"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Cleverly using a music video idiom in terms of its style, Mother Mary has Anne Hathaway as a lost pop star somewhere between Madonna (the name) and Taylor Swift, though Charli xcx's contribution to the music shouldn't be neglected. She goes former friend and fashion designer Michaela Coel, who is terrific as a mysterioso truth teller/zen guru, for help. For a dress, for forgiveness, for an expiation of her sins. And though the turn into a certain supernatural metaphor works well enough for me - especially given the overt religious/profane nature of Mary's act - the film really lives in that contentious relationship, and almost begs to be a stage play. It's perhaps a more obvious film than David Lowery's The Green Knight or A Ghost Story, but it's playful about its own pretentious discourse - it actively confronts its arty "obviousness" and therefore defuses it. But like those other films, the image-making is impeccable. I'm not planning the most terrifying pop music show, with Mother Mary, Lady Raven, and Skye Riley on stage together. Bonus points if you know which movies I'm talking about, but it's unlikely we'll walk out alive to do anything with them.
At home: In Taxi, covertly made shortly after his release from one of his prison stays, director Jafar Panahi expresses a thought that has stayed with me. He thinks he's heard his interrogator's voice and wonders if he's imagining it. It Was Just an Accident feels like he's working through that feeling and perhaps taking a certain revenge. A man thinks he's recognized his torturer, captures him and assembles other survivors of the Regime's oppression to confirm his identity, and there's tension in either outcome. Are they going to kill an innocent man, or is the man really their interrogator? It's chilling either way. I kept thinking back to the title's "accident" and the animal that was run over by the alleged torturer (and the film wants you to, because other moments are evocative of it). Does the look on his face indicate his innocence? Or does the way the animal's death is justified to the child in the car instead present his (and the Regime's) ability to dehumanize and absolve themselves of wrongdoing? I won't say how it ends except that the drama hits hard (and the coda is extremely effective and thought-provoking) despite Panahi's trademark humor through the sequences leading up to it. None of the meta cleverness that enlivens his earlier work here to distract from what is really at stake.
It's very funny to me, judging from Matt and Mara, that Matt Johnson plays a cool author who is attractive to women the exact same way her plays the hyperactive losers he usually writes for himself. He's opposite our actual lead, Deragh Campbell's Mara, a more repressed writing professor who he catches up to after many years. Though vaguely plotless, I find a lot of truth in this portrait of a relationship that was merely on hold. It's the idea that - especially considering Mara's rather awkward marriage - there's someone you never got out of your system, a nagging "what might have been" or "what might still be" that demands exploration. And Matt is definitely better aligned with who Mara is, and there's more chemistry there than with her husband (at least, on screen), but there was a reason it didn't work out back in the day, honey. Some fun improvisations along the way, though Campbell is a little too "mumblecore" for me in hers. As for the elliptical ending, it might frustrate some, but I think it's pitch perfect.
Jerrod Carmichael's bleak black comedy, On the Count of Three, starts with two best friends (played by himself and Sanctuary's Christopher Abbott) about to shoot each other as part of a suicide pact, before we go back for context. But if your bromance is going to take you to this point, you better make your last hours count, and maybe take some monsters down with you. And you better be sure. Carmichael and Abbott are a strong double act, one absolutely deadpan and assured, the other an impulsive, emotional wreck. Great chemistry, and their dialogue is innately funny. There's a slight metatextual edge to it, commenting on the tropes endemic to "frenzy films" where desperation is the order of the day and one gets the sense of dominoes not so much tipping each other as just falling out of a box. Are they going to take it all the way? Would that be too dark? Is anything else realistic? You'll just have to see for yourself.
Pedro Almodóvar's Volver is about death - the upkeep of graves, the thoughts we have of the dead, a possible revenant (Volver means Return), and maybe a righteous murder - but it's also about life, moving on from death and WITH death, how we live so that we may die well, and respect for both. So I don't think it's any coincidence that Almodóvar favors overhead shots, as if his characters are being watched over from the afterlife, or that his crowd scenes sound like buzzing flies. There isn't a bad performance to be seen, or even a middling, merely competent one. The five women at the heart of the film, Penélope Cruz and Lola Dueñas as sisters, Yohana Cobo as the former's teenage daughter, Carmen Maura as the childhood friend, and Blanca Portillo as the family matriarch, are all excellent. Now, I'm not a fan of melodrama, and there are a couple of extremely melodramatic moments in Volver that made me frown, but the playful touch of magical realism makes me forgive them. Ultimately, a beautiful picture of mother-daughter-sister relationships set in vibrant Spain. (On a very personal note, let me just say that I've never been comfortable with French "greeting kisses", and the loud Spanish variety scare me even more.)
Tokyo Pop captures a Japan that's at once alienating (I like the French word better, dépaysant, lit. de-country-izing) and obsessed with things American, and interesting setting to send Carrie Hamilton (daughter of Carol Burnett) on a journey to find what she can't find in New York - rock'n'roll stardom. Hamilton - who died too young and was mostly a Broadway star, so we don't have enough movie performances, honestly - is great in this, a platinum blonde beacon in a sea of dark hair, fated to be Japan's newest fad, but still a fad. Her romance with wannabe rock god (but actually rather nerdy) Hiro (Diamond Yukai) is sweet and charming, and redirects both their lives in the direction they want to go, and their music is catchy (not just the covers the industry forces them to sing). Celebrity comes with strings attached, and it's the detaching that's the important part. A lovely Star Is Born story, rich in detail and humor, but also an eye-opening realism.
