BuysMy rewatch of the Chibnall/Whitaker era of Doctor Who mandated I finally buy the second season and the first two New Year's specials on DVD.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I find it surprising that Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman prequel, The King's Man, is so much more grounded, which is to say less irreverent, than the first two films. In fact, we're hardly plunged into that absurdist world at all for the first half of the movie, and some audiences will resent that. Me? I bade my time through the slow first act, and simply enjoyed the cast at work creating the elements that would lead to the "secret service". I quite like this alternative take on history and how a SPECTRE-like group manipulated the world into World War I, which would have gone even more catastrophically without the proto-Kingsmen. Ralph Fiennes is a perfect actor to be make the footsteps people like Colin Firth will walk in "later", and his helpers are cool too (especially Djimon Hounsou). David Tennant isn't in it, but the actor playing the villain had me thinking he was because of the voice. The absurd historical touches, the dancing Rasputin fight, strong mountain goat action... that's all very fun, and I may be alone in this, but I like the less Millarish tone, which I often found distracting in the previous films even if they led to a more exciting experience.
At home: Maggie Q and Michael Keaton, with a side-order of Samuel Jackson, in an action thriller about righteous assassins? The Protégé should have been my jam. But we're very far from director Martin Campbell's better work, i.e. GoldenEye and Casino Royale. It's not the actors or even the characters, because I think the two leads are well matched in wit and ability (even if I scarcely believe Keaton can hold his own here), and when the action sequences kick in, they are usually excellent and well-choreographed. But there's something dreadfully wrong with the pacing and the editing. My eyes tended to glaze over during the connective tissue, leading to some disjointedness and my often asking WHY people were doing what they were doing. The insert shots were silly or didn't seem to match the scene. The flashbacks proved entirely unnecessary. The final shot should have been withheld. And why are 80% of people in Vietnam white? Sadly The Protégé (sic) fails despite its strong action beats.
I wouldn't use it as a primer on mental health or anything, but Jolt has a lot of fun with Kate Beckinsale having anger management problems that require her to self-medicate with shock therapy every time she wants to bash someone's head in. Her trigger is people behaving badly, so it feels like wish fulfillment, honestly. And since this is a movie, she's perfect for getting involved in a revenge plot - it's therapy! Beckinsale has a great presence - they even let her be British, which is a plus - and manages to eek out a sweetness despite her innate violence. Fun action beats. A couple of comedy cops (this is a wry comedy dressed up as an action flick). A cool neon look, which has become pretty standard for these things, but is nonetheless appreciated. Though I didn't really grok the epilogue, if it really is a promise for making this a series, I'm into it. Seeing as I like Kate Beckinsale as an action star, but hate the Underworld movies, I need a vampire-free niche to get my jollies.
So you sit down to watch Vacancy, and you probably know the basics to have chosen it - Luke Wilson and Kate Becksinsale go to a hell motel where they make snuff films with the guests - and well, a couple dozen cliches later, it ends pretty much the way you think it would. Or perhaps a little more anticlimactically. It's competent, but not very memorable. Part of the problem for me was that the couple was on the rocks, in the process of getting a divorce, and bickering through the long set-up, and inevitably, they're going to be brought closer by the extremity of these events. It might have been more interesting to see them be happy, then get tested by the experience. At least then we could have said it was a metaphor for a weekend trip relationship pressure cooker. Make or break, y'know? But it doesn't really have any say. All it proves is that Beckinsale is better as a badass than a weepy damsel in distress, but I don't think we need a 90-minute movie to figure that out.
You don't need to be Japanese to want to adapt a manga to the big screen, as The Summit of the Gods shows. This French "anime" chronicles one man's obsession with mountain climbing and, ultimately, getting to the top of Everest solo, and a journalist's equal obsession with the mystery surrounding this man. The film asks whether following your white whale (for Ahab would have just found another one to hunt if he'd killed Moby Dick) is a purer form of living, but for us non-climbers, it's a harrowing journey that could make you swear off even the most casual hike. Let's just say I'm not about to take up a new hobby. The film looks gorgeous and could have come out of any of the great Japanese studios, stark vistas of white and gray dwarfing lonesome characters, the world's bleakness matching the climber's hardcore approach. My one criticism is that it's initially hard to read that you've slipped into a flashback and the first act has a lot of "who is this again?", as young men in parkas all look alike, but that is quickly dispelled once you get your bearings.
Taking some of its anecdotes from the similarly-titled book, Slugfest is a 10-part series of shorts about the battle for newsstand domination between DC and Marvel. Well, kind of. Several episodes are only about what one company is doing and not the other, so I take it more as a series on the publicity stunts the Big Two have published as a consequence of their rivalry. There's an echo of what The Comics That Made Us might have been like (which makes me long for a second season of nostalgia), but without the overt mockery THAT docu-series often has for its subjects. Instead, the sense of fun comes from dramatized events using many actors on comic book projects (mostly Marvel) in the roles of famous creators or even just in cameos. (You can tell when the talking heads material was shot because the Netflix Marvel actors were asked their opinions.) Most of these behind-the-scenes stories I knew, but not necessarily in such detail, or told by these particular people, so they're appreciated. Bona fide comic book nerds will, however, tear their hair out at a few points, either because collapsed timelines create the wrong causalities, or when the editor puts the wrong piece of artwork in front of them. But I'll let you discover the mistakes and only say they are at least few and far between.
