"Accomplishments"
In theaters: The second lesbian crime period piece of 2024, Love Lies Bleeding is Drive Away Dolls' dramatic counterpart. It features a solid performance by Kristen Stewart, but most notably, Katy O’Brian as the bodybuilder she falls in love with. O'Brian has played action characters in superhero and sci-fi fare, but it still feels like we never see people like her in movies except it's as some kind of Amazonian henchperson. Here, she's a fully-realized person, caught in a web of crime and violence when she steps into a micro-town run by a truly evil Ed Harris on her way to a bodybuilding competition. She finds love too, but as things start to go awry... Well, that would be telling, and I do find the movie has a lot of nice, organic twists that keep it surprising. Also, some hallucinatory material, which could be seen as tonal inconsistency at times (like when it feels like a She-Hulk prequel) - certainly, members of the audience seemed taken out of the story by them - but I rather like the flights of fantasy even if they break from the extreme grittiness of the flick overall. It's not like they come out of nowhere... There are POV cues all throughout!
At home: Nicole Holofcener's exploration of the white lie in You Hurt My Feelings stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies as a surprisingly cute couple tested when she (a struggling novelist) discovers he (a struggling therapist) doesn't like her writing despite always fawning over it. This is the crisis point for them, but it's not the film's true focus and certain audiences may get impatient waiting for the trailer-promised moment. It's rather more about about what constitutes dishonesty, and how both ends of the honesty spectrum can be good or bad depending on intent and situation. We get this through an accumulation of moments between the protagonists and their family and professional interactions. My own conclusion isn't so much that it's okay to lie to spare someone's feelings (and it's not the film's either), but rather that people tell white lies because they are conflict-adverse. We lie to avoid awkward situations, mostly. But in this amusing, yet emotional (I think Louis-Dreyfus in particular is incredibly strong) dramady, Holofcener is keen to show that not all honesty is brutal, nor every white lie benign. There is a toll to pay either way.
I'm not convinced Funny Pages really comes together all that well, but I do appreciate that it doesn't cheat in its portrayal of its specific subculture. A teenage cartoonist interested in underground and indie comics loses his mentor and desperately adopts another who turns out to be unhinged. The movie is filled with oddball characters and cringy moments, especially in the kid's terrible first apartment. The idea, I think, is to make his life feel like one of those biographical indies, and indeed, the incidents wouldn't feel out of place in the oeuvres of Harvey Pekar or Chester Brown. So can I resent a film that sets itself up as a coming of age story then subverts it, when it expressly states up front that it's going for a subversive vibe? I can't. But like the "subversion" actually referenced, the result is unconvincing and for its own sake. I recognize what it's trying to do, and can't figure out where it's going (a good thing), but for me, it's a case of the individual parts being stronger than the whole.
Sean Baker's interest in real people - using a lot of non-actors, fully-realized places because they ARE real places, etc. - takes an ironic turn in Red Rocket, in which a desperate porn star (Simon Rex) goes back home to rural Texas in the summer before the 2016 election. The politics are just background color, but echo the lead's attitudes. The un-self-aware "Mike Saber" is on the cusp of a comeback, or so he believes, hoping to make his life great again by using the 17-year-old he's fallen for and who he thinks would make a great porn star despite her often saying she wouldn't want to. he sees this as virtuous even as he lambastes his friendly neighbor for stolen valor shenanigans. Mike doesn't even know he's a hypocrite. This is the section of America Baker is showing us, one that's so far up its own righteousness, it's in deep denial about its own wrong-doing. Saber is real pill, but Rex's energetic performance makes it go down more smoothly. He's a scumbag, but he's bad at it, so you can enjoy rooting for him to fail. Suzanna Son as his prey/love interest Strawberry is very charming. The rest of the cast is naturalistic and real.
In 2020, the United States had just gone through a rough patch (ongoing), so stories about pursuing the American Dream made around this time are going to be bleak. Lee Isaac Chung's Minari takes place in the 80s, but same difference (mentioning Reagan is, I take it, not incidental). A Korean family moves to Arkansas looking for a fresh start and seem to always be heading for disaster. Steven Yeun (Beef, Nope) is the head of the family trying to keep everything together, but he's tilling land that's marked as cursed and the Biblical undertones layered into the film should make us wary even when disaster is averted. An immigrant story that isn't too concerned with systemic racism, Minari has a lot of great performances and strong representation for Asian-Americans, but I don't know if the story really gels for me. There are many elements at work - including an important thruline about the young, sickly boy bonding with his grandmother - and I'm left thinking I just watched an out-of-context chapter in the characters' lives, one that ends abruptly and cruelly. It's naturalism in the literary sense and that was never my favorite mode. Too depressing.
Park Eun-bin is amazing in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, playing a rookie lawyer with autism spectrum disorder navigating a difficult professional world and a timid and wholesome potential romance for the first time in her life. I've seen trailers of other things she's been in and she's frankly unrecognizable here as the open-faced (and open-hearted) Woo Young-woo. Obviously, this is a fiction, and her awkwardness is counter-balanced by a photographic memory when it comes to the law. Still, the coping strategies are very real, and Park's performance remarkably consistent. The court cases are varied and very Korean, for lack of a better expression, but while they deal with South Korean realities, I don't think they're alienating (though I of course don't believe every plaintiff in Korea court blurts things out like they do on the show). And of course, it's K-TV, so it's very sentimental. Mostly through the music, but there's no denying that the characters and story are very cute. Even her foils at the office eventually tend towards their better selves, and the romantic subplots are so clean as to evoke the school yard. I mean none of this in a derogatory way. I often laughed and wept over the same same episodes. The only time I think it crossed the sappiness line for me is the "working holiday" two-parter, which is something that occasionally crops up on series where "production value" is added by going on location. These episodes often seem bought and paid for by local tourism and feel padded. But otherwise, I've got no complaints. While the 16 episodes work as a complete arc, without any real dangling plot threads, I've just read the show was renewed for a second season. Works for me, since I was going to say I was satisfied with what we have, but definitely love the characters enough to want more.
