Category: Commentary

I Am Legend

I’ve read the book and watched both Omega Man and the recent Will Smith adaptation. I am looking forward to the March 18th release of the DVD, if only for the alternative ending.

Both deviate from the novel wildly but the later adaptation actually annoys me more. In the epilogue narration, the words “and this is his legend” are used which implies that “I Am Legend” refers to Will Smith’s last minute finding of the cure.

Wikipedia sets the story straight.

as he dies he reflects on how the new society regards him as a monster. Just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become a mythical figure that kills both vampires and the still-living while they are sleeping. He becomes a legend as the vampires once were, hence the title.

See? That’s about a million times more poignant than Will Smith clutching a grenade and the hit and miss massacre that can cause.

Good movie? I’d have to say yes.

RQ: Fantasy Games

Since I joined the group, we’ve been playing either Delta Green (check for kinnygraham’s Actual Play on rpg.net) or Gaslight Cthulhu. Michael’s RuneQuest represents the first game where we haven’t had guns and we are not playing characters who are completely in the dark.

We’re playing inhabitants of a world where Magic and the Gods are real. We accept the truths we see. Visions and dreams have meaning and while the appearance of a half-man-half-goat brandishing a sword might shock the delicate sensibilities of a Victorian gentleman or a Air Force Deserter, to a Templar of the Sun Dome it’s just something that needs killed and burned.

It’s a very different experience. We must play as if we are confident in the world, we do not express surprise at the Morokanth and we should be well-informed about the behaviours of the rare but dangerous dinosaurs that roam the plains.

They use the same system but the method of play is exceedingly different.

RQ: Something bad at Black Rock

Anaxippos removed his golden breastplate and greaves and started to unpack his kitbag. He opened the cap of the spiced oily lotion he had prepared and began kneading it into his tired limbs. Even from another building he could hear the raucous laughter of the men as they settled in for the night. Hesiod’s laugh echoed off the walls of the peaks as they relieved themselves and made crude comments about the womenfolk of the village. Soon they would be asleep, Hesiod with his leather cap reversed and pulled down over his eyes, Zakary curled up into a foetal position clutching his backpack. Del, fearful of the night, would be huddled close to his friend, Turtle, for warmth and comfort.

He arranged his pack as a pillow and stretched out on the cloth pallet which served as the smallest boundary between him and the smoothed rock floor. Countless generations had worn this floor smooth as they walked and sat and slept upon it and for a moment, Anaxippos felt he could hear the hustle and bustle of bygone generations before he slid into darkness.

He woke to hear the creak of the door. Silhouetted in the red light of the moon stood a young child clutching a crudely hewn wooden figurine. Anaxippos reached out to rise but felt his legs pinned. The child stepped forward and as fear gripped him, he summoned the spirit memory given to him by Sahlan back in Pavis. The tip of his spear began to glow with the light of Yelmalio and the child started.

The light of Yelmalio shone and dismissed the gruesome luminscence of the Lunar’s moon but Anaxippos saw the flesh of the child was squirming as if tentacles writhed beneath. The eyes, blackened sockets, struck him cold and then it spoke.

“Save us…”

Anaxippos woke alone. There was no child, the door was closed. But the tip of his spear glowed bright. He shivered and knew the chill he felt would not leave him until morning.

Meanwhile, not far away in the darkness, a ochre-stained baboon looked balefully at the peak and muttered to himself in Firespeech, “Light me….brothers”

Cloverfield

I think it has everything to do with being a parent.

I’ve never been a fan of Godzilla movies but I do like action/horror/disaster movies as a whole. Cloverfield is excellently executed and it left my head filled with “what would I do” thoughts (which all good horror/disaster movies do). As a parent you worry about more than just yourself and that’s what M. Night Shyamalan touched on with Signs. When you’re a parent, it’s more than just you in the horror.

The presentation of camcorder footage worked for Blair Witch and, to be honest, works even better for Cloverfield though the cameraman obviously has some sort of disorder because most people would ditch the camera early on. Even if recording it from the point of view of seeing “how it all went down”.

I can’t tell you much about the content itself without introducing too many spoilers. The shaky handheld footage does get irritating at times when you just want to get a bloody good look at something.

To be honest, if you’re old enough, go and see this movie. I don’t know if it needs to be seen in a cinema at all – I’m pretty hacked off with the bullshit about the “cinema experience”. Watching cinema in Northern Ireland consists of listening to slightly muffled sound, watching a screen that proudly displays the human detritus of heavy petting sessions in the projection room and listening to the beeps of mobile phones, the rustling of packets, the slurping of smoothies, having to uproot yourself because some idiot can’t get to his seat “from the other side” and sitting in a seat that is solely designed to stop you falling asleep.

Despite all of that, Cloverfield is a great film. It makes me shiver in anticipation for J.J.Abrams version of Star Trek (now delayed for a Summer 2009 release) and look forward to a possible sequel to Cloverfield.

Interestingly, most people don’t stay to the end of the credits. They miss out.

Jumper

From IMDB:

A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and those who have sworn to kill them.

