"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I'm going to admit right off the bat that I do not consider myself an expert in the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle - I was out of comics when he premiered, though I liked the few appearances I've read or seen - but I wasn't expecting his film to actually be a legacy story where the other two Blue Beetles certain did exist and their stories are mixed into Jaime's (Pago Island, Kord Industries, and making me especially happy, the Bug). Of course, the best thing about Jaime's world - here transposed (as per this year's comics, synergy I'm sure) to the fictional Palmera City that has a great tropical flavor - is his family, who are responsible for much of the humor and heart in the film - it's not just George Lopez, though he's nominally the comic relief - and it's great that they see some action too. Of course, the movie hammers its family theme home a little too often (we get it!) and Susan Serandon's villain is rather one-dimensional (the physical threat villain is a very deep cut, but also pretty thin), so it's not perfect. If you've seen a superhero origin story, you've seen them all, sure, but this one is better than expected, with plenty of laughs, fair action, and a lovely cast. It also has the virtue of not feeling like it's part of the Synderverse even if the DCU is referenced a lot.
At home: Expanding out from Emma Seligman's short of the same name (also with lead Rachel Sennott) Shiva Baby is prime cringe and I love it for that. Danielle is a young woman who goes to a family gathering to sit shiva, and there bumps into her sugar daddy (or should it be "john"?), exposing both his lies to him and his to her. But her estranged former best friend and maybe more than that is also there, and it's like her whole sexual history showed up for the event. Throw in some judgmental Jewish love from family and family friends and you have the recipe for high anxiety (in fact, I love the way Seligman shoots the panic attack portion of the film. A lot of people are comparing it to Uncut Gems for its frenetic desperation, but it's more amusing and more touching - a portrait of listlessness and unhappiness ("it's a sad time, everyone feels it" is as much a double-entendre as the title). And when we find Danielle approaching happiness, it's for things that have clearly been denied her. It's a tragedy, really, so why did I laugh so much?
The lives and loves of two generations of artistic black women, Alma's Rainbow is a charming indie that acts as a coming of age for Rainbow, but is provides a substantial arc for her mother Alma. The latter needs to learn to accept others for who they are, and forgive herself for perhaps betraying who she used to be. The former has high hopes, and youthful impatience, but no real direction, at least not from the uptight mother she doesn't think she has anything in common with. Cue Alma's sister Ruby, a doubtful "star" to act as surrogate mother figure and throw their worlds into chaos. In a way, the older women are what Rain COULD become, depending on the path she takes, but surprisingly, the sister who stayed home isn't the one in arrested development. Director Ayoka Chenzira crafts a lot of nice moments throughout, though I sort of wanted the soundtrack to have more of an impact on the three musical women. The sisters are evidently tracked with jazz, but Rainbow is all hip-hop. It works as a simple generation gap, but I didn't otherwise feel it.
I watched and enjoyed the sitcom as a kid, but 1991's The Addams Family is so perfectly cast that is makes the amusing ghouls iconic all over again, and we're still seeing new material based on this version today. Christina Ricchi's star-making take on Wednesday Addams steals the show every scene she's in, but everyone's on point, especially Angelica Huston, Raul Juliá and Christopher Lloyd, each giving their all to their extreme characters. Morticia has never been so sexy, Gomez so energetic, nor Fester so weird. This era in comedy often surprises me with the amount of slapstick, but it works here because the movie is a macabre cartoon. Notably, while a weaker film would have sent the Family into the "real world" as a premise, this one uses it as a brief third act complication. For most of it, we're happily in the strange world of the Addams, filled with quirky characters, cracking punchlines, and background visual gags - a lot of it memorable, much of it forgotten and rediscovered with a chuckle. I only have two criticisms. One is that they could have done a better job with the cemetery statues. The other is the jarring hip-hop soundtrack that's a real sign of the times, but doesn't fit the tone one jot.
Addams Family Values has a very similar plot to the first film - someone who fits rather well with the Family infiltrates it to steal its money - but it's a little nastier, though that's not really why I don't give Values as high a rating as 1991's effort. No, I think it's a weaker film because the Addamses are separated into subgroups as of the second act. Fester is trapped in the A plot with the black widow. Gomez and Morticia (whose key lighting is overdone here) are at home worrying about their new baby. Granny is recast as Carol Kane, which seems a waste since she has little to do. And while there are memorable moments throughout and in every subplot, this sequel will be best remembered for Wednesday and Pugsley at summer camp. It's a real highlight, taking aim at rich white privilege in a way that seems like it was written yesterday, not almost 20 years ago. It also includes tween David Krumholtz who has since become a staple character actor. And hey, they don't slap us with the bad hip-hop until the closing credits, but boy, is that a terrible track!
