Gifts
Our gift exchange is after the holidays for various reasons, but Legion Leader Russell Burbage sent me a small care package with a children's Star Trek book (a primer) and a very nice Bouncing Boy pin. Aw, he shouldn't have.
"Accomplishments"
At home: [small spoilers] After the first Wonder Woman became the first generally critic-proof DCEU movie, putting the lie to the idea that women can't be blockbuster action heroes, it seemed like Patty Jenkins was heralded as a genius and any flaws could be attributed to the Snyder touch. Well... as of WW84, it's still a lie that women can't be action heroes (because it's always been), and aside from the murky final fight between Diana and the Cheetah the action scenes are bright and exciting, but I don't think Jenkins is any better or worse than your typical hired gun on superhero movies. She had a hand in the writing, and it's still a mess. Half the movie is basically an extended joke about all 1980s things, cramming every fad into the frame to the point where it's no longer the action 1980s, but the 80s diner version from Back to the Future Part II. The mall fight at the start in fact looks like a parody of an Arnold movie from that era, and I might have found that amusing if they'd actually put bad synths under it. Even the plot feels like one of those silly fantasies from that decade. Well, one or five! A wishing stone, a woman who suddenly becomes sure of herself, a human monkey's paw, a man from the past interacting with the "futuristic" 80s, a woman whose dead lover returns... I do think the script cleverly ties its three villains (yes, three, there's a deep cut there for Bronze Age Wonder Woman fans) through a single concept, but it doesn't smooth over the many plot holes, the most blatant being that Diana enters the final fight in a costume she didn't have with her (what the heck?), and the most egregious the fact no one gives a second thought to the man whose life Steve has stolen for his encore. I do like the resolution even if it's largely nonsense, and if this is an indulgent mess of movie, at least the leads are likeable enough to carry it through.
Anya Taylor-Joy would have had a great year of releases if The New Mutants had come out when it was supposed to. Or at least, that's the conventional wisdom. I'm not gonna say it's one of the greats, but I didn't dislike it and in fact would place it above the last few X-Men films. Part supernatural thriller, part prison movie, reinterpreting a Claremont/Sienkiewicz story and kind of turning it into a Stephen King horror film (variable hallucinatory terror, Native American iconography... I mean, isn't Doctor Sleep really an X-Men story?), I grok all that. It's real problem is that it spends too much time on one of its two mysteries, and the solution is obvious from early on, even to people who don't know the comics (not to say the other mystery is too difficult to solve). Obviously, making Illyana spout racist epithets at Dani Moonstar is distasteful - I guess they wanted to give this a real "troubled teens" boarding house feel, and eventually, I think we can accept that she's just acting out - but giving her Kitty Pryde's Lockheed is a great bit. Sunspot is sort of combined with Magma, which is okay. Dani's powers are amped up to make the plot happen, and that's okay. If the supernatural element sits strangely with the whole mutant thing, let me tell ya the comic version of this is even more absurd and has been streamlined. What New Mutants feels like to me is the pilot of television show, something that's suggested by Buffy always being on TV. It was designed as the first part of a trilogy (which is always problematic) and that's why it takes so long to have anything momentous happen. I was fine with just learning who these kids were and how they had to deal with their individual traumas. What's everyone so mad about? (Except the variable accents, yeah, ouch.)
Are the people at Pixar getting to that age where they want to talk about death? After Coco, comes Soul, which eschews any particular mythology to create its own metaphysical science fiction space to explore as a jazz musician dies on the day of his big break and is forced to team up with a soul that hasn't yet lived and doesn't see the point to get back to his body before it's too late. Good thing he's a teacher, right? Mentoring is a key component of the film, but its main theme is really the meaning of life, something both characters must discover. Obviously, the animation's gorgeous, and there's some interesting stuff with abstracted cosmic beings that look like modern art, but I'm perhaps most impressed with how unpredictable the story is, turning left every time you think you have a handle on what it IS. I think they tried to write it like jazz, finding it organically and letting sub-themes play out. Good music. Good voice acting. Interesting ideas. A lot of heart. It's Pixar, folks. Wadda ya want me to say?
