Talien & Maleficent's Reviews

The Happening

2009-11-05T14:44:00.001-05:00

There's a lot wrong with The Happening.

At base, The Happening is a nightmarish parable about our crowded society in modern times. We threaten the world, director M. Night Shyamalan seems to say, with our sheer numbers. On the other hand, being completely isolated isn't the solution either, creating a suspicious, isolationist attitude that leads to a self-destructive spiral.

But The Happening is mostly about watching people commit suicide in terrible ways. This ranges from terrible echoes of 9/11, when workmen jump from a building to their death, to the cartoonishly absurd, when a zookeeper taunts a lion and it tears his arm off. Anyone who watches the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet knows that big cats go for the neck first.

Anyway, The Happening's premise is spooky: what if something in the wind made people commit suicide in the most immediate and awful way possible? Where would you go? What would you do?

Night has all the elements of a good horror story: the aforementioned disaster, the strained relationship between Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his distant wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), and even an innocent little girl (Ashlyn Sanchez) thrown in for good measure.

The Happening should be a great horror film. It's spooky. The premise that a gust of wind could bring about a fatal, nightmarish end lends an ominous shadow to the events. We can expect plenty of drama, morally ambiguous choices, and desperate survival tactics as our protagonists flee for their lives from an alien foe.

Actually, I was just describing Spielberg's War of the Worlds, which took the same premise and made a creepy, nuanced film about parents, children, and the distance between them. The two films have a lot in common: the insidious enemy that pops up out of nowhere, the little girl in distress, the long journey against all odds to a haven that might already have been destroyed.

The Happening follows the same script but fails miserably on almost all counts. Oh, Night's got the scary part down. But what carries a film like this is the emotional heft of characters brought to the brink. Wahlberg does a workman-like job of trying to be clever and sarcastic, but the script forces him to spew mouthfuls of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook at a rapid fire pace that he can't keep up. Deschanel, never a strong actress to begin with, is comedically awful. There isn't the slightest romantic tension between her and Wahlberg. And the little girl? She barely says a word.

The list of what's wrong goes on and on: citizens leave New York in an orderly fashion without snarling any mass transit; victims go to inordinate and improbable lengths to kill themselves; a father abandons his only child in a vain quest to find his wife; nobody seems to think traveling with a gas mask might be a good idea except two old ladies sitting at home.

They're the smart ones.

EXPO - Magic of the White City

2009-11-05T13:51:00.000-05:00

Like so many other viewers, I came round to viewing EXPO – The Magic of the White City ("EXPO") because I read The Devil in the White City (The White City) first. Sort of. Actually, my wife read The White City years after I did and, her curiosity piqued, rented the DVD.

EXPO is about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, an exposition of such majesty, scope, corruption, and expense that it is a feat unparalleled in America today. The closest we have to the Fair is Disney World, a lineage most explicitly drawn in The White City; Walt Disney's father, Elias, was a construction worker on some of the buildings at the fair.

EXPO is narrated by Gene Wilder. I'm admit to a bias – I'm a big fan of Young Frankenstein and he's the only "celebrity sighting" I've ever encountered in real life. Wilder's getting on in age (the DVD was produced in 2005), so there's now a bit of a whistle to his speech. Still, his lilting voice has enough emotion and wry humor to make his narration enjoyable. And there is a lot of narration.

We tend to think of previous American centuries as quaintly backward, where such modern notions as political correctness and global unity didn't exist. And while EXPO is careful to point out that American culture still had its own foibles and intolerance endemic to the time, the World's Fair put all those to shame. It was a global unification of wealth, prosperity, and cultural exchange in a way that's inconceivable in today's contentious world. We can learn a lot from the Chicago World's Fair.

EXPO uses old maps and photographs to detail events at the fair whenever possible, with few computer graphics or animation. There are occasional shots of live actors, none whom particularly add anything of value to the narrative. In fact, it's clear that the producers felt that the medium was a little dry, because there are copious live action shots of a belly dancer interspersed with discussion of the Midway.

Minor quibbles aside, EXPO works overtime to try to encompass the grandeur of such a huge undertaking without losing sight of the details. As a result, it necessarily glosses over some pieces (rampant corruption, the aforementioned Devil himself who is the subject of The White City book) and emphasizes others (global diversity, architecture, and the first appearances of American staples). That's okay though; EXPO is a huge undertaking with such a sweepingly broad subject that it's better served as a companion piece to a book. Like The Devil in the White City.

What's of interest to gamers is the White City itself. It brought together vastly different groups from around the world, including popular entertainers, royalty, and indigenous peoples. Role-playing games set in this era are often constrained by political norms, but the 1893 World's Fair is an exception to the rule. Just about anyone from anywhere could be justified as being in Chicago during the Fair's existence.

If this seems like the perfect setting for a mystery adventure, Peter Nepstad agrees. He produced the text-based interactive fiction 1893: A World's Fair Mystery. Featuring over 30 hours of gameplay and employing over 500 archival photographs, Nepstad's exhaustive research brings to life dozens of interactive characters. Nepstad's game provides plenty of material for Game Masters who want to use the Fair as a setting for their own campaigns. It's the closest thing to being there.

Titus Crow, Volume 1: The Burrowers Beneath; The Transition of Titus Crow

2009-10-16T16:16:00.000-04:00

Titus Crow's adventures are a lot like the role-playing game exploits of player characters: they start out believable enough, but as the power creep and leveling sets in, the character's achievements and enemies seem to grow exponentially.

There are a few things that modern Cthulhu fans should be wary of when reading Lumley's foray into the Cthulhu Mythos. According to Lumley:

* Mythos beings can be repelled quite handily with "star stones." These are made with tiny chips of the original soap stone elder signs. That's right, they're mass-produced "extract of Elder Sign." And they work against shoggoths.

* The Tikkoun Elixir is actually holy water, which also works against the Mythos.

* There is a globe-spanning organization of psychics known as the Wilmarth Foundation. This Foundation has men in every level of government and business, and marshals their resources in times of great need, like when battling the Mythos. They also keep the Mythos hidden to prevent worldwide panic.

All of this is told to the reader after the fact in The Burrowers Beneath. In the tradition of Lovecraft, the stories are all from journals and letters of those who were there, shifting from character to character to build a story around giant psychic killer worms known as Chthonians. Mind you, they're just minions of the larger Cthulhu Cycle Deities (who are, irritatingly, referred to as the CCD).

Lumley seems intent on explaining everything in Lovecraft's fiction and providing a logical framework behind it all. This is great for a role-playing game but makes for boring reading. But when Lumley writes an action scene, such as when DeMarginy (the Watson to Crow's Holmes) is attacked directly by a Chthonian, it's absorbing. Unfortunately, there's so little action that the rest of the tale becomes a dry retelling, sometimes bordering on parody.

Did you know that there are dinosaurs swimming in Loch Ness? Lumley drops that and other nuggets matter-of-factly throughout the narrative – and it has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than to perhaps explain that the Wilmarth Foundation, with its uber-psychics, knows everything there is to know about the world.

By the time we get to the second part of the book, The Transition of Titus Crow, Lumley just gives up. Crow experiences every pulp trope, from the love of a green-haired "girl-goddess" to riding a lisping dragon, to replacing his shattered body with cybernetics manufactured by robots, to time traveling in an extradimensional clock. Crow, it turns out, is both the descendant of the Elder Gods and a cyborg. It's like a Rifts game in prose.

But the most unforgivable of all is that Transition is told in fragments. A terrible attack on the Wilmarth Foundation means its records have been lost, so we are left with a story that has been pieced together. Where the pieces are missing, Lumley uses ellipses. A lot. Reading the book becomes painful… whenever Lumley doesn’t feel like filling in the blanks…he uses ellipses…until you get just fragments like…ENERGY RAY…INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVEL…OH MY GOD MY EYES ARE BLEEDING…

There's a particular standout scene where Crow, confused and lost in a prehistoric era, engages in a battle of survival with a pterosaur and a giant crab. It's good stuff, but doesn't make up for the sheer insanity of what can only be described as lazy writing. We get it: the fragments of what happened to Crow are hard to piece together. But since this is, ya know, a WORK OF FICTION, it would be nice if the narrator made a token effort to craft a full story for the reader rather than transcribe the bits and pieces literally. And for that only Lumley can be held accountable.

In terms of characterization, Crow is a bit of a cipher. De Marigny has most of the personality, and even he tends to bluster through the book with very British exclamations of surprise and horror. The characters are rarely in actual danger and their stiff upper lip attitude becomes so overbearing that they begin to feel invincible even in the face of the mind-blasting insanity that is the *cough* CCD.

