"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Going back to the beginning to see the invasion (infestation?), A Quiet Place: Day One does provide a link to the previous films, but doesn't star the Krasinski family. Instead, we have the always-effective Lupita Nyong'o as a cancer patient who will die on her own terms, and (eventually) Joseph Quinn as her companion as they traverse Manhattan, avoiding alien monsters. But watch out! There's a cat in this story that steals the spotlight every chance it gets, Nyong'o's service animal who's seen Aliens and decided to play Jones' part. The performances, both human and feline, are excellent, and it's this personal story - the end of the world coinciding with the protagonist's dying days - that makes Day One work as well as it does. Because let's be honest: They're not really adding much to the lore here. We already know what's going to happen, and the Quiet aliens are just as mysterious as they were in Parts 1 and 2. The interest comes from setting the story in one of the loudest places on Earth (where the other films were in the country or already empty towns), but we've seen the 9/11 iconography many times by now. I don't know if they plan to make more, but if they do, they really need to finally show the aliens who sent the Quiets to Earth to clean us out. Let's move beyond the creature feature carnage and expand this world into "War Against the Chtorr" (look it up, book series by David Gerrold) territory.
At home: Look folks, if Larry Cohen's The Ambulance wants to give me Eric Roberts as a Marvel comics artist trying to uncover a conspiracy to kidnap diabetics off the streets of New York to conduct illegal experiments on them, James Earl Jones as a cop on the edge with a very strange relationship to comics (did he grow up believing Fredric Wertham?!), Red Buttons as an old journalist who just wants to escape his doctors, and Meghan Gallagher (China Beach) as the one sexy cop who believes our hero, I'm going to give it a good review! Cohen's films are nuts in the best possible way, which is to say they know when to wink at the camera and never take themselves too seriously, while also keeping the level of tension up. Lots of memorable moments and characters in this one, and it's based on a believable anxiety: If an ambulance comes and takes me, what if I'm never heard from again? But guys, is this really what the Marvel Bullpen was like in 1990?
When your name is Roger Mortis (geddit?), you kind of have to expect the worst. Dead Heat is a perfectly bonkers buddy cop movie where the (not very hard to identify) shadowy villains are resurrecting the dead to commit robberies before they turn into stew, and Treat Williams is the cop who accidentally dies and is brought back to fight them with his slovenly partner played by Joe Piscopo, of all people. The action is of the dumb shoot'em-up kind, where everyone in L.A. seems to be carrying an uzi, and people don't seem that emotionally invested in the situation (except when they are), but the gore moments are pretty cool. What sustains interest is the bonkers spin on what is essentially a formulaic 80s cop film and the Noir thriller Dead on Arrival. It's not just the genre implant - it's the odd scenes in mausoleums and Chinese butcher shops, and the way it doesn't consider ANY of its cast truly essential. But look, when you have a good pun, you can't NOT have it produced.
I can't imagine a more generic title for a cop movie than Cop - I suppose Ellroy's Blood on the Moon was considered too novelistic - but it suits a film that actually does seem a bit generic. There's a maverick cop on the edge, see, and he's tracking a serial killer, see, even as he dodges his chief and internal affairs who don't want him pursuing the case even if he's right, see. These tired old elements are treated with some originality - James Woods' cop has a philosophical reason for what he does, the femme fatale trope is upended, etc. - but I had problems with the book's adaptation. Not that I've read it, but there's just a lot of stuff in here that distracts from the story, and we jump to conclusions, or in and out of relationships and emotional states a little too easily. I'm not sure the serial killer's motivations always have internal logic (I was going to say "make sense", but that's a foregone conclusion), and I don't understand how this police department works. Woods answers calls without back-up or even a partner. I.F. are after him, but there's rarely a sense of it as he continues his investigation unimpeded... Not bad, but didn't hold my interest.
Lucio Fulci 's The New York Ripper is a gory, sadistic giallo set in the Big Apple and suffers from the usual bad dubs over Italian actors that - to my ears, anyone - feels like bad acting. But then, I question the sound design of this urban slasher film across the board. It's either genius or ridiculous, perhaps a bit of both, but ultimately grating. It's noisome, which is the sound of the city, so fine. But the killer quacking like Donald Duck is... something. Lots of sex - did this get an X in the States at the time? - and violence, often together. But where I take actual issue is how it uses red herrings to confuse our ability to figure out who the killer is. It follows eventual victims from really early so as to point the finger at people who aren't actually involved AND have those characters know other victims in other ways to confuse the issue. It has characters act suspiciously for no reason except to confuse us even more. The way it's done, it feels like cheating and creates an entire side-plot that's basically just there as an opportunity for lurid sexual situations. Trashy nonsense (which might be your thing).
