Music Makes the Movie – How Howard Shore made a fantastic trilogy legendary

This is one series I was staying away from because I could never pick a single thing from it that I liked over the others, but sitting here listening to my movie and video game score Pandora station (yes, I listen to music scores,  they’re great) a track came on that made me want to spend 12 hours straight sitting on my couch watching this particular set of movies even though I had a finals to study for and work on. I didn’t actually watch them but it’s on the short list now.  The movies are the Lord of the Rings trilogy (not the Hobbit movies, I’ll have a rant about that later) and the track was Breaking of the Fellowship.  I will say now that there are going to be some LotR spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the movies yet, stop reading this now and go track down someone with the extended version dvds and watch it with them right now (If you know me well enough I’d even let you use mine).  The series is too great to have any bits spoiled.

Now to the content.

First, listen to this track.

How does it make you feel?  Happy, calm, like you’re in a little farming village with no cares in the world, completely isolated from big cities and wandering bands of noise?  There’s a good reason for that.  This track, Concerning Hobbits, is from the main opening scene that isn’t the Prologue.  In the scene, Bilbo Baggins narrates the nature of hobbits while the camera is going across various parts of the idyllic Shire.  The score fits so perfectly with the scene that it feels real, and that you’re there in the middle of it.  For a minute you believe that out there somewhere there are little hobbits in their little holes tending to their little gardens, and you just want to retire there and have a little garden yourself (though you might get a few odd looks from the locals).

 

Finally, the one that made me want to make this post:

This track sets the stage for all the emotional content going on in the final scene of the first movie and goes into the credits.  As the title would suggest, it is the scene where the group of heroes is broken into pieces and some to not see the others until the end of the whole series, which for them is months later.  Two of the hobbits are taken captive, one of the men dies trying to protect them, the other two hobbits go their own way to complete their quest, while the elf, the other man, and the dwarf go off to save the captives.  There’s so much emotion that even I teared up a little for the first several times I watched it.  The part that drives all this emotion home though is the music.  I’m keeping the videos away from actual movie excerpts to keep spoilers down to a minimum, but trust me, the scene is fantastic.

 

That’s it for this one.  I’ve already got an idea for what I’m going to do next time, and I’m Really Feeling It.  Until then, keep it real.

 

Speaker for the Dead

Today, I want to talk about a book that has changed the way I view daily situations and how I act as a third-party viewer of events.  The book is Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card, and is one of the installments in the Ender’s Game series.

I won’t go too much into plot of this book since the plot has only a little to do with what I like about this book.  All that really needs to be known is that after the first contact with aliens not going so well, the human race decided to take the exact opposite route for second contact which leads to the death of a scientist studying these aliens.  This death prompts one of the characters to call the titular Speaker to speak at the funeral.

Now for my highlight for this book, The Speaker.

The idea behind the title of Speaker for the Dead is that the Speaker will collect facts about someone who has died and tell everyone about who the person really was, as people can be different in reality from the mask they wear in public.  The job of the Speaker is to present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of the deceased.

Reading about the Speaker has caused me to adopt some of the fundamental tenants of the Speaker.  Primarily, I now do not form conclusions on a topic until I have all facts, as I now know it is impossible to know if I’m right unless I know the whole story.  I also am not as quick to judge people, since I do not know their whole story.

Speaker  resonated with me and showed me that I still have a lot to learn, but for now I can just take what it taught me apply it to who I live and handle situations.  So until next time, keep it real, and remember; the enemy’s gate is down.

Special Tactics and Reconnaissance

Now that I have covered stories from film and print, I think I am now going to cover a story from the realm of interactive media, or as it’s better known, video games.

*As my topic regards parts of the story itself and how it plays out, there are some spoilers below, but since some of you may not have played this game and may intend to, I will remain vague about them so that I don’t ruin anything*

Today I am going to talk about the sci-fi adventure trilogy Mass Effect, from developer BioWare.  Mass Effect follows Commander Shepard of the Alliance Navy.  Players can chose a class, gender, and backstory for their Shepard offering different combat abilities, potential love interests, and speech options, respectively.  The game also provides the ability to transfer saves from one game to the next, allowing people to play as their Shepard through all three games.

