kingandy | Weekend in review

Friday I successfully picked up my Amazon package from the two nice men who now live in our old house. It was odd going back - I'm not sure what I expected, but they'd redecorated the front hall, putting down a decent carpet and painting the walls and putting up nice light fittings, and basically making the place look livable. Then I went home to Stretford, with the intention of going on to the SoS weekend. Thanks to the Levenshulme detour, however, by the time I got there and checked my mail it was half past eight (see Friday's entry), and I decided to stay in and watch TV and Freakazoid. And it was good.

So Saturday I made it over to SoS (along with

stsquad, who came home at around midnight, taking advantage of the site's proximity). It was nice and relaxing to just flop into old familiar places - both rules and characters - after a summer of extreme LRP. It's odd, I'm now one of those old coots that people seem to turn to for rules calls.

The boy known as "Six" (due to the number of characters he went through at BattleHwok) turned up. He is not a very good roleplayer, bless him, but at least he's enthusiastic - as a monster, he kept bouncing up and down and asking if he could play a monster that couldn't be killed because it would be so cool. (This in the encounter consisting of unlimited waves of single-hit demons.) Over the course of the weekend we learned that he has a fear of breasts (an ex-girlfriend used to beat him up with hers), he's bisexual and he has both attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders (ADHD?). If you believe any of that. Love him or hate him, you can't help but notice him.

I monstered two linears, and helped out at the start of a third. (People still call them "dungeons" reflexively, which is something I've been trying to stop - though I realise I'll have to break the habit in myself first. It wouldn't be so bad if people kept it OOC, but this isn't always the case...) The final adventure of the weekend was a double-length, big-plot-wrapup affair, though, so by the time the Armies of God had finished stomping on the Wicked Feindish Demon Upstart and we actually got a decent tavern rolling it was past midnight. Myself and

stsquad got a taxi home at about half past one, he being exhausted from the smiting and me being sleepy from the regular employment.

Woke up on Sunday and went back to the site by about half eleven, for to pick up our kit (and Alex's car) and do our required cleaning duty. Following this minor inconvenience (a blow which was softened by the many, many hugs from people that I love in a very real and physical way),

zheers drove the entire household (us two men and

tractorb) to see Alien Versus Predator.

(See summarized review here! I agree with most of Sam's points. More longwindedness follows.)

AVP: Yeah. It's an okay way to spend a couple of hours. It's entertaining, reasonably pretty to look at, not too challenging. It's basically a fanservice movie though. The title itself doesn't make much sense unless you know about the source movies - in fact taking just this movie, one might think that the bipedal extraterrestrials were the title Alien, and the savage animalistic hunting machines were the Predator. There's nothing in the movie itself to tell you otherwise.

Even the basic setup doesn't make a lot of sense. Why's the temple made of stone? it's clearly Predator-built, and it's got a sophisticated power source and cryogenic storage and such. It's not like the Predators made any other great efforts to conceal the fact that they were advanced beings ... and if they're still making these little trips every hundred years, after all this time, what have they been using for human hosts before the whaling colony in 1904? Why did they let humanity advance to the point they have? There's an implication that the civilisation there was wiped out following an Alien escape similar to the one in the movie, during which the Predators set off their wrist-bombs, but it's still a hell of a lot of time to leave it dormant. (What did they say, thirty thousand years or something?)

Continuity aside (and I'm not going to consider how well it fits in with the other movies because I'm not that big a geek), it wasn't a very good movie in and of itself. Some of the effects were very poor, not what you'd expect in what's basically an effects movie, though there was a generally high standard. What bothered me most was the pacing and structure. It was very much movie-by-numbers. Assemble team, throw team into killing bottle, they die one by one leaving single competent woman alive. Admittedly the "sole survivor" thing is very much in the idiom of both Alien and Predator (at least the original movies), but that just means it's been done already. Here, the slaughter of the team members happened far too quickly - within five minutes of that one guy pushing the Big Red Button half the team are facehugged, within ten they've spawned (defying everything we've come to expect, though perhaps these are specially bred by the Predators for speed). The writers went through the motions of trying to make us care about the characters ("I've got kids!" "Me too!"), then got them chomped in the very next scene, which took things almost to the point of absurdity. Talking about your home life is now a guarantee of instant mutilation. There were some moments of coolness (the Alien tail-spear and head-buckler), but it was generally poor.

Finally, something I've never liked about the whole Predator-race scenario. This entire extrapolated culture thing is based on the actions of a single being, in the first movie. There's nothing in that movie to suggest that the entire culture revolves around hunting, or a strict honour code, or anything! I hate when people take the behaviour of a single alien in SF and decide the entire rest of the species must behave that way, leaving no allowance for individuality. It's like assuming the entire human race behaves like one hunter you met in the Australian outback.

On balance I am glad I saw it, but I don't think I'll be buying the DVD.

Following AVP we went home and watched the first episode of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars on Special Advance Preview (wink-wink). The sound had a couple of sync issues, and it was encoded in letterbox format thus played on the widescreen TV in glorious scanline-o-vision, but this did not detract from the joy. Thus far it's a glorious romp through all things Farscape, tying up many a plot thread with plenty of recap along the way for the newbies, revisiting old friends and locales and even addressing the Human-Peacekeeper connection in a couple of throwaway lines which I feel sure will have no further impact on the plot (like they just wanted to clear that up for the fans while they had the chance). There's a couple of plot conveniences and/or oddities (particularly the Rygel complication, surely (a) the crystals in his belly wouldn't have reintegrated, and (b) if they did they wouldn't have been properly attached to healthy bits that wouldn't digest them? But Diagnosian tech is clearly far in advance of our own, and any inexplicable occurrances can be attributed to that.) I can't really say much more about it other than It Is Farscape and It Is Good. Will watch the second half as soon as Alex has properly downloaded it.

And now you know ... the rest of the show.

ETA: Oh, and before

zheers left we watched most of Dexter's Laboratory: Ego Trip, which was enjoyable as always.

CHILD MANDARK: "No! I always wanted the core!"
ADULT MANDARK: "No! I stole the core!"
MATURE MANDARK: "No! The core is mine!"
FUTURE MANDARK: "No! Just because I'm bitter and jealous!"