"Accomplishments"
In theaters: While the Twilight Zone comparison for The End of Oak Street is a fair one, the 80s setting and combination of suburban life and genre elements also gives it a strong Amblin vibe as a very watchable family goes from navigating domestic strife, to surviving in the prehistoric environment their whole neighborhood is whisked to. That is one dubiously bioactive area, but I still think Oak Street does a better job of integrating dinosaurs into modern environments than any Jurassic Park/World sequel that tries to do this, and they key is the relatability of the characters. Not action scientists and military personnel, but a normal family, running for their lives with little hope of defeating even one creature. Anne Hathaway is great as the sad mom who may or may not have been ready to give up on her screw-up husband (Ewan McGregor is fine, but his American accident is distracting to me, no Americans wanted the job?) - it's really the story of mammals vs. reptiles in so far as the way family is invoked. Engaging kids. No fear of exploiting the ridiculousness of the premise. Plenty of shocking moments along the way. And a rather weird ending that will merit discussion. (And then, the same night, we have a powerful thunderstorm that flashed bright light into the windows and made the house shake... I was relieved to find no prehistoric monsters in the yard the next morning.)
At home: The big stars in Tuner are mostly background, but both Dustin Hoffman and Jean Reno's characters are pivotal in the hero's journey from piano tuner with a hearing condition that derailed his music career (it's got a name, but let's call it an oversensitivity to sounds - honestly, I have a mild case of it, especially when they come from different sides at once, which is why I can't stand people talking during the movie in a theater, so that was relatable, end biographical parenthetical) to safecracker and hopefully back. The thing about falling in with gangsters, even the comedy-tinged screw-up gangsters we've been getting a lot of lately (think the Chechens in Barry or the Albanians in Justified and Ride or Die), is that it's hard falling out again. But if our boy (Leo Woodall) is to get with his new love, an up-and-coming pianist/composer (Havana Rose Liu, very watchable in this), he needs to get his act together. At once funny and tense, Tuner knows how to make opening safes exciting, but it's most memorable aspect is the powerful piano pieces composed for the film by Marius de Vries.
With Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan created a memorable portrait of the Australian national character for the Occidental mainstream, albeit one that lives in the bush, an Outback Tarzan that doesn't know much about civilization. He's quite charming as the character he co-wrote, and has real chemistry with Linda Kozlowski - the New York journalist writing, funnily enough, a portrait of him for her newspaper - and it's not a big surprise that the two actors would be wed four years later. She's really quite good in this, but once they're both out of the wilderness and we hit the NY streets, the film too often loses sight of her in favor of "amusing" fish out of water vignettes (barring a particular transphobic joke that hasn't aged well). The film's big weakness is that it's essentially plotless, so if you don't think the various "sketches" are interesting and funny, well... The knife gag is iconic and after all these years, still elicited a laugh, and the movie ends with a very cute spin on the "run to the airport/train station" trope. Cute, but I can't believe it would score an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.
The Crocodile Dundee sequel basically adds a crime plot to the kind of charming vignettes about a bushman in the big city premise, but while Mick Dundee as a sort of urban vigilante is a lot of fun, we long for him to get back to his native Australia because he always seems to light up when he's there. It was true in the first film, and it's true here, even if the eventual Outback sequences have him be more serious and worried. Well, he would be. The love of his life has been snatched by a Colombian drug lord because of photos sent to her by her ex-husband. But that's only half of a movie structured like an hourglass. The New York half comes to a climax and resolution, and then we start over as the Australian half lures the baddies to Dundee's home turf, where we once again have to defeat the bad guys. Not really a problem as it means more action than the gag-happy original, and though there are call-backs, they're always bringing something new to the table and not just retreading old ground. If you liked the first one, it's like staying in that feeling a little longer on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Tom Selleck goes west and keeps going after he hits the Pacific Ocean in Quigley Down Under, a western set in Southwestern Australia, and imagine spending three months on a sailing ship to get there, only to find your boss is Alan Rickman and your job is shooting natives. I'd turn my guns on the evil land baron, too, if I were him. But trading Native Americans for Aborigines doesn't really do all that much to change the nature of the film, and we're still left with a pretty standard western. A slightly slow-paced one at that. Selleck is engaging enough as a gentlemanly cowboy with a fancy rifle, and I'll never not like Laura San Giacomo in something - she pulls focus whenever on screen as "Crazy Cora", a prostitute with a tragic past - but loud gunshots doesn't do it for me, and it all felt very retro for 1990. The film apparently did wonders for Sharp rifle sales, but the change of venue didn't do as much for the western genre.
Cassandra Delaney is really giving off Sarah Connor vibes in the Ozploitation classic Fair Game (five years before T2), as a bush beauty and wildlife sanctuary manager under siege by psychotic Mad Max refugees playing a Straw Dogs. You absolutely can't wait until she gets her revenge on these three violent creeps, though every retaliation against the poachers seems to only make things worse. I'm never entirely happy with a film when animals are involved in even faked violence, but despite being on the exploitation end of things, Fair Game still has a lot of tension, cool cinematography, and good stunts. Even Delaney is obviously doing her own action, including the infamous hood ornament sequence! Where's Crocodile Dundee when you need him? It's 1986, so I guess he just went to New York, but he sure would have come in handy here.
