Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is one of those movies you wish somebody would just shoot in the head so it would quit staggering around trying to eat your brains. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is like taking everything that is bad about a Paul W.S. Anderson movie and distilling all the good stuff away, oh wait…it isn’t like that, it is that.

Resident Evil opens just days after the first film finished, with our heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich) waking up after her first encounter with the evil T-virus and its creator, the Umbrella Corporation. The Umbrella Corporation has been secretly developing this virus, which brings dead people back to life in a secret underground facility called the Hive. After zombies in the first film overran the Hive, the Umbrella Corporation has decided to reopen the facility, allowing all the undead creatures inside to spill out into the streets of Raccoon City, where an entire population of people are waiting to become zombie food. The Umbrella Corporation decide it would just be easier to vaporize the entire city, so they seal off the entire city (which thankfully has only one entrance) and the only people left alive are a small band of police officers and civilians led by Alice. They are contacted by an Umbrella scientist who offers them a way out but only if they rescue his daughter who is also trapped in the city.

Director Alexander Witt is working off a script by the director of the first movie, Paul W.S. Anderson. In fact, he’s practically stolen Anderson’s entire playbook, yet seems to have only a minimal grasp of the source material and script. He uses Anderson’s trademark computerized maps to cut between scenes and works the entire movie like its just one big computer game, with characters bumbling about from location to location with no rhyme or reason and the bosses getting progressively harder as the story progresses. Additionally, the lickers, who were only briefly featured in the first film get only about an extra minute of screen time in this movie, which allows them to introduce: the Nemesis. Another product of the T-virus research, the Nemesis moves like Darth Vader, looks like something Todd McFarlane doodled in his spare time, and wears a black leather slicker out fit that looks like it was stolen from the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Oh, and he’s bulletproof too, which is a brilliant design innovation.

While most zombie movies usually revolve around themes of commercialism or societies that are losing individuality, Resident Evil: Apocalypse decides instead to focus on giant, evil corporations who own everything (Who released the original “Resident Evil” game? Oh, wait that’s right: Sony.) The only thing that saves this movie is Mike Epps, who has all the great lines and Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) wearing an outfit that that is definitely not standard police issue.

To put it simply: if you must go see only one zombie movie this year, wait for Shaun of the Dead. As for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the movie barely manages to pull enough entertainment to keep the masses from breaking into the theatre to eat the projectionist alive for making them sit through it.

Putting in the Hours

It is an oft-quoted statistic from Malcolm Gladwell's book “Outliers” that becoming an expert in any given field requires a devotion of at least 10,000 hours to that task. This September marks nine years of doing improvisation for me, so I thought it would be a fun experiment to see how well I was doing on reaching this goal. (I have purposely only included times when I was actively engaged in doing improv – watching doesn't count, but teaching does.)

So the first couple of years are the easy part, as I was only doing improv with the Stage Monkeys Hattiesburg chapter – I estimated from a sample school calendar at USM that there would be 15 weeks of practices, once every Thursday, for two hours each go, and I was in the group for four semesters (Fall '03 – Spring '05), and we did four total shows in my first year and six total shows in my second year (at two hours per show), so my first two years are thus:

[(15 x 2) x 4] + (4 x 2) + (6 x 2) = 140 (So far, so good.)

I also played with the Humorrhoids on the MS Gulf Coast, maybe 3 practices/shows, at 2 hrs per, so I'll add 6 to my total, bringing me to 146. From May '05 – December '05, no improv. It sucks, but it's less math at least. I moved back to Hattiesburg in Jan. '06, and played under the normal school schedule until May '07, so:

[(15 x 2) x 3] = 90 (bringing me to 236; and all of a sudden I realize how slowly this number is rising).

There were no extra shows during that period, so that's my total. June 2007, moved to Chicago, started doing iO once a week, 8 weeks per session, six sessions, 3 hours per, so:

6 x (8 x 3) = 144 (And I'm up to 380.)

I did a cage match for what I think was 6 weeks, which I'll say we actually improvised an hour per match, bringing me to 386. And we got together to do extracurricular practice maybe 10 times, two hours per, bringing me to 406, combined with a few iO electives (5 x 2 hours) gives me 416.

