Derik Badman's Journal

Woke up at 5:20 this morning, I think I'm going to sleep too early at night. Though it was nice to get out walking and there were less people and cars about. Also I managed to watch a whole (not very long) movie over breakfast/coffee and it's still not even 8:30.

I watched Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper, the fifth of his movies I've watched in the past few weeks, and the third movie with Kristen Stewart (two of which were Assayas'). This one was a little more of mixed genre than the others, which have mostly been realistic quiet dramas. This one has a bit of a supernatural horror/suspense thing going on over top of the more realist drama. According to the reviews a lot of people seemed to not like this one, I think because if you expect a normal horror/suspense movie you are not going to get it, on the other hand if you are expecting something like The Clouds of Sils Maria, you get something with ghosts or spirits.

It starts off with a kind of haunted house motif, a young woman going to spend the night by herself in an empty house, and then just a glimmer of light behind her at one point that you can write off easily. But as it goes on the house becomes less important and the supernatural becomes less ignorable, and then there's a crime element that makes use of the supernatural. But it's not the supernatural as, diagetically, real, rather it's via a faked supernatural element used by one of the characters. That's a fairly interesting aspect of the whole thing, the way the supernatural is both real and fake. It's not like a Scooby Doo mystery where in the end it was just some person tricking people, but on the other hand, the worst stuff that happens in the movie is not because of the supernatural. And not unlike many ghost stories, it is also a good bit about mourning, both literally and metaphorically.

Last night we watched Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon with Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, and Henry Fonda. It too felt a little genre bending, in that ended up being a rather straight up "woman's picture"/drama but had at times this noir-ish look and feel (there were certainly times in it I was expecting that someone was going to murder someone else). But it oddly, ended up in rather happy ending. There's a love triangle and weirdly everyone is mostly calm and rational and the woman gets to make her decision, and the guy that seems to be an asshole isn't the one she picks.

Finished up the Mausritter adventure on Sunday, after three sessions. I like the simple rules, not sure the particular genre/setting is super exciting long term, but we'll see how everyone else feels. For now I think we are going to play some more cyberpunk run by Eric this time using his variation on the Mirrorshades rules, which is rules light but not as light as Mausritter/Into the Odd, and Eric made it less light by adding extra classes and extra rules elements.