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There’s a scene in the classic thriller The Day of the Jackal where cool, English, sophisticated Edward Fox is using his custom-made rifle to shoot at melons in a overgrown field in the middle of France. He’s doing this, wearing a very natty ascot, because he’s a paid assassin, practicing for his planned hit on French President Charles de Gaulle.

That’s a great juxtaposition. Debonair, efficient, not a care in the world, plugging away at watermelons and this works, there’s tension in this scene, because we the audience know that he’s planning on killing the President of France, and we know he knows. That he can be so suave while he’s imagining de Gaulle’s head exploding makes an otherwise non-descript scene work.

George Clooney as the title character in The American has exactly that same scene. Wildflowers instead of melons, Italy instead of France, and an overgrown river instead of an overgrown field. But the gun is his, also self-built.

Even though it’s the same scene, it is in all ways the opposite of the scene from Day of the Jackal. He made the gun as a job for someone else. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know who they’re going to kill. It’s not even clear that he knows who he works for, beyond a name and a phone number.

Lacking any awareness of the past, or any ability to understand the future, he acts in what must be considered an amoral way. For to act with morality, you must have some awareness, some context for your actions, and Clooney’s American has none of these things and if you’re wondering if this is somehow a comment on America, of course it fucking is.

It blows my mind that this movie opened at number one, though with a somewhat lower BO that you’d expect for a three-day weekend, because this is a bleak, spartan film. There’s not a lot of dialog. There’s not a lot of action. There’s a lot of George Clooney, alone, in his room. Alone on the streets of a small town in Italy. Alone in his car looking through a telephoto lens. People try to relate to him, with differing levels of success. It seems as though everyone he cares about ends up dead, and we never know why. We imagine maybe he knows why The Swedes are coming after him, but about halfway through the movie you realize that if his previous job was anything like his current job, he has no idea why they’re coming after him. Oh, because he killed someone, certainly. But who? And why? Why did they need to die? He doesn’t know.

So people end up dead around him and regardless of whether he or we know why, they certainly didn’t. The people he cares about who end up corpses, are as clueless as to who he is and why they are dead as anyone.

The American is very much aware of its place in moviedom. It would like you to have see Day of the Jackal first, then The Quiet American, then Ronin, then this movie. There’s no arc to Clooney’s character, but perhaps his character is the end of an arc that started with the idealistic Alden Pyle. Clooney’s character is very much Robert Deniro’s masterless CIA samurai, after Ronin. No more war to fight, no purpose except skill.

Even though he’s George Clooney, he does everything in his power as an actor to banish himself from the movie. When we see him in Italy, fit, in shades, we don’t see a dashing, debonair movie star. We see a random American with no identity, no past, no personality. Maybe he’s good-looking. Maybe people like him because he seems affable. But that’s something they’re projecting on to him. It’s got nothing to do with the man in the film.

There wouldn’t be much of a movie if it were just George Cloooney in Italy being paranoid, killing people, and making guns, so there’s a girl. A very pretty girl. She’s a prostitute. Which I feel like maybe you saw coming. Very popular role for women in movies.

He sees her because he can’t see anyone else, otherwise they’d end up dead (“The Swedes!!”) But of course he falls for her, and she falls for him. So there’s tension. Because he must suspect everyone, he suspects her. And maybe he has reason to.

Clooney manages to escape much peril through sheer instinct. He might guess someone he knows is going to try to kill him, but he can’t know why. There’s no greater purpose in anything he does, until he relates to a call girl. That has meaning for him. Will they live happily ever after?

What do you think?

Popularity: 2% [?]

The goal of the manifesto is simple; rebuild the network. Create a simple guide that, if used, if made popular, will result in a healthy and robust network of tabletop RPG players. We’ll get into what that means below, but let’s start with the manifesto. It’s simple.

1: A curious person is a new player

2: Playing is more important than learning.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. If we take these statements as axioms and put them to work, we will rebuild the network of gamers.

A Curious Player is a New Player

If people see you playing, if people see you reading, painting miniatures, if people hear you talking about the game and ask what it is? Tell them. Tell them it’s fun, it’s social, you get together with your friends and roll dice and kill stuff. You laugh, you have fun, and you come out the other side with intensely memorable experiences. Use references they’ll get. It’s like the Lord of the Rings except you get to be Gandalf. It’s like a video game except you don’t sit in a dark room staring at a TV.

