Jurassic Park III is not a capital-G Great movie, but it is a pretty good one. Its worst flaw is tastelessness; the two most famous bits of the movie are that the kid survives on the island for eight weeks by stealing T-rex pee, and that Alan dreams a velociraptor saying his name. The humour of the movie leans towards that borderline-abrasive goofiness. But it also has a powerful engine of a story, showing characters committing to action that draws from their character, causing consequences that they respond to in ways consistent with their motivation.
Like all decently-structured dramas, this makes the characters a little more peculiar than they need to be; Tea Leone’s character has a fun arc because she’s very good at making a character visibly laughable while committing 100% to their personal viewpoint, but my favourite is Alessandro Nivola as Billy, who would be a generic young dude if it weren’t for him causing half the plot by stealing velociraptor eggs.
That decision-making is what fascinates me today. There’s one scene late in the film that sticks with me, after Alan has learned, to his disgust, that Billy stole the velociraptor eggs and is responsible for them stalking the characters. He goes to throw the eggs out the window, then pauses. As he says, he realises the raptors catching him without the eggs would be considerably worse than the raptors catching him with them. That is to say, he considers his motivation – to survive – and his skills – his insight into the psychology of dinosaurs – the various possible outcomes to his actions, and reasons out the best action to take in the moment, despite it being terribly risky.
This is fundamental storytelling, and it creates a wonderful, uncanny effect that I’ve always been drawn to. Good drama is similar to good rhetoric in that it takes the premises you begin with and follow them in a rational way, not even but especially when some of the characters are fools, like the Kirbys. This is a particularly great moment, because it’s where Grant is forced to choose between two very shitty options and calculating the less shitty one, and his particular area of expertise matches the audience.
What I’m particularly interested in is the tone and emotion. Conveying decisions visually is a famously difficult task; I think the movie pulls it off with Grant holding the eggs out of a window, literally conveying the gravity of the situation, for one thing. A lot of my favourite acting moments are ones where they have to convey a character making, then committing to a difficult decision, and Sam Neill hits a lot of the great aspects – the pause, then the fast and clear-eyed movement as he moves again. The weary acceptance of a shitty situation is easy to understand and explain; the uncanny strangeness of the decision hitting him is much harder to lock down. It’s the sudden weight of responsibility on his shoulders and a terror at possibility that suddenly gives way to the only possible direction. That weight is the joy of storytelling.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Hacks
Finally caught the last episode of the season, over at Nath’s post.
Nope
The story of an animal trainer. This is more tightly constructed than Us but not as tightly constructed as Get Out; the fact that it can be summed up in a cool sentence that, nevertheless, goes somewhere extremely interesting points towards Peele’s strength as a storyteller. Really, the worst thing about it is that the flashback to Ricky’s traumatic childhood is dramatically unnecessary, if emotionally vivid, and it’s a bit distracting given he’s the movie’s sacrificial lamb even if it’s part of the theme. Everyone and their mother has said that this is a movie about Hollywood exploiting animals and children – if it makes up half the TV Tropes page, it’s pretty fuckin’ obvious – but what I notice is less acknowledged is that this leads to the idea that an animal’s behaviour can be quantified, analysed, and understood.
Our own Dave Shutton has described Spielberg as a feel-good director with a touch of horror to him, and this is the other way around; the climax is still tinged with horror – great, unnerving detail that we hear the Rider’s screaming inside Jean Jacket for a horrifically long time, and the movie’s smartest move is giving us a terrible look inside as his victims, including children, are digested – but Jean has been quantified so strongly at this point that it’s merely thrilling instead of scary as we watch our heroes fight him, and the music even follows suit.
One argument my mother and I have been having for a long while is me being annoyed by her personification of animals; she believes treating animals as different from us is making humanity out to be special, and I believe animals need to be respected as alien intelligences – even ones as attuned to us as dogs. Every animal incident in the film comes from someone treating it as an object as opposed to something with an independent motivation, and OJ triumphs because he appeals to how Jean Jacket sees the world, starting with the behaviours it actually exhibits and working from there as opposed to simply bludgeoning it. In a way, Peele isn’t criticising Hollywood for exploiting animals and children – he is, after all, doing both those things in this film – only for doing it incorrectly, in a way that disrespects their personhood.
