This Week in Geek (6-12/12/20)

"Accomplishments"

 

At home: It always felt to me that, even if there are some standout moments, Henry IV Part II is all epilogue. So any adaptation really needs to be laser focused to make it work properly. The Hollow Crown's falls short of that, though Tom Hiddleston tracks Prince Hal's transformation from truant to heir imminent well enough. It's just that the play, as written, is more about Falstaff than anyone else, but here seems to be trapped in a comic subplot that detracts from the main action. It takes a steady hand to engineer the right balance between Hal's loss of two fathers, but perhaps a series called "The Hollow Crown" needs to pitch one way rather than yaw the other. Both those moments are great, however. Hal's taking on the crown while his father is at death's door is the stand-out, until Falstaff pathetically walks in on the coronation ceremony and gets rejected, like Christ by St. Peter. Thinking on the two parts together, Simon Russell Beale was an amazing and layered Falstaff, and we should be sorry to see him go.

The first cycle of The Hollow Crown naturally ends with Henry V, which starts strong with Falstaff's death, always a tearjerker, but then becomes a bit of a slog. I don't understand how you can noticeably cut moments from the play, but then waste time with dead air. Everything takes a little too long in this one - the English lesson is excruciating - and all it really needed was for people to speak or answer a littler faster. There's no excuse for making Shakespeare's energetic, rousing piece of blatant patriotism so slow and turgid. While the direction is at fault, Hiddleston's performance is also a part of it. I fear he's too wet as Henry V, and his great speeches are intimate affairs that could only ever stimulate the passions of, like, three guys. I do think he pulls off the St. Crispin's Day speech even in those conditions however. Anton Lesser, as Exeter, also gives a relatively quiet, thoughtful performance, but one I really enjoyed - he's a highlight. Among the adaptation's innovations, we are shown York's death, and they do something interesting with John Hurt's Chorus by the end. Some great moments in here, but of the four Henry V adaptations I've seen, it's definitely the weakest.

 

The idea behind F/X - a movie special effects man is roped into faking a hit on a mobster for the Witness Relocation Program - is a terrific one, and if they'd focused on the con man aspects of the story, I might have been more happy with it. When it turns into a thriller with our boy Rolly (Bryan Brown) on the run from both good and bad cops, it unfortunately veers into some tired clichés, even if he does use effects wizardry to get out of a several tight spots. Part of the problem is that at some point, Brian Dennehy becomes a secondary protagonist, the "one good cop in New York" trying to figure out what's really happening ("one good", but he suffers the most cliché of fates, hand over your badge fella) and those dueling stories prevent what is essentially a fun high-concept action flick from sustaining its momentum. And the ending? Ugh, no. But the premise is a good one as evidenced by the fact there was a second film and a television series I was mildly aware of.

 

Radha Blank's The 40-Year-Old Version is an autobiographical comedy about her struggles as a playwright despite having achieved promising critical success, and consequent turn as a rapper as a means of reinventing herself (and a really good one, actually). Based on her own life, though I'm sure embellished for comic and triumphant effect, it has a lot of truths to tell, about getting to a certain age where the bloom is off the rose, about the New York theatrical scene, about living in the shadow of a talented parent and their disappointments, and most astutely, about how black artists are received by white audiences... One of the most interesting threads concerns a mangled play about gentrification that Radha must gentrify to get on the stage. Should black artists "white it up" to generate mass appeal? Hell no! But see what the movie thinks. Filmed (mostly) in black and white, Blank evokes other African-American film makers like Spike Lee (with whom she has worked) and Cheryl Dunye, with faux-documentarian asides and community interaction, which I've come to associate with that community's indie scene. Here's hoping Blank has reinvented herself once again and is off to a fruitful film making career.

Rachel McAdams is quite watchable in Red Eye, a fun little thriller in which she plays the super-concierge of a luxury hotel where a Homeland Security big wig is to stay, and so becomes a target for terrorists who want her to compromise his security... on a night flight into town. It's Die Hard on a plane, but if the protagonist was Holly McLane, which I would totally have been up for. The thriller is well put-together, with Chekhov's this and that early on, and at its length, not making you wait too long before the elements introduced are used. It's satisfying. Cillian Murphy's smooth villain is eventually discombobulated because McAdams just can't stand playing the victim, though I do feel that the climax lets the movie down. I understand why people would want a more decisive face-off between the two of them, but the one we get is out of the 2000s deconstructionist slasher handbook and feels cliched and perfunctory. Now, where's the sequel where McAdams is working AT Homeland Security?

