Buys
I couldn't make it, but my friends went to one of those massive book/media sales at the Coliseum and found a Man from U.N.C.L.E. boxed set for me. I told them to go ahead and buy it.
"Accomplishments"
At home: David Lynch's last film, 2006's Inland Empire, concerns a cursed film, an unfinished Polish production adapted (read: "stolen") from a Romani folk tale. Its leads were murdered and that was that, but how will the American remake fare? This is no simple "someone said Macbeth" type of curse, as Laura Dern's starring actress gets caught up in something recursive, getting first lost within the similarities mean certain elements don't fluidly pay off - characters might disappear, the title remains opaque with its one mention, and crbetween herself and her character, then inside the labyrinth of previous tellings of the story. The cursed tale essentially snares its own performers in a kind of nightmarish limbo that includes not just past tellings, it seems, but merely possible ones (from white to blue color, for example). The whole thing is shot on video, allowing Lynch a certain improvisational leeway, crafting a story on the fly (and then in editing). Takes a while to get used to because video is ugly compared to film, and it does itics have consistently failed to interpret the rabbits (hey, Naomi Watts!) or prostitute dance parties exactly. I still think it's a great achievement, a unique Hollywood haunting set in the House of Leaves, with intriguing images and, at its center, a great and varied performance by the unimpeachable Laura Dern.
When I was doing a romance comics podcast, we quickly came upon a empowering red dress theory, but what if the red dress were empowered instead? In Fabric is the weird neo-giallo about a cursed dress you didn't know you wanted. I think more highly of it if director Peter Strickland didn't insist on movie the story away from its first story to tell a second about a fourth of the way from the end. I'm way too invested in the story of Sheila - Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies) who is incredibly good here - a single mother looking to start dating in London's Swinging Sixties, even if I understand that only through a passing of the dead man's gun (um, dead woman's dress) can the story make its point. Although what point that might be is a little elusive, though it's an entertaining ride as you try to figure it out. The haunted dress premise is absurd and the film doubles down with absurdist humor. Especially funny are the invasive people in the service industry - the boutique personnel dressed for Tim Burton's funeral, the ridiculous bank managers, the gangster running a washing machine repair shop, the waiter who needs to know you name... I suppose the theme is capitalism and pushing its mechanics to the extreme: The consumer good that kills made in hell's sweatshop, the epic poetry of retail, the fetishization of department store mannequins, HR prying into your darkest dreams, coupon dating, etc. And it's beautiful to look at too, especially the warm tones of Sheila's story. Things look less phantasmagorical in the light of the present day.
Though it starts as a murder investigation in some lush, verdant, rural part of South Korea, The Wailing eventually turns into that country's equivalent of The Exorcist, and as for the mystery, it's a supernatural kind of whodunit - not just who is causing a plague of rage, madness and evil, but who in the village might be the ghost or demon. Everybody seems to comment on the length, and yes, I does feel a bit long (there, I've done it too), but it does allow for the kinds of twists - in story as well as genre - that elevate the film (and indeed, many of the best Korean films, a national output that often succeeds in confounding expectations). Personal stakes for the lead, a shlubby country cop, when his young daughter starts to go Linda Blair. Conflicting answers from ghosts and ghost breakers. Sin attracting sin, but nothing as simple as that. And luscious cinematography that nevertheless keeps things grounded in an every day reality that allows us to be non-believers like some of the characters in the drama. We perhaps get lied to once too many times, but the I think about The Wailing, the less than matters to me.
The idea behind Three... Extremes (as with Three before it) is to offer a horror anthology showcasing a director from China, one from Korea and another from Japan. They've got a couple of big names involved, but my take on short films (as opposed to shorts, the term I use for material under 30 minutes) is that they often feel like they could and should have been features, and are therefore lacking. I want to know more about these worlds, but they start and/or end rather abruptly. Wanting to know more is not so much the case with Fruit Chan's "Dumplings", which - I get it - is a commentary on China's population control policies, but is more disgusting than scary and has an undercooked ending. I'm a big fan of Park Chan-wook and "Cut" has his trademark cool, interesting visuals and visceral story. In this case, a film director's home is invaded and he's psychologically tortured by the invader. It's pretty demented, but this is one I think I would have preferred as a feature. If Three 2 succeeds, it's largely thanks to Takashi Miike's "Box, however, with its striking visuals and elliptical ending. Here, a woman is distressed by visions(?), hauntings(?) of a terrible childhood event, and Miike uses the length to the best effect, teasing just enough and not too much. The films are definitely stacked in ascending order.