Worth reading to provide a foundation for Titus Crow and as a template for a role-playing game universe where the player characters actually have a chance against a Lovecraftian menace. If you can stick with it, the next book in the series gets much better.

State of Play

2009-10-10T15:04:00.000-04:00

State of Play has received much attention for its spin on the plight of today's newspapers. The story pairs up a veteran journalist (Cal McAfferey, played by Russell Crowe with an odd accent) with a newbie blogger (Della Frye, played by Rachel McAdams). The plot is technically about the death of Sonia Baker (Maria Thayer) who just happens to be working for Rep. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) who just happens to be a former roommate of Cal. It seems there's something rotten in the state department, or in this case the private military company they hire: PointCorp, an analog for Blackwater.

State of Play has two different agendas, one more overt than the other. At its heart, the movie postulates what would happen if the U.S. military had largely surrendered its operations to freelance military operations that are not accountable to the American people. This is no theory. In fact, Blackwater received so much negative publicity that it changed its name to Xe. The supposed hue and cry that would be raised by this revelation didn't amount to much, deflating the entire premise of State of Play.

The other main theme is the tension between supposed cub reporters who only blog on the web and real journalists who aren't afraid to pick up the phone or make a deal. Frye is a foil to make Cal look smart. At no point do we see Frye actually blog or the consequences of her blogging, besides reporting on something Cal felt was private. Or to put it another way: bloggers are self-serving, unethical morons who don't know how to report the facts. The movie feels decidedly lopsided in favor of beat reporters. Oh sure, there's tension and drama and a few surprises along the way. But Frye is completely unnecessary.

In the background is the looming threat of the newspaper being closed, but these occasional reminders (falling from the foul mouth of Helen Mirren, no less) feel forced. To assume one breaking story would save the newspaper is to fundamentally misunderstand the downfall of the newspaper industry.

State of Play was based on a 2003 BBC serial of the same name. And that's the problem. Too long and creaky in places, it feels like a movie drawn from subject matter that's six years out of date.

Surrogates

2009-10-03T23:12:00.000-04:00

Let's get a couple of things straight: Surrogates is not a bad movie. It is not anything like Gamer, and yet Rotten Tomatoes has a spread of under 10 points between the two. This is a crying shame. With Gamer and Surrogates coming out within months of each other, it's almost like Hollywood wanted desperately to make a Second Life movie but realized too late that Second Life is no longer cool.

Surrogates has a lot in common with I, Robot and yes, Gamer. Implausibly, the world is dominated by remote-controlled robots, a parallel to Internet avatars. Thanks to these robots, known as surrogates, crime is unheard of and the dream of a utopian society beckons. Of course, not everyone is okay with the status quo, including a radical group known as the Dreads. The Dreads are the underclass, people who don't believe in a robot-filled reality. Everyone else has become shut-ins, hiding in their bedrooms in their pajamas, living life through perpetually beautiful twenty-something robots.

FBI agent Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and his partner Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) investigate a pair of murders in which the operators died too. There's just one problem: there are safeguards to protect operators from being harmed by the death of their surrogates. If word got out that surrogates were not immortal, the social fabric of modern society would fall apart.

On screen, the surrogates are disturbingly perfect. Their teeth is pearly white, their eyes without any hint of veins, their stubble-free skin cheeks are as rosy as a newborn's. The robots (and thus, the actors portraying them) only move their heads when they talk, even when angry. Sights and sounds are softly muted. Until the real world hits and Greer is forced to come out of his shell.

Willis' skill playing a sad sack and a scruffy loner are on full display here. Surrogates is as much about the increasing isolation of technology as it is about the wreckage of a marriage. As the stakes get higher, the movie becomes about the broken relationship between a husband and wife who were disconnected from each other long before surrogates were invented.

If along the way it happens to involve some amazing special effects and a lot of cool action sequences, that's not such a bad thing.

The Cybergypsies

2009-09-30T15:01:00.001-04:00

Back when Indra Sinha was addicted to Shades, I was a kid sneaking into college computer labs to play Ivory Towers. We were both playing Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). In fact, Ivory Tower players loathed Shades players with a passion, who were a bloodthirsty, violent lot – they came to Ivory Towers in waves when Shades was down and slaughtered everyone in sight with unbridled glee. It didn't give me a good impression of Shades.

That's not the impression Sinha gives in his book, The Cybergypsies. Sinha gives an aura of mystical wonder and beauty to a game in which stealing your opponents' weapon was commonplace--as if combat between medieval knights was all about wresting away your opponents' blade. It comes off as ridiculous as it sounds, but Sinha elevates it to poetic levels.

Cybergypsies isn't really about MUDding though. It's about Sinha's sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden, exemplified by the poor of Bhopal who were poisoned in an industrial disaster. Working in advertising, Sinha is in the unique position of trying to translate real-life suffering into everyday media. He finds the bizarre online reflection of the real world's struggles in Vortex, a role-playing MUSH.

In Vortex, like many MUSHs, the current players set the tone. And Vortex's tone is a decadent, anything-goes free love vibe that has a dark side. Cannibalism, baby sacrifice – you name it, the Vortex denizens have done it, reveling in their freedom to role-play anything and everything.

Somewhere in this contrast between MUDding and MUSHing, real-life oppression and cyber-decadence, Sinha struggles to save his marriage. Which is a bit odd, because Sinha makes almost no mention of his children. Speaking as someone who has a very active two-year-old, there's no way I can stay on the computer for more than a few minutes without him tugging on my arm. Sinha either seriously neglected them or intentionally removed them from the narrative; whatever the case, it's a glaring omission from his story of a family life brought to the brink by cyber-addiction.

The other problem is that Sinha is extremely well educated and enjoys demonstrating his knowledge in various allusions to disparate texts, often in other languages. Cybergypsies makes you feel dumb.

Sinha doesn't seem to have a point. Shades rises and falls. Vortex's appeal fades. Sinha raises awareness of global suffering through his advertising. He may even help a hacker access a nuclear plant, although it's never clear exactly what happened. And we can only guess that he saved his marriage…Sinha just ends the book without any resolution.

The author is a brilliant writer. But this book is a stream-of-consciousness journal made up of at least three other books, each which deserved its own focus. Readers looking for a parable on cyber-addiction, for a dialogue about human rights grievances, or for the wild and wooly history of the Internet will only get tantalizing glimpses.

Bolt

2009-09-12T19:55:00.000-04:00

Take Homeward Bound's tale of three pets drawn together on an epic journey across America, mix in Toy Story's winking sense of irony at the faux world of toys, shroud it in the artificially-created world of The Truman Show and you've got Bolt.

Bolt (John Travolta) is a clueless acting dog who truly loves his "person," Penny (Miley Cyrus). In the movies, Bolt is a superhero, but Bolt doesn't quite grasp that he's actually in a movie. When audiences begin to tire of Bolt's heroics, the network decides to throw in a twist and separate Penny from Bolt. Distraught and determined, Bolt escapes the studio in a quest to rescue Penny from Hollywood.

Along the way, he meets a street savvy cat named Mittens (Susie Essman) and a chubby fanboy gerbil named Rhino (Mark Walton). Rhino's a lot like Kung Fu Panda's Po – overweight, hopelessly consumed by fandom, and relentlessly optimistic. Mittens, on the other hand, is the Bones equivalent; a beaten down cynic who thinks Bolt is completely insane.

Bolt is at its best during the film-within-a-film sequences; the motorcycle chase scene is just as thrilling as the one in Terminator Salvation. The catch is that though it's not real, the violence takes place on screen. In other words, does it really matter if CGI actors are pretending to be CGI dead? Helicopters explode, motorcycles flip, and bad guys don't get back up. In that regard, Bolt's pretty violent.

Where Michael J. Fox voice perfectly embodied Chance in Homeward Bound as a young pup, Travolta's throaty whisper seems an odd choice for Bolt, who's at least as clueless as Chance. He does a great job, but occasionally you can hear the weariness and maturity in his voice.

Occasionally, the movie glosses over its own moral arc; although it's critical for Bolt to reunite with his person and Mittens still nurses her own emotional wounds over the loss of her family, Rhino leaves his old lady without nary a look back. It's never mentioned that she might miss him.

But those are minor quibbles. Overall, Bolt's an entertaining, fast-moving action picture. It's just not on par with Toy Story as a parable that younger kids can enjoy.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

2009-09-12T14:47:00.000-04:00

This book isn't funny.

Mind you, Ronson knows exactly what he's doing by presenting the book as "hilarious" – it starts out completely absurd, with the high-minded hippy ideals of a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran presented to a beleaguered military under siege. Jim Channon, seeking solace in the emerging human potential movement in California, struck a chord with the top brass, and the repercussions are still felt today.

