On the (Not Quite) Evil Empire

Final Fantasy X is getting a remastered HD release due out in North America in March, and as exciting as this is I can't help but wish this was of Final Fantasy XII instead. X's story is great, and probably the most concise of the entire series (excepting any of the XIII series which I skipped because it felt more movie than game), but XII really had it all for me. Though now replaying XII I've found the lack of character mechanical difference a shortcoming.

Gameplay being changed by using different characters adds attachment to these characters because they're the best in the group at what they do. The ability to LP grind your way to super-powered sameness in FF12 is at once a draw and a downside. This is probably because I've grown attached to the LotFP way of specializing roles so that the party NEEDS a character of a specific class if they want to get far at all with anything. Now if only my all-fighters all the time players could figure that out we'd be doing great. 

Now to the real reason I've gathered you here: the Empire. In our campaign world I set up an Empire that I was trying to model on the Warhammer40k Empire of Man, but things didn't turn out that way. Partly because this tactic required knowledge of a universe that I only have a cursory knowledge of through video games and old splat books as I could find. And partly because through gameplay the players in the Empire are chaotic evil rascals that making the Imperials "Xeno" hating conquerors didn't seem quite as fun as making THEM the good guys. Well, "good" guys. What Imperialist regime is truly Good?

Anyway despite all of my intentions the descriptions of the Empire became modeled on those of the Archadian Empire from FF12. So here's an image dump courtesy of Google to help your imagination.

Airships of the Dragonmarked Houses

Personal Airship

Personal Airship

Justicars

Imperial Engineers

Imperial Mages

Imperial Grunts

Imperial Priests

The Emperor's Flagship

Imperial Battleship

Imperial Patrolcraft

Imperial Supply Ship

Anything that is ring based is a bound elemental whose power is keeping the ship afloat, so notice the larger craft have a TON of those. Except I can't really see any on the Emperor's flagship, I guess they're there. If not it must be his Holiness' Divine Will.

On The Occasion Of The Return Of Nick & Nora

REPORTER: "Well, can't you tell us anything about the case?"

NICK CHARLES: "Yes, it's putting me way behind in my drinking."
"THE THIN MAN"

A few quick thoughts on The Thin Man...

While I consider myself a fan of the dark, hard-boiled noir detective stories, the kind that delve deep into the horrors of humanity and leave a scorched path of destruction in their wake that haunts anyone unlucky enough to survive, I can't think of anything more enjoyable than Dashiell Hammett's novel and specifically its film adaptation of The Thin Man. The film, starring Myrna Loy and William Powell as the witty and snarky lushes Nick and Nora Charles is delightful beyond measure. That's not to say that their cases don't involve murder, deception and violence, it's just that Nick & Nora are more interested in being witty & charming and finding their next drink than letting all that other nonsense get in the way. 

Nick is a famous detective who, although retired (he was at one time a Pinkerton detective, as was Hammett) reluctantly sets up shop in San Francisco after marrying the stunningly beautiful and, more importantly, stunningly rich Nora and they go about their day sipping scotch and doing verbal acrobatics around each other. Their loyal dog Asta is ever present and unnaturally canny but not as brave as the Charles' tend to think he is. Asta tends to run away or hide under something when one of the Charles' try to sic him on an intruder in their home. The film, made in 1934, was followed by 5 sequels and countless other adaptations as well as homages all over pop culture for decades to com. Loy, as previously noted, is nearly unrivaled in her beauty as well as her comedic timing, but she had a very troubled personal life and very nearly single-handedly kept the later films from going into production. Powell was once hailed by Roger Ebert as being to dialogue what Fred Astaire was to dance. His Nick is droll, witty, charming and reluctant to pursue cases that Nora pushes on him. However, six films is much more than we could have hoped for, as there was only ever one book written by Hammett featuring these characters. The titular Thin Man refers to the man Nick is asked to find in the first movie only but was later adopted by the producers to more or less refer to Nick himself (ie. Song Of The Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home, etc.). The character in the novel was described as being overweight and out of shape and obviously not the inspiration for the title but the films producers brought the young, thin and handsome William Powell in to play Nick and changed the course of the character for good. 

Nick is the world famous detective but Nora is the bored heiress and frequently tries to get involved in Nick's cases. A favorite trick of his is to tell Nora to hail a cab for them and then he will tell the driver to take her home and before she knows it, she's out of his hair and he can work in peace. It's usually just to keep her out of harms way but usually it's just that he wants to work alone. Nick tends to invite all the players in the case to his home for a dinner where he then lays out all the details of the case and fingers the culprit. Nora, the thrill-seeking wife, is always just as curious as everyone else to watch it all unfold. Dashiell Hammett usually wrote cold, hard-boiled tales of lone wolf detectives taking on the world and all it throws at them, namely Sam Spade (played by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon) and the nameless Continental Operative, but with The Thin Man, he gave us the most charming detective duo to ever grace the screen (the film was released only 5 months after the book, and it's one of the few cases where the film is more enjoyable than the book) and the inspiration for duos of the like for decades to come.

