Tag Archives: 2000

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

Posted in Film by

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Dir. Wong Kar Wai
2000

It is a restless moment. 
She has kept her head lowered… to give him a chance to come closer. 
But he could not, for lack of courage. 
She turns and walks away.

Mise-en-scene is the human weapon in film. The term translates roughly to “what is put in the scene,” and it is meant as the ineffable summary of the image. It belongs only to those unique combinations of director, cinematographer, and production designer who can create an uncanny and unforgettable moment on screen. Many great moments of mise-en-scene are defined by literary context – the image summarizes a pivotal moment in plot, character development, or unpacking of metaphor. Images like the Binary Sunset in the original Star Wars, or Cameron staring at Seurat in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, can create this intense feeling where the character’s psychology cannot be expressed more effectively through words. Others are defined by displaying the unusual, the elemental, as Kubrick, Trumbull and Unsworth took us Beyond the Infinite or Lynch and Deming and the team at BUF took us to the birth of JUDY and BOB in Twin Peaks: The Return.

Tokyo Story, as described below.

It takes a different kind of mastery to make the mundane the center of an overpowering moment of mise-en-scene. In Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story, there is a cut from a conversation between Chishu Ryu and Hisao Toake where they decide to go visit another old friend for drinks – the scene cuts to a hanging lantern sign which reads “Sake.” The first time I saw this cut, I burst into tears. The sign is framed center, as are most images in Ozu’s films with legendary cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta, and immense on screen, framed beautifully by the roof of a building on the other side of the street and the other signage for the bar and neighboring businesses. It’s not just the image itself, taken out of context (like I’ve done here, just so people know what I’m referencing) but the build of one hour of images framed with similar intelligence that made my heart explode.

While all the other Wong Kar Wai films I’ve seen are beautifully shot and impossibly well-paced, none have the power In the Mood for Love has to create undeniable mundane images. The film is a sensual feast of antiromance, of not arriving at the pivotal moment, of prolonged longing and years of yearning. These images are deeply lived in by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, giving all-time great performances as people desperately trying to decide whether or not to give in to desire. There are small etiquettes that feel less like historical put-ons and more like smart observations of how these characters behave. The way the two actors control their posture, their leaning into one another and apart, their gaze and their expressions – I’d be hard pressed to say that better acting exists.

For those who haven’t and may not see it, In the Mood for Love tells the story of two neighbors whose spouses enter an affair shortly after their move-in dates. The cheating spouses’ faces are never seen – we’re left with seeing Leung and Cheung as they try not to consummate their own love. Each cut back to stairwell into the noodle shop where they start encountering one another is a cut to the heart. The scenes of the two of them standing in an alley smoking while waiting for torrential downpour to cease are excruciating. Cigarette smoke has never looked better than in this film, its slow-motion arcs ascending into shapes that seem impossible.

Chow Mo-Wan leans in slightly – Su Li-zhen looks away.

Moments of beauty are anchored by the cinematography of longtime Wong collaborator Christopher Doyle, who granted Wong’s previous films a kinetic, experimental free-form (very 90s) and longtime Hou Hsiao-Hsien collaborator Mark Lee Ping-bing (Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, The Assassin,) who gives this film his signature stillness and grace. They are soundtracked by the reused titular theme of the 90s film Yumeji, now almost certainly better known as the theme used in In the Mood for Love. These elements combine into an intoxicating aesthetic experience, one that despite its melancholy I never wanted to end. When the film does finally reach its conclusion, it is a wrenching goodbye.

Of all the films I’ve chosen to write about this month, In the Mood for Love is the most acclaimed. In the 2022 Sight & Sound polls for the greatest films of all time, it placed 5th with critics and 9th with directors (tying with Bergman’s Persona and Kiarostami’s Close-Up.) I exited my screening this past September, having not seen the film in a decade, accepting that I’d now adopted In the Mood for Love. My relationship with this film is still young. I won’t let it go another decade before rewatching again.

He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 2

Posted in Games by

ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 2
Chris Sawyer
2000

I can’t remember how exactly I wound up playing Rollercoaster Tycoon, the independently developed first entry aimed at Scholastic Book Sales and cereal boxes – if it came into the house through the intended method, or if my dad (who was a PC gamer unlike me) had read about it and decided to take a crack at it himself. I loved Disneyland at that age but hadn’t been old or tall enough to really ride rollercoasters or most rides scarier than Dumbo. When I finally did get a season pass to Six Flags about four years later, I was terrified of each impending step up the rollercoaster intensity ladder. My motivation to keep going came from a love of the damn rides (I’m thankful I still enjoy them now!) and memories of playing so much RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2 as a kid.

I came back to the management sim as an adult after picking up RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 in a Steam sale during the pandemic. I often struggle with sim games and creativity canvas games – RollerCoaster Tycoon combines the two. Each park template comes with a scenario goal, such as attracting a target number of guests before a certain date, or to achieve a certain park value in fixed assets built into the park. As a kid, I found many of the more difficult goals arcane, unbelievably high, too distant to achieve. Now, the goals are almost ancillary to just designing a park I’d enjoy spending time at for a day.

While the game’s many “flat rides” (here meaning rides without tracks, such as a ferris wheel, merry-go-round, or swinging ship) offer some prefab parts you can slot together to get started, designing a fun, profitable park involves building some damn roller coasters. When I’m designing a ride, I spend time mentally imagining how it would feel to ride. I have enough sense memory of certain top speeds and G-forces to be able to consider (even if probably not 100% accurately) how the turns, rattles, airtime, and inclines are for the passengers. The game’s evaluation of whether or not a ride is fun is pretty smart, but I’m only really satisfied when I make something that I think I’d enjoy.

I follow a couple of different YouTube channels that produce really high quality RollerCoaster Tycoon content to this day. The first, Deurklink, is focused on using in-game scenery, rides, and shops to create beautiful, detailed parks, the way people build scale model backdrops for their model railroad kits. The second, Marcel Vos, is an expert of the game’s programming and design, testing the absolute limits of what the game can simulate – rides that last simulated eons, theme parks with no rides that can attract thousands of guests, parks that occupy two in-game squares. This degree of expertise partly comes out of the fan-made OpenRCT2 app, which basically operates as an enhanced version of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 you can only run with a proper installation of the game. RCT2 has an extremely dedicated fanbase I’d been unaware of for twenty years, and I’m blown away by all the work they’ve done and continue to do.

I remember listening to the Idle Thumbs podcast, a show run by game developers, discussing the intentional “game design” of theme parks. They talked about visiting Disneyland with a lot of attention toward “the intended experience.” This is, to some extent, true of all architecture, but unlike more purely functional landscapes or buildings, the theme park is meant to provoke the broadest, most directly accessible form of “fun.” Unlike Disneyland, RCT2 is at its most fun when you honor the natural landscape to guide the design experience rather than flattening everything to match your design, so simulating the economics only better facilitates the play.

I imagine most people learning the game focus first on just learning the mechanics of making a profitable park which can complete the game’s goals. But you don’t have to become a wizard at exploiting the game mechanics to reach the point where it’s more rewarding to turn the game into a canvas. I haven’t been able to get into more abstract creative games like Minecraft or SimCity – it helps me a lot to have the sound of a roller coaster chain lift, the screams of joy from guests getting soaked on a log flume, imagining adolescent summers where I learned to conquer the Raging Bull’s 208 foot drop.