"Accomplishments"
In theaters: There are a lot of layers to peel back in Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain. He and Kieran Culkin play cousins who were like brothers before they became adults, now on a Holocaust tour in Poland to honor their recently-deceased grandmother. Culkin was hard-hit and his unacknowledged bipolar disorder makes him sway between effortless people person and explosive chaos agent. Eisenberg is less showy as the more traditional repressed case (there's a reason Woody Allen once cast him as his younger self), though he does give himself at least one very effective monologue. The film has mood swings of its own, on the face of it structured like a conventional travelogue film, but deploying both humor and crushing sadness in well-measured amounts. It all comes down to the title. Culkin plays "a real pain in the ass" - as expected from a "buddy travel movie" - but his grief, loneliness and listlessness are palpable, and then mixed into his and everyone's feeling about the Holocaust, an ancestral pain that goes beyond the personal, yet informs it. Is it right to wallow in our own pain when this kind of suffering has existed and still exists? Is there a limit to empathy? The film presents different opinions, but ultimately seems to say it's all valid. I consider this primarily a comedy, but I wiped my eyes often.
At home: Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, is quite good. She has an eye for the interesting shot, and molds this real-life story into a thematically-consistent running commentary on sexism and misogyny finding their ultimate expression in 1970s Hollywood's intersection with a serial killer, while all the micro-aggressions Cheryl (Kendrick) suffers remain palpably relevant today. Women - whether Cheryl who would "win a date" with the killer on The Dating Game, or others seen in cutaways to the charismatic killer's "career" - aren't just would-be victims in the film, but are also things to be looked at and fondled, never listened to or taken seriously, and our girl is just too smart and self-possessed to take much more of it. Not being too aware of this story, I wasn't sure if Cheryl was a victim or a survivor, and there's a lot of tension in that. I did check out the Dating Game episode afterwards, and the movie's version is mostly fabrication, but pleasant fabrication. It's funny and gives its heroine a chance to shine and get a little revenge on the patriarchy, but also creates a great deal of suspense. The focus on a would-be victim promised by the title is only half-true - we do see a lot of the killer, even if his motivations remain obscure - but it prevents Woman of the Hour from feeling like a bog-standard biopic-type movie, despite falling into some of the tropes. I liked it a lot despite by bias against so-called "true event" films.
Naked You Die (AKA The Young, the Evil and the Savage AKA The Schoolgirl Killer AKA The Miniskirt Murders) is a mod giallo with poppy James Bond music, voluptuous girls reading American comic books, and the awe-inspiring ability to have people get undressed and yet withhold nudity. I don't think it ever gets better than the opening sequence in which a woman is strangled in her bath and shipped off to a all-girls prep school in a trunk. Which of the teachers is the killer, then? You place your bets and even if you're right, there's still a twist at the end. I'm not surprised to learn this was co-written by Mario Bava, as there's a wicked sense of humor to the proceedings, in part thanks to the amateur sleuth in the class. Otherwise, the violence is fairly tame (no gore), and the film relies on juxtaposing sex with jeopardy, so the school is one where a teacher has a tryst with a student, and the gardener peeps at the girls in the shower. You don't always die naked, but that's your best chance. Watchable, though the dialog is often risible. I only had access to the 78-minute U.S. cut, but it didn't feel truncated.
Cooper Raiff's writes and directs himself in Shithouse, a one-night coming of age, borderline mumblecore film about a young man who is crushingly homesick while at college, and failing - academically AND socially - due to his inability to cut the umbilical cord. That's until he makes a potentially ill-fated connection with Dylan Gelula's character. At the back end of one particular frat party, she opens him up to college as an experience, and it changes his life. But meetcute or not, I think we can respect Gelula's refusal to be some cog in a romcom plot, and Raiff's crippling loneliness isn't fixed with a kiss. Relatable moments abound, no doubt thanks to that mumbly awkwardness, which is real and universal. If this is the "zoomer experience", then fine, but I easily make connections to my own college days in the 90s - the crazy nocturnal "missions", the bad room mates, the party anxieties, and fumbling in the dark. I wasn't homesick though - is that the zoomer thing?
An early effort by Matt Farley and the gang at Motern Media, Druid Gladiator Clone has quite the title, and therefore, quite the outlandish tale. Farley himself plays an apprentice druid with magical powers (they have fun with an electric beam effect) throwing off the shackles of his evil master to do good in the Small Town America where these movies usually take place. Interested in two girls, he creates a clone of himself to cover the spread, but despite the poster's promise, they get along just fine. Motern's trademark off-kilter humor means tropes like the evil twin are easily subverted, which also means you can't know know where it's all going. It's not my favorite of theirs - the dialogue and acting, while in line with future offerings, is sillier and there's less heart - but it's a matter of degrees. An amusing and rather original oddball folk horror comedy.
