"Accomplishments"
In theaters: David Cronenberg returns to squishy sci-fi horror with Crimes of the Future, but while there are a lot of interesting ideas, it also plays like a Greatest Hits album. Surgery as sex sits somewhere between Crash and Dead Ringers, the weird bio-tech comes from Naked Lunch, Existenz and Videodrome, and I know this is hardly fair, but it reminded me more of his son Brandon's films (Antiviral and Possessor) which were, on the whole, more intriguing. In a future where humanity starts to evolve, in particular losing its sense of pain and proclivity for infection, Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seyoux are performance artists, the former growing new organs inside him, the latter tattooing and cutting them out in public. They get embroiled in a conspiracy to force/repress evolution, and you can well imagine fascist politics trying to control people's bodies even when change is a natural occurrence. Evolution as crime. If you want to see this as a parable for trans and reproductive rights, you can, but I don't think Cronenberg really seals the deal. On anything. There are too many competing ideas, most of them never paying off, that in the end, it's an intellectual meditation on the core idea of human evolution that doesn't metastasize into a clear enough story.
At home: I believe I'm made my ambivalence towards Macbeth clear in the past, and that doesn't change even if Joel Coen is directing The Tragedy of Macbeth, but there is a lot to like in this spare and very theatrical adaptation of one of the Bard's most enduring works. There's certainly some striking direction and cinematography, especially when it comes to the Witches, but I'm more likely to remember Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as Lord and Lady M. There's the sense here - one that I don't normally get from the play - that her madness comes on the heels of having unleashed something she wasn't prepared for. Lady M of course pushes for that first murder, but it opens a can of dread worms as her husband finds it easier and easier to kill, especially considering the immortality the prophecy seems to confer on him. Washington's is a quiet Macbeth, not so much reflective as fated and therefore inhabited by a kind of calm, even once his own death is at hand. If Macbeth is psychotic, then it's the kind of psychosis that deadens natural empathy and eventually turns into a god complex. My one real complaint is that the adaptation relies a bit too much on knowing the play beforehand, and perhaps knowing it well, as there's an awful lot of characters that show up for a scene and you're made to wonder "who is this?". Ross' ambiguous loyalties under fall under this heading, though they're more interesting. If the proper stresses had been applied, I don't think we would have felt as lost in those moments.
I don't know if the continuous shot is the new found footage, but the gimmick is always rather impressive, especially if you can't see the joins. There is one obvious place One Shot stops rolling tape, after an explosion requiring a set redress, but otherwise, you could well imagine this as a tightly choreographed actioner, rehearsed then shot as one continuous "play" (or two), with at least one action sequence very reminiscent of John Wick. Because continuous shots suggest real time, what can suffer, especially in plot-centric genres like action, is the story (different from plot). Here, Navy SEALs have to extract a reputed terrorist from a CIA black site to stop a terror attack, but the people who don't want him to talk attack the place with what looks like an entire army. There are a lot of moving pieces, and we're told everything we need to know, when we need to know it, but that story is necessarily thin. I'm into the procedural feeling of the movie, but when there's this much action, and for the most part, it's "real world" action, my eyes tend to glaze over during those sequences. In other words, if it didn't have its gimmick, it wouldn't be worth mentioning.
Director Naoko Yamada's brand is young people suffering quietly but daring to reach out, timidly. A Silent Voice (I guess some distributor somewhere didn't think "The Shape of Voice" would play in English markets) is just such a film. In 6th grade, Ishida bullied a deaf girl (Nishimiya) relentlessly until she had to be pulled out of school, at which point he is ostracized, though the there's plenty of guilt to go around. By late high school, Ishida, devoured by guilt and isolation, is on the verge of desperate outrage, until he meets Nishimiya again and an unlikely friendship is struck in his need for redemption. The story remarks on how redemption is a personal choice, because it never seems like Nishimiya, as pure a soul as you're likely to find, resents those events. Time is often enough for forgiveness from others, it's forgiving oneself that's the hard part (indeed, both characters are too focused on their self-loathing to realize it). A tear jerker for sure. I was especially taken with Yamada's sensitive psychological stylings, not only putting crosses over the faces of the people Ishida has taught himself to blank out (no doubt in the original Manga), but following through by making her "camera" look away, at details, or at strange frames. It may be hard to imagine, at first, that we could forgive Ishida, but Yamada puts us in his head, and in any case, it's not our job to do so. It's his.
I've seen a lot of revenge movie. You might even say it's one of my favorite subgenres. But Götz Spielmann's Revanche is a rarity: A revenge film that's more about vengeful feelings than it is vengeful acts. Normally, we side with the avenger - the person responsible for their woes is pure evil and the revenge is righteous. Or it's a horror-thriller and some innocent soul is being terrorized by an evil villain. Revanche spends a lot of time with the protagonist, an ex-con trying to escape to a new life with his prostitute girlfriend (you expect fridging and you are not wrong) before tragedy strikes (toldja), but that tragedy is not caused by a bad person. Can revenge then be righteous. Fate is a sick puppy and contrives to put the protagonist in proximity to the man who has done him wrong, and Spielmann creates many situations that evoke the coming revenge, but will it come? It's quite a thing to make the thought of revenge hold the same power of catharsis as the act itself. In other words, can you withhold what the audience craves and not only make it work, but by then BE what the audience wants?