/1996: Spike Lee puts a bunch of character actors on a bus bound for 1995's Million Man March in Washington D.C. in Get on the Bus, and I would probably have watched another two hours as they returned to L.A. Even if they'd just be listening to music and singing. Even if some of the characters are jerks (like a young Andre Braugher, ironically a loud-mouthed raging homophobe - at least to Brooklyn 99 fans), there's an overall sense of community, even if that community is far from homogeneous. How DO we achieve unity when the scope of the black experience in America is so diverse, not to say fractious? There are many interesting stories aboard this bus, but the heart of the picture has to be the one-two punch of the late great Ossie Davis and as the bus driver ferrying souls across America, Charles S. Dutton. Between them is the moral center of the drama. People should talk about this one more when they discuss Spike Lee's work!
Paired Short: Great house fly action in Kill the Day as we spend time with an addict just waiting for the next fix.
1997: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure is, in the end, a little more enigmatic than I would have liked, but is still an engrossing thriller in which a police detective tracks and confronts a strange amnesiac who may be connected to a rash of strange ritual murders by random people compelled into violent action. Did the Devil really make them do it? Or is the truth less supernatural? I'm not sure I have definite answers for you. Parallel to this, the detective also has a wife at home who is struggling with memory problems herself, and I thought this would be more relevant to the story. It is, but it isn't. So while the premise is disturbing and the atmosphere and mystery kept me glued in place, I'm not quite as enthusiastic about Cure as I want to be.
Paired Short: You can spot themes and images Christopher Nolan will use later, in his student film Doodlebug, but it's mostly a dull excuse for that final special effect.
1998: It's fun music, but it had to die... Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco chronicles the height and sudden death of the early 80s club scene in a dramatic comedy about New York yuppies, not unlike his Metropolitan, but a lot less mannered. (That film's attempt at timelessness was perhaps to blame, while Disco is set in a specific time and is more fun as a result.) Poor dejected Chloë Sevigny tries to find love, but is often undercut by her snobbish best/worst friend Kate Beckinsale (she'll return in the Stillman filmography in my favorite, Love & Friendship), and though the humor is dry indeed, I burst out laughing several times. Robert Sean Leonard is one of the boys in play, but is not really reunited with his Much Ado About Nothing co-star. Anyway, it's the ladies who are the most engaging characters, with the boys rather pathetic in comparison. Well, not just in comparison. Objectively so. Chris Eigeman is probably the only one I'll remember later because he is just the WORST person. I had a lot of fun with this, and it's got a great coda too.
Paired Short: Lynne Ramsay gives us a little girl's impressions in Gasman, not complete memories, not formal frames, and certainly not a complete understanding of what is happening with her dad at that Christmas party. Lovely and truthful.
1999: In Breau Travail, Claire Denis points her erotic lens towards both sexes and blurs the distinction. Denis Lavant, who gave a bravura performance in Holy Motors, is no less fearless here as a French Legion sergeant who becomes jealous of a younger serviceman for the attentions of their grizzled commander. An erotic tension arises without it speaking to any kind of homosexuality. There's not much plot, however, the film more interested in showing the life, day in, day out, of Legionnaires stationed in Eastern Africa (training mostly). The cinematography favors metallic skies, bronze bodies, and land and sea out of the ceramicist's kiln, a hard, primeval palette. And then there's that credits sequence, Denis Lavant at his fiercest.
Paired Short: There's something a little self-aggrandizing about Edwige Shaki making a character compare her to great paintings in The Curve, but I've been reading about art history lately, and so thoroughly enjoyed her questioning of the male gaze.
2000: Michael Haneke's 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance proved to be a dry run for Code Unknown, a similarly fragmentary narrative with harsh interrupting cuts. But while 71 Fragments told us what we were barrelling towards, Code is constantly making us ask how each piece fits into a greater connected story, and withholds a final statement even at the end (a bit too elliptical perhaps). The overall picture, also echoed in smaller moments throughout, is that our actions and inaction, even our general attitudes, have an unseen and unknowable effect on others. Even in Haneke's dissection, we can't see the full picture. A domino starts to fall, but does it really lead to another domino falling down the line? The breakdown in communication is between us and world, causality as mystery. In that context, Juliette Binoche is the villain of the piece. And so maybe you are. Or I am. Even if we're just innocuous balloons on the wind, a child might follow us over the balcony. While answers are intangible, this is nevertheless the most accessible of Haneke's films I've seen, in that there's no shocking mass murder in it (except for the news footage of the conflict in Kosovo). The theme of unknowability is the same, but the film is more subtle.
Paired Short: Guy Maddin recreates the feel of a Meliès-era silent film in The Heart of the World, but goes further, turning it more into a found object, a decaying artifact from another time. It's glorious.
Books: I'm not surprised a fan of the Belle Époque like Julian Barnes would mostly focus on French painters of the 19th Century, but it makes me realize my art history knowledge is very weak in that regard. Keeping an Eye Open is a collection of his essays on art, all originally published in various places, starting with the one I'd read - his piece on Géricault's Naufrage de la Méduse, which was a chapter in my coup de foudre with Barnes, History of the World in 10½ Chapters. I didn't mind reading it again, then went on to discover artists through an insightful combination of their biographical details, personalities, output, specific pieces and THEIR stories, and then the effect they had on my favorite novelist. The highlight for me was discovering the prodigious ego of Courbet, but there isn't an essay in the collection I didn't find both penetrating and entertaining. Reproductions enliven each chapter, but the text only made me want to 1) have the Internet handy to see more, and 2) see them in person, as this is the only way to truly appreciate brushwork.
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