"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Halfway between found footage and mockumentary, Last Night with the Devil is an incredible showcase for David Dastmalchian (after years of seeing him in supporting parts), here playing 70s late night talk show host Jack Delroy, a man who has lost much in his bid to beat Carson in his time slot. But his soul..? After "Behind the Music"-style context, we're shown the last episode of his show, a Halloween special where there's an attempt to summon a demon (for ratings), a show that goes off the rails. The 70s-ness is extremely well done. The way the characters are styled, as well as how these shows looked and unfurled. The "behind the scenes" footage is problematic, because the characters never acknowledge THAT camera and it seems like they wouldn't be saying what they're saying if a documentary crew were present. The phantasmagoria at the end has an explanation of sorts, but not really. I think we've broken the conceit by that point. I had a lot of fun with Last Night, and I do recommend it, but its "real footage" premise just doesn't QUITE work.
At home: Scorsese's dark comedy After Hours has been called a "yuppie nightmare", which WAS a kind of subgenre in the 80s and early 90s there for a hot minute. Give or take The Game, this is probably the darkest of the lot, though not without its smirks. Griffin Dunne plays Paul, the kind of guy who would avoid keys thrown at him instead of catching them. He makes ONE unsafe decision on impulse and pays the price, proving he (we?) should always play it safe. In the span of one night, he meets a lot of experienced comic actors (among them Teri Garr, Cheech and Chong, and Catherine O'Hara), but his journey is one of constant emasculation, not only from the women who initially show an interest in him, but from things as innocuous as bathroom graffiti and mouse traps snapping shut near a bed. That image is pregnant. He's a rat in a maze - I feel like they should have made him a more active participant in the rat race instead of a "word processor" - tempted by cheese, but threatened with castration (if rats could conceive of such a thing), duelling primal instincts. And yet, though the themes are interesting, I'm not sure it really comes together. We're focused on him and miss out when other characters disappear from the narrative, and I'm not sure we know what he learned from the experience. Entertaining, but an uncompleted pass.
Be careful how you treat your friends... As Mikey and Nicky begins, the latter (John Cassavetes) is a low-level gangster who has called his colleague and childhood pal (Mikey, Peter Falk) for help. He's sure their boss has put a hit out on him. And so follows a night of paranoia where the audience is progressively ahead of Nicky in terms of who he can trust. The movie feels raw and semi-improvised (which, as I found out, it was) and is essentially a two-hander between two neurotic forces of nature. Nicky probably deserves what he gets - he's such an A-hole - and it's something we discover through Mikey's responses to him. This is a friendship on the rocks, one that has been neglected, taken for granted, and was rooted in pecking order masculinity in the first place. But has it deteriorated to the point where Mikey would sell him out? There are surface answers to that, but also deeper, more ambivalent ones.
Paul Walker is told to get rid of a gun by his boss, but it falls into a kid's hands instead in Running Scared, a stylish action "one-nighter" which acts as a violent picaresque for both characters. Unfortunately, Wayne Kramer's style is more distracting than interesting, with dumb flashes to show how Walker is figuring out clues, but basically telling us what WE'VE already figured out. It's not that complicated. Feels more like the flair is used to hide low production values (especially when it comes to fights, which are edited to impair clarity), and I mean, this is a movie where the Czech Republic often doubles for New Jersey. Still, there is some imagination at play - the hockey rink sequence, for example - and Vera Farmiga (the sexy mom) has her own bit of heroism, but a lot of the movie goes for shock value, failed to kill its darlings at the script stage, and is too long for what it is. It tries hard, but in the end, it's getting in its own way.
I had read and enjoyed Jaroslav Kalfař's Spaceman of Bohemia some five years ago and was very intrigued when a film version was announced. Then it came out as simply "Spaceman", starring Adam Sandler, and I feared the worst. But what we get here is sad, depressed, restrained, dramatic Sandler, and despite the title made generic, it's somehow still about the first Czech cosmonaut, nothing has been Americanized (except in the sense that the Czech Republic has joined the Western world post-Soviet era, which was always part of the novel), and though it cuts off the last bit of the story, it hedges very close to the source material. Naturally, those who haven't read the book will be befuddled by the depressing tone and perhaps think it inspired by the COVID lockdowns. But this is a loneliness that transcends the pandemic. It's about being alone even when you're with other people because you - YOU! - have failed to open yourself up to them. The film may well recontextualize this for the COVID-era, as the novel was more about the Republic coming to terms with its isolation behind the Iron Curtain, something that doesn't really come across as strongly in the movie. Things that work in a book and all that. We're still left with a melancholy oddity that evokes Cast Away as much as Interstellar, with the volley ball replaced with an alien spider therapist. As a fan of the novel and of strangeness in general, I was reasonably satisfied.
