"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Can you become the thing you pretend to be? Definitely. But be careful about what that is. My favorite Richard Linklater film in years, Hit Man is a full entertainment - a comedic take-off from a real story about a college philosophy professor who posed as a hitman on the weekends in police sting operations who eventually falls for one his clients/suspects, at which point you fear he's veering into Film Noir territory. It's very funny, but it's really sexy too, with powerful chemistry between the leads. Glen Powell gets to show a lot of range in the various hitman guises (many inspired by movie killers, I wish I had a decoder ring), creating a real audition tape for himself. Not that he needs it post Top Gun; he seems to be in everything these days. Adria Arjona also shows she should be having a better career than she's had to date (like, she was in Morbius, yo). And despite the suspense, the hot romance, and the laughs, it's still recognizably a Linklater films where characters are driven by key conversations, and the whole thing is foregrounded by philosophical discussions in the classroom.
At home: I bet there's at least one film history thesis out there called "The Safdie Brothers and the Cinema of Desperation". Judging from the thanks cards at the end, Daddy Longlegs is at least partly biographical, with the two boys standing in for the Safdie Brothers themselves, even though the style here is more mumblecore than biopic. While this plays well with the very natural performance of the kids, I usually find it painful to watch actors "improv" nervous conversations. But then, the father (Ronald Bronstein) is a nervous wreck. He only has his kids two weeks out of the year, and probably for good cause - his life is out of control, and it's not always his fault. It's a vicious cycle. If you don't see your kids more than that, you want to give them a good time and not be a disciplinarian (plus, could you be, since they don't see you as an authority figure?), but you've also got a life that isn't in any way "child-proof", because they're not there 50 weeks out of the year. Chaos breeds chaos in this case, and the more he wants his kids there, the less he's likely to keep them. A bustling New York City makes that chaos manifest, a place where you could get mugged by a Abel Ferrara (of all people) or be haunted by one of Nemo's Rare Bit Fiend.
There's a real love of movies and anything-goes attitude in Spike Lee's earliest films, and it's a joy to discover them. Case in point, School Daze, which is a musical, albeit one that doesn't really follow musical rules. Sometimes the songs are diegetic, sometimes they're huge productions, sometimes they're just this side of school cheers. It doesn't matter. Some have called this movie a bit slapdash, trying to make too many points and cover too many issues. Again, I don't think it matters. It's about college life and this is kind of like what it's like. You're being pulled this way and that, by interests, by politics, by your hormones and freedom away from home. It SHOULD be a little slapdash. Strikingly, it starts with Laurence Fishburne leading a demonstration against his mostly African-American college not divesting money from Apartheid South Africa, which should sound familiar to anyone watching in 2024. His character is at odds with the "wannabe whites" represented by "Greek" frats and sororities, led by the power couple of Giancarlo Esposito and Tisha Campbell (yes, this is a movie where Martin Lawrence's sitcom wife is boning the villain from Breaking Bad). What it means to be black and proud is different from grouping to grouping, and the kids struggle to find where they belong. While this is a heightened reality, I found the movie quite relatable - I studied and then worked for years in student activism at a minority university - and people will always tend to chuck solidarity in favor of tribalism if they can. College is where you should be learning not to do that. And Spike Lee makes that point.
1961's The Day the Earth Caught Fire is obviously a response to nuclear proliferation, but not an OBVIOUS response. We're not dealing with a nuclear war, but rather with testing disrupting the Earth's axis and accelerating climatic change to disaster movie proportions. Years before that would become a popular genre. (We might also credit its scenes of an empty London for similar fare in 28 Days Later.) The impending doomsday is told through the eyes of the media - the media of the day, which feels almost utopian compared how things would be handled today, utopian but for the end of the world, of course. Ethical, witty, and above all human journalists are given cracking, fast-paced dialog in what is essentially a newspaper procedural. But they also find time for a little romance, and Janet Munro is so lovely (and well integrated) that it never feels like a distraction. Or perhaps we want one, even need one, in those circumstances. So... are you of those who will report the news to the bitter end? Or will you be splashing our last water reserves around like there's no tomorrow? Choose now.
Michael Bay isn't quite Michael Bay yet in Bad Boys - it's his first film, after all - reserving his trademark stylish motion for the action beats and transitions, but the film pretty much STOPS for dialog scenes. There's a feeling that because the stars have backgrounds in comedy, they can just improvise banter and it'll be good, but it goes on forever, and it's NOT that funny. In fact, the dialog is pretty dumb across the board, the characters badly motivated and spewing nonsense. The number of times someone says "ENOUGH!" or "SHUT UP!", they should have realized they should turn it down a notch and cut this down to the energetic 90 minutes the film deserved (it tries my patience at almost 2 hours). Bad Boys minted Will Smith as an action star, and he pulls it off, but woof, Martin Lawrence really DOESN'T. I would say he's the main problem. He's over-acting and making gurning expressions and making us realize the script makes ALL these cops highly incompetent (including, and perhaps most of all, they captain Joey Pants). Téa Leoni is a bright spot, but Bay doesn't work to make her continued involvement believable, and Marg Helgenberger is completely wasted. We're left with a pretty standard buddy cop plot and a memorable musical theme, but so much annoying "comedy bickering" that I can hardly believe I had a good reaction to this when I saw it in theaters.
