"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I might be alone in this, but I would watch (or even read) the s#!t out of a SERIES of Margaret Qualley's Honey O'Donahue sun-drenched Bakersfield strip mall vinyl siding Noirs. In Honey Don't!, Ethan Coen creates a wild world that doesn't sit in any particular era - Honey has a 40s style, the cars are from the 70s, the video games (and Charlie Day's amusing cop) are from the 80s, but everyone has a cell phone. Qualley is great with the deadpan patter investigating strange goings-on connected to a nascent cult run by an absurd Chris Evans, while navigating a budding relationship with Aubrey Plaza's cop fatale. It's a bit too short, with what feels like a shockingly abrupt ending (but in terms of deconstructed Noir, it's not worse than The Big Lebowski's solutions) and some audiences have clearly been disappointed that Coen led us to red herrings. I had too much fun with the characters and style to care all that much. They don't seem to be meeting with critical success, but I, for one, am having a lot of fun with Coen's outlandish lesbian crime tales.
At home: Eenie Meanie really does steal a lot from Baby Driver, but it's Baby Driver without strong direction or music... and not that many chase scenes (there are only two car chases), but they're pretty good. That said, Samara Weaving is very watchable as the teenage getaway driver who grew out of crime and thought she had left it behind for good, only to be brought back into it by her terrible (ex-) boyfriend and his inability to stay out of trouble. Really, you'll spend most of the movie waiting - HOPING! - for that moment where she'll finally ditch him. He's a walking, talking, driving complication. Andy Garcia has a nice double act going with his second banana as the main bad guy, and Marshawn Lynch has some fun with his rival driver, but they make me wish the heist gang were more interestingly drawn. Weaving gives a full performance, but not everyone gets the same chance.
I am perfectly fine being the only person who's enjoyed Meet Cute, but I can see why it's not anyone's favorite time loop movie. It's just too unromantic despite its core premise of a woman (Kaley Cuoco) wanting to spend all her days inside a single perfect date (with Pete Davidson). That's really time loop fantasy 101 by now, but what I came to like about Meet Cute is how (acknowledged) messy it all gets, and even from the start, there's strident urgency to the first date because we're already on the 7th and didn't know it. As time wears on, bigger and bigger jumps take the relationship through its paces even though one of the partners isn't aware of it, and we're seeing a descent from passion to boredom, artificial attempts at refreshing things, and ultimately some kind of acceptance. But this is a dark, grungy, self-negating take on the concept, not too surprising from Duplass collaborator Alexandre Lehmann (Blue Jay, Paddleton), supplemented by some gorgeous neon photography. The relationship is frequently (and perhaps fully) toxic, and the leads aren't entirely likeable (though we can empathize), but that gives it an unpredictability and a somehow refreshing ugliness that made me want to forgive it its wonky time travel physics.
The great, great Jeanne Moreau plays a sociopathic schoolteacher in Tony Richardson's Mademoiselle, a dark and nasty film nevertheless of great beauty thanks to cinematographer David Watkin, who seems to be channelling Kurosawa's perfect black and whites here. It's a difficult film, at the center of which is an evil person causing harm because she gets off on it, using her position's respectability as a cloak, and Italian migrant workers as scapegoats. When she is lured to one of these, he seems like the only one who could tame the beast in here, and you half expect him to be the instrument of both her redemption and her punishment. But while the film is often lyrical - the play with mirrors, the animalistic sex scenes - it's still very much grounded in real psychology, and we're wrong to expect art to triumph over reality. Fair warning: We see a lot of animals in distress, and this being made in 1966 doesn't give hope that they actually weren't.
While About Endlessness is visually striking - the tableaux look like paintings with hyper-crisp depths of field, everything in focus no matter how far - but it's correspondingly a little like watching paint dry. As far as I know, the shots aren't based on any canvases by great masters, but they look like they are (and certainly, the dream about the stations of the Cross make you think of old paintings). The vignettes are sometimes historical, rarely fantastical, mostly slice of life moments, largely existential. The best moments have a narrator giving a cursory description of the action, which sometimes expands in your mind as a full, unseen story, but some have dialog instead, some even continue from one scene to a later one (the story of the priest losing his faith, for example). As a visual experiment, it's intriguing. As a storytelling experiment, I think it fails by not sticking to its best method. If I'm moved, it's to say "so what". It's looking for transcendence, but doesn't quite find it.
It's almost a time travel film. Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy sends a despondent, suicidal man back through his memories (in a flash before your eyes kind of way), one last tour of his sins, perhaps in search of the incipient event that sent him on such a self-destructive path. We'll perhaps find out it's no excuse for a life of hurting others, and while, on occasion, there's a beautiful scene in an otherwise ugly life (usually relating to the man's first love), the stink of his self-loathing can't be covered by popping an occasional mint in his mouth. The aging of the principals, simply through styling and performance is actually very well done over the 20 years chronicled, and I certainly like the directions devices, like the train motif acting both as a means to go back and a symbol of doom, as well as the romantic scene where a woman becomes the avatar of his first love, who, as we'll discover, was an avatar herself. It's depressing, no doubt about it, and those railroad tracks lead to a certain understanding (of his obsession if not his behavior, we're not tracking what you think we're tracking), but not to redemption.
