"Accomplishments"In theaters: The tag line says it all - We Can't All Die First. The Blackening is therefore a black-cast slasher that tries to confound expectations by preying on what the audience knows is the standard tropes for this kind of movie. And while a lot of movies nowadays will try to get away from those particular clichés, I can think of several recent releases that fail to do so. For the knowing comedy to work, the tropes have to be acknowledged - a cabin in the woods, a spooky board game, and so on - and on the villainous side of things, there are clichés to the point of predictability (and few to the point of parody - lookin' at you, Carlton/Erkel guy). I'm reminded more of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies than Scream, but it's all in there. On the side of the heroes, however, the movies doesn't follow convention, and "blackness" is part of the theme, as the affable cast of characters is forced to examine or even prove their own in the course of one night of terror.
At home: I suppose the reason everyone's noting that The Covenant has to be GUY RITCHIE'S The Covenant is because it doesn't particularly feel like a Guy Ritchie, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It shows he can stretch (or restrain) himself as a director, and all stories can't be told like they're Snatch. And this is a good one. Jake Gyllenhall leads a unit in Afghanistan, trying to find weapons caches, while Dar Salim is the maverick interpreter who's hard to control, but on whose area knowledge is crucial. Well-choreographed, grounded action, with a memorable score and cool dialog supports what becomes a love letter to the post of interpreter, and dramatizes the debt that should be paid to those who put their lives on the line to oppose the Taliban who are once again masters of that country. The two principals are terrific and carry the picture without the help of Ritchie's usual bag of tricks. So good on him for acknowledging he didn't need them, and so produced a solid war picture that didn't need to replay some "true story" (which is often how these things are sold).
Me? Watch a Michael Bay movie? It happens! And Ambulance, though a lot of is predicated on people making dumb mistakes or being quite terrible at their jobs (some of these car crashes are entirely avoidable, officers!), is a hoot and a half and shows Bay can still do effective action when he's not faffing about with video game cut scenes. There's an over-reliance on movement - this is a drone-happy flick - but it kind of fits the story, right? It's a huge, extended chase scene with bank robbers who have hijacked an ambulance vs. L.A.'s entire police force. "We don't stop!" His movies can be accused of being soulless, but casting can offer redemption. Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Eiza González are all engaging performers and bring their own soul regardless of Bay's deeper interest in plot mechanics (and still, they all have character arcs, with González's paramedic coming off as the actual main character). The cops are quickly drawn, but are entertaining for various reasons - we could have watched Ambulance from THEIR point of view and been entertained. (Could have done without those two cops consistently referencing Michael Bay movies, but jury's still out whether I liked that or not.) It's big, dumb, edge-of-your-seat fun, but not without heart, so I'm surprising myself by extending my thumb upwards.
Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan's script for Wildlife (which Dano directed) is a drama set in 1959-1960 Montana, about a couple (Jake Gylllenhall and Carey Mulligan) tested by the husband leaving for an extended period of time to fight a forest fire, and really more about the effect this has on their teenage son Joe, played by Ed Oxenbould. It's all in the title. There are allusions to animal behavior in the script, but the wildlife in the story is the adults, and Joe is an observer (notably, he takes an after-school job as a photographer), very seldom accepting to take active part in the proceedings. He witnesses his parents' supportive marriage crumble, and his mother's dalliances while his dad is away, but Gyllenhall is so absent through most of the movie, this is almost like living through a divorce in an era where that was very rare. Children of "broken homes" may well recognize their own experiences in Joe's. I wish Dano had done away with the two(?) scenes where Joe isn't present to solidify this theme, but regardless, Wildlife is a quiet but well-written representation of that moment when you realize your parents are just normal (flawed) people.
There are many ways to grieve, and in Jean-Marc Vallée's Demolition, Jake Gyllenhall's character Davis navigates complicated feelings when his wife is killed in an accident, trying to reconcile, among other things, the apathy that comes with shock and loads of guilt. The dissection of those feelings causes Davis to take himself apart, and everything around him, before he can put himself back together. Having lost a cornerstone of his identity, he destroys his life so he can rebuilt. He's helped on this journey by a relationship with a customer service rep he corresponds with (Naomi Watts) and her self-destructive teenage son (Judah Lewis) who have their own destroy/rebuild subplots, and not directly helped by his disapproving father-in-law played by Chris Cooper. Needless to say, this is all very well played and shot, and given that I've had construction in my living space these past couple months and that I'm moving house, it felt extremely cathartic to watch Gyllenhall smash things to bits.
