"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Alexander Payne really does capture the look of 70s cinema in The Holdovers, so well that my friend admitted to thinking it was too bad the actor playing kid didn't really do anything after this (before she caught herself). It's a kind of reverse Dead Poets Society with Paul Giamatti in Robin Williams' role, except he's been at that prep school forever, and all the students hate him. Stuck babysitting rich boys who aren't going home for the holidays becomes a catalyst for comedy, while Da'Vine Joy Randolph's grieving cook supplies the drama. Except, it's not always so cut an dried. Giamatti always seems to hide a desperate sadness, and Randolph can be amusingly cutting. And of course there's Dominic Sessa as the trouble maker who might just bond with the teacher. The key line in the film comes from Giamatti's Ancient Civilizations teacher: "If we're to understand the world and ourselves, we have to understand the past." (I'm paraphrasing.) And yes, why are these people so lonely and broken? They'll eventually tell all and possibly turn their lives around. It's a pretty standard plot, but it lives and breathes through its strong characters and performances. So did it have to take place in the 1970s? Only insofar as parents need to be hard to reach, but so long as you need something like that to make your premise work, might as well go all in stylistically.
At home: I know it's a fairly generic title, but if you're going to make a movie called The Killer, it better be damn good to eclipse the similarly-titled John Woo film. David Fincher disappoints, however, with a movie that's just okay (and sort of supposed to be his take on Melville's Le Samuraï). Starts off well enough, with Michael Fassbender doing cool voice-over on top of his assassin's actions, making him seem badass as shit, so of course he has to suffer his first/worst failure, with very personal results. This takes him on a picaresque revenge path, and that structure is really what sinks it for me. After the Florida sequence, my attention started to drift. Even though Fincher gives us a different take on killing each time, he always seems to be making the same semi-ironic point about the personal vs. the professional, and after the cool Florida fight, everything else seems kind of anti-climactic (especially the "final boss"). Fincher is extremely good at putting various pieces together (as in his detective thrillers), but here, the story is just too slim for his particular talents to shine. It's just "one thing after another".
William Powell and Myrna Loy are back as Nick and Nora in After the Thin Man, a movie that has all the slick banter of the first film, but unfortunately, never feels as iconic. Part of the problem is that it's too long (the longest in the series, I believe) and therefore pretty indulgent. We spend a lot of time with the married couple, comically trying to get a good night's sleep after arriving home in San Francisco, on New Year's Eve (impossible). The dog gets bits with his missus too. And I do like this part of the movie, but it's surplus to requirements once the detectives get pulled into a family affair that uses misunderstandings - a comic trope - as fodder for a murder mystery. I like that movie too - it's got some great reveals at the end, and the help of a young Jimmy Stewart as a man in love with the cousin in trouble. But yeah, there's a strong feeling that after The Thin Man's success, its makers wanted to give the audience more Nick and Nora at the expense of a tight mystery.
Jørgen Leth's classic 1968 short film, The Perfect Human, has two people in a white liminal space doing mundane things as the narrator asks questions as if an alien seeing humans for the first time. The deconstructed human reconstructed as actions, objects and language are slowly added to the mix. After all these years, it still retains its absurdist mystique. Enter Lars von Tier, a more recent Danish director of reknown, and a big fan of The Perfect Human. In The Five Obstructions, he connives to make his mentor, Leth, remake the film with various "obstructions", challenges that he hopes, it seems, will shake Leth out of a rut. Whether tough love, a prank, or just the kind of hell he puts his characters through in his own films, it hardly matters. My favorite is undoubtedly the juddery 12-frames-per-shot version, but there's something to like in each without any of them exceeding the purity of the original (naturally). What we have here is a look into the creative mind and how the artist not only overcomes challenges, but uses obstacles as inspiration to make the work more interesting. I absolutely believe that "rules" and "limits" provoke art better than the limitless blank page. Leth nevertheless vaults even over the latter. Of course the film also has something to say about von Trier, but he largely says it himself, so how far can we trust the fiction slipped into the documentary? Either way, the use of The Perfect Human's own language to say something about von Trier, Leth, artists of all stripes, humanity is actually quite poignant, and we end on a note that resonnates strongly with me.
