Ken St. Andre arrives at TIFF

Reporteth Spawn:

Ken St. Andre returned to Toronto for the premiere of his new Tunnels and Trolls movie, a joint production of Film Canada, Canal+ and Flying Buffalo, at the Toronto International Film Festival. Sporting a new hat and buoyed by recent appearances at OSRCon and GenCon, St. Andre was heard to say that his film was way better than films about That Other Game, that Gygax couldn't screen-write his way out of a paper bag, and that no one around here seemed to be able to take a joke. The film is scheduled for limited release in time for Christmas 2012.

John Carter of Mars

The City of Helium

I saw the new John Carter movie on Wednesday, and I really liked it.  While acknowledging that it ain't Shakespeare, I nevertheless enjoyed it thoroughly.  It was great fun to see Barsoom brought to vivid life, and I would single out the film's depiction of the Tharks, its portrayal Carter's faithful "hound" Woola, and its casting of Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris as particular high points.  The airships were killer too.  I wasn't totally sold on Taylor Kitsch as John Carter at first -- I agree with Al that he could have been characterized as more of a "chivalrous gentleman," as in the ERB books -- but he grew on me over the course of the movie.  

As you may know, there has been a ton of press circulating about how the film is a colossal box-office flop, sunk due to the studio's overindulgence of director Andrew Stanton and a seriously botched marketing campaign.  That all makes fascinating reading, and I am especially interested in (and, having seen the film, frustrated by) Disney's last-minute decision to change the film's title from the appropriately evocative John Carter of Mars to the blandly obtuse John Carter.  This was a big blunder that, if corrected, may not have widened the actual audience for the film by a great margin, but as it stood surely didn't help the film's chances to accrue the following it deserves.

Much of the press about John Carter zeroes in only upon the tumultuous production and distribution circumstances that brought the film to the screen.  Yet as a loyal Edgar Rice Burroughs fan who knew I wanted to see John Carter even if it was flawed in certain ways, I am more interested in the movie that actually made it to the screen.  I want to judge the film on its own merits.

A Red Martian airship

On that score, John Carter is a total success.  It is an engaging, thoughtfully crafted and very well made science-fantasy action epic.  I would even say that it is the superior, entertainment-value-wise, of many recent superhero films including Thor and Iron Man 2.  I personally had much more fun watching John Carter than I have practically any other big-budget movie since the first Iron Man.

For a really smart video review of the film itself, check out the Red Letter Media "Half in the Bag" Review, which begins at the 11:03 mark in the linked episode.

At around the 13:44 mark in that review, Jay (the light-haired guy on the right) calls John Carter a "1980's throwback," and that assessment may account for much of its appeal to me. I am forty years old, and my movie tastes are starting to become increasingly "old-fashioned" I think. I really enjoyed John Carter's fun spirit and straightforward, comprehensible action sequences. In fact, the editing of the action sequences in John Carter works for me in ways that the action-sequence cutting seen in Christopher Nolan's Batman films or Michael Bay's Transformers films does not. I find much of the action portions of those movies to be literally baffling; I cannot tell what the hell is going on from shot to shot. In addition to its general fidelity to source material I care about, John Carter moves more at my pace, editing-wise, and I like that.

To pick a couple of nits, I would say that John Carter's flashbacks to Carter's dead wife (??!) were totally unnecessary and did nothing for the story being told. The dialogue was a bit clunky and stilted at points, though no worse than what we get in most big-budget action films (this is where Nolan's work leaps ahead of the competition). I also wasn't totally keen on the role the shape-shifting Therns played in the narrative -- I agree with Oliver Lyttelton's point #6, which states that: "For all the many antagonists thrown at him in the first 90 minutes, John Carter finds out in the last third of the movie, it’s actually Matai Shang (played by Mark Strong) who's the villain. Pulling the strings behind Sab Than’s quest for power, he spends most of the movie keeping an eye on John Carter before they finally meet head to head late in the game, although he doesn't simply kill Carter, because he's a cliched movie bad guy." The Therns indeed seemed bad just for badness' sake, and I would have liked to see more actual development of the Sab Than character and a greater emphasis on the substance of the rivalry between John Carter and Sab Than.

