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Cinema, Reviews

Celluloid Cubes

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Way back in the distant past of 2000, there was a movie called Dungeons & Dragons. It was a pretty big deal at the time, with a substantial budget, plenty of flashy CGI, and a cast that included Jeremy Irons and a then-hot Thora Birch (hot in the sense of fame, for clarity’s sake). It was also, unfortunately but deservedly, a rather massive flop

Treating the fantasy trappings of the game it took its name from as an embarrassing necessity, its mix of overwrought portentousness and slacker humour didn’t work at all. D&D crashed and burned, failing to make back its original budget (not even accounting for what I remember as a substantial marketing campaign). It was enough of a flop that it could have killed off fantasy movies as a genre for a decade, were it not for the small matter of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring coming out the next year. As it was, the D&D film series limped on with a couple of direct to DVD sequels before being put out of its misery.

Well, now we have a new D&D movie, in the form of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and it’s coming out into a very different landscape. Not only is fantasy as a genre both more diverse and more respectable, but D&D and roleplaying are actually kind of cool at the moment, courtesy of cameos in Stranger Things and real-play series like Critical Role. And, wonder of wonders, HAT (they might have thought a little harder about that acronym) isn’t just a good movie, it’s also a riotously fun one.

Spoilers below the jump…

Sure, the film is stuffed with CGI, but that CGI is actually used to recreate elements of the Forgotten Realms setting from D&D that players would recognise, and those elements are used as functional parts of the narrative, not as embarrassing set dressing. (The beholder from the original movie can make me cringe at a distance of two decades.) As the action hops from location to location, each one is colourfully depicted and the various fantastic beasts that show up all have a good amount of heft to them.

Cleverly, the writers of the movie have hung the story on a familiar movie form: the heist. The main characters have to run a scam on a former friend and in order to do so they have to gather a team, case the joint, make a plan, deal with setbacks, collect necessary equipment, etc. Any halfway ciné-literate viewer will catch on to how things are supposed to work, and that allows them to just sit back and enjoy the ride. A ride that takes them on a whistle-stop tour of the Forgotten Realms, complete with encounters with the undead, dragons, and Red Wizards, not all of which are hindrances to our heroes’ quest.

The lead heroes in question are Chris Pine as bard and spy Edgin, who is only marginally handy in a fight and slightly better at making plans, and Michelle Rodriguez as barbarian warrior Holga, absolutely the combat specialist of the two and devoted friend to Edgin and surrogate mother to his daughter. That shared devotion provides the emotional hook for the plot, driving the heroes into and through their heist and counterpointing a personal motive against the more traditionally grandiose plans of the villains. In fact, the conflicting web of motivations is one of the strongest points of the movie: everyone’s reasons for what they’re doing are kept clear and consistent, right up to the inevitable but satisfying conclusion.

For D&D fans, there’s plenty of fun in spotting the many and varied call-outs to elements of the game’s lore, both Forgotten Realms-specific and otherwise, but what really makes the movie sing is how it uses now-recognisable elements of the roleplaying experience to enliven the action. The heist itself, with its many setbacks and impromptu plans, resembles closely many roleplaying sessions of my own experience, in which players came up with outlandish plans that got themselves into trouble (with or without the help of the dice), which they then got themselves out of via even more implausible plans. There were times in the action when you could feel the fumbles and criticals being rolled.

Special mention needs to be given to Regé-Jean Page’s extended cameo as the paladin Xenk Yendar. The “lawful-good” alignment in D&D is often jokingly referred to as “awful good” and paladins portrayed as dour enforcers of divine will, but Page brings a warmth and humour to his portrayal while still being the perfect paladin. It’s an impressive achievement and one I want to catch again on a rewatch. For many, I suspect Page will be the highlight of the movie.

All the above is only a very quick and incomplete stroll across the highlights of the movie. D&D: HAT is a surprising riot of a film, and it’s one that should manage to entertain both fans of the original game and people who don’t have the first notion of what a displacer beast is. Go see it, relax into it, and enjoy the ride.

Health

Catching Up

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Well. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I wasn’t even going to look up how long it’s been, but the WordPress app front loads the list of recent posts and, well, the last time I posted here was in February. And even that post was late. So I guess 2022 hasn’t been a good year for posting. Hasn’t been a good year for a lot of other people either, but at least this one small thing I can fix…

In actual fact, I did have plans for posting here multiple times across the year, but distractions and overthinking combined make for a high hurdle. Something of a theme for the year, maybe? Anyhow, here’s a bundle of thoughts that maybe should have been posts of their own but didn’t make it.

