The Woman in Black is a solid attempt to make a classic ghost story from the revived Hammer .  The film making combines the best of the old school Hammer with 21^st century production values.  It takes a classic approach to horror eschewing the slasher / blood and gore school of horror.

The cinema I saw it in wasn’t completely full but was very close.  There were lots of teenagers there to see Daniel Radcliffe.  The teenagers next to us couldn’t believe a 12A could be a horror.  Half an hour later they literally jumped feet out of their seats at the first fright and one was watching through his fingers by the end.  And they loved every minute of it.

The Woman in Black’s production values are extremely good with excellent cinematography and dramatic editing.  The sets are beautifully dressed and atmospheric.  The score is jarring in all the right places building tension not distracting from it.  There was a nice mix of old school practical effects and CG.  I’d be interested to know if the island was enhanced or even created with Vue as there was just a touch of something artificial about it.

Having only around half the Potter films I’m not trapped in seeing Daniel Radcliffe as Harry.  Daniel Radcliffe is on-screen in pretty much every scene and gives a solid performance that is maybe a little wooden in places. But that could just be him playing a rather tightly strung young Edwardian lawyer whose job depends on resolving the estates paperwork and who is still in morning for his wife.  There were good supporting performances especially from Ciarán Hinds and Janet McTeer while I’d like to have seen more of Mary Stockley’s Mrs. Fisher and some of the other locals.

If you enjoy an old-fashioned Hammer ghost story with a quality modern production The Woman in Black is well worth a trip to the cinema.

The Woman in Black Roleplaying Notes

If I was going to run something inspired by The Woman in Black as a roleplaying game I’d probably use it as a scenario for D&D Ravenloft, Trail of Cthulhu with Shadow over Filmland or a Victorian age mortals World of Darkness game.  If you want to turn it on its head you could use it in a game of Lost Souls with the PCs taking the roles of ghostly children.

The majority of the story takes place in an isolated Northumberland coastal town.  It’s a backwater with a post office, grocers, a single public house with a few rooms for paying guests and a solicitors.  The Daily’s, the richest couple in the town, have the only car while other residents use horse-drawn vehicles.  The date of the events in the film is sometime in the late early 20th century judging by the relatively new Rolls Royce Silver Ghost Mr Daily drives. Electricity hasn’t reached the town yet.  The only communication with the outside world is by post or telegraph – there are no telephones in town.  Its two changes on train from London.  The railway station is some way from the town and is on a small branch line with a limited service.

The locals are hostile and suspicious of strangers especially anyone planning on going to the island.  Whenever someone even glimpses the Lady in Black a child dies in a terrible accident.  The locals are over protective of their children and hide them from strangers.  Player Characters can expect a very unfriendly welcome.

Across a causeway open only at low tide from the town on an island stands a classic haunted house.  Its overgrown grounds include a small graveyard.  The house itself is run down and full of junk.  There are stuffed animals, broken furniture, clockwork toys and old oil paintings on the wall.

Within the houses walls is hidden the evidence of a dark family secret.  A woman declared insane.  A child adopted and isolated from his natural mother.  A tragic death with the body never found.  A suicide.

The titular Woman in Black is a ghost associated with the death of children.  She’s out for revenge on the town and kills children by possessing them before forcing them to kill themselves.  Ghosts of the children she has killed manifest on the island and sometimes in other places.  The ghost of her son manifests but not at the same time as she does so they don’t meet.

The children can communicate through possession of Daily’s wife.  They can speak through her but are more likely to use her to draw crude images by scratching surfaces with sharp objects.

Key to PCs solving the mystery are:

• Basic paperwork provided to investigator on way to the scene
• Superstition about The Lady in Black and the house from the locals
• Birth, Death and Institutionalization certificates that can be found at the house
• Letters from The Lady in Black at the house
• Scratched messages from ghost children through possessed woman
• Birthday cards from The Lady in Black to her son
• Son’s body lost in the marshes around the causeway

The player characters and their loved ones are threatened by accidental death resulting from the Lady in Black’s possession of children.  Their sanity is challenged by the effects of her haunting.