Either I used to be a lot better at decoding Atom Egoyan movies, or The Adjuster is more opaque than most. One thing I WILL say is that the "model home" setting HAS to have inspired Arrested Development's - just too many parallels, despite the differing tone - and I'll go to my grave believing that. If I'm a little mystified, it's that I'm not always sure how the various storylines fit together thematically. There's the insurance claims adjuster who sleeps with the people who have lost their homes and who is treated like a literal saint, but visually is painted as a Robin Hood figure. His family lives in a fake home in the middle of a wasteland. His wife is a pornography censor, watching things that will be cut for content all day long, but perhaps feels outside sexuality herself. And then there's the filthy rich couple who want to rent the house to try explore elaborate scenarios, whether kink or to save their relationship... There's a play on emotional dependence and distance mixed with Egoyan's usual interest in sex, how images affect us, and so on. Ultimately, I suppose it's about feeling empty and seeking comfort in something, anything, even if it's the wrong thing. If there's a decoder key, it's probably in the great Maury Chaykin's speech. One to watch again some day.
Tracy Wright and Molly Parker are former rock chicks who meet up 10 years after their last show in Bruce MacDonald's Trigger, and there's a lot of resentment there, but also a broken-hearted love and the ability to fall back into old patterns that feels very true to life. Speaking of true to life, while I've always liked Parker, Wright is the one who sells the idea of them as retired rock stars, and that's quite appropriate. Parker plays the sell-out (and in terms of casting, has been in a lot more American stuff), while Wright plays the purer musician. Authenticity can also be found in the rock scene presented, because it's MacDonald, so of course it is. Though a quiet walk-and-talk kind of film, it does have some wry humor and flights of cinematic fancy in how it deals with the two women's history with addiction. One could do worse than put this one a double bill with Hard Core Logo as both films play with the same themes, setting their characters a decade apart.
So I'm looking for movies starring Don McKellar and/or Sandra Oh, you know, as any normal Canadian might, and I come across one that stars Hong Kong Action Legend(TM) Cheng Pei-pei, and I'm, like, what is THIS?! In Mina Shum's Meditation Park (2017), Cheng is an immigrant housewife who discovers her traditionally controlling husband may be cheating on her, an upheaval that sends her reeling into a world of new experience and wilful independence. In many ways, a quiet slice of life among Vancouver's Chinese community, but it feels momentous and is often funny in that understated way I find many Canadian films. And touching. While Cheng Pei-pei will always be known as an action star through the late 60s and the 70s, she really does have great dramatic chops, and here she's as real and grounded as can be, in a Jeanne Dielman kind of way, but also endearing and even funny. I don't think her character's experience is limited to the Chinese community's either - it's much more about a certain generation, full stop. And yes, Sandra Oh and Don McKellar are also in it and terrific as always.
There's something incredibly 90s about Mina Shum's first film, Double Happiness - to-camera testimonials, a score by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, the moments of directorial flair, the fashions of course - and it's basically treads the same ground as her most recent feature (Meditation Park), but with a twentysomething finding her independence within the traditional Chinese family structure (Sandra Oh, in only her SECOND film) rather than an older woman. It's all about where one is as a writer-director, I suppose. So the transgressions are different, but the impulse is the same. One might think making changes is easier when one is younger, but the pull of family is a strong one. We're hard-wired to comply by the very people from whom we seek to be emancipated. The themes Shum will explore throughout her career are all delineated here, and while I think the best is yet to come, it's a strong debut.
The middle film among Mina Shum/Sandra Oh collaborations, Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity is a sweet comedy about a little girl who desperately wants to fix her struggling single mom's life with Chinese charms and spells, but her haphazard manipulations of Fortune creates chaos for the community around her as she misses the mark again and again. Little Valerie Tian would go on to appear in a number of mainstream films as an adult and is very effective here (it goes without saying Oh is terrific and very real as always). Though the premise is a lighter, more whimsical one, there are still good moments of drama and other people's stories intersect the A-plot, and Shum returns to one of her principal themes - how Chinese men are slaves to their fear of losing face, which is always presented as destructive to the family unit and opposite to the female impulse. And I think we learn a lot about Chinese traditions in the process as well.
