"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut Blink Twice is an Eat the Rich puzzle movie that takes a while to take off - there's just so much opulence I can take before growing restless, even if odd clues as to what's going on are dropped during such sequences - but brings some joy both on the puzzle and revenge sides of this story. In a nutshell, two friends (Naomi Ackie, who I absolutely love in this, and Alia Shawkat, who I loved already) accept an invitation to a nice guy billionaire (Channing Tatum)'s private island for an impromptu vacation (with other all-star guests). But something weird's going on (of course), and our girl Naomi is sure to discover it in time for a third act climax. Well shot, well edited so as to create a mystery, and well acted, Kravitz (who gives herself a small cameo, blink twice and you'll miss it) crafts a film that works as a thriller, but is also about that feeling you can get on vacation when you don't know what day it is, or how long you've been there. It's definitely a mood. Don't stare at the plot too hard.
At home: Let's start this review of 2024's The Killer by saying I find very little reason to remake international hits into English-language films on a artistic basis, even when the original director is doing it. At least not unless you change a lot of things. It will still never equal the impact of the original, and we have to make our peace with that. John Woo does indeed change most of his 1989 classic. It's still about an assassin who likes to hang out in disused churches full of doves and who, after causing a songstress' blindness during a hit, teams up with a maverick cop to protect her. But that's it. Nathalie Emmanuel cuts a great figure (in all sorts of cool fashions) as the lead, removing the romantic notions of the originals and leaning harder into the killer's quest for atonement. Omar Sy is such a fun presence as the Parisian detective that it makes me want to finally check out Lupin. Some strong action beats (even if I do not love the CG squibs) and a story that's not going in the original's direction except to give us occasional callbacks. And as predicted, it really DOESN'T have the original's impact. Things that were fresh in 1989 are well-worn now, and a Westernized story falls into over-used clichés. Judging it not as a "remake", but as its own thing (a direct to streaming actioner), I still enjoyed it a fair bit.
If you want to watch a good movie based on the idea of an assassin who stages accidents, check out Soi Cheang's Accident, starring Louis Koo. Accident Man has the same essential premise, but Scott Adkins' character kind of abandons his modus operandi when the going gets tough and turns to somewhat repetitive Scott Adkins action (especially when fighting nameless goons). Never thought Adkins was a particularly charismatic action star, but it's really the direction that fails to properly adapt the Pat Mills comics this is based on (not that I've read them), by using too much narration, for example, which is more "comics" than "Guy Ritchie", though the London locations may evoke some of that as well. What works in comics (captions) doesn't work as well on film. That said, there is some cartoonish fun to be had with a crew of killers with outlandish methods - à la Kōtarō Isaka (Bullet Train) - coming into conflict with Adkins after one of them "takes care of" the woman he cares about. Ray Stevenson is the best character here, though don't expect him to feature very heavily.
On almost every metric, Accident Man: Hitman's Holiday is better than the original. Setting Scott Adkins' continuing story on Malta is more exotic and visually stimulating. The narration is still there, but tamped down and more relevant/less awkward. There are way more murder "accidents", even if, once again, Adkins does a lot of martial arts once the plot gets going, but the action is more interesting, the camera work more exciting, and the foes more outlandish. It feels more like a comic book (complimentary). There's a tighter camaraderie between the "goodies" (including some surviving members of the previous cast). It's funnier, too. I was, of course, not a fan of the privileged twit Adkins has to protect in order to save his partner (and yay, he brings a gross scatological gag with him that I could do without), but even that seems dosed in a proportion that sits well with me. After the lackluster first film, I'm surprised to hear myself ask: "Where to next?"
What if Oscar Wilde wrote a John Wick movie? You might get The Assassination Bureau, a comedy about the secret world of assassins directed by Basil Dearden, who is best known for British thrillers. He acquits himself quite well! Diana Rigg stars as a would-be journalist who doesn't just want to expose the Bureau, but destroy it by putting a clever contract on its chairman (Oliver Reed). He's such a purist that he takes it and tasks his cohorts with trying to kill him while, as incentive, he does the same to them. Maybe his purity will save him. Maybe Rigg will change her mind. Or maybe the Bureau will use this opportunity to get rid of their leadership so they can make more money on amoral contracts, what with the First World War on the horizon and everything. Reed and Rigg are great fun, running around Europe as a bunch of assassins bear down on them. The effects are goofy by today's standards, but it's no impediment. The dialog crackles. The counter-history is amusing. It's often delightfully saucy. Doctor Who fans will note a Roger Delgado in a bit part. I do think it's at least 20 minutes too long (there are too many assassins if the film ALSO wants its WWI plot), so not quite phone-proof.
