The romantic and career troubles of a star TV news producer (Hunter). Albert Brooks is the veteran reporter and aspiring anchorman with whom she has a strictly platonic friendship, and William Hurt is the newly-hired telegenic but extremely dim anchor with whom she becomes smitten. Jack Nicholson is the network’s current star anchor, Joan Cusack is a production assistant, and John Cusack appears from behind in a walk-on (“Angry Messenger” during the layoff scene, credited as “John Cusak”). Written, directed, and produced by James L. Brooks.

You have to feel sorry for William Hurt’s character, who, while no genius, isn’t as stupid as all that. I think there is a certain logic in prioritizing appealing mannerisms and a good voice in a news presenter, and having people like Albert Brooks act as their Cyranos (Cyrani?). By all means, respect my intelligence, but don’t respect it so much that you don’t even try to make the news presentable. Comparative advantage is what makes the world go round.

But the movie is good—if nothing else, then for an insight into the weird, weird consciences of reporter-types. James L. Brooks has problems wrapping it up (as he did in As Good As It Gets), but the beginning and middle are solid.

2h13m; 1987; Colour; Oscar nods for Best Picture, Actor (Hurt), Actress (Hunter), Supporting Actor (A. Brooks), Screenplay (J.L. Brooks), Editing, Cinematography

That said, let’s have a look at the list. Simply going by the volume of nominations, I’m inclined to tentatively guess that the Best Picture winner will be either Hugo or The Artist. However, we’ve got a nice broad slate of nominees this year, and I look forward to watching some of them.

Best Supporting Actor has some very interesting names in it, including Max von Sydow, Kenneth Branagh, and Christopher Plummer. Not having seen any of the movies, I have no predictions here, but just a general enthusiasm. Particularly notable is the absence of any Pixar movies from the Best Animated Feature list. The last time Pixar failed to win was in 2007, when Cars lost to Happy Feet, and the last time they weren’t nominated at all was 2006.

Not that I’m surprised, mind you—the best thing you can say about the Cars series is that it does a good job of funding real Pixar movies. It’s nice to see some diversity here for once. I’d be very surprised if Rango failed to win, though, because in terms of technology and art it was a milestone. Also, the rest of the slate is a pair of mediocre Dreamworks movies and two indie films that no one’s ever heard of.

Best Original Score this year is John Williams, Howard Shore, and two other guys. I’m sure we all know how this is going to go. The question is whether Shore gets to build a pyramid or Williams gets to melt down his awards and form them into a life-sized statue of himself. Last year’s original score category was very strange, with Zimmer’s excellent work on Inception losing out to Trent Reznor’s faintly comic soundtrack to The Social Network. This time around things appear to be more conservative.

The changes to the categories all seem fairly sensible—philosophically, I’m opposed to the Best Animated Feature category because a good animated movie is a good overall movie, but it’s realistically the only way for animated films to get any recognition, so we’ll have to deal. It’s nice that they expanded the slate of Best Picture movies last year, but we all know which films are the bottom five and nobody actually thinks they’re going to win, so it’s hard to see the point. They reduced the change this year, allowing anywhere between five and ten candidates, which makes somewhat more sense.

James Earl Jones got an honorary award—he never received an Oscar during the height of his career (his only nomination is from 1971), and what has he done lately? Nice to see him get some recognition, even if it’s of a “sorry we forgot you” variety.

Like last year, I’m going to watch as many of the nominated movies as I can. Watch this space for updates.

A psychology grad student (Julianne Nicholson) is interviewing men as part of a thesis on the effect of feminism on masculinity. Timothy Hutton is her thesis advisor, John Krasinski her former boyfriend. The interviewees include Dominic Cooper and Will Arnett, among many others. Based on the short stories by David Foster Wallace.

Krasinski, the man behind this wacky enterprise, probably could have picked his subject matter better. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, the brilliant collection of short stories, is not easily filmable, and the Brief Interviews themselves are arguably one of the less important parts of the collection (the most important being “Octet” and “The Depressed Person”). Believe it or not, it would probably be easier to make a good adaptation of Infinite Jest. Many of the interviews are reproduced almost verbatim (with the language filed down somewhat in the swearier bits), and while DFW was a brilliant writer, the man was constitutionally incapable of writing a terse, straightforward sentence.

