"Accomplishments"
In theaters: There's always going to be a self-serving element to a musical biopic in which the subject is a participant, but Better Man hides it better than most by really being about self-loathing and insecurity. Robbie Williams, the low-income boy band bad boy with terrible daddy issues, is transformed into an ape for the purposes of the film, which is a sometimes brutally honest portrayal of an addict and general dick bag, more interested in fame than art. Now, Williams isn't well known outside the UK - I only really knew him from British chat shows, not his music - but that really doesn't matter. Just take it as a musical with mostly original songs (indeed, it throws in some big numbers that have a Golden Age musical feel). The film turns melodramatic moments into music videos, and stage performances into an excuse to create fantasy sequences where Robbie fights his demons. As a biopic, it's more about what it feels like to be a controversial pop star who made it too big, too early in life, than any specific detail, and that's where I like my biopics. It's also got one of the best final lines in cinema.
At home: It really feels to me like Blow the Man Down was originally conceived as a television series. You know the ones. A small town with lots characters, a criminal element in their midst (Justified and The Sticky's Margo Martindale has just such a role), a mystery with hapless young women caught in events, a well-meaning small town cop... This is a season of Fargo, except set in Maine, and of course without that actual Coen Bros. vibe. And that's my main complaint, I suppose. Though it resolves its storylines, it does so almost abruptly. This has "pilot" written all over it, and when it doesn't go to series, we cut everything short with deaths and decisions. Not sure if "wanting to see more of these people" is a plus or a minus here (I wasn't THAT invested), but I do like how sea shanties (including the eponymous one) are integrated non-diegetically into the proceedings, a rare stylistic flourish that makes it feel more like a movie.
Some of what French film Hu-Man is doing has been lost over the years. I suppose audience today wouldn't realize that Terence Stamp had just spent several years on a retreat in India, nor that he and his model ex-girlfriend had been one of the 1960s most photographed couples. Because his return to film in this surreal picture has him play a retired actor named Terence Stamp still grieving the death of his wife and recruited by Jeanne Moreau into participating in a wild time travel experiment. Essentially, if he confronts his trauma in front of a big enough audience, the emotional energy generated can be used to send him backwards or forwards in time. It's certainly a play on the acting process and the psychic damage the actor risks. With its apocalyptic landscapes (they sent Stamp to some crazy places), it's also a play on grief and depression. He sees no future, but if he thinks of the past, he risks dying. There's a nod to La Jetée in there somewhere. After a few minutes, you know you're in the grip of WTF cinema, and you shouldn't think too hard about the physics at play. It's not about science. It's about the one kind of time travel we really do have access to: Memory and imagination.
In Jane Arden's Anti-Clock, a man is mentally unmoored from time, but time is many things. It's memory - and time travel is therefore a kind of psychoanalysis - it's physics by way of Buddhism, it's New Age psychic phenomena, it's a mathematical calculation of probability, and it's how we relate to personal identity. It's too much, maybe? I give the film props for using the vocabulary of video editing to represent all this through frame-by-frame moments, stock footage, and side-by-side monitors. But does that mean it's really talking about film making? I think I would like it better if I could confirm that. Instead, I rather think it might be more interested in a very 70s Third Eye kind of cinema, where New Ageism tries to connect to Science and Psychology. Very nearly plotless - it's in many ways a kind of video essay - and very nearly nonsense, but many of its ideas still resonate.
Sitting at the crossroads of Narnia and A Christmas Carol, The Amazing Mr. Blunden is part of a tradition of Victorian/Edwardian time travellers, although in this case, he's a ghost whose torment can only end if certain equally time-travelling kids aren't saved from their Dickensian fate (Diana Dors' screeching villain performance is pure cod Dickens). So he tags another pair of children to help him in this mission, not that they really know what's going on at first. I know it's a family film based on a children's book, but I nevertheless feel like its temporal mystery could have been more complex. The film hints at a grisly end for the up-time boy, but doesn't play into the possible confusion. And it misses the mark like that a number of times. Not in a way that's bad, necessarily, but in a "could have been a bit better" kind of way. Of course, that was 1972 (or '69 for the book) and the audience has had access to a LOT of time travel narratives since, so this one is a little quaint. (Bonus for Trek fans: The little girl from 1818 is played by Rosalyn Landor, the "Irish" alien woman who seduces Riker in "Up the Long Ladder", the one who told him "Do you not like girls?" as she dropped her skirt. Jeepers!)
