Films 2014

5. Sabotage

Hidden deep within the relentless hostility is a thesis on star power and the incompatibility of our 80s relics with modern, team orientated action fictions. With this in mind Sabotage's key moment comes when Schwarzenegger's Breacher discovers his family have been kidnapped by a cartel. This information comes to light out on an airport runway with a private jet to hand. Mooks on standby, ready to be blazed through.

Schwarzenegger's team resists, they swarm him, restraining him. An 80s action narrative is bubbling up, Commando come again, but this false, self-proclaimed family won't allow it to happen. In doing so, they fail Breacher. They should have smoked those Federales on principle, piled into the jet then crashed themselves into the nearest drug compound.

That never happened and Breacher hates them for it. That's all I could think about watching Sabotage, Schwarzenegger had been denied an instinctual, suicidal impulse. His team should've wanted to die gloriously in their commander's service but they didn't. For all their bluster about brotherhood they weren't truly committed to him, or his psychotic ideals, so he stopped loving them. They ceased to be allies or even people in his eyes. Their short-comings transformed them into grist for Schwarzenegger the walking Gulag, fuel to be consumed and excreted on the way to a petty, self-destructive revenge.

Original Review


4. The Raid 2

What are we getting out of superhero films? The colourful application of overwhelming force? What backs up the anger? What emotions drive these heroes? Do they even suffer? Captain America: The Winter Soldier hits harder than the usual dross because Cap is trying to coax a friend out of a lethal, amnesic funk. It's lip service though. Neither body is broken. Cap's life isn't on the line. Nothing is lost.

In The Raid 2 Rama gives everything he has. He turns his back on his wife and newborn for a bullshitted abstract. He compromises his morality, his identity even, to stay hidden. In a finale fight with a slash happy equal his body is pummelled, gouged, and rended. Rama takes an incredible amount of punishment and still keeps coming. That's the kind of superheroism I can key into. Obstinate, illogical, and utterly devoid of any sense of self-preservation.

Original Review


3. '71

You don't hear a great deal about The Troubles over here. Despite lasting the best part of three decades you're more likely to read about a 74 day conflict with Argentina over the invasion of a distant archipelago. I suppose it's like anything. People are only directed to care about outbreaks and resolutions, the difficult, messy centre is to be glossed over with rhetoric and forgotten.

Go in with zero knowledge, as I more or less did, and '71 is almost like something out of Action or 2000 AD, a terrifying occupation war being fought on the same kind of densely terraced streets you see all over my city. Turns out everywhere that came up during the Industrial Revolution looks the same. All the people sound similar too. It happened 300 miles away and you know fuck all about it. It makes you feel ashamed.

Original Review


2. The Wind Rises

"I've become sceptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and a girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I'm able to, then perhaps I'll be closer to portraying a true expression of love." 

- Hayao Miyazaki

Original Review


1. Inside Llewyn Davis

I've read a few reviews of Inside Llewyn Davis in which the author hasn't been sure if Davis is supposed to be talented or not. Their take from the Coen Brothers' latest is a pitch black comedy in which a marginally capable person rubs up against failure and refuses to change. For them his craft is indistinguishable from the manufactured graspers he rubs shoulders with. Presumably this failure to connect makes every performance a kind of cosmic punchline in which we are expected to shake our heads and grin at the delusional man with the guitar.

For me Llewyn is obviously, painfully gifted. When he performs diegetic sound dies off, Davis is the focus. During gigs the film's soundtrack is dominated by Oscar Isaac's vocal range. Edits and shots attempt nothing more complicated than a relaxed glance around the show. The meat is always the singing, from hushed, melodic whispers to the peeling, agitated roars of Davis' solo performance of Fare Thee Well. The arrangement is like a fight film or a musical, everything stops dead to drink Llewyn in. We see him in his moment, briefly triumphant and unyielding. Inside Llewyn Davis is a beautiful film about feeling like you're banging your head against a wall. No-one cares, no-one's interested. The only consolation to people in this situation is that at least they're pulping their brains for their own ends and not compromised, in service to someone else.

Original Review

Also Liked:

Under the Skin / Interstellar / The Guest / Map to the Stars / Blue Ruin / The Wolf of Wall Street / The Grand Budapest Hotel / Edge of Tomorrow / The Amazing Spider-Man 2 / Dawn of the Planet of the Apes / Transformers: Age of Extinction

Video Games 2014

5. Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition

After years of stuttering action adventure games Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition offered a brief glimpse of what it was like to own a maxed out PC rig. After sinking entirely too much money into a current gen system I wanted something to show it off. Although essentially a last-gen game given a cursory makeover, Tomb Raider was made new again by the kind of frame rate and control responsiveness usually reserved for extreme action games. Tomb Raider stood out against the rest of the first-quarter releases, its platform shooting the best of an early crop that tended to skew basic and uninvolving.

4. Desert Golfing

My favourite thing about Desert Golfing is the sound design. Everything is satisfying in its simplicity, from the hollow PUTT when you strike a ball to the crunchy Atari 2600 fizz when you finally manage to sink it. There's no music, no extraneous noises. There's basically nothing. Desert Golfing is relaxing, like someone reached into heyday The Simpsons and dragged out a weird adjunct in the Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge series.

3. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and PT

Two KojiPro demos that deliver concise, excellent experiences. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes wows thanks to some carefully considered controls. Snake is wonderful to manoeuvre, Hideo Kojima having long since left behind the awkward, claw set-ups of earlier Metal Gears, crafting an interaction model more in line with recent stealth stand outs Hitman: Absolution and The Last of Us.

Ground Zeroes' inputs tend towards simple prods and holds based around how physically taxing each action will be for the player character. There's a constant sense of immersion, risk versus reward. Want to pick that lock? You'll have to sit out in the open while Snake gets to work jimmying it. Snake also moves with an impressive clip, keeping a brisk pace even if he's lying face down and crawling. You'll need all the help you can get. On Hard Ground Zeroes' guards never fail to pursue noises, or really anything out of the ordinary, when conducting sweeps.

PT does as much with even less. The entire game experience is one L-shaped corridor that repeats incessantly. After a few loops new details start to bleed in. You notice the squalor, key colours change, a presence or two makes themselves known. You might even gain access to a bathroom.

PT gives you something mundane then tweaks it over and over, adding jarring sounds and piling on the unease until you don't even want to move. There's no sense of escape, make it to the other end of the corridor and you're back where you started. Games tend to be about progress, ticking up a number or a value. In exploration games you learn the cues that signal you're on the right track - new paths, key items, enemies to fight. PT has none of this, progress is obscure and contradictory. A breakthrough might be stabbing at the analog sticks while on an options screen or examining an item you've already looked at twelve times before.

2. The Last of Us: Left Behind

The best standalone DLC since Minerva's Den for BioShock 2, The Last of Us: Left Behind is a short, supplementary campaign that comes on like an adjunct but ends up being a way for Naughty Dog to explode the form and function of their game. Left Behind is an even split between a romantic stroll through a dilapidated mall with your best friend and a fraught struggle to locate medical supplies in a similar space months later.

Pace in the former is largely dictated by the player, you can rush to conclusions or try and wring out every single item or dialogue prompt. Gunplay and distraction mechanics become literal games, part of your bonding experience with the friend who has returned. You can smash windows competitively or chase each other around a Hi Fi separates store with Super Soakers. The object here isn't survival, it's the simulation of interpersonal connections. Friendship blossoming into desperate, teenage affection.

1. Destiny

Destiny is a tremendous disappointment, particularly for a studio so adept at lacing action setpieces around po-faced intergalactic fictions. Destiny has none of this. There's nothing here to touch Halo 3's Scarab attack, bosses in Destiny are usually scaled up generics with infinite health bars. This dismay is compounded by a post-release maintenance schedule that prioritises wild goose chases and exorbitantly priced DLC.

Fuck all that though, I had my fun. I hadn't gotten caught up in the pre-release hype and I certainly didn't expect to get ten years worth of play out of it. All I wanted was a multiplayer destination. The deciding factor in even purchasing Destiny was knowing I had a ready-made fireteam of work mates chomping at the bit. Co-op can elevate any game, the interplay with your buddies trumping any of the cackhanded moments the game makers have prepared. This emphasis on palling around made a virtue out of Destiny's insignificant framing - barring the pre-gameplay pep talk cum loading screens, there wasn't much story getting in your way. Destiny was all shooting, all the time.

What makes Destiny kind of exceptional is a moment-to-moment gameplay model that is nothing but satisfactory feedback. Shooting is rapid and fun, headshots are unusually easy to score. Mundane tasks stay agreeable far longer than they have any right to purely on the ease of interaction. It's no exaggeration to say that just firing your weapon in the vague direction of an enemy was fun - if it hadn't been people wouldn't have gotten so obsessed with the loot cave. Destiny only really becomes unsatisfactory when you consider the variety of things being shot. Enemies never evolve, locations stay very similar. Destiny is a basic call and response so finely tuned that if the wallpaper changed often enough you'd be playing forever.

Also Liked:

Far Cry 4 / Raiden IV: OverKill / Wolfenstein: The New Order / Alien: Isolation / Escape Goat 2 / Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare / The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo

Gutted I Missed:

Titanfall / Sunset Overdrive / Everything Nintendo put out - the Kyoto company had a banner year.

Music 2014

5. Perturbator - Future Club / Humans Are Such Easy Prey





Video game power fantasy music. If I close my eyes listening to this all I can see is a 16-bit Michael Biehn sprite scaling ladders and hurling grenades at indifferent Schwarzeneggers. Matt Furniss as fuck.

4. Taylor Swift - Blank Space



Sharing a personal stereo with my girl, getting driven to London.

3. Le Matos - Kiyoko



Geinoh Yamashirogumi's Kaneda reinterpreted by Le Matos doing Zombie Zombie doing John Carpenter doing Ennio Morricone.

2. Nice Try - No Good / Feels Right





Sounds like shoegazey Blur b-sides sung by someone else.

1. Lana Del Rey - Shades of Cool



A drunken midnight confessional from one of the poor women Lee Marvin brutalises in Point Blank. David Lynch looks on, scribbling notes.

Also Liked:

La Roux - Let Me Down Gently / Futurecop! - NASA / Forth Wanderers - Tough Love / Lazerhawk - Demo / Mark Ronson - Uptown Funk ft. Bruno Mars / Michael Jackson & Justin Timberlake - Love Never Felt So Good / Greyhat - Departure / Mac DeMarco - Let Her Go / Run the Jewels - Blockbuster Night Part 1 / Kiesza - Hideaway