BuysMy GURPS collection continues to grow with GURPS Adaptations (I love that it uses The Wizard of Oz and Pride & Prejudice as public domain examples) and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting: Caverntown. They are 4th Edition - whereas 3rd is what I collect - but provide different (and non-rulesy) enough material for me to consider them.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: One the surface, Nope is a cool horror twist on the ol' alien abduction story, visually interesting, funny when it wants to be, tense when it needs to be, and extremely well-constructed, its Chekhov's guns organic rather than forced. But the choices Jordan Peele makes force you to scratch beyond that surface at what meaning might be hidden underneath. I came out of this thinking it was Peele's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with much of the humor coming from the vacuity of the projects various characters take pride in. A story about exploitation (of animals, child actors, tragedy, even self-exploitation), doing everything for "the money shot" including putting people in danger or burning them out (art as commodity is definitely a theme, note the extended Monopoly riff), and a sense that if you don't exploit yourself, someone else will. And in the context of Peele's oeuvre (seeing as the first piece of film shows an unknown black man on a horse, equating the two), that exploitation and thoughtless abuse is of African-Americans. Here, I thought of Childish Gambino's This Is America - African-Americans in the entertainment industry becoming acceptable "as spectacle" to white audiences, but at what personal or cultural cost? Look at me! Make me famous! That's the only way to be safe and thrive! Say the characters, says the monster.
At home: Kimi is an improvement on Siri-type services because it flags misunderstandings so a human operator can go into the code and increase the disembodied voice's lexicon. But it's a Steven Soderbergh thriller, so it's only a matter of time before it overhears a violent crime, and a human being can't ignore it. That human is Angela, a tech-savvy agoraphobe well played by Zoë Kravitz, whose mental health issues have not been improved by the pandemic. This is a rare COVID-era movie (most act like it never happened) and trades on the isolation and paranoia involved without making it about the pandemic, first by heightening Angela's anxiety and second by introducing a paranoia-fueled corporate conspiracy angle. Obviously, Angela is going to have to leave the security of her apartment to get the overheard victim justice and things just get crazier from there. There are some very cool directorial elements that elevate the movie further, like the way those outside sequences are shot, but also how many conversations have characteristics not dissimilar to the Kimi software's (humans are no better at understanding subtext, or can be running their own "script"). There's also something delightful about how Kimi is used to bring down its owners. Like any good thriller, everything that's introduced is used organically later. A fun, tense, and relatable cutting edge take on Rear Window.
War is a disease that will infect everything it touches. In Shame, Ingmar Bergman creates a fictional Swedish civil war, one that is as data-less as the false conflicts of 1984, because he chooses to focus on the personal. A couple - Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow, it doesn't get any better than that - musicians who have retired to the countryside and consider themselves apolitical nevertheless will not be spared its horrors. A cue is given early on when Ullman, in her first scene, walks around with her shirt open. A domestic scene, but the first of several that showcases her vulnerability. We'll often get scenes that play on her face, never cutting to the reverse shot. She is exposed. Von Sydow, the weaker person of the two, prefers to hide, to run, to bend, and eventually to break. There are some harrowing moments - loyalist forces headquartering in a primary school and conducting torture there, for example, and the glut of bodies at the end - but the focus is always drawn back to the relationship, how two ordinary enough people are affected by the event, as it grows ever closer to being the "new normal". The shame of the title is at first thrown on the devisers of the situation, but we quickly understand that whether one took a side or refused to, there will be opportunities to expose one's ugly side - ruthlessness, cowardice, etc. - and plenty of shame to go around. One might survive, but not as the same person.
1988's Shame is a cool little Australian thriller in which a badass stranger rides into a small town terrorized by bullies and rapists, with a corrupt sheriff type unwilling to stop them, has their vehicle break down - the heroic stranger is forced to stay just long enough to get involved and inspire the population to fight back. It sounds familiar, but by casting a woman in that role, it refreshes everything, even 25 years on. Deborra-Lee Furness plays a biker chick/attorney who can take care of herself in a fight and ends up helping a young girl who is only one of many on a long list of silent victims. You think it's going to end up in court in the third act, but naw, this has more in common with The Cars That Ate Paris (to name another underseen Australian flick) than any kind of issue-of-the-week TV movie. The story is extreme, but not so extreme as to release us from responsibility - the shame is ours, as a society, even today maintaining systemic access to rape for privileged bully boys. #MeToo this thing into prominence. If nothing else, Furness is terrific as the offbeat heroine whose past is only hinted at.
A stark look at sexual addiction, Steve McQueen's Shame reminded me of Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon from 2 years later, but without the friendly voice-over. At the heart of the film is the relationship between Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and Sissy (Carey Mulligan), siblings with a contentious relationship, and because we're never really allowed into Brandon's head, all sorts of scenarios present themselves as his sister walks around naked in front of him, or jumps into his bed, etc. But is he revolted by her because of his own self-loathing, afraid of his impulses in those situations, or is it that she's an intimacy junkie, opposite to his own illness born of coping. The only thing we can almost say for certain is that both suffered trauma within their families, a trauma never spoken or explained, and tragically, one that makes Sissy need to have a relationship with her brother (the other survivor), but that makes Brandon want to flee anything connected with the event, including her. Not that anything like this is ever spoken out loud. McQueen presents us with realities that suggest a background and infers psychology, and these morph as we head deeper into the narrative. And yes, there's lots of nudity and sexual situations right out of pornography, but any early titillation one might feel watching eventually evaporates as the sex turns desperate and ugly.
