"Accomplishments"In theaters: I'm really enjoying Josh Hartnett's middle aged career, a lot of which seems to fall in the "big dumb fun" category. That's where I would put Fight or Flight, essentially Bullet Train on a Plane, where he plays a disavowed operative whose last chance at redemption is bringing in a terrorist hacker (the "Ghost", who is a cool customer, too) alive on a plane filled with assassins. Buy a seat in the hyperviolent section and have fun. Not perfect by any means - the reveal of just who his handlers are is clunky at best - but it doesn't waste time getting us into the action and keeps the mayhem going, leaving little time for catching your breath. And it's pretty funny too. So by all means, Josh Hartnett, keep taking these jobs (is there sequel bait in this movie? mayyyyybe), cuz I think I might keep seeing them. It's no Kōtarō Isaka, but it does the job.
At home: Real Men was a movie Young Siskoid thought was hilarious when he was 16 and reviewing films on cable access. As he grew up, he discovered other critics didn't feel the same way and that most audiences didn't remember it at all. So how does middle-aged Siskoid feel about it now? He watched with other, younger people as a control, and they agree with the following review... No, Real Men isn't as funny as it was once believed, but it still has juice. Jim Belushi's American James Bond parody feels like he's doing a Bill Murray impression (was Bill ever considered for the role?), and John Ritter has fun doing finger guns as the Everyman who finds his spine. The expected "problematic" gender-related humor (heralded by the title) actually subverts expectations in a pleasant way. I found that I didn't remember much, certainly not that there were ALIENS in this thing, but it's one of those weird 80s genre mash-ups that I still have affection for. The MVP, however,is Miles Goodman's insane score, as if he challenged himself to use every instrument ever made PLUS a Danny Elfman spooky choir.
Elliott Gould and Robert Blake are buddy vice squad cops in Peter Hyams' Busting, spending their time hassling and bullying hookers, gay bar patrons and strip joint owners, and then feeling like they're not getting anywhere because the whole system is bought and everyone walks out of jail the next day. Must be frustrating, but also, a lot of these arrests are for things that arguably shouldn't be crimes. Except on the exploitation end, and so our grubby heroes start hassling the man behind the pay-offs, in a very entertaining way (though if they'll get anywhere is a matter of whether the 70s are going to 70s). Hyams proves himself a more than able action director with some eye-popping camera movements - ridiculously dynamic follows and track backs that impress, and not just for the era - and I like the comic book-literate script too. This is some cool stuff, and without a doubt an influence on Tarantino and by proxy, those who followed him in the 90s. The alternate ending I have in my head is even cooler, but they don't do Viewers' Cuts.
I came to Cockfighter because I think Charles Willeford is an interesting crime writer, and not only did he adapt his 1962 book into a screenplay here, but he plays one of the characters. But my problem was always going to be a dread that the action would show a lot of animal suffering. It's hard to fake those cockfights, especially with 1974 means and Roger Corman money, and the film takes on a procedural, almost documentary feel in those sequences. They MOSTLY get away with it by using close-ups and editing, where puppetry might be used, but some of this stuff is real and I, personally, don't like to see it. That said, I also think the story has to lose something in translation, a contraction of a novel reportedly based on The Odyssey, but it's hard to see it even when you know. It just seems to meander from fighting ring to fighting ring, with Warren Oates obsessive in a gambling addict kind of way, and thinking his way of life has value, when his writer largely thinks it doesn't. And that's the best part of this. Sticking with it to the end (and its very ugly moment) reveals an inversion of this kind of narrative I find particularly good, when the Penelope to Oates' Ulysses finally shows up to see a fight.
