Weekly Geekly for August 16, 2024
Audio Illusions
When my wife and I are watching movies, she will let out an audible groan if there is a scene where a plane lands with the ever present “er er” sound simulating the sound of the tires hitting the ground. Ever since sound designer extraordinaire discussed why movies use this sound and asked his students to go and listen to actual planes landing, it’s driven her crazy. Planes landing sound nothing like that. The landings are loud and “thudding” and if the tires squeaked like that it might suggest that something terrible was about to happen, but if we were to see planes land in films to their real sound we might not believe the sound. It’s a case where what we see and what we hear need to meet conceptual expectations. We see the plume of smoke from the tires, so we expect to hear a skid.
These kinds of connections between what he hear and what we see amaze me and so too do other audio illusions. This video by Veritasium discusses a number of audio effects and includes some good discussion of the connection between seeing and hearing. It’s really remarkable how much we can control what you hear by manipulating what you see.
Weekly Film Article Cavalcade
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
The Alien franchise is one where the mythic tone varies from entry to entry. The first film, partly inspired by A.E. Van Vogt’s story Black Destroyer, is pure horror. It has an inexperienced crew encounter something for which they are not prepared. Unlike the scientists of the Space Beagle, the crew of the Nostromo have neither a deep understanding of history (the short story version) or a Nexialist (the book) to help them overcome the creature. When I first read Voyage of the Space Beagle, I wondered at what the relationship between Alien and Black Destroyer was because it seemed weak at best. Then I read the short story in Astounding and immediately saw the connection and both are straight horror tales.
The second film is an action war film, a tragic action war film but an action war film nonetheless. It hits all the right beats and adds a couple more. While it contains some horrific moments, the mythic tone of the film is one of heroism and family. While the antagonist is the same, if dialed to 11 to allow for action, the conflicts are different as are the capabilities of the protagonists.
A third mythic tone emerges in Prometheus and later films and it’s more rooted in HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and the book Chariots of the Gods. While once again horror directed, the horror is of the cosmic rather than personal variety and aims at capturing “where do we come from?”
Reading Luke Y. Thompson’s review of the latest entry Alien: Romulus, it sounds like the film is trying to capture more than one of these mythic tones in a single picture and comes up short. I don’t envy anyone who tries to make an Alien movie. James Cameron’s shift in tone, while creating an equally good film to the original, presents what I believe is an almost impassible hurdle.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
My first exposure to Jean Reno as an actor was in Luc Besson’s seemingly forgotten masterpiece The Big Blue. He played a stoic and almost unstoppable force in opposition to the spiritual and seemingly fragile protagonist. The film blew me away with its cinematography, performances, and subtle surrealism. Like Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, it was a film that has stuck with me because it resonated with my soul in the way it presented friendship and love.
Reno’s performance in The Big Blue was very different than it was in The Professional, the film that most people think of first when they think of Reno. As much as I liked Reno in The Big Blue and La Femme Nikita, The Professional never quite connected with me. Maybe it was because my friend Rich observed, when we watched it on DVD, that Leon lived off of Milk and Cheese and must suffer horrible constipation. It’s a good movie, but his performance didn’t sing to me.
My favorite Jean Reno performance comes in a film that I don’t think would come to a lot of people’s minds when you mention his name. I absolutely adore him in French Kiss. The Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline romantic comedy is one of my favorite love stories, in large part because of the chemistry between Kline and Reno. It’s a role where Reno brings a gentleness and compassion that makes the film’s presentation of the friendship and mutual respect his character and Kline’s character share have depth. It’s a subtle performance that allows for the “glass slipper” that saves the day and makes romance possible.
It is this backdrop that makes me very excited to see My Penguin Friend after reading Courtney Howard’s review at Variety. The quote in Courtney’s piece that made this movie a must watch for me was, “the French actor reveals new colors as a performer, shading the picture’s playful and poignant overtones with sensitivity and subtlety, making this a must-see for those who love uplifting stories about redemption, perseverance and empathy.” It’s a description that reveals in full what I saw glimpses of in the earlier Reno films and I cannot wait to watch the movie.
Glimpses from the Substackosphere and Bloggerverse
“Thog” over at
has a very intriguing post that I recommend any practicing Dungeon Master check out entitled “Twenty Quick Questions for you Campaign Setting.” What I love about the twenty questions is that it is a mix of the mundane and semi-obvious questions like “Where can we go to get some magical healing?,” and deeper more unexpected questions that when answered end up adding significant depth to your world building such as “Where can we go to get platemail custom fitted for this monster I just befriended?”There’s a lot to unpack in answering that second question, as there is with many of the questions in the piece. It’s thoughtful and I think if you answer those twenty questions, you might just have a full campaign setting. I’m thinking about having one of next week’s posts be me answering these questions for my own home campaign.
