70MM-FESTIVALEN 2015 - There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing.
My second screening at the 70mm festival this year was Lawrence of Arabia. Cinemateket screened a newly restored copy - good crowd, perfect screening, what more could you possibly ask for? Surprisingly (?) this film attracted a much younger crowd than the opening film, South Pacific.
I'm not sure what to say about Lawrence that hasn't already been said. It's a grand experience of highs and lows, with plenty of adventure and excitement in between - that "I enjoyed it." just stays with you somehow. One day I'll sit down and read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, because, hot damn.
I think I know what music I'll have stuck on repeat at work this next week.
Today is Sunday, and I had no 70mm screenings scheduled. I played board games instead. First up was Pandemic: Contagion where we found out afterwards that we'd been playing it wrong :/ We played new event cards and neutral player tokens for every turn, not every round ... so.. effectively we upped the difficulty and cut the play time in half. Or something like that. In any case, something seemed off, and we were unable to accomplish anything. I still managed to win, I'm not sure how.
(I'm the yellow score marker, the neutral player is the blue one)
I need to play this again actually following the rules before I can do a proper review :P
Next up, adding to our growing collection of GMT games, we played Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan
It's two players only and the setup and gameplay is the simplest of all the GMT games I've had the pleasure of playing. We couldn't quite figure out how to utilise the Siege rules, but other than that, it was smooth sailing (.... in as far as feeling constantly blocked and not finding any way to achieve your win conditions can be considered "smooth sailing", sure). It felt very fast paced too, which I always count as a plus for these type of big games. I definitely enjoyed the big blocks used as play pieces. They make it a lot easier to understand what's going on, and it's easy to follow your opponent's movements (dealing with those movements and the number of opponent pieces is a different matter, though).
I lost, but no surprise there. Not only am I terrible at war games/strategy heavy games, I also chose to play as Ishida Mitsunari, who lost the battle IRL, so I had the odds stacked against me anyway. Keeping it historically correct, awwwww yeah.