I don't know why movie clip documentaries like Los Angeles Plays Itself use droning voices for narration, but it always seems to be the case. It's doubly strange that though this examination of Los Angeles in film has an opinionated essayist tone, writer-director Thom Andersen doesn't supply his own voice, but has someone else drone-read them. What do I know, maybe he has a stutter or, like most people, just doesn't like the sound of his own voice on tape. I'll tell you something else he doesn't like: How his city is portrayed by Hollywood. Though there are some highlights for him (good thing too, because you could almost believe growing up in Hollywood's radius has soured him on the medium entirely), his thesis is that generally, Los Angeles is only "L.A.", a background space, a sort of fictional gangland, a place film makers either misunderstands or actively disdain. Compare it to New York - there aren't very many "love letters" to Los Angeles. Andersen goes into exacting detail - the doc is nearly three hours long! - using clips from a couple hundred movies to make his points. And I get it, y'know? While I appreciate the history of the town, its neighborhoods and buildings, there's a sort of universality there. There aren't a WHOLE LOT of film or television productions made in my area, but I'm often disappointed by them. They come off as reductive, partial, and more often than not, insulting. +½ star for talking so much about Blade Runner.
Based on a William Gibson story, New Rose Hotel is Abel Ferrara's lo-fi attempt at cyberpunk, at least the corporate espionage side of it, and it's a pretty cool paranoid thriller, actually, even if it's too often shot in the daylight. Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe send a singer/prostitute played by Asia Argento (daughter of...) after a Japanese scientist to ensorcel him with her wiles so he'll defect to their client's company. Problem is, Dafoe's character is also mad for her. Needless to say, things are not always what they seem, especially since Ferrara limits our point of view. Strong performances support multiple interpretations. It probably needs to be said that the story could have been told at half the length, as it's padded with songs, sex, and "putting it all together" flashbacks, but I rather think these help set the mood, seduce US as much as it does the men the "honey pot" goes after, and I came out at the other end satisfied with how long I was kept in thrall.
When I first saw The Cell, back in the day, my memory is that I didn't really think it was any good. Twenty-some years later, I note that it's directed by Tarsem Singh who made The Fall, which I rate highly, and he does bring a similar visual style that's part childhood dream/nightmare, part fashion show. And in addition to J-Lo and Vince Vaughn, there are actors that didn't mean anything to me then, but who I've come to greatly respect - Vincent D'Onofrio and most especially, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies, In Fabric). So okay, let's check it out... Hi, I'm back. Past me had it right. The Cell is not very good at all. Singh's aesthetics are interesting, but applied to a dumb cop thriller, they're forced into Hellraiser territory or are too on the nose so we get the standard explanations. Lopez uses a soft empathetic voice throughout and has no real screen power as a result, nor much of a character. And so when she draws the villain into HER mind, it kind of looks like his and well, whatever. The premise has since been done better, usually without the creepy serial killer element.
In the future of Strawberry Mansion, your dreams are taxed, so dry to dream small. Tax auditor James Preble does just that, but his worldview is expanded when he has to audit an elderly lady with no tax record. Oh, she's got all those dreams on tape, and he'll have to go through them all. What he finds is truth, and love (certainly one of the most unusual romances I've ever seen). This is a movie that understands dream logic better than most, and its dream imagery feels legit, but it's a surrealism that's amusing rather than pretentious. The animal heads are especially fun, and there's a lot of traditional effects work, including stop-motion. There are a lot of fun visuals, and not just in the dream world. The set dressing in the lady's house alone will have your eye jumping around from one element to another. There is a lingering mystery here - dreams and reality intermingle through no known device - but I'm so charmed that I spin theories out of whole cloth that easily satisfy me. A visual delight, a thin but biting satire, an original romance... Anything can happen in dreams. And what are movies..?
