Buys
Still building my collection of Torg Eternity pdfs and took advantage of a sale to grab a lot of adventures (Delphi Missions for five of the Cosms and The God Box). But boy, I can't wait for the Pan-Pacifica sourcebook to come out. Like edge of my seat here, guys!
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Smile seems to have taken the world by storm (as a meme, at least), but being part of that "the horror is really trauma" subgenre, it's in danger of being a bit tired. While I was all about this type of horror film (horror with a deeper meaning) when it first started popping up this last decade, I feel like we've seen it all. While Smile is a little cheesy at the end (but there's no way a popcorn horror flick would go bleak enough to subvert expectations), it mostly evades that danger by really being about the FEAR OF trauma. The Internet and yes, movies like this, are bound to throw up images that we don't want in our minds, inhabiting our nightmares, creating TRAUMA. And so the movie is about people who witness something traumatic and are then infected with what I will call the Smile Virus, doomed to also cause others trauma before they, or as they, expire. There's a conversation there that's worth having. The movie is well shot and acted, and the jump scares better justified than most, since we're in the lead's head and she's also jumping out of her skin as she experiences a quick descent into madness.
At home: Jumping the line to place as one of my very favorite Takashi Miike films, Gozu is a strange homoerotic nightmare in which a a young yakuza accidentally kills his way-over-the-edge Brother and is ordered to dispose of the body. Except the body and soul go walkabout in a strange town filled with bizarre characters, capturing and accentuating the feeling of being a stranger in a strange town. Then it goes completely off the rails. There is no predicting where this movie goes, or where you mind will, since Miike aways injects a certain ambiguity that makes his work stay with you beyond the credits. Gozu seems grounded in the idea of a brotherhood of men that encourages mentorship and admiration - here with gangsters, but the same is true of sports teams, close-knit groups, etc. - and dares express the kind of love it develops as sexual tension between hetero bros (but also children and their parents, etc.). Awkward at first, building that malaise to demented extremes. To say more would be spoiling the film's best surprises.
I thought I'd learned my lesson with Jean Rollin's Facination, but I started watching The Living Dead Girl (La morte vivante) before I realized it was his work. A much better film, though it's also about blood-sucking nymphettes. A chemical spill near a crypt raises a young woman from the dead so she can bodily haunt her old chateau and one thinks perhaps take revenge on her "blood sister" who, in youth, made a blood pact with her that whoever died first, the other would follow. It's been two years and the woman's still alive. But that isn't really where the movie goes with it, rather making the blood sister a willing participant in feeding the poor "morte", who really doesn't want this unlife. More naturalistic at first, the film goes full Rollin a third of the way in, as people get naked and the blood sister starts talking in a writerly way that doesn't sound natural at all. Though there are few competent actors in the cast, Marina Pierro as the "sister" is wretchedly wooden and a big problem for me. But the movie doesn't go into complete erotica, despite its presentation of an obsessively toxic relationship, and its eponymous character is unusual for the genre while also providing plenty of gore moments.
While they often look good, Italian horror films that have been dubbed into English usually suffer from that dub. That's certainly the case for Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery, which has this horrendous kid who seems to be dubbed by an adult woman (and a wooden actor to boot) - truly annoying - but has some nice atmosphere, try-to-get-out suspense, and effective gore moments. But I dare say the dub isn't its only problem. It just seems a very confused plot, throwing too many horror subgenres into the mix. If the "creature" is the result of scientific experiments, how can we justify the supernatural elements? I can almost accept the psychically bonded kids, but what was that stuff about dolls and mannequins becoming people? The creature sniffling like a child also doesn't really jibe with the premise as stated. Of interest to horror fans on some technical merits, but a real mess of a movie.
An early one by Kathryn Bigelow, Near Dark has all the atmospherics we've come to expect from her later work, her days - inimical to the vampiric fiends of the film - hazy scorchers, her nights deep pools of black with bright pools of light. It's her transitions between scenes that feel a bit clunky at this point. The cast (a lot of it pulled from Aliens) is well supported by genre veterans like Lance Henriksen, Tim Thomerson and the never boring Bill Paxton, but some of the younger actors, the leads especially, mumble their way through their southern drawls. Bigelow plays around with the idea that vampiric freedom is a great asset to the female lead and that she would miss it if it were gone (note the final freeze frame), but as it's not really Mae's story, it doesn't quite connect. Near Dark is much too interested in vampire mayhem and (former) people bursting into flames for the message to clearly come across. Still, as a vampire initiation film, it's not half bad. It just dips in and out of its cooler elements.
