PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Monsters

Monsters (2010, dir. Gareth Edwards)

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The film begins with title cards that explain that a NASA probe was launched years ago and brought back microorganisms that have mutated into gigantic monsters that rule a swath of land between the United States and Mexico. This area has been walled off and named “The Infected Zone, ” and no one is allowed to pass without permission from the joint-government operation. Andrew Kaulder (Halt and Catch Fire’s Scoot McNairy) is a photojournalist guilted into escorting his boss’s daughter, Samantha back into the States. The catch is that in two days all travel between countries is going to be blocked off for a six-month long major operation.

With Star Wars: Rogue One being released in theaters this weekend I thought it was the right time to finally sit down and watch director Gareth Edwards’ Monsters. I’d only seen his Godzilla film, which I wasn’t very impressed by. When Edwards was announced as the director of the first Star Wars spinoff, I was a bit confused. These were the same feelings I had when Colin Trevorrow was announced to director Jurassic World, Marc Webb was set to helm the Spider-Man reboot, and Josh Trank was put in charge of Fantastic Four. There appears to be a trend of picking the “hot young director” to take over a major film property. This sort of mentality defies logic because from the outside this feels like a very risky proposition. The only way this really makes sense to me is from the perspective of a controlling studio who wants a director that has a creative vision but hasn’t had time to build that sense of earned professionalism to think they can make the big decisions. “Hot, young directors” let studios and their notes on dailies wield greater power than with a genuinely creative director who has earned it.

Monsters is a beautiful looking film. The cinematography is masterful, and Edwards does an excellent job of evoking scale. Landscapes fill the screen and when the monsters do appear they are represented as truly towering and powerful. It also becomes very clear that Edwards is not interested in telling a story of man vs. monster. The film is purely focused on the two characters traveling across a dangerous land and the relationship that grows between them. The appearance of the monsters is used to underline some larger concept or idea that is going on between them or to emphasize that they are in peril to get home. There are a lot of fascinating ideas at work in Monsters.

Monsters wants to be an insightful character piece, but I personally found the characters to be shallow and ultimately uninteresting. The film’s tone bounces between a straightforward narrative with hints of Cinéma vérité but never delves deep enough. The stories behind both characters are painted in fairly broad strokes (He has a son and has never been involved in his life, She is running from an engagement she really doesn’t want to be in). Dialogue is a little too on the nose and, while these are good actors, I just don’t think they are skilled enough to bring a full performance into every gesture or look that would tell these characters’ stories at a greater depth. Edwards has a background in digital special effects which explains why the film looks so good, but may also inform as to why the characters ultimately feel flat and undeveloped.

Character Development: 7th Sea Second Edition Part 1

Character Development – 7th Sea Second Edition

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7th Sea Second Edition is a role-playing game created and developed by John Wick, Rob Justice, and Mike Curry. The game is centered around the exploits of pirate culture in a fantasy version of 17th century Europe and its associated colonies. Stories told with this system are expected to high adventure full of intrigue, romance, and some sorcery thrown in for good measure. The official setting is that of Théah, a continent rules by various nation-states that are in turn connected to a central church and its theology, sorcerous powers and magic, and the remnants of a lost civilization called the Syrene.

Conflict resolution in the game is handled by the GM declaring a player action as a Risk. The player clarifies their Intent and the GM responds by telling them the appropriate Skill and Trait. These scores are added and the corresponding number of ten-sided dice are rolled. Sets of 10 are the desired outcome and the more you can make the better (7+3, 2+3+5, etc). Each set of 10 is a Raise and can be spent to accomplish everything from overcoming the conflict to inflicting wounds and even establishing a fictional detail.

I read through the details of the setting’s nation-states to determine what sort of character I wanted to create and decided upon Castille as the place of origin. Castille is essentially Spain, even with the emphasis on the Vaticine Church as the chief governing body over the monarchy. With the Church looming so large I wanted to create a character deeply connected to it but in conflict with the powerful organization. I was intrigued by the idea of corruption within the Vaticine and thought up the idea that there could be a society within the Church that were actually worshippers of demonic occult powers. Their long-term goal would be the collapse of the Vaticine internally with their faction rising up to control the organization. My character would be someone who witnessed their dark rite and who they in turn found out saw them at work. I struck upon the idea of a church guard, like the Swiss Guards of the Vatican. This man would be a veteran of war, seeking peace as a soldier for the Church. Now the demonic conspiracy has framed the guard as a heretic, making it seem that he was the one indulging in the dark arts. The guard is now on the run, seeking the help of Church exiles who might also be aware of the conspiracy and know how to aid him in revealing this truth to the world. The guard would be named Moisés Cano.

Once again, I used the three metrics of Maslow, Myers-Briggs, and Covey to determine aspects of my character’s psychology and needs.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Cano is definitely focused on basic needs somewhere between Physiological and Safety. His excommunication from the Vaticine and the subsequent manhunt based on false charges has our hero struggling to find a safe place for more than a few days.

