"Accomplishments"
In theaters: It's not hard to say that Honor Among Thieves is the best Dungeons & Dragons made to date because all the other ones were terrible, but it more than jumps over that low bar to provide some goofy fun set in the Forgotten Realms. In terms of theatrical experience, it was like going to one of those early MCU movies, with some breed of obnoxious audience member nerdsplaining everything just loud enough to be annoying, but also because the movie offered a strong mix of high-octane action, amusing comedy, and bald-faced world building (or world showing, I guess, since these realms have all been codified). Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez make an unexpectedly good comedy double act (he's the bard screw-up, she's the impossibly badass warrior), supported by a shape-shifting druid, an insecure wizard, and as the GM's Mary NPSue, a self-serious paladin. And it's a heist movie, so it had me at hello, despite my not really grokking with D&D too much at my own role-playing table. Some deep cuts for gamers - especially in today's environment (I'm too old school to know much about these dragonborn and bird-like characters), but for the more casual fan, references to the video games and cartoon as well. Honor Among Thieves seems to be a crossover hit, so I'm sure we can expect more, as well as the obligatory rip-offs. Man, remember all the B-movie sword & sorcery of the 80s that came out in Conan's wake? Or the direct-to-DVD fantasy post-Lord of the Rings? Netflix is about to spam you with hack and slash, son!
At home: The new Quantum Leap has been fairly typical television in terms of writing and story structure - adding, as it must in today's landscape, a sort of conspiracy plot that involves all the support personnel at the Project - but it does manage to recapture some of the old magic. Most of the credit goes to Raymond Lee as Ben Song, who needed to be as trusting and good-hearted as Sam Beckett was, but still be his own person. Not as keen on Caitlin Bassett as his hologram (the Al of this lot is Ziggy's programmer Ian, played by Mason Alexander Park, and my favorite of the supporting cast), but their particular history is the heart of the series. What I most question are the changes made to the lore, even if they might be explained away as "advances in the field", but they're still weird to me (the one thing that doesn't even get mentioned is that originally, Sam only travelled in mind only, and the displaced personality was accessible to the Project. Despite those characters having their own lives and screen time now, that's all gone for simplicity's sake, replaced by information available non the internet, I guess. There are some fun episodes, even if the effects budget is obviously pretty poor and hampers some of them. As for the larger arc, it's fine, and I like where it ends up, but a lot of it predicated on Al's daughter keeping information secret until she doesn't, and there's little reason for this except to keep her antagonistic. But overall? I'm there for a second season.
At first, you might think Zone Troopers is going to be a World War II riff on Predator, and I don't know if I give it bonus points for not being that, or take them away because the result isn't particularly exciting. Tim Thomerson stars as a gruff Sgt. Rock type (you could have done worse than cast Thomerson in the role back when a Rock movie was in development) trapped behind enemy lines with a few men who stumble upon a crashed alien ship. Interestingly, the movie uses the SF magazine aesthetics of the time to realize its (actually massive, practical) spaceship, and its aliens, which has to count for something. One soldier is an obsessed SF fan, which makes this sort of his fever dream. Unfortunately, the action is very limp. Back to riff and rip-offs, you'll find that the Nazi theme in this is quite like Empire Strikes Back's Imperial March, deviating just before the movie gets into copyright issues.
In the late 80s, the "historical" kung fu film was on a big downturn in Hong Kong, while modern crime flicks were the all the rage thanks to hits like Police Story. Lau Kar-leung tries to bring some of his kung fu stylings to Tiger on the Beat, a buddy cop comedy starring Chow Yun-fat as a slick ladies' man and Conan Lee as a recklessly violent rookie - Gordon Liu is the more interesting of the villains - but the interesting action takes an hour to arrive, and the violence is the one thing his kung fu films' was not - sadistic. The female characters are very badly served in this, and the romance subplots ludicrous given the jerks involved. So it really hinges on the last half hour, which really does have some spectacular stunts and fights. It's Lau Kar-leung doing Gun Fu the way he would be doing "weapons of Shaolin" type action in a different film. If only they could have figured out that was the real strength here while the script was being written.
