This Week in Geek (17-23/07/22)

Gifts'n'Buys

Having determined that I will produce an episode of Gimme That Star Trek about the Playmates action figures next year, I then admitted to one of the guests - Little Russell Burbage - that I might only have a couple of loose figures someone once put on my birthday cake from that line. The generous soul that he is, he sent me more cake decorations in time for THIS year's birthday, some in the original package! Odo, Commander Sisko, Mirror Spock, Bashir, Worf, Captain Kurn and Blood Oath Kang join my lonely Guinan and Mordock on the frosting plains. Russell may also have included a tiny, tiny Batman figure and an Aquaman comic, but I'm not telling.

Less timely is the 2nd Edition Doctor Who RPG from Cubicle 7. I pre-ordered this book almost a year ago (perhaps more, I lost count), and though I've had the .pdf version since, the hard copy wasn't printed until recently and we are getting it, and its 13th Doctor trade dress with only one story with Jodie to go. C7 has let slip in the past that getting all the permissions and approvals from the BBC was difficult, but there's a real lack of synergistic appeal on show here. I'll probably have cause to talk about it more in the future - pdf or not, I refused to really dive into it until I had the book in hand - but I'm curious at what streamlining has actually done to the game. A quick flip through reveals C7's usual graphic quality, and though Jodie-era material is well featured, there are pictures extending back to the whole of even the Classic era. More to come.

"Accomplishments"

At home: I don't think Leos Carax's Annette is necessarily "about" celebrity relationships, or even relationships between performers, though it is definitely about celebrity CULTURE and its characters BEING performers gives the director an excuse to create a dark, dank musical where every part OF the relationship is a performance, not to say PERFORMATIVE. But then, how much of OUR lives are performative, especially given the role of social media in our broadcasting of ourselves? Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard are money on the bank as a stand-up provocateur (a savage and memorable take-down of Bo Burnham's act) and a tragic opera singer whose shows infect the film's style and plot - his cynicism, disdain for humanity and delusions of godhood; her posed grace and doomed character - and when they have a child, it's both a surprise and arguably not that it would be played by a puppet (an eventually touching marionette, really), an object that's as much part of the creative act and media narrative as anything they've produced. Visually, the film is very strong too, with obvious color theory behind it and dreamy editing. My only other Carax film has been Holy Motors, which was more opaque and therefore more interesting, but its subject matter is adjacent to Annette's. When are we NOT performing for someone or ourselves? And in this case, what does that mean for our children?

Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo are drawn as, in a way, the same man decades apart in Une singe en hiver (A Monkey in Winter). The former is an innkeeper who swore to his wife he'd stop drinking if they survived the Nazi occupation. 15 years later, they meet the younger man, a hard-drinking man on a mission, but whether in Normandy to take or shirk off his responsibilities, it's not clear. They strike up a nice friendship, and in relation to the title, we'll see how far one man is willing to go to help a lost soul find its way home. Book-ended with explosive sequences, for Gabin, the experience isn't unlike a fearless, celebratory kind of PTSD. Drinking buddies as comrades in arms. Verneuil manages to make it quite touching. The two leads are impeccable, of course, but they are well supported by an evocative seaside town and its cast of likable citizens, some of them pleasantly, and memorably, zany. Makes me want to stop in this Tigreville and spend a holiday among its citizens.

Though evidently an important early international hit for Ingmar Bergman, Summer with Monika today seems to me a little underwhelming exactly BECAUSE of the things that made it a hit in 1953 (its mainstream appeal). And the fact that while in the 50s, America was perhaps not ready for such a frank look at young love (booty shots and all), later audiences would see it a lot more. And still, there's something very compelling about Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg's young lovers, and how much of a mess they are. In one way, this is Bergman's Romeo and Juliet, not star-crossed, but making poor decisions, motivated  by a naive, over-romanticized world view, with no thought to the consequences - the tragedy here being that Harry is able to grow out of it, but Monika refuses to. In another way, and knowing his interest in religious studies, it's Bergman's Adam and Eve, living wild for that Edenic summer, awaiting the Fall (though whether the pun exists in Swedish is unknown to me) - something each of us repeats between various states of innocence and awareness of a loss.