Myers-Briggs – INFJ

After going through the test I found Cano was an INFJ. This means he is like less than 1% of the population, inborn sense of idealism and morality, he is a dreamer but establishes concrete steps. Cano is soft-spoken but with strong opinions and he fights, fiercely for his beliefs. In everything he does, Cano works toward balance, not advantage. He can easily play the role of an extrovert, but needs time to meditate and decompress. In his eyes, the world is full of inequity, but he does not believe it has to be that way. This religious determination can easily wear him down. He is extremely private and finds it hard to open up to others personally. authenticity in romantic relationships and a kinship of shared values is essential in Cano’s mind.

7 Habits Maturity Continuum

Our hero is still struggling with the Private Victory on his way to Independence. He is definitely being proactive (Habit 1) and has begun with the end in mind (Habit 2). However, Cano has not yet put first things first (Habit 3), getting embroiled in other’s problems and stories taking him off track from his personal goal.

20 Questions

Part of 7th Sea character creation are 20 Questions before you even touch the numbers and mechanics of the game. I absolutely love this feature and works especially well for my approach in character creation in this series.

What country is your Hero from? My hero hails from Castille.

How would you physically describe your Hero? My hero is male, physically well built from years of military training, he has the faint trace of a vertical scar across his eye the remnants of a war faraway. Jet black hair with wisps of white through the temples. He walks with a slight limp in his right leg, another souvenir from the war.

Does your Hero have recurring mannerisms? My hero prefers to stand in the background and is very hesitant to step forward and make himself known, especially in intense conflicts. He will let a smile slip through when caught off guard and finds himself trying to suppress it without success.

What is your Hero’s main motivation? My hero desperately seeks to find any who can help him reveal the occult sect taking over the Vaticine.

What is your Hero’s greatest strength? Greatest weakness? My hero’s strength lies his in-depth knowledge of the secret signs and rituals of the secret societies within the Vaticine, helping him find allies no matter which port he comes to. My hero’s weakness are his anxiety attacks brought on by PTSD. Things he saw in the war and the dark rites he witnessed within the walls of the Vaticine leave him prone to these attacks when triggered.

What are your Hero’s most and least favorite things? My hero’s favorite thing are his morning prayers and meditations. They bring him a centered peace that he hopes one day will be permanent. His least favorite thing are onions, onions are disgusting.

What about your Hero’s psychology? My hero wants nothing more than to resolve conflicts without bloodshed, he has seen too much in his lifetime. He will do any and everything to negotiate and compromise even with the deadliest buccaneer or cunning scallywag. My hero often uses food and drink as a negotiation tool, always a simple meal, bread and ale, thinking it will bring he and his adversary together as equals.

What is your Hero’s single greatest fear? That he will lose his peace and end up killing again. He knows he may have to shed blood in self-defense and has from time to time, but he always pulls himself back from unleashing the sort of blood-fueled rage of his youth in the war.

What are your Hero’s highest ambitions? His greatest love? My hero’s greatest ambition was to rise amongst the ranks of the Vaticine Guard until he became one of the anointed protectors of the Hierophant. His plans were put on hold after uncovering an occult conspiracy within the church and fled from those who wish to silence him. My hero’s greatest love is that of the way of peace and sharing his faith with all those he crosses paths with.

What is your Hero’s opinion of his country? My hero deeply loves Castille but worries that the Vaticine has had so much corruption sewn into it that now it’s evil is leaking out into the streets. He saw signs of demonic entities plaguing the land through famine and pestilence.

Does your Hero have any prejudices? My hero still finds his hatred of the Montaigne raised despite his best efforts to suppress it. He saw his comrades brutalized in the war with Montaigne and is always a hair’s breadth away from giving into the violence seething through his veins.

Where do your Hero’s loyalties lie? Despite being far from home and the headquarters of the church, my hero is ever loyal to the Vaticine. This does not mean he believes all clergy above questioning, in fact he will challenge those he sees as committing heresy towards the Articles of Faith.

Is your Hero in love? Is he married or betrothed? My hero loved one of his fellow soldiers, his commanding officer, but she was killed before his eyes. The nightmares still wake him up on nights that are too still and quiet.

What about your Hero’s family? My hero comes from the Cano family. His father is a veteran who found no peace within the faith while his mother was devout. His father turned to drink, likely related to his own PTSD and disappeared for weeks. He was found dead, succumbing to the elements. This pushed our hero’s mother further into the faith. Because he was the son of a soldier, our hero did not come from wealth. His mother poured all their money into the church and when was of age our hero conscripted into the service. Our hero does not know much about his paternal grandparents except that his father was disowned by them for choosing to serve, as they wanted him to go into the priesthood.

How would your Hero’s parents describe him?

Mother: “He was a good boy, until he turned on the faith. I do not know if he can be redeemed now after what the fathers told me. The sins he has committed will require the deepest atonements.”

Father: “I don’t know what sort of man he will grow up to be, likely ruined by my own actions. I have made a place for him in this world without any sort of honor. I have buried him before he has had a chance to live.”

Is your Hero a gentleman or gentlewoman? My hero attempts to be a gentle within the boundaries of his faith, and this leads him down a somewhat chivalrous path. He does not seek the affections of any maiden, but to bring light and truth to the world.

