Intouchables

- or how I restored my faith in humanity.

I watched Intouchables yesterday. It's a heartwarming, wonderful, brilliant movie and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everybody. I'll try not to spoil the movie as I go through the whys, but, once again, beware of spoilers. If you want to see the movie without any of it being spoiled, read this after you've seen it.

So, why is Intouchables such a good movie? Off the bat, it opens with an entrancing scene, immersing the watcher in the beautifully fitting soundtrack by Ludovico Einaudi. It's also fittingly cast, thoughtfully directed, well screened and the characters feel real. It makes sense they would feel real - the movie is based on a true story, after all.

The movie in and of itself isn't anything new or astounding: it's a growth story, it's about friendship, caring and courage. It's something that we've seen a thousand times before, in children's movies, in fantasy settings, in good-willing whole-family deals and all around in the kind of movies that air on tv during christmas. What makes Intouchables special is how real it feels. The characters act like real people: they're not cardboard cutouts, they do mistakes, tell horrible jokes, fumble and pick themselves up. They're afraid, they're in pain, they care.

And sometimes they dress up to smoke.

What made Intouchables spectacular to me was the amount of feeling they'd been able to put in there. There's some bumbling foolishness in the movie, but it's not the Adam Sandler -kind, it's real. It's the kind of goofy you might pull with a friend, and it's heartwarming. There's a scene where Philippe and Driss cruise around with the motorized wheel chair, and the whole point of it (atleast it seemed to me) is to make them feel real, feel like people.

What's most spectacular is how much you can feel the people care for each other. Even if it is underlined, even if it is "just a movie", it's based on a true story. Here we come to my secondary title. To me, watching a movie about people caring about each other - total strangers to begin with - that's based on real people, real friends, was the most spectacular thing. To know that there are people like this out there made the movie that much better.

My recommendation to everyone is to watch Intouchables if you haven't. Watch it alone, watch it with a friend, watch it at home or in the movies. Just watch it, laugh and cry and feel with the movie. It's definitely worth it.

Accumulated worth

When I first started this blog, it was supposed to be named Accumulated Worth (as might be seen in the url). I chose something a bit lighter, but I've felt I should explain both the namesakes, because there's a rather interesting thought (atleast to me) behind them both.

The name of the blog, Vesinokkaeläimen Viinakaappi, translates to the Platypus' Booze Cabinet. This actually spawned largely from the want of an alliterative name and the need to think of something funny. I like platypi, I find the conjointment of different qualities charming.

You know, like this.

And Booze Cabinet's are the place you go to for ideas, relief, oblivion... Kind of what I use this place for, only the other way around. In the subtitle (or ingress, maybe) there used to be more of the platypus' flat mentioned, other places that this blog might be. And it's true, this place is a bit of a hodge-podge, a place where I come to vent, think and comment. This place isn't really aimed on some specific audience, nor is it a theme blog. It just is, and you kind of have to accept it for what it is or skim most of the stuff.

The url, accumulated worth, comes from Terry Pratchett's book, The Unseen Academicals. According to the cover, the book is about football and life in general, and while I don't so much care about football, I was very interested in what Sir Terry might have to say about life in general. I'll try to avoid spoilers, but if you intend to read the book and don't want to spoil the fun, you might want to to leave this for later.

The protagonist -  or atleast one of them - is Mr. Nutt, a (probably) goblin working in the candle vats of the Unseen University. The workers of the candle vats are, all in all, an odd bunch, basically refuse and lost souls from the world above. Amongst them is the hard-working, well-mannered Mr. Nutt, who is kept at arm's length mostly for what he is - a goblin.

Mr. Nutt can be seen as a commentary on many things, as can most things that Sir Terry puts on paper. What struck me the most about the character, though, is the dogma he lives by. There's a question that Mr. Nutt keeps on asking, especially towards the end of the book, when he believes himself to be a burden, a hindrance or a problem. "Have I accumulated worth?" All of Mr. Nutt's relationships are based on this little question, "Have I accumulated worth?" In Mr. Nutt's world, worth is something you must accumulate. You must be useful, helpful, skillful and able. If you aren't you don't have worth. Worth isn't inherent, it isn't handed out freely. Worth must be gained, and it must be stocked, because, like from a badly seamed flask, it will pour out eventually.

It's not a very happy view of the world, and it's not one that I would like to see people live by, not fully. But I can see worth in it, and I can see it in myself and the people around me. I think it is good, from time to time, to ask if you have accumulated worth to other people. Have you been useful, or helpful? I think everyone should be, whenever they can, but not because of worth - because it's the right thing to do. But this is a good way to try to keep measure of it.