The movie also works really well as a horror film specifically in that I was unnerved to go about my morning walk the next day, out in the bright sunlight, at least until I remembered I was fine as long as I didn’t look up.
Michael Collins
A dog chases a car, and the car slams the brakes, and the dog doesn’t know what to do. The last half hour, in which the characters are shocked to find they’ve successfully brought the British to a truce, is absolutely amazing as they realise they had no idea what they were even fighting for; Liam Neeson is incredible, shifting from the clear-eyed certainty he’s had almost the entire first hour and a half and suddenly he’s completely lost. Alan Rickman is equally as good; when he comes back from America, he’s carrying himself with a contempt for his comrades, as if he’s learned something in the States about ruling that he’s going to have to carry, and he functions far better in power than Collins as the IRA tears itself apart, having lost a bigger enemy than each other.
Need to see Collins but would recommend The Wind That Shakes The Barley as a companion piece, also about the fight in the IRA for an ideal and the aftermath.
I love that Peele made used so much studio money to make something this messy, after he’d gained a reputation with one of the tightest screenplays in recent history. I really want another Peele-directed project, but I also think he’s smart to take his time. If he came back with something this loose in quick order, I think his reputation as a filmmaker could be different.
Did not expect the line “And Chris Kattan was…transcendent…” to be so haunting and lived-in, like Jupe has been in that memory ever since. The movie’s biggest flaw might be trying to unite the two strands of story but even then, it’s a magnificent character and story idea.
Unlike Peele’s first two movies, it’s organized more by theme than thesis, which is a more interesting route to go to my mind (witness Shyamalan who attempted to continue replicating the magic of a clockwork script he spent years on with arguably diminishing results in each project).
Peele’s horror borrows (arguably too) heavily from Spielberg too, Jean Jacket’s digestion is right out of War Of The Worlds. I don’t think Peele is as interested in sadism as Spielberg is, or maybe he’s conscious of trying to avoid it given who he’s centering in his movies, but he still has some juice — the issue here is how diffuse everything gets, although I like your thread of respecting animal intelligence.
How to Succeed in Show Business Without Really Trying – One of those movie musicals that isn’t actively great, in part because the romance gets cut quite a bit when you really need the subversion of “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm”, and like many then-contemporary comedies, it shows its age, but has an absolutely on fire performance from Robert Morse. Is this one of the weirdest leading man performances pre-New Hollywood? Morse is 5’4, bug-eyed, buck-teethed, and something of a live-action cartoon with his rapid deliveries and how he leans in incredibly close to everyone he’s manipulating and cajoling. (“I don’t want to take the credit, oh, that’s Finch, F-I-N-C-H.”) The songs are of course really good – big fan of “The Company Way” and “Rosemary”, much as it is a parody of “Maria,” is genuinely lovely – and it’s fun as hell to watch J. Pierrepont Finch con his way up the ladder. Would recommend to Tristan as someone also interested in this kind of social climbing and it additionally enhances Morse’s performance as Burt Cooper on Mad Men. Burt is like if an older J. Pierrepont Finch was thrown back in the Sixties, even wearing the same suit he opens the movie in, and in old age and power has learned how to use his eccentricities to dominate and throw people off guard. (“Mr. Campbell…who cares?”) Speak softly and carry a big stick.
Live Poetry – realised I had no plans all weekend so figured I’d give the local poetry night a shot. It was very good! Three featured poets doing longer sets, plus most of the other attendees / regulars got up to read something or other. A generally high standard – lots of wit, quite a bit of politics, a surprising amount of bodily fluids (in the poems, I should clarify). I’ve never fully clicked with poetry as a written artform but I do enjoy hearing it performed.
Ludwig – binged this six-part BBC comedy-drama-mystery over the rest of the weekend. David Mitchell from Peep Show plays an anxious introvert who creates puzzles for newspapers, but is forced way out of his comfort zone when his identical twin brother – a detective – goes missing. Soon the shy twin is moonlighting as his brother and finding he’s unusually skilled at solving murders. Not a million miles from High Potential thematically, although obviously it’s vastly more British which is quite a different vibe. The cases are generally pretty intriguing and the solutions are fun, good comfort-food viewing for a laid-back weekend.
