"Accomplishments"
In theaters: One Night Only AKA The Sex Purge is just a silly romcom and most bad reviews seem to want it to be something else, either a serious attack on the fascism that is lampooned (yet, accepted as a fact of life, I see the problem) or an R-rated sex comedy (as those teens who snuck into the third act in my theater probably did). But it's a silly, charming, and actually pretty funny romcom, and I really enjoyed it on the terms it set for itself. It's certainly got more world-building than I was expecting (even if it's played for laughs, there are some sly political arrows shot at the right kind of people) and I certainly don't need nudity to enjoy Monica Barbaro's presence in a movie (okay, Callum Turner is charming, too, but I really do like Barbaro, lately of Crime 101 and A Complete Unknown - she even gets to sing in this). The sign of a good comedy, for me, is when even the bit parts have fun stuff to do, and One Night Only certainly has a lot of recognizable performers onscreen doing those bits. After the initial meetpuke (not a typo), the movie gives you a bit of a build-up with an After Hours kind of middle before the inevitable must occur, as we always knew it would. Gags set up earlier keep paying off throughout. Maybe if I was a sexual/gender minority living in an increasingly oppressive state (instead of a linguistic minority in a mildly oppressive one), I'd find the premise objectionable, too, I dunno, but beyond the premise is an actually funny and charming little film.
At home: What if the John Wick films were a midlife crisis comedy? Ride or Die is the answer to that question, merging a world of super-assassins (Amazon's algorithm must provide) and, rather overtly, Thelma & Louise, with Hannah Waddingham as a statuesque assassin (Judith) whose secret best friend, the resourceful power behind a British MP's throne, Octavia Spencer (Debbie), is suddenly introduced to the secret. There's a bit of Barry in the formula as well, with dissonant violence, a screw-up Eastern European mob (here, Albanians), and failing attempts at quitting the game. I don't really expect anything entirely original from streamer productions, but this is a fun remix of successful ideas, with great leads and supporting characters (would have loved for Savannah Steyn to have become a Doctor Who companion at some point, Bill Nighy is the evil Director, and the roguish Billy Donovan character is a nice surprise). The action takes place across Western Europe (with very cool attendant soundtrack) and the plot is satisfyingly complicated as various entities converge on our duo, often at cross-purposes. The show's weakness is its TV-ness, too often recapping information (at 8 episodes, which HAVE recaps already, it's not necessary) and the friendship will they/won't they of best friends feeling betrayed, getting angry, then forgiving each other, perhaps one too many times. That said, spy (or spy-adjacent) action comedies are totally my jam, so I dug this a lot.
Jenna Coleman in the 4-part mini-series The Jetty plays a small town detective in the Lake District who finds herself at the center of a cold case mystery when a podcaster who hunts down sexual predators reopens a certain can of worms. Coleman is pretty great as a total smartass who's had enough, and as if to permeate the atmosphere with as much misogyny as possible, it seems impossible for her to get any respect from the men around her, police officer or not. The present-day investigation is intercut with events from 17 years before, and the last days of a missing girl, even as Coleman starts to suspect her dead husband may have had something to do with the disappearance, throwing her world out of whack. The mystery works and the solution is fairly surprising. It's too bad DI Ember Manning is a one-shot character firmly anchored in this one story, because I'd like her to solve more mysteries with the help (or hindrance) of this supporting cast in further stories. So that's a win.
The third and final series of Ashes to Ashes had to bring some kind of closure, not only to Alex's story, but Sam's from Life on Mars as well. It does and more besides, while still leaving a bit of ambiguity as to the true nature of the "cop show world" these characters have been thrown into during their respective comas. After the events of Series 2, the department now has a sinister Internal Affairs detective investigating it, and everything threatens to fall apart (their jobs, their lives, their relationships, the status quo, even the building itself). They may not all walk out of this "alive", but before they go, we learn a lot more about each of the main cast, along with the usual well-plotted murder mysteries. It was perhaps time to go (Life on Mars was only two series itself), as the 80s musical cues start to repeat from past seasons. Had we also exhausted the available catalogue? On the other hand, much more use of 1983 events and fitting our characters in, which is cool. At the finish, not the ending I expected, but satisfying.