I should have turned back when I briefly saw the K-Pop Cinematic Universe tag, but I didn't. P1H: A New World Begins lured me in with its promise of a time travel narrative that sounded like a cross between 28 Years Later and Terminator. It's more like Heroes, but that's okay too. The problem is that it's not a finished story, and at this point, I'm dubious that it will ever be followed up on. Even as a prologue, it feels disjointed. You're watching a postapocalyptic movie where drones have destroyed the world with a rage virus, with plucky Korean survivors ready to do anything to reverse things. You blink and you're in another movie already in progress, where two young amnesiacs have super powers, and then it happens again, and you're seeing the start of the terminal event through the eyes of a would-be dancer and, completely separately, a girl who talks to her teddy bear (and it talks back). Only in the final reel do these things start to coalesce, but nothing is actually explained and it just feels like an awkward mash-up of sci-fi ideas that aren't even internally consistent (if there are chosen youths with super-powers, why do the amnesiacs need gadgets to make theirs work, etc.). I like a lot of elements, mind you, but they're lost in a chaotic structure. I suppose if you're a fan of the pop group P1Harmony, you'll recognize the boys and have more fun. If not, expect confusion.
Hong Sang-soo's first collaboration with Isabelle Huppert, In Another Country, could actually be called THREE collaborations. At a seaside resort, a young Korean woman writes three scripts for a short film, and though she seems to make them sequential, she's really rewriting the same story, or at least, some of the same scenes, repurposed for different but similar contexts. Isabelle Huppert is some French woman staying at that same resort in each story, each a remix of the same elements - infidelity, showbiz, the search for a lighthouse, cultural and linguistic misunderstandings, a thirsty lifeguard (as well as other recurring characters) - and stands, perhaps, as a look into the writing (or rather, re-writing!) process itself. The writer here is a bit of an unknown, and I miss returning back to her at the end of the third sequence. Her influence is too subtle, though we have to imagine these are her particular obsessions, and her idea of a foreigner. Perhaps it's based on a particular French woman she knows and therefore always the model for her heroine, the cultural conflicts stemming from that one interaction. The writer seems to get all this right, as well as the very naturalistic, kind of dumb patter between speakers whose first language isn't English, but their only shared language. The speaker's intent can fall between the cracks, but it's not just a matter of language, as the conversation with the monk particularly shows. And perhaps the in-story writer's intent is also obscured in such a way...
Even at over an hour, Claire's Camera could be a fourth short film featured in In Another Country. Infidelity, language barriers, drunkenness, a sea-side location (Cannes rather than Korea, but still), and of course, Isabelle Huppert as the kooky French lady who questions Korean norms. It's all here (no thirsty lifeguard, though). Hong Sang-soo has a subtle sort of meta-textual device going - Claire's contention that taking pictures of someone changes them is under-explored, in my opinion, but it does seem to actually occur. As usual, a lot happens between the cuts, and we're relationship detectives, a bit ahead of the characters in most cases. Their own reality is essentially translated by a French lady they've just met, and indeed her idiom - photography - as a revealing catalyst for righting wrongs and exposing truth. There's more going on in this slight little film than first meets the eye. Unless you freeze-frame (so to speak) and look deeper. Then things change. At least, that's the idea. I'm only over-stating it a LITTLE.
Though the circumstances vary, Hong Sang-soo uses Isabelle Huppert the same essential way - as a foreign element that puts Korean attitudes to the test. In A Traveler's Needs, she's a French teacher who questions and prods her students for some kind of emotional statement (is any of this grounded in actual pedagogical theory? cuz I really like it), rejecting facile, surface answers, which may or may not be a contrast to Korean society generally. Then, much as Claire's Camera did, she translates these feelings into her own idiom, in essence rewrites the characters (shades of director Hong's rewriting in In Another Country, here again we get repeated scenes) and... changes them? The alchemy is perhaps too subtle to see, but how do we feel about the young poet she has befriended and HIS own "interpretation" of her? Is she changed by HIS idiom? When confronted with his image of Huppert versus its reality, is there a difference, or has she been "rewritten" to fit that image? And perhaps the film asks if we're different when we think in different languages, and as a bilingual person who has given some thought to this, I think my answer would be yes.
[Turkmenistan] The tropes and initial feel of a children's film, a kind of "World without Grown-ups" narrative, is subverted by History itself in Turkmenistan's Little Angel, Make Me Happy. During World War II, the Soviets deported Germanic people to Siberia, leaving children and livestock in villages with too few adults to take care of them. An almost-empty village and its surroundings become a kind of bleak playground for the kids left behind, the only hope laying in nest left for the "little angel" young Georg prays to. While this is a "misery" film, its point of view rests squarely on the shoulders of children, from the low camera angles to the sense of dark wonder and lack of understanding of what's going on in the world (and yet, their experiences make them anarchists in the face of cruel government policy). Don't expect a feel-good experience, but do expect to draw parallels with current events, giving new life and relevance to this artifact of post Soviet-fall cinema.
