"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I have never played Bodies Bodies Bodies, but I have played Werewolf (I guess Lee Pace represents my generation in the movie), and the horror plot pretty much mimics what happens when you play this kind of bluffing/elimination game. People turn on each other, friendships are broken, the wrong people get hurt, etc. The audience is taken along, our own paranoia pointing the finger at this or that character and keeping things lively. Those characters are the kind of Twitterati and Tik-Tokkers who speak Woke, but almost more as a trendy fashion than core values - this is what gives the murder mystery an Agatha Christie feel, with class being important even if the rich kids have their politics nominally "in the right place". It's amusing to a point, but the satire does get a bit much, even forced, over time. Regardless, it does the job, keeps you on your toes, maybe gets a few chuckles out of you, and provides a modern take on the ol' murder house genre. My policy against playing Werewolf stands, with good reason.
At home: We're gonna look back at Our Pandemic Year(s) and find it produced a heck of a lot of closed room movies like Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. Though a couple of other actors peep in at some point, this is basically just Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack for the whole of the run time. She's a retired widow who has never had an orgasm, or much of a sex life, and he's the charming sex worker she's paying to give her certain experiences, if not liberate her. Thompson is of course impeccable, very funny when she's filled with anxiety, regret and shame, but tracking her sexual and emotional journey quite well, her rising comfort level palpable through the various meetings. And of course, she's always wise and touching and real, that's just Emma Thompson. So it's McCormack I want to make sure to praise. His suave escort persona is just that, a persona, and it's always interesting to see him in those moments where she isn't in the room, when the persona cracks. But in both cases, we're looking at characters disrobe, so to speak, and reveal who they really are. It's quite charming, and the most sex-positive movie you're likely to see this or any year. It can be a bit didactic in parts, but generally, it lives in these two actors' performances.
The Sandman dropped a bonus episode this week, and my first reaction was to gasp - "Are they going to do the stand-alone stories that separated the story arcs?! Is the show going to be THIS faithful to the comic?!" - and by Jove, yes, that's exactly what they did. It's very clear that one comic = a half-hour of television, but the show insists on packaging them two at a time to reach the full hour. I don't know why they can't just be "as long as they need to be" in this era of streaming. Some executive at the top needs to wake up and smell 2022. In any case, Episode 11 contains both "Dream of a Thousand Cats" (animated) and "Calliope" (live action) and both are successful. Though Cats is one of my favorite Sandman stories, I perhaps know it too well for it to offer any surprises (except in the voice acting, see if you can identify then - Neil Gaiman himself plays a character, but there are some huge cameos), so it's Calliope I most enjoyed, and which felt more of a piece with the rest of the show. Derek Jacobi, Arthur Darvill, a wicked short story twist, I mean, I'm not made of stone. Now I wonder how many of these will actually be made, given that there are a LOT of them, and entire "arcs" (like World's End) made up of such stories. In the short term, I have a feeling the Midsummer Night's Dream story will be incorporated into the series itself (as we saw Shakespeare there) and that the Element Girl story relies too much on the larger DC Comics universe and will have been cut just like the Justice League, Infinity Inc. etc. We'll see, but I'm well impressed by the commitment to the original material.
Got sucked back into Suits despite the CW-style writing and withstood it in part by often adding "BECAUSE I'M A CHILD!!!" to characters' dialog. (It actually helps.) But Seasons 5 and 6 are just generally better at making you press the "Next Episode" button, with higher stakes and a real shake-up of the status quo. After a couple seasons, I was asking for Mike to either go to jail or get his actual law license, and these seasons actually maneuver the show in those directions. Season 6 is the prison season, but disappointingly, they don't make Mike a lawyer-to-the-inmates, not really. It's more like Oz Lite. The addition of a therapist for Harvey and Donna moving over to Team Litt (adding a new, also interesting secretary to the cast) help bolster Season 5. Still, there is the sense that the show is just spinning its wheels, with more internal strife at the firm, and people going back and forth on their decisions because emotionally THEY ARE CHILDREN. Some characters seem to be spun off into their own show, but that one-season deal is still several years in the future and the characters do still show up fairly frequently, but they stick to some of these changes longer than they usually do. While it pulls you in like the best trash, I still think it's trash, especially the writing. Characters are either volatile to the point of parody, or loyal and supportive because they're just accessories. And they're really leaning into the sexual innuendo, so much so it feels like we're in later seasons of a sitcom, by which point comedy characters have become absurd. In Season 7, exploring the new status quo, they also gain access to dropping F-bombs, which is a blessing in disguise because the show was really in love with using the word "shit", a LOT, in ways no one really does. The new curse word actually leads to more organic language. Used to be, dramas went to 7 and stopped (usually because of salary inflation), and Suits' has all the hallmarks of a show ending naturally. It goes on for two more, somehow. In for 7 pennies, in for the full 9, but let's take a break here.