Now comes the fun parts; I started teaching the SD Monkeys the first week of June 2009, which was 3 years and three months ago, for a total of 168 weeks (2.5 hours per week), which I'll say I've probably missed 10% of which due to work, being out of town, holidays, giving me:

[168 – (168 x 0.1)] x 2.5 = 377.5 (and a total of 793.5 hours)

I did four levels of NCT classes, 6 weeks per level, 2 hours per week, so:

4 x 6 x 2 = 48

And 2 years, 9 months of NCT SunCo, (to which I'll apply the 10% miss rule) and 2 hours per practice:

[(2 x 52) + (9 x 4) – ((2 x 52) + (9 x 4) x 0.1) ] x 2 = 252

And 9 months of ROAR, (10% Rule), two hours per practice:

[(9 x 4) – ((9 x 4) x 0.1)] x 2 = 64 (And bringing the total to 1157.5 (four digit numbers, yay!))

I'll say that I was in, conservatively, an average of 1.5 shows per month of SunCo's run and maybe 6 shows of ROAR, an hour per:

(28 x 1.5) + 6) = 48

I've done 55 As Ink episodes, for a total of 27.5 hours of improv, five Barrel of Monkeys, which were likely around 12 hours of improv per, bringing me to 1293 hours.

Throwing in a few random teaching gigs, improv camp, LA improv fest workshops, I'd bring that section to a total of 150 hours (this is the part of my record keeping that is unfortunately guessing) and my total comes to 1393 hours. Including Partial Credit, Mike & Chris, and Fourth Date practices and performances, I'd throw another 75 hours, giving me a total of 1518 hours. I've taught a four week workshop run, and two a month for the period of January to June 2012, and one a week since then (two hours each), giving me:

(4 x 2) + [(6 x 2) x 2)] + [(3 x 4) x 2] = 56 (Up to 1574)

I've done Dinner Detective for 15 months now, averaging around 2 shows per month, of which I'll be conservative and say I've maybe improvised for 1 hour a night (given the scripted beats, and that I've done seated roles here and there), and I'll be generous and give myself an extra 10 hours to account for any shorter gigs I may have forgotten. Combined with four Simply Symbiotic gigs, with two hours apiece, it brings my grand total, for 9 years of improv to:

1622 hours.

That's it. Nine years, and I'm not even 1/5 of the way to being a virtuoso/expert/adept. Now, by my estimates, it would take five years of someone working 40 hours/week to reach this mark, and over the last 9 years, I have worked on my craft an average of ~3.5 hours per week (which actually sounds about right). Oh, well, time to keep improvising.

Camp

(Author's note: this was originally published on the Camp Improv Utopia blog in August of 2012.  It received some negative feedback (likely from the same people who are being called out for their actions in it) and was taken down.)

What I've been telling everyone since I got back from camp, is that my favorite thing about the weekend wasn't the workshops or the teachers or getting to do some camp activities (though those were all great, I should emphasize, as was the wonderful conclave of improvisers I met and the food we ate). No, my favorite thing was the energy – the attitude, as it were, of everyone there. A noncompetitive, supportive, and overwhelmingly positive view towards improv being a gift; one that we were all fortunate enough to have received and even more fortunate to get to give to others. Now this is a wonderful 'tude, but could it survive outside the confines of a place where we were all gathered under the banner of “CAMP”, which is to say, could it last when we got back to whatever jingoistic tendencies we had back in the real world?

So a little background here: the San Diego improv scene has been dominated by one theater for the last decade, and the people in charge there have firmly self-enthroned themselves as being the pinnacle of improvisation in the city. (And I know from talking to other people that this, or similar behavior, is not unheard of in other burgeoning communities too, but San Diego's where I'm at, so it's where my examples come from.) They have their own space, five shows a weekend, and a regular training center. However, the folks in command have also become petty, insecure, and elitist about their work – and it's this negative aspect I've most become concerned with. I didn't realize it until I had gone to camp, but I had been tainted with this negative attitude; a wary, watchful, and defensive eye to anyone else trying to do nearly anything. All attitudes are contagious, and bad attitudes are perhaps the most viral, and it wasn't hard to ascertain where the disease vector was.

It's unfortunate, more than anything, because the city has started to get a very strong, active improv scene in the last few years, run by people who I consider friends, even though they have a different team name from me. People who don't care what flag they march under, just so long as they get to march. Which, some people (including those at the above theater) interpret to be some indication of untrustworthy, disloyal, or even seditious behavior, but others just see as people just wanting to do and get better at something they enjoy doing. Part of the issue is that this problem group also likes to think of themselves as the solenoid who gets to decide who is and who is not worthy of getting to improvise because they see lesser productions as being a detriment to their image. They play improv as poker - however it's not; poker is a zero-sum game, where one player will walk away the victor with more chips than anyone else, at the expense of the other players. In a zero-sum game, the totals of losses and gains all add up to zero, but in improv, everyone can win. We can all walk away from the table with more chips if we want to.