Don’t be afraid to reference things people get. There’s nothing wrong with saying it’s like a movie, or like a video game. These are massively more popular forms of entertainment. If you feel  compelled to push the idea of “cooperative storytelling,” well, I can’t stop you. But regardless of what kind of game you play, I think this is the wrong way to sell RPGs. It’s at best an arcane idea and probably abstruse and misleading. People don’t know what ‘cooperative storytelling’ means and might not even realize they’re doing it while it’s happening. Let them discover the storytelling aspect. All RPGs have it. But people already know they like playing games, they don’t know if they like telling stories and it’s not your job to convince them they should.

Don’t wait for them to ask to play, invite them. Someone who asks you what you’re doing, even if they do it while seeming to look down on it, that person just overcame their natural tendency to keep their mouths shut, and tried to cross the divide. Meet them halfway. Don’t wait for them to ask! Ask them! They’re already curious!

If they say “no thanks,” let them. One of my friends thinks another of my friends is a douche because he spent 5 minutes trying to get her to play with us while she was trying to work. That was a long five minutes for her, after she’d already made herself clear. Respect their answers. If they say no, but you think maybe they can be converted, let them stew. Let them think about it, don’t bug them. No hard sell, we do this for fun!

This can be tough because if we all just always invite everyone who seems interested, many groups would very quickly get too large. But I think we can agree that we’d all be better off, happier, dealing with the problem of Too Many players, rather than Too Few. The first step, then, is to ask the curious person to become a new player.

Playing is More Important than Learning

When someone sits down to play with you for the first time, they don’t want to be intimidated. Stacks of books, charts, lots of choices that don’t mean anything to them yet, it’s confusing and it gets in the way of the goal: play. Even if your favorite game is a pamphlet you bought off someone’s website and then printed out yourself, the player who sits down with you for the first time doesn’t want to read that pamphlet, doesn’t want to make choices about their character, they want to play. You may think “but this game is so simple, there are only 4 choices to make in character creation!” That’s fine; if they like playing the game, they can make their own character and their own choices next time. But the first thing that happens when a new player sits down is they get to play.

Even if you did everything in your power to make it as easy to play as possible, a new player would still have a lot to learn. Remember that for a new player, everything is new. Including even the idea of getting together with your friends to play games! They’re going to be intimidated. It’s your job to make them feel welcome. The new player is going to be learning everything, they’re going to be learning you, learning the group, learning how everyone behaves and what’s expected. That’s a lot and we haven’t even gotten to the rules of the game yet! The goal, then, must be to maximize play, and learning through play.

How do we do this? Easy. Make sure new players have everything they need when they sit down for the first time.

• Dice
• Pencil and Paper
• A pregenerated character, preferably one that has cool stuff to do, but is not too complex. Don’t go overboard.
• A mini, if appropriate. You’d be surprised how many new players key off things like the funky dice, or the cool miniatures.

Once you’ve done this, you’ve just gotten started. Now you have to be a good GM and a good group of players, but the Manifesto can’t do that. That’s not its job. Just make sure the new player gets to do things, preferably right away. Helping a new player have fun is a short-term sacrifice for you and your friends, for a long-term payoff. It’s an investment. For this one night, it’s ok that you’re not the star of the show. Let the new player be cool. If the new player is intimidated by all the attention, let the new player watch for a while. Either way the goal is the same; make sure the new guy has fun.

A group that gets large may need to have more than one GM, more than one group, evolve into a collective where you show up and don’t know who your GM is going to be or which of the 20 players you’re going to be gaming with, but that’s how it used to be! That’s how RPGs were originally played in 1974, that’s how the phenomenon grew. We play now because those ur-players followed this manifesto without ever writing it down. They derived it. And for a long time the network was healthy.

The network grew to the point where it was so large, and the game was so popular, that eventually in the mid-1980s when the hobby exploded, people who weren’t full-time geeks became gamers and those people once they got into college and shortly thereafter felt weird talking about gaming to normal, non-gamers. People shut up, started playing in groups of 4 and 6 in private and saying “I play RPGs” meant you were weird. The network suffered.

