"Accomplishments"
At home: Silent comedies often string disparate set pieces together to make their feature length, whether they have much to do with the story or not. Harold Lloyd's Speedy is in that category, though even the long Coney Island sequence still pushes the characters in a certain direction (and scores them a useful dog), so as usual, Lloyd's film are better at story-telling than, say, Buster Keaton's. He plays the eponymous Speedy here, so named because he thinks quickly on his feet, never stays in one job for long, and drives like a maniac. Nominally, the plot concerns his having to save an old man's horse-car business before the railways take him over (truly, a 1920s problem) before Pop's granddaughter will agree to marry him. And as with Lloyd's other feature films, it's a lot of fun and he stands out as the underrated member of the great silent comedy trifecta. Speedy's unhealthy obsession with baseball is a fun bit, though it's almost just an excuse to get Babe Ruth into the film, except that the sport shows up thematically as a motif throughout, which I like, The third act is all kinds of great - chases, fights, suspense, comedy, romance community coming together to preserve tradition, a cute dog, it's got it all.
I'm sure Mermaids means more to people of a certain generation (coming of age through the 60s), but it still works as a story about the loss of innocence. The mother lost it long ago, her eldest daughter both fears losing it and desires to, and the youngest daughter is a total innocent. Modern America is also about to suffer its first trauma and lose a kind of innocence there. All this is wrapped in the portrait of a single-parent family, where the mom (the always powerful Cher) acts like a teenager and is contentiously parented by her daughter (Winona Ryder) and vice-versa, with Bob Hoskins quite charming as the man who would like to make the family "whole". Ryder's sister is Christina Ricci, which makes me think it's too bad Jenna Ortega wasn't even a baby in 1990 so she could be in this family. Quite obviously adapted from a novel, the narration is good, but I'm not in love with Ryder AS a narrator, which kept the film at a distance from me at first. But it did eventually charm me.
Divine is saddled with the absolute worst family and that's enough to drive even the saintliest woman to drink in Polyester, John Waters' parody of family melodramas. Yes, it's the one "shot" in Odorama, and I do wish I had the scratch and sniff card, but also, I'm sure there would be instant regret by Smell #2. It's an amusing gimmick, but it's more than that. This is a world that "stinks", and certainly, Divine's life does. She's gifted with a powerful sense of smell that presages the flashing numbers on the screen, almost like she can sniff out evil. And while some of the broad acting (by the kids, mostly) can be hard to take, and the joke starts to wear thin in the final act, this still has to be one of Waters' downright funniest movies. There's all the stuff taken to extremes, of course, but I find a lot of the small details (the Pepsi bottle at the breakfast table, for example) extremely amusing. Waters has always been a good satirist, but Divine is a sympathetic figure that allows us to tap in when things get TOO satirical. And what a role for Edith Massey - her acting is worse than her dental work, but I love her for it.
While I'm a fan of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble (especially), the third film in John Waters' "Trash Trilogy", Desperate Living... Not so much. Literally sitting between Female Trouble and Polyester - it even feels like a blend of the two - does it no favors, but you can see how pushing the bad taste to its limit blew the concept's load (so to speak), pushing Waters to do other things in the 1980s. As with Polyester, suburbia is cranked up to 11 at the beginning of the movie (to me, the best part, but then I'm a fan of both Polyester and Serial Mom), with Mink Stole and Jean Hill proving to be forces of nature who kill the former's husband and run to "Mortville", a fascistic shanty town that's about to undergo a revolution. And while Desperate Living is more colorful than Waters' previous films, and it certainly MOVES like a freight train, it's just too LOUD for me. Constant violence and nudity, characters screaming their heads off, and one shock piece after another just wore me down until it was just a big smear. A smear I could respect, both for its quest to find "the line" that shouldn't be crossed, and for its overt LGBTQ+ content, respect, but not love.
Cathernie Breillat's L'été dernier (Last Summer) concerns a taboo relationship between a woman (a fearless Léa Drucker) and her rebellious teenage stepson. From her side, it's not entirely predatory - the 17-year-old is definitely the aggressor - but given what she's ready to do to cover herself in the back half of the film, you may well question whether this was a calculated - if irresponsible, and of course, criminal - seduction. Drucker is absolutely amazing in her ambiguity, by turns ruthless and powerless, and informed in no small measure by her job as a lawyer specializing in family law, child protection and sexual assault. She knows all the tricks, but also all the pitfalls, so why does she do it? So many lines with double meanings here, and I absolutely love the one-pixel finish (you'll see what I mean) before the credits roll. Excellent soundtrack choices too.
