GiftsLate combined Christmas and birthday gifts from oHOTmu or NOT's Amelie: Two amusing little books from Hallmark - Pop Sonnets and Name That Movie. Short reads that should come up in these reviews some time.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: A better Ready Player One (bar's pretty low) mixed with Wreck-It Ralph, Free Guy's main problem is that it's been over-trailered. We go in knowing too many jokes and plot details, and it takes a while for it to surprise its audience (things I think pick up in the third act). That will go away with time, but what will stay is that the movie feels the need to over-explain itself, as if for audiences who have no video game culture (and just who is THAT at this point?). And yet, it's still very likeable thanks to its stars (Taika Waititi a very funny villain) and Ryan Reynolds's character being a genuinely positive guy (or Guy). It doesn't dwell on its theme equating video game NPCs to the way we, the 99%, are treated as nameless pawns in politi-corporate games, but it's there. I also like how the love triangle comes in at an odd angle. And it's got some replay value, with many gags happening in background action and set design. An amusing trifle, and I'm not just saying that because most of the games I play are sandboxes like Free City.
At home: Fellini's Nights of Cabiria stars his muse Giulietta Masina as the title character, a middle-aged (and in her flats, tiny) street-walker who deals with the world essentially by shouting at it. And she seemed so happy in those opening frames, before her boyfriend pushes her in a river and runs off with her purse. After the almost-drowning, you'd think there'd be a rebirth, but the film is too clever for formula and though Cabiria is exposed to other potential lives - of luxury, of charity - she cannot trust. But then she is exposed in a most touching yet cruel way, a moment of grace... But Fellini contrasts two religious figures, the Madonna and Satan, and you're left wondering whether the Devil is looking out for sinners where the Divine won't, or if we're right to think he's up to his old tricks. So whatever happiness is engineered fills you with as much dread as hope, and the woman who likely annoyed you with her screeching approach to life to this point because the vessel of all your best wishes and greatest fears. And is there, finally, a rebirth? That's a matter of interpretation and part and parcel of the film's staying power. Masina, the most expressive face in Italian cinema, sells every moment, every nuance, and Fellini has full control of his frame, his Roman slums gorgeously shot and edited. To me there's always a sense that Cabiria is walking towards the light, towards the morning, so no matter what happens to her, I can't see it as a bleak film, though some might.
/1990: Set in the 1960s, John Woo's Bullet in the Head is a surprising war movie, especially given that it starts with a riff on West Side Story's gang warfare. Three friends flee the Communist Revolution and a murder charge and head smack dab into the Vietnam War thinking that, as Chinese nationals, they would be kept out of it. But no, it's heroic bloodshed meets Rambo II out there, and their friendship will be tested by a box of gold, a woman in trouble, and their own hubris. It's John Woo around his peak, between The Killer and Hard-Boiled, so there are some great action pieces, with his usual Mr. Cool here being played by a startlingly young Simon Yam. But big-budget Woo is a little like reading a 90s superhero comic, everything is extreme and characters rage with spittle coming out of their mouths. He lays it on thick, and because the story moves from one venue to another, the film lacks cohesion. So the fact all this happens to the same few people is also EXTREME. In the end, I enjoyed it, but it's a bit overwrought for my tastes.
Also from that year: La Femme Nikita, Total Recall, Die Hard 2
1991: Samwise Gamgee and Wesley Crusher take on the cartels! Die Hard in a prep school, Toy Soldiers is a movie that couldn't possibly be made today. It has gun violence in a school, which can't be played off as light action fare now, and there's also something uninspiring about making the leads privileged rich kids who act like rebellious youth from the streets. That said, I thought it worked better than I expected. Though it's clearly doing Die Hard, the kids aren't superhuman even in a "vulnerable" John McClane way, and their capacity to cause trouble for the cartel terrorists holding them hostage is well foregrounded, and then have surprisingly realistic consequences (for the genre anyway). The main kids aren't all differentiated as much as I would like, and the main villain isn't as insane in the body of the film as he is in the prologue, but Lou Gossett Jr. is likeable as ever as their equally heroic dean.
Actual best from that year: Terminator 2, Point Break, Once Upon a Time in China, Double Impact
1992: Laurence Fishburne plays a squeaky clean cop who goes undercover to take down a drug ring in Deep Cover, a job that requires him to make increasingly greater moral sacrifices to achieve, what exactly? He's Sisyphus working for a corrupt system. We perhaps don't think of Bill Duke as a director first, but he turns in a surprisingly stylish Neo Noir thriller here,with Fishburne delivering hard-boiled narration and navigating a world where no one is particularly sympathetic. Things really pick up for me once he goes rogue - although telling you rogue against which masters would be spoiling it - and are at their most satisfying when people are getting their comeuppance. Before that, it follows the usual crime film structure, but it's not boring. Let's just say it's fairly typical of the genre until it isn't.
Actual best from that year: Hard Boiled, El Mariachi, Supercop
1993: Most of what you remember of The Fugitive, the iconic action bits like the train derailing and the jump off the viaduct, are from the first 35 minutes, thereafter trading most of the action for suspense and mystery. There's nothing wrong with that. Unlike the television show of the same name, Kimble has to track down the one-armed man who killed his wife and uncover the conspiracy that led to his being framed for her murder (not that it's clear why she had to die exactly). Harrison Ford is a dependable middle-aged action hero in this era - dependable, but not particularly exciting as far as I'm concerned - and Tommy Lee Jones came to prominence with this film playing a Javert-like U.S. Marshall. The rest of the cast is actually quite good, to the point of being wasted (Julianne Moore, for example). I wonder, is the story more or less desperate for being told in two hours? I couldn't decide, and that might be a mild indictment of the attempt at doing this kind of story as a film.
