Game of Thrones Trailer

I've been a fan of George RR Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" for a long time. It was recommended to me early on in college, long after I had sworn off reading fantasy, and it brought back a fondness for the genre for me, helping me expand my view of weird fiction and allowed me to discover my one true love, the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. Martin and Howard have very little in common with each other writing wise, but Martin allowed me to peak my head back into the dusty and B.O-smelling world of fantasy literature long enough to stumble upon the Conan stories. The hundreds of dollars I've thrown at the Howard estate would never have made it there had it not been for Martin reminding me to give the genre another go.

"He will not thank you, so I will thank you for him."

But Conan-fanboying aside, Martin's books are really, really good, holding a gritty, realistic place in fantasy where most authors fear to tread. It's dirty, violent, sticky, and sexy. It's like the exploitation cinema of fantasy, except, you know, actually of artistic value. I recommended the series to a fantasy-reading coworker of mine and he handed it back to me about a day later, saying it was  "Too Rapey". I'm only glad he hasn't borrowed any of my movies.

"Oh, hiya Hanzo."

However, you might come for the brutal decapitations and the horribly scarred grown men lusting over twelve year old girls, but you stay for the incredibly well-characterized personalities, the lush storytelling, the complex plots, and the horribly scarred grown men lusting over twelve year old girls.

SANSAN 4 EVA 

Martin's slowed the pace of his writing over the past few years, and I've no intention of griping about that, mostly because others, with better capabilities to back up their death threats, have already done so to little avail. The next book, A Dance with Dragons, will eventually come out,  or Martin will die like Robert Jordan did, and we'll all get to make up our own endings.

I know what my ending is gonna be.

What I'm here to touch on today is the fact that HBO, in their infinite wisdom, decided to pick up A Song of Ice and Fire as their next big budget TV series. Named after the first book in the series, "A Game of Thrones", the series has had the online fan community buzzing for a long time, and very recently, HBO released a teaser,  which gives fans of the books something other than fan art to masturbate too.

There's a ton of this stuff, seriously.

Now to be honest, due to Martin's...shall we say...relaxed writing pace, a lot of my enthusiasm for the series has died down. But when I heard they released a trailer, I was really, really excited. There's some big names in it, like Sean Bean, who, in a staggering change of pace, will not play a support character who the main character totally trusts and who betrays that main character and winds up as the villain. This time he plays a genuine good guy! I know, I was surprised too. To be honest, the character he plays, Eddard Stark, is one of the few genuinely good characters in the entire series; its a very much grey-and-gray morality world, which is very very rare in fantasy.

See?

Anyway, here is the teaser:

Upon seeing it, the feeling of excitement I had sorta...went away. Not because it looks bad. It looks great, I mean, what we saw of it looks great. But that's sort of my issue. Its a twenty-odd second teaser. It doesn't show us shit. After a long time of talking about it, of debating casting on Internet forums, on wondering how they'll handle certain unpalatable situations in the narrative, this trailer is kinda anti-climatic. Everything's so quick and subliminal. I mean, for Christ's sake, what precisely is going on in this shot?

Or this one?

I guess I'm just griping because it went by so quick. I wanted a three minute movie trailer. I want the prime rib, not a junior bacon cheeseburger. I wanted more recognizable characters! I wanted huge men with horribly burned faces making bedrooms eyes at little girls! I guess I just wanted more. Is that too much to ask?

"Yes."

Oh well. I'm still excited for the show, even if half of me wants them to totally fuck it up and run off the wall like they did with Dexter and that show about the southern lady with the psychic powers who hangs out with vampires. Or the Sword of Truth TV show, Legend of the Seeker. I mean, as long as the show is entertaining, deviating from canon wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

I missed you guys.

Prince of Persia is better than Iron Man 2

Movies based on video games suck. This is an immutable law of nature. The corollary to this law, that video games based on movies also suck, is no less true, but not the point of this post. Neither is the point of today's article to delve into the many, myriad reasons that up until now, there has never been a video game movie that didn't make me want to floss with razor-wire. We must simply accept that video game movies suck.

Besides, we all know the reason.

No, what I need to tell you all today is that this immutable law of nature has, as all rules do, an exception, and that exception is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Because not only does this movie not suck, it's better than the other big summer blockbusters I've seen this year; Robin Hood and Iron Man 2.

"Take it back!"

I liked Russell Crowe T. Robot as Robin Hood. The film had some narrative missteps (like Prince John's heel-turn at the end of the movie coming completely fucking out of nowhere and not fitting the characterization the movie already gave him as a ruthless-yet-completely-reasonable leader handed the crown at a really shitty time), and it had some research failures (1199 is the turn of the 13th century, Ridley, not the turn of the 12th). But it was exciting and entertaining and at no point did I want to stab myself in the throat.

Iron Man 2 for me was a little more hit and  miss. I absolutely love the first movie, but felt the sequel didn't really deliver on the promise of the first. The special effects weren't quite as good (especially some of the times with Rhodey wearing the War Machine suit with the mask open; it looked like a really bad photoshop of Don Cheadle's face in there), and the story was sort of a head-scratcher. It didn't reach Spider-Man 3 levels by any stretch, but the plot was meandering and contrived enough to irritate me.