I can't pretend to understand the politics or historical context of 2015's The Assassin, and that's an important impediment to understanding its plot. There are others. It's also got a very minimal soundtrack, only in the rarest occasions letting a bit of score seep in and even then, it might be diegetic. It's often like we're in another room, looking in, and therefore only overhearing scenes. And to say it's slow-flowing is an understatement, with many very still shots making you check if your player somehow froze the image. If it's anti-filmic in those ways, others might consider it to be PURE film and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. It's largely down to cinematography, which is absolutely gorgeous - everything I've seen from Hou Hsiao-hsien was basically painted with light - but that's just not enough for me here. I wish it were, because the concept of a reluctant assassin with a connection to her target is a strong one. But her interior life gets lost in opaque historical drama and direction that is obstinate in its contention that the audience should decode images without any help.
Books: No matter how good Ian Marter's prose is, it's hard to make a silk purse out of sow's ear, or in this case, the thin tale of Doctor Who (and) The Rescue into something worth reading. He almost manages it, mind you. Vicki's introduction was just a quick 2-episode turnaround with a Scooby-Doo villain. Marter expands upon it with mixed results. The bad? Doctor Who has a joke about "These corridors all look[ing] the same", and I just can't get interested in all the Tomb Raider stuff. I never really understand the geography of the mountain, the caves and the crash site, and the extended tunnel crawl is quite tedious. The good? Marter's dark streak makes this a more uncompromising story, in particular by setting new scenes on the rescue ship, which is manned by characters who are satirical of 80s American culture. Certainly helps raise The Rescue's cred.
Donald Cotton's Doctor Who (and) The Romans was perhaps the Target novelisation I was most excited about by reputation. And it lives up to the hype. Written as a satirical epistolary novel, we are handed a collection of documents in various characters' own voices that tell the story, often in unreliable narration that could help explain why Cotton keeps the main beats, but completely changes the details. Under his pen, the assassin is a legionnaire with mommy issues instead of a subverbal caveman. Ian's Greek ally is a 8-foot Olympian who doesn't like Ian so much. He changes some beloved scenes for entirely new humorous ones so that the episodes and the book each stand alone, neither necessarily better than the other, and therefore both relevant. Sadly, Barbara seldom writes a document (Vicki never does), so she's mostly seen through others' eyes. Where Cotton does improve the story is in lending more humor to the straightforward moments of violence - the slavers don't come with swords but with a con, the arena is more grandiose and has more comedy of errors - and it also gives the leads more agency in some matters. The prose is verbose, alliterative and clever, and might send you running to your dictionary, so it's a lot of fun. Might end up being my favorite Target of all time.
One of the three novelisations penned in the 60s and subsequently folded into the Target range, Doctor Who and the Zarbi has its writer Bill Strutton himself adapt The Web Planet. You can tell this is an early one because "Tardis" is uncapitalized, they call him "Doctor Who", and there are only 6 chapters, corresponding to the TV episodes. Not quite slavish to the aired version (he never names the Animus, which is weird), it's still very close, showing that The Web Planet was mostly what he envisioned, but for the production's attempt at creating Vortis for the small screen. Does it help the book that we get clear descriptions instead of Vaseline-O-Vision and goofy insect costumes? I don't know. I'm among those who thought those were a feature, not a (hehe) bug. Unfortunately, without the sheer oddity of the production, and hemming so close to the episodic plot, Strutton fails to streamline his adventure story. There are a lot of redundant moments (especially for the Doctor and Vicki in the control chamber), and all that wasteful bafflegab at the beginning in Tardis. Where it does a little better is in making Ian's arrival in the Anima's chamber more germane to the story, though his journey there is rather tedious. If I can't look at smeared insect people doing ballet, I guess I'm not that interested in this one. Nice illustrations though - John Wood's plates feature clean art and fair likenesses (aside from Vicki).
Early Who script editor David Whitaker starts Doctor Who and the Crusaders - his adaptation of his own serial now known as "The Crusade" - with a sort of mission statement about the sacrosanct quality of history in the Whoniverse in a fun insert scene, and this book, the third and final 1960s adaptation later included in the Target range, might be worth a read just for that. But good news! It's also quite an action-packed story, probably more so than the televised version, of which we are missing the two most action-oriented episodes anyway. Whitaker's lush descriptions make the book feel longer than most, and he pushes the violence further (King Richard and Saladin almost disappear from the back of the book in favor of all swords converging on the villainous El Akhir), and full warning, threats of sexual assault are involved. This story will always shine thanks to its Shakespearean dialog, but the unlimited-budget action sequences make the book the best version of the story. Nice art plates from Henry Fox, too.
