Ntuple Indemnity

If you thought waiting three weeks for a new post here was bad, you only know a fraction of my pain. You also need a new hobby.

Revised ETA for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Autumn 2006. I realize Nintendo wants to make the greatest game ever made and all, but to insist on pushing the title onto the GameCube is now getting really silly. I once adamantly supported the idea of releasing Zelda as the Cube’s swan song, a last hurrah of sorts, but I think it’s time to jump on the put-it-on-the-Revolution bandwagon.

It would make sense for Nintendo to move Zelda to the new system even if they retain the GameCube-style controls and design (which are too integral to change by now, and probably have been for some time). Two immediate reasons: four times the storage on the DVD format (because I highly doubt that a game ballooning to its alleged size, a year past its deadline, is going to fit on one GameCube disc), and the next-generation graphics hardware, which the game could really put to use given these few extra months of polishing time. The first is probably the more critical benefit, since a defining characteristic of the Zelda series is its free-roaming exploration, and I would hate to see it partitioned.

They’re obviously trying to duplicate the Minish Cap phenomenon – one of the latest and greatest games for the Game Boy Advance released after the launch of the DS, which early adopters used their DS to play during the launch-period software drought. But it makes no sense to apply the same strategy here. For one, the GBA still had a near monopoly on the portable market prior to the launch of the DS. Unlike the DS, the Revolution is not an incremental layer over Nintendo’s existing home console business, which has been travelling on inertia alone since its last significant title, Resident Evil 4, came out over a year ago.

People won’t buy Cubes just to play Zelda, even at bargain-bin prices, because at this point the GameCube is basically a dead system (albeit the one with the best games to rediscover over the years to come). If the expectation is that a traditional console game will sell Revolution units while developers figure out how to take advantage of the Revolution controller, then the only thing stopping Nintendo from pushing Zelda to the new system is that they would be going back on months of assurances that it is still a GameCube title. But breaking this promise isn’t going to lose them any customers.

As for delays that are even more egregious, let’s just say Air Canada owes me a lot more than the $100 voucher and apology letter I was offered. I would elaborate, but your time would be better spent sitting through The Terminal; the stories are basically the same, but Spielberg tells it with more charm.

In the intervening time that went to waste, I could have watched Gone with the Wind. I could have watched it twice.

Anyhow, if I were not so busy, here are some other topics I probably would have written something about earlier in the month: Kurt Elling, Michelle Grégoire, The Marriage of Figaro, Bluebeard’s Castle, Erwartung, and how Freedomland isn’t an outright terrible movie in spite of the impression that might emanate from my review in Vue Weekly, but it sure makes an easy target for merciless lampoonery. In other words, three things the world couldn’t do without: jazz, opera, and Samuel L. Jackson.

I have a few remarks to make about this year’s Oscar nominations.

First off, all the number-crunchers out there lambasting 2005 as a slump year couldn’t be more wrong. This year’s nomination field for Best Picture is, overall, the strongest and most balanced I’ve seen for quite some time. The one of the five I have not seen is Crash, which everybody keeps saying is Paul Haggis’ directorial debut for some reason when his real debut, the quite excellent (and very obscure) Canadian production Red Hot, was a full thirteen years ago. I can’t comment on that one, but I was very impressed with the other four. The big story is that the five contenders are all serious, intelligent dramatic films and, to varying extents, independent productions.

Now, at this point, Brokeback Mountain is practically guaranteed to take home the top prize based on other awards events and the all-important guilds, though my personal pick remains Munich. But all four of the five that I sat through are films of such a high calibre that they’d make a serious and deserving bid for the win in almost any other year. And beyond that, it still feels like some of the best movies I saw this year are not on the shortlist, though I have no idea what they would replace. Among them are King Kong, The Constant Gardener, Wallace & Gromit, and maybe A History of Violence, which is growing on me the more I think about it. Make no mistake: 2005 was a very good year. That is, unless your film was computer animated. We’ll get to that.

