"Accomplishments"
At home: The problem with Monarch Legacy of Monsters is that it's a prequel. TWO prequels, in fact. I'm most interested in the flashbacks to the 1950s and the birth of Monarch, but anyone who's perused the Monarch history that shows up in the film credits is going to have a certain sense of déjà vu. And yet, that's initially still more interesting than the "present-day" events that take place immediately after the first Godzilla film (2015, so still a prequel, or midquel) that have young people running around the world to solve their family mystery and stumbling upon a very conspiracy-laden Monarch. And I do hate that old saw. SF shows that attempt a long story arc are always going with the conspiracy angle and I'm so bored by it. Things pick up when the kids contact Kurt Russell's character - played by Russell's own son in the past time frame - because Kurt Russell, and pick up AGAIN in the two final episodes with some nice twists. By that point, I think I cared for the kids more. We do get some monster action and Godzilla appears several times, so dedicated fans of his (present) are going to want to watch this, but there is a sense that, though it puts more of a human face on the franchise than the films do (It's their big weakness), we already know what's going to happen. It's hard to think of it as appointment television. And I'm sure no one buys Anders Holm as the Bill Randa who grows up to be John Goodman in Skull Island.
What is Godzilla: Singular Point even about? I get it on a surface level: Red dust, some kind of temporally active element, is allowing giant monsters to come to enter our world, and we follow various scientists, in particular a girl with an innate sense of theoretical physics and the team behind Jet Jaguar, as they try to prevent the Apocalypse. But as to what happens exactly, that's all wrapped up in a mix of hyperdimensional physics, computer programming, and zen philosophy. It is very nearly impenetrable. And even what I get from context doesn't exactly explain what happens on screen. Netflix's animated Godzilla projects are confounding to me. Between the animation and the giant monster fights, these should be perfect for kids, but the previous trilogy was ponderous and boring, and this 13-episode series (which teases a second in the end credits of the final episode) is hard for an adult to understand unless they have very specific PhDs. What gives? (If I hear the words Orthogonal Diagonalizer ever again... but then, how could I?) The animation is nice though - good-looking characters, backgrounds, effects and fights, and a cute hero AI too. Even if the monster designs are way off-model, with Rodan a swarm of pterodactyls (that put me in mind of Gamera's Gayos), for example. And fine, but I always draw the line at Godzilla himself being redesigned beyond recognition (which is one of the reasons I had a adverse reaction to Shin Godzilla). In this case, you couldn't even tell it's Godzilla if not for his trademark theme playing over his scenes, at least until his fourth form (ya, a LOT of Shinfluence) shows up. I didn't hate it - Jet Jaguar fans will get behind this - but there are too many opaque conversations.
I knew that Howl from Beyond the Fog used puppetry to create its kajiu, but I wasn't expecting even the human beings to be puppets! Well, it makes for a dream-like short (the streamers back it up with the making of DVD extras immediately following, so it will appear as a 70-minute film, but is actually half the length) where a ghostly woman has a relationship with a giant lake monster, which the villagers hate (as a sort of force against progress and civilization). It's very lyrically shot and paced, poetic in its visuals and dialog, and a very charming way to tell a special effects story that teeters on the edge of legend. Obviously, the doll-like humans and miniature sets make this unreal, but when you look at the charming monster work, it's no worse than the men-in-suits Show era Godzilla films, and more fluid than stop-motion effects. The monster even manages a kind of sympathetic energy that's I think the key to the best kaiju films.
Patricia Clarkson and Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle are the two big stars of Wendigo, but the monster kind of isn't, and you keep wondering if it's at all real, or just part of the kid's dark, overactive imagination. But also asks whether that makes a difference, as spirits might exist on belief. That doesn't mean it doesn't have any chills and scares. After a family has a traumatizing run-in with a mean-spirited hunter in snowy upstate New York, they find themselves further terrorized up at the cabin they're borrowing from a friend. There are many volatile situations where you think things could explode, so the film works fairly well as a thriller. I wouldn't call this a kid's movie, given the blood, sex and language, but it's practically told from the boy's point of view, which is perhaps why it feels so timid at the end. Some hokey transitions and nightmare effects, but at least there's some style at play, and it works hard to cover the low-budget climax, if not entirely successfully.
