This Week in Geek (3-09/06/19)

Buys

'Tis the season! With a Godzilla film out in theaters, I got myself a couple (more) Godzilla shirts, which I will be modelling around the province all summer.

"Accomplishments"

At home: Prospect has a punful title and a picaresque plot about a teenage girl who has to survive on a moon with a toxic atmosphere and dangerous prospectors looking for that world's equivalent of gold. Shall we say her prospects aren't good? While the plot, and therefore pace, is all over the place, the movie more than makes up for with atmosphere and world-building. A story about people in space suits trying to survive would normally be set in a desolate environment, but here they chose to make it a lush forest filled with poisonous pollen. The hard science aspect reminded me of the stories of Hal Clement, or something like H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, where half the story is discovering the world. Made with relatively little means, Prospect still manages to hint at a huge, and strange universe out there. Our heroine's music, books, writing, are all outside our experience, and yet we recognize her and the men around her as humans. The technology certainly seems old school. If there's a real-world referent, it's the Old West, but replace gold or oil with weird and wonderful alien resources. Much better than most direct-to-Netflix indie sci-fi.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine Season 6 dropped on Netflix and I'm not sure it lasted me more than 24 hours. It's just so good. By this point, we know the characters and love them, and they could get up to almost any shenanigans and we'd be happy. As usual, there are actual crime mysteries in addition to the comedy, which I think is one of the best things about this show. Not to say it skimps on the laughs because I probably laughed out loud twice an episode. The new Peralta-Santiago dynamic is actually quite strong, their partnership funnier than their past rivalry. Andre Braugher's Captain Holt is still MVP though. Leaving us this season is Chelsea Peretti's Gina, though she still gets a number of episodes to send herself off. I was never a big fan of Gina - too extreme a personality - but she does grow on you, and in these last few episodes, shows her heart as well as her usual ego. But hey, it means Hitchcock and Scully get to be in the opening credits now, and the odd episode focuses on them to great effect. NINE-NIIIIIIIINE!

If you're a fan of Death Proof, then you have to see Vanishing Point. That's where the car comes from, and probably Tarantino's entire reason for making the film. If you're not a fan of Death Proof, you still have to see Vanishing Point. It's a brilliant, artful, PURE car movie that turns a 90-minute car chase into the American Myth. Filled with amazing shots and well-used music, this flick stars Barry Newman as the iconic driver Kowalski, who with the slimmest of possible motivations, is trying to drive a car from Denver to San Francisco in under 15 hours. Along the way, he has all sorts of crazy encounters that smack of something more, tapping into something Jungian, and he's guided by a kind of oracle, Cleavon Little's blind, psychic D.J. It's all very strange, but it works. And as we get closer to the end, we've learned just enough about Kowalski that we start to understand him, and that simple motivation becomes more complex. He's freedom seeker, yes, but seeking freedom from what? Vanishing Point isn't just a car movie, it's an experience. FAVORITE OF THE WEEK

A car racing comedy out of China, I thought Pegasus would bring a little of that Shaolin magic to the racing sequences, à la Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Dunk, but it's a lot more grounded than that. It still manages to make a rally race, where competing cars take off at 5 minute intervals so they don't normally interact with one another on a dangerous mountain course (it's real and it's insane), through funky editing and effects. Where the film finds its extremes is in the comedy. The story of a disgraced racer trying to make a comeback and reclaim his passion and honor has a lot of heart, but there is a point in the second act where you may well ask yourself if we'll ever see any racing at all. His comic humiliations make it seem less and less likely as the narrative unfolds. More extremes are to be found in the film's lyricism, which asks you to forget about the plot on occasion to focus on its poetry. Overall, while Pegasus is a sentimental piece by a director who did some car racing himself, its characters are sympathetic and work well together. There are no true villains. It really is about following one's passion to the end, and respecting that trait in one's opponents as well.

I wish I liked The Cars That Ate Paris more than I do. After all, this little Australian picture has a great premise. A small town called Paris lives off the car accidents it causes, with creepy results. It's interesting to see how their home-grown economy works, and the sad sack protagonist, who has a fear of driving ever since he committed vehicular manslaughter years ago, makes for a good, if passive, point of view character to tell the story. The car fetishism prevalent in the film is also a good metaphor for his phobia and possibility of overcoming it. And there's a cool car attack in the third act, with colorful killer cars that may or may not have inspired Mad Max down the road (ha!). But it fails to gel together for me. Director Peter Weir would go on to do bigger and better things, but here his narrative feels disjointed, like he's trying to tell a story about a place, and is just shuffling his hero along from one set piece to another to reveal the bigger picture. We're still left with a lot of unexplained shenanigans, and perhaps it's just supposed to be the hero's psyche trying to repair itself after a trauma, but I don't know that that's altogether clear.

