A lot of stuff goes into my brain, some of it by choice. If I decided to watch, read, play, or do it, I'd like to talk about it here. I'm a musician, a sometime actor, a frequent player of electronic and table-top games, and a lapsed reader (though I'm getting better). I write long and awkward sentences, because the more things resemble Douglas Adams' writing, the more I want to live in the world. Thanks for reading.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Black Swan

So it's been a couple of weeks since I've seen The Black Swan and I've calmed down a little bit. Thoughts a bit jumbled post-hoc, but here's what I thought, in no particular order.

First, that I can a bit callously but affectionately think of it as descended from Fight Club, for obvious reasons, but also from Full Metal Jacket (so I'll call it "Full Feather Tutu"). At its core, you had a message of an artist -- or a human, or a soldier -- pursuing the obliteration of self to give a truly selfless performance. As a performer, and an off-and-on Kendoka, I related very viscerally to her experience. How many times has a music teacher, coach, whatever, shouted at me to turn off my brain, to stop watching myself and just let my heart move me? At least, like, three.

At a high level, there were a number of surprises in the cast, all good. Characters came in with clear "entrances", and there were subtle, creepy inside jokes based around the casting. Winona Ryder's character is stolen from; Winona's shoplifting fiasco was massively publicized. Murders real or imagined; Mila Kunis' role in the baffling sequel to American Psycho, which originalliy featured similar ambiguity. Barbara Hershey's clearly broken character, and her visibly jarring face, subsequent to obvious plastic surgery, perhaps raising a question of a perpetuation of a cycle of abuse. And while there was no outright discussion of anorexia, the camera lingers for a moment on the loose skin and musculature of an older dancer's back midway through the film. It's impossible not to think of both character and actress, in that moment. Conflation of life and art was a loudly telegraphed theme of this movie. Perhaps unintentional was the subsequent disclosure of Natalie Portman's pregnancy by and engagement to the film's choreographer Millepieds.

Obviously this extended to the whole structure of the film, which followed most of the same dramatic beats as the ballet Swan Lake, which is sketched out by the choreographer -- as played by Vincent Cassel, whom I'd mostly known through his roles in Ocean's Twelve and Irreversible, but who's also Monica Bellucci's husband -- early enough in the film for the audience to play along with the game.

Body Horror was all over this movie. Darren Aronovsky is a huge fan of that idea -- Requiem for a Dream was wrapped around it all the way through. Interestingly, it intersects with Kafka's approach in a funny sort of way, with rather than a man becoming a cockroach, a woman becoming a swan. This invites consideration of the Ugly Duckling, although the "ugliness" of the Black Swan herself was actually a sort of repressed carnality, which then calls up all those questions so tritely trodden on in The Da Vinci Code, about sacred versus worldly, religious and intellectual orthodoxy versus the "evil" impulse of human lust. As for the "horror" itself, the movie had some amazing gimmicky shock/jump moments; tension was maintained with fairly expert acumen.

Three more things I want to touch on: first, the question of Black Swan in the context of Nicholas Taleb. Something totally unpredictable? But maybe also something you planned to happen and chose to maximize? Something only possible in "extremistan"? Something real but almost never really glimpsed? A question of a fading elite, with diminishing crowds in the ballet perhaps representing a "thanksgiving event"?

Second, the transformation. How real was Lily? Was her tattoo something that could ever REALLY be allowed on a dancer? Why did she have a tattoo so explicitly tied to a single ballet; didn't she think she'd ever dance The Nutcracker? You'd need a lot of concealer to tread that (though I suppose if Nina could have covered her scratchy scarring/emerging feathers, Lily could have obscured her wings). Pursuant to that there's the amazing transformation Natalie helps Nina undergo, by totally changing the character's physicality in the last scene of the movie, fully embracing the character and disappearing into it, but doing so twice -- both Natalie AND Nina disappear, leaving only this alien creature of supreme sensuality and power. Chilling.

