"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Promising a tell-all on just what happens after the Pope dies and a new one has to be chosen, Conclave soon starts to feel - from the way it's shot and the well-deployed music - like it might turn into a murder mystery thriller. Murder or not, there sure are a lot of secrets in the Vatican, and since the Catholic Church has a hierarchy, it's a sure bet the most ambitious of them are already cardinals and vying for the position using every political trick in the book. Great intrigue (audible gasps from theater goers) and Ralph Fiennes can do no wrong here as the man tasked with managing the election. Ultimately, this is about how the Church can maintain itself by either leaning on tradition or evolving with the times, and in that way, it's relevant to our current political landscape. It deals fairly with the Vatican's failures, but also makes a decent pitch as to its relevance and worth. My only complaint is the low saturation look, which makes the film dingier than it needed to be even with the windows shuttered for sequestration.
At home: In terms of personal relatability, Kramer vs. Kramer scores quite high. My parents got divorced when I was 6, just like Billy's in the movie, and it was also the late 70s. Of course, I wasn't an only child, and we lived with my mother - more traditionally, it's the dad who was at fault and who left the family - but I still connected very strongly with the onscreen events. Dustin Hoffman playing Mr. Mom is full of humor and heart, and the kid actors is quite good. I also affect Hoffman's relationship with his neighbor (Jane Alexander). If my own dad had as much self-reflection going on, I never knew it (and it seems unlikely), so there's, for me (and with all due respect to the good single dads out there), a fantasy aspect to some of this. Meryl Streep wasn't yet as big as she would get, so I'm not surprised she's not in the film that much, but I often missed seeing the woman's side. This is a man's story, and that's fine, with a stealth feminist message - the way he's treated at work for prioritizing his child is the way women too often are in the workplace even today - but one wonders if the film is fair to Streep's character. I think, on the whole, it is, and certainly Hoffman's character is. Some of the ellipses here make it a funny and touching discussion piece; it's a universal topic.
Though a competent and unformulaic police thriller, Black Coal, Thin Ice uses its female lead badly, and it's a real turn-off. Several dismembered corpses have been found in coal processing factories around Northern China over the years, and they're all men connected to a certain woman (Gwei Lun-mei). She's unrelentingly sad and very tiny, so it seems impossible that she would be the culprit, but the cops are on her case anyway. Including Liao Fan's alcoholic, long-dismissed detective who is ambiguously either falling for her or playing her. We get to see snowy parts of China, which is fairly rare, and the bitter cold is perfect for a bleak noir. However, I have a hard time getting over the fact that Gwei's character is basically there to be sexually assaulted by men. Over and over and over again, and she just takes it (because she's obviously traumatized by whatever's really happening). It's just so unrelenting that whatever the film's qualities are, it just deadened my interest and left me, well, cold.
Folk horror by way of Russian writer Gogol, Viy (literally "Spirit of Evil") could be a real folk legend, and certainly feels like one, but ethnological evidence is lacking. Gogol's wit at work. Set in Ukraine, a young priest learns a lesson about abusing a witch's hospitality when he is called to say prayers over a dead girl's body (a girl he saw appear in place of an old crone. For horror fans, the the three nights of vigil will be the most interesting - especially the last, which is filled with creature effects - but one shouldn't discount the importance of the set-up. The seminarian is a venal and cowardly character, ill-suited to a life of faith and service. He deserves everything he gets (Soviet cinema being what it was, it's possible this was greenlit for its attack on religious hypocrisy) and is a complex character despite the apparent thinness of the plot. Though the magical jump cuts are of their time, there are a lot of very cool, "how'd they do that in 1967?" effects too.