There once was a man on a Sunday / who saw poetry live just for funday / He woo’d most delightful / At the wit that was spiteful / And explained it to us on the Monday
Him poem read good!
Woo, live poetry!
Woooooo live bodily fluids!!
Wooo live
poetry!
Andor, “I Have Friends Everywhere”/”What a Festive Evening” – Watching this show at this exact moment is weird, as Krennick slaps his head upon learning that all he needed to do to crack on Ghorman is pretend there was an insurrection. Anyway, more on Sunday but overall, two very solid hours of TV but not without a few flaws. Will note that Jimmy Smits was apparently not available to play Senator Organa, so they hired Benjamin Bratt, who doesn’t look or sound a thing like Smits but according to Alan Sepinwall spent the 90s competing with Smits for roles since Hollywood doesn’t have room for two brown people at once.
French Open men’s final, last ninety minutes – I had things to do yesterday morning, so I figured I would miss this. But Alcaraz (and to a lesser degree Sinner) had other ideas. Second longest Grand Slam final ever, and a nail biter till Sinner just ran out of steam. Was a bit surprised that McEnroe never once mentioned the match he and Borg had that this one eclipsed. Fairly good coverage from TNT but Brian Anderson is a bit generic.
Kojak, “Tears for All Who Loved Her” – A mobster is killed by his wife and her mobster lover. She counts on the lover to hide the gun and on her long ago relationship with Kojak to keep her safe, but Kojak hatches a scheme to catch her off guard. The idea here is interesting, a “howcatchem” but nothing like Columbo, but as seems to be the case ever more this season, nothing really holds together. Sam Jaffe guest stars as the head of the mob family.
Frasier, “Daphne Hates Sherry” – Daphne and Sherry lcok horns over the care of Martin and other things. Daphne flees the apartment and seeks refuge at Niles’s place, which is not air conditioned thus allowing things to turn into a Tennessee Williams play (all the intertitles are inspired by the names of Williams’s plays). It is ultimately up to Frasier, fighting a cold AND taking a hot bath, to both straighten things out and to get Niles to realize that no, it would not have been ethical to seduce Daphne. Not high on the laughs, but generally fun and well acted, and there is a non-zero chance that director Kelsey Grammer was the first person to ever direct a scene from a bathtub, one upping Dalton Trumbo.
Not feeling well, so these are going to be brief:
Girl Walk // All Day
For Movie Club. This is a joyous, effervescent dance movie–very exuberant, very summery, and very New York. I particularly loved the parts of the discussion that concentrated on looking at this from the filmmaking and live theater side of things, which added to my appreciation of the film as a guerrilla passion project that was never destined for big bucks (its music sourcing leaves it in copyright limbo, for one thing) but was still made with as much craft and enterprise as possible.
PTU
Dave was right. Cynical, darkly funny, and loaded with awesome action. One of my favorite smaller scenes here is a scene that shouldn’t be small at all, but it feels like it intentionally gets lost in the hyperkinetic shuffle all the same, and that’s when Lam Suet’s hapless detective, in the midst of an attempt to cover his own ass after a banana-peel pratfall gone wrong, straight-up stumbles into a horror movie where a gangster is keeping his dead son’s naked friends in small steel dog cages to retaliate against them for not protecting him better. It’s a wild, surreally terrifying image, far darker than the workaday corruption and violence everyone else is practicing, and I love that Lam Suet’s only reaction is to essentially want to get as far away from it as possible as quickly as he can. It’s not about intervention, only escape from what’s too big to comprehend and too difficult to challenge. Now back to his problems!
