Richard's Online Journal
Popping Caps In Seattle
Just back from a really fun visit to see PopCap Games in Seattle. I’ve said before that they’re easily my favourite casual games publisher, and as hoped, they’re a fine group of folks — letting a bunch of journalists tramp around the building with a camera, showing off some new stuff like EMBARGOED and CENSORED, and handing out freebies.
Also, there were zombies.
There’s a zombie on the pull. We don’t like zombies on the- oh, looks like I stand corrected. Hurm. Undead get all the luck.
Click here to see some more shots of the event, along with some random shots of Seattle. Alternatively, if you just want to feel envious, click here…
E3 Diary, Day Zero
7:15: Wake up. Remember that I?m not actually at E3. Diary already failing.
7:27: Pondering what kind of monster can get up at 7:27 when they can get away with waiting for a nice round number. Relax with pleasant thoughts about not having jetlag and crushed legs from endless 10 hour plane flight. Aaah.
9:30: First closed-door meeting of the day, focused on the release schedule of yesterday?s dinner. Still better than anything Sony’s likely to show.
10:34: Pay tramp ?5 to pretend to be Tim Schafer. Spend half hour babbling incoherently about the amazingnessitudinity of Psychonauts until he gives the money back and stamps off to annoy some tourists.
11:32: On eBay, selling Tim Schafer?s autograph. Potential buyer wants to know how he can be sure it?s legitimate. I promise signed certificate of authenticity. He accepts.
13:30: Much needed lunchbreak. Feast on the irony of spending the day reading roughly a hundred million articles on new releases, then shrugging and muttering ?There?s nothing coming out.? Gamer-entitlement is awesome.
14:34: Snatching pictures of sexy booth babes. Or anyone who uses the photo booth outside Sainsbury?s, really. Note to self: some old people run fast.
15:43: Trying to get into the E3 floor-walking spirit by repeatedly smashing both feet with ball peen hammer. Walking now agony. Seemed like good idea at the time.
16:23: Desperate to see some new games actually moving, grab myself some print outs from the press releases, squint a bit, and shake them around in front of eyes. Frame rate obviously terrible, but no worse than Crysis on my old PC.
17:30: Can’t help but feel the people at the actual show have it better.
Stephen Fry In America
I just switched off the first part of this, after almost an hour of staring in bemusement at the screen. What happened? I’m a big fan of Fry’s work in pretty much every form. QI is one of my favourite shows, I enjoy his books, can’t wait for the podgrams, devour the blog posts, loved the recent documentaries, and I’ll tune in for a few minutes of next week’s episode to see if there’s some drastic improvement, but right now, I’ve got to call this offering one of the most superficial, vapid, poorly paced programs I’ve seen in a long, long time. And I’ve seen the whole second series of Hex.
They watch TV in America! DJs emcee in America! Samples are free in America! I’ve had a pee in America!
First of all, if you’re going to do a travelogue, you really need to spend more than a few minutes per state. In almost an hour, we barely got more than ‘Ben and Jerry is in Vermont, Maine has lobsters, New York is also a state’. Fry pokes his nose into each, a suitably media-friendly employee delivers a few lines, and then it’s off off and away to the next state with all the ceremony of making a mark on a list.
The storyline connecting these vignettes, at least in this opening episode, is more or less non-existent — Fry’s question of what he’d have been like as an American barely lasting past the intro, never mind being the focus. There’s no rhyme or reason behind what the cameras are aimed at in each state, whether it’s a submarine or a rich family’s summer lodge, save what caught either the editor or researchers’ attention. That leads to some… oddness, notably the scene where Fry specifically asks a deer hunter not to shoot at deer while he’s around, claiming that he doesn’t want to see one being killed. Ignoring the sheer pointlessness of hooking up with a hunter in the first place, fair enough, I’d feel the same in that situation.
Except that barely ten minutes earlier in TV-Time, he was personally throwing live lobsters into a boiling pot. Medic! Check the editor’s pulse!
Individual segments don’t fare any better. Take the Ben and Jerry’s bit, where Fry gets to make his own ice-cream. The fact that ice-cream is cold hardly seems like a titbit worthy of the next series of QI, does it? Where are the questions about… oh, I don’t know… the history of the company? The role of ice-cream in American culture, as mentioned in the segment’s introduction? The loss or not of its individuality after Unilever sank its fangs in there? Why are we watching an interview with some random oik instead of having Fry chew the fat with Ben and Jerry themselves? The Fairtrade associations of their banana ice-cream? The response to Free Cone Day? The origins of those bizarre flavours that made their name and the ones that didn’t make it?
Forget it. All we learn from this segment is that Stephen Fry likes walnuts.
EDIT: And toffee.