The title character of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is very pretty, and so is the film, a piece of surreal sensualism (or sensual surrealism? no, I'll go with my first take) in which a 13-year-old on the cusp of womanhood is opened to a new world. Are those "magic earrings" really at fault for the village outside her window looking so different, or is she just growing up? It's never clear, nor perhaps does it matter. The libidinous and frequently sapphic world that awaits us paints young people as sexually free, and adults as vampiric monsters - and image of mortality as well as sexual aggression. One girl is about to turn from one to the other (shades of Star Trek's "Miri"), but Valerie could be her savior. There is a good way to love and a bad one, a benign reason to have sex and a selfish one. It's all some sort of dream, and sometimes a nightmare. When dealing with symbolism, we add our own layers of meaning (especially, as is the case here, when viewing it from an outsider culture), or else it's nonsense. Might depend on the viewer's own sexual awakening and how relatable any of the images here are...
Move over Harry Potter... The Girl on the Broomstick starts in a school for witches, in a world of monsters, where spells are cast with Potterian phrases, but our very cute teenage witch is terrible at memorizing them and is always getting into trouble. She flees to the human world where high school isn't any easier, but many shenanigans ensue after the class truants abuse her magic skills. This Czech family film feels like those high concept fantasy comedies of the 1960s (despite the 1972 release), something like Bewitched: The School Years, and it's charming as all get-out. The "monsters" are fun to look at, there are some amusing magical gags throughout (the effects stand up), and the situations get more and more ridiculous as time goes on. Petra Černocká isn't the most emotive of leads, but she's pleasing on the eye with her giant copper curls, and she's well attended by a cast game for anything. Good, silly fun.
I really like the ending - or perhaps I should say the coda - of Alison’s Birthday, a TV-strength Australian horror flick that's kind of the country's answer to The Wicker Man and other pagan ritual-inspired film, and that's damning it with very faint praise. It's fine, but its tendency to info-dump and overall predictability drain it of much of its power. It's hard to keep the tension up when the exposition has prepared us way too much for what's about to happen or be relieved. When she was a teenager, a makeshift seance warned Alison that she shouldn't trust "them" when she turned 19. So now she's turning 19 and it's pretty obvious what the warning was about, and her very good horror boyfriend Peter is on the case and he even knows a former witch to help him out. But you know how it is in these movies, you can't trust a village. Yeah, we've seen it all before.
Sara Driver's When Pigs Fly is a whimsical ghost story in which clinically depressed jazz musician Alfred Molina is given a haunted rocking chair by his well-meaning lodger. Two ghosts - his former pub matron and a little girl - then become part of his life and help him get out of his funk, though there is a quid pro quo involved (leading to the film's only chill). A lot of neat ideas here, but I'm not sure it all comes together with any kind of coherence. The dream sequences, for example, don't really tell us much of anything the script doesn't. "Ghost-vision" is interesting, but how is Molina connecting with his past really giving him a future? So I'm left liking it for its various parts, especially the lore around the way hauntings work, but am underwhelmed by the overall result.
A young Peter Capaldi evokes the American road trip in Soft Top Hard Shoulder (which he wrote as well as starred in), that feeling of the open road in a convertible, wind in your hair and dreamy electric guitar playing. Of course, for North Americans, the 7-hour journey from London to Glasgow seems ridiculously short for a "road trip", but of course, things have to go wrong almost immediately, and Capaldi's down-on-his-luck illustrator meets all sorts of zany characters while trying to get home for his father's birthday. There's a certain lampooning of the genre, and possibly a romcom brewing between him and his hitchhiking pick-up Elaine Collins, but what's important is that the journey be transformative. Capaldi starts out as a very selfish boy indeed and takes a step in the right direction. But like the wheels-on-pavement journey, it's not going to be easy to get him far ahead at all. A pleasant ride, but not one that ultimately reinvents the genre.