A sad fantasy signed Hirokazu Koreeda (Shoplifters), Air Doll stars Bae Doona (The Host, Cloud Atlas) as an inflatable sex doll who, one day, comes to life. Unlike Kim Catrell in Mannequin, who is turned into flesh and blood, she's still a blow-up doll, with seams along her limbs and in fear of losing her air. And that's all in service of the movie's central metaphor - she feels hollow, empty, and tries, like many of us, to fill that emptiness with... a job, a love, a child, a sense of closure. Koreeda interlaces the narrative with the lives of secondary characters who feel hollow too. This is the human condition. No surprise, Koreeda treats his creature with incredible dignity and Doona is up to the challenge of making us believe she is seeing and understanding the world for the first time, as we track her growth from innocent child to disappointed adult. Remove the fantastical filter, and she is a kept woman, hollowed out by a relationship in which she is well treated, but does not love the other person. But then you'd lose her journey's existentialist extremes. And it's always a joy when you absolutely don't know where a film is headed from moment to moment. A lovely lyrical experience born from a lascivious premise.
It's crazy to think that Minbo: The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion might have caused Juzo Itami his life, or even if that tale isn't true, provoked a savage knife attack on his person a few days after its premiere (leading to public outcry and government crackdown on their activities, ergo the story about Itami meeting with foul play five years later). If the Yakuza felt slighted that he would satirically portray them as bullies and thugs, they went about proving him wrong in the oddest way. And look, it's just a very amusing film in the style of A Taxing Woman, with the wonderful Nobuko Miyamoto starring as a lawyer whose expertise is Yakuza extortion methods based no civil disputes. A hotel is being terrorized by a number of gangs - as it was marked as easy prey once the personnel started to fold to their demands - and she comes in as their white knight to fix the problems. Not that it's gonna be easy. Plenty of surprises to be had over the course of the film. Itami's secret recipe is easy to decode, but difficult to reproduce: Choose an unusual walk of life to make "heroic", then cast the always charming Miyamoto in the role. Done. I, for one, would love to live in the timeline where the Yakuza had a sense of humor about themselves and there were more films in the Itami/Miyamoto canon.
Make no mistake, Itami's Supermarket Woman is a story of Good vs. Evil. Honest Mart and Discount Demon wear their ethics on their sleeve. Nobuko Miyamoto stars as a "simple housewife" with shopping acumen hired to help save the struggling business for its hapless owner - and oohboy, is this thing mismanaged top to bottom - and it may well be Itami's closest to Tampopo in terms of content. There might even be a samurai trucker in it. In Itami fashion, it's slice of life, but with the stakes raised way up; everything becomes a moral issue as Honest Mart tries to outplay the evil "Big Grocer". There's a supermarket consultant in the credits, and indeed, we learn a lot about grocery stores that I'm pretty sure we didn't want to know (and if you think we're doing better in the West than Japan, I'm sure you're wrong). But this is about the utopian grocer. I smiled a lot, but also teared up. There's just something about Miyamoto's performance that makes my heart swell, what can I say. Another fresh, charming surprise from what is fast becoming my favorite film-making duo.
I do not feel adequately prepared - culturally, generationally - to talk about Nagisa Ōshima's Sing a Song of Sex, just as I wasn't particularly prepared for watching it. Japan in the 60s... the role of Americans in the country since World War II ended, as the Vietnam War begins... you had to be there(?). Ōshima presents us with sexually frustrated boys who, the night of the last day of school, share off-putting murder and rape fantasies, and then go out and admit as much to their "victims". It all comes to a close in a final fantasy where a teacher figure goes through the history of Imperial Japan while a girl wonders if, this time, the rape is real. So disaffected youth, rudderless in their abortive history, feeling shame at what went before, haunted by it (through folk songs, omnipresent in the film) but disconnected from it, feeling the impulses of the old imperialism, and yet nihilism seems the only option. Is anything real? Does anything have a point? We are frustrated, but do we really want our ugly national imperative back? One vivid image is of one of the girls in the friend group being dressed and coiffed as a whore during a party where kids sing American songs, and between that, the death (murder?) of a mentor, and it all taking place on Foundation Day, it's easy to guess at the political metaphors. Or rather, that they are at work. For the non-Japanese audience 55 years later, it's a bit more murky. Honestly, I watched it because Nobuko Miyamoto and Juzo Itami (back when he was an actor) are in it and wondered if that's where the future director and his muse met. They were married 2 years later, so I'll gander a yes, not that they share very many scenes.
Jonathan Demme provides a comedy crime romance that's hard to pigeon-hole with 1986's Something Wild, in which Melanie Griffith essentially grabs Jeff Daniels' uptight businessman, a completely stranger, by the hand within the first few minutes and takes on the wildest weekend imaginable. I've been in similar situations where you just want to shrug off responsibilities and say "yes" to everything. Want to, doesn't mean did. In this case, Griffith's character is such an anarchic spirit - a provocateur, really - that you just don't know what you're getting into. Ah, but when the shoe's on the other foot and Daniels starts to make impulsive decisions himself, she doesn't like it as much. We see what happens when anarchy (or we could call it freedom) is unlocked, especially out of a repressed person. A road movie without a road map, it charms by surprising you with its twists and turns (but I suspect, on rewatch too, with the wealth of details). Great musical choices from Demme, often using music live as opposed to soundtrack, which adds to the anything-goes flavor of the film, and tracks that don't feel their age.
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