"Accomplishments"
In theaters: A lot of movies have European Vacation sequels, but Paddington is already a Londoner, so he's off to South American in his third film. I really wasn't expecting Paddington in Peru to include references to Werner Herzog's Peruvian trips (Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo), but here we are. If you've committed the first two to memory (or seen them recently), you'll feel the loss of Sally Hawkins, but Emily Mortimer acquits herself well as the mother whose kids are leaving the nest. Hugh Bonneville's risk assessor is once again a highlight. The guest characters (and villains? I'm not saying) are played by Antonio Banderas and Olivia Coleman, whose nun character is absolutely ridiculous. A lot of laughs for audiences of different ages, though the quest through the Amazon looking for a missing bear/treasure is the kind of thing kids' movies have been doing a lot lately. Still, with this group of people (and animals), it's still a lot of fun and has something to say to kids who are from adopted, especially coming over from other countries.
The Importance of Being Earnest is always huge fun, and Max Webster's version, made available through National Theatre Live, had the audience (both on screen and in the movie theatre I was in) in stitches. Oscar Wilde's wit is, of course, a big part of it, but the director has the actors more than usually camping it up. It starts and ends on burlesque numbers, the characters are all gay despite the entanglements with members of the opposite sex, and there's a lot of winking at the audience. It's Wilde unchained from his period, though the characters are obviously all very randy because they live in the repressed Victorian era. At times, it does go overboard with the physical humor, in that kind of British cabaret/panto way that's very British and very unlike anywhere else (I'm thinking of the young women in particular). Ncuti Gatwa (Algernon) is good, but the real powerhouses are Hugh Skinner, very funny as Worthing, and Sharon D. Clarke as Lady Bracknell, who commands every scene she's in. AS IT SHOULD BE. Gatwa's connection to Doctor Who is obvious, but she was Grace from the Jodie Whitaker era, and this is a powerfully different role. Like I said, huge fun.
At home: Reputedly the best of the best Argentine Noirs, I wasn't sure about The Bitter Stems at first. The performances, especially Carlos Cores as the lead, seemed rather theatrical. But the cinematography kept giving and I'm happy I stuck with it. The film is absolutely GORGEOUS, with great showpieces like the nightmare sequence, and the various lighting tricks to create memory spaces. And as it turns out, it's a pretty great story, with one foot in Noir and the other in Hitchcock, as a journalist goes into a scam business - a fakey correspondence course - and starts mistrusting his partner... enough to make the mistake of his life? Cores' Alfredo Gasper's flaw is a hero complex that pushes him to take risks, but is largely manifest in his need for an inspiring leader. His partner - played by the boisterous Vassili Lambrinos, is more inspiring than his desk editor, but can you ever trust a scammer? We're on Gasper's side until we aren't, and then perhaps even after that as guilt, redemption and ever more misunderstandings make him Fortune's fool. It's great stuff.
Children are very rarely Film Noir heroes, so the Argentine film If I Should Die Before I Wake feels fresh thanks to that conceit. Announcing itself as the modern-day equivalent of fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel & Gretel - stories in which only a child may kill a monster - it nonetheless crafts as a Noir hero out of Néstor Zavarce's pre-teen Lucio. Noir heroes have a fatal flaw, and in his case, he's a bad student always in hot water with his policeman father, and therefore makes a dreadful mistake when a classmate is taken by a strange man. Thinking his father would rather he keep a promise to the girl than betray her secret, the crime goes unpunished and guilt starts to gnaw at him. Crazy dream imagery takes us into Night of the Hunter territory, and when the lunatic strikes again, Lucio is the only one who can stop him, armed only with a need for redemption and a prayer, he might yet succeed. A very dark story that pushes at boundaries, enhanced by great photography.
Based on Cecil Day-Lewis novel, The Beast Must Die features a bunch of Argentines with distracting English names, but a very small complaint about a solid murder mystery noir. The mystery is less about who did it and more about how things got to that point and whether it really is what it LOOKS like as we flash back to the story proper. In this melodramatic tale, a mystery writer infiltrates a rich family of a-holes (very Knives Out) to take revenge on one of them who is responsible for his child's death (so a little more like Columbo). But even from that first scene, it's clear the victim was hated by a LOT of characters, so exploring why makes for an interesting viewing, and makes you second-guess your initial assumptions. Twists and turns keep coming despite our being present at the climax. But we shouldn't think we know everything.