A plot has been added to give structure to the whole thing. The interviewer, whose existence and opinions were only implied in the book, is here in the flesh, although she is given so little to do she may as well not be. The monologues are laboriously worked in, almost like thinly-justified musical numbers. The impressive collection of actors do their parts well enough, but good character performances do not make a good movie. People who loved the book might as well watch it; it’s mercifully short. But it’s a failed experiment.

Those who haven’t would be better off reading the book. Here is a taste of Wallace’s writing, if you’re interested.

1h20m; 2009; Colour

One of the things you notice, if you immerse yourself in the show, is that you very rarely laugh at the introduction and interludes. In the beginning, the show featured the pre-movie “invention exchange” between Joel and the Mads. Joel was a prop comic and that was the sort of thing he did before his TV career. Mike did them too, at first, but quickly stopped in favour of skits and musical interludes. In these skits, it’s easy to recognize what Chuck Klosterman calls the “form of funny”, but they’re not usually laugh-out-loud affairs, especially Joel’s. Mike was somewhat more energetic as a performer, and Joel’s comic persona had (intentionally, I’ve heard) a bit of the stoner in it.

Still, Joel was the better host.

To understand why this is, you have to be immersed in a certain culture. You don’t actually need to frequent TV Tropes, but you can’t be at more than one degree of separation. MST3k embodied and may have even kicked off a certain tradition of caustic audience participation (cf. Linkara, Yahtzee, etc.) in what’s often called genre fiction. The leaders of this vitriolic knockdown genre are mostly good at what they do. They’re funny and often insightful. Some, like Linkara, come off like they’d be genuinely nice people in real life. The problem is the fans, who don’t seem like they’re in on the joke.

The big secret is that the “genre” slum may not produce fiction that is unusually bad, but it’s often read and watched by unusually bad people. Bile is flung, some competently and some not so much. If you spend enough time in this community, it becomes inescapable. TV Tropes has undergone major structural changes over the years to minimize and quarantine this attitude. Whole clusters of pages have been renamed, shunted to a different section of the site, or even deleted. It’s their #1 administrative problem. For a certain type of person, it’s impossible to hate mildly or quietly, and you know what an excess of bile causes….

This is where Joel comes in. The MST3k movies are unusually bad even by the standards of bad movies. While Linkara’s comics are sometimes enjoyable, and the games panned by Yahtzee are often some of the most popular titles, MST3k was always scraping the bottom of the barrel for new depths, and if anything the main complaint you could make about it is some of them are so bad it’s not even funny.

But Joel never seemed vindictive or angry about it. He never seemed to hate the movies or the people behind them. There was something in his voice that was kindly—the kind of intonation you use to soothe a child. Between the bots, Joel was a father figure and mediator, while Mike was the equivalent of a brother. In short, Joel was nice, and he established the tradition of the show being nice.

Which is important because while the movies were low-budget, the show was, too. Teenagers From Outer Space had to make do with the shadow of a writhing lobster projected onto the screen as a monster, true, but MST3k‘s props usually look like stuff they picked up at the dollar store that morning.

The lack of expensive visuals, and, yes, Joel’s somewhat shaky comic numbers, made the show seem like a couple of buddies threw it together in their garage as a labour of love. It takes on a friendly everyman appeal that makes it hard to get mad. When you laugh, it’s the genuine belly laughter of enjoyment, not a bitter, derisive imitation. Joel epitomized the MST3k philosophy, which is outlined in the title theme and embedded surprisingly deep in its fibre: “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”

A group of friends who went to school together in the sixties reunite after their ‘leader’ (Kevin Costner’s body parts) commits suicide. The weekend after the funeral is spent reminiscing, mourning, and half-heartedly reenacting the excesses of youth. Kevin Kline is a sad clown and de facto new ‘leader’ of the gang, who has gone from college revolutionary to shrewd upper-middle class businessman. Jeff Goldblum is the lecherous and unpleasant tagalong who you have to wonder why they even let him stay with them. Tom Berenger is an actor on a bad cop show. William Hurt is an obvious candidate for the next one to commit suicide.