In addition to possessing children The Lady in Black can visually manifest and scream although she never speaks.  She can affect objects including locking and unlocking doors in the house, affect clockwork toys causing them to work without being wound and affect other objects including a rocking chair.  At least once she cause an impenetrable darkness to appear behind her.

The Ghost of her son can visually manifest on the causeway, the island and in the house.  He can leave a trail of muddy footprints.

The other ghosts appear to be able to visually manifest and possess Mrs Daily.

The haunting can be ended by finding the information about what has gone on.  This allows the PCs to search the marsh for the body lost in the mud near the cross marking the rough location of the son’s death.  Placing the cards sent by the woman in black with the body and winding the toys in his room will summon the lady and lay her to rest.  She and the other ghosts may not go immediately to their grave.

The maps represent an area of hilly upland terrain with several large lakes connected by rivers. The map covers an area 22.5km on each side.

In absolute measurement the lowest points on the model at around 430m above sea level and the peaks at 2500m. However relief models are often scaled vertically to show features more clearly. If you take each contour line as being 10m and start with 430m for the lowest point the terrain’s peaks are around 770m.

Hopefully this will be useful to someone for their game – I’ve already had ideas for using it with D&D and Call of Cthulhu.  I’d love to know if you use it or what you think about it…

Its BAFTA weekend and I’m not expecting The Grey to be getting any nominations other than for film shot in the coldest location (and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy may beat it in that category too).  As is pretty obvious from the poster above it’s another Liam Neeson vehicle trying to find the ingredient that he brought to Taken a few years ago.

The plot is pretty straight forward: a plane loaded with workers from an Alaskan oil drilling operation crash in the wild.  Those that survive are threatened by the weather, lack of food, lack of medicine and hostile terrain.  Driving them is a belief that no one is coming looking for them and a hungry pack of wolves.  Holding them back are their personal demons and internal disputes.

The story is interspersed with flash backs to Neeson’s Ottway in what appear, at least at first, to be happier times.  This little sub plot is somewhat laboured.  I can understand what it was trying to achieve often interrupted the more visceral conflict between the group of crash survivors.  Maybe if, like the lads sat behind me in the cinema I’d not spotted where it was going, earlier in the film it would have provided a more interesting twist in the sub plot to set up the last scene of the film.

Overall for me this is a relatively fun, reasonably acted survival horror film but not a personal classic.

Role Playing The Grey

However The Grey is eminently suitable for any Game Master looking for ideas for a survival horror role playing adventure.  The five key elements I’d consider using are:

• Low powered Player Characters
• No outside help
• Limited resources
• Hostile Environment
• Hunted

Let’s tackle these in order…

The characters in The Grey are all hardy oil workers, some have served time in prison but they aren’t ex-soldiers or survival experts.  There certainly aren’t any ex-special forces or super heroes here.  No man nips round the back of the plane to change into his spandex costume and fly off to fetch rescuers.

Once the plane crashes they have no outside help.  Mobile phone doesn’t work, the wrist transponder doesn’t summon rescuers and they see no rescue planes and barely any signs that humanity has touched the wilderness.  They are on their own.  If you don’t include any NPCs then your PCs will only have each other to interact with.  You could try insisting that once that is the case that they should discuss everything in character.