The worst bits are the historical snippets. There’s one that works really well, as he interviews a pastor who delivers some very funny bits on the Pilgrims and dips a little into the American mindset, but it’s too damn short, and stands alone. Later, we’re stuck with a version of the Salem Witch Trials that number-drops the 150 accused and nineteen hangings, but steers clear of the fascinating history of it all in favour of nipping into a shop for a chat with a self-proclaimed witch in truly horrifying eyewear, and then off to a Halloween (Samhain) party that Fry skips out on in favour of bed.
And that’s all we really get on Salem, and indeed, Massachusetts itself. No facts, no opinion, nothing to make the segment even remotely stand out of the crowd. Just for starters, I can’t remember a recent documentary that talked about witchcake, or the judges in the case being specifically advised that it was better for ten witches to escape ‘justice’ than for one innocent person to be condemned.
Isn’t that more interesting than some silly people arsing about in fancy dress?
“Madame, your glasses fill me with scorn and pity and a mild quivering of the bowels. I do apologise. Please, continue your mad ramblings.”
The Boston Tea Party fares no better, dropping ‘no taxation without representation’, but nothing about the actual political situation (Britain trying to weasel its way into getting the colonists to accept that it had a right to tax them, along with details of what the money was being used for, or the lack of representation in the UK at that time), fun trivia like at least one of the Founding Fathers — Benjamin Franklin, I believe — saying the lost money should be repaid, or anything else you won’t already know.
Instead, he goes to a tea party.
Christ.
There’s not only no attempt to dig deeper into things or ask questions that might actually shed light on something other than the media-friendly facade the interview subjects are trying to push, it’s actively avoided. Mitt Romney fielding softball questions is hardly indicative of the political process, especially when Fry comes across as deeply smitten by his ability to push a charming facade and oblivious to being utterly blanked the split-second Romney realises that he’s irrelevant to his campaign stop. A trip to a clubhouse full of gangsters is wasted on namedropping Robert de Niro and explaining a con so phenomenally old, you could probably cut its head off and steal its power via the Quickening. Every stone is left unturned in the search for information, with Fry’s questions so spectacularly softball and facile, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that his interviewees got to write them themselves in exchange for allowing the film crew into their world. Jon Stewart does harsher interviews than this.
Okay, there’s one possible exception involving the Kennedy family. But it doesn’t get much in the way of an answer, so no harm done, eh?
“If I offended you, take solace that one of my legs will soon be snapping like a dry twig. Quite badly. Bones and everything.”
I expect more than this, not just from Stephen Fry himself, one of Britain’s great wits and founts of information, but from the people editing this stuff together, pacing it out, and serving it up. Nothing about this series, at least in its first episode, comes close to justifying itself. There isn’t the scope of Palin’s adventures, or the rather less open-minded journeys of someone like Paul Merton (in India/China), the whimsy of Dave Gorman (Unchained America) the wackiness of Louis Theroux, or the off-beat stuff done by Penn and Teller (Magical Mystery Tour).
Instead, it’s generic, patronisingly simple, and Fry is utterly superfluous in his role as host. It may as well be anyone offering these observations and asking these questions. Hell, it’d probably be better, because then there wouldn’t be so much frustration due to them never bloody being the right ones!
Whether it’s just that they weren’t asked, or ended up on the cutting room floor, I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s the latter, because it’s rare that I see a Stephen Fry anything I don’t enjoy. I’d be interested to see the tie-in book, if only to see if it moves away from this viewers-are-morons stuff in favour of something with Fry’s usual wit and sense of investigative interest… something more akin to Bill Bryson’s amiable ramblings than a program so driven by the research team, they may as well just get in front of the camera and present the damn thing themselves.
Definite thumbs down. Down what, I leave to the imagination.
Things To Do In Venice
A handful of photos from my trip across Europe this week. Can’t get enough of looking at random internet strangers’ snaps? Click here for the full set, including Venice style noir, girls playing with diseased pigeons, the square made famous by Miss Garnet’s Angel, and other random assorted images. Images… like these.
Take a trip around the canals with your own personal gondolier! (Bank loan recommended, but no ear-plugs, since none of them seem to sing any more. A couple did however have a mixing deck and separate singer on board.)
The craze in St. Mark’s Square one afternoon - tourists sprinkling themselves with breadcrumbs and trying to attract pigeons to their arms.
One of those nice arty shots that just turned out terrific, of one of the many beggar women around the Rialto bridge.
Las Vegas 2008: Reviews of the Revues
Aside from going to a tech conference and taking random snaps, I took the opportunity to go see a number of Vegas shows. As regular readers can probably guess, I don’t really gravitate towards things like Jubilee or the Crazy Girls or whatever, but towards the comedies, the magic shows, and sometimes the big budget Broadway On A Casino Budget stuff, which last took me to see the surprisingly fun Avenue Q at the Wynn.