But that was 20 years ago and while the damage that period did to the network was pretty bad, geek culture is now mainstream. There are more of us now than there are of them. Let’s go back to inviting new players. Let’s get the hobby back where it was, and then take it farther. Don’t wait for your favorite designer, don’t wait for the license holders and corporations, just follow the manifesto, and the network will repair itself.

Let’s make new gamers.

Popularity: 14% [?]

The issue here isn’t spoilers. The issue is one of trust and here you just need to trust Chris Nolan.

The midnight showings of Inception in Burbank were sold out. Why? It’s not a Batman movie. Leonardo DiCaprio can’t open a huge film now, probably never could. The trailer is AT BEST confusing. So why were people packing the theaters?

There’s only one answer. They trust Chris Nolan. He’s earned it, I think we can agree. And for that reason, I entreat you not to read this review until after you’ve seen the film. I try my best below not to give anything away, but sometimes even knowing there’s something to give away gives something away. If you keep reading, then I warn you, you will lose some of the thrill of seeing the movie for the first time.  Continue reading…

Popularity: 28% [?]

Like the A-Team I feel I’m writing here for an audience who wonders what kind of movie this is, rather than because I have some insight burning to get out. Hopefully that’s a good enough reason.

If you think Predators are neat, and by this I mean, the idea of Predators absent any specific instantiation of them, if you watched the movies and read the comics, if you’re over 30 and you’ve got kids and you’re raising them to love all the stuff you loved growing up and you’re looking forward to taking them to see “a Predator movie” then this movie is for you. You’ll love it. Stop reading.

If, on the other hand, you love Predator, the original film from 1987, and think it was special and have never really given a shit about any of the Predator stuff that’s come since, and you’re wondering if this movie will be like that movie, then no. It won’t be. Stay home, save your money. Or go see A-Team, that’s lots of fun.

The original film is a snapshot of the Summer Action Movie in transition. The first 20 minutes of Predator is a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie. Commando, Conan, Raw Deal take your pic.

But after the movie opens with an homage to the Commando-era action movies, it does something extraordinary. It goes into the jungle. The movie itself goes into the jungle with the heroes and the Predator destroys those 1980s ideas just like it does the characters in the movie. The characters in the film are not prepared for what’s in there, because they all just walked off the set of other 1980s action movies. Where they win. They always win. The Predator’s arrival announces that those kinds of heroes cannot survive in the new action movie. Muscles and guns are no longer enough. It’s going to take smarter, leaner heroes, everyman heroes like Mel Gibson or the balding Bruce Willis to save the day from now on. It reinvents Arnie and allows him forever after to be smart enough to continue making action movies in the ’90s. There was no indication, going into it, that this was the movie you were in for. You look at the cast and you think you’re getting a Walter Hill movie. Nothing could be further from the truth.

That was the virtue of the first movie. You had NO IDEA what was going to happen next. Presuming you haven’t been so oversaturated with culture that you know the entire story without having seen it. That first time, it was pretty intense. Especially if you grew up in the 80s and presumed Action Jackson and Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura were going to make it.

Certainly there are many members of my generation who loved Predator because the alien was bad-ass, for which see paragraph #2 above. But I think for some of us, it opened our eyes to the idea that an action movie could be a little clever. A little smart. Encourage us to think. Show us heroes who think, and who persevere and win not only because of oiled muscles and oiled guns, but because they’re smart. That’s something I’ve been missing recently; heroes who have a virtue other than being pretty.

Predator showed you a real jungle. They went and filmed in a real jungle and the location scouts did an excellent job picking a place that let John McTiernan put his camera anywhere and create whatever feeling he wanted. Confusion, claustrophobia, or vast open space, awe. At one point, the camera gives us a shot and you felt like you could see and understand the shape of the jungle. Where everything was. Just as Arnie is figuring everything out, we are figuring the jungle out.

This movie, the jungle feels like a series of sets. There’s no sense of space. No sense of reality. Just props. Robert Rodriguez is famous for making great movies on the cheap, but this may be an instance of a little too cheap. John McTiernan had the benefit of being bankrolled by a huge studio.

