Resident Evil movie feels like you're playing the video game, and why is BET erasing its history?

In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game. Ryan's style is really gun it and go. And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high. Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world. I'm Michelle Shepard and from CBC Podcasts and the Toronto Star, The Most Wanted Olympian. Available now on Amazon Music. This is a CBC Podcast. So for decades, Black Entertainment Television or BET has been the most prominent media company covering Black American pop culture and entertainment. Now there are reports that BET has removed all of its digital articles from its website and Black journalists are worried that significant Black pop culture history is going to be lost. I'm Elamin Abdelmahmoud. And this is Commotion. Belton Higgins and Jay Smooth joined me recently to unpack the story. Here's our conversation. Hello to both of you. Hey, how's it going? Nice to have you here. Listen, Jay, I'll start with you on this. Can you give us some examples of like what erased from BET's website? Yeah, I mean, there's such a wealth of history and culture there. You know, so many reviews, artist interviews, coverage of Black arts and culture and, you know, and politics as well. That was just erased in one fell swoop. BET. Originally one of the biggest Black-owned media companies now owned by Paramount Skydance decided this month to just delete the entirety of the BET website's written digital archive, which is something like 20 years of Black journalism and documentation of Black culture just disappeared. And as is often the case, it was done without any warning. So there was no opportunity for especially, you know, these writers and journalists to try to save their work. And a lot of people are understandably upset about all this. All that history being erased. Dalton, listen, you're a veteran journalist. You've written for BET. You've written for other U.S. publications. When you heard this news first, what was your reaction? Yeah, well, you know, as a writer, content creator, you know, was I surprised and shocked? I would say not so much really. But, you know, further to Jay's earlier point, it's this part, the no warning part. So they'll just say, hey, we're removing 20 years of archives, you know, and 45 stories you wrote with no forewarning. That's the part that really kills us writers because if they were to put it out and say, hey, you know, six months from now, a year, it would give us adequate time to, you know, screen grab, screenshot, save to PDF files. Yeah, put it in your portfolio, yeah. Yeah, to rebuild your portfolio. But it's just sort of you read this news story, it gets leaked, and then boom, that's it, you know? Jay, when you look at this story, like, I feel like there is something to be said about these articles being removed, having a much larger ramification for just like the history keeping that we have of black pop culture. What are those larger ramifications, you think? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a scary time if you're a writer, a journalist, someone who wants to be a keeper of that culture. It's harder than ever, first of all, just to find work that's sustainable in the media as a journalist or a writer or a historian. And then there's a sense that none of your work exists in a physical form, and that means nothing we create is permanent anymore. And then at the same time, as we have this shift to focusing on video content, that gives more incentive than ever to create content that's sort of shallow and disposable instead of. thoughtful art and journalism. So it feels like we're getting hit from all sides by an environment where it's just harder than ever to do cultural work that we know will last and will have lasting value and will be able to be passed on. There's a degree to which, you know, preserving the record is something that we sometimes take for granted. And I, you know, I say that, but also I'm aware that like every librarian listening to this going, maybe you shouldn't have, maybe the history, the lesson of history throughout all of time, has been actually we only have a record of the thing that remained and so much of the other stuff does not exist anymore. And this is exactly that kind of process. But the Internet feels like it's a new thing in terms of like the way that this history is getting erased, because like that hasn't happened for some time. And now it's happening all the time. Jay Dalton mentioned earlier MTV. Like, I remember when that happened, much music here in Canada, the same same thing kind of happened there. A major driver of this shift is YouTube. Jay, do you want to explain what's going on? Because also you're like you're a YouTube OG, you know, I am a YouTube OG going back to 2006, 2007. And yeah, there is a big movement in the mainstream corporate media world, the sense that YouTube specifically is where the future is at and where the money is at. So whereas, you know, five, 10 years ago, media companies would talk about a pivot to video, but that would mean posting videos on your website, probably. Jay Dalton: Yeah, yeah. Jay Dalton: But now we're moving towards everyone in the media competing within this same YouTube ecosystem