Ozu's Tokyo Twilight bears its title well. If the family is normally the stand-in for post-War Japan as a culture, it feels like the end of that culture. The film is filled with wives leaving husbands and parents abandoning children - it is is principally the story of two sisters' reactions when their estranged mother returns to the fold - but it's more than that. A lot of post-War films are about the Americanization of Japan, and certainly, there are Western-style offices, drinks, cars and fashions here, but I'm more intrigued by the Chinese elements. These characters eat Chinese noodles and play Chinese games. It's like Ozu is saying that Japan destroyed itself and is being conquered by the countries it tried to conquer in the first half of the century. It's all about Japan being on the wane - culturally, morally, historically - and therefore so is our starring family (which again features a heartbreaking performance by Ozu's grande dame, Setsuko Hara), but the film isn't without hope. It's not yet night, only twilight. Of course, when has the sun been known to reverse direction..?
My Companion Film of the week features Frazer Hines (Jamie McCrimmon), but blink and you'll miss him... I often forget that James Clavell directed movies, and that when he took on a novel adaptation, it wasn't one of his. J.B. Pick's The Last Valley is set during the 30-Years War and Clavell's film wastes no time telling us the religious cause of the war is really just an excuse for looting and massacring the peasants of Europe. Omar Sharif is trying to escape the war when he stumbles on an untouched alpine valley, but soldiers led by Michael Caine soon follow and he convinces them not to destroy this sanctuary, but instead live in peace with the locals. They go on to forge a new society, precariously teetering on the edge of discovery by outside forces and superstitions and political moves from the interior. The film is a critique of organized religion and its exclusionary qualities. Here are a bunch of Christians who want to destroy each other for not worshipping correctly, though on the whole, they're wielding their faith like a club used to make others submit to their will. The locations are beautiful enough that you come to think humanity doesn't deserve this Eden.
Shorts Roundup... Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Delights: I'm a big fan of Bosch, so listening to erudite French people try to come to terms with what he painted (and likely failing) is one of the Delights.
She and Her Cat: Shinkai's impressionistic style is well suited to shorts, and I love how everything is so photo-real, but the cat (or perhaps its idea of itself) is super-cartoony, highlighting the two perceptions - the cat's happiness and the girl's despondency. It's true that being loved by a cat is a lonely affair...
Voices of a Distant Star: What would a giant robot anime be like if Shinkai did one? The action is solid, but like the rest of his work, it's really about what impressions the lead characters have, and like Your Name, uses science-fiction to create a distance between star-crossed lovers. There's a sense that this isn't really happening and stands as a metaphor for a real-life event - Evangelion is a probable influence - but it's just out of reach. Which fits the theme.
Books: Collecting issues #258-267, Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne Vol. 4 also includes Alpha Flight #4 and Thing #10 (the first being a pointless crossover to help sell Alpha, the second actually where the FF are whisked off to the Secret Wars). We're starting to get into peak John Byrne FF here, with spectacular battles (the roughness of the previous volume is gone) and key storylines. Doctor Doom gets blasted into atoms(?), Reed Richards is on trial for saving Galactus' life, She-Hulk joins the team (at the tail end there), and the book ends on a family tragedy. Reading these in quick succession, I do get a sense that Byrne was improvising a lot of his storylines. Johnny's love triangle is upended when 4 months suddenly go by and we're TOLD what happened there. Sue's pregnancy motivates a move to the suburbs and secret identities, but it's all going to be walked back by the next volume. And of course, editorially-mandated events (Secret Wars, Assistant Editors' Month) no doubt threw some spanners in the works, and one wonders how much lead time he had to make changes and how thought-through these were. But despite being too quick to cut off dangling plot threads, he's doing a good job of keeping things exciting and looking cool.
RPGs: Big moves in our Torg Eternity game when I let the players deal once and for all (well, kind of) with Pan-Pacifica's Contagion, though it took a LOT of resources to get through the climax and make it happen. I used the Dr Y adventure for this, but made the Cure more immediately available. No waiting, vaporization in Kyoto's city center, instant gratification. And instant Kanawa taking the credit. This is actually later in Year One than the game's makers would have it (they leaned back from it pretty quick after the real world suffered its own pandemic), but I felt it was a good time in our game (Day 184) because we had a new Akashan PC, and he could 1) discover the Contagion is based on the Comaghaz, a virus that ran roughshod through his now-destroyed home cosm centuries ago (oh Gaunt Man, you're such a nasty scavenger) and 2) have the skills required to help bring the cure to fruition. A pretty neat multi-cosm final scene fighting a mutating Yokai they had to wrangle rather than kill (her anti-bodies had to stay fresh), preceded by hordes of Infected that had to be mowed down or avoided. But it was kind of the last hurrah for those kinds of scenes (barring failure, of course), so it felt right. My great disappointment is that even the usual suspect didn't play a romance card on Dr Yi (my version of Dr Y), which would have made her sacrifice more poignant.