The eponymous Kotoko of Shinya Tsukamoto's film has an intriguing condition: She tends to see "double". People in her environment sometimes manifest twice, once as their normal selves, and once more as a threatening figure. These feel like more than visions, as if struggling single mother Kotoko (pop singer Cocco, but don't let that make you think she gives less than a raw, emotional performance) is dislocated from reality and seeing quantum possibilities. Tsukamoto (best known for Tetsuo the Iron Man) has these realities intrude shockingly and viscerally (there's at least one shot in there that deserves a content warning), but he's more lyrical and loving of his subject than in his more punk-experimental work. The strangeness of Kotoko's condition/ability is well chosen to represent mental illness, sure, but post-partum depression in particular. She both loves her child and wants to extinguish its life and noise. She self harms, but so she can feel alive. We have to ask, if there are two version of everyone, are there two of her too? She's a nice person and a monster. Though it sags in the middle, when the director shows up as a stalker/helper, Kotoko has a sweetness as well as a harshness that makes it thoughtful and memorable. It's not going to leave me any time soon.
From the Masahiro Shinoda films I've seen (Pale Flower, Double Suicide), I'm used to his making strange choices, but I really do question Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees starting in the present day with voice-over. I suppose it's meant to indicate this is a folk tale, and perhaps excuse its sometimes haphazard plot. Apparently, there was a time people were FREAKED OUT by cherry blossoms, but the film remains rather ambiguous as to the relationship between the cherry blossom forest and the cruel woman kidnapped and married by a mountain bandit - both are beautiful but terrifying, and both induce madness... is there more to it, though? Defying genre, the film is part horror, part romance (albeit a demented one), and part drama, but it also has a ghoulish sense of humor that marks it as the blackest of comedies. The woman in the story decides to accept the marriage, but immediately becomes the dominant figure, domestically and sexually, sending her mountain main to do the most horrendous things. I imagine that if this story took root in folklore, it was as a warning not to let women wear the pants in the family or some such thing. Beauty's corrupting influence, an excuse for misogyny.
Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case) brings Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the present day in the fabulous and demented horror comedy Frankenhooker and I loved every minute of it. Jeffrey Frankin is a med school drop-out experimenting with electricity and human body parts, tested to his limits when his fiancée, Elizabeth Shelley, is ripped apart in a lawnmower accident. In search of the perfect body for her, he ultimately tries to collect the right parts from prostitutes... and then we start switching over to Liz's story, as a creature that, not unlike the classic Frankie's plight (if he's built from murderers, does he then have to be one himself), finds herself walking the streets. Everything in this movie is a little arch - plot, characters, set design, ridiculous prosthetic effects - and it's a lot of fun. Henenlotter obviously didn't think Re-Animator was camp enough and decided to pour it on. Everything becomes a target of broad satire. Nothing is to be taken seriously. It's a huge amount of fun.
Hey, Canadian Content! Haunter's first twist is pretty easy to guess so I won't hide it here: It's a reverse haunting from the perspective of ghosts caught in a time loop until one starts to "awaken" to what's really happening. But it's only the first of many twists, giving Abigail Breslin's character Lisa a strong heroic arc. Vincenzo Natali (Cube) offers a tight script that presents then respects its own rules. It's not exactly a time loop story, but it does have the attention to detail a time loop story needs. The different layers of this world come with strong visual sign posts, whether in terms of style or production design, and I've rarely seen dust motes so well used. Aside from Breslin, the cast is all-Canadian, with such highlights as Cube's David Hewlett, the effortlessly creepy Stephen McHattie (Pontypool), and an Ontario license plate (I do love it when a movie could theoretically take place in the U.S., but the production doesn't feel it needs to cater to that market by dropping an American plate on every car, you know?). A well-made little puzzler (what is it with Natali and strange prisons?).
