Zombie Fairy Tales

A couple of weeks ago, BookBub informed me that a book called Zombie Fairy Tales: TheComplete Collection was on sale.

My first reaction was: Really, it's zombie fairy tales now? But I also remembered how much I enjoyed both Pride, Prejudice & Zombies, as well as it's prequel Dawn of the Dreadfuls. So I decided that a dollar wasn't too much of gamble and I picked it up.

I can without hyperbole state that it is a fantastic book, really amazing. Kevin Richey has done an incredible job seamlessly weaving together all the different fairy tales into one open, shared world and then unleashing the zombies in the mix.

I'm by no means a stranger to zombie fiction, but I found things in this book that were new and interesting to me. What really caught my fancy though, was how so many of these over-familiar stories like Cinderella, Pinocchio, Red Riding Hood, Beauty and The Beast etc. are combined with characters like Bluebeard, The Headless Horseman and Countess Bathory, and it just works. Then when you add zombies and plague to the mix, all hell breaks loose.

When I say all hell, I truly mean it. This is the goriest book I've read in years. Even though it doesn't dwell too much on the grisly carnage, there's something gruesome on almost every page. If that's a problem for you, stay far away from Zombie Fairy Tales.

But to be fair, the gore is necessary. If Mr. Richey had left it out, the book would have been too dry and dull. Besides, the original versions of the classic fairy tales were brutal, sometimes in the extreme.

The way in which all these characters live (and die) in one shared world is wonderful. This means that as the book progresses, the story becomes more convoluted without ever becoming complicated. Each chapter is sort of stand alone, but most characters show up more frequently as the book continues, but never just for show. There's always a reason.

I really can't explain too much more without running into spoiler territory, but if any of what I just said sounds interesting, please read this book. You won't be sorry.

That's all he wrote for this time, so until we see each other again, have a great week!

Trailers pt. 2

Last week we talked a bit about the history of the movie trailer. This week we focus on different kinds of trailers.

First up we should separate them into three different camps; honest, misleading and dishonest trailers.

An honest trailer shows you what the movie is about, plain and simple. There's not much else to say, except that the biggest problem an honest trailer can have is when it shows too much. I still remember when I went to the movies back in 1996 and saw the trailer for The Rock. I turned to my friend and told him that this was either the whole movie or it would be the best action film of all time. As it turned out, it was pretty much the whole movie.

Misleading trailers don't outright lie, but they present a distorted version of the film. Like showing a scene with a famous actor, giving the impression that (s)he is prominently featured in the film, when in reality that is the only scene the actor is present.

There is a fine line between the misleading trailer and the dishonest trailer. But when it is crossed, you do not get to see the film you thought you were going to. Studios usually use these when a famous actor is riding high on a particular genre, but suddenly makes a movie that's very different. They know that audiences will flock to see a new movie like the previous ones so they shift the trailers focus and outright lie.

Studios also lie in the trailer if they become concerned that the audience won't like a movie, but since it's already made they can't shelve it without loosing all their money.

An example of when the trailer shows scenes that aren't in the film at all is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988). The trailer shows Steve Martin pushing a small boy off a pier into the water, while Michael Caine shoves an ice-cream into a girls face, all while strolling down the street. This scene is not in the film.

Apart from these three categories we have the teaser trailer. The teaser is usually cut together from early footage and it's sole function is to give you a rough idea of the movie. Just enough to whet your appetite, or as the name implies, to tease you. Teasers can be misleading and dishonest, but they are usually so short and abstract that it's unfair to categorize them as such.

If you remember last weeks post, I mentioned that the Jazz Singer had a seven minute trailer. Now these days that's impossible, partially because no advertiser would make a commercial that long, but also because the MPAA forbids it. According to them, a trailer can be no longer than two and a half minutes long. Every major studio gets to exceed this once per year, and only if it is really necessary.

Apart from the length of the trailers, the MPAA also hands out the so called bands for the trailers. Not musical bands, mind you, but the usually green splash screen that appears before the trailer starts. The following preview has been approved... you know how they go. The green band denotes a trailer that conforms to all MPAA's rigid demands concerning content, including profanity, nudity, violence etc.

If the trailer does not conform, it gets a red band, denoting that it's for mature audiences only. You may have seen these though they are fairly rare, if not as rare as the yellow band, intended for internet only trailers. The yellow band is so rare, that I can't find more than screenshots of them.