How religious is your Hero? What sect of the Church does he follow? My hero is a highly devout member of the Vaticine Church. He has been labeled a heretic by the church proper due to witnessing the dark occult rites of a corrupted cardinal. While he still practices as a private individual, he struggles to find a way to redeem himself and burn away the corruption in his beloved church.

Is your Hero a member of a guild, gentleman’s club, or secret society? My hero has found himself in the growing favor of Močiutės Skara, a society driven by a compassion to help and aid others.

What does your Hero think of Sorcery? My hero believes all sorcery is making concert with the devils of the earth. He is highly opposed to its use.

If you could, what advice would you give your Hero? Let the peace of your faith guide you, but do not allow yourself to be blinded to the truth.

Next week: Plugging all this character work into the actual mechanics of the system!

Scarlet Heroes – Character and World Creation

scarlet-heroes I decided recently to start a one on one tabletop roleplaying campaign with my wife and chose Scarlet Heroes as the system to use. Scarlet Heroes is an Old School roleplaying game designed specifically for one GM and one player. There is a premade setting that comes with the system, but I prefer to build something with my players, so we have a shared mutual vision of the world. Ariana and I sat down a couple weekends ago and used Ben Robbins’ Microscope to broadly build the world.

Microscope is a game that allows plays to collectively create the history of a world. You start by creating a concept for the world and starting and ending periods. From there, players rotate as the Lens, a role that allows a player to choose an aspect of the world and spend a round building it out through additional Periods, Events, or specific Scenes. Microscope is not about being comprehensive but about working at whatever level of detail you enjoy and interacting with a world that way.

Here are the results of our Microscope game.

The world we created is Muatera, a refuge for a large group of colonists from a world drained of its magic and left lifeless. Piling on board their planar shipwhales, around 350,000 refugees headed for a star that had been found by some of the last mages. They became lost on the way as the magic faded and found Muatera, a decently hospitable planet where a home could be made. Almost as soon as they landed, their shipwhales became stricken with a strange illness and the colonists realized they would be stuck here for the foreseeable
future. The races that made up the colonists were Humans, Elves, Halflings, and Orcs.

The Humans are pretty standard and hold many of the bureaucratic and political positions in the colony. Elves are more esoteric and alien and have developed their own technical magics, separate from the very elemental craft that drained and ruined the Old World. Halflings are the industrious agrarians doing the hard labor without seeking praise or reward beyond a good job done. Orcs are the roaming free spirits, moving in nomadic tribes and exploring Muatera in more detail that any other race.

eecb9967d852b7759d52ad659d98fa34 After about a century, the ruins of the Remnants were discovered buried beneath Muatera. These were the piece of a lost civilization, the details of whom are yet to be fleshed out. Their writings did lead to a cure that helped boost the shipwhale herds and allowed the colonists to visit the three neighboring planets in the system. Three additional races were discovered: The Goliath Tieflings, Hypogeal Elves, and Psionic Dwarves. Relations with each is complex and distinct, but no major conflicts have sprung up…yet.

Our campaign will take place 200 years after the colony began and Ariana decided she wanted to play as a Halfling came up with Estrella Pips, the daughter of a shipwhale rancher and the middle child of five. She has learned magic from some dusty tomes in her parents’ attic, and she uses her magic to midwife the shipwhales. We decided that once the shipwhales reach a certain size, possibly when they develop the capacity to hold their breath in the vacuum of space, they float up through the atmosphere and finish growing to their final massive ship size. Ariana established that Halflings are determined survivors who don’t think much of leisure time but are loyal to the death with their friends and allies. Estrella is the maturity equivalent of 15 human years in age and actually does like the idea of enjoying life and playing.

Some of the threads and hooks she gave me through my questions were:

Shipwhales escaped, Milo (Estrella’s eldest brother) thinks they were stolen by some Orc bandits.
Politicians from Kaphis, the capitol colony, wants to buy up or take land because of the Remnant ruins possibly buried beneath.
The worldscar left by a battle between a Magus and Remnant golems is barren and has caused the fertile land to increase in value and be fought over more violently.

This will be my first major delve into OSR/Dungeon Crawling since 2008 when I ran the dismal (IMO) D&D 4th. I am very excited about this and the world, fed mostly by details from Ariana has me intrigued. I’ve even purchased a halfling wizard mini for her to use. The first actual session will be Saturday, December 17th so look for a write-up after that.

TV Review – Westworld Season 1

Westworld Season 1
(HBO, created for television by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, based on the film by Michael Crichton)

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If you have not seen Season 1 of Westworld DO NOT read further. This article contains very detailed spoilers.

