"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Trying to decode the alternate history in Alex Garland's Civil War is a fool's task, as is trying to untangle some kind of direct message about American politics. It's not about that, and will probably be the most misunderstood film of the year, or even the decade, because that's the natural impulse here. What it IS about, on a thematic level, is showing us what's already happening in the world - in Ukraine, in Syria, in Palestine - and giving it an American face, within American landscapes, to make what is far away more immediate to its target audience. The iconography is recognizable as what is transmitted by war correspondents, and therefore, this is the story of journalists and war photographers, the dangers they face (to both body and soul), the techniques they use, and the ethics of the job. It's a vocation that, in the absolute, is apolitical, and so Garland's America is necessarily fuzzy on its politics, a remix of the contemporary USA and of war-torn countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and it's on purpose, I think, that you're never sure which side the journalists are following around at any given moment, or which side is "righteous". Kirsten Dunst is great as a dead-eyed veteran photographer, at the end of her rope even as a younger model (Cailee Spaeny) comes in to slowly replace her in the narrative. The cycle continues. A lot of memorable moments that strike emotionally true in spite of the fantasy setting, mixing the mundane with the shocking in a way that can be missing from real-world footage where the "otherness"of a place might create a distance. But even if you're not an American, Georgia has been in films so much by now, the familiarity should have its effect.
At home: While watching the absolutely delightful Hundreds of Beavers, I kept thinking of the aesthetic of Guy Maddin's similar faux-silent films, and wouldn't you know it, the trailer has a pull quote from him endorsing the movie. If hadn't been sold already... This loopy movie is like a live action Looney Tunes cartoon (though it still has animated elements, both classic funny animals and CG-produced collage animation that made me think of Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction and Fabulous Baron Munchausen) with hundreds of gags and a kind of video game logic. Jean Kayak (great name) is a hapless fur trapper at odds with a variety of animals intent on outsmarting him - and I think it works best when they can rather than the middle part where he's growing in ability - animals played by people in mascot costumes as this is a lo-fi near-silent that I'd love to smuggle back in time and show to unwary 1920s audiences. The gags really build on one another cleverly, and director Mike Cheslik never pulls a shtick once if he can't pull it half a dozen times at least, each time with an amusing twist. But that's damning it with faint praise, because it often provokes genuine laughter. Sometimes it's the small things that do it, but it's also how crazy it all gets as time goes on. And what you thought was just a silly gag? It'll probably turn out to be important to the plot later. It may LOOK like the vignettes in any given Woody Woodpecker, Bugs Bunny or Road Runner cartoon, but it's intricately written so that everything fits like those plastic pieces in the old Mouse Trap board game. A great time!
Looking back at Stargate (for Kurt Russell, of course, and he does provide the film with necessary humanity), I feared it would be much worse than it actually was. The Emmerich/Devlin dumbassery is, of course, present, even at this early stage, with stupid science, unearned coincidences, and bad messaging (if one of your heroes' tragedy is that his son accidentally shot himself with a badly stowed gun, you can't have arming child soldiers as one of your solutions later). It would have gone unnoticed at the time, but Emmerich's belief that conspiracy theorists are right and will save the world is already present (which is one of the reasons I hate his movies so much now). But the Egyptian sci-fi designs are cool, it's a bold choice to subtitle so much of the film (though apparently, Emmerich was going to let it play without translation until a catastrophic preview forced a producer's hand), and I enjoyed watching Russell slowly take the movie away from nominal lead James Spader. Obviously, Stargate went on to have a big legacy on television, though I've never seen more than a couple seconds of ANY of those shows. And several of its supporting players went on to bigger things like Djimon Honshou (here just a henchman) and 3rd Rock from the Sun's French Stewart (here as an annoying, unprofessional soldier). Better than I dreaded, sure, but too problematic for a recommendation.
It would be lying to say I knew what was going on in the first hour of Duelle, even WITH a synopsis. Just elegant women speaking lines in a faux-noir Paris. To me, it felt like director Jacques Rivette was making a Godard film - Noir trappings, stylized poetic dialog, experimental film making - and in your book, that comparison may be a plus. It isn't in mine. Ultimately, it's just that the film takes too long to explain itself, who its characters are, and what motivates them. The second hour is therefore much stronger as we start to understand what's happening. It's a modern fairy tale, with the Daughters of the Sun and Moon, made to taste the human world every year for a number of days, trying to find a jewel that will allow one of them to stay on Earth forever (and reign). Various human beings become their pawns, caught in a web of intrigue as the goddesses quest for the MacGuffin and manipulate them into deadly situations. Visually, Rivette offers interesting lighting, gorgeous fashions (Bulle Ogier and Juliet Berto are astonishingly beautiful in this, with Berto having as many looks as the Moon has phases), and a live score that can be distracting, but forces long takes and necessary silence (there can't be a piano or live band everywhere you go). On repeat viewings, it might grow in my estimation, but after a single one, I respect it more than love it.
