Want to see a great video game get ruined? Watch its transition from your game console to the silver screen. Whether you’re talking about something recently released (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li), something released in the last few years (Doom, Resident Evil, anything by Uwe Boll) or something released back in the days when arcade fighters and Nintendo consoles reigned supreme (Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat), it’s clear that Hollywood still has yet to figure out how to make a video game movie work. And even Japan, with its video game-based anime films like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Tekken and Street Fighter II: The Movie, has not been able to create films that are as compelling as the source material.
I’ve seen a lot of articles that have talked about how badly video game movies have failed, but I haven’t seen any articles on why they’ve failed. Certainly, it seems to be common knowledge that these films are generally rushed through production with poor choices made when it comes to the screenwriters and directors, but there’s an even more basic reason that games don’t work as films. Simply put, it’s all about the experience… but my, how that experience plays a role in the shaping of the story.
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Actually, I used Arial to create this, but it's practically the same font. Windows PCs come with Arial; Macs come with Helvetica.
I’ve been sharpening my graphic design skills lately, and as I’ve read books on improving the look of my Powerpoint slides, the visual display of quantitative information, and basic typography, I grew interested in a documentary film my brother mentioned to me last year called Helvetica.
“Helvetica?” you might be asking. “Isn’t that a font?”
Not only is Helvetica a font, but it is the font that you’ll see in most graphic design since the 1960s. See, back before personal computers, typesetting and font design was a very complex process — you had to create very detailed illustrations of every character and then ship them to type foundries, where steel pieces would be created for printing presses. Because of this, there was a great need for a simple, “everyman” sort of font that not only was readable and stylish, but neutral.
“Yeah, but why should I care?” you might ask. “All I have to do now is fire up a computer, and I can use any font I want.”
True, but it never hurts to learn about why Helvetica (and copies like Arial) became a visual standard. And it’s even more interesting to see how Helvetica has been used in the creation of logos we see every day:
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I consider myself someone with rather eclectic tastes when it comes to film. I’m not into pretentious art films, I hate almost everything French, and I despise films that value style over substance. But at the same time, I don’t like movies where the formula is obvious, I don’t like things that are dumb or that are pointless, and I really, really hate bad writing.
“So, you watch about 2 movies a year?” you might be asking. Pretty much. But fortunately, I’ve got a Netflix account, so I have a chance to check out movies that I wouldn’t normally think to watch.
As it happens, I’m trekking over to a friend’s later today to watch Hamlet 2, a film I’m pretty sure I’ll like, and it’s prompting me to think of some other offbeat movies that I’ve enjoyed. Here are five, in no particular order, that I think are worth watching.
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My litmus test for suck.
Have you ever seen a movie that was
bad? I mean really, really
bad, not bad in the good way where you can make fun of the film and enjoy yourself, but bad in the bad way, where you feel like you’ve just wasted two hours of your life. Bad in the way that you walk away saying, “if anyone ever recommends this film to me, I’ll know
not to take advice from that person on movies again.”
For me, that movie is Armageddon. It came out the summer after I graduated from high school, and I somehow missed seeing it in the theater. But when I saw it on home video later that year on my first Thanksgiving break away from college, holy crap was I annoyed by it.
You might like Armageddon. You might think it’s a good movie. You might even own a copy for a purpose other than irony.
Well, to you I say: that’s fine. But I won’t be taking any movie advice from you until you realize the error of your ways.
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[Movie Monday] | SeanJJordan | 
April 13, 2009 12:43 am | 
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