1938's The Strange Mister Victor offers a comedic absent-minded performance from Raimus, as a well-to-do merchant in a small town in the South of France, but his nervous energy is channelled differently when we realize he's also a ruthless fence who deals with underworld types on the regular. We head deeper into crime thriller territory when he kills one of his cronies, but the film keeps surprising us with a time jump that shows the wages of guilt and how, many years on, the odd Mister Victor has been served by his actions. It's surprising because a lot of films would have stuck to him during the manhunt and used his native anxiety to build a stifling fiasco. Instead, this is delayed, and he comes out of it more slick than anxious, though it's also the portrait of a self-important man who believes himself perhaps more clever than he actually is. While Raimus is very strong here, the setting does a lot of heavy lifting too, creating an intimate few blocks where everyone knows everyone, giving the story a nice inter-connectivity.
It's a little bit as if Norman Bates hadn't killed anyone (on purpose anyway) and walked out of the institution in 1968, isn't it? In Pretty Poison, Anthony Perkins is a man with an overactive imagination and perhaps some strange ideas, but just how deluded is he? I'm not entirely sure he is! When he meets Tuesday Weld and makes her believe he's a secret agent on an important mission - whether he believes it himself or not - he gets more than he bargained for. She's all too willing to let things go too far, perhaps even the MAKE them go too far. A nicely twisted thriller that also works as a dark comedy, with Perkins in great form and ultimately more self-aware than you'd think a mental patient normally would be. Accept that it IS 1968 and a grown man could get involved with a 17-year-old (the actors are both older than their characters) to avoid some discomfort, but you have been warned. A fun one you've probably never heard of.
The death of Bambi's mom is the cultural touchstone of that movie, but it's surprising when you watch it that it occurs at the halfway point, and then we jump in time and Bambi's a young adult and all the animals are - let's choose our words carefully - mating. It's pretty incredible how much The Lion King owes to the 1942 classic. Bambi is essentially an excuse to show off Disney's high level of animation, rendering cute forest animals yes, but also making them move like proper animals, putting them in beautifully painted environments, and creating sequences like the night fight and the blazing forest. There isn't much of a story, per se, just vignettes from the life of a faun and then a young buck on which to hang various animal gags and a message about man's ability to destroy nature. But like Fantasia, it often plays as animation for its own sake, and there's nothing wrong with that. The tone is somewhat odd, with cutey-pie performances (especially when the friends are young) and innocent romance jostling with what we know to be happening. For example, how can this universe have Faline fall in love with Bambi, but also have to respect the winner of a mating battle? But it's a great achievement in animation, and the only thing I find rather dated is the Lawrence Welk music.
Kylie Travis growls her way through the time loop thriller Retroactive as one of the least competent police person ever put to film (fine, I guess she's a hostage negotiator - and a failed one at that - so she doesn't need to know how to handle a gun) who, after she has car trouble in the Texas desert, hitches a ride with a psychopathic Jim Belushi and his long-suffering girlfriend. The ride ends with her murder, but Kylie runs to a bunker where time travel experiments turn the clock back 20 minutes so she can attempt to stop Belushi. Again and again. And the more she tries, the more chaotic things become. And like I said, she's not very good at what she does, so the final solution may not be that cathartic (but cathartic enough, I admire the fact that no one pulls any punches). As a time travel narrative, it's got a couple of plot holes, but nothing outrageous. As a thriller, Belushi gives a big, nasty performance that's worth seeing. M. Emmet Walsh is kind of wasted as the simpering gas station guy. Ultimately, it's Travis' unconvincing performance that does this one in, and I would have flipped her with the girlfriend (Mike Hammer's Shannon Whirry) in a heartbeat. But I can only go back 20 minutes and the film was made in 1997.