When most people in the gaming community talk about this game, they will inevitably touch on “that disappointing ending” or some such line and then continue to talk about how great the series is or how they play the game different from other people.  I’ll touch on the ending thing a bit later, but for now I’m going to talk about that other part.  How can two people play the same game in such different ways?

[SPOILERS BELOW]

Mass Effect is a series that gives the player significant input on how the story will progress.  Sure, the basics stay the same, “Shepard says for years that the Reapers are coming but nobody believes him/her until it’s too late”.  However, on that really basic skeleton, BioWare builds a vast number of ways this can actually progress.  One big example is about half way through the first game, on the planet Vermire (people who have played this game, you know what I’m about to talk about), there are two major events that can change the rest of the series, one where unless you have met specific criteria one of your squadmates dies, and one that requires you to make a very difficult (assuming the first event went well) decision of which of two squadmates must die and which one is saved.  Particularly that first event changes a huge amount of the story in the other games.

In the Mass Effect 2, it is possible for all squadmates, and even Shepard, to die on the final mission, changing events in Mass Effect 3 (of course, if Shepard dies then you have to play again or else you can’t transfer the save to the next game).  The way to prevent squadmate deaths is to complete their loyalty missions throughout the game.  The best thing is, though, the loyalty missions cause the characters to become more fleshed-out and believable than if they were just left alone, so they are by no means tedious side missions.

Now, Mass Effect 3, the final installment, is where all the choices you have made in the previous two games really come to be evident.  Through an Effective Military Strength, or EMS, system, it is possibly to quantifiably compare the differences the choices make.  The part that makes people upset, however, is the end.

[SERIOUSLY, SPOILERS]

At the very end of the game, after, if you play like I do, 60+ hours of gameplay and decisions, you are given one last choice.  This choice, however, is not affected by anything you have done previously.  The worst part is that the only visible difference between the three options is the color of the explosion; red, blue, or green.  The final cut-scene is the same no matter what disregarding color.  Narratively, there are minor differences, but only minor.  One choice is what the side of good has been striving for the entire game, one is what the secondary villain party has been wanting, and the third comes out of left field with nobody having said a thing about it beforehand. Either way, the threat is neutralized, the Mass Relay system is messed up, Shepard’s team is stranded on a random planet, and Shepard dies (I told you there were spoilers).

I will say that the ending is by no means a reason to not play the game.  I still fully recommend it to anyone with an Xbox 360, PS3, or PC (although Xbox 360 is the only one I know that has all 3 games and no save transfer issues, but I may be wrong.  Mass Effect 3 is also on Wii U, but only 3).  I even recommend multiple playthroughs of the series and do things different every time, just to see what I’m talking about (if you have time.  It’s kind of a huge time investment).

And so, here I will leave you with a fanmade trailer for the series.  Not official, but still good and gives a good feel of the series. Until next time, keep it real.

The Kingkiller Chronicle

“There are three things all wise men fear: The sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

 

Hey guys, me again.  This time I am here to talk to you about the fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.

So far the series consists of two books, The Name of the Wind (2007) and The Wise Man’s Fear (2011), and an unpublished third book under the working title of Doors of Stone, as well as a short tie-in novella titled The Slow Regard of Silent Things (2014).  The series is of an innkeeper named Kote recounting the tale of a man named Kvothe, who is a legend in the world of the story.  The majority of the time is spent retelling Kvothe’s story, with occasional interludes that cover the events inside the Waystone Inn.

Kvothe himself is a red-haired Edema-Ruh, a race of troupers, who is a prodigious musician and quite skilled at the magic-science called Sympathy.  Kvothe spends the majority of the story looking for leads on the mysterious Chandrian and learning at the prestigious University.

The element of the story that I want to focus on right now though, is the previously mentioned magic-science of Sympathy.