"I invented a new element and then hid it in a theme park to cure the poison that will be killing my son forty years from now. Don't question me."

And then there was THAT scene. That one scene that turned me into George C. Scott in "Hardcore". The scene where Tony Stark gets hammered at a party while wearing the Iron Man armor and asks the DJ (a cameo by the late DJ AM) to provide a soundtrack for a fight between himself and War Machine. Just typing that sentence hurts me in parts of my heart I long thought dead.

Being in Iron Man 2 was the second worst thing that happened to DJ AM this year.

Now I'm not saying all of Iron Man 2 sucked. Ivan Vanko and Justin Hammer were great villains (even if not quite as menacing as Jeff Bridge's Obediah Stane) and the fight scenes involving Vanko were the best parts of the movies. There was just too much fluff, too much blah blah in a movie that should have trimmed all the fat. It was a C+/B- at best.

Stop sulking, Tony. You made this mess, now you gotta sit in it.

But wasn't this supposed to be about Prince of Persia? Right. Now I didn't even want to go see it. I went on a Sunday night with my girlfriend and my manager and as I sat in the theater I was prepared for a real shit fest. I liked the PS2 Prince of Persia series as much as the next nerd but I knew that they'd never make a decent video game movie. It can't be done.

But they did, somehow. I spent most of the movie really enjoying myself, more so than my companions, who were the ones who had wanted to see it in the first place. Now don't get me wrong, there were parts of this movie I HATED. HATED. In huge capital letters written across the sky HATED. Most of them involving our two main characters, Prince Smug-tits and Princess Stuck-up-McLack-o-Charisma.

"Wait...I think I see our personalities over there..."

Most of the dialogue is hackneyed, dime-a-dozen fantasy pap, with lots of talk of destiny and righteousness and *yawn*. But whenever Prince Dastan and Princess Tamina start talking to each other, it quickly takes a left turn into insufferable bullshit. They're supposed to have this smart-alecky slap-slap-kiss dynamic going on, but its neither clever or funny, and quickly becomes two smug posturing assholes slinging intolerable one-liners at each other while we try and figure out why in the holy hemorrhaging fuck they're still hanging out together.

But for whatever reason, the movie works. The action sequences are exciting when you can figure out what the fuck is supposed to be going on, and there's a nice little shout-out to Assassin's Creed early on which I appreciated. This is the kind of movie that's doing a million things at once and while it can be a headache to follow, it hits all the right notes for a dopey sword-and-sandal action flick and at no point did I desperately want the movie to end, as I did in Iron Man's drunk party/fight scene.

"Turn it off....TURN IT OFF!"

Soda, Cowboys, and stuff.

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Hanzo the Razor

Now I'm not really very big into manga and anime. It's never really been my thing. I'm not going to denigrate the entire art form and say that it all sucks, but for the most part I find it childish, badly drawn and often times hair-pullingly full of faux-philosophical bullshit. Try as you might, you're not gonna find much anime in my collection.

Unless it's porn, I mean.

So when I say there is manga out there that I fucking love, you better believe I mean it. And the manga that I do love is the work of writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. "Lone Wolf and Cub" is their magnum opus as well as their most famous collaboration, but for me, it's "Hanzo no Mon", localized to America by Dark Horse comics as "Path of the Assassin" that really shines as their best work. But it was in "Path of the Assassin" that I started noticing some....disturbing trends in Kazuo Koike's writing.

...

Yeah...it kinda seems like ol' Kazuo has a bit of a thing for women getting raped and then falling in love with the guy who raped them. The main character in "Path of the Assassin" has this happen to him no less than TWICE, and since I'm still only about three-quarters through the books I wouldn't be surprised if it happened again. Maybe it's just my soft squishy American liberal mind, filled up with stupid ideas that rape is fucking horrible and shouldn't be trivialized like that and sometimes women might even count as people, but I'm having a really hard time coming up with something that's nearly as offensive as having rape victims go ga-ga over the man who just took them by force. I mean seriously, what is worse than that?

Isn't one of these assholes dead now?

Anywoo, my point is that Koike-san takes the idea of rape being the thing that opens a woman's doors of perception (....) to unbelievable pleasure and runs completely off the fucking wall with it in the manga "Goyokiba", about an Edo samurai-police officer named Hanzo, a self-mutilating sadomasochist, whose nickname is "Kamisori" (meaning "Sharp" or "Razor") and who patrols the mean streets of Tokugawa-era Japan armed with a love for justice, a hatred of oppression and a giant cock that he routinely flagellates to make stronger.

"Sometimes you need to hit it to keep it in line."

Rooster jokes aside, the part I left out is how Hanzo goes about enforcing the law and bringing justice to  the people. But I don't need to tell you. All I need to do is show you the cover of the DVD boxed set of the films based on the manga, and trust you have both two working eyes and a memory-span longer than a boll-weevil's.

       The "Longest Arm" is his penis.

