This Week in Geek (22-28/08/21)

"Accomplishments"

In theaters: If I was ahead of The Night House for a good chunk of it, it's that I have had, at some point, a certain affinity for magical architecture and psychogeography, so I "solved the mystery" rather early, if we take it to be a mystery story. It's also a spooky ghost story, where the always great Rebecca Hall feels herself visited by the spirit of her husband who, for no apparent reason, committed suicide. So beyond the well-done horror moments (the jump scares are based on her state of mind, no cheats - one such left me with sound-produced goose flesh, you've been warned), it's a story of the grief particular to suicide, the quest for answers where none are satisfactory, and hopefully coming out on the other side with that last stage, acceptance.  One thing I want to think was on purpose is how Hall is sometimes shot so that she doesn't look like herself, which ties into the mysteries and mirrors of the story. How much of what we see is supernatural and how much hallucinatory? The film pleasantly doesn't commit to a facile answer.

At home: I certainly appreciate the experimentalism of Dementia (sometimes called Daughter of Horror), a post-silent era film without any dialog, and whose only text is one of the strangest opening cards in cinema, but it's only really experimental in the context of the 1950s, since silent film and expressionism were earlier forms strange to the audience of its day. I'm still impressed by how little trickery there is in the film, depending on cinematography, acting, and music to give the sense that the title character is descending into madness for reasons expressed as clues throughout and, if we can believe anything we see (which isn't a given), revealed/confirmed at the end. Our "heroine"'s journey, on a basic level similar to that of Nights of Cabiria (out two years later, or 4 considering the film should have come out in '53), is nightmarish and paranoid, and everyone seems sinister. Her too, though I find Adrienne Barrett's performance a little too theatrical for my tastes at times. A strong piece of lurid psychological horror nonetheless, and it's unfortunate that it initially got banned and probably blocked director John Parker from making more.

I was a big fan of the con-heist show Hustle from its first 4 seasons, but they were the only ones available on DVD. Here were are more than 10 years after I first fell in love with it, getting to see the back half thanks to streaming. We've lost a couple of characters in the transition, but the new recruits change the dynamic a little bit, though we're perhaps always missing the chaotic energy of Marc Warren's Danny Blue through these. He was a jackass, but a more worthy punching bag than his raw replacement Shawn. So more cons, more evil villains the crew might not walking away from (some of them a little over-the-top I'll admit), and because we understand the formula, an effort is made to shake things up with amusing or plan-destroying subplots. We sometimes concentrate more on the consequences than the con itself, and so forth. Hustle keeps enough of its freshness through its last four series to please. I never felt there was a significant drop in quality. And nice final episode; there could be worse blow-offs.

It's actually kind of strange to see the events leading up to 9/11 shown in The Looming Tower as if it were a Clancy or Le Carré adaptation. Personally, I could have done without this much of the "personal lives" stuff that's meant to bring real and imagined/composited persons to life. These were often the weakest part of the 10 episodes, and probably the most fictionalized. The exception would be the FBI agent Ali Sufan (Tahar Rahim), who through life and work plays a big role in the exculpation of Islam itself in these events, and is the most engaging "character". The mini-series frustrating thesis is that terrorists got through the cracks because of a pissing match between the CIA and the FBI, with the show (so probably the book it's based on) pointedly taking the FBI's side, while also ferreting out all the ironies it can, in particular describing cults of personality that mirror Al-Qaeda's to Bin Laden. An engrossing biopic that exposes the U.S.'s systemic failure, it does use some news footage as part of its narrative, but 9/11 itself is tastefully depicted as tense prologue and smoky aftermath - I say this in case, the incident itself is a trigger for would-be viewers.

50 Years of Action/1995: I've yet to see a Hughes Brothers film I can get entirely behind, though Dead Presidents often comes close. Its selling point (according to the poster, title, synopsis, etc.), a daring heist/robbery, doesn't even make up a quarter of the film, so based on that, we may get a little impatient as the directors start the story way early and end it a bit too late. Turns out, this is something of a 70s-style crime picture, as loose as any Scorsese or Coppola in that decade, but it feels more like a Spike Lee joint. It might not have worked if I didn't like the character of Anthony so much and wanted to stay in his world, whether that's his youth in the Bronx, his tours in Vietnam, or his unhappy return to the States. Ironically, it's around the time of the robbery that I start to lose interest. The film's structure is a little off, but I still respect how it mirrors a certain black experience, transitioning from the promise of the Civil Rights Movement through the catalyst of Vietnam, and to the desperate early 70s of the Black Panthers, and no fair shakes available for minorities, veterans, and so on.
Actual best from that year: GoldenEye, Desperado, Sudden Death, Rumble in the Bronx

