Seth Harris

Games for Two – Dice Heist & Welcome to the Dungeon

Dice Heist

In Dice Heist, each player is a master thief about to take on the four major art museums of the world: The Hermitage, The Met, The British Museum, and the Louvre. There are famous paintings, jewels, and artifacts to snatch up but you’ve got to be skilled and bring in sidekicks to help you out.

The four museums are each given a dice rating from easy (The Hermitage with 2 pips) to the hardest (The Louvre with 5 pips). Each player starts with one black die and each turn has the option to roll for a heist or recruit a sidekick (a white die). There is a limited pool of sidekicks and once you claim one it is yours for the rest of the game. Each turn, a player draws a card and places that item under the matching museum. If you roll on a museum and succeed then you get every single treasure that has accumulated there. When you roll your dice you look for at least one that beats the target value on the museum.

At the end of the game you add up the values of your total paintings, first place gets 8 points and the second gets 5. For each artifact you get 2 points and each set of gems scores in an ascending order (first red gem is 1 point, second red gem is 2 points, third red gem is 3 points, etc).

The game was very fast paced and there was some strategy in which museums you wanted to target based on their target value and what treasures they held at the moment. This was a game I think would benefit from a third player just to increase the tension. An okay game, very simple and easy to learn, very light on strategy.

Welcome to the Dungeon

WelcomeDungeon_3Dbox Welcome to the Dungeon is a game about a staple in tabletop gaming: heroes going into a dungeon and fighting monsters. The twist in this small card based game is that players all play the same hero. The first round of play is bidding which consists of pulling a monster card from the deck and either placing in the dungeon deck face down or keeping the card which allows you to take a piece of equipment from the hero. This mechanic does a couple things: the players are trying to make the dungeon as uninviting to the other players yet still beatable by themselves. There is the danger that you will think you are going to Pass and leave the dungeon in another’s lap only to have them drop out and leave you with a hellish dungeon.

Each successful run through the dungeon earns the player a Success card. The number of Success cards up for the getting varies depending on how many players you have. If you are killed in the dungeon you must flip an Aid card you individually have over to its red side. If you die again with this card on its red side you are out of the game entirely. To defeat the monsters you either expend a piece of relevant equipment (the Dragon Spear defeats the dragon for example) or be able to absorb the hit point damage based on the card value and your total armor added to your base HP.

While the game works with two players, the Bidding phase screamed out that it would work so much better with at least three. Bidding between two is a little lacking in the tension while adding a third would create some more variables. There are four different heroes to choose from at the start and we did only play once so with additional playthroughs some things might shine forward.

The BFG (2016, dir. Steven Spielberg)

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On a dark night, at the witching hour, an orphan named Sophie glimpses a strange shadow on the streets, quickly realizing it’s a giant. She rushes to hide under the blankets of her bed, but a massive hand reaches in through the window and carries her off to Giant Country where her adventure begins. There she learns that her abductor is big friendly giant and that his kin are the ones she needs to watch out for.

I have been a lover of Roald Dahl since I was very little and had Charlie and the Chocolate Factory read to me chapter by chapter at night. From there I remember books like The Twits, Matilda, and of course The BFG. Of Dahl’s children’s books The BFG is one I don’t think about often. I remembered the illustrations by Quentin Blake with the giant’s comically oversized ears, but as for the story I didn’t remember much of it. Steven Spielberg is another figure I remember vividly from my childhood. I can’t say what the first Spielberg movie I saw was, I have memories of a some scenes from E.T. early on, but I would guess the first one I watched in its entirety was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg is known for the sentimentality he tries to weave into his work, which would seem to be in opposition to the sometimes caustic wit Dahl brings to his writing.

The acting in The BFG is pretty much perfect. Mark Rylance as the titular giant has captured every aspect of the character from his soft garbled understanding of language to his jumps from hunched shuffler around his cave to nimble leaper through the city streets. Ruby Barnhill as Sophie delivers a very confident performance, never coming across as an act-y kid, but feeling like an actual Dahl protagonist. The supporting cast doesn’t have much screen time, but they do their jobs adequately, the evil giants being the big standouts. The film lives or dies on the performances of Rylance and Barnhill and they are very strong.

