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A great opening scene grabs the audience’s attention while establishing setting, tone, and key characters in the story. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive does all of this while memorably defying our expectations of the action genre. When I reflect on my favorite films from the 2010s, Drive ranks high, and its opener is a significant reason why.
However, eight years removed from Drive’s debut, subverting action conventions isn’t the film’s legacy. What lingers for many is Cliff Martinez’s electronic score and Refn’s 80s visual pastiche punctuated by bursts of graphic violence. So while the general critical consensus on Drive is positive, many critics write the film off (if not Refn’s whole filmography) as self-suffocating style over substance. It’s an unfair rap because beyond the synth-heavy music and neon-drenched L.A. setting, Drive has superb craftsmanship that makes it unique and compelling today.
Stadia looks like a flop out of the gate, and its meager, overpriced game selection is a significant factor why. Google overestimated the console market’s appetite for experimental moonshots. Most gamers aren’t making purchasing decisions based on streaming quality, teraflops, 4K, or fast SSDs. Instead, as I wrote about earlier this year, it’s the games themselves — both selection and quality — that matter most. It was a crucial differentiator in the battle between PS4 and Xbox One, essential to the Nintendo Switch’s breakout success, and it will continue to be important for next generation hardware.
Games matter more for reasons beyond their historically strong track record. It’s also because across other facets — hardware, marketing, third party integrations — Sony and Microsoft will be on similar footing next generation, at least to your average consumer. I don’t foresee the major stumbles that marked previous console generations. Price and power, two factors that solidified PS4 as the clear victor this generation, I expect to be a moot point in 2020. Microsoft learned its lesson launching a console $100 more expensive and less powerful than Sony’s. Sony hopefully still remembers the $600 launch PS3 debacle and how undercutting on price helped secure their win for the PS4. Speculation from Digital Foundry and other sources posit the PS5 and Xbox Series X will rely on similar internal components. The result for consumers should be two boxes with similar specs and no more than a $50 gap in price differential.
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The 180 degree rule is one of the most fundamental tenants in cinematography. It’s commonplace across every genre and filmmaking style. Once you understand the basics, it’s easy to spot where it’s used and intentionally broken. This year’s excellent drama The Souvenir breaks the 180 rule in one pivotal scene we will examine here.
At its most essential, the 180 degree rule states if you were to draw an imaginary line between the two characters, the camera stays on only one side of the line for the length of the scene. The camera’s placement limitations to a 180 degree arc give the rule its name.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (MW) has the look and mechanics of a modern AAA game from 2019. So why does its politics (or lack thereof) feel like a relic from decades earlier?
MW developer Infinity Ward invites this questioning given how hard they pushed realism as both a selling point and a differentiator from previous Call of Duty games. Its first press event earlier this year had presentations on the game’s authenticity and moral complexity. The official marketing boasts how the game “engulfs fans in an incredibly raw, gritty, provocative narrative.”
Infinity Ward also made the “Clean House” mission from the campaign a centerpiece demo of their preview event. Now having played the campaign, I understand why; the audio and visual design is uncomfortable and tense in a way that stands out from the rest of the campaign, not to mention other first-person shooters. The mission centers on a British SAS team that raids a building housing terrorists at night. You assume the role of one of the SAS agents, bursting through doors and making split-second decisions to “clear” threats with civilians thrown into the mix. Given your usage of night goggles, the mission has an eerie visual palette of stark greens and blacks.
Apple Arcade is a no-brainer investment for devoted iPhone gamers; for five dollars a month, you get a wealth of top tier, original mobile titles. But if you’re not already actively invested in mobile gaming today, Apple Arcade may not be the service that makes you a believer. As an already devoted console gamer, the service didn’t provide enough to keep me paying.
That caveat shouldn’t distract from the quality of games offered here. Given the usual knocks against mobile as a gaming platform — lack of genre variety, monetization in the form of annoying microtransactions — Apple had an uphill climb. But as a credit to the high bar Apple has set, I found many quality titles within a few hours of play.
With Sony MIA, Microsoft had an opportunity to go on the offensive this E3, which made their lack of detail on next-gen hardware, exclusives, and even streaming technology perplexing. But when you looked past console war talking points and read between the lines of their keynote, 2019 marks the most definite sign that Microsoft is splitting away from its competition, with Xbox Game Pass its centerpiece strategy. Other companies have dipped their toe into the subscription market, but given the maturity and boldness of Game Pass, I’m convinced Microsoft is all in.
The evidence of Microsoft’s subscriptions push was all over their E3 presser: onstage speakers and game trailers name-checked Game Pass frequently. The debut of Game Pass on PC and a special “Ultimate” bundle for combined PC and console access got a prominent showing. Two high budget upcoming Game Pass games — The Outer Worlds and Halo Infinite — bookended the show. And there’s no coincidence the first item Microsoft highlights under their E3 page is Game Pass.
1:1s are deceptively hard. On paper, they look straightforward: set aside some time to let your reports talk through what’s on their mind. Actively listen, give them feedback, repeat. But no report shares the same personality, seniority, career trajectory, or learning style. Add to that mix a changing agenda and office politics, and you learn early on good listening alone won’t cut it. Knowing how to react at the moment in a way that’s tailor-made for your audience tends to elevate 1:1s from so-so to stellar.
But flexibility challenges aside, some principles work well for every report regardless of their background or environment. If you’re new to 1:1s or been doing them for a while and want to get better, adhering to these four basics will help.
Every engineering manager juggles multiple priorities: managing the velocity of the team, serving as a cross-team engineering representative, making sure the engineers are happy, and weighing in as a deciding voice on hard decisions. There’s never enough time to do everything which forces prioritization.
Unfortunately, promoting career growth among a manager’s reports can be the first item to get lost in the shuffle. It rarely carries the visibility that managing team velocity or a substantial presence in meetings can. Put another way, when you hit your deadlines, ship software on time, and take decisive action on the weekly sync, your boss notices. If you’re not promoting a report on schedule, you might have an unhappy individual, but it can get lost to the larger company view.
Mortal Kombat 11 had the potential to be one of the best reviewed games of this generation. Game critics universally praised the core gameplay, HDR graphical flourishes, story, training mode, and overall polish. But MK11 hovers at a solid but not stunning 83 on Metacritic given the long, frustrating grind required to unlock cosmetics through the Tower of Time and Krypt single player modes. NetherRealm, the studio behind the game, apologized and promised to improve the situation.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to NetherRealm’s ambition (though this comes with an uncomfortable caveat given troubling reports of rampant crunch and other issues at the studio.) MK11 takes a bold step forward to generate a long tail “endgame” of single player content. You can blow through most fighting games’ solo modes in a matter of hours. MK11 wants to entertain you through randomized Tower encounters and the Krypt for months. But there’s a fine line between a grind that’s rewarding and one that’s tedious; NetherRealm has veered too far into the latter.
The Criterion Channel has upended my expectations of what a streaming service can be. Smart curation changes everything in a way that makes Netflix feel flat-footed.
It shouldn’t have turned out this way. Years ago I expected the powerhouse streaming trio of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu to be must have destinations for movie content. The ingredients were all there: multi-billion dollar war chests, A list talent, and big tech to drive smart recommendation algorithms. But today it’s a struggle to find a decent movie to watch on any of the three big services. “Netflix original” has become the modern equivalent of a made for TV movie of yesteryear. Occasional highlights do pop up (Roma, Moonlight, You Were Never Really Here, Annihilation, Minding the Gap), but they are few and far between, buried under mostly lukewarm content.
