video games

OBEX (2026)

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In Albert Birney’s debut feature The Beast Pageant, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines in his job & home is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to go on a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural upstate New York (where Birney was living at the time). In Birney’s breakout collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines on his jobsite visits to strangers’ homes is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to dream of a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural Maryland (where Birney has been living since). In his most recent directorial outing, OBEX, Albert Birney himself appears onscreen as a lonely man who . . . you get the picture. Birney has six feature films to his name, and the three I’ve happened to have seen all follow the same basic narrative structure, the same way that all Neil Gaiman stories I’ve read happen to rely on the same Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole plot device. The only thing that’s changed between these career checkpoints, really, is the nature of the sad-sack protagonist’s job, the types of machines that distract him from his mind-numbing daily labor, and the type of fantasy adventure that breaks him out of the routine. If you’ve already seen The Beast Pageant or Strawberry Mansion, you’re already familiar with the general vibe & shape of OBEX but, thankfully, Birney still finds plenty room for variation & novelty when coloring within those rigid lines.

In this iteration, Birney plays a 1980s computer whiz & agoraphobe who never steps outside his modest Baltimore apartment. His only true friend is a geriatric lapdog named Sandy that randomly wandered into his yard and has been spoiled like a baby ever since. Birney’s sad-sack loner makes a living by “drawing” computerized portraits of strangers on commission, recreating family photos with carefully arranged keystrokes on commercial-grade printer paper. When it’s time to relax, he entertains himself with the other screens arranged throughout his house, most notably a tower of cathode-ray TVs stacked in his living room as a kind of unintentional video art instillation. He often runs three different programs out-of-sync on this TV tower like a televised-media DJ, cuddling up with Sandy on the couch and cranking up the volume to drown out the roar of cicadas outside of the house. Things go awry when he purchases a PC computer game through mail catalog that promises to bring great adventure into his life — a promise made literal when the game invites a demon named Ixaroth to invade his home through the screen, directly importing Sandy into the game. To rescue Sandy, he must then go on a harrowing adventure outside of his apartment by willingly entering the game himself, represented as a live-action roleplay version of 8-bit era Zelda puzzle games. The story is not unfamiliar (especially not if you’ve seen Riddle of Fire in addition to Birney’s prior work), but its familiarity is ultimately, warmly sweet.

The most notable shift in craft here is Birney’s newfound interest in horror genre tropes, which is usually where most low-budget directors start. Some of his best couch time with Sandy in the first act is spent recording the entirety of A Nightmare on Elm Street Film from TV broadcast to VHS tape, so they can rewatch it together later, anytime they want. This allusion opens the film up to a wide range of surrealistic horror touches, including dozens of rubber-masked cicada mutants straight out of 1950s creature features, a couple Harryhausen-style skeleton soldiers and, most improbably, some spooky late-night drives inspired by Lynch’s Lost Highway. The treacherous demon Ixaroth obviously adds to the film’s horror bona-fides as well, represented onscreen as a beast made entirely out of TV static, with a tangible taxidermy skull. It’s an image that pairs well with Birney’s return to the Game Boy Camera-style black & white cinematography of The Beast Pageant, but more importantly it’s one that signals the themes he’s getting at with this latest stylistic experiment. The evil entity is composed of the glowing-screen filler that keeps his protagonist from venturing outside his apartment, making the film out to be a dire warning about the price of staring at screens all day instead of living a real life. Sure, you get some mind-melting psychedelic video art out of it, but at what cost? In comparison, I’m not sure that The Beast Pageant had a similar underlying message other than that having a job sucks. Maybe OBEX is Birney admitting that making & looking at niche art all day sucks too, especially if that’s the only thing you do.

-Brandon Ledet

Grand Theft Hamlet (2025)

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Making art is hard work, even when you’re just goofing off with your friends. No matter how silly a collaborative art project is on a conceptual level—a novelty punk band, an amateur movie blog, a Mardi Gras costuming krewe (to name the few I have personal experience with)—the practicalities of seeing it through gets mired down in the general bullshit drudgery of modern life. Between everyone’s duties to work, to family, and to personal health and well-being, real-life circumstances are always stacked against your success, which can make you question why you’re working so hard for something so silly as, say, organizing a meet-up for a small group of friends to dress as Divine on Mardi Gras day. It does feel great when everything clicks in to place, though. There are few victories sweeter than defying the odds or our modern capitalist hellscape by making something sublimely stupid with your friends.

Even by my personal standards, the communal art project documented in Grand Theft Hamlet is exceedingly inane. “Filmed” entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto Online during the early lockdown years of COVID-19 (in the style of We Met in Virtual Reality), Grand Theft Hamlet documents the efforts of two goofball British blokes to organize a staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely within the gaming platform. It’s an absurdly specific novelty project that quickly leads to a broader story about how hard it is to complete any piece of collaborative art. All the usual roadblocks of squeezing in rehearsals around work schedules, balancing personal obsession with familial obligation, and navigating contributors’ differing excitement levels to distribute labor according to enthusiasm all apply to meeting online to recite Shakespeare while digitally represented as archetypal sex workers & thugs. Only, the video game platform literalizes those obstacles in the form of outside players firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to goof off with your friends.

