Back to an annoying topic

Yes, I know there is a lot of annoying topics for me, but this time it’s the Star Wars Prequels. I was reminded of how much damage they actually did to my childhood memories (sort of), when I saw these awesome ‘Star Wars Characters as people from the 1980s’ pictures. There might be coming something from that, but that’s not the topic here.

Looking over the pictures and identifying the characters (I love Luke’s Marty McFly look and Han’s ‘I shot first’ shirt), I was reminded of how I met the Star Wars cast first – on paper. And how I met them visually for the first time when the commercial stations in Germany started to run the original trilogy and I got to see them (as I was born in 1974, so I never saw any of the movies when they originally hit the theatres).

I was rather happy when they arrived at the movie theatres again, because it was my first chance to see them on the big screen. I even saw them all twice – once separately as they were released, once during a rather chaotic night all in one go. I wasn’t completely happy with all the additional scenes cut into them, but compared to the fact that Annoying Annie from the Prequels is now at the end of Return of the Jedi (which is illogical, as Obi-Wan still looks like the old Obi-Wan and Yoda probably is the old Yoda, too), the first release was pure bliss.

I see the point in not making sequels to the original trilogy, as it’s highly unlikely Mark Hamill or Carrie Fisher would reprise their roles (and Harrison Ford has a lot of other stuff to do). I could accept prequels that keep up with the pure basics of the original trilogy, though. There are a few details you will find in the novels to the movies that are actually negated within the new trilogy (in the novels, Obi-Wan says Owen actually is his brother, not the brother of Luke’s father; Leia claims she can remember her mother, but not much of her, which goes against their mother dying at their birth, especially as Luke is born first in the last Prequel). George Lucas also has gone all out to keep all novels in the same time line, but suddenly changes stuff in the past himself.

When the first Prequel, The Phantom Menace, came out, I was fully prepared to like the new Star Wars movies. Ok, so no Luke, Leia, or Han. New main characters, new heroes, a lot of new villains. That’s cool, really.

The Pod Race should have tipped me off, though. While all Star Wars movies to date had at least one big battle, the Pod Race was different. It was an omen for things to come. Ten minutes of rather pointless action shots. Rather pointless, because it’s obvious who will win the race. Rather pointless, because we will see how good a flyer Anakin is at a young age later one, during the space battle. Anakin’s major challenger during the race will never turn up again in the movies, so WTF, really. The whole Pod Race is ten minutes of my life that didn’t have any use for the story. It is unnecessary to establish the fact that Anakin is a pilot prodigy. It does not introduce any major opponent. It is not really necessary to drive the story, either. Seriously, the whole slavery turn is so unnecessary all by itself. We are talking about two men working for an intergalactic government and the ruler of a planet who need to buy something. Three people that should have some emergency account or something, just in case. I know the Old Republic was not well off towards the end (which is at least ten more years in the future at that point, anyway), but a few ten thousand credits for emergency use? And by the looks of it, Naboo does have quite a bit of cash to spend, why not have an emergency account in case someone from the government has to go off planet under disguise? Every normal government has something like that.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. I, personally, found JarJar amusing, so I am not going to crucify him (others have done so already, no real point in me doing it, too). Cool new villain? Check. Survives the first of what will be three movies? Nope. Help me along here, please. Darth Vader, as we all know, needs a mechanic rather than a medic, right? There’s one dark Jedi in the first Jedi Knight game who only has half a body (upper half, of course). Yet the Emperor never tried to salvage the remains of Darth Maul? That guy makes a great opponent. He is such an opposite to Vader, really. Non-human, non-mechanical, savage, lithe. He would have been great to keep around until he fights a duel to the death with Anakin-turned-Vader. Yet the poor guy gets the boot in the first movie.

And Anakin himself? Not really a guy you would like, either. He grows from the annoying kid in the first movie (yes, he’s had a hard life, but does he have to be such a snotty know-it-all because of those midi-thingies in his blood?) into an adult that can put every Emo out there to shame. We know he will end up behind the black mask. We don’t need a reason to hate the guy before he puts it on. What do we get? Mr. ‘I’m so unsure about me and my life, because my mother died before I could save her, so now I will almost kill my highly pregnant wife I’ve been angst-ing over and try to kill my only friend/mentor in the world’ should have ended up in the black suit at the end of the first scene of the first movie of the Prequels. It would have made them much better. Seriously, the guy tries to strangle his wife to death (and is only stopped by his friend) and later on is shocked that she, and, as he’s falsely informed, the children, have died?

