"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Live, from New York! It's Saturday Night! The tell-some does two things to alleviate the humdrum "this happened and then this happened" of stock biopics. One is that it's told in real time, telling the story of SNL's beginnings through the lens of only the 90 minutes before the first episode went on air. The other is eschewing factual detail for the FEELING of being there. And that feeling is utter chaos. If you've ever stage managed a show, it's pretty relatable. If you staged managed many, imagine all the things that have gone wrong and setting them on the same night (which I have no doubt is one of the historical changes made to craft the movie - no way did this ALL happen on the same night). Some people are just their onscreen characters, or played for laughs, because that's how it FELT to know them. The movie ends just where you want it to, even though that didn't happen on the night in question. But it FEELS like it should have. The real story, though they never put a post-it on it is of a polite Canadian producer who wants to please everyone trying to juggle a new format, unruly writers, conservative "suits", annoyed technicians, and an insane bunch of jokesters, bring order to the chaos by... being nice? It's a lot of fun to watch. And the casting is actually pretty amazing too. The actors look and sound like the originals, but give performances, not impressions. But when they do, do impressions, they're great (I'm thinking J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle and Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd in particular). I'm smelling the first Casting Director Oscar all over this one.
At home: In Babes, one friend (the always very watchable Michelle Buteau) just had her second baby, the other (co-writer Ilana Glazer) is unexpectedly having her first, and the film proposes to tell you all the things usually ignored in movies about what it does to your body and to your state of mind. And it uses gross-out humor and adult language - common in American comedy - to expose what seems an odd taboo. It's not like this isn't happening to millions of women every year. Damn you, patriarchy, for hiding the truth! Of course, if you have known ANY pregnant woman, or been pregnant yourself, you'll recognize what's they're talking about here. Grounding itself in the kind of comedy I dislike made it hard for me to get into the swing of things, but once I did - very much helped by a bunch of funny supporting roles - I did let some laughs out, and even got a little teary. Babes' original context and some very endearing performances just won me over, as I hope it will win you over too.
Even if you know that the movie is about a child ballerina vampire, Abigail still plays out as a solid heist/mystery that makes you wonder how we'll get there. And once we DO get there, it's an entertaining blood fest where the monster uses dance moves in her choreography and that still continues to throw twists at you. I really like this cast of kidnappers... Melissa Barrera is always welcome on my screen and is a great lead here. Dan Stevens is an "of course" even if his character is a jerk. Kathryn Newton is the spunky hacker. And Kevin Durand is doing a damn impressive Québécois accent (his mother was Franco-Ontarian, which must have helped) and is perhaps our favorite of the bunch. Even the bit parts are well cast. The script is witty and funny - though there's perhaps one exposition scene too many - and once the violence is unleashed, there's plenty of gore for horror fans. Fake teeth are a bit big though, right? It's not just me?
I would put Body Parts in the same category as Flatliners. It starts with a strong psychological/metaphysical horror premise, but by the end, the finer points are lost to provide more traditional (albeit bonkers) horror thrills. But I like Body Parts a lot better. A prison psychiatrist is shocked to discover that, after a terrible car accident, they've replaced his arm with that of an executed serial killer. Can he live with what that hand has done? And could those dark dreams and bouts of violence all be in his mind, or does evil live elsewhere than in the brain? Jeff Fahey is quite effective as the tortured lead. Brad Dourif is one of the other men who benefited from the same donor. And Lindsay Duncan is the medical genius/mad scientist (for is this not a modern-day take on Frankenstein?) who made it all possible - this, before she was a recognizable name. Not without its plot holes - what's a homicide detective doing responding to a bar fight? - but still quite engaging.
After The Ring's success, it was only natural for Japan to export the next J-horror hit with a "ghost caught on video" element, and Ju-On: the Grudge is therefore one of the West's well-remembered titles (the American remake might have helped, but The Ring can say that too). Certainly, the creepy girl from the trailer is seared into a generation's brains. But it's no Ringu. I like the set-up: A social worker makes a welfare check and certainly doesn't expect a haunted house. I like the structure, at least in theory: We go back and forth in time, getting answers and new questions as we follow the various characters affected by these ghosts. However! I was about ready for some real answers when the vignette-style structure started digging into the investigating cop's story and more or less lost me. If we would have stuck more closely to the social worker who opens and closes the film, and if there had been more of a resolution, maybe. As is, it's perfectly fine and has a lot of creepy moments, but I I'm not sure the film follows its own internal logic, or if it just fails to present one to follow.
