#2,383: The Dark Tower

Batman v Superman: The Dawn of Justice: Ultimate Edition - ★★★½☆
On my first viewing, I said that a) I wanted to re-arrange a few scenes and b) I already liked this movie more than anyone I know. Which maybe says more about the movie than about me.

This time around was the 'Ultimate Edition' and it's had quite a bit of work done - this isn't the exact same cut plus a few deleted scenes re-inserted. Stuff is moved around, subplots are added, motivations are changed. It's long, and a little bit of it is still confusing, but it's definitely a better version.

Also, here's a fan theory: I'm sure someone else has already said this, but it's mine anyway: Jeffrey Dean Morgan is Thomas Wayne for all of thirty seconds. Maybe he's just really into Batman, or friends with Zach Snyder from Watchmen. Or maybe the Flash movie is doing the Flashpoint storyline and we've already got a solid actor locked and loaded to play Batman. I didn't recognize the actress playing Martha, so I can't rightly guess whether we'll see her again, but look forward now to JDM-Bats and Affleck-Bats having that heart-to-heart...

Miss Sloane - ★★★☆☆
What if Nightcrawler was about a woman? Well, for one thing, she'd be way more successful...

This movie wasn't bad but nobody had the stomach for a film about electioneering in late 2016. Jessica Chastain is becoming typecast as the skillful and competent woman - as these things go, that sounds like a pretty good career.

The Dark Tower - ★★★☆☆
Some of the acting was bad, but I thought this was great! One of my minor talents is recognizing the secret identities of the media. (Examples: PS1's Vagrant Story is the best video game of the board game Hero Quest. Tomorrowland is the best movie of Bioshock we're likely to get. Interstellar is a fine Lovecraftian horror.) This movie is a terrific adaptation of the Arkham Horror board game. Characters travel through gates to fantastic other worlds where they fight monsters and encounter sanity-blasting realizations about the world around them, before ultimately doing battle with an ancient evil to prevent the end of the world.

I couldn't tell you whether it has anything to do with the Stephen King novels. 

Set List: Umbrage Edition

Oh hey Jason, I was just thinking about our place in the social ladder.  Do you remember when some out-of-towner would come to the open mic at Meltdown Comics and open with their thoughts on how stupid comic books are? And how that never worked for anyone because most of the comedians aren't that into comics and don't care, and anyone who is into comic books and is here in this comic book shop to do comedy has just been personally attacked for no reason? I thought of that just now when the biggest comic book nerd I know came in here to tell us how about how terrible our show is. Everyone needs someone to pick on I guess.

Anyway, I wouldn't normally promote a show at another theater during our show, but tomorrow night we're doing a Bat Night over at Gangbusters!, which is a comedy show performed in complete darkness, which feels a lot like: This!

(Seriously though, if agree to do a theme show and then you spend your whole set attacking the theme, the thing every other person in the room is participating in, you could just sit at home. What a jackass.)

Set List at the Pack is a completely improvised stand-up show that happens every Thursday night at 10:30, at the Pack Theater in Los Angeles, CA.

Bat Night 6

Gangbusters! presents our special Bat Night show: comedy performed in environmentally-friendly Complete Darkness! Starring Jared Logan, the spooky stories of Max Von Spyder, and so much more!  This week!

Escape Room Reviews: Grandma's Master Plan

Company: 60 Out
Room: Grandma’s Master Plan
Date Played: 8/6/17
Player Count: 4
Success:  Success!

Premise: From the company website, "The story begins when your granny suddenly disappears without notice. No one has a clue where she is, but one day you come across a letter in which your grandmother reveals a secret about her inheritance. All you have to do is to go into her house and find it -- simple, right? We'll see about that."

Immersion: This is an escape unlike any I’ve ever done before. In a lot of games, any failure of the set design to simulate a real-world location makes the game an approximation of the real thing, but I believe Grandma’s to be the first *impressionist* Escape Room that I’ve played. Each of the multiple rooms is stripped down to the vital and memorable bits, yes, but I don’t believe that they are, in the story, literally connected to each other. Each space is probably a different location, and would take place some time after the previous space. They are more like levels of a video game than a literal hour (or in this case, 75 minutes) in your characters’ afternoon.

