Danger, Will Robinson! D&D post! (I know. But I can’t bring myself to clog up the community with boring crap about a character nobody actually plays with. Er, clog it up more than once, anyhow.)

Just in case anyone was missing it – most of my D&D commentary will wind up over here, since I wanted my compatriots to be able to post as well.

Ack, I never wrote about The Wrestler. Well, there’s not that much new to say, really. It’s fundamentally a simple tearjerker, which is where Darren Aronofsky does a lot of his best work. Like Pi and Requiem for a Dream, he’s telling a story about outsiders. I think that’s his niche as well: people who can’t relate or participate in what we might cynically call the world of the squares. Or marks. Mickey Rourke is really good. It doesn’t hurt that he’s reiterating his own story of burn out and stupidity, of course; still, he’s really good. I’ve seen a fair number of the movies he’s made in the last five or six years. He’s not just acting the same part repeatedly. He gets the pain and suffering and – eh, call it what it is; Randy “the Ram” Robinson is not smart. I tend to think that’s a commentary on twenty years of concussions, but regardless, Rourke’s playing a dense caring guy with a lot of skill. ...

I have these nice omnibus editions. I’ve read other Gene Wolfe books and liked ’em. I’ve read the first couple hundred pages of Shadow of the Torturer at least four times. Time to stop stalling out!

Looking back, I never did talk about Fringe outside of some RPG wanking. That was because I wasn’t that enchanted with the show. John Noble is a superior being, and his Walter Bishop is a great TV character, but I found Anna Torv to be fairly dull and uninteresting. Her FBI agent was bland and played the victim a bit too much for my tastes. As of the 11th episode, “Bound,” things changed. Agent Dunham… let’s say she revealed her inner badass rather than claiming her characterization changed, because I haven’t gone back and watched the early episodes to see if I missed something. She is now really interesting, because we’re seeing this vast well of anger inside her, which she mostly has to keep repressed. But man, it comes out sometimes. She is ruthless without being apologetic and without making a big deal of it. ...

A bout of wrestling with my mail spool brought it down to a mere 50-odd messages. Go me! I am now graphing this as an aid to diligence: Um. I will edit those images so as to be visible on the blog later.

The chic thing to do is to keep it at 0 messages. Ha ha. But I got it under 50 over the fall and I kept it there for a few months; let’s make sure I can keep that up for a while.

Check off American Gangster on the Oscars list. I don’t think I’ll bother to do a whole review. It was okay, very competent, not great. Ruby Dee got an Oscar nomination for like five minutes of acting, which was probably not deserved.

See all the Oscar nominees for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Film, Best Animated Film, Best Directing, Best Documentary, and Best Foreign Film for any year. 2007 looks pretty plausible, actually. Update to task: Here’s the 2007 Oscar winner checklist. I added screenplays, because it wasn’t going to mean too many more movies. Those I’ve seen are in bold.

Finished entering the 100 best films you’ve never heard of etc. Man, for a site with a cool concept, the interface for adding things to lists is painful. Well, no, more correctly, the search interface is atrocious. You can literally search on a full title, find nothing, then search on the first two words of the title and get the movie you want. It could also use some data normalization. They key on Amazon entries, which is wise, since the revenue stream is Amazon affiliate links. However, there’s no linkage, so if you note that you’ve consumed a movie in one format there’s no record of it being consumed in any other. ...