This sounds like a children’s book. “And the gun goes bang and the knife goes snickt and the landmine goes click”. Since the premise is someone steps on a landmine and can’t step off, this also sounds like a rip-off of No Man’s Land, a bitterly funny political allegory about the Balkans. Only this movie is about American kids hiking in Georgia. The Georgia that Russia invaded, not the one where peaches and The Walking Dead come from. Maybe you wonder what else the director has done and you come across a movie called 247 Degrees. It’s about four people who get in a sauna, but then a stick falls over and wedges the door shut. Then a whole movie happens about four people sweltering to death because a stick fell over. No joke. I saw it so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.
So why would you bother with Georgia filmmaker Levan Bakhia’s Landmine Goes Click? Because all of the above fail to express what Landmine Goes Click actually is. Sure, it starts out as dopey as you feared. But just when you’ve resigned yourself to watching three whining American kids standing around in a field because one of them stepped on a landmine, something else happens entirely. Unfortunately, the press materials, any synopsis, or any other review would spoil it. And frankly, I’m not sure the movie is worth watching if you already know the something else. I’m not sure it works unless you’re blindsided.
As the ill-fated mine stepper, Sterling Knight could be described as Leonardo DiCaprio Lite. He has to carry much of the movie, and he’s almost up to the task. But the real star here is the movie’s willingness to get grimly uncomfortable. It almost recalls trashy exploitation movies from the 70s, but with a focus on the trashiness more than the exploitation. I’m also reminded of the Dutch horror movie The Vanishing for how it used a haunting two-act structure to tell the story of the unlikely evil done by a family man.
Director Bakhia sees his premise and twists through to their bitter ends, and without the typical American PG-13 soft-sell. If Bakhia deserves credit for anything, it’s his willingness to coldly commit to a story about people instead of hardware. The landmine was never the problem. The problem all along was the people capable of the same cruelty it takes to lay down landmines.
Landmine Goes Click is available for VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.
This week we see yet another biopic, but a couple of us like it. At the 1:09 mark, we detour into a discussion of road signs and other signs in movies.
Next week: Z for Zachariah
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Tom Chick talks Chaos Reborn with Julian Gollop, who teaches him a thing or two. Gollop also explains that random numbers are random, that there is no place for centaurs, and that, yes, more content is on the way.
At the 43-minute mark, Tom and Nick Diamon conduct a Call of Duty: Black Ops III debriefing.
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“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” someone says in Call of Duty: Black Ops III. You said it, brother. You and me both. That’s about the only line of dialogue that makes sense in the whole game.
After the jump, here’s what the hell is going on Continue reading →
I hate to call out a developer making informal comments to his fans about a work in progress, but I’m going to call out a developer making informal comments to his fans about a work in progress anyway.
One of the boldest boardgame designs I’ve ever played is Quartermaster General, a sleek and grand presentation of World War II for six-players (review here). It uses simple rules — you can teach Quartermaster General in ten minutes and then finish a six-player game in well under two hours — and unique decks of cards for each nation to express broad but familiar historical guidelines. The pacing is snappy. The asymmetry is deeply gratifying and a minor miracle given the simplicity of the rules. Japan plays nothing like Germany which plays nothing like the United States which plays nothing like Russia. Designer Ian Brody has created a masterpiece of rich minimalist gameplay.
Brody posted on Boardgame Geek that he’s playtesting the next expansion, called Alternate Histories.
[Alternate Histories] adds 100 new cards and 8 substitute cards. There are pieces for France and China, and the 8 substitute cards are largely to reflect the new pieces. So cards that represented the French with UK pieces and the Chinese with Americans now bring in pieces from their own country.
The idea is that you shuffle the news cards into each nation’s decks, but then you have to discard from your hand more frequently, forcing difficult choices as you play. Brody also said he considered actual deck building for each nation, but it raises difficult balancing issues.