I can't, unfortunately, claim innocence in any of this, this petty, uncouth behavior. This darkness seeps out into our community and it was only when I came into contact with people who don't think about how to take advantage of each other that I see how far I've dropped (an issue I've explored in previous blog posts: 00george.blogspot.com). I think of a line from the Monkees theme song in particular:

We're too busy singing/To put anybody down

Time spent infighting is time not spent improvising, and that is a true waste. And it really is sad, because together, we have the capability to accomplish so much more when we're not worried about stamping out those that are different from us. Diversity should be encouraged; research has shown that being welcoming of diversity is not only good because it makes us not monsters, but because it makes biological organisms stronger and less prone to disease, and makes organizations and systems more agile and flexible. On an artistic level, the more people working on a problem, the faster the problem is solved and the larger the variety of solutions.

Do those good vibes survive outside of camp? The answer is yes – but unfortunately a non-emphatic, qualified “yes”. I have forged some very strong bonds with members of the other “independent” groups; we go to each other's birthday parties, we congratulate each other on successful shows, we help get each other gigs when possible. I meet people all the time down here who are excited about improv and just want to “do”. I also meet a lot of people who have become disenfranchised by the haughty and non-supportive attitude, and the strategy is to either put up with it or distance yourself (and of course, others continue to embrace it, which is even more unfortunate). Ultimately, it is our responsibility to promote the kind of energy we want (to which I could quote an endless series of seemingly trite kitsch slogans like “be the change you want to see in the world”). At least we can take comfort in knowing that somewhere out there (maybe not even a place, maybe just a group of people), there's a spot we can be free to work and explore.

A Cult

People get really put off by the word “cult”; my group, the Stage Monkeys, when it originally started in Louisiana, was (and still is) called the Cult of the Stage Monkey, but when it moved to Mississippi, dropped the “Cult” part, because nearly all of the Miss is in the bible belt, and they don't take to kindly to that kind of talk down there. But improv is in general, a cult itself, and not just in the way that other folks have pointed out before (we make you pay money, we steal your time, we make you more open, emotionally bare weirdos), I mean we are a cult of personality.

Even outside of the near religious reverence of people like Del Close (who does have a shrine at the iO Chicago, for Del's sake) – we revere the people that are involved in it. There are certain people, whose personalities are magnetic – players we love watching, regardless of what show we're watching them in, in fact, we may even prefer to see them in low-concept shows so that we can just watch them. I'm as guilty of this as anyone; you tell me Greg Hess or Blaine Swen or Dave Hill or -stop the presses- Bill Arnett is in a show, and I'm there – I don't even care what they're doing. That's a cult of personality: the devotion of a group of people or community to a single person, based solely on the fact that they are them. A religion built on someone's persona.

Now, in contrast, I just started playing in a community band and noticed something that I had really forgotten about bands – the melding of disparate voices into one sound (“one band, one sound”, to use my Drumline parlance). It's really there in the name: band, ensemble, etc., you have a bunch of very different sounds, that all work together to create a song. Now some instruments are stronger than others (trumpet, trombone) in their big, splashy (often brassy) sounds, while others are cooler, more mellow instruments (saxaphone, clarinet) – but the point is that the entire sound of the group isn't derived from a single voice; it's all the tones working together that complete the sound – it is the very nature of the myriad instruments working together that you can make music. Sure, you can still play some songs without some instruments, but you need all of them working together (and in the right balance) or what you're playing isn't complete.

By the same token, it's important that groups of improvisers recognize the need to have a “complete” ensemble to make “complete” improvs. You can't have an orchestra made of just english horns, and you can't have an improv group made of just smart-witty improviser types. We often lose sight of this when recognizing good improv, in focusing on one particular solo, and forgetting that it was the tubas and bass clarinets that finished the picture. And I say this being well aware that being in two-man improvs, it is all about the cult of personality. Two people can't just be playing the bass line; they've gotta carry the melody and the harmony just to make the song go. You watch a two-man improv, and you buy into the cult of personality: you're saying that what these two people do is interesting enough to sustain your attention.

