You can do worse than the lurid fantasy worlds of Games Workshop when it comes to novels. I blame it on Britain; like 2000 AD comics, Games Workshop’s Black Library seems happy to allow authors to indulge their hallucinogenic whimseys as long as the canon is consistent. And the canon is a fever-dream to start with, so you’ve got a rather fertile base for excess. What more can one ask of RPG novels? ...
I finished A Feast for Crows last night. It’s quite a book; slow through much of the first half and picking up in the end. My favorite character doesn’t appear at all, since he’s off in the section of the world that will be handled in the next book. Things happen. We see a lot of Dorne; I liked that a lot. I’ll touch on some spoilers in the extended entry, but before that: I also have the Guardians of Order A Game of Thrones RPG in hand. (Put it together with The World’s Largest Dungeon and Hero Fifth Edition Revised, which I happen to be able to do at the moment, and you’ve got a hefty chunk of book.) So, campaign: Three players; one’s a cousin of Ned Stark, one’s a cousin of Tywin Lannister, and one’s a cousin of Mace Tyrell. Possibly once-removed in any of those cases. Also possibly bastards, but if so, recognized. Either gender works. All of them are between the ages of 13 and 16; they’ve all been fostered down to Dorne a year or two before the beginning of A Song of Ice and Fire. I’d run for a few sessions focusing on childhood concerns, letting the characters develop, letting them bond. Then I’d start running the events leading up to the War of Five Kings, without any particular expectations as to the reactions of the characters. At the start, they’d be fairly fringe. By the time the fourth book rolls around, there are enough dead people so that their place in the lines of succession might be important. OK, spoilers follow.
House of Flying Daggers is the latest movie from Zhang Yimou, the guy who directed Hero. Depending on how much you counted on Zhang Yimou to keep making beautiful art movies, it’s either the final step in his commercialization or a slam-bang action movie without all that complex flashback stuff. Either way, those who complained about the politics of Hero will hopefully be relieved to find that House of Flying Daggers is light on the political subtext. ...
In my Episode III, Palpatine’s temptation of Anakin is mirrored by Count Dooku’s struggle with his own desire for redemption. As Palpatine is to young Anakin, so Yoda is to his best student, Count Dooku. Count Dooku is the man he pretended to be in Episode II. The movie has a tighter focus: Obi-Wan and Anakin pursuing Dooku against the backdrop of the Clone Wars. (None of this nigh-instantaneous transport between star systems.) This, too, is a mirror: this time we’re reflecting the pursuit of Luke and Leia. Dooku moves from system to system, just ahead of the Jedi, directing his grand strategy from behind the scenes. He is still Palpatine’s creature; the Clone Wars are still orchestrated. But he has potential. ...
Closer is the movie that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance wanted to be: it’s a story about the pain humans cause one another. It succeeds where Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance failed, because the characters are people and not caricatures and because Mike Nichols recognizes that pain arises from the cruelties we deal one another. It’s very close to being a great movie. The only flaw in the ointment is Julia Roberts, but let’s leave that for a moment. It’s the best Jude Law performance of the year, edging out his executive in I ♥ Huckabees. He’s still got that surface gloss which detracts a little from his performance, but like his executive, this is a role that fits that gloss. And his body language is a thing of beauty. Particularly during his scenes with Natalie Portman: the pair of them express themselves in exactly the way lovers interact. Not when they’re first meeting — that’s not so hard — but when they’re parting badly, and one of them wants to taste the other’s mouth, and there’s the moment of wanting to give in, to comfort, but no, you can’t — ...
A Sundial In A Grave: 1610 is what the Kushiel books wanted to be, but less gilded. Late Renaissance, swordplay, espionage, desperate adventure, and dominance/submission games? Check. It’s possible there’s even a Mary Sue character, depending on how you look at things. And yet A Sundial In A Grave does not over-enthuse about the joys of pain in the bedroom, it does not linger endlessly on the prowess of the hero, and it is not a morass of angst. It swashbuckles, all the while aware of the contradictions that lie at the heart of the protagonist. He is a duellist: he is a man who desires — but that would be telling. ...
I’m heartbroken. I wanted to watch Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow forever, dancing back and forth in slow motion, captured in the timeless rhythm of Wong Kar Wai’s directing. Despite the titles which fix the story in Hong Kong: 1962 and Singapore: 1963 and Cambodia: 1966 — despite them, there’s no chronology to it. There are panes of glass layered one on top of another, and you peer through them murkily, making out the outline of a fruitless love affair. ...
Pros: Drew Barrymore, Red Sox, Nick Hornsby. Cons: Jimmy Fallon. So that was a pretty easy call. Alas, Fallon did not rise to the honorable occasion of working on a Red Sox movie. Thus, I got about what I expected out of Fever Pitch — a light, airy romantic comedy with some Red Sox bits that made me mist up. It’s got most of the spirit of being a Boston fan about right. There’s a Boston Dirt Dogs T-shirt, they knew it was important to make a big deal about Ted Williams at the 1999 All Star Game, and so on. There’s a jarring scene where Fallon’s “summer family” of season ticket holders get all anxious about the Curse of the Bambino, though, which pissed me off something fierce. The Curse is a mythical publicity tool that mostly sells Dan Shaughnessy books. Perpetuating it at this stage of the game is hackneyed and lazy. ...
To my disappointment, the Boston Underground Film Festival’s copy of Able Edwards (original) was flawed or scratched or something and they were only able to show the first fifteen minutes of the movie. It was a keen enough fifteen minutes, though. I could have sworn I’d written about this movie before, but I can’t find the post in the archives. Able Edwards is a thinly veiled Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse becomes Perry Panda) who is cloned after an ecological disaster in order to revitalize Disney. Er, revitalize Edwards Corporation. According to other reviews, the cloned Edwards suffers an identity crisis of some sort. Regrettably, we didn’t get that far. ...
I was going to watch Infernal Affairs last night but then I said “whoa, Bryant. Cut back on the noir. There’s been nothing but for a while; maybe it’s time for a break?” In service of purging the noir obsession from my system, let’s get the last two movies I saw at the Brattle L.A. Noir series into one post, shall we? It’s especially convenient since they were a double bill. Sounds like a plan. ...