There are a lot of reasons for Anakin to switch sides (and, indeed, that stupid ‘Jedi are not allowed to get married’ rule makes an excellent reason). Playing it all on the ‘angst’ card is using the most stupid reason out there. The whole slavery issue is unnecessary by itself. Okay, Anakin has had a hard life and for some reason (and growing up in the Outer Rim isn’t reason enough?) he wasn’t found as a baby and thus has not attended Jedi school properly. What is so wrong with making him and his mother poor farm hands, for instance? The first Star Wars movie ever made has already established people have chosen a desert planet (talk about logic) for farming. It would make his mother marrying a farmer later on much more logical.

You want better reasons for Anakin to defect from the Jedi order? Have a few:

• Anakin did not start training at the proper age, make him grow to hate the others, because they treat him as inferior. Good one to explain him leading the forces to destroy the order’s headquarter later on.
• The Clone Wars are starting, throw him into dangerous situations and have him use ‘just a little bit’ of the Dark Side (which, supposedly, is easier to take power from) to get out alive. This will make him distance himself from his friend Obi-Wan, who will warn him of the lure of the Dark Side.
• Use the whole ‘Jedi do not marry’ thing and have him defect after he decides that marrying Padmé is more important than the order. I’m sure he’s not the first one to see things that way.

Don’t put it all down to the ‘fear of loved ones dying’. Don’t make the natives of his home world (as it’s pretty obvious the Jawa and Sandpeople are natives and the humans are colonists) look like terrible beasts that need to be slaughtered.

• If you have to use the ‘fear of loved ones dying,’ let his mother die of a disease that wasn’t treated, because the Republic does not provide any kind of health care to the colonies of the Outer Rim. A disease she would have easily survived, had she lived somewhere closer to the centre of the galaxy. Let him hate the Republic for it, let him join the Emperor to overthrow it.

I’m sure I could find at least a dozen reasons for a young man with a hard childhood to join the Dark Side that do not require him to be a whiny Emo to start with. A guy like George Lucas should be able to find at least as many. And how can a self-assured, snotty know-it-all kid turn into such a whiny adult? Is it all the Jedi training or what?

Then there’s the midi-thingies (I’m too bored with them to look up the proper name). Seriously, what is that all about? People can do awesome stuff, just because they have some sort of bacteria or something in their blood? Logically speaking, that would mean you can create an army of Jedi (forget those measly, non-Jedi clones), just by injecting those midi-thingies into perfectly normal people. The Force for everyone! What happened to the mystical force that keeps the universe together? It became an infection you are born with!

Then the second movie … Attack of the Clones. More like Attack of the Hormones, if you ask me. The movie is nicely balanced – between a sticky-sweet romance that nobody needs and action scenes that nobody needs, either. I’m always happy to see Christopher Lee, he’s an awesome actor and it was time for Dracula to make an appearance in a movie series which has had van Helsing in the first movie (look it up, if you don’t know what I am talking about!). I also like seeing Yoda jump around like a gummy bear on speed during their duel. But apart from that, Attack of the Clones is weaker than The Empire Strikes Back (which is pretty weak, too, second parts of trilogies are vulnerable to a certain weakness). So, all the clone soldiers are copies of the father of Bobba Fett. And Bobba, one of the most badass bounty hunters of all times, is a clone of his own father, too. Great. Someone shoot me, please, to put me out of my misery at that discovery.

And is it just me or does Padmé suddenly look strangely young, compared to her boyfriend? Didn’t the first movie establish that she’s at least about seven years his senior? Maybe choosing such a nymph of a girl wasn’t such a good casting idea. It does establish a certain similarity between her and her daughter, admittedly, but it does not make that jump of ten or more years more logical. If Padmé was 15 at the time of the first movie (which would make her an awfully young ruler) and Anakin was 8, Padmé would at least be 27 in the second movie, if we say Anakin is 20 (and I find that highly unlikely, he should be at least something like 25, in my opinion). She certainly doesn’t look a few years shy of 30 in Attack of the Clones, or even Revenge of the Sith, where she’s pregnant and should probably look even more grown-up.