There are many questions evoked by Saturn 3, chief among them: What was Stanely Donen thinking?! And also, is production designer John Barry a scriptwriter? And also, why did Kirk Douglas agree to this? (Perhaps the answer is the often casually nude Farrah Fawcett - definitely part of my original, on-TV, experience of the movie.) And for that matter, how did I forget Harvey Keitel was also in this. Barry didn't do his own production design, but the film's look is quite strong, if at times derivative. It opens the same exact way Star Wars does (a shot originated on Space: 1999, to be fair) and the outer space stuff is running the 2001: A Space Odyssey playbook. The gory violence is always brief, but it IS shocking, starting with the freeze-dried murder at the top. Unfortunately, most of Saturn 3 is like watching paint dry, or watching a robot being built, as the case may be. And that's even after it turns into a robot slasher. So was the genesis of this project 2001 with violence and nudity? Whatever the case may be, it just doesn't work, in part because the (human) villain is never given a reason for his actions.
Rewatching it for the first time in a while, I want to break The Fifth Element into its 4 strong elements and 1 weak:
The first element is of course how strongly it manages the Moebius vibe. Some of it is iconic - the city, the diva - but I'd forgotten how Moebiussy the police officers were. Moebius and tall hats, eh?
The second element is the music. I of course remembered the diva's solo - who doesn't? - but to do space opera sci-fi with Middle Eastern sounds gives The Fifth Element a feeling like no other. It of course doesn't stop with a single sound. It's a big universe.
The third element is the weak element, and that's having to conform to Bruce Willis' action presence. The least interesting in the movie, to me, are the blazing guns and smart remarks which seem to have been rewritten to reproduce Die Hard almost to a fault. Event he action scenes seem copied from that august actioner. Korben Dallas' tiny apartment still brings me a lot of joy, however.
The fourth element is the controversial element, which is to say Chris Tucker as Ruby Rhod. Back in 1997 and for many years afterwards, his hyper-comic shock-to-the-system performance felt detrimental to the film. But we've moved on in terms of how much information we can "take", and now he seems quite modern (in other words, avant-garde in 1997). Not to mention his style, prefiguring any kind of non-binary chic we now easily tap into.
The fifth element is how Milla Jovovich just springs into our imaginations as a fully-formed movie star. Leeloo is beautiful, fearless, touching, and a great action hero (her martial arts are way more interesting than Dallas' gunplay). It's really too bad the action movie tropes force her to bed Dallas in the end.
So overall? It feels like this movie could have been made today. The effects are on par with anything being done in the 2020s, and perhaps a little better because of all the practical/creature effects. There's even a consent scene. The Fifth Element endures!
I like the aesthetic of Shane Acker's 9, a rusty postapocalypse where machine monsters from The Matrix try to destroy numbered clockwork yard dolls in a world of oversized junk, but had trouble engaging with the story and characters. Perhaps it's that 9 himself is such a cipher. The thin MacGuffin-driven story picks up the third act, however, with an exciting climax and an ending that veers on the mystical. There's almost a way to interpret the film as if each doll represents something deeper. 1 is an obvious stand-in for faith, and is at odds with 2, science. Faith sends science out to be destroyed, and science ends up corrupted. In that scheme, 9 is youth and our last chance, the one who questions everything, as he should. I just can't quite pull that trick with the middle numbers, so I'm not sure that deeper level can be maintained. That's 9 all over: There's something there - visually, thematically, narratively - but it never quite commits to sealing the deal.
While Loki Season 2 ended on a spectacularly epic note (I especially like the nod to Norse Myth), I felt it was playing for time (not a pun) for most of its run time. Too often, scenes pretty much stopped so characters could engage in semi-improvised banter as if this were a dumb comedy's Director's Cut. The new Kang variant slowed everything down with his delivery as well. A lot of dead air and as with the first season, a lot of moments spent on doing something only to show it was futile. Never mind the plot hinging on technobabble. And what about that MASSIVE McDonald's ad? Like, I can understand a show on the cusp of being cancelled going to Subway or some car manufacturer for commercial placement money (I endured it in Chuck, for example), but a Disney 6-parter? Come on. Bonus points for adding Ke Huy Quan, fresh off the tangentially similar Everything Everywhere, and it was fun to open an episode with a plonky piano version of the MCU theme. Otherwise, the MCU has lost its touch and become a formulaic parody of itself, consistently going after DC concepts and breaking for programmed laughs and applause. This is coinciding with many fans' fatigue (including mine, even if I lasted longer than most).
