The Sound of Music is, of course, the film version of the musical by Rodgers & Hammerstein and starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer (singing by Bill Lee), Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Charmian Carr, Heather Menzies, Nicholas Hammond, Duane Chase, Angela Cartwright, Debbie Turner, Kym Karath, and Daniel Truhitte.
In Austria, just as Nazi Germany is ramping up, Maria (Andrews) is a novice about to become a nun, except the other nuns are concerned because she's, like, got a personality. She's got far too much lust for life to be a nun (and here's how you can tell this is fiction), so instead of beating it out of her they send to be the governess of the seven children of Captain Von Trapp (Plummer), a naval veteran who lost his wife some years back.
Von Trapp runs his house like a naval academy, refusing to let his children play or, like, be kids, and so they've taken to terrorizing and running off any governess they get because it briefly gets his attention. Maria rolls in with the radical notion of being kind to the kids, letting them play instead of march, and (most important) teaching them to sing, and Von Trapp comes around. However, he's also about to marry the Baroness Elsa von Schraeder (Parker), who isn't crazy about having all these kids around (she's not, like, evil about it, she's just not interested in being a mom and plans to ship them off to boarding school). But it becomes clear that Von Trapp really loves Maria, and Eleanor graciously bows out, Von Trapp and Maria marry, and get back from honeymoon just in time to flee over the mountains because the Nazis intend to press Von Trapp back into service.
Now, that is a two-paragraph summation of a 3-hour movie, but when you take the songs out it goes faster. I'd never actually seen The Sound of Music - unusual for a theater kid, I know, but it was just out of rotation when I was in high school, I guess. Now that I have seen it, it's very much a Rodgers & Hammerstein show. The music is catchy but verses get repeated and there's a lot of refrains, the dialog is snappy but largely harmless, there are double entrendres but nothing that would make anyone grasp their pearls.
I will say that it's hard with this many characters to give all of them a distinct voice, especially with the seven Von Trapp children. Liesel (Carr), the oldest, manages because she gets her own duet with the lost postboy Rolfe (Truhitte), who does a heel-turn later and goes full Nazi. Greta (Karath), the youngest, is easily identifiable because she's a wee one, but the other ones, the two boys (Hammond and Chase) especially, just kind of blend together.
Christopher Plummer brings some edge to the show as Von Trapp, and comes across perfectly as a man who's still in flux, moving from mourning to rediscovering his family to having to flee his home. Plummer evidently hated this movie and was kind of a prick about it at the time, which I'm sure helped the performance at least somewhat.
In any case, it's an older musical, and it's a fun time if you like older musicals. It's a little cloying at times, but that's kind of part of the charm. I do remember thinking that the show could have ended when Von Trapp and Maria marry if not for those damn Nazis.
The world's most popular role-playing game! (insert sound of eyes rolling)
The Game: Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition The Publisher:Wizards of the Coast Degree of Familiarity: More than I thought; Pugmire basically runs on this system Books Required: For this, just the Player's Handbook
You know, I've badmouthed D&D a lot over the years, often more in jest than anything, but it's never been my favorite RPG. Credit where credit's due, though, 5e is a huge improvement over previous editions interms of how clearly and accessibly the information is presented, to the say nothing of how the game is mechanically slimmed down. Also, there's finally a stated focus: exploration, social interaction, combat. And yeah, it's still D&D. There's still no actual setting (rather, there are so many and none of them are described in the PHB), it's still mostly combat focused, but I have to admit that the game has managed to incorporate some of the design sensibilities of the last 20 years rather than resting on its laurels.
Now, does that mean I'm in a particular hurry to play or run it? No, but that's only because there are a lot of games I would prefer to play that actually do have interesting settings, and if we're doing a generic system I prefer Fate or SWADE or Cypher. I think it's largely down to taste, though.
(With that said, I want to read the DMG, too, before I really decide on how much I like this game.)
For now, however, I'm gonna make a character, and my buddy Toasty has helpfully given me a theme song:
So this song is pretty obviously about someone with a cause and a righteousness behind them, so I'm gonna lean into that an make a paladin. The lyrics also suggest someone with a more chaotic than lawful bent, but I'll get to that. Let's figure out race.
My primary abilities, according to the chart, are Strength and Charisma, so do any of the races get bonuses there? A bunch of them, actually, but y'know, I think I'll make a human paladin.