Nostalgia hits big with Bill & Ted Face the Music, but is it a comeback tour? A greatest hits album? A bunch of covers? A completely new sound? Well, a bit of all of that, actually. Bill and Ted are now deep in middle age and they still haven't written the song that will create a super-future, and time is running out, not just for them but for the universe. With the help of Kristen Schaal as Rufus's daughter (you could almost call it a Flight of the Conchords casting gag) and their own chips off the old blocks (Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine), plus some friends, old and new, they must save all of history and unite reality with their song. What follows is the kind of nutty, anything-can-happen comedy that was appealing in the first two films, but isn't really seen much anymore. Some of it works, some of it doesn't, but I do like how they get around the problem of playing an impossible song. If I was unsure at times, it got to me by the end, and the duo's positive thinking (and their daughters') is just too infectious not to have at least a smile while revisiting this world.
The History of Future Folk is an origin story for the galaxy's fourth most popular folk comedy duo... No wait, different duo. I'd never heard of Future Folk, but they are indeed a wacky folk comedy duo out of New York, who wear bucket-like helmets and sing songs about their experience as aliens who came to Earth initially to invade, but discovered music and decided to stay (it helps that their species can learn any skill in a few seconds flat). "History of" distills their complex back story into a charming lo-fi science-fiction story, filled with song, absurdity, suspense, and heart. If you're a fan of Flight of the Conchords, you'll probably like this. I am too, but I'm even more interested in good SF made on the cheap, where the lack of resources is a feature rather than a bug. That's the case here. We soon accept the silliness of Hondosian accoutrements (and the planet's pathetic envoys) and start to believe. And the fact we do means it's easier to believe they can get fans and allies on their mission to save two worlds. Not a mean-spirited bone in this movie's body.
Behind am unfortunately generic title, Happiest Season is actually a pretty good Christmas romcom with a large cast of zany characters who all have their own thing going on, comedy "types" until they are needed to drop pretenses and deal with the drama. Writer-director Clea DuVall calibrates these tonal shifts pretty well, and they're thematically consistent too since the film is about the masks we wear when we're with other people. Kristen Stewart's Abby is too authentic to take that pretense for long when she's forced to hide in plain sight after being invited to her girlfriend Harper's family Christmas and we get it, they're very proper, obsessed with appearances, and passive-aggressive in their constant judgment. But the person we relate to is Abby, and we want to shout at her to get the hell out of there (I guess the audience is Dan Levy's characters, a great example of someone who puts on a character and dials it way down when the chips are down, I really liked him in this). Get out of there, these people aren't good beyond the surface. You have more chemistry with Aubrey Plaza's character anyway. But that's a point of view colored by the fact that beyond the question of Harper's coming out to her folks, there's something universal in the isolating experience of spending Christmas with strangers, and your one life line can't be expected to cater to your needs when their whole world is there begging for attention. We relate to one character, but not the other, and taking sides can lead to antagonism for person B, when what is sought is support for person A. In any case, DuVall's resolution is touching despite a big helping of cheese sauce - it's still a Christmas romcom, peeps! - and gives Harper's drama its own due. Now, will someone explain to me how Mary Holland (the youngest sister, and the only one who doesn't struggle with authenticity issues) is NOT related to Sarah Paulson?
When I think of Éric Rohmer, I think of summer holidays and beaches, but his third "moral tale" takes place during the Christmas holidays. He starts Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud's) with Mass, and there's an awful lot of it, then follows with a discussion on Pascal and mathematics and you think, this is gonna be the most boring Christmas movie ever. Thankfully, things pick up with the eponymous nuit at Maud's. It probably shouldn't have that effect on me, but listening to intellectuals debate such things as Faith like they're in college makes me laugh, and the banter here pitched it just right. That, and Françoise Fabian is to die for. Simple interest is damn sexy. I could have stayed in that apartment all night, but Rohmer has much more to say about relationships between men and women, and through chance encounters with both Maud and a girl who is his "type" (probabilities being one of the themes), there's an attempt to contrast who one should be with, who one thinks one should be with, and who the "author", God or some ironic fellow named Éric Rohmer, decides you'll be with. The fact that Maud seems to so completely complement Jean-Louis is partly due to Fabian's onscreen charisma, but it's the little things, like his sudden inability to find a match to light his cigarette while in the other girl's apartment, that put the lie to his notion of the "perfect girl" of his imagination. And if he left it at that, there'd be a meaty film there, but he also addresses issues of what constitutes sin, faith and kindness, and I love his snowbound Central France (the one character who thinks snow feels "fake" is deluded in many ways, as it's a metaphor, but man, it really feels like the production improvised around the weather).