Istanbul is a city with a lot of street cats, and Kedi is a harmless little documentary about that, following certain cats with strong personalities and speaking to cat lovers around the city. If you're a cat lover (guilty), it's an automatic thumbs up. If you're not, I don't know what you will make of this film. What does it offer besides quality cat action? The cinematography and editing do a very good job of showing us the day in the life of these animals, and there are some poignant stories from people whose lives were deeply affected by the cats around them. Some of the more philosophical musings are a bit hyperbolic, though you will immediately recognize the sorts of things cat owners say. It's a bit thin, but some of that material does expose what people in Turkey (or at least, in Istanbul) value. And then there's the city itself, and its history with cats who, like wilder animals, are perhaps being pushed out of their habitat by the urban sprawl. Kedi makes its points, but it's really more about watching cats do things, and people who love cats gushing over them. I'm sure a good percentage of you out there are into that.
The initial surprise when watching Louis Feuillade's seminal silent serial Les Vampires is that it's not about vampires at all. Rather, this is a convoluted crime thriller in which journalist Philippe Guérande and his comical sidekick Mazamette fight a criminal gang known as the Vampires. There's nothing supernatural, even if the villains have an innate propensity to seemingly come back from the dead. An ancestor of television far more than it is a precursor to more immediate matinee serials, each episode features and resolves a crime, with time moving, sometimes in bounds, between chapters. While Guérande (Édouard Mathé) is the hero, it's Marcel Lévesque's camera-mugging Mazamette who is more memorable. I could not have guessed that this minor character from chapter 1 would become this involved, but Lévesque has such a great (French) face and humor, they had to expand his role, I bet. But even so, it's Musidora as the intense, anagramatic Vampire agent Irma Vep who steals the show, managing to outlive several Grand Vampires, a mistress of disguise, cat burglar, and as hard a dame as any in cinema. Feuillade's pace doesn't feel too slow even if he lets dialog scenes play without inter-titles for realistic lengths of time (a French lip-reader could reconstruct a full script), and I like his use of blue tints to indicate darkness, great for blackouts where the baddies can pull a fast one - while we watch! But generally, there are some good stunts, engaging performances, intriguing puzzles (not easy to make sense of such things in the silent era, but Feuillade manages it), and some pretty clever Mission: Impossible-type plots. Worth the 7 hours, and having that music wired to your brain for a still-unknown length of time.
Books: Time-Life's World War II series examines one of the most ignored fronts of the War with The Italian Campaign, a grinder of a conflict that I had heard about because a grandparent had told me many Canadians lost their lives taking a hill or mountain, but reading through the book, it's not clear which of the many mountain battles that would be. That's how bloody and awful this particular conflict was (and indeed, while there are only a couple of gory pictures, the prose doesn't mince words and gets very graphic at times - a lot of this is in the soldiers' own words, so I'm not complaining, but again, I'm surprised I was gifted these books when a I was a child). As usual, I get a little lost in the play-by-play with all these numbered units etc., but the stories are vivid enough that it doesn't matter. Of particular interest: How Italy saved its art treasures (or in some cases, didn't), the multicultural composition of the Allies at this point, and how invasion turned into liberation, helping to explain why Italy wasn't put on the same black list as Germany and Japan after the War.
The Infinite Frontier mini-series belatedly jumped off Morrison's Multiversity project by strongly featuring Justice League Incarnate, a group of heroes from different Earths in the Multiverse. However, it was an incomplete story. JLIncarnate almost immediately got its own mini-series following up on those events, but guess what? Incomplete story. It's all a lead-up to Dark Crisis, not even a year after the multiversal upheaval. JLI in fact leads into Justice League #75 (The Death of the Justice League)' then on the Dark Crisis event. At least it's all by Joshua Williamson and doesn't seem to cross over with very many comics (gotta get current with The Flash, I guess). Williamson understands the mechanics of such stories, and the mini-series (to be collected in October 2022) uses as many Earths as it can, though also, Darkseid, a villain who has not been done right in ages and should be retired. The best parts are the use of Earth-Prime ideas (where comics dictate or reflect every other reality), chapter 4's explanation of how all the Crises connect, and the villains assembled by the Great Darkness (also connected). It's big, it's bold, not as funny or clever as it thinks it is sometimes, and probably in need of a stronger main artist (though I don't dislike the idea of using different guest artists for different Earths, I'm not sure the styles are always radical enough). It's just a shame that this mini and the previous weren't part of an ongoing monthly series that just happens to dovetail into Dark Crisis (and continues from there), because it's undoubtedly going to be confusing to collectors.
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