Review - Corto Maltese: La cour secrète des Arcanes

I feel there is an injustice being carried out here. Even as I sit eating my croissants to write this review, I feel I’m missing out on something I should already know. This is not the first Corto Maltese animated movie ever made you see, and the name strikes me as one familiar enough to make it feel like I’m jumping headfirst into a universe I should already know the rules to. The main injustice though, the main problem that prevents me from being completely prepared and level to review this movie is...that I was not born in France.

You really need to be French to watch this movie. More accurately, you will be French if you watch it. It is unavoidable. This is not like Wakfu or Oban Star Racers where France is imitating other countries in style and in subject matter; Corto Maltese is FRENCH. It bleeds it and, through the act of watching it, it bleeds into you too.

Take the main character for example, the eponymous Corto. He has precisely one facial expression: smug asshole, and when he’s not looking like one he’s busy talking like one, mocking people and their possessions wherever he goes with an easy, bemused contempt that seems to come naturally to the French (even though he himself is not). What’s impressive, however, is his ability to display this contempt during the long and wistful silences he creates whenever someone is waiting for him to talk back to them. With absolutely no change in either posture or facial expression you can still see that raw, screaming FUCK YOU come beaming out of him and into the minds of everyone present; audience included. It really is remarkable, and gives him the same kind of watchability as Daniel Craig’s James Bond at the end of Casino Royale, only with less one-liners and more beatific nonchalance.

In a lot of ways, the James Bond franchise would be a fine point of comparison for this movie; the exotic locales of Hong Kong, dealing with the Russians in Siberia and the fallout of war, Corto being a naval officer, the undertaking of a mission and the polite meetings that all the characters have with each other regardless of if they are friend or foe. Everything moves nicely and looks beautiful (including the women, which is important for any good adventure). Some of the effects let it down- the smoke effects from gunfire and the unseen 1950s style ‘gunwounds’ grind otherwise satisfying spouts of combat down into PG and dodgy CGI territory, but those niggles aside the mirror to 007 still holds up well.

What shatters the comparison is how relaxed the movie is. It moves along with the urgency of a noir detective lighting up a cigarette; it doesn’t matter what is going on in any particular scene, how fast-paced the action moves or how massive the scale of the tragedy, the music stays as sedate and as soothing as it was when overlooking the junk-ships in the Hong Kong harbour. The women are bored despite their beauty, their emotions perpetually glazed and subdued, only cracking through to the surface when they can grasp onto something to hate, whether in anger or in sorrow. Everyone is just doing what they are supposed to do in order to pass the time; even those with ambition never seem to be in a hurry to realise them.

This lethargy and stillness even goes so far as to affect the details of the plot. Simply put; nothing is explained adequately and chance plays too large a role. You don’t know what is planned and what isn’t, who is supposed to be meeting who by design and which meetings are by fluke, or even why some people are meeting in the first place. There is a snatch of dialogue early on that encapsulates this phenomenon and the films attitude toward it perfectly in regards to Corto coming in contact with a friend of his.

                Officer: Today, we find his trail: He’s with you. Chance or coincidence?

                Corto: (Placidly) Probably both, Lt. Barrow

Despite this damning underlining of the use of such coincidence in the story, this line...well, in some ways it actually saves the narrative, because in the end even you find yourself adopting this attitude. No-one reacts in the film in regard to these improbable and chance occurrences, as if everyone knew it was going to fall out this way from the beginning, so the audience in turn ends up accepting it too. Because hey, why not?

This is the truly insidious thing about this film; the thing that I spoke of way up there near the start-: You WILL become French if you watch it. You get saturated so much in its tired, serene outlook that in the end, you become every bit the bored French lover just trying to pass the time by watching it. No amount of violence or tension will shock, and rather than attaching to the series of events you will willingly distance yourself, watching everyone play their parts with a cool eye and a clear head. It becomes obvious why the film’s idea of comedy is two people having a friendly conversation; the very notion of people being nice to each other becomes a laughable one. In the end the only thing that will surprise is how long the movie lasts-: like your tedious existence, it seems to go on without end.

And yet. For all of this, it is the movie which has done this. It takes the tricolour and lances it straight through your heart, and damn if that wasn’t its intention. I can’t say that it’s bad; even objectively I can’t say that – the score is nice, the resolution is sound, and even if they don’t show it on their faces the characters show their involvement through their fists. Hell, even Corto is disdainfully compelling as a character. The curtain of sluggishness the movie throws over you may make you feel otherwise, but you aren’t actually just killing time by watching this movie.

Overall, my feelings about it are almost Parisian. It was intriguing but not particularly engaging; I have a fondness for the characters even though I don’t care about them; and despite the fact I don’t know if I even enjoyed it, I do know that I’d happily watch it again and will seek out more of Maltese’s adventures in my own time.

Whatever it is this team has done...they did it well.