I enjoyed this movie. Hayden Christensen was pretty good though I think they could have kept Max Thieriot as the protagonist even though it might have made the film either more kiddie-friendly or perhaps more dark, who knows.

There were a lot of loose ends, lots of things that went unexplained – like how this is all a secret when there are 5 year olds teleporting around – Marvel went with the puberty thing because, let’s face it, teens undergoing puberty are already alienated from society.

One tiresome detail though was the war that has been raging for centuries. Of course, now Jumpers are the REAL reason for the Crusades, the witch hunts, the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto, the reason for concentration camps, Stalin’s purges, the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the Great Fire of London. I’m exaggerating here but if you ignore the “paladins” thing and just assume they’re just the next logical extension of HomeLand Security, things go a lot better.

The real “deal killer” for me was sadly Samuel L. Jackson. He’s gone the way of Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro and every other Hollywood actor who now completely believes his own hype. Apart from the ridiculous hair dye job, he’s a crazy insane preacher who uses a signature hunting knife to viscerally gut people. And this is a 12A? Load of bollocks really. They should have made more use of Diane Lane rather than a few cameo pieces. I think she’d make an excellent head honcho and an even better foil for our hero.

That said, deal-killer or not, it’s not a bad film. I think they have expended a lot of their juice in the first film and if it were me I’d already have Jumper 2 ready for casting.

Promoting your book via blogging…

When Patry Francis was first diagnosed with colon cancer, she didn’t want anyone to know. “I wanted to be able to have lunch with people and not have them wonder if I was going to drop dead on the spot,” says Francis, the 52-year-old author of The Liar’s Diary, a sexy whodunit about self-deception, murder and motherhood out today in paperback. Francis, who lives in Cape Cod with her husband of 25 years and is in close contact with her four adult children, found a different refuge for her own dark places: simplywait.blogspot.com.
…
Cohen is just one of about 300 writers – including Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, and Neil Gaiman, the scribe behind Stardust – who plan to promote The Liar’s Diary on their own blogs today online. Because Francis is unable to do a conventional book tour to promote the book, her new friends and fellow authors will be doing it for her online. While some will simply write about The Liar’s Diary and their friendship with Francis, others, such as Cohen, will also write about cancer, sickness and a healthy dose of publishing-world dish.

And here’s the link to the story.

We’re Space Marines, We’re Glorious…

I’m going to be writing a little more about Human Unity today and over the weekend concentrating on the space military.

On Wednesday night, our gaming group chatted about old comics before we got stuck into DG. We indulged in nostalgia while stuffing our faces with Bhunas and Jalfrezis that were a lot hotter than usual but absolutely delicious (from The Khyber). We remembered 2000AD (yes, I know), Eagle, Starlord, Action and bits and pieces of other stuff. We marvelled at some of the stories and how they were printed uncensored for the time.

Anyway, it was an interesting diversion. My character got killed that night by a goat-footed invisible thing with many mouths.

Shame.

The American Dream

It’s called the American Dream,
because you have to be asleep to believe it.

– George Carlin

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.

-J. G. Ballard

“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

the children the world almost breaks become the adults who save it

– Frank, Postsecret

“We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

I challenge anyone not to read these quotes and think of a plat/storyline/game.

Setting #1:
Generate characters for a 1950s-era game. Encourage the players to find pictures of their characters or archetypes. Give them appropriate skills. If they want to be involved in the themes of the day, that’s fine. They also don’t have to know each other. We’re placing them into a Matrix/Truman-Show style setting where they will quickly start to peel away the flaking paint of a failed social experiment. To a degree, this will be like “Blast from the Past” as the players should be mired in 1950s America before being exposed to the truth. And what is the truth?

Setting #2
Society has broken down and the GM should grab as much 1950s style memorabilia as possible. Maybe it’s the 1st Jan 1960, mere months after the bombs hit. Maybe the Red Scare was really really real and the war happened. Players here will be a lot better prepared but should be encouraged to hold onto telltales of their previous lives.

Setting #3
What would you suggest?

Fairly Grim Fairy Tales

I was reading this the other day and it reminded me of a con game I ran, say 10 years ago. It was a sequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs where the seven little blokes decided they needed a maidservant again. The players decided that kidnapping Snow White from her life of humdrum fairytale royalty was absolutely the best course of action. Mayhem followed as did several deaths. Okay, these dwarves were brigands rather than miners and had pretty awful skills (Murder Quietly: 80%, Steal Candy from Baby: 110% and the like)

It evolved into an idea which I called “Fairly Grim Fairy Tales” where a modern and somewhat …unsavoury… rethink would be applied to the fairy tales. My thought was that these could be a series of one-offs. Paul wrote up “The Elves and the Shoemaker” and I tackled “CinderZ” (white trash hoodlum plus posse meets Great Expectations) and “Little Red Riding Hood” (do you need this one explained?).

Anyway, what brought this on was that I bought “GRIMM” by Fantasy Flight Games. I’ve not read this yet but it looks lovely.