"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things can, on the surface, be compared to The Favourite - Emma Stone, a period piece, a similarly-shot dance number - but it's really a throwback to Dogtooth in the way it presents isolated children whose worldview is affected by the lies they are told, limited environment they thrive in, and the absence of "the real world". And it's also a Promethean story, with Emma Stone's Bella, a grown woman with a child's mind (which should make you squirm given the amount of sexual content is in the film), developing much as the Monster does in Mary Shelley's book. She's the Monster twice removed, in a way, since her own creator, who she calls "God" (for Godwin), is himself severely deformed by way of HIS father's experiments. Very strange sights, fish eye lenses, and discordant music create an arresting look for this darkly comical steampunk fable. What it's really about is bodily autonomy, as Bella insists on her liberty, discovers who she is and was, makes choices for herself, and resists patriarchal subjugation from the men who would love/possess her.
At home: I can't argue with I Want to Eat Your Pancreas' detractors that the premise of a dour loner beings awakened to the world around him by what is uncharitably (in this case) called a manic pixie dream girl (of the dying variety) has been done, but Shinichiro Ushijima's film is so well-observed and sensitive to the teen psyche that I can't possibly see it that way. This isn't a romance, not really, and initially more of a naive seduction at her hands, making moves before her life is cut short by a pancreatic disease. The relationship is awkward in part because it only exists due to his being her only classmate who knows her secret. And he's not just a loner, he's incapable of processing and properly exhibiting emotion, asocial perhaps by way of being somewhere on the spectrum. Critics similarly mistake the objectionable moment where they sexually harass each other as somehow teaching that this is okay. The film doesn't judge; these are kids making mistakes in moments of heightened emotionality. "I don't like this behavior" is a normal response, but not an indictment of a story that's true to its characters. We know from the beginning we're in for some heartache, and yet, it still finds a way to surprise and pack a punch.
Blazingly good (and violent) martial action makes Sword of the Stranger as a blood-soaked winner, a samurai film in which the titular stranger helps a boy (and his dog - good dog, too) escape the clutches of Chinese cultists out to take his blood to make an elixir of immortality. Emperor's gotta live forever, you know? A blond "foreign barbarian" acts as a physical threat who is perhaps looking for another kind of immortality. Visually, it prefers earth tones and a muted palette, but I love the wintry action in the second half. Musically, the main theme sounds like Lord of the Rings, which I admit I found a little distracting, no matter how good the score is. And while I did, at times, get lots in the politics of the various competing factions, it's all much simpler than it seems. For me, this is an impeccably-animated recreation of a chambara actioner crossed with a Chinese martial arts epic. And that's not a bad place to land on, even if you recognize the source material.
Which came first? Upside Down or Patema Inverted? An episodic version of Patema streamed in 2012, the year the live action Kirsten Dunst movie came out, but animation takes a long time to make, probably longer than even a special effects picture. In any case, Patema Inverted doesn't come as cheesy as the other film, and flips the tables by having the "inverted world" not in the sky facing the other, but underground as a kind of reflection. They are therefore hidden from one another. A boy from a tightly controlled fascist state thus falls (ha) for Patema, an all-too inquisitive girl from the more chaotic underground. They become enemies of the state and through their escapes and adventures, we learn the history of this topsy-turvy world (which gives an acceptable scientific explanation, unlike Upside Down's fairy tale), which is so clouded in legend, it's hard to really trust. It's cute, and the choreography - how to make gravity work both ways correctly on screen - is impressive.
The Garden of Words (by Your Name's Makoto Shinkai) isn't a feature, not at 46 minutes, so it doesn't feel as rich and full as the director's greatest hits. One perhaps wonders if there was room to develop the plot further - many call it a mood piece, I would rather say psychological study - but the film doesn't entirely explain every motivation fully, so I think that yes. It's about a teenager who plays hooky on rainy days to meet with a young woman who's also skipping her day job, in a beautiful park in the middle of the city. A friendship between strangers, the difficult emotions relating to a boyhood crush, and the acknowledgement that the adult in those cases does receive something. We fear for the women's state of mind - something isn't right, depression perhaps - but some of the reasons we're later given are either extremely curt or rather odd (about her choice of foods, for example), so there's definitely more that could have been done there. So it rather leaves me hungry for more, but an uptick for the animation and backgrounds which are absolutely gorgeous.
