Various and Sundry
Watched three - well, two and a half - movies in the last few days, all of which were very different.
Regarding the first: there are a lot of movies and tv shows that I watched as a kid that I find I can now only just vaguely remember, or sometimes just barely remember. Over the years, when I've had the opportunity, I've tried to track down information on these movies and shows, and watch them if possible, fully expecting that they're probably going to be terrible, just so I can put those miscellaneous bits of memory into context. One of these shows was a made for TV movie from 1981 which I remembered having the title of "The Archer" but which is actually known as both "The Archer and the Sorceress" and "The Archer: Fugitive From the Empire." The only thing I remembered about it was that the hero had a magic bow, and when he fired it, the tv screen would turn all red and the arrow would explode. Well, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I got to watch it last week, and it was indeed terrible. In fact, it was so bad it went all the way around back to good again. It did indeed have a magic bow that turned the screen red. It also had the following: a totally bland, generic early-80s hero with a big coif, George Kennedy wearing a blonde viking wig with braids, fight scenes that would be considered amateurish at your local Ren Faire, and props and sets that would have looked artificial on the original Star Trek series. I also found the story somewhat incomprehensible, but that may be because Damon and I were goofing on the show too much to really listen to the dialogue. At any rate, that's one more vauge memory put into place. Next up: the movie Arabian Adventure, a 1979 that I remember seeing in the theater, which I found on ebay for about $15.
Along the same lines, I also, on impulse, picked up a copy of Ong Bak 2 on DVD while in NYC. While this movie does have the greatest trailer ever, the movie itself hasn't been quite as good. Actually, it's not a bad movie at all; it's shot beautifully, it isn't hokey or cheesy, and the fight scenes are all well staged. The problem is that it just isn't much fun either. The fights are brutal, and the whole movie is grim. It doesn't have any of the sense of Jackie Chan-inspired fun that Ong Bak had (and it doesn't seem to have any relation to that film either, other than having the same star). Still, I haven't finished watching it yet, so I'll have to reserve final judgement for now.
The third film, which I saw in a theater, was Up!. This is the first Pixar movie I've ever seen. It's also the first time any movie has ever made me shed tears. For a movie that was promoted as a wacky, uplifting kids' adventure, it's way, way sad at times, and a lot more adult than I expected. It was never maudlin though, or saccharine or blatantly manipulative, just genuniely sentimental and bittersweet and really well done.
It's been three weeks now that I haven't had a computer at home. The only good thing about this is that I've caught up reading some of the many, many games sitting on my shelf, and might even run some of them.
I finished reading Zorcerer of Zo, an indie rpg inspired by fairy tales, fables, The Wizard of Oz, Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, and so on. It uses a rules light system - the "PDQ" system - that works well with the setting, since fairy tales probably won't translate very well with a more "realistic," crunchy rules set. I'm thinking of running this game, so to brush up on the source material, I got a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales and the collected stories of Hans Christian Andersen. These are the original stories, not the Disney-fied, kid-safe versions, and they are seriously warped. Violence and child-abuse abound, and while the good and innocent usually do live happily ever after, half the time evil isn't punished. Then again, some of them have very weird morals, or no morals at all. Hell, some of them barely make any sense at all.
I've also been reading a new game entitled "Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies" that uses a variant of the PDQ rules that fits better with the swashbuckling genre. The game is set in a snow-globe like world where there is no ground, per se. Rather, islands and continents float in the skies, and travel, commerce and - of course - piracy, is done with the use of flying ships. The premise got me interested, but so far, I've been a bit underwhelmed. There are only a few lands, and you only get a little bit of information about each one. I don't expect an encyclopedia, but the write-ups felt underwritten and sketchy, and considering how wide the page borders are, there could have been more setting material included without inflating the page count (as a counter-example, Talistlanta features dozens of different lands, yet the short descriptions in the main rules are much more informative and useful). As for the rules, I haven't delved too deeply into them yet, but there seems to be too much of the author attempting to weld rules onto situations where they aren't needed, and don't always make sense - which is odd considering that it's a rules-light system. I'll probably try running the game at some point, but at the moment, it's left me a bit disappointed.