The tradition of adapting Shakespeare in a novelty setting is long & storied. Even the modern specificity of Grand Theft Auto can’t make this staging a total anomaly, since a digital office-building setting will instantly recall Hamlet (2000) or a burst of neon-lit gunfire will recall Romeo+Juliet (1996). I’m sure there have also been unpermitted guerilla productions of Shakespeare plays periodically shut down by the cops, even if those cops are usually not algorithmically generated NPCs. It’s the effort that Sam Crane & Mark Oosterveen (along with central documentarian Pinny Grylls) put into working around the intended purpose of GTA Online that affords the project its true uniqueness. The triumphant perseverance of a player shouting their lines over machine gunfire during rehearsal while fellow collaborators play defense against disruptive trolls & “griefers” adds a new obstacle to the usual “Let’s put on a show!” artistic sprit. The defiance of carrying on in those chaotic circumstances is energizing, inspiring an actor to shout “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers!” into the digital void.

Hamlet proves to be an apt play to stage for this ludicrous project, not least of all because its tragic Shakespearean violence fits right in with the basic control functions of GTA. The actual themes of the play are genuinely felt in the final edit, especially in scenes where Crane & Oosterveen slip into suicidal ideation thanks to the isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns or when GTA‘s in-universe superhero franchise Impotent Rage is advertised in block letters on billboards & slot machines. The most critical Shakespeare quote repeated in this particular staging, however, isn’t from Hamlet at all. It’s the Macbeth line about how life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That pretty much sums up the whole project, from the proudly idiotic premise to the meaningless displays of violence to the general, persistent emptiness of being alive. It’s also a succinct explanation of why it’s so important to make dumb art projects with your friends despite the effort required to pull it off. Nothing matters anyway; you might as well have a little fun while you’re here.

-Brandon Ledet

Riddle of Fire (2024)

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It’s going to sound like an insult to immediately focus on its background details, but the low-budget kids’ adventure Riddle of Fire has some of the best set decoration artistry I’ve seen in any modern picture not directed by Wes Anderson.  A large portion of the film is set in the woods, which comes with its own ready-made production value, but the interiors of characters’ living spaces are intensely, wonderfully over-curated.  Whether cataloging a curio cabinet of one witchy mother’s taxidermy projects & Pagan relics or scanning over another, normier mother’s sickbed full of used tissues & plastic medicine bottles, the adult world at the outskirts of Riddle of Fire is crammed with tactile visual information.  It’s a fascinating collection of weird little talismans and the weird little dirtbags who cherish them, conjuring up childhood memories of a time when mundane objects held immense power.  It’s the feeling of bringing home a vintage t-shirt, a futuristic video game, a cool-looking rock; it’s magic practiced through obsessive, personal collection.

This practical magic of collecting just the right assemblage of seemingly mundane objects is central to the text.  The story is set in modern, suburban Wyoming, but it’s structured as a fairy tale quest to acquire a specific list of impossible-to-secure items, achieving legendary hero status once complete.  A small gang of children shoot paintballs & ride dirt bikes around their unimpressive suburb without much outside attention.  Their petty crime spree escalates when they steal a futuristic video game counsel from a poorly guarded warehouse, and they plan to waste away what’s left of their summer eating snacks and smashing controller buttons on the couch.  Only, their mother figure has locked the TV with a parental control to ensure they’ll spend some quality time outside.  They convince her to hand over the password if they bring home a blueberry pie to ease her flu symptoms, which leads them to doing a similar favor for the local baker, then seeking out a speckled egg to bake the pie recipe themselves, and so on.  The list of items gradually leads them astray to the point where they go to war with a Cottage Core death cult in the woods outside town, shooting paintballs at violent felons who pack real guns with real bullets – all in a fairy tale video game quest to bake an epic blueberry pie.

There’s an understated but over-verbalized magic to this film, which is mined for low-key absurdist humor.  The central trio of neighborhood brats announce themselves as The Three Immortal Reptiles, distinguished by the taxidermized reptile feet they wear on novelty necklaces as gang insignia.  When they make unlikely friends with the adult gang’s young daughter figure, she’s announced as Petal Hollyhock, The Princess of the Enchanted Blade, not simply as Petal.  The forest outside town is located at the edge of Faery Castle Mountain, described in-dialogue as “a wolf land of magic & dreams.”  Everything in the script is overly verbose in this way, so that when the kids collect a creepy babydoll to aid in their quest it is consistently described as “a rather chilling, ghastly doll” with no variation.  It’s like watching the rascals from The Florida Project get dropped off on the shores of Roan Inish, with their dialogue getting stuck somewhere between those two worlds.  Between its artful collection of strange objects and the shot-on-film textures of its visual aesthetic, there’s something familiarly magical in every frame of Riddle of Fire, and the dialogue underlines that magic every chance it gets.  Whether the humor of its dissonance between old-world magic and mundane modernity hits you in the right way is all personal bias, but you can’t deny that the magic is right there on the screen; the movie never lets you forget it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Starfighter (1984)