But instead of being used as a positive force for peace, the military twisted it into a force of evil. Ronson ties it all together: September 11, Heaven's Gate, sticky foam, Abu-Grahib, Waco, Art Bell, Projects STARGATE, MKULTRA, and ARTICHOKE, and yes, Barney. Goat-staring is the least of our worries.

The thread running throughout all these seemingly disconnected blips in history is that they are a new form of psychological warfare that is innocuous, ruthless, and entirely effective. The Men Who Stare at Goats would be just another conspiracy-laden anti-government diatribe if it wasn't for the fact that Ronson always takes the next step as an investigative reporter. He finds people to back up the wild claims, interviews them, and often challenges their wild theories.

The sad thing is, very few of these shadowy contacts hide their past. Almost unilaterally, Ronson calls them all out by name and they step forward, sharing a story that sheds a disconcerting light on America's human rights record. Where is the vigorous conversation, the protests, the discord over these revelations? The facts are right here before us – even photographic evidence -- but we laugh about Barney being used to torture prisoners and we shake our heads at the poor, misguided psychics. But outrage? There's no outrage. We save our vitriol for partisan debates in our own government.

Eric Olson, son of Frank Olson, a military scientist who died under mysterious circumstances while working on MKULTRA, sums it up best:

"The old story is so much fun, why would anyone want to replace it with a story that's not fun. You see…this is no longer a happy, feel-good story…People have been brainwashed by fiction…so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, 'We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.' Actually, we know nothing of this. There's no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don't know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they're not cynical at all."

Have you heard? There's a movie based on this book coming out starring George Clooney.

It's a comedy.

Gamer

2009-09-06T23:20:00.000-04:00

Dear Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor,

We appreciate your recent attempt to create a movie that would appeal to gamers by naming it after us. Really, we do. But now that we've stopped throwing up from all the motion sickness and our pupils have finally refocused from the flash cuts, we thought you might appreciate some tips to help you farm XP faster.

Stop with the static: Seriously guys. Stop it. Apparently in your version of the future all video games have terrible reception. We have lag, we have crashes, we have all kinds of problems, but the one problem we do not have is static. That's because our video games are not television screens. You'll also notice that our television do not have static either, and haven't had static for about a decade since they invented this thing called cable. Look it up.

Speaking of Kable: Cable is the name of a time-traveling cyborg in the Marvel Universe. Kable is the name somebody thinks gamers think is cool. Nobody thinks Kable is cool. Nobody believes Kable is the best killer in the gaming universe. You didn't even use 133t speak, so…fail.

Making Michael C. Hall an evil genius is…a stroke of genius. Go Dexter!

Stop with the red/blue colors: Ludacris is cool and all, but even his cyber cred is sorely tested by a blurry 3-D image on screen.

The teabagging gag was funny.

Your jump cuts suck: We notice when you replace rapid jump cuts with actual fight choreography. It's the movie equivalent of shouting and pointing, "LOOK! A KITTY!" every time a fight starts. You just look stupid and we feel embarrassed for you.

Dancing convicts are hilarious. Dancing to a Frank Sinatra song is vaguely creepy. But still hilarious.

Why is there still lag in the future? Bad guys can control other human beings by changing their brain cells into [INSERT STUPID MADE UP NAME] but we haven't solved lag? Is this future made of stupid?

Evil Villain Tip #58: Next time around, you might want to consider not making the guy who holds your deepest, darkest secret an international broadcast superstar.

Don't insult us: No offense, but portraying the gaming universe as nothing but "deviants and murderers" doesn't really make us want to watch your movie. Yes, the Internet has a dark side. But since you called the movie "Gamer" and not "All Gamers Are Disgusting Fat Perverted Slobs Who Watch Porn All Day," we'll assume you actually want us to buy a ticket. Please consider this the next time you name a movie after us.

And finally…

Thank you for killing John Leguizamo: That's not a tip. But thank you.

We hope that these tips prove useful the next time you level up as directors and writers. Incidentally, multiclassing as both might not be such a good idea.

Unholy Dimensions

2009-09-04T07:28:00.001-04:00

There's no flowery introduction by anyone to Unholy Dimensions explaining what a major contributing force Jeffrey Thomas is to the Cthulhu Mythos. It just starts immediately with a short story set in Punktown, a seething planet of decay and corruption in a sci-fi universe where there are holograms, ray guns, and aliens. This review contains spoilers!

Thomas' science fiction tales are not his strongest. My reaction to this sudden and jarring juxtaposition in THE BONES OF THE OLD ONES wasn't favorable. It features Hound of Tindalos, a private eye who dabbles in sorcery, a creepy kid, and Yog-Sothoth. Although Thomas deftly handled the tension between the protagonist and his former friend, I wasn't impressed with the setting because I hadn't yet bought into the idea of sci-fi Cthulhu. By the second story, with the same protagonist in the same universe, I was hooked. John Bell, a Mythos hunter archetype that would make any Delta Green gamer proud, takes on a weird conglomerate being led by Nyarlathotep in THE AVATARS OF THE OLD ONES. This story is told from the view of a third party and love interest, H'anna, which helps preserve the sense of horror when a conglomerate of deformed Mythos minions are activated. THE YOUNG OF THE OLD ONES is the last of the Punktown trilogy in this volume. It features an Elder Thing and Horrors from Beyond. It is also something of a tragic love story, a theme that will continue throughout Thomas' work.

Thomas returns to the science fiction genre with THE SERVITORS, a star-crossed tale of two beings who really, really hate their bosses. When they finally meet, it turns out their worlds are far more different than either might have dreamed. THE HOUSE ON THE PLAIN reads like the trailer to a science fiction horror movie…because the perfectly preserved house is on an otherwise barren and inhospitable planet.

I'm not a fan of Thomas' poetry. THE ICE SHIP, ASCENDING TO HELL, and YOO HOO, CTHULHU are clever enough but relatively uninspired.

Thomas enjoys dabbling in the relationships between his characters, building on romantic tension to further accentuate the horror. I MARRIED A SHOGGOTH is both the most disturbing of the lovelorn tales, despite the clever name. Thomas plays on the Lovecraft-style of the narrator narrating something he obviously survived. Here, he sets out to show that there are some fates worse than death. It's a parable about getting exactly what you want, even when what you want involves turning a Shoggoth into your own personal plaything. In SERVILE Thomas deftly interweaves romantic tension in a love triangle that features the Dreamlands and a Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua. You'll never look at a pair of dentures the same way again. THROUGH OBSCURE GLASS is another love story about a man tasked with guarding against a Dreamlands' intrusion by Gugs and the woman who loves him. CELLS is another sad love story between a mad scientist and his wife as they desperately try to cheat death through misbegotten science. In LOST SOUL, Thomas shows that there are worse things than a Mythos sorcerer as he explores an obsessive, incestuous love triangle. The ickiest story of the bunch. The collection ends with another love story, THE CELLAR GOD, combining Tcho-Tchos with Moonbeasts in a tragic tale of secret romance. THE FOURTH UTTERANCE is perhaps the best story of the lot. It features an exchange between a lonely woman, a sorcerer who summoned something terrible, and the answering machine between them. The Mythos is only hinted at, but that makes the story all the more disturbing.

In THE DOOM IN THE ROOM, Thomas parodies Lovecraft's writing style by filling the three pages with flower text and a narrator who madly types the story even while a Mythos beast advances on him. He must type very, very fast… Lovecraft is parodied again in the super short WRITING ON THE WALL, a cartoon-like representation of the typical Lovecraft explorer deciphering his own doom.

RED GLASS establishes another theme: that when you look into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back. Narrating in first person, the protagonist is drawn to a house full of mental illness and secret portal behind its peeling walls. Thomas is also an expert at prolonged suffering. BOOKWORM is a short tale but the ending sticks with you as we glimpse the last desperate moments of a too-curious thief succumbing to the Mythos. THE BOARDED WINDOW builds slowly, exploring parallel dimensions and how each side views the other as strange and horrible. THE FACE OF BAPHOMET provides an alternative twist to the Templars, Baphomet, and Shub-Niggurath. The initiation ritual and main character would complement the Templars as described in Unseen Masters nicely. WHAT WASHES ASHORE follows a conflicted female protagonist who is fond of seashells, a hobby that will ultimately consume her in the outskirts of a forgotten town.