Based on true events, Memories of Murder can be a hard watch, and also a frustrating one as we watched country cops bungle an investigation into a series of terrible rape and murder cases, even with the help of better-trained detective from Seoul who, inch by inch, starts to crack under the pressure. As with the director's other films, it's excessively well-made, but yes, frustrating. I reconciled myself to the fact that this was ABOUT frustration, the frustration of the "unsolved case", the frustration of seeing the police go after the wrong people with the wrong means, the frustration of coming up empty or else seeing evidence evaporate before our eyes because of accidental circumstance. And that makes sense - it's a story crime thrillers rarely delve into - but for an audience, it hurts out brains and our souls. But that's really the point, and Bong Joon-ho's tonal inspiration - Alan Moore's From Hell - definitely exists in that same sphere.
Books: Nigel Robinson effectively saves Doctor Who (and) the Edge of Destruction in his late-era Target novelization. On the one hand, he puts us inside the heads of the characters and more clearly explains their trains of thought and how they come to the conclusions they do on the program. The televised story is a big WTF - though a bit less so today when it's accepted the TARDIS is a living being - skippable except that it ends on some sweet scenes that move the Doctor away from being a sort of antagonist and forges the original foursome as a family. Robinson hasn't jettisoned that and provides the same feels. But since this WAS only TWO episodes long, he gets to fill out the story with additional scenes of the characters visiting the ship. Ian and the Doctor go down to the engines, and Barbara finds herself in an enormous laboratory, which is all very interesting. Interesting, but also quite useful in showing how the TARDIS is alive and is trying to protect them, something that doesn't come across very clearly on the show.
I have experience Marco Polo many ways. I've seen the short recap of it on The Beginning DVD boxed set. I've listened to the BBC's narrated audio. I've watched the reconstruction. But my first Marco Polo was the Target novelization. This is what the adaptations are FOR, since it's especially true in the case of lost stories that we're never going to be able to watch them. And yet, it took 20 years for John Lucarotti to adapt his own script to the printed page. Having the same writer do both means he gets to make a few "corrections", and generally, I think the changes are better than the original treatment. Scrunching a 7-episode historical into the same size as most other novelizations means it's got a faster pace, and Lucarotti doesn't skimp on the budget. A bit too much emphasis on what everyone is eating at every meal, but still. Marco Polo IS a picaresque, with lots of stuff happening on the road (the Tartar warlord ties it all together), but it's got lots of little character moments which are precious to me. One of Who's great losses, but it lives in the pages of this book.
Would it have killed them to give the artist of Doctor Who and the Keys of Marinus photo reference for the Voord?! Even the Doctor Who production office was pissed off at the off-color TARDIS (for me, I thought I had Edge of Destruction AKA Inside the Spaceship in my collection, but it was this one). In any case, it's going to be difficult to save a Terry Nation picaresque (ugh), but I'll admit Philip Hinchcliffe tries his best. His era of the show is known for its Gothic horror stylings, and though he follows the action of the show very closely, his word choice gives everything an added air of menace. Bright light STABS THE EYES! That kind of thing. If he needs a verb, adjective or turn of phrase, he finds a violent or horrific one. So not an unpleasant read, but he can't get away from Nation's curt mini-plots and nonsense planet. Additions are few and mostly invisible, except for an invented moment where Ian slaps a "hysterical" Barbara. *Eyebrow raise*
RPGs: Was that supposed to be our Christmas episode this week in the Call of Cthulhu game? I guess. Our characters made up after the falling-out at the end of our last, disastrous adventure (why is the nun now saying she's the Chosen One?!) and we even exchanged gifts. How sweet. The session was prefaced by the Keeper handing out a newspaper clipping about a missing meteor and a connection to the Witches of Wolfville - old enemies of ours - which I immediately read in an old-timey radio voice - no mistakes! (I should do all my podcasts in that voice.) My goal for this one (and I think the Keeper was also hinting at it once we got underway) was to finally contact the Twilight Tea Society who sent us their card months ago (we just didn't follow up) and is the name of our Discord server (so... yeah, call'em up, gang). Our characters have thus, not joined, that's not the right word, but accepted to have their investigations financed by a trio of rich widows who know all about this Mythos stuff. Good idea since it's hard to get out of Massachusetts when your party is made up of a mooching dilettante writer, a Catholic nun and a disfigured gravedigger (who just blew up his own shack on a fumble with dynamite). Just because this was a "down-time" kind of session doesn't mean there weren't a lot of Sanity checks (the gravedigger and my writer did not fare well) as the Keeper presented the former with the ghosts of his dead dog and his former character, and mine with with the creepy undying fetus of our former colleague who was aging in reverse. A bad case of "what is thi---OH NOOOOOOOO!". Christmas is ruined! My Sanity has dwindled to 40%, but that's still pretty good this far into the game. I'm holding on.
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