Wim Wenders' The American Friend perhaps plays a little differently if you don't realize Dennis Hopper is playing the "Talented" Mr. Ripley - I admit I didn't clue in until late, as I don't have any experience with the novels, this one adapting "Ripley's Game" - but I didn't mind the added layer of ambiguity. In short, a man with a potentially fatal blood disease is conned into committing murder for hire out of existential desperation for medical treatments and/or money for his family, and all because Ripley felt he slighted him in a casual encounter. Hopper is great, but it's really told through the eyes of his victim, and Bruno Ganz gives a full, textured performance. It's Noir, but colorful Noir, Wenders and cinematographer Robby Müller using blocks of pure color, striking highlights and interesting patterns to contrast the story of corruption. It's gorgeous to look at, and felt like Wenders was making a Fassbinder film, with a nod towards Hitchcock as well. Story aside, it's a masterclass in using space on film. Spaces as large as cities, or as cramped as train bathrooms are beautiful shot, used to TELL the story and not just as setting and backgrounds... Beautiful, beautiful work.
A real - or real enough - Cold War story told in 6 episodes, A Spy Among Friends explores the now-declassified scandal surrounding the defection of a top MI-6 agent in the early 60s. In particular, through the lens of the British class system, since it would seem the good old chaps who ran the show just couldn't imagine one another going communist-side. After a debriefing, Kim Philby (Guy Pearce) escapes to the Soviet block, and suspicion falls on his best friend and debriefer (Damian Lewis), layering in some irony as neither man's superiors know of they can trust them. They are, after all, naturally and professionally duplicitous. And we don't know who to trust either, as it's all wheels within wheels, and the memory-like structure of the series reveals things only gradually and somewhat obliquely. For me, however, it's Anna Maxwell Martin, as the fictional MI-5 debriefer Mrs. Thomas, who brings it all together. Literally, in that she's a device used to make other characters tell us the story, but also figuratively, as the lower-crust, minority character who has an eye on a service blinded by tradition.
My Companion Film of the week features the first Romana, Mary Tamm... The Odessa File adaptation pulls the same trick as the novel by Frederick Forsyth, which is to say it's based on true events - an Egyptian plot to throw hundreds of missiles at Israel in the early 1960s, if only an organization of Nazis in hiding can supply them with the rockets - though there's more "alleged" than "true" here. Certainly, John Voight as a crusading German journalist who picks up the ODESSA's trail and has a hand in stopping them is fabrication. In terms of paranoid thrillers, it's a little "made for TV" and not as scary as we want it to be, despite the plot elements offering a frisson for tapping into current events. And I could do without the final twist. But it's still adequately suspenseful, and makes use of great German locations, as well a stable of recognizable British actors like Derek Jacobi, Mary Tamm and (not sharing the screen with her, but to play opposite her in Doctor Who's The Androids of Tara) Peter Jeffrey.
Books: Collecting FF #61-93 and Annuals #5-7 (though just the cover of that last Annual since it was all reprints), Fantastic Four Omnibus vol.3 shows Kirby in great form, as he's finally found his inker. I think Joe Sinnott is THE Fantastic Four inker (it's all about how you render the Thing). Every issue now includes a big ker-pow moment at a time when artists weren't doing splash pages beyond page 1, and there's even a point where Stan lets the art breathe without dialog (but exactly once). In terms of stories, we're moving into longer story arcs and evolving subplots. It's unfortunate that one of these - Sue's pregnancy - makes Reed bench her for a lot of issues. She's either pregnant or "the mother of my chiiiiiiiild!!!!!", even though every time she shows up, she proves herself the most powerful member of the team. But it's still more palatable than clingy Johnny treating Crystal - Sue's replacement - as if she needed protecting and getting in her and his own way. The gender politics in this book are near unbearable. They also leave the baby nameless for over a year (comic book time), which is kind of ridiculous (the "plot thread" is still dangling at the end of the book). The boys are still cranking out key Marvel concepts - the character who would become Adam Warlock, Psycho-Man, the Kree, Quadimodo, and Annihilus all get ther starts in these issues - in addition to returning foes, and giving a lot of play to the Inhumans and the Silver Surfer. The collection also includes a lot of Not Brand Echh material, which I have a hard time finding funny, and a lot of penciled and/or inked pages, enough of them that you could easily have squeezed in another issue instead.
RPGs: When one of my players left his Paladin as Baron of a fairy tale kingdom in Northern Aysle to work on another character, it set Sir Osfrid up for more adventure. We vowed to return to him once a month (in game time) to see what he was up to. I gave him some rumors and situations going on in his region a couple weeks ahead of time and we met for less than an hour to resolve his plans for the month. While he dabbled in regional politics, the big move was to personally scout North for the source of the gloomstorms - foul, unnatural weather robbing the land of light, color and joy. He finds the dark clouds coming out of a Finnish volcano resurrected by Uthorion's evil priests and activating his Giant Armor, stomps into the ritual and a large garrison of Vikings loyal to the High Lord and stops them (beating a Heroic test). The point of these micro-sessions isn't to carry out full combats (or even role-play), but to make skill rolls and interpret results (Mishap-Failure-Standard-Good-Outstanding). The player has a single hand of cards to play with (that Setback was lucky), and react to what happens within the action undertaken.
Comments