Summary: Early 20^th century James Bond starts slow, ends slow, and does it with a style, ease, and arrogance that overtakes its strange sequence-of-events nature.

Wanna watch for yourself? : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgzyHMB_crk

Review - Muramasa: The Demon Blade

It is hard to find good games on the Wii. I don’t mean this in the sense that there aren’t any, there are plenty enough that have been made for the console; but rather that the games stores of England simply...don’t stock them. Don’t advertise them. Maybe they simply don’t understand that the Wii is more than a family and party console. Who knows? Maybe there’s an article in it.

This however is not an article, it’s a review, and when one plays Muramasa one gets the sense that this is a game that could greatly benefit from one...namely because the only people who are going to play this game are the kind of people who actually read reviews.

And that’s fine in this case, because Muramasa is not something for your stereotypical Wii owner. It’s entire design screams ‘niche’, from the side-scrolling action to the fact that they didn’t even dub the dialogue into English (which I’m kind of thankful for, as the voice acting is solid). The atmosphere of the game grindstones you with its foreignness to an overwhelming degree; the enemies come from Japanese folklore, the gods from Shinto and Hindu, the map you traverse is nicely painted in the style of old Edo-period illustrations, the music is airy and alive with traditional wind and string instruments, the weapon-names are unpronounceable. Even the morality of the narrative is distinctly Bushido, from character speeches to plot-points.

Nothing about the design of Muramasa suggests that it would be something that marketers could sell or the masses would enjoy. And it feels...deliberate. One suspects that Vanillaware did not want a vanilla audience for this game; they wanted an audience that would appreciate what they had made: people who knew a good game when they saw one. They didn’t fall between the cracks by accident, they wanted a niche they could call their own.  A niche that they managed to secure the same way they got into it; simple quality.

It’s the combat which most obviously showcases this thread that runs throughout the game; it’s easy to understand, superb in how it flows, and offers a subversive level of depth. You, as either Kisuke or Momohime, switch between three swords, each with their own ‘spirit bar’ which recharges when sheathed and when you collect souls (of dead enemies and just around the place), and which whittles down whenever you use a special ability or parry an attack. Aside from the special, all attacks are done via different analogue stick and A button combos, or, for blocking, just holding the A button down on its own. As I said: simple, but once you get used chaining aerial combos into specials into drawing out another sword (which if you wait a while between switching becomes an AoE attack all of its own), you can sense the mastery and skill required for playing at the high end...and you will want to get there. It’s a game that makes a perfectionist out of you, and you will wince at the end of every fight if you don’t get that ‘completely unscathed’ points bonus, believe you me.

It’s exactly this level of detail in a system so simple that impresses throughout Muramasa. The movement only happens along a 2D plane, but because of that they’ve given themselves ample time to make the lands you run and jump through beautiful. You can only use three swords at a time, but you can forge more from all the souls you collect. You want to heal yourself, then you acquire ingredients that you can cook along the way and bestow different bonuses on your character for a while, like regen or greater attack power. There are single items, too, that you can equip along with your sword that change your two stats or have a status effect on you. These small additions are perfectly complementary to the action and satisfying in their own respects, ensuring that the combative focus of the game isn’t lost but still allowing a pleasurable amount of tinkering for those who enjoy such things.

The stories too speak of this bountiful level of intricacy, if not through the narrative itself then by the fact that each of the two characters has their own completely separate tale, only meeting each other a handful of times (and in a very unlikely place). Rising Star could have very easily just have made one story and given you a character-switch option, but no, they went that extra mile for no good reason; like the little animations that happen whenever you cook something and the way that each character executes the exact same move in a completely different style.

It has to be said, though, that this minimalist style does cause some problems regarding repition though; not every locale has its own unique graphical twists, and though every combat is a joy, it is a joy that always involves the same mechanics. This is alleviated somewhat by being able to duck out of combats that aren’t worth your time, particularly later on, but if you want to kick high-level ass, you’re going to have to kick the small-fries out first, and often. Luckily, the combat is good enough to never devolve this pursuit into a chore, particularly as all you’ve gotta do is lower your guard only slightly to get your teeth knocked in against some of the tougher street-thugs and samurai.

It’s hard to stress how much there is to see and appreciate in this game, and to be honest I don’t want to; its ability to surprise you with extras is probably my favourite thing about Muramasa. It lasts you longer than you think, and gets harder than you could guess (Which is good, because the ‘normal’ difficulty setting gets far too easy after you get used to the controls). ‘Generous’ is the word that springs to mind, and it’s the word that makes this otherwise good game unexpectedly great. Ignore it at your expense, Wii owner.

Summary: Vanillaware have gone through the effort to make a game that punches above its weight, and if you think you’re the kind of guy that can tell a good game from a bad one, then here’s your litmus test.