The section on paladins tells me that the most important aspect of the class is the oath and the quest for justice, so it's worthwhile thinking about the particulars even if mechanically they don't matter as much at level 1. I think my character's larger ambition is "no kings at all," but his ambition to start out is "fuck this king in particular." (Since I'm not familiar with any of the established D&D worlds I'll just make some shit up.) Let's assume that the monarch in my character's area is, while not a brutal or violent ruler, prone to squeezing the peasantry until they bleed. His lieutenants are brutal and violent, and so I think that's where my paladin would start.
So anyway, Step One was Choose a Race (human), Step Two is Choose a Class (Paladin), but Step Two also includes noting my Hit Die (1d10). So I'll have 10HP plus whatever my Constitution mod winds up being. Oh, wait. These steps include some other stuff too. Ahem.
OK, so as a human my base walking speed is 30, and I speak two languages, Common and one extra. Now, if this were a setting I were writing, languages would be cultural, not racial, but let's assume my dude speaks Dwarvish.
As for paladin stuff, I don't get spells at 1st level, but I do get Divine Sense and Lay on Hands. I get two skill proficiencies, so I'll take Insight and Medicine.
For equipment, I get chain mail, a holy symbol, and then a bunch of weapon sorts of choices. I get a martial weapon and a shield. I'll take a short sword (military issue) for that weapon. I get either five javelins or a simple melee weapon. I'll take the javelins, I think. I get either a priest's pack or an explorer's pack. Let's have a look. Oh, definitely explorer's pack. That gives me a backpack, a bedroll, a mess kit, a tinderbox, 10 torches, 10 days of rations, a waterskin, and 50 feet of rope.
Step Three is Ability Scores, and since I have a concept I'll use the array rather than rolling (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8). I get a +1 to all my stats for being human, so I'll arrange them thusly:
Step Four is to Describe My Character! This isn't just physical description; I get to pick a Background which actually matters in this edition. Let's see.
So, I'm gonna say my paladin was a royal guard (and thus take the Soldier background). He was never, like, a king's bodyguard or anything like that, more the sort of guard that would get knocked out so the heroes could get uniforms. But somewhere along the way, he filled in for another guard who was going out on tax collection duty, and there he was asked to stab a dude when he refused to pay what the sheriff said he was due. To his eternal shame, my guy did it, but he never returned to the palace. He burned his uniform in his victim's funeral pyre, but he kept his sword. He's planning to cut the sheriff's stupid face with it someday.
As a solider I'm proficient in Athletics and Intimidation. I get proficiency in land vehicles and one type of gaming set (let's say dice; my guy's not smart enough for cards or chess). I get an insignia of rank, a trophy from a fallen enemy...ooh, OK. Let's say that particular sheriff's face has been cut. I took his signifier of office (a ring), and I wear it on a chain. I have a set of bone dice, a set of common clothes, and 10 gp.
Now, as a soldier normally I could pull rank and get access to military installations. With character's particular backstory I don't know that that works, but maybe I could use the sheriff's ring? That's a little dishonest, but like, I ain't lawful good. (Chaotic good, I think.)
Personality trait: No violence to the poor except in self-defense (even then, only self-defense). Ideal: Equality (no kings or masters). Bond: I honor the memory of Horace, the farmer I murdered, and hope to live down that shame. Flaw: I killed a King's Sheriff and took his ring as a trophy.
I think all I need is a name and a description (for reals this time!) now. My guy's name is Lanos. Lanos is buff, but not tall - he's pretty average for a soldier. Brown hair, brown eyes, nondescript but friendly and affable. Since deserting and killing the sheriff, he's been lying low in the countryside, praying to the Gods of Freedom and Justice, and building his skill as a warrior. He had grandiose plans of going back to throw down the king, but then he hooked up with a group of adventurers and joined them on a monster-slaying kind of quest, and realized that he is in no way ready to mount a revolution.
Plus...look. Lanos isn't very bright. He's got a pretty childish view of revolution, formed out of stories he's heard of folk heroes besting stupid kings at archery contests or whatever, and he's got a very simplistic attitude (you kill the king, and then you...win, right?). I think Lanos' arc would get really interesting around third level when he picks an oath, because Oath of Vengeance is a kind of "shit gets real" point.
Song of the Sea is an animated urban fantasy movie starring David Rawle, Brendan Gleeson, Fionnula Flanagan, Lucy O'Connell, and Lisa Hannigan.
