"Accomplishments"Publishing: In addition to the self-published holiday-themed Torg Eternity adventure I put up on
DriveThruRPG earlier this week (Silent Night, Stormy Night), I also got my copy of Outside In Regenerates: 163 New New Perspectives on 163 Classic DOCTOR WHO Stories by 163 Writers and I'm one of those 163 writers. Did my bit for the 60th Anniversary. Out now from
ATB Publishing.
In theaters: It strikes me, perhaps more in The Boy and the Heron than in previous films, that Miyazaki heightens the wonder of his fantastical worlds by first giving us a very solid reality, filled with tiny, relatable details. The way your foot sinks in mud. A reflection in a mirror. All the bird poop! Less Totoro than a dark version of Spirited Away, the film nevertheless has its share of humor, usually provided by the comedy grannies, the always cute warawara, and the fascist budgies. But it's still a pretty serious story. Mahito has lost his mother in WWII's fire bombings of Tokyo, and goes out to the country to be raised by his aunt until the end of the war. There he is taunted by a trickster figure, the Heron, into entering the mysterious ruins of a tower and into a timeless underworld. Many have seen in this story something of Miyazaki's relationship with his own son, an indictment of someone disappointingly unable to take up his legacy. But aren't the film's conclusions rather an admission that things look very different from one's ivory tower, and that sons and daughters should be allowed to make their own way, according to their temperaments and priorities? As is the case with the best personal films, the audience sees what it wants to see. And there's a lot to see and digest here, about the creative process, about spending/wasting your life on it. A dark, reflective farewell piece.
At home: I'd only heard lukewarm reports about Brigadoon, but if you put Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in something, I won't be able to resist it forever. Indeed, the dancing is of a high level, and it's when the choreography takes over that the film shines strongest. The songs, not so much. Aside from the bonafide classic "Almost Like Being in Love", they're pretty forgettable. There really needed to be some peppier numbers thrown in. The story, about a man who walks into an 18th-Century Scottish village that only appears once every hundred years and falls in love there, but finds he can't stay, and returns with his annoyingly caustic friend (Van Johnson). Except he hears the call to return. The third act does offer some surprise twists, and I like how they play Kelly being haunted by his experience, but ultimately, it's an excessively saccharine story where people make goo-goo eyes at each other and things magically resolve themselves. Charisse feels miscast, or perhaps it's just that her character is underwritten (as is Kelly's fateful decision). I won't fault her too much for a dodgy accent because that seems to be a characteristic of Brigadoon entire. Nice matte paintings on giant sets too, but in the end, it's just okay and I didn't feel the same pull back to the town Kelly did.
I do like the conceit of spy comedies where hapless normies are in way over their heads, so there was an even chance that, given its international setting, uber-rich pool of possible villains, and penchant for action comedy, I would find Murder Mystery amusing. That's IF my old nemesis Adam Sandler didn't derail the whole thing. He plays a shlubby New York cop on 15-year-late honeymoon with his wife, a mystery fan played by Jennifer Aniston who's the real hero here. Sandler's dumb jokes mostly fall flat, but Aniston has enough comic charm to get us through, and the two of them DO have comedy chemistry, which makes this re-pairing a no-brainer. The Thin Man is a clear reference (Sandler's character is even called Nick), and the whodunit elements work within that context, even if most of the characters are played for laughs. The hardest thing to believe is that "Nick" scored (not-Norah, uhm...) Audrey given not only the beauty gap, but the way he treats her until the excitement reinvigorates the marriage. Not great film-making by any means, but still enough here to justify a sequel or two.
By Murder Mystery 2, Sandler and Aniston are husband-and-wife private eyes, and not good ones, which creates a certain tonal dissonance when she starts shooting people and he breaks out the martial arts in a story that's less a whodunit than an action-comedy caper. In this one, they're invited to one of the previous film's survivors for a wedding, which leads to a kidnapping. Once again, the Sptizes are framed for it, and once again, they have to untangle a web of motives, with all the twists and turns. But we've moved away from the "hapless normies" angle despite the duo's borderline abilities. Sandler's jokes are still pretty dumb. Aniston still saves the day with little effort. We get a pair of gorgeous settings - India and Paris. Mark Strong is in it. So it's another success in the "stream on a lazy Sunday" category. Closer to the hapless spy comedies I seem to enjoy, so I might have enjoyed it more than I should have. Do with these caveats what you like. But... who puts bandages OVER their clothes?
I think it's pretty clear what's going to happen in We're the Millers once we hear the premise. Jason Sudeikis is a drug dealer forced to smuggle way too much weed (so as to make this pretty inoffensive, all things considered) into the U.S. from Mexico. His scheme is to pretend he's just a touristy family man, and so he ropes an exotic dancer, an orphan and a runaway to be his family. So you know 1) he's gonna get hosed on the deal and 2) they're going to start acting like a real family. Some extra complications from a real ordinary family also feel like a basic building block here, but Kathryn Hahn is without a doubt the comic highlight of the movie. Overall, it's a little too sweet to earn the edgier moments - Jennifer Aniston stripping, the mock incest - but it does leave you on a smile. Some fun bloopers at the end too, don't bail out early. I guess Aniston is the queen of light entertainment, but the rest of the cast is quite watchable too.
