A Descent into Dullness

Brad Pitt seems to be finding a bit of a new niche as a WW-II guy.  Here as a Canadian pilot-turned British spy-pretending at start to be French.  Cotillard is pretty good throughout, but I kind of would like to see the story told entirely from her perspective.  As it is she really only gets to do some heavy acting right at the end.  I also would be interested in a movie about the character of Pitt's sister, an a British officer openly living as a lesbian during the Blitz.

Red or Retired: Extremely Dangerous. Referring in this case to former CIA operative Frank Moses (Bruce Willis). The high point of Frank's retirement is when he gets his pension check. Because then he can rip it up and claim it never arrived so that he has another opportunity to talk on the phone with his case worker, Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker). Of course when a wetwork team arrives at his house in the middle of the night that all ends. Now he's on the run with Sarah, marked for death and hunted by the CIA's new best agent William Cooper (Karl Urban). Luckily Frank still has a few friends from back in the day who are also "retired"...

A very fun action/dark comedy. Helen Mirren as an elite former MI-6 sniper, John Malkovitch's super-paranoid Marvin and Brian Cox's agent turned diplomat Ivan are especially high points. Plus there is just a great fight between Willis and Urban, a high point in a movie full of excellent action scenes...

Ugh. All bloated from eating too much chicken. Man I wish I could lie down. But since I'm at work might as well write out the next Character Creation post. This week, I break out my old, old (the copyright is 1980) copy of Top Secret. To start you use d100s to roll up Physical Strength, Charm, Willpower, Courage, Knowledge and Coordination. And then depending on how you roll you add a variable bonus to that...

So -
P.Str: 55 +10 = 65
Charm: 77 +5 = 82
Willpower: 52 + 10 = 62
Courage: 46 +15 = 61
Knowledge: 32 +25 = 57
Coordination: 87 +5 = 92

Witty and friendly and quick on his feet.

The next set of stats are all derived from the first set. Offense: 77, Deception: 72, Evasion: 87, Deactivation: 75, Life Level: 13, Movement Value: 119

My spy, who will be named..um..Lance..er..Fire..gate? Sure. Lance Firegate. Anyway I'll make him an American. Age and height are random. And Lance is short. Only 5'7". And 29. I'll make him black haired with steel grey eyes and weighing in at 163 lbs. Not sure how that would look on someone that short of course...

So with his Knowledge level, Lance gets 3 languages. His native (English) and two others. For English he speaks at a skill value of 97, and for the others (German and Russian) he scores a 1 and an 8. Since the lowest you can have to start is 40, both get bumped up to the minimum...

Lastly (well there is still gear, but I don't want to do shopping for these characters) is Superior Areas of Knowlege. These are things he knows more about than just the general info the stat gives him. His Know of 57 gives him six. I got 3 rolls for PC Chooses so I gave him Political Science/Ideoogy (55), Psychology (64) and World History/Current Affairs (67). The ranomly rolled ones end up being Photography (54), Home Economics (53) and Geography (98). So he's an ok cook and can fake taking pictures to use it as a cover and he's good with maps...

Wait, forgot one thing. Bureau. I've got three choices. Investigation, Confiscation and Assassination. I'll go with Investigation. So there we go. Low-level field analysist Lance Firegate. Or maybe tree. Firetree? No, we'll stick with gate...

Here again is my rpg list if any of you have any requests. Otherwise I guess I'll start working thru Terry's list...