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I am reporting from deep within the bowels of New Nerd America: a pop art dystopia in which nerds have decidedly won the culture war and allowed the media landscape to rot in decades-old rubble instead of encouraging anything fresh to flourish.  What I mean to say is that there’s nothing especially interesting to me in theaters right now, because all the local marquees are cluttered with nostalgia-bait IP.  Our poptimistic celebration of vintage nerd culture has gone too far, to the point where nearly all American screen space has been gobbled up by bajillion dollar intellectual propertie$ that service some long gestating fandom: Marvel fans, DC fans, Mario fans, Transformer fans, Fast & Furious fans, Little Mermaid fans, oscillating fans, and fans of the Boogeyman.  Even the more artistic alternatives to this deluge of summertime corporate schlock—the new Spider-Man and the new Kamen Rider—are reverently referential to the nerdy histories of their titular superheroes; they just happen to be better crafted than most other nerd-culture nostalgia stokers currently on the market.  In these moments of early-summer panic, I always think back to Spielberg’s dystopian adaptation of Ready Player One, a movie that mourned the cultural brain rot of a society willing to dwell in the artistic triumphs of the past instead of innovating new populist art for the future.  As you’ll remember, Ready Player One was a critical failure upon its release, mostly for its association with its vapid source-material novel, which celebrated the dawning of the New Nerd America with uncritical nerdgasmic glee.  I personally thought Spielberg did a good job of undercutting the nostalgic poptimism of Ernest Cline’s book, though, the same way that Verhoeven “adapted” Starship Troopers into an argument against its own militaristic thesis.  To me, Ready Player One was a nightmare vision of a near-future Hell dominated by 1980s nerd culture bullshit (one we’re already living in just five years later).  The only way its Pre-Existing IP Futurism could possibly look fun & celebratory is if nerds were still the pop culture underdogs fighting to earn wider cultural respect for their personal pet obsessions.  Basically, it’s as if everyone misread 2018’s Ready Player One as a remake of 1984’s The Last Starfighter.

There’s something fascinating about the pop culture ouroboros of The Last Starfighter borrowing heavily from early Spielberg, then being echoed in Ready Player One, which was then adapted into a legitimate Spielberg film with outright contempt for its own source material.  Like in Cline’s celebration of New Nerd America, The Last Starfighter is the story of a Fanboy loser who proves the local Haters who doubt him wrong when his video gaming skills end up saving the planet instead of just wasting countless hours of his youth.  The 1980s setting means that he’s addicted to an arcade cabinet instead of a VR headset, but the spirit remains the same.  Lance Guest “stars” as a frustrated, go-nowhere teen who earns the high score on his trailer park’s communal arcade game while all the Cool Kids are off enjoying a social day at the beach.  The game turns out to be an intergalactic recruitment tool for a noble space alien army who need the nerd’s joystick skills to win their space-laser war with a vaguely defined enemy.  Instead of directly adapting the gameplay “plot” of a specific game the way most Video Game Movies would (the animated Super Mario Bros movie being a recent example), The Last Starfighter instead portrays the reason nerdy kids obsess over those games in the first place.  It’s a live-action illustration of the escapist power fantasy the medium offers its pasty shut-in players.  And since video games were still a nerds-only proposition at the time The Last Starfighter was produced, it’s a charming prototype for the much sourer escapist power fantasy that would be echoed in the Ready Player One novel, which is a gloating celebration of the dominant pop culture of its time.  The Last Starfighter is almost just as much a celebration of 1980s kitsch as its 2010s equivalent.  Its titular arcade game is a shameless Star Wars rip-off; its space-age adventurism is directly informed by early Spielberg titles like E.T. & Close Encounters; and its basic video-game-recruitment premise is essentially a too-soon remake of Tron‘s.  It’s so deeply steeped in 80s nerd shit that its inclusion of a DeLorean-shaped spaceship feels like an homage to Back to the Future, even though it was released a year earlier than that Zemeckis touchstone.  There’s just something wholesome about that reverence for 80s nerd culture being filmed when it could still get you dunked in a toilet or shoved in a locker, as opposed to it being screen-printed on every Target brand t-shirt on the shelf.

Not every aspect of The Last Starfighter is wholesome & quaint.  In my dusty DVD’s behind-the-scenes documentary on the movie’s “continued popularity”, the computer effects artists behind its creation are loudly proud of their contribution to modern blockbuster filmmaking, claiming that The Last Starfighter was the first feature film to primarily use CG effects to produce its “real world” space-fighting environments.  The early-80s CG has aged about as well as you would expect, often giving the film the feel of a vintage PC video game instead of a proper sci-fi picture.  It was certainly ahead of the industrial curve, though, which you can tell in how improbably advanced its star-war graphics look in the arcade gameplay vs. how surreally dated they look once our nerdy hero is playing the game “for real.”  It was also made in a time before programmers were brave enough to attempt computerizing their space alien characters, so there are thankfully plenty of adorable rubber-mask monsters cheering on & fighting alongside our fanboy gamer hero.  The computer animation team did a decent job for their era, but they could have done even better if the studio had given them the proper time & resources needed to complete the project.  Even in my DVD’s victory lap featurette, they complain about the stress of completing the project on time, having been given an impossible 6-month deadline to finalize their effects work. As a result, they rushed the project to completion, putting in overworked, undercompensated hours to make sure the movie could hit its predetermined release date.  In that way, the New Nerd America is nothing new at all.  The way the computer animators behind all the nostalgic fan service behemoths currently on the market are treated by the studios who subcontract them is bottomlessly cruel & abusive, especially considering how much money their employers are making on their undervalued labor.  The Last Starfighter was a template for modern nerd culture filmmaking both its reverence for schlocky 80s pop art (which was at least fresh & interesting at the time) and in its exploitation of the actual, real-life nerds behind the keyboards that made it come to life.  I’m going to guess that the Ready Player One film, no matter how much higher in quality than the Ready Player One book, also participated in that modern industry standard, which has only gotten worse as the demand for this kind of material has exponentially risen.