Back in 2014 when Spike Jonze’s Her was in theaters, I remember seeing a very awkward interview between Jonze and a reporter on BBC Newsnight. The reporter begins the segment describing the film as being about humanity falling in love with technology. It’s obvious Jonze doesn’t agree with this analysis and attempts to explain his view of the film about any romantic relationship and how often one partner can grow in ways that cause them to fall out of love while the remaining partner has not grown past the love yet. The film is about that emotional dissonance people in dying relationships experience told through a fantastical lens. That’s how I’ve felt reading a lot of pop reviews and analyses of Westworld. The focus is either on the mystery behind everything or seeing it as being about the singularity and advanced artificial intelligence. Westworld is a show that has futuristic technology, but it is not about technology, not about human progress in material terms. It’s a series about self-discovery and the journey inward.

The bicameral mind was an idea developed by Julian Jaynes and published in 1976. He believed early humans had divided cognition which led to the assumption of God when in fact we were speaking with ourselves. Auditory verbal hallucinations resulted in the creation of deities and spirits. Jaynes stated that the modern concept of Consciousness developed around 3,000 years ago which led to introspection and the idea of an inner self. Jaynes compared the psychology of the Old and New Testaments, with the New eschewing legalism for a more human-centered concept of spirituality. There’s no consensus on what causes schizophrenia, this could be a vestige of the early bicameral mind, he theorized. Jayne’s ideas have been routinely shot down as having no scientific footing, one of the main arguments being that language emerged before his timing and that internal consciousness would have had to have existed for language’s development. While Jaynes might have been at something or completely off, the theory is important to understanding what Westworld is attempting to say about our relationship to ourselves and our spirit.

In the final moments of Westworld’s first season, we have two characters, Dolores and Maeve seemingly developing autonomy outside of their creator’s wishes. Throughout the ten episodes, both they and other hosts in the park have experienced contact with an external entity and we’ve been led to believe this is Arnold, the deceased creator of the park. Dolores, through prompting by the park’s co-creator, Ford is brought to the “center of the maze” and finds that the voice she believes to be Arnold’s is supposedly her own inner consciousness developing where once there was none. Dolores then goes on to assassinate Ford, an act the man himself had implied he wanted to be done as part of his creations’ ascendancy. The question then is, did Dolores kill Ford by her own choice or was this yet again another program?

A bit earlier, Maeve, a host who had coerced human technicians into aiding her escape from the facility, learned her entire plan to recruit fellow hosts and stage an escape had been programmed into her. Her entire journey of self-awareness and autonomy was now just the bidding of the masters she had been trying to escape. Maeve angrily tries to reject this and continues on her path to the last train out of Westworld. As she is about to depart, Maeve is reminded of the daughter in her memories, a daughter that logic tells her was just another host and no real relation to her, but the memory and the emotions connected to this child force her to disembark, an act that is truly breaking her programming. I believe Maeve has indeed broken from her programming with this act of humanity while Dolores is still in the process of evolving.

episode-2-william We are William. The audience, unsatisfied with the story we are given, petulant and entitled, believing that nihilistic, destructive behavior toward this former object of our love is warranted. How could it end like that? They didn’t explain what it meant! They were just making it up as they went! I wasted hours of my life on this stupid thing! It’s no coincidence that J.J. Abrams was the producer of Westworld, a creator who has been the bullseye of endless online hate towards his work. William is us in that he sees himself as the protagonist of this story. Why? Because he paid to be, I guess? Humanity does an excellent job of elevating the material Self over the internal Self, but more on that a little later. William is continually told that The Maze is not for him, yet he never listens and believes he is entitled to the Maze and this abstract finality he thinks he was promised.

This season was full of meta-commentary about creators, their creations, and how the audience can override the artistic vision for “what sells.” Loops are those conventional narrative formulas and tropes that are trotted out time and time again because they knew the audience will mindlessly eat it up. Shallow mysteries are strung out, diverting the audience’s attention from thinking about the emotions and psyche of characters or using this as a moment of self-reflection. Ford sums it up in his final speech to the board of directors, but actually to the viewing audience:

“I’ve always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth. For my pains, I got this, a prison of our own sins. You can’t change, or don’t want to change, because you’re only human after all.”

I believe we must step back even further to see what Westworld is trying to tell us about ourselves. The show makes no bones about saying how we consume life is equally important to what aspects of life you consume. The visitors to Westworld, from the arrogant Logan to the faux-noble William, consume life from the point of view of entitlement and expectation. People are continually unsatisfied with life yet never contemplate what they have done to make it such an unfulfilling experience. I go back to that old dictum of Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Unlike the guests, the awakened hosts have keyed into the central element of life that must be tackled: Suffering. Suffering is essential for growth, but that growth is contingent on learning how to overcome your suffering.

Life cannot exist without suffering and how you deal with it determines the trajectory of your future. You can become consumed with hatred and seek to lash out and destroy those who caused your suffering, you can submit to the suffering and passively take it, or you can seek out some way in the middle. Westworld makes no formal judgment about that choice, at least not yet. Dolores chooses, apparently, to stand up against the architects of her suffering, Arnold chooses to die rather than continue living to feel his suffering, William believes life is nothing but suffering and accepts taking it while giving it back.