The movie starts the way a lot of animated fantasy films do - we're introduced the family: dad Conor (Gleeson), mom Bronagh (Hannigan), and young son Ben (Kevin Swierszcz as a little tyke and then Rawle for most of the movie). The last we see of Bronagh is her stumbling off in labor with Ben's little sister, and then we cut to six years later. Conor is depressed and barely speaks to his kids, Ben is contemptuous of his little sister Saoirse (O'Connell, when she eventually speaks), who is still mute.
Granny (Flanagan) comes to visit, trying to impose her mainland standards on the family, and Saoirse finds a box with a white sealskin inside. She wears it and goes out into the sea, and turns into a seal! All the others see, though, is her wash up on the shore, and so Conor allows Granny to take Ben and Saoirse to the mainland, while he throws the box into the ocean.
Now, it should be obvious to anyone who knows their Irish lore what's happening here - Saoirse is a selkie, like her mother, and turns into a seal when she wears the skin in the ocean. But there's a lot more going on, here. The owl-witch Macha (also Flanagan) is hunting down any fairy creature to steal away their feelings and turn them to stone, as she once did to her giant son Mac Lir. The siblings escape from Granny and go on a magical journey back home, trying to get the skin so that Saoirse can sing the Song of the Sea and restore everyone that's been turned to stone.
Thinking about it, there was a run of animated movies - maybe it's less a run and more a shift in style, since Turning Red does this a little, too - where the resolution of the conflict isn't about slaying a beast or enduring an attack but healing a wound. Encanto, Moana, Coco (up to a point; there's still plenty of "evil bad guy" in there), Kubo & The Two Strings - they're all about older characters confronting their own demons and realizing that by holding on to those hurts they're dooming the world around them. Doesn't take a genius to see the genesis of that trend, I think. Song of the Sea does that within the context of Irish mythology (from the same studio as Secret of Kells and Wolfwalkers), but it's the same basic idea. The visual style is soft and beautiful, and I especially love the motif of having families of animals snoozing as the children are walking by on their journey. I also enjoy that the movie doesn't hand-hold American audiences; the characters and faeries are introduced, but Ben knows who they are and treats them accordingly.
Song of the Sea was nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar and lost to Big Hero 6 (which also features healing from loss as a theme, though it's a much more traditional story in terms of presentation; it's Disney). I hadn't seen it at the time, and looking back I think it might have been my choice that year.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a Disney production of the novel by Ray Bradbury, screenwritten by Bradbury, and starring Jonathan Pryce, Jason Robards, Vidal Peterson, Shawn Carson, Diane Ladd, Royal Dano, Mary Grace Canfield, Pam Grier, and Bruce M. Fisher.
Will Halloway (Peterson) and Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) are two lads in middle America, just vibin'. Will has a strained relationship with his father (Robards), because his dad is a little older and has a bad heart and he's sad a lot. Jim's father isn't around at all, however.
Anyway, one evening the Dark Carnival rolls up with all the Juggalos...well, no, run by the sinister Mr. Dark (Pryce), and starts sucking in members of the community by letting them give in to their vices and then absorbing them into the carnival. Jim and Will witness some of this magical evil and catch the attention of Dark and his monstrous henchman Cooger (Fisher), and eventually learn that the carnival has been preying on the area for centuries. Will's father comes through with the solution - they feed on misery, so joy and life repel them. Mr. Dark gets stuck on his magical carousel that ages (or de-ages, depending on the direction) a rider, turns to bones and is carried away by one of his henchmen, and the whole carnival is sucked up into a tornado. The end!
So, I love Bradbury, and this is...not a great interpretation of his book. That's not because of what's in the movie or not in the movie, it's just that it's a studio production and no one (except maybe Bradbury himself) had any particular vision for what the movie is really about. The studio forced reshoots (some nearly a year after shooting had wrapped, which when you're talking about child actors makes a bit of a difference - during the mirror maze and spider attack scenes, I legitimately wasn't sure if it was the same actor playing Will because he'd shot up like a beansprout and he was clearly wearing a wig), scrapped the entire score and replaced it with one by James Horner, changed some effects around, and it makes the whole thing really slapdash. Actually, one bit of trivia I learned was that Vidal Peterson is actually dark-haired and Shawn Carson is actually blond, so rather than have them play the characters that are meant to have those hair colors, they bleached and dyed their hair, respectively.