I suppose this is technically a comedy, but there are few laugh-out-loud moments. As Ebert says, “It has all the right moves. It knows all the right words. Its characters have all the right clothes, expressions, fears, lusts and ambitions. But there’s no payoff and it doesn’t lead anywhere. I thought at first that was a weakness of the movie. There also is the possibility that it’s the movie’s message.” It’s a cold, cold film, but it inspires contemplation. It feels like it’s groping around in the dark for something of terrible but ineffable importance.

1h45m; 1983; Colour; Oscar nods for Best Actress (Glenn Close), Screenplay, Picture; The soundtrack is available as a very nice album.

Jack Lemmon is a nobody accountant who rises to the top by letting his bosses use his apartment for their affairs. He becomes smitten with Shirley MacLaine, a troubled elevator attendant. Unfortunately for him, MacLaine’s lover is the director of personnel (Fred MacMurray), one of the guests of the apartment.

Despite a setup of positively Shakespearean dramatic and comic potential, the movie limps flaccidly through the middle and finally slumps into a half-hearted sappy ending. The scenes drag, the jokes mostly aren’t funny, and not even the old Jewish doctor (Jack Kruschen) can give the movie some heart.

Director Billy Wilder brought on a lot of people from Some Like It Hot, which wasn’t all that funny either. Lemmon is a master, but he can’t work if he’s given nothing to work with.

2h5m; 1960; B/W; Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Art Direction, Editing; Oscar nods for Actor (Lemmon), Actress (MacLaine), Supporting Actor (Kruschen), Cinematography, Sound

OK, so 2009′s Sherlock Holmes had a somewhat more actiony tone than Doyle’s original stories, but nothing was invented ex nihilo—just exaggerated. Most of the people who criticized it clearly were not familiar with the source material. The adaptation could have been more faithful, but director Guy Ritchie struck a good balance between the demands of Hollywood and Baker Street. The sequel is pretty much more of the same. If you liked the first Sherlock Holmes, you’ll probably like this one, and if you didn’t, you’ll almost certainly hate this one even more.

The movie opens with a disguised Holmes following Irene Adler, who summons minions to fight him. The slo-mo fight preplanning returns from the first movie. I thought it was a bad device in the original, and it’s certainly overused in the sequel, but there is an interesting scene where Holmes’s fight plan is upset by a knife-throwing gypsy. The disguises, which only appeared a couple of times in the original and were carefully handled, are also overdone. At every turn the filmmakers try to turn Robert Downey, Jr. into a woman, a rabbi, or a bellhop, and it gets ridiculous.

Stephen Fry appears as Mycroft Holmes, an inspired casting choice. But there’s one pointless scene of him wandering around his house naked while Mrs. Watson is staying with him that serves only as an in-joke about Fry’s sexuality. And while the romantic chemistry between Downey and Law is true to the stories and was put to good and subtle use in the original film, here it’s just belaboured.

The shipyard scene from the first movie is dwarfed by the several action bits in the sequel. While Sherlock Holmes did deal with wars and attempts to start them (including World War I), he was never on the front lines crawling through forests like Rambo. They start off a little overboard, and only get bigger as the movie wears on.

All that said, almost everything that was good about the first movie is still here. I didn’t enjoy Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows as much, but it’s still smarter than most blockbusters and more exciting than most literary adaptations. If you can put up with a few karate fight scenes amid the deerstalking, it’s well worth it.

The new Men in Black movie is probably worth seeing, but without Tommy Lee Jones playing a prominent role (as the trailer seems to indicate), what’s the point? Wikipedia says that the new movie will have Josh Brolin as a young Agent K, Emma Thompson as Agent O, and someone named “Etan Cohen” writing the script (I’m reminded of a pair of SQNY headphones my brother once bought).

In keeping with recent trends, we have a darker and edgier update of Jack and the Beanstalk coming soon. This is the kind of thing our generation will be mocked for, twenty years from now.

As for Batman, I fear that Nolan might be going overboard with “bigness”. At least it’s the last film in the series. If he can restrain himself even a little bit, he’ll probably hit it out of the park even if he can’t recreate The Dark Knight (which is too much to hope for). If not, at least we won’t see another one.