What’s more, Padmé starts out as a woman very much like her daughter in the original trilogy. Like Leia, she is strong, self-reliant, a leader. But while the original trilogy and the novels that follow Leia’s future enhance those characteristics (even though her life is anything but normal and nice), her mother loses them in the following movies. Padmé must have caught that Emo germ from her husband while they were making new Jedi, because the strong woman she was turns into a helpless and hopeless girl who doesn’t even find the strength to live for her children.

Then there’s the Emperor himself. On the whole I approve of the take they did there. It was a great idea to bring back the actor who played him in Return of the Jedi for the Prequels. He had then reached the perfect age for the consummate politician Palpatine is and he knew what his character would turn into. Palpatine is nicely balanced between the more-or-less (as politicians go) trustworthy guy and the scheming manipulator behind the curtains.

Yet, why so plump? Mace Windu may be the fiery side to balance out Yoda’s serenity (there’s not much that could surprise a guy after 900 years…), but have him jump through a door, accuse a respected politician of being a Sith, and then duel him right there and then? Can you do something like that with any less finesse? Was that only so Anakin can jump in and save the ‘old man’ from the attack? The fight between Yoda and Palpatine later on shows the venerable Emperor is no weakling with the lightsaber. Now, that is a cool duel, really. But Yoda is a cool guy in all the movies he graces with his presence. Palpatine is only slightly less cool himself. Two cool guys, two lightsabers, and a lot of collateral damage, you can’t go wrong there.

It’s also obvious George did not listen to his fans, otherwise JarJar would never have left Naboo in his life (well, okay, once during Phantom Menace). Even after the first movie, it was obvious the fans hated JarJar. Yet he’s persistently present in the whole franchise. He’s in all three Prequels and in the Clone Wars universe (movie plus all the seasons, including the first two which are more artfully done than today’s ‘official’ first two seasons). He’s a minor side character, so why not just write him out of the movies? You can get rid of a potential badass enemy like Darth Maul after one movie, but you keep the hated side character up to now, George? Wesley had to go, which some people could use as proof that Star Trek is the better franchise… Just saying…

The Star Wars Prequels had a lot of potential to expand and enrich the Star Wars universe. They could have told a touching and interesting story about a young man falling for the wrong side. We know there was good left in Darth Vader, just as his son claimed in Return of the Jedi. When faced with the choice to stand by his master and see his son die or defy his master and save his son, he threw his master of over twenty years into the core of a battle station. That’s a definite statement. Novels, comics, and other material have shown a lot of people who had a brush with the Dark Side in their lives (including, btw, Luke himself). Many paths lead to the Dark Side, Anakin’s story could have added to that, enriched the topic. It could have been so much more epic than just ‘I was so afraid to lose my wife that I destroyed an order of guardians of the galaxy and almost killed her because of it.’

And plunged the galaxy far, far away into tyranny for over twenty years, but that doesn’t count…

I hate Trojans

I don’t hate ancient Greek people, to make that clear from the beginning. I don’t have much of a problem with them, as it were. I rarely think about them at all. But I hate computer Trojans, since I yesterday got one (no idea how, I wasn’t even downloading anything) and now have to build up my whole system again.

Now I have a new system and it will take ages to get all back into working order … not to mention I need to get used to Windows 7…

Casual Corner

Welcome to the Casual Corner for July, the month of the Steam Summer Sale. Despite the fact that Steam was just enticing everyone with their amazing discounts, the three games I have chosen today are not from there. I might do a post about Quantum Conundrum later on, but right now it’s casual games. This month’s choices are Adelantado, A Gnome’s Home, and some games I want to rant about. We’ll start with the two games I actually like, though.

A Gnome’s Home is a game in the style of My Kingdom For The Princess, but is has some nice changes in the gameplay. Instead of upgrading the worker’s home to get more workers, you order them and they arrive by blimp. I love them bungee jumping from the blimp. However, the game has a high difficulty (luckily they updated it with various modes), so it is a long one. I like the idea of rebuilding an underground kingdom while I make my way through various landscapes. The graphics are very nice, bright and funny. The gameplay is well-balanced (although getting expert isn’t easy) and fun. I love A Gnome’s Home and can definitely recommend it.