And the third thing, the name "Nina". Yeah, I know it means "child". I know it's one of Columbus' three ships. I also know it's slang (at least, Dr. Dre uses it thus) for a 9mm automatic pistol, a concealed, dangerous weapon. But the weirdest thing is how it lines up with two Ninas in my own life: one of whom is a dancer, and another of whom has undergone a dramatic physical transformation. This movie is full of weird resonance with the real world and the world-within-a-world of the Swan Lake ballet's story. It's only fitting that it should still be stuck in my head weeks after I've seen it.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition

(originally posted to RPG.net's "Other Games Open" forum, about 10 minutes before it was posted here.)

I played Twilight Imperium last weekend and it got right under my skin. The thing is-- while I don't want to say "brilliant", or even "innovative", I do want to say "inspired". A full-on game of conquering a whole damned galaxy, or at least the important parts of it, that's not even a wargame per se: it's almost more of a "civilization" game, with "points" given for the development of technology, culture, political influence and diplomacy.

We played for three hours (and it was our first game, so we really only went up to turn three, six or so victory points) but the overall effect was absolutely breathtaking. Taking a page out of Cosmic Encounter, you have a distinct set of individual successor empires with wildly distinct feels, using only subtle variations within the rules.

But taking a page out of Race for the Galaxy and (as Third Edition calls it, "its greatest new influence") Puerto Rico, there are "non-conflict-based" ways to improve your empire and get ahead in the victory point race.

If I were to consider a fourth edition of Twilight Imperium, I'd think that the best new mechanic to roll into it would be the card-driven wargame mechanic of games like Twilight Struggle and Labyrinth. Those "influence" points on worlds all over the galaxy should be somehow factored into the way points are scored; Political Events don't seem to happen quite often enough to really make a difference. On the other hand, early expansion seems to make a really big difference. Here, racial starting numbers of ships (The N'orr, for instance, with their huge army but single carrier) can swing the game wildly.

But in its cosmic-encounter-like looseness lies a type of wide-open freedom that, even with my often analytically-paralytic group of Enderian calculator knights, allows for a tremendous amount of story-telling and role-playing in the context of a board-based strategy game about building a galactic empire. So, it wins.

Comics, week of January 26th.

Shortly, we'll be getting Squideye and The Bitter Guy back online for the new year. For now, these are the comic books I'll be checking out this week:


BOOM! Studios
Incorruptible #14 -$3.99
- I'm along for the ride; interested to see where it all winds up.

Dark Horse
Star Wars: Legacy - War #2 (of 6) -$3.50
- I refuse to bother with Legacy War until it's in trade. And at half-price books. SO burned out on fricking Adolescent Rebellion Skywalker and his BS.

Image
Skullkickers #5 -$2.99
- This thing is consistently awesome. Just gets better with each issue. And I like Zub; Zub's the man.

Marvel
Deadpool #32 -$2.99
- I like laughing and being happy. Anyone else interested in these things should be fed a steady diet of Deadpool comics by Daniel Way.

Fantastic Four #587 -$3.99
- This is the one where they kill off Ben Grimm, right?

New Avengers #8 -$3.99
Secret Avengers #9 -$3.99
- Immonen could draw paint drying and I'd just eat it up. Brubaker could write a story about paint drying and I'd be gripped. I wish they'd work together and make the One True Avengers comic. In the meantime, I'll keep up with both I guess.

X-23 #5 -$2.99
- I got a friend who's a pretty big fan. So I pick 'em up with some regularity. Marjorie Liu makes things more interesting than they'd be in the hands of a male writer doing a typical "Wounded Girl" comic.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Thinking back on "Reasons to be Pretty"

I think I might actually have reviewed this site somewhere else, but as she was mentioned in a recent Ontario press release, I checked out the wikipedia page for Piper Perabo trying to remember whether she'd played a police officer in the play I saw in preview on my last trip to New York.

Looking up the play, however, I saw that it had in fact premiered before the on-Broadway run I'd seen at the Lycaeum theatre.  And in its original cast? Nick Sobotka (Pablo Schreier) and Kim Pine (Alison Pill)!

