This Week in Geek (9-15/10/17)

"Accomplishments"

In theaters: Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is not, to my mind, the transcendent piece of cinema some would have it be. It is many other, fine, things. A film noir thriller like the original (though visually closer to the director's other sci-fi films, Arrival and Enemy). A reverse Blade Runner, in that the hero is a replicant who may have doubts as to the truth of that. A tribute that doesn't, to my amazement, kill the ambiguities I so love from the first film (despite the participation of some of its stars/characters). A strong action flick with awesome set pieces. A social fable about how we treat minorities. A lesson in cinematography from film legend Roger Deakins. An exercise in world building, pushing the retro future imagined in 1982 by another 30 years. Further questioning of what it means to be human, or just what makes a person "real". Clocking in at nearly 3 hours, there's certainly a lot to unpack. However, it lacked the most of the elliptical qualities of the original, its story-telling more overt and its story beats explained. I felt like the fates of certain characters left me hungry for better resolutions. So in strictly comparing the two films, the original hasn't been dislodged from its exalted place in my appreciation. Taken alone, for what it is, 2049 is still one of the better SF films one is likely to see this year.

Stronger tells the true story of Jeff "Boston Strong" Bauman, a man who lost his legs in the Boston Marathon bombing, still managed to give a description of the bomber, and ended up an American hero/symbol. Not that he wanted that. And that's the real story here, and how the film subverts the way these kinds of stories are often told, i.e. with sentimental cloyingness. Jeff has to deal with becoming a vessel for other people's emotions, whether that's unconditional love, pride, hope, or awe, things he doesn't feel he deserves. To that psychological journey is added a procedural look at amputee rehabilitation, and a lot of real faces and voices (either local talent or people playing themselves) to add to the harrowing verisimilitude. And still, it manages to wring sincere tears from you. Jake Gyllenhall is always good, but Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany and Jeff's long-suffering girlfriend is the most emotionally engaging, while love her or hate her, Miranda Richardson comes up with such a real performance as his mom, I half-thought she was an unknown. Best supporting actress territory.

Let's get it out of the way early: The LEGO Ninjago Movie does not reach the fevered heights of either the original LEGO Movie or LEGO Batman. Based on a pure-LEGO property, it simply can't compete on the fun references front. It does tap into Asian cinema tropes (giant robot anime, kung fu films, samurai epics), but that stuff is sort of lost on a general audience and for a particular fan of those genres, there's not enough of it. But it's still a lot of fun. It has a sometimes touching father-son story (what happens when your dad is pure evil, but you're not? this could have been LEGO Star Wars, am I wrong?), even if the family politics, as it were, are rather surface level. To my enchantment, it starts with a live action sequence starring Jackie Chan (who also voices a character in the story), and live action elements creep into the movie in a way that tries to do something a little different from the other films in the franchise. I went in not caring about Ninjago (in LEGO Dimensions, it's the stuff I tend to snore through because I have no attachment to the world), but came out as a fan.

At home: In the lead-up to Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve asked other directors to make shorts that took place between the two films. I watched these AFTER seeing 2049, and I'm glad I did because while they are spoiler-lite, it's all information I would rather have the core film tell me. The most interesting by far is Black Out 2022, a 15-minute high-action anime by Cowboy Beebop's Shinichirô Watanabe. It helps reframe the replicant plight from the original film in a convincing way. The next two, directed by Luke Scott, are really single scenes that don't really stand on their own. 2036: Nexus Dawn features Jared Leto's character and informs the new replicants' psychology and actually does make their portrayal in 2049 more intriguing. 2048: Nowhere to Run gives Dave Bautista something to do, but there's no real point to it.