and trying to produce content that can thrive there. And I think there are a lot of ramifications to that potentially, you know, as part of a long running trend where media companies have to rely on these sort of centralized social media platforms instead of just getting traffic on your website for your content. And that can have big ramifications. Like for a lot of news organizations, they used to rely very heavily on Facebook for a lot of their traffic. Then one day Facebook said, you know what, we don't want to promote news content anymore. And that had a huge effect on the news business. So it puts us in treacherous ground, potentially, I think, in a lot of ways. Jay Dalton: Listen, you said the words pivot to video. And as someone who was working at BuzzFeed during the time when everybody was pivoting to video, I broke out in hives. I had an allergic reaction to that. Jay Dalton: To that specific set of words. But Dalton, like we're losing recipes, man. Like I want to focus on Canada for a moment and the sort of the MuchMusic situation because MuchMusic kind of went away and then it got relaunched maybe as a TikTok channel, maybe as a YouTube channel. What is going, what is MuchMusic situation with its archives and how are things going to be, how are things going with its pivot to YouTube? Jay Dalton: Yeah, totally. Well, MuchMusic, yeah, they reportedly have been in the process of digitizing, you know, archival videotapes, you know, going running. Some 40 odd years. So, you know, I don't know how you do that, but it's, it's as laborious as it sounds, right? 41 plus years of footage. Jay Dalton: That's history. And, you know, also too, you know, while they're, you know, engaging this process, they're having to deal with, you know, getting permissions, permissions and licenses from the artists and the record labels, the universal music groups, Warner Musics. And so they've now, you know, as of right now, they have a channel on YouTube. It's called Much Rewind, where you're able to get some sort of snippets, you know, as, as part of this process of what's music from the eighties, the feel good eighties, you know, El Amin, the nineties, you know, when they were at their peak, you know, when it was at its peak. So MuchMusic was a nation's music station, right? It was, they had a virtual monopoly where it's very different from Jay Smooth's situation in the U.S. Where you had, you know, you had BET, you had MTV, VH1, you know, MuchMusic was a monopoly. Jay Dalton: We had one guy. Jay Dalton: We had Much, right? So that's all we had to rely on. So it's, it's interesting times. Jay Dalton: Yeah. And it's also, we should mention, it's probably not a fast. Process to digitize 41 years of video. Like that's, that's a lot of video to sort of, you know, get up and running. How, what do you make of like how that's going so far? Jay Dalton: Yeah. Well, you can't really fast track or expedite that process because you're quite literally listening to hundreds of thousands of hours of footage of interviews with celebs, A-listers, music, pop culture. Um, again, it feels like a near, next to near impossible task. Um, that being said, uh, you know, I think one of my concerns is, you know, how do the, you know, the staffers at Much. That are engaged in this process, how are they able to determine what is salvageable, you know? Um, so me as a hip hopper, I'm into reggae, R and B I'm like, is it a, you know, 23 year old, 23 year old intern, uh, that knows nothing about hip hop. Like if there's an interview, you know, brand Nubian or some, you know, fantastic rap group and it's obscure, it's rare, or is it going to get salvaged? You know? Jay Dalton: Cause those are making, they're making editorial decisions in that case. Jay Dalton: Oh, absolutely. Jay Dalton: They're making decisions going like this is significant. We should preserve it. This is not significant. We shouldn't preserve it. Jay Dalton: Yeah. So yeah, it's the gatekeeping function that that's a great concern. Cause I don't think it's music historians or archivists that are working on this digitization project. I think it's like just staffers, you know? Jay Dalton: I will say that I hope something to be determined is not significant is all the footage they have of the, the Much Music VJ search of 2006. Cause I, I might've auditioned and no one needs to see that video. So let's hope they burn that one. Whenever interns listen to this, please get rid of that video. Uh, Jay, I think up until this point, there was this sort of expectation, right? That like the companies that like making their business to cover pop culture, um, in real time. They would be responsible, right? Like they would be responsible to us, to the audiences, to history, right. For preserving that pop culture as, as a part of the permanent record. Do you think those expectations, A, were they fair then? And do you think they're still fair now to be putting on private and public media organizations, you think? Jay Dalton: Yeah. I mean, you know, I think it's a scary time in that regard. We, you know, we used to see in olden days, um, really great culture and history, like, uh, Nat King Cole's TV show, a lot of that kind. Jay Dalton: Yeah. content would be lost because at that time there were limitations in