Yeeaaaaah. In his quest to see that harm does not befall the common man, Hanzo the Razor routinely rapes the ever-loving shit out of the women who know things about the cases he's working on, which sends them into such tremors of unbelievable ecstasy that they not only readily confess everything they know, they become placid, love-struck sex kittens who follow Hanzo around worshipfully.

Cuz, ya know, thats what really happens with rape victims.

There are actually three movies in the series but they're essentially the same thing over and over again. Hanzo stumbles upon some plot, does some detective work, beats the shit out of his massive dick with a wooden truncheon, finds a woman related to the plot, rapes her into paradise, fights some ninjas, and solves the crime. This shit would be nigh-unwatchable if it wasn't for two things: Shintaro Katsu, who plays Hanzo, strutting around these carefully constructed Edo-period sets like he was the Japanese version of Shaft, and the funkadelic soundtrack, both of which on their own are massively entertaining. These two things ALMOST manage to turn the movies into high-camp, but then we have a rape-scene and it gets all squicky again.

On a slightly related note, I realized my boxed-set of the Hanzo movies and my boxed-set of the TV series "Shogun" have weirdly similar color schemes. I hope this wasn't on purpose.

"Little Timmy said he wanted some Japanese-sounding movie...what was the name?"

First!!!!!11111 Also Pendragon.

Hey everybody and welcome to Killer Forklift, my own little voice in the vast trough of unimportant pop-culture reviewing nerds. Because, gosh darn it, there just aren't enough guys with beards and glasses who ramble on about stupid shit on the internet.

Lets see go over to the stuff shelves and grab something to look at, shall we?

"I gift you with this sacred letter-opener."

Allrighty, so here we have one of my favorite tabletop roleplaying games of all time, King Arthur Pendragon, or as it's usually called, just Pendragon. Now for whatever reason, Pendragon never seems to have really picked up among the mainstream gaming community, which is damn tragic. There's levels of mainstream acceptance in the gaming wold a lot like there is in music. You have your highly-successful-but-arguably-over-hyped bands like Metallica (Dungeons and Dragons), then you have the stuff that people who started listening to Metallica and moved on to the other mainstream-but-not-really-played-on-the-radio metal bands listen to, stuff like Slayer or Anthrax (World of Darkness). Then you get sort of really into thrash and start listening to Toxic Holocaust or old stuff like Sodom (Legend of the Five Rings and Call of Cthulhu). Then there's the really bad stuff, the stuff everybody's heard of but nobody with half a brain likes, like Avenged Sevenfold (F.A.T.A.L). I don't really remember the point I was trying to make except that Avenged Sevenfold sucks (although I guess that song "Afterlife" is maybe kinda okay in the same way rolling up your character's anal circumference in F.A.T.A.L can be sorta fun).

"Your anus can comfortably fit twelve inches."

Wait, I think I remember what I was trying to get at. Below that, there's this layer of drunken bar-bands that get really devoted little following but never play more than five or six shows and most of those are played in abandoned factory buildings on the south side of town. Pendragon is one of those bands; it's not perfect and it occasionally throws up on the front row, but its pure, man! It hasn't sold out and started doing things like memorizing it's own bass-lines.

                                                    
                                             
Pendragon takes place in, surprise surprise, the time of King Arthur, in dayes ofe olde whene knightse wheree bolde and all that. The mechanics are pretty standard for the most part; you play a knight (or if you're really not into actually contributing anything to the party, a woman) and you go one quests and fight in battles and generally go around being a tin-can wearing feudal badass. Depending on the time during Arthur's reign your campaign is set, you can pick from a number of cultures and religions to sort of personalize your knight.

Just like this guy.

While this sounds pretty standard fantasy stuff, Pendragon departs from conventional roleplaying games in two major ways. The first is that every game sessions takes exactly one year of game time, and you are not expected to play the same character through the whole campaign. The idea is to found a dynasty, beginning with Uther Pendragon's rise to power and playing fathers and sons all the way to Arthur's death some seventy years later. This shift can be shocking for some players, and it does cause you to not get so attached to your characters; add this in with the fairly brutal combat (not L5R brutal but still pretty intense) and you do sometimes find yourself looking at your character as a conglomeration of statistics rather than as an imaginary person.

"You're not real!!"

However, this is somewhat offset by the other unique feature of Pendragon, which is that your character's personality and behavior HAVE STATS. All characters have a list of personality traits organized on a "Vices and Virtues" scale (i.e. Energetic/Lazy, Chaste/Lustful, etc), and there are situations where the game-master can force you to roll on these traits to see how you behave. Particularly high personality traits grant Glory bonuses (Glory being part of the game's leveling-up system as well as recognition in-game), but having these traits so high basically robs you of the ability to make decisions for your character at all.

"Roll Chaste/Lustful".

While it may not really sound like your cup of tea, especially if you're really into traditional DnD type-gaming, Pendragon really does allow you to become part of a sweeping epic story, and it is precisely because its such a weird little system that I love it so much. I recommend it and you should probably go out and buy it and give it the old college try. Be warned though, it's out of print and I've seen the huge-ass campaign guide (aptly titled "The Great Pendragon Campaign") go for around 300 bucks on Amazon.