Bergsonian Critique

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.

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Perhaps the best approach to gloss over the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel is by introducing this snippet from “Fitzgerald’s Radiant World,” a critical piece written by Thomas Flanagan of The New York Reviews of Books:

This Side of Paradise had had a success, which was almost freakish, capturing the aspirations of a generation and especially of those within that generation who, like its author, aspired to be great writers. Reading it today, one blanches at its emotional and rhetorical excesses, and yet, as Matthew Bruccoli says, it was received as “an iconoclastic social document—even as a testament of revolt. Surprisingly, it was regarded as an experimental or innovative narrative because of the mixture of styles and the inclusion of plays and verse.” It was the autobiographical first novel of a very young writer who took himself very seriously, and who had not provided for his hero those escape hatches of irony . . . But it was not, by any stretch, the work of a man who planned a career as a writer of commercial fiction.

Indeed, even after more than ninety years of its publication, This Side of Paradise doesn’t quite exude a nostalgic archaism of narrative prose as one might generally expect, nor it purposefully exercises an ambition in creative writing or a contract to a lucrative career. While the novel might have laid the groundwork for Fitzgerald’s repute as a lyrical and clever innovator, the very stylistic elements he strings -episodic narrative, wavering point of view, stream-of-consciousness, the almost mystified mixture of prose, verse, and dramatic writings – are defiantly and consistently original for anyone who just started reading his oeuvres. His ostensibly experimental narrative, paired with a keen study of American contemporary in adolescence and young manhood, certainly cements This Side of Paradise as a perpetual classic of whenever and wherever.

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“You’re only thinking of yourselves,” cries the devious, hulking Nazi to the others passengers of the lifeboat during a vertiginous typhoon sequence, “you’re not thinking of the boat.”

That line best highlights Lifeboat’s maxim, Alfred Hitchcock’s World War II film, which points to the cause for all of the dangers to follow. That the “enemy” utters that line made it particularly indignant in 1944 (when critics lashed out at Hitchcock for his unpatriotic portrayal of Brits and Americans), and perhaps it still resonates today: we (as in anyone who’s not a Nazi) may have rallied together, expressed our contempt after the many hours of history lessons, and deservingly ridiculed the Nazi regime to great measures but, since then, we’ve certainly become more petulant, materialistic, and egotistical than ever.

The funny question in all of this is who would’ve pegged Hitchcock for a moral humanist? Certainly not me, I would like to believe that my universal humanism is more intricate to be correlated with a man whose métier was the psychological horrors that distort the glam of the American/British bourgeoisie. But I digress, though I’d like to acquiesce with the the selective consensus that, despite the film’s lack of technical excellence, this is probably the most characters-driven film within the director’s voluminous canon.

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• 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.

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When it comes to predictability in cinematic storytelling, the revenge variety is perhaps the most stagnant and superficial; the film usually features an afflicted protagonist (or a group of individuals) who has been robbed of something quite precious, leaving him (or her) devastated for quite some time until he musters the conviction (or seizes an opportunity) to take matters into his own hands. As an audience we might not relate to such extreme measures, but our delight from watching a couple of hours of blood gushing out of the screen (because killing is almost inventible) is often tasty despite the tasteless execution. However, in Denis Dercourt’s aptly titled The Page Turner (“La tourneuse de pages” in French) the retribution doesn’t proceed as generally expected, the journey doesn’t dwindle on grotesque executions, and the avenger doesn’t necessarily evoke our sympathy, but the aftermath, regardless, remains permanently destructive.