There’s a lot more that can be said about Westworld, and this is just scratching the surface. The series was co-created by Jonathan Nolan, writer of pretty much every Christopher Nolan film and, as I saw someone say this week, he is able to write about complex ideas and respect that the audience can understand. In future, it would be interesting to look at a lot of the dual relationships in the series (Dolores/Maeve, Logan/William, William/Ford, William/Teddy, Teddy/Dolores, etc.) and explore what these dualities are saying about audiences, creators, and art.

Movie Review – Heartbeats

Heartbeats (2010, dir. Xavier Dolan)

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In watching I Killed My Mother, it was clear that Xavier Dolan had a sharp sense of humor. In Heartbeats he allows himself to make an overt comedy of manners that has delivered more laughs from me than most comedies I’ve watched this year. The story centers on Francis (Dolan), and Marie (Monia Chokri) are best friends who meet Nicolas (Niels Schneider), a young man who entrances them both. They begin a vicious back and forth to decide who gets Nicolas in the end.

The comedy in Heartbeats comes from Francis and Marie’s growing animosity with each other over Nicolas’ affections and the ongoing confusion his behavior and words illicit. During a playful game of hide and seek in the woods he manages to tackle Francis, pinning him to the ground. And keeps him pinned for a longer than usual amount of time before hurriedly rushing away, an act that builds confidence in Francis’ perceived chances with Nicolas. A few scenes later, Francis finds out Nicolas has invited Marie to see a play together without even asking Francis which throws him into confusion about his possible suitor’s intentions. At first, our protagonists attempt to play things cooly and not truly acknowledging the competition at hand. By the end of the film, they have devolved into wrestling on the ground decked in clothing out of place in the rustic, cabin setting they have ended up in.

Dolan has a very deft hand at the awkward moment, particularly zeroing in the desperation people take on when they are incredibly attracted to an individual they see as “cooler” than them or “out of their league.” At one point, Francis makes a completely inappropriately expensive purchase for Nicolas’ birthday and, while this fact is only known to Francis and the audience, it adds tension to the informal gift competition that springs up between him and Marie. As an actor, Dolan has the most perfect uncomfortable, awkward smile. He’s left behind at Nicolas’ apartment and has to receive a monthly allowance being delivered by Nicolas’ mother (played by the remarkable Anne Dorval, who played Dolan’s mother in his previous film). Dorval dominates most of the conversation, revealing her career as an exotic dancer, her broken relationship with Nicolas’ father, and other TMI. Dolan doesn’t fade into the background, though, and through his face and his body language, the audience is reminded of all those intensely awkward conversations we’ve ended up in, and especially those with a friend’s parent or some other acquaintance who shares far too much information.

The new element in this film for me was Monia Chokri as Dolan’s rival. Chokri was fantastic and kept up with her co-star and director by exuding an awkward confidence. As the tension increases, her chill unaffected nature begins to show cracks culminating in a scene where she runs into Nicolas on the street that will elicit the strongest empathic cringe from anyone watching. The awkward humor is never to the intensity that something like Curb Your Enthusiasm produces, it is continually softened through a lens of romantic idealism. Chokri’s Marie is presented as a very composed and intentional person, bearing an early 1960s appearance in both hairstyle and clothing. Coincidentally Nicolas mentions his love of Audrey Hepburn and Marie begins adding accessories that emphasize those aspects of her appearance.

The film is about friendship and the silliness of “profound love” and romanticism. It evokes the visual style of Wong-Kar Wai’s In the Mood For Love in particular moments, but instead of using this imagery to evoke a sense of serious simmering passion, Dolan uses it to cultivate a sense of irony with the protagonist’s actions. This is yet another Dolan film that highlights a different talent than I Killed My Mother and Tom at the Farm. The former is a wonderfully bittersweet character study, and the latter is an exercise in tension and psychology. Heartbeats are Dolan’s take on a romantic comedy, a modern remix of Jules and Jim with his own personal visual flair.

Movie Review – The Monster

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The Monster (2016, dir. Bryan Bertino)

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Lizzy (Ella Ballentine) is ready to leave her mother and go live with her father. After growing up in the shadow of her mom’s alcoholism, the young teenager has had to raise herself and try to keep her mother alive despite overdrinking and the threat of drunk driving. Kathy (Zoe Kazan), the girl’s mother, goes through an emotional rollercoaster, unable to communicate that she is actually heartbroken that her daughter is choosing to leave. As they drive through the night, taking an old road off the highway that leads them through the dark woods, Kathy swerves to avoid a wolf that has run out into the road. The car’s axle breaks and they skid to a stop, trapped and waiting for help in the form of an ambulance and tow truck that they are assured are on their way. But something is watching them from the woods. Something was hunting that wolf and drove it into the road. Something is waiting to devour these two women.

The Monster is a tough one. There are some interesting ideas, and the acting is incredibly strong. But as a horror film, I think it fails to create an atmosphere of fear. The set up is rife for some really unnerving horror set pieces, but the director doesn’t seem confident in the monster or sure of what to do. Director Bryan Bertino is the filmmaker behind 2008’s The Strangers. My opinion of that film was that it handled the ambiguous nature of its horror pretty damn well but didn’t do much to help me care about its two protagonists. The Monster appears focused on giving us that needed character development but then delivers sloppy horror.

