"Accomplishments"In theaters: Mormon missionaries go to a theologian's house and get more than they bargained for in Heretic, and I think there's a version of this film I like better, in which the thriller of ideas DOESN'T turn to horror and still shakes the two girls to their core, but I'm not holding that against the finished product. After all, it works as simply a confrontation between religion and reason, with lots of interesting points made in a witty way. Chloe East, in particular, plays someone who is adept at justifying (to use what appears to be HER cultural touchstones, No-Prizing) contradictions to her faith, and that plays into Hugh Grant's manipulations. His genial, yet creepy character is the perfect teacher, pushing his unwary students into uncomfortable realizations, but he isn't playing fair. Except... is that part of the lesson? There are bits where I was asking myself if, in the world of the film, certainly miraculous things could be true. Completely absorbing.
At home: 1959 is quite early after WWII to make a war film (indeed, the tanks are wooden fakes), but The Bridge feels more powerful as a result of its proximity. How could this not be personal? Towards the close of the war, a band of school boys are eager to go and fight for their country and the adults being all too aware of their age and naivety, they are eventually put on guard duty, on a bridge ten meters from their home village. Nothing should have happened there, but things quickly go wrong as the Americans advance on the town on their way to Berlin. In addition to some great cinematography, the reason Die Brücke works so well is that we spend half the film (more!) finding out who these boys are, their lives in the village, their relationship with their families and each other. Once they're in the army, it becomes a little harder to distinguish who is who (barring rewatches), but it hardly matters - we know what they, as a group, as a DEMOGRAPHIC, stand to lose. Enthusiasm for war is a product of propaganda, and the film is filled with national regret.
Though I absolutely appreciate Hal Ashby's The Last Detail for its 70s anti-authoritarian vibes, it does, necessarily meander a bit too much for me. I get impatient with the sailors' week off shenanigans and the idea that you "become a man" by getting drunk and getting laid is tediously dated (or at least, uninteresting to me). I do think the acting, and the tracking of the three characters, is very strong. Randy Quaid is being hauled off to prison for a minor crime and Jack Nicholson is one of two men (with Otis Young) who has to escort him there. But with a week to do it in, why not show the kid a good time? Young eventually falls for this anarchic spirit as the trio crosses the United States looking for a bit of fun before the walls of injustice close in on the boy. In the process, Quaid has a kind of coming of age, but one wonders if he was done a favor. He loses his liberty just as he understood what it meant. Notable for some famous faces in small or cameo roles - this is the first film appearance of both Nancy Allen and Gilda Radner, and not far off for Carol Kane! What happened there?
I don't like biopics, but I like journalism stories, and A Private War - tracking the last 10 years or so of war correspondent Marie Colvin's career therefore has me in a tight spot. We follow her from war zone to war zone, which is where the real meat of the story is - journalists see atrocities so we don't have to (a theme that plays into her getting maimed and losing an eye) and there's a very real toll to pay (PTSD and actual risk to life and limb). Rosamund Pike even sounds like the real Colvin, and I like her relationship with Jamie Dornan's photographer. But I couldn't make myself care very much for the biopic elements. Her drinking, her affairs... we jump in time so often, I didn't really need to track any of that, even if the expressions of all the involved background characters are part of the moving climax the film is building up to in Syria. Time jumps are an awkward necessity in many biopics, but in this case, they do have a thematic function as one war bleeds into the other and ultimately, into the conflicts going on today. The suffering presented in the film is suffering past and suffering future, and that's one thing the film doesn't truly address - we haven't moved the needle in the right direction one bit, and what's heralded as a heroically empathetic act on the part of these journalists seems to just be grist for the mill on the other side of the media machine.
I didn't know Jodie Whittaker and Sacha Dhawan had worked together before Doctor Who! They don't interact much in the three-episode thriller Wired, but they're both bank employees (different branches) coerced into helping dangerous criminals commit bank fraud. Whitaker is very good at playing a complicated character, and there are lots of strong actors around her, but you know, it's hard to get too involved in a thriller based on shuffling paperwork and watching money move from account through a load bar. (I don't know why I've never thought of this before, with all the movie slow transfers of money, but it must be fairly simultaneous in real life, right? It's just a ledger adjustment, you're not transferring each dollar as a file, unless I'm mistaken about how these things are encoded. I'll never see those scenes the same way again, thanks Wired.) Anyway, a watchable TV thriller, but it feels like its complicated story and multiplication of villains needed a few more episodes to breathe.
