"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Spielberg remakes Close Encounters with Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor in the Richard Dreyfuss role of "human antenna", but where the original had mystery going for it, Disclosure Day has disclosed too much even before the curtain rises. I suppose there's no way not to know it's about aliens (a word that is conspicuous by its absence in the film) unless you're watching this far in the future and the trailers have been forgotten - not that it takes long for the movie to tell us. The mystery is therefore what the aliens' message is, and I do like the intent, if not the process. Severe pacing issues kept me at arm's length, honestly, with exposition repeating the same information several times, or making points I just didn't think were very solid. The villains tend to give up when they have plenty of other avenues, or else are incredibly incompetent so the heroes can sneak up on them or escape. And, well, the characters are too often their plot function rather than real people, John Williams delivers one of his most forgettable scores, and the CG, as with a lot of modern film making, is awful, culminating in a dream sequence that looks like A.I. slop. Of all the directors in all the world, you would think Spielberg immune to this. There are a lot of striking moments in the film, and all the leads are strong, but ultimately, it'll hinge on whether or not you believe in the ending's transcendent moment. And... I don't. That's not the way people interact with media anymore. How long had this script been sitting in a drawer?
At home: Ludvig must have been a dream role for David Mitchell. Not only does it tap into his persona as a posh but pathetic nerd, but it's in the style of two of his mystery heroes - Inspector Morse, but switch Oxford for Cambridge, and Agatha Christie, with drawing room finales in every episode. The premise is one that allows for strange, complicated mysteries to solve, too. Mitchell is a pair of twins, one of whom used his genius to become a police detective, while the other turned into a renowned, but anxious and reclusive puzzle setter. When the cop disappears, his wife (Anna Maxwell Martin, the heart of the show, and an able sleuth in her own right) calls in her brother-in-law (with whom she has a tender relationship) and convinces him to work through his panic attacks and pose as his own brother to investigate the disappearance. And then "Ludwig" is called upon to solve mysteries-of-the-week which take him away from his main goal (which outlasts the Series 1). Clever and amusing, with some strong guest-stars along the way.
Given the opportunity to be showrunner of his own Essex County adaptation, Jeff Lemire delivers a 5-episode mini-series that's like his graphic novel, but also quite different. The original Essex had three stories - a boy who dreams of being a superhero meets his deadbeat dad for the first time, an old hockey player is haunted by memories of his team, and an on-call nurse serves as connective tissue between the stories - but the production understood that these needed to be more strongly integrated to be part of the same series. The trick is a fine one - they make everyone a member of the same family, and give some of the more ancillary characters (like Lester's uncle) their own lives and secrets. Molly Parker and Stephen McHattie are the bigger names here - Parker as the nurse is the most changed from the graphic novel, but is the real heart of the series, and McHattie is Lou and if there ever was an actor who LOOKED like a Jeff Lemire drawing... The climax of what was "Ghost Stories" still gave my heart a pinch, as it did reading it, but there's no question the best arc for television is that of "Tales from the Farm", crafting a heart-breaking relationship between the kid (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) and his absent father (Kevin Durand, who is especially good in this). Because it's in full color, it never feels as dark as the comics trilogy, and perhaps that's why its theme seems less about grief than about forgiveness, for others and oneself. I appreciate it for that.
Julian Barnes is my favorite contemporary author, and I've been reading him since the early 90s, reading everything whether fiction or non-fiction. So of course I've read The Sense of an Ending (published in 2011), which ironically doesn't have the most memorable story, but I know I was perfectly content wrapping myself into the warm blanket of his prose. I say ironically, because what I did remember going into the film version was that it was - big picture - about the unreliability of memory. And that still comes across, if more subtly, as the film - surprisingly, I thought - mostly eschews using that prose as narration, except as a bookend. Jim Broadbent is an old man who is forced to revisit a dark chapter of his life - confront the truth of it - when he is willed a friend's diary by an ex's mother, a diary withheld from him by that ex. As we dive into his memories - some of them unreliably told to his ex-wife (Harriet Walter, who becomes my favorite character in the piece) - we start to put the pieces together, but just as we can't trust the "memory", perhaps neither can Broadbent once competing evidence starts to filter in. Likeable enough, though without the book's prose, I'm not sure it'll be memorable in its own right.
