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oh man I'm excited for perpetual Film Corner. I actually took a community college class on noir a long time ago, it was great. I'm assuming the next one is The Maltese Falcon, but then there's a couple of others that are almost mandatory. Obviously LA Confidential (Bobbin you should also mention the book and Ellroy's work a little bit), but also Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Double Indemnity, and The Big Sleep.
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Apr 1, 2016 22:38
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yaaaay, The Big Sleep's next! That's really fun to talk about, for ~REASONS~. but talking about The Maltese Falcon, I think it's only fair to talk about how Dashiell Hammett's writing had a profound effect on the development of film noir, crime stories, and detective fiction in general. Of course The Maltese Falcon was a great film adapted from what was already probably his greatest novel (of the five he wrote). But The Thin Man was also fantastic, and spawned an entire film series, all of which are worth checking out thanks to the magnetic chemistry between William Powell and Myrna Loy. The second Thin Man film has an utterly fantastic villain reveal, too. And then two of Hammett's other novels were tremendously influential - The Glass Key and Red Harvest. Although the former was directly adapted into a film starring Alan Ladd, its true influence is in providing sort of a blueprint for other detective stories involving political corruption. So while you may not have read The Glass Key, in essence you've seen or read the story elsewhere. Yojimbo, the classic Kurosawa film, is said to have been inspired by both The Glass Key and Red Harvest, both being about a lone figure caught in between two evil forces who manipulates both of them to bring them down. While some people said Red Harvest was more influential, I think The Glass Key explains Yojimbo better, as it's more positive about there being good people in the world worth protecting. And of course Sergio Leone blatantly ripped off Kurosawa for A Fistful of Dollars. both novels also strongly influenced the Coens' Miller's Crossing. The title of the Coen Brothers' first film, Blood Simple., is taken from a line in Red Harvest. Red Harvest is one of two of Hammett's novels and most of his short stories featuring a nameless figure called the Continental Op as the protagonist. The Continental Op was an influential precursor to many other hardboiled detectives, and appeared earlier than any of them, showing up in a short story published in 1923. He is cynical, and deft at manipulating people, but he maintains something of a hope for finding the good in people even as he operates in a dark, corrupt world. In Red Harvest, he finds an entire town seeped in corruption (appropriately named Poisonville) and undertakes to play both warring factions against each other to essentially eviscerate the entire town. There's a strong argument that Red Harvest heavily influenced gangster films, in addition to the effect it had on noir and westerns. also, Dashiell Hammett himself is a tremendously fascinating person, but I don't have the background to really talk about that in as much detail as I think he deserves, so I hope someone else can step up.
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Apr 5, 2016 01:56
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Verbose posted:I like how the chief is basically a 1:1 of the chief from L.A. Confindential That was literally all I could think hearing him talk. He sounded ALMOST EXACTLY like James Cromwell in LA Confidential.
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Apr 5, 2016 08:04
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:I'm reasonably certain the developers found a list of obscure American names, because they're only going to get more unusual from here. You know, I appreciate that, I think it gives the game a little verisimilitude to have people with unusual names. Watching the sleeping_dogs LP, most of the names of random passerby that came up were mash-ups of pretty common first and last surnames, giving a weird homogeneity to the bystanders.
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Apr 7, 2016 03:17
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Historical fiction risks audience offense if it's TOO accurate, I think. People are often under a misapprehension that the past wasn't that bad, and things are now as they were even 20 years ago. This is especially problematic for writing the protagonist of historical fiction. Too much like people of the time, and they risk alienating the audience. Too little, and they seem like a time traveler from our time. Which is why a significant amount of historical fiction involves time travelers, because it skirts that whole problem. If the game were completely accurate to LA law enforcement circa 1947, it would probably be pretty upsetting for a general audience that doesn't know their history.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:02
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Jeez that was a sloppy plot to murder a guy, like did they not realize autopsies are a thing? I assume we're going to see far more clever murders as the game goes on, because that was a bush league mistake.
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Apr 26, 2016 06:39
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hahaha, wow, you really laid into Intolerance there, Bobbin. That has to be one of my favorite lectures of yours so far, up there with the biological nature of cooperation lectures. Also, who the hell said Metropolis wasn't a cop-out centrist film? It's so well made, but the end moral is so dumb.