Books: Part 2 of The Daleks' Masterplan--pardon me, The Mutation of Time (still can't get over Target Books' title change) shares Part 1's problems - it's based on one of Terry Nation's picaresques, and therefore a thing of parts. For example, I quite enjoy the (in the book, more overt) Z-Cars Christmas crossover (sadly, the book doesn't have the balls to wish the reader a Happy Christmas), but John Peel's inclusion of a pie fight in the Hollywood farce does nothing for me. The segment in Ancient Egypt should have been a stand-alone Monk story, but suffers from brevity. At least Peel connects the dots a little better than the serial did in terms of the finale, Sara Kingdom's motivation, and Earth finding out about Mavic Chen's treachery thanks to the tape made all the way back in Mission to the Unknown (essentially episode 0 of this story). Mutation isn't bad by any means, but the lack of focus means it's a bit long, and you're not quite sure why you have to slum it in some of those chapters.
Since The Massacre (of St. Bartholomew's Eve) is entirely missing from the Doctor Who canon, the Target adaptation is all the more precious, but it's not REALLY hedging all that close to the televised version. And in this case, that's a good thing! John Lucarotti gets to bring his original, undiluted vision to life to what became a Doctor-lite story back in the day. It's still a strong Steven story, but the writer has restored the Doctor's parts, and even has him meet his doppelganger, the Abbot of Amboise in ways that would not have been possible the way the show used to be shot. This is a dark page of French history, and so not unlike The Reign of Terror, but with apologies to Ian, Barbara and Susan, I would call it the BETTER Reign of Terror. The history is complex, but it's still easier to follow than on audio-only, and it's one of Doctor Who's few forays into religion. Bonus points for creating a frame tale with a retired Doctor (I imagined the Seventh, but he's not identified).
Beyond its gimmicks - visiting the same place in different times in a row, a companion carrying a virus - there's something rather unsatisfying about The Ark, as televised. Because it's really two two-episode stories, everything is wrapping up even as it's being set up. Paul Erickson (one of the writers)' adaptation fixes some of the problems by expanding on the story considerably. The first half is especially well-served by the Doctor visiting the generational ship as he goes about vaccinating the population. What it gains there in tension is somewhat lost in the back half as the Doctor and Dodo play tennis and board games (with alien Refusians with less alien names than the humans) while a nuke ticks down on the ship (and they know it!). Still, the final actions scenes are much more exciting on the page. Now, I'm never gonna love the hoary tropes of the "Buck Rogers" SF in the black and white era (the information on vaccines seems wrong for sure!), and the writer uses the word "ejaculate" too much (in the sense of interjecting), but there's a lot more meat on the bones of what I previously considered a bit of a fluff piece.
RPGs: It's still Christmas time in our Call of Cthulhu time, and after being a little groggy in our previous session, I felt more awake and active as an investigator in this one. The characters were looking into the mysterious disappearance of a strange meteor kept in a church (big cultist vibes). On a more personal basis, the good sister that is part of our group had been gifted with a statue of, well, depending on when you looked at it, the Virgin Mary, the sister herself, or Cthulhu. She surprised(?) the GM by giving the thing away to the church minister, as it was obviously affecting her mind, and it turned into the missing rock. Now back in the hands of what we discovered was likely a cannibal cult. A nice chat with the town's oldest man who seemed to be next on the menu, we found the house surrounded and thought they were there for him. No, they were there for us. He sent us out through a basement tunnel and as we left it, our plans were to use some of our characters' war-time experience to create a distraction, save the man, blow everything up... It's a rather frontal approach to a problem in this game, and I'm worried. Also trying not to think of that flying monster flapping about, the one responsible for our first PC death months ago...
Comments