I didn’t revisit The Last Starfighter in order to heap more praise onto a five-year-old Spielberg film most people hate or have totally forgotten.  I also didn’t revisit it to make some kind of Galaxy Brain point about the state of modern populist filmmaking.  I revisited it because I was bored, I wanted to watch a movie, and nothing currently playing in theaters looked novel or exciting enough to justify leaving my couch.  However, I did venture out the next day to sell my Last Starfighter DVD (along with other dusty pop culture leftovers) and was greeted with two bittersweet responses from the incurably nerdy clerk at my local 2nd & Charles: 1. “We’re no longer buying back DVDs,” which is a real heartbreaker for me — the end of an era.  And, 2. “That movie’s badass,” which I hope is the same reaction whoever picks up my copy from the Mid-City Goodwill has as well.  It turns out these 80s nerd culture leftovers aren’t worth all that much after all.  They’re meant to sell popcorn & digital downloads for a few months then promptly be forgotten forever, which would be the ideal amount of reverence for this kind of nerdy pop art if it weren’t for the fact that all of its latest examples are regurgitations of past triumphs. 

-Brandon Ledet

Kung-Fu Master! (1988)

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As I’m writing this review of a movie that’s nearly as old as I am, there are currently two prestigey Awards Season dramas from well-respected auteurs in theaters that dabble in age-gap “romances” between adults & teenagers.  In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, a 25-year-old-woman disastrously indulges a semi-romantic friendship with a 15-year-old boy.  In Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, a 40-something conman actively grooms a small-town high schooler for potential employment in the pornography industry.  Surprisingly, it’s the former film that’s taking a lot of online heat for its supposedly dangerous amorality, while the latter is enjoying a quiet, uneventful theatrical run.  Maybe the difference is that Licorice Pizza‘s friendly quasi-romance is played with a nostalgic sentimentality, while Red Rocket more aggressively interrogates the moral shortcomings of its skeezy conman protagonist.  Maybe it’s merely a symptom of Licorice Pizza reaching a wider audience, so more people are around to be offended by it.  I’m going to make no attempts to pinpoint the discrepancy, as I’ve been constantly baffled by what movies have been singled out by the sharpened knives of Age Gap Discourse™ in recent years.  Ever since Call Me By Your Name was treated like a Cuties-level provocation, I’ve struggled to figure out why we’ve completely lost our ability for nuanced discussion of morally ambiguous relationships, especially in discussion of fictional age-gap romances.  One thing I do know, though, is that if it were released in this current hyperbolic environment, Agnes Varda’s Kung-Fu Master! would make these morally righteous kids’ heads explode.

Agnès Varda’s cinematic persona has been over-simplified into a kind of wholesome meme in recent years, but she made provocative, fiercely political art in her time.  Even so, Kung-Fu Master! is one of the toughest watches I’ve seen from her, although it appears to have been made as a tossed-off afterthought mid-production on her documentary Jane B.  Made as a collaboration with that documentary’s titular subject—actor & singer Jane Birkin—Kung-Fu Master! is a sentimental romance drama about a middle-aged woman who inexplicably falls in love with a teenage boy.  The small cast includes Varda & Birkin’s own children, including Varda’s son Matthieu Demy as the snotty object of Birkin’s desire and Birkin’s daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg as his classmate & her romantic rival.  It doesn’t sexualize the scrawny, boyish Demy in any way – outside maybe lingering on a few closed-mouth kisses with the adult Birkin.  Still, it also doesn’t make any excuses for his adult fling’s transgressions.  She is attracted to him specifically because he is underage, visibly fascinated by his juvenile ramblings about boyish nonsense like Dungeons & Dragons and the titular arcade game Kung-Fu Master!.  Falling in love with him ruins her social life, isolating her from her own children & other adults.  The movie doesn’t make any grand gestures to demonize her for her bizarre infatuation, though.  It instead delicately interrogates the absurdism of an adult being so transfixed with a child she has nothing in common with.  It’s a premise that would not survive a minute of modern Age Gap Discourse, at least not in the morally ambiguous way it’s handled here.

Personally, I think Kung-Fu Master! more than justifies exploring this specific moral transgression.  It’s a movie that’s more about the why of its morally squicky events than it is about depicting the what; the most we ever see of Birkin & Demy consummating their onscreen fling are a few chaste little kisses and an implied sleeping bag sleepover.  Meanwhile, the film is anchored to a grim contemporary context that’s presented with much harsher tonal severity.  Kung-Fu Master! is not so much about its romance itself as it is about escaping from the grim circumstances of the AIDS epidemic by retreating into the innocence of schoolyard crushes.  Divorced & painfully lonely, Birkin’s fantasy-prone protagonist longs for the flattery & safety of flirting with a teen boy instead of a sexually mature adult.  She swoons for the smallest, scrawniest boy in her daughter’s class of brutes specifically because he is “curious & vulnerable”.  Meanwhile, the video game arcades she trails him to are crowded by AIDS pamphlets & condom dispensers, constantly reminding her of the much more dangerous, complicated logistics of adult romance.  It isn’t until the mismatched couple isolate themselves for an island vacation that they escape the havoc AIDS has wreaked on big-city living, and they enjoy a moment of interpersonal peace.  It would be very easy to dismiss this film outright for the hands-off way it approaches the immoral romantic pairing at its core, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for being too squicked out by that predatory dynamic to appreciate its larger themes.  I found it to be a tough but moving watch in more ways than I expected, though, especially the further it digs into the reasons for Birkin’s immoral predation.