Patrick Tam's My Heart Is That Eternal Rose has a plot out of John Woo, and looks like Wong Kar-Wai film - well, no surprise, the cinematographer is Christopher Doyle - but it makes for an awkward mix and an unsatisfying ending. It's a love story, with lovers separated when the girl has to go to a Triad leader to protect her father and, by exiling him, her boyfriend. Six years later, he's a hitman, comes back to Hong Kong for a job, they see each other again, but can she escape the clutches of the Triad? Tony Leung is the very green gang member who loves her and dares helping her (a few years later, it would be unthinkable not to cast him as the romantic lead instead). The film looks gorgeous, its colors acidic even in its golden glows and bright accents, and it's that acidity that foreshadows tragedy more than anything else. Shot for romance, with some cheesy (but very Hong Kong) editing (camera freezes and slow motion), the eventual spin into the heroic bloodshed genre is an unwelcome shock. Yes, it's set in a violent criminal world, but something about the film's grammar lies to the audience. So too violent for a love story, too cheesy for a crime story, at least for me.
A lot of people love L.A. Confidential, but I personally think it's highly overrated. A sun-drenched neo Noir set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, the story of cops with different levels of corruption try to solve a diner massacre that's more than it seems could have been told anywhere. The setting is therefore interesting texture, but not integral to the story no matter how much it wants you to believe it is. As a Noir, it goes the Maltese Falcon route of being over-complicated, and requires a load of exposition at the end, though not before a big, loud, boring shoot-out can take place. It's trying for Scorsese or De Palma, but it doesn't get there. The biggest waste is an all-star cast where the characters become the opposite of what they start as, but they don't have arcs so much as pivots. This is true of the three starring officers - the brute obsessed with domestic abuse, the ambitious straight arrow, and the vain celebrity cop - but also Kim Basinger's not quite femme fatale and the romance that comes out of nowhere. Love what you love, peeps, but this one fills me with ambivalence.
By now, it's hard not to know how My Cousin Vinny ends because we've all seen Marisa Tomei's Oscar clip a billion times. That said, it doesn't mean the movie doesn't have a lot of other pleasures on offer, ESPECIALLY when it comes to Tomei's performance (and outfits). She really does steal the show here - funny, sexy, smart, pushy, comical while still being real... her character deserves to be the MVP. But Pesci is a lot of fun too, as are the support players - the suffering kids, the hard-nosed judge, Lane Smith's genial prosecutor, the nervous public defender, the hick who stiffs Mona Lisa, the various witnesses, hell, even the mostly-silent jury members. This is definitely not a tourism prospectus for the Deep South, but the movie takes shots at the big city folk too, and everyone is competent or justified in their own way. I guess this is a reverse Anatomy of a Murder, in a way, and Vinny is just a "simple city lawyer". Love the sleep gag, the various misunderstandings, and of course, the court stuff that makes cross-examination the real star of the judicial genre.
"Depresso! Come and dance!" Azazel Jacobs' The GoodTimesKid (and ironic title seeing as the character this points to seems impassive to say the least) is a quirky little take on "Hair", featuring two men with the same name, and an army recruitment letter sent to the wrong address. The film operates a strange osmosis between the two, as the passive Rodolfo (Gerardo Naranjo) encounters the mercurial Rodolfo (Jacobs himself)'s girlfriend - Diaz, whose style choices seem to be a cross between Olive Oyl and Betty Boop in this - and makes her dream of leaving. This is really about those crazy nights when you make some unreasonable plan and are so sure you'll go through with it, until morning comes and you just... don't, but emotionally, it's like you did. So it's also about what ties you to the present moment... the inside jokes, the shared music, comforting familiarities. What's out there is more exciting, and after a few drinks, it all seems in reach. But just wait 'til you sober up.