The Onion's AV Club pointed out in a recent article that rock is currently a post-decadence period: we built nearly the entirety of music (and movies, and a lot of other art) on the backs of artists. “A gross display of power” was how they put it; popular musicians with easy access to money, drugs, and women, and in a lot of ways, we celebrated them for it. Sure, we want them to put out good music, but we also want to see how outrageously oppulent their mansions were, although, the AV Club does point out that now being a “rock band” is discouraged among rock bands. Look at the virtual indiffference to film like I'm Still Here, that follows the faux-destruction of Joaquin Phoenix. These are artistic endeavors nearly more focused on the behavior of the people making it than what they're actually making.

But it's that exact same reason that I am always more impressed to watch a group of people put something together than I am to watch a two-man show, it's just plain harder. You get more people, you add more voices to the sound, which both makes the work harder and at the same time more complex, distinct, and diverse. You are no longer relying on two people to do a duet or an accompanied solo, you're watching the whole orchestra folding themselves into each other to create a rich ensemble piece. Which isn't to demean or diminish the work of a great duo of improvisers, as that has its own inherent difficulties, but its to say that there is a difference between a note and a chord. When you diminish the inherent power of the individual, you heighten the value of the collective – the group mind, or in this case, the group sound. But remember that your group is playing a chord, and every instrument should be utilized to fill it out.

007, The Ivory Tower, and the Common Man

Bond is in trouble again folks. We find our hero immobilized, as a slow and painful death creeps closer to him. The villain is goading over his impending victory, drawing it out – when just at the last minute, the jaws of death slowly withdraw and Bond is spared to go on and win the day.

Now the Bond villain speech has become something a mock-able trope in action movies – Jason Lee's Azrael, when prompted for a missing piece of the puzzle in the film Dogma states: “No no, I've seen way too many Bond movies to know you never reveal all the details of your plan, no matter how close you are to winning.” The TV Tropes entry on “Bond Villain Stupidity” lists just 12 entries for non-Bond films, but there are likely countless more out there. Now, there are some “legitimate” reasons why a villain might choose to keep an incapacitated hero alive, notably: the villain wants to break the hero's spirit, a good fight, to manipulate the hero, or get the hero to switch sides. For our purposes, we won't be considering these as the logic behind this death trap, because as we'll see, this villain monologuing is actually central to the allure of the character of 007.

We'll start with the central villain of classic Bond: Ernst Stavro Blofeld, if only because he is the supposed head of SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion), a key villain in at least three movies, and the mastermind behind the murder of James' wife. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service (OHMSS) – we discover two key facts about Blofeld and Bond's respective lineages, specifically their family mottoes: Blofeld's is “Of Heights and Soaring”, whilst Bond's is “The World is Not Enough” (which eventually became the title of a 1999 film installment in the series, TWINE). Blofeld's family motto here underlines a character trait that is common among all Bond villains; megalomaniac-ism and vanity. One thing could be considered fairly standard for a Bond villain, they don't dream small, from volcano lairs (You Only Live Twice, YOLT), to plains to kill every person on earth from a space station (Moonraker) and complicated impersonation plots (Diamonds Are Forever and Goldeneye). But more importantly, Bond villains are more than regular people, they are geniuses, shrewd businessmen, clever manipulators of people, politically and socially well connected, and oftentimes rich, which doesn't even include those villains (such as TWINE's Renard) who are also superhuman in physical ability (in Renard's case, that he couldn't feel pain).

Now Bond's family motto seems to suggest a certain haughtiness and arrogance, but yet can also have a secondary interpretation. In the film TWINE, the villainess tries to coax 007 by saying that she could have given him the world, and he replies with his saying that “the world is not enough”. In 007's eyes, a world's worth of physical, tangible possessions is insufficient, so what is enough? Bond is repeatedly presented in the books as a “civil servant” for Her Majesty's government, while he does have a housekeeper (May), he has few luxuries as possessions (outside of a car), and doesn't even have access to London's elite gentleman's clubs, requiring M to gain admittance for work in the novel “Moonraker”. Bond is a man of pleasures bending into the intangible: honor, loyalty, ingenuity. Bond is an English gentleman, but one with a blue collar upbringing: his father worked for the arms company Vickers, his parents died in a climbing accident, he was raised by an Aunt, and while he did get high-end education from Eton and Cambridge, he went there under scholarship (a point which is emphasized in Casino Royale, and which results in a fair degree of resentment for the character as portrayed by Daniel Craig). Bond is an everyman; he has little property, lives comfortably at home, but not lavishly, but can proffer his duty in service of his country.

