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Speaking of inspirational material for a certain action movie roleplaying game, The Good the Bad the Weird, recently arrived on DVD, is the most Feng Shui western ever made.

A good Killer, an evil Thief and a weaselly Everyman, Korean expats all, wreak havoc across Japanese-occupied Manchuria in pursuit of a mysterious treasure map. Director Kim Ji-Woon pays his homage to Sergio Leone by way of Tsui Hark. (He has a new film at this year’s TIFF: I Saw the Devil, in which a secret agent pursues the serial killer who murdered his wife.)

The Subjective

Loved it.

The Cultural

Its status as a box office disappointment marks the limits of geek culture in influencing the mainstream. Pilgrim was projected to make $15 million its opening weekend but instead made $10. That means that one in three people who told market researchers that they were planning to see it didn’t show up to buy tickets. What happened? I posit the following scenario: they tried to convince their less geeky friends to see it. Their LGFs hadn’t heard of Scott Pilgrim. Their would-be geek mavens tried to explain it, but The Expendables had a much clearer pitch to the uninitiated. Result: that 33% got dragged with their friends to see the ill-reviewed Stallone flick over the well-received nerdgasm.

Pilgrim will instead find its audience the way previous Edgar Wright movies have done—on DVD. Its cult status means that a later generation of non-nerds will readily understand the concept when the remake appears in 2040, making it a big hit.

The Beat Analysis

One of the film’s innovations is to express the dramatic progress of its protagonist, as he struggles with his girlfriend’s past, through action sequences normally associated with procedural narratives. Arguably this is because we’re seeing Scott’s life through his own distorted lens of pop culture references and video game play. Instead of dramatic dialogue scenes in which he makes emotional progress, we see him win a series of outlandish fights.

The Autobiographical

I’m not familiar with the comics, but knew that I was going to a movie about living in my city. What I didn’t expect was that I’d be seeing a movie about living in my neighborhood. Much of the action—in front of Honest Ed’s and at the Pizza Pizza, the Second Cup, Sonic Boom and Lee’s Palace—takes place within a few blocks. It takes five minutes to walk there from our current apartment.

I was at Lee’s Palace the night it opened. (Or rather, opened as the club it still is today, carrying over the name of the Chinese diner it replaced.) I went to see the now sadly deceased alt-country scenemaker Handsome Ned, whose college radio show I listened to. The first night I went by myself, on the first day back in Toronto after a summer break back in the home town. That was when I learned that going to a club by yourself sucks.

So on the following night, which Ned was also playing, I dragged a bunch of my hometown friends, also going to university in Toronto, to see him. A couple of my friends lived nearby with two other students. On the way to the club we ran into one of their new housemates, who I hadn’t met before. Her name was Valerie.

I may not be of Scott Pilgrim’s generation, but he and I nonetheless share some serious personal mythology. Lee’s Palace is not only the site of a battle between him and the vegan-powered rock star Todd Ingram. It’s where my wife and I went the night we met. A couple of weeks from now, we’ll hit the twenty-fifth anniversary of that moment.

For new readers, here’s the score. August’s Gen Con rush of hobby game-related announcements and jabber will, as of Sept 9th, give way to my fest coverage. Brace yourself for a ten-day onslaught of capsule film reviews, stray observations about movie storytelling, and grousing about the inevitable logistical glitches that accompany any run of the festival. I’ll be taking an in-town vacation to see 4-6 movies a day for the run of the fest. Afterwards, I’ll assemble the capsule reviews into a single handy post and then collapse into a gibbering, meeping puddle in a Starbucks-branded oxygen tent.

If you’ve heard of a film that’s playing the fest, chances are that I won’t be programming it today. The high profile titles with the red carpets and movie stars in attendance will be getting conventional releases in the next few months. Instead, I concentrate on titles that don’t have distribution in place.This may be the only chance to see them on a big screen.

This year’s defining new element is the unveiling of the Bell Lightbox, the ambitious five-screen edifice to high cinema culture the fest has been promising for years. At considerable risk to their core mission and fundraising wherewithal, they’ve finally got this spiffy new headquarters ready to go. It’ll be doing partial duty for this year’s festival, as they blow off the drywall dust and wait to what happens when planning and reality collide. I’m hoping to fall in love with the place. The alternative will be grumbling about its dramatic upward impact on ticket prices over the last half decade.

As always, the programming ranges from the ultra-experimental Wavelengths slot to the exploitation-friendly Midnight Madness. It seems like an especially strong year for MM this time around: or at least one devoid of the items I can safely scratch off the list, like slasher flicks or alt-culture documentaries.

