Ebert, gaming, Panic and other randomness

Greetings to the many new readers of Pick-Up Flix after yesterday's surprise and welcome Tweet by movie critic and born-again blogger Roger Ebert. Strange enough, he didn't mention the item I thought he was most likely to mention, which was my defense for his video game blog — it's the post right below this one. Instead he plugged my review of A Town Called Panic (two posts below), which he saw months ago and also loved. Not long after Ebert's post, Zeitgeist Films also Tweeted my Panic review, which was another welcome surprise. Many thanks to Zeitgeist and Roger — they've made this writer ecstatic. (They've also made this writer use the verb "tweet" several times, which is several times too many.)

Lastly, I hate to beat a dead horse here, but my page designer and I were still arguing about this video game art topic when something struck me that seemed profound at the time. It will be my last word on the subject. Anyway, I kept thinking of these video game fans and I wondered what other kinds of art they had experienced. Not to generalize, but I kept thinking that the only other artistic mediums they had experimented with were video games, comic books, Star Wars and Japanese anime. No paintings, no poetry, no architecture, no sculptures, no great works of literature. Surely someone on that diet could not tell anyone else what is and is not art. Then this Robin Williams quote from Good Will Hunting seemed to descend from the clouds in a magnificent halo of blinding light. The scene comes at a turning point in the film, when Williams (as Sean) confronts Matt Damon (as genius Will) in a park about his attitude toward people, knowledge, life and, yes, art.

Sean: Thought about what you said to me the other day, about my painting. Stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me … fell into a deep peaceful sleep, and haven't thought about you since. Do you know what occurred to me?

Will: No.

Sean: You're just a kid, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talkin' about.

Will: Why thank you.

Sean: It's all right. You've never been out of Boston.

Will: Nope.

Sean: So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations … the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "Once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you … I don't see an intelligent, confident man … I see a cocky, scared-shitless kid. But you're a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan right?

[Will nods]

Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally … I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you I can't read in some fuckin' book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that, do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.

This single scene probably won Williams the supporting actor Academy Award in 1997, and probably helped win Damon and Ben Affleck the original screenplay Oscar. Not all of it applies to my point, but the part about art, love and war do. If life is a video game, then gamers should acquire a certain amount of XP before they can comment definitively about art. After these gamers live full lives, and possibly experience other mediums of art, maybe they'll feel differently about video games. Or maybe they'll feel the same. Either way, it hardly matters because Yahtzee is right: what is and isn't art is entirely up to the individual looking at it, or playing it.

Video games aren't art ... yet

Roger Ebert, you gotta love him.

Here he is in the worst physical shape of his life following a tremendous (and victorious) battle with cancer and the many surgeries that have left him unable to speak, and yet he’s at his writing peak, churning out movie review after movie review and writing some of the most thoughtful prose of his career on his blog, one of the smartest and most insightful on the entire Internet.

First he angered creationists by rebuking their need to have the “science” of creationism taught in school. Then he turned his guns on Glenn Beck, who he said any rational human being, Republican or Democrat, should despise. Then he outed himself as a longtime Alcoholics Anonymous member, an AA no-no.

And that’s how it goes; nothing’s really off limits: health care death panels, new-age medicine, the “festering fringe” of the anti-Obama movement and textbooks in Texas. He also talks about nice, happy things, like memories of his father, the Champaign-Urbana neighborhood he grew up in, stories of his late reviewing buddy Gene Siskel. But the meat and potatoes of his blog are really his careful articulation of controversial subjects.

Last week, Ebert posted a blog titled bluntly, “Video games can never be art.” And then, seemingly, the world lit on fire and started plunging toward the sun … at least according to every video game fanboy with an Internet connection. This group of people, bless their heart, don’t hear “no” very often judging by the anger exhibited in their responses. The largely anonymous group of game junkies will convict you of blasphemy if you don’t show pious respect to Mario, Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog or Master Chief. And boy did they convict Roger.