But quite apart from producers pissing the proverbial soup, there's just a lot about the movie that doesn't work. With all due respect to Jason Robards, he doesn't read as sad so much as dour and severe, and at the end when he's supposed to revive Jim and beat the carnival with love and joy and affection, it doesn't work because he doesn't read as loving or joyful or affectionate. The two kid actors, Shawn Carson especially, do pretty well (though I think the best child actor is Brendan Klinger played Cooger after he's been de-aged), and the supporting cast is OK, though it suffers from the 80s allergy to casting anybody but doughy white people (the only person of color in the cast is Pam Grier as the Dust Witch, and she doesn't get much to do).
Something Wicked This Way Comes, like a lot of Bradbury's work, is hard to film because you need the filmmakers to understand the themes as well as the text, but even if you've got the author himself writing the screenplay it doesn't matter if the studio comes in at the last minute and chops it all to pieces. I'd love to see a new interpretation of this novel directed by someone who knows how to work with these themes. Del Toro would crush it. I suggest Mark Rylance as Charles Halloway.
I was gonna do D&D5e next, but after the blargh that was the last game I wanted something quick and simple to cleanse the palate. And besides, I wanted something I could read at the vet with Sandy today (she's fine).
The Game: Back Again From the Broken Land The Publisher:Cloven Pine Games Degree of Familiarity: None, but I've seen the Lord of the Rings movies and I've played lots of PbtA Books Required: Just the one
Back Again From the Broken Land is a delightful little game about a fellowship of hobbits adventurers on their way back from the end of the grand war against the Doomslord. The Hunters (servants of said Doomslord) still follow you and it's entirely possible that not everybody gets home. I'm very much looking forward to playing it - it's designed for 1-3 sessions of play, and I think it'd be fine as a one-shot, so I'll put it on the menu at some point.
As with many PbtA games, we start with a playbook. Unlike many games, characters aren't meant to be especially well fleshed-out at the start, because you do a lot of character-building through play. So this'll be quick. I'm picking the Wayfinder (kind of the ranger archetype) because I like their special move.
Normally character creation would start with the table deciding things about the Doomslord, the War, and suchlike, but it's just me so I'll keep things vague. Chargen is mostly just deciding things about the character's look and bearing. So.
Name: My wayfinder's name is Stillan (he/him).
Gear: Carefully clean, handmade boots. Made from buckskin and treated with an oil that he's now run out of (it's only available at home).
Gaze: Calculating and curious. Stillan likes to say that everything deserves his attention.
Gift From Along the Way: A drink from a distant river. I have ideas about how that might play out; normally that'd be explored in play, but y'know, just me. I'd like that to be a kind of River Styx arrangement, something between life and death (or maybe war and peace, some liminal space).
And that's basically it, yo. I picture Stillan as clean-shaved (his people don't grow facial hair), kind of round-faced, but his eyes have dulled over the journey. His clothes, which he made himself, no longer fit him, and he wonders if that means he's not him anymore - that's not a bad thing, necessarily, but what will it mean for a homecoming?
Some Like It Hot is, of course, a comedy directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, George Raft, Joe E. Brown, Pat O'Brien, Joan Shawlee, and Dave Barry.
In the rip-roaring Chicago of 1929, Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon) are two musicians working in a speakeasy run by dapper gangster Spats Colombo (Raft). They witness Spats and his boys gun down a witness (and a bunch of other dudes) and flee Chicago by dressing as women and hooking up with a girl's band headed for Florida. En route, they meet Sugar Kane (Monroe), a singer in the band who has an admitted fixation with sax players (like Joe!), but really wants to marry a millionaire.
So in Florida, Joe, who's not only a gambler but a bit of a sonofabitch, takes on the persona of Junior, an oil heir, and romances Sugar, while Jerry fends off the advances of another rich mama's boy, Osgood (Brown). This all gets even more complex when Spats and every other gangster in the country come to the same hotel for a convention run by "Little Bonaparte" (Nehemiah Persoff).
It's interesting that a movie made, what, 32 years before Soapdish somehow manages to be less offensive about gender-related stuff, even allowing for the differences of the time. Sure, when Joe realizes Jerry has gotten swept off his feet by Osgood and has agreed to marry him, he asks why a guy would want to marry another guy, but it really does feel like all of the cheeky gags are done with love rather than the mean-spirited gross-out humor of late "men in dresses" jokes. Of course, it's our heroes who are dressing as women, but they're not doing it to deceive (at least that's not the immediate intent; they're running for their lives), not a secondary character who gets dehumanized. I think, though, that the ending of the movie, where all four of them (Sugar, Jerry, Joe, and Osgood) are fleeing the hotel in a speedboat and Jerry finally reveals that he's a man and Osgood remains perfectly willing to marry him that we see this trope of "man in a dress provokes disgust" subverted before it was even a trope.