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May 11, 2016 04:54
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Chimera-gui posted:I was hoping someone else would say it so I wouldn't have to but yeah the reason people stop trying to treat stupidity with anything other than contempt is because historically speaking trying to do otherwise does not work because any attempt to provide minority perspectives is going to be immediately tossed out just on the principal of being the opposition to status quo. This is a gross oversimplification of both Bobbin's argument and history, but I don't want to get into a drawn out, circular-firing-squad type of slapfight. I don't believe treating all prejudiced people with contempt is productive in the slightest, and neither do the civil rights leaders that actually get poo poo done. They use shame and public pressure, but they don't demonize, and they don't try to make people feel subhuman, because that's just turning the oppressed into the oppressor. Civil rights ain't about that, it's about achieving an equitable society. Intolerant people often have to be dragged kicking and screaming into progress, but you can do that without dehumanizing them the way they dehumanize the people they don't tolerate. It's like, I dunno, if a persecuted minority, victims of a terrible genocide, got their own place, and in no time at all started treating the locals like poo poo, eventually walling them off, declaring them second-class citizens, and bulldozing their homes, to build big houses for their people. This is purely a hypothetical, you understand. We must end intolerance, but we can't do that through simple inversion of the classic power dynamic.
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May 11, 2016 06:23
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I'll have to add The Big Combo to the list of films to look into, because drat those screenshots look lovely, it must look even better in motion. a little bit of a shame that the plot's so generic. Also I'm super-excited about the next one. Hopefully you mention in The Story about the Story all about the director and maybe mention the other landmark films he's done that people really should check out, namely Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, Some Like it Hot, and The Apartment, although it's possible you may be covering the first one as well. On a game related note, I kind of love what the game is going for here in terms of Cole's boss being happy with quick case resolutions, ignoring how much just doesn't fit. But I feel like they've strung this on a bit too long, and someone playing the game might start to get real frustrated that the game doesn't even allow you to follow up on some obvious leads (like actually going to the Crystal Ballroom).
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Jun 15, 2016 06:47
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It seems like a lot of the problems with this game can be blamed on rushed development. but to be honest, the entire arc of the Homicide Desk was kind of dumb, and I wish Cole and Rusty had been dealing with literally any other kind of homicide case than "psycho serial killer straight out of an episode of Criminal Minds". The ideas they were trying to get across probably could have been communicated without having to frame like, six loving people. also Earle stabbing Cole in the back could've been developed a bit better. and the game's overarching plot heavily hinges on the player reading the newspapers, but it doesn't seem like you absolutely have to read them, so people that accidentally skip them miss out on important exposition.
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Sep 16, 2016 02:33
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:"Rushed" isn't the right word to use for a project that took eight years to publish. oh dear. That's...wow. From everything I've heard, AAA game development sounds like a nightmare, and I can't imagine why anyone would really want to be involved in it at a high level. I mean, being a programmer or something wouldn't be that bad, but the managers and writers must have miserable jobs.
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Sep 16, 2016 04:04
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Great LP, Bobbin. It's really interesting watch a playthrough of a game like this, with so many weird flaws, and yet alive with ideas and possible innovations. It's a shame it's probably a dead end and nothing will take cues from it. I'd love to see a refinement of its ideas and gameplay. Also, L.A. Confidential is dope, both the book and the movie, although the book has some very strange plotlines that the movie wisely excised. but Ellroy is a magnificent writer with a tremendous sense of place, and a remarkable ability to make even total shitheels compelling and sympathetic. One thing worth mentioning is that L.A. Confidential is the third novel in James Ellroy's "L.A. Quartet". The first was The Black Dahlia, which we've talked about, to some extent. The second was The Big Nowhere, which introduced the character of Dudley Smith, and featured a character named "Buzz Meeks" as the protagonist. So the name was reused for the movie of LA Confidential in a somewhat different context. In the novel of L.A. Confidential, Dudley Smith avoids prosecution for his crimes, and he's brought down in the final book in the L.A. Quartet, White Jazz, by Exley, who became deputy chief of the LAPD as a result of the Nite Owl case's resolution. Ellroy has just started a second L.A. Quartet, with Perfidia, which is set around when Pearl Harbor happened, and features a younger Dudley Smith as one of the characters. One L.A. Confidential connection that really stuck out to me from this game is that in mannerisms, Cole's boss at the Homicide desk is really reminiscent of James Cromwell's portrayal of Dudley Smith in the film.
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Sep 20, 2016 06:25
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