Canadians have a bad habit of relentlessly promoting any artists, writers, or musicians associated with us, regardless of artistic merit or tenuity of connection. Neil Young and Nickelback are testament to this, the former having not made it big till he left the country and started writing songs about American things, and the latter being an act of unprecedented blandness that receives unprecedented radio play, mostly to fill content quotas. Our national inferiority complex leads us to whore ourselves out to people who don’t really deserve it simply to prove that we’re a real country too, guys.

Which segues nicely to the topic of Kelley Armstrong. Armstrong is a Canadian paranormal romance/urban fantasy writer, essentially a poor man’s Laurell K. Hamilton. While Hamilton’s fiction is not by any means good, it’s certainly, ahem, memorable. Armstrong gets no such praise. Her Otherworld series of lurid stories about witches, vampires, and werewolves getting it on in various permutations are in the wretched position of being almost totally banal and insipid without even the small consolation of failing in an interesting way (like Hamilton). And she has a whole shelf to herself in the horror section of the Chapters at Polo Park.

I could go on at length about the state of the arts in this country, but it strikes me that the most jarring thing about this is not the “whole shelf” part, which is not all that uncommon—Pratchett has a shelf, sometimes more, and James Patterson, bless his heart, at one time had a whole section—but with the “horror” part. Because while it stands to reason that somebody likes Armstrong’s writing, and presumably would come to her defence in a discussion of its merit, it seems inarguable to me that her work cannot be rightly classified as horror, and moreover I doubt that even her fans would argue the point.

That’s right, this is a genre categorization rehash. By all means, click away if you feel you must. If you prefer, I’ve written a play-by-play analysis of Half-Life that’s quite nice.

I will confess to finding Laurell K.’s Narcissus in Chains disconcerting in a gruesome sort of way. But it wasn’t the shapeshifting and necromancy that threw me off—plain old cannibalism, impalement, and soaped-up nymphomania (which, seriously, ouch) were enough for me, thank you. Hamilton’s books would be horrifying without traditional horror content like vampires and werewolves.

And isn’t that (being horrifying) what horror’s all about? In the best kind of horror, the monster challenges your view of the world through the sheer fact of its existence—Cthulhu is, with his fatal weakness to high-speed watercraft, pretty poor as an antagonist. But his size, age, and total apathy combine to make him a fearsome symbol of humanity’s insignificance, and that’s why the Mythos is an enduring series of horror stories. The worst kind of horror goes for easy shocks. In both cases, they’re trying to frighten you, to stir up the areas deep inside that you don’t talk about at parties.

But vampirism doesn’t do that. Neither does lycanthropy. They haven’t for a long time. They were last horrifying in 1897, when a little-known Irish paranormal romance writer published his fifth novel. Dracula‘s intersection of violence, religion, and surprisingly overt and vivid sexuality may well have been frightening at the time. It’s not now, in an era where violence and sexuality in the media are commonplace, and most people could not use a cross as a vampire-repellent if they lived in the Dresdenverse.

There has been a proliferation of vampire books, shows, and movies in recent years, ever since the advent of Hamilton and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But while Hamilton is out to scare you with body horror, Joss Whedon has no interest in such things. When he pulls a scene right out of a 50s B-movie, it’s always with a knowing postmodern smirk that makes fear pretty much impossible, even if the vampire prostheses weren’t hilarious to look at. And anyway, while Bram Stoker was graphic about the idea of neck-biting and blood-draining in Dracula, Whedon and his acolytes leave it more or less in the abstract so they can get on with the interesting stuff.

It’s not surprising then that Armstrong, who is as much a Whedonite as a Hamiltonian, is not a scary writer. This is not an implicit value judgment. She’s not trying to be scary.

The entire Whedonian school of urban fantasy takes elements from horror, but they take a more analytical tack than real horror writers. For an example of a proper horror story, The Monkey’s Paw outlines a clear set of rules for the paw’s workings. However, for the sake of atmosphere, the story largely glosses over the plot holes opened up by these rules. Being pedantic, worrying overmuch about nice distinctions, is inimical to horror.