Czech cinema delivers a fun time travel comedy in Tomorrow I'll Get Up And Scald Myself With Tea (one of the great titles), set in a future where time travel is used for tourism, and old Nazis hopped-up on de-aging pills connive to go back in time to give Hitler the atom bomb before Germany loses the war. Their plans are stymied when their pilot is replaced by his good twin brother who knows nothing of this evil scheme. Let the comedy of errors begin! Though I could do without the slide-whistle sound effects (thankfully used very little), the humor sometimes approaches Airplane levels and is quite amusing. The middle, when we're in Nazi Germany, rather sags, but the third act goes all timey-wimey to resolve the different problems and the charm of cod-future Prague is back. A delightful offbeat gem that foreshadows the time travel farce of Back to the Future, even if it's a touch sillier.
Books: I'm normally a fan of Paul Magrs, but The Blue Angel (written with his partner Jeremy Hoad) is extremely clunky and is therefore a disappointment. On the whole, no matter how much I like that mode, it's TOO postmodern. It has the cheeky business we expect from Magrs - Iris Wildthyme (here played by Jane Fonda's Barbarella), a vicious Star Trek parody, weird aliens with impossible cultures, humor - and that's all for the good. But the shifting points of view are confusing, especially considering there's an entire strand featuring the Doctor as a normal person, interacting with veiled versions of past companions, which is never explained. It takes a while before you even know what's going on, and the ending refuses to give you proper explanations, or even a proper ending. We're literally left with questions which we are expected to answer for ourselves (and perhaps these are obvious from the framing). Very postmodern, and I wouldn't have minded it if it were the only trick being used. But we also have everything else, almost in a random arrangement, as well as a deconstructionist approach where, once again, the Doctor isn't really allowed to save the day. The Blue Angel itself is the weakest part of a book that sparkles here and there, but leaves you frustrated overall.
Collecting 6 horror stories from the mind and pen of Canadian cartoonist Jay Stephens, Dwellings LOOKS like cute all-ages comics from the 40s and 50s (the opener in particular evoked Heckle and Jeckle), but the cartoony figures are soon killing each other with extreme prejudice often motivated by some supernatural (or psychological) element. And of course, they speak and act like adults from the 2020s. All these macabre tales take place in Elwich, Ontario, a town where the serial killer ratio is way off, with some characters in one story appearing in another to give the world cohesion (though never really addressing why Elwich is like this, or at least, not credibly). What is it about backwoods Ontario that's so spooky? Stephens' Elwich, Lemire's Essex County... To complete the illusion of comics artifacts of an older era, Dwellings features fake vintage ads that are a lot of fun to read, but ultimately, the anthology's first story was my favorite, and the joke got old in subsequent ones. Still fun, but the collection kind of sustained the same few notes all the way through. A neat Halloween read.
RPGs: Strange conclusion to our Call of Cthulhu trip to Blackwater Creek this week... The big problem from a player perspective is that we didn't do all the research we could have, and therefore were missing some context for what was about to happen (or even what the scenario thought were our implicit goals). But here we were at the story's climax, going down into a forbidden cave before we blew up its entrance (that, at least, proved to be one of the goals). We could have blown it up and NOT satisfied our curiosity, but where's the fun in that? Well the "fun", was a Lovecraftian vision of the "Mother", an unsettling creature that is a LOT like the one in an Eighth Doctor novel I recently read, The Face-Eater (were the authors both inspired by the same Lovacraft story?). At this point, the game asked us to do a lot of mysterious dice rolls and we all went temporarily insane (or worse). Memory loss, mostly, but we still dynamited the cave entrance. Then more dice rolls, and each of the characters waking up in different parts of Massachusetts with different epilogues/problems. My character Oscar got out of it the best, with just a brand of topophobia that makes him panic when in rural areas - my idea (write what you know!) based on these events. But our gravedigger's appearance became even more ugly (something dark inside him), which we used to motivate a (momentary) break-up of the group, and the battle nun became some kind of bloated body that gave birth to herself again, which is sure to test her faith. So it ends on a mystery more than an answer, which is perfectly Lovecraftian. I had to get myself a psychiatrist. Well, Oscar did. I think I, the player, will be okay.
