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Author: Bryant

Monkeyball

March 6, 2012
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Last night I headed down to the new Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane location, since movie tickets were two bucks during this week’s soft open of the theater. It’s way out of the way for us, particularly coming from work, but seems reasonably convenient for South Austin peeps. Take Mopac south to the first traffic light and turn right, then immediate left. It took twenty minutes flat to come home at 12:30 AM. Kind of late? Well, cheap movies, so I caught a pair of them. Oh look, the title of this post is a bad joke. Look, they were both set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it’d be way amusing to watch a motion captured Andy Serkis in an Oakland A’s uniform.

Moneyball was pretty good even if it was a touch fictionalized. Pitt was great, as was Hoffman in a nice supporting role. The one scene where Jonah Hill is desperately keeping up with Pitt and Hoffman is totally worth the price of admission. I’d love to know what Soderbergh would have made of it but I am totally content with what we got. Also, that was an entirely funny caricature of John Henry.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes was kind of conflicted. The first hour or so is a pretty rough drama about the horrors of animal experimentation plus a really good performance by John Lithgow. Then there’s this magical point where my disbelief ceased to hover lightly in the air, and I’ll even spoil it, because it’s awesome. Caesar is in primate jail, and he’s having trouble adjusting. You know what it’s like being the new kid on the cellblock. So he gets kicked around a bit, and when he’s brooding back in his cell, he looks up at the orangutan across the way. Lo! Maurice the orangutan signs, “Hurt bad?”

Caesar is shocked, because whoa, another ape knows sign language! So he signs, “You know signs?” I’m wondering exactly the same thing. Maurice signs back, calmly, “Circus orangutan.” Clears it all up: everyone knows that circus animals are always taught ASL. Me and the shards of my disbelief will be over here snickering wildly. The movie doesn’t get any more believable from there on in. It stays enjoyable, though! It’s just a different movie in the second half.

Award Winner!

March 2, 2012
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I won an award! I am the 2012 Rose & Bay Best Patron, which is pretty cool. I think mostly this means that C. E. Murphy has a lot of fans who listened to her when she said to vote for me because I convinced her to try crowdfunding, but I guess that implies I deserve some kind of credit for something. It wouldn’t have gone far if she wasn’t an awesome writer, though.

Let The Bullets Fly

February 29, 2012
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That didn’t suck.

Let The Bullets Fly is not really a Chow Yun Fat movie in the way that The Ides of March isn’t really a George Clooney movie. It’s just that when you get an actor that charismatic, a movie tends to lean towards him or her. Pleasingly enough, Jiang Wen is equally magnetic and is both the star and the director, so the charisma duel is just about even. You can’t say the same for the duel between their characters, but that’s the story of the movie. Note: it’s a battle of wits, without a whole lot of significant gunplay. It’s a black comedy at heart.

I don’t expect a Hong Kong comedy to be dry and witty, thanks to decades of Stephen Chow and a lot of Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung slapstick. Let The Bullets Fly is completely wry. There’s slapstick in the way the Coen Brothers do it: with a lot of bite beneath the surface. It’s also fairly poignant in a weird sort of a way. Without ever making it explicit, Jiang Wen’s Pocky Zhang undergoes a transformation during the course of his long con.

It’s a gorgeous movie as well. The 1920s vistas are spectacular and Jiang Wen has a great sense of motion. His imagery is likewise excellent. He uses certain visuals, in particular a fortune in silver, as unifying thematic elements. When the final scene is reached and he substitutes something else for the silver, it’s awfully powerful and effective.

Recommended, as long as you don’t expect another Chow Yun Fat heroic bloodshed piece.

Price Awareness

February 29, 2012
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I don’t get the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7. It’s a pretty standard tablet, with LTE as the standout feature. It’s a 7.7″ model. It runs Android 3.3 — in theory ICS will come in the future, but we hear that a lot. At 16 GB of storage, it retails for $499 with a two year contract. How does that make sense when the 16 GB iPad 2 is selling for $580 no contract at Best Buy? And where’s the cheaper WiFi model?

