GiftsI got a Batman: Black and White random figurine (it was Damian) and Godzilla socks for my birthday. Yes, other things, but they don't interest this collumn.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Men are desperate and needy in Celine Song's Past Lives, but perhaps we'd rather say that they allow themselves to be vulnerable, honest, and accepting. Grace Lee plays the grown up version of a girl who immigrated to North America as a 12-year-old, leaving behind a boy who she had fancied marrying when they were older - as 12-year-olds might (though that had perhaps more power in Korean culture). As adults, they find each other again, and it seems he, at least, had built something up in his head. Had she? "What might have been" are dangerous words, and her current husband feels naturally insecure when that handsome boy comes to visit. The film creates an awkward tension between the three points of this romantic triangle, in part sustained by our notions of the romantic normally hardwired into romcom tropes. The characters even address the expected narrative, preparing us for a tipping point where the film must decide if it indeed a romcom that leans into those tropes, or rather a romdram that subverts them. Impeccably acted and very adult, with a crucial piece of Asian myth giving it poetry, Past Lives isn't just one live story, but two, or shall we say 16,000.
At home: A complex exploration of what we leave behind after we die, After Yang proposes a future where people seem to have trouble conceiving given that some are clones and there's a trade in "cultural" androids (like Yang) who help adopted kids from other countries learn their original heritage. After the refurbished Yang suffers a fatal error, his "dad" Colin Farrell gets to examine his fragmented memories and discovers things he didn't think possible. What is Yang's legacy, what has he left behind, and to whom? There's a reversal here, since we're seeing HIS memories, but as a way to comment our OUR memories of HIM (or our lost loved one). We leave, but we leave things behind, we change others, we continue to exist, as fragments, in the effects we have had. Bathed in golden light, After Yang is quiet and meditative, and yes, it's about A.I. and whether it can ever constitute a "person", but that's almost background noise because it's really about us, how we remember and how we are remembered.
As a "child of divorce", I find Aftersun eminently relatable. This is the story of a little girl (very engagingly played by Frankie Corio) on a holiday with her dad (Paul Mescal), possibly the last if we let the occasional eerie music and the dad's evident mental health struggles take our imaginations in that direction. My situation was very different, but until these darker themes come to light, there was something that felt true about the kind of stolen season aspect to limited shared custody. It's a vacation, but you kind of wish you were home with your friends. The parent tries to cram a year in a few weeks, make you have a good time so they'll be fondly remembered. And in that, there's boredom, and a growing independence from the child, and the underlying stress of all this can make the parental facade crack. This is all very sensitively treated in Aftersun, and between the title and the flash forwards, we fear the worst, but the drama remains ambiguous and enigmatic.
The Invisible Guest is my second Oriol Paulo thriller, and it's a terribly good one, where all your narrators are unreliable liars and cinematic reality can't be trusted. A rich businessman in a hotel room. His new defense attorney grills him about his story as he faces charges for the murder of his lover. She's interrogator and detective, pushing him to reveal another crime he's covering up and that could hurt his defense. But how far do the lies go? It starts with a locked room mystery, and the lawyer keeps telling her client - and therefore us - to concentrate on the details, but we probably keep missing them, only to say "I should have seen it" later. Great, great twists throughout, and in terms of suspense, I was often reminded of Hitchcock, and that's not a bad thing to evoke. Such a well-constructed puzzle movie that, between this and Mirage, I have been convinced to seek out Oriol Paulo's other films. See if you can figure this one out.
Presented as an early 80s indie documentary about computer programs playing against one another in a tournament, Computer Chess is a dry, awkward comedy that only seldom betrays its fictional nature by putting the camera where it shouldn't be. You can almost believe it was a relatively prescient piece made 30 years before it actually was, and I found myself interested in it as if it actually were a documentary (at least, the chess bits). I'm not sure it really earns its very weird endings, devolving into lo-fi phantasmagoria at too steep an angle, but it does have some intriguing themes, like the birth of something that could supplant us (more relevant today than in 2013), and the loops A.I. can get trapped into not that dissimilar to our own problematic behaviors. In the real world, glitches abound. Why do we expect any better from our machines? Computer Chess is a little cursory with some of its story elements, but there's enough there for a recommendation and I'd have spent more time with its characters.
George (Tom McCamus) claims he is aware of every possibility, every himself, in Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds, and he's going to spend all of them pursuing and loving Tilda Swinton's infinite selves. It's an epic love story, albeit an often off-putting one (he is single-minded in a way she cannot be). But if this is all true, what about the reality in which policemen are trying to solve George's murder and the theft of his brain? Are we seeing things out of sequence? As we head for a final truth, we also head for tragedy. A more introspective interdimensional story than most, Possible Worlds examines what is essential to a person, what makes them themselves, whatever quantum state they might find themselves in. Can we reduce ourselves to Slab and Rock (and Hilarious) and that's all? Partly shot in the Magdalen Islands, a rare spot for filming, the movie uses the ocean as a leitmotif for loss, dreaming, and the vastness of the multiverse.