In Torg Eternity... Well, it seems someone has found a way to drain possibility energy from SHIFT's heroes the world over, and even stop new "shifters" from being created. Team Beta is on the case (now at Gamma Level, I really need to start adjusting threat levels). It's personal for our Leopard Warrior, because the woman he's in love with COULD and SHOULD have been a shifter, but her Moment of Crisis was short-circuited by whatever is doing this. If she were P-rated, they might be able to move away from her home village without fear of transformation. The starting mission: To intercept the mysterious transfer of an artifact to Nile Empire agents on the nearby Isla de la Juventad (Cuba) and jump on their mole machine for a return trip to, hopefully, some answers. At the start of the mish, the players were riding high on a Glory moment from the game before, and I put it to them plainly - if they Gloried again, the stellae on the western tip of Cuba would become very vulnerable, and that I pledged to make the other inhabited zone held there equally vulnerable if they somehow did get a Glory in Juventad's zone. Welp... see Best bits, below. A player also played a card that forced the discovery of a Wonder, which allowed me to use The Book of Wonders, which I wrote myself, and I impishly deployed one AFTER the mole trip through the Earth had begun. A cave holding the Infinite Library (from Borges' Library of Babel), with the possibility of finding many (well, ANY) useful texts. The two players who tried both instead went after more info on the Wonder itself - the most they got out of it is that it contained much more interesting materials (histories of the High Lords, potion recipes, lost Shakespeare plays...). The other team members' impatience had them board the Mole before more attempts could be made and the night ended just as screwy craft burst from the ground in Saudi Arabia...
Best bits: The Monster Hunter complaining that he (and three quarters of the party) was always failing his Find rolls (and indeed, was/were using Find unskilled), and me going, "and yet, there are Find rolls EVERY SINGLE SESSION (my character in the Call of Cthulhu game has Spot Hidden as his highest, almost-never-fail, skill, so *I* know what's up). We had a good laugh about it, considering that raising skills is the cheapest improvement in the game. (Still no one raised their Find at the end of the session.) Other good banter was explaining how the Realm Runner easily passed an endurance (Strength) test in the Library when he usually NEVER does - he was raised in a bunker, and being in a hole in the ground just puts pep in his step. The Runner tried to confuse the Nile Shocktroopers by disguising himself as a monocled scientist they knew on sight, so that was never going to work, but at least one guy was tricked and got blown away, Indiana Jones style. And he threw his book on the Wonder's original Cosm when he realized one of the Lyaksandros was the author pictured on the dust jacket (player's detail), i.e. another fragment of the character who is incarnated as a Leopard Warrior currently. The same Leopard who almost went cannibal on the Shocktroopers after discovering it was a 3-day trip (tracks, since the one exiled Leopard encountered previously was a cannibal, but also quite insane), so our Frankenstein's Monster made some (non-human!) stew in the kitchen to resolve the impasse. Oh, right, the Glory Moment. We tested the hell out of the Warrior's ability to get damage bonus dice, using cards, perks, world laws support from other characters, and he scored a whopping 8 bonus dice (and a dice total "to hit" of 70, a rare 60 gets you a Glory, and then you still need to HAVE and PLAY Glory). The players had hoarded certain Destiny cards to make it at least possible. So here's what happened: The mad scientist in charge of the Nile Empire mission was protected by an energy field of his own devising. The Frankenstein had tried to tackle him and got shocked back into another room. Dude was a fanatic and untouchable. So the Leopard threw everything into his Wolverine-style attack, plunged his claws THROUGH the field (causing 8 Wounds, the villain soaked 2, it takes 4 for him to be killed), was still shocked back onto a bed (and KOed, since he'd drained his Shock to cause more damage), the professor's heart spiked on his claws. Well, after that, how can I deny them a shot at the Cuban stellae? But that's going to have to keep until the end of the current mission...
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