RPG Articles

Went and saw this on Halloween. In short, it’s a fun movie with some solid performances, good makeup, and is worth seeing if you don’t have any reading to catch up on or other movies that grab your attention.

The Good:

Some of it was quite funny. The “zombies” had good makeup. Bill Murray shows up for a bit.

The Bad:

We’re subjected to some really pointless love interest bits, pointless back story for Harrelson’s character, a total lack of curiosity on the part of everyone, and generally the characters doing things that make you sit back and wonder how they got by before the apocalypse.

The Hideously Stupid:

Voice over? Really? When did this story seem so complex that we needed a fucking narrator a la The Wonder Years? At one point, in this voice over, we get an explanation for the zombies, begging the question “How the fuck do you know that?”, since the narrator is obviously not any older than he is in the film, unlike The Wonder Years, and it’s not like there was anything around to tell him what happened.

General Bits and Bobs:

There was no reason to have the beginning be asynchronous like it was. It added nothing to the story and would have probably worked a touch better just laid out point A to point B style. For that matter, it would have been a lot more interesting to see the main character actually working through the initial days of the outbreak. Instead we end up with something feels like ten minutes of youtube videos spliced into 60 minutes of marginal value and possibly another ten minutes of story relevant comedy. It felt really forced, like it was made by committee.

I can’t help but wonder what it’s like to be the guy they turn to when they want a low rent Michael Cera.

Today I ended up eating at this place.

Having trundled about on public transit and foot with only a very small breakfast I was quite hungry, so imagine my surprise when the kefta I ordered was only tolerable, despite the extra spice of hunger.

Perhaps the place has gone downhill since then. Maybe cosmic rays were blocking my taste buds. I can only give my honest impressions.

The kefta itself, which I ordered in a wrap, was super dry and bland. The veggies were good enough, but everything was slathered with some sort of ho-hum sauce. Possibly sour cream that a tahini jar once bumped into. Even if it had been great there was just far too much of it. The pita it was wrapped in wasn’t stale, but it seemed a near thing.

Really the whole impression was “here’s some crap that’s been sitting here drying out all day”, which is odd considering it took a fairly long time for the food to get to me.

While the place seems fairly resistant to zombie attacks, what with so few patrons and only a small frontage, you’ll probably end up killing yourself for want of something good to eat.

Base Zombie Safety Index: 7

Adjusted for suicidal yearning: 3

So, uh, yeah. Know that bit about not saying anything if you can’t say something nice? Yeah, that’d lead to dead silence here.

This book was excruciatingly boring, pointless, and various kinds of not good. Very Neal Stephenson, and if you think that should be a compliment, then by all means pick this book up.

So, this is the book Soylent Green was based on. Based on in the same way that another Heston classic, The Omega Man, was based on I Am Legend.

Allow me to adjust your set for reading this book. There is Soylent, but no Soylent Green, and nothing is distressingly made out of people. Soylent is the closest thing to affordable protein available, and it’s still far too expensive for most people. It’s comprised of soybean product and lentils. The mainstay food are weedcrackers, which are made of seaweed. Also mentioned are ener-G, which are granules of plankton, and meat flakes, comprised of snail or slug bits, issued to the very ill.

No, the thrust of this book is the living hell we’ll create with unchecked population growth. In this New York City has about 35 million inhabitants, the vast majority of which are beyond impoverished.

I really have to point out how amusing, and interesting, it is that someone as pro-life as Heston was in that movie. Of course, it leads me to wonder at how much impact he, or someone else in production with similar morals, deflected the message of the movie from birth control to outrage at defiling the dead.

Anyway. The plot, characters, and setting, are all carried out so very well. Sometimes you feel the author himself shy away from the future he can envision with such clarity, but it really only serves to get your own wheels turning.

All that said, you really have to prepare yourself for a soul crushing ride. You are left feeling that happiness, in any form, is at best a setup to more cruelty, and that you have been pre-fucked by every generation before you, while failing to summon the strength or resources to unfuck the future even a little.

Like anything I’ve suggested by Peter Watts, read this one when you think your feeling too good about yourself and the world.

So yeah, this series of books is all wrapped up now. It was fun, had some neat ideas, and was thoroughly enjoyable, but there’s just something about it that doesn’t make it stand out in my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite worth reading, unlike, say, certain books written with Brian Herbert. I think the biggest hindrance to the story hanging with me is it all felt a bit too much like television. I can’t really find the right way to describe it. I suppose one of the biggest similarities is that it really seemed like we could have wrapped some of these points up well before we did, know what I mean?

