"Accomplishments"
In theaters: It's surprising at how well Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse manages to give you the same feels without retreading too much old ground. There's an increased focus on Spider-Gwen - it's just as much her story, if not more so - and introduces a lot of new Spider-Men in starring roles (an intense version of Spider-Man 2099, a goofy 90s Ben Reilly who acts as a joke only 90s comics readers will get, pregnant Spider-Woman, the Spider-Man India and - big laughs - Spider-Punk), keeping the old crew mostly in the background. As before, heartfelt family drama, great gags using all sorts of animation styles, and cameos and Easter Eggs aplenty (so we're gonna need to freeze frame this one). You won't believe how the Spot goes from mort to epic villain either, but it works. But its most engaging element is the question it asks about parallel universes. If all these places have a Spider-person, someone bit by a radioactive spider who learned responsibility by losing a loved one, what ELSE does fate mandate for each of them, and couldn't a majority of worlds predict what happens in your own? What if you found out? Unfortunately, at the point I was most gripped by the film, it flashed "To be continued" at me. This is going to be a tough year for franchise sequels as they all go Infinity War on us...
At home: More poem/political discourse than plot would describe the pace of the African cyberpunk musical Neptune Frost, but it still has a story and moves towards an ending (or a beginning) and feels like a full experience. Cyberpunk is making a comeback in the West using the present-day as a template since we're past some of the touchstones that used to be sci-fi. But we'd abandoned it for a while after accepting some of its tropes as the new normal. In my study of afro-futurism, I've found that cyberpunk has remained of interest on the African continent, and this movie is vocal about why. Dehumanization is more strongly linked to primary resource exploitation (mines, cheap labor) and Neptune Frost rebels against everything the global "Authority" stands for, whether that's the West's notion of Africa, gender norms and queerness, what cyberpunk itself is (here we have it tied to a kind of local mysticism with visions coming through brain wave wi-fi), and the film's genre specificity too. Because yes, it's a multi-lingual musical, and I'd listen to this soundtrack, actually. There are lost of intriguing ideas, like geography as interdimensional travel (look our your window, then at an Rwandan village, then at a mine where people are being worked to the bone... are these all the same "world"?), and the leads are engaging, especially Cheryl Isheja as the hacker who acts as a promise of the Third World achieving full internet capacity. In the Global Village, how can there be a Third World, unless the First World manufactures it with propaganda and warfare?
My interest in lo-fi science fiction carried me through Flaming Ears (the actual title, translated from the German, would be closer to Red Ears Shred Through Ashes), because I was never quite sure what was going on. The year 2700 is a dystopian, post-gender world inhabited by androgynous rebels who may or may not only exist in a comic book artist's mind, though they are also PART of the world, and get into a love/hate feud with them. In a world of active rebellion - against religion, against sexual norms (and on this point, the film is well ahead of its time), against everything - the ultimate act may well be against one's own creator, and so the fiction tries to get away from the author. That's what I got out of it anyway, but each viewer will have their own impression, I'm sure. The Austrian underground film movement remains a mystery to me. I do like the low-budget world, however, with its model cities and expressionistic sky.
If you had a time machine and the power to change a loved one's life for the better, or indeed save it, would you even if it meant never having known them? Jay Baruchel is a strung-out addict desperate to do just that in Fetching Cody, a low-key time travel picture shot in the run-down parts of Vancouver you never see. There are many things here you hope aren't a fantasy - how people living on the street hold each other tightly, how even two addicts/sex workers can love each other with no strings attached, and how a beat-up old chair can travel through time because it's got Christmas lights all over it. Fetching Cody is sweet in its way, like Christmas (so that justifies so many of the scenes taking place during the holidays SOMEtime), and it's really very sad (like Christmas too, if I'm honest). The movie keeps you guessing by remaining ambiguous about whether history can't be changed or if fate gives events a lot of staying power. Baruchel had never been asked to carry a picture before, but he manages it with the same pottymouthed humor and sympathetic persona that would become his trademarks.
36.15 Code Père Noël (AKA Dial Code Santa Claus AKA Deadly Games AKA Game Over) is essentially the French version of Home Alone and indeed came first (there was a bit of legal action attempted and everything). Hard not to see it - It's about a precocious kid who's a bit of a MacGyver and fights off a home invasion on Christmas. The mom even looks like Catherine O'Hara. The main difference is that instead of Keystone thieves, we get a psychotic killer Santa who, in Thomas' imagination, has come to punish him for doubting his existence for the first time (he's not called Thomas for nothing). Thomas likes to dress up as a cross between Rambo and a cyberpunk street samurai, and the film is very much steeped in 80s action tropes. And is quite a bit darker than the cartoonish Home Alone, so much so that it crosses a line with its portrayal of violence towards kids and animals. This is quite at odds with the kid's movie atmosphere set up in the first part of the movie, with its fantastical house, giant toy room, and cute relationship between the kid and his grandfather (and mother). The sense of wonder doesn't really go away after the killer shows up, but is rather twisted into mad horror that's magical to the child, if not for us. I give it points for originality, but I'm not always sure who this was for.
It's Thelma and Louise x2 as Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Vivica Fox and Kimberly Elise start robbing banks in Set It Off, but though there are a fair number of robberies, the film skews more towards character-driven drama than most heist-type pictures. We really do get to know these women, through both dramatic and comic beats, even a bit of romance as part of life events that will complicate the relationships. These aren't professional thieves, but rather people at the end of their tether, who see no other option, but then maybe some of them do, and that shakes their commitment to the sisterhood. Also interesting is the cop played by Scrubs' John C. McGinley who at first seems to be playing to type (the jerk), but turns out to be much more compassionate than expected. In a real way, this is a film about impatience, all itchy trigger fingers and people who haven't thought ahead because they don't really believe they have a future. But will it necessarily lead to tragedy?
