Gifts
So we had our annual gift exchange between friends and here are some of the geekier things I found upon opening packages: From the oHOTmu crowd, Shotgun got me "The Ultimated (sic) Illustration Book of Godzilla" when she was in Japan last year, or so the English cover copy would have it. Monster names inside are in English, but I'm on my own trying to decipher the Japanese - great souvenir from her landmark trip! Isabel also went the Big GZ route with a new t-shirt for my collection, with Gojira silhouetted in blazing red-orange on a black T. Wearing it already. Art-Girl Josée remembered that I liked Kotaro Isaka's Bullet Train and got me the only other of his novels in translation, Three Assassins. Not that geeky on the surface, but DJ Nath had to contact four different provinces to find 4 bottles of Korean soju, a drink I've always wanted to try (based on my high consumption of Korean media, but really ever since I saw Daytime Drinking a decade ago). Liquor stores in New Brunswick can't legally sell it until we have a homegrown soju producer, see. The story of her quest to find soju was perhaps even better than the gift itself. Above and beyond. Outside the oHOTmu crew, I have to thank my friend Berry for the Kardashev Scale card game (I think I might combine it with Cosmic Encounter for a themed game night), and Clo who made a dumb calendar where every month, my cat's head has been Microsoft Painted over different scenes, many of them in the geek canon, like Star Trek, Doctor Who and my favorite movies. Absurd, and therefore great.
"Accomplishments"
At home: Rye Lane shows that you can make a very simple story, even one we've essentially seen before, and still make it fresh, fun and exciting. Davis Jonsson and Vivian Oparah (who I enjoyed in Class, playing a very different character here) are two lonely people who, over the course of a day, bond over their previous break-ups. Romcom rules say they may be meant for each other despite their differences. He's a rather nervous sort; she's wild and unpredictable - it shouldn't work but it does. I find Jonsson's experience entirely relatable though. Sometimes, a person, group or event just makes you go with it, no matter your anxieties, and you throw caution to the wind without knowing the end result. Oparah, for her part, is so lively as to be infectious - she sells it. And then you have director Raine Allen-Miller who turns a talky little love story into something special with her style, from the opening bathroom crawl to the various ways she shows memories/stories. The finished product is funny and affecting, and makes you fall in love with its leads. Bonus points for the Love, Actually joke.
Sometimes a tearjerker comes down the pike that transcends its potential for melodrama thanks to strong performances and unusual character dynamics, and I think "King of Sadness" Zach Braff's A Good Person falls into that category. It had me at Florence Pugh, of course. She plays a woman who loses her future sister-in-law and brother-in-law in a car crash, ruining her life and the family's. One year later, she's addicted to painkillers and a real mess. A chance encounter with the man who would once have been her father-in-law (Morgan Freeman, who Braff can't help but give voice-over, a dreadful cliché that he mostly gets away with in the end), now raising his children's difficult teenage daughter, gives her hope she can turn her life around. He struggles with addiction too, and while Freeman isn't as emotional as Pugh - it wouldn't fit the character - he gives just as solid a performance. So while we've seen many similar addiction stories, the unusual family dynamics and the frankly terrific performances elevate the movie above what it otherwise could have been. Pugh had me weeping, but she's always had a certain power over me. It's also that I find stories about people trying to do the right thing and showing each other grace especially touching.
Anno's tribute to the old Japanese superhero show, Shin Kamen Rider immediately throws you into the action and never lets up in what looks like one of those compilation films that often cropped up as daytime "movies" on this side of the world. It makes the plot seem thin indeed as the Kamen Rider and his computerized gal pal Ruriko (Godzilla Minus One's Minami Hamabe, she had a good year) go through one Augment after another until they turn into suds on the ground. The look is all over the place - from HD that looks like it was shot in the backyard (harking back to an older TV look), to images that would well in anime, to goofy CG effects, to moments that seem to evoke Ozu - but I think that's by design. Anno seems to be working from childhood memories, but injecting his aesthetic where he can. Certainly, the last 45 minutes have some indelible moments, and though there's a certain repetitiveness to the film's structure, how each encounter is handled creates an arc for the heroes, from blood-splattering, thoughtless violence to empathetic reconciliation. It's balls to the walls insane action, and yet, Anno reaches for something more. Ultimately, Shin Kamen Rider is perhaps more fun than it is substantial, but that's not a bad place for a grasshopper to land.
There's no question that what makes How to Get Ahead in Advertising work at all is Richard E. Grant. He gives a wild, balls-out performance as a marketing expert who gives no f**ks and takes no prisoners, until he has a breakdown/epiphany and starts to go against the Orwellian system and against his nature. The schism is represented by a giant boil on his neck that has a mind - and voice - of its own. It's insane, but you can of course interpret it as the pimple being just a hallucination. Grant speaks both for and against capitalism, but both takes are condemnation given how terrible his "salesman" persona is. This is Bruce Robinson's follow-up to Withnail & I (he also plays the boil's voice, which does confuse things actually), and so Grant gets to play the same kind of cranked up character. It's not as successful, however, perhaps because it's too dogmatic, perhaps because there isn't much of a throughline - it's just a weird thing that happens to a terrible person and even their redemption is undercut by what the movie wants to say.
