I recently helped Kickstart some GURPS pdfs and got them, a collection of twists, places, advice, and adventures in different genres. Of particular note is a brief historical setting, GURPS Spies of Venice.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: When I came out of The Green Knight, my brain was on fire and I truly felt I could write 40 essays about this film (having just re-read the original poem no added added a few essays to the pile, and gave me the right context to appreciate the alliterative verse they actually use on screen - I'm a man of simple tastes, all I wanted from the movie was alliterative verse). When the poem was in illustration of chivalric values, the film is perhaps more a deconstruction of them, and its Gawain (brilliantly played by Dev Patel) is a man-child with fewer virtues than the text's would admit. There, it was about overcoming his crucial flaw, cowardice, but in the film, he understands honor as a word in a book, apprehending it like a child would. So no matter how much he travels, his quest is an interior one (and his ultimate heroic act an interior one). I've read a quick review of the poem that went "English literature's first WTF", and I quite like that. It's full of surprise twists. The film makes changes to better foreground those surprises, give them more meaning, keep a certain ambiguity, and so on, with injections of other Gawain tales (or tellings) that keep even the literary nerd off-balance, yet add to the whole. Great imagery supports the theme of substitution that is present in the original romance, and despite the supernatural elements, Camelot looks like the Dark Ages, not Hollywood's colorful version of it. I'm just scratching the surface of a very deep ocean here.
At home: The new animated Fury from the Deep DVD restores the story fans most want to be found in a back room in Kenya or somewhere, having a reputation for high production values, a creepy atmosphere, and a companion farewell. The animation, available in color and black and white (and this time, the B&W doesn't shave off the widescreen and it's the better for it), manages all three of those elements well - for the third, the face acting is better than most - with bigger sets and enhanced action sequences. It can't do foam very well, but there's just so much that can be done in this style. The DVD release also includes the reconstruction so you can compare the animation with what everything originally looked like. A subtitle track is available on all three presentations, and the commentary track with cast, crew, and the animation's producer on the first two. We also get a nice making of with some of the participants visiting the rather spectacular locations, another about the animation, interviews with the visual effects designer and the writer, a photo gallery, all the surviving clips and behind the scenes footage, and if you want more, the full of audio of The Slide, the radio story considered to be the writer's first draft of Fury (it co-stars Roger Delgado, for good measure).
I don't know enough about mahjong to truly appreciate every nuance of the game play in Mahjong Heroes, but it's still a fun Shaw Brothers comedy about high stakes mahjong players, treating the game to the same treatment Hong Kong cinema might give a Triad picture (villains who are ready to bump off the young player lest he win the game that secures his inheritance) and a kung fu epic (masters, students, training montages and duels). The Cantonese comedy is quite broad at times, which always takes getting used to and may make the film too silly for some audiences. It certainly drains the tension out of the film. But considering it's mahjong as a martial art of quick wits and quicker hands, maybe it shouldn't be taken that seriously. I can't say I'm a mahjong master after seeing the movie, but between the young pup's training and the script letting us into the minds of the players in the climactic game, it didn't come across as completely opaque either.
Johnnie To is as great at romcoms as he is at crime pictures, in some ways maybe better, if Don’t Go Breaking My Heart is anything to go by. Not only does To have an eye for cinematography (not a given in this genre), but he actually fulfills the promises inherent in a love triangle. It means the ugliness of conflicted emotions, manipulative competition, and some cutting edges. He takes us on a roller-coaster where you're actually dreading the idea of Gao Yuanyuan's character making the wrong choice in the end. She's cute but grounded in this, and inspires two men to be better versions of themselves (and to the extremes of love) - Louis Koo's flirtatious, take-charge business leader, and Daniel Wu's down-on-his luck but faithful architect - and all three of them are engaging and interesting in their own way. Much of the courtships take place across the expanse between buildings, through window panes, which is also fun. Johnnie To regular Lam Suet gets a small but funny role, and there's also a great part for a frog. So while it's cute and romantic and laugh-out-loud funny and sad when it needs to be, what puts DGBMH over the top is that it has something to say about relationships and desire. You might even recognize yourself in each of the trio's situations.
Romcoms don't typically get sequels for a reason. With Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2, Johnnie To tells us what happens to the point of the love triangle who wasn't picked, and proposes a follow-up that is much darker, where the grand gestures of the first film are desperate, more ambiguous, even creepy. What is true love and what is obsession? It may just be a matter of tone. The film adds a couple of new characters to create another triangle, which becomes a pentagon before long, and once again, we're worried that the wrong choices could be made. And in a darker take on the romance film, is the wrong outcome more probable? Don't let the comic misunderstandings and spit takes fool you... maybe? But for all the deconstruction of what was a first satisfying picture, I can't help but like the sequel. It's so damn human. I still want to follow the characters, and in lieu of the frog, a great role for an octopus!