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Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was released in North America on November 20^th, 2007, and two years later, I got to play it for the first time…

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It would be fair to confess that my adulation for Revolutionary Road had galvanized my impulses to purchase the rest of Richard Yates’s oeuvres, possibly as a self-conceivable mean to prop up his forgotten works even by the tinniest margins. I am fixated on reading them sequentially by their years of publication, simply to get a sense of Yates’s ruminations and intents after he went through each of his stories, and to observe whether he would do anything to circumvent his myopic endeavors and low sales. After a collection of short stories and two novels later, it seems hardly the case, so far, that he lost his domestic realism in favor of maintaining a lucrative career in writing. He might have lost some of his sensibility in A Special Providence and Disturbing the Peace, his stories, however, shrewdly remain as vehement and uninhibited as they come.

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• This post is dedicated to my cousin, who has graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in film production from SIU this Saturday.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring, is pretty much a film about the forces of nature as it is a depiction of human’s frailty, and the consequences that follow when childhood innocence gets tainted with the lust of adulthood. Renowned South Korean film director and extraordinaire, Kim Ki Duk, has masterfully guised his meditative picture with a Buddhist’s stern scrutiny; it is not quite loquacious in judgment, though subtle in wisdom, harsh in discipline, and profuse with quaint imageries. Despite his hypnotic, naturally visualized storytelling, Kim’s message in his feature is critical, intense, and rather pervasive. While it is easy to conclude that the film is an elaborative domino effect (and possibly it is), the themes and the intricate progression of human’s growth are doubtlessly successive.

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It has been almost three months since I finished Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, a modern tale of magical realism that echoes a comparable stupefaction to “Alice in the Wonderland”. Though, unlike Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, Chronicle evokes both delightful musings of an ordinary man and sometimes a grotesque depiction of a sympathetic nature of Japan’s involvement during World War II. What started as a mundane detective tale becomes something far extraordinary, but Murakami is by no means a sensationalist in his writing, rather a tranquil surrealist who lets his readers to freely wonder in his imagination. While the book is relatively fragmented, the chaos that engulfs Murakami’s work is orderly and constructed, and even though it leaves too many unanswered questions to ponder, Chronicle manages to linger a sense of completion and satisfaction behind.

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It appears it’s rather easy to criticize (or even ridicule) the chief titles of Final Fantasy games these days, considering that the release date of Final Fantasy XIII is creeping closer now. And of course, the easiest approach to do just that is by nitpicking the games’ plot and characterization, which might allude to a sense of criticism when, in actuality, it’s a mere trivia comprised of poor judgment and attention to cheap laughs (1UP’s childish “Top 5 Most Irritating RPG Protagonists” is an excellent contender). That doesn’t mean Final Fantasy games are exempted from criticism, but seldom have I ever read a practical critique of the games’ narrative and characters that not only is well-reasoned and valid but at least convincing.

Final Fantasy VIII also seems to be the favorite title among Final Fantasy critics (though the word “critics” might elevate their merit than necessary). Few of their assessments are legit but most of them are crudely vague. Saying the characters are “annoying”, or the plot is “awful”, or the gameplay is “broken” without giving any elaborative examples, or at least semi-extensive clarifications, doesn’t indicant anything evident on their conclusion. Of course, it is always the main character that gets the short end of the stick, and in this case, it’s always Squall Leonhart, the gunblade-wielding protagonist.

Quite the opposite, Squall, personally, is one of the most tenderly written leading characters I’ve ever encountered in an RPG. His lone wolf persona is nicely justified in his arc (more on that that later) and Kazushige Nojima, the writer of Final Fantasy VIII, made sure to disclose enough credentials for him to be as persuasively detached and compassionless toward the rest of his teammates, specially in the initial stages of the story. A specific plot device among many in Nojima’s design in Final Fantasy VIII is the prospect to perceive Squall’s inner thoughts and contemplations, which cleverly exposes and flourishes his character to the player than he candidly allows. Yet, Squall isn’t resistant to influence; indeed, he inevitably and willingly becomes to accept his comrades, confess his love to Rinoa, and assume his role as the student leader of the military school of Balamb Garden more earnestly. The following paragraphs will succinctly particularize this transformation by examining Squall’s character progression in the plot. In other words, spoilers are abundant.

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