Are video games making kids fat? No, that would be food…

It’s a familiar theme in the news and it only needs the slightest of sparks to get going. If there’s a murder it means that the killer has been honing his skills on Xbox Live, amassing headshots of spotty American teens on Call of Duty. If there’s a horrifically tragic car crash then the kid’s obviously been getting ideas from the mindless traffic weaving, crude language and pedestrian skittles of Grand Theft Auto and the like. If a young girl is sexually harassed by a young guy, he’s been spending too much time working through the levels of Teach that Girl a Lesson: The Titillating Adventures of Spankatron Part II, or something.

What’s even more infuriating than the casual asides of blame in news stories though, is the supposedly in-depth and professional advice columns on the sort of parenting that can banish the evils of the games console. This type of thing is inevitable written by Dr Terri Praisebut Dontsmother or Professor Lilia Mollycuddleova of the Belgrade Child Tantrum Institute. These Gods of infant psychology will proceed to patronisingly explain the dos and don’ts of video gaming, which will ultimately turn out to be common sense.

Rather than appeal to such things as maternal instinct or the law of the bleeding obvious, these articles will be stuffed with lots of studies about the effects of gaming. Profound insights will stem from their findings, such as the fact that gaming immediately before bed might make it difficult for your child to sleep and that too much button bashing might cause inflammation and conditions like RSI in their hands.

Of course the really contentious question is: do games cause aggression? Our helpful Agony Aunt will usually start by admitting what a hotly debated topic this is, before laying out briefly the two views in the debate. The anti-games view will normally be presented with greater weight of evidence and any postives will be qualified, with phrases like “limited evidence shows that they can improve children’s willingness to co-operate”. Wrapped up somewhere in the waffle, will be the admission that the effect of games depends on the child’s environment, i.e. they don’t do any harm in a healthy and stable home, and it’s the badly behaving parents doing the damage in the poor environments, not video games.

Once in a while a reasonably interesting point will arise from one of the numerous studies being quoted. For example, that playing football based games increases appetite. However rather than seeking any positives in this, like, I don’t know, interest in playing ACTUAL football and getting regular exercise, a new evil shall be swiftly created. Football games = fat kids. So no shooting because that makes murderers and no scoring because that makes gobblers.

Some studies will just be frankly ethically dubious. They’ll casually mention that a group of children failed to do as many sit-ups as they once could. Who is making our primary school kids do sit-ups? Who is callously tracking their progress, as if we were breeding an army? I didn’t do any sit-ups in primary school, at least I won’t have thought of them as sit-ups. Forcing painful and sweaty exercise on our young, as if we were training race horses, sounds a lot worse than letting them dabble with escapism that isn’t The X-Factor or In The Night Garden, now and then.

It should be obvious that video games, like anything else that came before it like TV or comics, should be used in moderation. By anyone, not just kids. It should also be said more often that the greater immersion of video games has its developmental benefits as well as drawbacks. Increasingly experimental and quality narratives and technology, like that in LA: Noire, is simply an advancement in storytelling, not an untameable, corrupting beast to be feared.

Kick Ass Assassins: Salt on Blu-Ray and The American on DVD

The world lacks a female super spy. Angelina Jolie has perhaps come closer than most to filling the void with her all action portrayal of sexy video game Tomb Raider Lara Croft, but this was ultimately more Indiana Jones than James Bond. Last year Phillip Noyce’s Cold War conspiracy thriller Salt, originally earmarked for Tom Cruise, morphed into a very different project altogether with the casting of Jolie as CIA agent Evelyn.

I may be veering into sexism here, but because of Jolie’s casting my expectations were drastically lowered. However I’ll defend myself with two qualifications; firstly I think of Jolie as more than merely an internationally coveted sexual icon, but as a fine and capable actress, particularly after her powerhouse performance in Clint Eastwood’s excellent Changeling. Secondly I believe I expected disappointment because of the film industry’s own sexist view of women playing action leads, rather than my own narrow and intolerant perspective on the “fairer sex”.

What I mean by this is that women rarely seem to be cast in serious mainstream action films. They’re a common feature in action comedies, such as the dire Knight and Day and Jolie’s own light-hearted romp with her equally famous and sexy spouse in Mr and Mrs Smith. But there’s no realistic and gripping female equivalent to the Bourne series, for example. Filmmakers are reluctant to showcase women, even today, as ruthless and professional killers without elements of fantasy. Watch a film about what is essentially a paid, female murderer (a “hitwoman”) and expect lots of ninja style, silly high kicking and unbelievable martial arts, alongside tight costumes, to offset such a horrific notion.

Sadly this is a formula that Salt eventually and perhaps inevitably, conforms to. The opening of the film is promising. Once we get some god awful dialogue out the way, probably ripped straight from the “how to script a film in the espionage genre” handbook, along with some forced flashbacks, we get Salt interrogating an apparent Russian defector. He drops the bombshell that there’s a sleeper agent in the CIA, and that agent is called Evelyn Salt.