[Botswana] Though it has some pretty important technical flaws - the looping is terrible, and they keep speeding up the action to make it more exciting or funny, generally failing at both - I can see why The Gods Must Be Crazy was an international hit at the time. Its hero Xi (played by N!xau) is a charming figure, and we just don't get a lot of "Cargo Cult" narratives in cinema (something that has fascinated me ever since I read about it in the Niven/Pournelle novel Dream Park). Initially played as a nature documentary that treats "modern civilization" in the same way it does the unspoiled Bushmen who find an evil Coke bottle "sent by the Gods", it unfortunately starts spending more and more time with its villains - murderous terrorists on the run - and its White Anglo romcom couple - a shy scientist with the worst vehicle in cinema and a bored office worker taking a break to educate the natives - and only really recovers when Xi intersects with these groups. Not to say there aren't some fun action gags throughout, but the slapstick is extremely broad and juvenile. It's 1980, so colonial attitudes ensure most of the Black African characters defer to the non-natives, but despite being a South African production, there's no real whiff of Apartheid, especially since the true hero is Xi (perhaps this is why they shot in the more progressive Botswana). I still can't believe this spawned three sequels, the last two as Chinese productions. International audiences couldn't get enough of Xi, I guess!
[Eswatini] In the "films with terrible titles" column, we have Wah-Wah, a drama set in the country formerly known as Swaziland on the cusp of it getting its independence from the British Empire. Written and directed by acting icon Richard E. Grant, it's apparently semi-autobiographical, and tracks his (well, a boy named Ralph's) entry into adolescence, just as a new country is being born. I don't think he makes enough of that, and a lot of the underlying metaphors stay entire too far in the background. Played in his later years by a still very young Nicholas Hoult (backed by a strong British cast, though Emily Watson's brash American often steals the show), the boy has to deal with his parents' acrimonious separation (which again seems to mirror the political situation, but not enough to really say anything about it), and uses puppets to work his feelings out (you guessed it, it doesn't really pay off). So while Wah-Wah has some good ingredients - strong performances, class satire, and beautiful scenery - I'm afraid it might only really interest Grant's fans interested in a pseudo-biography of his life.
Books: With its slightly tweaked title, Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion is Malcolm Hulke all over. He spends more time on the first two parts than the last two, doing world building early and amusingly putting us in the head of the various dinosaurs to show what THEY might think of London. And then has to rush to the end, giving the reader whiplash as he jumps over events and forgetting to give Mike Yates a proper send-off - it's all up in the air. While I think the novelisation benefits greatly from not having to see the BBC-TV level dinosaurs (though I would argue they're so campy, it makes them fun), and Hulke does a good job of filling in a lot of the guest cast's back stories and motivations, I wish he had learned to kill his darlings. The opening sequence where a dinosaur kills a Scotsman isn't just surplus to requirements, it's kind of confusing for a London location. And I vastly prefer the televised serial's epilogue with the Doctor trying to lure Sarah into TARDIS travel than the pointless Biblical reference made in the book. It's all stuff that could have been cut to reinstate more important moments. Bonus: The idea of the elite ditching the Earth they poisoned in a spaceship is more relevant today than it must have been in 1974.
The changes Terrance Dicks makes to Death to the Daleks! - a not particularly well-loved story, so there's room for them - in the novelisation are quite good, actually. Nothing major, but they normally go towards making the story more sensical (the Doctor doesn't wander off after Sarah begs him to wait for her, for example). Of course, he can't make the "tomb robbing" sequences work - they're still bafflegab solutions to bafflegab problems - but doing it with curt prose is a lot more acceptable than watching the Doctor and a badly made-up Exxilon tediously work through each puzzle on screen. While I'm frequently bored by this on in televised form, it made for a fun, quick read. Daleks with powder weapons, Sarah carrying off complicated plans, and wow, looks like Terry Nation predicted the city-sized A.I. server than eats up all the energy, eh?
It's kind of too bad that Dicks changes the serial's ONE FAMOUS LINE in Doctor Who and The Monster of Peladon, you'd think some things would be sacred. His heart was probably in the right place, but the word "girl" for "women" is still better than the cringy "female". Nevertheless, the Doctor's return to Peladon, while ostensibly padded on screen, works well in shortish prose fiction. Plenty of excitement, plenty of twists and turns, and not much time to outguess them. In my head, The Monster of Peladon always gets mixed up with Star Trek's "The Cloudminders", and it was no different with the novelisation (where's the invisible gas that makes you stupid?!), but I suppose that's what I find disappointing about Doctor Who's take on the plight of the miner - it doesn't really directly address the inherent class struggle and comes off as just another "rebellion on an alien planet" episode. The book's perfectly fine for what it had to work with, Sarah Jane coming out of it the winner (as usual).