In Life After Beth, Dane DeHaan's girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) returns from the dead giving him (and her parents) a second chance at doing it (romance/parenting) right, though she soon starts to deteriorate into a zombie monster as a mini-zombie apocalypse sets in in their gated community. The metaphor seems to be how second-chance relationships seldom work out and indeed can be quite toxic, attempts are doing things right often just (perhaps hopeful) playacting until the underlying problems return as they always would, until you have to pull the trigger on the relationship and accept it was never going to work. Fine, though I'd be more comfortable with it if it also didn't come with a kind of "psycho-bitch" metaphor (perhaps if the reversed the genders - it's not like DeHaan looks that alive - it would work better). It's a black comedy and has some fun moments, but I think it's far more interesting when Beth is the only undead character. I suppose in the above metaphor, the end of a teenage relationship is the end of the world, but it still feels more rote when we get to that point.
Comics: Gail Simone and Phil Noto's The Variants, "A Jessica Jones Mystery", seems to take its cues from Marvel Television, setting up a sequel to the TV series in that Killgrave is involved, and using the concept of Variants made popular by the Loki and What If? shows. The result is pretty crazy - which is a positive - though I'm not entirely sure the Killgrave element pays off as strongly or clearly as I'd like it, nor is the villain behind it all achieve multiple dimensions. The gist? As the anniversary of Jessica's release from Killgrave's power approaches, she starts encountering variants of herself from parallel Earths, but which ones can she trust? Indeed, will Killgrave possibly in the mix, can she even trust herself? There's some nice writing with the whole lipstick colors symbol for different selves, and Simone throws in some fun guest stars as well, but I kind of wish this had been slightly longer. At 5 issues, it goes by like a freight train and there would have been room for expansion.
RPGs: If the team's last adventure (for a while) in the Nile Empire was kind of rougher than usual, it's not the death trap (well...), it's that the GM was rolling high and the players were rolling badly. Hey, it happens! They were also playing complications from Cosm cards like there was no tomorrow, truly leaning into the Law of Drama that is core to this pulp realm (you do what you must to regain possibilities, but this went beyond). The mission to ||retrieve an Eternity Shard in the form of a scarab ensconced on a lost sarcophagus in a tomb under the Nile was a rip-roaring action spectacular almost from start to finish, ending in an airplane chase (though I haven't quite learned how to run chases in the VTT environment using the new vehicle tokens - I should have tested things out first).|| In the non-action portion of the story, I was glad to see the players remembered a contact from two adventures previous (a month ago, at our pace) and efficiently (not an adverb I normally associate with this group) found their way to the tomb. As per my house rules about Cosm-specific Possibility Tokens, after 3 Acts in a particular Cosm, the group would vote for one player to receive this special award (which acts as a normal Possibility Point, but also imparts special powers, usable once per Act for 3 Acts counting down from this point). The vote for who best represented the laws of the Nile Empire was tied between two players who did so much of their big action moments together that I had to give each of them the Token.
Best bits: Two romance cards were in play. One led to a lovely relationship over the last couple weeks, so I made the other a real pain in the ass. Amanda the songstress is a relationship with our super-wrestler turned out to be a nosy, spoiled, jealous sort who should up at the most inopportune times to throw a fit or just ask what was going on. Obviously, she can't show up in a tomb or in a dogfight... wrong! Someone played an innocent bystander Cosm card while their plane was being boarded by daredevil wing walkers and I allowed Amanda to somehow be a stowaway, coming out of a crate, and immediately being taken hostage. Poor girl was then dropped in an inflatable dingy into the Red Sea. "I've never been so poorly treated!!!" During the aerial battle, our realm runner flew the plane into a sandstorm (another Cosm card) to make things difficult for everyone, but our monster hunter still managed to throw a flask of burning Demon's Breath onto one of the pursuing biplanes which eventually took it down.
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