With Rob Reiner at the wheel, an all-star cast, and a story occurring in the shadow of The Graduate, Rumor Has It... should have been, if not a home run, at least a base hit (why am I using a baseball metaphor? is it Kevin Costner's participation?). But naw, it's pretty dull. More rom than com, eventually verging on melodrama, this flick features Jennifer Aniston as the daughter of the woman who Katharine Ross' character was based on in The Graduate, digging at old family secrets to track down who Hoffman's character was based on. Had it been more of a real-Hollywood detective story, or if there had been more laughs (Shirley MacLaine and Richard Jenkins provide a few, at least), it could have had some legs. But it doesn't really go anywhere you want it to go. Mark Ruffalo as the boyfriend is a boring match for Aniston, so you're hardly invested in their engagement's success. There's a something of a creep factor when it comes to the alternative, so not that either. Ending's got some warmth and a couple of good lines, but by this point, we're in cheeseball territory. A big meh.
David Mitchell and Robert Webb weaponized their sketch work into Peep Show, where they play unlikely flat mates, one uptight to the point of emotional crippling (guess which?), the other a dumb and venal layabout. The conceit (to explain the title) is that we see everything through someone's eyes, whether a main character or a passerby. When we're in the leads' heads, then we may also hear what they're thinking (I would have liked a weirdo episode where we hear the recurring guests' thoughts instead, but maybe that would have broken the mold). If your nastiest thoughts were exposed, you'd probably come off as a terrible person too, but these guys act on those thoughts more than they should, and you can squarely place this comedy in the cringe column as a result. I find Mitchell's character personally relatable, but the only thing that saves his and Webb's characters is that almost everyone else is just as bad or worse. It can be quite a pill to watch these in the span of a few days like I did. 9 seasons, 64 episodes, it got a little depressing by the end, in spite of the laughs. A great cast surrounds our hapless losers, including Olivia Coleman before she was as big a star as she is now, Rachel Blanchard (the Conchords' "Most beautiful girl in the room", and Paterson Joseph, whose performance as the bullshitting superboss makes me think that, yes, they were right to consider him for the role of Doctor Who at around this time.
Books: The Living Land sourcebook was the first Cosm book released for Torg Eternity, and though there are some stylistic discrepancies with the rest of the line (the way Minor Laws are introduced, for example), it's still one of my favorite ones. I mean, I've always loved the Living Land, even before they peppered it with Wonders and Lost Lands. Who doesn't love dinosaurs? Lizard men? Cryptids!? In original Torg, it was a deadly jungle that nobody wanted to go to (or so I'm told). Now it does hold more attraction, I think. The sourcebook saves a lot of space - relative to others - by not having a huge amount of new abilities and gear to grind through (only Miracles work here and even Tech is extremely limited), so it uses the extra pages mostly on how to set varied adventures there. I'm not sure I really need random tables to kitbash adventures, in principle, but I did come up with several ideas reading the lists and descriptions, so no complaints. Where the book fails a little bit is that there's too much repetition. Concepts explained in the Core Rules are re-stated too often, which is okay, but information from within the book is copy-pasted from one chapter to the next for those GMs who don't read the whole thing. If it wasn't the same verbiage, I might let it pass, but it usually is. Tighter editing would have allowed a little more information on the edeinos, which I think is a little lacking. One major omission for me is the idea that individuals evolve and adapt so as to explain adding some of the biological perks mid-game. I guess it'll have to remain head canon...
RPGs: In this month's Call of Cthulhu session, my author, Oscar Alan Phelps, lost enough Sanity to send him into a traumatic flashback set in the Great War and two much smaller characters had to carry his bulk down some stairs. I'm lucky not to have broken my neck, I suppose. The story, involving a disappearing stage magician takes the expression "smoke and mirrors" to another level as it becomes obvious someone is travelling through mirrors, invading our hotel rooms (well, those mirrors are gonna be put out in the hall "for cleaning", ok?), and being used for murrrrderrrrrrr. The sight of a decapitated body, its head only visible in reflections was enough to send a couple of us over the deep end. But since I'm playing Phelps as a staunch unbeliever, there's a certain fearlessness there. He rips the mirror off the wall and ends up on the other side. And he thought WWI was the coldest hell he'd ever been to! In a way, he cracked the case, and yes, that's a dumb mirror joke. In terms of role-playing, my theme with him is to bring out his writerly mannerisms. He gets his notebook out to scribble a useful metaphor (the rival magician wanting to "mirror" the mirror act). He makes literary allusions ("My gorge rises at it." "Like Alice through the looking glass.". And I don't know if this is going to become a thing, but as I was thinking of how Phelps might explain the mirror trick "scientifically", I quickly researched key words and found the oldest reference to the word "teleport" in a 19th-Century Hawaiian paper.
Passed it off as Phelps' own piece, showing that though he's a debunker, some things are still on the books as "unexplainable".
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