This year I did not lead Niko Bellic through Liberty City, create a Death Knight or chop up dudes with a Lancer. I don’t think I shot a single zombie. Despite playing only a tiny fraction of the games that came out this year, I did manage to log in few hundred hours gaming. So where did all that time go? Here’s a year in hours lost to games: Read more »
It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means. A week ago I had every intention of doing my part for blogging tradition by posting a top 10 list or two, but try as I might, I couldn’t really think of any category of stuff that I had 10 things worth recommending or punditizing. I love video games, for example, but considering that I still haven’t played GTA4, Fallout 3, Metal Gear Solid 4, Gears of War 2, Left for Dead or Wrath of the Lich King, would a top-10 list mean anything? So I guess I’ll buck the list trend and post my very personal highlights and trends of the past year. Nothing too formal — just a chance to reflect in public. Part 1 covers food, music and books. Part 2 will recap highlights in movies, games and life. Even though there aren’t any rankings to dispute in the comments section, please do share your own highlights and hopes! Read more »
A few posts back I wrote about my frustration with the games industry for encouraging a monoculture where niche titles have a hard time finding an audience. I mentioned how music and movies have done a much better job with bringing niche content to the right audience, but even in those categories, things aren’t perfect.
Last week Apple released the latest version of iTunes with the new “Genius” feature. Basically, you select a song and click the Genius icon and iTunes will generate a playlist from your library around that song. It will also recommend songs that you don’t own that you might want to buy. As someone who has found the recommendations systems built into the iTunes store to be a valuable tool for discovering new music, I was excited to give Genius a whirl. With over 5000 songs in my library, there are doubtless plenty of songs I’ve overlooked.
First impressions boded well for the feature. Testing out a few songs from different genres, Genius generated playlists that meshed featuring songs that I uniformly liked. But the more time I spent with it, the more I realized that what seemed like its strength is Genius’ greatest flaw—namely, Genius generates the obvious.
Genius is powered by the same recommendation systems that can be so useful when browsing the store. By tracking the buying habits of millions of users, Apple does an amazing job at capturing the trends of the moment and can make very effective recommendations of obscure albums for those who take the time to follow the “Listeners also bought” trail. Because its consumer base is so large, Apple’s recommendation tools are strong, no matter how deep you go down the “long tail” of niche music. The iTunes recommendation system has two major flaws—1) it is heavily skewed towards new releases as that’s where the biggest sales and most active reviewers are; 2) it prefers strong quantitative associations over qualitative.
To illustrate these problems, let’s look at the album Neon Bible by the Arcade Fire (one of my favorite albums, BTW). It’s the latest album by a contemporary Canadian indy rock band, but by no means obscure. For fans of this album, iTunes recommends the latest albums by the Shins, LCD Soundystem, the National, Spoon and Wilco. On the song and Artist level, you’ll find Wolf Parade, Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs added to the list. Basically, you have a bunch of the standards of mainstream Alt/Indy rock for the past couple years. Are these good recommendations? Well, they’re certainly safe in that all of these bands are approximately equal in popularity. There’s nothing obscure, nothing from a jarringly different genre. A much better recommendation than any of those would be Bruce Springsteen, who is the most influential artist on the Arcade Fire, and whose music would actually mix better side-by-side with theirs. Similarly, older listeners who don’t follow up-and-coming indy bands but who like the Boss might be very fond of the Arcade Fire. Sadly, iTunes doesn’t help in that direction either, with Springsteen leading to recommendations of U2, John Mellencamp, the Who and other institutions.
There are plenty of other tools out there to find the music associations that iTunes can’t, from music blogs to services like Rhapsody and Pandora—I just had hopes that with Genius, Apple might have found a way to make their service, well, smarter. On the contrary, it only serves to make iTunes shortcomings even more frustrating by making playlists that seem culled from singles and greatest hits. New songs yield nothing but other new acts on the Genius playlist, and genres seldom intermingle. I like some hip hop and some girl bands, and I am probably someone unusual but hardly unique in that I like to mix the two in my custom playslists – Genius would never create a playlist like that.
The sidebar, which recommends items not on your playlist is probably the biggest missed opportunity here. Apple leaves them as passive recommendations with the option to play a 30 second preview. As implemented, this feature is only useful if I’m in active shopping mode, as playing the recommendations interrupts my regular listening, and I’m only getting a 30 second preview. Once again, Apple plays it far too safe here. A smarter way to handle this would be to automatically slip new songs into your playlist for 1 time use, then reminding you in the sidebar which songs played you don’t own.
As it stands, Genius is better than “shuffle” at creating a pleasing playlist, but it’s hardly revolutionary. With other places offering digital music cheaper and offering more sophisticated recommendation systems, Apple really needs to step up their game here if they hope to retain the appearance of mavericks.
