craigoxbrow

Some advice on how to cope in these tough times, by eight great thinkers.



Tom Gauld

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Well, I had a free ticket.

... Oh, alright. It looked nice. And there were some funny things in it. It's just that all but about two of them were in the trailer.

(Which is an improvement for the writer, whose books have all their jokes in the title.)

A visit to The House Of Del Toro.

A 12,000 word interview. Wowsers.

Having fought my way up to the bus stop and found a loaf of bread in a shop, I rewarded myself by going to see Monsters, advertised as Cloverfield Meets District Nine but more like Spielberg's War Of The Worlds meets Before Sunrise. Cleverly made both on location and with the DIY CGI, quietly touching and lifelike, an SF anecdote rather than a story but certainly worth going to see.

Trailers: something called I Am Number Four starring Alex Rider Pettyfer and Dianna Agron, the clearly deeply odd ballet psychohorror Black Swan, Season Of The Witch which looks well dodge, The Tourist again, The Way Back again.

Joss Whedon declared that yes he is doing The Avengers (the Marvel ones, not the ITV ones) and when it came up he had to put off a web series with Warren Ellis. Ellis added "I'll wait then."

He's generally happy with Red. Which is nice. And Helen Mirren's Harvey Pekar longsleeve.

Karl Urban offered Judge Dredd which could be cool as, unlike the last guy, he can act. He's a bit pretty, though.

Guillermo Del Toro moves on from The Hobbit to... Disney's The Haunted Mansion. Uh... yeah...?

and outside...

Having preordered Aliens And Creatures for Doctor Who from C7, they were kind enough to send out a free copy of the PDF.

Good stuff all round, not just the big descriptions of the monsters but especially the extras like the adventures book and a simple but evocative planet creation system, and giving some space to the original Cybermen as well as the modern parallel ones. (Which apparently might be addressed in the computer game released tomorrow apparently, but these things happen.) And there's an adventure hook that draws from the Dave Gibbons run of Who comics (best tie-in comics ever? I'd give them a supplement all to themselves...) and a shot of the back of Christopher Eccleston's head.

It goes up to Planet Of The Dead, so the nice Time War Daleks get on the cover rather than the weebly new ones but that was to be expected. More susprisingly it stops there, three hours short of the end of the Davies era, so there are no stats for the Flood or the dying electric Master. I'd say the former could be covered in a generic "zombie with a power" template of course, and the system's so simple I can cook up monster stats in three minutes if I even need to use them at all, but various zombies with powers get their own writeups. The Master would probably need his own chapter.

Super 8

Spielberg and Abrams team up to make an alien-on-the-loose-in-the-midwest movie? I'M THERE.

SteveD came up with 28th Century posthuman Star Trek and assorted RPGnetters started shaking it to see what it does:

"Sensor reading, Mister N?" The Captain looks over at a shifting column of white light (like V'ger's probe) hovering by the science officer station. It shifts audible frequency and its lights pulse. "I see. Shields up."

But as a totally coincidental knock-on effect, it lead to me watching the episode of Deep Space Nine that happened to be on - an early example of a funny Quark episode, a lighthearted normal episode rather than a total farce. But at one point he gets an idea, and his eyes widen and he bares his teeth in a smile and he looks bloody terrifying.

So, a thought experiment: make the Ferengi scary...

Buffy Versus Godzilla on the Conpulsion site. One of half a dozen games on Sunday morning. How many will get any players at all? That remains to be seen...

And there's a LARP about a virtual coffee shop on Saturday afternoon. Hmm. Makes me think if I'd had the Doctor Who LARP idea a month earlier it wouldn't have been that insane.

Yes, The Wolf Man, obviously.

Good fun. Not a classic. As xnbach noted, very hardcore werewolf. And lots of guts for a 15-cert. Didn't quite pull off the CGI face-change in full light but everything else worked. Sir Anthony Hopkins underplaying seems very strange in this day and age. Danny Elfman score added to the unreal Burton-y feel of the CG-ed up Victorian London. Loved the shoutout to Rick Baker's previous werewolf triumph with the bus.

Trailers: Freddy Kruger is apparently German now, which'll probably cut down on the wisecracks in the sequels. Shutter Island, same trailer as August apart from the date at the end. (What happened there anwyay?) Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston fight crime, or something. Maybe in a funny way. And Bourne Versus The Dodgy Dossier continues to look awesome but also shakycammy.