The Bleeding Effect

In the popular press, it is all the rage right now to try to claim that violent games create violent people.  Sweet, innocent adolescents, they will claim, are suddenly, overnight and without warning, transformed into gun-toting, brass-knuckle-using thugs after five minutes of Halo: Reach.  An hour of WWE Smackdown will send little Johnny scampering to the store, where he will load up on weight gain products and subsequently beat the hell out of his classmates for no reason other than that he played that game.  And all of those trenchcoat-wearing social outcasts who brought Uzies to their schools and used them with extreme prejudice surely had Xboxes hidden away with the latest Grand Theft Auto in the disk drive, still warm from its latest use.  Every single teen in juvenile prison must have played State of Emergency since they could fart.

 

There are so many things wrong with these claims as to make them almost comical.  Why the media or the politicians or whomever are so obsessed with pinning teen violence on videogames is beyond me.  After all, who buys those games for their kids?  Did violent children not exist before the advent of the Nintendo?  And who lets a violent child grow up without ever teaching him more peaceful ways of resolving conflicts?  Playing Dynasty Warriors 6 no more makes me a violent person than it does make me a Three Kingdoms general.  I play violent games all the time, but I was taught the difference between fantasy and reality by my responsible parents, and I have an easy-going attitude to begin with.

 

That being said, I have encountered two unusual and rather specific instances in which playing a game really has impacted my poor little psyche.

 

The first comes from Stuntman: Ignition, a patently un-violent game (at least in the "stabby-stabby blow your brains out" way) in which you drive stunt vehicles around movie sets for faux action films.  Brilliant game, but it has one design flaw.  I hesitate to call it a flaw because it does make it a more challenging game, but I will call it a flaw nonetheless.  You score points by succeeding with stunts, like driving close to an explosion, pulling a 180 turn, driving between two trucks without touching either, etc.  Every stunt you do adds 1 to your score multiplier, and there is a way to string together the entire level so that you have an ungodly multiplier by the end and get a five-star rating: you do "little" stunts between the big ones, like popping wheelies on motorcycles or driving really closely by parked cars, so that your multiplier stays alive (it goes away after just a few seconds) and increases.  This means that you will actually drive out of your way in order to steer close to oncoming traffic, pedestrians, park tables, trees, whatever will count as a "close call" and increase your score.  I got pretty good at this, but unfortunately, it began to transfer into real life.  I remember driving into my apartment parking lot and actually steering to the side just so that I would be driving closer to the parked cars.  I realized what was going on immediately and had to stop playing for a few days.  I call this the Bleeding Effect.

Christmas sale at Wal-Mart!  Outta my way!

I've dubbed it such because of the second instance, which took place just last night.  Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was just released, and as I am a big fan of the series, it naturally sits in my gaming library.  In the Assassin's Creed series, a man named Desmond is hooked into a Matrix-like dentist's chair and relives memories stored in his DNA of his ancestors, like those of a man named Altair from the crusades in 1191.  As he experiences those memories, Desmond slowly acquires his ancestors' assassin talents, something which Desmond's colleagues call The Bleeding Effect. 

 

This latest entry, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, is special because it has a multiplayer component, which I tried for the first time last night.  You and seven other humans are thrown into Renaissance Italy as various characters who look exactly like the rest of the people in the crowd - guard captains, smugglers, doctors, executioners, etc.  Each player is given another player to assassinate, meaning that while you are hunting down one player, someone else is hunting you.  This means that you have to find your target and watch your back at the same time, because at any moment, some random barber may come up behind you and suddenly fancy himself Sweeny Todd.  In my second match, I stalked my target into a square where we both saw one player kill another.  Then my target went up and killed the killer.  I took the opportunity to kill my target while he wiped the blood off his blade, and right after I stabbed him, some jerk came up and killed me!  We all had a good laugh about this (at least, I did), but after I turned off the game, I realized something slightly alarming.  I still felt the anxiety of knowing that a fellow assassin was trailing me and may strike at any moment.  I felt paranoia, even though the only two things behind me were my Christmas tree and a sleeping cat (who, to be fair, could very well attack me at any moment).

I'll show YOU Protestant Reformation!

If psychologists really want to study gamers, then they should look into this.  A violent kid is going to play violent games, but then, so will mild-mannered cornballs like me.  Rage issues are certainly nothing new, but for some reason the media keeps trying to pin the blame on the gaming industry without taking a second glance at the child's home life, whether he's being bullied at school, if he's insecure, whatever.  The media craves the easy explanation.  "If you do x, then y will happen."  But if you've ever been around a human before, you know that we are never so simple.  Why Stuntman: Ignition and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood have impacted my sensitive little brain while the hundreds of other games that I have played haven't made the slightest dent I have absolutely no idea, but at least these two haven't instilled in me a strange desire to kill people while driving away from a raging volcano.

