Archive for February, 2010
The Tarnished Flaws of Crystal Bearers
How can we describes the rules and conventions of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers without stuttering at least once, not because of its breathtakingly long title, but more so from our hazy insight of its inscrutable structure? We might also wonder how could a game that has been in development for three years, in one of the industry’s most accomplished game companies no less, to arrive to its audience as a project that has seemingly been hurried due to schedule restrains? Obviously, pondering the game’s hapless state is frivolous at this point, but at least we can look back at it with a slightly approving judgment; Crystal Bearers remains audaciously original next to the contrived creations of late from Square-Enix. The regrettable reality, however, is that its novelty deteriorates just as soon we come to grasp its dubious ideas.
Screwball Conventions: The Comedy of Errors and Courtships
Screwball [pronounced skrue’bol] is a noun that means unbalanced, erratic, irrational, and unconventional, in which became a popular slang word in the 1930s. It was applied to films where everything was a juxtaposition: educated and uneducated, rich and poor, intelligent and stupid, honest and dishonest, and most of all male and female. When two people fell in love, they did not simply surrender to their feelings, they battled it out. They lied to one another, often assuming indifferent personas toward each other. They often employed hideous tricks on each other, until finally after running out of inventions, fall into each other’s arms. It was fossilized comedy, physical and often painful, but mixed with the highest level of wit and sophistication, depending wholly on elegant and inventive writing. ~ via Modern Times
My introduction to such subgenre of comedy is very recent, and for someone who openly discloses his affection for romantic comedies, it is indeed a blissful discovery. In the last two weeks I have seen more films that I usually do in a single month, and my enamored admiration for the classics has never been as vigorous as it is now, and that what has led me to write this post in the first place. Truth to be told, however, is that I have had to truncate my original draft in order to make my exposition more concise and piercingly focused. You should grasp the matter of consistency that pervades the films that I have selected for my discussion below, as I try to elucidate meticulously their differences as well as their similarities. The bigger portion of the discussion will be reserved to what I believe is the quintessential screwball comedy, and that is The Philadelphia Story.
