This Week in Geek (19-25/02/23)

"Accomplishments"

In theaters: Though it did evoke some elements of Disney's own Strange World, Ant-Man and the Wasp - Quantumania (quANTuMANia?) creates a world all its own in the Microverse--sorry, Quantum Realm--that gives the Ant Family new worlds to discover and makes it look like a Guardians film. I won't mince words, the Ant-Man franchise is one of the MCU's weakest overall, so the bar isn't high when I make the claim that this is perhaps the best of the three. Paul Rudd's performance is a bit simplistic for my tastes, and I'm rather disappointed this is what they gave Bill Murray to do - his acting style should have made him an Elder of the Universe! - but there are other people in the cast to like. Kang and Janet van Dyne are good, Hank Pym is cool as hell, Cassie proves her worth as Young Avenger, MODOK is sufficiently goofy (I know this is a minus to some, but get over it), there are some interesting and weird denizens of the Realm, and... well no, the Hope Wasp does nothing for me here. There's an excellent scene where Ant-Man is treated as an ant and shows where his heart lies, and they do find a way to have ant action despite being in another universe. Minor squeeing at the mid-credit scene, if you're a comic book nerd.

At home: On the surface of it, The Incredible Shrinking Man looks and sounds like a 1950s B-movie. A basic SF idea, narration from the protagonists, you know the sort of thing. So how did it become some a poignant (and well-made!) existential fable?! Though Creature from the Black Lagoon is Jack Arnold's most famous film, Shrinking Man deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. First off, it takes its absurd premise seriously. In the first act, Scott Carey shrinks very slowly and it's a human story of dealing with a strange illness. Secondly, the effects are impeccable at the larger scale, and pretty damn good at the smaller scale, using rotoscoping and giant props to put Scott in miniaturized action. Third, it actually is exciting to see him try to survive the world of his basement in the later parts of the film, as strong as any survival film set in the macro-world, if a little old-fashioned. Mostly, what dates it is the dang narration, but even that's justified by the ending which uses it to make its point, and it's a bit of a gut punch. When the last few seconds of a movie make its score soar upward.

Joel Schumacher's first feature film, The Incredible Shrinking Woman is very much a comedy remake of the The Incredible Shrinking Man, with Lily Tomlin a housewife similarly fogged, this time by household products, and carrying on cooking for the family, etc. despite her small size, until she is similarly thought dead. It is a very weird film, predicting Batman Forever more than it does, say, Falling Down, but it doesn't always justify its flights of bonkers. Tomlin playing several parts, for example, has no purpose AND kind of makes the ending confusing for a second. The existential climax only happens because it's harking back to the original film, but is nonsense in this new context. And that context is the inclusion of Big Business as a villain who doesn't want confidence in American products to take a dive because of what happened to her, dovetailing into an ill-justified supervillain scheme that replaces the basement survival story and gives Tomlin a super-intelligent gorilla as an ally. The original film was absurd, but this remake is simply cartoony. Not without interest, and the giant props are certainly well done, but nowhere near as resonant.

Family films are a mixed bag for a lone adult. Sometimes, they really do aim for the whole family, but oftentimes, there's little for the adults to really latch onto. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids falls into the latter category for me. For the grown-ups, I suppose there's the parents' worry, a very thin suggestion of the Szalinskis' marital problems, and Matt Frewer's character not really being a villain (just a bit of a jerk - though I don't know if I buy him as a "jock"). But the science is silly Disney stuff, there's a lot of slapstick and shouting, and it features one of the most annoying tropes in kids' movies, the annoying jerk kid. There's always one, apparently, and you just wait around for him to show vulnerability and a softer side (this, of course, happens). As a kids' adventure, it does work pretty well thanks to very well made sets, props and creatures, the back yard a giant jungle filled with threats. The stop motion effects show their age, but it's pretty cool. I only take exception with the sound design, which would have use believe a normal voice is deafening to tiny kids one minute, but they next they can't hear voices or lawnmowers going like they're in some kind of bubble.

After some pretty interesting world-building around its of course preposterous premise, Downsizing fails to find any kind of motive energy to carry its long run time. Which is to say, it doesn't have enough of a plot to feel at all satisfying. I'm not against a "portrait" of a shrunken society (at odds with the macro-world or not), but the film's style is not in line with that (perhaps as a mockumentary, I don't know). Matt Damon's wife not following him into the downsized gated community might have provided the necessary plot, but it doesn't. (Indeed, she is one of several characters that show up, then disappear entirely.) Damon finding there is inequity in this world too is ALMOST the plot, but the film doesn't really follow dystopian tropes and is timid about any kind of resolution here. The third act has a dark twist and perhaps the funniest bits, but by then, we've taken too many detours for it to count. Perhaps cutting a half-hour out of the film would have made it better. Ultimately, it's a big downer, which is surprising (not to say disappointing) given the number of comedy stars involved. Raising it by a half-star for Hong Chau once again giving it her all, but even she's not enough to rescue this one.

When Joe Dante tackles themes similar to Rear Window in The 'Burbs, it's a pretty insane affair. Young Tom Hanks, still in his comedy rant phase (not a bad thing), wants a stay-at-home vacation, but soon falls under the spell of the neighborhood gossip as he and his neighbors start acting like children vis-à-vis the street's "haunted house", or in this case, the dilapidated structure home to eccentrics who may or may not be ghouls. Dante has a lot of fun having his cake and eat it too, remonstrating the characters for having too much imagination and time on their hands, but also requiring us to question whether these strange neighbors really are up to no good. But this really works on the merits of its comedy. It's not just a case of funny premise, funny dialog or funny slapstick (and Hanks is definitely underrated as a physical comedian), Dante is, like Edgar Wright to name what I propose as a pretty direct descendant, a comedy DIRECTOR. So there are tons of throw-away gags, background bits, and amusing uses of camera work and sound design. A lot of fun. And what a neat cast!