RPGs: Now it can be revealed to my Torg players that I was working from the fan-made sourcebook/module Apex Predator. When I was imagining the Possibility Wars with completely different Cosms in play, I always gave Toontown (from Roger Rabbit) a foothold in Hollywood as a minimum (I know of at least three different instances - a Risk-like Torg wargame we created to play online, a blog post, and a podcast). Author Scott Schomburg was fascinated by the same idea and it's the first thing I ever grabbed on the Infiniverse Exchange, and basically the only reason I angled towards the Cyberpapacy so early in our campaign. See, in the adventure, Toonville isn't invading, but one of its villains is trying to sell insane weapons to the Cyberpope. But death is permanent here in a way it isn't in Toonville, so in Act 2, the Apex Bros. (think ACME meets DuckTales) rope the PCs into going to their home dimension to stop the plot. And from there, things get completely loony-tunes. On a plot level, they get caught by the Cartoon King, escape, find the missing Apex Brother on a pirate ship, while a Church Police zealot runs tracks them through the cartoon landscape (Act 3 will bring things to a climax). On a 1000-foot level, it's about the GM saying yes to everything. On a mechanical level, Schomburg's product offers a deck of special Cosm cards that get a lot of use and MAKE the game appropriately crazy. Instead of your usual 1 Cosm card per Act, you get 5 and they are continually refreshed. Some are cartoon gags like rubber arms or ignoring gravity, but many are Apex products covering all sorts of weird weapons, vehicles, chemicals and exploding cigars. Our super-wrestler was very quick to figure he could use these to his advantage (and sense of humor) and slapped, like, 4 cards down in a single round, and never stopped. I absolutely couldn't have an enemy attack without being interrupted with Cosm cards from then on. Our Realm Runner absolutely hated the cartoon Cosm, but his player LOVED it, so he let his Grumpy Gus get more and more attuned to it and was eventually pulling Bugs Bunny tricks reflexively. Despite Torg having sometimes sluggish mechanics (as you make choices and shuffle resources in combat), this all just made things extremely fast, furious and ridiculous, with the pirate ship climax particularly chaotic (but in a good way).
Best bits: Where to start? The first Royal Guard to accost them is hit by lightning and turned to cinder, and they keep the ashes in a bottle and he's still squeaking out lines. When they eventually meet the Cartoon King, the cowardly monarch starts to cry and fill the room up with water, which rusts the Guard's new armor (he had just gotten up from his wounds - and out of the bottle) and sets HIM a-crying. The PCs escape the flood on an Apex missile, riding it directly to Pirate's Cove where they need to go next. Trying to find the right pirate ship becomes near impossible when the GM pulls the camera out and reveals a thousand ships in the cove, but eventually they follow messages in bottles to the right one. The Realm Runner goes behind a mast and comes out dressed as a pirate lass with whom the captain falls in love. The Rocketeer finds the captive duck, but is caught, so lets himself get walked off a plank (he can fly, which stymies the sharks wearing bibs underneath). The captain is "killed" by an exploding cigar, which makes the Wrestler the new captain (by pirate rules, players' idea), so the pirates continue to fight the PCs in the name of their new captain who can't get them to stop. They shoot cannonballs at the PCs, and these are animated characters trying to get a hug and explode themselves. The Monster Hunter draws a cute face on an inert cannonball and the bomb following him around falls in love with it and they get married, right there on the deck while the Jolly Roger up above animated and blows its nose (it always cries at weddings). Ah, and the Church Police guy gets killed twice. Once when the Wrestler flattens him like a literal pancake, the other when he gets aboard the ship (what was supposed to be a Setback) and slips on a banana peel (thrown by the Wrestler) and falls into the awaiting maw of the sharks who were just denied their lunch a couple rounds before. Every time, he squeezes out a rant, maybe a hail of bullets, and falls prey to slapstick indignity. There's more than I can even remember, and some amusing puns if you're a French speaker, so I won't bother here, but I'm totally ready for one last Act before returning to a semblance of normalcy.
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