"Accomplishments"
At home: Using the same main cast, the three stories in Yorgos Lanthimos' surreal anthology film, Kinds of Kindness, the year after Poor Things is released, is really like he, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley just made four movies together back to back (and Jesse Plemons, three). The result is Lanthimos' take on The Twilight Zone, "fables" in which the purported "kindness" is toxic and ultimately leads to tragedy. But it's also a caustic comedy, where everything is slightly off to tickle audiences with the right mindset. Along with the repeated casts, several repeated memes give KoK a gooey consistency, or a trio of "Iron Chef" recipes using the same ingredients, somehow. Of the three tales, the first is my favorite, featuring Plemons as a man whose boss truly micromanages his life, and how drone work really does remove someone's ability to have agency. The middle lull, about a cop whose missing wife returns as a "different person" is more Sacred Deer than The Lobster and more opaque, but I suppose it shows the dangers of "kindly" subsuming your identity to please a partner. The final tale is less heady and mostly fun, as Emma Stone is part of a weird cult that's looking for a prophesied miracle worker, which she does like it's a Saints Row mission, judging by her purple car.
Some films can be drained of it power through temporal and geographical distance, and that's how Fellini's La Dolce Vita loses me. Essentially a portrait of Roman society in the year 1960, and mostly of the upper crust which Marcello Mastroianni's trashy society page reporter is trying to access, it has the latter as a soft plot linking various episodes over a three-hour run time. The film is never better than in the twin media circuses of his falling in love with a glamorous movie star and a debunked sighting of the Virgin Mary. But then the film goes on, and on, and on, with party after party, and every time something interesting happens, we move on to the next thing. Fellini could have made a dozen movies out of these ideas, but I found this collage of them mostly tedious, and his lead character, quite pathetic (which is somewhat the point - like the decrepit mansion at the 2-hour mark, this kind of life is empty). Yes, yes, at the end, Marcello walks away from purity after embracing the "staring monster", I get it, but I got it well before the third hour.
Generally, Ozu's post-war output has been dramas about marriage and the generation gap, but The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) has such a playful, light touch, I rather put it in the comedy category. It's still about those subjects, of course. Michiyo Kogure is the central character, a woman in an arranged marriage to Shin Saburi - a civil, distant affair laced with a certain deference and politeness reserved for when you go to a friend's house - who is aunt to young Keiko Tsushima, who refuses her own arranged marriage. New Japan vs. Traditional Japan, as usual, and you knew it would be from the first shot of the two women in a the back of a cab, just by their clothes and interests. Ozu creates this clash throughout with room decoration, the characters' outings, and so on. How can the aunt convince the niece when her own example is a terrible one, and one that also shows that beyond the generation gap is also a rural/urban gap that acts the same way. Seeing themselves from the outside like this actually makes the older couple face up to their lack of communication and the tension between them... and makes them come to a new (and touching) understanding? Believe it. An understanding that reconciles Japan's two halves? Perhaps.
Where Is the Friend's House?, out of Iran, is such a beautiful portrait of a child's heroism, as 8-year-old Ahmed runs around a labyrinthine town to give his classmate the notebook he mistakenly took, before the fascistic teacher expels the latter for a procedural mistake. Ahmed is a good bot, unfettered - though often stymied - by adult concerns, and the larger point of the film is how discipline can be amoral. From the child's eye view, what adults impose on children is a kind of oppressive regime, where contradictory commands must be followed, and the child-citizen has no real voice and is victimized by a soulless bureaucracy. Perhaps director Abbas Kiarostami meant this to apply to other oppressive regimes... Regardless, the film disguises itself as a fairy tale about a boy's quest through a maze lit with colors projected from painted windows, encountering sights such as a walking bush (a man carrying so much wood, he disappears) and dangerous-seeming dogs. The final scene is the most mundane nail-biter in film history, and the boys cast in the film are universally natural and touching. High marks.