Nearly overnight, the article tallied up more than 1,600 comments, 98 percent of them in strong disagreement of Ebert’s assertion that video games will never be art. (Comments now number more than 3,500.) Ebert argued: “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

One assumption that gamers make, one they get all wrong, is that Ebert says all films are art. Nope. He said film as a medium is an art form, although most films are not art. For example, Armageddon is not art, although cinema as a medium surely is. He does suggest (through consistent reading of his work) some films that can be classified as art — many of Ingmar Bergman’s films such as Cries and Whispers, works by Akira Kurosawa, last year’s Synecdoche, New York, or Michael Haneke’s Caché — for the way they examine the intricacies of the human condition. I agree with his assessment of film as an artistic medium, the same way I agree that hip-hop is an art form, although I can’t name you one Ghostface song that should be comparable to the works of Monet or Mozart. On the same plank, video games as a medium surely can be art, though no game yet has exemplified itself as art.

Although Ebert’s entire argument is critically flawed since he apparently has never actually played a video game, he still brings up some valid points, like why do video game fans feel that they must have their time-sucking hobby validated — “Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form.” He suggests they keep playing with his blessing, as they surely will.

What he really brings up, though, especially later in his replies to comments, is the nature of art: What is art, and what isn’t art? By and large, video game enthusiasts feel that (a) if it’s beautiful it’s art, like Flower, a game where you play as a flower petal and blow through grassy fields. (b) If it includes a moving story it’s art, like Bioshock a retro sci-fi shooter set in an underwater world. (c) If a game gives the player choices it’s art, like Heavy Rain a cinematic murder mystery. (d) Or if the puzzles require comprehension at an advanced level then it’s art, like Braid, a Mario-like platformer where the player can manipulate time. Gamers also argue that any combination of these attributes makes a game art.

Surely some games are beautiful, some games are challenging, some have involving stories and well-written characters, and some are created by visual artists of the highest caliber. But these alone don’t make a game a piece of art, or more specifically, a piece of fine art. This is where Ebert got it right even if there is a growing movement of people who will call anything art, from their ergonomic desk to their kitchen toaster. No, art shouldn't be so exclusionary that nothing is art, but it also shouldn't include everything because then it yields the same result — nothing is art. Ebert simply suggested we demand more than health bars and ammo packs from artwork.

I think art has to stir something deeper in the soul than just beauty, or invigorate the brain with something more than just puzzles. I think art must speak to elements of the human spirit, examining who we are at our core. A movie like Synecdoche, New York surely does that. The works of Picasso do too. As does Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s fusion of architecture and nature. But Halo 3? It’s closer than most video games, but still has some distance to climb to reach the lofty pedestal of fine art.

Gamers need to be realistic: Yes, games like Halo 3, Bioshock, Heavy Rain, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, God of War III, Flower and Braid are fun, and they also look amazing, but what do they say about us as a people or civilization? At their core, games are about jumping and shooting — essentially mashing buttons on a controller — to beat the boss and win. Some games stray from that formula, but usually not far.

If I must label anything in the gaming community art I lean toward the sandbox gaming of products — I use the word “products” intentionally — like Grand Theft Auto IV. No, I don’t think the game itself is art, but I think the way it provides an open world and then allows the players to interact with it is more artistic than anything mentioned in the Ebert blog comments. Players are given a sandbox to explore. Some do just that, explore; others get in a car and mow down pedestrians with reckless cruelty.The player’s identity is reflected in the way they play the game the same way viewers are reflected in perplexing ways in Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park, in Ebert’s own city of Chicago. Of course, a game like GTAIV would be more artful with just a city and the tools in which to realistically interact with it, but the designers give players missions, objectives and storylines, which then dilutes the artistry of the open-world choices. Other games, like Heavy Rain, give the illusion of choice, but really the formula has already been written. These sandbox games, though, really do give freedom in a digital world teeming with life.