Something of a modern fairy tale, Cryptozoo's indie animation style isn't the prettiest, but it certainly delivers on crazy (but also well-researched) visuals. Creatures and beings from myth and folklore are real and they live among us, but as humanity is big on torches and pitchforks, and governments want to harness some of their powers, there is the Cryptozoo - a sanctuary for all the cryptids, in the form of a theme park where humans can get used to their existence and even work with them. Lake Bell supplies the voice of a cryptid liberator who must recover a Japanese dream-eater before it's used against the hippie movement, and you'll find that this is very much about counter culture and the forces trying to snuff it out - whatever it may be at any given point in time. But it also explores the legitimacy of the Cryptozoo's methods and doesn't necessarily agree with its own characters or premise. I don't think it's saying that minorities should play to the majority audience, or that the burden is on them to prove their value. It's a complex piece of work. And I wish it were for kids, because the message is good, but nudity, sex, violence and language are issues parents might want to look at before pressing play. Bonus points for a legitimate Tarot reading.
A stray tabby psychically called to a little girl's side to fight a monster connects three short PG horror stories in (Stephen King's) Cat's Eye, a movie that gets some points by starting on a Cujo joke (a film also directed by Lewis Teague). Each story has one big star attached and is pretty timid in terms of gore (more DC's House of Mystery than EC's Tales from the Crypt), and of course, your mileage will vary with these. The first two - James Woods signing up for an insane quit-smoking program and Robert Hayes becoming the target of a vertiginous bet - are too adult in premise for even older kids to really tap into, but the third, in which the cat has an epic battle with a tiny troll to protect (an also tiny) Drew Barrymore is the opposite. (That said, an animal in jeopardy could be harrowing to SOME kids.) Each story does play on fear and has good moments of suspense. They're also linked through the theme of second chances - reprieves - including the cat's. But ultimately, you're there for that last story, with its giant prop set for the actor playing the troll to run through and it's insane fight for a little girl's soul.
Mike Flanagan's first feature film, Absentia, is a low-budget affair, but succeeds despite its limitations, especially when it only evokes the existence of its monster (though actual manifestations are brief - I'm not as bothered by them as some) and the "ghosts" it creates. The aesthetic here is part mumblecore (the image treatment and evident speed of shooting) and part letting figures go out of focus in the background, so that a ghostliness is always around the corner. Anyone could disappear from view, forever, at any time. And that's the premise. A pregnant woman (Courtney Bell actually carrying her director's child, no fake bellies here) and her drug addict sister (Katie Parker - a lot of these actors would show up in Flanagan's sophomore effort Oculus and beyond) finally get a death certificate for Bell's husband, missing for the part 7 years. But this is a neighborhood where people disappear all the time, and are taken... SOMEplace. There's some play with the idea that not knowing what happened to a missing person keeps them alive, present, and even sinister, but I also enjoyed that, unlike a lot of horror films, we do see the cops' point of view. We often wonder in these films just how any of this will be explained to the authorities after the credits roll. But not here. Absentia is a pretty bleak film, chilling and suspenseful, and you might also develop a fear of underpass walking tunnels from it (nah, I was already kind of afraid of them). Flanagan would go on to bigger and better things, but this isn't a bad starting point at all!
Because of its recursive nature, and the way it replays scenes several times as part of its structure, I'm not sure Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes really has 71 minutes of material. The first half-hour, in particular, had me rating this lower than I eventually did as the repetition drained my enthusiasm. It's a loopy (ha! literally!) sci-fi flick in which café workers and patrons realize the computer monitor in the shop and the one in the lead's room upstairs, communicate with the past/future, but only at 2 minutes' "distance". The ensemble test their theories out, but there's really no reasoning with the bootstrap paradoxes that make the story work. It's quite the technical achievement though, and the end credit behind-the-scenes footage only shows us how they filmed this "one-take wonder", not really how they made sense of the grand temporal puzzle they built, having characters talk to themselves across micro-units of time. But what finally endeared it to me is the ending - a sweet budding romance, a point about waiting for the future to happen, and a clever action scene (not in that order).