An odd film for Michael Mann to be attached to, The Keep (based on F. Paul Wilson's novel) is about Nazis who hole up in an old fortress in the wilds of Romania and accidentally unleash an evil that could destroy the world. In other words, it's a stand-in for for the Third Reich, even if it's part of that satisfying subgenre where Nazis get massacred by supernatural forces (well, the Reich didn't survive the war). As you might expect from Mann, it's visually arresting, even if the smoke machine is working overtime, covering some scenes not with atmosphere so much as murky haze, and he overuses the slow motion. Tangerine Dream provides the music, and after several "horror" scores from them in the past week, I'm ready to call it: I don't think I'm a fan. The airy synths just don't evoke fear or even dread to me. A kind of neo-Gothic awe, maybe, but it's counter to what I want to be feeling. Surprisingly, a young(er) Ian McKellan turns out to be the hero here, though he's saddled with a rough American accent (which is how they have the Romanians speak, as opposed to the accented Germans). The creature is pretty interesting when it's covered in roiling smoke (how'd they do that?), but progressively turns into a lumbering man in a rubber suit. And what do we make of the mysterious "guardian" who stand between the demon and our world? Probably made sense in the book, but the movie doesn't quite get us there, possibly because it was hacked up by the studio (which it was). So you see, for every interesting thing in The Keep, there's something that drains it of its power. You might enjoy as a cult item, or you might think it an irredeemable mess.
Taking place 5 minutes after the previous film is really to Halloween Kills' detriment. The movie never figures out how to recap the events of the 1978 and 2018 movies, so it keeps doing it, over and over. Indeed, Kills is so repetitive, with people saying the same thing several times (the drinking game would be a murderfest in and of itself) that you can't help but recognize that there wasn't enough material for a trilogy. Kills is keeping time until Ends can be released. Does it do some things well? Yes. I think it's pretty interesting to see what we never see: The direct aftermath of a slasher movie. Fire trucks racing to the burning house, panic at the hospital, people finding bodies from the first movie, etc. Real chaos left in the wake of these sadistic killings, and it justifies (to a point) the stupid decisions made by the vigilante posse that decides that "evil dies tonight". It's also the first time I've looked at the way Michael poses bodies and thought, hm, he's really just decorating for Halloween. So there's that. And I think the ending is pretty is pretty cool and surprising. But remove the redundancies, the philosophical speeches that don't sound like dialog, and the weird "lore" about Michael looking out his window, and I doubt you have a feature-length movie. Still too much to insert into the final chapter, which perhaps should have been a clue that while setting an entire trilogy on the same Halloween is an intriguing notion, it's not really a practical one.
I like what Tobe Hooper is doing in the first half of The Funhouse - he plays with the convention of the killer's POV in domestic situation and creates an off-putting carnival setting where the various barkers are all played by the same person, for example, and actual mutant animals are used... never mind the strong animatronic clown content. Everything is slightly creepy or upsetting. Then the teenagers decide to skip out of their buggies inside the funhouse to spend the night - as a dare, but mostly to fool around - and witness something they shouldn't have. The "creature" and its keeper are then after them, gory kills, yadda yadda. While it doesn't stop being entertaining, it's where formula starts to take over and the film becomes more and more predictable. There are worse sins this genre could commit. The setting alone is worth the watch, and while Hooper would go on to weirder heights, his trademark originality is still on show in this 1981 effort.
In the standard blaxploitation film, the villain is the White Man. There are no white characters in Lord Shango, but white culture is still the bad guy in the form of the Christian faith. Given how Christianity is the religion of many African-Americans, this is pretty subversive. But not only is a baptism used to kill a young black man at the top of the film, Christianity is represented as ineffectual and hypocritical throughout, something to be rejected in favor of voodoo, which DOES work. Even the price it exacts is presented as a positive, all part of the suffering undertaken by the characters. Imbued with mystery, Lord Shango is not the revenant tale it seems to advertise. Rather, it's about a woman pushed to extremes by her own community and household, and who sees no other way but to put her hopes and prayers (had this been made today, it would have another layer of commentary, but perhaps it did back in '75 too) on an old-time religion, no matter the price. You might expect the acting in something like this to be middling at best, but no, it's strong overall, with Marlene Clark and Lawrence Cook particularly effective.
One of those Father Knows Best comedies, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation has Jimmy Stewart complain and grumble about having to deal with his family while at the same time helping fix all their problems and bonding with them. He's not gonna get any peace and quiet in the spooky old house he's rented on the beach, but he's overstating things when he says he can't stand anyone in his brood. While there are a couple smiles - in particular when boring house guests pile on - Mr. Hobbs's Vacation is quite dated. Not just because he takes a kid out sailing with nary a life jacket, or because things like shared phone lines don't exist anymore, but because of the sexual politics (no surprise) and a couple casual racist remarks that didn't go down well. But ultimately, there's the pretense of a plot, but it's all vignettes, some much less successful than others. Fabian getting to sing a song feels very random, for example. Not a terrible way to pass the time - Stewart is always fun to watch - but it doesn't amount to much.