In conclusion, I must admit that director Stanton's attention to the details of the original Burroughs concepts may alienate or confuse many viewers not already familiar with John Carter from ERB's books (Lyttelton makes this his point #4). Yet I also can't see how any moderately intelligent viewer wouldn't figure out what a"Jeddak" was once it is used three or four times in the course of the dialogue (which it is in rapid succession at the film's outset).  Come on, folks, how much spoon-feeding is necessary?  I admire Stanton for sticking to his guns and keeping Barsoomian language more or less intact -- it gives this movie flavor and uniqueness.

Jay of Red Letter Media captures this spirit when he remarks (starting around the 18:18 mark) that "I see this movie having the same fate as other big-budget movies that don't find an audience in the theater, like Tron or David Lynch's Dune, it finds its audience later, becomes more of a cult movie."  This sounds right to me. I think John Carter -- which thankfully retains its full original title, John Carter of Mars, in the title card right at the end of the movie -- will age well, and will be regarded more highly once the hubbub over its big budget and small theatrical returns have died down.  I plan to see this film again when it releases to DVD, and I know that I will be an avid member of the cult of John Carter of Mars.

Lynn Collins says: "Come see me as Dejah Thoris in John Carter -- I'm so good I practically steal the movie!"

Las Hurdes: Surrealist Documentary of a D&D Town?

From the world of dissertation madness writes Spawn:

Yesterday I was trying to find a reference to something I had written in a journal of mine from 1994 about labyrinths and illusory walls apropos of a conversation with Carter the other day. Then I got sucked into the journal, this was from a fairly rough period in my life during college. (Note to dissertation writers: Don't move across the country in the middle of writing a diss, and never pull out a journal from 17 years ago. Probably you shouldn't be contributing to a blog either.) And I came across this passage from Nov. 23, 1994, the day before Thanksgiving that year:

Today watched this terrible documentary (Los Hurdas) [sic] about goiter victims and dirt-eating cretins and idiots in Spain. Firecracker murder of mountain goats.

This was in an anthro class, Human Adaptability and Variation, which I absolutely loved, and I presume it was a day-before-Thanksgiving filler. Yesterday I looked this up and found out it was actually called "Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan", (Land without Bread), and depicts the incredibly hard life in the Las Hurdes region in the 1930s, a perennially neglected and shunned area of northern Spain, practically medieval even then. The instructor was making a point about the social abuses of physical anthropology in the early 20th century (e.g., cretinism was a diagnosable condition, not just a snobby insult), and how the doco was so staged and artificial. Hence the "firecracker murder of mountain goats": there's a scene where the dispassionate narrator is talking about how the people only rarely eat meat, such as when a mountain goat falls to it's death. The instructor said they set off firecrackers to make the goat fall for the film (you can see a puff of smoke, frame-right). It's only 30 minutes, you should watch it. This is the "Unpromised Land" version, which differs subtly from the original narration*, but is a better film transfer:

 What I didn't know was that the film was made by Luis Bunuel, everyone's favorite early surrealist film-maker. And they shot the goat, it wasn't firecrackers. Even if you've never seen his earlier film "Un Chien Andalu", you know Dali was involved, there's ants crawling out of hands, and as the Pixies remind us "Got me a movie! Ooh-ho-ho-ho! Slicin' up eyeballs! Ooh-ho-ho-ho!". Well, in fact, there's an argument (thanks Wikipedia) to be made that the whole thing is in fact more of a parody of documentary films than a mean-spirited effort to portray these people as degenerate sub-humans. Mr. Ruoff's article presents a really interesting analysis. It seems that no one got the joke at the time, or even into the 1990s.