Also from that year: True Romance, Tombstone, Last Action Hero, Hard Target
1994: When the con is on, I like Maverick, but there's so much to make me cringe in Richard Donner's adaptation of the old television show (and I don't just mean the cognitive dissonance associated with Jodie Foster fawning over Mel Gibson). Now, I do love the IDEA of Maverick, a western anti-hero who never shoots to kill and gets into (and out of) crazy amounts of trouble. Mel Gibson isn't as actually charming as the movie wants us to believe however, or perhaps he can't help but seem more of a lunatic than the original model on account of James Garner being RIGHT THERE for us to compare. But then, a lot of the comedy bits are extended to the point of annoyance - the incessant bargaining for % points, the bit with the Natives, and that ending that makes me feel like I'm being dragged behind a lame horse - as well as cameos that call attention to themselves and produce different reactions, not all of them good. Margot Kidder? Sure, ok, that's cute. Dan Hedaya? Completely wasted (cutting room floor casualty?). Danny Glover? A Lethal Weapon joke that took me right out of the movie, and I couldn't trust it again. It's not that I don't have a sense of humor, and I did appreciate the general sense of fun, but maybe Maverick was trying too hard, and like all those "extended cut" comedies that indulgently restore every bit of improv, it's limp where it should be sharp.
Actual best from that year: Speed, Léon, True Lies, Legend of Drunken Master, Fist of Legend
Books: Like the three books preceding it, War of the Daleks introduces at least one character who would make a better companion than Sam and teases us with the possibility. It must be hell to edit a line of novels where continuity is a factor, and so I understand that a generic companion like Sam is a necessary evil (though one they eventually do away with). Still, while John Peel gives her moments where she inspires the Doctor (a very NuWho function), she mostly thinks she's stupid and useless, which seems the writer's own indictment (but all the writers have done this to date). The other thing every novel in the line has done is plug continuity as herald of how "legitimate" the Eighth Doctor Adventures are. This is where Peel goes too far, and the reason why there's so much hate around this book. I don't actually share it. One retcon too far, I would say, though some of his connections to past Dalek stories are clever. I personally like the interludes that shows different fronts of the war even if they are part of an attempt to reference every Dalek story in existence (the Mechonoids sequence is particularly fun), and generally, Peel is good at describing big action sequences. The third act is a real page-turner as a result. It's a Dalek book through and through, and they are played as very devious, which I like. Some will say the Doctor's almost surplus to requirements, an observer more than a player in this thing, and they wouldn't be far off. It's a case of wrong place, wrong time, but he still needs to figure stuff out and escape from danger even if he's being railroaded through the adventure. You may not agree with what Peel chooses to reveal, but you can't say it's boring!
Some 15 years ago, Julian Barnes turned 60 and wrote Nothing to Be Frightened of, his mediation on death as filtered through his experience with the deaths of family and friends, as well as those of literary precedents and what THEY had to say about it. An essayist's stream of consciousness, the book made me by turns come to terms with my own (no doubt upcoming) death, and fear it all the more, and yet rightly makes the point that it probably won't change my eventual approach to it, or to the life that precedes it. Death, memory, identity, posterity, the existence of God, the notion of free will... Barnes dissects it all in a running conversation that essentially dissects himself and the concept of author with his usual wit and literary verve. He makes terror and despair fun, but also thought-provoking, and if I admit to tearing up here and giggling there, I must also testify to my having to go back and reread several paragraphs when some point made me reflect, without first stopping my eyes from their scanning motion, on my own attitudes, opinions and memories on the topic discussed.
In Name That Movie: 100 Illustrated Movie Puzzles (though be warned I have Hallmark's abridged edition, 50 Illustrated Movie Puzzles, which might at least have changed the number in the author's introduction...), cartoonist Paul Rogers offers 6 sketches per movie, and it's up to the cinephile to figure it out. I was expecting a rebus-like game, visual charades, but no, each sketch is a scene, moment, object, location from the film. It's a clever idea, but the final product does suffer from the author's particular tastes and quirks. First, he admits to being drawn to graphic design, so business signs and buildings are over-represented among the clues. As an example, Hitchcock's Vertigo has three building exteriors and interiors, but say, no tree rings, not even as the final (sometimes "give-away" picture). The other problem you might encounter has to do with whether or not you like the same movie genres. I happen to be iffy on all but the best known Noirs, and generally weak on 70s American cinema, which the intro makes plain are two of his favorite subjects. Admittedly, I only have half the puzzles, but the selection I do have has some directors and eras over-represented, others either neglected or very obvious choices (SF/Fantasy, for example). So how did I do? 27 out of 50 isn't too bad; 17 of the 23 I missed were complete blanks. After looking at the answers, I think I could technically have figured out 10 them if I'd tweaked the meaning of a certain image. Out of the 50, there were only 6 I've never seen (and I still got one of them correct). Knowing I've seen almost 5000 movies (but relatively few enough times to register this storefront or that car), make of that what you will, vis-à-vis the potential for frustration.
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