The first mission is a flashback to Mason's participation in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, a doomed effort to assassinate Fidel Castro. These questions set the stage for the campaign missions. Mason is asked questions by an unknown interrogator about a numbers broadcast which is being used to contact Soviet sleeper cells in the United States. Much of the Call of Duty: Black Ops campaign is told through the eyes ofSOG and CIA operative Alex Mason, primarily through flashbacks. Furthermore, the campaign's playable characters now speak while being controlled by the player. The game also introduced several new features such as dive-to-prone and the available use of a flashlight on certain weapons. Gamers play from the perspective of Captain Alex Mason of the MACV-SOG, Jason Hudson of the CIA, and Russian-born soldier Viktor Reznov of the Red Army. Urban Tale is a very sterile and disengaged film, that somehow seems to have tricked itself into thinking that it has terribly important things to say.Call of Duty: Black Ops differs from most previous installments, which would involve a usual three-country campaign while Call of Duty: Black Ops features two playable countries (Russia and the USA), but only has an American campaign. Style complements substance it can’t replace it. But all these fail to make up for a fundamental lack that pervades the film. The cinematography is exquisite, with gorgeously framed shots and intriguing camera angles. It is a pretty film to look at, it must be said. Certainly, the prurience with which Urban Tale negotiates male nudity – which I’ve talked about before and won’t bother going over again – is strikingly timid, the very antithesis of the radical claims that the film stakes for itself.
Truth is, it all seems rather quotidian, even conventional. In style, execution and, um, length, it is clearly intended to grab us by the short and curlies. Take the sex, for example (and there is quite a lot of this to take). But where it thinks of itself as brash and daring, it is instead quite conformist. Urban Tale, to be fair, has a couple of interesting things to say about the irresistible cynicism that replaces the optimism of youth, the inevitability of one’s capitulation to the conformity of a deeply unimaginative age. The thing though is that it is always going to be the message, rather than the medium, that matters. Think of it as a wilful provocation from transgressive sexual conduct to a perhaps unfortunate preoccupation with anal polyps, Urban Tale agitates for our attention from its very first frames. It is, I suppose, the film-maker’s right to make a film as misanthropic, sexualised and stylised as Urban Tale. Including, it seems, this risibly misjudged film. From now on it is finally full sex, 24 hours a day, sex in your face, in Hi-Definition on prime time. No more self righteous programs with hidden messages. We’ll watch with our tongues hanging out. Don’t just hint, give us full penetrations. Women accentuate everything except their minds. We do not speak to each other in words, we declaim at one another in paragraphs. They tell us the things they think that we do not know. Sometimes, the others talk as well as fuck. Our father, he left us when we were small. Our mother has died and we are alone in the world. We have a preternatural passivity, and we speak only in declamatory monologues.
We don’t have names, because we are Everyman and Everywoman. This is Urban Tale, written and directed by Eliav Lilti, and we are Boy and Girl. Maybe I will just stare meaningfully instead, and then you will understand.
Too complacent and too bourgeois, I repeat in case you did not understand the first time. I want to shock you, shock you because you have become too complacent and too bourgeois.
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