Woulda been cool to see them onstage.  Of course, at that point I had seen neither The Wire nor In Treatment or Scott Pilgrim, and so I wouldn't have been confronted with baggage associated with their roles.  Either way, that play was pretty darned good.

Piper, of course, I knew from other work, but her character didn't ring of her Lost and Delirious role, which is cool.  (She co-starred with Jessica ParĂ© -- now a big part of Mad Men -- and, to an extent, Jackie Burroughs in that movie, which was awesome.)

Saturday, January 08, 2011

Seven Wonders

I played the board game "Seven Wonders" last week with Danny, Eugene, Laura, Samy, Rob and the "team seat" of Ora and Mary-Ellen.  Most of us were learning the game for the first time, but it's not terribly complicated.  Eugene is a great teacher, and he was willing to step us through the rules without belabouring the details before they're needed.

If I had to fall back on the old "X+Y" paradigm for elevator pitches, I'd say that the game felt like playing Race for the Galaxy but using the mechanics of Guillotine.  I love both of those games, so this isn't a bad place to be, though it doesn't quite capture the pure experience of either one completely.

Like Race for the Galaxy (one of my favourite games ever, just on the strength of its theme of "building an empire" and the extreme variation from game to game, which forces players to make a plan but improvise frequently -- strategy plus disruption!) it gives each player a distinct "starting point" -- in Race for the Galaxy it's a home world, which lessens in importance as you go, but in Seven Wonders it's the "ancient wonder" (Colossus of Rhodes, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, etc.) at the heart of a bronze-age city-state -- and lets you expand your empire using a variety of additions, represented by cards, each of which gives you the capacity to more easily acquire other additions in subsequent turns.  At the end of the game, based on how much of your "wonder" you've built, and how many additions you've accrued, you score points.

But like Guillotine, every player has access to the same batch of cards, and this access rotates around the table, giving each player a crack at the cards in turn.  There are three sets of cards that make their way around the table, and once these sets are exhausted, the game ends.  But thematically, Guillotine is one of the most accessible, whimsical games I've ever seen.  You play a bunch of executioners during La Terreur, trying to collect the most prestigious collection of heads.  The nobles to be executed are lined up, the Guillotine blade makes its way around, giving players the next noble in line -- unless they monkey with things by playing the "action" cards in their hand (tripping nobles, making Marie Antoinette talk about cake and sending her to the front of the line, etc.).

Guillotine is so simple and easy to grasp, conceptually, that it's incredibly fun.  Race for the Galaxy, on the other hand, doesn't make sense for the first two games while players try to figure out what on earth all the icons on the cards mean, how they interact and so fort.  It's this complexity (because of the similar "empire-building" themes) that Seven Wonders shares that makes it less simple than Guillotine, and consequently not as much of a "game for everyone".  And unlike Race for the Galaxy, which lets you develop wildly divergent types of empire, your Seven Wonders empires are fairly limited to libraries, quarries, marketplaces and stuff.

So it's somewhere in the middle, and not quite perfect for either geeky conquerors or unconvinced non-gamers, but it's still fast and fairly simple to play.  I'd give it another try to see whether it will hold my interest like Race for the Galaxy, and I'd love to try it with people who don't play too many games.  But it's not going to appeal to as many people as Guillotine, I don't think -- it's just a bit too dry -- and I don't think it's going to show itself to have as much depth as Race for the Galaxy.

But those are pretty tough acts to follow.

Thursday, January 06, 2011

Louie

Louis C.K.'s new FX sitcom -- a sort of companion piece in tone to "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and really, if not for Community and 30 Rock being an NBC block, would make up the best hour of television conceivable -- really works for me in a single sentence: "Dr. Katz but in live action".  It's just a very patient sort of show, stunningly non-judgemental; not a lot of laughs but the kind of pathos that only humour can really evoke.  It's pretty great.

