My Force is AWAKE!!!

Spoiler Free Bit

I saw it yesterday morning! Yes, at 9 am and it was AWESOME!!!

I might go into more detail in a future post, but here are some initial impressions. This was a great movie--not just a Star Wars movie, but a great blockbuster of a movie. It felt like being back in the Star Wars Universe with an added bonus of actually reversing some of the damage done by the prequels. The prequel's shrank the universe and felt limited, while The Force Awakens took advantage of the fact that they have an entire universe to play in. That means different planets, races and types of spaceships.

The casting was incredible and it was gratifying to watch these new heroes interact with the previous generation whose mere presence added so much gravity to the movie. Unsurprisingly, this movie is one to see in theaters, though from the looks of the box office, I am one of the last people to see it. So maybe you already knew that. But go and see it again! Great work, J.J.!!!

(Very Small) Spoilers Ahead

Watching the movie had me figuring out who all of the new characters represented in the movie. It is the geek in me. Like, who was the new Han, Leia and Luke? Chewie is still Chewie after all. 

Rey: Rey is obviously Luke. This one goes almost without have to say it. She was raised on a desert planet, dreamed of leaving, and a droid from space changed the course of her life. 

Finn: This one to me is kinda obvious too. Finn is Han. He was not looking to be a hero, planned to leave when the going got rough, but returned to save his friend (hopefully love interest! Yes. I am officially shipping those two and their crazy amount of chemistry.) and has that roguish charm.

Poe: Poe has to be Leia in this new rendition. He is captured early on a secret mission, already a member of the Resistance, and has that biting Leia wit during an interrogation scene. Some people may say Poe is Han because he can fly a ship but his motivation doesn't line up. 

My overall thoughts of the movie is it felt like A New Hope but that is mostly due to covering a few of the same beats, similar worlds and the starting of a new trilogy with Han as a faux mentor. I could not stop smiling when Han stepped on to the screen. He is my Star Wars character, I even read the now defunct Expanded Universe books to follow the journey of the character. 

After watching The Force Awakens, my film order has to change. OK. My ranking of Star Wars.

1) The Empire Strikes Back

2) The Force Awakens

3) A New Hope

4) Return of the Jedi

5) The prequels. I refused to re-watch them, generally remembering a feeling of dread. Lucas executed my childhood love while distracting me with the insult that was Jar Jar.

Overall, it was everything I had hoped for from a movie that needed to make fans happy, to be accessible to other non-fan people, and to be something I want to show my kid. A good show, indeed.  I am going to think on it for a couple of days and then really think through the details, but I can't wait to buy the blu-rays, run some RPGs based on it, and show this movie to my daughter.

2015 Top 10: New TV Shows

I am sitting here looking for something to watch on "me" night! The kid is asleep, the wife is out and I am looking to catch up on some TV. Yes, I should be writing, but my ideas need to marinate (and I need to procrastinate). It is the time of year when all of us reflect on the highs and lows of the year: what we liked best, what was okay, and what we walked away from. So here are my top picks out of the 400 odd new shows that dropped in 2015.

Jessica Jones: This is Marvel's best TV outing to date.  The story is strong, the cast is excellent and it deals with a series of issues in an approachable manner with a noir wrapping. It has 13 really good episodes (but could have been 9 or 10 amazing episodes).  (LUKE CAGE!!!! SWEET CHRISTMAS! 2016!)

Red Oaks:  I am surprised by how much I like this Amazon original show.  It is an homage to 80s movies, with all of their greatness, quirkiness and lack of diversity. My wife laughed the whole time and it reflected swaths of her life. 

Dark Matter:  This show was incredible breath of fresh air. It is so hard to find good science fiction that based in space. The acting was good, the stories solid and the Blake's 7 like ending (one of the best I have ever seen) had me giggling, even as my wife asked, "Blake what?" (I am also a huge Roger Cross fan so that may have given the show bonus points.) 

Catastrophe: Another great Amazon original show.  It is incredibly funny, and depicts modern day relationships and the inherent struggles within them. 

Galavant:  I have already written a love letter to this great show. Can't wait for the new season in 2016!

Master of None:  An incredible show that did not back down from masterfully and humorously addressing some serious issues in our society. One of the funniest shows of the year, that was also self assured and a tight 10 episodes. 

Togetherness:  A dramedy about the death of dreams and the struggle of a midlife crisis. An incredible show and one that HBO should be proud to have. The Duplass brothers rarely disappoint. My one hope is that they add more diversity to their projects. 

The Carmichael Show: I loved this show, even watching it reminded me of a TV version of my family and home life from my youth. The cast was incredible; they touched on some serious topics and did not back away from them. Refreshing, even more so given that it is on network TV and has been renewed for another (hopefully longer) season.

Honorable Mention!  iZombie: This is a gem of a show with a stellar cast, doing some great geek television and making it look easy. Each episode has me laughing and wanting to see the next one. 

All in all, a great year for television demonstrating the power of the medium. 

RPG Fridays: When To Call It

This one goes out to all of my fellow GMs, Keepers, DMs. Basically the person running the game. When do you call it a quits? You lost players. The game keeps getting canceled due to real life.  It has lost its mojo.  Has it happened to you? It has happened to me on more than one occasion and seems to happen with the same blasted campaign! 

