BuysBlack Friday sale in the Xbox store, 10 bucks to spend from my budget, and after doing three weeks of 10-hour days with no weekend breaks, I wanted to grab something that would provide absolutely brainless play, at the cheapest prices. No story, nothing but muscle memory training. I got an old Arkanoid simulator and a racing/demolition derby game called Wreckfest. The latter has been promoting the most brainlessness.
"Accomplishments"
At home: When I discovered they made a TV show out of Charles Yu's postmodern novel Interior Chinatown, I thought, no, not doable. But as it's Yu himself with comedy genius Taika Waititi... okay, yeah, maybe it is. As it happens, this 10-episode limited(?) series is pretty great, though I think if you want to know what it's really saying about the Asian-American experience, you need to read the book. The novel uses a television script conceit to track its lead, Willis Wu's (Jimmy Yang) journey from background extra to "kung fu guy" (which itself proves limiting), but here, we're already in television land. So Yu and Waititi lean into that and make it a cop show, going through various eras (80s, CSI, up to today's big conspiracy arcs) to explore how television itself has changed of the years, especially in connection to showing more diversity on screen. To make it work as a television series, ancillary characters get much more to do, including Chloe Bennet as Willis' cop partner, Diana Lin as the mom, and the Daily Show's Ronny Chieng as the comic relief best friend. The absurd metatextual premise is amusing, but Chieng brings more straightforward comedy to the proceedings. So wow, guys, they did it. And the result is different enough from the book that both can still be enjoyed without spoiling one another.
I love meta stuff, and I love Zeo Kazan, so the fact that she wrote and starred in Ruby Sparks is a confluence of Things Meant for Me(TM). Indeed, I like this whole cast. Paul Dano is a novelist with writer's block suddenly inspired to write what can only be described as a manic pixie dream girl, falling in love with what's on the page, and bam, manifesting her into reality. Of course, she's so real, she starts making choices for herself, and the writer discovers that he can manipulate her back into the fold, but at the cost of her believability/humanity. The characters that write themselves are the most engaging, and we all know when it looks "forced". Layered on top of that is just the simple idea of a man trying to control ("write") his relationship and robbing a woman of the agency that made him fall in love with her in the first place. Layered UNDER it is the concept of authorial narcissism and the writer's relationship to his own work, which of course, came out of himself. An unusual romance story with plenty of funny moments, and some subtle ones too - I like how Ruby is a lot like the writer's mother, which he resents, but those ideas had to come from somewhere, right? Clever and charming.
There are some opaque flourishes in Lawrence Michael Levine's Black Bear - like the appearance of the bear itself - that I have yet to decode, but I'm really here for Aubrey Plaza who may be playing her two essential castings - the deadpan comedienne who takes nothing seriously and the total mess - but she plays them to their fullest in what is possibly a career best. We're given two realities. One in which is she is a former actress, now screenwriter, witnessing a couple's fighting where she is lodging. The other in which she acts in drama that seems to be inspired by said couple. We're dealing with how an inciting event is transformed by art, and in the cast of film, also transformed in performances and a production's circumstances. It's all quite intriguing and Levine's playfulness (with the casting, for example) adds to the mystery, and even by the end, interpretations may vary.
Initially, Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes is a retro-look German film that looks and feels like one of those 60s-70s art house vampire films, with a Gothic castle, arch dialogues, and underlying metaphors for relationships and sexuality. Then bam, we're outside the film, looking at the people who made the aforementioned, but that doesn't mean the story has untraveled. The question of who the film makers are remains - perhaps even more confused by having the ACTUAL film makers feature in bit parts on set (and looking like their charismatic actorly counterparts) - and the question of the ending (of the film within the film) is addressed several times, and... And I'm not entirely sure. This is evidently about the anxiety of completing something and having to let it go into the world (or not). Did we make the correct choices? And if we didn't, is it the end of the world? And does perfectionism (or collaborative stalemate, in this case, perhaps, since we have duelling authors) prevent us from making anything of value despite the contradiction in terms? Are we too close to our work to even know what we're doing anymore? These questions come up, but obliquely. Otherwise, this is an art house ghost story that's got a lot in common with Aronofsky's mother! (non-derogatory).
I had no real knowledge of Nick Cave nor his music before watching 20,000 Days on Earth. I knew the name and that he was a thing in the music underground of a certain period - the angel in Wim Wenders' The Wings of Desire goes to one of his shows - but that was it. This semi-written doc, predicated on Cave discussing his artistic process with old collaborators in his car (Kylie?!) or with his psychiatrist(!), shows him working on his 2013 album as counterpoint to all the talking... and it does its job. Would I seek out some Nick Cave music now? Yes, I believe I would. How "Push the Sky Away" compares to earlier musical eras, I don't know yet, but I'm willing to do a bit of exploration. That's a promotional win for the film. AS a film, it's very slick and I liked what Cave had to say (some fun anecdotes as well as the talk about art). I'm not really able to judge how much of his story is fictionalized (is it just the contrivance of seeing all these people on this day, or are there full-blown myths made real here?), but it fits his art, which he describes as a solidification of memory.
