Backlash time! Slumdog Millionaire was pretty fun and I can always lounge back and watch Danny Boyle get all flamboyant with his camera, but it wouldn’t find a place among my ten best films of the year. Also I’m going to say snide things about its relationship to City of God. Problem one: I’m too sensitive to the conditions depicted with such skill. The Mumbai slums are atrociously awful, and the poverty level we’re seeing is horrifying. Boyle’s really good at showing this. The early scene with Jamal covered in shit, running around oblivious – you laugh and you’re repulsed at your laughter, because it’s funny but guys. That kid is covered in shit and he’s going to get an infection and die or be scarred for life. This is bad. ...

As per request, quick summaries of the tools I’m using to GM D&D 4e: First cool tool: the GameMastery Combat Pad Initiative Tracker. It’s a wet/dry erase board with a steel core and a bunch of magnets that you shuffle around to track initiative. It works very well; in the first session, I was pretty much able to run combats with the module and the tracker held in one hand. However, it’s got a lot of wasted space. ...

I saw the Che roadshow down at the Kendall Square Theater in Cambridge this last weekend. Quite the experience. It started with a nice glossy program book, which I’ll have to take a picture of, since I can’t find any out there on the Web. As the very serious posters on the wall explained, it’s an old school roadshow, which means no opening or closing credits: those were in the program book. We collectively shuffled in, found seats, watched the lights dim, and saw a map of Cuba come up on the screen. For the next minute or so, various regions of Cuba were highlighted and named: sort of 50s geography filmstrip. And then the movie proper began. ...

This is not a terribly difficult task; I’ve done it before. The motivation is to get writing again. I am 99% sure I can make a sale in two and a half years, so I’m content to make this one contingent on success. As opposed to fiction sales, which are dicier.

I like film festivals a lot. The minimum number of movies means I can’t finish this off by just hitting the Boston Film Festival once; I have to do the festival thing, read film listings, and participate. I would count Harry Knowles’ Butt-Numb-A-Thon for the purposes of this, although it’s unlikely. More likely candidates: Fantasia, the Boston Independent Film Festival, maybe the Tribeca Film Festival if I get ambitious, or the Boston Fantastic Film Festival (which didn’t run this year).

If we lived in the future, AMC would put every episode of The Prisoner up for free viewing. There, isn’t that nice? I strongly recommend this if you’ve never seen it; it’s a perfect marriage of surrealism, British spy drama, and anti-authoritarianism.

Other than that the showrunner is a geek’s geek, who has credits in RPGs, comics, and of course television in the last year, how did I like the show? … that was way too overworked a sentence for the sake of a couple of cheap jokes. I want to put semi-colons in it, but I can’t figure out where. Anyway, how’s Leverage? Well, it’s not great television so far. Five episodes in, and I can’t say I have a strong emotional attachment to any of the characters. I say so far because I think the potential exists – Timothy Hutton’s a solid actor and there’s backstory to be developed there, and I’ve seen Gina Bellman dig out emotional grounding from a character who’s way more superficial than Sophie. So I think there’s potential. But it’s also the case that the characters are currently collections of quirks; in the introductory sequences, we saw what they could do rather than who they were. ...

2009 is not exactly getting off to a good start with the news of Donald Westlake’s death. He was a consummate professional. The guy knew how to write mysteries; his range went from the comic caper Dortmunder books to the hardboiled Parker novels. He was primarily a novelist, but he did a few screenplays too. The Grifters was probably too quiet a flick to get noticed a ton, but it’s one of my probably top twenty movies and the last scene still disturbs me like very few other cinematic moments. ...

I’m still trying to fuse the brilliant combat engine from D&D 4e with the brilliant narrative engine from Gumshoe. You may not have known I was trying to do this. But I am. Let’s skip over the skills question for now and pretend that we have a Gumshoe adventure all mapped out, with the multiple paths and the clues and the major and minor scenes. It’s a flowchart, basically. None of these scenes are directly combat-related, although it may require combat to reach a given scene. Here, have a PDF example. Contains spoilers for the Esoterrorists sample adventure, though! ...

Some guy named Shane Acker apparently made a student animation film called 9, which you can see online (original). It’s only like 10 minutes, it got nominated for an Oscar, go ahead. But because sometimes the right thing happens, it got picked up and now he’s directing the full-length movie version, with Elijah Wood and Crispin Glover and other people doing voices. There’s a trailer just out. I think maybe the right order is the trailer first, so your appetite is whetted, and then you can say “whoa, I can see a full version!” and watch the short, and then sit around contemplating whether or not adding voices and making it stretch longer is a mistake. It’s probably not, though.