Every time I think I’ve hit the limit of just how kid oriented the television of the 1970s and 1980s were, someone like
over at provides me an example that makes me want to go even further down that rabbit hole. His most recent post discusses WPIX’s television “show” PIXXX, which may use three x’s but is very much aimed at kids. It was a show where kids could call in to “play” a video game remotely in order to win prizes. I don’t want to reveal too much, but I will say this. WPIX version of the show was less “commercial” than the show that inspired it and that if I played the Los Angeles based version I would have hoped for Toy Bin 2 (the second tier of three) instead of the “good” Toy Bin 3. I imagine if one were to have won the Star Wars toy set on display there and kept it mint, it would be the most valuable item given away by the show.
I almost had
’s interview with Dr. Lindsey Cormack about her new book How to Raise a Citizen (And Why Its Up to You to Do It) as the opening piece this week. One doesn’t work in youth civic engagement for over a decade, having developed three curricula for K-12 students, without having strong opinions about how to create a more participatory society. Between that and writing my dissertation on parental transmission of negative political affect to the next generation, Dr. Cormack’s book is (as they say) my jam. Dr. Cormack has been gracious enough to let me read her book, which I will now cite in my dissertation and include in my Political Science 101 classes this fall. It’s a good read and contains good advice.Underpinning some of her advice are some concepts that run against the typical elitist positions about voter information. This isn’t to say that she thinks the American voter is super knowledgeable, rather that she thinks that the “pop quiz hotshot” method of determining civic knowledge is a bad one and that parents are in fact capable of doing civics at home. It’s a position that is in line with Joseph Schumpeter’s actual argument about democratic knowledge in his classic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Most people read that book thinking that Schumpeter is saying that the masses aren’t actually capable of democracy because they lack sufficient knowledge and that elites should fill the void, but those people miss where he discusses how the average person knows more about the effect of inflation than bureaucrats in a discussion of the long string of specialized knowledge that the average person has. It’s a string of knowledge that ranges from cynicism about advertising to trade unionist policy.
Schumpeter isn’t arguing that everyone has all of that knowledge, but he is arguing for a kind of wisdom of the crowd. Dr. Cormack isn’t quite arguing for a wisdom of the crowd, but she is arguing for a model that assumes people know their preferences and only need to learn how to use the system properly. Her focus on local and state government over assuming all problems are federal in nature is a masterclass in American politics and this book is a must read because of that alone. That she also includes reasons for how this denationalization of politics, combined with the family talking about the mechanisms themselves, can lessen polarization make it even more valuable.
In my recent review of C.L. Moore’s story Dust of the Gods I discussed Kenneth Hite’s argument that H.P. Lovecraft was engaging in a process of remythologization. He was creating a new mythology for a post-religious world. Though “God is Dead” mankind still fears the void and experiences cosmic horror when confronted with the vastness of the universe. That fear is a central component to Lovecraft’s writing and led to the creation of a new Mythology. Given that this mythology was created for a post-mythic world, it seems odd that “the Mythos” has typically been confined to the 1930s and 20s when people adapt or pastiche Lovecraft’s work.
over at writes a lot about mythology in general and his insights into adapting Lovecraftian mythos to modernity are very insightful…and useful if you are running Call of Cthulhu.
Role Playing Game Recommendation
My next YouTube video is going to be a review of the Swedish superhero roleplaying game Supercrew. It’s a fun game that has a narrativist style that I think works extremely well with the superhero genre. Since I’ve got that review coming down the pipeline, I’m going to recommend one of the earliest narrativist games. It’s a great game that also happens to be a superhero roleplaying game. It’s called Good Guys Finish Last.
Better Games published Good Guys Finish Last and they are often overlooked for their vital role in the development of modern storytelling rpgs. They don’t often get as much credit as they deserve, but their games remain innovative and vital today decades after they were created. They were truly decades ahead of their time. Characters in Better Games Free-Style Role-Play games have no numerical statistics, instead they have a number of narrative descriptors that describe how their characters function.
It’s an innovation that works in a number of settings ranging from Fantasy to Horror, but my favorite example of it was in Better Games two comic book inspired games Good Guys Finish Last and Villains Finish First that were published by Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer magazine when Better Games owned the rights to that title.
Good Guys Finish Last has been rereleased by postworld games with a much improved layout updated by jim pinto and I highly recommend checking it out. While I could go on and on about how important Better Games was to the storytelling game scene, I will share jim pinto’s introduction instead. Given that jim has gone on to design a number of excellent games in the storytelling game space, his praise speaks volumes about the direct influence Better Games had on the genre.
To give you another example of what characters in Free-Style systems look like, though you are free to look at the link to my blog post above, here is a glimpse at a character sheet in Good Guys Finish Last. You’ll notice that all of the abilities are named and the only number listed is the modifier. I wish jim had opted for the actual wound chart for each character, rather than listing numbers, as that shows which keywords add to which damage type and help give the game even greater narrative focus.
Music Recommendation
One of the things I love about art in all of its forms is that it is one of the means by which we can see how our cultural dialogue evolves over time. If we view society as a conversation, art is a wonderful place to examine what gets included in the conversation and what people in later generations find to be important. One might think I’m talking about mores, logos, and norms here, and certainly I could because art does engage with cultural morality, but that’s not what I’m aiming at today.
