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The Conversation: The future of filmmaking, games & new media
Not a conference, but definitely the whose who on the frontier of cinema and the Digital Age talking to anyone interested

Scott Kirsner (Cinematech, Variety) is ever-present at the point where film and technology meet. Now he’s involved in co-hosting a “two-day conversation… about the future of cinema, video, games, and telling stories with new media.”

The Conversation will take place October 17 & 18 at the Pacific Film Archive theater in Berkley, CA. The guest list is exciting and includes Reed Hastings (founder Netflix), Peter Broderick (Paradigm Consulting, early advocate of digital moviemaking), Sharad Devarajan (CEO, Virgin Comics/Virgin Animation), John Batter (DreamWorks Animation SKG), and our friend Sara Pollack of YouTube among many others. You are eagerly invited to suggest topics and guests for the event, so it remains firmly informal, open and non-PowerPointy.

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The Dark Knight Review
It wasn’t until I saw THE DARK KNIGHT that I realized how long I’ve waited for it

Maybe you’re somebody who has no qualms when hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on a movie that amounts to a couple great chase scenes and a rock ‘em, sock ‘em fight with the hero’s girlfriend tied to some time-sensitive death contraption. But I always feel teased. Like I just got back from a date where my interest was exploited for a free meal. The Dark Knight is a diamond in a mound of cubic-zirconia gemstones, two and a half hours of blockbuster at it’s finest, a movie worth the price of a concert ticket.

Please, allow me to clear my head of my immediate reactions: The Dark Knight is the shit! It is so awesome I can not stare into the light of its awesomeness without seeing spots. Better than I hoped–and I was hoping for a lot–there were even points where I sat looking at the screen thinking, “Can Christopher Nolan (writer/director) possibly sustain my amazement any further?” The answer: Yeppers, and with a choke-on-its-way-down ending. I’ll shut off the blathering even though I want to keep going.

Christopher Nolan does what I wanted Jon Favreau to do with Iron Man. Kick ass and kick more ass while always staying a step ahead of me (Heath Ledger as The Joker is as mystifying and sensual as Hannibal Lecter). Then–so I don’t feel he just took my money for a couple great chase scenes–he knocks me in the head. When I walked out of the theater I couldn’t balance out the world. I laid awake in bed rethinking the Iraq war based on something a guy in a bat costume said, and that’s when I knew I’d gotten my money’s worth.

Tonally, The Dark Knight picks up right where Batman Begins left off. The soft, sour notes in the concluding refrain of Batman Begins have grown in volume. The closing of the first movie suggests that donning a cape and mask to inspire fear in the ruthless and hope in the innocent has, in fact, unlocked the frenzied fantasies of Gotham’s sociopaths, which crescendos in the opening bank heist of Dark Knight. Heath Ledger’s Joker is so exceptionally twisted and brilliant, I can imagine casting agents boycotting future assignments to cast comic book villains. He’s a sociopath, a terrorist and he’s totally magnetic. If The Joker weren’t killing people, he’d make the perfect role model: Resolute, determined, brimming with self-confidence and unshaken by the material things of this world. He’d be a monk on his way to sainthood, if only he didn’t live to see the world suffer.

There is no effort to explain where The Joker comes from, except for his own self-made mythology which changes whenever he tells it. Nolan won’t offer false comfort in “understanding” where The Joker comes from, but just the reality that some evil cannot be explained and must be faced. Gary Oldman returns as James Gordon (minus the befuddled old man in the Batmobile antics, thank god). And Maggie Gyllenhaal has replaced Katie Holmes as district attorney Rachel Dawes (again, god, thanks). Aaron Eckhart takes a prominent role as “The White Knight,” D.A. Harvey Dent, a surprisingly worthy double for Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale). Harvey Dent and The Joker orbit Batman like protons and electrons vying to change the very molecular makeup of our hero, and they do.

Take all the brilliant action of the first movie and give it the psychological sparring up there with Anton Chigurh and Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. It’s an art film with comic book heroes to geek out on. Ah, how refreshing for the hero to be challenged so far beyond his nemesis having a bigger, better contraption! The Joker is a spirit, a moral contaminant awakening uncomfortable admiration and shame over our silly values. He’s the most compelling defense for water boarding. Like a walking Sophie’s Choice, his sole purpose is to strip away any pretense of nobility and reveal what humans are truly capable of when only given the choice to kill or be killed. He’s Batman’s true nemesis because he preys not on Batman’s body, but the very hope he has in his city and the people in it. For us, he’s the enemy we won’t let ourselves believe in.