the technology and people didn't have the same foresight to know that we should preserve it. One would like to think that nowadays we know better and have the ability to do better. But in this age where so much of our work never exists in a physical form, it's feeling more and more like our history and culture just never really belong to us anymore. It's just always on loan from these companies that could revoke our. our access at any given moment and As we shift to everything being on platforms like YouTube, that can happen in multiple ways. We did a recent segment on Macklemore. I went to look up my interview that I did with Macklemore 10 years ago. I discovered it's not on YouTube anymore because there was some automated flagging of a snippet of music within that video. So there's so many ways that your work can disappear nowadays. And I don't know if it's possible to legally obligate these companies to do the work of making sure you preserve this material. But at the very least, I do think public media organizations should feel an obligation to preserve this history and culture and safeguard our access to it for future generations. And I think it's important for us to push them towards doing that. That was my conversation with Jay Smooth and Dalton Higgins about the reports that BET has removed all of his digital articles to his website and the ramifications of the shift to YouTube. That was my conversation with Jay Smooth and Dalton Higgins about the reports that BET has removed. Ryan James Wedding. I'm Alameen Abdul-Mahmood and this is Commotion. There is a new Resident Evil movie in theaters right now. It's made by Zach Kreger. He's the guy who directed Barbarian and Weapons. And critics and audiences are kind of in agreement about this. There's a lot of people just saying it just might be the best video game adaptation ever. I have seen way too many Resident Evil adaptations and I have never felt that way about any of them. So the fact that there's a lot of excitement about this is something that I'm paying attention to. David Ehrlich joined up with guest host Raz Sampley to talk about it and how video game adaptations might be changing in the future. But before they got into it, David got a bit of background on the games that inspired the movie. Yeah. So. To take me back to my formative years as a terrified young gamer. Resident Evil was launched in the PlayStation era towards, I believe the first game came out in 1996. And it sort of coined this term, which is now commonplace of survival horror. It was a genre that it basically invented where, you know, it was a horror focused game of which many existed before. But it was also, it gave players in a sort of action milieu very limited resources as they fought through a zombie. Invasion in a mansion that was owned by the evil umbrella corporation. And there was all this corporate intrigue, which still plays today, obviously. And Resident Evil was sort of an instantly a killer app on the PlayStation. It was a huge hit. It spawned Resident Evil two, which took the action out of the mansion into Raccoon City. Now, you know, a place near and dear to all of our hearts and and really exploded and expanded the concept of what the game could be. And was even more terrifying in some ways invented, you know, monsters that would especially once you beat the game, went to the post game content that would stalk you relentlessly and were unkillable and could burst through doors and they iterated on that in Resident Evil three with the nemesis character and so on. And the franchise has really kept up with the times and the advancements in video game technology by switching to a more over the shoulder perspective and a more action oriented kind of gameplay. Starting with Resident Evil four, which brought a lot of new fans to the series, and then more recently adopted starting with Resident Evil seven, a first person point of view when you play the games, which is terrifying on a whole different level than, you know, being able to see your blocky character move around in these chunky polygons. I would say too terrifying for people like me to play much of mercifully, depending on who you ask. They've now shifted back to a third person perspective with the option. To go first person, but the radio Resident Evil games are as popular as ever. Of course, there was a series of Paul WS Anderson movies that had very little to do with the game other than shared locations and characters, but in spirit was like new metal nuttiness and had none of the sort of like John Carpenter vibes of the Resident Evil games. And there have been a few other aborted attempts to start their own Resident Evil film franchises. And now we're back today with. Zach Kregger's singular spirited, very, very Zach Kregger take on the material. OK, so look, I mean, there's I should also mention there was also like a Netflix series reboot of Resident Evil, but I haven't seen that. I haven't played the video games, but I have seen this new movie and I would love to take a listen to a bit of the trailer. You got time for another run? Raccoon City General. No sweat. Signal sucks here. Can you hear me? I'm going to stay with Katie for a bit. Michelle, please do not go stay with freaking Katie to come home and have this