It’s got to be said, seeing shows on your own isn’t a whole hell of a lot of fun. The show itself is only part of the experience — with nobody to chatter about with it afterwards, and typically surrounded by empty seats and other peoples’ private conversations, it can be a pretty lonely affair. The show lasts 90 minutes, and evaporates the second you step outside. Even if you talk to someone who’s seen it later on, they didn’t see that show, and while it’s identical night-on-night, that distance… well, a day or so later, it’s tough for the conversation to get much beyond “I really enjoyed/hated, hated, hated it.”
But enough pointless melancholy. Time to go on about the shows.
Penn and Teller: Living In Vegas (Rio)
I still miss Penn’s podcast/radio show every Monkey Tuesday
No surprises here. Penn and Teller are hands down my favourite magicians, and the only downside of buying a ticket to one of their shows is that you know in advance how wonderful it’s going to be. The duo cycles tricks all the time, so this show wasn’t the one I saw a couple of years ago — it featured some of the same bits, including the now trademark flag-burning, but plenty of new material and tighter versions of older bits.
Hands down the best is Penn’s regular expose of psychic tricks, ‘reading minds’ to work out which jokes have been chosen by members of the audience. This is always entertaining, especially since it’s wrapped in the very important message that psychic powers are simply magic tricks, the only remote excuse being that sometimes the perpetrator isn’t any more aware than the victim.
(All that said, I do think it’s a shame that the second two halves of the trick — the two that do genuinely come across as ‘magic’ — aren’t explained. I can see one argument against doing so, that it leads to the “Yes, but my guy doesn’t do it /that/ way because…” trap, but it does feel like only going half way for the guys who repeatedly blow magic secrets as part of their act).
In short, if you only go to one show in Vegas, this is the one I’d recommend. It’s blisteringly fast, hilariously funny, and all manner of other bits cut and pasted from the Quotewhore Gazette. That’s the one that reviewed Phantom with the word “PHANtastic”, dontchaknow. Christ, I hate some critics…
Mac King Comedy Magic Show (Harrah’s)
...and speaking of Penn’s show, that’s where I heard about King.
The basic rule of afternoon shows is this: they suck. Especially in Vegas, if it’s a good show, it’s on in the evening and costs about a hundred bucks. This one is under $30, it’s on at 1/3pm, and… it’s really good fun.
Comedy is the main focus, with the tricks all well enough performed, but pretty generic fare — starting off with a rope trick and never getting wildly more advanced. What makes it work is King’s constant “Aw, shucks…” banter running throughout, keeping the tone light and the audience laughing its head off. Nothing very exciting in terms of content, just very well-practiced, very tightly honed, laid-back comedy, with none of the overpowering glitz or showiness of, say, Lance Burton or Copperfield. Hands down the best scene involved King’s magic cloak of invisibility — a bright yellow raincoat — and a long Pink Panther style routine involving two newly married members of the audience (one needing a running translation from her husband of exactly what the heck they were doing…)
Which made one thing a real disappointment: two seperate occasions of the mask slipping. The first was fair enough — obvious annoyance at one guy’s mobile phone ringing not once but twice. The second though, that irritated me. After bringing a nine year old kid up onto stage to help with a trick, he promptly stopped to order her family to stop filming it. Hmm. Sure, recording shows is banned, but there’s a time and a place. How much would it have hurt to adopt a naughty expression and say “Well, gee, the casino don’t like it when folks do that, but just as long as you switch it off after this one little trick….”
Aside from that though, it was a really fun surprise — a genuinely enjoyable afternoon show that doesn’t cost the earth, or require so much as a single showgirl to draw in a reasonably small, but intimate crowd. I approve, even though nobody gives a rat’s ass either way. And while I tried to express that sentiment to the guy afterwards, it didn’t work out, because I inevitably find I’m as bad at giving random compliments to strangers as I am at accepting them. But hopefully on some level, my stuttering attempts to say “Thanks, that was great fun…” have some impact anyway.
(UPDATE: Nope.)
Phantom (Venetian)
He’s really more of a stalker than a seducer, if you ask me…
The name says a lot, really. This is the quintessential American…
Wait, what? Yes. Yes, I’m straight. I went to see Phantom of the Opera in Vegas, and I like girls. It’s not impossible. No, really. You done? Moving on then…
Good. This is the quintessential American version of the story, with phenomenal production values, and the accelerator pedal pressed down. In cramming the whole thing into an hour and a half, with an apparent mandate to still do all the songs, it doesn’t miss stuff so much as it spits out the bits that aren’t tied to a song’s rhythm as fast as humanly possible. That leaves Raoul even more pointless than ever, the Phantom instantly belligerent to the point that nobody could ever be caught under his spell, and second-tier characters like Carlotta and Madame Giri reduced to spinning onto stage, delivering a breathless couple of lines, and running off to get ready for their next number.