For a Nazi-hunting movie, The Boys from Brazil is a rather stiff and dull affair (no matter much the bombastic score wants us to get excited). Oh, the mystery of just what the Nazis are doing is interesting enough, especially once the shocking/ridiculous twists start happening, but it's hard to get away from the fact that this is about old men chasing other old men across the world, at an old man pace. There's just no urgency. The Nazis barely take a chunk out of their checklist and Laurence Olivier's Nazi hunter takes his time getting to the heart of the matter. The cinematography doesn't help matters, with interiors flatly lighted and looking like 1960s television (with some of the actors you would have seen in Mission: Impossible once per season. It's fine, but never any more than fine, and could have told it story in 90 minutes by removing the redundant explanations.
Lisandro Alonso's Jauja (it means "Paradise" in Spanish) is a lyrical art film about a Danish officer (Viggo Mortensen) who loses his daughter in a literally timeless Argentine desert, or perhaps that's the girl's dream, or even one of her dogs'. Or vice-versa, as Viggo does fall asleep too, at some point. In any case, it's about missing someone, the anxiety created by that absence. Shot almost exclusively in exteriors (give or take the odd tent), with a looming horizon, dramatic landscapes and a claustrophobic View Finder frame, Jauja creates a spare, minimalist world where people are indeed few. Viggo is in an absurdist world where he doesn't fully understand the language, or what's happening to him. Existentialism is the vibe, and like the character, I guess we're supposed to feel lost. It might be a parenting story - how does one deal with a child leaving home, and where does one go after that? It might be many things. The film is easy on the eyes - beautiful colors and frames - but not on the mind. It's both relentlessly quiet and uneventful (its shocking moments tend to be simple breaks of format rather than anything active), and obscure in its likely multiple meanings. The DVD includes two shorts by Alsonso. Lechuza is just a minute of an owl watching you over drum beats. Hey, I happen to like owls watching me intensely. The other, clocking in at ±25 minutes, is Untitled (Letter to Serra). This connects several of his films, including Jauja, with which it shares a fascination for landscape, dogs, and Argentine history. If you don't know anything about the latter, it's all a bit mystifying. My cat doesn't, but he enjoyed watching the dogs walking through an almost 3D forest.
Werner Herzog's Apocalypse Now, the troubled production Fitzcarraldo, is almost more interesting for its making of (see below) than for what eventually made it on screen, but it's also a kind of follow-up to his (and star Klaus Kinski's) Aguirre from ten years before. Both films are about colonizing influences and a man's obsession taking him into the South American jungle on a fruitless quest. Herzog evidently has an affinity for the region, its landscapes and its aboriginal people, and in trying to shoot things for real as much as possible, gave himself, his cast and crew a lot of trouble. The title character is, in this case, obsessed with bringing opera to the jungle, and to raise the funds, he undertakes a journey down the Amazon to make himself a rubber baron. On the way, he has to convince the natives to pull his steam boat up and through a hill to a different tributary - and it's insane that this wasn't done with miniatures or camera tricks, but for real. The "well-meaning" white man wants to bring "civilization" to the "primitives", and in the process brings destruction to the land and its cultures. References to putting the boat on a "railroad" tells us Herzog knew what he was doing thematically. Practically, one might question how his film production ITSELF disrupted the natural order (which the documentary Burden of Dreams DOES address, in the negative and the positive), which I admit, made me uneasy. In a way, that's how the main characters felt as well, so the effect isn't misdirected.
I love documentaries about troubled productions, and Burden of Dreams plays much like Hearts of Darkness, with many of Werner Herzog's reversals on Fitzcarraldo being vaguely similar to Coppola's Apocalypse Now - local wars disrupting shooting, losing key cast members due to delays (Jason Robards and Mick Jagger were going to be in it, and this doc has the only surviving footage), strife between the director and star, people going crazy in the jungle, injuries, etc. Of course, we have Herzog interviews, which are always going to be strange and poetic, and would be interesting even if the production had gone smoothly. There's a lot of camp life activity on screen, presenting the natives of the area simply living, so some ethnological value as well. But a difficult shoot in remote jungle locations, spanning years, is going to be difficult on a making of crew as well, and so we're often told things post hoc when, presumably, director Les Blank returns to the set. Indeed, there's a strange rush at the end where we're told people died, and we're leaving it at that. Needed a little more finessing, but still a fascinating portrait of a film maker's hubris matching his character's.