But now that you are properly repositioned as a voyeur of this film, and let's say you watch it three more times and work through your moral outrage at yourself or film or anthropology or surrealism or Franco, this would be a creepy place to go into if the absurdities the doco lays on to reality were accepted as true. By all accounts life was extraordinarily difficult in the region, but in a D&D setting, you enter a town and the festival involves 6 guys pulling the heads off of upside down roosters ... I think Raggi has a module like this. Why do they do all this crazy stuff? Why do they not know what bread is, when they were given bread by the 6 heroes? What's wrong with their water, outside of pigs? Or do the pigs have anything to do with the water? What's the deal with the 18 ruined hermitages within the monastery walls? You get a sense of a fundamentally corrupted, poisoned, cursed land. Maybe the PCs need to figure out what is doing this to the folk and remedy the situation?

Of course the fact that no rooster heads or attempts at ripping them off are shown in the film seems to suggest that this isn't actually what went on in Alberca. Our belief is suspended by the narrator's tone and the ethnographic feel of the film. But, even with the surrealism and sarcasm, the average viewer can probably gain a historical sense that the people suffered because of failures of social governance rather than an evil demon living in a cave who makes even their honey bitter. But it's that sort of metaphorical, mythical imagery -- their honey is bitter! Maybe that's not "weird" but it's wrong -- that makes it interesting for thinking about a Village of Hommlet, or a much warmer, drier version of Vornheim, or Children of the Corn, or Parlier, or wherever else.

And you can impress your friends with references to surrealist film and critiques of ethnography. Win-win!

_________________
* What I think is closer to the first English-language narration is in 3 parts: here, here and here.

It's a Wonderful Blog

If you missed yesterday-and-half's happenings, here's a Spawn of Endra recap. Fill in the blanks as needed, rearrange the panels as suits your own situation. This happens to every humane being, repeatedly.

 

And of course the lost ending to It's a Wonderful Blog.

As my dear friend Frank told me: "If you can still laugh, you know you're either sane or insane." Sometimes that's enough.

Christopher Reeve's Penny

In the classic time-travel romance movie Somewhere in Time, the protagonist, played by Christopher Reeve, hypnotizes himself so he can travel backwards in time to 1912, the period in which an actress he is obsessed with lives. All is well until at one point late in the film, he breaks the hypnotic spell that allows him to exist in the past by accidentally glimpsing a penny from his own time: as synopsized on Wikipedia,

[Reeve's character Richard Collier] reaches into [his pocket] and finds a shiny new Lincoln penny with a mint date of 1979. Seeing an item from his real present wrenches him out of his hypnotically-induced time trip, and Richard feels himself rushing backwards with Elise screaming his name in horror as he is pulled inexorably out of 1912.

I think that certain game mechanics act like that penny for me: they obtrude into my immersive game experience and pull me out of the game world as I want to inhabit it. The particular concepts or mechanics that create this effect are purely idiosyncratic to me, and are admittedly based upon my own early experiences with the RPG'ing hobby. They may even designate me as a curmudgeon. If so, so be it.

I raise this issue because I am doing my best to motivate myself to return to the regular teen gaming group I first visited a few weeks ago, but I am having trouble. And I admit that my reticence is in large part because the group plays D&D IV. This is NOT a rant against that system in general, and believe me when I say that I really do wish that I could be as mature as Christian and simply "be quiet and play the [4e] game to my best ability and to do my best to be a good participant, even though it lacks many structural and thematic events that I prefer." But I struggle, because for me, simply hearing the words "healing surge" or "daily power" at a game session does to me what that penny did to poor Christopher Reeve: it sends me "rushing backwards, pulled inexorably" out of the world of the game. I want to rise above such pettiness, but I am finding it quite difficult -- as The Happy Whisk asks in Christian's comments, "Why are you playing a game you don't enjoy?"*

Why indeed?

Of course, I have an answer to that question: because I want to convert said D&D group to the Old Ways, to get them playing Labyrinth Lord. And I may be able to get back in there and stick it out long enough to accomplish that goal, assuming the group is willing to go there. But right now I am really struggling. I am not proud of this, but there it is.

