Safe is a film that tells you pretty much everything you need to know in the title.  It’s like one of those dishes that used to turn up on Great British Menu where an ingredients done Three Ways.  It’s a Safely handled action film, in which Statham’s character has to keep a girl Safe and that will feature at some points feature Safes.

The plot is pretty safe; it’s been around the block a few times over the years.  To its credit it manages to use that apparent predictability to have a little fun now and again.  The opening is quite brave slow cooking the situation with a series of moments in the lives of the main characters before finally bringing them together rather than launching straight into the action.

After that Safe goes down the action route all the way.  It has some gun fights.  It has some fist fights.  It has a car chase. It doesn’t have any particularly unbelievable stunts:  the most unbelievable one I can think of is on a par with the Borne Identity.  The application of a Borne styling and solid cinematography to the film gives helps it avoid slipping into unsafe action flick waters.  You know the ones – waters occupied by dodgy JKVD or Steven Segal movies – where it’s hard to date the film because they all look dated.

The acting is Solid from a supporting cast.  Thankfully there aren’t any big names or acting heavyweights that leave you with the feeling they turned up, took the money and didn’t work very hard for it.  Jason Statham plays this part pretty much as he plays all his parts – through one liners and physical performance.  He hasn’t quite reached the point in his career where he does a Jackie Chan and all his characters are called Jackie but if he keeps going the way he is it’s only a matter of time.

Safe is an entirely safe action thriller.  Better than Killer Elite, Blitz and on a par with The Mechanic.  Fun but not a classic.

Sea Odyssey Uncle and little Girl Giant with Liverpool Cathedral in the background (click to enlarge)

The third and final day of Sea Odyssey in Liverpool today.  I’d planned on having a lie in today but  I found myself there before it started. The weather was terrible with freezing wind coming off the Mersey and rain sheeting down. Despite that got some good pictures of the sleeping pair and once they woke up. Ineffectual marshalling then sent me and a fair section of the crowd down into the Albert dock where all the exits had been blocked or in the case of the bridge to the three graces removed. Got back onto the Strand ahead of the procession and watched them round the three graces. The crowds were now so big that I abandoned trying to get any more pictures. I did find a spot where I might have seen them sail off up the Mersey but it would have ment waiting for two hours on a rather exposed bit of the waterfront. Rapidly decided that I wasn’t that keen. Made my way back and watched them sail out of the Albert Dock (or to be more precise the top of Uncle and Little Girl’s heads). As I left to head home around 12:30 the crowds were still growing and people were still heading down to the waterfront from the City Centre.

Sea Odyssey has been an excellent event and great fun.

Sea Odyssey Little Girl Giant in front of Liverpool Town Hall (click to enlarge)

Rushed round to get my Saturday chores done early then into Liverpool city centre for the second day of the Sea Odyssey. Picked up the Little Girl Giant and her dog as they went along the Strand. Decided to cut across the city centre to further up the route and got a good spot to see them really close up. Cut through some of the back streets then along the very crowded route and found a spot up by the Crown Court where a slight rise gave me a bit of a height advantage to see her over the heads of the crowd and the Council House would be in the background. She paused just before the corner and I waited longer than I’ve ever waited to take a picture before (now I have a little bit of an idea of what wildlife photographers waiting for that perfect shot must go through). Patience was rewarded with the picture of her above.

Despite best intentions to take less pictures today than yesterday came away with nearly 400 shots. I’ll go through them and pick a few to make a gallery sometime. I’d post one of the dog I really like but it needs some serious photo manipulation to remove the face of someone who looks like they just tasted something sour from the background.

Sea Odyssey Uncle Liverpool April 2012 (Click to Enlarge)

Took a late lunch today and went down to the Albert Dock in Liverpool to see the emergence of Uncle which is one of the giant figures performing throughout the city as part of Sea Odyssey this weekend.  Took over 300 photographs in less than 45 minutes and reducing them down to a few to post is a bit much of a task for a Friday night.

Picked this one out – with all the Police around Uncle as they went past the entrance to the Albert Dock I couldn’t help imagining a little exchange going on down on the Strand…

Sergeant: “Sir”

Inspector: “Yes Serg?”