Black Bag
Soderbergh only occasionally intersects with my personal tastes, and when he doesn’t, I tend to find his films tepid, and I have trouble getting invested in them. This falls squarely into that category for me. As well-regarded as it is, and as much up my alley as it should have been, I found it something of a slog for much of its runtime: I never felt persuaded of the bedrock strength of the Blanchett-Fassbender marriage or interested in its potential dissolution, and I never found the emotional tangle of the ensemble of good-looking but relentlessly unhappy and unpleasant spies to be all that interesting either. Instead, I was just impressed these mopey fuckers managed to get any espionage done at all in between endlessly whining about how hard it is to have a relationship in their line of work. I wouldn’t trust them to water my plants, let alone safeguard a country.
There are flashes of life here–Pierce Brosnan can’t help bringing enough electric charisma to wake the proceedings up a little, and Tom Burke’s Freddie, who seems to understand and accept his own failings in a way the others don’t, was a surprising highlight–and the last dinner scene manages some oomph and narrative satisfaction. But overall, eh.
Plus some Primal, Andor, and Poker Face, over at Nath’s post.
Look for the Blanchett-Fassbender pairing on the USA Network this Fall as the superspy couple has just received a savage Burn Notice.
That PTU scene is so great (and it points toward an even more disturbing scene in Election 2) — it takes a second to recognize the gang in this state after their dipshit peacocking earlier and that makes it all the more disturbing; and it is To playing fair, his cops are corrupt but the mobsters are awful people too. No good guys here unless you count our man just trying to eat his dinner in the beginning before he gets a phone call, I think we’ve all been there.
Exiled — Johnnie To remakes The Wild Bunch. No one said it could be done! And this mad bastard pulls it off, although with his own spin — his Bunch is two pairs of killers (Pike and Dutch are one and the Gorch brothers are the other), the first sent to kill a guy and the second there to protect the guy. All five were pals back in the day until the guy (Angel?) got a wife and kid and uh took a potshot at the big boss, but after a showdown everyone decides to help the guy do one last job in order to give his family enough to live on. Things escalate from there, some extremely stylish gun battles and the second one in particular is To in god mode, bodies and bullets in space divided by curtains and walls and then turned vertical. And later on is an incredible scene where our guys come across some unrelated parties shooting it out and immediately start cheering on (and helping out) the dude who is owning the hardest (an unfathomably cool Richie Jen). But while there is a fair amount of exaggerated and rad spaghetti Western stylization and action in all this cool is not all that matters here, there is weariness and the stakes of the title, how no one here has a home to go to and To’s biggest swerve is giving space to Josie Ho as the wife, because she had a home and a life these guys and their life took them away. The finale settles debts and acknowledges that some debts can’t be paid, it also ends with a final appreciation of a nice ass even as more people go into exile. Everyone here rules and if Francis Ng is not Warren Oates he gets a wonderful moment with his eyes to say “why not?” and Anthony Wong as Pike is every bit William Holden’s equal, an old guy with some gas in the tank but who knows he has nowhere good to go, unless it’s with his buddies. To is not exactly Henry Hill, he has no illusions about gangland bullshit, but he does believe that bad men can find honor with each other. They’re not cops, at least. Not optional in the slightest.
Heist — David Mamet doesn’t remake anything, because that would require him to pay attention to the detail and execution of a heist flick and he’d rather jerk off with his cons! Everyone said it could be done! I am being much harsher on this than it deserves, I had a perfectly fine time watching this and the actors alone make it a good time (with the exception of the constantly frustrating Rebecca Pidgeon, she is actually sexy as hell here and yet her affectless delivery might as well have “DELIVERED ENIGMATICALLY” appended to every line, the absence creates its own obnoxious presence, as opposed to the more tossed-off Mametisms of the dudes). Ricky Jay is in a movie, it is worth your time. But Jay’s final scene and his final look, where he shows uncertainty and fear in a way that doesn’t often appear in a Mamet film and because of this carries enormous weight, is a road passed over for dumb cons and crosses, the last one in particular is stupid as hell and only makes sense if the person doing it has further plans — but we don’t follow this person so it’s just a thing that happens to set up one more twist. There are good pieces here, the emphasis on reading people and manipulating them, especially in the moment and under pressure, is really strong, but this isn’t backed up as strongly as it should be with the heisty meat, it’s cons all the way down and even a sheep would get tired counting them.