Saddled with an eminently skippable opening theme, New Tricks is nevertheless an extremely watchable cop show. I came to it because I love Amanda Redman, but soon fell in love with the rest of the cast. This is a team that investigates cold cases in London; the twist is that Redman leads a team of retired detectives who may be old-fashioned, have problems of their own, and indeed each have an "unresolved" issue, their own personal "cold cases". The mysteries are mostly well-constructed, though once you get used to the formula, you can often determine WHO if not WHY or HOW from early on (like every cop show, the bigger guest-star is often the culprit), but it's the nice balance between touching and funny that keeps you coming back for more. Brian and Gerry are especially funny. In the last third of the show's 12 seasons (all 8-10 episodes long), it starts shedding characters and replacing them, which disrupts the group dynamic and it takes though the new people have something to contribute, it takes the better part of Season 11 to find its groove back, and by then, the show's on its last legs. One early cut that I was sorry to see was the young P.C. Cooper who was only in Season 1; I kind of liked the old codgers having someone to mentor. Alas. You may want to cut your losses after Redman herself leaves, and I wouldn't blame you, but you do warm to the replacements. The very last scene, however, is the pits. It feels like it's been tagged on after the production got news of the cancellation and feels consistent neither with the characters nor the episode that precedes it. A false not to go out on.
Also from that year: Octopussy, The Bastard Swordsman, Blue Thunder
Also from that year: The Terminator, The Karate Kid, Romancing the Stone
Also from that year: Ran, Police Story, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Commando, Runaway Train, A View to a Kill
Also from that year: Aliens, Big Trouble in Little China, Highlander, Top Gun
Books: With Sir Gawain and the Green Knight getting the silver screen treatment, it just seemed like a good idea to revisit the poem which I'd studied in university lo almost 30 years ago. My trusty Norton Anthology doesn't have the Middle English original (despite presenting Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that way), but I really like the translation by Marie Borroff. She retains the alliterative rhyming of the original (which is great fun to read out loud, and unusual in later poetry) as well as the distinctive "bob and wheel" quatrain at the end of each stanza (which makes them look like beefy wheelbarrows). This is something I look for in translations. As for the subject matter, the unknown author must have really been into hunting, because the descriptions of the Lord of the Castle's hunts and subsequent butchering of his prey is almost absurdly detailed, but even centuries on, the verse still works as a nice combination of surprise twists, witty humor, tension, and Christian ideals.
I remember getting Iain Sinclair's Slow Chocolate Autopsy in the late 90s because (Sandman cover artist) Dave McKean made art pieces for each chapter and even turned in three of them as comics. I'm only getting to it now, but it did plunge me back to the height of Vertigo comics and the indie work I was interested in then. One the one hand, Sinclair's imagery comes across as the same kind of thing Alan Moore et al. used to write, and his obvious interest in psychogeography was something even I dabbled it in my own scratchings during that decade. It's not a novel per se, most of the pieces having been published elsewhere, nor is it exactly prose either. The book reads like gutter poetry, urban images rattled off at a fast pace, connected through a character called Norton (that Alan Moore actually inserted in volume 3 of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), though the notion that he is "a prisoner of London", walking through the city's history is just another image, more than narrative fact. The chapters each explore a psychogeographical idea, whether that's store fronts, football fields, artist studios or wooded areas, and for some readers, it'll seem pretentious and opaque. Sinclair defuses some of that with metatext, inserting McKean himself into the narrative, as the artist tasked to turn Norton's ramblings into visuals, but that in itself is pretentious and opaque. So it really depends on your tastes, this one.
Pretty much as expected, the third 8th Doctor novel, The Bodysnatchers, is a fairly standard adventure, the Zygon on the cover strangling the early mystery of what's happening, but still adding a lot of detail to the alien race (which hasn't exactly been contradicted in their NuWho appearances). The story is set in Victorian London and features Professor Litefoot as a delightful guest star (I like the Doctor's clever cover story for his regeneration here), but the rest of the guest cast is either pretty cursory or surplus to requirements (there's really no need for the grave diggers' point of view except page count). Mark Morris's Doctor is generally more somber, but still manages some great moments. Sam has yet to prove her worth - she's kind of the Mel of the book range, whose main trait is her essential "Companionness". Morris would later pen another underwater menace book, Deep Blue, and this isn't too far from that, including some unnecessary gore that, to my mind, crosses the line for a Doctor Who adventure, even one published post-New Adventures. Despite the flaws, it's an entertaining read, using the toy box to good effect.
As coffee table books go, James Bond: 50 Years of Movie Posters manages to have something to say and isn't JUST pretty pictures. There's actually useful commentary on the various publicity campaigns covering all Bond films from Dr. No to almost Skyfall (only its first image was available) - including the 60s spoof and Never Say Never Again - showing how the franchise itself evolved through its imagery, how different countries interpreted the ideas (and what concepts were tried but never used), and in short paragraphs, highlighting design elements we might not otherwise have caught. This is a book I might have opened now and again to look at posters or lobby cards, but the virtue of reading it all in one go is that you can track the audiences' changing tastes and how one image might progress from one campaign to the next. The first two decades' painted posters are definitely the best and most imaginative, with an ugly drop-off just in time for poor Timothy Dalton when photo elements became the norm. Things pick up once they've mastered digital compositing, but they've moved away from objets d'art by then. A big, solid book with vibrant images to leave lying around for company.
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