But what about it? The paw grants whatever is wished of it, but always with an ironic twist. So what happens if an enterprising wisher asks for something they would hate? Does the paw ironically twist this round to a positive outcome? Or does it sense that someone’s being a smartass with the rules and drop a piano on them? What about a wish carefully formulated to have only one possible interpretation? Does the paw respond to language, or intentions? What happens if the paw is transferred from one person to another and then given back? Or, the question I’ve always thought of as the kicker, what was the ironic twist on the final wish? We never hear the husband’s exact wording, so it’s left to our best guess*.

The Monkey’s Paw is, for all its over-familiarity, a scary story. But it’s maddening for a certain type of person, because if the husband and wife had stopped to think for even a few moments, they might have figured out a loophole in the paw’s rules. It might be that the paw specifically punishes this behaviour, but the annoying thing is that they didn’t even try.

In contrast, look at John Kendrick Bangs’s short story The Water-Ghost of Harrowby Hall. The titular ghost is doomed to haunt the owners of Harrowby Hall by appearing at midnight on Christmas Eve and soaking everything in the house, with the usual caveats preventing the owners from unloading the house or otherwise escaping her. At the end, the latest owner of the house takes advantage of the ghost’s compulsion to follow him around for one hour and leads her outside to freeze. He then puts her in a warehouse made of asbestos and maintained at a steady -416 degrees Fahrenheit (don’t look at me, I didn’t write it).

In horror, the mythological rules hold that there is no escape; any attempt to fight fate will inevitably make things worse. This meshes well with horror’s reactionary nature: if you break the rules, you’re punished and no two ways about it. However, in Armstrong and Whedon and Bangs, the rules are just what they look like: rules, which can be circumnavigated by a sufficiently talented legal orienteer. When “no weapon forged” can destroy the villain in Buffy‘s 214 “Innocence”, she takes him out with a rocket launcher. This isn’t even particularly new—Harrowby Hall was actually published shortly before The Monkey’s Paw.

We could invent new labels that no one will ever use, but in this case it’s actually unnecessary. There is an already existing genre which is primarily defined by playing smartass with the rules. It’s called fantasy.

The word “fantasy” conjures up images of castles, wizards, and elves. This is accurate to some extent, but remember that the genre is broader than that: it encompasses everything from Terry Brooks to China Mieville. Not everything with the fantastic trappings qualifies intuitively as fantasy—King Arthur stories and Greek myth are usually excluded. And not all subgenres are Tolkienesque: Mieville, Jim Butcher, and even magical realism along the lines of Groundhog Day all fall under the fantasy umbrella.

The element that unifies all these disparate works is that they play smartass with an established set of rules, which can take many forms. Often a fantasy work will draw on mythology, taking the traditional strengths and weaknesses of a certain monster and stretching them. For example, vampires can be repelled by crosses. Is it the cross itself that repels them, or what the cross means to its bearer? In older lore, this question was never asked because the assumption was that everyone was Christian. There were no control-groups: everyone who used a cross against a vampire would have believed in it.

In Buffy‘s agnostic ‘verse, Willow, who is Jewish, can nail crosses to her bedroom wall to keep the vampires at bay. Often, nobody even has to be around the crosses for them to work, as in Buffy and Dracula. But in Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, it’s not the symbol but the belief behind it that repels the vampires, with the strength of repulsion being (as I understand it) proportional to the strength of belief. Harry Dresden knows for a fact that God exists, but does not practice any religion. If he were to use a cross, it wouldn’t work. However, his pentacle necklace does the job nicely.

Another fertile ground for fantasy is in universal narrative tendencies. Joseph Campbell showed that stories tend to follow a single very specific form, and most heroes are very similar. In a way, this establishes rules—a hero must have the usual “heroic” traits. Terry Goodkind subverts this nicely in the Sword of Truth series. Goodkind’s Objectivism is a poor match for traditional heroism, which emphasizes sacrifice, duty, and selflessness. His hero, Richard Rahl, is by most sane standards a prick. But with Rahl, Goodkind defies the rules. Every story ever written says that heroes must be selfless. Goodkind, who gets distracted by his politics too often but is essentially a good writer, asked why and, getting no satisfactory answer, went ahead and changed that.

