GiftsTo mention only the geek-related goodies I received from friends and found family this year, we have a graphic novel called The Cat from the Kimono, China Miéville and Keanu Reeves' collaborative novel The Book of Elsewhere (set in the BRZRKR universe), and Godzilla and Mothra plushies who will either fight or team up against my cat, I haven't decided.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Though James Mangold's Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, never manages to escape biopic tropes, it does feel rather refreshing that it doesn't have the old rise and fall (usually due to drugs) of most music stories. This is just Dylan's folk period and transition into electric, uhm, well, I'd still call it folk, honestly. The actors singing all their parts is carried off surprisingly well, and there's a lot of music showcasing Dylan's early bangers. I'll probably be listening to Dylan more after this than I did before. Where it eventually charmed me more than most films of the genre is in the aggregate of moments (and songs usually suited to the moment) painting an interesting portrait of a man who was anti-establishment and authentic in choosing folk in the first place being attacked for going electric as the authentic and, by then, anti-establishment thing to do. And at the same time, a man who hated his own popularity so much that he would sabotage it at every opportunity. The title, taken from "Like a Rolling Stone"'s lyrics, is perfect in this context. Dylan is only trying to get back to the start when he was an unknown (or least might be treated like one). Of course, history tells us it didn't work out that way, but as a character arc in a film, it's very well done.
At home: I'm Not There is on my side when it comes to biopics. It essentially makes the point that they're all doomed to fail because you can't accurately portray a real person on screen, especially a famous one who has public and private personae. The title, though obviously a line from one of Bob Dylan's songs, says it all. Dylan really isn't in this picture, even if it's about him. And so he's played by six different people, none of whom play a character called "Bob Dylan", and while his songs play throughout, more than half the time, they're being covered by someone else. Some of the "Dylans" here are fabrications, like Richard Gere as Billy the Kid, trapped in a version of the Peckinpah film Dylan had scored and starred in. Heath Ledger is the bad husband, and an actor who played Christian Bale's Dylan (the closest terms of music career but somehow the least interesting of the sextet). Cate Blachett is the closest in physical appearance and is the Dylan from Don't Look Back (amusingly crossing over into A Hard Day's Night at one point), the Dylan who wilfully mystified journalists in London and she's great fun. My other favorite is little Marcus Carl Franklin, who despite being about 12, is treated like an adult. On the face of it, a film about reinvention, but I'm Not There doesn't do the easy thing of splitting the role up into musical eras. That's why I would rather see it as a middle finger to established biopic rules and as a take-down of the whole kit and caboodle.
In 1989, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, Fallen Leaves, etc.) gave us a Glasnostian dream in Leningrad Cowboys Go America, a dry but goofy comedy about a traditional Siberian band that goes to the U.S. to find its fortune. The titled scenes play like lightly humorous vignettes, or like a comic strip heading for some punchline (especially given the band's fanciful hairstyles and pointy boots, they're cartoons), but more Krazy Kat than Garfield. Punctuated by musical numbers in a number of styles - gotta learn American music if you want to survive! - the film has only the lightest of plots, held together by running elements. Will the band get to Mexico? Will the village's follicularly-challenged idiot catch up to them? WIll they throw off the yoke of their fascistic manager? All the while, we're treated to outsider Americana, with locations that might as well have been shot in Soviet farmland. They see an America they recognize, and we see an intriguing correspondence between two enemy regimes. Jim Jarmush plays a small role in this, which perhaps is all you need to know about whether or not Leningrad Cowboys, and its tone, are right for you.
I'm well used to Jean Simmons playing a disturbed woman, and Otto Preminger's Angel Face doesn't break her streak. However, pairing her up with Robert Mitchum, a man who seems entirely fatale-proof, gives this noir thriller its unpredictability. And indeed, you're not sure what's going to happen from act to act! Is this toxic romance, murder mystery, legal drama, or what? Mitchum is so cool and collected in this, you have to wonder if Simmons' manipulative nature will be able to confound him... or us. I will say this, I've never seen the Hays Code deployed in such a shocking and effective way. Usually, it restrains the action - and it's true that the "lovers" never share a room - but Angel Face takes some of the other rules Hollywood HAS to follow in this era and makes a virtue out of them. I can't say more without spoiling the movie.
Jack London's The Sea Wolf is well-served by Michael Curtiz's adaptation, which makes the screen heave with the waves, shows us the old wolf's blurry vision, and makes some key changes to the original story that tightens the plot considerably. That story? An innocent man, London's stand-in, is taken aboard a cursed criminal ship called The Ghost, where a couple of ne'er-do-wells also just came onboard (played by Ida Lupino and John Garfield), and where everyone wants to mutiny against their brutal, but learned Captain Larsen (Edward G. Robinson). Though London nominally wanted to show his protagonist's journey towards ruthlessness, the events of the book actually have him and the woman show kindness to the captain in his decline and become romantically entangled with one another. The film actually works better in terms of that journey, by pairing Garfield and Lupino and giving them an arc that flirts with breaking the Hays Code, and precipitating events to that the writer doesn't come out of it as unscathed. Strong performances across the board, and as potent as psychological thriller at sea as, say, Moby Dick.
Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill are grieving parents intent on working through their trauma by sailing the Pacific in Dead Calm. But when they pick up a castaway (Billy Zane) who turns out to be dangerous, things get very thrillery indeed. It's an old formula that's enhanced in a number of ways. First, we're used to these stories being claustrophobic, but this is contrasted with the wide openness of the sea. Second, the script doesn't obviously attack the trauma, but finds its way in Kidman consistently being asked to forget/ignore what's going on, and the omnipresent feeling of powerlessness, give it thematic power. And finally, this isn't a case of the man having to save the woman, but rather of putting both characters in different jeopardy and making us wait to see if either will be able to save the other. They're supported by cinema's most useless dog, so there's no help there, and while the last scare is entirely unnecessary, it's so crazy, it deserves your attention.
Released in 2004, Troy evidently lives in the shadow of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with big design and mass battles - it's even got Sean Bean (as Odysseus, so he survives, not that the movie respect who lives, dies or escapes according to the Iliad) and Orlando Bloom (as Paris, an archer) - but it also comes in the wake of the Iraq war, and so its Western king finding a slim excuse to attack a Middle-Eastern kingdom has some resonance. The way the Iliad has been taught and been used in media, it's natural to think of the Greeks as the heroes, but in the film, Achilles and Agamemnon are monsters, while Paris and Helen's love is pure, Priam is a pious king devoted to peace, and Hector is a virtuous man placed in an impossible moral situation. So it's perhaps reading the text with less bias, and tries hard to eke out some happy endings given the bad guys are fated to win, and a redemptive arc for Achilles, though I don't buy it at all. Indeed, among an amazing cast, Brad Pitt as Achilles essentially destroys the film for me. Not only is he miscast in the extreme, but the movie star nonsense going on around his character create the biggest differences between the original source and the film (aside from a 10-year war taking barely two weeks to wrap up), twisting Rose Byrne's Briseis into a completely different character whose Stockholmed love for toxic Achilles derails the story in the third act. The battles are great, almost superheroic in the case of the name heroes (there should have been more of Ajax the Giant!), but too strong a focus on Pitt drains the effort of life for me. I would have watched Sean Bean in The Odyssey though (except could the story be told with the supernatural taken out of it?). In case you're wondering, watched the 3+ hour director's cut, but it didn't feel too long.
Books: Galaxy 4 might well be the worst First Doctor story, so having its scriptwriter actually adapt it (as Galaxy Four) isn't really going to fix its problems, is it? I was kind of hoping his vision had been twisted by the production, but if it has, William Emms is describing things pretty much as produced, especially those infernal beeping machines, the Chumblies. The rampant sexism and the woeful science fiction clichés are all still here, and worse, when we get into the three leads' heads, THEY come off as terrible people too. Rough stuff. Emms seems to wake up towards the end and gives us a bit more background on the Drahvins and the Rills, and the action beats (including at least one new one) are stronger in prose than on television, but the story just can't survive its rotten core concepts. I sometimes imagine myself reading the Target books as bedtime stories for my fictional children, but this is one I would skip. The only thing that kept me reading was that I knew The Myth Makers was next...
Donald Cotton's done it again! As with The Romans, but even more so, his novelisation of The Myth Makers is a riot. Mind, it already was - a comedy send-up rather than a straight visit to the Trojan War - but it's entirely missing from the visual canon (and near the top of my wishlist for old film cans to be found in some basement in Kenya or something). The book then becomes a great way to discover the story, even its differences. The very amusing conceit here is that it's told by Homer, as if he were a character in the story, always running from place to place to get to the next scene. But Homer is just as much in "send-up" mode as the original episodes were, and he sounds a bit like he's Terry Pratchett, mocking the Greek epic AND Doctor Who, both. And yet, there's an added epilogue that makes it a little sweet too. I ran through this one. Huge, huge fun. Consider it the next time you're assigned to read the Iliad... it's definitely breezier. (I do not guarantee results on an exam, however.)
RPGs: Played a little Fiasco for our French-language improv podcast (it's become an annual tradition), this time letting the audience pick the playset. They went with Rock Band World Tour (our tour was more discreet, indulging in local humor) and after rolling the dice, we came up with the story of a prog rock quartet that hadn't had a hit in years and was at the gimmick stage of their combined careers. Translating as Ghislain Paradise and the Intense Demons, the band had people staging beefs to attract publicity while the rest thought the conflict was real and were trying to get that one member kicked out, a plan to make the lead singer fly into the air on rigging and angel wings while fireworks went off, my shit-stirring bassist leaking gossip to the tabloids, and gangsters following behind to break some debt-accumulating musical fingers. Let's just say not everyone got out alive, and not everyone punished actually deserved it. A real fiasco. I have high ambitions for the edit that we'll see if I can realize - it's got to have some kind of rights-free music fill - but I guess I have to cut the bits where we are audibly peeing our pants with laughter (drag them down to the blooper section). So my thanks to Isabel, Catherine and David for a fun afternoon, and I hope I'll be up to the task of packaging it for the People.
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