"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Move over Karmina, there's a new Quebecois vampire movie out and it's really great. Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant (Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person) is something of a cross between What We Do in the Shadows and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and though Ariane Louis-Seize's first feature, it's a deftly juggled black comedy with a strong dramatic core about young people contemplating suicide. It images a droll vampire subculture, where vamps have families, kids, doctors, etc. and in comes Sasha, a late bloomer who, at the end of vamp adolescence, still hasn't managed to kill someone for herself. She has too much empathy. Can Paul, the school loser who hates his life bring her out of her shell by giving her his consent? Or is the whole thing going to end in a sweet, oddball romance that will save both their lives? The leads feel everything very acutely, but they're surrounded by comic performers who create a kind of absurdist nightmare around them (especially Paul's school environment). In a world gone mad, finding a purpose one can ethically tap into is the key to fighting despair... Great music too.
Over 15 years in the making! Eli Roth's fake Thanksgiving trailer in Grindhouse was a filthy slasher parody with pornographic punchlines. The actual film version has very strong gore (it's Roth, after all), but discards the gross sex stuff, crafting a really good slasher film, actually! One of the winning elements is that we've had Halloween and Christmas-inspired slashers up the wazoo, but Thanksgiving is a blank canvas that nonetheless has the proper iconography for a horror film. Roth taps into different facets of the uniquely American holiday - and I could have watched a whole movie about his Black Friday Massacre, just imagine Assault on Precinct 13 in a department store) - while also winking at moments and lines from the old trailer. As a whodunit, it's not exactly difficult to predict, but the clues and red herrings are well set up and it doesn't feel like the movie is cheating. In terms of characters, there's the usual cast of teenagers, but they and their families are better drawn than in most films of the genre, with Suits' Rick Hoffman playing the jerk businessman who nevertheless is a loving father. But mostly, you're watching this for the imaginative kills and gory effects. The tag line may say there won't be leftovers, so is it too early to ask for seconds?
At home: The first episode of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off makes you think it will all be a rehash of the comic/movie with a few different jokes, but then throws a big curve ball - what if Scott had lost against the League of Evil Exes? - that takes the characters on an entirely different journey. And in the process - and this is the best part - we'll get to find out what Ramona's past relationships were like, delve much more into many of the characters, and actually make a better case than the original story did for the Scott-Ramona match. Many of the characters come into their own, including the Exes, but the big winners here are Young Neil, Knives Chow and Julie (Aubrey Plaza - because yes, every member of the film's cast agreed to return and voice their characters - they even integrate Edgar Wright's movie in a way). If they do a sequel, I hope they can do the same for Scott's sister and Kim Pine. So... outlandish visuals, fun format mash-ups, references to everything from Behind the Music to Dragonball and Old Man Logan (by way of Bill & Ted), and cool new music tracks. A good time whether chugged or parcelled out.
I had to think about Zoom a bit before I could decode what it was telling me, but it makes complete sense. Allison Pill is a woman who makes sex dolls, so she's in the business of fantasy. Her own fantasy is a comic strip she's drawing about a hot movie director (an animated Gael García Bernal) who is making an arty movie about a former model who wants to escape her life and become a writer, her freshman novel about a woman who makes sex dolls... Things go awry for our heroes make the wrong choices for their characters (and I'm not sure who to blame first, actually) impacting one another and, at the end of the line, themselves, since the characters are each other's writers. Playfully recursive, each "universe" shot differently and in another mode, I think what Zoom is telling us is that you can't let your your fantasy life negatively impact your real life. Pill's in-universe mistake, a boob job that causes her grief, is really predicated on fantasy inspired by her work, and she regrets it deeply. The director and writer in turn compromise their own visions, making their work suffer from a kind of ARTISTIC dismorphia. But no matter what it's own aspirations are, it's mostly amusing, if at times perhaps trying to be too clever.
Screenwriter Jonathan Perera does his best imitation of Aaron Sorkin in John Madden's Miss Sloane, a political thriller about a ruthless lobbyist played by Jessica Chastain, appearing before Congress for unethical practices in one time frame, pushing hard to pass a gun control bill in another. Polemically, it's definitely got that Sorkin vibe, with smart people debating important issues in a slick patter that amuses as much as it informs. There's enough nitty-gritty there to understand how lobbyists operate, painting the gun lobby's arguments as self-serving distortions and manipulations, but the proponents of gun reform as largely toothless unless they equally pull out all the stops. Indeed, the only way anything works in their favor at all in the film is that Miss Sloane is an incredible mastermind, outwitting her opponents every step of the way with tactics that aren't always kosher. Well? What are you ready to do for what you believe in? Chastain is well supported by a great cast, several of which are Sorkin alumni, which sent me straight to the credits, but no, it's just something Sorkin MIGHT have done.