In its third season, I feel like Upload loses its balance. There's too much stuff happening in the real world and we often lose sight of what's happening in the virtual world, and therefore lean hardest into corporate evil and thriller situations. The tone is more somber even if they manage to walk back some of the darker aspects by the end of the season (which could have led to a final resolution, but - perhaps realistically - cliffhangers us into a fourth). It still retains some of its world-building spark, but catering more to the real world of haves and have-nots, and less to the VR environment by now well-established by the show. The big losers are Luke, who is left without a rudder in the first half of the season, and the Nathan-Nora relationship, which is so resolved that it takes a back seat to Ingrid's redemption. So I was ready for the show to end, but am invested enough to continue even if Season 3 was harder to get into.
Books: With Neuromancer, William Gibson became the father of cyberpunk and launched a new science-fiction genre that almost immediately became dated, before becoming relevant again. Whether he predicted the cyberfuture we sort of life in now, or we made it happen because his books were so cool is a difference without a distinction, I suppose. So how does it read? Well, Gibson's prose crackles, engaging each of the five senses, and perhaps a few more. That opening line alone... There's a lot of casual world building, though I admit to getting a little lost once the action moves to Earth's orbit and the big heist. Because this is quite a convoluted story, where anyone could be lying, hide their true identities, and so on. Our netrunner Case is sort of on an urban Noir picaresque, but he never knows why he has to go here or there and do the things he does. We're sometimes going 'round the world for no discernible reason. It's part of the paranoia the novel evokes, but it can be a little draining. Nevertheless, its concerns about A.I. seem perfectly in step with today's zeitgeist and therefore Neuromancer endures in a way few science-fiction novels do. And once it picks up, it's a real nailbiter to the end.
Charles Yu's collection of existential short stories, Third Class Superhero, looks at personal isolation, the impossibility of knowing even the people you love most, and his own mommy and daddy issues using different lexical formats. They read as standardized testing, television drama, video game instructions, statistical studies, and fragmented notebooks. In that sense, "Third Class Superhero" is an outlier. It uses genre rather than format, and while more or less as sad as the rest, it isn't as tightly concerned with the above themes. "Florence" is another outlier, a kind of absurdist space opera, but it is. So this collection of bleak, deconstructionist tales are most definitely a precursor to Yu's first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. There's humor in adapting travel brochures or whatever to the short story form, and that keeps the reader of this short book afloat through the depressing material, but near the end there, oof, one starts to sag in one's seat. It's a mood.
Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt, two of my favorite comics writers, together on a single project? Yes, please! Cosmic Detective has Kindt's paranoid thriller vibes, but the high weirdness dove-tailing into a Kirby homage is of a piece with much of Lemire's work. The notion: A Noir detective story in a world where Kirby's Eternals (pretty much - artist David Rubin's sketches at the back admit to those origins) mingle with humanity. When one of them is murdered, our gumshoe hero gets involved and learns a little too much about their agenda on Earth. The feeling is cyberpunk - in the same Noirish way Blade Runner - but the sci-fi tech is of an incomprehensible nature (i.e. "cosmic"), which allows Rubin to create wild, surreal images, many of them across two-page spreads, and it's gorgeous work. His indie style would have pleased Kirby, one expects, taking inspiration from "the King", but making it his own. As for the story, I feel like it could have been longer, which is to say, the world was intriguing enough for there to be more world building. So it's a compliment. There's certainly enough for the creative team to revisit Cosmic Detective. I do like the ending though, so it can stand as is.
