This Week in Geek (18-24/05/26)

"Accomplishments"

In theaters: As a Monkey's Paw narrative, Curry Barker's Obsession cheats a little bit, but replaces the strict demands of the "be careful what you wish for" axiom with ambiguous lore that makes the movie more of a conversation piece. Or hold a different conversation than it might have, I guess. The protagonist, fruitlessly crushing on a co-worker, wishes she would love him more than anyone in the world, which completely changes her personality and indeed, seems to drive her completely psychotic. I thought the conversation would be about some underlying metaphor about manipulation, negging, toxicity, but the "cheat" makes us talk about what might really be happening,  and what the rules of this universe are, instead. It's not a bad place to go, but it's perhaps not as meaningful. Plenty of upsetting moments throughout. Plot-wise a bit predictable. Inde Navarrette seems to have a great time playing up the obsessive girlfriend. Cool, creepy lighting on her once she goes through the change, though the film overrelies on loud noises to make you jump out of your seat. But man, dude, pal, Megan Lawless was RIGHT THERE, and SHE'S the hottie here. I guess the hearts wants what the heart wants and consequences be damned. Damned to hell.

At home: This is real, but "legend has it" a lot. The Testament of Ann Lee explores a branch of Shakerism that believed Christ's Second Coming was as a woman (Amanda Seyfried) in the 18th century. Emboldened by America's promise of religious freedom, Ann Lee and her few followers make a move across the Atlantic, but the American Dream has a tendency to fail its dreamers, I don't know if you noticed. Making it a musical is a great idea, since the Shakers use dance and song as part of worship, and the music is devotional in a way that prevents the audience from thinking it's anachronistic. It's also interesting how every miraculous event is given a real-world explanation, if you choose to refuse its "religious myth". Director Mona Fastvold doesn't call these out, but we get it. What that says about more established religious traditions, well... History probably wanted to forget this page of history - a woman leading a utopian religion? - but the film is her resurrection and very loving towards her no matter what our take-away might be.

I was like, how can Kieran Culkin star in an 80s movie (judging from comic book selection)? But that's how well The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002) captures the moment. Culkin and Emile Hirsch play Catholic school boys who spend their time drawing an obscene comic and pulling off dangerous, elaborate pranks on Jodie Foster's unreasonably strict nun (she kind of deserves it, honestly), until things invariable go too far. Vincent D'Onofrio is the priest who wants to smile at their artwork, if not their shenanigans, and Jena Malone is Hirsch's crush who hides a shameful sin (a storyline that doesn't entirely feel resolved, if such a thing can be). Intercut with an animated version of the comic to show how the boys' art is impacted by their lives, Altar Boys stands as a pretty cool coming of age film that combines comedy, tragedy and fantasy. On a entirely nitpicky note, as a William Blake scholar in my university days, THAT poem from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and I don't any mention of Songs of Innocence and Experience on the cover. But the Swamp Thing fan imagining himself as a plant monster, that totally tracks.

In Rob Reiner's celebrated stretch of all-time bangers, The Sure Thing is the one I'd never heard of. And I can unfortunately see why. It's fine, but it's kind of meh, though I can understand how such a teen romcom would stand as someone's confort movie. No nostalgia from me, and no great interest. John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga are college students on a road trip across America over Christmas break. Cusack is an insufferable know-it-all who has been promised a hot babe who wants to "do it" (see title) in California, but he likes Zuniga's repressed A-student who doesn't reciprocate because he's so obnoxious and anyway, she has a boyfriend. They hate each other, they get closer, they hate each other again, they learn lessons from one another, maybe they'll get together after all (or at least, you're supposed to root for that). You know the drill and there are few real suprises in terms of big picture. There are a couple of funny moments (mostly Cusack reactions), and Reiner does something interesting with the boy's damp dreams, but ultimately, I don't particularly like the characters and I don't care what happens to them. The 80s score/sountrack is pretty cringy, too. So yeah, for me, there's a skip track between Spinal Tap and Stand By Me.

I'm not entirely sure I buy the melodramatic climax of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car, but perhaps because I enjoyed its closed-off ambiguity, driven by closed-off people - its leads, a theater actor-director and his young driver during his residency. And obviously, the relationship has to be important since it offers a title, but their closeness is earned over time and a third act kind of thing. Nothing in cinema has so efficiently made me feel betrayed by an adultery as Act 1 does, but I'll perhaps be appeased by the end of the film. Act 2 is largely concerned with the man staging a multi-lingual Uncle Vanya, a play that mirrors his personal tragedy and that seems like an expiation. Indeed, many of his choices feel like a self-made purgatory. Artistic process is very important in this film (even to the art of driving), but the most pregnant theme is that of the proxy or stand-in. It's what actors do when they take on roles, but we also have the man casting a romantic rival in his former part, letting someone else drive his car, a proxy daughter, a proxy lover, a voice replacing a loved one, objects being switched for others, and contradictory personality traits. Even the multi-lingual idea fits this notion. That in fact, we can be many things and contain opposites. That two things can simultaneously be true. And I think that's where the secret heart of the film lies. (I don't think Hamaguchi ever saw Slings & Arrows, but there are many things here that reminded me of the first season - an extramarital affair causes an actor's breakdown while playing a difficult part, a young hot star from TV/movies struggles to take it on - just replace Hamlet with Vanya. Whether he did or not - and Haruki Murakami's short story is very dissimilar to the film, so other sources are possible - this is a positive for me.)