The reason for the nostalgia is the fact that Johnny Depp and Rob Marshall have been attached (for quite a while now with no progress being made) to remake The Thin Man. Depp will presumably play Nick and there is no shortage of internet chatter about who should play Nora. I won't weigh in on that conversation just quite yet*, especially since it could be years before the film ever sees the light of day, if it ever does. I sincerely hope it does, however, not just to see two of my favorite literary characters grace the screen yet again but because it would put a renewed focus on Dashiell Hammett's work as well as the old films and we might get a nice new re-release box set or something like that. Right now, I can't picture what a Thin Man movie would look like in 2015 or however many years later but I will wait excitedly nonetheless.

*Depp's new wife-to-be Amber Heard could be an option, although I don't know if she has the comedic chops to step into Loy's shoes. Since we're here, I might as well throw a name into the ring and the first name that pops into my head would be Olivia Wilde...I think she has all the qualities necessary to be a Nora Charles for the 21st century.

What I'm Enjoying Right Now

THE GODS OF GUILT - Michael Connelly is one of the few authors whose new books I consider "event" releases. I always go on Amazon and make a note of when his new release date is. Gods is the fifth in the Mickey Haller series, of which the first was made into the Matthew McConaughey film entitled The Lincoln Lawyer. In this book, the first since the film was released, Haller actually mentions that since the film, his signature style of working out of a big, black Lincoln instead of an office has taken over the LA County courthouse, so much so that he continuously steps into the wrong Lincoln since there are so many parked outside. In the two years since the events of the previous book, The Fifth Witness, Haller has tried and failed to run for District Attorney and is now back to representing lowlifes and scumbags as a defense attorney. He is now representing a man who is accused of killing an ex client of his, a prostitute whom Haller helped get out of the life, or so he thought, but gets caught up between a rogue DEA outfit, an incarcerated cartel dealer, an incarcerated defrocked lawyer (both who reside at the prison in Victorville!) and a vengeful ex cop who were all involved in this case the first time he represented Gloria Dayton, the prostitute, 8 years ago. Connelly is the modern crime fiction laureate of Los Angeles. His Harry Bosch (Mickey Haller's half-brother) series is among the best in the game, with both Harry and Mickey roaming the streets of LA, from the offices of the county courthouse and the PAB to the streets of downtown and Hollywood to the mansions in the hills. Connelly knows and loves LA, and as a lover of LA and a lover of crime fiction, this is a must read, and I'm loving every word of it.

TELEVISION - January is almost, perhaps arguably, better for TV than the traditional start of the television season in September. This month saw the new seasons of Justified, Girls, Banshee, Sherlock, Community, Kroll Show and Episodes along with the premieres of The Spoils Of Babylon, Enlisted, and True Detective, among all the other continuing network shows back from their winter breaks. It's glorious. I fire up Hulu and all the network sites and other avenues of content and watch all my stories and life is good. The news that this is the penultimate season of Justified makes me cherish it all the more and Banshee fills the hole that Sons Of Anarchy left, with probably even higher of a body count. The market for sitcoms, network and cable, is flush with good stuff right now, with Girls and Community, two of my favorites, kicking off their new seasons and continuing favorites New Girl, The Mindy Project, Parks & Recreation and Raising Hope, among others, still going strong.

TRANSGENDER DYSPHORIA BLUES - The new album by Against Me!, a longtime favorite of mine, is fantastic. Gone are the polished power pop ballads about getting screwed by their label (although there does seem to be one of those here still) which have been replaced here by louder, faster, ferocious punk songs about Laura Jane Grace finally embracing her true nature of being a woman who had previously lived her whole life as Tom Gabel, husband and father. The album sometimes plays like something directly out of her journal, although what she's become is the voice of everyone like her; misunderstood, confused and angry punk kids who are struggling to find their place in the world. On the self-titled song, Grace sings "You want them to see you like they see every other girl / They just see a faggot." The album is a tight 27 minutes but it's 27 minutes of pure catharsis and the transition to a fast & furious sound from their recent past as a power pop, Replacements-like rock band and their distant past as a sing-along anarcho-punk garage band suits AM! well. They've gone through some personnel changes and personal turmoil in the last few years but Against Me! is still alive & kicking and they're better than ever. It's good to have them back.

