Another mystery-girl-in-white J-flick, along with the Ringu series, Tomie, Saimin the film, Dark Water, and others, surely, that I've forgotten or not run into. Not really though. Really it's a film about gaming or game-making, about building game-sized artificial worlds.
I'm not much of a gamer. My computer favorites are go and chess. I've played a very few first person shooters, sometimes cheating my way through firefights to get through levels just to see what really interests me: the worlds created, the degree of immersion. That's the same thing, in a way, I come to film for. But what the St. John's Wort programmers seem to be working on is a role-playing or adventure game, a game relying more on choice than dexterity. What little violence the game displays is so key that it would have to be scripted or portrayed in cut scenes, short films triggered by a gamer's choices. Much is made of mapping, on the home-base computers, Nami's mansion. I've always wondered whether the world of, say, Half-Life is geometrically true, whether four equidistant 90-degree turns would bring me back to a point of origin. I've even spent some time peeking, with cheat codes, through walls to try to test this. You see rooms connected, chained, yet hanging in black void, separated by spaces the programmers didn't bother with because you can't legitimately get to them. In St. John's Wort's slightly sci-fi world, every angle is true. The home base crew map the mansion, relying on nothing but live video over a phone line. Interestingly the work screens displayed sometimes do show that black void, as an area not centered or a room undiscovered.
If any of that intrigues you, don't fear to see the film. Just realize, dull characters in a cardboard plot are part of the show. The visuals, the color scheme, the maybe failed, maybe not concept, and your own perception of ideas about overlays of story, plot, reality are what, if anything will make it worth the time.
St. John's Wort is a yellow-flowered medicinal herb that once stood for revenge. Think of mad Ophelia: There's rosemary, that's for remembrance...And there's pansies, that's for thoughts (IV,v). Another touchpoint film is the 1969 Jigokuhen (Portrait of Hell). The paintings in St. John's Wort, possibly because you see them so fleetingly and unclearly, are more horrific than those in the older film. Yet another film about gaming is Mamoru Oshii's Avalon.
Finally, if you like St. John's Wort, then here are couple of extremely fine first person shooters that share none of its story but some of its atmosphere: System Shock 2 (out of print but if you find it) and Neil Manke's They Hunger, a trilogy of Half-Life mods. They Hunger 2 ends with such an odd, maybe existential, dilemma (trapped in a courtyard, you're supposed to hit a prominent red switch, blowing yourself up, to end the game, but you don't really have to hit it, you can just stand, or go hide in a shadow, and you'll be there alive, albeit bored, until your computer dies of old age or the next Enron shuts it down) that I wrote to the Manke and got a appreciative-sounding response.
I'm not much of a gamer. My computer favorites are go and chess. I've played a very few first person shooters, sometimes cheating my way through firefights to get through levels just to see what really interests me: the worlds created, the degree of immersion. That's the same thing, in a way, I come to film for. But what the St. John's Wort programmers seem to be working on is a role-playing or adventure game, a game relying more on choice than dexterity. What little violence the game displays is so key that it would have to be scripted or portrayed in cut scenes, short films triggered by a gamer's choices. Much is made of mapping, on the home-base computers, Nami's mansion. I've always wondered whether the world of, say, Half-Life is geometrically true, whether four equidistant 90-degree turns would bring me back to a point of origin. I've even spent some time peeking, with cheat codes, through walls to try to test this. You see rooms connected, chained, yet hanging in black void, separated by spaces the programmers didn't bother with because you can't legitimately get to them. In St. John's Wort's slightly sci-fi world, every angle is true. The home base crew map the mansion, relying on nothing but live video over a phone line. Interestingly the work screens displayed sometimes do show that black void, as an area not centered or a room undiscovered.
If any of that intrigues you, don't fear to see the film. Just realize, dull characters in a cardboard plot are part of the show. The visuals, the color scheme, the maybe failed, maybe not concept, and your own perception of ideas about overlays of story, plot, reality are what, if anything will make it worth the time.
St. John's Wort is a yellow-flowered medicinal herb that once stood for revenge. Think of mad Ophelia: There's rosemary, that's for remembrance...And there's pansies, that's for thoughts (IV,v). Another touchpoint film is the 1969 Jigokuhen (Portrait of Hell). The paintings in St. John's Wort, possibly because you see them so fleetingly and unclearly, are more horrific than those in the older film. Yet another film about gaming is Mamoru Oshii's Avalon.
Finally, if you like St. John's Wort, then here are couple of extremely fine first person shooters that share none of its story but some of its atmosphere: System Shock 2 (out of print but if you find it) and Neil Manke's They Hunger, a trilogy of Half-Life mods. They Hunger 2 ends with such an odd, maybe existential, dilemma (trapped in a courtyard, you're supposed to hit a prominent red switch, blowing yourself up, to end the game, but you don't really have to hit it, you can just stand, or go hide in a shadow, and you'll be there alive, albeit bored, until your computer dies of old age or the next Enron shuts it down) that I wrote to the Manke and got a appreciative-sounding response.
