The Friday High 5

New dragons, old batmans, and loving the villain

Wizards of the Coast

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High 5. 🙏🏻

The unacknowledged secret of D&D is this: The rules don’t really matter.

Yes, obviously, you need an agreed-upon framework to hold everything together; games would otherwise spiral into the fruitless disagreements that characterized (and concluded) childhood games of pretend.

“Pew pew—you’re dead.”

“Nuh-uh—I have a force field.”

“That’s not fair. I’m telling mom.”

“You don’t have a mom. I blew up your planet.”

“Mom!!!!! Johnny’s being genocidal again.”

But after you’ve run D&D long enough, you realize you can do so without consulting anything other than yourself. This is at odds with a nerd’s inborn desire to purchase new things for the hobby, so we pretend not to know what we already know: We don’t really need it and probably won’t use it. It’ll look hella awesome on the bookshelf though.

When it comes to D&D, only one rule matters: Is everyone having fun? You don’t need new books for that.¹

It’s for this reason I had no immediate plans to purchase the updated rules. I was content to put it on my Christmas list and wait on Santa.

If life is a big game of D&D—wouldn’t that be something—last week, a slew of random encounters left me beaten and bloody. After three consecutive days of heightened stress, I was catatonic Friday evening.

I’d mentioned the updated D&D rulebook offhand to my wife, in part because I was talking out whether or not to buy them. But I was also trying to be sneaky and put it on her radar for down the road. A sham she immediately saw through because I’m not nearly as subtle as I think, but she had the grace not to call me on it.

My love languages are gifts, affirmation, and chocolate chip cookies. Which is why she placed a pristine copy of the new rulebook into my hands Saturday.

You guys: This book is awesome.

I’m working on a D&D-specific piece related to the new book. For now, I’ll just say I’m blown away, and giddy, and so glad I got a copy.

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The Fall Guy

Universal Pictures

The trailer for The Fall Guy had me convinced this movie was the second coming of 21 Jump Street or The Other Guys. It sadly falls well short of that. It’s fine, and fun, but ended up a victim of hype. That’s the downside of trailers: Rarely do movies live up to what’s promised.

I was expecting something far funnier, but Fall Guy is only sometimes funny. The conceit is that Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt play a stuntman and a film director, so many of the scenes involve a peek into how the sausage is stirred. Which makes the beginning feel muddled, as characters we don’t know or care about—and never really see again—pull aside Blunt for technical discussions about the movie she’s shooting that, again, mean bupkis to us. The entire first act is a slow build-up and a prolonged wait for anything interesting to happen.

Fall Guy is a movie in which another movie is being made; Fall Guy fails every time it tries to make us care about this other movie. And it’s obsessed with this other movie.

So: pacing problems.

But the biggest problem is the tone. It wants to be an action rom-com, I think. At least, that’s what I was sold. But the movie is at least 50% satire, which undercuts both the action and the rom-com of it. It’s like it wants to be both Tropic Thunder and Romancing the Stone, and ends up an ugly mix of the two.

Fall Guy is an enjoyable enough watch. I just think there’s a much better movie somewhere inside here. Bummer.

The Wolverine (2013)

20th Century Fox

I made a passing reference last week to working backwards through Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine filmography, after I’d watched Deadpool & Wolverine, Logan, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. I have the vague sense there’s maybe an article somewhere in this experience, but there's also a 50% chance this is just nonsense. Either way, I’m going to follow Robert Duvall’s lead in Four Christmases: Let’s keep it moving. I’m starting to lose my buzz over here.²

The Wolverine is a movie in search of a story. Haunted by the death of Jean Gray, Logan follows the flimsiest excuse for a plot line to Japan. But Jean is there too, because the call is coming from inside the house. She alternates between giving him advice, negging him for not dying already, and shaming him for killing her. It’s less a Shirley Jackson haunting and more a Fak one.

Btw, what does it say about Logan that he imagines Jean Gray is waiting for him in the afterlife, when she was Scott’s girlfriend? And why does she only wear lingerie when she visits? Wolverine’s whole deal is about how his backstory is a traumatic paradise, but this puts a troublingly different spin on it.