Evidently trying to recapture the charm of Charade, Stanley Donen's Arabesque isn't quite as successful. Obviously there's the annoying use of white actors as Middle Eastern characters, but the stakes are something musty, Gregory Peck's character's motivations from moment to moment mustier, and the more overt attempts at comedy (plonky music, slaptstick) rather tedious. That said, it progressively won me over on other elements. The dialog is very clever, and even when the plot fails them, the leads are good (even if I find this rather slight for actors of Peck's and Loren's caliber). There are plenty of interesting characters supporting them too. Donen has some great directorial ideas for and I like the way he uses mirrors, gets us into scenes, and oh, that hallucinatory sequence. What took it over the top for me were the exciting and novel action set pieces set in and around London. Fun stuff and it convinced me to ignore the lackluster MacGuffin chase and stop worrying about who's doing what for what reason.
Le Navire Night (The Ship Night) is a film about absence, about stillness, about silence, an experiment in filling in details ourselves, indeed filling in the entire film. Writer-director Marguerite Duras and collaborator Benoît Jacquot narrate a story that was perhaps born of an absence, if the prologue is to be understood, about lovers who correspond only by phone and never meet, nor ever really want to meet. Duras is well ahead of her time, imagining a relationship that only exists in the chasm of the phone line, not realizing she may well be telling an internet romance. The film is never really made. We're told the story as the camera pans over landscapes and interiors, and the actors, like us, are receptive, but never active. We see them languidly prepare for a role they will never undertake. It's a noble juxtaposition of words and images, meta-textually about all those movies (or novels, comics, paintings, podcasts) one imagines, but never ends up making. Like the lovers who can't be sure the person at the end of the line isn't a fiction, these works exist in a nowhere space, out there in the stillness and the silence.
I don't know about you, but I love a good movie about food. And for some reason, though I'm often mystified at what the menu might actually taste like, Asian films that fall into this genre are often my favorites. In the case of Naomi Kawase's Sweet Bean, a sad man (Masatoshi Nagase) takes on a elderly woman (Kirin Kiki giving an incredibly naturalistic performance) at his dorayaki stand and she changes his life around with her love of food. The old woman, Tokue, has a kind of empathy not just with the beans she cooks so lovingly, but with all of nature, extending the film's message to a more universal scope. Whatever you do, do it with love and communion with its elements. When the store's owner threatens their partnership, can the man give up on the person that is the source of his tasty bean paste, and more importantly, of his new-found pride? The movie doesn't go where you think it will. Sweet Bean is very much that: Sweet. Sweet and charming. Sad too, but rousing and triumphant as well. Again, no idea what dorayaki tastes like, but I want to try some.
Jûzô Itami's short Rubber Band Pistol, his first directorial effort, is somewhat aimless and I almost want to see it's for completists only, but it may just trigger something you'll find enjoyable. We're basically just spending time with a group of friends - shooting rubber bands (their main obsession), inventing gross-out menu items, thrifting, imagining their lives differently - which is, though details will differ, what friends do. If you were to bring Itami's camera into any given group of friends, including yours, the result would be a little weird. What are these odd activities and conversation topics? Who can make sense of this cross-talk and these inside jokes? What are these pre-existing personal dynamics I've just walked into, but feel apart from? Those are some of the things that came to mind watching, and necessarily reflecting on my own inner circle who I KNOW gets odd looks and frowns from co-workers asking what we did on the weekend, etc. People think we're so odd (not necessarily in a negative sense), but we find others just as weird, because all these little worlds are alien to one another.
Books: I am always up for a fun tell-all of a geek industry not usually featured in such histories. Ben Riggs' Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons is such a volume. While he does get us through the origins of TSR and its first and best-known game, he does so quickly, because his focus is on how TSR squandered its success, made incredibly dumb mistakes through the late 80s and 1990s, and was sold to Wizards of the Coast in 1997 in lieu of going under. It's a great subject and Riggs fills the book with anecdotes while also staying fair to the participants, whether they talked to him or didn't. It must be said that I played very little actual D&D. When I started with the hobby, as a teenage Dungeon Master in 9th grade, we didn't have ready access to the game, so we improvised something. I bought a lot of AD&D product, both 1st and 2nd edition, later on, but my play and DMing of such has been sporadic at best. When hobby stores opened near me, I was much more interested in other games, tired of the old sword & sorcery. But D&D is a giant and looms large regardless. I loved reading about the products I did affect, but Slaying the Dragon is perhaps more fascinating in the same way some people like to slow down and look when they pass a car accident (not me, but in this book, yes). While I recommend the book, I can't quite recommend the writing. I get that Riggs wants to give it the flair of a fantasy campaign description, but at times he's incredibly florid and hyperbolic (he compares R.A. Salvatore to Tolstoy, for example). He slings the word "genius" much too liberally, and there's a lot of padding as he tells us something, then goes in deeper and repeats it in longer form. And sometimes, the prose is quite fun, so mileage will vary, probably from page to page. Riggs mentions possibly doing a follow-up about 3rd edition, and while I was totally out of D&D by then, I'd read it!
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