Curiously, Kung-Fu Master! opens with a scene that’s perfectly tailored for today’s social media climate.  The teenage Demy, dressed in a karate uniform, mimics the stilted video-game motions of his favorite arcade game by treating his city sidewalk as a sight-scrolling button-masher.  It’s a visual gag that’s been repeated endlessly in TikToks & Vines, where teens will mimic the nonsensical body language of GTA maniacs or idle NPCs.  I don’t know that modern social media discourse would have much breathing room for discussing anything that happens after that adorable intro, though, since Varda is entirely disinterested in damning her wayward protagonist for her crimes.  I understand the inherent sensitivity of a film tackling statutory rape in its core narrative, but I still think there’s something lost when art is reductively discussed as real-life morality parables rather than a safe, fictional space to explore complicated ideas.  Despite the obvious personal connection to Varda & Birkin’s own families (including the eventual loss of Varda’s husband & Demy’s father to AIDS complications), these are fictional characters whose onscreen behavior are not being endorsed by their real-life creators.  However, the harsh circumstances of the world they occupy is very real, and their moral transgressions within it are a troubling psychological response to that circumstance.  It’s deeply fucked up, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth grappling with.

-Brandon Ledet

We Are Little Zombies (2020)

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I remember watching Edgar Wright’s video game breakup comedy Scott Pilgrim vs. The World in the theater and finding it charmingly cute, certainly better than its box office & immediate critical reception implied. As its then-teenage cast has grown into mid-level fame and its then-teenage audience has grown to become the critical establishment in the decade since, Scott Pilgrim‘s underdog status has long faded away. If anything, praise for its 8-bit video game nostalgia and self-critical, anti-romantic twee sentiments is absurdly overstated by now, and what was once a low-key charmer has become overloaded with unsustainably hyperbolic accolades as a modern classic – at least in online Film Nerd circles. Nothing has made that gradual canonization more absurd to me than catching up with the recent coming-of-age comedy We Are Little Zombies, which pushes the same twee video game nostalgia aesthetics everyone drools over in Scott Pilgrim to much more consistently exciting, surprising extremes at every turn. We Are Little Zombies is one of those over-achieving stylistic showcases where every single in-the-moment comedic gag & tangential flight of whimsy makes you shout, “That’s so cool!” at the screen; it’s just absolutely overflowing with creativity. I now understand where the Scott Pilgrim die-hards are coming from, because I’ve seen that movie’s stylistic flourishes exploded into a vibrant, over-the-top spectacle much more suited to my own maximalist tastes.

Like most twee fantasy pieces and whimsical coming-of-age stories, We Are Little Zombies’s flashy sense of style mostly just functions to obscure the deep well of pain flowing just below its manicured surface. The plot is simple; four freshly orphaned children meet at their parents’ simultaneous funerals and run away to form a surprisingly successful (but ultimately doomed) pop punk band. The pint-sized lineup of Little Zombies are all emotionally numb to their grief, so they write vibrant pop songs about their apathy as a form of art therapy. Most of the structural conflict in the film is typical to a rise-to-fame rock band narrative, deriving from evil record company executives converting their art into capital. However, from scene to scene their journey is guided strictly by video game logic, wherein their instruments must be acquired like digital armor and the record execs are level bosses who must be defeated. The vibrant colors, rapid cuts, 8-bit score, and continually surprising shot choices that power-boost this video game surface aesthetic feel like they belong to a kinetic live-action cartoon populated by hyperactive kids in constant search of their next sugar rush. Instead, the Little Zombies are decidedly anti-emotional as a band, despondently stumbling through their shitty little lives in the exact way their collective name implies. The only time they appear to be having as much fun as first-time director Makoto Nagahisa is having behind the camera is when they’re playing their candy-coated pop punk tunes, and there’s a genuine tragedy to how easily that collective art therapy is corrupted for a one-hit-wonder cash-in.

In terms of its mind-melting, genre-defying maximalism, there are a ton of psychedelic Japanese freak-outs I’d compare We Are Little Zombies to before citing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Suicide Club, Hausu, Funeral Parade of Roses, Wild Zero, etc. Still, the two films’ overlap of pop punk soundtrack cues, twee heartbreak, and video game surface aesthetics make the comparison unignorable. We Are Little Zombies amplifies the little touches that make Scott Pilgrim charming into an explosively entertaining video game dreamscape that much more clearly, consistently registers as Something Special to my eyes. It’s apparently now my turn to overhype an underseen, underloved video game fantasy piece until people are sick of hearing about how great it is. Hopefully, I’ve got at least a decade until the tides turn against it.

-Brandon Ledet

Dabney Coleman vs. Video Games

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When praising our current Movie of the Month, the hyperviolent children’s adventure pic Cloak & Dagger, there’s plenty of flashy details that distract from the novelty of the casting. The film’s cultural relic function as a desperate attempt to rescue Atari from the video game crash of 1983, its incongruous clash of boys’ adventurism spirit & cruel depictions of 80s action-violence, and its whimsical flights of escapist fantasy all overwhelm minor concerns with the details of its casting. The cast is such an afterthought, in fact, that no one thought twice about featuring Henry Thomas in the lead role, despite his face being on every cartridge of the E.T. video game that helped nearly bankrupt the company the year before. Thomas’s association with “the worst video game of all time” isn’t even the strangest novelty in the film’s casting. That honor belongs to That Guy! character actor Dabney Coleman, who’s cast in dual roles (!!) as the boy’s father & imaginary friend. As Henry Thomas’s dad, Coleman is a straight-laced family man widower doing his best to keep his home in order. As his imaginary friend Jack Flack, he’s a James Bond-type world adventurer, prepared at a moment’s notice to take out an entire warring country using only his American fists. Both roles are used in the film to teach Thomas a lesson about the dangers of escapist fantasy – the dad in stern talks about what true heroism looks like in the real world and Jack Flack in placing the boy in danger through his reality-detached fearlessness. As if this dual-role lesson about the fantasy-life dangers of video games & RPGs weren’t enough of a novelty alone, Coleman’s casting feels like a bizarre choice because of its echoing of a role he played exactly one year earlier, in what’s likely the most beloved alarmist anti-video game screed of all time.