A Quick Appreciation of Bogie & Bacall

"I don't mind you showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights."

-Philip Marlowe, "THE BIG SLEEP"

Movie Review: HER

Spike Jonze has created a devastating masterpiece with Her. I can't think of another film that made me see and think about the world around me in the ways that Her has and will continue to do. The setting is LA and the film is about falling in love and technology and sex and friendship and falling out of love, all universal, everyday concepts but Jonze created something so special and so interesting, a future that is instantly recognizable, inevitable, even. Angelinos go about their day but they do it even further separated from each other than now. They all have earbuds that connect to the device in their pocket and that team connects their user to the entirety of the internet and beyond. Theodore Twombly uses it to listen to sad music and look at nude pictures of famous naked women. Joaquin Phoenix embodies Twombly better than anyone else imaginable, he is the picture of dejected humanity, hunched over and hiding behind a big mustache and glasses and high-waisted pants as he sits alone in his apartment playing video games and thinking about his estranged wife. His voice is warbly and wounded, he has insulated himself from the world and what he has to say is better said in writing, perfect for a man whose job is to write letters for people who don't do it themselves. He lives a simple life but is the voice of dozens of relationships and is well known for his beautiful writing, most notably by his coworker Paul (Chris Pratt) who is the last bastion of joy and enthusiasm in this world. Paul wishes he would get letters as beautiful as the ones that Theo writes.

Theodore Twombly is intrigued by an advertisement for a new system entitled OS1, billed as the most realistic and advanced system to date. The voice that comes online is the light, breathy, friendly voice of Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). Theo is amused at how instantly Samantha can insert herself into his life, but she soon wins him over. Samantha, like Theo, is in a weird place in life, she is aware of herself as a person existing in the world, but she struggles with the fact that she does not have a human body, so does she really exist? Samantha finds herself evolving and growing with Theodore, they help each other discover different parts of themselves and the world that they had never been in touch with before. Their relationship, like Samantha, like Theo, evolves and changes into something familiar, yet oddly alien and it begs the same question, What defines love, or a relationship, or humanity?

Theodore's relationships with other humans are just as complicated and they provide the most recognizable entry points for those who find themselves relating to Theo. His ex wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) is impossibly beautiful and quirky, but sad and unwilling to share her life with him anymore. He spends a lot of his time remembering when they were good together and even Samantha is still jealous of her. His best and only friend is Amy (Amy Adams), a game designer who has her own relationship problems. From the first time we see them together, there is a sort of weird chemistry in the air, an unspoken understanding of grief as if they're both here against their will, but willing to wait for it to get better. Amy understands Theo, but they keep their distance while they go about their own separate lives and cope in their own ways. His friendship with Paul is carefree and fun, the two of them end up as half of a double date on Catalina Island while their girlfriends get to know each other laid out on a picnic blanket. Paul brings Theo up a notch or two but they all pale in comparison to Samantha, for she is the only one who can really make Theo enjoy life.

The movie works best when it shows us how age old concepts like love and sex adapt and evolve with the world. The time is somewhere in the near future, but there aren't flying cars or hoverboards, just the inevitable crawl of technology and it's effect on those who use it. There were a few moments where I could feel the crowd shifting uncomfortably in their seats as Theodore navigates his world. The taboo is still prevalent, a man in a relationship with an Operating System, and you could feel the tension and awkwardness in the air inside the theater during some of the more raw emotional scenes. The funniest scene in the film comes when Theo tries to engage an anonymous fellow insomniac in a late night chat. SexyKitten (Kristen Wiig) has some interesting fetishes that get her off and Theo goes with it because that's what he's there for. Like relationships, sex is not necessarily relegated to just two living people anymore. Jonze creates a world where the wealth of technology and the ability for it to be at hand instantaneously both expands and contracts the world around us. It is an uncanny representation of what the world will look like very soon and it's not frightening, just lonely. The perils of humanity will still be there; the feelings of loss and rejection, loneliness and disenchantment, memories and dreams, for better or worse. The climactic scene of Samantha and Theodore's relationship is heartbreaking and beautiful and devastating and humorous in so many ways, mostly because of how familiar it feels and what it will stir up in you. You can't help but feel for Theodore, our avatar in this brave new world, beta testing the future and showing us what it will look like, but more importantly, what it will feel like.

