"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Despite giving Michael Chrichton (et al.) a "created by" credit, Twisters has very little to do with 1996's Twister (unless you think he invented tornadoes just like he invented dinosaurs), but that's fine - that first film left very little psychic imprint on me. I realize I am in the minority here. We do get an updated version of the same concept - storm chasers with their own YouTube channel get in the way of a scientist who only wants to help the people living in Tornado Alley; sparks fly. It's an okay disaster movie with some tense moments, a demure romance (this, at least, felt original, it's not moving at movie speed), and some humor (the mom gets a lot of the credit). At first you think this is Science vs. Fame, but it's really Purity vs. Exploitation (Capitalism), even if the movie acts like it's Rural America vs. Urban America (well, they know their market). Daisy Edgar-Jones is a strong lead, and Glen Powell has fun with it, especially when he's playing to the YouTube audience. I was thinking this was "fine", but the third act is extremely good, both in terms of the tornado climax nailbiter and the relationship closure, even if I would call neither unpredictable.
At home: Brighton Rock is a study in contrasts. A sunny holiday town where 1930s gangsters run roughshod. The villains are led by the youngest and more reckless among them called Pinkie (a baby-faced Richard Attenborough) - Pinkie BROWN if you're looking for another opposition - but not the notably older and wiser William Hartnell. And this young thug will marry a girl he hates just to hide his crimes while she makes loving eyes at him. In the gaps between these ideas lives the film's Noir tension. It's an ugliness that can be hard to watch. The story has Pinkie recklessly kill a journalist and spend the rest of the story in a paranoid state, trying to cover his tracks. Taking place between the two World Wars, he's likely a war orphan and therefore painted as rudderless. So is Rose, his "romantic" interest, a waitress who has information that could blow the case wide open, but is just as recklessly falls for him. Too quickly and too hard, really, but I think the film is making the same point about this "lost generation". It only gets darker from there, and I can see why Brighton Rock is well considered, but for the grace of God taking no prisoners.
I was absolutely not surprised to find out post-watch that Rian Johnson listed The Last of Sheila as an inspiration for Glass Onion, as I watched it because the premise sounded like 70s Knives Out (but yes, closer to its sequel). A great cast (Dyan Cannon nevertheless steals the show with her boisterous character) playing rich a-holes, a sadistic host (James Coburn), a murder mystery, lots of twists and turns... A year ago, Coburn's wife was killed in a hit-and-run. To commemorate the event, he's invited his friends - all Hollywood people, lending a metatextual quality to the dialog - to play a sort of mystery/scavenger hunt during a Mediterranean cruise. Perhaps to uncover/expose who killed his wife? That alone would have been a great premise, but the movie - written by the unlikely team of Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins???? - doesn't rest on its laurels at any point, but rather takes a left turn as soon as the audience thinks it's got the next story beat figured out. Highly entertaining.
You can't tell me John Waters' Pecker isn't autobiographical in some way. Eddie Furlong is an earnest, enthusiastic kid in Baltimore taking pictures of everything and everyone and just having fun with it, until he's discovered by a New York art dealer who puts him on the map in the art world. Only... to New York, his pictures art anthropological, and paint a picture of freaks, hicks and po'folk. Only by turning his camera on them can he show that his art is loving, not sarcastic. Consider Waters' own work, always filming in Baltimore, usually using non-actors and people on the fringe, physically and culturally. I think he's telling us something about the "weirdos" we outsiders see in his movies. About the attraction held by the big art centers (NYC, L.A.), but the purity of continuing to work in your own community and understanding its particular interest and beauty. In the movie, which plays as an oddball, goofy comedy - almost an artist's fantasy - everyone is passionate about THEIR thing, to an amusing extreme. The kid who only eats sugar, the launderer (Christina Ricci) who takes her laundromat deadly seriously, the mom who runs a thrift store and would give the clothes off her back for a homeless person, etc. All infused with Waters' earnest love of humanity in all its shapes, sizes and classes, Pecker is an underrated part of his filmography and I feel, a very personal film.