There are samurai and ninjas in Japan, because why else would you stage a movie there (apparently). On one hand, it’s cool that Mariko, Logan’s love interest / MacGuffin, isn’t a wilting blossom. But is it a backwards form of racism when every Asian character of any importance is a bad ass martial artist?

The story is seven flavors of dumb. Hiroyuki Sanada plays Mariko’s father but the film squanders him. Where’s the scene where he wrecks an entire roomful of ninjas? Not here. Hugh Jackman carries the film on his massive shoulders and single-handedly makes it a fun watch.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is next, followed by X-Men: The Last Stand. I’m genuinely curious to see which makes me want to quit this experiment more.

Batman: The Series

The moment the Joker called Batman ‘Fatman.’ Image: ABC

I’ve now watched 5 episodes of the original Batman TV series. It’s interesting viewing them in released order, as I’d previously only seen them on re-runs. There’s not a chronology to these things—though each episode either sets up or resolves one other—which is part of the charm.

It’s hard to imagine this was ever considered good TV, even by the standards of the time. But even if it is often bad, it’s still somehow fun to watch.

I’m planning on writing about the show once I finish all 3 seasons. A handful of observations I’ve already made:

• It’s stupid but also kinda cute that Bruce and Dick have a name plaque on their batpoles. Was this necessary to ensure they didn’t try queuing up on the same pole when time is of the essence? Or is this the kind of nonsense you spend money on when money loses all meaning?

• It’s established in the first or second episode that the police can track phone calls.

• The police have a direct hotline to Batman inside Wayne Manor.

• Are you seriously telling me they don’t know Bruce Wayne is Batman???

• Batman’s actually a bit of a doofus. Most of the riddles and puzzles are solved by Robin. How embarrassing.

• Every crime in Gotham is handled the same way: A roomful of police wait for Commissioner Gordon to acknowledge they’re useless at solving crime—he literally says, “there’s only one man who can handle this”—and to ring up Batman. And then everyone happily goes on a coffee break, I guess.

My favorite moment so far is when Joker seizes control of a TV station to publicly ridicule Batman, calling him “Fatman.” The camera cuts to the batcave and Bruce is just standing there, stunned. He looks like he’s holding in his gut.

It’s the unintentional comedy factor, folks. This show is rich in it.

The Penguin

HBO

I’ve been raving about this show already, and will be talking about it on next week’s pod, so I’m going to keep this short. Well, shortish.

Episode two is even better than the first.

Here’s what’s great about this show. (Besides the maturity, and the Gotham of it all, and the thrill of Colin Farrell’s performance.) It actually has interesting things to say. It’s not just going through plot motions to turn Oswald Cobb into the Penguin.

Episode two is partly shot from Sofia’s perspective, which is an uncomfortable place to stand. Girl is cray-zay. What else do you call someone who stands over a buffet, stuffing food into their mouth by the handful?

It’d be really easy to make Sofia a one-note character. But the show invests in her. Even surrounded by people, she stands alone. It’s self-inflicted—I can’t imagine known serial killers have full social calendars—but you get the sense maybe there’s more to the story. In fact, I’m sure there is. We just haven’t seen it yet.

Incredibly, I fell empathy for her.

Sofia and Oswald are both products of their environments. Oswald’s mother pushes him to be bad, to be more. She begets his fall. Is Sofia’s story similar? Did she kill those people as a misguided attempt to get her father’s attention? Was she trying to find her place in a family ruled by tradition, which is really just code for misogyny?

If that’s not enough to get your attention, there’s this: Oswald spraying bullets with an uzi. C’mon, man. This show has it all.

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That’s it for this edition of the High 5. What are you digging at the moment? Drop a comment and let me know!

1. Everything I said about D&D books being optional comes from my place as the long-time DM. You rely more on the rules as a player because they govern what you can and can’t do. There’s no real checks on a DM’s power; for the most part, they can do whatever the heck they want behind the DM’s screen. Including pulling treasure and enemies out of their butt.

That sounds really uncomfortable but you get used to it, and eventually learn how to run games almost entirely by the seat of your pants.

Not sure why this footnote involves so many analogies to one’s bottom.

2. Coming this December: A piece on the Vince Vaughn 2-part Christmas extravaganza: Fred Claus and Four Christmases. I don’t think we talk enough about how at the tail end of this incredible run of comedic films, Vaughn did 2 holiday movies back-to-back.