After a young man dies, his boyfriend (Ben Whishaw) tries to connect with his grieving Chinese mother (early kung fu cinema icon Cheng Pei-Pei) who resents him and having been placed in a home in Lilting, a BBC Films drama about shared grief piercing through a massive language barrier. Because the mother doesn't speak English, and the man doesn't speak Mandarin, which is perhaps the least of their problems. National mores also stand between them. A translator is brought in, nominally as a gift to the mother so she can speak to a British suitor at the same home, but she's a little... proactive, shall we say? Her well-meaning initiative isn't particularly welcome, but perhaps breaking down those language barriers wouldn't have been doing favors to anyone anyway. The relationship could fall apart once its gets talky, and for Whishaw and Cheng, it means a reckoning is now possible. Whishaw feels responsible for her, but he brings a lot of baggage to the situation that might derail his efforts, efforts that aren't appreciated anyway. And if they come to an understanding, it'll perhaps be because human nature is the same the world over, and speaking is surplus to requirements. Great actors, subtle stakes, very nice.
I'm the kind of snob who will sometimes dismiss (refuse to read or see) something because it's a "rip-off" of something else I've liked. I'm damn inconsistent with that, but I would put To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar in that category. When it came out, I had recently seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and enjoyed it immensely, and I couldn't be arsed to seek out an "Americanized" version of a drag queen road movie, especially since I wasn't convinced by the casting. 30+ years later, I find that they were two very different films, and while I still think Priscilla is a stronger film, To Wong Foo still has something going for it. Swayze and Leguizamo are actually quite strong in it, and though Wesley Snipes remains an odd choice, he has a good female voice. The dialogue is very witty and quotable, which is its best feature. And at its heart, though it spells out the difference between a drag queen and a trans person, it's still coded as a trans story - the trio never break character (whereas all the drag artists I know tend to persona-switch) and there's a scene that's really about deadnaming, for example. Of course, it's also a wild comedy where the characters' entire personalities are their drag personas, and the transphobic villains are cartoonish and consistently humiliated. The movie is unusually comics-literate, and I think it views the drag costumes as superhero costumes of a sort, and its ladies as the invincible saviors of the tiny town they're stranded in when their car breaks down. Fabulousity as super-power. It's a cute little fantasy, not so much naive as aspirational, very Hollywood, but it's hard to bear a grudge.
After Star Trek First Contact's success, Patrick Stewart showed up in a couple of action thrillers as a bad guy, and I remember insisting on seeing each of them. One was Richard Donner's Conspiracy Theory which, like Masterminds, isn't a great showcase for his abilities (was that supposed to be an American accent?), nor his dignity (his character is humiliated several times). But honestly, that's not my problem with Conspiracy Theory today. Though you're in good hands with Donner when it comes to well-shot action, Mel Gibson's performance as a conspiracy nut out-manics Riggs from Lethal Weapon and is extremely annoying to watch. The romance with Julia Roberts is therefore absurd (oh, she falls in love with her stalker, does she?). I know there are mitigating circumstances - they've been messing with his mind - but this is a deeply troubled individual the movie insists on treating like any other leading man in the final stretch. But then, the plot is pretty dumb. Gibson is right about conspiracies that don't even make sense and having nothing to do with the story (like the NASA stuff), and there's a moment where Roberts asks an FBI agent who the FBI's director is to rumble him as a fake, but guys, I can name the last two or three FBI directors and I'm not even an American citizen. Somehow, the agent in question fails. Maybe conspiracy nuts have hurt the world too much since 1997 for me to enjoy this thing anymore, but I don't think it has the juice regardless.
[1967] Dragon Inn: You can always count on King Hu for gorgeous cinematography, especially once he's emancipated himself from Shaw Brothers. Indeed, this is his first after the classic Come Drink with Me, and shot in arid and mountainous locations in Taiwan, and it looks beautiful. After a coup, the Imperial Eunuchs exile a political rival's family, but wanting to take no chances, send the secret police to killer them. The villain set up an ambush at the title location, but it's a hotspot for heroic swordsmen activity, leading to several fights as the heroes help the victimized family escape. Though there are definitely wuxia tricks - feats of strength and accuracy - the director still keeps the action fairly grounded. There's wire and/or trampoline work, but none of the "flying" that typifies the genre, which I think works to its benefit. Who I feel bad for is the staff, honestly.
