Girl Meets Geekdom

Movie title: Pride & Prejudice Starring: Keira Knightley, Matthew MacFayden, Brenda Blethyn, Donald Sutherland, Rosamund Pike, Judi Dench, Jena Malone, Simon Woods Directed by: Joe Wright Written by: Jane Austen (novel), Deborah Moggach (screenplay) Genre: Drama, Romance Year: 2005

Call me skeptical. As a die-hard fan of the 5-hour BBC version of Pride and Prejudice featuring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, you can hardly blame me for thinking it impossible for capturing the scope of the story in a mere two-hours. After having seen the new film, I can fairly say it does not capture the scope of the entire story, but this new Pride & Prejudice can certainly hold its own grounds.

This 18th century costume drama runs on a pace to match that of a modern suspense, but settles down comfortably enough. For those less familiar with the classic story, the film centers on the Bennets, a family with 5 daughters who face a life of poverty upon their father’s death. Mrs. Bennet (Brenda Blethyn) dedicates her life existence to marrying off her daughters. The film opens as a young man of good fortune, Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods), moves into the county and quickly takes a liking to the eldest of the Bennet girls, Jane (Rosamund Pike). Around the same time, the second eldest, Lizzie (Keira Knightley), takes a strong disliking to Mr. Bingley’s friend, Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFayden) who finds her too plain to tempt him. As the story progresses, Lizzie finds herself drawn to Mr. Wickham, a man who claims to be wronged by Darcy in the past, and the object of Mr. Colins, the foolish-minded heir of the Bennet estate. Ultimately, it is a love story between Lizzie and Darcy, one about overcoming prejudices and class barriers to reveal the true characters of two people who were meant for each other. Of course, we rush through it too fast to get that much, but it was an honest attempt.

What saves the film is the fact that director Joe Wright focuses far less on the theatrical absurdities of the story but instead takes a much more sensitive approach to the characters. The script lacks wit and is the low point of the film, but Wright makes up for it by brilliantly playing with the nuances of its characters and situations, especially in terms of their resulting awkwardness. Most of the film resides purely within the subtleties of every character, something which no other adaptation of the novel has accomplished to date.

The tone of the film is refreshing. There is a certain raw beauty in its cinematography, something Hollywood films consistently lack. Everything from the overexposed exteriors, to the stray farm animals, or the stringy curls of Keira Knightley’s hair adds to a certain realism of the English countryside.

For the fans of the BBC production who were wondering – yes, the film is as sexually tame as the BBC; no, you will not see Mr. Darcy emerging from a pond dripping wet; yes, Keira Knightley is a convincing Lizzie; no, Matthew MacFayden is not as good as Colin Firth (He keeps reminding me of a young Alan Rickman for some reason). The film lacks the intricacies of the BBC miniseries and skips out on many of the subplots, which is hardly unexpected given the length of the film. Minor characters such as Mr. and Mrs. Hurst, Mary King, and Mariah Lucas were left out completely.

The film is a worthwhile effort but, in the end, Wright attempted to capture more that a mere two hours would allow. I enjoyed the BBC version over this one, but, to be fair, if you take away comparisons to previous versions, this film on its own proves to be a beautifully delicate interpretation of Jane Austen’s masterpiece.

In General:
B  Movie
A- Performance
C- Script
A  Love Story
C+ Execution of Love Story

Have you ever wondered why most game dialogue has to be so cheesy? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we’re given a lot of time to think about the dialogue. I was reading Roger Ebert’s essay on the 1977 movie Annie Hall today and his brief note on average shot lengths got be thinking. Woody Allen, who is a champion of witty dialogue, has long average shot lengths, with Annie Hall at ~14 seconds, and a film like Armageddon having something around 2 seconds, which Ebert argues is too short for intelligent dialogue. Now any game writer will tell you that they aim to make game dialogue short and snappy—more to the Armageddon model, which begs the question: is game dialogue stupid and cheesy by nature? Unlike movies, games tend not to compensate for the pace, giving us more time to meditate on the cheesy nature of snappy dialogue. If you take an average game that actually has cutting in their cut scene, I’m sure you will find incredibly long “shot length” if you were to play it out at a reasonable pace. The visuals are not snappy. We don’t move on fast enough. All there is for us to absorb at any piece of dialogue are the words itself. You know why the dialogue in Armageddon works? We move on from the dialogue fast, they know to keep our attention off the words.