The plot of The BFG is quite different than I think we’ve become accustomed to lately. This is an older style of Spielberg storytelling, where there is no epic battle between the forces of good and evil. The conflict is solved fairly quickly with a short exciting moment. The emphasis is on our two central characters and their relationship. An element of the Tim Burton directed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that irked me was the addition of backstory to Wonka. It felt like the most unnecessary and pointless addition to a story that didn’t need it. In the same way we got the backstory of the Grinch or prequels attempt to fill in the gaps, these choices miss the point. We don’t need to know the origin of Santa Claus to love Santa. We don’t need to know how the Easter Bunny got his eggs to love Easter.

Dahl understood the details children are truly concerned about and he knew that they would accept larger than life characters without questions about where they came from. This is where the film shines because it flows like a Dahl narrative more than any other adaptation of his work I’ve seen. The plot is a lovely mess and not much really happens. But the time we spend with these two characters as they learn about each other is action enough. I loved how long some conversation scenes were, just these two bantering and hearing The BFG transformation of the English language.

I enjoy the latest superhero beat ‘em up very much. But it is very heartening to see a film like this still being made. It’s a picture about kindness and understanding. The BFG loves to help other but is very insecure about his speech and what other might do to him if they discover his existence. Problems are not solved through violence, but through peaceful means. Yes, the mean bad giants get what’s coming to them but it’s not being blown away and destroyed. Even they have a place in the world. And in this current climate, learning to understand that even your enemies deserve life and place in the world is a refreshing idea.

My Favorite Disturbing YouTube Videos and Channels

Unedited Footage of a Bear

Adult Swim decided in 2013 to experiment with its deep late night programming. They took the banal infomercial that you come across if you’re up in the wee hours and turned it into some of the most powerfully transgressive film making out there. Most of you have probably seen their most famous output, Too Many Cooks, which, while funny, is nowhere near as powerful as this short film from director Alan Resnick. It starts out with what looks to be footage of people watching a grizzly bear, then becomes a commercial for allergy medicine, and then evolves into a nightmare. I’ve watched this around half a dozen times and there is a lot to take from it.

This House Has People In It

Another short from Alan Resnick. This one is harder to crack than “Bear”. It’s a series of CCTV feeds from a home security system. There is weird stuff right from the get go. A couple arguing, a teenage girl lying stiff as a board face down on the floor, grandma watching a bizarre pottery show, the baby wandering around. Things just get more odd and you will need to watch every window to catch what’s happening in the yard. It all culminates in creepy climax that leaves you with tons of questions. This one has a very extensive alternate reality game attached to it. See if you can discover the clues and get lost in this strange art piece.

Hey Kids

Get your sport shoes ready! At first glance, the majority of the content on Hey Kids is just a series of repetitive and dumb finger family videos. However, you eventually come across the strange bald figure with over-sized eyes and mouth superimposed on its face. It speaks in a hard to pin down accent and talks in almost nonsensical sentences. The more recent videos on the channel seems to show an obsession with the Illuminati and creepypasta. Is there meaning behind this string of increasingly insane gibberish? What mind generates all of this demented content?

Poppy

I always felt there was something off about Ariana Grande. I thought the apparent overnight flip from tween star to twerking Molly enthusiast by Miley Cyrus was bizarre. The entire assembly line of female pop in America is strange to me. Even stranger than American pop is the highly manufactured KPop and JPop scenes. This is where we come to That Poppy. She is influenced by the Asian pop scene and has a very polite demeanor in all her videos. Watch closely though, something is wrong with Poppy. All that Illuminati iconography in her video for “Lowlife. Such cryptic sentiments in her videos. Something is wonderfully wrong with Poppy…

Moving, Reading, and Digital Media

Google Infinite Bookshelf — The experimental digital bookshelf developed by Google.

I just moved into a new house. We bought it, first time homeowners. After having moved multiple times in my 20s, I decided I would spend the money to hire professional movers to handle the furniture and heavier boxes. It went off so smoothly, I was literally stunned. They arrived at 8am and by 11:30am everything was in the new house and unloaded off their truck. Yet, somehow I still ended up pulling a muscle in my neck (I blame unhooking some very tight washer hoses).

One thing we did before moving was sell off most of our books and DVDs. Once upon a time, I was a rabid collector of physical media. I used to go into bookstores and have an almost euphoric and disorienting haze come over me, being unable to recall a single title or author I might look for. I started keeping a piece of notebook paper folded up in my wallet with these names in case I happened to go into a bookstore. When I was in college, we would regularly visit the local Blockbuster and pour through their cheap DVD selection, growing my collection by dropping $100 a trip. Once I was out of college, I hit some hard times and sold off most of my DVDs for some coin to buy groceries with. Slowly but surely they whittled down.