Though perhaps weird and wild, especially in the middle part, Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders is a very special story indeed. A redemption arc for Mike Yates. Sarah Jane Smith as the intrepid journalist. An appearance by the Doctor's already-mentioned hermit-teacher. A metaphorical link between Buddhist philosophy and regeneration. the Whomobile flies. Metebelis III. And of course, it's the Third Doctor's last story before he turns into Tom Baker (something for which my kid sister never forgave him). Terrance Dicks makes it even more special by writing a prologue starring Jo Grant and her new husband, out in the Amazon, and really, the only thing missing at that point to really give the UNIT era a send-off is the Master. Any changes are mostly cosmetic or restore brief moments that were cut from the episode. We don't have to listen to the Spiders' screechy voices and the chase scene doesn't feel too long on the page, but the trade-off is losing the emotional performances, in particular Lis Sladen's in that famous final scene. I mean, the cover spoils the regeneration...
The Fourth Doctor's first story, Robot, novelised as Doctor Who and the Giant Robot by Terrance Dicks, shows, I think, just how much Tom Baker brought to the role and Robert Holmes brought to the scripts in editing. Dicks, likely working from his own script, is lacking a LOT of the wit exhibited not just by the Doctor, but by other characters as well, especially in the front half. Where are all my favorite jokes and lines? Only a few show up. What Dicks is much better at is the nuts and bolts of plotting, and he fixes a lot of plot holes and generally makes scenes work better within the larger tapestry here than they did on screen. There's more urgency, the action scenes are more involved, and the restructuring of some scenes makes the revelations hit more strongly. But the dialog just doesn't crackle the way it did on TV, and you sometimes get the sense Dicks is still writing for the Third Doctor.
Ian Marter's prose is always so dark and violent. Things hurt more. Monsters are more disgusting. Tasks are that much harder. So he's the perfect writer to adapt (Doctor Who and) The Ark in Space, the serial that almost certainly inspired Ridley Scott's Alien. This is actually his first book for Target, so he's not entirely there in terms of geography and choreography - I felt a little lost at times because he gets a little too technical in describing Nerva Station (here, Terra Nova) - but he expands on the claustrophobic world we saw on screen, and on the psychology and biology of the Wirrn (here, Wirrrn). The first Doctor Who actor to write his own character, he apparently almost wrote the book with Harry Sullivan's first person narration, which would have been a trip. As is, the one possible clue as to the writer's connection with Harry is that the Who-After-Dark sailor joke has been excised... Don't think I didn't notice!
RPGs: After a false start last week due to technical problems (courtesy of the hosting platform for our online game), we finally got back to our Torg Eternity session already in progress. Contact (and beloved NPC) Sabella tied to the needle of a revolving restaurant at the top of Cairo Tower with a bomb about to blow up. A supervillain and her robot squids in the way. The Drama Deck pulling Setbacks like nobody's business. But everyone who counts made it out alive. On to the next Act as the heroes head into the Sahara to find a the main villain's dig site, enter the "Temple of the Eye" before the villains do (with the key previously acquired) and solve puzzles, avoid traps, play at Indiana Jones until we wrapped on a mummy-filled cliffhanger. It was a good session, with out of the box thinking (they were PRETTY quick at figuring out the big puzzle (rare in RPGs!) and even used team work to solve it) and nice help from all the programming work that was put into the Torg Eternity module lately. (The only bug is that Dice So Nice isn't supported by Foundry anymore, and it just looked like tons of dice were dropping every time - I might just have to disable them, but I'm sad about it).
Best bits: One bit that DIDN'T happen, but was funny - when the Realm Runner had to have an angsty flashback to something he was ashamed of, he first thought of a moment in his youth where he read his friend's diary with psychometry... instead of, just, reading it with his eyes? We laughed. Loath to shoot a human being in cold blood, the Deadlands Preacher shot Professor Plasmo's rocketpack and sent her flying down POSSIBLY to her death (in the Nile Empire, if you don't see a body...). The Demon Slayer isn't so great at killing robots, but does some nice flips over their heads. A randomly-drawn "Obstacle" made the last remaining Plasmo-Bots combine and explode, taking out a big chunk of the terrace - our heroes jumped out of the way (and not to their deaths). The Frankenstein, harassed by his former love interest (she keeps getting in the way during the fight), is left standing there with a "trust me, I'll be right back" and he never does. Again. Once things calm down, a weird romance brews between Sabella and the Preacher, a dead ringer for the father of her unborn child (same player, characters are near parallels), who HE only remembers from dreams. Instead of chartering a flight to the desert and so on, just a big dramatic CUT TO: plane crashing after being shot down by enemy planes and a scramble to reach the parachutes. The big puzzle might have been more complicated because the symbols were hard to see under all the dust - thank the Gods of Egypt for the Realm Runner's trusty cantrip app on his phone and it's Playful Wind function.
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