The basic idea of Sympathy is that by believing two items the same with “Alar” (a sort of force of will within the sympathist’s mind), they become linked, and by moving one of the linked objects the other will match the movement.  When fully applied, sympathy can be used to do things like lift a barrel using a twig, light something on fire using the heat off of a rock, or even move a slab of metal using a coin.

Now, in order to do these feats of moving something using a smaller simulation, there needs to be a source of energy.  When sympathy is first explained in the book, Kvothe’s first teacher links two coins and tells Kvothe to lift one.  Both move, but the perceived weight is that of three coins, not two.  This is because some energy is lost to the link, dispersing into the air as heat.  Later in the story, sympathy is described as “energy money changing”, which lets the sympathist change motion, heat, and light into each other, and then used this converted energy to perform tasks with sympathy.  As an example, if I had a pebble, a boulder, and a bonfire, I could link the pebble and the boulder together while drawing heat off of the fire, and then lift the boulder by the pebble using the heat from the fire by converting it to kinetic energy to help move the boulder.

Trying to explain the entirety of it would take, well, a good portion of two 1000 page books, but that is the basic form of it.

Why this is such a great system in these books is not because of the in-world practicality, but the fact that Rothfuss gave it actual rules to follow other than “You need to know the words to the spell and make sure to swish and flick with the wand”.  By giving his magic system a set of scientific rules and properties, it becomes a much deeper element of the story.

Now, I will leave you with a video of Rothfuss discussing the first book in the series The Name of the Wind, and, until next time, keep it real.

The Giver

So I figure that with its recent film release, I should cover the Lois Lowry story The Giver.  The book itself is a quick read, probably maxing out at a few hours (it’s been a while since I read the book).  The story follows a boy named Jonas, who lives in a “Community” at some undisclosed point in the future.  In the Community, everything is decided by the Elders, including occupations, relationships, and so on.  Also nobody can see colors.  When Jonas is old enough to receive his occupation assignment, he is given the job of being the “receiver of memories” and is apprenticed to the previous receiver, now the titular Giver, to experience memories that the Community and its Elders had purged from the rest of society.  Past that I don’t want to spoil anything.

So the question you may be asking now is “what’s so good about it?  You’ve only given a synopsis of the beginning and it seems kind of boring if you ask me.”  Well, to you I say “sorry I’m not an interesting writer.”  Just trust me, it’s good.

The Giver falls in the same area as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as a commentary of how things might be in a dystopian society where leaders care more about conformity and safety than they do rights and happiness, where good intentions have gone too far down the dark path.

The thing that I like most about the story is its use of color.  One of the main story elements is that in an effort to make everyone “equal”, the Elders have phased out the ability for people to see and interpret colors.  To portray this, in the book the character begins with vision in black and white, slowly gaining color vision as he receives memories from the Giver.  In the film, the movie starts in black and white, and changes how much color there is in the image depending on the plot, similar to The Wizard of Oz in the days of technicolor (for those of you who don’t get that reference, go look it up.  You don’t have to see the whole movie but at least look at how they do the color transition at the beginning.  Lots of fun.)

So to wrap this up let me just say that The Giver is a good story all around and is great for an afternoon, either reading or watching (or both, if that’s what you want).  Also, take a look at the trailer below, it sort of gives a primer on that color thing I was talking about.

If there’s something you think was interesting in the story that I didn’t cover or have an idea of what I should cover later (allowing time to read/watch before I cover it), let me know in the comments.  And until the next story, keep it real.

 

Preface

Hey guys, how’s it going?  For the next few months (or longer, not sure yet), I will be going through and evaluating stories that I think are good in some way. Now, when I say story, I don’t just mean books. I’m talking about books, movies, short stories, plays, poems, video games, pictures, internet forums, etc.  Now, to try and keep this academic, I’m not going to write in a “this is cool check it out” format, but a more “I like this because” fashion, occasionally even bringing in other people to get their opinion on the topic. I’ll also occasionally do posts in a vlog format (I want to play around with the idea but I’m not sure if that’s the only thing I want to do), and those will be more of a ramble on the topic or an interview with someone about the topic, it’ll vary. So, until the next story (or in this case the first), keep it real.