Archive for the ‘Play’ Category

The Five-Year Engagement Takes Director Nick Stoller Off the Grid

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Nock Stoller finds comedy in discomfort.
Photo: Bryce Duffy

In The Five-Year Engagement, Jason Segel follows his fiancè (Emily Blunt) to Michigan, only to find himself exiled hundreds of miles from his family and the rest of his life. Director Nick Stoller says isolation—physical and emotional—is something he and Segel are familiar with. “We’ve both been in long relationships that haven’t gone anywhere,” Stoller says. “I’m really interested in the changes in power dynamics that can happen.”

A rising star in the Judd Apatow Nebula, Stoller, 36, has been mining relationships for laughs since he landed a gig writing for Apatow’s short-lived 2001 sitcom, Undeclared. It was there that he met a couple of young unknowns named Seth Rogen and Jason Segel. After writing screenplays for the Jim Carrey comedies Fun With Dick and Jane and Yes Man, Stoller bartered with his mentor, offering to help Segel write 2008′s Forgetting Sarah Marshall if Apatow would back him to direct.

Apatow agreed, and so did the suits at Universal Studios. “I still don’t know why they greenlit it,” Stoller says. “Jason told me after the fact that the first week of shooting the movie, he was really nervous—it was pretty clear I had no idea what was happening.” The partnership proved solid, and Stoller and Segel went on to cowrite Get Him to the Greek (which Stoller also directed), The Muppets, and now The Five-Year Engagement, which comes out in April.

While he was filming the project, Stoller had to hide his phone so he could focus properly on the task at hand, but now he’s back in the fold and on to his next film project—which in all probability will involve at least one of his comedy compatriots. “To get to make movies is really exciting,” he says, “but to do it with a group of people who you trust, who you love creating stuff with—and who you find hilarious—that’s even better.”

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Mixed-Media Artist Brings the Middle of Nowhere to the Masses

Alex Hartley creates artwork based on some of the most remote places on earth: “It’s so hard in Europe to find spaces away from other people,” the British artist says of his exile-themed pieces. “The realization that there are still real wildernesses left is fascinating to me.”

To find the backcountry he wants to shoot, Hartley has spent weeks in the Peruvian jungle, suffered altitude sickness in Bolivia, and traveled by dogsled across northern Norway. Back in his studio, he constructs physical domes, towers, and huts that he affixes to the photographed landscapes. The result is mixed-media art that connects habitation with isolation.

Hartley’s most recent project, Nowhereisland, puts a different spin on solitude. Last fall he and a crew sailed into international waters aboard a boat full of bedrock and boulders gathered from a nameless island in the High Arctic. He declared it a new nation: Nowhereisland. Hartley is now working with engineers to transform the terrain into a floating sculpture that, in July, will travel by tugboat to British ports as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It’s his most public piece yet, and the attention is virgin territory for Hartley: “Normally I make my work, put it in a gallery, and if you don’t like it, fuck off,” he says. Sounds like it’s time for another Andes trek.

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iPhone Games That Fell From Grace

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These four titles tasted of the Apple,
then fell from grace.
Illustration: Alexandra Bruel

The App Store game aisle seems like a utopia, filled with the words of friends and jumping doodles (whatever those are). But that innocence is carefully policed by Apple: Any game that commits blasphemy is sent to the hinterlands, where only jailbroken iPhones and Android-toting heretics dare tread. Consider these mobile sinners to be cautionary tales.

Free Fall High Score

Drop your phone as far as you can—while recording a video of it all.

Sin: Apple doesn’t care for games that might destroy your phone. Go figure.

Exiled to: Android Marketplace (or Cydia, for blackhat iPhone users).

Free Fall High Score

Obama Trampoline

Play as a politician circa 2008, jumping on a trampoline and popping balloons in the Oval Office.

Sin: Apps that are “defamatory, offensive, [or] mean-spirited” constitute forbidden fruit. Off the iLand with you!

Exiled to: The original is gone—but Swamiware has a totally unrelated game called Party Trampoline featuring brown-bagged maybe-politicians.

Obama Trampoline

Phone Story

Motivate laborers to mine raw materials, rescue suicidal plant workers, then sell an iPh—sorry, generic smartphone—to consumers.

Sin: Games like Ninja Steve flatter iTunes overlords. Games like Phone Story? Not so much.

Exiled to: Android Marketplace. (Developer Molleindustria donates proceeds to fighting corporate abuse.

Phone Story

Smuggle Truck

Shuttle illegal immigrants in your pickup truck.

