[It Aint Pretty Full Movie Free Download
Tilo Chopin
Of course, that was the same day that this game, featuring a long haired, but balding psychopath (Lynch) appeared at my doorstep. Along with it, of course, I became aware of the aforementioned ad campaign that claimed that these guys and their world were anything but ideal or beautiful.
Creating archetypal physical figures is a notably and classically romantic (by romanticism, I refer to the literary and philosophical movements, not the genre of romance that is pretty much concerned exclusively with love as a topic of fiction) in art. Consider a novel by an American Romantic, like The Scarlet Letter, whose protagonist, Hester Prynne, is one who represents freedom and liberation. Hester is absurdly beautiful, but she represents ideas that are highly prized by an American sensibility. Her controlling and manipulative husband (and the villain of the novel), Roger Chillingsworth, is a twisted, little hunchback. Bodies reflect abstract ideas in this fiction. They serve as a means of representing abstract concepts, rather than in presenting realistic reflections of what people are actually like.
In other words, most worlds and bodies in video games lean more towards the idealized and fantastic worlds of romanticism on a fictional spectrum, than they do towards some effort towards mimesis, a realistic reflection of the world.
The newest Kane & Lynch game is an exception in my estimation in the video game market (and there are others) as it is a game that does tend to seem to want to embrace a realistic aesthetic, rather than a romanticized one. Now, on the face of it, this might seem somewhat silly given some of the insane and absurd events in a Kane and Lynch game. After all, these guys are a two man army. In the latest game, they seemingly more or less successfully take on the entire Shanghai underworld. However, the kind of aesthetic that Kane & Lynch seems to want to embrace is actually one that comic books seemed to likewise also want to embrace during the 1980s in an attempt to seem less fantastic and absurd.
Just such a cynicism also underwrites the story of Kane and Lynch and their bodies. Both Kane and Lynch are criminals with bodies marked more by human frailty than a noble spirit. This may sound like more romantic exaggeration, just of a villainous sort (a la Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter, but it seems to me that the reason that Lynch is bald and ugly is because some guys are just bald and ugly in the kind of world created in these games.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean through one of the darker moments in the game. In my essay on idealized male bodies, I suggested that scarring spoke particularly positively on a male body, as scars on characters like John Marston of Red Dead Redemption speaks to his resiliency and endurance, notable qualities in a father and husband trying to keep his family safe. In Kane & Lynch 2, both Kane and Lynch are captured by rival gangsters, stripped naked, and tortured during a cut scene. A fairly lengthy level of gameplay follows in which Kane and Lynch hobble naked and bleeding around the streets of Shanghai after their escape. Their bodies are covered in wounds.
Again, a certain cynicism and sense that the world is one of suffering, where men are reduced to their most fundamental impulses while being pushed around by forces larger than themselves, tends to locate Kane & Lynch in a slightly less common kind of world than most video game characters usually occupy.
Is hacking a netbook to run Mac OS X really worth the trouble? Two tech journalists today expressed grief with their Hackbooks, so I felt like chiming in with my thoughts about my somewhat controversial MSI Wind Hackintosh. In short, my Hackintosh and I have been pals for six months, but it's been a pretty bumpy ride.
Art may be pretty, but that is not a necessity. In fact, many artists bypass pretty, and attempt to create art that is beautiful. And beauty is an entirely different animal. Beauty goes far beyond mere pretty; for some, prettiness actually interferes with the beauty of the art.
Although there is little agreement among aestheticians on what beauty is, there is general agreement that it conveys something meaningful and significant to the viewer. Regardless of the medium, if you ask knowledgeable people about the best art, the most beautiful art, you are very likely to get answers that include plays and poems and novels and paintings and sculptures and films that are anything but pretty. They may be uplifting or depressing or breathtaking or sad or heartwarming, but they are likely not to be attractive, and they certainly will not be superficial.
Art is a different thing. And most collectors of art know this and dress their walls accordingly. Just in the last week, I have seen hanging in residences images that tell stories about relationships, memorials, ambiguous abstract ideas, abandoned buildings, cemeteries, nudes, burned homes, flowers, complex concepts. Only a few were pretty in any kind of conventional sense; some were not even attractive. All were beautiful. All were compelling. All invited contemplation. They were not only art; they were good art.
I completely forgot to write this one up in the Work in Progress section, but here's my pretty much completed 1/72 Ka-27 Helix-A, a Russian Navy ASW helicopter which sits somewhere between a Wildcat and a Merlin in modern RN parlance. The kit is from Zvezda - it fitted together pretty well, but it's littered with inaccuracies and came with 4 useable decals. I'm not a big fan of a million tiny decals, but this is very much the other extreme. So all in all it was a pretty average kit in terms of recommendations, but would greatly benefit from another look at aerials and appendages, and especially those little hand rails on either side of the aircraft which are way, way off. Anyhow, here's Russia's entry for the Ugliest Aircraft of All Time:
Nicely built Helix and while maybe not pretty it is certainly eye-catching. There is something about the whole Helix/Hormone family that it wouldn't be surprising to see them without rotors as some sort of spaceship in a dystophian Blade-Runner type future.
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