In Tomboy, Céline Sciamma shows the same ability to work with child actors she did in previous and later films, getting incredibly natural performances out of a mostly pre-teen cast, interactions within the group so naturalistic as to seem improvised or documentarian. This is the story of a 10-year-old "gender non-conforming" "tomboy" who, after their family moves to a new area, creates a male identity for themselves to integrate with the local kids. Laure/Mickaël experiments with male presentation, but also with acting on same sex attraction, as the start of the school year - and exposure of their lies - gets closer. 2011 seems like another world, and one would imagine this story playing out differently (and yet not) today. While I've been using a neutral pronoun for the character here, a mainstream vocabulary for gender issues hadn't been set yet, and the characters' reactions are in part predicated on their inability to put word to concept, therefore inhibiting their understanding. A very sensitive exploration of gender identity and self discovery.
It takes a while before you really start to understand Miami Blues' tone - which it doesn't always hit correctly - but calling this a neo-Noir is going to create expectations that can't be met. It's much too quirky and madcap for that and is in fact a black comedy with a very unusual sense of humor. Some of that is in the novel, apparently, and it's at least made me interested in checking out Charles Willeford's work. But some of it is also director George Armitage's (Grosse Point Blank being the better example of his style). Alec Baldwin is kind of crazy as an ex-con who steals a police badge and starts committing crimes as if he were a corrupt cop, while Fred Ward is nominally the hero, a literally toothless detective and protagonist of the book series (despite Miami Blues being his first appearance, it still seems here like we're coming into the middle of things, in a lived-in world). Neither are good at what they do and there are a lot of cock-ups until crime movie fiasco tragedy stuff needs to happen. The movie's secret VIP is Jennifer Jason Leigh who gives 110% as the woman who dares love Baldwin, a woman who ALSO gives 110% to this relationship, despite not really understanding what's going on. It's sweet, and comically sad, really. But despite everyone's efforts, the film's tone really isn't consistent, and the pacing is always a little bit off, moving too fast or too slow or giving us off-kilter transitions. We still chuckled a lot, but that was sometimes because we couldn't decide if it was bad, or if it was good!
What is it with Abba and Australian films in 1994? I'm thinking of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and now it's 90% of the soundtrack to Muriel's Wedding, a pretty great coming of age comedy starring Toni Collette as Muriel, a young woman with very little going for her - not education, not prospects, and not looks, maybe just the fact that her dad is locally influential - but fixated on getting married just like her terrible school friends. After she catches a bouquet, she starts to make changes to her life that will lead her on a path to self-discovery. And she may not like what she discovers. Six Feet Under's Rachel Griffiths co-stars as her only real friend (I didn't know she was Australian!). It's not easy to realistically portray people who are essentially unintelligent and make them watchable, but Collette is really terrific - and makes you believe in Muriel's growth - and so is Jeannie Drynan as her sadly dim mother. A strong theme in Murial's Wedding is social competition, which the film correctly identifies as a fruitless endeavor. Can you really win at life? Against whom?
Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir plays Halla in Woman at War, waging a one-woman war (at the risk of repeating the title) against global interests intent on despoiling Iceland's natural beauty and Mother Earth (who is practically a character in this). And with a big shift coming up in her life, she has to do something BIG in a short amount of time. AND get away with it. You wouldn't necessarily think it, but this is partly an exciting action film, where preparation is key, and the entire world is against our heroine. A real nail-biter, especially in the third act. But it's more than that. Woman at War LOOKS gorgeous, the wide frame filled with Iceland's dramatic landscapes right from the beginning, just so you KNOW what she's fighting for. Just beautiful. And while I'm not sure the conceit of having the score played by mysterious characters in frame - a polka band and folk singers - actually fits the theme (aside from the fact that she's a choir teacher), it's too much fun to object to it. There's a moment where she becomes aware of the percussive tension beats that sells this "chorus" idea more than adequately. Loved this one!
While Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance is unimpeachable in Capote, the film just reminds me why I'm so disinterested in most biopics. There's so much that could have been done thematically with the writing of In Cold Blood, but instead, it just treats the subject as an "interesting story" and leaves it at that. For example, this is the fictionalization of a true story about the fictionalization of a true story, but they don't do anything with it. Somewhere in there is commentary on "true crime", its ghoulishness, the toll it takes on the writer delving into the details, getting too close to his subjects, etc., but it feels underdeveloped. Literary fame vs. doing the work (largely through Harper Lee's presence in the story) is addressed, but it's just texture. Even Capote connecting with one of the killers through their outsider status doesn't really bloom into anything. Now, a lot of that is in the acting. Hoffman has to both care for the killer and want him dead so he can finish the book, but the final product is too ordinary to give these ideas their due.
My Companion Film project hits continues with a mini-series starring Jenna "Clara" Coleman... Based on actual crimes committed in the 1970s, The Serpent is an 8-part mini-series that should interest true crime enthusiasts, but despite its exotic locations, it still suffers from "and then this happened" syndrome common to most biopics. The murder of tourists in Asia for their passports has a young Dutch diplomat interested (and ultimately, obsessed) and the chess game between him and the mastermind villain is filled with tension. I didn't have any problems with the back and forth, almost puzzle-like, chronology - it seemed pretty clear to me WHEN we were at any given time, but the criticism I've seen of it isn't unwarranted. My main problem is with the reason I watched it in the first place. Janna Coleman, though it can't be denied she makes for a gorgeous 70s beauty and has the acting chops to pull off the psychology of the Serpent's girlfriend, is not a native French speaker and there's a LOT of French spoken in this. Most of the people around her who do ARE native French speakers and though she's supposed to be French Canadian, her pronunciation is absolutely horrendous and requires subtitles even for us French speakers. (At least they made her mother's voice on the phone just the same, so I guess this is how Quebecois speak in the universe of this series.) I'm sure there's some terrible Dutch too, I can't tell, but I have a feeling even English speakers will know something is up here.
Books: The BBC's Eighth Doctor Adventures line editor, Stephen Cole, writing as Michael Collier, doesn't have a great track record. Longest Day was terrible, and his second effort in the series, The Taint (unfortunate title), meant to introduce new companion Fitz (an editorial implant that would become the longest-serving companion in Doctor Who history, all media included), while better, is still an annoying mess. It features a house filled mentally ill people with Satanic delusions, actually being influenced by an alien infestation and their malfunctioning exterminator, and for the life of me, I can never figure out that house's geography and things just seem to jump around constantly, which is extremely distracting. The plot is similar, with POV changing sometimes sentences in, and the attendant technobabble remaining opaque and there are too many villains to keep up with (the nasty nurse is the one that sticks in mind, while the aliens are a damp squib). Things happen and you have to go, okay, I guess that happened. Cole has some talent for horror description, and he makes Fitz a fun character (who, at this point, could be a Turlough as much as a Bennie - I know it's the latter having read some of the books far ahead of this one), though perhaps at the cost of making Sam at all palatable. If she isn't liked by a lot of readers, it may be books like this where she's quite irritating (and the line editor is sort of showing his hand playing her like that, no? I'm surprised he didn't do away with her completely). The Taint takes place in 1963, which is a nice nod to the show, and cements Fitz's importance to the canon. No problem with his hopping on board, but his introduction story is nasty and confused.
Justin Richards' novels can always be counted on to render a solid, meat and potatoes episode of Doctor Who. This holds true with Demontage, which should correctly be identifies as a comedy where the nominal bad guys are perhaps just misunderstood or will ally with the Doctor in due course, and the premise is a little silly. This was written before televised stories like Fear Her and Vincent and the Doctor, but it shares the premise of people being sucked into art. That part of the book is predictable enough, but it's not the big twist. Rather, watch out for revelations based on the wider cast's motivations as we head towards an action finale. It's also Fitz's first trip in the TARDIS and Richards does a good job with him. He's funny, still a bit of a coward but less so than in The Taint, and the idea of adding someone to the crew pans out. Now, you can split the group up and at least two of them will have someone to talk to. The Doctor's a bit too sidelined at first - he's gambling in a space casino for days on end?! - but all the better to make Sam and Fitz show their worth.
