"Accomplishments"
In theaters: The problem with Furiosa is, of course, that it's a prequel and therefore a lot of its results are foreordained. We know where these characters will end up, which will survive, and which are unlikely to. We don't always know where Furiosa will succeed, but we certainly when she must fail. And being set in the same Wasteland as Fury Road, there's a certain sense that we're revisiting old haunts, so the world building isn't as novel as in the previous film. That said, it's still pretty cool. We spend a rather long time with Young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy has such a distinctive face, the poor actress had her face digitally manipulated to fit), and while I like that version of the character's resourcefulness, the movie REALLY picks up when the lead is squarely in the driving seat (well, a little before that, if we take it literally). There are some great action scenes from that point - the attack on the war rig, the Bullet Farm fight - and Tom Burke (who looks like a young Stacy Keach here) is a strong mentor/partner for teenage(?) Furiosa. She's a badass with or without. As for Chris Hemsworth's Dementus, a sort of neo-Roman wannabe Renaissance Man, he's often too goofy for me to really tap into his menace, but ultimately, he's a coward who got ahead of himself, and his last stand in particular has a Shakespearean undercurrent I rather enjoyed, even if I wasn't always convinced Dementus was as entertaining as he must have been on the page. Nevertheless, a good time at the movies.
At home: While we do see the serial killer that terrorized New York in 1977 and the cops that hope to catch him, Summer of Sam is a Spike Lee film through and through, and is much more about a South Bronx Italian-American community under threat and how it reacts with fear and paranoia. Lee focuses on two best friends whose friendship is tested during this time - John Leguizamo, who routinely cheats on his wife (patently insane given that Mira Sorvino has never been lovelier), and Adrien Brody, a punk rocker whose adopted cultural differences make him a suspect for the murders in the neighborhood. No one's thinking straight in this cast, whether because of drugs, alcohol, sex, love, heat, or straight up madness, and things spin out of control. It's also a love letter to the late 70s, and Lee includes a lot of historical detail, which does mean the movie rambles a bit, but it also lends a certain authoritative authenticity to the proceedings you might not get just with music and fashions. And if you're doing a "70s film", you can't really be criticized for giving it the meandering feel of a 70s movie.
I've always loved Spike Lee's playfulness and it's definitely on show in Mo' Better Blues, in addition to some great jazz and blues, with Denzel Washington as the dangerously named Bleek Gilliam, a trumpet player and band leader who has put all his eggs into the same musical basket, so to speak. His music is more important than the women he loves, the musicians he leads, or other people's music. The irony is that he stands to lose everything because of the one person he might care about more than the work - his childhood friend and patently useless manager played by Spike Lee himself. Is there something for Bleek after he sounds his last note, or is jazz his only possible mistress? A story of obsession and non-pharmaceutical addiction that Lee might be equating with film making (I couldn't say), but that resonates with anyone who's put the purity of their work/art before what others call "life" (*raises hand*). Washington is great, as usual (MORE than usual). Lee gives us a lot of interesting shots, two arguments for the price of one, and a very clever, redemptive ending.
Watching Mississippi Masala for a young Denzel Washington, but charmed to find he's playing opposite an even younger Sarita Choudhury, here in her first role, long before she would become one of the go-to actresses of Indian descent in television and film (Homeland, Hunger Games). She plays Mina, whose family had to leave Uganda during the Amin regime. Love is on the wing when she meets Demetrius, a man outside her cultural circle. The romance is pretty straightforward, but for the culture clash (and even so, she's a modern Americanized woman), but director Mira Nair uses it to present a subtle exploration of race relations. It's not just that Mina's community goes from ally to enemy when one of their own is "threatened" (so to speak), but that her father, who considers himself a Ugandan where Asians were an economic upper class, has reason to suspect that she is of mixed race to begin with, even if Nair leaves ambiguity there. The race-driven romance is familiar, but usually the dynamic includes a white person. The narrow gradient makes Masala more original and more interesting.
I'm not always keen on sports movies, whether based on true stories or fictional, but I AM usually keen on COACHING movies (given my background coaching for theater games). Remember the Titans worked both ways. It's a great story about coaching, and indeed, a strong interracial coaching partnership, as a high school in Virginia presents the first integrated football team in the state back in the early 70s. Denzel Washington is probably too hard on those kids, but he needs to break down attitudes before they can act like a team. Before long, the team's success brings the whole community together, but also attracts nasty racism from other teams, so even as winners, the Titans are an underdog. So it's also a rousing sports movie that works on its own terms, distinguishing a lot of players (including baby Ryan Gosling) and making us care about their personal successes, failures and sacrifices. And the football action is clear, varied and well choreographed. Exciting, often funny, but also pulling at your heart strings, Remember the Titans is a great entry in the sports, biopic AND race relations genres.
