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I retweeted this a few days ago when Mike Russell posted it, so you might have already seen it, but I've been watching this video of GTA4 with wheel friction turned negative several times a day and it just does not get old. ( Cut for embed: )

Seriously, flawless nightmare fuel.

Good Ending / Bad Ending

Okay, let's post a pair of essaylets tonight! This one's been simmering for a while, and it just came up again in a conversation with roler, so I'll get it out for public comment:

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The ending of the Scott Pilgrim movie kind of sucks, and that actually doesn't really bother me. Which might surprise those who've heard, for example, my insufferable Howl's Moving Castle spiel. In short, I think the way the movie engages with video game grammar and video game logic allows multiple endings to harmoniously co-exist in a way not possible when those methods of story aren't invoked. (Wayne's World notwithstanding, because Wayne's World is special that way, and besides, it doesn't work quite the way I'm talking about here.)

Which is to say, video games are a narrative form where multiple endings are equal peers in an integrated whole. Sure, there's usually a "best" ending, but if you do a perfect playthrough to the good ending and then never touch the game again, you actually haven't experienced the whole game. Multiple passes, some of them "failed," are expected and accepted on the road to completion.

This lets the Scott Pilgrim movie diverge radically without becoming an "alternate" take on the story; it remains an integrated part of a single work. Without importing the concepts of branching paths and multi-pass completionism from video games, any ending to a story is necessarily the only ending, which polarizes readers and viewers and forces adaptations to exist in private worlds apart from their sources.

Anyway, the ending of Scott Pilgrim: The Movie is the perfectly legitimate ending that happens if you don't do any of the sidequests* and don't manage to keep Crash and the Boys alive through the fight with Patel. Yeah, it sucks; play better next time! (i.e. read the comics.)

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* Ramona's fights at the library and Lee's Palace, learning how to fight girls, meeting Lisa at the mall (necessary for moving in with Ramona at the end of the Roxy chapter), helping Kim move house, the recording sidequest, facing Nega Scott early enough that you can unlock the Power of Understanding once you get to Gideon, getting a fucking job**, etc.

** Zvi, who hadn't read the comic at the time, pointed this one out: "I do think it's interesting that this is the only movie I can think of where the hero's sole reward at the end of the film is romantic fulfillment. He doesn't have a job, he doesn't have a place to live, he doesn't have a calling: all he's got going forward is Ramona. On the one hand, I disapprove of that as a conclusion for anyone, but, on the other hand, if that sort of thing is going to say with us, I think it should be an ending for boys, too."

Going Faster Miles an Hour

Next up: Speed Racer.

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Okay, so the first time I tried to watch Speed Racer*, I made the mistake of doing that "Megavideo" thing, where it seems to magically want to show you a movie for free but then it cuts out after an hour and tries to make you pony up. And I was like, "Yeahhhhh maybe I'll just find three bucks and rent it on iTunes instead for a +8 to my save against bullshit." So I did! And then I forgot about it until it started warning me I had like four days left, so I watched it on the 6th.

And wow, what a deliciously broken movie! It was completely insane. I liked it a lot, and with absolutely no irony. Yes, it's silly as hell, but it's an incredibly ambitious work of silliness and how can you not love it for that? It is glorious.

• That thing where they run different parts of the same shot at different speeds and it kind of makes you queasy? Aces.
• The wipes. The CONSTANT WIPES. Wow.
• I don't think I've seen anything structurally similar to that part where the same clips are functioning simultaneously as conditional future tense, present tense (maybe), and past tense. In fact, it was complicated enough that I probably described it incorrectly, but it was totally legible in situ, which was impressive as hell.
• In a way, the movie is there to teach you how to be enthralled at ending credits that consist of a chimp thrashing around in a go-cart over the top of the dimensional gate sequence from 2001.
• I kind of love that it's a non-functional piece of SF. Based on the positioning of past technological reference points, it seems to be taking place now or earlier, but there doesn't seem to be any way to get there from here, or from slightly earlier than here, or for that matter from the 1940s.
• The face Royalton makes right at the very end of that confrontation between him and Speed is one of the most perfect things I've seen on a screen. So hilarious.

I actually have a lot of lingering questions about to what extent we're supposed to take the candy-colored insanity of this world as literal and to what extent it's a reflection of the characters' emotional landscape. In part, this came to my mind with something someone (either Kip Manley or Mike Russell or Bill Mudron) said about how Scott Pilgrim may have been the first unqualified success of this new conception of what visual FX are good for, but Speed Racer was the first one to land on that shore at all, and people will evaluate it very differently in just a few years. In Pilgrim, we're very much wearing Scott-goggles for the entire film, although Scott-goggles are us-goggles for much of my generation and the FX are always functioning at least partially literally anyhow. (No matter what else a zombie functions as, it's still also a flesh-eating zombie.) And I can't shake a suspicion that there's something kinda sorta similar going on here, but it doesn't map very cleanly at all, and I'm having a hard time tracking it down.

Anyway, Speed Racer! Definitely worth a watch, especially if you saw the previews, said "eww," and haven't thought about it since. Give yourself some time to calibrate to its aesthetic, and check it out.

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* The 2008 Wachowski version, we're talking, just to make sure we're on the same page here.