Health

May as well get this out of the way first, seeing as part of the reason for getting back into posting was to throw out updates on my health situation. So, the good news is that the cancer is staying put for the moment—my medicine is doing its job nicely and long may it continue to do so. Covid hasn’t been quite so friendly, and it’s taken two shots at me this year, the latter of which left me with a cough that’s been hard to shake in the face of a cold snap and the array of sniffles and maladies doing the rounds at the moment. Still, Christmas is coming, and that’s a season of rest, right?

Work

Not a huge amount to say on this front, apart from the fact that I’m getting towards two years in the games industry and still enjoying it. Actual details will be thin on the ground, due to the NDA-heavy nature of the industry, but we actually had some RTE cameras in the studio recently, and it was nice to see some info creep out into the wild. With any luck, there will be some exciting news on the projects I’ve been working on revealed to the world.

Writing

Not for the first time, NaNoWriMo was a bust. Honestly, being stuck at home as much as I’ve been this year isn’t conducive to creative writing, at least for me. What creative juices have been flowing have been directed towards work instead. Hopefully something to balance a little better in 2023.

Travel

I travelled! Not just once, but twice. First time in March, a long weekend in London, to catch the Stonehenge exhibit in the British Museum (proof that the BM can do pretty well in the absence of imperially abducted goods) and do a metric ton of walking across a city I love but hadn’t been to in about ten years. Then, towards the end of the year, I took a somewhat chaotic trip across Switzerland, Germany, and Brussels. My travelling partner came down with Covid (I dodged it, somehow), but we took in new cities and met old friends, and I got to travel by rail and climb to the top of Cologne Cathedral, eleven years after I arrived in town too late to gain access. Again, here’s hoping that 2023 has some new travel adventures in store.

From below ground level to the base of the tall spire. With only a few pauses to catch my breath.

Movies

I didn’t get to the cinema much this year, mostly out of a desire to avoid Covid. And there are still several movies that came out this year that I really want to watch, not least The Banshees of Inisherin. Still, I did see a few. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was disappointing, at least on my first and only watch. Chadwick Boseman’s absence was felt and the gap wasn’t entirely filled, even with multiple actors taking their shots at it. In this, it felt as disjointed as its Marvel stablemate, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Which at least had the advantage of multiversal capering and Sam Raimi’s imaginative visuals to keep things fun. Lastly, there was See How They Run, which started strong with Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell’s double act (Ronan in particular is a deadpan delight) but never quite committed to the bit and limped to a flat finish.

TV

If movies were something of a mixed bag for me in 2022, TV offered a lot. Especially when it came to large-scale fantasy productions. Amazon’s The Rings of Power threw huge amounts of money at the screen to variable results, but despite a few charming performances it was sunk by the fact that its setting, massively truncated in time and space, had little to no internal coherence. Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon fared a lot better by keeping its focus on the machinations of family and regal politics and trusting the audience to follow along with its time jumps. Its success can be seen in just how hard the climax of the series hit. Lastly, there was the long (as in decades) awaited adaption of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, which proved admirably faithful to the books, under Gaiman’s stewardship. Perhaps even to a fault, as the series more or less climaxed in episode 5, had its strongest episode in the subsequent one, then picked up some loose plot threads to round out the season. Now that it’s been confirmed for a second season pickup, hopefully some of these pacing issues can be smoothed out.

Other Media

Loads to talk about here, but this is already dragging on a bit, so I’ll do a drive by on everything.

Comics: Kieron Gillen has been one of my favourite writers for years, and he got his moment in the sun this year with the Judgement Day crossover, in which he got to put all of the Marvel toys in play and run them through an existential wringer. Well worth catching, especially if you read his Eternals series (a vital prequel and great series in its own right).

Games: Best game of the year is a recent entrant. Pentiment sees the player take the role of an artist in medieval Germany and attempt to solve a murder that rocks a small mountain community and the nearby abbey. It’s meticulously researched and beautifully presented, but it’s not heavy going at all, and I introduced a non-gamer friend to it, much to their enjoyment. Worth a spin if you have any interest in murder mysteries, the social politics of imperial Germany, or illustrated manuscripts.

Roleplaying Games: Keeping up a regular gaming habit in the face of social distancing wasn’t easy, but now that those restrictions have eased a bit, there has been some in-person gaming too. Most of that has been plain old D&D (with Solasta providing a nice toolset for online D&D adventures) but I’m hoping for more in 2023: a return to Call of Cthulhu, the new Pendragon release from Chaosium, and the Kickstarter delivery of DIE, based on Kieron Gillen’s comic of the same name, which promises some psychologically intense gaming if I can find people willing to play it.