Feels like someone watched some Scream movies between Ju-on: The Grudge 1 and 2! A TV crew drops by the same haunted house to do a reenactment and those associated with it start dropping like flies. It's got the same time-skipping, character-by-character structure. The same ghosts show up. And yet... I like this one a lot better! The gags are for the most part more clever (the temporal displacement, most of the hair stuff, the ending), though some are a little goofy (the creeping wig) or are only scary because the music tells you they are. But on the whole, clever and creepy. It also explains itself more efficiently and actually has a resolution I can get behind. At first, I thought the structure was a conceit that didn't feel as necessary here as it did in the previous film - that it would have worked better told linearly - but the things it does with the teenage extra toward the end might well justify it.
Despite its (English) title, Kung Fu Zombie starts off with hopping vampires, then introduces us to a ghost who bullies a comedy wizard into finding him a freshly dead body to inhabit. The wizard accidentally releases other evils, but none of them are the zombies you're thinking of. Kung Fu Undead just doesn't have the same ring to it somehow. It's cheap, doesn't have a big star attached, and as with a lot of kung fu films from the early 80s, it's on that comedy bandwagon that tends to play things a bit too broadly. But the story is unusual and the action is solid. Especially that insane final sequence against the title character. (Personal note: I broke my rule of never watching English dubs on kung fu films, as they are always loud and dumb, as if the translators didn't know Chinese and ewre just guessing, because of, yes, the title. Many years ago, I'd repurposed the poster for a Hong Kong Action Theater role-playing session, though our use of the title was more Train to Busan than anything I saw here.)
Yuen Wo-Ping's Dreadnaught is a rather schizophrenic film, and I don't mean the insane killer opera killer who might have given us a U.S. title like, I dunno, Kung Fu Slasher. Because while there are moments that fit a horror film, they are few and far between. The restless plot is more interested in comedy - this IS a Yuen Biao vehicle - or Chinese culture (this is perhaps the closest the director comes to making a Lau Kar-leung film). The lion dances up top are particularly great, and I have a soft spot for kung fu based on every-day activities (bench fu, tailor fu, laundry fu), of which there is plenty here. Kwan Tak-Hing co-stars as an older Wong Fei-Hung (even without dialog, that music is unmistakable) who has a murderous rival in the area. Yuen Biao is trying to get Wong to be his teacher. There are comedy cops in the mix. And THEN, the masked/made-up "slasher". It's a lot, and the story often gets lost in the amusing action set pieces, but at least it all comes together in the end.
Nagisa Ōshima's Empire of Passion stars Kazuko Yoshiyuki as Seki, a pleasantly spirited lady married to a rickshaw driver, but pestered with attention by Toyoji, just returned to rural Japan from his military service. After he has her way with her several times, he manipulates her into helping him kill her husband. A Hitchcock premise, but three years later, the latter returns to haunt her as a ghost and we're in Japanese folk tale territory. By then, the bloom is rather off the rose, but the relationship is still on. It's problematic that sexual assault has turned to lust, but I don't think it's psychologically false. In her time and culture, Seki has lost more than she has gained, and guilt has smothered up those pleasant spirits. If the rest of the village wasn't being haunted too, you'd almost believe the ghost was all in her head. Ōshima's eroticism is on show, but also is ability to create images of real beauty. The leaves falling down the well, the way the camera discovers the guilty lovers (in positions indicating where they are in the story), and the passing of seasons are all impeccable.
Around the turn of this century, Japan gave us a bunch of ghost stories that intersected with technology (The Ring, The Grudge, One Missed Call), but Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse goes further in grounding things in the existential horror of the new millennium, by equating death and loneliness and crafting an afterlife bursting at the seams, despite each ghost being unable to interact with others, and leaking into our world, bringing a communicable loneliness curse with them. The haunted Internet that seems to be the high-concept premise at the start of the film may merely be a kind of Ouija board to communicate with the spirit world... or is that OUR world, filled with lonely souls itself? Kurosawa's apocalyptic vision is set in cold, urban and industrial spaces, creating a progressively-empty Tokyo as the main characters lose friends and family to - if we track the metaphor - online existence. He was on the cutting edge to have thought this up in 2001.
RPGs: This is it, The God Box epic finale (review of the product below). The Agents drop into the Yucatán, assemble a small army of villagers, policemen and cavemen, and (after taking care of cartel oppressors), head for the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá to stop the wedding of High Lord Baruk Kaah and his queen in waiting, AND free Lanala, the Living Land's goddess/manifestation of Nature from the titular artifact before it's too late. Along the way, our Leopard Warrior OF COURSE falls in love (I say "of course" because his player is known for dropping Romance cards on unwary NPCs - this is his 6th), this time with Lupe, a Mexican resistant who proves quite able seeing as I made her the grand-daughter of a kickass NPC from our now rear view mirrored Shiftworld campaign. The climax went a bit late, but this time no one seemed to mind, and the PCs got very lucky with the Drama Deck giving them much better chances than otherwise. Baruk Kaah - who would have made mince meat of them - had been lured away (see, this is why you need allies sometimes) along with most of the tens of thousands of Edeinos warriors, but he was coming back when the players put the final nail in the scheme. The players will never know how much the map might have been changed had they failed (if they survived to even LOOK at a map), but I had stuff prepared. As is, they have Lanala's thanks, can use their Famous Perk across the media-less Living Land now (the goddess is connected to all life there), and Baruk Kaah starts to shed followers. Looking ahead, I also laced in a new mystery, but that'll be addressed next time.