On the movie front, one of the biggest success stories in separating the good from the bad is rottentomatoes.com. Films are rated “fresh” or “rotten” based on a meta-critic rating. The reasoning here is that the average score of 100 reviewers will lead to a more useful and objective score than that of any one critic. It’s a fun reference, and a handy starting point for reading more detailed reviews, but as a recommendation tool, it is hugely flawed. Certainly it does an effective job of recognizing the very best and very worst of movies, but stuff in the middle… the ratings are pretty much worthless. A movie that 70% of critics thought was just OK is ranked fresh, whereas a decisive film that 50% love and 50% hate is rotten. It disturbs me that the Tomato-ometer ratings get as much weight as they do, and that the idea of a critical bias is looked down on. You want biased critics! Understanding how your tastes measure up to an individual critics is a more useful tool for finding films you’ll like than following the averages of all critics.
Case in point, three new releases on DVD/Blu-Ray that were all rated rotten but that I would put on my top 10 list for the year: Youth Without Youth, Speed Racer and The Fall (23%, 31%, 44% respectively according to top critics. Going beyond the numbers, each of these films has one thing in common—they are highly decisive. These aren’t movies that fell off the radar – they were each subject to some very harsh critical lashings. Each, however, had a minority voice that praised the film in the most glowing of terms. Clearly they’re not for everybody, but they are far more likely to illicit a real reaction from the viewer than “fresh” movies like Kung-Fu Panda and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Originally this post was just going to be mini-reviews of those three films. Now I’ve got a dinner party to prepare for and some Force Unleashed to play, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out why I think those three rotton movies are worth your time.
Also, expect some new Labyrinth preview art this week–certified fresh, I assure you.
While browsing this week’s new DVD releases, I was quite surprised to see a 20th Anniversary release of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry Guilliam’s take on the classic chronicle of tall tales. It doesn’t surprise me that the film is getting a much deserved rerelease (and Blue Ray Edition!), but that “20th Anniversary” bit made me do a double take. Yet another reminder that I’m getting old.
I distinctly remember when the movie came out as that weekend I was hanging out with my Uncle Wes and he offered to take us to the movies and I got to pick the film. The only two movies that were appropriate for 10 year old me on that April weekend were Munchausen and the Jim Belushi/dog love story K-9. As half my family is involved with breeding/training/supplying dogs, it seemed best to honor that tradition through moviegoing, so I ended up going to the later. And that was the film that changed my life and turned me towards a life of law enforcement and… Oh, wait, it’s the 80’s fantasy stuff that forever shaped my sensibilities. Maybe I should have gone with law inforcement…? I bet it pays better.
Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to see Munchausen in the theater, as it completely tanked and disappeared after 1 week, but I did not forget it. When the film finally came out on VHS (how quaint!) I absolutely loved it. In fact, this was the first time I remember actually wishing I’d seen a movie in the theater first. After one viewing, Munchausen became part of my video store standby movies — one of the short list of films that I’d rent a third, fourth or twentieth time, when the new releases didn’t excite me. It earned its place right next to Labyrinth, Excalibur (mom didn’t know about the sex), Great Muppet Caper, Star Wars, and a handful of others that I never tired of watching.
Munchausen is far from a perfect film — it drags at times, and a lot of jokes fall flat — but it has some absolutely inspired moments (like the execution scene), and some gorgeous fantasy images that will haunt me all my life. Things like the Baron’s ship sailing over the sands of the moon or the terrifying angel of death (it ranks somewhere between the depictions of death in Watership Down and Seventh Seal for causing childhood trauama). It’s been a few years since I’ve watched Munchausen, so maybe when I finally break down and get a PS3 with BlueRay, I’ll get this disc to break it in.
In the meantime, if you’ve never seen it, or need a refresher, here’s the trailer:
Something of a change of pace from the usual manga/Labyrinth fare, I thought I’d share my thoughts on last year’s crop of films in the spirit of Oscar Season (TM). Before I got involved with writing and editing manga, I was a student at the USC Film school, and before that I was a movie junky with a permanent seat at the multiplex and a bladder adapted to storing 48oz sodas without the need to pee (which should give me at least as much authority in film criticism as Drew McWeeny). This past year I saw 57 first-run films in theaters, and after compiling my list, I pulled the films that stood out for me as the cream of the crop. I try to be equal-opportunity when it comes to genre films and so-called serious fare, so I wouldn’t leave something off the list just because it’s a popcorn movie. There were plenty of films that I enjoyed and admired (3:10 to Yuma and Harry Potter come to mind), but for one reason or another didn’t resonate with me on a personal level. I came up with 16 starred reviews plus a few slams at the bottom for films that stuck out in a bad way. Here they are, in chronological order… Read more »