Things that fly right past me in Juzo Itami's A Quiet Life: His family and friendship connection between Itami and Kenzaburô Oe, the author of the novel adapted and his other works. It doesn't impair enjoyment, even if it makes for a slightly different Itami film, more novelistic and pastoral. Maa-chan is a young woman coming of age and left to take care of her older, but neuro-atypical brother Iiyo (who the English subtitles insist on calling Eeyore, which is rather odd and distracting) for a parentless 8 months. Both siblings are touchingly rendered and have a great relationship. At the heart of the picture is Maa-chan being confronted with what I will call the paranoia of guardianship, worrying perhaps too much about her brother, though in a world where sexual assault is frankly portrayed (trigger warnings in effect), is she wrong to do so? These shocking moments break up the "quiet life" of the title and lightly comic tone, but the title remains and acts as a sign of the characters' resilience. Now if only the dad could deal with the plumbing with such aplomb.

Chow Yun-Fat is having a perfectly nice vacation in Nepal with his girlfriend when he gets a mysterious sketch, falls of an elephant, breaks his leg, will never walk again, and then a hot witch throws him out the window, his cast explodes and it awakens later (reincarnated?) wuxia powers in him. And THEN, things get weird. That's Witch from Nepal, a supernatural action flick that could play as a double-bill with the same year's The Seventh Curse, except Chow Yun-Fat is ACTUALLY the hero. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I always knew what was happening (or really, WHY things were happening), especially in the cheesy super-powered romcom in the middle of the film, but I often give bonus points for weirdness. The cognitive dissonance of bringing wuxia magic (and historically-clad villains) into the modern day is quite pleasant. The climax is particularly fun in that context and makes me recommend it on its strength alone. Otherwise, expect odd plot holes, some of which can be explained by "magic", others not so much. There's a real lack of consequence from one scene to another. And a lot of insert shorts of the villain's face or running towards the heroes, as if they only had their Cat Warrior for a day and made the best of it.

One Cut of the Dead's first gimmick: A zombie attack during the making of a zombie movie. Its second: It looks as cheap as the movie purportedly being made. Its third: It's all one take. So there you are, wondering if it actually brings anything new to a tired genre beyond its basic gimmicks, and after a half-hour, it seems like everything's been told. It's what happens AFTER, that is actually interesting. It's almost impossible to discuss the movie beyond this point without spoiling its surprises, so I won't, except in the vaguest terms. And by saying that you can't judge this movie by its first act, nor by its second, but by the whole thing. You shouldn't bail even if you think you've gotten everything you think you can out of it. In the final analysis, it's got a nice family element, has fun with the genre tropes it explores, and is rather amusing and maybe even a little heartfelt. It's just not exactly the movie it pretends it is, but that's good, because it pretends to be a movie you've already seen 100 times.

Rudy Ray Moore may be best known as Dolemite, but his blaxploitation riff on Daniel Webster, Petey Wheatstraw - The Devil's Son-in-Law - has a more interesting story, with his folk hero birth and eventual deal with the Devil himself, who resurrects him in exchange for marrying his daughter. When going for outright gags (many with watermelons), Moore is rarely funny to me - there's too much toilet humor, facile caricature, and Benny Hill under-cranking - but the absurdity of his scripts IS quite funny. How much you enjoy Moore's films really depends on what you find amusing. Bad acting? Amusing and kind of charming (I DO like Ebony Wright as his long-suffering girlfriend though). Bad dialog? Mostly amusing. Bad props and make-up effects? Amusing. Bad fight choreography? The buck stops there, I'm afraid. Moore always seems to insist on several martial arts fights, but it always looks so inept. Maybe he thinks they're funny; maybe he thinks they pass muster. Neither. They really drag the movie down over time.