Highlights: As in every 60Out game, Grandma’s brings sharp set and prop design, an abundance of magical objects (our pet term for objects that are probably outfitted with some kind of sensors to ‘know’ when they’ve been used correctly, as opposed to traditional padlocks), and cleverly designed spaces to explore. Some of the interactions are very neat. One puzzle that I’ve seen used before (in another 60Out game, no less!) worked better here than anywhere else I’ve seen it done. 

Lowlights: Player damage in one area lead us to accidentally skip a puzzle, because a ‘locked’ item no longer closed properly. One prop was especially finicky. The gold shown in the advertisement turns out to be fake. These are very small complaints. 

And Finally:   This is an extra large room, and you are given an extra large amount of time (at an extra large price) to solve it all. Our team didn’t find anything in the room to be especially difficult or mind bending, but there is indeed a lot of it. Which is great! All four of us had plenty to do. 60Out has an offer where one player in your group plays for free on or near their birthday (which our foursome has taken advantage of a bunch this year), and this game was a real birthday treat. Out of 31 games played, this gets a solid #6, and it’s found its way into my heart as my current favorite at any 60Out location. 

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.60out.com/los-angeles/rooms/grandmas-masterplan

Kickstarter Monday: Flag and Hadean Lands

Ages ago, I wrote up a few posts to see how various Kickstarters I backed had turned out. Starting this month, I'm going to make the first Monday of the month about reporting on a couple of the projects that I've backed since then, or catching up on previously mentioned incomplete projects. There was a time when Kickstarting was probably my number one way to spend money frivolously, and while these days I’d say that hobby has given way to room escapes, I’ve still backed or attempted to back over 80 projects. 

My first instinct here was to draw this series out and cover all of them, but I stand by just about everything I had to say when I wrote the previous reviews. Here's the digest version: 

• Video games are second only to films as bad projects to back.
• First-timers making hardware gadgets are probably going to fail.
• Sometimes I back artists more as a way to thank them for previous work than because I want their new thing.
• I like things that light up.

So here's what's new:

The Glif, and also The New Glif - These are well-made and practical gadgets for sticking your phone on a tripod. The original was built for the iPhone 4, which means it is now a piece of plastic trash that I will move from junk drawer to junk drawer until I die. The "New" version is built to be phone agnostic, and although I don’t use it often, it’s a big help when I do have a need for it. 

Flag - This was a startup that did a huge faceplant leading its founder, Samuel Agboola, to try to scrub himself and the project from the internet.  The idea was for you to get free prints of your photos in the mail, as paid for by advertising that would appear on the reverse side of each print. I guess their problem was that you can’t attract advertisers to a platform with no users, and they didn’t have enough cash to burn on giving away prints until they had a respectable amount of users. Plus they promised a bunch of dumb and expensive frills. They ran a second (and third) shady crowdfunding campaign, totally failed to keep up with shipping prints to their existing users after a couple of months, and then shut down as much of their web presence as possible. Backers have been left to post pleas for refunds on the campaign comment pages like an extra sad chain letter.  For what it’s worth, the first photos I received were actually very nicely done and encouraging of the service as a whole. The second month was four months late in delivery and of noticeably lower quality. Neither batch had any ads, and I never saw anything else from them except apologies and promises.

Hadean Lands - This wonderful text adventure (ahem, interactive fiction) is like a Thanksgiving dinner - Andrew Plotkin spent years developing it, and when it was finally served I gulped the whole thing down in a tiny fraction of the time. It’s a story of alchemy-powered space travel gone awry, and it’s the reason I have TextExpander snippets for things like “orichalcum,” “anaphylaxis,” and “anti-Tellurian distillate,” along with some especially long and complicated series of commands I used time and again. I am perfectly pleased with myself to also mention that I was among the first players to complete the game in the week it was released, before the internet filled up with hints. This was one of the very first projects I ever backed, and it's pretty much a best-case scenario for how happy I was with the end result.