God lives in Brussels and he's a terrible a-hole in Jaco Van Dormael's absurdist comedy The Brand New Testament, but the writer-director is, quite frankly, judging him in His Works. From his point of view, his Son ran away from home and ruined everything with his Gospels. This is the story of his 10-year-old DAUGHTER, Ea (thankfully, because he's intolerable and deserves every taste of his own medicine he gets) as SHE runs away from home and attempts her OWN Gospel through her own apostles (most recognizably, Catherine Deneuve) and evangelist, people picked randomly from the crowd who are, like everyone on Earth, trying to parse the paradigm shift Ea has created during her escape. Their stories are ones of loneliness, and therefore makes Ea's Testament one of connection, with oneself, with others, and with the natural world. It is a beautiful piece of work. Van Dormael's image-making is surprising and wonderful. The music is well-chosen. The twists are wild. The characters are poignant. The satire is biting. And for fans of Van Dormael's other films, you might even get a few of their characters folded into this larger world.
Sometimes you're hobby/fandom/passion can get between you and your partner (or prospective partners). Sometimes it can bring you together. Faintheart is a really rather sweet situation comedy that explores this idea, with Eddie Marsan as a meek Viking battle reenactment enthusiast despondent over his recent separation from his wife (Jessica Hynes), losing his connection to his son in the process. Trainspotting's Ewen Bremner is his best mate, a virginal comic shop clerk looking for love on the Star Trek bulletin boards. And between the two of them, and the tween son who might fall in love if he can only get respite from bullies, we get different variations on the theme. Though much of the film paints the "fans" as losers of the social order, the last half hour is both rousing and touching as the characters accept who they are and double down after a period of doubt. Is it possible to grow up without growing OUT of something? Faintheart doesn't reinvent cinema, but it's a smile-inducing British comedy with lots of recognizable faces.
I go to the theater often and I've had a lot of bad experiences with rowdy or disrespectful (also stupid) patrons. Lamberto Bava (Son of Mario) gets it. Demons (co-written by Dargento) is at once a horror pastiche of that kind of movie-goer and in concept, the movie fighting back. You're having a bad time, but you don't want to leave the movie because you're a prisoner of the story. A bunch of quickly-drawn characters are lured to a theater with golden tickets and the demonic summonings on screen slip into the real worlds. As they one by one become Deadites (and if there's a movie that deserves to count as part of the Evil Dead universe, it's this one), the patrons have to band together and either huddle in fear or try to escape. The front half of Demons is the stronger, with its cool interplay between the real world and what's projected on the screen, but the really crazy stuff is at the back, some of which I'm unable to even justify (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). Either way, the gore is very, very gooey. You've been warned. Man, I sort of wish I'd seen this IN a theater. I bet it would be much more effective than my living room.
Shot, or at least presented, on the horizontal plane, like a letterbox ratio on its side, Never Tear Us Apart (or Fisting, if you prefer) creates a voyeuristic intimacy with its formal experimentation, sort of as if we were seeing everything from a door opened just a crack. But it's really a phone's eye view, with chat screens and meme iconography edited in. Or at least, this is how it plays in the first act, when we follow a young gay man's visits to his older lover. I started losing the plot when we moved over to his father (where James Bond imagery takes over, but one can't really ascertain if he's really a spy or just playing at being one) and mother (delusional in that she makes herself relive her son's birth and early years). And then there's the Shadow, a serial killer that's out there and could be one of them, or an urban legend, or a fiction based on news reports since so much of the film seems to be a fantasy. What are we to believe? The claustrophobic shots give a partial picture, which director Whammy Alcazaren may be equating with the view of the world we get from our devices. But the principal theme is sex, perverse and not, which also invites fantasy.