In my favorite change of M.O. this time, organizers left a significant number of titles unannounced until the arrival of the program. This fills me with grizzled nostalgia for our earliest fest-going experiences, when the thick program book’s entire contents came as a surprise. As a consequence, there are several titles that as of this writing I hope to see on the list, but aren’t sure will show up, like the latest from Johnnie To or John Woo. I am however already stoked for titles from Álex de la Iglesia, Benoît Jacquot, Jorgen Leth, Dante Lam, Im Sang-soo, Jee-woon Kim, Susanne Bier, Andrew Lau, François Ozon and Werner Herzog (a 3D documentary about cave paintings!) Will I fit them all in? Will they have distribution in place, allowing me to pick other things? That’s what Program Book Day is all about.

Want to follow along at home? Check out the quickly-updated title list from the third-party site TOFilmfest.ca.

With the blockbuster era of commercial cinema now thirty-three and counting, we may have to start finding sub-divisions within it. Today we’re living in the Remake and Reboot era, with the blockbuster segment of the market increasingly dominated by proven properties. An original film made in the early blockbuster age is now old enough to be remade in the R&R era.

Made for five million bucks, Escape From New York was a hit without being a blockbuster. It also belongs on a short list of good movies for which you can imagine a successful remake. Such a thing is in development already, with director Breck Eisner, recent remaker of George Romero’s The Crazies, attached. The refreshingly unprocessed original remains highly watchable without being some kind of unassailable masterpiece. There’s no guarantee that the new version will be any good, but its awfulness is at least not a foregone conclusion.

Mad Max, now being reworked by its original director, would be another example of a rough-edged classic of the era that could theoretically not suck when remade.

It will be interesting to see what the writers of new EFNY do with its astoundingly nihilistic ending. Will they be ballsy enough to carry over Carpenter’s cynicism from its post-Watergate context to the present post-ironic emo zeitgeist?

Pressure will doubtless be placed on the writers of the new version to properly explain the audio tape McGuffin around which the action revolves. (Assuming they retain this element at all.) If you’ll recall, Snake Plissken is sent to retrieve a cassette tape and the President of the United States who’s holding it, in that order. The contents of the tape are supposedly essential to broker a peace between the world’s warring super-powers. Although the tape was apparently created by the government that lost it, the screenplay never troubles itself to explain why that one copy is so dang irreplaceable.

A McGuffin that makes sense is by no means a prerequisite for a classic film, as I reminded myself when looking at layout proofs for Hamlet’s Hit Points. One of the three narratives I break down in the book is Casablanca. Famously, its letters of transit, which symbolize the protagonist’s dramatic choice between selfishness and altruism, make no realistic sense given the political situation. But we accept them, because the film believes they make sense. Same with the tape in EFNY.

Although already a curio on all of these fronts, the datedness of 1953’s Thunder Bay, directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, has suddenly taken a nosedive from the quaint to the wildly ironic.

Stewart stars as hardscrabble engineer Steve Martin, who goes up against a hidebound corporate establishment to bring his dream to fruition. Against all conventional wisdom, he believes it’s possible to drill for petroleum underwater, through use of his crazy new invention, the offshore oil rig. Along with loyal sidekick (Jay C. Flippen), Martin battles not only the suits, but the irrational prejudices of local shrimp fishermen. These colorfully hard-living types, who seem to oscillate between being Cajun, Italian, Greek and possibly Portuguese, backwardly object to his plans to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way Martin falls for a dutiful fisherman’s daughter, played by Joanne Dru. All’s well that ends well when Martin successfully drills for oil—and, when a legendarily elusive and valuable shrimp species starts to breed beneath his rig, proves to the shrimpers that his innovation is nothing but good for the environment.

So if you’re running out of people to blame for the BP disaster, add Jimmy Stewart, or perhaps Steve Martin, to your list.

In the meantime, check out some of the classic westerns Mann and Stewart made at about the same time, including The Naked Spur, Winchester ‘73, and Bend of the River. Thanks to stronger, more emotionally powerful material, they are far from dated: of their day but still aesthetically alive today.

Thunder Bay is available on DVD as part of the James Stewart Screen Legend Collection.

The first film never fully integrates its origin story and its villain story.

Iron Man 2 crams in too many new characters. This tends to happen when the studio exerts pressure to fill up the marquee with new actors, and to increase toy sales. Instead of two storylines jostling one another for screen time, we have three or four.

Like its predecessor, Iron Man 2 follows the rules of the iconic hero, but in a loosey-goosey way. Its structure doesn’t pursue a single, propulsive narrative, because it’s a banter movie. Its pleasure arises from the witty, off-beat verbal riffing, as deployed by an expert cast. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man series is really a return to the mode of his early films Swingers (which he wrote) and Made, with explosions and CGI robots.

In a standard action movie, you keep the hero aware of the threat posed by the villain at all times. Here Justin Theroux’s script makes sure that Tony thinks Vanko/Whiplash is dead for most of the movie. This enables him to pursue his goal as protagonist, to reverse his palladium poisoning. Even this goal is achieved alone in a lab. This leaves plenty of screen time for banter and charm. Even the scenes between the primary and secondary villain are banter scenes.