Salt is dismissive at first, but all the high tech brain scans and probably some ingenious pad questioning his balls from his seat, says that he’s telling the truth. After a bit of dithering Salt decides to run, apparently out of concern for her husband, but it still seems rather daft if she really is innocent. Once she does run however, it looks as if Salt is going to be a decent film.

With the shadowy, backstabbing premise of the plot and some tense evasion of security cameras by a grey suited Jolie, Salt seems very Bourne-esque at first. And a female Bourne film would not have been such a bad thing. Boxed into an interrogation room, Salt constructs a makeshift weapon from chemicals and chairs and table legs to allow her to escape. She then flees for home to look for her husband and just avoids capture by climbing around the outside of her building. Finally she escapes the city after a standoff by jumping from truck to truck on the freeway.

During all of this action it’s easy to get swept up and the character remains believable. You sympathise with her apparent innocence and will her to succeed. But once Salt heads to New York based on information that someone will attempt to kill the Russian President at the Vice President’s funeral, the plot completely loses its way. It utterly surprised me on several occasions but purely because it becomes so absolutely ludicrous. You can no longer relate to Salt as a character and the action degenerates into ninja Jolie implausibly kicking the asses of trained security personnel in seconds.

At first I thought it was refreshing that Salt was a spy thriller based on the old Cold War rivalries and tensions. Cinemagoers could do with a little more entertainment courtesy of grand, evil schemes, rather than grim and realistic takes on Al-Qaeda. There’s nothing wrong with fantastical plots based on extravagant conspiracies and the destruction of the world, providing they’re executed plausibly. But Salt is just too farfetched and has too many holes, mainly surrounding the believability of its characters. It also strays into the absurd and hilarious; supposedly a “master of disguise” Salt looks fairly obviously like Angelina Jolie dressed as an effeminate man infiltrating the White House.

As usual with Blu-Rays, there’s a whole host of meaty special features to devour about the making of Salt. There’s a baffling section on Salt’s supposed genius as a “master of disguise” and a separate “in screen” interview with the costume designer explaining the selection process behind Jolie’s grey suit earlier in the film. Apparently it was really beneficial to visit the CIA and presumably discover they wear boring and generic corporate power suits like everyone else. The most revealing sections are interviews with Noyce and Jolie about the fact Salt was originally written for a man, which might account for some of the script’s rough and unfinished feel.

There are some pleasing references to classics of the genre in the film, for example when “defector” Orlov escapes using a blade concealed in his shoe, like Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love. But in the end Salt resembles a mishmash parody of everything it has taken influence from. It lacks originality, quality and entertainment for most of its thankfully brief 100 minute runtime.

THE AMERICAN is the sort of serious and sombre story that sadly wouldn’t get made with a woman in the title role. It’s a slow-burning meditation on the nature of being an assassin and on loneliness itself. It’s an exercise in minimalist storytelling from writer Rowan Joffe, adapting Martin Booth’s novel A Very Private Gentleman, and particularly, director Anton Corbijn. With the lightest of brush strokes he paints what was, for me, an incredibly evocative and captivating picture. 

I had meant to see The American on the big screen but sadly its lack of success at the box office resulted in a short stay at my local multiplex. For critics the problem with The American is that it never truly ignites following such a tantalisingly drawn out simmering of tension. Many find it boring to sit through. But for anyone that loves the genre, the intoxicating idea of the lone assassin, or anyone that likes understated and subtle films, The American is wonderfully watchable.

In many ways George Clooney shouldn’t work in the title role. He is such a recognisable face across the globe, a brand rather than a name, that he shouldn’t convince as an unknown and elusive assassin. But Corbijn needed someone who could act without words and Clooney delivers a master class. When there is dialogue Clooney enthuses it with charisma; it oozes enigmatic intrigue. When the camera is entirely reliant on Clooney’s movements a pained expression, a cold glance or a precise gesture speaks more than a page of script ever could.  This has been hailed by some as the best performance of Clooney’s career for a reason. We’ve never seen him laid bare like this; robbed of the charm and the cheeky grin.

More than anything else The American is beautiful. Its soundtrack is haunting, atmospheric and touching. Every other shot would make an arty still in a gallery; in Corbijn’s second picture after the acclaimed biopic Control, his background as a photographer is constantly evident. Clooney’s character chooses photography as his cover and there’s something about the parallels of precise skill and solitude between pictures and killing that’s endlessly fascinating. Indeed the subtlety of the storytelling really lets you think about its themes whilst enjoying the gorgeous visuals and the sexy girls.

The loneliness of existence is there in every furrow of Clooney’s focused face; the life of the assassin is the perfect lens for examining anyone’s existential angst. His character makes meagre relationships that wouldn’t satisfy many human beings, and yet they prove too much and too risky for his secretive profession. Despite the reports of boredom and never-ending build-up, I thought that the restrained action punctuated the plot well and the climax of the simple story was suitably engrossing.

In many ways Salt and The American both take “old school” approaches to a familiar genre; Salt with its outlandish Cold War plot and The American with its focus on an age old character, complete with soul searching scenes with a priest. The undoubted difference between the films though is a sumptuous and sexy style and quality that makes The American infinitely more interesting than Jolie’s briefly entertaining foray into the world of espionage.