[Uzbekistan] I had hopes for Scorpion when it opened on a femme fatale recruiting a despondent man with unerring aim, with cinematography reminiscent of late-era De Palma. Unfortunately, we soon turn to the man's brother, an unbeatable member of the Uzbek secret service, and the rest of the movie looks like a BBC TV spy thriller. That's okay, but it's far less interesting. He becomes our hero, looking to rescue his radicalized brother from the Scorpion terrorist organization. There are action moments, but that's not really the focus - real espionage/special forces stuff is. Anyway, it can't really sustain excitement because the music is dialed in too low. In the end, while watchable (and I do like to see a different country do this kind of material), the plot is too scattershot for a recommendation. Characters show up and disappear without a by your leave. Things are set up that never pay off. The various villain plots are disconnected from one another. And ultimately, we end on an answer to a question we weren't really asking.
Books: Though prosaic, Kit Schluter's Cartoons should be filed in the poetry section - a collection of short surreal tales, sometimes separated by cartoons that belong to this same, dark world, if not to any specific story. Sometimes reading as twisted fairy tales (I want to borrow the title Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children), sometimes as hallucinatory confessionals, Cartoons creates - as its title proposes - vivid images that play on the idea of attraction and repulsion. Kit is visited by his younger selves, including a wheezing fetus. He holds a conversation with a sassy microwave. He is forced into a golden shower situation by a modern-day de Sade. He shows us an umbrella's most private thoughts. And very often, he bails out of these nightmares with some wordplay, some alchemical transformation that works on dream logic and sends us crashing into a the vilest pit. I wasn't always sure what to think - a pitfall of surrealism, with its private symbology - but I enjoyed the ride.
David A. McIntee is great at pastiche. He's written Doctor Who novels in the style of kung fu films, Lovecraft, X-Files and more. So it's no surprise that The Dark Path is such a competent Star Trek pastiche, using the Whoniverse's own "Federation" as an excuse to create a multi-species crew and play the Veltrochni (butchered on the cover) as pseudo-Klingons. And they're up against "Imperials" (Humanity's preferred political status quo earlier in the timeline) with access to a planet-destroying weapon on an artificial world... Hold on, is this Star Trek vs. Star Wars in disguise? In any case, what really takes center stage is the Second Doctor (with Jamie and Victoria) meeting the Master for the first time since they were at school together, a kind of "secret origin" of the Master, in fact, that toys with the reader in terms of just where we are on the villain's timeline. I only resent the early ambiguity because it makes me think of different endings to reconnect with the television timeline, and I'm not sure what's written is better than my imagination. Nevertheless, McIntee writes everyone involved well, and has fun (as do we) with the reinventions of famous space opera franchises. The quick pace makes this an engaging read, as does the atypical plot for this era of Doctor Who.
You can't put lipstick on a pig, and you can't make Ian Marter adapt one of Doctor Who's worst stories and make it good, apparently. The Dominators benefits from Marter's vivid descriptions and crisp prose, but there's just no saving this one. Barring the fact that it's always been a lame remix of "The Daleks" (killer robots, radiation concerns, pacifists who don't want to fight for their own survival), it also features what might be Doctor Who's stupidest villains. I don't mean the Quarks, even if they're silly (that's less obvious in prose and Marter makes them bigger and fiercer), but the Dominators themselves. Most of their role is to argue about using or not using their robots to kill locals. And those locals aren't any smarter. The Dulcians spend THEIR time being obstructionists oblivious to the danger they're in. So even if Marter is a good writer, and manages some excitement in the in back quarter, he can't avoid the dumb dialog scenes.