Am I to understand that Drylongso ran the festival circuit in 1998, won a bunch of prizes, then never found distribution until Criterion put out a restored print in 2023?! Indie cinema is a tough life, perhaps especially for a female director of color. Because Cauleen Smith's only full-length feature is too good for her not to have gotten more momentum from it. And similarly, I would have liked to see these actors in more things than what ultimately happened. Pica is a young photography student who takes pictures of black men before they disappear, though careful not to snap a pic of the boy she has feelings for, lest she tempt fate. Fate is manifest in a serial killer that's picking off youths, a kind of faceless force that's perhaps too on the nose and an attempt at giving the film a "plot" in the normal sense. It's the weakest part of what is otherwise a well-observed coming of age story, central to which is the friendship between Pica and another woman, Tobi, who starts dressing like a man to avoid lascivious stares and make the white folks get out of the way - itself commentary on, well, Drylongso, which is defined as "a sense of being that exemplifies the average African American way of being, doing, and thinking". It's a friendship at least partly based on reading Martha Washington comics together, so... I'm into it.
Set in the diverse Toronto neighborhood of Scarborough, the film of that name follows three low-income families - one white, one Native, one Filipino, focusing on the easy friendship that blooms between a child from each, but also the hardships suffered by parents who are trying to do their best with the meagre tools available. One such tool is a literacy center where they congregate every day, hosted by the empathetic Miss Hina who always seems to know what to say, blazingly well played by Aliya Kanani. It can be difficult to watch young children in difficult situations - one in particular walks through the film clearly traumatized - but there are also moments of innocent grace and the crazy games you make up and require zero money. Scarborough is charming, but it's also incredibly moving - just grips your heart and doesn't let go (I'm writing this through tears two days after seeing it) - and I assume like the novel it's based on, it uses the town's diversity as a strength, showing a multiplicity of perspectives and realities within a microcosm a few kilometers in area.
What if aliens made a movie about the suburbs? Greener Grass would be that movie. Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe - here a triple-threat as leads, writers and directors - are doing real theater of the absurd, evoking Eugene Ionesco in their so-colorful-it-hurts-my-eyes tale of suburban soccer moms who compete with each other on every level, to bizarre extremes. The catalyzing event is when Jill (DeBoer) gives Lisa (Luebbe) her baby, an over-polite gesture that creates great unhappiness and an erosion of the perfect veneer of this society of brace-wearing, golf cart-driving, extracuricular-obsessed "people". Its humor at first seems completely unhinged, but there's real method to it. Every single odd thing that happens is rooted in some waspish behavior and savagely (if surreally) satirizes it. Bonus points for having The Good Place's D'Arcy Carden as a school teacher called Miss Human - that's an irony on top of all other ironies. Greener Grass is a real shock to the system, but having decoded its vocabulary, it wouldn't take much pressure to make me watch it again.
I want to taste everything that's featured in The Lunchbox, which is usually the mark of a good food-driven movie, but it's the characters who cook and who eat are what's actually important. When the lunch meant for Ila's husband ends up on Saajan's desk by mistake (or cosmic providence), the two start a correspondence that only eventually turns into a flirtation, a correspondence that impacts their lives by changing their attitudes. Ila might see an alternative to her distant and possibly unfaithful husband, while Sajaan, a widower on the edge of retirement, has a powerful reawakening that opens him up to experiences and friendships. It's all quite subtly played, however, and we only see the needle move incrementally. In other hands - certainly those of Hollywood - this would have been a straight romcom, but The Lunchbox is more realistic. All roads do not lead to love, but they do lead SOMEwhere, even if you're not sure what station you'll end up at.
Early Barbara Stanwyck plays the eponymous Night Nurse in an uneven pre-Code picture from 1931 that looks like a procedural ensemble picture about a hospital at first - what ER might have been like in the 30s - before ditching its medical vignette structure and turning into a crime picture featuring pre-stardom Clarke Gable as a heavy who doesn't mind punching women. And it's for the good, because there's little motive power in that first part. Stanwyck is the nurse with a heart of gold, at first contrasted with Joan Blondell's less committed party girl, and then with a crooked doctor who actively wants little children to die for [reasons]. When our heroine goes into action trying to save her in spite of a household that doesn't care and even obstructs her efforts, it's pretty gripping. Gable is menacing. Stanwyck is fierce. And we cheer for the bootlegging would-be boyfriend coming in to help. A good drunken performance from Charlotte Merriam as the bad mom too. Ralf Harolde as the evil doctor, however, is total pants. Night Nurse plays like a couple episodes of some TV melodrama, but it does lift off in the third act.
Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets is an intense thriller about an incipient pandemic (jeepers!) - in this case. the plague - with Mr. Intense himself, Richard Widmark, playing the physician in charge of containing it before it goes out of control. The problem? The case is a murdered immigrant who's had contact with criminals who aren't about to give themselves up (led by a young Jack Palance, no stranger to intensity himself). A manhunt ensues, ending on a pretty effective action set piece. Part of Widmark's troubles is that, whether because they are crooks or just don't trust the authorities, people are unwilling to identify the victim. The year is 1950, a couple years before Kazan would name names to the Committee on Unamerican Activities, but it's hard not to see the film foreshadow his attitude. Here, the characters refuse to point the finger (or often believe in the threat of an epidemic, which you could switch with Communism in our analogy), and bad things happen. The almost strident lesson is that you should trust the authorities and tell them all you know. Of course, a health crisis isn't the same thing as gangland peer pressure, so it shouldn't be TOO instructive. Still, there's something about how much he's pushing this button...
Books: Jeff Lemire's Essex County remains his most enduring classic, and with ample cause. The rural county where he grew up in Ontario is, under his anxious pen and ink, a place haunted, not in the traditional sense, but my hopes and memories. All three volumes (supplemented with two short stories "cut" from the trilogy in the Collected editing) have the feel of indie autobiographies, especially Vol.1 which has a young protagonist and Lemire's own childhood scribblings, but meld what are probably biographical remembrances into a fictional narrative web that really sneaks up on you in Vol.3. Vol.1, Tales from the Farm, is about a quiet kid being raised by his uncle after a family tragedy and to those who don't know any better feels like it's Lemire's story as much as Yummy Fur is Chester Brown's. But it's deceptive. In Vol.2, Ghost Stories, we get a professional hockey player now aged and reliving his memories of family, sports and again, tragedy. It's incredibly poignant. If you read it, you which scene made me well up. Vol.3, The Country Nurse, aims to tie all these characters together (and I feel blind for missing it) and the history of the county, too. Brilliant stuff that uses the comics form to create interesting transitions and flights of imagination within grounded surroundings.
Hard to assess Jeff Lemire's Phantom Road as this is definitely a "Volume 1" and there's no resolution in sight, so at this point, I'm mostly taken with Gabriel Hernández Walta's art, who manages to remind me of both Guy Davis and Howard Chaykin, with a rounded solidity despite his sketchy line. The book looks quite nice, with its earth-toned desert vistas and expressive characters. The premise: A trucker and a woman he finds at the sight of an accident are pulled in and out of a hellish in-between space inhabited by zombie-like beings. Also at that intersection is an FBI agent who once experienced the same thing as a little girl. And what does all this have to do with a truck stop chain and its mascot? Lemire builds a mystery on several fronts, but the problem with serialized mysteries is that we might lose sight of the prize before we get to the end, or rather, get to the the second volume. I really should have waited for the series to be completely over before reading because I'm sure to be lost by the time Vol.2 is available.
There's a lot of love for Black Hammer out there, but coming off the first Omnibus, I think I only... like it? I think it's because I'm always a bit distracted by the fact that Lemire is riffing off established comics characters in a way that's often too close to the real thing. There's always a twist, but Golden Gail is almost too close to Shazam, for example, and Barbalien too much like the Martian Manhunter. Sometimes, the creations tickle my love for Amalgams, so Abraham Slam being part Golden Age Atom, part Captain America is neat. Or the Big Bad being at once Darkseid and the Anti-Monitor. It's just that sometimes I feel like Lemire is rewriting canons rather than commenting on them. At least the frame tale is an original one, even if the mystery is stretched beyond even the 13 issues contained in this collection. A handful of heroes disappear from Spiral City after the (let's say it) Crisis and find themselves trapped on a farm, tapping into Lemire's interest in rurality. Each chapter has a central flashback that takes us back to Spiral and various superhero eras. Black Hammer himself is conspicuous by his absence, which is actually perfect because this is a book about legacy - individual heroic legacies (especially how his daughter is used), but also the legacy of superhero comics in general. Lemire explores this literary canon by combining and twisting stories we find immediately familiar, even if drawn in an indie style. I may sound ambivalent, but I do plan to read the franchise's different books through to The End, currently being published. The Omnibus has the usual back matter - sketches, bonus art, etc. - but surprised me with early character profiles drawn up as classic Who's Who pages. The information is all wrong, but it's a fun way to show one's work, and expose what might have been had Lemire launched the book before he got caught up in a little project called Sweet Tooth.