conversation. Seriously, I'm working. This could be some eight year old boy's heart or someone's mom's brain. So, David, I mean, look, this movie is not borrowing its story from any of the games, as I understand it. Right. And we're going to get into that. OK, so but look, like I mean, it's so the story here is it's following a medical career who has to deliver a package through this monster infested city. And as you mentioned, it is written. And directed by Zach Kreger, who is kind of a hot property in Hollywood right now, following the success of his horror movies like Barbarian and Weapons, which was a huge hit last year. And you, of course, wrote this really positive review of this new Resident Evil movie in IndieWire. That was last week that you published it. How is this movie sitting with you now? I mean, it's sat with me very well. I mean, it's been, you know, I had some reservations about the movie, which we'll discuss. But on the whole, it's an absolute blast, particularly its first half. But it's also. It's been really, you know, I have come to an understanding. I've made peace with the idea that video game movies and TV shows are going to be the next. They're already the current, but are going to be sort of the foreseeable future, the next hot wave of intellectual property adaptations in Hollywood. You know what they are now, sort of the comic book movies of five or 10 years ago. And so we're going to be inundated with these things one way or another. They may as well be clever and interesting. And, you know. We're going to be led by a filmmaker with a real creative vision. And so to see a film that ticks all those boxes be not only so enjoyable, but so well received, so popular, is really encouraging about the potential quality of what these films might be like over the next little while. Because what you're seeing audience respond to is less a facsimile of the games. And the Resident Evil series tried that with a movie called Resident Evil. Welcome to Raccoon City a few years ago, which few people saw and even fewer liked, which was very. Very loyal to the games. But what this Resident Evil does is it really captures the experience of playing the games, even though it jettisons any character that, you know, is from the original games. It shares the location of Raccoon City in mostly a name only. But it and we can talk about why, but like it really captures the experience of having control in your hands and playing through these survival horror games. It really gets to the spirit of the game. And I think that's a really winning. Template for how other games that are may have unwieldy lore and mythology might be adapted to the future. So for all those reasons, whatever my reservations about this movie, especially its goofiness, I think that it is a real, real win and an important cornerstone for video game adaptations going forward. I love to hear that because I had such a blast with this movie. I mean, it's so fun. I do want to address. I mean, you talked about the previous Resident Evil movie. He's the ones directed by Paul W. Sanderson and starring Mila Jovovich. I mean, I got to say, like, you know, when you say Raccoon City, I'm thinking of Toronto because those movies were shot here in Toronto. I mean, who could forget Mila Jovovich scaling down our city hall, you know? But, you know, thinking of those movies, like, is there something that those movies had that this new one lacks? Oh, that's an interesting way of putting it. I mean, I think I think those movies. They were so deranged from the start. I mean, the first 20 minutes of the first one takes place within a recognizably Capcom is the developer of Resident Evil related universe. And then they very quickly go into their own Paul W. Sanderson like new metal space. And that was that feeling is amplified and deepened in the sequels that followed. And it reached a point where it became such a self-contained aesthetic universe that abided by its own logic. That. Really made no sense beyond the scope of the films that it reached a kind of like self-referential ecstasy at a certain point, like four movies in where it was just operating on a plane, unlike any other movies at the time. And then I think as it landed the plane, a different kind of plane towards the end of the franchise, it returned to normalcy and the series suffered enormously for it. But I think there is a maybe we'll say like a scope to those movies. A vision there that the 85 minute movie that Zack Craig made as and this is something I love about it. it it was clearly made as a one-off it was not susceptible to so much so many of the franchising um you know visions that people have for these uh properties now where everything has to tie into 10 more movies and a netflix series and so forth i mean this is clearly just an 85 minute lean and mean ride um and it takes a very blithe approach to the things that fans find sacred such as like canon and uh you know story beyond what we're seeing of this one courier played by austin abrams um who's sort of a goofball with sort of running for his life um but yeah i mean there was a there was a real sense of uh of scale to the all ws anderson movies um and self-possessed vision but the zach gregor one isn't lacking in that in its own way it just takes