I'm used to Stanley Kubrick playing distancing tricks on the audience, but Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, takes the cake. The book is a 19th-Century picaresque set in the 18th, following the good and bad fortunes of an Irish rogue who eventually marries into the aristocracy. It's a story book-ended by duels, and wryly narrated by Michael Hordern's rich voice, but that's just it - we're often told things and not actually shown them, especially where emotional context is concerned. The lead, Ryan O'Neal, spends most of the film, stone-facedly moving from one circumstance to another, do while I wasn't exactly bored (restless perhaps, but not bored), I definitely had a hard time engaging with the story. But this is Kubrick, so it's all part of the plan, of course. The achievement here is to create what is clearly the product of 18th-Century high art. Every frame is a painting (some shots inspired by the art of the era). Every note of the soundtrack a classical piece. The narration, literary. So when he puts us at a distance, it's the distance one feels from a painting, from the past, from the artifice of the century. We're meant to be detached, but to also take in the beauty of the image - perhaps an exploration of the difference between painting and cinema on his part - albeit, intellectually. As a piece of cinematography, it is impressive; as a story, it (necessarily?) leaves me cold.

Before Snowpiercer and Okja, Korean director Joon-ho Bong gained acclaim for The Host, in which chemicals dumped in the Han river help create a mutated fish monster that takes people to its lair for later eating. A young girl is among those taken in the initial attack, and her family become monster hunters to try and rescue her and kill the beast, with plenty of Bong's satirically-presented government forces getting in the way of their success, which has turned out to be his trademark. The monster is well imagined, and neither the characters not the story beats can be called predictable, but I did find the narrative a little confusing at times. The Host is a fresh take on the SF monster genre, but in its bid for freshness, it's not always as clear as it needs to be (the chemical agent business that's too far in the background to suddenly hit the foreground in the climax, for example). I'd still rather have something new than a tired old formula.

Visibly passed masters at creating atmosphere by this point, Universal added the last key piece of the Universal Monsters puzzle 10 years after Dracula, with 1941's The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains as miscast son and father (one's a giant, the other tiny), the former cursed before long to become a wolf in the night. While Chaney does a good job as a man tortured by what he might do, the film fails to exploit the metaphor of the predator that might be lurking there already. We have shades of that in his pushy (not to say creepy) flirting with the film's ingenue, but the short 70-minute run time doesn't allow for much in the way of psychological exploration the werewolf myth. But then, they were really introducing it to audience. The fact they tease it meant I had  a certain expectation.

1932's Island of Lost Souls adapts H.G Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau for the Universal Monsters fan, its success almost entirely hinging on Charles Laughton in the mad scientist's role. No really, wow. While the humanoid animals are meant to be the "monsters" on the surface level, it's really man's potential for inhumanity that makes Moreau the real monster, first as unthinking cruelty to animals, but at SOME point, one must consider whether they deserve human dignity. Laughton creates a whole performance here, not simply a portrait of obsession or sadism. He's sinister, funny, quirky, intelligent, deluded, tortured... and more. He may rise above everyone and everything else in the film, but everyone else is at least competent, the pacing is adequate, and the cinematography atmospheric. Given the lack of success of 70s and 90s adaptations of the story, Island of Lost Souls may well still be the best "Island of Dr. Moreau" we've ever gotten.

The Black Cat, "suggested by" a story by Edgar Alan Poe, has very little to do with that literary classic. The first pairing of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, it toys with the audience's expectations concerning those actors. Is the true villain Lugosi's intense psychologist who drugs the heroine after a car accident? Or is it Karloff's famous architect who keeps beautiful dead women (a Poe trope, at least) in his basement? The film does try to do new things with Gothic, in particular with a slick, modern house as its setting, but a lot of the ideas on show seem unfinished. Characters might not react normally to seeing something shocking, for example, and the more supernatural elements are never explained. And somehow, it's never not watchable, strange to the point of inviting cult status. The music is sometimes a bit heavy-handed, almost silent film-style, and I could do without the final punchline, but as a creepy struggle between two Universal Monsterverse stars, it has real spark.