When you think about it, Training Day is one Denzel Washington's coaching movies, and he's only slightly more terrifying in it than in Remember the Titans or The Great Debaters. While I was always rather mystified that THIS is the one that landed him an Oscar for Best Lead Actor, it's certainly a showy and memorable performance. The movie presents the L.A.P.D. as just another criminal gang, which young Ethan Hawke isn't quite ready to be disillusioned about, but is forcibly taken into the loop of corruption on his first day in an elite narcotics squad. While Training Day was commenting on past abuses from its perspective, it sure feels at times like it became a training video for bad cops in our own era. It's like a turbo-charged Bad Lieutenant, but you still can't help but feel like stuff like this is really happening. Antoine Fuqua bastes his modern Noir in golden sunlight, uses a great hip-hop soundtrack, and casts a lot of memorable faces even in smaller roles. Watch for a young Terry Crews as a beefcake gangbanger with no dialog.
Denzel Washington's first feature film, Carbon Copy, is a race relations satire that's perhaps a little too dry for its own good. Really a vehicle for George Segal, who mostly plays up the comedy by repeating everything he hears to make sure we understand it's shocking, he plays an advertising executive who married the boss' daughter and struck it rich, but is too good a person to be in that position. It's a job that once cost him - at his boss' urging - a woman he loved very much and who happened to be black. When Denzel shows up and reveals he's the fruit of that union, Walter (Segal) isn't too happy, but even though his son is clearly trolling him (which makes him suspect on the one hand, and hard to get a handle on on the other, at least until the end reveals all), he's ready to do the right thing by him. At which point, his white privilege is stripped from him and his entire entourage start talking as if Oscar Wilde had written 80s race comedies. Whiteness as an exclusive club. It's an interesting take, putting a white character through the tropes of a black story (which knowingly leans into the clichés to examine their value), but I feel like the terrible comedy music and Segal essentially doing shtick makes the satire go out of focus. By the end, we might reevaluate Denzel's character enough to make the creakiness of some scenes work better, however.
If you're a fan of 30 Rock, then Baby Mama will probably to your liking, and feel like a parallel world where Liz Lemon is desperate to get pregnant and tries surrogacy. Tina Fey turns to her real-life bestie Amy Poehler, playing some ignorant white trash that could derail her attempts, or turn into a nice onscreen friendship. From there, it heads into romcom formula and a pretty pat ending. Most of the time, it taps into Fey's brand of comedy so well, I thought she might have written it, and it could honestly have used more of her type of send-up (Steve Martin's granola nutbar and Sigourney Weaver's sales pitch are good examples of what I mean). As is, it's got some good bits and a lot of SNL performers in large and small parts, but it gets more smiles than laughs, and it's always dangerous to make one of your leads "amusingly irritating" because they can come off as simply irritating. But there's nothing wrong with a comedy that makes you smile.
Who did they make Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend for?! It's got a cute baby dinosaur with human emotions being hugged by the leads, but it's also got lots of nudity (even of minors, but I guess the racist MPA considered this "National Geographic" nudity, and still gave it a PG - I did see it in the theater age 14), and what I find most bothersome, some very misogynistic dialog played for "laughs" in the first 15 minutes. It's also pretty violent, so even if the animals here are fake, it would still be hard for more sensitive audiences to watch them under threat (or worse) on such consistent basis. Patrick McGoohan shows a lack of scientific ethics, ruthless in his pursuit of these legendary beasts (a real legend, but geographically shuffled), Sean Young and William Katt aren't really any better since they also plan to take Baby out of its habitat for study. At least they didn't throw in with a trigger-happy local army like McGoohan, people who keep shooting in the direction of priceless dinosaurs. I'm impressed by how well the dinosaurs walk, given they are people wearing rigs, even if their faces are stiff. I can take the cheap effects. It's the haphazard tone I have trouble with.