Once upon a time, Henry James put an idea in François Truffaut's head and the result was La chambre verte (The Green Room), a dry, intellectual piece about a man morbidly obsessed with the dead after the First World War and the death of his young wife. Truffaut plays the man himself and his adequate acting is up to the challenge of representing a cold, distant man who mostly shuns the living (even if one wonders what a stronger actor could have done with the part, his lifelessness is kind of the point). Nathalie Baye, playing his impossible romantic interest, is much more lively and sympathetic, though I feel like her part is comparatively underwritten. Par for the course when the lead is in almost constant dissertation mode - in fact, the language of all the characters sounds very "written", which is why a performance is necessary to make things come alive - but she never gets to explain herself AS well. This was the director's biggest failure, but it's still interesting as a philosophical drama about death, grief, remembrance, letting go, and moving forward.

Can you do Film Noir with a child lead? The Window goes out of its way to try and I think it succeeds admirably. Prefiguring Rear Window but harking back to The Boy Who Cried Wolf, 9-year-old Tommy (Bobby Driscoll) sees a murder in the upstairs apartment while lurking on the fire escape. Only, no one will believe him because he's told one too many tall tales to get attention. Well, if it's attention you want, Tommy, it's attention you'll get. From the murderers! So he have our flawed protagonist. We have our dark crime. We have some great black and white cinematography. And from the point where the bad guys are coming after him, we have a lot of suspense, leading to an edge-of-your seat climax filled with tension, action, and surprises. Yeah, sure, the way they put a button on the end of it is a little corny - were they really marketing this to kids that it seemed necessary? - but that's forgivable after all the genuine thrills they gave us. Fun stuff.

If A Fantastic Woman is a winner, it's that its themes are universal. While the specific indignities Marina suffers in the film are tied to her identity, you could make it about any "intruder in the family" dealing with grief over the loss of a loved one that family doesn't feel you should have a right to. Because Marina is a trans woman, the situation is thrown into stark relief, and the way she is treated more brutal. Daniela Vega is striking in the role of a very guarded woman, because she's had to be. As a film about the transgender experience, it's at times incredibly on the nose. The magical realism I expect from Latin directors manifests itself as rather obvious images - mirrors that suggest dismorphia, Marina walking against the wind, a fabu dance number - and there I get the feeling the film is translating an experience in a language cis audiences either expect or can understand. A necessary step that, at least on that level, may date the film sooner than later. And that's why I appreciate it as a story that need not have been about a trans woman, because ultimately, that's truer representation.

By the makers of Spring, The Endless has a very intriguing premise - two brothers who once escaped from a UFO death cult (if it is that) return to see old friends off after receiving a message from them about the upcoming ascension. If it sounds like a bad idea, well, the younger brother hasn't actually found a way to fit in with the real world, and he's curious about what he's missing out on. The characters are universally interesting, and the commune itself and its rituals may relate to an actual supernatural or science fiction premise. Lovecraft is rightly quoted at the top of the film. When the characters get lost in the temporal anomalies peppered across the area, however, I think the film gets a little lost too. In fact, The Endless intersects another Moorehead/Benson film from five years prior - Resolution - as a means of partial explanation (it really isn't). As part of the larger universe, I'm not sure what to make of it. No matter which film you see first, it will spoil the other's mysteries. Revisiting Resolution might be fun for those who see them in chronological order, but it still stops the film in its tracks. Are we to think the other "pockets" of activity introduced here will get their own features down the road? By itself, I do like how each encounter, a diversion though it may be, has something to say about isolation, the reasons why any given person would feel isolated or choose isolation, through the metaphor of the time bubble. But its meandering second half does seem to squander that great opening premise.

Set time machine to 2012, same valley. Keywords: Same universe. Same characters. Same mysterious presence.

In Resolution, one man is drawn to the woods by a strange video message from his best friend, a tweaker in dire need of an intervention. As Mike tries to save Chris from himself in a disused cabin, they are visited by a number of creeps, and manipulated by a presence that communicates with them via photos and recordings of all kinds. Just what is happening is open to interpretation, be it supernatural or Lovecraftian science-fiction, but the way the gate flashes on the camera also opens up the metaphor of the film maker as cruel god, forcing characters to play out their comedies and tragedies. Perhaps it explains where all those weird characters come from when they're essentially holed up in the woods, and it certainly connects with the mysterious entity's need for resolution, the sort of climax and closure only really required of stories, as opposed to life. By itself, it's intriguing if not entirely satisfying. Paired with The Endless, which intersects with it, I'd use the same qualifiers. The same mystery plays out in both films, undermining each one's effectiveness. I like The Endless' premise better, but I think I like the solutions suggested in Resolution best.
#The TARDIS lands in the film... The 11th Doctor and Amy Pond are trapped in strange temporal bubbles created by a Great Old One. The manage to get back to the TARDIS before it's Groundhog Day, but sacrifices are made along the way.