Is Deconstructing Harry really Deconstructing Woody? I mean, that's an easy one: It's about adultery. There, done. Most of his films are, although in this case, he seems to reckon with the poisonous nature of that particular sin - it usually has "healing" properties in his fictions - even if the focus is on his character's toxic use of his personal life in his stories and novels, setting all the women in his life against him. That, too, is a betrayal. Since we see scenes from his stories and memories, there's a huge cast attached, and of ghoulish interest today is one of Woody's stand-ins, a pervert called Epstein (played by Stanley Tucci), brrr. Within the structure of the film is a fragmentary approach that extends to stylistic jump cuts inside many scenes, in which we're supposed to come to our own psycho-analytical understanding of "Harry Block", but I don't think that understanding comes with forgiveness. In the end, a fairly amusing piece of meta-fiction that leaves you wondering how much of THIS is based on the author's life, and therefore how much of his other films are, and indeed, whether this is a letter of apology to the women Allen himself has betrayed, or else, perhaps - especially given anterior work - revenge against their rejection of him for his trespasses. But it's all a little too whimsical to make either intent seriously stick.
[1953] It Came From Outer Space: Though it shares a lot of the tropes found in sci-fi B-movies of the era, it's really the blueprint for those tropes, offered as a prestige presentation. Based on a Ray Bradbury story, it is more ambiguous about its aliens' motivations than most movies of its ilk. We still have the Action Scientist and his Plucky Fiancée investigating a crashed ship full of hideous aliens, but are the latter friend or foe? An early example of "humans are the real monster", as mob paranoia explodes (we're not too early for a Red Scare), and though The Day the Earth Stood Still preceded it, it didn't have this kind of plot. The music also seems like it would aped or reused across all of 50s sci-fi. Look for Russell Johnson (Gilligan's Professor) as one of the people whose identities are taken by the aliens. The effects are quite cool, and director Jack Arnold would go on to make a couple more stone-cold effects classics. Normally, I would prefer a film in its original version, but the colorized print seems to give everyone a radioactive glow (perhaps for the use of 3D) that adds to its strangeness, so I wasn't mad at it. Not in this case.
[1954] Hobson's Choice: Shades of King Lear or half of Molière's productions, Hobson's Choice stars Charles Laughton as a wealthy but stingy boot maker with three headstrong daughters who he wants to marry off, at least until he's told he'll need to pay their dowries. What he doesn't count on is his eldest, the old maid he wants to keep a hold of because she's his best worker, having plans of her own. At the heart of the film is HER choice (I guess she's a Hobson, too) and the unusual, but very sweet, romance that flows from it. Brenda De Banzie and John Mills are absolutely wonderful in it, and her schemes to outsmart dear old dad are clever. Laughton, for his part, gives a nicely comic performance as a character who might otherwise be objectionable, and director David Lean gives him hallucinatory opportunities for slapstick. It's perhaps no surprise that Lean (with Lawrence of Arabia in his future, among other epics) makes great use of his Manchester locations. Because this may be a smaller film in scale, but it's an epic nonetheless, one about female emancipation from a patriarchy resting too long on its laurels.
RPGs: On this week's episode of Torg Eternity...The group and Furn's new PC finally speak, but they take absolutely forever to figure out they're all working for the same Operation Eris handler, even though the players know it. It's the push and pull of role-playing vs. meta-gaming, although one might question "what the players know" at this point (as, I've found, in every long campaign adventure), because some players have started loosing the plot. They've been sent on a mission by a handler, but never inform him of anything, yet expect him to know everything, and they're working deep undercover for a former High Lord, and expect HIM to know what's happening even though they don't message him, and seem quite confused about who they should be working for. Point it, even if you do recaps every session, only the GM remembers the original mission statement 3 months after the first chapter. As this is the penultimate Act, the handler betrays them and tries to burn his agents before they screw things up for him. A killbox apartment. The Hong Kong police set after them on trumped up charges. A contract assassin. Mercs in boats as they escape Hong Kong. And said handler in a high-tech helicopter shooting down at them personally.
Best bits: As the hacker tries to disable the death traps in the lethal apartment, the Psionic, Street Ninja and Merc deal with the autoguns in the cupboards with extreme prejudice, but then Kanawa security starts pouring in. These become victims of the door's choke point, however, with the coolest moves in the fight being the Street Ninja climbing up on the fridge and lopping someone's head off from there, and the Merc jumping from one couch to the other in slow motion to get different vantage points on the guys using the door frame as cover. The Merc has a fight with the contract assassin on a fire escape, where he John Wick bullet punches her at close quarters. Her move, jumping at him with piano wire and leaping off the platform to strangle him with her weight WOULD have been cool, but a tepid roll means he shrugged her off before he was beheaded. The PCs lost their pursuers in the South China Sea by turning off their lights, but that still left their muzzle flares. In the final confrontation, we're in Core Earth waters, and it's important to keep its action movie tropes alive. which means I give the players a lot of leeway. And so, the Street Ninja crests a big wave with the speedboat (I'd already establish that particular hazard in the previous chase) to get his pals in range of the helicopter where the Psionic shorted out its systems and it crashed into the water as their betrayer tried to make a final speech.
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