I recently called my Horror on the Orient Express game. This was the fourth time trying to run it (I'm nothing if not persistent.). I was jazzed to be running the game, on the cusp of completing a two and half year run of Mask of Nyarlathotep.  That game was amazing! I made a matchbox and one of the players still talks about all of the great props for it. This is the amazing part . . . a CALL OF CTHULHU game got up to 12 players at once. Yea. I ran a CoC with 12 players a couple of times.  But as expected, gamers come and go, so we really had a solid six players. 

With all of that momentum from successfully completing Mask, having one of my players tell me that the ending was incredible and felt totally Lovecraftian (yeah . . . they did not win), I took on my cursed campaigned with my shiny new Kickstarter HoToE books. 

After nearly a year of more missed games than played,  a player doing the fade away (after the first session due to it being mostly character creation and in-character attending a lecture full of clues), as well as personal stuff all around, I ended the game. I took stock, made notes about what I would do differently if I ever tried it again, but really would a fifth or sixth time be the charm? Probably not; I'm guessing the curse would continue. And I do have a shelf full of other games. 

I have been running Call of Cthulhu for ages now as my primary game. For a while I was running three campaign games a month: Cthulhu, Star Wars (SAGA) and Pathfinder. Then it narrowed down to just CoC, due to the kid for the past year or so, but it is time to put it back on the shelf and break out some other systems as my main campaign game. 

My current contenders in order of preference are: Esoterrorists,  Shadowrun, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire or One Ring. I have year-long campaigns in mind for each one and plot strings for additional campaign arcs after that. I am close to just narrowing it down to the first two, as I love Robin's work, the premise of the game, and it is burning a hole though my bookshelf waiting to be run. My love of Shadowrun goes back to my teen years;  I have never had a chance to run it, and all of the great games from Harebrained have my brain churning out ideas.  Currently, the game to be chosen is still up in the air until early 2016, and it has six confirmed players. 

So much like Jean Grey, even when you have to end something, you can rise from the ashes. All right, I am off to work on one of my con scenarios and speculate on what game to run from my local crew.

Alias a.k.a Jessica Jones

After a leisurely pace of about one episode a night, we finally finished Jessica Jones. I know you're on pins and needles, waiting to hear what I thought about it. Well . . . it was awesome and a must-see! It is a powerful piece of storytelling that was well crafted, although a bit repetitive in parts. The show felt like an incredibly great 10-episode season stretched out to a strong 13 episodes.  I am actually not going to give any spoilers because this show is something that should be watched.

It is crazy what Alias became, given the fact that Brian Michael Bendis  originally wanted to write about Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman) because she had the best hair in comics (yes, he actually said that). But instead, he created Jones since Drew was involved in a larger Marvel plot. I actually emailed Bendis when he first started Ultimate Spiderman, about how nice it was to have one of my favorite characters reflect my own background. He emailed me back within a day!  

Jessica Jones, the comic and show, both embrace my love of noir, powers not solving all problems, and repercussions for actions. It also highlights the truth that choosing to do the right thing is rarely easy. Within moments of the first episode, my buy-in was pretty high, not to mention David Tennant is my favorite "new" generation Doctor (sorry, but McCoy has and will always be my Doctor). And . . . MOTHERF'ING LUKE CAGE!!!  Luke Cage was one of the first African American superheroes being introduced in 1972.  He was ripped from the pages of Blaxploitation but has really come into himself over the last decade or so.  It is the recent runs with Cage that made me a fan. That and the (minor spoiler) relationship between him and Jessica. 

Having read the comic, I had a number of worries before starting the show. The largest of which was the lack of Carol Danvers and the use of Trish Walker, but I never missed Carol and think that the story actually played better in the series than the comic. 

This short review would not be complete without a mention of Daredevil. The Daredevil series was good, my issues aside, but it did not have me wanting to come back and watch the next episode. Jessica Jones had me invested in the character, her own personal struggle, and the moral struggle between doing what you need to get by or to do the right thing. Daredevil was all fury and noise with little substance.

Jones actually played out what white male privilege looks like within its villain (a post for later when I do a spoiler version and tag in examples). I just want to stew on the show a bit longer, maybe do a re-watch (something I have not done and have no interest to do with Daredevil).

The funniest part was when my wife turned to me and said, "I know what super power I want in your next game." 10 guesses whose power was featured in this show, and it does not belong Jessica Jones.

If  you haven't already, check the show out. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Cap Wolf . . . really?

Nick Spencer's first two issues of Captain America were incredible. It was great, maybe even inspiring, to watch a main stream comic highlight some social justice issues that plague our society today, while at the same time, giving the finger to a lot of conservative America by focusing on immigrants coming into the US and being harassed by hate groups. 

Then Issue 3 dropped into my Comixology account and the world froze for a moment. All of that momentum that was building and setting a great tone for the book began to erode when Cap-Sam-Wolf emerged.  It feels like a massive misstep to have gone from discussing a real world issue to a villain talking about being shat out of an alien. A funny poop joke for some, but a break in the reality of the narrative tone that was being created. 

Cap-Wolf is a shout out to the old school. I am not saying it is something that should not happen, just not this soon. The book felt like it was building to something incredible and this is a stumble. Hopefully Nick bounces back from this step back, gets us back to the good stuff, and confirms that he has not been intimidated by the conservatives to change what he was doing. 

This issue at the end of the day was , , ,