Foreign Entertainment

Starting in 2005, filmmaker Keven McAlester set out to capture the lives of three people who have thrown themselves into the popular tabletop role playing game Dungeons and Dragons for his documentary The Dungeon Masters. We meet his three subjects at Gen Con, one of the biggest RPG conventions in the world and the official D&D convention in the United States. The early part of the film wanders around the Indianapolis Convention Center where the movie's three main figures stand out among the other self-identified geeks either because of their age relative to the average convention-goer or, in one case, because of an elaborate costume that keeps her in obsidian makeup all day. The film that proceeds is less about the complex ins and outs of D&D and more about how people grow to use it as a form of extreme escapism in difficult times. The three subjects (Elizabeth Reesman, Richard Meeks and Scott Corum) are used by McAlester more as stand-ins for some of America's troubled demographics than as representations of the average gamer.

As the trailer for The Dungeon Masters betrays, the documentary is about the slowly decaying state of middle America. Its interview segments are broken up by images of suburban parking lots, tiny apartments and worn roads. In Reesman's segments McAlester always makes sure to linger on shots of the eerily ravaged Gulf Coast, then still reeling from Hurricane Katrina and just a few years away from being awash in spilled oil. The Dungeon Masters isn't really a film of opinions. It doesn't put the blame for its subjects' difficult lives on any particular source and it doesn't posit any ready solutions. It also does its best not to mock them for their attachment to D&D, even though that would certainly be a temptation given the camera's definitively "outsider looking in" perspective. It does, however, imply reasons for why these three people play the game.

Elizabeth Reesman, a young woman who starts the film living in a motel after Hurricane Katrina effectively washed away her town, prefers to game in her Drow costume, an ensemble that includes a platinum wig, prosthetic elf ears and metallic black makeup that renders her nearly unrecognizable. The film spends a lot of time watching her apply the makeup, making it seem like a transformative ritual. Over the course of the movie, Reesman reveals that she's a survivor of an abusive marriage and one of many young Americans struggling to find work in a down economy. Her story ends up being the most reassuring. By the end she has escaped the motels and trailer parks of rural Mississippi, found a white collar job and started a relationship with a respectful man who shares her passion for costumed role playing. Their final scene together depicts them helping each other put on the Drow makeup that has, until that moment, seemed so lonely.

On the other end of the spectrum is Scott Corum, a chronically unemployed man from Torrance, California who spends most of The Dungeon Masters trying to get a fantasy novel published. There are a lot of tense scenes of Scott and his wife struggling in their marriage, as well as a fairly obvious, tragic arch in his attempts to publish the novel. He also puts together a Public Access show in the meantime. Corum is depicted as a loving father and a man who has humble but still difficult dreams.

The last subject, Richard Meeks, is a more complex individual and somewhat harder to like than Reesman or Corum. He's a man who uses his role as a game master to exact a sadistic amount of control over his players, which often puts him at a distance from his friends. In a particularly heartbreaking scene, he visits his stepson (whom he abandoned several years earlier) and who is now a firefighter who clearly wants very little to do with Meeks. Of all the players, Richard Meeks is the one most paralleled with addicts. Even though gaming is a destructive form of escapism for him, he can't bring himself to entirely let it go.

Keven McAlester's The Dungeon Masters is a sobering look into the lives of three Americans who, but for their gaming habit, are among the most average. At times depressing and occasionally uplifting, it's a casual slice of honesty in a genre that is all too often a format for political grandstanding.

These days, comic book adaptations get the A-list treatment. Major directors get attached to them early, big-name stars camp it up for big paychecks and their budgets are massive. They're either summer blockbusters like Spider-Man or they're arthouse films like Sin City and Watchmen. Even when they bomb they're given a fair shake in the initial marketing push. Such was not the case back in 1995 when Rachel Talalay decided to adapt the British punk comic Tank Girl for the screen. Back then comics got the same treatment as video games in the film industry. The result was a huge box office flop (grossing roughly $20 million less than the budget) and possibly even the derailment of an otherwise promising career for star Lori Petty. So, what was wrong with Tank Girl and what could have been done to fix it?

The first and biggest hurdle was its source material. Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett created the Tank Girl comics for Deadline magazine, a publication that rose out of the highly political pop culture scene of England in the 1980's. While the comics themselves aren't exactly mature or well thought-out, they have an anarchic appeal that's pretty thrilling in the context of the counter-culture in which it was born. It would be no small task even today to adapt Tank Girl properly. The first issue alone features a gang of mutant kangaroos, a tank parked upside down and a barbecue transformed into a bloodbath. Each panel is downright claustrophobic and there's really nothing cinematic about the text. Talalay took on a project that simply couldn't be done in 1995 and then made the mistake of bringing it to a major movie studio where its last spark of creativity would die a predictable death.

The other major problem with the Tank Girl adaptation is that it's at war with its own sense of time and culture. The comics and the style they promoted were inextricably tied to the punk art of the 80's. All the outrageous forms, busy panels and cavalier ultra-violence came out of a real sense of youthful anger and rebellion. Rachel Talalay aimed for something else entirely. Hers was a very 90's Tank Girl, a tech-obsessed and baldly optimistic celebration of style that doesn't even begin to earn its R-rating. It was meant to be as fun and inclusive as possible, which ultimately killed any chance it had at being a big middle-finger to, well, anything. In the end, Tank Girl has more in common with Spice World and Hackers than it does with Mad Max or Surf Nazis Must Die.

Tank Girl might have been saved if it had been 100% animated instead of being a mix of live action, animatronics and a brief, film-closing cartoon sequence. It still would have been a hard sell, though it probably would have thrived on the home video market along with other, equally irreverent movies of the era. It might have even been half as hip and clever as its soundtrack, a veritable who's who of alternative music in 1995. As a live action film, Tank Girl was destined to fail. It took Deadline magazine with it and ended Lori Petty's streak of high profile roles. This is what happens when you try too hard to be cool.