Big Finish Audios: As the Eighth Doctor Adventures' fourth season continues, the Monk returns in the Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars two-parter, a story that has him meddle with the history of the Ice Warriors where it intersects humanity's, putting the Doctor in a very difficult place. Now, I'm not sure I accept the premise that this Doctor refuses to have any lives on his conscience and that that's been true since the TV Movie and is a reaction to Doc7's ruthlessness. Even if I discount the novels, I'm pretty sure this hasn't been strictly true over the the many Doc8 audios. It does seem to make him unable to face a dilemma, and turns out to be a unfulfillable prophecy. The format won't really allow it. But it's required to create a real contrast between his methods and the Monk's. Because the good the Monk is trying to do requires long term planning and may require actually engineeing deaths. On this basis, the two trade companions, which makes Tamsin a failed companion, sadly. Not that I'm not happy to see Lucie return, but her replacement never had a chance. As soon as she seemed interesting (in The Book of Kells), she's out (or turned into an "NPC"). The story moves the pieces around the board and gets us to the back half of the season well, though I did have whiplash with the terraforming weapon being in play, then not, then yes, then not, etc. Fine, but not a favorite.
RPGs: On Torg Eternity this week... What The God Box published scenario wanted to have happen - the people of the Land Below join forces to free all the slaves held by the volcano worshipers and a new Golden Age is forged in Merretika. My players' actions made this impossible (indeed, the new Leopard Warrior PC is banished, which serves the party's needs). A slave revolt does happen thanks to a Glory card play, but future uncertain, and certainly no united Land Below. But when you give PCs agency, you have to be prepared for failure. The short-term goals of freeing their guide's kids and stealing sparkling crystals that can power the portal outta there WERE achieved, of course, and as usual for this group, a lot of potential combat was avoided through stealth and personal interactions. Never even got to trot out my Serpentor slaver tokens! The Pyrian Fire Tamers were well represented however, as a Roman-like volcano cult intent on making their god sleep for a thousand years (this didn't work out either, but it would have been a reach for the players to make this happen under those circumstances). Another reversal, but up top: We have a PC that is no longer on the team, but his player still gets to make decisions for him once a month (setting time). That character failed to give any attention to rumors that Uthorion was massing a Viking flotilla to attack Iceland, so while in the official Torg game, the chronology says Iceland's invasion was repulsed, in ours, it indeed WAS invaded. Oops!
Best bits: Good Cosm card play this time around during the trek to the volcano - to get more Possibilities, the players drop cards that add a geographical difficulty AND a monster threat simultaneously, and an easy crossing becomes a fight with a submerged vegetable tentacle monster in furious, boiling rapids. The creature is killed by the Monster Hunter (appropriate) with a grenade, and with the full support of the Leopard Warrior currently submerged with it - he was almost killed, too, have to spend Poss on his damage soaking roll and still only healing a single Wound. Trying to rope themselves across the river, the two dumbest PCs almost threw both ends into the water simultaneously, but I would only have enforced it on a Mishap. The Promethean Wrestler almost came apart in the rapids, leaving a trail of greasy liquid in his wake. He also kicked a guy into a volcano ("THIS. IS. MERRETIKA!") and successfully intimidated a lava monster by peeing on him while chuckling. That's what happens when a pyrophobe is made to feel indestructible by a "Boon of the Volcano spirit" + fireproof turtle shell shield combo. The Monster Hunter had a good stealth moment, slipping under a wagon during a spot inspection. The Leopard Warrior showed how the Stalker Perk can be very powerful, clambering unseen under a bridge overlooking the volcano's caldera and catching Pyrians flat-footed like Wolverine on crack. And the Glory? Scored by the Realm Runner - the Land Below will long tell tales of the skinny, unloved man who cut down a Fire Tamer with his boom stick.
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