"Accomplishments"
In theaters: M. Night Shyamalan's Trap would benefit greatly from not having a trailer, or else the onus is on the audience to keep mistrusting the film to amp up the tension. It's a little straightforward as is, even if it keeps changing gears on you in terms of who you care about (that's a kind of twist, isn't it?). Structurally messy, but it IS pretty fun nonetheless. Josh Harnett is evidently having a lot of fun, and we like him best as the doofy dad taking his daughter to see a big pop star's show. He can be a little over the top when things get unhinged, but that's part of the fun. The front half of the film is therefore the best, as I love claustrophobic environments (not in life, but in film) and Trap plays as a sort of reverse Sudden Death. Saleka Shyamalan's music is pleasant enough to forgive the director giving her such a career boost (though the acting is more uneven). The back half isn't as strong, but still has its pleasures. If this really is part of the "M. Night Universe", I can well believe someone's being driven to the Split asylum at the end...
At home: An absorbing three-hander set in the final days of a cult, The Mire has that organization's leader caught by the faithful as he's about to make out with the money - though you certainly allow for him being right and on the up and up in the universe of the film. So if you doubt one way or another, that's just what the characters are feeling. The pull of faith and community is strong enough for the two adepts to logic their world view around this speed bump, as to distrust their leader now is to negate the last 8 years of their lives and all their beliefs. This could have been a stage play, though the play with chronology, the intense close-ups and intimate lighting make this as good on film as it would be on the boards. The Mire kind of put in me in mind of another indie film about cults, Sound of My Voice, but it's more straightforward and to some, likely more satisfying. I have my misgivings about the climax (too simple?), but I like the coda, which sends gets my imagination going, so we're going to call this a win.
It's hard to believe the director of House made Casting Blossoms to the Sky (except the phantasmagoria of the play within the film), but it's the first part of an anti-war trilogy by Nobuhiko Obayashi. The total maverick offers something that's part documentary, part reenactment, part ghost story, in which tragic history is always present, as memory, as story, as revenant. The town of Nagaoka was hard hit by the 2011 earthquake, but as a journalist tries to cover the aftermath, it seems the upheaval has thrown up earlier memories of the same town being hit by bombs during World War II, and she is told stories within stories within stories. She has also been corresponding with a teacher from the area - an old flame - who is helping a mysterious student stage a play about those events, an impossible remembrance for an 18 year old. Unless she is one of the dead... or one of the unborn. A lot of post-war Japan cinema is essentially about the anxiety of having participated in WWII (and lost), but by the 21st Century, who remembers enough to be anxious about it? Casting Blossoms acts as a different kind of reminder, a post-post-post-war film that treats "war" as a more relatable "disaster" after which people would come together. While I wondered if it needed to be as long as it is, the accumulation certainly hits hard in the last act, and you almost have to debate which of the various endings/epilogues is the more touching.
The translators really pulled a softening number on the French coming of age film "Naissance des pieuvres" (Birth of the Squids) by calling it Water Lilies, the original title better suited to the tale of late bloomers discovering their sexuality and sexual identity adjacent to the world of synchronized swimming (so how do you swim with others rather than stand out, or stand on the side of the pool). The film is mostly concerned with 15-year-old Marie (Pauline Acquart) and her attraction to the popular (but "bad") girl who leads the swim team (Floriane, played by Adèle Haenel), and at least initially, the gay subtext is just that - wanting to be someone being confused into loving someone - but things evolve from there. Does Floriane reciprocate, or is she just seeking an intimate friendship, or else simply manipulating others for selfish reasons? Why do these have to be mutually exclusive? Céline Sciamma's film is too subtle for that kind of reasoning, and growing up too complex for blanket statements.
Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves is a deadpan blue collar romcom where the meetcute is replaced by a meetawkward, the meaningful conversations by silent acknowledgements, and the pop soundtrack by radio news of the war in Ukraine. The latter is likely to key to fully understanding this Helsinki where people are barely expressive, apathetic whether working their menial jobs, getting fired from them, or singing in a band. Just sit there, and don't care too much, because it'll overwhelm you (whether that's war, relationships or loneliness). You might point out that, "well, maybe this isn't a romcom, Siskoid!", but the way Fate takes a hand, at first thrusting these two together, then later keeping them apart, in that ludicrous way that's only true of the movies (and Kaurismäki wears his love of cinema on his sleeve in this one), spells romcom to me. Or at least, a deconstruction of the romcom structure. But while the emoting is minimalist, the emotion is not. Kaurismäki has just tamped down the histrionics to see what's left, and given us a kind of realism.
If there's a plot against Harry in The Plot Against Harry, it's one of his own making, or of his choices masquerading as Fate. Sure, there's a whole thing about having to testify against another mobster and maybe they're out to get him, but the movie isn't really about that. Rather, writer-director Michael Roemer will push Harry (Martin Priest) into a position where he has to do the right thing - by his family, by society - in spite of his venal impulses. A very dry comedy that failed to get a rise out of me, but that's partly due to the film making. Shot in a kind of cinema verité, the movie is just insanely noisy. At first, I thought the car phone bit was clever, since this guy needed a wake up call if he was going to get through parole. But as the sound design piled up noise after noise throughout, that verisimilitude took me out of the experience. It's not like I don't get enough noises in my own neighborhood... I watch movies to couch against that!
My Companion Film project hits NuWho this week, with a movie featuring Billie Piper... In Eternal Beauty, Sally Hawkins - past master at playing odd, awkward or neurodivergent characters - plays a schizophrenic woman who struggles with her condition, a chaotic family (including Penelope Wilton as her judgmental mother and Billie Piper as her frankly terrible sister), and a sense that she is trapped in the past event that "broke her" (even if we know that's not how it works). Just as she starts to become a danger to herself and others, a possible love affair comes into her life to complicate (improve?) matters thanks to fellow Mike Leigh alum, David Thewlis. It does indeed feel like Mike Leigh was a major inspiration for writer-director Craig Roberts here, and that's not a knock. What Eternal Beauty offers is a portrait of mental illness and incremental healing (I'd give this a good review on the basis on the last 10-15 minutes alone) as seen from the inside, and in which the protagonist is consistently infantilized and mistrusted because of her illness. It feels truthful.
Books: Somewhat ubiquitous when I was reading superhero comics as a kid in the early 80s, writer Paul Kupperberg was what I would call a workhorse in the industry. Going by his memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life, he doesn't have any illusions about being anything else. The prototypical workhorse will write anything and anything if asked, and that's really the narrative here, with the author moving from job to job, from fanzine beginnings to (mostly) DC Comics work at various levels (as writer and editor), to marketing, to tie-in novels, etc. He's honest about his strengths and weaknesses, and relatable to this reader at least as a fellow "terrible office politician". There are some fun behind the scenes stories throughout. Despite his acidic humor, he's still a class act and doesn't name some of the bad bosses he's endured, turning me into a comics detective out of a certain sense of frustration (I've determined one's identity, but not the other). As an editor, Paul K will probably kick himself for the typos that always seem to linger in this kind of small press effort, especially the page where he credits Watchmen to David Lloyd and gives Peacemaker's alter ego as Christopher Chance (that's the Human Target). Oops!
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