"Accomplishments"
At home: I liked Captain Marvel more than most. I liked Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau in WandaVision. I liked Ms. Marvel and her world in the TV Series. But The Marvels is underwhelming superhero fare and I think it's because it doesn't really have much of a human story. We're almost always in Plot, in fact almost always in action set piece. I like the throwback to the Mar-Vell/Rick Jones switcheroo from the comics, but there's just too much switching places in the movie, making the fights a bit samey and sometimes confusing. Carol's big story is a consequence of something we didn't see happen are only told about. Monica and Kamala's character arcs are grounded in MacGuffins or plot convenience. The villain is forgettable. Now, I do appreciate that some of the ideas here are pretty loopy and things we haven't seen before, but they either don't go far enough (the musical planet) or are so silly, they'd be a better fit in She-Hulk (Ms. Marvel's parents fighting Kree warriors with mops, the Flurken sequence). There's a nod to the fun way Ms. Marvel was told, but it's not only her movie, so it's dropped. With the level of ridiculous humor (amped up in the MCU since Ragnarok's success), it doesn't feel like Captain Marvel's tone either. Watchable, but by the numbers. Marvel needs to get back to what made the first Phase such a success. It wasn't that they had "better/more well-known characters" - Iron Man and Thor weren't Spider-Man or X-Men - but that the stories were character-driven and well told. Now it's all about increased continuity and a roller coaster of laughs and dramatic moments, a formula applied to every film no matter its needs.
To compare the look of Carolina Cavalli' Amanda to Wes Anderson's films, with their symmetrical tableaux and deadpan comedy, is correct, but Anderson wouldn't be so partial to things being so out of focus. But this is well-suited to the story of the eponymous, anti-social young woman who finally finds (or wrangles) a friendship (with a shut-in) and starts to COME into focus, or who, in her lowest moments, fails to find that focus. A portrait of two borderline personalities trying to get their lives on track, even if that track isn't the one everyone else takes. Interestingly shot. Replete with a matter-of-fact irony that makes it sardonically funny. But the moments are grace I want from it are, if not completely lacking, at least rare. But that kind of sentimentality really wouldn't be proper. And so, we can find these usually obnoxious characters amusing and perhaps poignant, but they don't want you to think of them as touching. Being true to itself, it keeps us at a certain distance.
On the surface, it's easy to get that Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is about 9/11, the bus accident that so affects Lisa (Anna Paquin)'s character a stand-in for the second-hand trauma that hit the Western world on that date, whether one had been to New York or not, knew any victim or not (and to the point of the film, more appropriately NOT) - the event is debated in class, the shots of NYC, etc. - there's a lot more going on UNDER the surface, however. Lisa is a teenager who, even in her most selfless moments, is somewhat performative. The opera is a leitmotif in the film because teenage life if operatic. It's all drama (and so the mom who is a theater actress). And the WORLD of the film tries its best to reject that childish notion. The sound design drowns in snatches of conversation, an often continuous mumble of other people's lives distracting from the "plot". A large, very recognizable cast keeps a lot of balls in the air, as if dropping you in the city where you might ask of bystanders, "what's HIS deal?" And indeed, the roles of the accident victim and of the bus driver are to be mysteries Lisa may or may not uncover, may or may not empathize with. Considering she doesn't know herself or the people around her, very often (something she shares with her mother, and I suppose, most everyone in the film), she's also that person dropped in the middle of things (and so, everyone is). The title is a reference to a figure in a poem read in class, exactly once and not referenced again, the point of which is the selfishness of grief - that we grieve not for the dead, but for ourselves, our loss, our feelings. So Lisa can't even be the stated subject of her movie. And now go back to 9/11. If she's to realize that she's just a cog in a greater universe that doesn't care about her drama, her malaise is transferred to that event. As people come to terms with the tragic event, dissect it, get used to it, weaponize it, forget it, dismiss it, it too becomes just one stitch in a larger tapestry. Lonergan's three hours of teen angst explores those ideas, or if they don't, they made me do so.
With Sibyl, Anatomy of a Murder's Justine Triet creates a psychotherapist (Virginie Efira) who quits most of her patients to become a writer, only - and this is her central paradox/irony - despite having a life complicated enough to be a novel, she suffers from writer's block and instead latches on to a new patient's story. And professional ethics be damned. This is actually a question I've struggled with and had debates about. If someone is part of your life, can you use them as fodder for your creative endeavors, or is it THEIR story to tell? What if I become a character in someone else's story? How do I feel about that? And in this case, things are confused further by Sibyl's more and more direct interference in the patient's life, leading to some pretty insane moments no a film set where she is asked to direct something that is uncomfortably close to what's really happening. Where the film doesn't quite work for me is the way it keeps flashing back to memories that point to the mystery of Sibyl's own troubles, the solution of which is rather ordinary. Some very interesting ideas, but they don't really gel.