In Petite Maman ("Little Mother"), a little girl is brought to her recently deceased grandmother's house to help pack up her things. But out in the woods, she magically crosses paths with her own 8-year-old mother, back in the past. It's kind of like Back to the Future with children, and without the comedy and action shenanigans. The girl and her young mother, played by sisters to foster an uncanny resemblance that bemuses the adults in both time frames, become fast friends, the way kids do on summer vacations and such. And through this friendship, the girl gets to understand and come to terms with her mom's temperament, and learns lessons we only really come to later in life - our parents are people, just like us. At the end, we wonder if the mother remembers any of this, but the film's point of view - the girl's - necessarily keeps such answers from us. Petite Maman is quiet and naturalistic, but I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks at the end. Perhaps it's its subtle examination of grief (for the grandmother, and by extension, for relationships), but I'm not sure. It touched something deeper in me and not so easy to name.
I'm discovering Motern Media and its Farley/Roxburgh joints with the recent Magic Spot, and yeah, it's made on the cheap, the acting is extremely variable, and the dialog feels written, but wow, what charm. In this one, cousins who work on a local cable access show in a sleepy New England town remember a rhyme their uncle taught them as kids. Only, he died long before they were born. But this isn't your traditional ghost story - the solution is actually time travel. This is a film that doesn't take itself seriously - everyone takes this stuff more or less at face value - but doesn't have an once of cynicism. The community is loving and accepting. The solution shows a lot of grace. In other hands, the portrayal of small-town folks could easily have felt snarky, but many seem to be playing shades of themselves (the non-actors), and it just feels very earnest and sweet. Everyone in the cast also seems to be musically gifted, so we can a lot of songs and musical numbers thrown in. I never felt like they were padding to get this to feature length. Its originality goes a long way to making you forget its homespun production values.
The most popular Motern Media film is Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! [red flash! red flash! look away!], a Creature from the Black Lagoon spoof using Charles Roxburgh's usual cast members and a guy in a rubber suit. While it ostensibly takes place in 2012, the script uses a clever 1950s B-movie approach. Characters have non-descript jobs (instead of "Scientist!", the lead is the Ministry of Tutoring's best tutor, and there's of course a genetic "former athlete") and speak using old-fashioned literary terms or hackneyed exposition. We're too wise today to have the naivety of those old movies, but Roxburgh and co-writer/star Matt Farley are adopting a kind of "We don't know how movies work" attitude that evokes those old pictures. But they DO know what they're doing and are using the production's low-budget and amateur actors to their benefit. And as with their other work, in total earnestness, casting a charm spell over its audience.
Books: Becky Chambers' debut novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, stars the diverse crew of a "tunnelling" ship bound for a distant battleground where they've been assured diplomacy has won the day and a space tunnel needs to be built for trade. But while the crew of the Wayfarer will have an impact on that larger story, it's really background for a picaresque, each chapter exploring one of the characters, giving them or resolving a dilemma, even as Chambers does some efficacious world building. It plays like a television series that, despite the special effects, is deeply centered on the characters. And what characters! I immediately fell in love with this "chosen family" and how they lent each other support. There is something about showing grace that I find incredibly touching, and these characters have it by the cargo-ful. I wept, like, a LOT. It's just charming as heck, and perhaps it's because I cast them well enough in my head (thanks to descriptions and dialog) that the performances sprung off the page so vividly. Chambers has written three more novels set in this universe, but they're not about the Wayfarer, which on the one hand, is a good idea - the spell woven here is unbroken - but on the other, I'll deeply miss this crew.