L7: Pretend We’re Dead makes me wish I'd gotten more into L7 back in the early 90s when they were a thing, but honestly, I only just remember the song that gave the music documentary its title, and it's a lot poppier than their harsher, more metal, more political output. I might blame it on their band name (sounds like a boy or K-pop band), but I think it goes beyond that. The sound is a little harder than I liked at the time. Their blue lyrics meant they didn't get radio play. And their music label didn't really know what to do with them. But it's evident they were a big deal in certain areas and for certain listeners, and had a big impact on female rockers especially. The documentary avoids talking heads and has the band members talk over archive material instead - and there's a lot of it thanks to their own camcorder efforts. Whether the music speaks to you personally is secondary because this works as a documentary on all those mid-level bands that you THINK were successful, but in reality, barely got by. It's obvious the business model is built so record companies can exploit musicians, and L7 certainly fell prey to that. Some good tunes, some fun anecdotes, and a full tracking of this rags to riches to rags story.
My girlfriends went off to Toronto to see Taylor Swift, and I decided that, even if couldn't even NAME a Swift song, I would press play on The Eras Tour just as their show was starting. Now maybe I'll know what they're talking about when they recount their experience. As it turns out, I recognized three tunes, though possibly one of them was used in the trailer and that's where I'd heard it. Not unpleasant, if way too long for someone who doesn't know any of the words, with lots of spectacle and a good storyteller on stage (through the music, the crowd work is a little cheesy). That's perhaps one of the problems with shows on this scale. They are SO produced, there's little room for improvisation. You have to hit all the beats perfectly, or else something is going to go out of sync. So I do appreciate that Swift at one point proposes an acoustic set - apparently different at every show, truncated in the film presentation, but tacked on at the end of "Taylor's Version", the cut that's streaming - where she can just sing and play instruments and not worry about all the bells and whistles. Will I end up putting any Taylor Swift songs in my rotation? Probably not? Maybe a few? Time will tell. For a Swifty - and I get it, folks, even if her topics aren't really in my wheelhouse - this is a great show, and everyone who saw her live have this memory of her they can watch and rewatch (and everyone who couldn't get a strong substitute). For a non-Swifty, it's a little overwhelming and the love/anti-love ballads kind of melt into one another.
Ridley Scott's Spartacus 2000 - I mean, Gladiator - seemed overrated at the time. Russell Crowe's Oscar-baiting snot, Young Joaquin Phoenix and Connie Nielson giving off what we'd today call Lanister vibes, CG coliseums, and a ludicrous action story... Am I not entertained? Yes, I am, but it didn't - nor does it now - feel like a serious film like some of some of Ridley's other historical epics (The Duellists, Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down...). Revisiting it absent the contemporary hype, it IS a lot of fun, but it's also incredibly emotional. Maximus' tragedy, the constant rejection suffered by Commodus (whose shenanigans today remind us of other unstable world leaders) and Juba (Djimon Hounsou) as the soul of the film (or at least the soul Maximus believes he has lost) create an impactful, operatic emotionalism that supports the action beats and grandiose spectacle quite well. I looked a few things up and was very intrigued to discover that, while the story is fabrication, it has a lot of basis in fact. Maximus is a composite of several figures, one of which did kill Commodus, though not under the same circumstances. And Commodus WAS known to fight in the arena. Crazy. Look, it's Ridley, you're always in good hands.
Books: Probably because it's one of my favorite First Doctor serials, Doctor Who (and) the Aztecs was a less involving read than I'd hoped. I know all the beats, even pieces of dialog, and that just made John Lucarotti's retread of his own episodes familiar and even a little tedious. Until the last episode's worth of prose, anyway, because there he makes several interesting changes. Ian climbs up to the tomb in an added sequence, for example, and the last battle between him and Ixta is completely different. While each fight between the two "chosen warriors" is different (and usually limited) on screen, Lucarotti correctly intuits, I think, that it's all kind of the same on the page. Now, if you're NOT that familiar with The Aztecs, this is as good a read as Marco Polo, but with a tighter plot. It's a bona fide Doctor Who classic (in any medium), with a well-rendered historical culture and an important lesson for time travellers. Plus, the Doctor's first romantic entanglement! Yeah, that didn't just happen in the new era!
Nigel Robinson once again does his best to uplift a weak First Doctor story in Doctor Who (and) the Sensorites (look, I really hate that they dropped the "and"s in the later Targets), but it's really hard to make this one sing. It helps that it's six episodes contracted into the usual page count. It's less tedious, and I dare say the back half of the book moves a very good pace. I'd go so far as to call it exciting, and I'm into the thoughts of the various characters (denied to us onscreen), including the key Sensorites themselves. But that first half, oof, I find it hard to stay interested. And that's not Robinson's fault. He was editor of the line in the 80s (so HE'S at fault for losing the "and"s, and it looks like he took one of two for the team, assigning himself stories I'm sure no one wanted (Edge of Destruction, The Underwater Menace and this). So I'm thankful, and I think The Sensorites might have been weaker without him. It's certainly weaker on screen due to some poor direction, especially in the later chapters!
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