The single most atrocious absence is Revenge of the Sith in the Visual Effects category. Narnia? Are you kidding? The awards establishment has been progressively (or rather, regressively) less kind to the Star Wars saga over the years, but I never thought it would go quite this far. Now, I think this is King Kong‘s award to win, but to ignore Episode III completely is just bizarre.

For the second year running, my favourite musical score of the year was ignored. Last year it was Michael Giacchino’s work on The Incredibles. This year, it’s James Newton Howard for King Kong. That isn’t to say I don’t admire the music in the five films that were nominated for the award. The piano cues in Pride & Prejudice were arguably the prettiest thing about a very pretty film, Brokeback Mountain sports one of the better scores in its style not written and played by Clint Eastwood, and The Constant Gardener felt very complete as a production in part thanks to its underscore. Munich was tense with percussion and Geisha was lush with exotic colour, but neither of them strike me as that magical sixth win for John Williams alongside Fiddler on the Roof (adapted), Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and Schindler’s List. In fact, they don’t come even close. Williams has lost with much better scores in much weaker years.

The point remains that while I wonder how things would have turned out had Howard Shore stayed aboard King Kong or James Newton Howard been hired from the get-go, the end product was great film music in the footsteps of a grand tradition that began with the likes of Max Steiner (whose music to the original King Kong is incorporated into the Jackson film’s “Eighth Wonder of the World” sequence). Corpse Bride, one of the high points of that vintage Danny Elfman sound, is also conspicuously missing. So is Revenge of the Sith, but it looks like John Williams already has his hands full of accolades.

The Original Song award has not had any legitimate reason to exist in at least a decade. This year, it did, thanks to Corpse Bride and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – both of which were left out. It’s seriously high time to scrap this junk filler category if significant in-film showtunes are going to go completely unrecognized.

I’m very pleased to see that the Animated Feature award is earning its keep. All three of this year’s nominees are movies I would buy on DVD and treasure over and over again. I suspected CG would get snubbed entirely, though I wasn’t sure Howl’s Moving Castle was high-profile enough to take the third slot over actual (albeit limited) moneymakers like Madagascar, Robots and Chicken Little. But to my relief, it was; and when awards recognize films that are worth awarding, nobody gets hurt.

Speaking of animation, this is another year where like Boundin’ and Geri’s Game, a Pixar short is cruising to the Oscars before being released to the general public. The one in question is One Man Band, which I assume will be playing in front of Cars. Will it win? I don’t know – I haven’t seen it.

And as for Supporting Actor, it’s about time they nominated Paul Giamatti for something. He should have made the cut last year for Sideways, and he should have won the damned thing for American Splendor. It appears that boxing movies make for compelling sidemen.

Remember what I wrote in The Gateway a few weeks back? The experts agree. I’ve been validated.

Let’s go over few news items that have been simmering since Friday. So it looks like the stars decided it would be a good idea to stay in alignment, and presto – Toy Story 3 is out the window. Does anyone still have doubts about the Pixar buyout? I didn’t think so. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

In the isolated world of obscure comic book anthologies based on Pulitzer-winning novels, Dark Horse has cancelled The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. This is a landmark in that I now unexpectedly own every first-printing issue of a comic book series. It’s also too bad, because in the last few issues, the series was just beginning to show some of its true potential.

I haven’t mentioned how a little over a week ago, I saw the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra perform a night of sacred music with pianist Kevin Cole and Vancouver-based singer Denzal Sinclaire. By “sacred”, I mean George and Ira Gershwin, and I mean it in earnest. There’s not much to say about it aside from the fact that it was an exhilirating night with the American canon thanks to interpreters who are best described with the word clarity.

Listening to Mr. Cole dance on the keys is a lighthearted reminder that speed isn’t created by cranking up the metronome: it’s an illusion generated by what you play, and the cleanliness with which you play it. Budding pianists would do well to remember this, especially when it comes to ragtime. It’s all about control with the illusion of freedom. That’s magic, isn’t it?

