This Week in Geek (16-22/10/17)

Buys

I've decided to re-up on the various comic book television series I follow on DVD, with Supergirl Season 2, Flash Season 3, Arrow Season 5, Legends of Tomorrow Season 2, and Gotham Season 3. And I've finally received my copy of Outside In Makes It So, 174 perspectives on 174 TNG stories by 174 writers, one of which is me (on Season 5's "Ensign Ro"). Check it out from ATB Publishing.

"Accomplishments"

In theaters: Battle of the Sexes tells the true story of a Billie Jean King's historic woman-on-man tennis match with hustling aging champion Bobby Riggs. Or rather, its several stories. Building up to that feminism vs. chauvinism contest are each of the competitors' tales. Bille Jean (Emma Stone) is in a drama about discovering one's sexuality while having the fate of women's tennis on her shoulders. Bobby (Steve Carell) is in a hustler comedy à la Wolf of Wall Street or The Big short, indulging in all sorts of shenanigans to distract himself from accepting he's a gambling addict. But make no mistake, it's her story more than his; it's just that her antagonist lives in a world apart. Which is perhaps part of the point. One of the things the film does well is showing the casual sexism of the early 70s, more upfront but no less malignant than today's, and the tennis sequences, of course, are very well done. A well-acted and entertaining biopic, but not one that transcends the genre. It's a little too obvious for that, I think.

In The Foreigner, Jackie Chan plays a man destroyed when his daughter is killed in an neo-IRA bombing. He goes on a rampage in London and Belfast to get justice, part of which involves getting the names of the malefactors from Northern Ireland's Deputy Minister, a former IRA member whose ties to the organization may be suspect. It's very much two films in one, with an MI-5/political thriller overtaking about half the screen time. For what it's worth, this is how the film manages to subvert expectations for audiences used to action tropes, but it's hard to see Jackie's role as anything but a weird plug-in. At the end of the end, just what did his character accomplish? Would the day have gone differently had he not been involved? While I'm sure his stirring of the pot had an effect - and it may be that the novel this is based on, the less-sensitively titled "The Chinaman", is more obvious - the film doesn't draw enough of a line between events to make it clear.

Kevin Kline's 2008 Cyrano de Bergerac, part of the "Great Performances" line, is, I'm afraid, marred by out of focus shots, which made it less than optimal for the cinema experience. But one can't deny the brilliance of the performance. Kline is both funny and touching, and extremely real despite being surrounded by more than a few over-actors (including Jennifer Garner, who makes Roxanne a comic heroine you want to laugh with - which is good - but mostly comes off as fake and mannered as a result). Regardless, the leads will have you bawling by the end. Anthony Burgess' translation is excellent, managing some fun word play and rhyming, which given Edmond Rostand's original, is no easy task. For a French speaker like me, that was as interesting as anything else - seeing scenes and lines I might once have known by heart reinterpreted in another language, and so ably (no surprise given Burgess' linguistic skills, of course).

At home: From Season 1, Gotham is a more mature piece of television than the Arrowverse stuff. There's none of that painful repetition of plot points and awkward over-stating that, though I like them well enough, makes those shows at times condescending to its audience. Instead, noir cinematography and a "don't look at the screen and you'll miss something important" attitude to story telling. Though the show is nominally a Batman prequel, starting with Waynes' murder and focusing on three real threads - Gordon cleaning up the GCPD, the rise of a new type of villain to supplant the more traditional mobsters, and 12-year-old Bruce Wayne investigating his parents' deaths - it would probably be useful to rather see it as an Elseworlds where fate is pushing the characters towards the Batman configuration we know, but doesn't mind introducing characters long before they should be relevant either. Don't sweat it, continuity freaks. And it doesn't mind changing the status quo of its characters every so often either, even within that first season, making for a pacier show than the Arrowverse canon. Now, the focus this early on is definitely the GCPD, which makes the show come across as a traditional cop show, except that the crimes are usually dark and outlandish. This is, after all, a world that must be able to admit superheroes and villains. I think it succeeds admirably, with Gordon a strong hero to latch onto, Fish Mooney a stand-out new character, and the continual humiliation of the Penguin a driving force behind the creation of his persona. The DVD includes some deleted scenes and outtakes, and a mix of making of and talking heads material that looks at designing the world and its characters. The longer Penguin profile's cheesy chess metaphor notwithstanding, they're all fairly good. There's also a Comi-Con panel, but it's the same one included on one of the Arrowverse DVDs.