What I'm Enjoying Right Now

BLACK MIRROR - Black Mirror was part of a slate of British programming I went through over the past few weeks where, due to the holidays, there was scant new television to watch. There was the long awaited return of Sherlock, the binge watch I did of Orphan Black and the nice surprise of stumbling upon Black Mirror. It's a bleak, eerie anthology show with each episode being a complete contained story a la The Twilight Zone. The show does have a loose theme of the role that technology plays in our modern lives and how its advances and innovations don't always mean life will be better or easier, usually just more tragic. In one episode, a bizarre story about the British Prime Minister being forced to perform an illegal sex act on live TV spreads like wildfire on social media, captivating the entire world in a matter of hours. It begs the question: Did our addiction and reliance on social media make this horrific event possible? Another puts us in a futuristic world where people have lost their identity and exist only to work toward gaining merits, which are used to buy everyday products (toothpaste), pop-up programming (live sex chat rooms, where you're charged if you exit out of the pop-up) or potentially a way out of their pre-programmed life (an American Idol-style talent show or a career as a porn star). Yet another drops us into the lives of a young couple in the future who dissect everything in their lives with a chip connected to a hard drive in their brain, called a Grain, which shows us how dangerous & tragic being able to recall and display every event in the history of your life can be. In one scene, during a painfully awkward lovemaking session, each participant replays footage from when their life and their lovemaking was actually good, and use that to make it through the ordeal. Their eyes glaze over while they watch the footage, making them look blank and robotic. I've got the second season (or series, if you will) queued up and can't wait to see what else they come up with.

Mr. PENUMBRA'S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE - I picked this up and have been listening to it in my car in the audiobook format. It concerns a tech-savvy young man who acquires a job at a curious little bookstore in San Francisco who, after noticing that the shop's customers don't really buy anything but instead check out odd titles from dark corners of the store as part of an old agreement with the owner, sets out to figure out what's really going on there. He enlists the help of some of his friends and the quest turns into a quaint, old-fashioned mystery as our heroes explore the past, present and future of books and the act of reading. The author, Robin Sloan, originally wrote the story as a Kindle Single and then expanded it to a traditional printed novel, which is fitting. It seems to share a loose connection with Black Mirror, that being the way that technology is rapidly changing the way we do things we had done the same way forever. His girlfriend works at Google and his friend has a startup, while he is working with the outdated glue-scented dusty old volumes that line the shelves of Mr. Penumbra's shop. I just started it and I'm only 1 disc in (again, fitting the theme of the story is the fact that I'm "reading" a book on CD) but it's quite the page turner, so to speak.

REVIVAL - I have loved Revival since it's inception but I had recently taken some time off from it for a few months. However, I recently caught back up and I was instantly taken back into rural Wisconsin and the quarantined town where, for one day, the dead returned. Dana Cypress, whose father, and boss, is the sheriff and whose sister is one of the revived, is tasked with keeping control of the situation, as much as a situation like this allows. With the revival comes a whole host of problems for the small town including murder, mysterious supernatural beings, a body parts black market and the regular drama that comes with living in a small town. I have seen it referred to as a "farm noir" or a "rural noir" as it says on the cover of each issue, but it transcends that title and is something truly cool and original and creepy and continues to be one of my favorite series and a must-get each month.

THE HORRIBLE CROWES - LIVE AT THE TROUBADOUR - I usually don't like live albums for some reason, I think it's because after listening to the same songs the same way from the studio albums, hearing them done not as tightly and with different timing and sometimes different lyrics is slightly off-putting. However, after hearing of a live album by the side project of the singer of my favorite band at a venue I could've gone to, I became very interested. And it didn't disappoint, Brian Fallon and company delivered a very nice set with all of the songs from their album Elsie and a couple extras. Fallon gives a few short thank you's to the live and listening audience for giving his little vanity side project a chance and supporting them. He has some good banter with the crowd, expressing his admiration of some of the attractive people in the audience and giving a bit of background on a few of his songs. Fallon is a natural leading man, he's humble and humorous and genuinely enjoys being in the moment and sharing the night with his audience. I've seen him solo at the Troubadour and numerous times around LA with The Gaslight Anthem and his live shows always deliver. I have pretty much had this on constant rotation lately.

Movie Top Ten 2013

In case you didn't realize yet, 2013 is in the books. As I sit here and try to think about all that occurred in the last 12 months, all I can come up with is a simple, single thought: It was a long, strange year. I was best man at my best friends wedding, I had a few failed attempts at romance, I started writing and came up with some stuff I really like, and I made plans for my future. Outside of my personal life, there were the strange stories that consumed all of us for, you know, at least a couple days, including the Boston Marathon bombing and the Christopher Dorner saga right here in our backyard, as well as the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and the Edward Snowden story.* The Red Sox won the World Series again, giving Boston a team to rally behind after tragedy, the Heat won their second title in a row, giving Lakers fans even more fuel for their hate fire, and for some reason, the Ravens won the Super Bowl. It was a good year for TV, as noted in the previous post but now it's time to talk about what I really want to discuss, the year in film. In no particular order, these are more or less my favorite films of the year:

Mud
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Short Term 12
Out Of The Furnace
Upstream Color
American Hustle
The Way, Way Back
Frances Ha
Gravity
The Wolf Of Wall Street

Other favorites that are in the conversation include Stoker, Side Effects, Prince Avalanche, The Kings Of Summer, Pacific Rim, Inside Llewyn Davis, In A World..., Drinking Buddies and The Heat.