They only have what they can scrounge from the crash and later their surroundings.  At no point do they have medical kits, survival rations, firearms, improvised bombs, rope, survival gear, satellite phones or a host of other stuff that would have given them more of a chance and less of a challenge.  From memory the resources they have include:

• Backpacks
• Warm clothes
• Boots
• Miniatures of alcoholic drinks from the flight
• Knives
• Basic tools
• A flask of aviation fuel
• Paper from books and magazines
• Lighters
• Some food
• A handful of shotgun rounds
• Cloth
• A bit of thin rope
• Mobile phones with no signal
• A survival watch with a radio beacon built in
• Burnable material from the plane
• Shelter in a mostly intact section of the plane
• Scrounged water
• Scrounged firewood
• Scrounged wolf meat
• Scrounged sharpened sticks

If I were using The Grey as the basis for an adventure I’d follow its lead and keep resource sparse.  Make a list before you start of things they can find or have with them.  Don’t let your players start expanding the list in play.  Remember role players will probably make a better job of improvising weapons.  This group lacked the sense to attach knives to the end of long sticks to make better spears.  While I’d not normally count every shotgun shell used or every alcohol miniature drunk in a game keeping track of their resources could be an essential part of a survival horror game.

As in many survival horror films the weather and environment are both dangerous and unpredictable characters as deadly to any character as hostile forces.  Here blizzards swallowed them, the cold sapped them, hypoxia slowly strangled the life from them, lighter snow limited their ability to see, deep snow hampered their movement, hidden drops tumbled them, fierce rivers drowned them, drops killed them and darkness left them vulnerable to surprise.

Finally there are the hostile forces hunting them.  In The Grey that takes the form of a pack of wolves with an Alpha male, the pack and loner Omega that can be thrown against the group to test their resolve.  Changing the nature of the hostile force would change the nature of the adventure.  For example a lone alien like that in Predator can’t flank or outnumber its victims like the wolves but doesn’t have to get into close quarters to kill.  A group of human hunters could have any equipment they are carrying taken and turned against them as Officer John McClane turns Hans Gruber’s gangs weapons against them in Die Hard.

With a little work The Grey includes elements that could be incorporated into a wide variety of games:

• D&D and other Fantasy RPGs: PCs versus the elements and a pack of wolves.  Especially good for low level / powered groups.
• Traveller / Serenity RPG / Star Trek: PCs crash on an ice planet.
• All Flesh Must Be Eaten: Pretty much as it is or have the dead from the crash rise as zombies for some added danger.
• Call of Cthulhu / Trail of Cthulhu: Pretty much as it comes or throw in Ithaqua or some other mythos creature for added nastiness.  Personally I think the environment, wolves and halucinations should be enough to wipe out most groups of investigators.
• Vampire: Strand a group of vampire PCs in the wilderness with a pack of hostile werewolves after them.
• Cyberpunk: Take away their guns for the flight and leave them

Role Playing The Grey

If you know the original Underworld you’ve a pretty good idea what you’re getting here: Vampires, Werewolves, action, a palette of blacks & blue, a certain amount of gore, a British character actor of a certain age, a gut shaking thump to the soundtrack and, of course, Kate Beckinsale in that outfit.

Yet for each of those characteristics they have in common each of the Underworld films is a slightly different beast.  The first is more political, Evolution is more of a chase and Rise of the Lycans is more historical.  So what of Awakening?  Humans have discovered the existence of Vampires and Lycans and set out to exterminate them.

After three films most people will already have some idea if this is a film for them or not.  The real question is does it deliver (and does it have Kate Beckinsale in that outfit)?  Personally I have to say it’s a definite yes.  It delivers.

I’m not going to over analyse it because, frankly, analysing this film too much would be silly.

I still think the first film is my favourite because the politics and mystery added a level of nuance to the story.  Underworld: Awakening is a new fairly close second place.

And it has Kate Beckinsale in that outfit.  With guns.

If you’ve ever stood on the side of a road and seen a car about to crash you’ll understand this film.  If you’ve ever sat in a car that is likely to crash you’ll understand what is staring the characters in the face in Margin Call.

Margin Call is the story of 48 hours in a bank as things go wrong.  Almost from the start there is a growing sense that things are falling apart.  It starts in a small way and grows as the crash looms more and more certain.  This is a story that could become bogged down in the detail of the financial dealings at the core of the story.  Instead it sketches them in the same way a science fiction film uses techno babble to explain how a space ship travels faster than light and don’t fall out of the sky despite having no wings.