McTiernan is a genius at this stuff. Predator, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, The Last Action Hero, The 13th Warrior. The dude invented the smart action movie. Rodriguez is pretty good, he might have been able to pull of a real spiritual sequel, but Robert Rodriguez didn’t direct this movie. Nimród Antal did. I haven’t seen anything this dude has done, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say, this movie was outside his brief.

It’s much more like a Twilight Zone episode. It opens just like Five Characters in Search of an Exit. But why? The whole purpose of that opening on the Twilight Zone was to keep you asking questions. Here, that same opening is used explicitly to avoid questions and answers. You already know why they’re there. You might not know who they are, but you know who they are.

Rather, this movie uses that opening because it wants to get straight to the action. It wants to dispense with story and character, plot and dialog, and just show the audience a bunch of dudes being hunted down and killed by Predators. It’s Fanservice. The whole movie is essentially fanservice. Without characters having sex with each other.

There’s a character in here with literally two lines of dialog who exists solely so there can be a fight between a Samurai and a Predator. That’s fanservice. That’s a pretty good definition of fanservice. I haven’t seen everything ever made, but if I had, I’d probably still think the scene from this movie where a modern-day Yakuza on an alien planet re-enacts a scene from The Seven Samurai complete with katana, against a Predator, was Plato’s Ideal Fanservice  of which All Others are Mere Shadows.

Now, certainly there’s an audience for that. There always will be. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that I am not that audience. The audience for this movie believes it when a character says “I’ve been in every jungle on earth, and this don’t feel right. Too hot for Africa. Wrong season for Indonesia….”

In that sense, it deploys a lot of comic book logic and characterization. Characters who can tell a guy is a member of the Yakuza because he’s Japanese and wearing a nice suit. Characters who can speak with authority about fighting in every jungle in the world.

Adrien Brody is the only actor who makes it through this movie with his dignity intact. No one else is given anything to do. But Brody, while wasted, at least shows us some of the charisma and acting chops that won him an Oscar. The rest of the cast, some are very fine actors, but they could all be replaced with random people from Central Casting and the movie would not suffer for it.

The movie never seems to take its own premise seriously. Apart from one line, no one in the movie thinks to wonder why Topher Grace’s character is there. Probably because it’s so obvious as soon as anyone starts to think about it.

You put some extreme people in an extreme situation, the expectation is we’re going to see humanity pushed to the extreme. Das Boot in a jungle with aliens. Alas here, everyone knows they’re in a Predator movie and so no work is done to show us anything but the absolute minimum required by the plot. The Scene Where He Won’t Tell Them His Name. The Scene Where He Says ‘I Work Best Alone.’ The Scene Where Two of Them Don’t Get Along. The Scene Where They Become Friends.

There are many people for whom the fun of moviegoing lies in recognizing those scenes. Execution plays no part in the process. They expect those scenes and so, if you put those scenes in front of them, they are satisfied.

For good or ill, I am not that kind of moviegoer. Happily there are plenty of other good movies!

Popularity: 16% [?]

With big-budget summer fare, I think often people look to reviewers for permission more than anything else. Sometimes, with movies everyone’s talking about like Avatar, we want permission not to go. We want someone to confirm our suspicion that the movie is awful so we feel better about not seeing it. Or, in the case of a movie like The A-Team, we want someone to give us permission to go, remove the guilt from the guilty-pleasure and say “hey, it’s pretty good. Don’t feel bad about wanting to go see it!”

Allow me to be your enabler. Hey, it’s pretty good! Don’t feel bad about wanting to see it!

This is how you resurrect a beloved property. You play it completely straight, and just make a bad-ass film. Anyone who remembers the original series with fondness (warning: do not attempt to enhance that fondness by going back and watching the original!) will love this, and anyone who’s never heard of or seen the original will have a great time. It’s exactly what I wanted from The Losers, but only got glimpses of, here and there.

Somewhat bravely, the movie does not take our heroes’ backstory and shove the whole thing offscreen, open with a jailbreak. Nor does the Set Up, the mechanism by which the team ends up in jail, or breaks out, happen in the first ten minutes. Oh no. First we get an over-the-top action sequence whereby our heroes meet and Hannibal gets the team together. Then we fast forward several years, to Iraq and the modern day, and the team are tasked with recovering some stolen plates used for forging US currency. This is the operation wherein the team is set up.