Adelantado (that’s some sort of Spanish title, but don’t ask me for any details) is a rather unusual game, at least for a casual one. Instead of a long row of short levels, it only has ten levels (plus one bonus level), but you can easily calculate between 30 and 50 minutes per level in this game. It’s kind of a real-time strategy game, but mostly without the fighting. The ‘mostly’ has to do with some cavemen that come out to annoy you in the later levels. Still, I like the gameplay. Building up production lines, exploring the maps, fulfilling tasks, moving on to the next level. Even though I got a lot of playtime out of the levels it has, I can’t wait for part 2 and 3 of the trilogy. They are promising.

Now for the rant. The first targets of my rant are Ghost Whisperer and Criminal Minds. Not the TV series, though, but the games Legacy has made with the licences. I guess House, M.D. should have warned me, as that game wasn’t very good, either, but those two somehow are even worse. I love both series they are based on, but the games are not very good. To be honest, they are both so boring I haven’t finished them – although I usually finish a HOG (and they both are HOGs) in about three or four hours. I wonder how you can buy the licences for great TV series and make games out of them that look and feel like they’re out three years too late. That is annoying and both series deserve better.

The second topic for my rant is named Emily. Said Emily is the main character of the Delicious game series. I found the series late and have mostly played the latter ones (starting with Emily’s Tea Garden). By now, I love them and want every new one as soon as it’s out. The latest, however, has really annoyed me. Instead of releasing the full game, GameHouse has decided to release the game in episodes containing two normal levels and a bonus level each. For half a year (25 weeks) they want to keep it up, demanding far more for the game than usual. All Delicious games have 50 levels minimum, the last Premium Edition has an extra restaurant that brings the total up to 60. The standard version has always been out for regular casual game price, $9.99 for non-members at GameHouse, $6.99 for members, and $5.99 for Funpass owners. The Premium Editions of the last two games (Childhood Memories and True Love) were available for $13.99 for members and $19.99 for non-members. For those prices, you were always getting the full game in one go. The newest Emily game, Wonder Wedding, is available for the season ticket, $24.99 for all episodes, in 8-episode packs for regular casual prices, or per episode. All prices are far too high, in my opinion. I don’t want to wait for half a year, until all episodes are out. Neither do most of the people over at GameHouse, but the company isn’t listening. That is really annoying and might kill one of the few TM series that are still produced (now that Sandlot has been bought up and Playfirst has decided to drift into the app market – the Dash franchise and Cake Mania are gone).

So, now that I locked my baser nature back in the cage, here’s the verdict: A Gnome’s Home and Adelantado? Definitely give them a go. The new Delicious game, Ghost Whisperer, and Criminal Minds? Avoid, avoid, avoid. And now excuse me, the monster deep inside my mind needs to be fed raw, bloody meat…

Casual Corner

Welcome back to the Casual Corner (I bet you thought I had forgotten it) with three games this month as well. Two are pretty new, one has found its way in here, because it was finally released at a casual games portal this month.

Again we have three different game types in this month’s casual corner. The TM building game Build-A-Lot: Fairy Tales, the life-simulation Long Live The Queen, and the RPG-Maker-made RPG Skyborn.

I will start out with Skyborn, as it has been out for a while, but was only released at the first casual games portal (BFG, as a soft release) yesterday. Claret, the main character of the game made by Dancing Dragon Games, is a young and very talented mechanic, working with her brother in their own shop. A long time ago, their parents vanished without a word, something which Claret has not forgiven them. The world of Skyborn is ruled by the Skyborn, a race of people with wings. Humans like Claret are used as workers and usually left alone – mixtures between human and Skyborn however, like Claret’s friend and helper Corvin, are imprisoned and frequently killed for having magic. The day her brother does not only sell their workshop, but also tries to marry her off to the insufferable nobleman Sullivan, Claret decides to take the money and Sullivan’s airship (which she has repaired that very day) and find another place to live and work. Unfortunately, that brings her into contact with a rebellion that is going on. The game has very nice graphics and a Steampunk style that has by now found its way into the mainstream gaming culture. It plays well and is balanced out nicely. Unfortunately, you really need to pick as many fights as possible (thankfully, the monsters are visible in this game, no random encounters), so you can defeat the later enemies. Unlike most RPG Maker games, this one has a fighting system in which you can have more than four party members and can see who will make their move next.