And for the Joesky tax:

Penny of Retrieval
The Penny of Retrieval is a very rare item thought to have been created by insane wizard Alaxxx Leprongo Kulikkx. This unassuming-looking copper coin (worth 1 cp if not recognized as magical) automatically returns one teleported or gated being to its point of origin. All the being must do is look at the coin, and s/he or it is instantaneously transported back to the place from which s/he or it was first gated or teleported. The coin works equally well within one dimension or interdimensionally, and functions whether or not the user is aware of its presence or function. In fact, the Penny of Retrieval is often slipped into a dimensional traveler's pockets without his/her/its prior knowledge.

--
* Just so you don't think I am picking on D&D IV exclusively here, allow me to mention that ascending AC is another such "penny" for me -- the penny that has so far kept me from playing Swords and Wizardry despite my immense respect for that game.  Just seeing ascending AC figures in the S&W White Box booklets somehow ruins the vibe for me. [EDIT: I am eating those latter words now.]

V for Vampire

[Note: Any non-gamers tuning in to this series of posts are invited to consult my New Reader Introduction for some RPG-specific definitions and a general introduction to the Lands of Ara blog.]

As regular readers know, I am a huge fan of vampires, and have accordingly decreed that the typical Arandish Vampire is much more powerful than the "standard" D&D vampire. I have little to add to my prior comments about the role vampires play in my D&D game, but I want to take this opportunity to explain which pop-cultural (and specifically, cinematic) vampires have been most influential to me.

Being a Generation Xer who came of age in the 80's, the first truly scary vampire I remember seeing on film (or, in this case, on TV), was Mr. Barlow, "the Master" in Tobe Hooper's 1979 mini-series adaptation of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. That sonofabitch is SCARY looking, and when he first popped up in that jail cell sequence, he scared the crap out of me.

At the time, I was of course aware of Bela Lugosi's famous 1930 portrayal of Dracula, but I found the Salem's Lot vampire much more frightening and believable: less human or "civilized" than Lugosi and much more like a bald, rat-like, animalistic bloodsucker. Nasty!

As a young lad I did not know that Hooper's depiction of Mr. Barlow in Lot was an homage to the ORIGINAL cinematic vampire, Count Orlok, portrayed by Max Schreck in F.W. Murnau's classic silent film Nosferatu (1922).

Today, as an "adult" and a professional film scholar, I would nominate Schreck's performance in Murnau's masterpiece as the best embodiment of a screen vampire ever. So creepy, especially in the "Death Ship" sequence:

 Still images hardly do this scene justice -- it's how Schreck moves across that deck that really conveys his uncanny "undeadness."

To conclude, I would be remiss if I did not mention the second-greatest vampire portrayal ever, and surely the best one of the sound cinema era: Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula in Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of Nosferatu.

 Bruno Ganz as Harker and Klaus Kinski as Dracula.

 "Listen! The children of the night make their music!"

Note the overarching trend here: bald, ratlike vampires = scary!

I know how this guy feels!

Where’s Our ELP? An Outline for a Destined-to-be-Classic Campaign Setting...

... inspired by (or derived from) the music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

The Spawn of Endra says: I shit you not.

I read ChicagoWiz’s post of last week and at first was stumped: “Our EPT”? ... Emerson Palmer and ...? Emerson .... “Oh, Empire of the Petal Throne,” I realized. “There’s something I know fuck-all about.” And so I immediately posted several grumbly-assed comments here and there about liking the derivative game I play (with which I still abide).

But before that a few posts got me thinking (unintentionally) about Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, to wit those mentioning Baba Yaga’s Hut as a 1e magic item, and Baba Yaga herself, e.g., where Mandy and Zak were talking about Baba Yaga as an NPC in her game. That got me thinking about making borscht for our game group (folks liked it; if you use this recipe you should add 2-3 cloves garlic, and probably puree before serving). For me, Baba Yaga brings up Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (in the form of “The House on Fowl’s Legs”) and of course ELP’s live album of the same name from 1972. So then I thought, could I make up a campaign setting in the Lands of Ara (but probably on a different continent than Ara, or on a different planet in the Ara universe) using material from ELP? I’ve never done world-building before, maybe I’ll see what happens. And either way, I have a feeling that ELP is not a source that I’m going to be fighting over with anybody else, so I don’t envision any intellectual property theft happening here.