What is worse, however, is that I see this around be a lot. It's mostly subconscious, something that's been hardwired into us so deep that we don't even notice it anymore. Ask someone about their weekend, for example. "Oh, I did nothing, I just sat at home." Now, if it was the first weekend in months that the person did this, the follow-up might be "and it was nice and relaxing for a change." But if it's the second, or third weekend of this in a row, the follow-up will much more probably be "I really feel like I should have done something" or "I'm so lazy all the time, it's horrible" or something along those lines.

We've been taught to think that worth is doing stuff, being busy. And, by model and teaching, we've been taught that we should be busy all the time, lest we lose worth. If we're not productive, we're not just neutral. We're a hindrance, a load on everyone else. We can't possibly take time for ourselves, for we would seize to accumulate worth for that time.

I think everyone should think about accumulating worth - it's good to think of someone else from time to time - but we should also think about ourselves. When it starts to get too hairy, ask yourselves: is worth all there is to it?

Interactive storytelling

I wish to talk about storytelling in games - a subject I started on last week - by using a specific case example, The Walking Dead. I'll try to avoid spoilers about the plot, but those who have not played The Walking Dead and wish to get the most of the most out of it (and haven't been spoiled by anyone else) might want to stop reading here. Done? Alright, let's get going.

According to Telltale Games, the company behind The Walking Dead, it's an "adventure horror game series". Telltale Games has made episodic license adventure games their thing, with Tales of the Monkey Island and the Sam and Max franchise being the biggest ones until TWD. Now, The Walking Dead is based on Robert Kirkman's original comic book story that really hit the charts with Frank Darabont's live action series. It's basically a story about a zombie apocalypse, but with a sort of a twist. It actually focuses on the stories of the people that have survived instead of the surviving itself (for these, check every other zombie game from Left 4 Dead to Resident Evil).

The Walking Dead is a blast from the past - an adventure game. Adventure games were really in in the 1990's and for a while afterwards, but they've all but died out in the last five to eight years. Telltale Games is all about reviving this (back in the day) loved genre, and they're doing a more or less good job. What The Walking Dead isn't is as huge and unforgiving as the old adventure games - it's more like an interactive story where your choices count - it actually all but says it itself. It also plays pretty much like this.

The Walking Dead isn't that player intensive to play: lot of the events that come and go in the game are timed, even discussions: you only have a limited time to pick a talk option, or to solve a situation. What it focuses on are the choices: they're not easy, not black and white and they really do matter. The other characters remember what you say, and it changes how they speak and react.

The Walking Dead has an interesting feature: at the end of each episode, it takes five moral choices from the chapter and tells you how everyone else chose. I find it curious, since it anchors the already moral options into a larger frame. What did others do?

To me, The Walking Dead doesn't seem so much like a game - it's more like an interactive story and a pshychological exercise than anything else. If you needed to choose between two bad situations, which would you pick? If you needed to save someone and didn't have time to save everyone, who would you save? Who would you side with in a fight? How will you justify your choices to yourself?

I really like The Walking Dead. It's not much as a game, but it's a really good way to have a look at your own morals. I suggest it to everybody: it's a game for that will make you cringe, laugh, be angry and cry. It's sad moments are actually sad, the good moments actually good. The characters are real: they feel human and you can understand their choices - the why and how of their doings. It's got Clementine, probably the only six-year-old that's felt like a person instead of a midget stick-on you'd want to kick back to the sea. Try it, you might like it.

Game writing

Gaming gets trodden on sometimes because it's "badly written", "stupid" or some other, rather similar descriptive terms. And it's true, often games are a bit stupidly written: the plots are overly evident, simplistic and clumsy - and gamers easily forgive this kind of stuff in favor of playability, because, as an acquaintance of mine put it, "you don't have time to listen to follow the plot if you're too busy shooting everything in sight."

I find this unfortunate. I wish that gamers - the core group that actually consumes games and game culture - would demand something better. Unfortunately a large portion of gamers are happy as clams to simply get the next FIFA, NHL and Battlefield off the shelves, which really isn't that good for originality, risk taking and cool new ideas in the gaming business.

Luckily, the fringe, underground and indie markets are slowly gaining ground. Services like the XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade), PSN Store (PlayStation Network Store) and Steam have made it possible for anything that seems marketable to be on the market. You could make your cool ideas into a real, finished product but have no means of marketing it? Now you do.