When I first saw the parents' home in Azazel Jacobs' Momma's Man, I thought it was specifically picked to NOT look like a living space. This cross between a cluttered warehouse and an industrial workshop seemed perfect to tell the story of a mid-life crisis making a grown man (Matt Boren) spin all sorts of lies to stay with his parents rather than return to his job, wife and infant daughter. This isn't your home (anymore) and to our eyes, it's no home at all. But the fact that Jacobs cast his own parents in the film (including Ken Jacobs, an avant-garde maker of some 250 shorts, who is seen doing avant-garde film making stuff in the movie) made me do a bit of research, and it turns out this is their actual home! So I don't know what to think anymore. To Jacobs himself, this might hit differently - a kind of semi-autobiographical mid0life anxiety he needed to go through. For the audience, as naturalistic as the parent-child relationship is, the oddity speaks to something being off. Boren is definitely playing a deep and unspoken depression, his character Mikey going back in time with adolescent behavior and MISbehavior, and hopefully working out his problems. Toys and puzzles in the film are an indicator of what's happening in his mind, though the mumblecore-adjacent naturalism doesn't allow anyone to verbally express it. This might all be very relatable, if not with Mikey himself, then with his impatient wife back in California.
A more overt comedy from Jacobs, Terri is a naturalistic coming of age story with a couple of askew details, which is the writer-director's brand. For example, Terri (Jacob Wysocki), the disaffected higher schooler at the center of the film, always dresses in pyjamas, as if to say he's trying to sleep through a life not worth living. Bullies at school, his only family an uncle (The Office's Creed Bratton) struggling with the onset of dementia... life is hard. But when a cringy vice-principal (John C. Reilly) takes an interest in him, it actually makes a difference. Sometimes by happenstance - like befriending the other kids in trouble at the principal's office - sometimes because a specific piece of advice or comfort resonates. Reilly seems to be tapping into the same vein as his character in Magnolia (I'm not mad about it) as a man who means well, but can feel cheesy for meaning well, might push too hard, have to eat his mistakes. A subtle film about the smallest of triumphs - accepting that it's okay to exist.
My Companion Film project hits continues with a movie starring Karen "Amy Pond" Gillan... Karen Gillan writes, directs and stars in The Party's Just Beginning, a quarter-life crisis story exacerbated by her best friend's suicide some time in the past year. Survivor's guilt mixes with a self-destructive lack of direction and motivation as other potential suicides come into her orbit and hopefully push her out of her grieving period. You can't tell it's a first film, honestly (she had only made shorts before), as there's a lot to recommend here in terms of composition, deft editing (slowly exposing the solution to the mystery of what really happened), clever moments of expressionism (things are how they feel, not how they are), and emotional content. The Inverness setting provides a gloomy atmosphere proper to the story, and the acting hits all the right notes, both in terms of drama and what comedy is allowed in. Lee Pace has an interesting character in here as well. Gillan probably serves herself better in this than her Doctor Who-fuelled genre career has, and I'll be interested in what she does in this particular arena once the action-adventure stuff dries up.
Books: With The Mantis, Kōtarō Isaka evolves while still remaining in the same world of weird assassins (which he shouldn't have to, the references to Bullet Train and Three Assassins calling too much attention to themselves). He's gone from a big cast, to three main characters, to a single one(Ish), and this one feels like it's about something other than karma/luck. Kabuto is killer on the spectrum, always analyzing situations too deeply, especially at home where he is deathly afraid of his wife's moods. He's trying to get out of the business and do what's right for her and their son, but the retirement package in this business is a bit... lethal. So what can we do. Of course, even if we're privy to his thoughts, we may also interpret the wife's reactions as completely normal. But the mistrust of the assassin's world pervades everything, a world of traps. It's really about doing accidental harm, and the consequences of our words and actions on others, even when our intentions are good, even if we didn't mean it and lashed out, and the sort of web of incidence that springs out of that (converging on the themes of previous books). The wife hurts Kabuto without meaning to, and he hurts his family even as he protects it, and there are loads of other aggregate examples throughout, including a key story about the preying mantis that lends the novel its title. I'm unsure about the third act style choice (a switch from third to first-person voice), but it works fine. All in all, Isaka's most mature work, if not his cleverest.