Now I'm not saying that making a trailer is in any way easy, but it seems to me that Hollywood is getting worse at making them. It seems that the trailer for the newest Terminator film, Genisys, spoils the major twist in the movie. Yeah, that's smart... Sure I prefer an honest trailer above all, but don't spoil the twist, or even hint that there is a twist.

That's it for this subject and today's post. So until next time, have a great week!

Trailers pt.1

Trailers, we've all seen trailers. Love them or hate them, they are an essential part of the film industry. However you feel about them, trailers are as old as cinema itself, right? Or, in fact older, if you accept that the first trailer was for the theater.

In 1913, Nils Granlund handled advertising for the Loew Theater chain and in November that year he produced a short film as advertising for The pleasure seekers. It was made up of actual rehearsal footage, and it became a huge success, setting a trend for the cinema that's, still today, extremely active.

In those days, trailers were shown after the movie, thus the name trailer as they trailed after the feature presentation, but the problem was that the audience tended to leave after the film was done. Therefore they started showing them before the film, to what is essentially a captive audience.

Of course, the earliest days of cinema was the silent era, so it wasn't until the talkies came along, pioneered by The Jazz Singer (generally considered the first talkie) in 1927 that trailers started to bloom. The jazz singer had a whopping seven minute long trailer, something unthinkable by today's standards.

As the film makers got more used to making trailers, they added a new feature to them, or rather between them: cartoons. The perhaps greatest example of these were the old Looney Tunes shorts. If you ever wondered why Bugs, Daffy, etc. sometimes addresses the theater, it's for this reason. They were never intended to be seen at home.

From between approximately 1920 to the end of the 50's all trailers were made by National Screen Service, who had ironclad contracts with everyone on Hollywood. These trailers invariably show scenes from the film covered with huge letters like THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD and dramatic stuff like that, and they were accompanied by voice overs equally bombastic.

With the eventual demise of the NSS, trailers started to become more artistic and unpredictable. Stanley Kubrick led the way here with his trailer for Doctor Strangelove, but it wasn't until Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975 that the trailer starts to look modern in our eyes. Jaws is basically the first blockbuster, and it's only fitting that it's trailers were equally groundbreaking. Universal used $1.8 million promoting the film, including an incredible $700,000 on television advertising alone with two dozen 30-second advertisements airing each night on prime-time TV.

Other noteworthy trailers at the time were Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, George Lucas's Star Wars and Ridley Scott's Alien. The modern trailer was well and truly born.

Here the history of the trailer becomes a bit muddy, but standouts include Independence Day for showing a major spoiler (the white house being destroyed) and The Blair Witch Project for breaking open the door for the found footage genre, with the added bonus of using the internet as a part of the trailer campaign.

Naturally the scope of this post is woefully inadequate to properly analyze this subject, so I have to cut it short here. We'll continue next time, so until then, have a great week!

Party Time

This weekend past, I went to a LAN party. We barbequed, sipped drinks, laughed ourselves silly and most prominently, played games. After all, that's' what a LAN party is for. A great weekend all in all.

Naturally the best laid plans never work out as intended, and although we had a list of games to play, we spent way too much time trying to figure out exactly what to play.

The standout game for me has to be The Ship. Imagine a luxury cruise set in the 1920's, just like on Poirot. Now imagine everyone is trying to kill someone else. This is The Ship.

The tension comes from trying to find your target in an unobserved area, and then brutally exterminating them with a plethora of weapons from candlesticks to Tommy-guns.

Since everyone is hunting someone, it means you are also being hunted, and on several occasions, I was just about to murder my victim when I was viciously massacred from behind. Very tense and absolutely hilarious. Although if you are super competitive, I think you might find The Ship more frustrating than fun. I absolutely loved it.

I also tried Project Reality, a modern military shooter. Now, I'm not partial to this genre, but PR is free so I thought I'd try it anyway. I'm still not partial to the genre, but I get what this game is for. It's not a twitch reflex FPS, it's a slower paced tactical shooter, but even so, it's not for me. The learning curve on PR is very steep, and I lack the passion needed to mount the curve and get good at this game. For me it's running around for five minutes and then getting killed by an enemy I didn't even see. But if the modern military shooters are your cup of tea, go check it out.

Having stayed up way too late the entire weekend, I'm naturally pretty damn tired, so I'm cutting it short today.

Until next time, have a fantastic week!

I am not a crook...

OK, I bet you're wondering why I'm blogging on a Saturday, right?