I pretty much expected I Am Groot to be cute fluff and it was. At around 3 and half minutes each, they provide a quick series of gags, but are very slim in terms of story, even "Magnum Opus", which seems the most in line with Guardians of the Galaxy thanks to the music and Rocket's presence. The shorts that have antagonists are generally better at creating a plot, but many of these end with some kind of accidental cruelty - which may be Guardians-ish, but raises an eyebrow given how young they're pitched - after switching gears mid-story. When you like them (the second half of The Little Guy, or Groot's First Steps), you want them to last longer, or be part of a larger narrative. But they're twig-thin. Like this review. My ranking: They all get 3 out of 5 stars (cute but unnecessary), but I'd still put them in the following order - The Little Guy, Groot's First Steps, Magnum Opus, Groot Takes a Bath, Groot's Pursuit. But scramble those titles, and I probably wouldn't notice.
I wasn't sure if Dan Stevens was dubbed into German in I'm Your Man, but no, it appears he's fluent and that's him. But then playing an android whose factory presets are rather robotic (kind of like Data on Star Trek) before his algorithms can adjust to the person he's assigned to is probably why he seemed a little off at first. But this is really Maren Eggert's story. She plays Alma, an archaeo-linguist chosen to test a new android lover who evolves into one's best possible partner. She's against the whole idea, and a thoughtful romcom ensues. On the one hand, there's the science fiction idea and its philosophical ramifications, but I don't think that's what the movie is really about (though the play between revulsion and allure is key to the humanity of the film). Rather, it's a heightened portrait of a new relationship, and one could imagine a similar story where the android is human and simply awkward, trying to please, romantic but perceived as clingy or too intense, and just feeling his way, playing slightly different versions of himself, until the relationship stabilizes or falls apart. And isn't Alma herself "programmed" to react in certain ways, not by a computer engineer but by her past which, if the film's cursory science is to be understood, is what was input into "Tom" to make him her perfect mate. Her childhood fantasies aren't any more real than this artificial man, or any more fake, if you glimpse my meaning. Ultimately, this is about Alma learning to open herself up, overcoming her programmed responses. And if she can, couldn't Tom?
There's a famous Lois Lane story (from Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane #106, November 1970, by Robert Kanigher) called "I Am Curious (Black)" and I always found the title curious indeed, until I discovered the existence of I Am Curious (Yellow). How this controversial Swedish blockbuster (it remained the highest grossing international film in the U.S. for decades) kept its existence from me all these years is a mystery, but I have finally seen (Yellow) and its companion (Blue) and I get that perhaps the film itself fell out of favor once its more shocking aspects were relegated to history. One wonders, in fact, if the big brouhaha about banning it in the U.S. and elsewhere wasn't less about the sex than its effective socialist manifesto. But if it retains any cinematic power today, it must be because of that particular cocktail (pun not intended), tracking Lena Nyman's political AND sexual awakening, and coming out of both are more cynical, disabused person. The experimentalism can be fun - the movie within a movie, blurring the line between documentary, fiction and meta-fiction; the strange asides to camera; the capitalist commercial intrusions - but is often beside the point. Director Vilgot Sjöman, who like Lena, plays himself in the film, has so many ideas, he doesn't know when to stop himself. It's probably why he had to turn his almost 4-hour epic into two films ("the same, but different"). Yellow is the first released and the more potent, a lot more interesting than its place in film history as the "first male full frontal nudity" might reductively indicate. But sheesh, Robert Kanigher, THIS was your inspiration for a silly comic book story?!
Because (Yellow) got all the attention and remains the game changer, there doesn't seem to be a lot of love for its companion piece, I Am Curious (Blue). I like it about the same, for different reasons. Knowing the two versions were originally envisioned as a single, very long film might suggest that (Blue) both prefaces and finally book ends (Yellow), but the middle part does seem an entirely different journey for Lena. The documentary elements are different, attacking different issues than the first film, more in line with the introspective mood of this second effort. (Blue) is narrated by Lena - the actress, not the character, though the line is still blurry - as a journal or travelogue, and the subjects tackled feel less political and more societal (how women are perceived by men, for example, and questions of family). So it's a bit less opaque, more intimate, and more straightforward. And it does fill in some gaps that can be felt in (Yellow), we get a better sense of who some of the characters are. Since (Blue) came out a year after (Yellow), it uses that opportunity to include the reaction to that film, exposing uncomplimentary letters sent to the film maker, not to showcase the international furor, but Sweden's own conservatism. I was reminded of Anno publishing death threats in The End of Evangelion, so whether or not it's considered the weaker film, (Blue) is still influential.
A meet-cute leads Jong-su to be saddled with feeding pixie dream girl Hae-mi's cat while she's on a trip to Africa, but his high hopes are dashed when she returns with the sophisticated Ben. Sometimes it seems like he has something to worry about, sometimes it doesn't. But Burning is a highly-internal Noir, and as it starts to turn into a thriller, it feels like there's a vanishing long before anyone vanishes. There are perfectly reasonable explanations, though not always, with Jong-su a would-be writer who doesn't know what to write about because the world is very literally a mystery to him, and we're along for the ride. Is he uncovering clues, or is he jumping to conclusions? Whichever it is, we're doing it too. If things are sinister, they are sinister because we want them to be. Or maybe they really are. A lesser film might have given us a more solid answer, or an ironic twist, at the end, but we're left with our thoughts, judging our own paranoia perhaps. When Korean films are a touch long (and this one is), you can almost count on there being a structural pivot that sends the story in a strange direction. And it looks gorgeous, its locations as interesting as its characters, so it's well worth the time invested.
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