Sure, we can argue, lots of games have real time facial expressions now to compensate for the lack of activity in cut scenes—but lets face it, they fail to capture the depth of emotions as a real person. In movies, we can fixate on certain actors and read something out of that, in games, you have to try a lot harder. During gameplay, cuts has to make sense for the game play, but are there specific things that can be done to make the camera more dynamic? The cinematic dynamics in cut scene have certainly gone up, but so far, I haven’t seen anything that pushed any limits. Film theorist David Bordwell once noted that average shot length of Hollywood films decreased dramatically over the years. Thus, pace has increased in films over the years and audience attention span has decreased and games are generally fast-paced in everywhere where there is not a lot of dialogue. I think it’s about time exposition got more dynamic — up the pace, and cheesy lines will become far more acceptable.

I turned on the TV today to find that video games invaded MTV. Maybe I’ve been living in a hole or something, I haven’t watched much TV since I started college, and I’m not surprised that there’s Xbox 360 coverage, but what on Earth is This Sims Life? That was certainly an eye opener on the MTV generation of today. This Sims Life is a pseudo-documentary in the style of a human inspiration story that takes a glimpse into the lives of various Sims addicts. Since I am a great believer of bringing video games to more mainstream audiences, I guess I should consider this to be a positive step. However, the content of the show, or lack thereof, creeped me out a little. One girl talked about how the Sims helps her understand her relationship with God and it got me to think—“wow is this what it means to make games mainstream?” On a station like MTV I’m sure they went for the unique stories and good-looking people to interview, but they could have said something about our generation of gamers, or of gaming addictions, good or bad. Instead it was, “Hi, my name is Jane, I am addicted to the Sims, this is my boyfriend Paul, and this is what happens when I kill one of my Sims.” Sure, this is a fabulous marketing ploy, it felt more like an infomercial rather than a documentary anyway, but couldn’t it have said something a little more? I think I would’ve preferred yet another criticism on how games destroy our lives just for a little more substance. This was some attempted praise for a game that had no substance and had a funny way of saying that people who play the Sims are superficial and live to deeply in a make-belief world.

Since when were gamers part of the MTV generation? When I was part of the MTV generation, I barely even played video games. I guess, for me, it sucked the character out of the gaming population, at least the part of it that was personal to me. In their attempt to maybe show the diversity of the Sims audience, they somehow reduced everyone to a shallow annoyance who all sound the same in the end. For a while, I thought that the Sims demographics was a group that broke out of the demographics of violent or nerdy young men. Instead, they get to be shallow. How did gaming culture fall into this depiction? Mass culture doesn’t depict movie-goers or theater buffs this way!

I guess the bottom line is, the MTV generation tends to lead to stereotypes that I just don’t want to be part of. As a female gamer, I already deal with stereotype and often feel strange playing certain video games. The conventional gaming audience, altogether, is one big stereotype! There is just so little out there to really give substance to the richer gaming population out there. This show is one of the only ones of its kind, and it is speaking for the Sims audience. Well, I am a Sims fan, and I resent that This Sims Life would choose a wishy-washy way of saying nothing about our culture and giving its fans no true substance. I’m glad that The Sims has more publicity now, but this show really shouldn’t have been made.

Blur Studio’s doing it, The Orphanage’s doing it, so why not Australia’s Animal Logic? Animal Logic joins the club of effects houses turned feature animation studios with Happy Feet, a film seemingly about a lot of penguins dancing. The film features an all star cast including Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Elijah Wood, and Brittany Murphy. The trailer shows a sea of dancing penguins based on motion capture (humans not penguins). Check out the trailer for yourself.

Six full CG-features made the list of ten animated features deemed eligible by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which allows a total of 3 nominees for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. This list include Chicken Little from Disney Animation, Gulliver’s Travels from the India-based Pentamedia Graphics, Hoodwinked from Weinstein, Co., Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, Madagascar from Dreamworks Animatiom, Robots from Blue Sky Animation, Otomo’s Steamboy, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Valiant from Vanguard Animation, and, last but not least. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit from Aardman Animation.

This may be thought of as a weak year for computer animation with no Pixar production in the running, and half of the candidate film being newcomer films from studios that had never before released a feature length computer animation. However, it is certainly a good year for stop motion animation with Wallace and Gromit and Corpse Bride both receiving critic-acclaim and box-office success. So who will be nominated? We won’t know until Jan. 31, 2006, but I would put my money on Wallace and Gromit, Corpse Bride, and Madagascar, with Wallace and Gromit taking home the Oscar. We’ll find out in a few months if I am right.