P.T.U and BREAKING NEWS— Dave Shutton is not wrong: This is essential Magpie viewing: I second everything he said, but I would also emphasize how darkly humerous, and subversive, these films are. To and his co-writers are exploring the consequences of authoritarian policing here within the confines of heroic warrior tropes, exposing a cynicism and opportunism within the militarization of public space. This is particularly true in P.C.U., where the multi-colored nightlighting of Hong Kong comes off a sterile and sharp as a surgical instrument, yet a population of those not involved in the eternal struggle of police and gangs are absent. BREAKING NEWS is much more on the nose, but it’s choreographed action setpieces rest alongside a bleak commentary on how the police stoke heroic narratives to gain public support for their operations. Strong stuff.
Yes! To-pilling continues at Media Magpies! Great call on the non-participants of PTU, I was wondering that myself at points — these streets are pretty empty — but it works as a larger excision. And if Breaking News is on the nose its momentum never lets things weigh heavy for too long, there are always further complications and the apartment building is such a great setting, tons of vertical movement and pressure. Making the main cop adversary the media specialist is a brilliant idea (and setting the real conflict up based on a cop looking bad on film is very smart, shades of the lost gun in PTU — it is not that corruption or incompetence are problems, it’s the evidence of them that is a problem). The ending’s cynicism is built around a tiny core of outlaw heroism, there is a moment of honor here and the cameras don’t catch it and outright deny it, but To shows it to us.
No Hard Feelings — An aging party girl (Jennifer Lawrence) in dire financial straits is hired by a wealthy couple to seduce their teenage introvert son out of his shell before he leaves for college. It’s not gut-bustingly funny, but it is genial and humorous throughout, and it’s the one “losin’ it” picture I’ve seen that is something like accurate in how it depicts the importance of that moment — not as big a deal as expected, but still sort of a big deal. Also there is a scene where we are suddenly reminded that the star of this teen sex romp has a best actress Oscar on her shelf, as she brings in some true emotional stakes.
Wish I liked this more but the naked fight is indeed really funny and even funnier when she casually tries to go back into seduction mode after punching a bunch of kids. “Is that…blood?”
Rehearsal s2e1-2. Every pan from the flight simulator to Nathan is pure genius.
HBO is giving him a bafflingly large budget, even while Zaslav does bizarre penny-pinching bullshit. I hope they keep it up.
Monsters Inc. Great chemistry and delivery between Goodman and Crystal. The animation rule about using abstractions and letting the viewer do the rest of the work applies really well here. Sully and Mike capture Goodman’s and Crystal’s physicality in a way that more sophisticated mo-cap often does not.
Doctor Who, Destiny of the Daleks, the first part of the serial. Back to Skaro. Romana regenerates into the face of someone they met before and the fourth doctor scolds her for walking around in someone else’s face. Oh buddy. If you only knew what you would do when you were 1500 years older (or 2 billion years older depending on how you count heaven sent).
What Did We Play?
Missed a few weeks of reporting tabletop games I’ve been playing.
Paranoia
This is effectively a Looney Tunes cartoon that you get to play – you’re a Troubleshooter (find trouble and shoot it) in a dystopian society run by a supercomputer that hates Communism (even if it doesn’t know exactly what it actually is). This is very simply constructed; the basis is that you roll a number of six-sided dice equal to your score in whatever you’re doing, and you need so many 5s or 6s to complete the task. The game is deliberately designed to descend into violence between the player characters; for example, my character was secretly a Communist (even though nobody is in a secret society) who had a mission to find a spy in the Communists in the party, and it turned out there was another player who was also a Communist with the same mission (I killed him, he failed to kill me).
You’re given six clones – effectively like lives in video games – and I used up the first one trying to get to the Mission Briefing room. In fact, the mere fact we managed to survive the Mission Briefing was apparently very rare. I had enormous fun with the game, though the other players didn’t, because they didn’t like that it’s basically designed to make you feel incompetent.
Draw Steel
We’ve replaced our regular D&D game with this. I’ve only played one session, but I already like it a lot; it was designed by Matt Colville, famous for creating D&D content and expansions, and it clearly simplifies and oragnises the idea of D&D into something much easier and smoother to play. One basic element is that you never actually miss a shot (though neither do the enemies), you just do certain amounts of damage. Will report further as I get in.