Best bits: I can always count on our Super-Wrestler to overdo it when given a weakness to play, and his photosensitivity after getting infected (using some of my home-made Infection cards - now on DriveThruRPG!) was pretty over the top - dark hotel lounge, sunglasses and still complaining. A lot of trolling of the group's self-proclaimed "leader" (the Realm Runner) this time around, both in play (the Monster Hunter is really done with his over-cautious approach as he prefers to go in guns blazing and it generally works, especially on Mooks) and around the table (when he dropped from the infection and needed First Aid and the Akashan offered to save Dr Yi by throwing the Runner into the infection circle. It all came to a head when the Runner disconnected and Mishaped on his reconnection roll. This guy's a Core Earth zealot, see, so desperate to NOT transform. Everyone started to goad him into keeping the result, but he ended up trading for a Second Chance card (after arrogantly having refused a Reconnect card early, haha) and undoing it. He was pretty maxed out after that. As for Dr Yi's sacrifice, I played it so that the players didn't know she was infected, so the infected Wrestler was actually about to propose himself, reluctantly, when she revealed she was eligible and willing. I don't know how close he thought he came to losing his character. Wait, let me ask. Yeah, he totally thought he was done for and was reaching for one of his Day One character sheets. The Wrestler actually had a pretty good moment where he slung the Yokai back into the circle as if he were throwing someone in the ropes and the monster wound up hog-tied before the end of the Dramatic Skill Resolution. Calendar-wise, some good bits too. The date just happens to be when there's a change at the top of Kanawa Corporation, so Reiko's apparent rise to power is now linked to this affair. And a few weeks ago, the PCs helped Volkov deliver a secret weapon to Tharkold's High Lords' thrall and the players were shocked to hear the news that she assassinated the High Lord with it! (Goodbye Kranod, you sucked.)
And if I'm to review the product... Dr. Y and the Jiangshi & Kanawa Operations is quite the mouthful, but that's because it's really two products smooshed together, and that's perhaps the unfortunate thing. I'll explain. The Operations back-half has some interesting ideas about pulling off con jobs and heists in Torg Eternity, ideas that feel inspired by the Leverage RPG and perfect for the intrigue of the game's Pan-Pacifica Cosm. It seems a bit abstract at times and I wish there had been more examples to explain how to pull all of this off, but mostly, I wish the Dr Y adventure in the FRONT half had made use of it! There's no real connection between the two halves, however, except that they both appear to be material cut from the Pan-Pacifica releases. That said, Dr Y and the Jiangshi is a great 2-Act adventure that really puts the players in the driver's seat when it comes to dealing with the Contagion once and for all(ish). This is an element Torg Eternity leaned away from for obvious real-world reasons, but you can at least make the players' characters directly responsible for its cure! Infiltration, zombie hordes, and drastic measures make this one of the better scenarios I've read for Pan-Pacifica, and I'm always looking for opportunities to make my group's actions have an impact on the global stage. Whether you're going to use the Operations rules or not (and I think you could at least cannibalize how to handle spy/thief stuff from it), the adventure itself is well worth the price of admission.
Improv: And this weekend, I organized an improv show that was based on the Milton-Bradley classic, The Game of Life. Basically, I sat at the board with a camera hanging over it, projecting the action on the wall. Four players would act out scenes based on where the little car landed (skipping over those dang Pay Days and other boring money concerns) until we got, over 90 minutes of comedy spectacle, a character's entire life from the moment they got out of high school to their retirement. The audience of course made choices for them, playing the role of Destiny. The result was goofy fun. Marty got to be the protagonist - a one-hit wonder who married his old college professor (at which point, an older couple left the room because it was a same-sex marriage, I kid you not) and eventually killed a man and recycled himself as a policeman (the satire was biting here), but died rich (his tell-all was a bestseller) and fell into his dead husband's arms in the afterlife. The audience gave very weird prompts (they go fishing - what fish? - squid?! Okayyyy), and that's all part of the fun.
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