Triet's In Bed with Victoria (or simply, Victoria, as the original title would have it) has Virginie Efira in a role not unlike the earlier Sibyl - a whip smart but damaged professional woman - but is a much warmer film, and like Vincent Lacoste's Sam, you fall in love with her despite yourself, warts and all. But though there's a romance brewing, to put this in the romantic comedy category is doing it a disservice. It's a portrait of a lawyer who, like all of Triet's protagonists, puts herself in an impossible situation and has to maneuver (not always successfully) ethical dilemmas. Here, it's a court case that involves one of her friends and a number of animal witnesses(!), even as she's suing her ex for using her life in a novel (which again throws us forward to Sibyl). Victoria is often funny, but it's tragic too, and if it IS a romcom, the formula's twists and turns are predicated on psychology rather than plot mechanics. If Sibyl kept me at a remove, Victoria draws me in close.
A tight thriller with uneven "British" accents, My Name Is Julia Ross has Nina Foch get a job as a live-in secretary turn into a nightmare when the household attempts to gaslight her into circumstances that evoke du Maurier's Rebecca. Derivative though that is, it does create a Gothic mood, and otherwise plays more like Film Noir, with violent, evil villains, tense situations, reversals that help both Julia and her adversaries, and a good action climax (despite being marred by some rather terrible day-for-night shooting). Director Joseph H. Lewis has done better - Gun Crazy, for example - and here is sort of doing a poor man's Hitchcock as double-feature fodder (65 minutes? yeah, sounds about right). That means it's better than it ought to be, but also that it leaves you wanting more. And by "more", I certainly don't mean the facile "romantic" epilogue brought to you by the Patriarchy(TM).
Do you think that sometimes YOU might be the problem? Mary Bronstein directs herself as THAT person on the cusp of losing all her remaining friends over the course of a single weekend in Yeast (the title is pretty dirty if you give it any thought), a mumblecore (screamcore might be more apt) indie also starring a young Greta Gerwig. Bronstein, or rather, Rachel is the worst kind of codependent, the "mom" you resent when you're 25. Because she is the straight person opposite the roommate who's giving her the silent treatment (Amy Judd Lieberman) and the chaos agent with borderline personality (Gerwig), you soon come to understand that Alice and Jen are justified in their treatment of her. There's a camping trip from hell - the Safdie Brothers show up out of nowhere, but that's not the hell part - but then, I'd say it's ALL "from hell", which is perhaps why it ends (rather abruptly) at an amusement park Halloween side-show. It's all quite raw, though the camera work does settle down as they get more proficient with it, and as usual, the improvisational dialog in mumblecore makes me wish for wittier scripted moments. Potentially relatable, but you hope you're none of these people.
Fourth in the series, Shadow of the Thin Man is for me the most delightful since the original. By this point, it's clear that Nick and Nora Charles (and Asta the Dog, who finds a LOT of clues in this one) are going to be roped into okay, but forgettable mysteries. So what they need to do is keep the banter up and be given fun gags that involve their romance, their family, and Nick's drinking. Now Junior is a young boy and he's an amusing addition to the cast (in just the right dose), often left at home with the maid so the Charles can do what they're good at - making/drinking cocktails, rough-housing, and solving murders. The case du jour has people dying around sporting events where gambling is involved, and some nice bits at a wrestling match. There's a frame-up and dumb cops and a "dame" and Nick doing physical bits of business to figure out how the crimes were done. Good one-liners throughout keep it from fizzling out.
If you could forget everything and start over, would you? Christos Nikou's Apples asks the question. There's this amnesia pandemic going around, and looking at the protagonist's life before he's taken to hospital, it seems like he's already living in a sort of forgetting. As he is given a new identity and tasks to perform to perhaps shake his memories loose, we might wonder if there isn't some joy in the amnesia. Rediscovering movies and music as if for the first time, for example. But also terror, as hardwired fears and weaknesses are exposed. Apples, the ironic Fruit of Knowledge, are the only thing the character knows he likes. And there's perhaps another amnesiac he might fancy. But the road to self-(re)discovery is a bumpy one, and connecting with people doesn't get easier when your past has been erased (this is a COVID movie, if by some distance, but certainly a film about depression). There's a dark humor at work, the humor inherent in the absurd, but mostly, a sadness.