Monday, January 03, 2011

Highlander: The Source

From the all-caps Papyrus opening title cards with half-assed narration to the pop-song soft-lit ending makeout with half-assed narration, this movie was a rough ride.  True to its low-budget roots, I suppose, but with an insane mess of characters, an ex-nihilo macguffin involving the decay of the world and some kind of astronomical alignment (I'm sure Zeist was in there as well) to the hilarious fast-motion swordfights with the inside-joke spouting nemesis all just begging to be set to Yakkity Sax, this was brutal.

If you're in the mood for an Uwe Boll movie without the big name actors slumming it, it's worth an hour of your time.  However, this entails being in the mood for an Uwe Boll movie.  Fair warning.

World's Greatest Dad

Picked this one up at a 3-for-$10 at the Rogers' Video on the way to Eugene's New Year's Eve party, but to be honest I'd been trying to see it for a while.  Bobcat Goldthwait, whose comedy is a heck of a lot deeper and smarter than that high-strung Police Academy character I knew him as before (thanks, Meeplemart Steve, for showing me the way there), wrote and directed this movie as a sort of Robin Williams vehicle, and a sort of story about loneliness, isolation, and broken and reconstituted families.  I heard about it on Adam Carolla's Podcast last year ('09, actually, at this point), and it sounded dark and twisted enough to stand up to Bad Santa in my "Fiasco Comedy" shrine.

Well, like I say about so many movies, it's not quite as funny or sharp as Bad Santa.  That's not a huge strike against it, though; it's going for something a little bit different, though it's still morbidly fascinated with weird sexual obsessions and characters so unrepentantly loathsome that you worry how you'll be able to stand an hour and a half of them.

In this movie, though, the loathsome character is the kid, Kyle (played by Spy Kids' Daryl Sabara, who was charming and awesome in that, and is riveting and awful in this), and as most of the promotional material indicates, Kyle is more of a supporting character: it's Robin Williams' character Lance that is the focus of this film's proceedings.  Lance is Kyle's frustrated father, frustrated teacher, frustrated writer who just can't make it work, but tries like crazy not to take it out on people, though Kyle pushes him to his absolute limit.  Midway into the proceedings, Lance takes advantage of a horrible (if inevitable) tragedy to bolster his writing career, his teaching career, and his love life.

There's not a whole lot to say about the narrative, as it's generally a simple morality fable about being true to yourself and the people you love, or hate, but either way being honest.  There were a lot of "what does that expression mean?" moments from supporting characters -- the kind of awkward pause that can be a tremendous source of humour, but if not carefully managed can make you wonder exactly what a given expression means.  I point to shows like Lost or Arrested Development, or films like Iron Man, as examples of works that are carefully enough directed and edited to ensure that no glance, no expression and no pause by an actor is divergent to the story; that they all mean something, and by paying attention to them, we get a sense of what the character is thinking or what their goals are.

But World's Greatest Dad isn't a movie about characters' calculated ambitions; unlike Bad Santa this isn't a movie about well-intentioned schemes and scams that take people into dark and dangerous places.  This is a movie about messy people, their messy lives, and what can come to them if they're willing to be lying bastards and play into people's wishes and expectations.  The trick, of course, is that to do so is to be so contemptibly insincere as to make honest relationships completely impossible.  So there you have the movie's simple dilemma and its concept.

It's not for everyone, but it's oddly sweet.  Robin Williams is a totally different kind of father from his character in Mrs. Doubtfire, and he's worth watching in this exercise in nebbishy ambition.  It's a bit hard to find -- never got a really wide release, not exactly filling the video shelves and oddly not on Canadian Netflix -- but I'm glad I dug it up.

Saturday, January 01, 2011

The Fighter

So only a few days after reading The Power of One, wherein a kid boxes his way to self-esteem with really good grasp of how to describe the sport to an uninitiated observer (yeah, he has some superpowers, but the book's kinda magical realism anyway) I went with my family to see "The Fighter", a pseudo-biopic about a welterweight boxer named Micky Ward (Marky Mark) and his brother, a wired, dissipated mess of an ex-fighter named Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale).  His family, his love interest and most of the town of Lowell, Massechusetts all figure into the story bit by bit, as does HBO to a surprising degree (there's a movie within the movie, which is to say the actual "America Undercover" episode about Dicky Eklund, which is right there on the IMDb for your reference).