Books: So I've decided to read Target's Doctor Who adaptations, in episode order (which is not at all publication order). To keep the pace up, I was thinking of reading something different at the end of each season - alternating between an Eighth Doctor novel, a novel starring that season's Doctor, something not Who related... - which is much less ambitious than my original plan, but more reasonable. We'll see how long I'll stay with it. It starts with Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child, which wasn't published until 1981 (what with the very first book giving a different start to the series). Terrence Dicks' crisp, efficient prose recounts the first four episodes, sliding in some of the characters' thoughts into the narrative. These are the additions I'm on the look-out for as I relive episodes I know well in the theater of my mind. The cavemen - and folks, I've always liked the Tribe of Gum stuff more than the typical fan - are the most enhanced, thanks to a clear point of view. I like to imagine myself reading this to an earthly child I never had at bedtime, imagining myself imagining them discovering the actual episodes as adults and having their minds blown. Is that too much imagination?
If Doctor Who and the Daleks (or, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks) is an atypical entry in the Target range, it's because it was written in 1964, years before the Target line was initiated. It was meant as a one-off, with then-script editor David Whitaker giving the crew an entirely new origin that eschews An Unearthly Child and all the caveman stuff. It's well-written, but it's mostly fascinating for all the little differences - Ian's tobacco habit, Barbara being much younger (though I don't like the two teachers being at the "I hate you SO MUCH" phase of a romcom), the Doctor's famous ever-lasting matches, and the Glass Dalek. Is this what Whitaker WISHES the show had done, correcting Terry Nation's "mistakes"? Maybe. He does cut own on the padded picaresque portion of Nation's original and what feels like a more exciting climax. There's a lot more about the TARDIS's interior and capabilities as well. All told from Ian's perspective, some bits have to be recounted back to him, but I don't think we lose much in the exchange. I have the 1970s and 2011 editions, which reprint the original illustrations as well. They're not great, honestly - a little too dark and scratchy - but I'd rather have that than nothing at all.
RPGs: In our Torg Eternity game... after boarding the Mole and digging through the Earth, our heroes pop out on the coast of the Red Sea, Saudi side, under a Nile Empire military camp. Some sneaking around is indicated, but the Leopard Man not understanding much of anything in the modern world eventually raises the alarm before the others can press-gang a more-than-willing pilot into taking them out to the next step in the adventure, and all hell breaks loose. But this is the Nile Empire - it's a big matinée serial - so the players had lots of tools to beat back the shocktroopers in the explosive climax. Well, the actually scripted climax was an airplane chase/dogfight, but they got out of it with trickery. Which is fine. I just started on Act 3 early, a meeting with a greedy demon off the shore of Christmas Island, where the bribe the bugger so he lets they go down into the deep before Mobius himself is meant to show up to check on his Possibility-sapping machine. Instead put the cliffhanger as the characters don very bulky (and attribute-draining) diving suits and they dropped into the Indian Ocean...
Best bits: It seems this was the session where the characters kept menacing NPCs who were either on their side, or quite willing to do the things asked of them (a lot of mistrust of the demon, but I guess that's normal). The first of these was a simple lab assistant who pointedly asked the agents to tie him up and gag him, as this is just the normal matinée thing to do. The Frankenstein: "Ok, let's talk about this." The Leopard Warrior: "Again?" Finding the camp commandant's shrine to the scientist's (too young) daughter in his quarters (while looking for the airplane starter), the disgusted Monster Hunter spent a Dragon's Breath grenade on destroying it - the villain was so distraught that he took his eye off the ball and was skewered by Wolveri--the Leopard. The Frankenstein jumping into a tank and shelling enemy troops AND the Realm Runner making a fuel tank explode turned the camp into an inferno within seconds of the alarm being rung. Some fun with the Runner fast talking the fighter pilots following the group, as we used meta-language like "I need you to roll Trick", but mixed it with CB lingo, as in "Roger that, I'll need you to roll Trick to see if I'll fall for it, over." "10-4, what's your difficulty number, over?" And after more than 40 episodes, the to-date asexual Realm Runner FINALLY played a Romance card on an NPC - the sassy French pilot who calls him "Toothpick" - I guess she IS perpetually drunk. For now, it's just a lot of teasing, but a middle school romance seems about right for the jerky boy raised in a bunker.
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