"Accomplishments"
At home: In L'innocent (The Innocent), a ex-con marries his drama teacher and you really, really want it to work out. But maybe her miserable son (played by director Louis Garrel) is right to mistrust him, mistrust that plunges him into the middle of a hare-brained heist along with his dead wife's best friend played by Noémie Merlant who, quite frankly, steals the show in every scene. She's very funny AND tragic, which fits a black comedy that may be heading for outright tragedy, and makes me want to track down all her other work. As part of the scheme, there's a moment where the criminals "direct" Garrel and Merlant, which has fun meta-text, but the emotional explosion when the scene is done for real is the real standout, heartwrenching in its ambiguity. Roschdy Zem and Anouk Grindberg are great too as the older couple. I will say I'm not entirely sure the axolotl metaphor entirely connects, but if it's meant to say this is a movie about healing, then yes, I think it tracks.
Giving me vibes out of Wyndam's The Chrysallids, The Innocents (De uskyldige) presents children with mental powers in what could be a postapocalyptic setting, but it just an apartment block estate when most residents are on holiday (oh, to live in Scandinavia!). Initially, if there's to be a supervillain in the lot, it's the little girl who tortures her autistic big sister, but she turns out to be less sociopathic than the telekinetic boy she meets after moving to the estate (at which point I will mention the cruelty to animals as well as children in this film - even simulated, these can be hard to watch). A telepathic girl changes everything for them, and their powers start to grow from proximity to one another with both beneficial and terrible results. The Innocents is very much on the vein of psychic threat movies from the 70s, but having the kids both quite young and in several cases, uncertain of their moral compass, makes for intense viewing and a certain measure of squirming in your seat. And I do like how the powers are represented, with minimal effects or just through camera work.
I'm a fan of Oriol Paulo's films and how they manage to keep you guessing, mystery thrillers in which nothing is ever as it seems, and the 8-episode The Innocent (El Inocente) shows was the Spanish director can do with a longer format. The initial set-up seems similar to her The Invisible Guest, with a wrongful death and a vengeful parent, not to mention the participation of Mario Casas and Ana Wagener, but soon deviates. Indeed, The Innocent might have inspired that previous film since it started life as a Harlan Coben novel. New Jersey is now Barcelona, but otherwise, the story is much the same, going so far as to use the novelistic device of having each "chapter" headlined by a different character speeding us through their backstory in the 2nd person, as if the actor were telling their character who they are. It works surprisingly well, and in such a sequence as to suddenly reveal new truths about characters we thought we'd figured out. Paulo's great strength is teasing out information so that we get incomplete pictures, but don't realize we do, nor feel cheated when more information comes out. The mystery is complex enough to warrant a limited series (it keeps throwing twists at you in the epilogue!), though the length means it's not as tight as his movies are. There are perhaps even a couple of noticeable plot holes. But overall, a strong crime thriller with some of my favorite Spanish actors (hey, anyone who was in The Ministry of Time, I will like), and the police inspector played by Alexandra Jiménez could carry her own series.
Bárbara Lennie is very good as a glamorous detective who walks into a mental institution to investigate a wrongful death in God's Crooked Lines, and it's signed Oriol Paulo, so you you KNOW you can't trust what you're seeing, though this time, it seems pretty straightforward until the third act when your assumptions are given a big jostle. And still, you think you've seen this before, right? Woman enters madhouse on false pretenses, and they're going to gaslight her to cover their crimes and/or because she can't prove she's NOT crazy. But Paulo, just as I thought I had you figured out... you still got me. And got me again. And again. It's always to the last shot with him. *Shakes fist in feigned anger and obvious delight* And it's a beautifully shot film, with intriguing dream sequences and filled with odd characters, not the least our cool, confident heroine who could have deserved an entire series of detective pictures.
Watching Oriol Paulo's first feature LAST doesn't really do it any favors because NOW I feel I have a handle on his brand of twisty-turny mystery thriller and The Body, though it came first, has an air of familiarity about it. But of course, I realize my bias. If I had seen this first, I probably would have been blown away and a LATER film would have been the one that gave me the present feeling. That said, I do think you can see the puppet master's strings a little more easily in this one - Paulo gets better at hiding them in plain sight. Or I'm so used to distrusting everything that my brain accuses everyone and therefore I'm right about the solution in at least one of those thought tracks. A man murders his wife, but when her body disappears from the morgue, he's called in by the cops, propelling him into a Hitchcockian nightmare. Is he being framed and by who, or did he get rid of the body himself as the police suspect? Everything on the coroner's table including the stuff you didn't think was.