The Ildirans kept whining about how stagnant they were, then someone would throw out something at least a little innovative, but it would either go nowhere or they’d die, horribly. The Roamers were like MacGuyver clones, and never ever failed. It all just came off as a bit too static.

Anyway. Onward.

I didn’t have any real expectations going into this, just fyi, but I found it to be fun, and funny, but ultimately forgettable.

That’s kind of all I can think to say about it.

A very energetic story that manages to convey a sense of doom, humor, and hope; usually in the same breath.

It’s a tough one to explain without giving away everything. The best I can do is that it sums up all the feelings of heartbreak, whether it be of a lover or friend that has abandoned you, without getting maudlin, and always as part of the story.

Also aliens and doomsday cults. Just read the damned thing, ok?

You can check out the author’s website and even read a chapter of Spaceman Blues.

I hadn’t heard of this movie, at all, but apparently it did actually show on some screens. Not really important, just that when I saw it I’d expected the sort of thing that dwells in the direct to DVD market these days.

Apparently it received a lot of negative reviews, primarily arguing that the plot was too convoluted, which is completely untrue. I’d suggest that’s merely a barometer of the average attention span. You’ll also find mention of the plot being somewhat monotone, which is a fair criticism.

The movie drops you headlong into a world that is recognizable to any fan of science fiction- Nazi scientists set about enhancing latent abilities in people, the rest of the world co-opted the research once they fell. These abilities fall into a bunch of categories-
Pushers can force thoughts and memories into you.
Shifters can change the physical aspect of objects temporarily.
Sniffers can track people from psychic traces left on things.
Watchers see potential futures.
Bleeders emit this ghastly wail that shatters glass and can rupture organs.
Shadows generate a sort of anti-sniffer field.
Wipers erase memories.
Stitchers can mend injuries.
Movers are telekinetics.

First off, I really enjoyed the movie. It was filmed really well, the actors all did good work, the script was not bad and bordered on really good several times. Well worth renting or buying if you’re into collecting DVDs.

The good-
Sets were wonderful. Lighting and camera work were all really well done. Location shots were brilliant. The story was really rather compelling, conceptually, and carried off pretty well. Makeup and clothing left people looking like people, which is shockingly rare.

The questionable-
There’s a power enhancing drug in the film, but it kills everyone they try it on, leading me to wonder how they know it enhances anything. This is questionable, rather than bad, because in most movies the drug would turn you into some freakish juggernaut, but this one is aptly compared to steroids, meaning the effect is significant but not overwhelming. Which, of course, leads you to wonder why you’d test something of marginal benefit, and near certain death, on such worthwhile resources. One is left to assume that they use it on people that have Fucked Up, which makes sense given the rest of the story.

Nick, one of the protagonists, initially has little skill with his telekinesis, because he doesn’t use it. I have trouble buying this. There’s no indication that using it makes him easier to track, and it doesn’t appear to have any negative consequences. I mean, it’s not like his eyes bleed whenever he bends a spoon, ya’ know? With a little bit of tweaking it would have been easy to paint it as more of a lack of teaching. Still, I’m willing to buy it.

The bad-
There are definitely a few places where you go “Haven’t we been here before?”. It’s not so bad as to ruin the film, but it is enough that you’ll notice it.

At one point they’re trying to figure out where a certain locker is, and realize it’s being Shadowed. In a startling lapse of logic, given how internally consistent the rest of the story really is, the little girl Watcher says something about not being able to see the building if it’s being Shadowed. There’s some mention of how that shouldn’t be possible and how Shadows shouldn’t be able to do whole buildings, but it felt really weak just because of that lapse. Seriously, how did she know?

There’s other dangling threads, but I won’t lump them in as bad, since it’s obvious that the writers want to finish things up in either a sequel or a comic book series I saw mentioned.

That is one long assed title.

Anyway, I checked this gem out of the library a couple of days ago and have since read it from cover to cover. That’s right. Cover to cover. A cookbook.

First off, there’s a lot of white space, and the pages are really thick, so it isn’t really as long as it looks, but also it’s boiled essence of these dishes sprinkled with Bourdain’s asshole charm.

If you like to cook it’s so very much worth reading. His passion and understanding of the fundamentals behind this food shines through. Also, you’ll learn what a “pope’s nose” is.

Oh lord. Where to start?

Christian Bale? Not the man for this job. You could have replaced him with a wind up toy that yelled periodically.