Bond and his villainous counterparts represent the central dichotomy of elitism versus populism. Other than the post-Dalton films, most of the villains are not presented as seeming “regular” - they are smarter than the everyman, but they are also presented as fairly androgynous: they don't have girlfriends, wives, or even lovers, and the few female sub-villains that do exist are also androgynous: Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love (FRWL), May Day in A View to a Kill (AVTOAK), and the ones that are overtly sexual use physical attraction either as a weapon (Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye) or with passive disinterest (Elektra King in TWINE). Bond on the other hand, appreciates the passion and touch of a beautiful woman, the roar of the engine in a fast car, and the taste of fine drink. Now, one could see a hangup with this reading – the tuxedo is, after all nearly as synonymous with 007 as a shaken martini, and almost unavoidably the symbol of wealth and privilege, and still for Bond it is a disguise more than anything, and perhaps more importantly, a sign of 007's capacity of to blend and adapt – essentially his world-knowledgeableness. Bond can effortlessly go to any spot on the planet and is as informed as any local (Bond in The Living Daylights after he and Kara Milovy narrowly escape a crashing airplane: “I know a great restaurant in Karachi. We can just make dinner.”), he is the ultimate everyman – at home everywhere, and street smart, not book smart.

This conflict between suits and shirts is no new one; I think of the recent song “Red Solo Cup” by Toby Keith which has the line: “And Freddie Mac can kiss my ass” (though the entire song is a plaudit of the proletariat, and a condemnation of the snooty elite). Toby Keith has not had to worry about money issues for quite a while, but he is still appealing to his fan base, which is hard-working, appreciates simple pleasures, and harbors resentment for suits who get rich without breaking a sweat or getting their hands (or three piece suits) dirty. When Goldfinger, or Blofeld, or Mr. Big, lords over Bond, who is precariously situated in a death trap, what we're really seeing is an allegory of the regular everyday man: competent, capable, hard-working, but appreciative of simple pleasures, versus the characterization of the elite: morally hollow, erudite to the point of arrogance, and overdeveloped beyond the point of humanity. Bond wins because of his human-ness more than anything else, and the villains again prove their vanity by believing that they are more than human and somehow better.

The Right Way or the Highway

“If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it isn't.” - Crimes and Misdemeanors

I was asked a question recently that quite dramatically shone a light on strange dichotomy in improv that I had (until that moment) never noticed, but now seem to see everywhere. Here are the two dicta of improv that are at the root of all the trouble:

1. Play the reality. If you want to leave a room, do it. If someone is acting crazy, say it.

2. Raise the stakes. Increase the tension, the consequences, and the frustration with every move.

The way I see it (to back up a few steps), goes all the way to back to basics. Now, full disclosure, I am a hardliner populist when it comes to improv, which means that I think anyone can improvise, because, well, really anyone can. The absolute definition of improvisation is to “do without prior preparation” - which means every single person on the planet improvises everyday; when you walk out of house in the morning, you encounter a dynamic world, one that would be impossible to accurately predict every last encounter of to make a complete plan. In effect, we improvise every action we do that is not pre-rehearsed, from driving your car (because the traffic patterns will have to be adapted to) to talking on the phone (because we have no idea what Becky said about Amber, but we'll need to figure out how we feel about it in the moment) – though these are, arguably, fairly simple tasks that some presets to them (we know how to drive the car, and we know whatever is going on with Becky and Amber based on past experience). But in terms of theater, whenever anyone steps on stage on does something that is not pre-written, rehearsed, or practiced – it is improvised. As a result, literally anyone can improvise by the mere act of going on stage and doing/saying something.

Now, that's an awesomely populist framework, but anyone who's ever seen or done improv knows that there is a difference between good and bad, and enjoyable and un-enjoyable improv (much as there is for really any human endeavor). There's no questioning that a talented and experienced improviser can create something more interesting and watchable than someone who is not those things. The difference here is simple – anyone can improvise, but not everyone can improvise well.