When we think of music in 1977 Britain, we think of punk, but it wasn't the only count-culture music of the time as Young Soul Rebels reminds us, creating a fuller picture centered around funk and soul music, abutting black culture (principally from Jamaican roots) and gay culture to punk's fascist leanings (skinheads, etc.) and the Silver Jubilee that year as a reminder that the mainstream's colonialism and racism was also pretty fascistic. In this context, two pirate radio DJs - "soulboys" played by Valentine Nonyela (rather histrionically) and Mo Sesay - are our heroes, trying to succeed at love and passion, in the shadow of the dreadful murder of a young gay man in their community. I wouldn't say the murder mystery is the focus, exactly, more of a setting to heighten the culture clash of the time. The plot is all over the place, in a sense, but it works as a portrait of an era, with good music and the first feature film appearances of both Academy Award nominee Sophie Okonedo and Oz's Eamonn Walker.
Abel Ferrara's China Girl is his version of West Side Story, with Chinatown at odds with Little Italy, and adult gangsters proving unable to prevent an escalation of hostilities between their youthful counterparts (in itself an interesting point to make about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on which these films are based - not that it was wholly original when the Bard wrote his version of the story). And yet, one "mixed" couple persists. It's Ferrara, so in a sense, there's tension created in that knowledge. You just know that things are going to turn horribly violent eventually. But it's still a movie trapped in its source material. While well-shot, well-acted (check out James Hong on one side and a young David Caruso on the other), and innovating with its distinct cultures, once you realize what China Girl is based on - which is extremely early, if not straight from the cover blurb - it all seems rather inevitable and predictable. I would not rank this among the director's most memorable.
Raw but strong performances from Robin Johnson (16) and Trini Alvarado (13) gives Times Square a teenage Thelma and Louise quality, as the younger of the two runs away from a "fakey" home to join the other's "true" life on the streets (feat. the chillest strip club you've ever seen). Tim Curry is the radio DJ who gives them a platform and encourages/exploits their truancy. It's a riot grrrl fantasy, so they become counter-culture stars the authorities can't seem to get a handle on. It's a lot of fun, and the streets aren't as dangerous as they would be in real life, but it doesn't entirely sign of on the lifestyle. Johnson's Nicky, for example, is quite clearly struggling with bipolar disorder. A big part of this is the soundtrack - something director Allan Moyle will become known for - which is a total banger, up to and including the songs created for the movie. The spirit of punk is alive and well in Times Square. Not sure what to think of the ambivalent figure of the dad tasked with cleaning up that part of the city though - it's like he's silenced after a while, subjugated by that spirit.
The cry of a generation and it happens to be mine, Pump Up the Volume features high school seniors in 1990 (I graduated in 1989) in a dull Arizonan suburb where Christian Slater's family just moved. He's a Baby Buster (don't call us Gen X) version of Jekyll & Hyde, shy nerd by day, potty-mouthed pirate radio DJ by night, and his broadcasts are all the rage... literally pushing the student body on the brink of rebellion and beyond. He's also got uncommonly great musical tastes (it's an Allan Moyle picture), so that helps. I remember my schooling having fascistic tendencies (I almost got expelled for publishing a parody newspaper, it's not quite as cool as pirate radio) and the movie seems to agree that this was universally true (it may still be, in some quarters), taking it to more villainous levels for movie reasons (but if you think a teacher getting physically violent with a student is nonsense, I'll tell you we were living through the last of that in '89, so...). We're introduced to Samantha Mathis, who is almost too hot to touch here, and blink and you'll miss him, but baby Seth Green is also around this school. But of course, this is all about Slater being great in his dual(ish) role, and who makes you leave the movie rather "pumped up" yourself, ready to commit some minor infraction. Who knows what kind of trouble I would have gotten up to had this come out just a year or two earlier.
Allan Moyle's Empire Records predates the similar High Fidelity by 5 years, but it's so full of half-formed ideas, I can't really give it a leg up. A bunch of teenage characters work at a record store (including young Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger) for the rather ambivalent figure of Anthony LaPaglia as the manager (ambivalent adult figures seem to be trope in Moyle's films, just like the overachieving girl whose parents unreasonably push her harder) whose store is about to be sold to a big franchise. Various subplots criss-cross the narrative without real focus - the boy who wants to finally tell the girl he loves her, the girl who just tried to kill herself, the has-been music star come to sign records, the cliched idea of putting on a show to save the business... Nothing unpleasant, but nothing that really grips you long enough to say "THIS is what the movie's about". And what to make of Rory Cochrane's Puck-like character, moving through the story with a detached, magical touch. What is his relationship to the manager? It all plays a little too weird. I do like many story beats, just like I enjoy about half the tunes chosen for the soundtrack, but Empire Records just never really comes together the way Moyle's other teen operas did.