So in a series of posts, I’ll go through their albums up to Brain Salad Surgery and see what I can pull out of them in terms of settings, monsters, magic items, etc., for a mostly Lab Lord campaign, though I can already tell there will be some Mutant Future overlap (maybe even Boot Hill! Egads!).

An biographical aside: I had a weird fascination with ELP since late high school, when I found their third studio LP Trilogy in a bin at a thrift store, heard snippits of “Karn Evil 9 (1^st Impression)” on newly spawned classic rock radio in Fresno, and of course was beaten over the head with “Lucky Man”. Well, there was something in ELP’s music that intrigued me, and so, after getting some of their re-released boxed stuff in early college, when Rhino re-released their albums in CD form in the 2000s I started acquiring them in hopes of unearthing something really epic and grandiose. That is, a hugeness of vision that had been suggested by the bits I had heard. Ultimately, after lots of listenings to ELP (but only up to Brain Salad Surgery, I’ll add), I now know empirically it simply is not there. So don’t bother telling me how disgustingly rotten they are. I know better than most precisely how and why they are as bad as they are, because I gave them some hard dedicated listening, with every benefit of the doubt I could muster hoping for a miracle. Not many people can say that (or will admit it if they have).

Anyway, we’ll start with their eponymous first album. The cover gives us some DIY art that should give a segment of the OSR a boner just because it’s not particularly well-executed. A visible-brained man apparently meditating or sleeping, and a dove emerging from his mind.

The entire continent or planet is or may be the product of a dreaming god/beast/madman and the PCs don’t know this but may begin to deduce it as they work their way through the world. Um, derivative. Could be Lovecraft, Hinduism, Gnosticism, or all the P.K. Dick I’ve been reading. Sorry, I suck. Let’s say: He actually does exist in Ara held in a magical coma. He has no skull because a demon he summoned told him it needed to be removed so his mind-powers could directly affect the universe. He’s in a tower in some remote part of the continent. My entire ELP setting is his first serious messing-with-the-fabric-of-realities cosmic experiment.

Track 1: The Barbarian. Here Emerson tacks some plodding not-that-ominous-sounding stuff on to the front and back of a Bartok piano piece (Allegro Barbaro). I like a barbarian, maybe one that hangs around a mountain pass fighting people from all directions. Since he’s been up there for a really long time the two valleys below have been out of contact with each other for centuries. He’s a long-lived barbarian, we’ll say. I don’t have any stats, but luckily Talysman posted this yesterday, and I’ll go for the stronger version. His name is Throwgrak.

Track 2: Take a Pebble. At 12:27 long, it’s surprising there’s not much to work with here. Dreary stuff ... maybe this is a very stupid idea for a series of posts. Well, the main image is throwing a pebble into the sea, “disturbing the waters of our lives”. Something about memories not being real. Photographs scattered on your fields. Ugh! Too much incomplete and disjointed imagery in this “song”. I give up. There’s a short hillbilly jam in the middle. Maybe there’s a race of hillbillies in this world (please Talysman, do a post statting up a hillbilly race for me [Update: Ask and ye shall receive!]... or Carter you must have this covered already somewhere?).

Track 3: Knife-Edge. Okay, this song seems to lay out a scenario for a city viewed from some high tower by a king (or by kings flying on silver wings), full of madness, a road through an abbess (or abyss? trying to rhyme with madness), spectres on the city streets, “patient queues for the gallows sing the praises of the hallowed / our machines feed the furnace, if they take us they will burn us!” (not bad lyrics for Lake, honestly). Then throw in a Janacek organ piece for no reason. “When the flames have their season, will you hold to your reason? Can you still keep your balance. Can you live on a knife-edge?” Wow this post is long. More on Knife-Edge City in another post, but I think it’s a pretty messed up undead-filled human sacrifice place! Yay ELP!