I'd bet all the drachma I have that 1987's Morning Patrol was the inspiration for Apples, and not just because both lo-fi SF films are from Greece (but that helps). There's a play with memory, and its erasure following trauma here that's very similar, if not as central. Postapocalyptic art house that plays almost on silence at times, it presents us with a woman (and later a man) whose narration is pulled from various novels, wandering through a dank, decayed and deserted Athens, trying to escape its rape gangs and fascist police. It's perhaps a portrait of insomnia and its root causes, anxiety and depression, as the action takes place at night and the heroine literally drowns herself in old movie for a good part of the film. What do you do while no one else is awake, and you're running from these patrols who are just PEOPLE, an innate danger. The man she meets and forces into helping her might be someone she knows, or has known, and in this fatalistic character we might understand why she's running and what she's running from, but nothing is explicit. This is an anxious waking dream that only might lead her, and us, to some kind of understanding or catharsis. It's a real mood, and could easily be boring if yours isn't in sync with it. Ultimately, I respect it more than like it.
It's 1963 and the Czechoslovak New Wave pulls off a procedural space thriller titled Ikarie XB 1. It may perhaps have been screened by Kubrick when preparing for 2001 and I can believe it. The model work is very good. The stark black and white design could have transferred to sci-fi films on through Star Wars. The ship even incidentally has roundels like the TARDIS born that same year. In Czech hands, this trip to Alpha Centauri, not unlike American astronaut adventure from the 50s, becomes a much more internal story. It wants to be a look at the future of space travel, and so imagines how it might really be done and what effects long relativistic voyages would have on the crew (a half-female crew, many travelling as couples, no tokenism here). Consequently, it's not much on plot. (Loosely based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, it shares that DNA with Solaris.) There's certainly a mystery at work when the crew encounters things it can't understand, but it's a small (if important) part of the story. I've read the American dub (Voyage to the End of the Universe) changes the ending to include more of a twist, one the original film hints at (so it works with minimal changes to the dialog). I suppose Ikarie makes the same point, but is more subtle, or perhaps I should say POETIC about it. Given how influential this might be, I'm surprised it's not referenced more often (or not surprised since it's a foreign film).
In Plan 75's too-close-for-comfort future, Japan has decided to reduce its economic burden by offering its seniors a simple, accessible, incentivized euthanasia program. This is viewed as a more humane solution than the one shown at the top of the film, which evokes a real-world tragedy from only a few years ago. It all feels pretty real. More real than Soylent Green's similar mechanism. Too real. Lets hope no governments look at this and think it's a good idea. We follow an old woman who shows us that even if Plan 75 is strictly voluntary, other policies are going to make it more and more mandatory, and so the most vulnerable in our society are going to find no other recourse. But it's also about the toll this kind of policy takes on health/death care workers who have to put the policy into action. How many lies do you have to tell yourself to believe this isn't state-mandated murder? And how long before it becomes the new normal and seniors are just some objectified commodity? It's a downer, but not entirely bleak thanks to the goodness of the protagonists. Might even eke out a happy ending or two (of a kind).
A few years ago, I watched one movie per actor to play Doctor Who (I also did this with the casts of the Star Trek franchise). I've always wanted to try my hand at doing this with the actors who played companions. I've made a list, I've checked it twice, and I'm gonna try it at a rate of one a week, in order of appearance. So our first Companion Film stars William Russell (Ian Chesterton)...
Great premise in Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch, one that foresees the ghoulish nature of Reality TV and still pushes it to enough of an extreme to still be science-fiction today. But barely, and that's one of its problems. Harvey Keitel is a human camera tasked with following a dying woman (Romy Schneider) in a world where such things are rare indeed. So cybernetic implants and all diseases have been cured, and yet it looks like 1980 Scotland in every other respect. There's no world-building beyond its core concepts. And if it's a little dull and uninvolving, it's that it doesn't hammer home any of its points. Keitel falls in love with her? If you say so. All the stuff about his fear of the dark is innate of what, exactly? She's seeking her ex-husband? Sure okay, and always happy to see Max von Sydow, but what was the point there? And indeed, why does she make that decision at the end? With the talent involved, including Harry Dean Stanton (probably the best character in the film) and Doctor Who alumni William Russell, it should have sung. Instead, it seems loathe to develop its intriguing premise and ends up feeling like any old drama about a dying woman escaping a hospital (instead of a TV program).