Thomas enjoys spotlighting the war against the Mythos, including the terrible cost it exacts on the mortals who dare fight back. OUT OF THE BELLY OF SHEOL is told like a biblical tale, featuring a prophet, the insides of Cthulhu, and a war between the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones. CONGLOMERATE, told from the perspective of a security guard working at Monumental Life Insurance Corporation, features Nyarlathotep in one of his many guises as the CEO of a massive, sinister corporate entity. Good stuff for Keepers looking to expand Stephen Alzis' holdings. Two sorcerers and brothers of Cthugha and Cthulhu go to war in CORPSE CANDLES, baffling the police. Building on the war between Mythos and Man, THE THIRD EYE is a sad little tale of a broken detective, his frightened son, and the burden of occult knowledge of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. PAZUZU'S CHILDREN takes place during the first Iraq War. It ends with a fitting Twilight Zone-esque scream.

There are a few layout problems. Pages 193 and 248 feature just a few words and a whole lot of blank space. The artwork is blurry, abstract, and not particularly scary, serving only to interrupt the story. Thomas' text is evocative enough without these distractions.

But overall Unholy Dimensions demonstrates Jeffrey Thomas' amazing talent to tell an approachable Mythos tale that is both entertaining and creepy. A must read for Delta Green and Cthulhutech gamers.

Watchmen

2009-09-01T14:48:00.002-04:00

Thanks to a string of successful comic book movie hits, directors are finally showing some respect for their original source material. In the past, it was clear that the director's vision eclipsed any fan interest, which resulted in the Batman series kicked off by Tim Burton eventually circling the toilet bowl before being flushed by Joel Schumacher. The tide has reversed, with fanboys-turned-directors like Peter Jackson, Robert Rodriguez, and Guillermo del Toro showing an almost slavish devotion to the source material. Zack Snyder can now add his name to that list.

Watchmen takes place in an alternate reality where the threat of weapons of mass destruction looms large, thanks in part to superheroes who range in sanction from government agents to violent outlaws. They are gods among men, these superheroes, but they are also deeply flawed human beings. Watchmen is their story.

There's remarkably little superhero-action in Watchmen. When you strip away all the distractions like the altered timeline and the murder mystery, it becomes clear that Watchmen is actually a character study. The film ping-pongs between each character's backstory, slowly peeling back each layer until we get to the conclusion: that people do terrible things for good reasons. Unfortunately, some characters are fleshed out more than others.

Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), the Question-like stand-in, is the most interesting character, an anti-hero filled with the rage of moral absolutism, right at home in a repressive society. He also provides noir-style narrative throughout Watchmen.

Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), who has an uncanny resemblance to a young Chevy Chase, is basically an alternative Batman in search of a cause. He's largely a cipher here, cast primarily as the potential love interest of Silk Spectre.

Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) provides the emotional center of the film but unfortunately doesn't do much for women's rights – she comes off as emotionally conflicted and petulant.

The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a Punisher analogue whose death at the beginning of the film provides much of the movie's structure, is also a relative unknown. His nickname is derived from his sociopathic detachment, killing with glee. Unfortunately, he just comes off as a murderous thug.

Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is perfect as a mildly contemptuous superhuman, more alien and powerful than Superman. His mere existence can cause nations to go to war. Unfortunately, the film struggles with defining the limits of his powers – I half expected Manhattan to change time and space (like Superman did in the 1978 film) to "fix" things.

Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), perhaps the most important character in the film, is inexplicably both the most brilliant man on earth and a supreme martial artist. There's nothing in Ozymandias' background to explain why this is. His complete lack of development compared to the other characters is where Watchmen stumbles.

Watchmen is a really interesting take on superheroes. Unfortunately, it is no longer revolutionary as it might have been, because the 80s comic laid the framework for serious superhero comics that came later, which in turn spawned serious superhero movies like The Dark Knight. In other words, Watchmen might have been a genre-shaking film ten years ago. It's less successful as an entertaining film today. It's a museum replica of comic book history, faithful to its medium and appreciated more as a reference than a movie experience.

Last Rites of the Black Guard

2009-08-24T22:57:00.000-04:00

Last Rites of the Black Guard is a d20 Modern ghost-hunting adventure, produced by 12 to Midnight, for low-level characters. It includes suggestions for adjusting to higher-level campaigns, a bookmarked PDF, and a printer-friendly version. The scenario also features rules from the OGL Horror ritual system. The 12 to Midnight website also offers free downloads of cool extras such as audio recordings of ghosts, pre-filled initiative cards, and more. Please note: this review contains spoilers!

If you’re familiar with the Karotechia in Delta Green, you know that it is led by a triumvirate of Nazis on their last legs: the ancient Olaf Bitterich, the artificially sustained Gunter Frank, and the immortal Reinhard Galt. Advancing the Delta Green timeline thus causes a bit of a problem, because Bitterich should be dead of old age. The solution: Last Rites of the Black Guard (LRBG).

In LRBG, the investigators visit Rosetta, Texas, home of a dirty little secret: it was once home to a Nazi, Franz Heimglimmer. Though Heimglimmer is dead, his legacy lives on in his secret acolytes, who are both trying to rob him of his power and keep him from returning to life. The investigators start out visiting the home of Lisa Gray and her two children, Marissa (7) and Matthew (6). Marissa is in contact with the spirit of Aimee Resnick, a little girl who was murdered at the hands of Heimglimmer. Matthew is protected by the spirit of a Rabbi, but that doesn’t stop glowing atmospheric balls of energy and poltergeists from terrorizing their home.

LRBG has difficulty structuring the plot such that the events flow from one to another. In my experience, players crave clear paths – it helps move the game along, gives them hints to their next clue, and ensures that the game master is appropriately prepared. Because LRBC is largely freeform, it's possible for players to skip whole swaths of the game…like skipping the haunted house to visit Heimglimmer’s home.

The free downloads are awesome, including audio clips of the various spirits speaking and photos of each of the main characters. These really add to the horror, which is why it’s all the more important that don't skip it by going to visit Heimglimmer’s home immediately.

LRBG assumes the characters will conduct a séance, which isn’t necessarily something every group will try. Instead, I had our resident psychic character possessed by Aimee’s spirit and let him role-play out the answers with the other characters. Only after enough clues were gathered about what happened to the spirits did I reveal that there was once a Nazi living next door.

LRBG then moves to the second part of the scenario, which is essentially a death trap. There’s reference to a gold tooth that’s part of the next installment in the series (as far as I know, there’s never been a sequel). Then the investigators find a secret door down into the basement…or they would, if it were on the map. There appears to be only one set of maps, labeled as handouts which are presumably for both the players and game master. This means that secret doors aren’t labeled on the map, and one of those secret doors is critical to finding the finale. The map of the Gray house, conversely, has several rooms labeled “Jeana” – we figured out that this was supposed to be Lisa and the name must have been changed.

Once the investigators find their way down to the secret door, it locks behind them and they are engaged in a fight for their lives with a Risen of Osiris, an undead monster. Since I adopted this monster to a Delta Green setting, I changed it to a Screaming Crawler. The effect is the same: the investigators have to slog it out in a toe-to-toe fight. My players were unhappy about this, expecting to uncover some plot-device to destroy it. The monster has no other purpose than as a guardian, which surprised my players, who expected it to be the Nazi himself (more about him later).

Once the investigators defeat the monster, two undercover cultists arrive to finish the job. When one of the cultists dies, the spirit of Heimglimmer appears (he’s also responsible for locking the characters into the chamber) and absorbs his soul. The other cultist flees, screaming “you’ve doomed us all!” I wasn’t content to just let the scenario end like that, so I had the police, already spooked from the swirling spirit activity around Heimglimmer’s home, fire on whomever ran out the front door waving a pistol.

It turns out that the characters’ actions have led to the resurrection of Heimglimmer and we get to see his return in a cut scene. In other words, the investigators have managed to unearth a great evil. This didn’t make my players happy, who felt like they were being manipulated all along.

It bears mentioning that one of the Nazi cultists has a Jewish-sounding name. For a scenario that spends a significant amount of space dedicated to respecting the Holocaust legacy, it seems peculiar that it would casually cast a Jewish person as a Neo-Nazi without explanation.

Overall, my players really enjoyed the first part of the scenario but were frustrated by the second half. The lack of an overall story arc may irk some game masters, who are left with a newly revived Nazi cultist without a plan as to how to proceed. For Delta Green keepers, however, it’s the perfect way to put Dr. Bitterich back in action. I recommend The Painting by Modern Misfits as a follow-up.
For more info: To see a demo of Last Rites of the Black Guard, visit the 12 to Midnight web site.

Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-23T20:58:00.000-04:00

Inglourious Basterds is supposedly about Nazi-hunting in World War II, a revenge fantasy where Jewish-American guerillas (or terrorists, as the Nazis point out) are tasked with spreading fear and loathing throughout France. Led by the rustic Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the Basterds have but one task: to each collect 100 Nazi scalps. Please note: this review contains spoilers.