Set during the first weeks of college for a freshman baseball player in 1980, Everyobdy Wants Some!! is a perfectly pleasant meet'n'greet with these characters, but they're not MY crowd, nor would they ever be. Even once we meet the theater kids, I don't recognize my college experience (starting in 1989) in theirs. This is all about big parties (don't think of it as a baseball movie, certainly) and getting laid, with a good soundtrack and fun comic shenanigans. But I don't think Richard Linklater is necessarily at his best when doing nostalgia pieces. Barring the success of Dazed and Confused, there's a general plotlessness and it kinds of works better as the pilot for a TV show than it does a self-contained film. College students finding their passions is a worthy theme, and replace baseball with my own interests, I can tap into it. But this commencement week is too "frat boy" and not anxious enough for me to connect to it fully.
There's an obvious trigger warning that comes with Matt Johnson's The Dirties - two teenagers make a movie filled with gun violence for film class, and one of them becomes obsessed with staging an actual school shooting. It's an off-putting topic to lampoon in a found footage/mockumentary format (or any format), but if anyone had to do it, I'm glad it was Johnson. He seems to specialize in half-improvised, "let's keep the corpsing in it", goofball vérité that turns serious and making them work. The Dirties basically throws all the theories about why these things happen (specifically: Columbine) without really choosing one. The high school bullies are relentless, but take a second seat to the Matt character's love of movies and disassociative perspective of always acting like he's in one... while being filmed, so he's not half wrong. A film maker making an indictment of film (that perennial straw man when it comes to corrupting youth)?! Or a send-up of the theory? Surely, the latter, but what a weird tone to strike. Ultimately, it's about a bromance and how the end of high school signals various parting of the ways, but it gets dark. Film nerds will love the end credits.
Can you believe The Road Warrior is the only Mad Max movie I hadn't seen? Having mentioned it to a friend who told me he had seen it as a boy and become the belle of the ball the next day at school, he lent it to me and... yeah, it holds up! It's the most like Fury Road - the look, the action, the vehicles, the convoy under threat, the low amount of dialog - and where the first Mad Max was kind of a cop movie, this one has George Miller define the postapocalyptic aesthetic, not just for his franchise, but for generations of content creators to come. It's all there. It's original even if inspired by sword and sandal films and westerns. This is a movie where a man wets his lips at the thought of finding gasoline, not water, and it's a rollicking good time that while pretty straightforward, still surprises you with who survives and who doesn't. Miller even includes some pigs, which links forward to Babe. Could have done without the on-screen rape, but otherwise, a bona fide, foundational classic.
I want to examine Live Wire's opening contention that, in 1992, no terrorist attack had ever been carried out on American soil... until NOW. First, that denies acts of domestic terrorism. But second, this is an 80s-early 90s-style action flick where it's absolutely not uncommon for terrorist attacks to occur in the U.S. So it seems silly. Not as silly as some of the absolutely bonkers elements injected into Pierce Brosnan's turn as an explosives expert, like a doofy robot that follows him around and analyses materials, or a liquid that turns senators who have pissed the villain off into human bombs. It could score some points for balls-to-the-wall originality, but aside from R2-D2 and the bombwater, it's terribly cliched. A maverick hero, 80s jazz synths, an unnecessary sex scene with lots of nudity, boring old UZI shoot-outs... We're only missing a car chase. Still, there's some fun to be had with Brosnan's character using his knowledge of explosives to win the day, not giving in (too much) to the film's late interest in gunplay. Watch for some pretty wobbly sets in the climax!
Johnnie To's usual cast members (Lam Suet, Anthony Wong, Simon Yam) look incredibly young in 1999's The Mission, but then this is pretty early To. It still follows one of his concepts though - the expert action film. In this case, the experts are bodyguards. An old crime boss has been marked for death by persons unknown and a team of heroic bodyguards fend off a number of hits against the old man, but when one of them is compromised, they must choose between their loyalty to the boss and their brotherhood. Can one more life be saved? On the one hand, To gives the group their own earworm of a synth beat as they walk into and out of action, cool as ice. On the other, he insists on making them real people. The bodyguards play silly games when bored with the job, for example, and the old boss acts like a dad, making sure everyone has sugar in their coffee if they want it. This and the slick cinematography elevate the very simple set of action sequences above similar action fare.
The title is nonsense - if only there were a character called Ho - but Dirty Ho is a rather fun Lau Kar-leung original about a prince (Gordon Liu) who disguises himself as a common merchant, or rather, an uncommon one, so he can go around China tasting wines and having fun. He meets a local tough (Wong Yu) angered by this "con man" and they start playing a game of onupsmanship, until another prince tries to have Liu's assassinated, and Wong Yu finds himself helping the prince he now thinks of as his master (martial arts training montage oblige) almost despite himself. There's a sequence where the prince fakes having Kara Hui as a bodyguard by using her as a marionette of sorts, which isn't just clever, it also stymied my initial complaint that Hui wasn't going to get into action with the role she was assigned. But sequences get only more inventive from there, with lots of "shadow fights" happening in full view (the wine tasting, for example), things only the mind of Lau Kar-leung could have devised. And the training includes moments that will make you go "my God, they're doing this for real". In comparison, the big climactic fight, extended beyond measure, is the least interesting even if some audiences would have craved it by this point. Expect the freeze frame to come a little too soon on this one.
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