• Review: Must Love Board Games

    From Roger Bell_West's autoposter@21:1/5 to All on Sun Dec 25 10:54:48 2016
    2016 short romantic comedy, dir. Travis Hedges Williams, Kacie Barnes,
    Tyler Grezaffi: [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6062150/)

    When Quinn meets David, she has to decide whether he is a worthy
    suitor: she knows the rules, just as she knows the rules of her
    favourite games. But he doesn't seem to be following them.

    Yes indeed, the core plot is thoroughly hackneyed. But it's used
    mostly as a skeleton on which to hang a series of board game parodies
    and call-outs, including _Betrayal at House on the Hill_, _Flash Point
    Fire Rescue_, _Pandemic Legacy_ and _Settlers of Catan_.

    One doesn't need to know the games to enjoy the film, though that's
    obviously its primary selling point: popular games tend to use easily-understood scenarios ("you're in a scary house, and one of you
    is a secret enemy"; "you're heroic researchers trying to stop the
    spread of a modern Black Death"), and it's clear what's going on even
    if you're missing some of the in-jokes.

    The cast is small and the acting is decent, particularly from the two
    leads; like most romantic comedies the viewpoint is primarily on the
    woman's side, but David isn't the usual bland patient perfection that
    this sort of thing can fall into, Quinn recognises and fixes her own
    faults rather than just bumbling along waiting for a man-shaped reward
    to fall into her lap, and both actors portray these subtleties
    effectively in ways that go beyond merely delivering the lines in a
    convincing manner.

    This is not world-shaking filmmaking, but it is freer of horrible
    mis-steps than most major releases, and I'd have been happy to spend
    more time with these people. The full film is available on [youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff9zbFCnTjs), as is a
    [blooper reel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F2FvfVZ8WY).

    https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2016/12/Must_Love_Board_Games.html

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)