Call Of Cthulhu
As you might expect, this is a tabletop game based upon the works of HP Lovecraft. I picked up the Starter Kit for 7th Edition, which begins with a solo adventure to teach you the basics of the rules. It’s much simpler and much less combat-focused than any other game I’ve played, but the approach to skills feels both deeper and cinematic. You’re given an array of percentages to apply to your various skills – 70, 60, 60, 50, 50, etc – and when you make a skill check, you roll a d100 and are aiming to roll below that. For example, if I’m making a Spot Hidden check and I have 70 in Spot Hidden, I would pass it if I rolled a 54 and fail if I rolled 75.
It’s very much based on investigation and exploration, very appropriate for a Lovecraft game. The big innovation back in the first edition was introduction of a Sanity stat – every time you’re exposed to a horror, you make a Sanity check, and if you fail, you lose Sanity points and the Keeper (i.e. game runner) takes control of your character for a moment (so you scream or fire your weapon or whatever, which can be inconvenient when you’re hiding). I haven’t gotten very deep into it – just one run through the solo story, which involved very few skill checks – but it’s already very smooth and intuitive to play. Looking forward to running a campaign with it.
Paranoia is a gas, but it really requires a good GM. Because the situation is designed to lead to chaos at any moment, but that’s really only fun once. So the GM has to move through some semblance of progress while not completely railroading the players when their natural inclination is to start shooting each other.
We had the advantage of a GM so experienced at running Paranoia that I quickly figured out how deeply it influenced his D&D DMing, and a set of players who sincerely tried to solve the problems given to us (except me, who enthusiastically fucked about), which ended up making it feel even more ridiculous. If anything, it ended up the other way around – most of the players were the comic foils to this ridiculous world.
I feel like I’ve missed this question the last few weeks so apologies if I’m repeating myself.
Citizen Sleeper – finished this a couple of weeks ago now but I’m pretty sure I didn’t offer a final verdict. It’s a really well-written and atmospheric sci-fi tale that got me a bit emotional towards the end. I’m playing it late enough that there was a bunch of extra DLC stuff included and I kinda think that was the best part, although I guess it had the advantage of being able to refer back to previous storylines for additional emotional resonance. Will play the sequel at some point for sure.
Cocoon – a game from the designer of Limbo and Inside. This one has a 3D-ish view rather than the left-to-right approach of those other two, but it’s a similarly linear puzzle adventure that does all of its storytelling visually. The main puzzles revolve around jumping in and out of orbs that each have a power but also contain another world – so you can carry the “show hidden paths” orb inside of the “activate moving platforms” orb to complete a task there etc. It’s nicely mind-bending, I’m kinda stuck on a puzzle at the moment but I’ve been able to work through everything so far with a fair amount of effort so I think it’s pitched just right. Cool visuals too.
Balatro – still playing this an embarrassing amount, but this week I completed the last of the 20 challenge decks, getting all the way through the 8 antes without using any jokers. Which is a pretty ridiculous challenge but it feels good to have done it!
The rest of Hexcells Plus, and on into Hexcells Infinite. I already pitched this series of aesthetically glorious puzzle games last Monday, so I’ll only add here that, after a subtle campaign of marital peer pressure, I finally talked my wife into trying these out. She was hooked within minutes, which has led to a lot of enjoyable faux-recrimination. We haven’t yet landed on “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?” / “I’ve done worse,” but we’re getting there.
Marvel Super Heroes – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Switch
Beat the arcade mode during the week. It’s fun to play a one-on-one fighter again after playing the later Marvel vs. Capcom games first. In theory it should make it less chaotic but the infinity gems, which give you special powers and can be picked up and lost during battle, keep it pretty unpredictable. It’s one of those features that you have to learn to use wisely or risk getting used on you, which adds something unique to this game. That feature and the relatively higher difficulty make it feel closer to Darkstalkers than to the rest of MvC or Street Fighter. I mained Psylocke for this one, Capcom really did love her. It also looks great, specially the final stage with Thanos in space. Moving on to X-Men: Children of the Atom next week.