One might think, given the title and the trailers, that this is an action film filled with the occasional machinegun dialogue Quentin Tarantino is famous for. It's quite the opposite: a series of measured vignettes in which the tension is ratcheted up to feverish heights, then explodes in quick, messy violence.

The opening scene sets the stage: Han Landa (Christoph Waltz), AKA "The Jew Hunter," does what he does best in France. As such, he is the nemesis of spies and revolutionaries hiding in plain sight. Landa hunts down Shosanna's (Melanie Laurent) family in a terrifying exchange that culminates in the death of her family. Out of mere whim, ego, or simply being true to his hawk-like nature, Landa lets Shosanna escape. Her survival will have grave repercussions for the German war effort.

These two plots, the Basterds and Shosanna's revenge, eventually intertwine when Hitler and his entourage arrive to view a special showing of a Nazi-propaganda film (Stolz der Nation) in Paris. The film stars Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a Nazi war hero who singlehandedly killed dozens of enemies from a sniper tower.

Tarantino never just makes a film to tell a story, as evidenced by the obvious digressions from history he takes with Basterds. He films a vibe, an expression -- in doing so, Tarantion comments on the nature of the cinema and our own humanity. And this time, he's aiming his camera at the audience.

You see, this film isn't just about Nazi hunting, or Pitt's funny accent, or the tension between agents who know their social repartee will end in blood; it's about violence in the movies and how we glorify it. And Tarantino is merciless as he judges every person involved with the film guilty:

The producers are guilty: Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) is a simpering suck-up who is far too enamored with the approval of his audience to see how vile his film is.

The actors are guilty: Actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) is a duplicitous murderer who shoots an unarmed man in cold blood. Zoller, the star of Stolz der Nation, has no stomach to watch his own murders taking place on the big screen but is only too happy to bully a woman with his affections.

Even the projectionist is guilty: Shosanna is so consumed with her revenge that only in killing a man does she finally see his humanity.

But the most guilty of all is the audience in the theater watching Stolz der Nation. They are shot, burned, and blown to bits at the end. That was the goal, of course – to kill as many Nazis as possible, right? It's just a goal that doesn't seem quite so laudable if you happen to be a member of the audience.

From the images of soldiers dying in the Nazi propaganda film to the graphic scenes of Nazis being scalped, Tarantino holds up a mirror. Are you enjoying this, he asks? Because if so…

You're the basterd.

Fall of Cthulhu Vol. 3: The Gray Man

2009-08-21T17:11:00.000-04:00

The Grey Man is the third volume in the epic story arc that is Boom Studios' Fall of Cthulhu comic series. I discovered Fall of Cthulhu when I was just launching my Delta Green campaign and was hungry for any fiction dealing with the Cthulhu mythos in a modern context. Fall of Cthulhu is all that and more.

The Gray Man continues the story of the odd knife that caused so much havoc in the earlier parts of the series. Our new protagonist is Raymond Dirk, Arkham's sheriff, who is accustomed to strange goings-on. His life is radically changed once he crosses paths with a Brazilian thief named Luci Jenifer Inacio Das Neves (Lucifer for short). A student of Professor Walter McKinley, Lucifer returns to Arkham only to discover he committed suicide.

McKinley had Lucifer steal a cursed knife from an antique collector in Fortaleza in an attempt to keep it away from Cthulhu cultists. It turns out the knife belonged to a very special person: The Gray Man, patron saint of sacrifice. Lucifer and The Gray Man are in a race to get to the knife first.

Dirk is a likable lead character, a man who keeps his cool no matter how strange things get. Lucifer, on the other hand, looms larger than life: she is a master thief and adept sorcerer, capable of concealing herself from the Gray Man and entering the Dreamlands at will.

Speaking of the Dreamlands, The Harlot is back in this series. Although her dialogue is wry as always, the Dreamlands artwork is not up to the same creepy standards of Andrew Ritchie, who oozes weirdness with every frame he draws.

Throughout the storyline, a little girl in a yellow dress makes random appearances. Her origins are somewhat explained in the final volume of Fall of Cthulhu, but the nature of separate installments means that readers new to the series will invariably be confused. My guess is she's an incarnation of Hastur (and his avatar, the King in Yellow).

Gnruk also makes an appearance, but he is not nearly as horribly realized as his debut earlier in the series. A conflict between The Gray Man and Gnruk looks a bit like the two are waltzing together.

At the conclusion, Mickey Rennier, a Cthulhu cultist with a green Mohawk, provides a bit of a deus ex machine to wrap it all up. Rennier feels oddly out of place in a comic that seems so grounded; punk villains went out of style in the eighties.

Lucifer is clearly a favorite character; her abilities as a thief aren't really demonstrated in this comic – her claim to fame is basically grabbing a knife and jumping out a window while failing to avoid The Gray Man AND Gnruk – but it's clear she's being set up for greater things, specifically the comic series Hexed.

The conclusion has a great twist and ends on a surprisingly poignant and bittersweet note. Unlike some of the other volumes in the Fall of Cthulhu, this story largely stands on its own. Overall, this is an excellent entry in the Lovecraft tradition that manages to bring the horror of the Mythos down to a personal level.

District 9

2009-08-18T22:49:00.000-04:00

While searching for alien encounter videos, I discovered a little clip titled "Alive in Jo'burg" on YouTube by Neill Blomkamp. Fortunately for us, Blomkamp's ill-fated Halo movie was delayed, so he went back to his roots with the film that started it all: District 9.

If you've seen Alive in Jo'burg you know much of what's going on in District 9 (this review contains spoilers!). In essence, a giant alien saucer lands on Earth and its citizens are repatriated in Johannesburg. However, the aliens are ugly, uncivilized squid-like monstrosities and thus integration attempts (when they happen at all) go poorly. The movie begins with a battle with a telekinetic mech and ends with riots in the streets.

District 9 adds meat to the bones of this highly original film. The aliens are no longer blurry actors in masks but crustacean-like beasts in fully-realized CGI. The ship and the conflict in Johannesburg is still a major plot point, but it is explored through Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley). Wikus is a bigoted but cheerful company man who just happens to be married to the daughter of the head of Multi-National United (MNU). He documents the task of relocating the "prawns" (a racial slur for the aliens) to a concentration camp through video, with frequent asides asking the producer to remove particularly embarrassing shots in editing.

In this tightly scripted film, every detail is important: the fact that the aliens have powerful weapons technology only they can use; that the Nigerians take advantage of the prawns by selling them prostitution (and all that implies) and cans of cat food in exchange for said weapons; and that the Nigerians believe they can acquire the power of a prawn through cannibalism.

Blomkamp quickly achieves a sense of rising dread through documentary-style clips where various experts expound on "what Wikus did." The special effects used in creating the prawn are a critical part of making them utterly alien. This is counterbalanced by a horrifying scene where Wikus destroys prawn eggs by setting them ablaze, comparing the popping sound of the roasting babies to popcorn. As a new parent, when Wikus threatens a young prawn, I flinched. And just like that, I was now on the side of the aliens.

An important but unlikely plot twist brings Wikus around to the alien side of life. Betrayed by his company and his father-in-law, he has no choice but to work with Christopher Johnson, an alien who knows more than he lets on. Together, they unveil the depth of corruption in both the squalid slums of Johannesburg and the clean corporate offices of MNU. No organization or race walks out of this film unscathed.

Combining elements of Alien Nation and Enemy Mine, District 9 adroitly balances political commentary on apartheid with Peter Jackson-ian levels of violence. The movie ends with more questions than answers and the certainty of a sequel. I can't wait!

Dark Wisdom

2009-08-11T23:00:00.001-04:00

I was chiefly interested in Gary Myers' collection of Lovecraftian-inspired short stories because they all take place in a modern setting. I'm always looking for ideas for my Delta Green campaign and was curious to see how other authors updated the Cthulhu Mythos.

There are two ways an author can modernize Lovecraftian horror. He can borrow elements from Lovecraft and incorporate them into his own work, thereby changing the setting but not the theme. Alternately, he can maintain the narrative style of Lovecraft and apply it to a modern tale. Most authors choose the first option, because it's easier; Lovecraft's archaic voice is difficult to emulate and even more difficult for modern readers to absorb. His protagonists narrate the horror tale after the fact, diminishing any sense of urgency. And the final twist is always blasted with great fanfare; italics, exclamation points, and all.

Myers vacillates between these two options with varying degrees of success. Unlike Lovecraft, he is fond of ending the tale at the moment the protagonist is about to discover his fate. He does mimic Lovecraft's narrative style in "The Nest," wherein a police officer shares in the first person his encounter with a ghoul. It's actually one of the best of the lot, and shows a glimmer of potential that isn't always recognized in the other stories.