I've always liked The Mind Robber as a rare sideways-in-time story for the base-under-siege-obsessed Second Doctor era (and now this kind of thing seems to be the focus of Disney+ Doctor Who), and Peter Ling adapting his episodes to prose makes it even better. He adds literary characters and references not in the show (or that wouldn't have been detectable without a bit of exposition). He turns Part 1 into an extended flashback and plays around with structure. He makes the comic book sequences with the Karkus come alive like a Batman '66 episode. He gives us a different ending that dips into meta-text (I wish he'd done more of that). He's on less of a budget and manages to up the fun without deviating overmuch from the televised version (we still get, for example, the strange "Jaime's actor goes on vacation" conceit). Quite fun and it betters the show.
RPGs: We might have gotten through the climax of the current story arc in Torg Eternity if players didn't initiate several unprogrammed combat scenes. Once with a Cosm card that drew a Kraken from the bottom of sea, once because of bad Mishaps on Stealth rolls. Though arguably, this would have always happened because we're at that special time of year when players' brains are fried, and they weren't thinking of alternative solutions. At least they got the passkey to some of the elemental traps peppered along the way, so we saved ourselves from some PROGRAMMED fights there. Whether fried brains (yum!) or lack of clarity on my part, it was hard to get certain concepts across, as players kept misinterpreting battlemaps, or struggling to get a handle on chaotic motivations (which were simpler before their card plays made things more complicated). The players always want help from NPCs, but having control of a second team becomes another complication when we lack focus, and they might end up misused or ignored anyway. This is definitely a session where we got hosed by Cosm cards as well, so cursed items, random encounters, and deadly traps... Not that ALL of these HAD to be played. Still, it means the PCs are going into the world-saving climax with a surfeit of Possibility points... and I'm still not sure they'll succeed.
Best bits: The Kraken was their suggestion for a random encounter on the high seas and they had fun sending it back into the deeps with massive cudgelling (it almost ended too soon). The Frankenstein lost an arm when he was hit by a LAW rocket, and it flew into branches halfway up a cliff - the Realm Runner used a Playful Wind cantrip to make it fall, after what I imaging was a lot of hopping in place trying to reach it. Forced Setbacks on the Vikings made the next LAW rocket explode in their hands, pushing them back into their enclosed camp. A bonus Melodrama card forced a love interest to betray the team - she made a b-line for the Viking chief and made a truce with him (me, avoiding another extended combat, I suppose), but the card ("Betrayal!") from then on made the crew very wary of her (are they just paranoid? and if anything happens, with her Frankenstein paramour have her back?), especially the Monster Hunter who keeps his gun trained on her most times. The Freedom Magician used his darkness spell to intimidate the chief with a vision of what would happen if the wizard they escorted got his way (the Northern Hemisphere plunged in volcanic darkness), making him race off to his ships with his entire army, leaving the PCs to try and prevent it.
Meanwhile... it was that time of the month (in-game, not real world) to check on the Paladin we left in charge of the Fairy Tale Barony, and whose player I give the opportunity to advance events in the Aysle region. Three major things happened. 1) The Viking pirate Red Raven asked for the Barony's port stronghold and was given it. A Melodrama card put a layer of jealousy on all of the Paladin's relationships including between his wife and Raven, but his Politics rolls had a tendency to crit, so the middle holds. 2) The Akashans have been allowed to plant a second and bigger Reality Tree on the territory (without permission, but without objection). 3) The Paladin brings a force of fairy tale giants, ogres and trolls to help defend Oxford during the castle's siege, fulfilling a treaty previously signed with Lady Ardinay. The siege won't be lifted until Boxing Day (this chapter takes place during December), but the Army of Light comes out of it a bit healthier than in the standard Torg meta-arc.
Best bits: The Paladin uses his magic boots to also appear as a giant, intimidating the orcish army as his entire force walks up behind him, just as big. To evade a pincer movement while retreating to the castle walls, as ballista fire starts to take down giants, the Paladin uses the Mistaken Identity card to confuse the enemy, saving most of his force's lives. He then uses his FIFTH Romance card on Lady Ardinay herself, creating a dangerous political situation at Court, but he crits on this roll too, so well it creates a magic item (I improvised a Torch of Love he can use to protect a romance from Melodramatic manipulation). This is a love that isn't spoken (he's married, after all), but it definitely exists.
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