[Honduras] Though more creepy than scary, La Condesa is a pretty good haunted house story told in two (or indeed, three) time periods. We follow two couples in the 70s, and another in the present day, each discovering the same grand old Mexican house's secret evils, accumulating from period to period. I almost resent the final explanation - it's a little clumsy to just drop it on us all in one go, and I would almost prefer for sin to pluck on sin without a supernatural push - but as the twists keep coming, there's more than what I already guessed and so I accept the ending. Ultimately, this is a monster story where the monster is only hinted at until it's too late, and the tension and paranoia you feel in the present-day sequences has a satisfying pay-off. Also, some fine cinematography for a low-budget picture.
[El Salvador] Imagine Taken at one end and Not Without My Daughter at the other. Now imagine a shallow pit between the two. 2018's Relentless sits in that pit. "Based on true events" only in a ripped from the headlines kind of way, a white woman's daughter is kidnapped by a gang in El Salvador (because we only care about the white women, of course) and she's forced to do everything she can to get her back. In a more high-profile film, she would go to Jean-Claude Van Damme or Liam Neeson, but here's it's David Castro's scuzzy character and he isn't that helpful. A Sydney Sweeney type plays the daughter--no wait, that's actually Sydney Sweeney--and thanks to all sorts of contrivances, she and her mother (mostly) remain inviolate despite the very real sexual danger. I've seen a lot of such films and this one's mostly okay. A little toothless, but okay. The big problem is Lauren Shaw in the lead role, who not only is difficult to believe as Sweeney's mother (they're only 15 years apart), but is way out of her depths in rendering the emotional level and complexity required. A major impediment. Also unbelievable is the ending, which I would be warranted in believing is a fantasy brought on by a fugue state.
Books: When Doctor Who's missing story, The Highlanders, is discussed, it's usually to say that Jamie McCrimmon wasn't designed to become a companion, was asked at the last minute (after a scene where he watches the TARDIS leave was shot, even), and really wasn't very important to the story. He feels much more present in Gerry Davis' Target adaptation, a full partner to Ben in their story thread, and his joining the cast feels more natural. And yet, this is really a Polly story. She is probably the most competent she's ever been, and funny too. They probably wouldn't have gotten out of 18th-Century Scotland without her. Not to say the Doctor doesn't get lots to do, they ALL do! So if this is goodbye to proper historicals, it's a good one to go out on, and reading the book inches the story to my top tier of lost stories I wish to be found.
With The Underwater Menace, Target line editor Nigel Robinson assigns himself another story probably no one wanted. It's very much the most sour lemon of the Second Doctor era. It's just so old-fashioned! On television, it looks like a bad matinee serial from 20 years earlier - the designs are silly, the dialog hokey, and the motivations are flat cliches. The theater of the mind created by the book removes one of these problems, and Robinson works hard to create efficient back stories and motivations for the serial's cardboard characters. It still can't save Polly who, in the previous story, was a saucy action girl, but in this one, is a wet screamer who needs to be slapped out of her hysteria by Jamie. It's not a good look, on TV nor in prose. The two things this story is remembered for is the Fish People (they get the cover) and that one over-the-top line from the mad scientist (you know the one). I feel robbed of a little something that Robinson doesn't write in Zaroff's accent, but he at least makes a lot of hay out of the line, referencing it even beyond its moment. Overall, better than the televised version, but I would have been surprised if it hadn't been.
The fact that I wanted Sarah H. Cho's Camgirl to be longer (it's in the 48-page range) or actually be a series/mini-series is a testament to how much I enjoyed it. Drawing from personal experience in a number of areas (though not the central character's job, I don't think), she creates a neat little thriller in a corner of the sex work universe we don't really think about. Dani ("Kyoko" online) is getting death threats from one of her clients, so the procedural turns into a potent techno-thriller, universal in that hyper-surveillance and shitty online interactions are everyday fears regardless of your profession. Dani is a heroine you can root for, but also a bit of a mess. The art by C.P. Smith is beautiful and well-suited to the story's erotic appeal, while also grounded and naturalistic when the camera's turned off. Camgirl has a lot to say - from the point of view of sex workers, Asian women, and mental health - so it only really scratches the surface. Cho could have kept me interested for four times to length.
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