In some cases, Myers is just content to create an eerie sense of weirdness. "The Web," in which two boys mess with a Necronomicon web site, plays out more like a bad eighties horror movie.

"Slugs," in which a thief finds a statue of Cthulhu in a sewer, begins what is something of a problem in Cthulhu-mythos authors: massive information downloads. Look, we're all fans of Lovecraft. But it is not necessary to mention every Mythos deity, explain who Cthulhu is, and otherwise lay out the plot like a Saturday morning cartoon. Part of Lovecraft's genius was being perfectly comfortable not explaining anything, and in these very short stories there's not a lot of room for exposition. A thief who just happens to run into a sewer and just happens to find a Cthulhu statue and just happens to be on the run from the police and just happens to know an antiques fence…the whole thing begins to sound like a Tales from the Darkside episode.

"Mother of Serpents" is an oddity as the tone is completely different from the rest of the stories. It's written in the stilted language of an older, more formal time. The ending isn't particularly scary and entirely predictable.

It's not until we get to "Fast Food" that Myers really knocks it out of the park. An office worker is sickened by the food at Belial's (yes, it's called Belial's, complete with a pitchfork logo on a matchbook), a burger joint. Customers obsess over the burgers, become grotesquely fat from gorging on them, and are then led herd-like into the restaurant at night. Despite the cheesy name of the restaurant, this is a clever take on an old mythos beast…and no, it's not tcho-tchos. The imagery at the end stuck with me long afterwards.

Connecting Deep Ones to the Creature of the Black Lagoon is the plot of the "Understudy," a mediocre entry. "The Big Picture" is much more Lovecraftian, about a man obsessed with stereograms (remember when those were popular?). This is a modern twist on a popular Lovecraftian notion of perception beyond space and time, but it's pretty standard fare. Similarly, "Omega" is more like a Lovecraftian tale, with a narrator who provides the big twist at the end. This is another massive Cthulhu Mythos dump that saps the story of its momentum.

"The Mask" is another great entry, expanding on the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign and the Mi-Go war. That's followed by "What Rough Beast," a hitchhiker tale that is both heartbreaking and terrifying.

"From Inner Egypt," like "Omega," provides too much detail and not enough freaky weirdness. Likewise, "Horror Show" ends without any real denouement.

For reasons known only to the publisher, someone allowed Myers to produce black-and-white artwork for this book. This was a mistake. The cover is perfectly evocative, but the interior art is a lesson in bad Photoshop. Two cloned pictures of a pixilated butcher standing in a hallway, meant to represent two cultists at Belial's, nearly ruins the story. As does the full-page picture on page 97 of…boxes. A story about Yig has a picture of a snake; a story about Tsathoggua has a picture of a toad. This book would have been better off without the art.

For modern Cthulhu fans, Myers has some entries worth reading. But the uneven nature of the tales and the terrible art detract from what could otherwise be a solid collection.

The Mothman Prophecies

2009-08-10T08:26:00.001-04:00

It took me years to see The Mothman Prophecies. I was in the midst of a switch from VCR tapes to DVD player and The Mothman Prophecies was an unfortunate victim of the transition, a tape with no player for it. I promptly forgot about it, but Netflix didn't.

In a somewhat eerie parallel, I recently started prepping the Dark*Matter adventure "The Killing Jar" for my D20 Modern conspiracy game. The Killing Jar has quite a bit of information about the Mothman and provided a helpful backdrop to The Mothman Prophecies.

What's interesting is that this movie actually makes a lot more sense than the book of the same name by John A. Keel. Keel covers a wide range of paranormal phenomena, from UFOs to Men in Black, from ghosts to the bizarre Mothman. The Mothman itself even has a name, Indrid Cold, and isn't afraid to make phone calls late at night.

And that's what's so unsettling about The Mothman Prophecies. The film flagrantly violates movie tropes by having its apparition not only adopt a name but make dire prophecies at length over the phone.

John Klein (Richard Gere) is the perfect foil for an exploration of the beyond, a haunted man who cannot move on after the death of his wife. Klein has an entire conversation with Cold, testing its knowledge of the present and the future. He even tapes the phone call.

But Cold's paranormal abilities extend well beyond phone calls. It can adopt other peoples' voices, both dead and alive. Ghosts show up in the flesh. It can leave messages for you at the front desk. And you can tape it all you want – vocal analysis will show it's an actual voice. Your voice. Only you didn't make the call.

If you know anything about the original Mothman Prophecies, you know how all this ends. But that's beside the point. The Mothman Prophecies is largely about grief and recovery. But it's also about the burden of the future, knowing that there is an inevitable conclusion to all things that we simply cannot control. Death brings that knowledge into terrible perspective.

Unfortunately, the movie drags. And drags. The eerie sounds are a bit overplayed; in some cases, silence would have been more effective than the relentless sound effects. The aural assault may have been more effective in the theater, but on television it's just annoying.

That doesn't detract from Mothman's overall sense of dread. If you have an interest in paranormal procedurals, watch The Mothman Prophecies. It will leave you Cold. And that's a good thing.

Dark Entries

2009-08-04T12:52:00.000-04:00

I'm a sucker for haunted house stories, if only because they're such a challenge for modern horror writers to pull off. I also love Blair Witch Project-style narratives, supposedly unfiltered media that catalogues horror without artifice and just presents terror in all its messy glory. So the plot behind Constantine's latest jaunt into the unknown, a reality show about a haunted house, piqued my interest.

Like so many Alan Moore characters, John Constantine is arrogant, wily, grungy, hails from the lower class, and the world pretty much hates him. Constantine and his ilk defined a whole generation of trench-coat wearing bastards that provided a much-needed dose of reality to the comic genre. So it's interesting to insert someone like Constantine in what is an undeniably modern format; that of the narcissistic, relentlessly self-promotional Generation Y-world of reality television.

Constantine shifts very quickly from paranormal investigator of a haunted house to reality show contestant, a shift that isn't entirely believable. We're led to believe it's because Constantine is attracted to a woman on the show who reminds him of someone he once knew. Which is all fine and good, but seems entirely out of character for a drifter who brings bad luck to everyone he meets.

And here's the first problem: it's never realistically explained why all the contestants stay there. The house is a virtual fortress, with no windows or doors. All of the contestants are suffering from grisly, realistic hallucinations. And not one of them cracks enough under the pressure to opt out of the game.

Constantine's arrival mucks up this somewhat delicate balance of greed and paranoia. His sole contribution is sleeping with the woman he was attracted to and asking them all to remember their pasts. In a comic all about Constantine, he barely lifts a finger.

About mid-way through, there's a surprised twist involving demons and hell. I figured it out several pages prior and was actually pleased with the direction the book was going in. In the style of the remake of 13 Ghosts, the book's true premise promised a really dark foray into the human condition as the various contestants realize the hopelessness of their situation and…

But alas, that's for a different book. Once the Big Surprise is revealed, Dark Entries begins a downward spiral into parody. Here's a hint: it includes demons wearing headsets, televisions from hell, and an infernal cannibal who still hears the voice of Sawney Bean.

In other words, instead of continuing the dark noir tone of the first half, or the Gen-Y ironic sensibilities of the second half, it chooses a third route: utter ludicrousness. The infernal forces come off as absurd. When the dismembered head of one of the contestants asks if he'll ever play the piano again, it's clear that Dark Entries has given up.

Rankin seems uncomfortable with the graphic novel format, vacillating between Constantine's noir-style narrative sensibilities, the relentless navel-gazing of modern media, and a bad eighties slasher flick. The result is an uneven installment of the Constantine universe.

Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds

2009-08-03T22:20:00.000-04:00

Gary Alan Fine's book, Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds, provides an enlightening overview of the state of gaming in the early eighties. Fine, a sociologist, inhabits the gaming cultures he reviews, reporting on Dungeons & Dragons, Chivalry & Sorcery, and Empire of the Petal Throne as a player and game master. He also interviews many of the leading lights of the industry at the time, including M.A.R. Barker, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax.

What's revealed by Fine's studies is that issues many gamers face today have remained largely unchanged over the course of thirty years. "Roll-" vs. "role-" playing figures prominently. Game masters who are unprepared or capricious, players who are petty and competitive, groups that exclude other groups…they're all here in vivid detail. What sets Fine's work apart is that he provides sociological constructs to discuss the gaming hobby, a hobby he treats with respect.

On the other hand, there are several issues that are clearly tied to the nascent gaming culture. Rampant sexism and violence towards women disturbs Fine; things have definitely changed for the better. The other major concern of most of Fine's subjects is the invasion of youngsters to the hobby who are too immature to fully grasp its rules. Nowadays we have the opposite problem – there aren't enough young players attracted to the game.