Burt Reynolds is a whisky runner who is allowed out of prison to get evidence on the crooked sheriff who killed his brother in White Lightning, an ancestor of the Dukes of Hazzard if I ever saw one (it even has confederate flags painted on car tops). "Gator" gets by on his racing ability (and there's an energetic car chase grounded in reality at the center of the film) and his charm. Almost everything is resolved by seducing one lady or another (the principal love interest, Jennifer Billingsley, is on the whole pretty terribly acted though). It's fun, though the sheriff's motivations for killing the boy are paper thin and even the kid's loved ones seem nonplussed about it. These moonshine-running movies always make me think that, on both sides of the law, the South never accepted the results of the Civil War, making the Feds the true enemy, whether you're the Law or good old boys trying to make a living in a dry county driving booze around. It's a little weird. And what is it with all the black kids smiling up at Gator in multiple scenes? If it wasn't for that one black "speakeasy" owner, they would be the only African-American presence in the flick. I don't know what it says about the South, but it seems to say something.
Like White Lightning, The Last American Hero focuses on a fast, grinning driver from a "virtuous" moonshine family, and there must have been something in the water, because it came out just two weeks before Burt Reynolds' more famous flick did. It certainly has the same sense of the South bucking Federal law, at least if it wants us to take the title unironically. To make money while his daddy's in jail, a young Jeff Bridges gets into car racing where he still tries to buck the system, but may end up disappointed no matter how much talent he has. Loud, but exciting racing sequences, and Bridges' innate charm enliven this "sports movie", but it's really an American Dream story, and as any Am-Lit student will tell you, those never end particularly happily. And so facile formulae are confounded so that youth can be tamed and dispirited, no doubt a big theme in the early 70s, as Flower Power wilted and America got into its Nixonian malaise. Of course, this is loosely based on a real racer's life, so it must drive around certain posts, but the point stands, I think. Plus, nice use of Jim Croce's "I Got a Name", which was first introduced in this film.
Spiritual sequel to The French Connection (cops on the edge in grimy 70s New York), The Seven-Ups actually reminds me more of Bullitt, in that no one remembers anything but the extended car chase. All three movies share a producer, so that's not surprising. Roy Scheider plays the leader of a special police unit that goes a little far in its sting operations, and that could have been a movie. Parallel to this, mobsters are being kidnapped for ransom by guys who may or may not be posing as cops (a car wash has never before been so tense), and THAT could have been a movie. Unfortunately, aside from the well-shot car chase that combines the two (but which mystifies the police), the two plots don't really intersect until the third act, and so we're left with a rather haphazard narrative that lacks a proper engine, especially on the "heroes"' side. Scheider would be the man to watch, normally, but he's too sympathetic to really be "on the edge" and I don't buy that hard man closing scene from him. It's a lot of tedium while you wait for the car chase or recover from it.
George C. Scott is an old getaway driver who comes out of retirement for one last job in The Last Run, a surprisingly literate caper movie set on the Iberian peninsula with a nice score (Jerry Goldsmith using an Italian style) and director Richard Fleischer (Soylent Green, Conan the Barbarian) going for something out of Melville (Jean-Pierre, not Herman). Scott's Harry is contracted to drive a criminal (Tony Musante) away from a jail break and to his old partners, but things are not as they were sold to him, and Musante's Rickard proves difficult to handle. Complicating matters, the man's girlfriend is along for the trip (charmingly played by Trish Van Devere) and this pulls Harry in different directions as we head for potential double crosses and tragic endings, usually with speed and strategic chases. Scott is great as a hard man who tried but didn't take to the quiet life, trying to do something to the best of his ability, hoping it's not entirely pointless. A nice surprise hidden behind a generic title.
An extended chase through the countryside à la Vanishing Point, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry follows three characters as they race from a robbery, and while it has some nice dialog, it's still a little underwritten. We understand the motivations of Crazy Larry and his mechanic Deke (Peter Fonda and Adam Roarke respectively), but tag-along Dirty Mary (Susan George) is a bit of a mystery. Why is she so keen on following these boys? Similarly, the cop who's after them treats them like his White Whale, but there's no indication as to why other than some midlife crisis maybe. On the one hand, I want more. On the other, I do like the ambiguity. Some nice chase stuff, anti-heroes with spark (Susan George especially - they really should have reversed the epithets, frankly), but... that ending. No. It's very 70s, but no. It's insane to end it like that, and I don't think they earned it, even if it's presumably how the short story it's based on does it. Change it and my rating would improve, because I really did have fun until then.