a different form it mutates you know per resident evil terminology well i mean i i want to talk about this kind of idea of mutating in terms of video game adaptations because those paul ws anderson movies they're in a way they're almost of another era because you were talking about how we're in this moment now where video game adaptations they're basically like the new kind of comic book adaptations right they're like the new rage with movies like the sonic the sonic movies the minecraft movies these are the ones dominating the box office now so we are in a new era of video game adaptations do you see this new resident evil zach gregor's resident evil in the way that you talk about its blithe adaptation like do you see that as an inflection point that could uh you know steer video game adaptations going forward i sure hope that it will be seen as an inflection point and i would imagine that it is i mean i think that you know as to what i was saying earlier about the fact that it it really evokes the spirit of the games and whether or not fans especially sight unseen before these films come out feel like that is what they want i think what zach gregor's movie does is show that fans that are very attached to the iconography of a certain series may not know what they want they may think that they just want to have the experience of playing the games and and the rush of falling in love with these things regurgitated back at them um and there's plenty of regurgitation in in this movie in all sorts of forms but um i think you know if i can speak generally and certainly from my own experience i i really think that what people respond to is a deeper sense of what they love about this stuff i mean you'll always be able to go back and play those games and i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point um although i mean always in the video game parlance now with the switch to digital games it's a whole different conversation but well you may relatively always be able to play these games and have those experiences but to watch this movie to watch the first 30 minutes where austin abrams character is uh basically alone in the middle of nowhere with just one zombie who he doesn't even know is a zombie uh and is scrambling around a car and like trying to you know his hands trembling load uh bullets into a policeman's pistol uh that he doesn't really know how to use um and he feels as helpless and as lost and as scared as you know my 10 year old self did playing the first game um uh i think i just made myself sound even older than i actually am but um uh but yeah i mean i think like that it took me right back to my living room you know in 1996 playing resident evil uh and that i think is what makes it so exciting connect and gives the movie license to uh sort of mutate on its own terms and pivot away it's like once you get the essence of what resident evil is that if you slapped a different title on this movie and you called this resident evil i would say no no that what you're experiencing you're evoking here is just resident evil um even if albert wesker and claire redfield and leon kennedy don't show up the characters from the games um once you have that you're giving yourself as a as a filmmaker license to take things in your own direction and it's exactly what zach crager does so i i hope that's an example that you're giving yourself as a filmmaker license to take things in your own direction and it's exactly what zach crager does so i i hope that's an example that um other game adaptations can follow because there are very few that would benefit from a linear and faithful adaptation of a narrative from a game i think that the last of us show on hbo is is sort of the exception to the rule um but most video games weren't really designed for non-interactive engagement um which you know twitch and whatnot might might uh suggest otherwise but i think that in in the cinematic sense um you they need to compensate for the fact that they're not that there isn't a controller in your hands and this movie you know is able to sort of uh thread the needle and that you are uh watching it you're experiencing it taking it as a passive viewer but it does evoke the exact feeling of playing the game so it has its cake and eats it too in that sense listen david i mean i love your enthusiasm for this movie because it is reflecting back my own enthusiasm for this movie because i had a great time um and so listen thank you thank you for being here and walking us through resident evil my pleasure that was my friend rad tywin talking with david erlich the head film critic for indiewire they're talking about resident evil which is a movie that is out in theaters now that's it for the show today tomorrow on the show we're going to be talking about some new public artworks from indigenous artists that are popping up all over the country i mean these are big we are talking about big outdoor installations from artists like cheyenne rain lagran or brian jungian or kent monkman and also we're going to be talking in that conversation about how public art can help further reconciliation i'm really looking forward to that conversation and i'll see you in the next one bye for more cbc podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts Podcasts.