Now, I only have a very minimal collection of things I consider fairly obscure: Seasons 1 & 2 of Frisky Dingo, Wainy Days, Seasons 1 & 2 of Upright Citizens Brigade, and so on. Mostly things that aren’t easily accessible on the streaming platforms I subscribe to. I no longer own many physical comic books and my weekly reading is done purely digital. For literature, I mostly read off the Kindle app on my iPad and only buy a physical book if I don’t have a digital option.

Throughout my graduate school days and into the present I still hear people bemoan this shift from physical to digital. Whether it be with movies, books, music, or anything else you can find someone who is slightly saddened by a decrease in the tangible. I remember sitting in the Writing Center where I worked at my university, where freshmen came to have their papers critiqued and revised, and having conversations with a couple fellow tutors who were totally against the idea of reading off a screen. Having been through an involuntarily move that forced by books into storage I was on the side of the digital. Their arguments touched on the sensory aspects of a physical literature mostly (feel, smell). I have begun to think of this as the fetish-zation of physical media. The same way a music lover might wax poetic about the groves on a vinyl record, so does the book lover talk in erotic tones about the smell of a used bookstore and the crack of a hardback spine. I personally just don’t get much from those sensory experiences.

Digital means a few different things to me. Because of my personal experiences moving so often I felt that my physical books were either not accessible or a burden I had to think about when going from place to place. Since I got my first iPad and started reading digitally reading and literature feeling freer to me. I can carry my whole library around with me no matter where I go. I can stream movies where ever I have a connection and I can sideload video files onto my devices for watching whenever I choose.

In a world where we have to become increasingly more aware of our impact the environment, moving from printed paper texts to digital ones seems like a necessity. I admit I haven’t researched the carbon impact of a tablet computer versus analog media, but I would have to think that over time the digital option is more environmentally friendly. It also takes less space on a planet that is becoming increasingly overcrowded. Being able to compress media is one way we create more space for each other and our environment.

Digital media is also revolutionary is what it can do for developing countries. Distributing books to people in rural, poor areas through pre-loaded devices would be easier in a digital format. In the same way I would have been able to move my library throughout my 20s if it had been digital, I can imagine how helpful it would be for refugees to hold onto their books despite having to leave their homes. Add in digital photos as a way for them to preserve memories instead of the sad reality of leaving physical photo albums behind when you don’t have time to pack up your life.

There’s a lot of fears around dropping physical media that are very valid. The infamous case of Amazon wiping DRM copies of 1984 off users Kindles rang as one of the most ironic thing our culture has experienced. DRM should be a major concern for digital users. It’s the one great hurdle to making digital media a universal form of the free exchange of information. This ties into copyright law which transcends the digital and affects all forms of media currently.

The future is always uncertain. But I feel very passionate and sure that the future of media lies in the virtual world. The ability to compress an entire library into a single handheld device is one of the most revolutionary things humankind has accomplished. My generation and the next will likely be the transitioners, but in handful of decades reading on screen will be the norm. Like vinyl, there will always be a niche market for physical books, but the way to open the doors of communication across the globe will be in how we develop digital literature.

Games for Two – Above and Below

Above and Below
Designed by Ryan Laukat
Published by Red Raven Games
Purchase here

Above and Below is the story of rebuilding after disaster. Your village was destroyed by barbarians and you’ve moved your people to a new place to start a new life. However, you find beneath the ground is an intricate series of tunnels and the opportunity to discover great treasure. You’ll need to build new buildings, recruit new villagers, harvest resources, and explore the world below to win.

You start the game with three villagers: one builder, one trainer, and one explorer. All are capable of going cave diving, the explorer just has the chance of rolling better. You can spend income to purchase new buildings, each of which have special actions, or purchase new villagers to train. If you choose to go into the caverns you take a cave card and roll one die. The pips correspond to a paragraph number in the adventure book. Another player reads and gives you options to choose from. Different options provide different rewards but you won’t know what those rewards are until after you roll. The game is played out over seven rounds and at the end you calculate points based on the number of buildings you have, how many of each resources you’ve accumulated, your reputation score, and any bonuses you get from specific cards.