Dabney Coleman’s role in the 1983 Cold War thriller WarGames feels like a perfect synthesis of his two roles in Cloak & Dagger. With his hair dyed unnaturally black like Jack Flack’s, Coleman plays a no-nonsense military man who both has no time for the fantasies of teenage gaming culture and lives the unreal international espionage lifestyle that’s exaggerated for comic effect in Flack. Coleman’s performance in WarGames is such a perfect midpoint between his two characters in Cloak & Dagger that the film feels more like an audition reel than it does like inspirational source material. He’s even called on to give Matthew Broderick’s teen protagonist a stern fatherly talking to about the dangers of video game fantasy, despite not being the boy’s father. In Cloak & Dagger, he’s right to warn his son about losing touch with reality in his roleplay gaming fantasies, but misses the larger point of how RPG’s & video games could be useful as a bonding tool with the lonely, grieving boy. In WarGames he’s right to update military procedure with computer programming automation, but misses the larger point of how video gameplay & gamesmanship logic are useful in war strategy – particularly in stalemate conflicts like The Cold War. As often happens with character actors, all three roles between these two films feel like different variations on the same archetype, and it’s funny that both of these Beware the Video Game movies thought to cast Coleman as their browbeating fuddy-duddies. As Cloak & Dagger is the more eccentric, over-the-top work, it plays almost like a parody of his grounded (even if archetypal) performance in WarGames. Both films’ paralleled arrival (along with their accompanying Atari game tie-ins) at the exact time the video game industry crashed only make comparing the two films all the more appealing; Colema’s casting in both projects is the perfect excuse to oblige.

Objectively speaking, WarGames is likely a superior film to Cloak & Dagger, but I’m not sure that quality craftsmanship is what I’m looking for in an 80s relic about how video game fantasy can put real lives at risk. A pre-fame Matthew Broderick & Ally Sheedy star as teen brats who hope to hack into a video game company’s unreleased titles, but instead mistakingly access a military supercomputer that nearly instigates WWIII. It’s the same video game fantasy leading to life-threatening danger premise of Cloak & Dagger, except in this case the danger is global instead of purely personal. As the teens play with real-life nuclear weapons as if they were toys, the tension between harmless bedroom fun & dead-serious war room retaliation says a lot about the automation, abstraction, and depersonalization of war (which has only gotten more intense in the last 35 years). At the same time, that abstraction & depersonalization makes its actual stakes feel almost too distanced to fully hit home, as opposed to the more hands-on dangers of video game fantasy in Cloak & Dagger. The conflict of a hacked, haywire computer nearly triggering nuclear war is truer to life than a boy’s imaginary friend landing him in a deadly game of international espionage, but there’s still something more affecting about watching a grown man pull a knife on an E.T.-era Henry Thomas or threaten to shoot out the child’s kneecaps “just to watch him bleed.” WarGames’s video game alarmism is also cleverer than Cloak & Dagger’s in the way it makes the video game itself a deranged character threatening death & destruction; in Cloak & Dagger the cartridge everyone is after is more or less a MacGuffin. Clever or not, I still find myself more drawn to the over-the-top, cartoonish antics of Cloak & Dagger (especially when they clash with brutal child-threatening violence), and the difference between the two films’ aesthetics is perfectly summarized by Coleman’s cartoonish performance of Jack Flack therein.

You don’t have to squint too hard to see the similarities between WarGames and Cloak & Dagger: two alarmist thrillers about the dangers of video games that arrived just when their subject’s industry was crashing, but were developed as Atari games anyway. Dabney Coleman’s casting as three characters across these two movies only helps further illustrate both the already apparent parallels between them and the difference in their respective tones. WarGames, as the more tonally sober war thriller, won out in the long run in both respect & notoriety, but the much sillier Cloak & Dagger deserves even more respect for its willingness to go for the jugular in ways you might not expect – especially considering how silly Coleman is in the Jack Flack persona.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the hyperviolent children’s action-adventure Cloak & Dagger (1984), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our comparison to another alarmist 80s roleplay gaming thriller Mazes & Monsters, and last week’s look at the death of Atari.