While the true story behind The Bling Ring - teens who broke into celebrities' homes to steal some swag, theft as hero worship - is an interesting one, I'm afraid there's not enough there to make a good film, and Sofia Coppola's treatment just doesn't find a way to strengthen it. What we mostly have here is privileged kids walking into celeb homes with no security, taking what they want, and leaving. It's too easy to be called a heist. The opposite is also true. Because they brag about their exploits, catching them is incredibly easy once the police take notice, so it's not much of a crime picture either. The theme of contact celebrity, exponentially deployed seeing as they rob Paris Hilton who is only a celeb by virtue of having famous parents, and then spinning that into the kind of celebrity similar kids want to get close to, is intriguing, but I feel like that point is made early and the movie keeps going. It isn't helped by cutting forward to the interviews for the article that inspired it, which just seems to make everything a foregone conclusion. The Bling Ring just has no motive power, and if your leads are going to be this clueless, your movie really needs to be a comedy. Halston Sage (The Orville) has an early blink-and-you'll-miss-it bit part in it, so there's that.
Giuseppe De Santis creates a strange fusion of Italian neorealism and American Film Noir in Bitter Rice, on the one hand showing real and real-seeming seasonal workers (I have so many questions about rice culture now) and lots of small private moments between the women helping in the country's reconstruction through this back-breaking and thankless labor, and on the other, layering in a Noir crime story (that doesn't quite culminate in the great Rice Heist I longed to see) that turns to violence and melodrama in a way that can only be cinema, and therefore rather opposite to the neorealist ideal. It feels more "posed" than films that fit more squarely in the genre, but since every shot is a thing of beauty, you're gonna hear me complaining. A number of them stay with me, like the white hats flying in the background like a perpetual graduation ceremony, Silvana's "noose dress", and the various crane shots that show incredible depth of field. And in terms of Noir, it still provides some twists, like the fact that this is a women's story and therefore has an HOMME fatal, and a strong theme showing how people of good character can be corrupted, or those of bad character can be redeemed. Lurid in terms of violence and sex, but not overlurid, I can also see how this film ends up on LGBTQ+ lists as at least "coded", and that's all very interesting too.
Books: Oops, I didn't want to spoil my players, so I forgot to review the Cyberpapacy Sourcebook for Torg Eternity. On the game side of things, the it adds a lot of new gear, implants, miracles, spells (for black, white, and cyber witchcraft) and threats to the Cosm, but also expands on how hacking works to make it an exciting part of an adventure. In terms of setting, I'm not as satisfied. While the Cyberpapacy is one of Torg's most iconic settings, different from anything you'll find in other games, that makes it a little harder to get a good hold on, so I often felt like I needed more explanations, perhaps more art, to really understand some of its more abstract concepts. A large part of the problem is the book's organization, which mentions certain concepts in the text before those concepts have been explained. Never mind the cyber-jargon that always comes with cyberpunk settings. And then I have to dock it points for an overload of proofreading problems - an inordinate amount of typos and much redundant text that should have been caught by an eagle-eyed editor. Sadly, where other sourcebooks in the line have made me want to visit the represented Cosm MORE, with Cyberpapacy, I felt less interested logging out than logging in.
RPGs: Didn't quite finish the Act we started this week in Torg Eternity on account of our lycanthrope having to deal with a full moon (as per the calendar we're following), but that's ok. We'll get 'em next time. This was to be an offbeat excursion in the Cyberpapacy as the PCs find a safe house in Le Havre littered with bodies whose hearts have exploded, and where random pieces of furniture (or perhaps people) have been turned into bananas. What could possibly be happening? They are soon on the trail of cartoonish "Bombshells", humanoid bullets who flutter their eyelashes and make your heart go pop, creatures whose plan is to destroy a Core Earth fixed point using a giant anvil. (Oh, and one is armed with a banana ray.) After slipping through police lines, past punk gangbangers and up on 12 story rooftops, we ended on a thin cliffhanger at the Museum of Modern Art where a certain painting was keeping Core Earth pure for yards around. The anvil missed the painting, but the Bombshells are brochure in hand looking for that very special Renoir. As for what the heck is going on, that's going to have to wait a couple weeks for our next session...
Best bits: My own personal favorite bit of narrative flavor - if I can toot my own horn for a second - and for the single pleasure of the player I saw the BlackBerry movie with was to describe a hissing intercom as the sound of a BlackBerry Storm (cyberpunk in that William Gibson way AND appropriate to Torg). As for the players, I think my favorite bit was how they dealt with the Crucifaces, a street gang partying around a burning car. They made like they weren't squares and were there to party, at which point, I improvised a gesture where one of them offered our monster hunter a stamp to lick. Before the hallucinations got too bad, he used his Alchemist perk to whip up a counter-agent. The punks got interested, looking for their next high, and he further whipped up a new party drug for them. This eventually motivated them to follow the heroes to the rooftop fight where their impaired sense of what was real got most of them killed. Sadly, the dice were very harsh that night, and some fun ideas failed at the roll level, like stealing the banana gun and turning the anvil into a piece of fruit before it hit the museum. Alas.
Comments