The Gut Cup

So, Roger Ebert (the only movie reviewer I pay much attention to) has this hilarious bit to say about zombies

I think zombies are defined by behavior and can be “explained” by many handy shortcuts: the supernatural, radiation, a virus, space visitors, secret weapons, a Harvard education and so on. I suppose it would be a “spoiler” if I revealed why the Crazies are on the lurch, but come on, does it matter? What if I revealed they got that way because of, oh, say, eating Pringles? Would that spoil things for you? What difference does it make? All that matters is that they got to be zombies somehow. Before that, they were your friends and neighbors. Then they started in on the damn Pringles.

He is a bit tired of zombie movies, if you can’t tell.

First, I have no idea why its called Chocolate. The title makes no sense.

Chocolate is the martial arts movie about the autistic girl “A special needs child with a special need – to kick some ass”. Anyway, overall its a “meh” movie, except for a couple of interesting tidbits. Though I did rate it four out of five stars in the “late night Kung Fu” movie category. That is however, a pretty darn limited category.

From a gaming perspective, its interesting because of the wide variety of fight locations. They fight in lots of places, and use the environment extensively. At one point they fight crouching under a metal grill area, which is pretty extensive. There is a traditional dojo fight, an ice cutting factory fight, a big fight in a pig slaughtering factory, and the final fight. The final fight is vertical. Its on the side of an elevated rail track, about 30 feet above the ground, and extends over to the ledges outside the windows of a cheap hotel. These ledges are a foot wide, at most, with a small fire escape. I think a system like FATE captures this better than a more traditional system, like D20. Because really, the goal is “leap onto the sign, and race over it before it collapses, while launching off it to kick a guy in the face, then land spread eagle against the wall, dropping a foot or two to the ledge”. In FATE, you just add a couple of modifiers to the roll. In a more traditional system, those would be several rolls, and thus really slow.

The other interesting thing, is watching her fight. She uses a lot of Taekwondo, so you see a lot of elbow and shin strikes. That was the most interesting part of the movie to me. I was like “Is she striking with her shins, not her feet? (She does use both)”. And sure enough, she was. So I started paying more attention to the fighting style. It was quite interesting.

So the Lightning Thief has Uma Thurman as Medusa?

Alright, now I have to see it. Uma has been in my top five for 20 years now. I saw her in The adventures of Baron Munchausen at the Lefont Tara in the late 80’s. I noticed her as the bit dancer Rose, before she showed up in the movie as Venus (an apt role for her).

I haven’t seen most of her movies, but I’ve always liked her. And Medusa is one of my favorite mythological creatures.