When it comes to mysteries, I try not to let my happening upon the solution early affect my judgment unless it's egregiously obvious. I did figure out Another Thin Man basically from the murder, but from a clue Nick Charles doesn't even mention at the end in the big wrap-up. Huh. In any case, this is another light mystery with lots of players - you sort of get lost in the motivations there, for a while - propped up by the banter and innate chemistry between William Powell and Myrna Loy. Now, to me, a Thin Man movie doesn't work if Nora doesn't get something to do (because Myrna Loy, I think that's clear), so while she has some comic bits of business in the first hour, it's not until the Cuban club sequence that the movie comes alive for me. It's not like she was strapped to the baby or anything - which they involve in gags, must like they do Asta the Dog - though they don't forget Jr. is a concern no matter what else is happening in the plot. Since it plays for laughs, I DO question the darker elements of the plot, like the killing of a dog (not Asta, don't worry). They never show dead bodies, but that seems grisly given the light tone of these movies. Still, on par with the first sequel, and not as padded.
The soul-swapping Heaven Can Wait remakes actually remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan. 1943's Heaven Can Wait has nothing to do with that, which is a little perplexing. Rather, a man (Don Ameche) recounts his entire life, from cradle to grave, to the Devil (a very kind version of him, at any rate), sure that his sin - women - warrants his skipping directly to the lower floor of the afterlife. This isn't top-tier Lubitsch, but it IS Lubitsch, so the language is often witty and ironic in a Wildean way. The passage of time is well presented, with costumes and set decorations transforming over the man's 70-year life-span (but what were they thinking with Gene Tierney's terrible hair style in her later years?). Charles Coburn steals the show as a the grandfather vicariously living through his grandson's "adventures", but there are other fun comic types. It's an unusual way to present as comedy of manners playing over decades - and amusingly non-denominational - but one might wonder if it isn't one of those Hollywood fantasies where men are exculpated of their sexual transgressions (while women are definitely not). And Signe Hasso's French maid accent - look, she's Swedish, okay? - makes her quick patter hard to understand, so there's just too much of her. Still quite amusing.
I can't believe there's an time travel/adventure movie from the 80s that I'd never heard of. But Biggles: Adventures in Time is 1) not very good, and 2) has a most uncommercial name, despite it being based on a "boy's own" adventure series about ace pilots, numbering close to 100 volumes. Never heard of those either. Big in the UK, perhaps? In any case, these adventures were played straight. The big screen adaptation opts to give Biggles a "time twin" that appears when he's in deadly danger (and vice-versa) during a mission to destroy a secret German weapon during WWI. What's unfortunate is that it's all from the 1986 guy's point of view, and Alex Hyde-White (Mr. Fantastic in the Corman FF movie) plays him as annoyed and annoying, until the action starts and the character gets a personality lobotomy, either not emoting at all, or just acting like an action hero suddenly. The action isn't bad, but there's too much of it, every set piece going on a just a little too long. That's okay when it's biplanes, but guys shooting at other guys or simple brawling is really boring. In the middle of all this is Peter Cushing's final performance, and he's the only one giving more than a TV strength performance. There's a certain goofy 80s energy to all this that makes me like it perhaps more than I should, but it's terribly flawed.
Mean Girls meets Groundhog Day in Before I Fall, a wholly derivative time loop movie (and therefore YA book) that kind of makes me sad that some audiences will come to this BEFORE Groundhog Day. What doesn't really work is that Zoey Deutch plays the Bill Murray role and is supposed to have the same arc. But it's hard to believe her as one of the mean popular girls, or perhaps the story doesn't let her push hard enough in that direction (or else why would that other boy feel unrequited love for her?). And is it an arc, or did she just grow up in the time it took for the time loop to resolve itself. Maybe she just lost "selfish teenager brain". Once she starts being kind, we recognize the character Deutch was playing all along, and while it's a nice sentiment, Before I Fall's innovation is really that it's fine with being sappy compared to other versions of the story. As for the Mean Girls aspects (like, why else would there be a character called Leslie?), it's really up to Deutch to shoulder the burden, because it's standard high school stuff and I found myself zoning out in the first act - which is counter to what your audience needs to (want to) do in a time loop movie. It gets better, but in the final analysis, it's just painfully okay.