Sin: Want “potentially offensive”? Try “save the baby for a power-up.”

Exiled to: The original is still on PC/Mac, but iOS users are stuck with Snuggle Truck, where it’s cutesy animals in need of discreet transport.

Smuggle Truck

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Journey Gamers Trek Through Exile and Loneliness

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Journey for PS3 is a desert odyssey.

Mud-and-guts graphics. Obscene trash talk. Concussive explosions. Mainstream videogames excel at sensory overload. Journey, on the other hand, gives players quiet respite. In this PlayStation 3 title, out this spring from Santa Monica-based thatgamecompany, you’re an enigmatic robed figure who’s trying to reach a distant mountain. You’re alone on your desert trek—unless you run into a second traveler, a fellow online player. You can’t communicate. You don’t have a name. You just … walk (and jump and occasionally glide). The game’s designers see it as a kind of philosophical exercise. As company cofounder Kellee Santiago puts it, “the journey to the mountaintop becomes a journey through exile and loneliness.”

Rich landscapes and an elegant soundtrack make Journey’s meditative odyssey of solo exploration a compelling Zen experience. Think of it as a yoga retreat for your inner Master Chief.

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Mary H. K. Choi on When to Ignore Web Memes

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Illustration: David Galletly

When you’re sternum-deep in the Internet all day, the shifting currents and riptides of the collective are tough to ignore. You’re minding your own business, processing email from inbox to outbox, extracting information for conversion to knowledge, when suddenly your social networks start disgorging flotsam: Galleries of grumpy animals. Videos of children in pageant dresses singing at 40 bpm. Shit Girls Say. GIFs.

You’d have to be a dark-hearted spoilsport not to click, right? This stuff isn’t spam. These are memes, the raw feed of popular culture. If you don’t look/listen/watch, you’re on the outside of an inside joke.

And some of it is funny! Or heartbreaking. Or important. But the people who are best at the Internet know when to opt out. They know which memes to skip. So be a dark-hearted spoilsport — but do it well. I’m here to help you be an ace meme-skipper.

Rule 1

Avoid Knock-Offs

Shit My Dad Says on Twitter? Funny. Shit Girls Say on YouTube? Hilarious. But the Shit _____ Say meme metastasized faster than the Real Housewives franchise. Shit Single Girls Say. Shit Black Girls Say II. Shit Yogis Say. Everybody with a face made one of these things. “It’s variations on a theme. Five percent are good, and the rest are crap,” says Jason Kottke, the programmer and shrewd link collector who runs kottke.org. “Cocaine Bear is great. There’s this grizzly bear in the snow, and the caption says, “I love coke!” and he’s, like, on a binge. It’s funny. I don’t need 11 more with penguins or cats or Ryan Gosling.”

Rule 2

Know Your Friends

Curate the so-called curators. That woman you’ve known since high school and can’t bring yourself to unfriend? Is she funny? If the answer is no, then don’t click on a link she posted with the comment “This is hilarious!” Incorrect. Avoid. (If she is a genius comedian, do the opposite.)

Rule 3

Know Yourself

Far be it from me to cast aspersions on Purritos (kittens wrapped up like burritos — you’re welcome), but if cuteness doesn’t do it for you, don’t click. Not into music? Don’t engage with Lana Del Rey. (Bonus: You never have to spell chanteuse.) Be as much about what you ignore as what you adore. “It’s identity signaling,” says Jonah Berger, a Wharton professor who studies social contagions. “A way to show distinction is to be an early disadopter.”

Rule 4

Have No Fear

Vanquish your desire to participate. What the kids call FOMO — fear of missing out — is where memes get their power; it’s the mitochondria of meme. But extreme participation can ruin you. “Memes are all about social coordination,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University. “You either do it or you don’t do it.” In other words, once you’re in, you’re in. And that guy who has seen every dubstep version of cartoon theme songs is a sad, sad man. Consider being the other dude, the one who knows WTF dubstep is and can sing the ThunderCats theme but feels zero compunction to marry the two.

Look, if slide shows of the ever-weird Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom are your thing, fine. Just own what you love and ignore what you hate — even anti-meme vitriol counts as engagement. Meme-skipping is about pulling the ejection lever and avoiding the canopy. It’s about not being cool. Is it “cool” that a guy whose avatar is a nine-layer cheeseburger with a bun made of doughnut just uploaded a series of videos of Mila Kunis dressed as a sorcerer, rapping in Russian?

Ha. Never mind. Worst example ever. Totally click through. He’s a freaking genius.

Email: mhkchoi@gmail.com

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