That arc, from getting the team together and recovering the stolen plates, is fully half the movie. This is a movie that takes its time with its characters, lavishes action sequences around, and allows the actors time to show camaraderie.

That’s my favorite thing in all moviedom, camaraderie. So when you put it in front of me, I tend to like it. My problem with The Losers is that we rarely got to see them doing their thing and enjoying it. There’s nothing in The A-Team that’s as much fun, as perfect and beautiful, as the Don’t Stop Believing sequence from The Losers, but in retrospect that’s all The Losers had. Whereas the A-Team has several fantastic action sequences, lots of laughs, some good dialog, sympathetic characters. Pretty much everything you want from a summer action movie.

Alas a movie like this is only as good as its bad-guy and that’s where everything kinda falls apart. The plot, how the story gets from point A to point B after the first half, probably makes sense if I spent a lot of time trying to puzzle it out, but I didn’t then and I’m not going to now. I think a lot of movies, and a lot of video games, give plot short shrift. Yes, you can take for granted that the audience will follow the characters anywhere if you’ve done your work, and so the plot becomes window-dressing. It only needs to *sound* like it makes sense. The audience will tune out, but they’ll think “presumably this would make sense if I paid attention,” and so you, the writer, escape. You’ve tricked your audience into thinking you knew what you were talking about, even if they didn’t. But that’s what separates a movie like Die Hard or Romancing the Stone from awful action movies: incredibly tight plotting. Everyone knows what Hans wanted in Die Hard and how he was going to get it. But it’s not clear to me why there were two or three bad guys in this movie and what they wanted. Or, maybe it is, I’m not sure.

None of the bad guys are memorable. It’s the rare movie that stacks villains two or three deep and keeps them all memorable and compelling. Robocop is probably the best at this. Die Hard has two good bad guys. Lethal Weapon had two, but one was forgettable. If the plot for the second half were a little more straight forward, if there was one fantastic bad guy–and it’s no small challenge to find someone to play the heavy to Neeson’s hero–then we’d be talking about a truly great action movie. But what we get instead is still a surprising amount of fun, and better–I feel–than The Losers which it inspired.

The actors take to their roles well. There’s a little too much work in getting things like “I love it when a plan comes together” to make sense. I’m not sure a statement like that needs an explanation, but at the same time we learn why BA hates to fly, and it’s pretty spectacular. So the principle is sound, they just go overboard a little trying to get the actors to convincingly say lines of dialog designed to explicate character we don’t need explicated.

Liam Neeson is a born leader and has been a friend to genre work ever since Excalibur, Krull, and Darkman. Here, we believe these men would follow him, we believe he’s got everything worked out, and we believe nothing is as crazy as it looks.

It was fun watching Sharlto Copley from District 9 being, if not too crazy, just crazy enough.  His accent comes and goes and if you’ve ever wondered what a South African speaking with a Louisiana accent would sound like, it turns out it sounds Australian. I have no explanation for this, its purely observational analysis. His Murdock is slightly more believable than the one we got in the TV show, in that you feel this is a character using the insanity bit as a smokescreen, possibly for some deep disturbance, rather than an actor using it to get a laugh.

I have no idea where Quinton Jackson came from, I haven’t bothered to look him up, because I don’t need to. I have some awareness that he’s from some other entertainment, which means probably wrestling, but who cares? It would only matter if there were a problem, and there’s no problem. There are a few moments where he’s sitting opposite Liam Neeson and you realize he’s out of his league…and you realize he’s realizing it, but mostly he’s acting off the other two members of the team and he’s a lot of fun.

The guy they have as Face is a lot of fun, but doesn’t get much chance to show us why he’s on the team. That’s another thing that’s not a problem; we like him and we like the interplay between the four characters, but Liam Neeson is a pretty charismatic dude, and pretty good looking, so you need some other reason to have Face on the team besides charm and good looks. He needs to be the thief, the cat burglar and while we get one or two moments that hint at that, it would have been nice to see it.

It’d be nice if we could have a sequel to this, but there’s no real need. Plenty of action movies to go around. But it’s an awful lot of fun to watch Liam Neeson having fun in an action movie.

Popularity: 23% [?]