You can read more here, including a tantalizing description of a couple of new cards for Germany and Russia. There is currently no announced release date for Alternate Histories.
In case you haven’t heard enough grousing about the latest James Bond movie, listen to some more! After 1:23, we chop short the discussion for a 3×3 of our favorite lines from the thoroughly quote-worthy Bone Tomahawk.
Next week: Steve Jobs
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I think Chaos Reborn might be broken. It told me my elf had a 90% chance to kill the other guy’s rat. So I took the shot and didn’t kill his rat. You can see the problem here, right? What kind of game makes a promise like that and then breaks it? I had a 90% chance. I was sure to hit. But I didn’t? Seriously? What are the odds?
After the jump, math has no place in games. Continue reading →
The only things I remember about Life, the Hasbro boardgame that’s nearly as awful as Monopoly, is 1) the spinner in the middle of the board means never having to roll dice, and 2) you put blue and pink pegs in your car to represent family members. Blue represented dudes, pink represented chicks. Based on my recollections, the recently released Game of Life: Spin to Win videogame is a faithful recreation of the boardgame. It’s got a big spinner in the middle of the board and you accumulate pegs as you play. You start out as one peg on a scooter, you graduate to two spouse pegs in a sedan, and then you end up in a minivan with child pegs in the back seat.
But what I didn’t realize is that when it comes time for your peg to take a spouse, you can pick whether your spouse is a blue peg or a pink peg, regardless of your own peg color. So there’s my gay wedding up there, which happened because when I was picking a spouse, I thought I was telling the game the color of my own peg. Oops. There’s no divorce in the Game of Life, and I’m a pretty progressive guy, so I just rolled with it. Later, my husband and I flipped a city penthouse for a $100,000 profit, then we lost the money in a pool of lava, and we adopted a son who was delivered by helicopter. Somewhere along the way, I switched careers from farmer to brain surgeon. C’est la Life!
What Game of Life: Spin to Win, which carries the “family friendly” tag on Steam, absolutely won’t tolerate is bachelors. Marriage is mandatory. Now that’s family friendly!
Join Tom Chick, Nick Diamon, and Jason McMaster for a discussion of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo 5, the Steam controller, D-Day Battle at Peleliu, Broforce, and Sorcerer King. Also take our Skylanders quiz! And discover the startling solution to The Mystery of the Missing Prison Architect Podcast!
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I need some iridium so I can put finance calculators on the tidal power stations I had to build for all my new synthcell incubators.
That word soup, which makes complete sense to me, is Anno 2205 in a nutshell. A chain of interconnected sci-fi gobbledygook that you must link together: iridium, finance calculators, tidal power stations, synthcell incubators. Not “you must” in the sense of “the player must blah blah blah” as a tedious description of a game. “You must reach the end of the level in Super Mario Bros” or “You must repair the water filter in Fallout” or “You must gather ten bear hides in World of Warcraft”. But “you must” in the sense that you are driven to do it. You feel a need to do it. It has a pull on you. It is incumbent upon you. You must do it in the same way you must do the bidding of some mysterious master when you’re in his thrall. You must link together an interconnected chain of sci-fi gobbledygook. And you must do it for hours on end. Beware the allure of Ubisoft’s Anno series, more powerful than ever in Anno 2205.
After the jump, you have been warned. Proceed at your own risk. Continue reading →
This week we watch Tom Hanks negotiate another Steven Spielberg movie. At the 1:19 mark, we revisit a previous 3×3 by discussing nonsense movie titles.
Next week: Spectre
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Far be it from me to second guess what Arenanet is doing. 99% of the time, I just sit back and let them work their fabulous magic. But then there’s the other 1% of the time. Now is that 1% of the time.