Sergeant: “I don’t think kettling him’s going to work!”

Safe House looks like Bourne.  Safe House smells like Bourne.  Safe House even tastes like Bourne.  But Safe House is missing that meaty Bourne texture.  Yes ladies and gentlemen Safe House is The Quorn Identity.

Weston (Ryan Reynolds) and Frost (Denzel Washington) are, if I take my beef bourguignon analogy a bit too far, the red wine is the sauce.  Yet they don’t have the chemistry of Matt Damon and Franka Potente – they aren’t a fine Burgundy.

Like Bourne Safe House has a heavy weight supporting cast: Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Liam Cunningham, Robert Patrick and Sam Shepard.  It has the distinctive look Oliver Wood brought to a certain trilogy.

What lets Safe House down is the plot.  It just doesn’t have a lot of plot to chew on.  The mystery around who the bad guys are, the Weston’s romance and the tenuous threads holding the plot together are all a bit contrived.  It tries to replace the meat of plot with its action which is done well but isn’t sadly enough beef to turn this film into beef bourguignon.

If you switch off your brain Safe House is an enjoyable enough action film but it’s not classic French stew.

First Encounters of a Sausage Roll Kind

I remember when I was a student describing them as napalm wrapped in crispy cardboard.  If you eat it hot the pastry is crunch but the filling will burn the roof off your mouth.  Wait for the filling to cool and you risk the pastry goes fatty on the bottom.  Leave it to go cold and you risk the pastry going soft.  The filling is a strange sort of texture free, pink material that has been waved past pork at some point in its creation.

Sayers Sausage Roll

Wikipedia

Wikipedia in a meat related stub says

“A Sausage Roll is a type of savoury pastry commonly served at parties and available from bakeries and milk bars as a take-away food item. Originating from the United Kingdom, it is also very popular in the Republic of Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, and the Netherlands.”

History

Now Sayers is a Liverpool institution founded a hundred years ago with 150 odd shops in the North West.  When I arrived in Liverpool it was the dominant bakers across the city.  If you needed something to eat and didn’t know of a better shop nearby you could at least guarantee a Sayers nearby and that the food would be just like every other Sayers.  In any busy row of more than a dozen shops the odds would be on there being a Sayers.  Often there would be two one toward each end of a row of shops.

Then came Greggs.

Greggs spread across the city as they’ve spread across the country.  Sayers faced real competition:  Greggs shops were more modern, the food a tiny bit more expensive, a tiny bit more modern and the food a tiny bit more exotic.  It divided people: do you eat at Greggs or at Sayers?  I’ve seen family groups go into both a Sayers and a Greggs to get sausage rolls.

Greggs Sausage Roll

Market Research

I did a quick survey of Sausage Roll availability at the shops near where I live.

Iceland Sausage Roll

The Science Bit

Well sort of the science bit.  OK its completely unscientific.  A sample of sausage rolls were bought from each seller for measurement, tasting and dissection.

Sausage Roll Length Comparison

The Sausage Roll Disections…

Greggs Sausage Roll Cross Section

Iceland Sausage Roll Cross Section

Sayers Sausage Roll Cross Section

Taste and Crumble Test

It was a dirty job but someone had to do it.  I tasted all three sausage rolls.  Its been some time since I’ve had a Sayers sausage roll: it seemed to me the filling has been improved.  Less like a vaguely flavoured napalm mousse and more like lightly spiced sausage meat.  I couldn’t really say there was a significant difference between the Sayers and Greggs sausage rolls.  The Iceland one had a spicier filling but was generally as palatable.

The most noticeable difference was the pastry.  The Sayers pastry was slightly crublier than the Greggs while the Iceland one had a more robust puff pastry possibly engineered to survive transportation better than the others.

An Outsiders Perspective?

Working on the edge of Liverpool’s Cavern Quarter there are tourists about all year round.  I was walking past a Sayers last week and I overheard a conversation between two tourists.  I’m not going to try and reproduce it word for word but more in spirit…

Japanese Tourist “What is a Sayers sausage roll?”

American Tourist “A sausage roll is a traditional British street food delicacy.”

Japanese Tourist “Yes but what is a Sayers sausage roll?”

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.