The bigger question is this: Who said video games wanted to be art? The Rolling Stones never sat around whining that they weren’t art. They wanted to be rock’n’rollers, and they wore that title like a badge of honor. Video games should be happy to be bad-ass shooters, or sleek ultra-modern adventure thrillers, or perplexing visual riddles. I can admit, at least, that video games can be art, which is more than Ebert is willing to admit. The medium is full of artistic opportunities. We just haven’t seen any yet. And if Ebert’s debate does anything, then it should challenge video game designers to think on a higher plane, to design a game worthy of the Louvre or the Met, not just the TV rooms of every 14-year-old with idle thumbs.

In this town, Panic is the name and currency

In a single breath A Town Called Panic is a genius of absurdity and also a whimsical farce. The fact that it stars characters named Horse, Cowboy and Indian — and they are played by little plastic toys in the shapes of a horse, cowboy and indian — adds to its unmistakably zesty magic. How, you will ask yourself, did adults channel their inner 5-year-olds to make this? I’m still pondering that question myself.

Indian and Cowboy decide one day to build Horse a barbecue — why a horse would want to barbecue anything is charmingly never explained — so they get online and order 50 bricks. But due to a computer typo, 50 million bricks are delivered. The delivery trucks number so many that they create a roaring stream of traffic near Cowboy and Indian’s farm. With a mountain of bricks outside the front door, now the two friends must hide their mistake from Horse, who is smarter and more mature than both of his roommates. Where they hide the bricks, of course, is impossible, but it's hilarious they're not noticed sooner.

I love that plot. I especially love telling people that plot, because it prompts all kinds of questions, some more absurd than the film itself: Why celebrate a horse’s birthday? Aren’t cowboys and indians typically rivals? Wouldn’t their credit card be declined before ever successfully ordering 50 million bricks? Questions like this are valid, until you see A Town Called Panic, and then you realize that nothing quite lines up in the nutty meringue of the film’s delivery.

What a wacky movie this is. It comes from Belgium, based off a world created in several shorts by the film’s directors, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, who also do some character voices. The voice acting is French, but the English subtitles are hilarious on their own — Horse, for instance, frequently says, “No probs” to things that most farm animals would definitely have cause for concern.

Panic is shot in the most rudimentary style of stop-motion animation, though the film’s blissful mood is so contagious you won’t much care that the movements aren’t completely smooth. Many of the characters stand on the little plastic platforms that keep some toys from tipping over. The film assumes we know this, and it gets a laugh out of us, as does nearly every visual, from the enormous waffles in the vending machines to the lava spewing from cell phones.

I’ve explained the bricks, and how Horse, Indian and Cowboy live together on a farm — though Horse lives indoors, uses the Internet, reads the newspaper and has his own bed, while the slightly dumber cows graze in an adjacent field without complaint — though there’s so much more to it. Like how the trio journey to the center of the earth to play cards on a rock teetering above the molten core. Or how they encounter a giant robot penguin whose main purpose is to hurl snowballs on unsuspecting creatures hundreds of miles away. Or how a disco is held where the postman (Postman), local law enforcement (Policeman), various farm animals and a red tractor can party on a lighted dancefloor. How and why these and many other hilarious antics happen I will let you discover; just know that it all proceeds in this refreshingly illogical kind of stupor.

A Town Called Panic is not playing anywhere near where you’re reading this article, unless you happen to be in Europe or perhaps near several obscure theaters in California or New York. Why offer a review of a film you have no chance of seeing until its DVD release, you ask? Because I want A Town Called Panic to showcase the talent and originality that comes wrapped inside film festivals. I saw Panic at the Phoenix Film Festival this past weekend. It was the 10:15 p.m. screening Friday night. I think 11 people were in the theater. And we all surrendered ourselves to this charming, nonsensical movie.

The Phoenix Film Festival is not the greatest of film festivals. It’s certainly no Cannes, Toronto or Sundance. But what it does exceptionally well is introduce new films — even new kinds of films — to audiences that would otherwise be unable to see them. Only a handful of people in this state were able to experience the giddy magic of A Town Called Panic. Next year, when I see another gem, I want there to be more than 11 people enjoying it with me.