The most obvious source of rules is the current conventions of the genre. Swords and sorcery fantasy began with Tolkien and by 1983 was well entrenched as the standard of the genre. Plenty of crap was put out that purported to be original, but actually just rewrote Tolkien with different names and different setpiece battles. This eventually began to bother Terry Pratchett, who wrote the Discworld books, a series of elaborate parodies of high fantasy, in response.

One of the conventions established by Tolkien and used over and over again by his imitators was that the descendant of an ancient line of kings would come from humble roots to restore order to the land. This was seen in Aragorn in LoTR and countless others. In Pratchett’s Discworld, however, the righteous returning king has no interest in any position above the rank of police constable. The steward who holds his place is the most effective ruler the Discworld has ever seen, and the group trying to get a king on the throne are villains who hope to profit from it.

There’s really no end to Pratchett’s subversion of conventions, because unlike most authors he makes an explicit point of doing it. One of the timeless narrative traditions is that, to use Pratchett’s words, “million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten”. In his Guards! Guards!, some characters try to slay a dragon by giving themselves handicaps calculated to make the odds of success 1000000:1 (they are off slightly, but the odds of surviving the failure turn out to be exactly 1000000:1).

But that’s not to say Tolkien was slave to tradition, either. He was certainly influenced by heroic mythology, but the interesting thing about The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit both is that the traditional strongman heroes are side characters who essentially run interference for the main characters, who are pretty obvious stand-ins for Tolkien himself. The actual plot takes place in a very few decisions at the personal level, and most of the battles are decided before they begin. It’s difficult to see Tolkien as anything like a maverick, given how shamelessly he’s been aped in the last sixty years. But there you go.

In Greek mythology, Oedipus is doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, and the steps he takes to avoid this fate are exactly what bring it about. Croesus consults an oracle for advice on a military campaign, and decides to go to battle when the oracle says “a great empire will be destroyed” if he crosses the river Halys. Unfortunately, she did not specify which great empire and Croesus loses the battle. Time and time again, the story says that if fate has it in for you, there is no escape from punishment. This tradition is carried on by horror, where slashers implacably seek out their victims and the descendent of a cannibalistic cult cannot quite escape his family’s depraved nature.

But the world doesn’t work that way. The real world is not by any means a happy-go-lucky place. It doesn’t care if you survive. But it’s not out to get you, either, and it’s not particularly bothered if you thrive. There are certain consistent rules that must be followed no matter what, but if you can engineer a way to follow these rules while still living the good life, the world is not going to send out an angel of death to strike you down. By asking questions like “how does the cross vs. vampire thing actually work?” fantasy literature recognizes this.

With the prevalence of monarchism, the frequently backward-looking setting of knights and horses, and the use of magic and mysticism, fantasy looks superficially like a dark, unenlightened genre, the polar opposite of science fiction. But there has to be a reason why the two genres are largely read and written by the same people. The smartass instinct is simply the scientific instinct in disguise: a desire to learn how the system works, to seek out things that don’t seem to make sense and come up with a theory to explain them. Fantasy literature adopts an essentially scientific point of view—scientific about imaginary things, but the principles are the same.

* Imagine that the husband took the paw in his hand and said, “I wish there was nobody out there”: “The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.” [return]

• Perdido Street Station (Mieville) – Because I’ve read Kraken and I’ve heard PSS is his best book
• The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi) – I know nothing about it, but the cover looked nifty and I know that it was up for several awards (and, since Paolo Bacigalupi isn’t exactly a household name, they probably weren’t “nicest author”-type awards)
• American Gods (Gaiman) – Believe it or not, I’ve never read anything by Neil Gaiman except Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett.
• Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (Wallace) – Read it, but I took it out from the library. I’ve been through enough of his books at this point that I should probably throw some money in the direction of his estate.

I still have to make a trip to Chapters, McNally’s more mainstream competitor, for some more. I’m currently halfway through Infinite Jest with a short book on statistics and McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men next in line, so I’m set till then.