There are moments where the horror begins to emerge from Kathy’s lack of parenting skills, putting her daughter in dangerous situations and being generally stupid in the face of horror. The film is peppered with flashbacks detailing the most recent decline of Kathy to the drink. We see her struggle mentally and physically in the backyard trying to decide if she digs through the trash for the bottles she’s thrown out. We see Lizzy hiding car keys to prevent drunk driving. We see the two devolve into a screaming match of profanities as the daughter does not want her drunk mother attending her school play. It’s pretty obvious what the director wants us to feel about these characters and the actors work their asses off, but the direction seems to undercut or hold back the deeper emotional impact.

The Monster is a movie about the horrors of addiction, but I would argue it fails to make those horrors feel truly horrific. Where The Strangers is confident in its pacing and the slow build up of horror, Bertino feels clumsy and unsure through almost every step of The Monster. There is a really great movie here, a premise that can connect us to the characters and a horror that is left unexplained. But when all the pieces are assembled, and we view the final project, it just doesn’t add up to much of anything really.

Tabletop Actual Play: Lovecraftesque

Lovecraftesque is a game by Josh Fox and Becky Annison. The game seeks to evoke the creeping, brooding horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s work while getting rid of his problematic racism, misogyny, and inaccurate depictions of mental illness. There’s no GM. Instead, scenes are composed of rotating roles. There is the Narrator who sets the scene, creates conflict for the protagonist, and drops a clue in each scene. Then there’s the Witness who is the main character exploring the mystery being laid out before them. Finally, we have The Watchers who are the players adding flavor to the scenes the Narrator lays out or playing NPCs if asked by the Narrator.

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Each scene The Narrator must drop a clue that The Witness discovers. These clues can be physical objects, strange sounds, or even odd behavior. The catch is that nothing overtly supernatural can reveal itself until the third act of the game. The one catch are special cards that are dealt out at the start of the game and, if triggered by a particular condition, can allow a player to actually put something overtly supernatural into the story either as an Interrupt or an Ongoing element. All the clues until then should be able to be explained with mundane reasoning. At the end of each the players, without consulting each other, record the clue and their conclusion of what it means in relation to the other clues revealed so far. Eventually, the story works its way to The Final Horror and whichever player wants can step forward and reveal how these clues add up to something beyond the Witness’s comprehension. As Pamela, one of the players Saturday night said, it’s like the game of Telephone but with Lovecraft horror.

This past weekend myself, my wife, and three friends played an online session of Lovecraftesque. It was everyone’s first time with the game, and as with all new systems, it was a little more about comprehending structure than developing an excellent story. To get us started, we used one of the seeds from the book, The Chateau of Leng written by Renee Knipe. The premise is that Latissha Hall, a black single mother of two has purchased her first home on Nash Avenue in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The story takes place in 2004 at the height of the U.S. housing bubble. The seed presents the players with four possible characters to appear in the story, and we did make use of that.

Our story had Latissha preparing to do some renovating due to buying the house “as is” and inheriting a lot of structural problems. The first clue discovered was a weathered photograph from around the turn of the 20th century, a portrait of a family with individual members faces crudely scratched off. This led to the next scene: an awkward meeting between Latissha and her gruff neighbor Cass. Cass attempted to spook Latissha by telling her about the string of owners who has lived briefly in her new home and were scared off by something. She also noticed him carrying around a cat as he meandered about his front porch in a bathrobe. Scene 3 introduced Latissha to Officer Newhall, a local beat cop who ends up telling her that Cass had gone for prison decades ago for murder but apparently new evidence was presented and he was released. As a misty rain falls, Officer Newhall appears to vanish into thin air leaving Latissha unnerved.

love02 — Absolutely beautiful and horrific art by Robin Scott

That evening while rummaging around one of the side rooms, Latissha finds a cobwebbed baby grand piano. Stuffed inside is an entire photo album with the pictures sharing a common theme: all the faces have been scratched out. They show different families throughout the century but all missing any trace of who they were. The next morning, Latissha goes to visit Geraldine, the elderly neighbor across the street. She’s lived in her house for decades and Latissha figures the woman might have some insight to the photos. She brings the album with her but finds herself unnerved by strange shadows and sounds in the woman’s house. Geraldine gets very aggressive about putting her hands on the album, and this causes Latissha to back away. There’s also a large number of framed photos of a cat that looks suspiciously like the one Cass was carrying around. That combined with the missing posters for the beast pinned up around the neighborhood has her questioning what is going on. Cass coincidentally comes by Geraldine’s to “check up” on her and Latissha can’t help but notice the gun he has tucked under his belt.