I have no prior experience with Tomihiko Morimi's characters from The Tatami Time Machine Blues, but I take it each project (Tamami Galaxy, Night Is Short...) is an alternate reality. In this case, the students who live at this summer boarding house get caught up in a wild time travel adventure where everything is caught in a time loop and it's really about untangling the mess and making sure history (that's a big word for how local this is) proceeds the way it should. Oh, and maybe find love along the way. The six episodes, five of which are no more than 15 minutes, go by quickly, but out of the gate, you're racing to following the fast narration as long subtitles flicker away. There's a lot of visual insanity to keep track of as well despite some deceptively simple renderings in most scenes. I came to like it a lot, but still dock it some points for episode 6 which impairs the series' structure: It's an epilogue, that's really a prologue/origin story for the group, and while it's good, it feels weirdly tacked-on after episode 5's finish.
When dealing with Ingmar Bergman, if you suspect a film is about examining faith in God, you're probably right. I don't suspect The Magician (I like the sound of the original title, Ansiktet) of being about that, I'm very confident it is. Compare the life of Christ with that of Max von Sydow's title character and the parallels play out playfully, if darkly. When a troupe of con men, mesmers, psychics and witches carriages into town, the police and the local atheist/doctor command a private performance to debunk the whole thing before allowing any kind of public spectacle. And from then on, we're witness to a play between what is real and what isn't, indeed pointing to nothing being real. Characters cross-dress and wear wigs, justify their actions by evoking the supernatural, and teeter between life and unlife. Those who most sincerely believe feel betrayed and angry by the end. Those who only play at believing are spared the anguish, and are more sympathetic to the show people. I liked figuring out the final trick just as it revealed itself too. And of course, Bergman's usual cast is excellent as always.
Books: A mostly amusing and sometimes illuminating travelogue (of sorts), Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone's Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World is a chronicle of their shared entry into the book collectors' market, how it works and what treasures are out there. It's non-fiction, but it's full of remembered dialogs and feels like a novel. It's also written in a royal "we" that hardly ever differentiates between Larry and Nancy, so it's up to you to guess who is speaking which lines at any given point. Odd, but kind of sweet when you think about it. The Goldstones and I aren't really on the same page in terms of what books we affect - they're way more into American Lit, for example, to the point where I don't even know all the authors they're looking for, but Used and Rare is nevertheless instructive, taking them (and us) from the status of complete neophyte to well-informed amateurs, in a kind of docu-series in the style of an Antique Roadshow, with strong descriptions of book stores and dealers. They get caught up with collecting, but in the end, always remember that books are for reading. I agree wholeheartedly.
I come to Percival Everett's Erasure AFTER seeing American Fiction, a rare film that isn't invalidated by our reading the source material. They tell the same story, but come to different conclusions. The literary point made in the book several times is that repudiation of a thing affirms that thing's existence. So while the film tells us the African-American experience cannot be reduced to the clichés found in the main character's parodic novella "My Pafology" (included IN FULL), it is ALSO that, and indeed, his life has more "black experiences" than the film would allow. Again and again, Everett comes back to this point, through the mother's mental deterioration (erasure of mind affirms presence of mind), and so on. We also get a lot the Monk's notes (making it clear that he is a stand-in for Everett going by his bibliography - which I'm not very interested in discovering further), memories of his childhood, and a woodworking overlay that creates a background metaphor for his thought process. The movie stands its ground as a satirical comedy with a lot of warmth. The novel's satire is more subtle, and it is a darker take on the characters, so it stands its ground too. I found it so readable I got through half of it in a single sitting.
Simon Hawke's Time Wars continue with volume 5: The Nautilus Sanction, in which time terrorists steal a Soviet nuclear sub and aim to blow up history. Our heroes follow it downtime to stop it, and inadvertently rope in Jules Verne, whose work has inspired the villain, who in turn inspires Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There's a bit of a time knot in this one that I'm not entirely sure follows the rules established prior, but is fun nonetheless. Temporal technology is advancing, which evolves the status quo, though I'm still not sure what to think of "Doctor Darkness" (what's with that name?) as a potential deus ex machina. Good action climax, however. But oof, the return of the Drakov, the villain from the previous novel, essentially turns him into a tour guide - which I realize isn't too far from how Verne plays Nemo - giving us long expository speeches about local history, Jean Lafitte, and most absurdly, how nuclear power was developed. Rather tedious padding, and it sounds like the guy is reciting from Wikipedia. Who speaks like this?!
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