There seems to have been a Mexican standoff amongst the actors.  There are lots of actors in this who are known for chewing scenery including Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto and Stanley Tucci.  Yet the performances are measured without histrionics.  The drama is on the screen but it’s the car crash that’s about to happen.

This is a smart film with no gun fire, chases, explosions, fist fights or car crashes except a metaphorical one. If you want to see an interesting film go see this.

Due to my own stupidity and incompetence I never made it to the Open Eye Gallery before its new venue so I can’t compare it to the old space.  Its new home is almost on the waterfront in a small but perfectly formed gallery with three rooms and a small shop.

There is an impressive elegance to the design.  It’s a simple uncluttered space with simple wall geometry and sight lines used to incorporate the entrance, reception, retail and first gallery area into one room without the other elements impinging on the gallery space.  Cleverly though the reception desk can see the retail area, entrance and first exhibition area while also acting as the payment point for the shop area without resorting to an exit through the shop design.  It’s the sort of architectural design I can’t help admiring.

I read about the Painted Photographs exhibition of pictures collected by Martin Parr on the BBC website last week.  Some of the commenters on the site get tangled up in the idea that this is a modern art exhibition.  It’s nothing of the sort.  It’s a curious insight into the way things were done before Photoshop became the ubiquitous tool of photo retouching.  Its old school and fascinating for it.

There is a photograph of Mohammed Ali arriving in London with crop marks to just use his face, another of James Dean with legs painted in and one of John Lennon with just enough of Yoko painted out to make a square frame of his face.  The brush work is hurried and surprisingly basic.  These are pieces of work produced to illustrate a news story not pieces of art intended to be hung in a gallery.

If you’re interested in how things were done before digital stormed the world this exhibition is worth a visit.   It’s a perfect for a bite sized visit for lunch if you work in the city centre or an excellent aperitif for its larger neighbours if you’re coming from further afield.

They say football is a game of two halves: and so is my review of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is an enjoyable movie.  It’s populated by beautiful people in exotic locations.  It has guns and gadgets.  It has explosions.  It has chases.  It has spectacular high places.  It has all the elements of a modern action spy thriller.

It is dominated by Tom Cruise but I don’t see that as a bad thing.  It’s his name above the title on the poster.  He’s the one at the front of the group on the poster.  He’s one of the film’s producers too.   If he’d not been the main player reviewers would be asking “where’s Tom?”

It has a stand out performance for me was Simon Pegg: Benji  is a great foil to Ethan Hunt.  Benji is both competent at the technical parts of the job but Pegg manages to infuse him with enough comedy to  lighten the films atmosphere.  William Brandt  (Jeremy Renner) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton) round out the team yet despite being given more back story than Benji  get less to do.

It’s Not a lot of effort goes into developing the villains whose actions drive the plot with little more justification than they’re a bit mad or are working for cash.

It is overall an enjoyable action movie – not a classic but good fun.

But is it a Mission Impossible film?

On the surface it has the trappings of a film based on the 1960′s TV show: the famous theme music runs over credits that feature glimpses of the action to come while a fuse burns down; there are face masks; there are missions that are impossible; the stakes are high; the secretary will disavow all knowledge etc etc etc.

The problem is these are elements borrowed from the series not what made it unique.  Week in week out they used to select a team of talented individuals, have a little fun as they showed the gear they’d use, then the stone cold operatives would go into action, overcome some unexpected happenings before Mission: Accomplished they’d ride into the distance.  I’ve not kept count but if the current IMF pull off more than 50% of their jobs then I’d be surprised.  At least in Ghost Protocol despite hints there aren’t any traitors in the IMF.