[1968] Witchfinder General AKA The Conqueror Worm: Often touted as the grandpappy of the folk horror explosion of the 70s, I don't think it's exactly that. It's historical horror, if it's horror at all, because witchcraft isn't real, and the torture and vicious executions are conducted by human beings. Who needs the supernatural, when Man's cruelty to Man is so prevalent? Its influence on folk horror is obvious, however, because it looks A LOT like those later films (and yet, has its own visual stamp - I love the editing transition from water to fire, for example, both used as punishments). Vincent Price as the main villain is cold and, in a turn that seems rare for him, not playing it with sparkle in the eye. He's a terrifying judge and executioner, a hypocrite and a zealot, and able to destroy enemies with a simple accusation. The hero are a soldier in Cromwell's army seeking revenge for what the Witchfinder has done to his loved one, and this world is realistic enough and bleak enough that you can't be sure he'll win. A harrowing page from history that could have gone for exploitation, but succeeds by resisting that temptation.
Books: Perhaps, like me, you've enjoyed Bob Mortimer's comedy and skills as a raconteur on British panel shows, but I can also vouch for him as a writer and prose humorist, going by his latest novel, The Long Shoe. Mortimer eases us in with a first third that's all about building his lead's perspective and wringing humor out of it before surprising us with mysteries that beg to be solved - not wanting to go to bed to reach just one more chapter makes it a literal page turner, right? - with lots of surprises incoming. What we really need is new perspectives to explain what's happening and how it all connects, and I do think Mortimer cheats a bit by not synchronizing the timelines exactly, but he certainly gets the reader spinning theories. A quick overview of the plot for potential readers: Matt is an easy-going (to a fault) bloke whose girlfriend Harriet has potentially left him. Then he gets invited to act as caretaker (but mostly, spy) in a luxury apartment building and things get weird. Just what is happening there and is there a connection between this and Harriet's disappearance? The characters are funny and surprisingly sweet, and the prose is amusing without calling attention to itself. I quite loved it. Oh, and for the fans of Mortimer's raconteur persona, there's a cat he references on Would I Lie to You? that appears prominently in the novel. I really need to investigate the wider Mortimerverse...
Jeff Lemire's take on The Invisible Man, The Nobody was his first work for Vertigo (indeed, for any of the major publishers) and would lead to be big things for him. I tend to like him most when the stories feel like they're taking place in Essex County somewhere, down in rural Ontario, even when there are genre additions (like Fishflies and Minor Arcana), so The Nobody classifies. There's the small town slice of life, as teenage waitress takes an interest in a bandaged recluse doing experiments in his motel room, and a pleasant play on being a nobody, whether an erased invisible person or one that simply lives in a small town no one knows or thinks about. Lemire provides fake EC (but really DC) style covers for his three chapters, even if this was designed as a self-contained graphic novel rather than three issues. It could have been longer, which is a compliment.
I think Jeff Lemire proves himself a comics writer above all with his memoir 10,000 Ink Stains because the prose is very simple and direct, even repetitive. Prose biography isn't his medium. But style aside, there's great value in comics professionals telling their stories, especially one with Lemire's trajectory. It's the making of an auteur, from indie comics work to the big time, splitting his time between personal projects and work-for-hire, and even getting to see/work on some of his creations brought to the screen. Lemire is honest with himself and his work, and never throws anyone under the bus even if he could have (the Big Two gossip is very intriguing, but you'll have to do your own research if you want your tea hot because he's shy about naming names). Each project is given its own chapter (with a stronger focus on the stuff he both wrote and drew, and less so on stuff he doesn't own, as it should be), with art pieces, many of them never before published (including his first Kinko-printed comic in its entirety), supporting the biographical detail. No spoilers for works you haven't read - which I appreciate even if I've gone through a sizable chunk of his bibliography - merely discussion of inspirations and techniques, premises but not conclusions. If anything, it'll make you spring for the stuff you haven't read yet.
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