It's a strange movie for the British HandMade Films to make, but Powwow Highway is a worthy addition to their catalog. It's a road trip movie in which two Native Americans set off in a junker to bail out one of the two's sister, who has been arrested as part of a land grab scheme. A Martinez (L.A. Law) is the volatile activist who has a pragmatic take on being kept down by the white man, while Gary Farmer (Reservation Dogs) is an endearing dope who believes in his heritage's power and makes it work in his favor. Both are connecting with their culture over the course of the trip, but Martinez is really doing so kicking and screaming. Charming set pieces and strong commentary on the state of First Nations in the U.S., but I do think the film ends too early. The stakes as spelled out are unresolved. But then the final reel is really playing by its own rules, evoking magical realism to even get the characters anywhere near where they need to be, and then deciding not to pursue any consequences for their actions. But I would have been happy to follow these characters for a bit longer.
Bob Hoskins is terrific as a London gangster trying to go straight as a real estate mogul in The Long Good Friday, and trying to drag his whole organization in with him. But this is a biting Noir, so all his associates, all his contacts, all his reflexes are all from the criminal underworld, and that's going to cause him problems. He's pushy, he's vengeful, and there is an underlying question of whether this is "straight" business after all, and he's only really being stymied by his lower-class status (it's a British film, so it has to be at least partly about class). When his men start getting bumped off in pretty spectacular ways (check out young Pierce Brosnan as a silent assassin!), he's desperate to find out why and by whom before his deal with the Americans falls through. The violence is harsh but cool. Helen Mirren is great as Hoskins' partner in love and business. The dialog is witty. And I really love that ending. So if you're looking for a Holiday fare to watch around Easter (I'm kidding, watch it any old time), The Long Good Friday is the fun'n'nasty crime picture to break your fast with.
In Mona Lisa, Bob Hoskins once again plays gangster with the need to change his life around, this time an ex-con forced to drive a high-end call girl around. He hates it at first, but he eventually warms to her and perhaps a little or a lot more, because he accepts the kind of task for her that's sure to get him in trouble with the criminal underworld (represented by a bunny-stroking Michael Caine). Hoskins feel so natural in a Noir environment - it would make him perfect for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? two years later - not the least of which because he's a man out of time here, having a hard time catching up to a world that's left him behind. Even his car is out of an old Film Noir. Cathy Tyson as femme fatale is more vulnerable and wounded than most. Robbie Coltraine has a quirky side-character to play. I liked it, but I'm not sure I entirely buy the ending, given the cycle of violence that's usually represented in this type of film. Can there really be an escape from the life?
Bob Hoskins' directorial debut, The Raggedy Rawney, has the feel of an odd modern fairy tale in which a green deserter hides disguised as a mad woman (or is he having a bit of a fit?) following a caravan of travelling folk, where he and Hoskins' daughter (played by Zoë Nathenson who played his daughter in Mona Lisa, so it's nice that he wanted to not only work with her again, but give her a lead role) fall in love. If there's a fable vibe to it, it's that the war feels entirely nondescript. No countries are mentioned (the film was shot in the former Czechoslovakia, which looks gorgeous, but it's not said). The enemy is referenced, but never, and is rather presented as the home army, conscripting every young man in sight and committing crimes on its own people. And though the caravan is coded as Romani, the cast is entirely made up of British types (including Dexter Fletcher, Downtown's Jim Carter, and the ubiquitous Ian McNeice) that just give it an unspecified, and therefore universal, feel. And I fell under its dark spell. In this world that already seems like an overgrown ruin, magic is both real and not, a young man is both a coward and not and a father is both kind and cruel.
RPGs: This was for my French-language podcast, but I'll talk about it here in broad terms. I hosted a Fiasco game with the scenario Rat Patrol, in which one plays an escaped lab rat with high intelligence (think Pinky and the Brain meets The Plague Dogs). This sounds super-wonky and therefore a fan-made Fiasco set, but no, it's by Jason Morningstar himself, the designer of the game, and includes a special Rat Tilt for the perturbing elements on which the two acts pivot. The options are pretty crazy and the players really went with it. Isabel and Nath (known as near-telepathic sisters in real life COULD have gone with that very option, but opted for precognitive rats, one of which was a fake (but listeners will have to guess which). Bob and Chalif were early children of the über-rats who were the parents of the entire colony and therefore aristocratic "rat bastards" in charge of Ratopolis City, a series of tunnels stolen from the moles digging up the lab garden (and so I played ancillary moles, largely communicating with a pet's toy squeaker). Two of these rats wanted to get back to the lab, two strongly felt they should return to their natural state, infighting and backstabbing ensues. The Tilt had several experiments come to fruition (or fail) causing a lot of trouble as everything headed, yes, for a fiasco. So if you're looking for a fun playset that takes you off the beaten path, I do recommend Rat Patrol and wish you fewer rat puns around the table than this particular group (Chalif, you monster) gave me.
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