Best bits: Leopard drops Romance card on Lupe, but they send her away to discuss things - I place her token next to a random Villager and after a while change his token's name to "Guy who just got dumped by Lupe". Hey, gotta keep myself entertained while the players are yappin'. The Frankenstein walks out of the water, narrating how he leaks water from every stitch. The cartel fight had a lot of, if not exactly Mexican standoffs, at least people holding weapons to each others' heads/throats, using them as shields, acrobatically jumping over fences, etc. A cavewoman: "I am Deena". Players: "Is your last name Saur?" The Leopard kicks an Edeinos off a triceratops and takes control of the creature. Later, he kicks a guy down the pyramid steps and he falls mid-section first into one of the creature's horns. The Monster Hunter ramped up that pyramid in a Dodge Ram, bringing the Realm Runner to where he needed to be, within storming range of the bride and the Box. In the resulting tornado of trees, rocks and dinosaurs, the Leopard almost gets swallowed whole by a tumbling T-Rex as he runs to save Lupe.
Books: I was warned about The God Box - Torg Eternity's first campaign adventure - that it was one tracks and often robbed the Player Characters of agency. It's not true of every one of its five acts, but when it's true, boy is it true. I was confident I could make the necessary changes, but it was sometimes difficult. While there's a high-stakes plot at its core, the adventure is mostly a tour of the Living Land and what it has to offer, forcing the players to jump around the map as they race after the villains and never catching up to them until the end. It's hard to maintain any kind of NPC cast in those circumstances, so it feels high on action, low on role-play. Part of the tour - and the main reason to get this book regardless - is the Land Below, which was its own sourcebook in original Torg, distilled into a strong, evocative chapter here. Generally, the adventure itself too often makes a star NPC make the decisions or assumes the PCs will do X or Y without any prompting. It also too seldom uses Dramatic Skill Resolutions even where they would fit nicely, contradicts game rules, and is a mess in terms of threat stats (all stuffed into a chapter under category headings - along with creatures that are really part of the sourcebook section - instead of at the back of each Act. The text contradicts the maps supplied or vice-versa, and I also question to threat level, as it varies wildly from too easy to impossibly hard (I mean, a High Lord shows up) unless you do exactly the right thing. When it works, it works well, and I absolutely wanted to go to the Land Below, but I'm also kind of glad I skipped a few scripted combats here and there to get this one done in five sessions flat. Too many problems!
A good example of why I think Doctor Who novels from the interregnum are superior to more (if not all) other franchise tie-in fiction, Lawrence Miles's Interference Book One is a postmodern marvel, even if it's only (only?) set-up for a second part. There are a few postmodern writers working on Doctor Who at this time, a liberty that's almost unheard of in licensed universe fiction. It keeps changing modes of writing - documents, script formats, different 3rd and 1st person devices... It's got unreliable narrators, and you'll either entirely revise who was speaking by the end of a section, or be left with a partial understanding of what's going on because the starring character also has that partial understanding. It even begins a different novel just when the going gets good, as a distraction! And it's about media. Doctor Who is a television show, so Miles invents a race of people who depend on television signals for their culture, who exist as if in a TV show, perceive the world in this way and let themselves be guided by such signals. The point being that, so do we (although the Internet has since replace TV per se). "Interference" is a strong theme in the novel, and surely why it allows itself to start a second (related) story in the third act. It's about the "signals", yes, but also how the Doctor and his foes interfere with history, how he interferes with (changes) his Companions, and vice-versa, and ultimately, how the author interferes with the reader's ability to follow a narrative. Lots of cool ideas, lots of Faction Paradox stuff, lots of wit (especially for Doctor Who die hards who will get the meta jokes), but not lots of Eighth Doctor. He and Fitz take a real back seat (to the point where Miles is almost defying his editor by sidelining them... another type of "interference"? Sam instead shares the adventure with one of the Doctor's past companions (it's someone we like, don't worry!), and another version of the Doctor puts in an appearance (ditto). Such an intriguing read, I'm not even going to say my enjoyment depends on the resolution.
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