I’m still thinking about it.

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Video Games and Hollywood: Hook-Ups Gone Wrong
Kevin Kelly launches a new column on the intersections between gaming and movies––or, as the case may be, how hook ups between the two industries so often fail to satisfy.

Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, i09 and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. This is his introductory column; please welcome Kevin, ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments.

If you’d been holding onto a game controller or sitting deep in a multiplex somewhere a few weeks ago, you might have felt the shuddering groan of millions of video game and movie fans everywhere when the press release dropped the news: Brett Ratner is going to start making movies based on Activision’s cadre of video games. Maybe the Uwe Boll career path of making extremely bad movie adaptations of video games still appeals to him. It’s not clear what project will be first up, but given the fact that Ratner’s films have somehow made millions of dollars, it’ll probably be something fairly popular. Don’t rule out Brett Ratner Presents: Brett Ratner’s Guitar Hero: The Movie just yet.

It’s just another sign of the movie industry struggling to play catch-up with the gaming industry, which is currently leaving filmed entertainment in the dust. The Entertainment Software Association announced earlier this year that the gaming industry made just over $18 billion in 2007, which is more that double what the movie industry raked in. ESA CEO Michael Gallagher said, “On average, an astonishing 9 games were sold every second of every day of the year.” In a day and age when games can cost $60 at retail (with special editions costing closer to a hundred bucks), that’s a pretty amazing figure.

However, for all the money the gaming industry is sucking in, that hasn’t translated very well into the movie realm. Just try and think of a good movie that’s been based on a video game. Give up? Properties ranging from Super Mario Bros. to Doom have made the jump to the screen, and they’ve all failed to wow viewers. Don’t think I’m counting out the “so bad it’s sort of good” terribleness that was Street Fighter: The Movie, either. Raul Julia and Jean Claude van Damme together in one film? It’s a wonder the universe didn’t implode somehow. Films like Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat, and Silent Hill have managed to keep their heads above water by making money, but they’ve been critically lambasted.

Likewise, it’s also hard to think of a movie that’s had a decent video game adaptation. It’s not a good sign when only two games come up in discussions about this very same topic: Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 in 1997, and oddly enough The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, in 2004. You’d expect the high water marks to come less than seven years apart. In fact, in a recent meeting with developers from Activision, they mentioned more than once how Goldeneye set the goal for what they wanted to achieve with multiplayer levels and an experience that wasn’t just a rehash of the movie. Eleven years after the fact and producers are still hoping to be as good as or better than an old James Bond game?

Part of the problem is the dissonance in development times. You can rush a film from development to the screen in less than a year, and that doesn’t always mean it’ll be a terrible film. However, when you rush a video game into development the end result almost always suffers. Just take a look at Enter the Matrix 2003 if you need further proof. You would think a huge game based on one of the most successful movie franchises in recent years would have some serious development muscle behind it. However, to say it was received “poorly” would be understating the case. It ended up on GameSpot’s list of Most Disappointing Games of 2004 alongside the Star Wars Galaxies massive multiplayer online game. That’s two huge movie properties turned into two lackluster games.

Enter the Matrix is a game that perfectly underscores the rift between Hollywood and gaming. Developers of this title were given unprecedented access to the two Matrix sequels while they were in production, and the game featured cutscenes (animated or live-action scenes where the gamer doesn’t play and the story moves forward) that were written and directed by the Wachowskis. They used the same actors from the movies, and in many cases further expanded upon and explained some of the murky ideas in the movies. Unfortunately the end result was a crappy video game with extremely good-looking cutscenes.

In another effort to grab some of those gaming dollars, Hollywood is going to try another tact by making movies about the gaming industry. Just last week it was announced that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way production company is working on a biopic called Atari about the heady days of video games back in the 1970s, based on Nolan Bushnell’s life and the company he co-founded. DiCaprio will be playing Bushnell, and it’ll be filled with polyester suits and sideburns. It’s not clear if they’ll be able to achieve the high cheese factor of 1983’s Joysticks (see above), but we can still dream. Until that day comes, Hollywood and video games keep pressing “continue” to try and reach the next level where movies and games actually get it right.

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