Burnout Paradise Remastered on Nintendo Switch
Played a long-ish session during the week. Never get tired of this one. And funny enough, I handily won some races that had been given me hell the last time I played the game, months ago. Always funny when that happens.
Poker
I played some Texas Hold ‘Em with our nephew, mostly to show my father-in-law how the game works. We both showed our hands and explained the rules, though I realized that knowing the rules only gets you halfway there, and that the heart of the game is in the calculations on when and when to raise and to fold, as well as to being familiar in reading what the other players might have and can do, both of which require a lot of practice and/or watching other people play well (good thing there was so much poker on TV back when I was learning; is that still going on). And of course, seeing everone’s hands doesn’t give you any idea for the suspense and tension/release you get from actually playing the game. So I don’t think my father-in-law got the best intro to the game necessarily.
I played a few real hands after that with the kid and his dad, but called it early for a family lunch.
Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. This ended up being a blast. The recursive use of the different areas, the flight mechanics, using the wiimote for the sword. All of its a lot of fun. I think they should do more to explore the concept of Link and Zelda being canonically cursed to keep repeating the capture / rescue. It feels like an avenue for more mature storytelling, but also they want to do things like make me run around the world catching butterflies so that I can boost my potions.
You know what other story has that mix of childishness and maturity and an eternally regressing cycle of capture and rescue? The ring cycle / Volsungsaga. They should make a three part game: in Part 1, Link rescues Zelda from a forced marriage to Ganon, but then dies. In part 2, Link who has been reincarnated as his son defeats a dragon to rescue zelda, who is zelda reincarnated from the first one. (It does get a little incesty). In part III, you play as Zelda after Ganon reincarnated uses magic to make Link capture you. When you defeat Ganon you break the curse (so you won’t have to kill
link) and also for some reason destroy Nintendo HQ, breaking the cycle.
I have an unusual amount of affection for this movie, so it was a nice surprise to see a detailed appreciation of one of its big moments. It’s a great beat, and I particularly love the point about how vividly holding the eggs out the window captures the (again, literal) gravity of it all: he’s a split second away from an irreversible decision there.
Another dramatic part of this movie I’ve always appreciated is the sense of understanding and categorizing characters by their particular motivation/drive, i.e., Alan’s astronomers vs. astronauts distinction that I feel like helps him salvage his relationship with not-actually-dead Billy almost as much as Billy trying to sacrifice himself for the group does.
Thanks! The whole thing was motivated by happening to catch it on TV when I was visiting my mother – possibly the best circumstances to watch the movie – and being enraptured by that particular scene. There’s an eeriness to the way he holds it out and catches himself just in time.
And I’d agree with that – Alan’s making the effort to understand where Billy was coming from in his decision, and he might not share it but he can respect it.
This also throws into sharp relief why even though I don’t think much of them overall, I vastly prefer the sequels to the Jurassic World movies. The World films try to make everything bigger and bigger and so they get more and more hollow. I’m much more into seeing small moments like these among big circumstances.
I, uh, would also like to express my affection for that sequel.
This made me think of one of my favorite character moments in movies, Cesar coming up with a plan in Bound. Instead of making him a total dupe, the Wachowskis wrote him as a smart guy missing one piece of information, and we see the logic in his decision-making even as we are positioned to appreciate the irony in its flaw. The fact that he’s smarter than the women planned for makes him more dangerous as the plot kicks in and the movie a lot more fun to watch.
Great call – they rightly see him as an asshole but he is not a true dope, and that’s where the complication comes in.
Another think I read in Neill’s performance in that moment is that he realizes midway that he’s making a decision based on his (understandable*) hatred and fear of the raptors (which in turn drives his anger at Nivola). He’d love to get as far away from them as he can and if he can keep a couple more of them from being born, then all the better. What makes him a good character is that he’s able to see that on himself for a second and realize that their chances of survival superseed his emotional turmoil, and act accordingly. Even though he still very much hates and fears the raptors (until, arguably, the final moments of the movie).
*This benefits from the movie being a sequel, as many viewers have already seen two movies full of reasons for him to feel this way.