Books: Charles Yu's first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, uses the language of science fiction as a poetic overlay on common experience. What is time travel, but memory? Interdimensional travel, but playing what if? And so the Charles Yu of the story lives in small universe that is equivalent to his own life experience. His colleagues are A.I. because he doesn't really know them or care to truly know them, and so a limited collection of behaviors without depth. His dog is out of a television show. He moves his "time machine" to an in-between moment where time doesn't move, because he's in an arrested state, and dares a time loop, which is how many of us live our lives, doing repetitive things to sustain a status quo. In some ways, it predicts the recent lockdown. But it's a personal story, exploring family, disappointment and reevaluation, cosplaying as SF. And I think it's pretty brilliant. It looks like a short read, and the prose is conversational, mostly breezy, but it's nevertheless dense and jumps around like stream of consciousness (we'll be given a reason in due course), and evoking memory as much as it does, the novel provoked my own to surface, forcing me to reread entire paragraphs. You're clever, Charles Yu. I'll be looking for more of your writing.
Hey, Canadian Content! The award-winning novella This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an intensely beautiful love story between two time travellers from opposing factions, each trying to push history towards their particular futures (one where humanity gave itself up to hard technology, the other to genetic engineering, both examples of transhumanity), but in starting to send each other letters, fall in love and secretly communicate across a vast tapestry to times and places. Red and Blue, as they are named, give one hope that their love could end this war, but the book isn't so naive, and eventually sets them against one another. With all their resources, can they still pull of a win? And for which side? The prose and world-building are wonderful and surprising, and I'm particularly intrigued by the collaboration of these two writers. Did one write Red and the other Blue? One the prose and the other the correspondence? It feels so of a piece, yet the two characters' voices feel different (and must, coming from two separate SF traditions) - to me, one sounds British and the other American, a linguistic shortcut that nevertheless helped make the characters come alive very early, though by the time we're deep in epistolary mode (now there's a bit of "time travel" for you! How old-fashioned!), they are alive in us. We think their words. Which is closer to the point of the book than we realize at first...
RPGs: Second part of the picaresque portion of our Torg Eternity's adventure through Aysle this week, but with a tighter focus on foreshadowing what is to come through NPCs and their information/assistance. Now even the dreams are talking more sense. To their credit, the players opted for diplomatic solutions rather than combative ones (though I can't say they weren't tempted). One major force for that is the Paladin who always frowns at needless violence, breaking promises, that kind of thing. How will he react when he finds out the other PCs agreed to carpet bomb an enemy camp? Or will they even go through with it, given the players are already struggling with that dilemma. All the talk of religion in the Cosms provoked by a pious priest and his field mistress may have put the characters on that ethical track as well. The Paladin being so preachy, I felt he could use a bit of religious confrontation of his high ideals, at least conversationally. Though the encounters are preparing the PCs for the next few sessions (and the eventual climax), there's also the matter of our resident Werebat who has been set on a Quest to perhaps get rid of his curse, so I catered to that too. Indeed, the real world calendar of 2025 (my Near Now) makes the next session coincide with a Full Moon AND our near-Halloween session! Guess what?
Best bits: Absent last session, our Super-Wrestler had been left for dead after a reality quake sucked him underground. Well, Aysle is cribbled with tunnels and dungeons, so he crawled through dust and dirt for 6 days until he popped out of the earth near his friends' camp. Almost got his fool head shot off in the presumed zombie attack. The player provided his own descriptions of the ordeal. The Paladin, with Romance card in hand, was keen on trying to woo the elven field mistress, but she had no time for his foolishness and he got the hint, #consent. Speaking of consent, the players struggling with milking sheep led to rather amusing on-camera hand gestures. A lot of peeing this week too as characters would say that's what they were going to do just to have private conversations with others. At the plane crash, a dilemma to either side with the pilot or a Viking led to an ethical choice that paid off. Meanwhile, the swarm of robo-bugs responsible were annihilated in a single round by the Monster Hunter's Demon's Breath potion and the Paladin calling Dunad's lightning from the sky. Good suspense as we ended the session with night coming, the moon rising, and the group accepting an invitation to spend the night at a Swedish Recon camp/larder. Our Monster Hunter/Werebat made this assessment of himself: I kill monsters until one day I'll have to kill the one in me; brrrrr. But we ended the night laughing at the Romance card not being played and everyone saying our Realm Runner deserves to be with the severe Tharkoldu character Dominika (not in this chapter, but they've talked to her twice, remotely) as they're essentially the same person. A lot of set ups indeed.
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