Structure isn’t an end in itself. It’s a safety net, an assurance that a story will smoothly build toward a satisfying conclusion. When you loosen your attention to structure to give breathing room to individual scenes, allowing for tangents along the way, each of those scenes has to crackle. Attempts at this light, jokey tone fall flat more often than not, because the crackle never materializes. Not so here; Favreau and his cast do more with verbal rhythm than his legion of animators achieve with the set piece armored action sequences.

Look at the bizarre biomorphic shapes that make up the rips on Sondra Locke’s jeans. No pair of jeans ever tore like that. Nor do the shards of glass making up the broken bus window resemble any known shatter pattern. The bus itself looks more like a metal-skinned monster than a vehicle.

The weirdly sculpted shapes that make up the mighty thews of any of his barbarian heroes likewise depart wildly from anatomy as we know it. But when you’re looking at a Frazetta painting, you want to live in a universe where torn denim stretches across a thigh like that. Its calculated wrongness establishes itself as preferable to mere visual observation. The force of his stylization, simultaneously muscular and impressionistic, catches and holds the eye. It is pulp illustration lifted to the realm of visual poetry, equally at home on the cover of a glossy limited edition or, in crudely airbrushed duplicate, on the side of a 70s stoner van. Many imitated him, but no one succeeded in capturing his off-kilter mastery of color, line and form.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the film. On this viewing I was surprised by how quickly the Bogie and Hepburn characters get together. In my misremembered version they didn’t fully get together until they succeed at their task at the end.

In beat analysis terms, The African Queen includes a dramatic thread, the romance between the leads, but is largely procedural. The protagonist, Rose, single-mindedly pursues the goal of blowing up the German boat, falling in love with Charlie Allnut along the way.

The complications are those of an arduous journey: getting lost in reeds, going over rapids, dealing with leeches, getting shot at. Like most arduous journeys the adversities of the road (or in this case, river), underline the emotional bond between the journeyers and add definition to their relationship. See also: Lord of the Rings.

This raises the question of how arduous journeys in RPGs might carry the emotional resonance of their fictional counterparts.

Lynne and Rich were set to fly out on Thursday—right when Eyjafjallajoekull erupted. They’re here still, and we’ve been doing our best to look after them with home-cooked meals and the occasional forced march through beautiful downtown Toronto.

Yesterday we caught Kick-Ass. On the way there we spotted a seemingly handmade sign urging us to be on the lookout for a missing cat named Mr. Bitey. As those of you who also saw the film know, this turns out to be viral marketing.

An even odder fiction-reality collision occurred during the scene where the mob boss takes his son to the movies. Much of Kick-Ass was shot here in Toronto. So that scene had the characters entering the very same cinema we were watching the movie in! I’d never heard a sound I’d describe as a vertiginous murmur before, but that’s what traveled through the audience as we collectively twigged to it.

If you’re in T.O. and want to see it with this added moment of trippiness, catch it at the Scotiabank.

When Hit Girl’s on screen, it fires on all cylinders. The rest is uneven.

Its occasional downshifts of momentum occur largely because its viewpoint character is not the protagonist. The story is told through Dave’s eyes, but it’s Big Daddy whose goals and actions drive the narrative.

I really wish comic book adaptations would stop converting captions into voice-over narration. What works in one form doesn’t automatically translate into the other. Captions help explain what you’re looking at, which is fine or necessary in a comic. Voice-over must work in counterpoint to the visuals and should never explain what you’re looking at.

Clearly a conclave must be held to establish acceptable windows before repurposing famous music cues from previous films. A classic slice of Ennio Morricone from For a Few Dollars More? A bit on the nose, but after forty-five years the statute of mash-up limitations has clearly expired. However, John Murphy’s defining guitar drone from 28 Days Later, reused for a punch-up scene? With only eight years separating original use and appropriation, that’s just bad form, man.

Nigel (verb): To portray a foil character as especially stupid or foolish. Most often, but not always, used as a cheap and easy way to burnish the heroic image of the protagonist he contrasts with.

As in:

The second half of this season of House has grown a little less shark-jumpy. One way to tell: they’re not Nigelling his staffers so much these days.

Wow, the Gospel of Mark really Nigels the apostles.

Derivation: named after the character actor Nigel Bruce, whose portrayal of Watson in the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies shifted the baseline image of the character to that of a jabbering idiot. Bruce may just have been following his script or direction, but “to Lanfield” doesn’t ring the same way.

Parting observation: though a lazy device in non-improvised forms, Nigelling may prove acceptable in a roleplaying context. All too often players Nigel their own protagonists. To maintain the idea that they are competent heroes (where this is desired), the GM may then be prompted to introduce some easily bested foil characters.

Apologies if you are actually called Nigel. In my defense, this is not as bad as what XTC did to you.