Pigsy's Drunken Demand (Five Element Ninjas Review)

I went back to Dallas recently to see my in-laws because, you know, it's the holiday season, and while I was in town I decided to try and hang out with my three best friends from my junior high and high school days.  It's rare that we all end up in town at once, as one of us lives out of town, one of us lives out of state, one of us seems to have an inordinate fear of leaving home, and the other has no money to travel, so it's usually only the holidays and occasionally the odd summer weekend that finds us all in town at once.  Alas, Rockman works in retail, and we tried to meet up on Black Friday, so Pilgrim, Pigsy and I had to make do without him while he found himself buried under an avalanche of receipts, discarded shopping bags, and crushed dreams.


The problem with this is that Rockman is our group's moral compass.  With him there, we can at least maintain some sense of respectability.  Pigsy and Pilgrim may still tell dirty jokes, but at least Rockman keeps anything more than that from happening.  Without him, though, there is little hope.  As I called Pigsy to tell him that I was on my way with a brand spankin' new Xbox Kinect with which to mess around, he said, a touch too excitedly for comfort, that we should go out and get some liquor, since a boozed-up round of Dance Central naturally sounded like a good idea.  I had my camera with me (for blackmail purposes) and prefer soda to beer anyway, so I said alright.  Unfortunately, I didn't have the right cables to hook up my Xbox 360 to Pigsy's ancient TV, so, after acquiring a twelve-pack of Coca-Cola, a bottle of rum, some kind of beer that Pigsy insisted I try, and an assurance that Rockman would not be joining us for the evening, we returned to Pigsy's humble sty and decided instead to watch an old favorite, Five Element Ninjas, known in America as Chinese Super Ninjas.  I had a beer, Pigsy and Pilgrim loaded up with rum-and-Coke, and away we went.

As Pigsy would later tell me, the problem here is that he loves rum a bit too much.  It is so sweet and tasty, particularly in something like Coke, that before we knew what had happened two-thirds of the bottle was gone, most of it consumed by Pigsy.  After several hours of pausing the movie for a bathroom break or to watch a Youtube video or listen to Pigsy spout philosophical about his personal trainer, we finally finished the movie, but I couldn't have told you a thing about it other than there was a lot of fighting and some dudes wearing copper hats that shot blades out the ends.  The night ended up a wash, and I suspect that Pigsy may have done some serious psychological damage to Pilgrim when, utterly intoxicated, he snapped his fingers in perfect rhythm for at least fifteen straight minutes and repeatedly asked Pilgrim what it meant about God.

While Pilgrim made sure that Pigsy didn't slide headfirst down the stairs to let us out, I snagged the movie and decided to watch it back home, since Pigsy had earlier demanded that I review it as my latest installment of "Pigsy's Gilded Trough Presents" or whatever I feel like calling it this time.  I figured he wouldn't mind me borrowing the DVD for a bit.  He has more kung fu movies than James Bond has one-liners.

Pigsy is the expert on all things Asian cinema, so I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but Five Element Ninas is a 1982 film distributed by the famous Shaw Brothers Studio starring Cheng Tien Chi and Lo Mang (a beast of a fellow who, at various times in his life, has had roughly 0% body fat and enough muscle to choke a rhino).  Cheng Tien Chi stars as Tsiau Chin Hau, a man whose martial arts school gets obliterated by Cheng Yun's deadly ninjas, themselves hired by a rival school.  Cheng Yun commands ninjas of the five Chinese elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth), so to exact revenge, Tsiau Chin Hau learns the secrets of the ninja himself and battles the elemental ninjas to the death.

One of the greatest aspects of the film is its clearcut sequence of events.  This is the part where the rival schools duel.  This is the part where the ninjas challenge the good school and completely kick their asses.  This is the part where the good school gets attacked and destroyed.  This is the part where the last surviving good guy learns how to fight against ninjas.  And this is the part of the film where the good guy and his three buddies turn the tables on said ninjas.  Even with the horrendous dubbing, Five Elements Ninjas is easy to follow and highly enjoyable.