Regarding the first: there are a lot of movies and tv shows that I watched as a kid that I find I can now only just vaguely remember, or sometimes just barely remember. Over the years, when I've had the opportunity, I've tried to track down information on these movies and shows, and watch them if possible, fully expecting that they're probably going to be terrible, just so I can put those miscellaneous bits of memory into context. One of these shows was a made for TV movie from 1981 which I remembered having the title of "The Archer" but which is actually known as both "The Archer and the Sorceress" and "The Archer: Fugitive From the Empire." The only thing I remembered about it was that the hero had a magic bow, and when he fired it, the tv screen would turn all red and the arrow would explode. Well, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I got to watch it last week, and it was indeed terrible. In fact, it was so bad it went all the way around back to good again. It did indeed have a magic bow that turned the screen red. It also had the following: a totally bland, generic early-80s hero with a big coif, George Kennedy wearing a blonde viking wig with braids, fight scenes that would be considered amateurish at your local Ren Faire, and props and sets that would have looked artificial on the original Star Trek series. I also found the story somewhat incomprehensible, but that may be because Damon and I were goofing on the show too much to really listen to the dialogue. At any rate, that's one more vauge memory put into place. Next up: the movie Arabian Adventure, a 1979 that I remember seeing in the theater, which I found on ebay for about $15.
Along the same lines, I also, on impulse, picked up a copy of Ong Bak 2 on DVD while in NYC. While this movie does have the greatest trailer ever, the movie itself hasn't been quite as good. Actually, it's not a bad movie at all; it's shot beautifully, it isn't hokey or cheesy, and the fight scenes are all well staged. The problem is that it just isn't much fun either. The fights are brutal, and the whole movie is grim. It doesn't have any of the sense of Jackie Chan-inspired fun that Ong Bak had (and it doesn't seem to have any relation to that film either, other than having the same star). Still, I haven't finished watching it yet, so I'll have to reserve final judgement for now.
The third film, which I saw in a theater, was Up!. This is the first Pixar movie I've ever seen. It's also the first time any movie has ever made me shed tears. For a movie that was promoted as a wacky, uplifting kids' adventure, it's way, way sad at times, and a lot more adult than I expected. It was never maudlin though, or saccharine or blatantly manipulative, just genuniely sentimental and bittersweet and really well done.
It's been three weeks now that I haven't had a computer at home. The only good thing about this is that I've caught up reading some of the many, many games sitting on my shelf, and might even run some of them.
I finished reading Zorcerer of Zo, an indie rpg inspired by fairy tales, fables, The Wizard of Oz, Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, and so on. It uses a rules light system - the "PDQ" system - that works well with the setting, since fairy tales probably won't translate very well with a more "realistic," crunchy rules set. I'm thinking of running this game, so to brush up on the source material, I got a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales and the collected stories of Hans Christian Andersen. These are the original stories, not the Disney-fied, kid-safe versions, and they are seriously warped. Violence and child-abuse abound, and while the good and innocent usually do live happily ever after, half the time evil isn't punished. Then again, some of them have very weird morals, or no morals at all. Hell, some of them barely make any sense at all.
I've also been reading a new game entitled "Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies" that uses a variant of the PDQ rules that fits better with the swashbuckling genre. The game is set in a snow-globe like world where there is no ground, per se. Rather, islands and continents float in the skies, and travel, commerce and - of course - piracy, is done with the use of flying ships. The premise got me interested, but so far, I've been a bit underwhelmed. There are only a few lands, and you only get a little bit of information about each one. I don't expect an encyclopedia, but the write-ups felt underwritten and sketchy, and considering how wide the page borders are, there could have been more setting material included without inflating the page count (as a counter-example, Talistlanta features dozens of different lands, yet the short descriptions in the main rules are much more informative and useful). As for the rules, I haven't delved too deeply into them yet, but there seems to be too much of the author attempting to weld rules onto situations where they aren't needed, and don't always make sense - which is odd considering that it's a rules-light system. I'll probably try running the game at some point, but at the moment, it's left me a bit disappointed.