My wife and I had a wonderful time playing Above and Below. Sometimes you come across games that say they are for two players, but as you play them you realize the experience would be more complex and interesting with at least a third. Above and Below works beautifully as a two player game and plays surprisingly fast. My wife actually commented that she wished there were a few more rounds. In total we played three full games. The first game was naturally a lot of figuring out the mechanics and making sure we were comprehensive in our actions. About halfway through that first session things began to click. By the third game, we were deep in the strategy and realizing what benefits delving into the caves beyond creating a very fun, light fantasy story.

Above-and-Below-board I was reminded a bit of IDW’s Machi Koro, a city building game, where certain cards are considered top shelf premium ones based on their cost and benefits. In Above and Below, there are six star buildings that provide multiple benefits if you can afford their large cost. There’s also four interchangeable star buildings that provide similar but less powerful benefits. Three pools replenish during your rounds of play: new villagers, regular buildings, and underground buildings. Each playthrough created vastly different villages for the both of us. Resources are harvested either from buildings or going into the caves. Once you have resources you can either stockpile them (which increases your income) or offer them up for sale to other players. At the end of the game you add up the resources you have stockpiled and multiply them by a point value based on where they were place on the stockpile track. So, selling resources can help the buyer increase that score while giving the seller a few quick gold pieces.

Above and Below is a game we would definitely play again. It takes a little more time to set up than the simple card games we had been playing, but nowhere near the set up time of games like Eldritch Horror and the like. If you are looking for a very deep, complex resource management game this is not for you. A perfect game to introduce someone to resource management without overwhelming them with too many actions and options. Because of the numerous building and variety of villagers, including special villagers that can only be recruited through going into the caves, there is a lot of replayability. Highly recommending this game.

Comic Book Review – The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol.1: Squirrel Power

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 1
Writer: Ryan North | Artist: Erica Henderson
Purchase here

unbeatable_squirrel_girl_vol_1_squirrel_power Without planning it, I decided to review the first volume of Squirrel Girl in the same week the internet is abuzz with Anna Kendrick pushing to play the character in a Marvel film. Kendrick has admitted she doesn’t know much about the character beyond that she is half-squirrel, so let me have the honor of helping to educate to Ms. Kendrick, and those of you in the audience who wish to read on further, about just who Squirrel Girl is.

Doreen Green was born with the genes of a squirrel mixed with her own. Not a mutant, but the victim of genetic tampering, Doreen first outing as a superhero had her teaming up with Iron Man and taking down Dr. Doom. Pretty impressive. She would later join the Great Lakes Avengers, a team that poked fun at the ubiquity of superhero teams in the 1980s. From there she ended up the nanny of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones’ infant daughter and is now solo in her own series. She is akin to Dr. Doolittle, except limited in her communication to just squirrels. She has a big bushy tail and can climb trees without strain.

In her first solo series, Squirrel Girl has just enrolled at Empire State University in NYC and has a roommate, Nancy Whitehead. Nancy is an introverted, take no nonsense character who at first has no clue her roommate is a superhero. There’s also Tippy Toe, Squirrel Girl’s sidekick, a squirrel who ends up converting an Iron Man glove into mini armor for himself. While our heroine takes on Kraven the Hunter in this first issue, I’m sure you can tell it’s not a deeply serious battle to the death. As Squirrel Girl encounters these villains she references her deck of Deadpool’s Guide to Super Villain cards.

Unbeatable_Squirrel_Girl_Vol_1_3 This is a very light-hearted view of the Marvel Universe and it is a pretty fun read. I would admit this is not my usual cup of tea when I read comics, but it wasn’t terrible. The jokes are very clever and I love the Deadpool villain cards that pop up every issue. While each issue is essentially a stand alone tale, there is a plot thread throughout of Galactus’ impending attack on Earth. The artwork is perfect this style of comic, very cartoony, conveys a sense of motion and kicks in when things get crazy. I saw a criticism online comparing this to Mike Allred’s X-Statix work as an insult. I think to have your art compared to Allred’s is a major compliment and Erica Henderson earns it.

If you’re getting annoyed and tired with a second Civil War and a little overkill with darker storylines in comics, Squirrel Girl provides a good palette cleanser. If you were a fan of the self-referential style of Giffen & DeMatteis’s Justice League or Joe Kelly’s Deadpool, Squirrel Girl continues that fun, less than serious tradition.