The explanation of who the Phantom actually is suffers the most from this, with a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ line to cover the whole thing. Also, this time, when the Phantom writes his love Christine into his own masterpiece, Don Juan Triumphant becomes the first ever performance at the Paris Opera to feature three hours of naked lesbian mudwrestling.
That may be a lie.
Abridged and sped-up as it may be, it’s Phantom of the Opera. Just about everyone knows it. What seperates this version is the insane level of money thrown into the production, with the theatre transforming from a worn-out slum to a gilded theatre during the opening number, the giant chandelier not only assembling over the audience in an epic, thundering music number, but later coming crashing down onto the heads of anyone silly enough to pay for the most expensive tickets, and absolutely wonderful scenery — most of which only gets used once, then shunted off-stage to be replaced with something even better looking. The Phantom even gets to have one of his emo, childish diatribes while hanging from the great chandlier itself.
(And yes, he really is a bit of an emo child. I’m still waiting for a version where they cut to the core of it — maybe a duet like:
“Those who have seen your face… are slightly squicked. But it?s not that big a deal…”
“You?re talking shit. (sigh) The murders were too far. Didn’t think you’d mind. The phaaaaaaaaaantom of the opera is sorry. Your place or mine?”
“Um. Thanks, but I’m washing my hair.”
“Aw. At least Hot Babes are Desperate To Meet Me.”
Or maybe not.
Spamalot (Wynn)
They’re Knights of the Round Table, the disappointment, was for-mid-able…
Oh, how I hated this one. It was arse, it was from an arse, I’d rather have eaten my own arse than sit through the second tedious, arse-scented act, even if it meant doing so with a healthy amount of impromptu brown sauce.
The basic problem is Eric Idle, who hasn’t done anything particularly funny in years, and hardly breaks the streak on this one. As the name suggests, it’s a musical reworking of Holy Grail, which in this context means destroying or leaving out most of the funniest scenes, replacing them with overblown dance numbers that get more humour out of the costumes forced on the showgirls than on anything approaching wit. Almost without exception, the joke is in one line, repeated ad infinitum in a largely failed attempt to mock the excesses of musical theatre by repeating all of them and shouting “Look how shit this is! We’re being dull and shit with one-joke songs like we hate! It’s funny because we’re not beating them at their own gaaaaaaame!”
It’s depressing just how ham-handed most of the familiar stuff is, from completely blowing most of the lines, to re-writing stuff like the Black Knight battle and Robin’s minstrel song for the worse. And the world really, really didn’t need two more bloody renditions of Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life — the song so heavy overused that even Idle insisted on writing something different when asked if it could be the theme for the second Discworld game. It all gets laughs, but it’d be hard for it not to, not with an audience so versed in the Python stuff.
Most annoyingly though, by far the worst parts were the new bits, including a terrible Broadway sub-plot replacing the shrubbery of old, an entirely random song about Lancelot being gay, some well choreographed but self-consciously wacky showgirl dances, a new romance for Arthur, and a bizarrely discordent song from the Lady of the Lake bemoaning her lack of stuff to do. I’ve never seen the show before, but I’d bet money that someone meddled with the lyrics to that one — after a funny start, she starts talking about being off stage for almost 30 minutes (30 minutes? Since when do theatre people talk about any period of time longer than 5 minutes and shorter than an Act?), and everything from the rhyming scheme to her cultural references completely went to hell.
The rest of the play joins it shortly afterwards. There’s none of the original movie’s effortless silliness, and the comprehensive way it messes up the source material offers very little in the way of respect for it, Idle’s involvement or not. It’s worse than a straight catchphrase comedy, simply by dint of how much it messes up its own source material — especially when it comes to the remastered stuff that comes straight from the original movie. The French taunting stuck out in particular, with the reading of “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries!” lumbered with a silent, prosthetic “Wait for it…” stuck right in the middle of the line.
Oh, and the Knights Of The Round Table song is absolutely murdered…
As either a stage show or conversion of Holy Grail, it’s just awful — and awful in exactly the same way as the Hitchhiker’s movie. It’s not enough to take a few popular scenes, if all you’re going to do is throw out most of the crucial lines and touches that made them work first time around. And if you are going to get laughs with such tried and tested material, anything that gets added has to be even funnier to have a chance of living up to how funny people remember the original movie as being, even if in reality, most of the Pythons’ output was pretty lame. Instead, there’s a core misunderstanding of how most of their characters were twisted straight-men rather than self-consciously wacky jokers, making the whole thing feel more like the world’s most grandiose school play than a tribute to/conversion of the original film. Too many nods. Too many winks. Nudge nudge, less is more, know what I mean?
Balls to it, I say. Balls to it with knobs on.