An acknowledged inspiration for Parasite, The Servant indeed does have that energy. The Losey/Pinter collaboration similarly creates a wry power struggle between "master" and servant, with the magnetic Dirk Bogarde in the servile role (but for how long?). His intentions are neatly ambiguous, which gives the film a homoerotic overlay that hides the long con being played on the house's owner, simultaneously commenting on domestic situations where one partner (this was 1963, so the woman) is placed in a servile position. But that con is more social than financial, its goal to upend the classist order, and ultimately show how impotent that upper classes are. They may see themselves as rulers, born with manifest destiny (and indeed, James Fox's Tony is a later-day colonialist with all the ambitions), but they really can't do anything for themselves. As with Parasite, there is a moment of cruel humiliation that makes us side with the "criminals", as Wendy Craig's character is not so easy to manipulate as Tony is. It's a very well played and shot. Tense in spite of its innate domesticity.

There is no doubt that the television show The Great was conceived based on 1934's The Scarlet Empress rather that Catherine II's diaries. It has the same sense of humor and treats a young woman's plunge into a decadent Russian court with the same satirical humor, not to mention how much sex and violence (even a bit of atypical nudity for the era) there are on show. But while von Sternberg has some nice ideas - a lot of cool shots and all that demonic statuary - he's not able to tell this particular story in 104 minutes without pulling up a caption in between every scene that sometimes feels redundant, and sometimes covers material we really needed to see. The most egregious is Catherine's transformation from wide-eyed innocent to shrewd politician with the army in her pocket. Marlene Dietrich is good at each, but they don't seem like the same character and the change isn't properly tracked. I could also do with more of an epilogue. She wins power and... now what? Was she any good? Where are you captions now? My biggest complaint, however, is Louise Dresser as the older Empress. She's terrible in this, running too quickly through her lines with an obnoxious, ill-fitting American accent. And Sam Jaffe as the mad Peter is at first interesting, but it's a one-note portrayal that soon wears thin. The Scarlet Empress is at once ahead of its time and deathly old-fashioned, and I found it more interesting as an object of comparison to a more recent work than as itself.

Books: Does Paul Magrs' The Scarlet Empress really fit the Doctor Who universe? The key is Iris Wildthyme, a character imported from a non-Whoniverse novel, here appearing in her first full-length Who novel. Her metatextual powers make anything possible, and from here on out, you won't believe what the BCC and later, Big Finish, let Magrs get away with. The Doctor's old flame - in my opinion, a direct ancestor of one River Song - has a way of making you think you're really reading one of her diaries (which in this case would also include home video footage), with all the appropriate embellishments. It's Doctor Who has 1001 Nights, with a planet fit for the Arabian Tales, filed with strange, amazing places, characters and things, and told in a variety of voices as Magrs shifts between them, much like a compendium of folk tales collected from different sources might. It's about stories, and the book's picaresque weakness (its essentially rambling plot) thus becomes a kind of thematic strength. Magrs' prose is excellently wordy, and he writes a good Eighth Doctor, but of course, Iris is the standout here. It's a little weird reading her first full Time Lady appearance at this point - since I've read and heard her many times before in later books and audios - I bet it was a bit of a shock in 1998. Outlandish fun. Nice afterword too.

RPGs: Torg Eternity sent the players to Orrorsh, the killerest of the killer Cosms, but not without ammunition. They were just off a Glory card so they had more resources, and the Zone was mixed with Core Earth, and inside the mad scientist's tower, with the Nile Empire. Didn't stop the Lovecraftian horror in the attic from manipulating their minds (all done with role-playing, I swear there wasn't a single roll involved - these guys are just this good at evoking the feel of the horror realm themselves). A race back to the plane before a raised ghost ship arrived provided a climax that was, for technical reasons, delayed by some minutes - Forge, which hosts our game, has been having stability issues in the past two weeks apparently, and every game was kicked off the servers for part of the evening (not long, and it happened again later just as we were calculating XP). Though they made their escape and even had the ship sunk by a passing steamer, the hopelessness of the region came to the fore - so many ghosts reached the shore that they soon started a massacre that turned the region Orrorsh Dominant, so the mission was actually a failure! Orrorsh is mean that way!

The lesson here is that whether a Zone is mixed, dominant or pure depends on the population - how much of it has transformed to the axioms and laws, etc. That's why the Gaunt Man massacred so many people on Day 1 - to establish pure Zones.
Best bits: Our tormented cyborg drew a Cosm card that allowed him to pass a Corruption test to take Possibility energy from another character. He had permission, I was told, so the Lurking Horror above whispered sweet nothings into his ear to encourage him to actually do it. Our realm runner may never forgive him. The monster hunter was whispered into becoming more and more violent as well. But again, I didn't activate any kind of power or anything. The Cthulhoid Thing in the Attic was ultimately defeated by a Cosm card. which made a sacred Egyptian cat come out of nowhere and startle the monster, giving the PCs time to blow it up. The final battle on the shore was finally resolved by super-wrestler Marcus Pain convincing the passing Victorian steamer to fire all cannons on the ghostly pirate ship, and that was cool if a little late. The plane finally taking off with the monster hunter still on top was an added bonus (gotta have that Core Earth super action in there too!).