The context of the question I was asked was during a scene in class; I was lecturing how one player just seemed to kind of take the punishment of another character without really reacting to it, and the student's response was simple – he didn't understand how to play the scene truthfully (he said that with the character acting as he was, he just wanted to leave) and also how to have a good scene. In real life, when someone acts strangely, it's true that most people would just leave (or maybe try to see what was wrong with them), but this makes for boring scenes. We go watch theater because we want to see people doing the things we can't do in our lives (because of the consequences, often), but still acting human (because not reacting to a crazy person is, well, crazy). It's the difference between just improvising, and improvising well. A good improviser knows how to carefully play with the balance between adding the strange or ridiculous, while at the same time keeping the reality alive (often in the form of emotional reactions).

Just as any improviser can improvise and doing it well requires striking that balance, it should be though of this way:

1. There is no wrong way to improvise.

2. There are, however, some ways that work better, and make the work more interesting.

(Writ another way: there are strong choices, and there are weak choices.)

Ultimately, this is the long-term goal of teaching improvisation (and comedy, in general): to learn the very distinct line between playing the reality and playing the dramatic scene. And there is a very fine division between knowing when to deploy “playing it real” and “upping the drama”. Learning the fine points, and the often very subtle intricacies of a scene, and when to deploy which one is what distinguishes a good improviser from a great improviser. There are few, if any hard rules, but being an artist is knowing when to follow the preexisting rules, and when to break them; when to leave the room, and when to stay.

Frozen Stakes

Improvisers talk a lot about stakes, which, in my effort to de-mystify a lot of terms that get used, but are not well defined, will be part of this essay's topic. What stakes are is a very ambiguous thing to define, so it's easier to think of them as “what's at stake”, rather than remaining nebulous. In gambling terms for instance, we talk about the stakes being what's at risk; what has been wagered is what you stand to lose or win based on the outcome of whatever event is being bet on. Now when we talk about stakes in improv scenes, so what is your improv director actually looking for? The improv stakes are just the same as in a chance game (when really, isn't improv a chance game anyway – in that we don't know the outcome at least) – what is this character risking in the scene? A character has to have something in danger of being lost, and that thing has to have personal or emotional weight; as in the loss of this thing is of interest, involvement, concern or share to to the person in question.

Okay, easy enough; so we know what stakes are, so it's pretty easy to see why they need to be there. If the two characters in a scene don't have anything at risk (or things at risk they don't care about), then they don't have any investment in the outcome and won't fight to win, and the struggle is where the drama is at. Compare these three scenes:

[A] Ralph has taken Martin's car on a Tuesday night. Martin is okay with that, because he wasn't going anywhere that night, he stays home and watches T.V.

No stakes, nothing at risk, right?

[B] Ralph has taken Martin's car on a Tuesday night. Martin really needed to run some errands that night, but now can't and will have to do them on Wednesday instead. This will cause him to be late for a meeting, which he kind of wanted to go to.

All right, something at stake here, but the problems are relatively easily solved.

[C] Ralph has returned Martin's car on a Friday night completely totaled. To top that off, Martin had a date scheduled that night with Stacy, a girl he really likes, and now he will be late to meet her at the restaurant and his car is destroyed.

Now we've got some stakes – Martin stands to lose the girl of his dreams (I'm editorializing him here a little) because Ralph took the car and wrecked it. Martin stands to lose something that he had at risk (and has lost something else, which may lead to confrontation with Ralph) and it's something he really cares about. Stakes we see, really have one important dimension – importance. Example:

[A] Will loses a plastic sword he used to play Knights and Dragons with. Now with no sword, he plays Cops and Robbers instead.

[B] Sir William loses the Sword of Destiny in a battle, and now cannot defeat the evil dragon.

Option A feels anti-climactic, because there is no consequence to the loss. B feels like the start of a story because there is already a lot at risk.

So stakes are the result of a) someone risking something, and b) the something has to have importance to the character (it should be noted that the stakes don't have to be world-ending, just world-ending for that character). I, for example, am a boring gambler. I don't like the idea of losing money (or at least a lot of it), so when I bet, which is rare to begin with, I don't bet much. The last time I gambled, I put a total of $30 on the line, which is a risk, but doesn't really have a lot of importance to me, and thus would make a very boring scene. Now, had I bet $30,000, then we're getting somewhere. Make that 30 grand the property of a notorious gangster because I was trying to impress a girl, and we're really getting somewhere good. The sub-dimension of stakes, we now see, are consequence. The loss of $30,000 if a I'm a millionaire may have some importance, but if there is no consequence, then the stakes are lost again. The audience needs to feel the risk that a character losing will be important, and have effect to that person. Heightening the stakes, then, are just putting more on the line – the bigger the bet, the bigger the odds; win or lose.