No, Buffalo '66 does not take place in 1966, but I'm not sure WHEN it takes place. Probably when it was made in the late 90s, but Buffalo is presented as a city in arrested development, with 80s arcade machines and Plain Jane bowling alleys. Vincent Gallo's first feature has a lot of indie flair and is funny in that cringy sort of way, but it's also a precursor to what he does in The Brown Bunny (which I know only by reputation), where he also directs himself and makes his co-star weirdly subservient to his sexual wishes. In Bunny, it's his then-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny (well, ok) who gives him a blowjob onscreen (oh no). Here, an 18-year-old Christina Ricci doesn't have to do anything kinky - it's all rather demure - but her underwritten character has to somehow fall for his, and he's a terrible human being in deep need of a diagnosis. Frankly, though he is loud and nervous and believes himself the star of his own show, she steals it right from under him, underwritten or not. She's who we wonder about at the film's close, she has all our sympathy, and she's the one who's blue eye shadow will haunt our dreams. With a solid assist from the dude's insane parents played by Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara.
Books: Oh the for the era of splatbooks, but I understand that, today, role-playing game publishers can't really push out product after product to satisfy any given gamer's interest in a particular system or setting. Torg Eternity perhaps suffers more than most because it's 8 settings in one, and a single Aysle (or name your favorite Cosm) sourcebook feels cursory. Torg's magical realm, for example, screams out for a monster manual and for a detailed gazeteer of the transformed British Isles and of Scandinavia. The book is just evocative enough to make me want those things, but not so much as to satisfy the craving. Perhaps I would have sacrificed some of the text on the Big Bads of the realm (are players really ever going to face them during Year One?) or some of the tables to get that much more flavor. We do get a large amount of new perks, items and spells, organizing magic in interesting ways that set Aysle apart from DnD (as it must, even if there are parallels, ON PURPOSE, I would say), and I liked the whole idea behind Quests. I recently complained about the proofreading in the Cyberpapacy sourcebook, and Aysle has those too, but they're less on the order of typos, and more in the homonym vein, like confusing mettle for metal, or the always annoying it's/its. These things bug me, so I feel I have to mention them. Quirk of doing a lot of proof-reading myself.
RPGs: My players had a number of surprises in store for then as I started their first mega-adventure (as Torg: Eternity calls them), as 1) the player who has a secret existence made his Nile Empire character leave the team only to find a third copy of him, this time from and in Aysle - a rather judgmental Paladin. 2) Because of the mega-adventure aspect, I splurged and got the Aysle booster pack, which included some new Cosm cards, a few new Destiny cards and most visibly, an Aysle-themed Drama Deck. I was afraid these would just have fantasy images and flavor, but it's more than that. Unlike the standard Drama Deck, they have extra game text that pushes the flavor of the Cosm with magical/heroic effects. 3) would come later when I teased the Law of Legends and offered the first bit of a capital-Q quest to our cursed lycanthrope (and Monster Hunter), should he choose to bite. As to the story, it takes place in the half-normal, half-fantasy city of Copenhagen, a living setting with multiple factions (preparing, I felt like I was writing for Game of Thrones, I mean, when I wasn't just GoogleMapping all over the city to inspire encounters). Mostly set-up, as the PCs interacted with various locals (making allies and enemies is going to count) while seeking Cyberpapal agents in the hope of finding their fourth member (our Super-Wrestler has had to take personal time, but we're keeping him "alive" by having him track those enemy agents in the background). Clues are collected, but the next Act promises a big fight, unless they don't mind the Mayor getting assassinated. Seems the Paladin may force them to do the right thing if they decline the responsibility.
Best bits: The army handing them the keys to a van with a unicorn with a warrior with a gun on the side was my inspiration, but the guys using its doors to block/fight some Viking raiders was all theirs. Later, we have a troll surfing the top of the vehicle, the Monster Hunter shaking him off and being rewarded with a rocky grin and applause - troll shenanigans may be my favorite thing to do in town. There's a Galadriel-type character and the Paladin falls in love with them at first sight (oh, Mister Frodo!) and delights them with a poem. The boys order Budweiser at the local tavern and get the stink eye from the pubmeister. After interrogating the Church Police goon left alive, the Paladin and Realm Runner start arguing about who to surrender him to; in the background, the Monster Hunter dispenses his own brand of justice and puts an end to the debate. And there's the basic idea that our AWOL character has been stealthing around behind Cyberpapal agents when he's the last person you'd call if you needed someone quiet (but to his credit, he's the best investigator in the lot and the others often struggle without him).
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