Rented Taken this evening. I kept hearing good things about it.

If you haven’t seen the film by now it’s probably because the “super-spy father saves abducted daughter” genre isn’t your thing. I can understand that. What’s neat is that this film does a great job of putting the hero in crisis situations.

Sure, you expect the hero to fight more effectively than the bad guys. You expect him to track more effectively than they hide. He’s a super-spy, after all. You know he’s going to live, right? But the three real crises the film provides work around that.

Spoilers follow. But it’s been on DVD for a while now, so I’m declaring us to be beyond the statute of limitations. No LJ-cut for you!

Crisis #1: He’s too late. That’s our biggest fear, right? Well… he can’t be too late to save his daughter or the film becomes pointless. So he’s too late to save the friend. I saw this coming, but it was still well-done.

Crisis #2: He has to do something unthinkable in order to progress. I thought this was going to be the torture scene, but I was wrong. The unthinkable thing he does is shoot an innocent woman at the dinner table in order to get her corrupt government official husband to talk. He doesn’t kill her, but he threatens to. This I did not see coming, and it added a measure of depth to the character that was equally unexpected. The hero really is a horrible person… but we still want to see him win.

Crisis #3: He gets captured. This is obvious, we all expect it and see it coming, and I even predicted exactly when it would happen (within two minutes of him finally finding his daughter) but it was still effective.

Lessons here? Well… if you want to crank up the tension, find good crises for your heroes. If you can be unpredictable, great. If not, try to take the expected crises and deliver them in unexpected ways. This film pretty much delivered exactly what it said it would, and had very little to offer in terms of plot complexity, but still worked because of how nicely the crises were executed.

From this CNN article:

A new study commissioned by the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs recommends a complete ban on tobacco, which would end tobacco sales on military bases and prohibit smoking by anyone in uniform, not even combat troops in the thick of battle.

According to the study, tobacco use impairs military readiness in the short term. Over the long term, it can cause serious health problems, including lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. The study also says smokeless tobacco use can lead to oral and pancreatic cancer.

I read the entire article and never saw what friends of mine with military backgrounds have told me repeatedly: if you smoke, you get more break time.

“Hey sarge, I’m gonna go light one up. Back in ten minutes.”

And you’re off. You’re still on the clock, you’re still technically “on duty,” but you’re taking a paid break. And it’s only available to smokers.

“Hey sarge. I’m gonna go lean against that wall with my hands in my pockets. Back in ten minutes.”

That’ll probably get you laughed at or worse.

Now I’m sure this will differ from unit to unit, base to base, deployment to deployment, and branch to branch. Please! If you read this and have military experience, I’d love to hear your take on it.

If it’s as broadly true as I’ve been anecdotally led to believe then the military has one more really good reason to ban smoking – it will increase productivity.

Of course they should then employ some decent management practices so that the overworked, undercompensated men and women in uniform can find healthy ways to decompress, blow off steam, take five, or whatever. Because let’s face it… whether or not you smoke, sometimes you just need to take a break.

My friend Tex, a regular at Dragon’s Keep, is on Facebook. We friended each other, and then about a week later I got a Facebook message from him de-friending me.

“Sorry, man. You tweet so often I can never see anybody else’s updates because they’ve scrolled off the bottom.”

This, believe it or not, is the very first time anybody has told me they can’t be my friend because I talk too much.

So I explained to Tex that he can hide my updates by checking a little box. This way he can tune me out and still be my friend.

(Note: I suspect that this is what all my friends do in real-life.)

Our friend and fully-compensated minion-manager Janci Patterson ran an RPG last night at Dragon’s Keep. The rule-set was “World of Darkness.” The setting? Dragon’s Keep, July 3rd, 9:00pm, in the Utah we know… only faced with zombies. The characters? Us, as ourselves. Me, Drew (Janci’s husband and business partner), Timothy and Rebecca, Tim, Jared, and Big Mike. Oh, and my 14-year-old daughter.

It turns out I’m a fairly robust RPG character. Good firearm experience, solid knowledge of the lay of the land and back routes, and healthy enough to keep up. Most of us were probably a dot or two overpowered in places and I’m sure I was no exception, but the stuff you know how to do by the time you’re 40 actually does count for something in games like this.

Game play began at around 8:00pm and ran with a few breaks until about 6:00am. The Keep was full of people until 1:00am, and downtown Provo had people camping along University Avenue all night in anticipation of the parade in the morning (which, following the game, I decided I would love to miss. So I drove me and mine home before the road closed.)

In-game, in a nutshell… there was a big crash, and we realized that there were dead people coming into the store. Hasty barricades and improvised weapons kept us alive long enough to get to cars. We zombie- and traffic-clogged roads prevent us from getting to Jared’s house and his firearms, so we settled for my house (and MY firearms.) Another stop for ammo and supplies (Jared’s Mom’s place) led to our first real combat. We all lived. From there we headed up the canyon to this place I know, a place that is pretty defensible. Except when it’s being swarmed by big stitched-together conglomerations of undead.

Still, all of us except Timothy lived. Timothy died once, and then undied a second time. It was sad. We almost lost the whole group, but the zombies rolled badly during those last three rounds, and I managed to get behind them with a semi-automatic shotgun and a pair of assault pistols while their attention was focused on trying to finish off the other party members (two of whom were unconscious.) And then morning came and the dead stopped being undead. No explanation for why. Life’s like that. Apparently so is un-life.

It was an intense play session. So intense, in fact, that my daughter decided to bail out and play a different RPG upstairs with Bob and Gary and friends. We gave her a happy ending early — the life-flight pilot came to get his wife near Jared’s Mom’s place, and had an extra seat, so Kiki flew to safety before the real fighting started. In that game she played some buccaneer sharp-shooter, popping off the guys with the fancy hats as the ships closed with each other. Oh, and apparently she accidentally seduced her way through Port Royal. I’m going to have to talk to her about that when she wakes up…

Speaking of which, I’m not as young as I used to be. That all-nighter was draining. I suspect I’m ruined for any sort of thinky work until Monday at the earliest.