David O. Russell directed the movie, and tonally, the film was a lot closer to Three Kings than it was to "I Heart Huckabees".  And I'm very glad for that; the trademark of that earlier movie was a deep, dark scenario constantly presenting visceral bodily threat, and yet the whole time, it stayed watchable thanks to charismatic leads and weirdly-textured background players (Spike Jonze in Three Kings, and most of the population of Lowell, specifically the teased-hair, denim-clad legion of sisters in The Fighter).  The sheer amount of time I spent laughing largely got me over what I saw as the sort of stock template into which the "inspiring" true events were slotted.

Acting was pretty good all-'round; Christian Bale, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio, can take a larger-than-life role with a wacky accent and, without the viewer having to suspend disbelief, infuse it with all the raw charisma and physicality that it needs.  Dicky was really the titular fighter in the movie; every time you saw Bale move, you saw the razor-sharp reflexes, instincts, authority and guile that Micky couldn't find.  Every time Micky went into a fight, you saw loss and failure all over his face.  You saw intimidation, you saw defeat, and that was really cool; Mark Wahlberg (now that I'm not being dismissive I'll use his non-Funky-Bunch-era name) actually undergoes a journey throughout the movie; though we see it sort of in montage, the arc from "stepping stone" to "contender" is at least clearly communicated in psychological and physical language, in the way Micky stands, in his expression -- there isn't a belabouring of BIG PERTINENT DETAILS with too much third-party explication or otherwise "wackity schmackity doo".

I liked the interpolation of the HBO documentary, which made a suitably David O. Russelly sort of comment on the nature of biographical filmmaking which sort of -- in a VERY lightweight way -- echoes season five of David Simon's theming for "The Wire", without quite getting into Charlie Kaufman territory.  Insofar as the way a story is told and reported can create impressions not only in the viewer but in the subject; it's sort of a Heisenberg principle for journalism, because the camera itself is a character.

I think, in fact, that that's the trouble I had with the movie.  For the first half, while the HBO documentary is filming, we see a clear camera, a clear perspective; we see the director of the piece in shots with Micky and Dicky, we occasionally pull away to show the camera, and eventually it culminates in most of Lowell watching the feature on TV in bars, houses and a prison rec room.  And we're aware of this representation.  And then we watch as the movie morphs into a Typical Hollywood Boxing Movie, teasing us with notions that it might be The Wrestler, or maybe even Million Dollar Baby, but is really basically Rocky 2.

Maybe that's the idea -- to leave people cheering, feeling good, voting at Oscar season.  But it abandoned the perceptiveness and perspective that made the first hour really smoulder.

In the end a really good flick; no damage quite as traumatic as the in viscero bullet-cam from Three Kings and lots of cute banter (much of it supplied by Amy Adams, fully loaded and unvarnished as a self-respecting, self-aware server at the local bar, and the myriad Eklund/Ward sisters).  It sort of handwaves the "one to grow on" lessons about the damage crack and ambition can do to a family, a town., and so forth.  Breaking Bad is out there, you can't really compete with that show's depth on the matter, so it was probably a good plan not to get too maudlin about it.  And the fighting gives you the basics, though it really only comes into play in the last little chunk of the movie.  I would love to have seen more attention to detail given to the camera crew of the HBO Sports team.  That would have provided the sort of conceptual continuity, and believable detachment, that the movie needed in order to earn its happy ending.

Yeah, the ending comes right out of "real life".  But the facts are no excuse to tell a story in a predictable, pat fashion. The actors didn't let us down, and maybe the direction didn't either, but the structure needed work. Sometimes it's not a matter of technique, it's a matter of attitude and strategy.