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, regardless of its antagonist, is really an answer to the question "What if Jane Austen wrote action movies?", not only changing the story to accommodate some world-building and zombie attacks, but also staging bantery arguments as physical fights. It's really where Austen's witty dialog has been retained that the movie shines, while the zombie-slayer angle more often than not seems to awkwardly fit, so one may well ask, why not just make/watch a straight P&P adaptation. Well, the world isn't without interest, recasting England's noble houses as those not infected with the zombie plague, and thus explaining the need for "worthy" marriages, etc. And of course, while on the one hand I couldn't get through the more recent P&P film adaptation on account of my movie kryptonite, Keira Knightly, no one should deprive themselves of Matt Smith's delightfully Doctorish Parson Collins.

While Universal Monsters had the money for elaborate make-up, Transylvanian sets, and cutting-edge effects, RKO put producer Val Lewton on a strict budgetary diet and told him to churn out competing movies based on provided titles alone. The first of these set the tone. Cat People is a psychological, atmospheric, supernatural thriller where the scares are provided by fleeting shadows, sound design, and the audience's own imagination. In short, it's more effective (and less likely to get outdated) horror at a fraction of the cost, with a definite Hitchcockian flavor. It's the story of a Serbian woman who feels out of place in America until she finds a man she loves. Only, not even then. Haunted by childhood folk stories of cat people, she fears she may be one of them on account of her strange effect on animals, and her deep ennui even in a loving marriage. Played as a romance/drama, the horror hits home in the third act, once we have a handle on every character's personal stakes. This is how you make a horror film on a shoestring budget - you make the budget not matter to the story as told.

Oh I really liked this one. The Body Snatcher, written by Val Lewton under a pseudonym, based on a Robert Lewis Stevenson short story, and directed by a young Robert Wise, is an atmospheric piece of Victoriana about a doctor whose school is always in need of fresh bodies. Cue Boris Karloff as a ruthless grave robber in one of his best performances. He may have acted some iconic monsters for Universal, but his villain here relishes in his cruelty. Truly sinister. This is the story of two doctors - one experienced but amoral, the other young and warm - who stand to lose their souls by association with the title character. It may in fact be too late for the former, but can the latter remain on the straight and narrow as the moral dilemmas pile on? Lewton provides a literate script full of cracking dialog, and Wise makes the psychological climax wonderfully chilling.

I Walked With a Zombie. What a great title. What dies Val Lewton do with it? Well, we're a far cry from the zombie apocalypse genre, returning instead to the legend's roots - in voodoo. We follow a Canadian nurse to the Caribbean where she's meant to take care of a catatonic woman... or is there more to it than that? The ambiguities mount as she gets interested in the rituals of the island people, and wonders if they could help her patient. All the while, everyone she meets is holding back secrets, which just adds to the feeling of unease already supplied by the moody cinematography and what looks like well-researched voodoo lore (but I have no clear idea - it just looks authentic). Another RKO triumph, doing a lot with little means, and creating a world that's an interesting blend we might call Tropical Gothic.