Next on our list is the building game Build-A-Lot: Fairy Tales. The newest of the Build-A-Lot series is set in the land of the fairy tales, where the player develops venues for various communities, building and upgrading houses, meeting goals such as X houses of this kind, X money, or special buildings (usually in the last level of an area). The game has very beautiful graphics and is well balanced, although it does get quite hard to get expert levels quite soon. Like usually in such building games, you need to have enough workers (fairies in this case) and materials for building purposes. In addition, you need to have the blueprints for the objects you build. And, as usually in such games, you need  to take a very close look at what the level demands.

The life-simulation Long Live The Queen brings up the rear of this month’s casual corner. Elodie, a girl of fourteen, has forty weeks to become a queen. On her next birthday, when she becomes an adult in her world, she has to take the place of her recently deceased mother, who ruled the Kingdom before her. Unfortunately, a lot will happen in the forty weeks, while Elodie has to decide which things to learn and how to spend her spare time. Will she master magic? Learn all about strategy? Will she fall victim to an assassination attempt? A robbery on the way to a friend’s birthday? Will she have to face a rebellion? There are a lot of ways not to end the game positively and only a couple to actually become queen in the end. Elodie has a great chance to die before the forty weeks are over – or to spend the remainder of her life in a prison cell. It’s a very difficult game, although not a very long one. I have played it through several times in the course of one day, experimenting with a variety of abilities. There is, however, a long list of possible things that might happen to Elodie, making them all come true will require a long time, making this game worth its money. The game comes with very beautiful manga-style graphics, as can be expected from Hanako games, the makers of life-simulations like Magical Diary. However, like most games of this type, it is not something for people who don’t like to read.

This it is, the Casual Corner for the month of June. Enjoy the games, I will be there next month, presenting three more games you might want to try out.

Casual Corner

Welcome to what might become a new series of posts, the Casual Corner. Here I will present a couple of games each month, usually games that will not get any coverage in gaming magazines for being casual and/or indie games.

For the first Casual corner, I have chosen three different types of games: Kingdom Chronicles, Nancy Drew: Tomb of the Lost Queen, and SkyDrift. A time management game, an adventure, and a racing/flying game.

I will start with the last one released, which is Kingdom Chronicles. It’s a game like My Kingdom for the Princess or Roads of Rome. You have to make your way through levels, usually repairing a road, and do other stuff on the side. The game has very nice and very funny graphics, a varied gameplay, and some nice, new ideas. On the down side, it is rather short with only 40 levels (plus 6 for the collector’s edition at Big Fish Games). 50 levels and more are standard by today. The game, however, makes up for it by the diversity of the levels, even though the basic principle is, of course, always the same. The game is forgiving for beginners (or people like me, who are not obsessed enough to replay every level again and again), you can continue even after the time runs out and so finish a level in your own time, if necessary. On the whole, the games gets good marks from me, even though the CE, as usually, is not really worth the extra price (but then, I got it in a sale for less than normally). The additional content of the CE is a Strategy Guide that is pretty useless, 6 more levels in which you play the other side, and some design graphics from the game.

April/May and October/November are Nancy Drew months, as they are the time in the year when HerInteractive releases a new game. This year it has been Nancy Drew: Tomb of the Lost Queen in May (in October/November it will be Nancy Drew: The Deadly Device, as the end credits of the game tell us). With this new game comes a new starting screen and a new HUD for the games, as they have revamped their looks. Nancy’s desk at home (which she can almost never use in the games, as all except Alibi in Ashes are not set in her hometown) is gone, replaced by a more conventional menu picture. On the whole, though, the Nancy Drew games seem to get easier. If you compare one of the last few (The Captive Curse, Alibi in Ashes, Tomb of the Lost Queen) to earlier ones, you realize the time for playing through has definitely been shortened. They have gotten easier, so you can figure puzzles out earlier and thus will finish them sooner. On the whole, however, that doesn’t hurt the fun and adventures are for replaying, anyway (at least for me). The game is nice, even though the Egypt setting has been used a bit too often recently, at least for my taste. The game also is more puzzle heavy than earlier games (which rely more on the adventure-type actions like talking and using objects from your inventory). Still a lot of talk and a true Nancy Drew game.