If you think Blitz will be an action movie on account of Jason Statham starring in it, you'll be disappointed. It's closer to a police procedural, though it's not much of a mystery - we meet the serial killer offing police officers pretty early. More "how will they catch him" than whodunit. And that's fine, especially with this stellar British cast - Statham, Mark Rylance, Luke Evans, David Morrissey, Paddy Considine, Littlefinger... Enough talent to keep one's attention. I like Statham's violent copper who drinks too much and is looking into the abyss where his soul used to be, and he's well supported, perhaps too well supported. Blitz feels like one of those prestige UK television series because it has so many characters with their own dramas - like Zawe Ashton as the former undercover cop who got hooked on drugs - which is perhaps a legacy of the novel the film is based on. It does make the world lived-in (like the Southeast London locations), but I still wanted more from each of these characters (perhaps a four-part series?). In any case, that lived-in world is a modern look at policing, a world of systemic brutality, corruption and addiction, and where Coonsidine's gay cop is consistently harassed by his own. But the film leaves the judgment to us, and because it's ALSO a Statham flick where petty revenges are par for the course and "humorous", while the cop hater is a psychotic villain, we might think it's on the side of bad cops. I don't think it is. It just show and let's you come to that conclusion.
A woman who could be mistaken for a dead one. A Bernard Herrmann score. A notable church. A notable painting. Ah, but also a locked room dedicated to the dead wife... For the first time viewer, Obsession plays on whether it's based on Vertigo or Rebecca. Either way, you have two of Hollywood's biggest perverts - Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader - working on the script, so it's got a perverse solution. I know they had trouble working with Cliff Robertson on this picture, but he's fine as the beatifcally amazed widower. Geneviève Bujold is the real star anyway, with a complex character whose motivations shift several times during the telling. Early work from John Lithgow has him camp up a Southern accent, but he's a fun presence (though unfortunately, real male friendships are rare in movies so we can't trust him). Obsession is a little slow to turn into a thriller and it's really too bad they opted for an abbreviated ending that works no better than the one they decided not to make (for length). Unless De Palma wanted us to leave with an icky feeling (which may well be), then I guess it's perfect.
There's a lot I want to like in The Power of Few, but everything's a little off - or contrived, really, like the absurd pun in the title - for me to be enthusiastic about the film. Structured a bit like 11:59, with various people converging on a specific point in time where they will meet their ends, it doesn't give us much time to get invested in the characters, a process that's impaired either by limited acting, limited information (by the time you understand what's going on, it's a bit late), and/or pretentious dialog. The bigger names like Christopher Walken and Christian Slater manage to make it work, though the latter is stuck in a weird, almost sci-fi John Wick (a year before the first one) world and accompanied by a potentially unplayable, but way over the top character. Each loop through the events gives us a better sense of what's happening, which I like, and ultimately, this is about what would happen if we could retroactively learn from our mistakes, and it redeems a lot of this movie for me. It just needs more polish, I guess.
I'm seeing a lot of commentary about whether or not Joseph Mankiewicz' 1959 adaptation of Suddenly, Last Summer tried to hide Tennessee Williams' gay subtext, but I rather think he leaned into it going by the prominent painting of naked black man in the "garçonnière". The absent boy who died "last summer", sending his mother (Katharine Hepburn) and cousin (Elizabeth Taylor) each into their own mental tailspins (where madness meets high camp, natch), is definitely coded to be gay, and his tragic fate (as investigated by Montgomery Clift's brain surgeon - casting that also adds to the subtext) is a manifestation of LGBTQ+ anxiety. As is the fate that might await Taylor's character if she doesn't pass the doctor's litmus test, her "erotomania" and "meaningless diagnosis" are surely stand-ins for homosexuality as described in the 1950s. As a film, it plays like a Southern Gothic, but we're never far from the theatrical. There are a lot of long speeches and Mankiewicz at least finds a way to bring the final confession to life in a filmic way. Liz Taylor is powerful in this, as is Hepburn, and they blow everyone else away.
The Pixies are one of my favorite bands, and I wish loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies dug more into its origins, the genesis of the music, its influences and influence... What it is is a behind the scenes piece on their 2004 reunion tour, which has limited value, especially to people who don't really know the Pixies beforehand. Not that there isn't an interesting story to tell. Kim Deal relatively recently out of rehab using her twin sister as emotional support, even as drummer David Lovering starts to descend into addiction. The family lives of Frank Black and Joey Santiago. Generally, how musicians deal with middle age. What's most striking about the Pixies, of course, is that they aren't really friends, just colleagues. and had always been so. They treat each other with respect, but don't really talk, and we're treated to four isolated people who only really come together on stage. The documentary uses a lot of the music, thankfully, and the film makers have a feeling for when to place any given performance, songs suited to the moment. They sound good (it's only about 12 years since they broke up), and guitarist Santiago in particular hasn't lost a step. I love the end credits, but I'll let all you PIxies fans out there discover them for yourselves.