This list does not include one film that I have yet to see but which I will almost undoubtedly love, Spike Jonze's Her. I can't imagine I will see this film and dislike it, as it seems tailor-made for me. A man who is at odds with the world due to his inability to connect with those around him falls for the operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson, who more than anybody has a voice you could fall in love with, that helps him get through life in near-future LA. I've said that I may be drawn so much to this movie because I could conceivably be this character, as I have trouble fitting in and finding love in real life. I may watch and do away with real women altogether.

Another thing to note is that I didn't have an absolute favorite this year and, to be honest, I had a hard time coming up with 10 notable enough to be shortlisted as favorites. I didn't love a lot of the Oscar bait films and didn't even see some of the soon to be Academy Award winning films like 12 Years A Slave and Captain Phillips and wasn't swept away (pun intended) by films like All Is Lost and Dallas Buyers Club. I think this is the year with the highest number of films where when asked how they were, I said "Eh, it was pretty good." Most of the time, movies are just fine, not bad, not great, just...fine, a perfectly okay way to spend 2 hours. Very rarely do I see a film that blows me away or one that I absolutely loathe. I couldn't do a worst of list for the year because I didn't see ten films that I hated. If I don't think I'm going to like a film, I don't see it. I almost always know what I'm getting into beforehand.

In many ways, this was the year of McConaughey, popping up in The Wolf of Wall Street and the trailers for True Detective and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar which will arrive, as the trailer tells us, one year from now as well as his presumably Oscar winning performance in Dallas Buyers Club and the criminally underrated Mud, which, gun to my head, would maybe be my pick for my favorite film of the year. He plays a criminal hiding out on an island on the run from the law as well as backwoods gangsters who befriends a young boy in need of a real life hero and some adventure in his life. Jeff Nichols created something very extraordinary, a coming of age film inside of a small, tight, rural noir crime drama. Another great coming-of-age film that was part of a pair of great films this summer was The Way, Way Back, along with The Kings Of Summer. McConaughey also schools Leonardo DiCaprio and is responsible for turning him into the titular Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio goes all out in Wolf, doing some of the most vulgar and hilarious acting I've ever seen him do. It's a cautionary tale about the ability of Capitalism and greed to corrupt absolutely and it's also really fucking funny. Leonardo DiCaprio's chief rival for best actor of the generation Christian Bale had a great year, going gritty & dark in Out Of The Furnace and going fat & funny for American Hustle. Hustle is not as good as Silver Linings Playbook from last year but David O. Russell is at the top of his game and Scott Cooper cast Bale in his rust belt crime drama Out Of The Furnace to play a man out for revenge for the brother he tried to but ultimately couldn't protect. Bale shared the screen with the love of my life Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle, who had a bigger part this year reprising her star-making turn as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire. Catching Fire is the biggest surprise of the year for me. The book is the weakest of the trilogy but I was still excited to see the film and ready to pretend I didn't notice all of it's flaws. However, it ended up being legitimately great and a rarity, a young adult series and a second in a series, being made for adults and done very well. The other contenders, in my eyes, for best actress this year are Brie Larson, who was so great in Short Term 12 and Greta Gerwig who co-wrote and co-starred in Frances Ha. Both films tackle the problem that many twenty-somethings have and ask the question: What am I doing with my life and who should I surround myself with? Both films do it in different but equally real ways and are two of my favorites of the year. The technical achievement of the year is undoubtedly Gravity and looked stunningly beautiful on the big screen, one of the best movie-going experiences of the year. Upstream Color made me question the way I look at life, Shane Carruth made something disorienting and haunting and wrote, directed, starred in, edited, soundtracked and distributed the film himself. It's a meditation on loss of identity in the modern world and starred one of my new favorite actors, Amy Seimetz who also popped up in the shows The Killing and Family Tree. If you can get through it, it's worth checking out. The dude makes about 1 movie every 10 years (Primer - 2004) so you have time to catch up.

*I just finished reading through an oral history of 2013 that was heavy on tragedy.