In Can't Hardly Wait, a large cast of high schoolers go to a graduation party, all intent on SOMEthing - getting laid, getting revenge, finally telling your crush you love them... - so it's essentially every teen movie you've seen or would later see rolled into one. It even goes for Animal House captions at the end, so no real points for originality. The writer-director team who would give us the underrated (in some quarters anyway) Josie and the Pussycats a few years later does manage a fun atmosphere and some actual belly laughs from yours truly. It's a little like an earnest spoof, if that's a thing. It's also quite the time capsule. The music is VERY 1998 - to the point of the cheesiness usually ascribed to 80s hits - and the cast, oh my, it's like every young adult star of the era is in this, even in tiny and uncredited roles. The main stars who were or made it big include Jennifer Love Hewitt, Set Green and Lauren Ambrose (my secret reason for watching the movie), but you'll catch Jason Segel, Melissa Joan Hart, Eric Balfour, Buffy's Amber Benson, Selma Blair, Jaime Pressly, Clea DuVall, and more attached to one-scene, one-line, or even one-shot characters. If you live through the era as a teen or twentysomething, it's a cute little visit to the past.
My Companion Film of the week features Daphne Ashbrook from the Doctor Who TV Movie (yes, it counts)... The Big rip-off you don't remember is 14 Going on 30, a TV movie in which a ninth-grader gets aged up by weird science so he can disrupt the teacher he has a crush on's engagement to his mean gym teacher. We enter romcom territory, which would be creepy if the movie weren't so goofy. It just about gets away with it (in a way Big doesn't) thanks to sudden musical numbers, an adorable performance from Daphne Ashbrook, and a truly silly climax. For some reason, there seems to be a lot of money injected into this (because its writers had just had a hit comedy in Three Men and a Baby?), including real, recognizable music of the era, and loads of recognizable stars in all the smaller parts - Alan Thicke, Patrick Duffy, Loretta Swit, Harry Morgan, Dick Van Patten... Everybody wanted to be a part of this. Props to the writers and/or director for the scene with the growing cucumber and tomatoes - that's a fun, covert way to show a kid getting older at increased speed. Somehow, of the four "kid-in-adult-body" released in 1988 (the other two are Freaky Friday clones Like Father, Like Son and Vice-Versa), this may actually be my favorite.
Books: I've become a fan of afro-futurism in the past few years, but mostly in cinema. Tade Thompson's Rosewater fulfills the promise of that genre in novel form, imagining Nigeria as a player in world affairs thanks to an alien life-form coming to Earth, making today's superpowers fold in on themselves while the intelligence takes up residence behind an impenetrable but life-healing dome at the center of the new city of Rosewater. It. Is. Wild. Our protagonist is one of the psychics empowered by alien nanites (tapping into mycology the same way Star Trek: Discovery does, is there an influential article out there?!), recounting his life in non-chronological fashion so we don't learn too much, too quickly, but the reader might still resent the cliffhangers. It sometimes irked me too, but I have to respect that this is also how the xenosphere (the telepathic landscape) of the book works. The psi-punk element is a perfect conceit to do world-building, because he knows more than a normal point of view would. A lot of original ideas, crisp prose, and a venal character with feet of clay having to make some hard choices... I will return to the world of Rosewater (there are sequels) in due course.
As an almost 40-year veteran improv player, judge, teacher, coach and organizer who has been GMing tabletop role-playing games for even longer, I am probably not the target audience for Improv for Gamers. It's too concerned with beginners for that. I AM, however, well positioned to review its usefulness. Its crucial flaw is that it's workshop approach, presenting activities that rarely connect well to the role-playing game experience. The 2nd edition does better, with more focused activities and tips (usually by new contributors), but it's still, at its core, a handbook about improv basics being SOLD to gamers, but not always interested in the gamer experience. There are two main problem sections. One is the warm-ups, which includes a lot of silly activities we in the community no longer use because they don't really teach anything useful. The other is all the stuff about miming objects and spaces, which has very limited usefulness around a gaming table (never mind an online play environment - though the 2nd edition does talk about this). Even the examples are filled with "doing the laundry" type scenes that would almost never come up in an RPG scenario. The prose seems to jump from reality to reality, speaking to stage work, table top, larping, traditional RPGs and storytelling games, players and GMs, from sentence to sentence. These all needed to be different sections, but the workshop workbook aspect prevents a better organization of information. Still some good tips in here, especially for more storytelling-based games like Fiasco, but do get the 2nd ed. if there's a choice at all. It looks nicer, has more and better examples, and the tips offered are more illustrative of the gaming experience.