SkyDrift is quite a bit older than the other two games I have listed so far. I have included it in this month’s Casual Corner, because I bought it on sale from Steam in May. At first sight it reminded me of Slipstream 5000, a futuristic racing game with flying cars that I have played endlessly a long time ago (you can still get it at Good Old Games, though). It is a bit more difficult, because you fly planes in SkyDrift and thus have to keep an eye on your distance to the ground, too. Yet the racing tracks are very nice to look at and each has its own difficulties. You can unlock a lot of different planes (and different skins for each plane) and there’s achievements and trophies, too. The different plane types do, indeed, fly differently. Some are more manoeuvrable than others, some are faster, or more durable. There are three types of races, too. Power races are your usual race type. Come in first to win the race. Survivor races are more difficult, because you have to make sure you are not in last place when the countdown happens. The last one during a countdown is out of the race. In both types you can pick up power-ups on the race tracks. Four of them (rocket, cannon, electrical field, and mines) are offensive power-up with which you can thin out the competition a bit. The other two (repair kit and shield) are defensive and help you to stay alive when others shoot at you (the electrical field can defeat you against a rocket, though). The last type of race doesn’t offer power-ups. Instead, the speed race offers a lot of golden rings. Fly through them to speed up, so you can stay ahead of the other contestants. I’m not a genius at flying, but I find the game quite amusing and fun to play. It’s definitely worth a look, if you like that type of game, and it’s very nice to look at.

That’s it, that was the first Casual Corner. Come back towards the end of next month for another one!

Tormented

I stumbled over the DVD of the movie “Tormented” (the one from 1960, not the one from 2009) and thought it would make for a nice movie evening (or afternoon) for a reasonable price, so I bought it. It turned out to be a wise decision, because I can certainly say I like the movie.

I’ve never had a problem with black and white movies – in fact, I find the black and white look more fitting for quite some movies. Old horror movies can be quite good, too, especially as they had to be far more story-driven than the modern ones. Today, quite some movies seem to rely more on gore or special effects than on the story itself.

“Tormented” has a tacky movie poster, as it were (I assume so, as it’s the cover art of the DVD and also turns up on IMDB) and a pretty tacky German title, too (“Der Turm der Schreienden Frauen” / “The Tower of the Screaming Women,” which is wrong, anyway, as there’s only one ghost in the story, so it would be only one screaming woman). Yet I have to admit I really liked it. There is a nice balance of horror and thriller elements. If you really want to, you can almost ignore the horror, as apart from the church there is no scene in which the appearance of the ghost could not just be a hallucination. In the church, however, all guests are witnesses to the strange dying of the flowers and spluttering of the candle.

The movie has a very nice pacing, starting of slowly with the last meeting between Tom (the main character, though not really hero, of the tale) and Vi, a woman he had a relationship with, but broke it off to be with Meg, who is younger and wealthier than Vi. Whether or not Tom really loves Meg more, isn’t really of any interest, as far as the movie goes. Vi and Tom meet in an old, derelict lighthouse on the island on which Tom grew up and Meg and her family live. During a heated argument, as Vi doesn’t want to accept it’s over between them, she leans against a banister that is not sound and falls backwards. Still holding on to the banister, she screams for Tom to help her, but he decides not to do so. Vi falls to her death – and Tom’s torment starts.

Vi is not prepared to let him out of her grasp, so she comes to haunt him, follows him back to his house at the beach, appears again and again. And Tom spirals deeper into crime. After the guy whose boat Vi rented turns up and demands the second half of her fare, Tom pays him to get him out of his house, but the man realizes Tom is marrying another woman and he knows Vi did not leave the island, so he attempts blackmail. Egged on by the spirit of Vi in the lighthouse, Tom kills him – but Sandy, the younger sister of his bride-to-be Meg, witnesses everything. Then Vi crashes the wedding and Tom flees to the lighthouse to tell her he will be leaving – will not marry Meg and will leave the island behind. When Sandy appears at the lighthouse and he learns she has seen him kill the blackmailer, he even tries to kill the little (8- or 9-year-old) girl. It is then Vi intervenes and makes sure Tom shares her fate.