What does Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life have in common with Dune? Fear is the mind killer. Or so his areligious imagining of the afterlife would have it. And playing to his anxious, insecure persona, Brooks is in a sort of hell as he enters Judgment City where his life will be examined to see if he can "move forward" or be sent back for another tour on Earth. People judging him is his personal nightmare, so great! There is such attention to detail in a Brooks movie - each line is given the proper attention, each character has something pleasurable about them, but in this case, the world-building is excellent too. Brooks has an answer for everything, if at the very least that an answer shouldn't be forthcoming. There's innate chemistry between him and his amusing defense attorney (Rip Torn) and between him and Meryl Streep, a veritable soul mate come too late. Funny AND thought-provoking, Defending Your Life becomes a conversation piece as soon as the closing credits hit, so do watch it with other people and listen in as they share just what moments of their lives would be examined, but also what theories they come up with about the more mysterious moments and elliptical lines. The more I think about it, the more I like it (especially the WHY characters do what they do), and the movie offers an afterlife that's actually hopeful as well as absurd. The universe could do worse.
My Companion Film of the week stars Anneke Wills (Polly)... Presented as a tall tale where anything could happen, Child's Play (no, not that Child's Play, 1954's Child's Play) seems an attempt to create a rural British version of the Little Rascals in the "Holy Terrors", but there's no indication that any further stories were ever attempted (the movie even came out two years after it was made) and it's... kind of fun and silly, actually. Not exactly a primer on atomic energy, the kid gang means to create an atomic bomb to blow up their nemesis, a self-serious constable, but eventually use the power of the atom for more productive uses. In the real world, everyone in the village would have died several times over. Personally, I think watching kids handling uranium with protective asbestos gloves is a hoot and a half from the era where people were told to put sticky tape on their window panes to protect them from the effects of atomic bomb explosions. Bubbly kiddie fare, sure, but there are a lot of jokes for adults too, and several "I can't believe they got away with that" type lines. Kind of too bad there isn't a whole series of these.
Books: Collecting issues #251-257 and Annual #17, Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne Vol. 3 also includes Avengers #233 and Thing #2, which cross over into an FF storyline and had Byrne contributions on story and art. The longer arc has the FF go to the Negative Zone while Annihilus crosses over to our world, but it's really a way to tell some "Star Trek" stories with the group (nothing wrong with that). It doesn't end satisfactorily though, and in the middle of it, the art becomes a lot sketchier as Byrne stretches himself too thin. It looks like the pages are smaller and therefore look a little blown up. The proof is in the pudding with writing and partial art credits on those issues of Avengers and the Thing (plus doing an Annual in that time period), which are placed so as to repeat beats from the core Fantastic Four book BEFORE they happen, which is just annoying on multiple levels. It also makes the collection drag on with fewer issues of FF per volume. Nevertheless, it seems like Byrne is finally ready to effect some changes by the end of this chapter, with Galactus eating the Skrull homeworld, Sue getting pregnant again, and the various members moving out of the Baxter Building. Changes for the team AND for the larger Marvel Universe. Should start getting more exciting.
RPGs: When we played the preliminary Day One adventures for Torg Eternity, the Pan-Pacifica one-off was possibly the favorite. While COVID naturally made the company bend away from the zombie pandemic element introduced there in later products, I didn't want to do with it too quickly. So while the characters are in Pan-Pacifica, is was time to do a Contagion story (using elements from the Dr. Y & the Jiangshi scenario). The Day One ended with an almost-Total Party Kill, which made it thrilling. But in a continuing campaign, when all the characters get infected and start showing symptoms, the thrills come with chills (both literally and figuratively). I still used the Infected cards from the Day One book, but felt like we cycled too quickly through them (especially since the virus mutates every Scene), so I'm thinking of maybe creating additional ones in time for the second Act. Hmmm... The mission? Simple enough. A researcher (in my version, the female Dr. Yi) has been kidnapped by Kanawa after possibly making a breakthrough. Our heroes find out where she's being detained and mount her rescue from an underwater lab where the Infected soon start running rampant. Lots of action, but the Players avoided it when they could, so we managed the full Act before our time was up. Might have helped that I only had 3 players on hand - one had to bow out at the last minute, along with the key skills of Lockpicking, Persuasion and Water Vehicles, oops!
Best bits: Weird coincidence - The first fight is against a guard shark (I made a joke about the smartsharks in Deep Blue Sea) in and the first Drama card was Comeback (I started singing "Don't call it a comeback") and was asked if I had placed the Drama card on top on purpose to do an LL Cool J joke (his song AND he was in the movie). Didn't occur to me, no. A lot of nice Infection role-play. My players complained of body pain, temperature swings, hunger pangs, according to their assigned symptoms (with the Realm Runner's heart stopping and requiring immediate First Aid lest he rise as a monster). The rage symptom made them start brawling for no reason, and the Monster Hunter willingly turned into his Werebat form (which he almost NEVER does) to snack on some Kanawa troops. He also played a key Connection card to surprise everyone with how quickly (and secretly) struck up a friendship with the boat captain who brought them to the location, insuring he would stay beyond the allowed time to pick them up. Desperate times, but also some yucks - the term Zuzu in French is pretty silly and characters sharing information by touching Zuzus always sounded like it was naughty.
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