Oddly one of the elements of the movie I liked the most annoys me as being not MI.  Benji is good as the tech guy but he isn’t a Barney.  Barney would crack a joke in prep for a mission but on the job?  Speaking English, talking about how cool it is to be a spy while walking through the Kremlin?  Mission Impossible isn’t about characters who need to wise crack all the time.  Leave the one liners to Bond movies.   I’d actually like to see if Simon Pegg can play a straight role because I have a feeling he’d be pretty good at it.

Jane Carter is another case of not quite getting the original series.  I’m glad she can hold her own in a fight like her three male companions.  We’ve come a long way from heroines who couldn’t do anything in a fight via Buffy and Alias.  Carter shows us that she can fight in Dubai.  Yet if I was picking an MI squad I’d take Barbara Bain’s Cinnamon Carter.  Why?  Because in Mumbai she’d have tricked the guy into giving up the code for the satellite and done it with a ton of style.

Frankly I’d like to see the MIF showing a bit more brain and a little less brawn.   Not so much running around.  Fewer guns.  Fewer car chases.   By now the IMF should be getting disavowed.  And handed their P45s too and looking for jobs as MFI.

On the plus side the theme sounds like it’s in the correct time signature.  The infiltration of the Kremlin is pretty good till it goes wrong.  There are some nice references to elements of the original series dropped in.  This is also a smaller, lighter weight IMF at least after Ghost Protocol is invoked who can’t call tech support or the marines.  And they don’t throw a traitor in the MIF into the story.

So if you’re a fan of the original Mission Impossible series and were hoping for more than a bit of surface ephemera on an OK action film you may be disappointed.

One critic I saw pretty much said it was more of the same as Sherlock Holmes from 2010 as though that was almost a bad thing.  I’d say it’s a very smart move.  Its equal parts modern panto, action film and Sherlock Holmes redefined.  On a grander scale than Sherlock Holmes but without going to far over the top.

Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law keep the repartee going and both carry the action brilliantly too.  It appears such an effortless relationship that it gives space for the Moriarty / Holmes dynamic that drives the film’s plot.

Moriarty is delicious – a truly worthy performance to complement Robert Downey Jr as a villain to equal Holmes.  He’s not at all a moustache twirler but a subtle and balanced villain.  Stephen Fry’s Mycroft Holmes is used sparingly but brilliantly especially his nude scene.   He could probably carry a Quite Interesting film all of his own.

Rachel McAdams, Noomi Rapace, Paul Anderson, Kelly Reilly, Geraldine James, Eddie Marsan and every other character down to extras playing minor villains, street life and gypsies do a great job of supporting the core cast while in many cases bringing characters only briefly on-screen to life as more than punch bags for the leads.

The sound track is excellent and uses a fiddle to add pace.  There is just enough steam punk without going too far over the top.  The visuals are excellent and the use of camera focus on expansive visual effects shots of historic cities to draw the eye is beautifully used.  The slow motion style from the first film is reused to great effect in the action sequences.

Foreshadows wonderfully used.  Too often films foreshadow one thing with a lingering shot. This one plays with it wonderfully by layering foreshadowing with the obvious foreshadowing of some elements to distract from other foreshadowing more subtly set up for later.

The climatic chess game is a cliché setting up to a twist on Holmes working out a fight before it happens.

Twice they don’t show us the body.  The first time we hear her fall and Moriarty tells us Irene Adler is dead but all we see is a slightly bloody handkerchief.  When Holmes sniffs it could he have detected something that will be revealed in a sequel?   And of course there is the other  body we don’t see.

The only bad thing I could say about Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is that the title is a bit of a cliché.  I mean A Game of Shadows?  Try harder.  Sorry just kidding

So overall I really enjoyed this in fact I can’t think of anything bad to say about Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.  Great fun.

In the winter a slightly odd phenomenon sometimes happens when I do the rather mundane task of doing the washing up. When its cold outside and I fill the bowl with hot water steam produces tiny water drops all over the bar of soap on my window sill. I’ve normally only seen this at night but a few times I’ve found its happened late in the day. Tonight it was light enough to get a few photographs before the drops succumbed to gravity and ran into the soap dish.