Gameplay footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXuBwjAv7

Review - Superman : Secret Identity

Not many people understand the appeal of Superman. At least not most writers; and those that do are stymied by people above them and by profit, forcing Crisis after Crisis upon The Man of Tomorrow, each requiring more strenuous use of his super-abilities to super-combat his super-foes. Unfortunately, this line of ‘Superman is great when he’s superpowerful’ is all too often applied in Superman’s titles outside of multi-hero collaborations, where larger foes require larger shows of strength, cleverer use of powers, and so on.  In short, people just want to see Superman be awesome and wreck some giant robots. Be awesome like Batman can be awesome, maybe even with a few one-liners thrown in. It’s fan-food as much as Batman’s ‘prep-time’ is.

Inevitably, with the main continuity absorbed within this bubble of power, it falls to the Elseworlds and one-off AU serials to try and carry the base messages of what makes Superman a great hero. And luckily for us, Superman: Secret Identity more than delivers.

What chiefly concerns Superman: Secret Identity is not the powers of Superman, but the life of Superman. Clark Kent. In this story, Superman is just somebody who Clark Kent is, in the same sense that Tiger Woods is a golfer, or...well, Tiger Woods is black. It’s not a persona separate from himself, and by making this apparent it helps remind us that this is true of most iterations of Superman, including the main version; anyone can have the powers of Superman, it’s only the honest and good person that has them that matters. The acts of superheroism, too, are reeled in and toned down into their most basic, most personal format. He has no supervillains or no alien menaces to battle here; only accidents to rescue people from and robberies to thwart. This close, at times direct interaction he has with the people he is helping really makes plain what it is that Superman is about when it comes to the bare-bones; a really strong, really fast Good Samaritan. A guy who comes along just to help you out, regardless of what kind of person you are.

What really stitches these parts together though is the sombre, thoughtful narration of Clark Kent, channelled through to us by Kurt Busiek. Busiek’s writing style in this is expansive, slow and contemplative; a voice that one imagines a person to have when describing something from a distance. This works well with Busiek’s excellent use and knowledge of panel-space, knowing when to reel back his narrative in order to let the pictures do the talking; most apparent in the large two-page spreads that dot the comic. It all combines to create a wide, confident style of prose that one can easily believe belongs to a man who can pick bullets out of the air.

Stuart Immonen’s artwork is similarly grounded and perfectly complementary; solid, muted pastels shaping the work into something just as vivid as traditional comic colouring but not quite as crisp, the end effect muddying the linework into something more akin to a painting, which slows the action down to match the text; creating humble yet powerful images. Again, the spreads and expanses painted out within the book showcase this excellently; the large aerial views not shrinking the world but revealing it, the beauty, the way it fits together, the scope and scale of the cities mankind has made and the charm of the lands we have never touched. You can really feel that the world through superman’s eyes is something he holds in awe, the same kind of awe a man stood atop a mountain feels when he looks around after having scaled its peak.

The narrative also echoes the triumph of such a feeling. The story pushes its way through events in such a way as that you actively, desperately desire that happy ending you feel the characters deserve. And by doing that, Busiek and Immonen have managed to capture the essence of what Superman should represent to people, something that you see in all the best Superman stories; the feeling that everything is going to be okay, and that this, in itself, is enough. It’s a reassurance in the better qualities of humanity and that any life properly applied can be a fulfilling one.

Towards the end of the book, Superman says ‘Maybe I had a “secret identity,” but when you think about it, don’t we all?’ It’s an easy parallel to make, akin to saying ‘you can have a good life too’, and it’s a message you see in a lot of media. In the grim darkness of the 21^st millennium of comics, however, such an uplifting message is, if not unique to Superman (Captain America also springs to mind), still a sentiment that you simply do not and will not find in the vast majority of superheroes and superheroic adventures. It’s probably Superman’s greatest power; to be wholesome and good without it coming off as cheesy (and it sure as hell ain’t something you can expect Batman to pull off even WITH prep-time).

With this in mind and with Brightest Day rolling happily along, DC would do well to look back at comics like Superman: Secret Identity and remember exactly what an honest, superb and above all heroic story actually looks like. Otherwise I’m afraid this new optimistic silver-age revamp will be both a sad affair and a wasted opportunity. 

Summary: A slow, rambling story that, page by panel, builds into exactly what a Man of Steel should be made of.

The First.

Ah, I always said I wasn't going to make one of these blogs; too many people thinking that what they had to say actually mattered. Fools! Fools I said! Opinions are ten a penny and everyone has them; what makes yours any different?! But here I am...and I'm here to prove myself wrong. Because mine are worth a damn; and if you're here reading this, then you think so too.

...Well I hope you do anyway. I'd be right put-out if you didn't.

Anyway, expect reviews of games both old and new, graphic novels, and maybe even the odd short story compilation. Thoughts, expo and festival commentary and articles will also be included, though hopefully not too much of the former will go off-tack into the land of Whimsy; lets try and keep things professional, yeah?

...Yeah.