-Brandon Ledet

The Time Henry Thomas Buried Atari, Then Dug It Back Out

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One of the more interesting aspects of our current Movie of the Month, the violent children’s action-adventure Cloak & Dagger, is that it was in part designed to rescue Atari from financial ruin. After the video game crash of 1983 that nearly put Atari out of business for good, the ailing company hoped a movie tie-in deal might help boost its popularity (and promote video game culture in general) by joining the ranks of popular films like Tron & WarGames. Hitching its wagon to the in-development Cloak & Dagger project, which was eventually named after a real-life Atari 2600 cartridge that never made it to market, was a strange choice for a couple of reasons. On a big-picture level, Cloak & Dagger functions as alarmist propaganda about the dangers of video games & fantasy roleplay, so its dual role as an advertisement for a specific Atari game seems a little self-defeating. On a smaller, more specific level, the film’s pint-sized lead Henry Thomas seemed like an odd choice for a video game poster boy, seeing as how he was already closely associated with the industry’s 1983 downfall. It was kind of a bold move both for Henry Thomas’s agent and for Atari to risk associating the young actor, best known for his role as Elliott in E.T., with video games again so soon after the E.T. video game disaster. The E.T. tie-in video game was such an embarrassing flop for Atari (due mostly to poor craftsmanship in its rush to market) that it’s cited as one of the major contributing factors for the 1983 industry crash – the very thing that made desperate last-ditch efforts like Cloak & Dagger necessary in the first place. The game was such a flop that it inspired an urban legend about its unsold stock being buried in a New Mexico landfill—hundreds of thousands of deadstock cartridges with Henry Thomas’s face on the cover discarded underground. That’s not necessarily the first face I would think to cast in my movie meant to rescue the industry.

The most fascinating thing about the E.T. video game legend is that’s it’s (at least partially) true. The 2014 documentary Atari: Game Over is especially illuminating on the subject, tracking the search for and excavation of the E.T. landfill meant to prove its existence. In a way, it’s a total success. Excavation crews uncover a landfill packed with thousands of unsold Atari games in Alamogordo NM, near where scientists first tested the nuclear bomb. An entirely different kind of bomb, E.T.: “the worst video game of all time,” was included among those buried titles, but it did not comprise as much of the loot as the urban legend may have suggested. Only 10% of the video game cartridges recovered in that New Mexico landfill featured Henry Thomas’s face; buried along with E.T.: The Video Game were much better-respected titles like Yars’ Revenge, Pac-Man, and Centipede. Blaming the massive cartridge burial and, by extension, the entire video game crash of ’83 on the E.T. game just makes for a better story, whether or not the infamous flop deserved the mockery. Much of Atari: Game Over functions like rehabilitative PR for the E.T. game in that way. It explains how the game was rushed to market in just five weeks’ time to capitalize on the Christmas season, so that its very existence is kind of a computer programming miracle for the game’s designer, Howard Scott Warshaw. Although its frustrating gameplay that it lands its avatar, an unrecognizably pixelated E.T., in holes from which he can’t escape is explained to be far from the worst gameplay to grace the Atari console; it only seemed that way it compares to the quality of the movie. Interviews with Spielberg also confirm that the director himself approved the game before it hit the market, so it seems unfair that was effectively driven out of the video game business after E.T.’s failure, despite having designed more beloved games like Yars’ Revenge and the Raiders of the Lost Ark tie-in. Most damningly (but perhaps least surprisingly), industry experts also explain how the video game crash of ’83 was far from E.T.’s fault; the game’s failure was just the convenient scapegoat for much larger financial issues. The whole film serves as a pretty convincing argument for why Henry Thomas shouldn’t be barred from video game adaptations after the E.T. game’s failure, even if the optics are initially questionable.

As useful as I found Atari: Game Over in illustrating exactly what happened with the E.T. video game landfill, I can’t exactly recommend it as a well-made documentary. The only feature film produced for X-Box’s video content wing X-Box Originals, this very slight 66min doc feels like it has a target audience of 14-year-old boys and not that much wider. Director Zak Penn brings a decent pedigree to the project, as a writer for many major Hollywood comic book adaptations & one-time collaboration with Werner Herzog on The Incident at Loch Ness, but he mostly crafts this documentary like the video game equivalent of Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Since the actual excavation of the Atari landfill can’t comprise an entire feature’s runtime on its own, the film busies itself crosscutting between the dig & an oral history of the early days of Atari that led to the E.T. debacle. There’s a lot of useful insight to be pulled from these interviews, but they just as often feel like a boys’ club glory days nostalgia trip – boosting the programmers’ own nerdy legacy instead of maintaining properly distanced, documentarian honesty. Ready Player One novelist Ernest Cline is a perfect mascot for how this unexamined, nerdy pop-culture worship comes across in its worst moments. He injects himself into the narrative of the landscape excavation it the cringiest of ways, staging a road trip to witness the dig by driving in a replica Back to the Future DeLorean he picks up form Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, accompanied by a life-size E.T. replica in the passenger seat. The self-described “screenwriter, novelist, and gentlemen adventurer” provides some useful context about how E.T.’s gameplay helped inspired the video game “Easter Egg” trope that guided the plot of Ready Player One, but mostly he just serves as the Guy Fieri of the piece—representing both its TV special qualities & its unwillingness to engage with pop culture nerdery as anything but The Greatest Thing Ever.

Regardless of Game Over’s quality as documentary filmmaking, the movie is extremely useful in illustrating both how the unsold E.T. cartridges featuring Henry Thomas’s face aren’t entirely responsible for the 1983 video game crash and how the urban legend surrounding them was so strong that casting him in Cloak & Dagger was risky anyway. As supplementary material, the film is more an act of reputation rehabilitation for the E.T. game & its creator than it is a revelation of anything directly related to Cloak & Dagger. Still, it’s an illustrative history of the cultural climate Cloak & Dagger was released in, a time when the future of video games as a lucrative industry did not seem as set in stone as it does now. It has no trouble finding nerds who were on the ground floor for those troublesome early days to reminisce about the era as if they were Guy Fieri singing the praises of Donkey Sauce.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the hyperviolent children’s action-adventure Cloak & Dagger (1984), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at another alarmist 80s roleplay gaming thriller, Mazes & Monsters.