I know cartoonist Gahan Wilson not through Playboy or The New Yorker, but through the Berkeley revival of Classics Illustrated - he did the very first volume, illustrating a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's poems. That's not referenced in the documentary Born Dead, Still Weird (it was a long shot), but I always try to encourage documentaries about cartoonists and comics creators. This is a fairly light piece that needs a couple of detours to get it to feature length (though I do like the deep dive into how a magazine like The New Yorker chooses its art pieces and cartoons), but it spends a lot of time with the man himself, dissects his work and the psychology behind it, and provides some glowing appreciation for it from various celebs (some of which are now on a trigger warning list, so viewer beware). Most crucially, it uses a lot of the art as part of the narrative, showcasing a lot of pieces, usually where they would illustrate a point.
I'm too old to know anything (or understand) 4Chan, so Feels Good Man serves as a documentary on that internet subculture as much as it does its use and distortion of indie cartoonist's Pepe the Frog. To an outsider, this meme seemed complete nonsense, even more so once it became an alt-right symbol. Like, what in the Seven Hells, right?! The doc follows Pepe's memification (and has some very interesting things to say ABOUT memes, generally) and alchemical transformation as online groups and subgroups copied and changed him for their own ends. It's fascinating. And then there's Matt Furie, his rather hapless creator, who's just a nice guy who likes to draw frogs and see the positive side of things, fine with letting the internet nerds have their fun until, you know, Pepe becomes hate speech. In the third act, he goes after such bad actors as Alex Jones and other deplorables, but you have to wonder if Pepe's hijack isn't total. Feels Good Man, with its fun animations of the star toon, is perhaps the most redemptive of solutions, I think making great strides towards salvaging the character and hopefully setting the record straight re: his creator.
My Companion Film of the week features Janet "Tegan" Fielding... Given that the Hammer House of Horror anthology series was edgier than what American TV could show in the same period, I'm not surprised the episode "Charlie Boy" was sold to the U.S. as a (rather short) feature. It's a good - if not entirely unpredictable - story about a cursed idol that causes people to die and a couple's attempts to stop the curse before it gets to them, and a well-directed one at that. The kills are memorable and there's some directorial flare throughout - whether ramping up the tension by crafting a sequence out of only inserts, or making a photograph come alive. Not quite true of the climax's choreography, but generally, more than competent. Not gonna lie, I sought this out to see Doctor Who's Janet Fielding for a few seconds (styled like Sarah Jane Smith, which is interesting), but it's not the only Who connection. Angela Bruce, who would play UNIT Brigadier Brambera ("Shame!") in "Battlefield", is the female lead and much more comfortable in this role than that one. Naturalism suits her. From the Doctor Who performance, you wouldn't think she could play a fetching model type, but she's one of the best things about Charlie Boy.
Books: Volume 2 of The World of Black Hammer collects two of Jeff Lemire's mini-series spinning out of Black Hammer, essentially covering the two ends of the timeline. Black Hammer '45 is a WWII aerial ace story in the style of the Blackhawks, and The Quantum Age is a riff on the Legion of Super-Heroes in this universe's far future. The stories in the collection are so disparate (in era and art style) that readers are sure to show a strong preference for one over the other. '45 is the most disconnected from the main action of the original Black Hammer series, though there are links. Matt Kindt on art is no stranger to the time period, though his work in the past has been more on the spy end of things, and I find his action beats a little messy. I have nothing bad to say about his plane action, however, as he draws some great hardware despite the expressionism. The story concerns an attempt by all parties to get to a key Jewish scientist, and it gets good when the Soviets show up, but the back and forth flashbacks only trick you into thinking there's any kind of plot complexity here. As a Legion fan, The Quantum Age was more to my tastes, and I thought ended on a marvelous twist. Willfredo Torres' clean art is perfect for rendering a hopeful future (even if Lemire is really tapping into the 5YL period for his story). The links to the main series are much more obvious here, and we find out what happened to several of the characters in the continuity.
Volume 3 collects two more mini-series - Colonel Weird; Cosmagog, and Barbalien: Red Planet - focusing on a different time in the lives of two Black Hammer principals. I love Tyler Crook's art in Cosmagog, providing a kind of children's book quality to the topsy-turvy story of Black Hammer's most challenging character. Colonel Weird doesn't live his live chronologically, and I'm not sure we ever realized how that felt or how tangled the timeline was (though it is, by necessity, a bit recapitulatory). As for the Barbalien tale, Tate Brombal brings a personal touch to the script, and Gabriel Hernández Walta (who now collaborates with Lemire on Phantom Road) has a gritty art style well-suited to the subject of the 1980s AIDS crisis. Our favorite gay Martian must face some hard truths about his secret identity as a policeman when he gets involved with a gay rights activist (even as his own homophobic people are out to get him, which turns out to just be background). I've always liked this spin on the Martian Manhunter and it's strongly handled here. Both stories come to a touching ending, for that matter.
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