Universal's The Invisible Man is a masterwork of period special effects, groundbreaking, in fact. Some of the rotoscoping is a little shaky, I guess, but very little of it. Most of the time, it looks great, and all the gags used to make objects move, etc. are seamless and fun. There are even times when I had to wonder how it was done. And there are so many of them, I'm even impressed that they attempted to make this film in this way AT ALL. Also impressive is Claude Rains as the eponymous mad scientist, bringing the character to life mostly through his voice and mannerisms, as the bandaged face leaves him very little to work with. The film moves along at a great clip too, with lots of action compared to many of its Universal cousins. The one flaw, to my mind, is Una O'Connor as the innkeeper's wife. Even worse than her over-acting in Bride of Frankenstein, here she screeches up a storm with a terrible Cockney accent, trying to steal (and then kill) every scene she's in.

House of Dracula puts the three best known Universal monsters together - Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man - and a mad scientist with shades of Jekyll and Hyde for good measure. The story is a bonkers mash-up where the three of them stand to get help with their conditions from said scientist, but this go awry, naturally, due to their monstrous impulses. I'm not sure I buy the scientific explanations given for the characters' supernatural powers (I prefer to think he's mistaken in advancing those theories), but the point is ultimately moot anyway. While on the subject of not buying things, John Carradine as Dracula? Nah, man. One highlight though was Jane Adams as a touching hunchbacked nurse. So. Was this a jump-the-shark moment for the Universal Monsters franchise? I'm guessing they're usually pretty campy after this, but I still think it's entertaining.

Doctor Who Titles: Face of Evil is a 1996 TV Movie (originally from Hallmark, currently available on YouTube) starring Tracey Gold as a sociopathic grifter who, having stolen the identity of another girl, will do anything to profit from it. A lurid tale only mildly hampered by its TV trappings - shot simply, with overdone musical cues - it kept my attention in a "don't know what happens next" kind of way, which is all that's really required of it. Gold gives a correspondingly limited performance, with little subtlety, but you still want to see her succeed just to get to the next scheme, and at the same time, fail because she is  despicable villain.
#The TARDIS lands in the film... The 8th Doctor helps Dr. Grace find her cousin who hasn't been heard from in a while, only to find her identity has been usurped by an evil girl. Is it too late to go back in time and save Grace's cousin's life?

Doctor Who Titles: 1938's Invisible Enemy is a bubbly spy thriller in which a former British agent, now a playboy, tries to prevent the sale of oil fields to foreign nations, thereby preventing a war (note the date). Alan Marshal plays the lead with a near-constant smile, too glib for anything to feel serious, and neither the love of his life, nor the villain she's married to are truly interesting (though there's a Bondian moment with a dangerous chair). Where the movie actually shines is in Herbert Mundin as the hero's resourceful valet. He gets all the great moments and if not the protagonist, he's at least the real hero of the story. And the only reason to watch this ill-titled film, really.
#The TARDIS lands in the film... The first Doctor and Susan show up in pre-WWII Paris and help Jeffrey Clavering stop the war months earlier than history would have it.

Books: In Sequart's Moving Target: The History and Evolution of Green Arrow, Richard Gray paints a complete picture of DC Comics' battling bowman, from the Golden Age to the New52 (not forgetting the Arrow show), with a few key creator interviews along the way. He loves his subject, that's clear, and perhaps he fawn over it a bit much sometimes, but his thesis that Oliver Queen is a "moving target", continually moving from one incarnation to another with the whims of continuity is an interesting one. Though he's working with 75 years of history, Gray finds a nimble enough thru-line for the character. There are a few errors in the book, but they're never about G.A. himself and like the occasional typo, don't really detract from the work. I like Green Arrow, but I admit to having skipped a lot of his comics, so I definitely learned something. Moreover, I was impressed enough to wish other writers would take up the baton and provide Sequart with similar books about the second string of superheroes - like Hawkman & Hawkwoman, the Atom, or Supergirl.