-Brandon Ledet

R.P.G.: R.I.P.

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Our current Movie of the Month, the 1984 children’s action-thriller Cloak & Dagger, has a lot to say about the dangers of fantasy roleplay gaming, but it’s all very confused & self-conflicting. If nothing else, the film seems to be confused about what gaming culture even is, conflating tools like video game cartridges and 12-sided board game dice as if they belonged to the same activity. Additionally, it cannot decide whether it wants to scare parents about the dangers of fantasy roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons or if it wants to promote the purchase of Atari cartridges like the one that gets its young tyke protagonist into a heap of trouble. Besides the film’s horrific eagerness to put children in life-threatening danger, I’d point to that self-conflicted messaging as one of the film’s major draws. In a key exchange in the first act, a father & son (Dabney Coleman & Henry Thomas) argue about the value of fantasy roleplaying and, in what’s rare for a children’s film from the era, both sides of the divide have a point – the father in pleading with his son to consider the practical realities of the world around him and the son in asking the father to participate in his gaming interests as a way of bonding. That well-balanced approach to the topic of fantasy roleplaying may be smart & nuanced, but it does dampen the novelty of Cloak & Dagger’s larger tendency to function as an alarmist siren to all parents everywhere that roleplay fantasy is corrupting their children’s minds. Thankfully, another early 80s gaming drama picked up the slack with a much less nuanced, raving lunatic screed against the dangers of D&D. And it even starred one of America’s most beloved celebrities.

The 1982 made-for-CBS melodrama Mazes & Monsters is a vision of what Cloak & Dagger would be like without dramatic nuance or tact. Based on a “true crime” novel about a real-life disappearance case where a fanatic D&D player committed suicide, the film deliberately skews logical cause & effect patterns to make RPGs out to be child-endangering killers. Mazes & Monsters opens with a news report explaining what fantasy roleplay gaming is and how it can directly lead to “loss of distinction between reality & fantasy, and possibly the loss of life in the process.” We’re then introduced to four college-age friends, each with deep-seated personal issues, who regular meet to play a fictional RPG called Mazes & Monsters when they should be focusing on their school work. Tom Hanks, in his first leading role, plays the most troubled of the foursome – a likely schizophrenic outsider haunted by the disappearance of his older brother. While the other players in his gaming circle have no trouble using the escapism of Mazes & Monsters to forget their personal issues (romantic, parental, school-related, or otherwise), Hanks’s fraying protagonist struggles with coming back down from the fantasy to return to normal life. He refuses to break character, hallucinates demons from the game in his real-life environment, and eventually runs off to NYC on a suicide mission to jump off The Twin Towers. His friends eventually call for help when they can’t stop him from doing a 9/11 to himself, but in the process feel compelled to lie about their involvement in the game, endangering him even further in their cautious self-preservation. Everything that touches the Mazes & Monsters game only leads to malady & misery.

The amusing thing about Mazes & Monsters is that it contradicts its own message just as much as Cloak & Dagger; it just seems to be entirely unaware that it’s doing so. The film shoots itself in the foot by foolishly swapping around the cause & effect of its alarmist fearmongering. The way the movie frames it, roleplaying games cause a psychological break with reality that generates a series of personal problems in the impressionable, weak-minded youngsters who succumb to their temptations of escapist fantasy. However, it also frames the Mazes & Monsters gamers as already-troubled youths who use the RPG lifestyle as a means of forming comraderie with like-minded peers. Tom Hanks’s troubled youth is already predisposed to schizophrenia & suicidal urges when he arrives to college; the social activity of roleplay gaming merely provides him with a safety net community who can call for proper medical attention when he needs it. Of course, this glorified Afternoon Special about the dangers of gaming misinterprets this dynamic to the opposite extreme and practically characterizes the RPG community as occultist freaks. Late night Mazes & Monsters sessions are candlelit as if they were witchy seances. Dragon-like demons (or at least hallucinations thereof) are summoned in condemned, life-threatening caves. Worst yet, the game is warned to even inspire your kids to run off to New York City, the biggest temple of sin since Sodom & Gomorrah. The depictions of fantasy roleplay gaming start off harmless & true enough – with college age nerds putting off studying for a Physics exam so they can roll 12-sided dice in a cramped dorm room. By the end of the film, however, it’s played with the authenticity & occult-fearing alarmism of a live-action adaptation of a Chick Tract.

As amusing as Mazes & Monsters’s alarmist rants about the otherworldly danger of roleplay fantasy gaming can be, and as adorable as it is to see Tom Hanks find his humble beginnings in a project so embarrassing in its central conceit, the movie is unfortunately too muted & slow-moving to recommend as an over-the-top novelty. It’s interesting as a comparison point to Cloak & Dagger (and the two films’ titles could be swapped with hardly anyone noticing), as it demonstrates what that superior film could have devolved into if it had fully committed to its scolding about the dangers of gaming. Cloak & Dagger‘s dual purpose as an advertisement for the flailing Atari 2600 console added an interesting, self-challenging layer to its anti-gaming moralism missing from Mazes & Monsters. Without it, that made-for- CBS melodrama only challenges its own message by missing the point entirely – advertising for roleplaying games as a source of community & comraderie in a misguided attempt to condemn the harmless activity for its supposed reality-distorting sorcery.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the hyperviolent children’s action-adventure Cloak & Dagger (1984), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet