"Accomplishments"
In theaters: There are elements of the new Ghostbusters film that evoke the old cartoon show, like Janine's styling and Slimer being kind of helpful, but also that it feels like a TV series, and that's really Frozen Empire's downfall. The first hour is replete with subplots, trying to serve the cast of Afterlife (with alllll those kids somehow making it to New York), the cast of the original films (I was surprised at how much Dan Aykroyd had to do), and a NEW cast made up of pretty great comics like James Acaster, Kumail Nanjiani and Patton Oswalt. Throw some fan service guest stars into the mix and you'll be wondering when the big bad will show up. Not to say the subplots don't eventually connect to the main action, but the movie really is written like a television mutli-parter where the final episode/reel finally brings out the big guns after several chapters of investigation and character building. So it takes a while to get going, and I do like that third act, but the first two leave little impression on me except some fine comic performances (let down by the pacing) and a plot hole or two (not a good impression to leave). The franchise is just too scared to leave the older characters behind, but also incapable of jettisoning members of its younger cast. Damn it, there's so much going on, I think we got robbed of Slimer actually joining the group.
At home: I'm not sure one needs to watch Disney's Dexter Riley movies in any particular order, because the first of these, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, still kind of drops you into the middle of things as if this were a college comedy series you'd been following for a while. There's perhaps more of a sense of introduction for the characters, but a matter-of-fact one. Perhaps Disney felt the audience had already been introduced to Medfield College and its wacky science in Absent Minded Professor and Flubber years before. In any case, this is the one where academically-inept Dexter Riley gets a computer brain in a lab accident, becomes the captain of the college trivia team, and runs afoul of a greedy criminal played by Cesar Romero, recently off Batman. The science is goofy, the dean of the college is a stock comic foil, and the plot finds opportunities for slapstick where it can. In other words, it's your typical 1960s comedy. But Kurt Russell, Cesar Romero, and the debut of an uncredited Ed Bagley Jr.
Incroyable mais vrai (Incredible But True) is a terrible title, but Quentin Dupieux's Rubber left such a mark on me that I'm up for anything he's penned and directed. In this short feature, a couple buys a house with a time conduit running in the middle of it. It takes you 12 hours into the future (but not vice-versa) and has some rejuvenating effects to boot. The woman becomes obsessed with it, the man doesn't. The subplot also deals with the fear of aging and what one might do to stymie its effects, and it's pretty funny thanks to a jerkwad performance by Benoît Magimel. The film has a late-game extended montage that makes you feel like you fell down the conduit yourself - which I respect, even if at that points one might feel like either the script was too short or was too long and this is all a bit of a compromise. But ultimately, a fine "Twilight Zone" cautionary tale about not accepting one's age. With Dupieux, the only thing you can ever expect going in is to be surprised.
François Descraques takes The Visitor from the Future from webseries to Manga, finally to feature film in 2022, and it overindulges in the comedy elements at the cost of the third act's tension and heart. It's like everyone in this thing is a Shane Black henchman. Everyone, even our point of view character, is kind of dumb, or at least foolish, if not outright morons (to the point where you have to wonder how they ever got into their positions). So when they suddenly become competent at the end, it's hard to believe. The comedy extends to its mish-mash idea of the future, at once able to support life-like robots AND still be a postapocalyptic world with both radiation and, somehow, zombies. So nothing is too credible, and therefore closer to a spoof. And that's fine, there are some fun and funny moments throughout. But the finale has cool action moments and enough of a heart that you wish it had restrained itself a bit more in the first two acts. Like an off-kilter Guardians of the Galaxy, which is something you may be into.
Vicki (strikingly played by Sally Dramé) is a young girl with a superhuman sense of smell in La Mysius' Les Cinq diables (The Five Devils), and one particular smell combination sends her back into the past through her dreams where she sees her parents when they were young. But it may be that her visitations could cause the very trauma they are still all struggling with... and her own existence? There are weird elements in the premise to be sure, and yes, the smell concoctions have a witchy vibe, but I don't entirely agree with all the synopses out there that talk about magic and "fantasy". There's a clue to a science-fiction explanation in the film if you care to notice it. But regardless of the "how", this is a strong drama about family secrets, or not-so-secrets except to a child who has yet to come of age, and fears her world will be turned upside down by what she discovers. Adèle Exarchopoulos may seem like the protagonist - Vicki's mother, struggling with her sexual identity and haunted by the past - but she's just one of the observed. It's Vicki who makes things happen. The final shot is as ambiguous as your mind allows it to be, which I liked as well. Still no clue as to what the title means.
I was not previously aware of material created by the found footage collective, Everything is Terrible!, but I love movies made from clips of other movies (and TV shows), my favorite example being Guy Maddin's The Green Fog. The Great Satan creates the story of the Devil himself and how he has wormed himself into the hearts of Americans everywhere, so beware! History might be a better word than "story" here, its closest analogue is perhaps Häxan (which is among the clips). There are two big threads in terms of repurposed material. One is gory horror schlock, and if you're a gore fiend, it sometimes acts as a clip show of your favorite slurpy disturbia. The other is programming made especially for Christians and that's where, I think, The Great Satan is at its best, comparing what devil worship is supposed to be about with cringy child indoctrination videos from the "other side". It highlights how the fear mongering from televangelists, etc. is kind of the promotional arm of the Beast. But even if it didn't have something this interesting to say, I'm always keen to look at such a montage and see where the new juxtapositions take my brain.
My Companion Film of the week stars Michael Craze (Ben)... Scene 1 of Satan's Slave - Michael Gough is a satanist sacrificing a woman to the Devil. Scene 2 - A psycho kills his date in an old manor. Scene 3 - A woman prepares to leave her boyfriend for the week to go visit relatives and admits she's having premonitions. These three characters and concepts will converge, but all the scenes really have in common is that each woman is naked. But more importantly, it's an example of how the pacing is absolutely all over the place in this grotesque exploitation hodgepodge. Part Gothic, part goreporn, perhaps inspired by EC Comics in the way it delivers a couple of head-scratching twists at the end, Satan's Slave has trouble picking a lane. If you like your exploitation films with nudity, gore and sexually-charged violence, you'll find something to like, but as a story, it seems to spend time on the wrong things and the visions could have been used better to motivate a climax that makes sense instead of what we actually got. Can't quite recommend.
Books: Going back to the beginning of the Marvel Universe as we know it with Fantastic Four Omnibus vol.1, collecting the first 30 issues and first Annual of the series by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. There's a definite sense that they're working from the tradition of monster stories and strange tales more so than what was being doing with superheroes at the time, but also forging a new way to DO comics, with a greater emphasis on duelling personalities and an increasing intertwining of the shared universe characters. It takes a while for Kirby to truly become Kirby, which only comes towards the end of the collection when 1) he's not drawing so many of the other books and 2) Chic Stone comes on as inker and gives the art a stronger polish. The collection includes some sketches that show that the Thing wasn't as rocky at first possibly due to the loose inking. Read all in one go, instead of years, some of the tropes can be a little redundant (the Torch-Thing feud, Doom and Sub-Mariner showing up yet again, etc.), but the comics are fun and, of course, seminal. The Omnibus includes the letters pages, with some missives sent in by future comics pros, as well as text pieces written by pros FOR the collection. One of the points addressed in the letters column is whether or not the Invisible Girl is useless or not and you can actually see Lee and Kirby address it in the stories. Sue gets a power up a lot sooner than I thought!
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