both star and director, and that's the beret on top of this particular croissant. There is nothing more French than imputing aesthetic and cultural value to the most unaesthetic and culturally devoid movies in America. Not to give CPR to a dead cliché, but Jerry Lewis is a case in point.

It'll be interesting to see if video game developers follow on the path of Heavy Rain, and how much narrative becomes a part of video games, and whether the increasing sophistication of hardware leads to increased sophistication of content. One thing we don't have to speculate about, though: there is a movie adaptation of Heavy Rain in the works, due for release in 2012. It remains to be seen whether something whose cinematic value is largely that it isn't cinema will work as cinema. I'm thinking . . . nuh uh. Or, no, now that I think of it . . . something that post-modern could totally work. In French.

You're welcome.