The Seventh Victim is a thing of parts, all intriguing, but do they fit together? That's what I was struggling with for the length of the film. It's about a young woman whose sister is missing after a tangle with - as we discover - a group of Satanists. Her younger sister heads out to New York to find her, and with the help of various interesting characters, eventually does. But it does mean the protagonist's role switches from one woman to the other at some point, making the narrative uneven. The striking image of a chair and noose, alone in a rented room, is only one of many to make the the film unsettling, along with a great many noir tricks that tap into the leads' paranoia. The first half of the film is about the anxiety of finding yourself alone in a strange city, the second a thought-provoking nihilistic exploration of the cult's strictly non-violent evil. While the eerie atmosphere is unimpeachable and the script quite literate, I'm not sure The Seventh Victim is as structurally coherent as it needs to be.

Jigoku (AKA "Hell" or "The Sinners of Hell") is a surreal, visual experience from the director now considered the father of Japanese horror cinema, Nobuo Nakagawa. The story, such as it is, presents us with a group of sinners, all due to die around the same time, and then spends the third act in Hell itself as their souls are tested and punished. The grotesque exercise is a but screamy, but undeniably unnerving, a master class in the use of absolute darkness and strict pools of light. That's why the definite lull in the middle of the film is so disappointing. An extended sequence (or string of sequences) at a debauched party, with a lot of singing and drinking, and shot flatly, had me struggling to stay interested. Not easy to follow in the first place, that's no help. But I do enjoy the look of the film otherwise.

Doctor Who Titles: Taking a page or twelve from the World of Darkness RPGs Vampire the Masquerade and Werewolf the Apocalypse, Underworld throws us into the deep end of the pool, very much in medias res, in a war between vampires and werewolves. We catch up to the politics at play eventually, and the heroine Selene (Kate Beckingsale) also eventually becomes sympathetic, but the film does a poor job of telling us why we should root for either side. Though there are some quick references to artificial blood, it all feels like they're washing the blood off monsters' hands. Except it all takes too long, so the first-time viewer would be right to feel at a distance from any of the stakes. I appreciate the world-building, but perhaps it loses something in the pacing, and is entirely too interested in extended machine guns blazing (not only does this seem off-genre, but it's just about the most boring action sequence I can imagine; there's some gun fu too, and that's where the movie needed to go, not boring 80s Hollywood gunplay). Still better than the monster vs. monster movies Underworld's success spawned, like Van Helsing and I, Frankenstein, which lack even more character.
#The TARDIS lands in the film... We know vampires and werewolves exist in the Whoniverse, so it's easy to imagine the 8th Doctor, Fitz and Anj stumble upon a war between the two.

Comics: The Death-Ray has Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) attempt the superhero genre in his own inimitable way, by juxtaposing kitsch Sunday comic strip aesthetics (even if it's one big story, each page may open out on a different stand-alone lay-out) and the grotesque (a teenager gains powers from smoking cigarettes and inherits a raygun from his father who died from cancer), and yet keeping everything grounded in the pathetic world of his protagonist. Though the story mostly takes place in his teens, where power fantasies are meaningful, it is told by his middle-aged self, a man who's lived an unremarkable life. It begs the question as to whether the fantastical parts happened, or if they're imagination replacing memories, but then, for powerless teenagers, such waking dreams may well have more staying power than more mundane events. I like Clowes, I just can't read too much of his work without getting a little depressed, is all.

Books: Midsummer Century is a science fiction novella by James Blish, in which an astronomer falls off a telescope and wakes up in 23 000 years in the future, piggy-backing on various individuals' brains. It's a time of crisis, where Man's vestigial "Third Rebirth" rubs up against its Fourth, and the Fifth may result from the protagonist's clumsy interactions. But while on the surface of it, this is "modern man projected to SF world" story like the Barsoon stories or more properly Stapledon's Star Maker, the more I read, the more convinced it was actually an allegorical retelling of the history of religion. By the time, we're following three minds in one, I knew for sure. Just what this means for the story's end point, I'm not entirely sure, because I think we've by then moved on to something transcendental, possibly Buddhist, of which I know far less than the Catechism I was taught and that pervades, satirically it seems, the first two acts of the book. One for the metaphor decoders more than the fans of futurist plots.