I mentioned this Joss Whedon side project a while back, which led to a number of posts on genre musicals.
Well, now there’s a trailer to look at!
I’m not sure I’m excited yet, but it definitely seems interesting…
Archive for the 'Fantasy' Category
The last time there was a major update of D&D Bill Clinton was still president of the United States, Everquest was still the number one online multiplayer game, and a whole lot of other things hadn’t happened yet.
They released 3rd edition of the game back in 2000. This was a major revamp of the system, taking a stand by recreating the game after the muddy depths of the previous had taken the game even farther into muddy realms of arcane rules where only the mightiest nerds might find their way out to fun.
Reading those books back I was struck by how strange it had all become. The game didn’t seem to be about anything. Well… that’s not technically true.: It was still about Dungeons and Dragons. But it was no longer about much else. This was a roleplaying game simulating a roleplaying game.
The game worked, but it didn’t interest me much. The barrier to entry was too high, and it was still vulnerable to the kind of munchkin behavior that turns what is supposed to be a friendly social interaction into a war of rules, and keeps everyone but the hardcore out. I’d tried it out a few times, but found it to be a fundamentally unsatisfying experience. As a player there was always that vague unease that somehow you had made a mistake when creating you character. That rather than being on the path to godhood you were doomed before you had even started.
All the best tabletop games share one thing in common, that is that their rules are simple, but the gameplay is deep. You discover the complexities of the system by playing the game, not by reading the rules. 3rd edition failed that test, and I stayed away.
A few weeks ago the 4th edition of D&D was released. The new system still the three beast with three books that it has always been; Players Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. But it’s been revised and streamlined. This is a simpler, smarter game. One that seems to have more roads to fun than it does to ruin.
Having now had a chance to play the game as both the Game Master and the Player, it’s clearly not totally “fixed”. But in the end that seems to be broken in the right way. In a world filled with computers that handle everything seamlessly, it’s fun to still have a game where you can gather around a table with a bunch of your friends, make a bunch of mistakes, screw up the rules and still have fun. It’s a game where even when it’s going wrong it feels like there’s always another opportunity to try out a new strategy, or pull victory out of the toothy, acid-spewing jaws of defeat.
It’s hard to be a fan of Doctor Who over the age of 25 without also being a meta observer of the strange and unique place that the show holds in the firmament of the modern Science Fiction show. Premiering in 1964, two years before Star Trek, the show ran continuously for over 20 years. It pioneered concept of the modern traveling show, with a character able to move through space and time so that he could appear in radically different locations each and every week. Originally this was intended to allow the BBC to use their vast historical wardrobe to create period dramas that far less constricted by actual history, and focused on action. That all collapsed with the arrival of the Daleks. Deeply-inhuman fascist monsters that took Britain by storm, both literally and figuratively, and sent the show into a deeply sci-fi, and gave nerds the first hit of meta-story and continuity that they so desperately crave.
??????
Then the show disappeared for twenty years, leaving the airwaves for a long trip through alternative media. These side journeys including a movie, a series of novels and radio-plays that kept the love alive. Then, in 2005, the show returned with a bang, picking up not quite where it left off, and becoming one of the top rated shows in England.
And it’s clearly not an American product, even if it has picked up a few tricks from serial soaps like Buffy. Unlike the clear stories told in American television, Doctor Who plays fast and loose with its own rules, going from hard SF to fantasy in the blink of an eye. It’s doubly odd when you consider that it manages to hew to it’s own continuity in what is essentially a single long story that stretches all the way from it’s original broadcast in 1964.
Of course some of the unique features of the show was built into its structure early on. One is that the main character is not actually human. The main effect of the character’s inhumanity is that it often makes him uniquely British, allowing him to lecture and reprimand humanity as a whole rather than a single member of the species at a time.
That other outcome is a hero can completely change his face and personality. Like everything else in the world of Doctor Who the specifics form when severely hurt, creating a dramatic way to for the show to change actors when the current actor is either losing popularity or simple feels the need to move on. So far ten actors have “officially” played the Doctor, with Paul McGann managing to turn his one shot appearance in the spin-off film into a veritable cottage industry.
I’ll admit that I’m personally fascinated by the character, but even more so with it’s seemingly endless ability to generate spin-offs, which I’ll discuss in more detail in a follow-up post.
This looks interesting. If nothing else it feels like they may have made an actual Indiana Jones film.
I’ll be honest and say that I never felt like the second two films lived up to the promise of the first one. Somehow they got bogged down in the cliches of the summer blockbuster (which the franchise helped to invent) and became artifacts of the 80s rather than having that spirit of timeless adventure that the first movie had.
Let’s see if this can bring back the magic.
In case you somehow missed it over the weekend, Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy director director, Guillermo Del Toro, is packing his bags and moving to New Zealand to start work on The Hobbit films.
Record needle scratching noise.
FILMS!?
Del Toro’s moving to New Zealand for the next four years to work with Jackson and his Wingnut and WETA production teams. He’ll direct the two films back to back, with the sequel which will deal with the 60-year period between “The Hobbit” and “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Yes indeed, there will be two films. While the plot of the first is pretty clearly going to be directly from the book, the second one, so rumors state, will be a semi-original creation cobbled together from the copious material created by Tolkein and his son. Until we get a more official name for this movie, I’m going to refer to it as Hobbit Milk.
Del Toro has proven that he can create strong original fantasy material when given the chance, so I’m hoping that we’ll see something worthwhile come out of this collaboration.
And as we all know, Hobbit milk is always best when fresh from the Baggins.
UPDATE:
There’s some interesting tidbits to be found with Del Toro in this interview on TheOneRIng.net:
Fans are all abuzz about ‘The Second Film’, can you tell some of your plans for it?
GDT: You know, I traveled to New Zealand just a little while ago, and one of the main reasons for going was to sit down and talk about the second film. ‘The Hobbit’, the book, is really one self-contained film, so for the second movie we sat down and worked it out. When we did this we got really excited because this second film is not a ‘tag on’, it’s not ‘filler’, it’s an integral part of telling the story of those 50 years of history lost in the narrative. There will be certain things that we will see from the first movie but from a different point of view, but it will feel like a volume, in the 5 volumes of the entire story. It will not feel like a bridge, I’ve been hearing it called ‘a bridge film’, it’s not, it’s an integral chapter of the story, and I think we’re all on the same page.
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