 

Takashi Miike's take on the haunted electronics subgenre, One Missed Call doesn't really stay in one place the way other death-curse stories do. It starts like a pretty conventional 2000s horror movie, with teens under threat from a time-stamped call that presages their deaths, a fate they can hardly escape, but that's only a third of a movie experience for Miike. He ramps up the tension as the "call chain" gets closer to characters we care about, where the film becomes more of a supernatural thriller, then a detective story, in which the leads try to figure out just what's happening so as the "exorcise" the situation. And finally it returns to horror, but more in line with the creepy ghost tales Japanese cinema has been known for since the 1960s, deconstructing even the gimmick of the haunted phones in its explanation. After The Ring, one might think these kinds of premises ARE a gimmick, but Miike goes further with it than most have. And of course there's his usual brand of disturbing imagery in the mix.

Pre-Code Ernst Lubitsch, Maurice Chevalier playing a love-addicted soldier from some European country and who sings ridiculous ditties... That could be a number of movies. But this one was The Smiling Lieutenant, a very oddly-structured romcom (a feature, not a bug) seeing as Chevalier is almost immediately in a relationship with Claudette Colbert, but then he gets in hot water with visiting aristocrats, thinks he can charm/Bugs Bunny himself out of it, and finds out what happens when a princess takes a shine to him. And keeps not going where you think it will, to the point where I really question Colbert's decision at the end (but truth be told, if there's a "perfect couple" in here, it's Colbert and Miriam Hopkins, whose piano skills are impressive, by the by). These kinds of movies are puff pastries, just fluffy entertainments that, thanks to the Lubitsch touch have some nice wit and energy. In this case, someone slipped a hot pepper in the pastry. It is QUITE steamy, especially considering I've always found Chevalier and Colbert to look like drawn cartoons of people. Fan me, I'm a little hot under the collar here.

 

Cop Cars Crashing Into Each Other: The Movie, otherwise known as The Blues Brothers can be a lot of fun, but I do think it's something of a mess. Perhaps I shouldn't be looking for a plot in a film based on two SNL stars' stage personae (and not really even sketches), but the hoary old "put on a show to save the [blank] was tired even in 1980, and then there's actually TOO MUCH plot for what the movie really wants to be - a musical that pays tribute to R'n'B, includes plenty of bit parts for music stars, and for good measure, Carrie Fisher with a bazooka. A lot of fun bits, but they ARE bits, and the characters themselves aren't inherently funny. They're at their best when they're cool even as the world explodes around them, but the humor inspires more smirks than they do laughs. Strangely, I often felt most impressed with visuals, some of which felt too good for the rest of the movie. Landis uses the golden hour masterfully, and in the climax, creates indelible images with the absurd action. I can see how this would become a classic from repeat viewings, but though it was always on TV at some point, it always passed me by. So on the first watch, let's just say it took longer than I would have liked to charm me.

I'm a sucker for fake nature documentaries, but beyond the Walking with (Dinosaurs, etc.) series, I never really feel satisfied with them. Walking with... was a humanless affair, using the style of nature documentaries - and Jurassic Park effects - to imagine how prehistoric beasts might have lived, based on current science. The latest program in this vein is Alien Worlds (4 episodes on Netflix), and it rather takes the approach of things like The Future Is Wild and Alien Planet, padding a few minutes of CGI to 45-minute programs where we spend a lot of time on Earth talking to astronomers, entomologists and even native Tanzanian hunters, about how things are here, thus drawing a line to "how the same pattern could occur" elsewhere. At its best, the series makes good points about what is currently known of exoplanets, and how life formed and took hold here, but sometimes you're just watching a falconer train his birds for a few minutes before tracking back to the alien planet where creatures hunt in a similar way. Not to say the four imagined planets aren't interesting, but we spend so little time on them that even the one said to be teeming with life appears to only have three life-forms and some trees for set dressing.

Role-playing: GM of my Star Trek Adventures game wanted to bring a bit of closure to the current adventure before the Holidays (which necessarily come with extended breaks in gaming), and the current (multi-session) episode was on the verge of wrapping up anyway (though it still felt pretty full). My part in the whole thing was sort of being the ambassador to all peoples, which makes sense with his "people person" design. So he was already the one who communicated with the weird aliens, and as time fractures, it turns out he will have made friends with at least one Romulan and had enough Klingon contacts already to keep them under control. Because the whole resolution brought us back semi-circle to events from the pilot (which is still just a couple "episodes" ago), I had the sense that we're still very much in the introduction. Because of  the pockets of future time, it's a little like we got to participate in a season (but really, series) trailer very directly. Are we going to get to all these things? Ir do we have enough free will to make them unhappen? Questions I might ask myself.