Well the truth is, I'm going out of town for a couple of days, and I simply don't trust Blogger to publish my post if I put it on a timer. So, you're getting your weekly dose of Eccentricity and Spheres today.

I read yesterday that apparently all the official papers on the JFK assassination will be released in 2017. Of course, as one eloquent redditor put it, “I bet redacted did it”. Wouldn't surprise me...

But it got me thinking, and I remembered a great documentary series on Youtube concerning another fascinating event in American politics, the Watergate Scandal.

Since I'm pretty busy today (and my brain won't accept blogging on Saturdays) I thought you all might like to see it.

The really interesting aspect of this multi-part series are all the interviews with the actual people involved. This is not people talking about what other people did. Oh no, it's frank interviews with Nixon, Liddy, Halderman, Hunt etc...

So if that's your cup of tea, get ready for some amazing stuff.

I'm not embedding the videos here, just follow the links instead.

Until next Monday have a great week!

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmxyM7ptKq4

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIXFJVmdgEg

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9R--FUOeM8

Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SWPNked0dQ

Part 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_RYJJWZOXE

Dead of Winter

Last Saturday I finally got to play a cool board game called Dead of Winter.

These days you can't take three steps without tripping over something with zombies in it, but DoW is slightly different.

Yes, there are zombies and they can be lethal, but the real challenge is managing resources and dealing with other survivors.

At the start of the game, every player draws a secret objective card, and amongst those is a traitor card. But there are enough regular secrets that you don't know if there even is a traitor in any given game. It's just that there might be a traitor that adds tension.

In order to win, the main objective of the scenario has to be fulfilled as well as your own secret objective, and this can be very hard as the other players won't necessarily cooperate with you.

There are lots of other difficulties as well. Random events can appear and derail everything badly, and the crisis deck that adds pressure every turn can change a fairly placid scenario into a panicked frenzy.

Since I've only played two games, I'm not qualified to actually review Dead of Winter properly, but from what I can tell, it's a great game that could benefit from a little more love.

Take the crisis deck as an example. From what I've seen, every crisis is collect as many of a particular resource as there are players or bad stuff happens. There doesn't seem to be any variation on that which is a shame.

But over all, I'm impressed. The artwork is sharp and detailed, the flavor texts are really good. And the mechanics that govern the game as a whole are very sharp.

So if you're looking to fortify a base and explore a small town in the middle of a harsh winter, with one of your fiends a potential traitor, get Dead of Winter.

Until next time, have a great week!

GTA Online

I talked earlier about Grand Theft Auto V and how good of a game it is.

It still is, but I've been playing it's online mode almost exclusively lately. Going on heists with your friends or just taking care of smaller jobs amongst other things is a lot of fun.

But this weekend I've been racing. Soooo much racing. You see, I discovered that you can run solo races. This is both good and a bit bad.

The good sides are myriad. You get better at driving. You get to know the tracks, although at more than 80 tracks for cars alone, not to mention motorbikes, helicopters, jets and bicycles, it's hard to remember which race is which. And finally you get to play around with all the different vehicles in the game.

This last point is really cool, since you have to buy all the cool cars in Online mode. In the single player game, you can steal any car and just keep it, but in Online there is an invisible line and any car above that line is too hot to steal, so you have to pay for it if you want it. And some of those cars are ridiculously expensive.

But if you set up a single person race, you can choose which car to drive, and you can eventually test them all. This has been so much fun. Not to mention that all races this weekend has been giving double experience, but more on that later.

So what's bad? Well, there are lots of different ways you can modify your cars in GTA Online. But most of these mods require that you win a certain amounts of races. And that is hard. Naturally you can't loose a single player race, so they do not count against the unlock requirements. I really wish that you could race against AI drivers and that this would count against the unlocks. But no, you have to race human drivers, and I've done that too. I've even won some, but of you want to win in order to unlock things, it's pretty silly to compete in open races, since the odds of winning against eight other players becomes slim indeed. It is very exciting though. Very adrenaline pumping.

Finally the amount of RP (xp in other games) is surprisingly good, particularly when you get double

the amount. I made a new character on Thursday evening because I wanted a female character as well as my regular gangster, Vinnie. As of this morning, my girl Fan Mei, is almost 39. Vinnie is 54 and only the last four levels have been from racing this past weekend. So the rate at which you can level up your characters through solo racing is amazing. And you can make some serious money as well. I have pulled in over 300K doing this.

Free money and experience. What's not to like.

That is it for today, until I see you again, have an exciting week!