And that’s…

…it. Too little too late as far as 2022 goes, but here’s hoping I’ll be a little more active in 2023. Plans are afoot to be a little more organised at least. I have all of the tools at my disposal. I just have to use them and develop good habits that have fallen into abeyance. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

Cinema, Reviews

Freshly Baked Reviews — January 2021

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A few years back, I was in the habit of writing regular reviews on this blog. Covering games, books, and movies, the poorly explained schtick of the reviews was that I limited them to three sentences each. This both leaned into the fact that this was more or less my job for over a decade (compressing information into tiny packages, not writing reviews) and was a fun writing exercise, even if it did occasionally lead to long run-on sentences.

Anyway, after a 2020 that proved very hard for writing, I figure it’s worth my while to develop a better writing habit, and returning to something that was once fun seems like a good start. So expect a few more of these review bundles in the months to come, but in the meantime, here’s what I thought of four movies that I managed to catch over the Christmas break.

Soul (Pete Docter)

Pixar’s latest musing on the nature of life, the universe, and everything may not have been the biggest movie to be released online-only at the end of the plague year, but it wasn’t far off the top of pile. Telling the story of a teacher and aspiring jazz pianist who finds himself hovering between life and death just as he gets his big break, it sets its characters to explore the question of what life is for: a single grand purpose or the simple joys of existing day to day. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Docter, who also directed Up and Inside Out for Pixar, lands on the latter option as the best one, and while Soul’s message might prove a little straightforward if you’ve already spent part of your life considering it, Soul tells its tale with warmth and humour and is definitely worth checking out.

Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins)

Okay, so this movie was the biggest online-only release of the festive period, made all the more notable by Warner Bros’ decision to shift its entire slate online in 2021, and it’s just a shame that WW1984 turned out to be a colourful mess of a film. The first Wonder Woman cannily cast Gal Gadot as a fish out of water hero, but despite the sequel being set some seventy years later, there isn’t any character growth to be seen, and Gadot and her talented supporting cast find themselves tumbling through a series of set pieces that are barely connected by the central conceit of granting wishes with dark costs. WW84 has clearly suffered from its many delays and the chaos surrounding the DC cinematic universe, and the result is a colourful and occasionally exciting shambles that doesn’t build on the success of its predecessor.

Tenet (Christopher Nolan)

If the pandemic year had a tentpole film, it was Christopher Nolan’s time-twisting Tenet, which Nolan fought to get into cinemas and which proved to be divisive on its release. Nolan’s success over the years has seen him lean increasingly towards structural complexity, as seen in Inception and Dunkirk, and Tenet pushes that habit further still, to the point where the structural games overwhelm character development and even plot clarity. Tenet is certainly a spectacle, but its drabness is only really alleviated by Robert Pattinson’s louche secret agent, and while repeated viewings might provide insight into its depths, there might not be much impetus to watch it again if it fails to engage and inspire on first viewing.

Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart)

Arriving just as the year was ending, in a small scattering of cinemas and on Apple TV+, Wolfwalkers is a spellbinding animated tour-de-force, set in a myth-soaked vision of the Irish past. Cartoon Saloon’s film tells the story of two girls—a hunter and a “wolf walker”—who connect amid the turmoil of Cromwell’s occupation of Kilkenny, with animation that sweeps and shifts in stunning hand-drawn fashion as the characters shift from human to wolf and back. Undoubtedly the artistic high point of all the films I’ve seen in the past month, Wolfwalkers benefits further from heartfelt performances from its voice actors and a story that invests viewers in the survival of the wolves and wolfwalkers as a vision of a threatened, romantic land.

Cinema, Reviews

Movie Fest 2011

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Over the last weekend, Movies.ie tried to bring a little of the San Diego Comic-Con spirit to Dublin in the form of the first Movie Fest event: two days of preview screenings and plenty of trailers and sneak-peek footage, all available at screen 17 of the Cineworld Cinema. It was a valiant effort, and some of the chosen films certainly suited the occasion, particularly the remake of Fright Night and Cowboys and Aliens, but the mention of Comic-Con was probably a bit misleading.

This was a movie event, and the Comic-Con tie lay in the fact that the preview footage had previously been seen at that event – and had since been uploaded to the Internet, both legitimately and otherwise. Other than that, it was all about being in a cinema, enjoying some films – both arthouse and mainstream – that weren’t quite out yet and previews of others still in production. Not really a “Con” event at all.

I like the idea of having a more populist alternative to the likes of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, but Movie Fest seems caught between being the celebration of movies that it wants to be and trying to shine itself up with some geek cred. If it comes back next year, I’d like to see it have a clearer idea of what it is. For now, congratulations to those who put it on this year – selling out both days is nothing to be sniffed at.