Lost River (Ryan Gosling, 2014)

Actors turning into film directors is nothing new, nor particularly remarkable. However, something seemed peculiar about Ryan Gosling taking control of the camera (and the pen since he also wrote the screenplay). Gosling is a bit of a wild-card as an actor. He definitely has a presence on screen, but one that gains actual substance when channeling an inner, speechless anger. Refn’s Drive might be the most obvious example (along with the misstep that was his Only God Forgives), as well as Derek Cianfrance The Place Beyond the Pines. But even in the fantastically underrated Blue Valentine, from the same director, a powerful, angry, frustration seems to emanate from his physical presence. And yet, somehow when the guy speaks, that effect seems to be lost, his voice unnecessarily languid or gritty, unsubtly ruining what his eyes and body posture had been setting up all along. Hence my curiosity: upon finding his “voice” as a director, which side of Gosling would we be seeing?

Papo & Yo (Vander Caballero, 2012)

Storytelling comes in many forms. From songs, paintings, cinema, literature, each of these mediums allows the creative exploration of our senses to convey moods, values and experiences. In its purest form, the creator of these stories imprints a part of him or herself on the artefact created, consciously or not. It is not uncommon, however, that we face certain artefacts that deviate into a more technical approach. I am not referring to purely aesthetic exercises, since these also possess the ethics underlying their creation. Instead, I mean approaches relying on certain “building blocks” that define standard experiences. In cinema, for instance, it is quite easy to identify infinite variations on the same formula, with similar scripts, scenarios and character types. At a certain point, it seems to become a combination of existing materials. Even aesthetics depart from its artistic (and I promise this is the only and last reference to this vague term here today) goal and fall into matters of decorating the assembled piece.

Videogames seem to be a medium born out of such an engineering process. Starting with minimal tools (from ASCII and pure text) and subject to vertiginous technical advancements in past few decades, many, or most, games are strictly exercises on using the right templates, adequate colour palettes, familiar interactive mechanics, and the bare levels of something resembling a script, stitching interactive sections together. They often feel like assemblies more than coherent artefacts originating from a authorial intent. And yet, they possess an ability to explore and enhance the interactive dimension of storytelling that, while not completely absent from other mediums, has the potential to engage an audience through different means. Maybe one day I can write more comprehensively regarding this subject (much to the cringing, I suspect, of some friends of mine). But today I want to talk about a particular piece that, flawed as it may be, managed to distinguish itself from my usual experience with videogames.

Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)

“What is the point?”

This question, as old as human nature, ties up the movie in a colorful damp bow. Posed so many times, answered in so many different ways, Boyhood is Richard Linklater’s attempt of both interpreting the question and provide for a non-answer to it. The setup is rather trivial: Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) is the central character of a dispersed and nomad family, with a father (Mason Sr, played by an ever childishly charming Ethan Hawke) infrequently present (and his “replacements” come and go), always jumping from place to place, home to home, with his mother (Olivia, Patricia Arquette) and sister (Samantha, Lorelei Linklater). We follow the childhood and teenage years of Mason Jr. as he deals with the pains of growing up and figuring out… let’s say, “stuff”.