Now, "indie" or any other of these labels doesn't mean a game is good. Not even close. But it means that original ideas finally have a foothold on the business: you don't have to try to get a footing through the coder scene (although it still helps) - you can go to a broader audience straight off the bat.

This means there's a lot of, well, not that good games (I'd rather not use the term swill, although sometimes it feels apt) circulating out there: topical spinoffs of something that was good, with very minor tweaks to the gameplay as such. But it also means that sometimes, you find absolute diamonds: blasts from the past, with a polished, "now" kind of a finish; storytelling treasures, psychological exercises made interactive, explorations into the human psyche...

Game writing is often mediocre and sometimes downright bad. But sometimes it gives you a slice of life that is worth a good book or a great movie. I've played games that have made me laugh, cry and live the plot with the characters. On this topic, I'll be pondering the Walking Dead (the game, not the comic or the tv series) next time.

Copyright Culture

Yesterday, the Europian Union Court of Human Rights made a declaration about the Copyright monopoly laws. Here's a news clipping about it.

"The European Court of Human Rights has declared that the copyright monopoly stands in direct conflict with fundamental Human Rights, as defined in the European Union and elsewhere. This means that as of today, nobody sharing culture in the EU may be convicted just for breaking the copyright monopoly law; the bar for convicting was raised considerably. This can be expected to have far-reaching implications, not just judicially, but in confirming that the copyright monopoly stands at odds with human rights."

You can read the full article here:
http://falkvinge.net/2013/02/07/court-of-human-rights-convictions-for-file-sharing-violates-human-rights/

I'm not going to discuss the whole article here, so I'll just summarize some points a bit outside it's area that I found important as well. In short, the European Convention outlines that an individual has the right to produce, reproduce and share culture and the current monopoly laws concerning copyrights limit this freedom, which is considered a base right of all human beings. It's a bit more defined and refined version of the 1st Amendment, for any American (or other) readers that may not be familiar with it.

There's been discussion about how the monopoly laws could be considered unjust, even degrading towards a single person, persona and personal rights, but no one's really done anything about it. Until yesterday. The EU Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg isn't exactly a small fish in this pond: it could be considered the single largest authority on issues concerning human rights, since the UN council and other chairs don't really give declarations anymore.

Some have lauded this as a victory for online piracy, which it is not. Piracy is still illegal, as it should be, but an individual is allowed to use and share culture without fear of unjust prosecution, what could be considered corporate blackmail and wholly unbased reimbusements that will leave an individual and his seventh son's seventh son in debt to a company that serves no one's rights, despite very vocal claims otherwise. It's still possible to get convicted for sharing content clearly owned by someone else, but now there needs to be a reason to do so in the EU.

What this is, is the first step towards copyright laws and copyright culture that could be viewed as even close to modern. It is a victory of the individual and the culture over unfeeling corporate power. (Not a socialist victory, just an individual one, mind.)

It's a start.

Underlying themes

I'm not one to ban old books for racist or maybe-racist content: if we block the past, the risk of repeating it grows exponentially. Yes, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Robinson Crusoe and Huckleberry Finn display black people in rather unfavorable light. But that's how they were displayed back then.

If we block the popular culture of the past, we're sort of erasing history as we do it. And if we refuse to acknowledge that our history wasn't all sunshine and lollipops we run the risk of repeating it. What I'd much more rather see is people reading these books, Ten Little Nigger Boys still on the cover of the now Then There Were None and people actually discussing these things in their cultural context.

There's a movie out with just such a theme now: Django Unchained. I haven't seen it yet, but I can make a few educated guesses: it's a Tarantino movie, so it will be an overfluous splatter fest with a perverse liking to violence. I hope it will be a good story that forces people to think as well, but we'll see. No matter the presentation, the point is very much valid: cultural products are this are necessary if we are to remember the lapses in humanity that have happened before.

I think that even more important than having these sort of overt cultural products that point fingers and use light-up billboards is discussing the underlying themes in those that aren't as self-evident. As a case example, I'll use everyone's favorite dead guy at the moment, J. R. R. Tolkien.

You know, the guy that wrote this.

... and this.

Mr. Tolkien wasn't exactly a writer as such: he was an academic, a linguist and a historian (mostly in literacy), and very good at both. Tolkien is mostly the father of much of modern fantasy literature, both in good and bad. Tolkien was a good writer, although his focus in building worlds and languages made his stories a bit huge. The influence he had was in how he took classic folklore, changed it, and sometimes added completely new parts. For example, the pointy-eared, lithe and graceful elves of today are the work of Tolkien (much of their being has been taken from folklore fairie, though), as well as the short, stout and gold-greedy dwarves (again, a bastardization of old folklore, but the combination in itself is basically Tolkien's).

So, while giving us much of the loved, liked and known tropes of high fantasy, Tolkien also gave us the bad ones. The webcomic, Order of the Stick, had a pretty good strip on this some years back, on color-coded dragons: read it here. The point that the comic underlines and I'm trying to make is that Tolkien's work made all of fantasy monotone black and white: everything was based in very, very deep-set stereotypes. I'll throw around some examples to prove my point.

Elves are good: the first children of the Ilúvatar, a shining example of right about everything. They are the epitome of good and justice. Dwarves are greedy, taciturn and haughty: basically good by proxy, but often too proud and greedy for the good of anyone. Hobbits are magnanimous, have a penchant for food and rest but are basically good. Orcs and goblins are bad, period. Honestly, the only defining characteristic orcs and goblins have is that they're evil, serve evil lords, and want to kill all the good guys. That's it.

But harken, I hear you cry, humans are creatures of changing morals and many themes in the books. Sorry, nope. A character is either good or bad, and most of the time this is defined by one's race. The Eastlings and Southlings, people that are mostly defined as being strange, foreign and just not very much like us are, by default, evil.

I'm not saying what Tolkien did was wrong. I am saying that it built tropes that have hurt fantasy literature as a genre and made it very, very difficult to do anything different (for quite a while). I also think his stereotyping hurt his own writing, but that's a personal opinion.

If these things - innate racism, tropes, stereotypes - cannot be discussed, our culture is driven into an evolutionary cul de sac. Until then, the discussion is necessary.

I believe in Batman

A lot of the 20th century pop culture revolves around vigilantism. To sharpen the focus, almost all of - at least the early - comics deal with the subject. I don't mean the newspaper strip comics, but the "real deal": (more-often-than-not) superhero comics and other such that come with the titular character's name usually printed on the front.

About like this.

Of course, the naming policy only became as it is somewhere around what's now known as "the Golden Age of Comics", going on from about the 1930's to the beginning of the 1950's. During this time, the world first met most of the comic book heroes (and a lot of the villains) that are still the most well known of the lot today, such as Superman, Batman, Captain America and Wonder Woman.

Back then, most of the comics weren't named after their main characters: Batman first showed his cowl in Detective Comics, while Superman began his career in Action Comics. The idea to name comics after the characters came during the later half of the Golden Age, when it was felt that characters such as Superman had grown bigger than the Detective Comics. Of course, there was the other thing, too.

As the Golden Age enveloped the second world war, most - if not all - comic book characters made their way into the happy world of propaganda (heck, even Donald Duck made fun of the japs and Hitler). Captain America was even born for this purpose only, and has had a bit of an uphill struggle to lose that mark ever since. While the original series of Action Comics kept it's boyish charms and direction, Superman flew off to embrace the stars, stripes and bald eagles to punch in the face of evil everywhere.

It made sense to make the super heroes fight the war: they were immensely popular among young boys, and if the boys thought it was cool to fight in the war like Superman, the homefront battle was halfway won. It also fit the vigilante status of the stiff-collared heroes like Superman to take the fight to the enemy if it was needed. It was, indeed, usual for the early age superheroes to be unquestionably good - to uphold the virtues everywhere. Superman, for one, is the ultimate boy scout and has kind of held on to that status all the way to today, despite some a bit grittier takes on him.

This is kind of why I like Batman better. Batman began as almost the same kind of moral absolute as the Man of Steel, but he's come a long way. Batman still doesn't kill, but he does what he needs to to uphold what he feels is right. The title of this post derives from the last Batman movie, the Dark Knight Rises, wherein Batman becomes the symbol of a Gotham that might be able to free itself yet from the ire of opressors, murderers and lunatics.

Seeing the movie again made me think about what Batman actually stands for, and here's my take. Do what you think is right, if you can unquestionably say that it is right, no matter the cost. This is what vigilantism as a thought is about, isn't it - the law is flawed, and thus there must be a force above the law, able to do what must be done.

This holds some very deep inherent flaws, pondered upon in Alan Moore's Watchmen (to give a comic book example, thus staying in only one source material). While the philosophical question of ultimate moral actor above the law is interesting, I don't find it plausible - human beings are not fully rational, and therefore are unable of ultimates. But, on a more everyday level, I find Batman a good thing to stand by. I believe in doing what I think is right, if I can hold it to the light. I don't believe in vigilantism, nor holding one's self above the law.

But I do believe in Batman.