The Jungle Book (2016, dir. Jon Favreau)

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If you’ve seen the original animated Jungle Book then you pretty much know the story: Mowgli, the man cub adopted by the wolves and watched over by the panther Bagheera, pals around with Baloo the bear, has some misadventures, and ends up in a life and death battle with the brutal Shere Khan. This live-action with CG animals adaptation by Jon Favreau is the latest in Disney’s new trend of remaking past animated films with real people. They have had mixed success: Maleficent did add a lot of unseen story to Sleeping Beauty while Cinderella felt like a banal retread of familiar territory. The Jungle Book is somewhere in the middle. While not the first live action attempt at the story (see 1994’s version with Jason Scott Lee as adult Mowgli) it is very entertaining and the effects are done well enough that you don’t have to travel the uncanny valley for an hour and a half.

Neeli Sethi as Mowgli is our singular human presence (save for one flashback) of the entire film so he immediately has a ton of weight to carry. He does a champion’s job though there is the occasional “act-y kid” moment which can be forgiven when you realize he was playing to some simple hand puppets and green screen. The voice work is great and each actor matches their role. Bill Murray is a perfect Baloo and Ben Kingsley sounds just like Bagheera should. I was not a great fan of Christopher Walken as King Louie though. His casting in anything just feels like a stunt at this point. Lupita Nyong’o voice Raksha, the wolf mother of Mowgli and brings a lot of emotion to the role. My favorite of them all was Idris Elba as Shere Khan. Both his vocal performance and the work of the animators created such a terrifying and insidious villain.

The songs are minimized from the 1967 animated picture to this one. The closest we get is Bear Necessities and just a hint of King Louie’s “I Want to Talk Like You” number. Scarlett Johansson voices Kaa the Serpent and just touches on “Trust In Me”. The personalities are all as you remember them and the plot beats pretty much hit the same as the animated original. The one big divergence and my one major hang up is the way this film chooses to conclude. In the original Rudyard Kipling “Mowgli” stories he ends his time in the jungle upon discovering his birth mother and in the animated original he leaves after seeing a girl about his age come to get water for the village. This version decides to forgo Mowgli ever having a real struggle between the jungle and the village. There’s some brief tension but it ends with him playing around with his pals in the jungle.

For me, Disney’s bittersweet endings like The Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh, The Fox and The Hound, and others were important. These are metaphors for transitioning from the innocence of childhood to learning about the difficulties of life as an adult. Now, maybe they didn’t need to have Mowgli go back to the village but I never felt like the character struggled with it as much the script would have liked me to believe. The village ends up serving as a convenient plot device for the third act but then is forgotten about. Maybe they have plans for sequel to revisit this more, but I went from really loving this film to feeling a little off at its conclusion.

Comic Book Review – Clean Room Vol. 1 – by Gail Simone

Clean Room Vol. 1: Immaculate Conception
Writer: Gail Simone | Artist: Jon Davis-Hunt

cleanroom 02 Two women marked by death attempting to understand the evil that lives in the shadows. This pretty much sums up the basic concept of Gail Simone’s first venture into Vertigo Comics territory. Chloe Pierce’s fiance killed himself and she miscarried their child. Now she wants to know what a Scientology-like cult run by Astrid Mueller. Astrid is a German woman who was brutally run down by a madman in a car when she was a child. After that experience she began to see what we might call “demons”. However, the series makes an effort to challenge our preconceptions about the nature of these monsters. In this first volume, we follow parallel stories of Astrid confronting a literal demon from her past while Chloe must decide if she trusts Astrid’s cult while attempting to figure out why her fiance killed himself.

I can’t say that I have ever intentionally followed the work of Gail Simone. Birds of Prey and Batgirl sort of passed me by. I have always loved her Secret Six titles, spotlighting a rotating cast of villains and anti-heroes who are less than happy to be working together. I’d had tremendously high hopes for her Wonder Woman run around 7-8 years ago and was really disappointed. Her Red Sonja work has been on my Must Read list for awhile. I think I entered into Clean Room with a pretty open mind, interested to see what Simone would do in the less prohibitive environment of Vertigo Comics.