My Companion Film of the week features the voice of K9, John Leeson... Basically wildlife footage to which they set a story... well, maybe I shouldn't use "story" per se when discussing Tarka the Otter. We see Tarka being born, emancipate himself from his parents (not by choice , so if you ever wondered what Bambi's mother would play like in live action...), run into a threat (often some bloodthirsty humans and their hounds), escape, kill and eat some other creature, rince-repeat. I don't think there was enough material here for a 90-minute film (the movie proves my point by suddenly tapping into a subplot about a couple cranes), but they had all this footage! There are a couple of rather violent images, though there's no real contact between the otters and other animals with "handlers" credited. It still manages to be pretty harrowing for a "family" film. The narration, read by Peter Ustinov, is strong and poetic (though why can't Tarka's mom have a name like he does? "The otter bitch" made me cringe), I can't fault the editing, and of course, the otters are very cute. Which makes the bleak tone of the piece all the more questionable.
RPGs: Not a great night for our party in this week's Call of Cthuhlu session. Oh, my character Phelps came out fine. I keep rolling "Extreme" successes, for some reason, while my team keeps failing their rolls, often spectacularly. Last session, our young socialite was beaten to death, but because of a temporal anomaly, she's been regenerating and aging in reverse. She's probably a little girl now, but they sent her to a Boston hospital and her player took on the role of Elsie's bodyguard, Mr. Winters. THIS session ended with our alcoholic journalist getting carried off by a Byakhee ("The House on Curwen Street") with no hit point to call his own. Mr. Winters did wound it, but most the journo got hit a number of times. All I can say is, those body swapping rings better save our hides. (But like I kept expressing, who would want Phelps' out-of-shape writer's body?) Meanwhile, Phelps was hiding behind a wall, "officially" protecting his cousin Odessa who - I WAS RIGHT - was NOT dead, but merely body-swapped. I wonder if we could have prevented a lot of this if we'd gone off to visit the mad woman in the asylum FIRST, but we can't cry over spilled journalist blood now. The big question is: When is MY luck going to run out?
For the first time since we started playing Torg Eternity, an Orrorsh-based mission didn't end badly. It looks like prefacing it with grim'n'grueling training from the game's archetypal monster hunter - Thomas Brownstone - paid off! The Nightmare threat - a corrupted version of a greek water goddess drowning people in Northern Pakistan - was out of Delphi-Missions: Orrorsh's Myths and Legends, but I renamed the scenario Myth Understandings (with apologies to Robert Asprin), a more fruitful pun. The trip TO the location, however, was designed to give the players, correctly pegged by Brownstone as "showboats" who went in guns blazing without doing any research. Indeed, that approach almost got them all killed in the previous adventure and allowed a NIghtmare to upgrade itself. This time, they did use their brains, and were even, for the most part, one Scene ahead of me, figuring out the creature's secret motivation in what was scripted as the penultimate scene and not having to go off to another library, then come back. A kid got in the way and got flash-drowned, but CPR saved the boy, so this really was an unqualified success. The contentious relationship with Brownstone mellowed, at least on his end, as our own Monster Hunter proved himself (even if it was the Realm Runner who figured it out at the end), so I felt like I should give them all the rewards I had planned: Accesss to Jay Rutley's Storm Knight's Guide to Monster Hunters (available from the Infinity Exchange) and its options, lodges, etc., and a nice silver dagger, the better to kill lycanthropes with (Brownstone doesn't appear to know our Monster Hunter IS one). And respect, which they earned.
Best bits: From a personal world-building point of view, I was glad to connect the adventure both to the Akashan (by making him remember his people had a colony on a world where Greek myths were real, destroyed by the Gaunt Man and therefore the likely source of this corrupted being) AND to our previous interdimensional GURPS campaign (which had spent time on just such a world). On the 4-day journey to the location of the murders, some fine banter in the cart, humor in the face of horror. The "candle tests" that started with the characters trying to find loopholes so they could sleep instead of keeping the flame alive in the darkness, but ended with the Realm Runner using his faith skill to maintain it. Also quite funny that they were extremely protecting of the candle when Brownstone would show up in the morning, never believing the test to be "over". A macabre moment when the Monster Hunter examined the latest victim in the morgue, and accidentally flipped her off the table (made more gruesome for being an 8-year-old). The Super-Wrestler is always very good at role-playing despair and sadness and got his chance when the boy was (temporarily) killed. As the watery Nightmare gets KO'ed, it starts to trickle back to the river - the heroes put their feet down and dig a little pond in the ground so it can't escape before the coup de grace. "Here, do it with this!" - a silver dagger flies towards our lycanthrope, so I had to make it a roll in case of Mishap (alas!).
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