10 Hours, 5 Movies

February 27, 2012
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In a hypothetical world, someone with a huge cache of Hong Kong flicks but without clearance to show them might ask attendees of a movie marathon to stay mum about the actual movies shown.

In unrelated news, the Alamo Drafthouse Hongkongathon was way better than I’d anticipated. I was expecting a bunch of exploitation stuff and a good time, rather than great movies. In practice, Grady Hendrix showed us two serious classics, two pretty entertaining movies, and one bottomless pit of sleazy horror. I managed to stay awake for the whole thing by some minor miracle, given my advanced age. Grady’s effervescent introductions probably had a lot to do with that. We started at 10 PM and got out at 7:30; five movies and two trailer reels. One trailer reel was dedicated to Category 3 erotica, which perhaps saved us from having to watch an entire Cat 3 movie. Good call. The other one was trailers for 70s US releases of Shaw Brothers flicks, and highly entertaining.

If you dig Hong Kong movies this would actually be worth the travel to Austin if they do it again. They think they might. Awesome.

Emoticon (MHRP)

February 24, 2012
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As one does, I wrote up my old superhero PC Emoticon in the hot new superhero RPG. This time, it’s Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. MHRP character writeups are tied to specific versions of the characters, both in powers and in XP Milestones, so I decided to do this writeup as the youthful, optimistic Emoticon. In actual play he went all the way through the Weight of Responsibility Milestone, but I don’t think he ever finished up the True Teen Love Milestone.

I’m not sure how I’d add the martial arts he picked up later — actually, he had a bit of it early on, too. But that’d be a third Power Set, which is a bit more spread out than typical MHRP characters. You could drop it into the Projective Empathy Power Set, but the Limit doesn’t make sense.

There are a couple of small tricks in the original Champions UN PEACE gear package that I skipped. Flash Defense never came up, so you could represent it with a stunt, and the radio headsets are most easily handwaved.

Oh, and I added a Social Specialty, because it’s missing and there clearly ought to be one. Cite: Johnny Storm, socialite extraordinaire, with no particular business acumen at all. Emma Frost might also fit in that category.

Continue ReadingEmoticon (MHRP)

Mike Doughty

February 15, 2012
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Mike Doughty, acoustic guitar, around 150 people, “Country Roads.” So that’s a nice way to spend an evening with one’s beloved. If you didn’t know Doughty was touring solo to promote his new book, now you know. If you didn’t know you should go see him, you know now. If you don’t like music that’s so dry you might not realize you have to drill through the bedrock to get at the vast lake of pain underneath, that’s a fair objection and I won’t think the less of you for passing it up. He’s kind of an odd taste. I love what he does with sound and the way he uses his voice, but it’s a pretty idiosyncratic little corner of the musical universe.

He’s pretty fucking bitter about Soul Coughing. I had no idea. I can’t blame him given the stories he tells.

During the encore he said that piracy is A-OK with him, and if you bought the album he wanted you to burn a copy of it so more people can listen to it. Works out for him artistically and economically. Bug me if you’d like to talk more about that. Encore, yeah. He’s still doing the deal where he turns his back to the audience during the encore ritual.

Oh, his girlfriend’s from West Virginia, so he learned “Country Roads” for her. Although he’s been a fan of it for a while so who knows? But he does it straight, no irony, and it’s lovely.

Poll Promotion

February 7, 2012
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So C. E. Murphy is up for a Rose & Bay Award for crowdfunded fiction. You should vote for whichever fiction you like best, but if you don’t know the others and you like Catie’s stuff, you can take my word on it: she’s the right choice. LJ membership not required. Also, if you want to continue voting in that vein, you can vote for me as crowdfunding patron of the year. I think Catie nominated me for this because I pestered her until she tried patron-funded writing, which is totally kind of her.