Audio: I kind of wish Relative Dimensions (The Eighth Doctor Adventures Season 4, episode 7) had really been called "The Fish That Stole Christmas", but what can you do? In this warm and cozy Christmas special (which has a final line that harks back to, well, listen for yourself), the Doctor decides to have a traditional Christmas, inside the safe environment of the TARDIS, with Lucie Miller, his granddaughter Susan, and her son Alex. Could the latter score a place on the TARDIS? Over his mother's dead body, perhaps? It's all quite sweet, even when the family starts fighting (it's Christmas, of course they do!), and then a fishy threat almost spoils their holiday. Writer Marc Platt excels at drawing links between the First Doctor's adventures and this one (including his own Quinnis, which had just been published), and even shows us something new about the ship (echoing, whether on purpose or not, in a later TV episode). It doesn't end on the note you think it will, and it's got great music, too! A lovely audio to listen to during the Holidays.
RPGs: What can nominally be called the second part of our Call of Cthulhu "Christmas Special", our characters visited a town much different from our last outing's - like a Dickensian Christmas made real, where everyone is friendly and well-fed (to a fault, but then, my character is gregarious too) and the clues seem to come fairly easy (meet the astrogeologist who knows everything about the missing meteor, etc. - my Oscar Alan Phelps is very good at making friends). Of course, we can't trust any of that. The Keeper did note that if the game, as planned, was poker, we were over there playing Monopoly (I'm paraphrasing), though I feel like my character was on the right track. It's just that some bad rolls about ongoing conditions (in particular, the nun's weird relationship with a state that keeps changing shape and has convinced her she is a "Chosen One", but of whom or what, I shudder to guess) sent the others astray. Or maybe not. The mysteries seem to be connected, we'll see. The big thing here was the Keeper suddenly playing the nun's role, though the nun's player was active elsewhere, and my character, after a Christmas party where he drank from wrong bathtub, doesn't want to hear a word of it and goes back to bed. That fact that he doesn't want to believe in anything that will drain his Sanity had to become a problem SOME time, right?
My players concluded the "Moments Without Crisis" three-parter in Torg Eternity, successfully diving to an underwater shipwreck off Christmas Island (this is the only "Christmas Special" they'll get) to deactivate, reverse and destroy the Possibility-sapping machine that's been preventing new Shifters from being created, and killing more besides. The Leopard Warrior almost drowns (he was not an obvious candidate for wearing an old-timey diving suit), but they manage it and boot-jet out of there before the Coral Golem guardian starts doing real damage. Up top, a quick meeting with Pharaoh Mobius, one of the High Lords, who, in supervillain fashion, leaves them to die in the middle of the ocean. They survive because that is the way of death traps. You can take the High Lord out of the Cosm, but not the Cosm out of the High Lord.
We still had time, so as promised after the PCs "Gloried" (refilled the population with Possibilities) across two Zones in the Gulf area, I gave them a shot at uprooting a stelae keeping 5 Zones AND a Maelstrom Bridge back to the Living Land in place. They came prepared through card play mostly - some good card management, cards that gave them a lot of extra Possibilities, and so on - and then were rather lucky with the Drama Deck (the steps they needed came up on the dot, good conditions for them and not for the guardian monsters), so here again, they won the day (with major changes to the map). It almost seemed too easy, but with a different shuffle, it could easily have spelled the death of a character or two as the Gospog of the 5th Planting was a major damage dealer. At the end, the Leopard Warrior retires to be with his love (who he insisted be there) who had been transformed by the ensuing reality storm into a Leopard Warrior Princess. They may well become important to the future of what little Living Land is left in Mexico...
Best bits: Rising from the ocean floor slowly enough that one doesn't get the bends, while one's diving suit is filling with water, makes for a harrowing journey - the Leopard Warrior survived, but with a permanent injury that will psychosomatically spread to the player's next characters, since they're all connected - the Out of Breath Injury card has been slipped into the Destiny Deck, uh-oh). On the way up, the Realm Runner played the Spirit Board card, and absent a Ouija set-up, we described it as a pressure-related vision that confirmed his uncle (the leader of the Delphi Council) ISN'T trying to become a High Lord, but something else might be afoot. The Warrior and Runner both saved their romantic interests from death (a burning plane sinking in the Indian Ocean, a fall from a cliff) by sharing their Possibilities with them. Speaking of which, the team can thank the Frankenstein and the Monster Hunter for all the Poss in their pockets before they got to the stelae. Their card play put the reality anchor on top of a high plateau, and then the Law of Decay destroyed equipment, all in exchange for Possibilities. To the Realm Runner's credit, he let dice decide which item and lost his magical Turtleneck of Intimidation! Well, that's 3 Possibilities, at any rate.
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