Kids on bikes was a movie trope in the 80s, but BMX Bandits upgrades it by showcasing a lot of trick biking. But though it promotes BMX bikes very heavily (no matter what the credits' warning says), it's also quite a good postcard advertisement for Manly, a beachside suburb of Sydney. Beautiful area and a definite touristy feel (I've never seen a chase go through a waterpark, for example). The story: Three teenage BMX bikers, including a 16-year-old Nicole Kidman, run afoul of bank robbers when they find a stash of walkie-talkies that use the police frequency and start using and selling them. The baddies are desperate to get their devices so they can pull off a difficult heist, but this is a juvenile adventure, so despite pulling off a bold crime at the top of the movie, the criminals are largely there to be humiliated by their young rivals in cartoonish ways. But while I feel past the age this is pitched at, there's no denying the Act 2 chase scene is a real show stopper (that the climax can't possibly hope to match), a long sequence of car vs. bikes, featuring many environments, fun gags, and superior stunt work. A fun one to watch with your kids, but be warned they'll come home with scrapes and bruises over the coming weeks.
There's too much going on in Midnite Spares, but as to which part is the "spare tire", I think it has to be the car racing. Really kind of an unnecessary element that eats up time in the middle of what should be a crime/revenge picture about a guy (yes, yes, a race car driver) on the trail of car thieves who may have killed his father. But between the racing, the romance and the comedy, it's something that gets relatively short shrift until the final car-destroying reel. The finale is just dangerous car stunts (indeed, the film is infamous for a driver being killed during the shoot, so even the fun part takes on a ghoulish aspect), but we could have used more quality action earlier. For the most part, Spares played as a likeable romance between hero James Laurie and local girl Gia Carides - both looking more like real people than most films' leads and therefore coming off as sweet and charming), and still, what I'll remember most is that diner's comedy branding and marketing.
When a nuclear spill threatens an Australian ecosystem, the powers that be try to silence a contaminated scientist who escapes their custody and meets up with a local couple. And because The Chain Reaction is an early 80s Australian film, the male member of the couple is a race car driver who likes to get into chase scenes with nasty corporate security agents, while the female member casually gets naked. That's just the way of the world. Of course, the baddies didn't need to let their paranoid quest to find the scientist go so far because he's got amnesia, and just waiting him out while he dies from radiation poisoning would have solved their problem, if not the world's. There's an alarmist message in the title, but it's mostly buried in the movie itself, which prefers its action beats (hey, if you hire George Miller to shoot your car stuff, that's bound to happen), but I generally felt like it lost its conspiratorial atmosphere the further in we got, and my attention with it.
What is an actress like Olivia Hussey doing in a nasty Ozploiter like Turkey Shoot? Being out of place works for the picture because she plays a woman who has been wrongly accused of deviancy and sent to a re-education camp in what is essentially Australia's answer to Punishment Park. Concentration camp madness ensues as she and four other prisoners are forced into a literal manhunt for powerful elites, each with their own weapons and means of locomotion - basically supervillains, one guy rides a mini-bulldozer and his favored weapon is the crazy apeman he found in a freak show. Steve Railsback (from The Stunt Man) is the unbreakable deviant who might just get her out of this, but Hussey manages a few kills herself (though it often seems accidental). It's a wild ride and quite a watchable example of the genre. For the more tender-hearted audience, there's a censored American cut called Escape 2000 that cuts 15 minutes out and probably makes a dog's dinner of it. I scanned through it quickly and I don't know why they cut so much of it - the back half is pretty choppy - and still used the final, extremely gory, money shot. Better make sure you're watching the 93-minute version and not the 78-minute one.
When Australian cinema needed a boost in the mid-70s, they called on the One-Armed Swordsman himself, Jimmy Wang Yu, to play The Man from Hong Kong, a supercop who "helps" Aussie coppers get at the heart of a drug and weapons trafficking ring run by former Bond at the time in Hollywood jail for breaking his 007 contract George Lazenby. And they got more than they bargained for. In the story, because Inspector Fang is a killing machine who follows no rules, and on set, because Jimmy Wang Yu was apparently a real a-hole. I've never rated him highly, and to think, Sammo Hung is also in this before he was a star. At least he gets to fight on top of Ayers Rock. In any case, the Lazenby connection suggests a Bondian picture and that's exactly what we get. Fang's apparent "license to kill", sophisticated dress sense and way with the ladies is only part of it. There are also mod sets, a Bond villain, plenty of stunts, and "Sky High" sounds like a B-side Bond theme. The local cops are comparatively real people who seem to have stepped into an action movie universe and are frustrated by it, and it certainly doesn't skimp on the action.