Gender-related questions aside, the movie is fantastic. The dialog is...well, it's Billy Wilder, so there's not a line out of place. And, not to keep comparing this to 90s comedy, but it's never sat right with me how much of recent comedy is improvised - sure, you get some gems, but I feel like it's a lazy way to write? Some Like It Hot kinda supports that, because the dialog is what Wilder and Diamond wrote, and it's funny as hell.
There are a lot of stories about the behind-the-scenes of it all, mostly about what a PITA Monroe was to work with, but for all that, her performance works. She comes across as a genuine and kind-hearted, if not terribly bright, woman, but her decision to go after Joe at the end of the movie works because she's being true to herself (and he's finally being true to her).
The dirty secret of comedy, I think, is that ironic detachment doesn't usually serve it - it's funny when the characters are people we can root for, even if they're flawed. Some Like It Hot gives us a cast of flawed people, but ones we can root for, and I think that's in large part why it works as well as it does.
Soapdish is a comedy starring Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Robert Downey Jr., Cathy Moriarty, Teri Hatcher, Elisabeth Shue, Whoopi Goldberg, and Kathy Najimy.
The movie is set on the, um, set of The Sun Also Sets, a long-running soap opera. Celeste Talbert (Field) has been the star forever, and while the head writer Rose (Goldberg) loves her and protects her, the producer David (Downey Jr) conspires with co-stars Ariel (Hatcher) and Montana (Moriarty) to turn her public against her so they can make the show theirs (Montana, in particular, loathes Celeste and holds sex over David's head to manipulate him).
Their first major ploy, making Celeste accidentally murder a homeless girl (on the show!) backfires when the actress turns out to be Celeste's niece Lori (Shue). The second one just about works, though - they retrieve Celeste's old flame Jeffrey Anderson (Kline) from his banishment in the dinner theaters of Florida and put him back on the show. He and Lori strike up a burgeoning relationship which pushes Celeste to finally come clean - Lori is her daughter by Jeffrey, she's been lying to them both for decades.
So of course tensions spiral (Montana stirs the pot even more by claiming to be pregnant by Jeffrey, which turns Lori against him) until the action-packed climax in which they all kind of admit that yes, hurt happened, but love wins. Oh, and then it turns out Montana is really a dude-
Wait, what?
Yeah, the big twist at the end is that Montana Moorehead used to be Milton Moorehead. And honestly, the movie is really good and really funny except for that one bit. It's not (just) because it's transphobic, because this was 1991 and "transphobia" wasn't really a concept that was commonly understood. It's that it plays into the old "trap" trope, the trans woman (if that's what she is, and again, 1991) is lying to everyone and just generally evil and deceitful. Also, she's the only one that receives any comeuppance - Ariel gets redeemed because she's the one who tells the "truth" about Montana, and David escapes any reckoning for all his underhanded dealings and in fact wins a humanitarian award (it's mentioned during the credits).
I suppose the thinking was that since David got tricked into doing sex-stuff with a "man," that's his comeuppance? But it feels weak even for the time. This punch line (basically, "a gay thing happened!") was very common in the 90s, and it was juvenile even back then, but whatever, let's talk about the rest of the movie.
ETA: This article goes into transphobia in comedy better than I ever could and I think it's worth a read.
Apart from that, it's a really well-done comedy. It's busy and fast when we're at the studio, and there's always some background business happening. It's also very common to see one scene from the perspective of another character after a transition (Celeste tries to throw herself into traffic, cut to Lori and Jeffrey eating at a nearby restaurant as a crowd of people gathers round the bus to get her Celeste's autograph). Kline, Shue, and Field are the stars but it's very much an ensemble cast, and we get to see Cathy Moriarty being deranged, Carrie Fisher being horny, Robert Downey Jr. alternating between being in charge and being thoroughly subservient to both Montana and his boss Edwards (Garry Marshall), and of course, it being a 90s movie, Kathy Najimy.
I have to imagine that the movie would improve if you know soap opera (Michelle does, and there were bits that she found funny that I didn't get), but it remains one of my favorite comedies, except for that one bit at the end.
