Quickies: Stoner – Still Walking – Dead Space: Extraction
- Book: Stoner by John Williams
John Williams’s Stoner is simply a novel about literature, those who love it, and those who spend most of their lifetime living on its nourishment. William Stoner, whose the book is dedicated to, had spent his childhood and few of his adult years in a most banal of bucolic lifestyles, until unexpected circumstances sought him to the University of Missouri to pursue the academics of agriculture, where he discovered the uncharted love “of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and of the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print.” With a deadpan prose and a discreet evasion from sentimentality, Williams unfolds Stoner’s trials and tribulations in many arresting, though despondent, instances: his marriage miserably fails, his daughter’s life is dishearteningly sheltered, and his career as a professor is hindered and ravaged by discomfited conflict. Still, Williams makes sure to distill Stoner’s daily life with enough reciprocated love and beauty to cope with such miseries, whether through the leaves of literary books or occasional friendships and love affairs. What emerges from the novel’s unhurried chapters is a burdened college professor, whose life is dovetailed with a stern observation on humanity, and how absurd, confounding, beautiful, mundane, and poignant it can be. Stoner is both a celebration of life and an elegy of reality, told with an honest overtone, delicate structure, and profound respect to the minimalism of everyday existence.
- Film: Still Walking by Hirokazu Kore-Eda (2008)
Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s obliquely quiet film, Still Walking, binds three family generations with grief and discontent of an improbable sway that hardly enervates their middleclass aspirations. Reunited around a food table and under a confined home that barely fits them together, the members furtively begin to knit the narrative of their lives, concurrently resurrecting the memories of the eldest son who died upon attempting to save a life of a young boy. The departed son, however, still fully inhabits the consciousness of his parents – and by extension the house, which in its peaceful decay has become a physical manifestation of him – that there is little room for anyone else, even for their younger son whose presence is almost ethereal. Though deceivingly simple and symmetrically filmed, Kore-Eda’s domestic drama rarely becomes monotonic with staid moods and emotions; sometimes it is whimsically funny and other times it is riddled with belated anger and well-tended resentment. Although one can extract mournful contempt for the younger generation or sentimental adoration for the old, Kore-Eda settles his characters’ faults and virtues with equal judgment, allowing them to divulge their truthful sentiments when no one is around, or at least when they’re oblivious of their throwaway remarks and glances. The upshot of such sophisticated simplicity is a heartwarming and peerless tale that is conveyed with painstaking pace, scoped with universal concerns, and restrained with florid images. Still Walking surely destines to leave its viewers awestruck with an entrancing spell while swathing them with pensive contemplations and earthly ruminations.
- Game: Dead Space: Extraction by Visceral Games (Nintendo Wii)
It is a truth that universally acknowledged, that the narrative of video games is mechanically progressed through actions and decisions formulated by the player. That the story generally doesn’t culminate completely until the player clears the obstacles first before receiving new information that adds up, or at least allows him or her to move on. This is perhaps most conspicuous in Visceral Games’ Dead Space: Extraction. Here, the player is literally seated inside the narrative vassal, assigned to survive the horrors that preceded the 2008’s original while filling the plot holes regarding Unitology, the game’s scientific cult, and the conspiracies behind it. Though the immersions and scares are diminished aboard the on-rail vantage, the thrills and grotesqueries have hardly been dialed down. Limbs dismemberment and zero gravity missions are still intact and well implemented, endorsing sufficient tools and mechanics that make the game’s episodic rides a little different than the last. Nostalgia also creeps into the scenery, as several settings of the original are revisited but also opened up, exposing nooks and crannies that the former didn’t even dare to go. Supplementing the main scenario is a challenge option ala Gears of War’s horde mode, which is designed to thrust players into the “good stuff” without forcing them to set through minutes of in-game scenes and dialogues. Surprisingly, it’s these scripted monologues and set pieces that ingeniously distinguish Extraction from other games in the genre. By the time the ride reaches its final stop, odds anyone will walk away attached to the main characters and disturbed by the events that have occurred. It is unfortunate that there’s little incentive to go back, seeing that unlockable difficulties and score attacks are mostly arbitrary and superficial. Still, Extraction is certainly a departure from the archaic model of on-rail shooters, and Visceral Games have done a great effort instilling climatic pacing and storytelling in the nexus of a genre that thrives on quick reflexes and constant monitoring.