Throughout, Fine interviews his subjects and quotes their experiences as well as his own. These quotes are illustrative of the little challenges gaming groups regularly encounter, from intergroup rivalry to players having their characters to commit mass suicide as a form of protest against a particularly unfair game master. Any gamer will recognize himself and his players in Fine's work.

Chivalry & Sorcery and Empire of the Petal Throne (Tekumel) are not as well known today, but at the time they were a game designer's response to the flaws in Dungeons & Dragons. In the case of Chivalry & Sorcery, it was a more feudal feel to fantasy. In the case of Tekumel, it was the distinct European emphasis that colored all of Dungeons & Dragons. Barker's direct involvement in the Tekumel game universe as a game master provides an immersive contrast to the typical hack-and-slash dungeon games that were popular at the time.

Fine's work isn't flashy, but it's a critical piece of gaming history and a must-read for gaming scholars everywhere.

Ball Peen Hammer

2009-08-03T07:35:00.000-04:00

Ball Peen Hammer was never meant to be a comic. It's clear, from the claustrophobic setting of a basement and a clock tower to the long silences and close-up panels of characters' expressions, that this graphic novel is a parable. The post-apocalyptic world outside is a foil to reinforce the claustrophobia and paranoia of those two little rooms. This review contains spoilers.

Ball Peen Hammer is about three art forms: music, writing, and acting. Welton is a musician, Underjohn is a writer, Exley is an actress. All three are part of a commune of artists who have seen been scattered from the Undertunnels by the Syndicate, an oppressive regime of gas-mask wearing soldiers. Adam Rapp, a novelist and playwright himself, is merciless in his critique of these three pathetic creatures. Welton is a shiftless guitarist, never leaving the basement and playing the same song over and over about a woman he loved – but is too frightened to try to find her or save himself. Underjohn is immune to the plague but returns to Welton's basement to write about his experience, cataloguing the slow death of the bleak world around him. Exley insists on wearing her little black dress and up-do hairstyle even in the middle of a city besieged by acid rain and wild dogs.

Ball Peen Hammer is about love lost. Welton, who fell in love with Exley, is paralyzed by the experience, stuck in a perpetual state of yearning for a moment he can never reclaim. Underjohn was in love with a man who died from the plague, but never expressed his affection for him before he passed. Exley carries Welton's child and in her journey to find him regresses to acting – as a mother, as a teacher – to Horlick, a thirteen-year-old street kid who lives in the clock tower with his older brother, Dennis.

Ball Peen Hammer is about filling holes. There are emotional holes in all of the characters, but there are also physical holes: the Collector, who slides in and out of manhole covers to ring bells, repair lights, and tattoo numbers; Horlick, who reenacts American Pie with a melon; Welton, who can never get his toilet to flush; Underjohn, who fled the underground commune after it was filled with concrete by the Syndicate.

Ball Peen Hammer is about the loss of innocence. There are sacks in the basement. Underjohn discovers later that he's a Sacker, whose job is to use a ball peen hammer to fill those sacks. Welton, a Dragger, is haunted by the ghosts of those he helped drag into the basement. Exley inserts herself into a family that doesn't want her. And Horlick pretends he is much tougher than he lets on.

Ball Peen Hammer is not a glimpse into a larger world, part of a running series, the beginning of a comic book franchise, a happy story, a quick read, or meant to be understood literally. It is Rapp's No Exit, banished to comic form because nobody's going to want to see a play that revolves around killing kids with a hammer.

Valkyrie

2009-07-29T17:40:00.000-04:00

Valkyrie's premise – the plot to kill Hitler – was practically scripted for a movie. Preparing for my Delta Green role-playing game campaign meant researching Nazis and Project Valkyrie, a major historical but oft-ignored event by the American public. Until now.

Because the movie is based on a historical account, typical models of assessing a film – like a twist ending, for example – aren't possible. We know how things turned out. In fact, doing research on how Valkyrie came about and ended somewhat tarnished the movie for me. Valkyrie's not bad, but it wasn't the great drama I hoped it would be.

Tom Cruise is perfectly serviceable as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and the surrounding cast does an excellent job of showing what amounts to a typical bureaucracy. The more apparent it becomes that Germany might lose the war, the more urgent the plans to overthrow him.

But there were other factors motivating these desperate men, factors that are somewhat lost in the film. My understanding – and I admit this is limited, as I'm no WWII scholar – is that the nobility that led warfare in olden times, and specifically World War I, felt that there was a "wrong" and "right" way to conduct a war. Hitler didn't so much offend this old guard's sense of moral responsibility as it did their sense of following the rules according to an educated upper class. In a sense, Hitler's war was a peoples' war, waged at whatever cost and using whatever resources necessary and, at times, ignoring the right of the nobility to determine how a conflict was conducted.

This is important because Stauffenberg, and some of the elites involved in the attempted coup, were members of this aggrieved ruling class. This isn't to say that Stauffenberg didn't find Hitler's policies reprehensible, but as a large group, it helps explain the framework for why a coup would even be conceived. This entire thrust seems to be deemphasized in the film. It's almost as if Singer was concerned that playing up Stauffenberg's nobility might be a comment on Cruise himself.

The other part that seems to be lacking from the film is the miserable ending for the conspirators. Stulpnagel, the German commander in France, tried to shoot himself several times before being captured by the Gestapo. There is a brief scene where the surviving conspirators are put on a mock trial and holding their pants up; this is because they weren't given belts, to humiliate them more. The scene flashes by so fast that, to a viewer who is unaware of those circumstances, it just seems like the defendants lost a lot of weight and are holding up their pants.

And that sums up the problems I had with the movie. The tension is ratcheted up, there are little known scenes drawn from actual history that further enhance the film, but it all seems to be disconnected from the greater war. It's like Valkyrie took place in a hermetically sealed film universe. This adds to the claustrophobia of the conspiracy, but doesn't quite satisfy those looking for a historical context.

Splinter

2009-07-08T17:15:00.001-04:00

Splinter is an indie horror movie inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II. Like any good horror film, Splinter achieves the right balance to terrify its protagonists: 1) psychological tension between the characters, 2) isolation, and 3) a creature. This review contains minor splinters—I mean spoilers.

On the surface, our happy couple and soon-to-be-victims Seth Belzer (Paulo Costanzo, last seen on the failed Friends spin-off Joey) and Polly Watt (Jill Wagner, who took Jessica Biel's place in the Blade television series) plan to camp out in the woods for a romantic evening. The in-joke is that they are the reverse of a typical horror couple: Seth is a wussy botany student and Polly is a rugged outdoorswoman. Unfortunately, this difference is a little too extreme – Polly seems too sexy for a guy like Seth.

Another couple is thrown into the mix, and this is where the parallels between Evil Dead and Splinter begin. Dennis Farrell (Shea Wigham) is a convict on the run with his junkie girlfriend Lacey Belisle (Rachel Kerbs). They hijack Seth and Polly's car, ratcheting up the tension. We're never quite sure how trigger-happy Dennis is or how crazy Lacey will get in need of her fix.

The quartet runs over an oddly infected raccoon, which blows a tire. Seth pricks his finger on a strange splinter while changing it out and Lacey goes nuts when the dead raccoon she confuses with her long lost cat begins to move. The car repaired, they tear off, only to have the vehicle overheat. Polly stops at the nearest gas station, which just happens to contain an infected gas station attendant. We now have our isolated location.

All that's missing is our monster, a plant-thing that co-opts its host's body. The monster has a very specific biology that's integral to the plot; it's up to the survivors to figure out how the creature works. Which is why, when you're being attacked by a plant monster, it's good to have a botanist on your side.

Splinter never moves beyond the gas station and doesn't need to. The characters make dumb decisions, but they do so for good reasons – the convict and his junkie girlfriend are unstable enough to begin with. There are plenty of other parallels to Evil dead, which similarly confined the action to a handful of characters in an isolated location with killer plants (among other horrors), but that's a good thing.

There are some weeds in the plot. It takes awhile before the action really gets started as Splinter struggles mightily to convince us that Polly and Seth are a real couple. Wigham mumbles all of his lines, making some of his delivery impossible to understand. And the ending, while satisfying, is a bit off in its timing.

Still, Splinter shouldn't be missed by monster horror aficionados. It has all the ingredients of a great horror film – and a great salad.

Wanted

2009-07-07T12:39:00.000-04:00

The beginning of Wanted plays out a lot like a scene from the Matrix, with a dangerous-looking man in a suit tracking down the source of a special bullet. What ensues is an over-the-top special-effects laden battle in which said man launches himself out of a skyscraper to engage snipers on an adjacent building and manages to kill them all, only to himself be taken out by a sniper's bullet in glorious and disgusting 3-D. Then we're back to a narrative by office drone Wesley Gibson's (James McAvoy), prone to panic attacks and harangued by his overweight boss. Warning: this review contains mild spoilers.