After the jump, what’s going on with the release of Heart of Thorns? Continue reading →
In my review of Spintires, the game of survival horror in which mud tries to kill various real-world driverless Soviet trucks, I wrote the following:
You as a driver, as a person, as a foot on a gas pedal and a pair of hands, dont exist. Whether its because [developer] Oovee didnt want to fuss with character models or because its an intentional effort to focus on the element of machines vs nature without mere humanity in the middle to muck it all up, the world of Spintires is like Maximum Overdrive, that dopey horror movie where trucks come alive and drive themselves around. Not for the cheese factor, of course. You wont find Emilio Estevez servicing a semi with a carnival mask on its grill. Its Maximum Overdrive for the basic vibe of trucks having to rely on themselves. These trucks are on their own. They have no drivers. You cannot angle the camera to look into the cab and see an expressionless character model with his hands perched fingerlessly on the wheel. You will never see a person in this game. People simply dont exist anymore, or theyve gone far away. These wildernesses are as empty and still as a crashed server.
Today, a year and a half later, my review is obsoleted with this news:
The biggest update to the game so far that…finally shows the driver behind the wheel. An animated physical driver [is introduced for] all vehicles. You can watch him turning the steering wheel, changing gears, operating hand-brake and reacting to the forces affecting the truck.
Thanks, Spintires. Just what I didn’t want. But the update, available now, also adds five new trucks. Now you can drive the B-66, the B-131, the C-4310, the D-537, and even the K-700. I don’t know what those are either.
This week we see Vin Diesel in the opposite of an origins story. At the 1:20 mark, you know what day it is? It’s the day to do a 3×3 about calendars!
Next week: Bridge of Spies
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It’s so obvious what Eli Roth is trying to do in Green Inferno. He wants to spend the first half of the movie establishing characters so that you’ll care about them in the second half of the movie when they run afoul of savages in the Amazon. But since he can’t manage anything in the first half of the movie that isn’t clumsy, trite, disingenuous, and blatantly manufactured, the second half of the movie has zero impact. It is nothing but a few unimaginative special effects. Fake limbs, fake blood, fake CG ants, fake horror, fake moviemaking. Roth doesn’t even have the grit to go as far as the Italian cannibal movies he’s supposedly homaging. The result is pointless trash without even the courage to be reprehensible.
Then there’s S. Craig Zahler’s brilliantly spare and wonderfully effective Bone Tomahawk. It’s no accident that it opens with familiar faces from Scream and House of a Thousand Corpses. But these guys are just the prologue. The first half of the movie that follows is actually so good that it’s the first two thirds of the movie. Here is a posse of perfectly cast actors enjoying whip-smart dialogue and effectively drawn relationships in a town forebodingly called Bright Hope. When Bone Tomahawk turns into a miniature version of The Searchers, four disparate fixtures of the American Western ride out against the savages. Kurt Russel’s wise and grizzled sheriff, Richard Jenkins’ surprisingly touching funny old coot, Matthew Fox’s coldly mysterious dandy, and Patrick Wilson as yet another too-good-for-his-own-good family man, this time as a literal cowboy.
The savages in question aren’t Indians, mind you. Bone Tomahawk dodges any distasteful historical realities by casting the savages as literal troglodytes. “They’re not my people,” snaps the only Native American actor in the movie, who plays a professor. This is a movie with its own rules, its own rhythm, its own progression. Four men descending from a Western into a horror movie. The violence will be simple, brutal, sudden, and thorough.
Zahler’s previous credits include the script for Asylum Blackout (my review here). That movie shares Bone Tomahawk’s brutality. But Asylum Blackout was directed by a Frenchman with a penchant for the excess of France’s new wave horror. For Bone Tomahawk, Zahler directs his own script with a measured austerity. Simple sets in bright sunlight. No sweeping vistas. The familiar sound of boots thudding on wooden floors and clomping hooves. Comfortable actors just doing what they do best. These are the things that make the second half of the movie work so well. These are the things that elude Eli Roth. These are the things that make Bone Tomahawk an unforgettable ride from one genre into another.
Support Quarter to Three by watching Bone Tomahawk on Amazon.com.