Book 6 of Simon Hawke's Time Wars series,The Khyber Connection, is really a bridge between two eras (so it's perhaps clever on his part to set it in a mountain pass). By the end of this short-ish novel, a main character will have died (the reader spends a lot of time wondering if there'll be a time travel fix or if they will be replaced and if so, by whom - that's good literary tension) and a new enemy will rise, completely changing the nature of the series. Honestly, it's probably what the books should have been doing from the beginning, and more properly taps into the "Time Wars" label. Otherwise, it's much like other chapters in the series, with its heavy-handed history lessons acting as a backdrop for the action, and intersecting with a piece of literature, in this case, Kipling's stories about Asia Minor, using several of his characters, including Gunga Din. There's a lot of talking, and then some furious action in an all-too-short third act, but if the story is relatively thin, what happens is an important to the continuing narrative. Am I HAPPY with those changes? The big game changer, yes. That team's status quo? Neutral, heavily dependent on how Book 7 shakes out.
RPGs: What I like about Torg Eternity's mega-adventures is that they frequently add to the game world's lore. The reason I wanted to play The God Box (which has structural problems I am working hard to fix) is that it reintroduces the Land Below (Merretika) to the game (it was a fairly early addition to original Torg), a giant Wonder under the Living Land and a sort of aggregate of low-tech societies at some point conquered by that reality. It was also a way to allow my player who keeps changing characters (all of them being reality echoes of one another) to make a Living Land character, since all these echoes have to be human and the LL doesn't have "native humans". His Leopard Warrior is built for savage damage, in the right conditions able to add as many as 5 bonus dice to his clawed brawling. A regular Wolverine, if Logan were more Mesoamerican. Infiniverse Cosm cards for the Land Below do exist, and are invocations to the various nature spirits of the Hollow Earth pocket, and proved to be a fun mechanic (PCs "prayed" to the totem of their choice and were either rewarded with the proper card, or got a random one from a "god" taking interest in them; this, in addition to their usual LL Cosm card). One of these would chance the course of the game. The plot, save the one guy who knows how to get out of this place before he's implanted with giant wasp eggs from a tribe's "goddess". The penultimate scene, where the Leopard Warrior unknowingly - but rashly - countermands his Prince's wishes by slaughtering the wasp's high priestess, almost ruining his best friend's plans to marry the wasp warrior champion and end an endless war between their peoples was exacerbated by a most dreadful play of Cosm cards, piling chaos upon an already chaotic situation where 3000 wasp worshippers were on hand to mob the heroes. Only the fact that the Monster Hunter had invoked the wasp spirit earlier got them out of the situation, restored the possibility of a marriage, and ultimately, got the giant wasp off their asses as they escaped the angry valley. The solution was almost more fun, but the players weren't game to try for it. I'll discuss it under Best Bits and you tell me.
Best bits: I liked the early confusion that the various peoples referenced might be Edeinos (but there are no Edeinos in the Land Below), natural conclusions. A lot of giant spider splatter, and the Leopard remembered to pray to his kill, to pay tribute to its place in the cycle of life. This was the most Mishap-heavy session ever, at one point three PCs rolling a critical fail on the same action (and half-a dozen more 1s on a d20 throughout the session - you have to laugh. Because a name NPC was named Marshall, the Leopards essentially thinking it just means "surface worlder" and calling all the PCs that. Attention from the wasp spirit meant the player suddenly had a small wasp familiar, which vaguely translated the wasp warrior's language and helped him navigate their cultural norms (credit goes to the Realm Runner for instigating this). Also not bad at making interaction attacks on a foe just before the Monster Hunter attacked physically. In the final scene, the players board giant baskets with their rescue and get hauled out of the valley, but not before being attacked by the giant wasp "goddess". Monster Hunter plays a Romance card to try and woo the bug away, doing a dance with the wasp companion (this same player only ever used a Romance card once before - on a butterfly from Toonville, so he has a type). The big wasp makes him understand it's about to burst, it needs to implant its eggs now! Though the idea was floating that he should allow it to inject HIM (as a were-bat, he would be healed from death anyway), or perhaps our Frankenstein (same deal), which would have led to some interesting wasp action in the next act, he rejects the option and instead sells out a Leopard ally, and manages a difficult Corruption roll (with the help of the Leopard Warrior's Supporter card... this guy is betraying his people left and right) as a result. There will be consequences...
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