Each ninja element takes place in a different location, with a different cheesy low-budget indoor set for each (the seams in the "sky" wallpaper are visible more than once).  The metal ninjas are four men (always four, for each element) dressed head-to-toe in copper-colored ninja suits, complete with wide-brimmed copper hats that, as previously mentioned, shoot blades out at all angles.  The wood ninjas hide in trees.  The water ninjas use wooden tubes for breathing underwater before they pull you down.  The fire ninjas use red smoke and set their swords on fire.  The earth ninjas burrow underground and poke your thighs and nether-regions with long pointy things (much like my wife's favorite battle tactic in Soul Calibur IV - sit back and poke until my guy dies or falls off the stage ad THEN dies).  What's great here is that you get to see how to lose against the ninjas at the beginning of the film and then how to win at the end, so while the "before" and "after" ninja fights take place in the same locations against the same ninjas, they feel like completely different fights.

And what fights they are!  You will see every weapon imaginable in this movie.  Straight swords, curved swords, katanas, spears, axes, daggers, bladed rings, staffs, darts, hooks on chains, tridents, naginatas, poisonous rings, halberds, copper hats, bow-and-arrows, fists, water, fire, Wolverine-claws, foot-claws, stilts, and even a giant kanji sign.  This is one bloody movie.  It is an exercise in the ingenuity of humanity's craft for killing.  You will see more people die in more ways here than just about anywhere else, and no one even uses a gun!

Not only that, but the actors and stuntmen for Five Element Ninjas are immensely talented.  What is so frustrating about action films these days, particularly when extensive hand-to-hand combat is involved, is that the director will film a single punch, then cut the action, then move to a different camera angle and allow the actors to learn the next move, shoot that, cut, repeat.  The mark of a talented film crew and cast is when a series of movements are all shot in one cut.  Watch the beginning of JCVD, for example, or any film by Jackie Chan, to see what I mean.  So many of these old Hong Kong movies are just full of sequences where the actors will swipe at each other with real metal weapons for at least ten seconds before the camera moves to a new shot.  These guys had to have their timing down to such a degree that it is some kind of miracle any of them survived filming.  This is further reason why I hate the "shaky camera" effect so pervasive in Hollywood these days (see: Transformers, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood).  All it does is confuse the viewer and mask the stuntmen's and actors' impotence.

The dubbing of Five Elements Ninjas is comically bad, the kind of quality which films like Kung Pao: Enter the Fist! make it a point to lampoon.  It's not that the actors are so abysmally poor - though they aren't exactly Peter Cullen - it's just that they were directed to not speak whenever their on-screen counterpart is not moving his or her mouth.  This means that you'll get odd

gaps right in the middle of a sentence that no normal English speaker would ever say.  Between that and the oh-so-simple plot, Five Element Ninjas is really meant to be viewed as a martial arts showcase, and it certainly does deliver on that.  I leave you now with a clip showing the initial fights against the metal, wood, and water ninjas, spectacularly kicked off with some shining examples of the English dubbing...

Harry Potter and That Guy (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 Review)

I have a confession to make.  For every Harry Potter film to hit the theaters so far, I've been that guy.  You know that guy.  You know him all too well.  Just before the movie's release, he reads the corresponding book so that he'll know exactly what was changed for the theaters.  He was very pleased with the first two films, horrified with the third, and increasingly annoyed with the fourth, fifth, and sixth.  Yes, I was that douchebag.  I was at my worst with the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where the movie ended on a Cliff's Notes version of an outstanding action sequence that blew me away the first time I read it.  I was the guy who complained about the omission of Hermione's "S.P.E.W." organization in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, even though I didn't even like the subplot in the book.  I was the guy who could taste stomach bile in the back of his throat when the Rastafarian shrunken head first graced the screen on the Knight Bus at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I thought about seeking therapy.  I thought about boycotting the movies and clinging desperately to the moments of pure awesome found on the pages but not at the local Cinemark.  I reread key scenes, like the huge fight sequence at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and memorized the names of important characters who never made it into the films (here's looking at you, Charlie Weasley!).  I considered personally petitioning Chris Columbus to come back to the helm and right the ship.

Karma came back and gave me a nasty turn by sending me to the hospital with what turned out to be mono literally half an hour after grumbling my way out of the theater of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  It was after that that I started to wonder if maybe being that guy wasn't such a good idea after all.  Upon seeing the first trailers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, my buddy Professor Goodtimes explained to me that he actually hated the first two films and has loved the rest, and he hates it when people compare books to their movie adaptations because you simply cannot compare items from two different forms of media.  I happen to disagree - we got into a few rather heated arguments over this - but it did make me think.  Movies cannot be word-for-word translations of a book.  Books simply have different pacing than a movie.  They can explain in a sentence what would take several minutes of film.  Humorous scenes in a novel can fall horribly flat on the big screen.  Comparisons between a book and its movie counterpart can be interesting studies of media, but they shouldn't make fans feel cheated out of certain superfluous scenes or characters, as I had long felt.