Comics: I've just read the first 17 issues of Ryan North's Fantastic Four, and let me tell ya, them's good comics. I will even go so far as to say it's Marvel's World Finest, and in fact, even better. Definitely worthy of its Alex Ross covers. I was suspicious when North started the action with a disassembled FF, but the one-off tales of each member (all five, because I have to include Alicia Masters here) are so good, I needn't have worried. The series has found a way to shed some of its status quo without destroying it, do some pretty neat things with the power sets, and build on the lore with some very fun elements. A lot of done-in-ones here that feel rich and innovative, with North evidently reading some science articles to push the boundaries of what can be done with the FF. Weird threats, the leads being lovely, old villains given new life, and a light-hearted atmosphere that occasionally slips into what North is best known for: Humor. Iban Coello is more than up to the task of presenting the wild, fun world of the FF and does most of the art. The first 6 issues (collected as Whatever Happened to the Fantastic Four?) gets the band together and gives them a new home that seems perfect. The next five (Four Stories About Hope - beautifully named) pushes things even further, reminding me of the best Doctor Who stories, or ideas Grant Morrison might have come up with. After that, North goes back to his first love and webcomics success - dinosaurs. Who doesn't love crazy dinosaur action? And then more high concept amusements. The series has made me want to go back and read (and reread) more FF comics, and that might be the highest compliment I can give it.
RPGs: We were missing a player due to physical injury this week, so here's what he missed... It also made the session a little short, because it's one less person around the table. First off, remember that Akashan probe from When Cosms Collide? It was actually an escape pod, and once decanted, awakened a mysterious Akashan version of the character with a Fragmented Existence that's been in the party since the beginning (as the cybernetic loner, the boisterous rocket man, and the randy paladin). Let's call this one the Reality Zen Master. Of course, Akasha is barely described in Torg Eternity, but I do still have my trusty Space Gods sourcebook from the original game, so I devised some Perks unique to the character, taking inspiration from the Paths Perks from Pan-Pacifica, and new Psionic Powers and Gear too. In the adventure that followed, the player tried to find his way into the new personality and juggle all these new abilities, but it was fun to see the other players try to figure him out, especially the (psionic) Realm Runner because this stuff is all his usual wheelhouse, but he couldn't figure out just how the Zen Master was doing it. As for the adventure du jour, there's a Tharkold scenario in Delphi Missions: Rising Storm called Demon Death Race which is just a sketch really. You have to ferry an Important Object across the Blasted Lands while a bunch of bad guys chase you and do vehicle battle with you. The set-up does not say what the Object is, and the chases work, the whole could have lasted 4 rounds or, if battle were involved, seemed interminable. So my version is completely different and involved ferrying President Volkov - painted very patriotically (from the Russian perspective) as the man who is holding the technodemons at bay and why Tharkold has made no advances since the opening gambit of the war - to first get a mysterious artifact from another team (from Storm Break, grrrr) and then bring that down near Moscow where he gives it a mysterious woman who the players recognized as Jezrael (the High Lord's right-hand Thrall), but the characters did not. Torg Eternity GMs might know what happening here, but the players were a little uncurious, with the Realm Runner shaking hands with Volkov at the end but not even trying his psychometric tricks on him. The artifact thus remains hidden in its black piece of cloth to the end. After riding away from the Russian Mob for a few hours (without much incident, sadly, as I hinged things on Drama Cards throwing up Dilemmas that never came - the GM's dice rolls were generally terrible this time around), there's more of a chase out of Tharkold down the Volga River, pursued by drones. Then hop on a friendly VTOL, a nice hotel stay in Minsk, and perfumed invitations by a certain Dr. Grimm (who last had them trapped in an insane asylum), oh crap, why are we so drowsy...
Best bits: First of all, props to the Realm Runner for being so uncurious about the mystery package, because that's absolutely correct role-playing. 1) Volkov gave him a big speech that tapped into his usual xenophobic stance that Core Earth should be for Core Earth humans and 2) the nature of Tharkold made him susceptible to the higher position of the President while also defining himself as team leader (it's always been more of a flat structure with various members claiming they're the leader as a recurring gag). This, despite his in-game attempts to soften his character, leading to a fun comedy double-act between him and the Super-Wrestler who, at his request, keeps him honest and reminds him to be "polite". Given our Wrestler isn't much of a philosopher, he did all the driving while the Zen Master grumbled in the background like Marge Simpson, the only one who thought this was all very suspicious and questioning if they'd be on the right side of history here. The Storm Break crew were - surprise! - the characters these very players used in Tharkold's Day One adventure, having shockingly defected from SHIFT to join its rival organization. When I threw up a shot of a blood-red river on the screen for the last escape, one player said "nice photo editing" and which point I revealed I hadn't color-corrected the photo. It wasn't the Volga, but it was a polluted Russian river that really looked like this. They were more shocked by this than the Storm Break reversal. (I'm always getting props for the way I describe things so disturbingly in Tharkold, I guess this peek at the real world counts.) And though the big chase was slightly uneventful in the end, the Drama Deck did seem to just throw up cards with vehicular mayhem images, so that was a pleasant coincidence.
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