Screen Culture: My video game revival!

(Note: An edited version of this post was previously submitted for my AFTRS Screen Culture course, Animation & Video Games Task, September 2010)

The ominous quote that opens the game

It wasn’t until my AFTRS Screen Culture course on Video Games that I realised how much I missed the form of entertainment that had occupied so much of my youth. An avid Nintendo fan from the Nes through to the Wii, exploring the worlds of Mario and Link, Samus and Donkey Kong was where I spent a large part of my teens. Offered the chance to review my favourite game of all time, I snapped up the opportunity to revisit an old passion. I immediately knew this review would only focus on 1 of 3 possible games: "Perfect Dark" for the Nintendo 64, "Jet Force Gemini" for the Nintendo 64 or "Eternal Darkness" for the Nintendo GameCube. I chose the latter as it more appropriately met the term of ‘complex game’ and is most notable for its wondrous storyline. 

Eternal Night of the Blogless Mind

Well yes, I have finally managed to blog again! Let's hope I can still 'Recall' my opinions and replicate them here for you. Following on from my blog entry about 'experimental film', and the fact that despite its appearance, it still heavily relies on a set pattern of elements and common form, I now extend this discussion by analysing Alternatives to the 'Classical Hollywood Narrative'.

In the 'Story' module of the Screen Culture course that I am undertaking at AFTRS, Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was a prime source of defining Alternatives to the Classical Hollywood Narrative. Gondry's take on Charlie Kaufman's script is exactly that, a piece of multiform narrative that seems completely detached from the Classical Hollywood and yet upon closer inspection matches the Classical almost to a tee.

Meshing 4907

In 1943 the husband and wife team of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid decided to put their creative minds together to produce a film. The result of this is the influential short "Meshes of the Afternoon", which has a structure that in today's Screen Culture we would label as 'Experimental'. Well this blog post is an experimental piece in its own right, as I will mesh together a film made by a couple in 1943 with a film made by a couple in 2010. That is, the film "4907" made by Raelene Loong and myself.

Now I had never seen "Meshes of the Afternoon" until last week when it was screened as part of the Story module of my Screen Culture course. And yet, a film made 57 years ago, has a sharp resemblance to this short film that I wrote and co-directed this year. Now maybe i'm just unoriginal, which is quite possibly the case, or maybe it is an indication that 'experimental' is really not that experimental after all.

Like A Blirgin

Well, well, well, what do we have here? Kieran Tully blogging? I know I never thought I'd see it either but desperate times calls for desperate measures. And by desperate times I mean I am required to blog as part of my Screen Culture course that I am undertaking at AFTRS.

So welcome to this little corner of the interweb called Tully's Recall, in which I will discuss all things film, football and a little bit of Fan Chan. I will try and make it as informative and interesting as possible, but I make no promises.

Why haven't I blogged before? Well I tend to consider myself much more of a 'Film Recommender' (that's a word) rather than a 'Film Critic'. That is, I enjoy recommending films to my friends and family or just handing them a DVD and saying 'Watch it'. But I don't really follow this up with a big discussion about the film and I don't feel the need to express my views on it. If they like it, which I hope they do, then that's great.

This may seem to contrast my activity on Flixster, where I have 18,643 ratings (don't be alarmed, 13,255 of those are "Not Interested"). So I am active on the review scene but it's not my focus. And those Flixster reviews are more so just a reminder to myself as to what I thought about a particular film, and often even take the form of a single comment. For example, my review of 2006's Ultraviolet: "Ultrashit" or my review of 1977's Rolling Thunder: "Rolling Awesome".

Hence I don't really plan for this to be a movie review blog as such, but just a recap on my activities and no doubt highly credible theories about today's Screen Culture. So look out for my posts in the near future, and I hope you enjoy them here at Tully's Recall.

Kieran Tully

"I'm not familiar with that address. Would you please repeat the destination? "

www.kierantully.blogspot.com