I am not generally a fan of zany comedies that feel the need to keep a frenetic pace as dozens of characters talk one over the other as if chaos alone is funny. It's therefore quite an achievement that Luis García Berlanga's Plácido managed to keep me invested, much less make sense of the individual stories of its large cast. Central to this black Christmas comedy is the character of Plácido, a driver who is desperate to make his payment on his vehicle before it is impounded, but Fate (and a selfish event organizer) continually throw wrenches into the works. Threaded on his story are all the others, as a small Spanish spends a chaotic Christmas night thanks to a charitable program where rich families invite a poor person for dinner, even as pseudo-movie stars descend on the town to help raise money. In the end, charity is merely a function of propriety and rich families bend over backwards to make sure they don't look bad in front of other rich families while the poor are essentially abused under cover of Christian kindness. We're thrown into the deep end, but once we learn to follow the parade, it's actually pretty fun.
Did you know The Lake House was a remake of the Korean film Il Mare? Asia original has got to be better, right? It is. Though it's essentially the same plot (dog and all), the differences are crucial. It all starts at Christmas time, for example, which makes this sort of miracle more acceptable. The leads are younger and more anonymous, which makes it all cuter, more credible, and less pregnant with expectations. In the American remake, the attempt to use the Keanu-Sandra chemistry from Speed falls flat because they're not really allowed to be in scenes together. Il Mare does a better job of creating the sense that the characters are together despite being apart anyway, and the theme of unrequited (painted unrequitable) love is much stronger as a result. But most of all, Il Mare is actually shot interestingly. The camera is bold and has fun with the material despite its tragic undertones, and the strange foggy beach where the house is located creates some unique vistas. Being set on the ocean rather than a lake, the tide becomes a kind of symbol for time, it's quite lovely. Neat links between the films created by The Lake House's Alejandro Agresti: The restaurant where Keanu and Sandra are to meet up is called the Il Mare, and in Il Mare, the girl pines for her ex who has moved to Chicago, where the remake is set.
When a movie STARTS with the "No animals were harmed" card like Barking Dogs Never Bite does, you know terrible things will happen to those dogs. So tender hearts, be warned, but it's really more (darkly) comical than it is violent. Bong Joon-ho's first feature already shows his interest in how people are interconnected, and that our actions have often unintended consequences. So one man trying to get some peace and quiet in his apartment block by getting rid of a yapping dog sparks a series of events, which in turn makes Bae Doo-na's character try to do something nice and also get mixed results. In a sense, both are "barking dogs" unhappy with their situation, but rather ineffective at changing it. They can bark, but they can't bite. It is a story about failure, and even knowing that, it's still damn unpredictable. You won't see the twists coming, though admittedly in part because the two leads' stories don't immediately have a connection and you're left wondering what one thread has to do with the other.
It'd been long enough since I'd seen the original, British State of Play that I could sit down and enjoy the American version from a couple years later. Besides, some things make in inherently different, like adapting the story and characters to a different form of government (and arguably, journalism), but mostly by collapsing a 4-hour mini-series into a 2-hour movie. And in therein lies this version's weakness. The original was a better journalistic procedural and didn't have to rely on quick montages to get the legwork out of the way. And still, 2009's State of Play makes sense of the puzzle and its many pieces for the audience, taking shortcuts yes, but not sacrificing clarity to do it. And it has an impressive cast (including Robin Wright, apparently training for House of Cards), just like the original, albeit more international (in fact, none of the principal characters who work at the newspaper are played by Americans).
Jumping into Malibu Express, the first of Andy Sidaris's "Triple B" series, is really jumping into the deep end of a pool filled with things that shouldn't exist (or work!) but do. On the mustached face of it, it's a parody of Magnum P.I. (with a touch of Dukes of Hazzard, going by that dumb subplot with the racing hicks), the somewhat pointless narration clinches it, and being inspired by TV-land may be part of the formula, each loosely-connected installment as an episode of a 70s-80s TV show beamed into your home from another dimension. And that dimension allows sex and nudity on television, and lots of it. There is SO MUCH of it that it eventually became absurd, but it still doesn't read as softcore porn to me. The moments just aren't sustained enough for that. Rather, our boy Cody Abilene (and the naming schemes in this movie are glorious) is a blue collar charmer drenched in pheromones for whom all the girls want to immediately disrobe and inconveniently try to have sex with him. It's T&A but it's a joke. Malibu Express stars mostly day players and Playboy Playmates - adjust your acting expectations accordingly - Sybil Danning the only really recognizable name. The country music keeps it from sounding as dated as a film from 1985 normally would. The plot is incomprehensible - what with the nude interludes keeping you from concentrating on it - so an explanation worthy of a Silver Age comic wraps everything up at the end. Pure cinematic junk food.
I wish Darby Hinton had reprised the role of Cody Abilene in Hard Ticket to Hawaii, he really was charming, as his more lantern-jawed cousin Rowdy Abilene (Ronn Moss) is essentially the same character down to the inability to shoot straight, but more boring (he makes up for it by using a bazooka where a blowgun will do). Loosely tied to Malibu Express (through that family tie but also the "Agency" everyone seems to work for), this one brings in the martial artist male stars into its crime plot rather late, leaving it to the female leads with strong echoes of Charlie's Angels, though Sidaris hasn't learned that show's lesson about casting. Too many blond women with the same basic haircut means I was often confused as to who I was looking it. I guess Playboy had a type. The sex and nudity have been toned down from the first film, but are somehow more gratuitous. Absent a figure like Cody who causes toplessness, the female stars need to disrobe to inspect clues, or we really need to watch them change from one outfit to another. So this is another silly guns with girls action flick, amusing for what it is, and I didn't even mention the subplot about the mutant snake. I'm also keen to see if clever opening credits are a trademark Sidaris move, but he's 2 for 2 after this one.
With Picasso Trigger, the Triple B series cements itself AS a series. Dona Speir returns, and is in practically all them from this point on. With "Donna" are Taryn, Edy, Pattycakes and Jade, but the series once again fails to hang to its Abilene boy, Steve Bond taking over the male lead as TRAVIS Abilene. He's exactly the same as the others except even less engaging. A new face in these adventures is Roberta Vasquez as Pantera, and she'll return later in a different recurring role. Weirdly, though Vasquez is just as much a Playmate as the other female stars, she's not allowed to disrobe in this one. She's part of a very steamy love scene, but it is clothed. Don't know what was happening there considering this universe is built on gratuitous T&A. The Agency goes up against a devious mastermind (plus the brother of the villain they killed in Hard Ticket to Hawaii), but all the same, the nudity is the real tension engine. I'm not kidding. It is so part of the movies' vocabulary that you expect it, wait for it, see it denied or granted... It plays just as much with expectations of satisfaction as does the violence.
Though Savage Beach finally allows the girls to carry a Triple B film - the boys are much less useful or instrumental to the plot - it's still something of a let-down. In this one, Donna and Taryn stop drug smugglers (with extreme prejudice), fly medicine to needy kids, and crash on a deserted island where the Japanese hid a stash of gold during World War II which everyone is after. Sounds good, but the flashbacks to the war are slow, the simple plot needlessly convoluted by explanations that don't make a difference to the story, and actually heartfelt moments (is this the most emotional Triple B?) at odds with the Scooby gang laugh-in at the end. A let-down, but also a pivotal chapter. The new Abilene, Shane, scrapes the bottom of the interest barrel, but Michael J. Shane remains in the series from this point. More devastating to me is that this is the last movie to feature Hope Marie Carlton as Taryn; she was very cute and generally more fun than badass, angry Donna.
Though the 3B franchise seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel with a title like Guns, it's actually a pretty fun entry in the series. Roberta Vasquez replaces Hope Marie Carlton's Taryn almost directly as Nicole (even taking her old boyfriend and a similar background, though not her attitude). You know she's not Pantera because she has shorter hair, see? There's actually a much expanded role for Cynthia Brimhall's Edy, and we finally delve into Donna's back story and her family ties to the Agency (I mean, did she even have a last name before this?). I know they were on the has-been side of things in 1990, but it's still fun to see Erik Estrada as the villainous Jack of Diamonds (minus the inferred rape, like no) and Danny Trejo as his sidekick. The two of them are playing a manipulative game of revenge using smoke and mirrors, which is actually a theme - yes, a bona fide THEME in a Triple B movie - what with Edy's mirror moment and her partner being a stage magician/Agency operative. Though the title song goes "Don't play with guns / they're not much fun", it's still followed by an awful lot of gunplay, but it takes almost a half hour before there's any sign of nudity, despite a lot of opportunities for it. I almost thought Sidaris was done with that. I wonder what happened?
Pat Morita plays the villain Kane in Triple B's Do or Die, a mastermind who arranges a hit on Donna and Nicole like it's a video game with level bosses, and is in a sex massage relationship with his assistant (oh, Pat). This is the most gratuitously naked chapter in the franchise in a good while, obsessed (as the early films were) with characters changing their clothes, and giving each of four ladies a torrid sex scene that approaches softcore more than any other 3B has to date. Between that and the characters flying/driving from one "level" (Hawaii, Vegas, Louisiana, Texas) to the other, there's an awful lot of padding in this one. Sidaris also takes his fascination in remote-controlled miniature vehicles by spending time at a model air show, and face it, one assassin team after another trying to take the girls out isn't much of a plot. Erik Estrada is back, this time as a hero, which is par for the course in these films (the villains are often recycled into other parts). So it's a weaker chapter for sure, its saving grace, believe it or not, is the cinematography. Most of the series features pretty basic, flat video, but this one uses golden hour, manages different "light" for different locations, and makes most of the sex scenes, well, rather arty. Visual interest can't make up for the lack of story, but still fairly entertaining for what it is.