My comrades inexplicably refuse to follow me much farther than the elvator, and I’m forced to leave them behind and prowl through the deserted offices alone. I come across a large, crooked portrait of Gordon Freeman under a sign proclaiming him “Employee of the Month”. The picture is on the same wall as the door I entered from, and it would have been easy to miss it. It’s the little details like this that really make the game.

I climb up through the ceiling and crawl in the vents. Stumbling across a radio setup, I try to call for backup, but the panicked voice on the other end shouts cryptically and fearfully over the bad connection. I get to the surface through a collapsed ceiling and meet up with a medic.

Leaving him to guard our rooftop platform, I crawl through a vent and up to a grate opening onto a room where missiles are stored. On the other side of the grate, Black Ops soldiers are discussing their assignment:

1: Why do we always have to clean up the mess the grunts can’t handle?

2: Tell me about it. I just want to deliver the package and get out of here.

1: Yeah, sooner or later the grunts are going to figure it out.

This is a nice parallel to a scene partway through Half-Life, where Freeman overhears two marines having a similar conversation about killing the scientists. And as I burst through the grate and open fire on the soldiers, it becomes one of the most exhilarating scenes in Opfor. Half-Life had its moments, but this game’s firefights play differently despite the almost identical mechanics.

It helps that the Black Ops soldiers appear to be faster and smarter than the marines. But in no small part, I think it’s due to simple differences in the trappings. The knowledge that my character is a marine corporal cut off from his unit, not an embattled scientist, changes the way I interpret the onscreen happenings—even though it is irrelevant to the game’s mathematical foundation.

I find a dying marine behind a garage door, but multiple bullet wounds are no match for my medic’s sophisticated first aid technology. The marine is an engineer, and he can take down locked doors. I point him at the door blocking the only other way off the rooftop, only to find a laser tripwire and an automated turret on the other side. Some things were not meant to last. But it doesn’t take long to link up with two more marines, heavily armed for combat.

We arrive at a storage room where, as you might expect, we’re attacked by the fast-running female Black Ops agents from Half-Life. This scene plays differently, though. In Half-Life you were an isolated, easy target. The best strategy was to set a trap, take away the Black Ops’ options, and kill them as they come through the narrow corridor you’ve left open. But I have backup, and while they’re no Alexanders, they’re smart enough to kill and not be killed. That completely changes the strategy and overall feel of this scene. The advantage is mine throughout—it takes them several shots to seriously hurt me, but I can kill one of them in one or two.

We clear the room quickly and efficiently and move on into the train tunnels, where the Black Ops have set up shop. I notice as I move along that my lackeys are covering me, and I’m covering them. They use cover efficiently, taking over for me while I slip back reload. The Half-Life games don’t have particularly sophisticated AI, but with the merciless pacing of the scenes that involve team combat, squad tactics seem to emerge spontaneously from the system.

These are some of the most fun bits of any game I’ve ever played, certainly any shooter, and this is all without complicated technology, wall-hugging mechanics, or much in the way of realism. It’s not necessary to beat players over the head with tactics and cover-based shooting. We can be trusted to figure it out for ourselves, so long as there are bullets and things that bullets won’t go through.

There is something deep in here about the nature of “fun” as it applies to game design. For much of the last decade, shooter design has been hampered by the principle of being true to life—the more the game imitates real battlefield conditions, the more fun it will be. Project Reality put the final nail in that idea’s coffin, but its odour has not yet been Febrezed out of the furniture. Opposing Force is not a realistic game, but this section is crammed with solid game design. It would not be improved by the addition of bullet drop.

It’s hard to point out what exactly is the certain je ne sais quoi in this section. We could spend thousands of words unpacking it in detail. In part, it’s the evident care and attention to detail in the level design. The developers anticipate the player’s actions and carefully place in-game objects to present a calculated challenge that is neither too dense nor too sparse—in essence, subtle manipulation of the player.

But there’s also an element of choice. If you play carefully, squad tactics will bubble to the surface. But you don’t have to play carefully. You could jump around, howling and whooping and firing at random. You could leave your men behind and try a stealth run. This paradoxical balance of free will and behind-the-scenes control may well be what fun is all about.