After chugging three seasons of Ashes to Ashes (and much earlier, two of Life on Mars), I was curious to see Philip "Gene Hunt" Glenister play a different kind of police detective. He's the front half of Lloyd & Hill, a more intellectual and compassionate copper in a small British town, which mostly manifests as his looking into the distance thoughtfully and really rather dull. Gene Hunt also had an inscrutable look, but it worked for those series (five years in L&H's future). Much more interesting is EastEnders' Michelle Collins (who seems to have lost the thumbnail game here) as the new DI assigned to him, but the twist is that they know each other of old and had an unconsummated romance that makes things awkward now. Now, this is a TV movie that was obviously a pilot for a show (based on a novel) that never went to series, but it feels more like it was supposed to be a mystery told in several episodes, which were smashed together to make a movie. The editing is choppy and the big cast (we spend more time with the NPCs than the leads) and amount of red herrings point to a more serialized story than a single, even UK-long mystery. I pegged the killer from the off, but it still kept me second-guessing myself. The British are so good at mystery that even a series that didn't take off and was repackaged this clumsily still comes out as watchable.
Alice Rohrwacher's poetic touch gives La Chimera - in which Josh O'Connor plays the dowser who can magically find Etruscan tombs for his ragtag team of tomb robbers in Tuscany - a lot of interesting flourishes, but they don't all mesh with the story. The undercranked camera bits and one sudden address to camera, for example, indicate this will be a romp, but it's too melancholy for that. Much better are the songs that advance the story, and the ambiguous female figure who may be a loved one or an ancient goddess. Definitely on a slow burn at first, things get warmer and more interesting once the gang starts looting ancient sites. Thanks to O'Connor's new flirtation (Carol Duarte), the film becomes a modern take on the story of grave robbers cursed by the dead, and things start to go pair-shaped. Ultimately, the film plays like an Italian vacation, with everything and everyone transitory, juxtaposed against a lost civilization that's as transitory as ours will prove to be, too. The past intrudes on the present like a rain through a leaky roof, but we are tomorrow's old bones in a continuum of dust.
I like that, on the year of Hong Kong's handover to China, Ringo Lam made Full Alert (also set in the shadow of the handover) as the last film of an era. But oof, what a downer. Lau Ching-Wan is a cop on the edge, impatient with colleagues and on the verge of quitting. Francis Ng is a criminal mastermind, planning a heist less for money than for revenge. Both are trapped in a "heroic bloodshed tragedy", as only Hong Kong makes them (or used to make them), two men haunted by that one time they killed another, and barrelling towards a second. It's like all the blood of the past cinematic decade is sticking to them until they can't move anymore. That mood and somewhat procedural feel of the first two acts made me impatient - it doesn't want for action, but it's rather grounded action - but the third, as the clever heist comes about and the leads crash into each other, is where it's really at. Tense, exciting and emotional. Worth not giving up on.
Wild Search's Chinese title more properly translates to "Ban me? I'll carve out my own path", which would be a crazy title, and this Ringo Lam effort isn't crazy enough for it. Or even for the epithet "Wild". It's not an unpleasant police thriller/romantic drama hybrid, but they each hold back the other in terms of delivering what seems promised. Chow Yun-Fat is a cop on the trail of arms dealers. Cherie Chung is quite engaging as a dead gunrunner's sister now stuck raising her sister's cute little girl. And their romance works. It's charming and emotional. But with these leads, no surprise. And because of the crime element, they keep getting into violent scrapes. These criminals sure would get away with more if they didn't insist on attacking police officers in public, and I'm not sure I always entirely buy the plot. The final fight in the barn is brief, but a highlight, but then the film cuts out before the main villain gets his comeuppance. We get a resolution on the romance, but not the crime story. Really a case of two pretty good movies pulling at the covers on their shared bed.
Definitely a lesser Hitchcock, The Paradine Case stars Gregory Peck as a London barrister infatuated with his client, an alleged murderess who may have poisoned her rich husband. This infatuation complicates both the case and his marriage, and on that last score, the film dips into melodrama, which is always where Hitchcock runs into trouble for me. We spend an hour on set-up, where the femme fatale isn't even trying and Peck is hoisted on his own petard, so to speak, and then more or less watch him fail in the more interesting courtroom scenes. Charles Laughton is an intriguingly ambivalent judge. Ethel Barrymore his kinder wife whose mind is disintegrating. Leo G. Carroll (The Man from UNCLE) is the prosecutor. Louis Jourdan, in his first English-speaking role, is the dead man's angry valet who might serve as a "Plan B" for Peck. Charles Coburn is Peck's friend and mentor... It's certainly a star-studded affair. So why is it so dull? I had hopes when Coburn's daughter shows herself to be a fun amateur sleuth, but no, nothing really comes of it except commentary on the action.