I keep wanting to call Hard Hunted, Hard TARGET, but that may not be accidental. Bullets, Bombs and Babes (the 3 Bs) as with any Andy Sidaris flick, but it feels like we jumped dimensions with the retcon recasting of Geoffrey "Son of Roger" Moore as Kane, complete with a re-staged flashback to a scene from Do or Die where Kane was played by Pat Morita. From aged Japanese star to generic young white dude in one bound and no one bats an eye, certainly not Silk the double agent who's been in his bed since the previous chapter. (To be fair, the regional Agency director Lucas has also been recast and his gf Edy hasn't noticed either, but maybe she's been busy reasserting herself as a restaurant owner without losing her newfound role as scantily-clad songstress.) Movie #7 isn't too late to build on the franchise's mythos, with the addition of the sexy (KSXY) radio station sending coded messages over the airways. More goofy fun thanks to a crazy stealth copter and a couple villains who amusingly riff on Wile E. Coyote. If it hasn't been clear what Sidaris has been going for this whole time, that last one should give the game away.
Fit to Kill is goodbye to most of the cast of the 3B films - the only real exception is CHiPs' Bruce Penhall whose Chris Cannon sticks around to maintain the semblance of continuity (other actors return, but not in any recurring role) - most notably the end for Dona Speir's Donna who has been headlining the series since Hard Ticket to Hawaii. I was never a big fan of her female Rambo persona, always preferring the other ladies to her, but I fear the series will go South without her. Julie Strain essentially picks up the baton, here appearing as a cold-hearted assassin working with the bad guys. She has a very striking look, tall and more catsuit than fatigues (we'll see if that translates to her recurring character), but her acting is quite wooden. I don't know if they knew it would be Donna's last hurrah. On the one hand, she makes comments like "My work here is done" and gets plenty to do. On the other, they leave it with a "get you next time". While Donna's well served, this is not one of the better Triple Bs. The dialog is cornier than usual, the editing is limp, there are blatant continuity errors, Kane is given a kind of redemption arc thanks to his dad being a Nazi(!???!), and Sidaris more overtly makes this a comedy, which he's not pacy enough to pull off. Edy is given a lobotomy to make her gags work (cute, but out of character), the jokes fall flat or act as red herrings, and the bit where Roger Moore's son (who plays Kane) fantasizes about being in a James Bond opener has cringy "dancing" from Speir. Still watchable, but throw some popcorn at the screen to blow off some steam.
Role-playing: So here's the deal. For podcasting reasons that will become clear in 2021, I wanted to play a game of Stupor-Powers, an RPG that spoofs superhero comics, but is also a parody of role-playing games, and yet, playable. At the same time, I have a friend who really wishes I would resurrect our old DC Heroes campaign (the Crusaders), but supers is a genre I've overdosed on. So for the Holidays, I decide to put all those things together, especially since his character, a local wrestler with powers, was always a bit ridiculous. So we imagined his story 30 years later. He's a has-been, the team has deteriorated, the JLA satellite it was using has crashed and is at the center of town. He decides to rebuild with local vigilantes. Stupor-Powers' chargen takes about 15 minutes and is mostly about finding a way to make three randomly generated powers (and silly powers at that) work together in the same concept. The heroes, including one with differently-powered farts, a cybernetic barman/librarian and a little waving cat from a Chinese restaurant that has achieved enlightenment (if not mobility), protect a nudist parade from alt-right supervillains before the real plot kicks in, in which Mighty Joe Jung (it's the old famous brain in an ape's body) changes history to change the Earth into the Planet of the Apes. A very amusing night of flipping coins and playing rock-paper-scissors to decide outcomes, with highlights including the players looking up Jung and finding out he founded Alcoholics Anonymous and unethically dealing with him using a lot of banana daiquiris. I also like how the kitty was lost in the mail for eternity until time looped back on itself, and later how our wrestler decided not to return to his own time, but rather to his golden days when he was most respected and a member of Grant Morrison's JLA. Yeah, history wasn't exactly set right, but close enough.
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