(*French version follows) Poet, film maker, performance artist, activist, and now essayist, Paul Bossé has always kind of run parallel to me. We were born the same year, had similar interests, and crossed paths a few times (he introduced me to the Pixies, I played a small role in one of his projects...), and so his new book, Tous les tapis roulants mènent à Rome ("All Escalators Lead to Rome"), part eco-aware essay, part 50-year memoir, feels like an intersection with my life as well. And it should because it's really about interconnectivity. Paul (or P-Bo, as we came to call him at home) ties his (our) year of birth to global efforts by scientists to stop the climate change crisis in its tracks, even as governments did their best to sweep all the data under the carpet (and succeeded). Over our specific lifetimes, the alarm was sounded again and again and always ignored. We are thus in a unique position, generationally, to see the environment crumble before our eyes to the point of no return. P-Bo scares us, but he doesn't want us to throw the book away in despair, also regaling us with personal stories, returning often to baseball, Star Trek, and French comics, using his poet's mind to create connections between these various interests, life events, and the sorry state of the Earth, like rhymes at the end of a verse. He is one person at the center of a web of such connections, the Rome in this story (even if Rome is also evoked), one connected to my Rome, and on it goes as we are all connected to his Rome, my Rome, THE Rome, one world, connected through space, time, imagination, and deterioration. I should mention the contributions by cartoonist and comics artist Paul Bordeleau (another P-Bo) that have a fun, retro feel, even if I'm not always convinced he's always bringing something new to illustrations of points made in the text. But hey, anything to keep our spirits up as the world burns...
(*Comme promis:) Poète, cinéaste, artiste de performance, activiste, et maintenant essayiste, la vie de Paul Bossé a toujours un peu courus parallèle à la mienne. Nous sommes nés la même année, avons des intérêts similaires, et croisésmmes plusieurs fois (il m'a fait découvrir les Pixies, j'ai joué un petit rôle dans un de ses projets...) et son nouveau livre, Tous les tapis roulants mènent à Rome, mi-essai éco-conscient, mi-mémoire de 50 ans, a le semblant d'une intersection avec ma propre vie. Et il devrait, parce que le thème est l'interconnectivité. Paul (ou P-Bo, comme on l'appelait à la maison) relie sa (ma) date de naissance aux efforts globaux des scientifiques d'enrayer la crise du changement climatique, alors que les gouvernements font tout pour glisser l'information sous le tapis (roulant ou non) et réussissent. Pendant la période très spécifique de nos vies, l'alerte est sonnée maintes fois et toujours ignorée. Nous voilà donc dans une position privilégiée, générationnellement parlant, de voir l'environnement s'écrouler devant nos yeux jusqu'au point de non-retour. P-Bo nous fait peur, mais ne veut pas que nous jetions le livre au loin dans notre désespoir, nous régalant donc aussi avec des histoires personnelles, retournant souvent au baseball, à Star Trek, et à la bande dessinée, utilisant son esprit de poète pour créer des connexions entre ces divers intérêts, les événements de sa vie, et le triste état de la Terre, comme des rimes à la fin de vers. Il n'est qu'une personne au centre d'une toile de connexions, la Rome de cette histoire (même si Rome est aussi évoquée), connectée à ma Rome, et ainsi de suite jusqu'à ce que nous soyons tous connectés à sa Rome, ma Rome, LA Rome, un monde, connectés à travers l'espace, le temps, l'imagination et la détérioration. Je devrais aussi mentionner les contributions du dessinateur et bédéiste Paul Bordeleau (tiens, un autre P-Bo) qui sont plaisantes et rétro, même si je ne suis pas toujours convaincu qu'elles amènent toujours quelque chose de plus aux illustrations des points faits par le texte. Mais heille, tout pour rester positif pendant que la Terre brûle...
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