Shievar Olegario's 24-minute entry in the Filipino avant-garde is OctoGod, a cyber horror tale that feels like a high-tech version of Tetsuo the Iron Man with some Lovecraft thrown in, but has such a unique look, it stands on its own. The synopsis tells us the protagonist is a graphic designer who somehow unlocks the door to another dimension, but in 2024, only 5 years after it was made, it takes a rather different bent. It feels like we're inside the mind of an A.I. data mining images so it can create its own "art". A concern of today, but consider that said graphic artist is stealing images off Instagram to manipulate them. He may or may not "travel" elsewhere, but he is certainly possessed, his consciousness captured by the OctoGod, sitting at the center of a web (is it worlds wide?), so we might see here the capture of the artist's soul, resulting in the soullessness of A.I. art. That is, of course, something I'm imposing on the piece from its future, but it's opaque enough to allow for new and different interpretations beyond what it probably is - a nightmare about artistic anxiety. OctoGod is not for everyone (epileptics, for example), but I dug it.
My Companion Film of the week features Katy Manning (Jo Grant)... Frog Dreaming (too Australian a title for marketers in other countries, so it's the woefully generic The Quest in North America and the ridiculous Go-Kids in the UK) stars Henry Thomas (Elliott from E.T.) in an Amblin-like production where kids ride bikes, invent gadgets, puff on cigarettes and kiss grubs (they didn't ENTIRELY get it, then). The film opens like a horror movie, and indeed there seems to be a monster in a quarry pond, which gives Elliott--I mean, Cody--the one American boy in this Australian venue, and his gal pals, an opportunity for adventure, getting into trouble, and sussing out if the Dreamtime is real. Sort of. The movie wants to have its cake and eat it too, so there's both a mundane explanation and a supernatural one, and both appear to be true. Which is fine, but also, both explanations are way over the top given its general tone. And I hate to go after kid actors, but Thomas looks miserable in this, over-serious 90% of the time, and pulling forced smiles the rest. Attempts at humor (and you've got Katy Manning right there as one of the mums) are just that and fall rather flat. It's like a Spielberg film if Spielberg lost his ability to manipulate the audience's emotions.
Books: Fritz Leiber's Swords Against Death, the second collection of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, contains 10 short stories, more or less from the early days of the thieving duo's partnership, when the tragedies of the first volume were still fresh. At least that's what the two tales written for the 1970 printing reinforce, and they're two of my favorites. Leiber is a raconteur who zooms out to build the world of Newhon, throwing away more intriguing concepts than he'll ever write about, and then zeroing in on the anti-heroes' point of view (definitely preferring the Mouser's in this batch - the best stories are those that give them an even share of the POV). The prose is crisp, the fights well described, the tales varied in theme and incident. Where I think Leiber's stories are weakest is in their endings, where I think the final lines lack luster. These aren't short stories with final twists, but they could wrap up with more pith.
Definitely set in the world of Bullet Train, Kōtarō Isaka's Three Assassins at first might appear to remix too many ideas from his most popular novel - hitmen with strange obsessions (none so annoying as Thomas the Tank Engine, thankfully), chapters named after rotating POV characters... - but the sense of deja vu soon subsides as the story progresses. The Whale is a killer with a particular knack for making you commit suicide. Cicada is a knife expert with no scruples, but feeling like he's being exploited by his handler (he's very much the type of weasel that would be played by Steve Buscemi in a movie). And Suzuki ISN'T a hitman, but he's surrounded by them, and is seeking the Pusher, whose whole deal is pushing targets in front of moving vehicles. Three Assassins shuffles through these three points of view as they converge towards the center of a complex web of intrigue where the victims and would-be victims - who appear in the flesh, as memories or even as literal(?) ghosts - may well end up deciding who things will end. A darkly comic page-turner that benefits from a tighter cast than Bullet Train.
Collecting issues #31-60 and Annuals #2-4, the second Fantastic Four Omnibus is where the Lee-Kirby FF really comes together. On the one hand, Joe Sinnott comes aboard as inker (from issue #44) and gives Kirby a real solidity and slickness, even as the King of Comics defines his Marvel style (the mad tech, the photomontage splashes) and gets to drop a few books in favor of, well, his favorites. You get the sense that previous inkers didn't render everything, or that Kirby couldn't draw as much detail because he was on too many projects at once. This batch of issues is also when the book started to be much more serialized, with fights continuing for several chapters, and ongoing subplots taking their time to bloom. The FF have a WORLD now and we dare follow characters other than the team and Alicia Masters - the Watcher, the Inhumans, the Black Panther and the Silver Surfer are all recurring characters, and Johnny's college roommate Wyatt Wingfoot is an honorary member of the team, often more useful than the people who were the blue suit! The cover sells you on the introduction of Galactus; other classic tales contained herein include "This Man... This Monster!", the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm, and Dr. Doom stealing the Surfer's Power Cosmic (the collection also includes a Not Brand Echh! parody of that very tale).