Track 4: The Three Fates. A classic Emerson ultra-repetitive keyboard showpiece in three parts: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. I’m partial to the Norns, myself, or even some MacBeth-ish three witches from Polanski’s film version. Maybe I’ll plunk them out on some barren moors in this world. Derivative, yes, but I’m new at this, cut me some slack. They do witchy things, and I’d like to make them an important source of info and power for PCs on quests. Maybe something like Ningauble and Sheelba in the Lankhmar stories. Or if I had a totally pointless and tedious tricks-and-traps dungeon that both bored players to death and killed their characters, this is the background music I’d be playing.

Track 5: Tank. Carl Palmer’s obligatory drum solo track. I’m a drummer, and I used to study such classic solos as Toad, Moby Dick, and so on (leaving Buddy Rich’s Hawaiian War Chant completely out of this) and I can say, Tank is a dud. I guess Palmer’s a fast drummer, that’s how he was trying to distinguish himself (his one interesting idiosyncrasy is damping crash cymbals after long fills, to his credit). But he’s mostly incapable of creating any real color. Anyway, okay, Tank. It’s the card I dealt myself.

In the lowest sub-level in a megadungeon there’s a huge copper tank. All the excretions of all the humanoid monsters in the dungeon are channeled through conduits passing through every level and end up in this tank. In it they ferment and generate methane gas that the BOSS of the megadungeon or somebody (or everybody) uses to drive steam-powered mechanisms, lamps, flamethrowers, what-have-you. Also, there are special sewage tank creatures that have evolved in the tank through the interventions of some twisted magic-user in the dungeon. If the megadungeon is somewhat past its glory days, the tank will be corroded and weakened in ways not obvious to PCs. Attempts to manipulate valves, hatches, climb its ladder, etc., will cause it to fail catastrophically, deluging all PCs in the tankroom in sewage. Then the sewage creatures swarm on to them (more on them in a later post). Not bad. Probably the best we’ll get out of Carl Palmer until Brain Salad Surgery.

Track 6: Lucky Man. Oh that masterstroke of irony and poetic justice in the form of an innocuous rock ballad! If you go with it straight-ahead, it’s a boring story about a rich prince getting killed in a war, and boy, by the end of it: You see how he really wasn’t so lucky after all! Zing! Ouch! You got me Greg Lake! You’re so heavy that I need to take more bong rips so I can take in all the implications! What actually appeals to me about this song is the guitar solo that sounds like bagpipes (oh hell, I see the next series of posts: D&D inspired by Tubular Bells!) and the weird Moog solo on the fade-out, because when I first heard that I thought “Hell, if these guys are brave enough to just put that crazy-sounding stuff on their first single, then they must have some really crazy stuff on the albums”. And partly yes, partly no. In fact, they just had no taste ... they probably couldn’t tell what they were doing, and so it’s unclear if this was bravery or not. Sometimes no taste breaks towards the interesting (John Waters) and sometimes it breaks towards the lame (here’s a cheap-shot: FATAL).

Anyway bagpipes = highlanders and Moog = spaceships so I’ll say there once was a war in another set of mountains (not near Throwgrak’s Pass) where a bunch of Celtic-oid, but not really Celtic-oid, tribes fought a musical deathmatch with an alien advance team. This is the opposite of the outcome of Close Encounters. The Celtoids quickly learned that their bagpipes produced vibrations at harmonic frequencies that disintegrated the brain-sacs of the alien invaders, and were able to destroy them all and commandeer their ship. Through what little of the technology they could comprehend, their civilization advanced in the mountains unbeknownst to anyone else. As the technology advanced, so did their sonic aptitude, so that Celtoids could all produce multiple pitches simultaneously through throat-singing, and a select group of monks eventually mastered a vocal sonic attack that tears apart humanoid organs when focused on an opponent. There’s a Hawkwind/Michael Moorcock reference in that, as well. Guess I’ll need to figure out who the Celtoids really are now.

Damn, that was work! I listened to that album twice to write that. Next up is the dreaded sub-concept album Tarkus. Break out your Gamma World / Mutant Future books, friends: cyborg armadillos, cyborg pterodactyls, and a manticore. Sorry detractors, but ELP is Old School, and I don’t care how much it hurts to admit that.