Derik Badman's Journal

Watched Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse yesterday afternoon. I'd seen it years before, but I didn't remember it well and something about Jean Seberg got me to rewatch. She was still a teenager when she made it, and the movie well plays up her immaturity. At first she seems a little more grown up than she is, but as the movie progresses (especially when maternal figure Deborah Kerr shows up) we see her childishness come to the fore, before she ends up as a kind of disaffected young adult. The whole thing is structured as a flashback with narration, where the time of the narration is filmed in black and white and the analeptic plot is in brilliant color. It's a clearcut device to showcase the depression and disaffection that we know most come as result of something in the past, but as such it is effective. The black and white sections have more narration too, which further distance the viewer from the characters and action in a way that nicely mirrors the narrator's (Seberg's character) distance from her own life.

Yesterday, I read a review of Laura Mulvey's Afterimages at Senses of Cinema which mentioned how Godard chose Seberg for Breathless because of Bonjour Tristesse which is probably what triggered me choosing that when browsing the Criterion Channel for something to watch. That same issue has a few short essays on Hiroshi Shimizu's movies, like this one on The Ornamental Hairpin_, which I've had on dvd for along time (in a Criterion set of Shimizu movies) but never watched, so I plan on watching that at some point this week (it stars Chishu Ryu of so many Ozu movies).

Just worked up a small hex map for Mausritter to start prepping for running that. The online Location generator was super helpful in that regard to quickly work up 19 hexes with a few landmarks and details. Now it's just a matter of adding some more details to a few of them (a number of the details ask questions), generate a few NPCs (also a generator), and make some connections between it all. The generators do surprisingly well in creating inspiration (of course the city next to the hex with the waterfall would have pigeon riders, how else would you get up and down cliff that must be there). There are also adventure site and hook generators that provide some more starting points. I don't expect we'll be started playing today (hopefully just character generation), so that will give me more time to work up a few more elements (maybe some factions, stock at least 1 dungeon of some kind). Even after all these years I'm still not always sure what I really need prepped for a session and what is just extraneous or something I'll only need later (if the game gets that far). The balance between given players choices and being prepared for those choices can be hard.