Three non-Japanese directors, three unconnected and pretty surreal tales set in Tokyo! with an exclamation mark. Given the directors involved, I should have been much more enthusiastic about the results, but the dead weight in the middle  - sorry, Leos Carax - really sapped my interest, even if it's kind of the only one that acknowledges it's a foreigner's understanding of the city. Indeed, Michel Gondry's "Interior Design" was adapted from a graphic novel set in New York, so its "Tokyoness" is suspect. It's a strong drama about a couple who crash for too long at a friend's place, until the girl, feeling like she's part of the furniture, starts to turn into a chair. I like it well enough, but it kind of comes out of left field and has nowhere to go - I think it needed to be a full feature, honestly. Carax's "Merde" is interesting because it features one of Denis Lavant's characters from the director's later, brilliant Holy Motors (which also explains why that film uses the Godzilla Theme), but despite Lavant's usual fearless performance, the triple translations required to tell the story of his monstrous foreigner creates irritating padding, and its commentary on racism (from the Japanese and towards them) is at once ugly and out of focus. Bong Joon-ho's "Shaking Tokyo" is easily the best, taking its cue from the "hikikomori" movement that has people become shut-ins, and more relatable now that we've gone through a pandemic lockdown, but it still needed more room to breathe. One such shut-in breaks is vow of solitude by making contact with a delivery person during an earthquake and then dares walk out of his apartment. What he finds there is disturbing, but we don't have time to really explore it. So in two cases, these shorts needed to be features, and in the other, it kind of BECAME a feature. As an anthology, I'm afraid it's all a little unsatisfying.

I find "WWII films" made during WWII always intriguing, and "Pimpernel" Smith, made in 1941, has the balls to tell the Nazis they can't and won't win, and I know it's propaganda for our side, but damn if Leslie Howard's last speech didn't rouse me out of my seat. Seven years before, Howard played the Scarlet Pimpernel. Here, he directs himself as a then-contemporary version of the same idea - an Englishman who liberates people from a European country in turmoil, in this case, people held in concentration camps or press-ganged into serving the Germans. As with the original Pimpernel, who saved aristocrats from the guillotine, Howard's rescues are the cream of the crop - artists, scientists... - so the idea is the same, and so is the lighter, adventurous tone. This Pimpernel's missions are a lot of fun (as is Howard's always gay-coded persona and the way he resists romances until movie magic forces him to), and the Nazi general played by Francis L. Sullivan is a great foil for him.

One Film for Every Year Since Film Existed
[1959] Journey to the Center of the Earth: It's expected that any adaptation of Jules Verne's classic will change the composition of the expedition to be more interesting to its target audience, but Disney goes further by introducing some romance elements and human antagonists (perhaps as a mirror of the space race), making the story more formulaic, but then, Verne's was too "pure science" (whoppers aside) to structure a film around. And so there's a woman on the team (Arlene Dahl), which draws some irritating 19th-century sexism from James Mason's character (the film knows him to be wrong, but still). The Disneyfication also requires a duck to join the expedition, and some light slapstick moments. However, there's a surprising death toll that clashes with some of the family film atmosphere. Honestly, I don't mind the additions, but they're in part responsible for slowing things down - the intermittently "Scottish" Pat Boone gets a SONG?! - and we don't head into ground until almost halfway. Perhaps that's a mercy, because people walking down tunnels and caves gets a bit repetitive over time, and it's when my mind starts to wander off into side-tunnels.

[1960] Letter Never Sent: Four geologist are prospecting for diamonds in the wilds of Siberia. One of them forgot to send a letter to his wife, so he keeps adding to it while the other three are caught in a romantic triangle. They may not all walk away from this expedition alive. On the surface of it, a simple survival story enlivened by Mikheil Kalatozishvili (I Am Cuba)'s visually striking photography. The camera is extremely mobile and close to the actors, in a way that's pretty rare for the era, and the actors look like they're in real danger in these beautiful environments (I guess they were). But there's a lot more going on under the surface. One man's fruitless quest for love pairs well with the seemingly pointless search for diamonds on the plateau, but I think the secret code is less existential and more Biblical. A woman finds something of a value and there's an expulsion from Paradise. Two "brothers" fight. Appeals to "God" (the leader of the expedition). Prayers for help on a radio that doesn't receive. A sacrifice for the benefit of others, and... a resurrection? Here, the 1000+ page letter becomes Scripture, perhaps. Would this have been subversive in the atheistic U.S.S.R.?

Books: Doctor Who's The Turing Test by Paul Leonard has the amnesiac Eighth Doctor of the "Earth" arc (is that really what they called it?!) reach the tail end of World War II, now desperate to find out who he really is and get back to his life, to the point of committing dark acts. The magic of this one is surrendering the narrative to historical figures who leave a record of their adventure with (or against) the Doctor. We're used to companions falling in love with the Doctor in NuWho, but it really started with Doc8, and here, pseudo-companion Alan Turing - yes, the father of computing himself - is in deep. It's through his eyes, and then through authors Graham Greene and Joseph Heller's, that we interpret this story. And because the Doctor doesn't even rightly know who or what he is, they never do either. And even the battling alien presences - machine intelligences, surely, given the book's title - remain a mystery to the end. I do kind of resent the brief Heller section because it's not geared towards giving us enough answers, and yet, what I get from it is enough. The lingering ambiguity - did the Doctor in fact do the right thing (if for the wrong reasons)? - is what makes this one interesting. That, and the various voices Leonard uses to strong effect. The high point of the arc?