Resist the temptation to think of Wild as a chick movie. Given the press, that might be hard to do. Writer Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada was adapted for the movie, and actor/producer Reese Witherspoon have used the movie’s publicity to advocate for women’s issues in Hollywood. Good for them. But this isn’t an issue movie. Instead, it’s a survival drama, minus the kind of catastrophe you get in 127 Hours or Into the Wild. That the lead character is a woman, and that she is largely defined by her relationship with another woman, shouldn’t even be an issue. It is, of course. But it shouldn’t be. And it shouldn’t be Wild’s identifying characteristic.
What makes Wild stand out is how it recreates the state of mind of someone alone in the wilderness. The visuals are gorgeous as the geography progresses from the barren desert through the cold and into the lush greenery of the Pacific Northwest. It’s no accident this progression reflects Strayed’s state of mind. The muted soundtrack is music remembered from a radio playing in a car or heard from another room. Director Jean-Marc Vallee’s deftly edited flashbacks are sometimes a split second or sometimes drawn out sequences, all presented in the style of someone left alone with her thoughts and recollections, all telling us a bit more about this woman.
And this is a woman worth meeting. Another thing that sets Wild apart from stereotypical chick movies is that Wild isn’t about someone who was failed by her parents or betrayed by her spouse. She isn’t rising above a perceived victimization, finding her strength. She’s an already strong character taking stock of the decisions she has made. Reese Witherspoon shows no trace of Tracy Flick, a role that’s hounded her ever since Election. Grimly bearing the burden of that colossal backpack, she shows grit, weariness, self-awareness, and complexity. This is how you work your way out from under a career of romantic comedies. Once again, Laura Dern reveals herself as an actor who deserves far more recognition than she gets. Who else consistently channels raw emotional intensity like Dern? It’s exhausting, in a good way.
As a procedural about an absolutely ass-kicking hike, Wild considers simple issues like having the right shoes and stove fuel. It also deals with the maddening loneliness, offset by bursts of camaraderie among fellow hikers. Wild is a warmly humanistic movie, full of good people. But it’s scary for a woman to be alone in the wilderness in a different way than it is for a man. The isolation when you see that lone hiker in the distance has very different implications for a woman. Wild acknowledges this, but doesn’t cheaply exploit it.
Sometime Quarter to Three contributor and baseball know-nothing Tony Carnevale takes a unique approach to Out of the Park Baseball 16. Also, check out his tutored Dwarf Fortress sessions starting here.
The bright spot in the disappointing RTS Planetary Annihilation was planets reaching out into the solar system and attacking each other. Actual interplanetary warfare, slinging nuclear missiles through space, firing massive Deathstar lasers, and turning moons into sledgehammers. The solar system was your battleground. But to get to this good stuff, you had to wade through a lot of middling RTSing. So imagine my delight to discover Interplanetary, a turn-based game that dispenses entirely with the middling RTSing.
Maggie isn’t a zombie movie so much as an elegy about terminally ill children. Who will turn into zombies. It takes place in the rural malaise following an averted zombie apocalypse. Arnold Scharzeneggar has brought home his infected daughter and now he has only to wait until she turns. Will he take her to a quarantine center? Will he put her out of her misery himself? Will his accent be explained? These are the questions the viewer must ponder.
The script calls for quiet grieving. Schwarzenegger is clearly out of his depth. But so too is the haggard farmer he affects. What parent is prepared to watch his child wither and die? What could have been the weakest part of the movie — an action star trying his hand at quiet emoting — kind of works. Kind of.
But then there’s the rest of the movie. First time director Henry Hobson has a nice eye for prosaic detail and dying light (the movie could have been called Twilight of the Living Dead and not just for its tween lead and tween romantic subplot (it could also have been called Foxcatcher, although you have to see the movie to understand that one)). But Hobson takes too long going nowhere in particular. The slow burn fizzles out and trails off. He furthermore displays a singular ability to undercut every scene by serving it with either rolling thunder underneath or syrupy music drizzled on top.
The supporting cast has the kind eyes and severe faces you’d expect in a rural malaise. And then there’s poor sporting Abigail Breslyn, who made her mark in movies by being humiliated in Little Miss Sunshine. Since then, she has been run down by zombies in Zombieland, thrown into a trunk and rudely beaten in The Call, and trapped in a ghost jar in Haunters. At this rate, I’d lay good odds that she’ll be one of the first to go in this fall’s Scream Queens, a Fox TV series from the creators of American Horror Story in which one major cast member is killed every episode. She’s left to do the heavy lifting in Maggie, despairing as the zombie make-up on her baby round face gets thicker and the contact lenses in her wide eyes get more opaque. If Maggie had trusted her more than its stunt Teutonic casting and the artsy indulgence of its freshman director, it might have shown more signs of life.
