"Accomplishments"
Arnold is a disgraced FBI agent who ends up slumming it as a small sheriff, becoming the unchecked arm of the law in Raw Deal, and that should have been the movie. There's more humor and fun action in that opening sequence than in the rest of the film, as it becomes the one thing a Schwarzenegger 80s action flick has no right to be: Boring. The comedic spark from the top of the film is quickly extinguished as Arnie plays undercover cop (he's so distinctive, this should never ever work) and through various dull fist and gun fights, tries to prove himself to the gangsters so he can smoke out the mole. There's a love interest, but nothing can happen there because he's faithful to a wife who is drinking herself into a stupor out in the sticks. Darren McGavin is good as his handler, but that's about it. I'm never too sure which gangster is with which gang, or why anything is happening really. Arnie just joylessly executes anyone that gets in his way, cracking wise but not in a clever way, and I think we can all agree a cop acting as judge, jury and executioner is something we're well over by now. Even by 1986 standards, the hero here is celebrated for murdering people who otherwise could have been arrested. Ugly as well as dull.
Guys, Johnnie To made a MUSICAL and it's AMAZING. Office (AKA Design for Living) tells several intertwined stories of people working at the executive level of a company (import/export? doesn't matter) about to go public - their lives, loves and ambitions, and there are enough of them to call it an achievement that the audience can not only remember their names, but care about them as people. To rakes in the bonus points on production design alone, creating a giant neon-lit abstract set with transparent walls that evokes the stage, but doesn't look like a play on film. In fact, there's so much to look at in the frame - design, choreography, emotion - the subtitles become a little hard to follow during the musical numbers. My eyes want to be up here, but I don't want to miss anything down there! Not every song is memorable (the language barrier is a factor), but enough of them are (despite the language barrier) to make this satire of capitalism a successful musical, songs either being used for comic effect or to reveal the characters to us. There's more than one note. I love Chow Yun-Fat doing comedy and he has a crucial role as the CEO, though my heart was usually with Sylvia Chang, Tang Wei and Wang Ziyi (this last one by design, as he's the innocent who could go down the wrong road). Ultimately, Office may be about how we do wrong without morally committing to wrongness, simply by working for wrong-doing corporations, but it's also about the myth of the happy wage slave, and so the lies we tell ourselves and others to successfully achieve in the corporate culture. A lot to unpack and good replay value.
The Hollow Crown casts Tom Hiddleston in the role of Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 1, and that's for the good, but I'm almost disappointed they recast Henry IV and didn't find a way to age up Rory Kinnear, who I thought was excellent as the young Henry in the previous chapter. Still, you're not exactly badly served by Jeremy Irons, and Hiddleston has a good time doing an impression of him in the faux-court scene with Falstaff. When it comes to this play, call me crazy, but it's always the casting and performance of Hotspur that most interests me. See, the half of the play that has Falstaff in it takes care of itself. But if Hotspur is weak, the other half is sunk. Good news, I really like what Joe Armstrong does with the role. His energy in this is without compare, and I personally know it works if, at the end, I'm sorry to see him go. The direction here is less cheesy than in Richard II, even if the music cues are just melodramatic strings, and the battle scene is filmed as chaos with a calm drunken center (Falstaff) at the heart of it. As usual, Hal's destiny haunts him to good effect, and I think Richard II set things up memorably enough that we understand why there's a civil war in this time frame.
Perhaps the purest piece of cyberpunk ever put to film, Tetsuo the Iron Man is an upsettingly bizarre, almost dialog-less surreal nightmare about a man slowly turning to a machine, and so symbolically encapsulates the "punk" in the genre, by making the anxieties associated with mechanized society manifest in the goriest, most effed-up manner possible. With a black and white aesthetic that evokes La Jetée more than anything contemporaneously made in 1989 (Tetsuo feels both retro and well ahead of its time), it starts as disturbing horror, but in the final act oddly becomes a kind of lo-fi stop-motion superhero narrative, as the lead character comes to accept what he has become. But what of the flashbacks to the moment that created this situation, when he perhaps became one with a killing machine--? I'm interpreting, the film doesn't give up its secrets so easily. At barely over an hour, and yet so relentless it feels much longer, there is a lot of rewatch value, trying to figure out meanings behind meanings. Beyond its surface theme, Tetsuo could be about any transformation, evolution, or acknowledgment of the self, most prominently on first viewing, puberty and queerness. But to properly apply those lenses, one must sit down and watch it again. Few would dare.
The second Christmas Chronicles offers more of what the first film did - a sexy Kurt Russell Santa Claus, a random musical number, Troll-ish CG elves, and on-the-nose lessons about the spirit of Christmas - but inverses its paradigm. Instead of magical Santa crashing into the kids' (our) world, the kids are taken on an adventure into Santa's, with more opportunity for myth-building, (sadly) more elves than you shake a candy cane at, and (most happily) a strong role for Goldie Hawn's Mrs. Claus. It's fluff and it's not always well gauged tonally, but it amusing, unchallenging, even heartfelt fluff. Personally, I was there for the Clauses, and that's where I got my chuckles and feels. Otherwise, not sure Chris Columbus has much control over the material, making the characters over-explain everything one minute, laying in some fun background jokes and movie references flying under the radar the next, a tour of Santa's Village that's pointedly for the kiddies, then violence that will give them nightmares (you do NOT go after the reindeer!). Julian Dennison (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) plays the villain, of course a teenager who has lost the spirit of Christmas (with a twist), and ultimately, this one's about reconstituted families and as usual, what's really important during the Holiday season - like putting your kid brother's eye out with a nerf pellet (cough, cough, I'm kidding, don't follow that lesson).
Bo Burnham's 2016 show Make Happy has an incredible opener and an phenomenal closer, and in the middle, a lot of great bits (tapering off at the start of the third act and picking up again), showcasing his unique blend of honesty (especially as pertains to the fact that performances are staged lies), music (and the systematic takedown of several genres), and the kind of happy/sad humor I really go for. Burnham is well known for his staging, turning stand-up sets into rock opera and well-produced one-man sketches, and I wish the team FILMING the show were as good as their jobs. He's so precise, it seems a shame that the camera and editing can lose focus. But he's not just a master self-director, a good song parodist, and well-timed stand-up, he's also a nimble deconstructor of his own performance, and with an appreciated not-entirely-false disdain for his audience, of their predictable reactions to his material (and to ANY material, really). He turns the cameras on the public a few times to make his points, and they sting, and yet, people laugh, as they should. That's real comedy, it's a toxic relationship, never more than when the comedian is this clever.
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