It's easy to make the parallels between The Matrix and Wanted, given the opening scene, but it's the second scene in the office that really gives the film its heart. This is Fight Club by way of Equilibrium, amping up the fisticuffs in the former with the gunplay of the latter.

Gibson suffers frequent panic attacks and medicates himself heavily in an effort to cope with the insults of everyday life: the stupid job, the unfaithful girlfriend, the backstabbing coworker. He is destined for something better, something that involves the sexiest mentor a man could ask for: a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie). Jolie looks a little too gaunt here, but she hasn't lost her aura of dangerous cool and she uses it in spades to bring poor Gibson into his own as an assassin.

Gibson is, in fact, a member of a secret society known as The Fraternity, who in turn are descended from a medieval order dedicated to interpreting God's will via a loom – that's right, a loom. After translating the threads into binary coded orders, The Fraternity kills people who might alter the world's destiny for the worse.

Once Gibson transitions from office worker to gun-fu martial artist, complete with curving bullets and hyper-time senses, the movie really takes off: Gibson is out to kill Cross, the man who, Sloan (Morgan Freeman) tells him, killed his father.

Unlike say, The Transporter series, which started out semi-realistic and slowly devolved into action parody, Wanted grounds us in a completely altered reality from the start. It makes some of the gun-ballet and insane acrobatics performed by the characters easier to swallow, in the same way we accepted Neo's superheroic feats in the Matrix.

What's surprising is that Wanted is committed to its tale of revenge and betrayal, willing to sacrifice a potential franchise to tell a good story. It asks the question asked of all religions: how long before the speakers of God's will begin twisting it to their own ends? And what is God's will anyway? Heavy stuff, considering the premise involves shooting lots and lots of people.

Wanted is a surprisingly good action movie that transcends the bullet-time genre without seeming too derivative. Along the way, it tells a tight little story that leaves just about everyone dead. And that's not such a bad thing.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

2009-06-20T22:52:00.000-04:00

I’m a big fan of the original version of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. It was a snapshot in time of New York City in the seventies; a cynical, bloated, bureaucratic mess that was entirely unprepared for a terrorist attack. In fact, there were actually concerns that the movie would inspire real terrorists to take a subway train hostage. The original featured everything from undercover cops to hippies, a crisp military professional turned terrorist to the random accidents of people in stressful situations. It even invented the “color codenames” later used in Reservoir Dogs.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is catnip to movie directors in the same way that single stage sets are to theatrical directors – be it a subway or a stage with just two chairs, this is a film about two men facing off in a battle of wits. The majority of the movie takes place over an intercom between a terrorist and a dispatcher, with occasional cuts to the havoc their conversation causes throughout New York City. And if the terrorist represents the international Other that is a threat to our national security, the dispatcher represents the everyman of New York, our hardworking servicemen and women who lost their lives on September 11. With material like that, it’s no wonder the film has been remade twice.

Director Tony Scott updates the film to modern day sensibilities. The villain, Ryder (John Travolta in full crazy mode), isn’t a mercenary applying crisp military precision to the art of extortion; he’s a (SPOILER ALERT) former Wall Street tycoon – slightly lower on the villain totem pole than industrialists who pollute the environment. The undercover cop moves into action immediately rather than later in the film, because of course New York’s finest would respond quickly to a terrorist attack. And the dispatcher, Walter Garber (Denzel Washington, looking appropriately puffy and slouched) has a more complicated past and a bigger role.

Unfortunately, the film suffers as a result. In the original, military precision was entirely the point. The trains never ran on time, so challenging New York to meet a deadline was both a delicious irony and a sticking point with a former military officer who expects nothing less than perfection from his men and from the negotiators. Here, that point is muddled by a sort of “we’re all into this together” blue collar ethic that Ryder projects into Garber. Their dialogue still crackles, but this simple change dilutes the force of the film.

The four-man team of bad guys is reduced to two speaking parts, with the other two generic thugs. The emphasis is clearly on Travolta and Washington, and it’s refreshing to have a movie that’s not afraid to spend some time letting actors just act. There’s a lot of talking in this film and that’s not a bad thing.

The movie struggles with the modern updates. A live wireless webcam feed gets broadcast to the Internet without government interference (yeah, right). Even though the laptop’s battery dies, it’s mysteriously back on a moment later. And the two teens on either side of the webcam come off as self-absorbed morons.

Because this is a big budget action film, the quiet subtlety of the original version is glossed over in favor of an MTA agent handling a hostage negotiation, wielding a gun, and ultimately engaging in a showdown with the bad guy. Since Ryder has no principles to speak of, the conclusion is particularly unsatisfying.

Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is a serviceable action film but not a particularly good update of the original. The seventies version was more of a drama with an ensemble cast that was comfortable playing second fiddle to the biggest character of all: New York City.

Quantum of Solace

2009-06-19T11:15:00.000-04:00

Congratulations! You've managed to reinvent your Bond franchise after the tired old boy had sipped his last martini, drove his last fast car, and bedded his last exotic hottie. This new Bond is vulnerable and violent at the same time, a wounded animal that was willing to give up the whole spy life for Vesper Lynd, a woman who betrayed him. This is supposed to explain why Bond's such a cold-hearted bastard, and it blazed an exciting if somewhat jarring new path for the Bond films.

The challenge with reinvention is that there is a blurry line between following the new Bond to his logical conclusion and retaining the quintessential elements that constitute Bond. Or to put it another way, if you constantly make Bond different with each film, he's not really James Bond anymore.

Quantum of Solace chose to continue Bond's (Daniel Craig) destructive path from the first film, picking up where Casino Royale left off. Bond tracks the shadowy global conspiracy (Quantum) that has infiltrated Her Majesty's Secret Service. That's right, there's a double agent in double-oh-seven's midst, and only M (Dame Judy Dench) seems to be the least bit concerned about the entire organization being utterly compromised. This is just one of Quantum's many incongruent plot points that are resolved with "LOOK! EXPLOSIONS!" to divert the audience's attention.

Our resident villain is a pop-eyed Buscemi look-alike named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who runs...wait for it...Greene Planet, an environmental organization that is secretly arranging deals for oil. But actually, it's about water. Greene's Blofeld-ian murder signature is to drown his victims in oil. It's not nearly as cool as it sounds.

Bond's supposed lust-interest is an agent named Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), who saunters onto the screen in boots and an overcoat. With her bright red hair, Fields seems like a great romantic foil for Bond. When Bond asks her first name, it's "Fields. Just Fields." No Strawberry. And here we come to the problem: Quantum of Solace seems embarrassed to be a Bond film.

Every opportunity for Bond to be suave gets glossed over. He just commands women, like Fields, into his bed. He kills every bad guy he's supposed to capture. When his license gets revoked, he blithely ignores M's commands. When he attends an opera, Bond lurks in the rafters like some kind of murderous roadie. Instead of cleverly tricking the Quantum cabal into revealing themselves, he crashes their secret meeting and then guns down their goons.

In the first film, Bond's blundering and brutal tactics were excusable because he was new. It was a great way to reboot the franchise with the promise that, over time, Bond would transform into the elegant, suave killer we've come to know and love. It's a particularly American approach, the idea that even killers can better themselves through hard work. But with Quantum of Solace, Bond is so bereft of actual development that he gets a proxy instead: Camille (Olga Kurylenko), an exotic hottie whom he doesn't get to bed.

The movie goes south from there: inexplicable bad guy meeting that brings everyone together in one place, flaming deathtraps that Bond brute forces his way out of, and a bad guy who physically can't compete with Bond but tries to make up for it by being really, really nuts. The clear advantage Bond has over Greene is obvious; it's like a jock beating up a nerd at supervillain convention.

In the end, Bond finally meets up with the agent responsible for Lynd's betrayal, Yusef Kabira. SPOILER ALERT: After all the beatings, blasting, smashing, crunching, and punching, the movie concludes with a quippy aside and some hurt feelings.

Are you kidding me? By the end of the movie I was so frustrated that I wanted to see Bond seriously #$% up the one guy who could arguably be held accountable for destroying the love of his life. Instead of using Camille as parable to tell the tale of Bond's self-destructive path, Quantum of Solace should have STARTED with Bond leaving Kabira in a body bag. Or multiple bags.

Now that we've gotten the murderous quest for vengeance out of the way, can we get back to Bond being at least slightly civilized, seducing hot women, and killing dangerous villains with awesome technology? Please?