[1991] Homicide: Though David David Mamet has been a fairly strident Zionist lately, it still feels like Homicide is an indictment of that movement, although perhaps the allegory plays differently depending on one's views. What it seems to me: Joe Mantegna's cop, Detective Gold, Jewish or not, represents the State, and is being pulled away from more important matters (the life of a black man hangs in the balance) by Zionists who use an actual tragedy (an old woman's death) to eventually "turn" the State into suborning their violent activities. While some of the threats they call out are real (the Nazi den), others ("shots fired from a man on the roof") aren't. Though made more than 35 years ago, that's U.S.-Israel relations as we understand them better today, and if it's an indictment, it's that the Zionists do not treat Mantegna nicely. Then again, one might understand this as comeuppance for the "self-hating Jew" who has lost touch with his faith and culture, and refuses to help "the cause". But it doesn't really feel righteous, and the audience may get the sense that these conspirators shouldn't be operating on American soil with such impunity (making a mockery of what it means to be American, much as the fake passport does), and extend that to the international politics involved. Morality is always gray-zoned in this either way.
[1992] Strictly Ballroom: Baz Luhrmann's first film may fit into his Red Curtain Trilogy and his general style of colorful, expressionistic exaggeration, but it's also VERY Australian, part of the same continuum as similar very LOCAL Australian comedies filled with big caricatures, mockumentary implants, and a take-down of a self-important middle class, like The Castle, Kenny or those Alvin Purple films. It concerns a star ballroom dancer who just wants to dance his own steps, from the heart as it were, but is condemned by the dance teachers' association who run all the contests. He's got an arrogant streak and a heavy chip on his shoulder, and his more willing partner starts out as a clumsy Plain Jane, but the spirit of unrestrained dance will unlock their beauty and purity. As with other Luhrmann films, it's a little hard to get into - the comedy is quite broad and the characters ugly - but there's a moment where you go all in. For me, it's that paso doble scene that heralds a wonderful finale where dance loses all competitive qualities and becomes just expression.
RPGs: After the previous longer session, we decided to start this month's Masks "issue" earlier, and it gives the GM the chance to give each character subplot scenes and still completing a story by night's end (but we did discuss tightening the supporting cast so that we're more together in those portions). For my Dial H for Hero hero, it means two dial-ups instead of one (the teaser, and then the main story) and that's good because I prepped way too many. Mucus Boy is the gross hero in the teaser action, all under the watchful eye of his mentor (oh no), and Magnesia, finally a "normal" hero, but my second female identity - he's started to question why this is happening. The plot concerned an Egyptian sorcerer controlling the city's crooks to commit crimes and bring the loot to the park, which is where the climax took place. At the very end, the Ultra-Humanite (uh-oh) showed up to get his guy back and disappeared in an egg thing that made a noise "legally-distinct from a TARDIS", so I guess he's the season's big bad. Let's look at H's heroic identities...
Origin: Mucus Boy is really based on a Joker from the Wild Cards series of books, referenced but not seen in the first couple books (perhaps ever, it went on longer than my reading them). Being mucus was also a power I listed on my Marvel Universe Deluxe page in 11th grade as a "power of the day" (see The Vegetarian a couple sessions ago for another).
Best bits: When a trio of thieves attacks the restaurant while Hugo is in the bathroom being "interrogated" by Uncle Chris (King, the 80s Dialer), he spins the H-Dial and gets Mucus Boy. Oh boy. He walks out of the bathroom and calls the main thief "Honeybunny" (Hugo likes movies), and "blows his nose" at him, trapping him in a gross glob of snot. He then takes a hail of bullets because he's really made of hardened mucus. When patrons are threatened with a gun, he splashes a big shield of hard snot between the villain and the innocents, reducing his own mass to do so. And he keeps losing mass, ramming into one man and splashing himself all the way to the runner who slips and sticks into the mucus. It put everyone off their meals, so I didn't claim this as a victory for the Midway Masks. Nonchalantly walking back to the bathroom, I slimed the window, dialed out, and hid in a bathroom stall, ready too act like I missed the whole thing while I was in.
Origin: This is an example of the image coming before the idea. Girl with an M on her chest and light coming out of her hands? M for Magnesium, right? I quickly researched the element while the GM was describing things, and derived some powers more than just a bright light. Magnesium burns, of course. There's an interesting reaction with water I had little hope of using (but did). And in the human body, it plays a role in maintaining strong muscles and bones, so I give her a bit of super-strength.
Best Bits: After blinding them, she runs through an army of thugs, punching them with fiery fists. She puts her hands on Doctor Who mummies, burning the bandages away and leaving an auricalcum frame. When Hawkgirl gets one of her "fits" again (traumatic flashbacks to past lives), she brings her "out of the darkness and into the light" so she can finish the fight. And then she asks Telkine to grab a nearby pond so she can plunge her hands in it and shoot a powerful blast of hydrogen steam at the villain, knocking him out. That awkward moment afterwards when Telkine feels weird about his buddy having turned into a sexy chick.
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