Can you do a time travel movie, but withhold the time travel part for the length of a Bible? I'll Follow You Down isn't the most extreme example of it (how about Safety Not Guaranteed to talk the prize?), but it's generally more interested in discussing the ramifications of time travel, what it means to live in a deviant timeline, and whether one has the right to abort even THAT timeline. It's talky, but has a strong cast that helps pull it off, and even some intriguing thematic elements that aren't particularly filled out, but are still appreciated. So it's decent, but I often found myself wincing at its muddled politics. Some, we can agree to disagree on, but one that's particularly troublesome is writer-director Richie Mehta's depiction of women as suspiciously devoted to the men in their lives and incapable of existing or thriving without them. Yes, Haley Joel Osment and Victor Garber are also living for the women in their lives, but don't need their help, nor do they sacrifice much agency in the process. Otherwise, it doesn't complete every pass it throws (so WHY did they leave the watch? I have a more elegant, if more shocking, solution), but enough to interest - if not fascinate - fans of the time travel genre.

Books: When I was a kid, I had a French collection of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories, containing the first three (so only those from the 1950s). I thought I still had this volume, but can't find it now. No matter, I recently got the most recent collection, which contains all 9 short stories (though two of them are long enough to be slim novels), i.e. everything but The Shield of Time novel (which I might soon reread). All together like that in a 750+ page omnibus, a sameness tends to develop. That's because Anderson spends a LOT of time exploring the eras that have always interested him - the Late Antiquity/Dark Ages of the Vikings, Germanic peoples, and waning Roman Empire - though that's an artifact of two novellas taking place in that context (though perhaps the "hard SF" historical detail doesn't help. Still, Anderson's prose is more evocative than most of his SF contemporaries (Asimov, Heinlein, etc.) and his use of archaic words to make historical characters come alive is always interesting. While Manse Everard, hero of the first tale, is in every story, a couple of them make due with him in a supporting player role, and nothing against Mance, but these are perhaps among the best - The Sorrow of Odin the Goth, The Year of Ransom - along with the iconic Delenda Est, which I still remembered from my teenage reading. Is it me, or does Poul Anderson not get the same respect and attention some of the other seminal SF writers of the mid-20th Century get? For my money, the Time Patrol is as influential a piece of SF as I, Robot or Childhood's End, its DNA finding its way into many depictions of temporal and dimensional travel across media.

RPGs: We're in between sessions on our Torg Eternity game, but while we felt Discord was fine for our online GURPS game, Torg's mechanics, especially the cards, made it a lot clunkier. I essentially had to run an analog card game in front of me, send images to players, etc. in addition to everything else one must keep track of. It worked, but I worried about the learning curve guest players would have to suffer. So we starting talking about other platforms, even if they came at a cost (I've never asked a penny from players, but they've been hounding me to contribute). We looked at different options like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, but for Torg, Foundry seemed the best option (also: a one-time buy-in, plus a stipend to host it on the Forge - cuz I'm not configuring my laptop into a server, thanks). The reason why it's the best for Torg is that its makers have created a "module" (free to use, though the content package which can save you a lot of time was on sale on their site too!) that gives you all the cards, the character sheets and automated mechanics to help you run your game online. Foundry is very pretty, but its open source also means it can be fussy. In only a couple days, I still managed to get myself up to speed, figure out fixes for things I wasn't sure how to do, and made all the character/threat tokens, maps and handouts I need for the next session. It's my hope that we coast through this new way of doing things, which keeps track of the various conditions imposed on characters during play so we don't have to. I expect to use maps/miniatures (tokens) only on Dramatic Scenes and keep the Theater of the Mind open for the rest (to save time, but also because it's our standard operating procedure). The audio is better than Discord (audio chat, but also the way it integrates music and soundscapes), but video needs a workaround. If I can't figure it out, we may be opening Discord or some other service to better emote during interaction scenes. Still work and study to be done, as you can see, but we've got another week before the next session.