I know the equally demented Psycho and Peeping Tom came out before Who Killed Teddy Bear?, but it still feels like it's begging to be banned in 1965. We have obscene phone calls shot on the caller's end like steamy sex scenes, sexual assaults, the suggestion of incest between the caller and his brain-damaged sister, Elaine Stritch as a lesbian, and the sex maniac running around Times Square looking at all the sex magazines and posters. Juliet Prowse is cute, but strong as the nightclub DJ getting the calls and all the unwanted attention, whether from the caller, the cop obsessed with such crimes, or her boss (Stritch). There's certainly an exploitative vibe (girls changing in front of the camera - though no nudity), which makes us participants in the caller's voyeurism. Boppin' rock'n'roll soundtrack (indeed, it perhaps goes a bit hard on dance scenes, padding things out). And it might have remained an exploitation flick, albeit one that pushed the limits of moral cinema at a cultural turning point, were it not so visually inventive. Director Joseph Coates puts his camera in strange places, very close to body parts, and uses editing tricks to create the caller's madness. As cool as it is lurid, I was surprised to see Doom Patrol co-creator (among other comics work) Arnold Drake credited as co-writer, but for a comics fan, that's just an extra little thrill.
[1989] UHF: What Weird Al had done for pop songs and music videos, he does for movies and television in this rather charming parody-filled flick, also featuring a lot of the day's comedy talents, several on the cusp of getting the sitcoms that would define their careers. Yankovic himself does a lot of the music, so that's a bonus, and plays George, a dreamer who imagines himself in popular movies and therefore can't keep a job. When his uncle wins a bankrupt local TV station in a poker game, he's convinced to make George the manager, and his decisions empower his team of oddballs to turn things around. This draws the attention of the very evil network affiliate in town and now you've got a ticking clock before U-62 is financially and physically bulldozed by a broadcasting giant. This is all very silly more than it is funny, but it's quite enjoyable and sincere (the Weird Al brand), basically a chance for him to do dumb game shows and insane commercials. I don't think it gets any better than the Spatula Store ad that goes on and on and on. A fun and goofy way to say goodbye to the 80s by mocking its media.
[1990] Presumed Innocent: Kind of dull and too sober, at least until Raúl Juliá shows up to defend Harrison Ford, a D.A. accused of the murder of a colleague he had had an affair with (one of many, it seems). Even though who help and support him are open to the possibility that he did it despite his protestations. With that title and the possibility of trading Ford's innate hero persona for a shocking reveal, he remains a fairly ambivalent figure throughout, though his early investigation of the murder would seem to say he didn't do it, and there certainly is a sense that accusers are acting politically after a new head D.A. is elected. The final solution makes sense and is well exposed, but I wouldn't call it too surprising. I'll say no more. For me, this had the hallmarks of a lot of the era's legal dramas - a bit of a thriller, a sordid crime with details that couldn't be used on Matlock, a bit of a procedural, it's throwing a lot of names at us like we're supposed to know who those characters are, even John Williams's score is the kind of serious piano this kind of film is normally saddled with. But those Raúl Juliá court scenes, delicious!
Books: Simon Spurrier's recent run on The Flash read like a Doctor Who comic, and no surprise, since Spurrier had written them. Volumes 4 through 6 of Titan Books' Eleventh Doctor comics is just one big story, perhaps annoyingly spread over three trades, that intriguingly involve the Time War, but the War Doctor appearing on the covers can be a bit misleading - we only really get one-panel flashes, and he only gets some real action in the Vol. 6 and he's not even on the cover - but the crux of the story arc is that events of the Time War are coming home to roost, and the Doctor has to send a companion back in time to complete a paradox. He's got options, too. He's travelling with his traditional companion Alice (who has a Bill vibe about her, though she predates her), the Squire, a now-wizened knight-like Time War-era companion he doesn't remember, Abslom Daak, Dalek-Killer without any Daleks to kill, and River Song, too! So it's crazy, with lots of weird visuals and lore casually thrown away. I do think the Eleventh Doctor is played entirely too much as the manipulative Seventh, but it's not entirely out of character. There isn't a consistently art style, as different artists worked on the individual issues, and the main one makes River pretty ugly, which is near unforgivable, but it's a fun read nonetheless, and ends with an amusing punchline.
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