"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Some people go through life dismissively asking "What's the worst that could happen?"; others knowing it in their bones and that it will happen to THEM. Like Joaquin Phoenix's character in Beau Is Afraid. Ari Aster's Kaufman-esque absurdist comedy (the raucous laughter in the audience was, for once, appropriate) initially makes you wonder how much of a "fear filter" is on events. But there's no real way to resolve the question of whether it's all in Beau's head or really happening. It's both. This is a world where everything Beau fears will happen, does. Aster explores the wages of fear - what it makes us do and not do, its repressive effects, its sins by cowardice, and satirically, how ridiculous the reaction in when you really think about it. And it's all in service of his seemingly exorcising his mommy issues as Beau goes back in time, meeting versions of his mother (that were, that could have been) on his way to the woman he loves but fears. Aster takes aim at parenting (molding and unconditional love), savagely so. There is a LOT to unpack, more than a capsule review could ever hope to, every image filled with meaning. I will admit that people coming out of the theater claiming this was the worst movie they'd EVER seen (hey, good on you for staying the whole 3 hours then) made me give it half a star more. I'm a movie sadist that way.
The joy of watching Spirited Away: Live on Stage is seeing how the stagecraft recreates Miyazaki's vision, largely through puppeteering, spinning sets and movement art. It is, if anything, OVER produced, but it's not the onstage effects that make it so. Rather - and my opinion may be influenced by the fact the movie theater had the volume cranked way too high - it's that it's about 95% swathed in music, which makes sense for songs, dance numbers and montages, but over dialog, it was just too much. I wonder if I were to watch the original film again if it's scored like that, but even if it is, at some point you have to acknowledge theater and film are two different media. Movie houses are showing two different distributions of the play and I saw the second with Mone Kamishiraishi in the lead. I liked her casting (and that of the other characters) so I'm not pining for the other one (glimpses of which I've seen in a trailer). Kamishiraishi manages to look and act like a little girl, perhaps never more so than in the final bows somehow. I do think I was more affected by the technical achievement than the story, because I only felt emotional during those bows.
At home: Noah Baumbach's first film, Kicking and Screaming, is a subverted coming of age story where a bunch of college graduates kind of fail TO come of age, or refuse to. Starting on a seldom-used Pixies track, it got my attention right away, but lost it meandering through these people's floundering lives. Though there are a couple of comedy idiots in the group, and on paper, the dialog is quite witty, the fact that so many of many of them are pretentious kept me at an intellectual remove. Even background conversations (Altman seems an inspiration) were arch and pretentious. The film mocks the attitude - after all, these guys are rudderless failures no matter how smart they feel - but we're still asked to spend time with these bozos. The romance, all in flashback, might want to suggest something about relationships, but I'm not sure it does. Baumbach flips the usual tropes by minimizing growth, but that's a big sacrifice. It does, nevertheless, capture the listless confusion of being out in a structureless world, ESPECIALLY for Liberal Arts students not shaped into a specific cog for the work place. I think this one would grow on me over time, but for now, it leaves me a little cold.
Presented as a 90s fashion icon in Daisy von Scherler Mayer's Party Girl, Parker Posey is great as a twentysomething who hasn't learned any skills except how to have fun in New York's party scene. Financial troubles force her to beg her godmother for job at a small public library and maybe get her life in order. Filled with amusing characters and several subplots to follow, the movie is never as funny or clever as when it's doing library stuff. Not to say there aren't some very good bits in the club scenes - and it IS required for the push and pull between Posey's two lives - but the library is where it's AT, capturing the tedium of stamping and shelving books, but also the satisfaction of being part of the working mechanism of a fount of knowledge. I used the expression "putting one's life in order" a bit thoughtlessly, above, but it's well chosen because it does serve as a useful metaphor, doesn't it?
Hal Hartley is so deadpan in Amateur, I'm sure will come out of the experience thinking it was meant seriously and is therefore the worst noir they've ever seen. Isabelle Huppert stars as an ex-nun trying her hand at pornographic writing and who comes upon an amnesiac man with a sordid, but unknown past. Enter his abused wife - a porno actress - and criminals who want them all dead, and you've got the makings of a sexy 90s thriller. Except there are many moments that approach parody without ever winking at the audience in that comedy way, that the thriller elements are undermined. And that's not a bad thing. We have a LOT of neo-noir from this era, but we only have ONE Amateur. In the right frame of mind, this ludicrous concoction - the assassin double act, Huppert with a drill, the guy who gets shot repeatedly, the compassionate cop - is quite amusing (and rewatchable). There's something very theatrical in the way Hartley's characters speak - theater acting rather than film acting - but in the context of a send-up, it seems to work somehow.
A sequel to Harry Fool - which I have not seen, but don't think it matters a jot - Hal Hartley's Fay Grim is a send-up of spy and conspiracy pictures, taking Parker Posey's titular character on a global adventure in Hartley's literally askew universe where everything and everyone might be part of an obscure plot to retrieve code books written by her presumably dead husband. Helping her are her son expelled from school, her star poet brother (this whole element had me laughing out loud), and his publisher who are more or less playing a riff on the Da Vinci Code. In the spy sphere, many more characters with disparate allegiances, including a less-than-trustworthy CIA agent played by Jeff Goldbloom. It's a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing Harry Fool some time just to recontextualize the characters, though I hear they are in such different genres/modes, they might as well be occurring in separate universes.