Torg Eternity's Tharkold Sourcebook benefits from the demonic reality being a realm of parts. There are the Technodemons who thrive on pain, the Race who are thralls to them and yet have an underground culture bolstered by secret telepaths, the Free who keep hope alive for the Race, the Russians trying to keep hold of power in the wake of the invasion, and the magically-radioactive Blasted Lands where Mad Max rubs mutated soldiers with crazy abominations. That's a lot to cover, in addition to Tharkold's meta-arc story, which is one of the more interesting in the game, starting with the Russians nuking the demon bridgehead in Moscow on Day 1. The book is quick to warn readers about "triggering" elements as if it was going to be filled with kink and/or offensive material, but it's over-egging the pudding. Despite the violence and depravity implicit in the setting, it never goes into such detail. It's also one of the best copy-edited books in the line that I've read so far. Maybe a handful of typos in all (and sometimes just stuff like they forgot to put a Perk in bold), which has NOT been my experience with the rest. My one complaint is that there are too many illustrations of the same things, even as we beg for illos of weird monsters and tech which we have no reference for. I KNOW what Kranod and Jazrael look like! But ultimately, these Cosm books are evaluated by how much I want to play IN the setting after I've read them, and given Tharkold was at the very bottom of the list when I started playing Torg Eternity (it was a Johnny-Come-Lately in oTorg, where it was set in L.A., and I never got into its heavy metal stylings), and that I now see a lot of value in its different aspects, I'd say it's a winner.
RPGs: This week, it was back on the Aylish road in our Torg Eternity game, leading the PCs to on of their major destinations, a giant Viking camp where they could drop off a "prisoner-diplomat" to a lieutenant of the Dark One himself. And despite raising hackles, there was a lot of merry as well - those Vikings are party animals! - and by the ancient rules governing such things, our Agents got to participate in a Moot of all the chieftains, and could even influence the assembly on their choice of target (I was surprised by that choice, but maybe they CAN capitalize on the chaos caused by this rapacious army ALSO looking for the same target they are). It was a good time to bring back Red Raven (she was a chieftain after all) and bring back the fact a Romance card had been played on her by our romantic Paladin AND a Nemesis card by the Monster Hunter. Her option being struck off the list at the Moot means she's ready to leave Uthorion's army, if only her Pal will come with her and become a corsair. He doesn't, not yet, and JUST convinces her not to kill her Nemesis. It's all tabled for later. Noted. The most surprising decision (well, if you don't know my players anyway) was that they didn't call an air strike on the Vikings' wolf pen as they had been tasked to by their Swede allies. These animals and their handlers are a major headache for anyone crossing the region, but can you drop the bomb on sleeping men and pups? There was a huge ethical discussion - as I knew there would be, the Paladin's devotion to the god of Good, Dunad, hadn't been informed before the moment came and would have objections - and though they thought of alternatively bombing Uthorion's lieutenant (I was game), they decided to play it safe and not have the entire camp running after them in the wee hours of the night. So I discarded that set piece - which would have been cool, but the philosophical discussion was good too - and off they went early the next morning hoping to make better time on horseback than the Viking army on foot. Hopefully, their stopping to free some human chattel about to be sold to Tharkold's pied-à-terre in Aysle, DemonTown, won't have slowed them down too much...
Best bits: A lot of slapstick with the Mishaps - the Paladin bows out of a friendly race because his armor won't let him run, the Realm Runner tries to intimidate from horseback and falls on his ass. By spiking the grog with a vitality potion, the Monster Hunter actually alleviated his Shock (drunkenness) in the drinking competition. The ethics conversation eventually hinged on the Super-Wrestler's hemming and hawing and trying to find a loophole so they didn't have to do something he didn't want to have done (Nile Empire superhero brain). The Paladin was always going to be against it; the Core Earth zealot Realm Runner was always going to be for it; the Monster Hunter always keen on death and destruction. It's the Wrestler, a very social character, who ultimately couldn't stomach it and found "reasons why not". I HAD made amplified the dilemma through social means - they had travelled a week in one of the wolf-men and he was a friendly sort, they had seen fluffy wolf pups, had participated in their barbaric games, drunk and ate with them... The decision just became untenable and everyone played the moment according to their character rather than personal opinion or plot expediency. Ayslish ethics are brought into focus further when that same Paladin freakin' MURDERS a slaver the next day. If he can reconcile it in his heart... Finally, a chuckle goes out to the Monster Hunter currently despairing that the lake they are questing will ever be found, saying "we'll find that the lake was really just the friendships we made along the way".
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