In today’s music recommendation, I’m looking at what art later artists think is worth engaging from an aesthetic perspective. In particular, what music did later artists think was cool enough to inspire them to make a new creation?
I’ll start with an easy one. When Young M.C. broke big he was, much like L.L. Cool J, viewed as a “safer” alternative to rappers like Ice T, NWA, and Public Enemy. Young M.C. and L.L. combined creative lyrics and skilled rap styles with lyrics that weren’t as dark or focused on class struggle, police brutality, or growing up in a community being destroyed by a drug pandemic. We may talk about the Fentanyl crisis today, but Ice T’s Power, High Rollers, Original Gangster, Home of the Bodybag, and New Jack Hustler talked about a drug crisis when no one else wanted to in a way that made people feel uncomfortable.
Young M.C.’s songs were “safe,” but if you look at his aesthetic influences there’s a little more going on than at first glance. Know How is a great example of competition rap where the performer exhibits his ability to make rhymes and insults the competition, but underneath it is a jazz hook by Isaac Hayes. It’s the theme from Shaft. It’s a fantastic riff, but the film it’s in contains social commentary.
To be fair, Shaft isn’t Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, but it did contain criticism of the social order at the time. More so than its sequels, and far more than the more recent remake. It wasn’t “completely” safe and by choosing that song as the riff underneath the song, I think Young M.C. was both showing how he was inspired by an amazing hook and that he wasn’t “completely” safe either.
No one would accuse Dr. Dre or Snoop Dogg of presenting themselves as "safe,” but in Dre’s song The Next Episode he does a little of the inverse of what Young M.C. was doing. It’s not surprising that someone who has donated millions of dollars to provide educational opportunity, in sharp contrast to the harsh image of his youth, would pick a deep cut from the jazz scene as the hook for a song.
It was such a deep cut that many didn’t even know where the hook came from until David McCallum died. Where the underlying hook of Young M.C.’s song comes from a movie about taking down the man, Dr. Dre’s was written by a musician/actor who was far more mainstream. I don’t think Dr. Dre’s selection was done for the kinds of social commentary that I think Young’s was, but I do think it was selected as a celebration of an art form and a desire to expose his audience to a broader catalog of music.
Film Recommendation
Okay, this week’s film recommendation is coming completely out of left field. It’s a film that I love. It’s also a film that a lot of other people dislike, especially critics. It has a whopping 13% on Rotten Tomatoes.
No, it’s not the Dungeons & Dragons film starring Jeremy Irons. While it’s even less appreciated than the film I’m recommending this week, that’s a movie I love even as I realize it’s not a very good movie. The movie I’m recommending this week is one that I not only like, but I consider to be an actually good film. Even though I watched Kevin Bacon’s underrated film Quicksilver last night, which also has a 13% Tomatometer, and think it is significantly better than it gets credit for, that’s not it either.
This week’s film is one that I think highlights how prone many critics are to placing particular kinds of films on specific “genre shelves” and when a film comes out that is a perfect example of one genre shelf, but is released in a way that would put it on a different genre shelf, then they hate it.
Wow. That was clunky. Let me try to rephrase this. Many critics have a tendency to like and or advocate certain kinds of genre films. For example, they might defend the films of John Waters films, advocate for watching more Hong Kong films Bollywood films, but when a “mainstream” film comes out that looks and feels like a film that should be on a particular genre shelf they hate it. It’s an odd kind of snobbery that suggests that they don’t actually like the films on their genre shelf, but instead think that those are subpar films that are only okay because their expectations for that genre are so low.
The film I’m recommending today is one of those films. In this particular case, it’s a movie directed by James Wong and stars Jet Li. Wong is an American writer/producer/director who produced the television series Space Above and Beyond. That’s one of my favorite shows and I believe is highly underappreciated, but that’s a story for another time. While Wong is an American director, he directed a film that is a quintessential Hong Kong style science fiction film that feels a bit like Heroic Trio stylistically.
Well, it’s like Heroic Trio if you put it into the Hadron Supercollider and aimed it at Scanners, Time Cop, and Highlander, except in this particular version of Highlander the immortal is hunting and killing himself. Okay, you should be guessing what the movie is by now. It’s The One.
From the use of wire work and atmospherics to the underlying plot of the desire for power vs innocence and purity, this could easily have been a film produced and distributed out of the Hong Kong film industry in the 1990s. If it had, with these production values, it would have become a cult classic with tons of critics advocating for it. Why? Because it’s fun and Jet Li has a blast chewing up the scenery as the villain (and as the hero). Jason Statham does a pretty good job and I’m quite fond of the silly conceit of a person who discovers that if they travel across dimensions eliminating their counterparts in those dimensions they will become nigh invincible.
Set aside expectations and put on your “lets just have fun” glasses and watch The One.
The shame of it is that Alvarez begins the new Alien with his own sort of class-struggle horror, which is mostly new to the Alien movies. That stuff is great. Then he starts trying to add all the others back in and it gets super-gratuitous.
I will note my "rotten" tomato is the softest possible rotten, but I'm starting to think more about the ticket price regular folks will pay to see not enough that's new.
Toy Bin 2 forever!