A great literary debut from Natasha Brown, Assembly is a novella about a black woman who works in finance in London (and the descriptions match Brown's pictures, so there may be an autobiographical element) and is faced with macro and micro aggressions on the daily because she's a woman, a black woman, a black woman navigating the world of the super-wealthy. And she has cancer, which acts as a fertile metaphor for the culture that's eating at her, threatening to devour her. It's all heading towards a climax at a rich family's garden party, of all things, but it's personally epic, apocalyptic. Told with clever turns of phrase and a fragmented, poetic quality, Assembly feels intimate and immediate, full of hard truths about expectations and a world waiting for you to fail, hoping you WILL fail. Do we "assemble" ourselves to fit a certain mold, and what happens when we think of breaking that mold. What are we when disassembled? Gorgeous prose and a precise, important point of view make this a must-read of the 2020s.
I didn't really read Godzilla Great Anatomical Picture Book - The Ultimated (sic) Illustration Book of Godzilla - by artist Nishikawa Shinji, because I don't read or speak Japanese. Wish I could though! Nishikawa was a designer during the Heisei and Millennium eras of the film franchise, so I really want to know what the caricature of himself in each entry has to say. But the only things in English are the names of the monsters, the date, and a couple words like "Explanation" that head text boxes. Still, very pretty. The artist provides a detailed illustration of every monster and every iteration of Godzilla, plus more cartoony (and quite fun) smaller images that tell the story and making of every film from 1954 to Shin Godzilla, plus de animated Godzillas currently on Netflix. None of the American stuff (though 1998's Zilla is in there by virtue of appearing in a Japanese film). Godzilla Minus One juuusssssst missed out. At the very least, it's a good visual guide for tracking the small differences between Godzilla heads, feet and tails, and reminded me that yeah, Godzilla sometimes has little ears.
RPGs: In our Torg Eternity game this week, the first of two back-to-back climaxes to When Cosms Collide, a mega-adventure we've been in now for 8 sessions, and where I paid off the large tapestry of NPCs met during that time. In fact, I went one or two better than the adventure as presented, with a Copenhagen faction (that's where it all started and I felt they needed to share in the diplomacy to keep their city free of Uthorion's influence). Our Paladin played many Romance cards in the past few months, so at least three of his love interests had to be present as well, and those relationships actually did change the course of the game - a game that had an unusual mechanic centered on a ball - ten dances (loved picking out the music), the chance to pair up with different factions, and if you "won" the dance, a chance to gain allies even as the half-undead evil high priest viking warlord was building a coalition of his own! My Realm Runner seemed to be strategizing the most, but the abstract mechanics and/or large tapestry of alliances left at least one player befuddled. It was a lot of balls to juggle for me too. In the end, the players got the best possible result. They turned every non-Army of Darkness faction to their side PLUS the Big Bad's lieutenant Red Raven (a well-exploited Romance from episode 3), secured independence and protection for Copenhagen and the Fairy Tale Barony, made Tharkold's Beacon Security flip Demontown over to the non-aligned Vikings' side rather than Uthorion's, secured fast egress from Aysle via Tharkold as well as the Atlantean probe they stole (in exchange for going on a little mission for them - I gotta start planning for the future!), and gave Helmar Corba'alson a true death as the stars aligned (very literally) and a Drama card gave him a Setback on the fourth round (it's useful to have the high priest/priestess of the God of Secrets on side to supply this tip, Copenhagen, baby!), enough time to drain him of Possibilities, lest he rise again in a fortnight.
Best bits: I liked it when the dance styles became part of the action, such as when the Tango sending the partner spinning away was used to pass a message between PCs. Or when the Realm Runner improvised a little poem/incantation to summon a fairy godmother to dance the magic-requiring elven dance (too bad he decided not to win it on purpose, but felt another player needed it more). The Realm Runner was really firing on all cylinders, actually, finally using his Aysle-powered Turtleneck of Intimidation AND Tharkold's Law of Domination to prevent a double-cross from the Tharkold representative's lieutenant as the realm's forces started to split (probably a better solution than tipping the guy off the castle terrace as originally planned). He seemed to have all the cool, badass lines this session. The Paladin' long-winded introduction by the sergeant-at-arms and the Monster Hunter's extremely brief one. And though the killing blow was technically a Thor's hammer situation, the KNOCKOUT blow that left him reeling was a super-strength kick to the groin, courtesy of our wrestler - there's no dignity in how he got taken down.
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