Collecting issues #287-295, Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne Vol. 8 finally ditches the secondary material that has plagued the last couple of releases and finishes Byrne's run on the book (plus a little more, leaving Roger Stern and Jerry Ordway to finish his last story as he flies off to the Distinguished Competition). The most important thing Byrne does in this run is get Marvel out of a nasty time paradox involving Dr. Doom, but you can feel Byrne's fatigue in the stories following. Negative Zone villains return, yet another man whose wishes come true shows up, and a nostalgia-driven Central City story. It's fine, but I'll take Byrne at his word that it was both getting tired, and suffered from editorial interference (Secret Wars II and the Scourge seem to have plagued the last two collections specifically), or what Byrne called "office politics", which could mean anything. After 8 volumes of Visionaries, half of them a reread (I started reading FF comics mid-way through the run), I find myself judging them relatively harshly. At the time, and probably because the comics that followed weren't great (some might even say they were BAD), it seemed a high point for the book. But the run's quality is more variable than I remembered. We're coming down off the bell curve here.
RPGs: We had a dangling scene to play left over from our last Torg Eternity session because having (artificially) filled two zones in Southeast Asia with hope, ripping out a cosm-sustaining stela was indicated. The PCs got fairly lucky with the Drama Deck and despite being pretty low on resources, made quick work of the thing. On of its defense mechanics did throw some virus into the air, which made the villain in their custody turn into a Yokai, but that was as far as complications went. Knowing we'd have a little less time than usual to do my planned on-off, I engineered a "speed run" that used both Dramatic Skill Resolutions each scene as a "ticking clock", but also set a real-world time (10 PM) as the moment everything went boom. Using Fog of War in the Nile Empire Delphi Missions book (albeit setting it in Tanzania), the PCs got a message from former PC Azar who was a Rocket Ranger and now had a team ready to bomb a secret Nile Empire facility... if they could only find it in the weaponized Living Land Deep Mist generated from it! At 10 PM our time, whatever bombs the PCs set would blow, the Rangers would bombard the place, and - ah-HA! looking at my trusty calendar for Near Now 2025 - the full moon would rise, making our lycanthrope Monster Hunter turn into a killer man-bat! Not a complete victory - some Rangers did die in the raid - but almost. Not gonna lie, the Realm Runner blocking the Big Bad in every climactic scene with a Reality Storm is becoming a plotting problem. 10 PM hit with one step to go in the final DSR, big explosions, very close escapes... just as intended in the Nile Empire. And it's just fun to remind players of what time it is and see play speed up (which they only did in the final 5 minutes, never short-changing themselves in terms of role-playing).
Best bits from Grimm House III: The Yokai fell off a cliff in the final battle, which may or may not mean I'll have the villain survive, but it's nice to have options. The Realm Runner immediately tried to trade this successful mission into a Requisition for an Eternity Shard they'd liberated in their very first mission (30 sessions ago). He put a lot of resources into the roll and got it. But see below...
Best bits from Fog of War: The Eternity Shard is from Orrorsh, and when he tried to tap it for possibilities, it started whispering sweet nothings in his ear. Uh-oh... The PCs knocked out some Stormtroopers in a very coordinated attack to steal their uniforms, then realized they were almost naked in those things (Ancient Egyptians, eh?) and had to forego armor while inside the installation. They split up to take care of separate cannon batteries, and of course one group got captured and woke up in the central chamber (while the other watched from the gantries overhead). Good card play: The Super-Wrestler had an escape card to release the trap and jump the bad guys; the Monster Hunter spawned a Nile Empire remote control for his C-4 to blow the fog machine without use of a timer. The PCs resolved the DSR with a turn to spare, which allowed the Akashan to race to the last cannon and blow it as he telekinetically threw himself out the window and everything started exploding. No one came out the same vent, basically. By that point, the Monster Hunter was a monster and had to feed, so full props to the player for making it gory. He grabs one of the knocked-out troopers at the door, takes him into the air and devours him as blood rains down on the party. Keeps acing those corruption checks though...
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