The movie is very good at building up suspense. Small steps make it more plausible for Vi’s ghost to be around. A gust of wind at the lighthouse, where she died, a bunch of seaweed that seemed to take her shape (or her body that dissolved into seaweed, as you want to see it). Footsteps in the wet sand. A record of her voice (seems Vi was a singer in life, which puts her in close vicinity to Jazz pianist Tom) that plays while Tom is practicing. Her smell, her voice, her ghost in a dream. Vi becomes more and more ‘solid’ to Tom as the movie goes on. The only other person who ever has contact to Vi is the blind real-estate agent Mrs. Ellis. She realizes soon enough what is happening, even though she doesn’t know why. And her almost-death at the lighthouse (where Vi’s voice lures her up to the platform and the still-damaged banister) is a vision of things to come. Vi will lure someone to a death like hers – and chances are high, of course, that it will be the man she still loves and wants to keep to herself.

Even though I, personally, had no doubt Sandy would survive (because in a 1960s horror movie a little, innocent girl would almost never be killed), I liked to see Vi intervene here. It gave the vengeful ghost something of a deeper personality, as Vi had before only furthered Tom’s decent into crime, by making him kill the blackmailer. Like this, Vi did protect the truly innocent, despite being her rival’s younger sister.

Vi’s body is discovered only after Tom fell to his death (about a week after she died), and even in death, as they are taken to the beach, her arm comes around him – sporting the ring that disappeared mysteriously before the wedding. Vi has been united with Tom in death, she has won out in the end. Justice has been served when Tom falls to his death, trying to kill innocent Sandy. Fate, however, has played out the moment Vi and Tom lie side by side on the beach, united in death, for all eternity.

The movie relies more on the setup, the pacing, and the story than on effects. The effects that are there, like a body-less hand that holds the ring, a body-less head that accuses Tom of murder (which, technically speaking, he had not committed at that time, as the blackmailer’s death comes later), the dying flowers and spluttering candles in the church, and the ghost of Vi, translucent and in flowing robes unlike the dress she wore when she died, are good for 1960, even though they could not really hold a candle to modern-day effects.

If you like psychological horror far more than blood and gore, “Tormented” definitely is a good movie to watch.

Don't Encourage Him!

I think even outside of Germany, some people might have heard about Günther Grass and his poem (if that it can be called) against Israel. I have not really followed the storm this brought about in German media very closely, but I thought something when it all started: Why the heck are you encouraging him?

First of all, I have to admit I don’t really think very highly of Mr. Grass, unlike most people in culture here in Germany. He doesn’t write the kind of books I like to read and I find he’s highly overrated as an author. This, however, is just my own opinion and has nothing to do with why I mostly ignored Mr. Grass and his poem.

While I have to admit that not everything Israel does is right, I also realize that it is very difficult (historically speaking) for Germans to criticise. However, World War 2 ended about 70 years ago (ok, 67 years ago this May). It must be possible after a time during which most people active in the war have ceased to live for a German to criticise Israel without being crucified for it. But even that is not the reason why I have ignored Mr. Grass instead of being angry with him.

From my point of view, the ‘poem’ itself isn’t really worth all the energy wasted on it. It’s merely a way Mr. Grass (who has not been in the limelight much lately) tries to get noticed. Like a kid who knows a certain swearword will get the parents to react and notice the kid, Mr. Grass has whipped up a quick poem, so people start talking about him again.

Now, the best way to get a kid to stop using a swearword is to ignore it. So, logically, the best way to get Mr. Grass to stop embarrassing himself would be … to ignore him. Talking about Mr. Grass (about his latest ‘poem’ as much as about the ‘erotic’ ones he made a few years ago) only encourages him to continue down this road.

Seriously, what would have happened, if nobody had reacted to the ‘poem?’ Nothing. Israel wouldn’t even have heard about it. A few stupid neo-Nazi might have gotten a cheap thrill out of reading and reciting it, but apart from that…

Please, media people, no matter how little is happening in the world, be so good as to not encourage Mr. Grass in the future. Save the world from a few bad poems this way.