1996: When I first saw Broken Arrow in theaters, John Travolta was peaking and he has so much fun playing the camp bad guy in this John Woo action flick that you do too. The Woo-isms will always seem strange to me in an American movie, and I wish I knew why exactly (like, replace with Chinese actors and it's fine, I dunno), but the action set pieces are definitely cool, even if they can tend to the ridiculous. I think the main stumbling block for me is Samantha Mathis' park ranger, at the crossroads between '90s action heroine and liability comic relief. It's really a script problem, because she doesn't have any motivation for the things she does, no reason to be so obsessed with getting into the action, no reason for the violent meet-cute where she threatens to shoot an Air Force officer... and it just can't be acted reasonably. It's not the only script problem, but if you're there for exploding helicopters, train fights and Travolta giggling his way through mayhem, you've come to the right place.
Actual best from that year: From Dusk Til Dawn, Mission Impossible

1997: I thought George Clooney was typically likable, but in The Peacemaker, he's smug and insufferable as the maverick military expert Nicole Kidman's government task force leader is saddled with. He's cocky, but gets it wrong at least part of the time, and I just want to slap his stupid face. His role is essentially to tell Kidman orders are meant to be broken and that the ends always justify the means (and the movie never disagrees). At least Kidman is good enough an actress to react naturalistically to his shocking tactics (not that someone in her position should be in the field). On the one hand, it's a political thriller based on the paranoia of all those post-Cold War nukes floating around where they can be stolen. On the other, it's a cool action movie with exciting and fairly original set pieces. The two don't always play well with one another, the real politik of the former undermined by the silly tropes of the latter. It's another example of the transformation of female leads in 90s action movies, but we're not quite there yet as she must still scream and be the butt of the joke no matter how competent and useful she is to the resolution.
Also from that year: The Fifth Element, Double Team, Face/Off, Con Air, Tomorrow Never Dies, Air Force One

1998: Sometimes, you can smell an action screenplay adapted to the demands of a franchise it was never written for a mile away. The Fugitive II: U.S. Marshals is such a screenplay. While the original had a corporate conspiracy to motivate the frame-up, this one goes into political thriller/spy stuff territory, which the Marshal Office task force from the previous film gets pulled into. With a stronger focus on the cops (who were more of an antagonist "force" in The Fugitive), I don't think we really get to care about Wesley Snipes' man on the run - he's pretty generic - and... really? Irene Jacob as his loyal girlfriend? Did the casting agent draw these actors out of a hat blindfolded? And it had started off quite well, with Tommy Lee Jones' persona contrasted in an undercover chicken suit, a chaotic home arrest, and then a cool plane crash to outdo the original's train wreck. But after that, it's really rather by the numbers, none of the action or tension really surprises, and Robert Downey Jr.'s character will only surprise you if you've never seen a movie before.
Actual best from that year: Run Lola Run, The Mask of Zorro, Ronin, Who Am I?

Books: The way Julian Barnes approaches biography in The Man in the Red Coat isn't that far from how he wrote Flaubert's Parrot, which was categorized as fiction - he sees his subject as a puzzle full of missing pieces, the ones a novelist likes to fill. So it's non-fiction because he doesn't fill them, except by admitted suppositions. We're privy to his process and I, for one, have yet to tire of his mind and voice (I've been a loyal reader of his for some 30 years). The titular subject? Samuel Jean Pozzi, a gynecologist and bullet wound expert from France's Belle Époque, but in a wider sense, that era itself. Pozzi was doctor to the stars, and is referenced in many journals, diaries and articles of the day, so Barnes follows his orbit around illustrious aristocrats, artists of all kinds, members of his family, patients, and others, some acting like they're the stars of the book, others like footnotes. Full of photos and art, the book includes insanely-before-their-time vintage celebrity trading cards that help make the details come to life. Through what we know of Pozzi, we understand something of France and England in the late 19th-early 20th Centuries, and of Barnes himself, taken by a painting of the handsome doctor, but far less about Pozzi himself, whose life is marked by contradictions, gaps, and impossible-to-verify hearsay. We'll all end up as this kind of biography one day. This is a book as much about the act of biography as it is the person biographied.

In Alien Bodies, Lawrence Miles introduces Faction Paradox, the idea of a Time War, sentient TARDISes who can look like people, and a general timey-wimeyness, elements that would wind themselves into the revived television show, in particular the Moffat era. The Doctor finds himself at an auction for his own corpse, along with an array of strange powers, including a really cool reinvention of the Krotons, and much weirdness ensues. Miles is very clever not just with the ideas, but in the prose itself, which creates various points of view and emotional states. And hey, he takes Sam's genericness and gives it value, or at least puts a question mark on it and turns it into a mystery worth revisiting. Ultimately, this is her best appearance to date - for once, we don't urgently want another character to replace her aboard the TARDIS. When I think of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, this is the kind of material I think of... probably because my first was The Taking of Planet 5, but also because it's what has had the greater legacy, both in prose and on television. A fun, inventive read. I wish they were all more like this.