Clean Room throws us right in the middle of things very fast. I had to re-read the first five pages a couple times due to how quickly the stakes are set up. The entire first issues feels paced way too fast in a effort to pit Chloe and Astrid against each other. It takes awhile for the character development to come out and even by the conclusion of this first volume it feels like a two hour pilot for a larger tv series. As you would expect with most Vertigo work, there is a lot of sex and violence. The gore is pretty much an essential element in this type of story and it goes to just the right places to make you uneasy and creeped out. One scene of a demon possessed man digging into cheeks and twisting the skin of his face upside down comes to memory. The series really gets interesting when it is slowly unraveling the world around the Mueller cult and their work with celebrities. We get to see the inner workings of the organization and how they cleverly and efficiently deal with problems.

cleanroom06 The artwork is very uneven. Artist, Jon Davis-Hunt draws an awesome demon, and brings a lot of interesting variety to their designs. Elements of insects and sea life are interwoven into his monster work and this adds to a sense of the larger than our perception Lovecraft style of horror. However, his normal humans often look like mannequins. His figures are very posed and there is a lack of sense of movement through the panels. It improves as the series goes on, but still retains a stiffness. His linework is very smooth and detailed though.

Clean Room has a very promising concept and I will definitely continue reading through the next couple arcs. The mystery behind the “demons” is intriguing and if written cleverly could end up being a great longform horror story. There’s room for improvement on the art, but the overall series is one of the best offerings I’ve seen from Vertigo lately.

John Wick (2014, dir. Chad Stahelski, David Leitch)

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I remember seeing the trailer for John Wick a couple years ago and thinking “You can’t be serious. Because they killed his dog?” Now that I’ve seen the film, I sit here thinking…well, I’m not sure. The film tells the story of retired assassin John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves. His wife died suddenly and not long after he receives a dog that was her last gift to him. The dog is brutally killed by Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), the son of a Russian crime boss, and this pulls Wick back into the game he thought he had left behind. Throw in supporting roles from a bevy of character actors: Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, Willem Dafoe, Adrianne Palicki, Lance Reddick, and David Patrick Kelly (Warriors! Come out and play-ayyy!).

This film felt like a comic book. That is it felt like I picked up the collection of “John Wick Returns”, a mini-series wherein a popular crime comics character was brought back after an absence of a few years. The way we were introduced to the world and its inhabitants without tons of exposition to explain themselves, made me feel like this was a world I could go back and read about in other titles. Of all the places and characters the world was peppered with, I enjoyed the Continental, a hotel that caters exclusively to assassins and paid killers, the most. I also loved the sense of history John had with everyone. We have no idea what the details are to these connections, but it felt like there would be dozens of stories to tell. Marcus (Willem Dafoe), John’s mentor, held a lot history in his interactions with John and, like any good comic book universe, I am sure the equivalent of “John Wick Begins” detailing his training under Marcus would be amazing.

I would never say I was a huge action movie fan so I was not the target audience of this film. Not being an expert on the craft and technique behind movie fights, I thought everything felt realistic. Nothing John did was too incredibly unreal. If you’re used to more hyper-stylized fighting you might think this was a more toned down version, but it looks like the way someone like John Wick would really fight. It’s funny now that I think about it; the action which you would expect to be the exaggerated element is played fairly real while it’s the world building that goes over the top.

There’s definitely some nods to classic action directors: The shooting out of the glass walls made me think of John Woo. Wick is your archetypal silent, stoic killer along the lines of a lot of French noir crime films.The acting is fine. I didn’t see any performances that blew me away, everyone sort of knew who they were playing and did that. I always love seeing David Patrick Kelly in anything and I did really enjoy the mannerisms he brought to his “clean up crew” character.

There’s a sequel on the horizon and I’m interested to see what they do. This film really plays like “the final John Wick” story and the stakes used to pull him back into action are about as intense as they get. Something taking place before this would work but I would like to see this older, broken Wick continue however they decide it might work. This isn’t going to be one of my favorites of the year, but it is an enjoyable film that kept my attention the whole run time. If you enjoy films with sense of a deep, developed world then I definitely think John Wick will deliver.

Movie Review – Swiss Army Man

a24 visions

Swiss Army Man (2016)
Written & Directed by Daniels

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This is the film that had people walking out of its Sundance screening. This is the film about the farting corpse with superpowers. This is also a musical. If you’re still there, let’s go a little more in depth with very unique film.

Hank is stranded on a desert island about to hang himself when he glimpses a body washed up on the shore. Hank names the corpse Manny and discovers that his new friend has an array of superpowers, from using his farts to act as a jet-ski to becoming a human water fountain and more. The duo begin an odyssey to return to civilization and reclaim the love they think is there’s. And things get even stranger.

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