This week, two of us check out True Story, the anti-thriller starring Jonah Hill and James Franco. At the 49-minute mark, we discuss cliches we’re willing to overlook.
No matter how many ways we game World War II and watch it in movies and dissect its possible outcomes, the central fact of World War II is that it actually happened. The fall of France, appeasement, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, Tom Hanks landing on Normandy, Johnson stealing doilies, Brad Pitt in a crippled tank fending off an SS division, BJ Blascowicz traveling through time to fix the timestream, or whatever happened in the last Wolfenstein game. I didn’t play it. Who has time to play a Wolfenstein game when you’re replaying Grand Theft Auto V on a third platform?
World War II isn’t just the most significant endeavor in all of human history, it’s also one of our favorite playgrounds. One follows from the other. Because it’s the most significant endeavor in all of human history, it’s therefore a popular sandbox. Boys love to move chits on a board or hear the pinging pin in a depleted M1 Garand magazine or thrill to the four roaring Wright engines on a B-17 or roll for research in Axis and Allies. And one of the best World War II playgrounds is the utterly brilliant, sexily sleek, and slightly subversive boardgame Quartermaster General.
After the jump, WWII for dummies, geniuses, and everyone in between.Continue reading →
The $188 million opening weekend for Avengers: Age of Ultron can’t be wrong, right? At the 1:15 mark, we introduce our favorite studio logo gimmicks before movies.
It’s a two-to-one split on David Cronenberg’s weird Hollywood gothic, Maps to the Stars. At the 1:14 mark, we let fly with a 3×3 about peeing scenes in movies.
Next week: hmm, is anything even coming out next week?
After establishing his CCG bona fides, Tom Chick talks to Brad Talton about his newest boardgame, Millennium Blades, which is currently enjoying a successful campaign on Kickstarter. If you’ve ever played a CCG, or if you’ve so much as pondered playing a CCG, or especially if you want to play a game about CCGs that isn’t actually a CCG, Millennium Blades is a game for you.
I’m at the farmer’s market on a date with Kyanna, a busty single mother with creepily childlike features. She’s most interested in talent and least interested in romance. That means I want to focus on matching blue gems instead of orange gems. And because I’ve put a point of skill into my sexuality and flirtation, I get extra affection when I match red gems and green gems. I have a teddy bear I can give her to turn all the purple gems into pink gems, which build passion that makes my matches more efficient. But until I match enough green gems, I won’t have the sentiment to use the teddy bear.
After the jump, what does this have to do with Ironcast’s steampunk mechs?Continue reading →
Desktop Dungeons, the fiendishly clever anti-roguelike that got five stars from a certain hard-assed reviewer, is about to find its way to iOS and Android devices, where it’ll freely sync itself with your PC version.
But in the course of making it for mobile platforms, the folks at QCF Design came up with some new stuff they didn’t want to leave out of the PC version. So today’s Enhanced Edition is available as a free update. I’ll leave it to QCF to explain the new features in their own words:
* Secretly despise friends for already beating you on the Daily Dungeon leaderboards.
* Unlock a terrifying new building for your Kingdom.
* Discover the Rat Monarch and Chemist classes… and their reasons for visiting the Kingdom.
* Click through new quests and ignore exposition as it streams past you.
* Gleefully and accurately sling spells from the player-requested drag-to-cast and radial menus.
* Pages and pages of optimizations and bug fixes that are awesome but don’t sound cool when we put them in lists like this one.
The mobile versions will be out “by the end of May”.
This week we see Tom Hardy in the Soviet era thriller [sic] Child 44. At the 1:17 mark, we interrupt this podcast for a discussion of newscasts in movies.
This week, writer Alex Garland proves himself as a director with the cerebral and sexy Ex Machina. At the 1:10 mark, we burst into a discussion of bombs in movies.
Tiny Epic Kingdoms occupies an all-too-small niche of games that are short, but not dumb, not utterly random, or not thinly themed. It’s modest and ultimately lite, a palate-cleanser ideal before the main game of the evening, while you’re waiting for that guy who’s always late, or after the main game of the evening, to unwind after a brain burner. It’s portable enough and modest enough for lunch hour gaming that doesn’t sprawl across too much of the table or too much of the lunch hour. Calling it tiny is a slightly precious exaggeration, but it’s certainly small.
A card exists. It cannot be denied. It will flip up by the time you’ve gone through the deck and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It’s a matter of when, not if.
This is different from a die roll. A die roll, which is always an if, doesn’t exist until it happens. It is only a possibility. A six is no more inevitable than a lottery win or a lucky guess. You could theoretically roll a six-sided die all day and never conjure a six into existence.
Computer games, conjured forth from the stored possibilities of 1s and 0s, are usually die rolls. The very 1s and 0s are coin flips, which is really just a two-sided die. So when a videogame like Hand of Fate comes along and really gets the point of cards, I can’t help but notice.