The dude that played Marcus had a couple moments of really brilliant acting through body language.

The script was so fucking bad that nobody could have saved this. Also, they totally lifted the entirety of the Reese/Star in LA bit from fucking Fist of the North Star. See Bat/Bart and Lin from that. Every line was either boring or stupid.

The signal thing? Who the fuck transmits that from their HQ? Put that shit in something near the front line. Nobody would do what they did.

The heart thing? Ok. Seriously. That was some stupid shit. Why would you give somebody a super alloy skeleton that provides less protection than a standard human one? If you blasted all the skin from my chest, do you think you’d see my heart? No. For that matter, wouldn’t you see lung there even in the shoddy terminator chassis? Or was it just SkyNet decided “Lungs are easy, but making a simple pump to replace that heart would be tough”? The fucking transplant at the end was as stupid. Yeah, let’s just plunk that in. I’m sure this veterinarian in the middle of a wasteland can pull off an organ transplant with no problem. Let’s not even think about tissue compatibility and rejection. Ghod, the retardation. Conveniently this also means the only good actor and character is dead. Yay?

Marcus in general could have been a great character. Take away the retarded lines, delete all the shit about his fucking heart, and let the man work with anger and silence. He was great at conveying the sense of someone with a killer just beneath the surface.

His back story needed something else though. Where the fuck was he for 15 years? Was he converted then frozen? Did they just freeze his body? What the fuck? We could have spent an entire movie exploring this guy, in a good story, but instead we get some bullshit.

Oh, and christ, that whole ‘you did everything we wanted you to’ bit. What kind of retarded fucking plan is that? There wasn’t even any reason for SkyNet to give a shit about John yet. Even if there was, it could have ended it by destroying that first fucking chopper. GAA!! THE STUPID BULLSHIT OVERWHELMS!

The giant robots? Stupid. There’s no fucking reason for them. The scout drone thing? Stupid. SkyNet never bothered with something that couldn’t hold a gun unless it had one bolted to it or, at the very least, had something stabby instead. 50 of some capture model droid would have been better, and seem more fitting. Not that there seemed to be any fucking reason to capturing people anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, the 4 armed thing looked cool, aside from being CGI, it just didn’t fit. The T-600? Fucking awesome.

My biggest non-story issue was the sets. They ranged from cheap looking and unambitious to just cheap looking. Also we jumped around a lot for no reason.

Now, the biggest story issues.

For one, the resistance was too organized and well armed. John was supposed to be the one gathering people up, training them, and really driving the whole thing. Instead he was just some asshole in some other asshole’s army. He wasn’t revered as some kind of prophet, he was revered for being really fucking good at killing terminators, outsmarting SkyNet, and organizing. That was the whole point of his mother raising him the way she did. Fucking idiots.

Next up is the feeling of danger. It wasn’t there. There was sunlight and everything. When you watched Terminator the first time, did you get the impression these people saw daylight? I sure didn’t. I got the impression of “Nuclear Hell-Hole”, and people surviving by living in warrens that resisted detection mostly because they were surrounded by fucking ruin. “It’s safer in the day” my ass. There’s no day anymore. “They’ve never pushed this far in before”. Fucking why not? They are an immortal army of super-steel with no concept of fear, rest, or anything else of the sort. Don’t even get me started on how I felt about them having aircraft, or a fucking compound all to themselves.

Last, let’s talk aesthetics. Why would there be any manual controls in or near anything SkyNet built? It literally controls everything. That door needs to be opened? Ok, it’s open, or kicked in by a Terminator. Also, people, drop the iPod look. Did SkyNet need a face? No. Would SkyNet have any kind of display anywhere? Not likely. Humans are to be killed, that is all. Would it give a shit about Marcus after using him? No. He would have been liquified and recycled. Also, his metal face bit looked terrible, wobbling from shitty makeup to shitty CGI.

Oh, and of course the cinematography mostly sucked. From shitty camera jumps to a bunch of shaky cam.

I see it was written by a couple of assholes that should be roasted and fed to animals you don’t like. Too bad they wrote the screenplay for Surrogates, since before now I was hoping that would be good.

EDIT: I realized that it slipped my mind to mention that being punched directly in the heart by a super strong killer robot will probably result in you needing more than a jolt to revive.

Also, on further reflection, who the fuck does John Connor think he is? He thinks he’s sooooo important that he scrapped a seemingly viable plan to save his own hide. Way to go Narcissus. And again, why the hell did SkyNet care one whit? Sigh.