I'm trying very hard not to compare William Friedkin's Sorcerer (with its confusing title) to Clouzot's The Wages of Sin, but having seen the original, the remake can't help but disappoint. Oh, the dynamite-ferrying bits are very strong - great suspense and LIKE Clouzot's, it's all done for real and you wonder how much jeopardy the actors, or at least the stunt drivers, were in. But it's the structure that's the problem. Friedkin pulls an Exorcist with an overlong prologue to introduce three of the drivers - the French banker stuff is especially egregious as it's boring and confounding - the worse because very little of those backstories have any kind of impact on the story. Clouzot also spent a lot of time setting things up, but at least we were in South America already, and we discovered his more memorable characters through their conversations. Sorcerer is a technical marvel (once it gets going), with hair-raising tension and some nice editing to create a sense of paranoid dread, but it fails to sustain any real kind of relationships between the drivers because its characters are all kind of in their own bubbles.
A group of disparate (and desperate) people hop a bus in Seijun Suzuki's Eight Hours of Terror and get more than they bargained for (but can't say they weren't warned). Mudslides have permanently delayed their train and there are violent bank robbers hiding on the road they have to travel, plus the prisoner transfer of a murderer on the ride with them. Paranoia eventually gives way to actual trouble as they find themselves on the worst trip of their lives. But fear has a way of exposing just who's brave and who's a coward, and more importantly, who's selfish and who's selfLESS. Fear makes monsters and it makes heroes. Finding out which are which is at least in this cross-section of post-War Japanese society is at least as interesting as the suspenseful crime thriller that's one the wing. The year is 1957 and Suzuki has yet to become the surreal noir director he will become in the 60s, but he still manages the noir all right.
With a title like High Tension and a premise hinging on deep sea divers, you expect suspense from this 1936 Allan Dwan effort, but not so much. It moves really fast, fitting a normal feature into 63 minutes, but it's really more of a romcom with a bit of jeopardy at the end (and I do mean the very end). Now, it's got some fun dialog and you certainly don't have time to be bored. The ladies are well put together despite being stuck in romance plots - it strikes me that Helen Wood is styled like Myrna Loy, and that's fine by me - except for Hattie McDaniel who, though she's of course given the role of an illiterate maid (such was Hollywood) is a highlight in a bigger role than usual. That said, it's hard to root for the male leads in this. Brian Donlevy is a cad with a severe (comedy haha) drinking problem, who's insolent at work, and pushy with with the girls. And then they go and blast Hawaii's Mako reef like it's in the way of their happiness. High Tension hasn't aged well enough to be forgiven its light turns.
A very indie black and white mystery (that ironically is not at all black and white, which is to say cut and dried) Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing uses the mystery elements as a kind of excuse to take a whirlwind tour of the Asian-American experience in San Francisco's Chinatown.Some characters are played by actors, some by themselves, and some even probably thought they were in a documentary. Two cab drivers are looking for their never-seen partner Chan who has disappeared, and no one seems able to given them the same answer. There's an early bit about how Chinese languages (and therefore, thought) work, which isn't just extremely interesting, but is also the decoder ring to the film. Chinese thinking is oblique and prefers context to straight facts, and so we have a detective story that is more about context and understanding the why of the mystery, more than solving it per se. It meanders with purpose. I respect it for that, even if (and this may be my Occidental brain talking despite its relatively high consumption of Asian content) it didn't always successfully engage me.
Books: Just before Jim Mortimore's Beltempest, the Eighth Doctor Adventures offered The Janus Conjunction, ANOTHER story about a star system under threat from wonky planets and misbehaving sons, in which Sam is separated from the Doctor and almost dies due to radiation and exposure. Soooooo... Either the editor of the line shouldn't have scheduled these back to back, or he didn't have a choice due to a deadline problem. Either way, I'm about ready for a story in which the Doctor and the Companion aren't separated for 90% of the novel. Mortimore initially has a good handle on the leads, even if his Doctor's eccentricities get to be a bit much as the danger ramps up, and he's telling a truly epic story with hundreds of billions of lives on the line. However, I do think it needed 50-100 pages more to do it justice, as we go from the brink of destruction to everything resolved in a couple of elliptical pages at the end, and I just don't feel the consequences, especially to Sam after the things she's done, or been made to do, during this crisis. I like how the author uses physics as poetry, but if you'll allow me to mix artistic metaphors, his canvas here was way too large for his brush.
Comments
Mike W.