Jackie Morrow's teen slice of life graphic novel Supper Club has a nice idea behind it, but I don't think it makes good on early promises. Teenage girls, high school seniors, after realizing they don't have classes or after-school activities together, decide to create their own elite cooking club away from school grounds. Initially proposed as a foodie's comic - there are a few recipes at the back - the food soon takes a back seat to personal drama. Can the girls' friendships really be sustained by Supper Club even as life naturally forces them to drift apart? One is dealing with anxiety, another with a sick parent, another with young love, etc. That said, it is a sweet, wholesome look at the last hurrah for a friendship and manages to end on a poignant note. Can we really criticize it for getting away from the food when that's exactly what the characters are doing? Morrow's colorful art has a Manga vibe, sometimes in sharp focus, sometimes more roughly sketched, and there is a natural roughness here given her fuzzy wax crayon type line. But in focus or rough, the expressions are strong, the light comedy charming... I'm just not as hungry as I thought I would be reading this.
A warm bowl of soup. A home-made sweater. An old toothbrush. A childhood toy. A football shirt. These are the object around which Yani Hu crafts five short stories in Udon Noodle Soup: Little Tales for Little Things. Each is a thin slice of life, one presumes even pseudo-biographical (at least in tone), lavishly drawn and colored, usually on textured paper. The book is beautiful to look at and sucks you into its mundane yet romantic world of young people making realizations about their inner emotional lives, each object explored a vessel for the memory of a certain love, whether gone or alive or perhaps waiting to be reignited, so long as the object remains. Though the stories are grounded, Hu doesn't forbid herself flights of artistic fancy, whether her characters' imagination or interesting graphic touches, experimentations that never take you out of the book. Can you infuse an object with an emotion? Hu says yes, and proceeds to do so with every page of her book.
Edgar Camacho's Onion Skin, winner of Mexico's first ever National Young Graphic Novel Award, starts with a food truck in a high speed chase through the desert, racing away from violent bikers. We then backtrack, spending time in different time frames, to see how the man and woman driving the truck met, and how they found themselves in this predicament. It's got good action and a bouncy pace, but I'm rather more interested in the chemical romance between the two loads, a platonic romance that makes up the best friendships. And the characters are well defined enough that we want to take this journey with them. The translation to English isn't great, however, or rather I should say the lettering. The exclamation point looks like an "I" which is annoying, and there's at least one glaring typo. I've come to expect better from Top Shelf Productions. In the grand scheme of things, these are minor complaints about what is otherwise an original story.
RPGs: I got roped into playing in a Call of Cthulhu game by the amiable Ian Fletcher, indeed, less than 48 hours before the first session. But Ian is a master at this particular game, and it's only going to be monthly? I was sure I could slide it into my schedule. My character is Oscar Alan Phelps, popular author of books on the Occult and professional ghost breaker. Played by John Rhys-Davies (I'm essentially channelling his Professor from Sliders), the twist is that he doesn't believe in ANY of this "poppycock" and always has some real-world reasoning to account for it. We'll see if his Sanity becomes more fragile as his convictions are challenged. He's always accompanied by a black cat, Lucifer, who sort of accounts for about a third of his charm, and half of his acute perception (I roll, but credit the cat). I do want people to know that I did not choose to have a cat, a ROLL forced me to have a pet. I am not someone who likes dealing with pets in my games, and thanks for not adding a pet/attack beast to your character in my games, prospective players. Phelps is a Newfoundlander (so a British citizen in 1922), but has worked at a more cultured accent. That's because he's mostly posture - a big personality who inveigles himself into high society to debunk mediums and gather stories for his populist books on the supernatural, though he'll sometimes pen a pulp novel based on his more fanciful adventures. Which brings us to the session. A lot of Canadian accents around the virtual table - Phelps is joined by a young journalist, a teetotalling drifter, and a seemingly young socialite who was the only player to come out (I don't want to say survived) of a previous game of Ian's, holding many secrets. We are tasked with solving the mystery of a magician who has vanished (in life, not on stage), but mostly, this session is about getting to know our characters, finding a working chemistry for them (a lot of splitting up is "in-character" early on), and setting up the mystery. It's also about finding our footing in the 1920s as a setting, and investigation as a genre. In terms of horror, there was one spooky moment, but it hasn't been dialed up yet. The characters don't know what they're in for (not that Phelps expects anything but a mundane series of parlor tricks). Ian is a fluid GM who wastes no time and doesn't hesitate even when cornered into improvising. The players are "character-first", seldom breaking the spell, speaking for characters who are each in their own way kind of a hoot - it's strange to say that in an existential horror game, but I think it's true to say that if players play up personalities, the PCs become comedy double, triple, quadruple acts pretty easily. Assessing my own performance, I reigned in Phelps' loudness lest he take over the narrative - or perhaps I'm just used to listening to Players when they talk - but was happy with the verbosity I was able to give him (hey, English is my second language).
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