And so it was that, for the first time ever, I did not reread the corresponding book for the corresponding Harry Potter film.  My first steps down the path of redemption had begun.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 picks up right where HP6 left off.  Right from the getgo, HP7.1 is dark.  Very dark.  Dumbledore was killed by Severus Snape.  Harry has learned that Voldemort split his soul into seven pieces, with each piece encapsulated in something called a "Horcrux", which could be any old item like a diary, locket, teddy bear, etc.  The wizarding world is at war.  Hermione "obliterates" all traces of her parents' memory of her to protect them.  The Dursleys are forced to leave their home, and when Harry does the same, he is accompanied by an honor guard of no less than about a dozen major characters (including the hastily-introduced Bill Weasley and his hastily-explained werewolf scratch and his hastily-explained engagement to Fleur, the attractive French girl from the fourth HP film).  They get Harry to the Weasley's house and prepare for the wedding of Bill and Fleur, but all hell breaks loose when the Ministry of Magic is overrun by Voldemort and his Death Eaters, and as the wedding gets crashed, our three heroes escape to London and begin their quest to hunt down the Horcruxes and destroy them.

This film will feel pretty different from the last few because they made the wise choice of splitting the book in half.  Regardless of how I feel about the books, movies 4, 5, and 6 were very fast-paced and rarely, if ever, gave you any down-time to stop and think about what was going on.  Subsequently, HP7.1 may feel slow for some.  Harry, Ron, and Hermione spend the movie away from Hogwarts, their friends, and their families, and while their character development and group dynamic was interesting, it does take a dedicated viewer to really enjoy two-and-a-half hours centered almost exclusively around the three kids.  One of my personal favorite characters in all the films and books is Hogwarts itself.  The school has such a unique personality to it that you come to feel like it is a character in its own right, and its exclusion, while necessary for the plot, is a huge letdown, though of course that's not the movie's fault.

That being said, this was probably the best Harry Potter film to come out in a long time.  The three kids are those characters, and the rest of the casting is so spot on that you would think Rowling had those very actors in mind when writing their parts.  The special effects are of course as top-notch as can be, and the settings are varied enough to keep your eyes interested while the characters sit around talking about Voldemort's creepy self-soul-mangling.

The only problem I had with HP7.1 - and this is me retaining a little bit of my "that guy" persona - is that it wasn't set up well enough by the previous movies.  There were too many instances of "oh by the way I'm so-and-so and I'm suddenly important", most notably the two-second introduction of Ron's elder brother Bill and his utterly out-of-nowhere engagement with Fleur Delacour AND his encounter with a werewolf at some point in his life that was only bad enough to give him the occasional craving for raw meat.  I understand that the filmmakers didn't want to include the big fight at the end of HP6, as it (SPOILER ALERT!) would have born too close a resemblance to the big fight at the end of HP7, (END SPOILER ALERT!) but the fight at the end of HP6 was a huge part of setting up this all-important wedding, so from a storyteller's perspective, not from an anal HP fan's perspective, that was simply sloppy moviemaking on their part.

Also sloppy was their dealing with Harry's and Ginny's relationship.  Harry knows that he has to leave Hogwarts, track down Voldemort's soul shards, and most likely die in the process, so in the books he forces Ginny away to protect her, even though she was strong/badass enough to never really believe him.  But in this film the two enjoy a nice little makeout session just prior to the wedding, and as Harry spends the rest of the time touring England, he never once mentions her or gives the slightest inclination that he actually cares for her.  Sloppy moviemaking, regardless of what has ever happened in the original material.  From the film I can only assume that Harry doesn't give a grindylow's ass about this girl, which makes me like Harry a bit less.

Mostly, though, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 is nothing more than one enormous setup for Part 2, so go into this one knowing that you will have almost no resolution until next July.  Don't take your kiddos - I am a firm believer that you should be at least Harry's age per film/book before viewing/reading.  The filmmakers have set themselves up for some outlandishly high expectations, and I can only hope that Part 2 delivers.  I hereby solemnly swear, though, that I will NOT attempt to reread the seventh book prior to Part 2's release.  I am that guy, no more.

BONUS!  We saw the movie at Alamo Drafthouse, which, among other things, introduced me to this excellent Youtube video from Tobuscus.  Enjoy, and be sure to check out his other one about TRON: Legacy, which I will almost definitely post in my upcoming review.