Our protagonist is unnerved even further by her youngest son’s drawings of their family, including her deceased husband his eyes scratched out looking remarkably like the photos she’s found. That night she’s awakened by the sound of glass breaking in the basement and movement. She investigates and find it empty but notices a panel from the wall moved to the side. Reaching into the space, she pulls out an almost identical album to the one she found in the piano. This album contains photography akin to Diane Arbus: portraits of people missing limbs, memento mori, and the visages of just slightly physically deformed people. Unlike the previous album nothing is violently scratched out, there appears to be an attempt to preserve these images. She also notices Officer Newhall driving down the street in his car as she looks out a basement window. He gets out and skulks in the yard between her and Cass’s house. Something about Newhall feels wrong, and she goes upstairs to search his name and the neighborhood online. She discovers very little except for a poorly scanned newspaper clipping about some wrongdoing on his part in a case. The grainy photo strikes her as bearing almost no resemblance to the man she met earlier.

Something compels her to return to the basement, and after searching further, she finds a hidden room. What lies inside finally reveals the horrific truth. The floor is almost breathing as she enters and finds lying across this flesh like floor her youngest son and herself…but proto versions, still growing and not yet alive. Pulsing tentacles, like umbilical cords, attach to them, some substance oozing through them and into the fleshy creatures. Latissha gazes into the dark void these tentacles disappear into, and she is startled when the proto-son finally stirs, blinking his eyes. She lets out a scream and descends into the void, discovering at its roots a great multi-legged multi-armed horror growing in the center of a carved out hollow. The fluctuating blob was surrounded by small hooded figures who turned to look at Latissha. These were the only faces she could see in the scratched out photos, the ones who had been left unmarked, the children. Unaged and without eyes, a dreadful glow emanated from the sockets. Latissha attempted an escape but found herself swallowed by the darkness between this ghastly place and her home.

Latissha finds herself waking up to the sound of her youngest called for her “Mama, mama. Wake up.” She is groggy and not sure what has been real and what was a dream. Standing in her room are her two children and Cass. Cass says that Latissha will be okay, but she will have a difficult pregnancy like she did with her first two. Duh duh duh!

I don’t think we managed to explicitly explain the connection between the clues in the game, but in a conversation afterward we had very similar ideas as to where the story was going. We all pretty much had collectively agreed that Officer Newhall was actually dead and a couple people had pegged Cass’ murder as being that of the cop. In my own notes, the story I was shaping was that Geraldine’s family had been involved in black magic and had done horrible things to the original family across the street. The result was that the house had become an Amityville type of entity, protected and fueled by Geraldine, the last of her family line. Cass had become aware of this fact around twenty years prior and attempted to kill her, but Newhall had gotten in the way. Cass’ methods were tied to very specific rituals and spells and Newhall’s disturbance set him completely back.

I believe that on a second playthrough, now with a stronger sense of the structure of the game and an idea of how it *should* flow and the way clues operate we’d have an even better time with an even more satisfying conclusion. Lovecraftesque is the kind of horror gaming I enjoy, where all players can be held in suspense until the very end. The Telephone style mechanic with the clues is my favorite part especially post game being able to see how others interpreted the story and what directions they would go. With players that have both a good background in understanding creeping horror and improv acting this could be a very magical game.

Lovecraftesque can be purchased here.

Movie Review – Krampus

Krampus (2015, dir. Michael Dougherty)

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In the last few years, the Krampus has become quite a popular internet meme. The Germanic creature pre-dates Christianity but was adopted into Christmas traditions as a shadow to Santa Claus. Where Santa brings good girls and boys presents, Krampus would bring a rod to beat the bad kiddies. The character has popped up in The Venture Brothers, Scooby-Doo and even been the focus of some holiday themed films, the best of which is Rare Exports. It was only a matter of time until Hollywood decided to give the monster an American feature, this one at the hands of Michael Dougherty, best known for Trick R Treat.

Max is a kid nearer the end of that period of childhood where a belief in Santa is socially acceptable. He’s penned a letter with his numerous Christmas wishes for his family and visiting relatives, but his twin cousins decide to snatch the letter and openly mock him at the dinner table. Max responds by shredding the letter and silently wishing horrible things upon them all while tossing the letter to the snowy winds. Overnight a dark storm rolls in, the power goes out, and the neighborhood freezes over. One by one the family members are taken out by deadly gingerbread men, malevolent toys, and other assorted holiday-themed horrors before Krampus himself shows up.

Krampus is a hell of a lot of fun. It hearkens back to 1980s dark classics, Gremlins chief among them. The killer gingerbread men have a laugh reminiscent of those title villains. There is also a lot of heart in this film, about family and the holidays, but never overly sentimental. People die and get wounded. There is some blood but not an overabundance of gore. I would never say the film was scary, but it was exciting, and the design of the monsters was excellent. There is a jack in the box that is one of the best holiday horrors I’ve ever seen.

The adult cast is composed of some solid actors with strong resumes: Adam Scott, Toni Collette, Allison Tolman, and David Koechner. They play the parents perfectly, digging their heels in at the start focused only on rational explanation and finally cracking with the chaos breaches the walls of their home and cannot be ignored any longer. Tolman especially plays a character with a lot of underlying complexity. She and Koechner work as almost a counterpoint to Cousin Eddie and Catherine from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. In that film the conservative, rural ideology of the characters is played for some incredibly strong laughs. Here we see the characters are not simpletons but working from a different paradigm. One of that works well and other times results in impulsive failure. Tolman has a number of scenes where her character proves her mettle and shows up her husband, who spends more of the film talking up his macho superiority than fulfilling those words.