As for Mr. Sinclaire, who has seen a lot of airplay on CBC for as long as I’ve listened to jazz, I’m enjoying his latest album, My One and Only Love. (The title track has been moving up and down the stuck-in-my-head playlist since the opening credits of Leaving Las Vegas.) It’s heavy on ballads of mellow disposition, but listening to him run the gamut from Hoagy Carmichael to Stevie Wonder makes it easy to place the disc in a grand tradition of song displaced by half a century. In person, Denzal was a littler guy than I expected, but mass-over-density has minimal bearing on presence when it comes to voice.

Speaking of jazz, I’ve always been a little baffled at the lack of dynamism in how jazz is filmed. I harbour a deep admiration for music videos on a purely technical level, as a person who takes pleasure in watching moving pictures for that elusive logistical how’d-they-do-that. I can’t stand to watch a lot of them, though, because generally, the music sucks. Were it not for A Hard Day’s Night and Fantasia, I’d almost posit a systematic inverse proportionality between the quality of music and the quality of a film constructed upon it. And there’s a gulf of difference between Walt Disney’s dream of the “concert film” and the modern music video, even though they share a common heritage.

There are some great videos that aren’t just a mask for a lack of musicality – consider Stars in “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead”, an ostensible tribute to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (and a pretty good song). But not in jazz. Recent years have seen Diane Reeves’ contextual insertion into Good Night, and Good Luck and Diana Krall’s Chrysler commercials, but that’s a very specific type of jazz, the mellow strain.

So it’s with reinvigorated joy that I present this Wynton Marsalis iPod advertisement. This is probably the best visual representation of the bebop aesthetic’s latent dynamism that I’ve seen since Michal Levy’s animation of Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Pity it’s so darn short.

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

The National Scrabble Championship is no more. Starting with this year’s event in Phoenix, Arizona, its moniker is now the U.S. Scrabble Open, or maybe the Scrabble U.S. Open (they’re not wholly consistent). It makes a lot of sense, since for years, Williams and Edley have responded to questions about why Americans don’t have an invitation-only regional championship like us Canucks with the vision statement, “It’s like the U.S. Open.” Unfortunately, I don’t think the T-shirts will make for great conversation pieces like the ones with alluring words like “national” and “championship” written on them.

The official transition to the Second Edition of the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OWL2) isn’t until March, but this weekend I played the last-ever Calgary tournament with the old book, so for all intents and purposes I’m finished with l’ancien régime. It’s going to be an interesting change of pace to throw defensive strategy out the window now that Q and Z are a palpable threat, which leaves C and V as the only foolproof blocking tiles, but also means that I won’t have to fret so much about botching an endgame on account of drawing an unexchangeable Q. Bring on the QI and MBAQANGA!

Speaking of the Q, I’ve always wanted to play ENQUIrES on a double with the Q on a TLS for 122 points, and this weekend, I did. That made for a good $10 in addition to the $50 in third-place lunch money I earned with my 9-5 record.

Not so hot was when I tried to play APHORIsT on a triple in another game, which in my excitement I placed as APHROIsT*, losing both my turn and my spot. I think it’s the Scrabble nerd’s equivalent of shopping at FCUK.

The Students’ Union Webboard has returned. This is a public service announcement and not in any way an unrelenting squeal of joy. In the months leading up to its disappearance back in early 2005 the Webboard’s utility and entertainment value were already in decline, but the new registration policy (requiring members to provide a unique university-affiliated e-mail address) is a sound one that will hopefully keep a lid on the overabundance of anonymous sockpuppetry that plagued the establishment prior to its subsequent implosion.

I’m glad to see that existing user records and the posts of the old regime have been preserved in full… or not. One notices that my triple-crossing Diplomacy victory as Italy is conspicuously missing. I demand answers.

It’s official. That’s the capsule summary, anyway; here’s the full press release.