Completing(?) his Grimm Family Trilogy with Ned Rifle, Hartlley now focuses on Fay and Harry's son who, in the wake of what happened to his mother in the previous film, has found God and determined to kill his father. This may be difficult because of an unbalanced poetry major (Aubrey Plaza) who tags along and has her own designs on Harry Fool. The direction isn't as peculiar in this one, though it's still infected with the same Hartley humor. Ultimately, this is about renouncing one's genetic/family heritage rather than anything truly Oedipal (as Harry accuses Ned of being), and comes down to the last shot. And I appreciate it for that - and for Plaza, of course - but Ned Rifle isn't as good as its predecessors and even feels a little padded at times. I'm happy to sneak back to Fay Grimm to see what she's up to and everything, but some of these sneak-backs to various characters add very little to the overall tapestry. I would also say that unlike the second film, it doesn't really work without seeing the previous instalment.
Comics: Kieron Gillen is one of my favorite comics scribes, and his version of Peter Cannon - Thunderbolt is a minor masterpiece, if one that works better for readers with some comics history under their belts (the Alec riff is a deep cut at this point). Peter Cannon is an old Charlton hero and is more famous today for being the template for Watchmen's Ozymandias. Gillen basically writes a Cannon vs. Ozy story in an extended commentary about Watchmen and the shadow it casts on the comics scene, totally in line with my own opinion that writers and artists today too often cannibalize past hits without really understanding what made them relevant in the first place. That fascination with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns has led to boring dark deconstructionism for its own sake since the mid-80s. Gillen begs comics to try something else. Excellent work from Caspar Wijngaard playing with page composition (including Watchmen's 9-panel grid) and varying his style to suit where we are in the story. The comics formalism is part Moore, part Morrison, but what's being said (indeed about both writers' work, among others) is all Gillen.
Gaming: Give or take some of the achievements (and the DLC) - I finished Watch Dogs: Legion this week. A great little evolution from past Watch Dogs games, DedSec London has its own flavor, of course, but also an interesting mechanic where you can recruit anyone of hundreds of NPCs in the game, building your own team of avatars with their own voices, fashions choices and abilities (by the end I was mostly rotating through Carmen the cargo drone-flying construction worker, Carolyn the former cop with a heart of gold and machine gun of steel, and Hariet the kooky cosplayer, but others from more than a dozen occasionally. The story has London turned into a fascist city-state in the near future and has as many side-missions as you want, really, with the recruitment stuff (I was still sad to hit the limit because I considered recruiting all of London). It ends on a surprisingly emotional note, which for purposes of continuing to play, has an epilogue mission that undoes aspects of the endgame, but is ALSO done with feeling. It asks you to run around the city a lot, so it's most effectively done while you sweep the town for all the collectibles - nicely done, Ubisoft! And there's a lot of replay value to Legion thanks to more difficult modes, in particular one where your agents' deaths are permanent(!), requiring you to mourn and recruit again and again. I'd be game, but I need to buy a new controller. The top left trigger, which is used for hacking, broke the next day (preventing any fooling around for achievements). I hacked a LOT.
RPGs: The things that happen when a player puts a lot of behind the scene energy into their character. Let me talk about Fabien a little bit. He didn't just create a tormented religious cyborg in our Torg Eternity campaign, he also wrote what we jokingly call "the novel", a series of journal entries detailing Lyaksandro's tragic life before joining the team. Fabien established that, as a child, Lyaksandro was visited in his sleep by a Kikimora, a malevolent spirit from Ukrainian folklore who invades the home and causes hardship. According to the novel, there was a lot of abuse and death in that small apartment, and it drew the character to the faith, and later to the Cyberpapacy where he got some implants before being turned by the resistance. I had the Kikimora appear to Lyaksandro as startling visions whenever the horror Cosm of Orrorsh held an influence, but I also knew that Fabien wanted this character to face his doom sooner than later and that he would have another character waiting in the wings eventually. So this week, we played Lyaksandro's final chapter, and it had to be steeped in horror and end tragically, though Fabien could have decided not to use the Martyr card I had slipped him secretly, if for example, he suddenly felt like he couldn't let go of the character he'd fostered over the last few months of play. The key for me was the concept of a "Tombstorm", a unique reality storm that sucks out souls and repurposes them for evil. Generated by a "Tombtree" I planted right outside Lyaksandro's window, in the shadow of which he grew up, it had recently become gigantic and sparked a nasty localized storm the PCs now had to investigate. In the storm, Orrorsh reigns, and we very nearly ended up with only 1 survivor out of 4 heroes - the Kikimora's death scream may have been a bit overpowered (in retrospect), but if you're not shitting yourself when you're in an Orrorshan reality, the GM isn't doing it right. In the end, while the heroes desperately tried to destroy the tree, it had to be Lyaksandro who finally faced his fears, destroying the apartment where he'd suffered so along with the monster rooted in it. It was a grand moment - Fabien gave a great speech AND gave me a Ukrainian song to play as a dirge under the action too - guys, during the funeral scene, another player choked on his tears. Sometimes, roleplay DOES become art.
With everything going on in Ukraine, I hope no one feels this story was in bad taste. The character, like its player's roots, is Ukrainian and we would always have to go there to finish his story.)
Best bits: While it was Fabien's show, I am pretty proud of the little touches I added based on "the novel", whether images like the table being set for four (which was something he made his love interest do to get over the loss of her own family, here turned into a creepy reveal that his family had been killed by the witch), or Lyaksandro being forced to relive the abuse from his childhood from the point of view of his parents, both the abuser and the abused. The Nightmare tree exploding into flames and the Kikimora with it was a good moment, eclipsed by the reveal that the witch wasn't attached to it but to the apartment. She still burned - Lyaksandro threw himself into her arms, stealthily turned to gas oven on, and shot his revolver to ignite it. The epilogue involved his soul falling into Hekaton - the Gaunt Man's black heart - to suffer for all eternity. Bleak!
Comments