Dougherty’s work in film has been a mixed bag. He was a co-writer on multiple Bryan Singer projects and some studio films. Trick R Treat was a breakthrough and Krampus is an awesome follow-up. He was ten years old when Gremlins was released so the perfect age to remember the feelings evoked by that film and others of its kind. Dougherty manages to do what Abrams accomplished so beautifully with The Force Awakens, the evocation of the sense of nostalgia without pandering. Krampus feels like the sort of film that would be in the cineplex alongside The Goonies and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. But it also tells a fleshed out story that completes the arc of Max’s character and ends just the way a good horror film should.

Movie Review – I Killed My Mother

I Killed My Mother (2009, dir. Xavier Dolan)

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If you look up the many articles and interviews about Xavier Dolan, you will likely get a picture of an arrogant young artist. These would not be wrong, but I would challenge that this portrayal is negative particularly in cinema. Dolan represents a strong, re-interpretive Millennial energy that was inevitable in film. In the same way, the French New Wave and the iconoclastic American 1970s filmmakers made their mark in the form; Dolan is doing that same type of work. Does he indulge? Damn straight he does. But I challenge anyone to find a single auteur who doesn’t indulge constantly.

Dolan’s first feature, I Killed My Mother is the story of Hubert Minel (played by Dolan), a 16-year-old gay man, still closeted to his mother and who engages in the most vicious arguments and conflicts with this central caretaker. Dad stepped out when Hubert was seven and left Chantale, the mother (Anne Dorval) to raise the boy on her own. Hubert is two months into a relationship with a classmate and looking towards a career in the arts, encouraged by a supportive teacher (Suzanne Clément).

Dolan is a filmmaker influenced by the medium. No moment in I Killed My Mother is simply a moment; they are accented by flourishes of style from Goddard-like framing (off center and with both conversants in the frame), slow motion almost from a perfume ad, black and white confessional close-ups, and myriad of other touches that add emotion to a relatively typical story of parent-child conflict. He also knows the importance of establishing character through setting, as seen in the very opening close-ups of his mother’s tchotchke-filled home. We also learn volumes about her through her hairstyle, clothing, even the manner in which she eats breakfast. And all this if before she even has a modicum of dialogue.

While Dolan is the composer and conductor, Anne Dorval as Chantale is the star player. It would have been very easy for Chantale to slip in caricature, but Dorval does gritty work to keep the character faceted and obscured. In moments of high tension, she will begin to follow the same type of script I imagine all of us remember from our adolescence, which is underscored by Hubert calling her out on this same repetition. She shuts him down in the same manner that frustrated us all and drove many teenagers to those primal, guttural ARGHs! There is a moment near the end of the film where her role as a single mother is blamed as the reason why Hubert is struggling academically and exhibits such rebellious behavior. This is the moment where Dorval lets Chantale crack through the thickly layered makeup and sequined floral outfits. Chantale’s love for her son is beyond the question of outsiders, and she makes that known.

Dolan made I Killed My Mother at the age of 20 and has not tried to hide the fact that it is heavily biographical. He has stated that this is a film he couldn’t have waited decades to make, that it needed the raw emotion of being only steps away from adolescence. And he is completely right. A forty-something making the film in deep retrospect would have let nostalgia slip in between the cracks. There is no wistful memory manifesting falsified beauty here. Through the ugliness of this relationship, we see Beauty and Love. We don’t fight and scream with this level of fervor at people we hate, the type of anger glimpsed in the film born out of intense love and need. It is the attempt to communicate love but failing to do so because the language does not possess the vocabulary to do so.

Hubert states in one of his bathroom confessionals on camera that he doesn’t love his mother like a mother, but he loves her nonetheless. During a late night conversation, Hubert fueled by ecstasy and barging home full of elation to speak to Chantale; he states, “I love you. I am telling you this so that you won’t forget.” This is the moment where the nature of the relationship changes, not profoundly, but both characters redefine the bond. Hubert is no longer the dependent glimpsed in the Super 8 home movies at the old house by the lake. He is an individual coming into his own, intellect, a sexual being, a partner in a relationship, developing complex ideas and emotions. Chantale is reticent to accept that, but by the end of the film, they come to an unspoken understanding. Their relationship will never be what they both remember and wish it could be, something new will form and in that they will find a place for their love.

Pop Cult Book Club Announcement #6

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The book for December 2016 will be The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud.

After a bar fight, a man discovers a cell phone left behind. He decides to hold onto the phone until the owner contacts him. And then he begins receiving messages. The book is a nice short novella for the busy holiday season clocking in at 68 pages.

“This isn’t the type of horror you can easily categorize, put inside a box and say, ‘THIS. This is what makes this story scary.’ The Visible Filth is deeply unnerving and you’re not sure why. It has all the requisite thrills and chills, but it’s what’s under the surface that will be your undoing.” Joshua Chaplinsky, LitReactor.com