There’s a lot of optimism bubbling everywhere, even in auspiciously-titled pre-announcement commentaries like “Will the great big Disney destroy little Pixar?” But it looks like it’s Pixar’s positive energy spilling over onto the House that Walt Built.

Have a gander at this. It’s the day of the deal, and they already got rid of David Stainton. The same David Stainton who reportedly had the tact to tell all the newly-fired Florida animators that “the public couldn’t really tell the difference between the direct-to-video stuff and the films that Feature Animation actually produces.” Disney’s on the up-and-up.

Harry McCracken sums up the open questions pretty well, though he doesn’t address what I alluded to in my previous post as my biggest source of curiosity: creative control over sequels to established Pixar hits. But I’m sure there will be no shortage of commentary on every aspect of the deal in the days to come, so I’ll leave further comment to the experts.

On a related note about moving pictures: last year, and the year before that, I wrote about the touring selection of short films from the annual Ottawa International Animation Festival. The 2005 programme didn’t impress me as much as the last two, though that’s not to say the films weren’t good. There were a few standouts, and there are two in particular that I think I’ll remember for some time to come: Morir de Amor, Gil Alkabetz’s film starring two singing parrots in a birdcage, and At the Quinte Hotel, Vancouver animator Bruce Alcock’s interpretation of Al Purdy’s poem about beer and yellow flowers (set to the poet’s own reading). They’re marvels, and I want to discover them all over again.

And now for something completely different.

Everybody in the country has already said something about the outcome of the federal election in their own blogospherical cubbyholes. I normally either avoid discussing politics altogether or reserve it for rare cameo appearances at Points of Information, as a fiercely unaffiliated citizen whose interest is not in policy but in the dynamics of political gamesmanship. However, this time I have a few words on the subject.

Generally speaking, I like the final result, at least on the seat-count level of analysis. The Conservatives don’t have a majority to abuse, the Liberals don’t have a government to corrupt, the Bloc doesn’t have its former sovereigntist momentum and the NDP doesn’t hold the balance of power. Everybody lost in exactly the right ways, with the prominent exception of election MVP André Arthur.

Many have already pointed out that Stephen Harper’s victory speech is a contemporary classic as far as Canadian political rhetoric goes. I certainly don’t remember anything else of that quality from his party since its Frankensteinian reincarnation in 2004.

There’s one specific thing the incoming Prime Minister said that partisan sycophants of all colours (including his own) needed to hear, and I’m delighted he said it. I’ll highlight the relevant passage, and include the crescendo that precedes it for dramatic effect.

“Today, for the 39th time in 139 years, Canadians have elected a new Parliament. And as we have done many times before, Canadians have selected a new government. Let me say here tonight and to remind all of you that through all these different governments with their different priorities in their different eras, one constant binds us from MacDonald’s coalition of Tories and Reformers to the modern Conservative Party I lead. Canada: strong, united, independent and free.

“To those who did not vote for us, I pledge to lead a government that will work for all of us. We will move forward together. Our national identity was not forged by government policy; it does not flow from any one programme, any one leader or any one party. Our Canada is rooted in our shared history and in the values which have and will endure.”

One last thing that nobody noticed or cared enough about to remember: a little after the stroke of midnight, CBC had a live report at the Liberal Party headquarters in British Columbia, where the mood certainly wasn’t that of a defeated party. Their correspondent had to speak up to hear himself above a jazz band they’d rented for the evening. They commented on the hot jazz and the cocktail party feel of the whole shindig.

What they didn’t point out was the song the band was playing: “Freddie Freeloader”. How appropriate. Doubly appropriate that like almost everything we consider jazz, most of the song is just a bunch of guys making it up as they go along. (The original recording on the seminal Miles Davis album Kind Of Blue features some of the most legendary blues solos you or I will ever hear.) The difference is that jazzmen improvise on chords and scales, and Paul Martin improvised on the notwithstanding clause.