"Accomplishments"In theaters: Steven Soderbergh's take on Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Black Bag, is a smart, lean spy thriller starring MI-6's one solid couple (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett). They love each other, which might be their Achilles' heel or their greatest strength. One might make the case that their greatest strength is their ability to throw great dinner parties, serving up chaos and tension (and delight, but maybe not to the guests). The way they keep their relationship safe is to spy on one another to cement their trust, but in this case, suspicions arise and their marriage (and lives) could be in danger. Modern-day spycraft and politics are mixed into what is essentially a clever whodunit (that's why you need dinner parties) and I am there for it. Especially with a cool cast of suspects, including Naomie Harris and Pierce Brosnan. You're invited to a game of Guess the Culprit, and hopefully, the call isn't coming from inside the house.
At home: I love Jeremy Saulnier's woodland thrillers and Rebel Ridge is his take on the Rambo/Reacher set-up. Aaron Pierre is an awesome presence as the upstanding veteran trying to bail his cousin out of jail for a misdemeanor, who gets assaulted and robbed by crooked cops (led by Don Johnson). A conspiracy is uncovered that explains why the cops are being so extreme, although one need only to look at the past few years' headlines for a narrative explanation. Indeed, this is a film made in a very current police environment, touching on tactics and concerns very relevant today - police misbehavior in the digital age of hyper-surveillance. Rebel Ridge is extremely tense from the beginning, and while things slow down in the more investigative middle, don't worry, it gets tense again in the final reel. Lots of strong action, but ultimately, it's a battle of wits between the heroes and villains.
Battle of Memories presents a world where you can get rid of or restore memories, and where a man's are accidentally switched with a killer's. The way the process works is a bit undercooked - they say it only severs our emotional connection to the memories, but the new implants actually have sensory information - look, it's only really an excuse for a sci-fi detective story as our man brings his memories to the police in the hopes of helping them solve the murders before they permanently affect his psyche. The big takeaway from the "world" is that people are incredibly resentful of having been forgotten. Memories being what they are, our understanding of events keeps shifting as more details are recalled, and even after we think we've solved it, not everything is as it seems. This theme carries over into the man's divorce proceedings, the film also acting as a rather sweet/tragic love story where the details are initially hidden from us, Huang Bo and Xu Jinglei quite affecting as the couple in trouble.
It's pretty usual for films with Motel Mist's content to be labelled as "erotic", but no, not really, like, come on. Even if you're into S&M, the man's kink here is a combination of non-consensual, paedophilia and incest, which well beyond acceptable. If we understand what we're seeing, that is. Set in a "love hotel" called the Motel Mistress, three stories converge - one of a gross pervert who brings a young girl to a room, another where a former child star is ostensibly communicating with an alien intelligence, and somewhere in the middle of that, there's the hotel manager and his kid sister. No question, the film looks beautiful, and director Prabda Yoon's clever, colorful shots and interesting editing, alone, might be worth the price of admission. The subject matter is meant to make you squirm and if there's a relationship between the stories, it may be that they're all breaking cinematic taboos of sorts, whether with sexual content (inferred rather than shown) or with art house surrealism (the film becoming largely opaque when the second story melds into the first). On a tonal level, both stories weave an illusion of something happening when, in fact, something else is, and perhaps you have to amend your head canon several times before the end (to to WHAT, ultimately, I can't hazard a guess). More interesting while it's building all that tension than once it releases it.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Millennial angst is strong in Bright Future, a movie filled with young people who reject their parents and replace them with odd fixations, maybe just to watch the world burn. Those Che shirted toughs interwoven into the main story are emblematic of this, rebels without a cause sporting the picture of a rebel who had one. And perhaps we can see Kurosawa's own rebellion against the status quo (even if he's nowhere near a Millennial) with the film's raw, video look, at a complete opposite from his more famous namesake's ruthless precision (I should hasten to add that they're not related, but the agon must be felt). it's right there in the title. These kids have a bright future, they have POTENTIAL, and that is a tyranny imposed on them by the older generation, something they reject violently. After one young man commits murder, his friend inherits his prized jellyfish and a father figure. Does the osmosis between the two - pet and father - tell us something? I'm not sure. Kurosawa throws in spirits as well (making this tonally related to his previous film, Pulse), but by that point, we're well into the WTF portion of the experience. Maybe it's a contrast we're looking for: The jellyfish adapts to fresh water, while the Gen X parents don't to the new Millennium. But the creature's fate is destruction, so... I have no tangible answers, nor, I think, is it expected.
Drenched in rain, neon and reflections, Suburra is as beautiful to look at as its characters are ugly to the core. This vast tapestry of characters, in reality stand-ins in events similar to these in Rome in the 2010s (the papal resignation is a hint and serves no other purpose), are a varied group of Noir anti-heroes - the corrupt politician with a dead hooker in his room, the businessman who must deal with his dead father's loan sharks, the young gangster getting too big and impatient for his britches (and other gangland figures), and at the center of it all, a slick, cool Mafia enforcer who goes by the code-name Samurai, trying to finalize a real estate deal for the Families. At first, we can't see the threads connecting these people, but soon, each of their problems creates those connections and unforeseen consequences. Things to spiral down the drain in a most absorbing fashion. And though no one's soul is unstained, it at least feels like the characters most abused come out as winners. If anything here can be considered a win.
One of the world's worst, but still entertaining movies, Samurai Cop has the distinction of having been shot in two separate time frames, requiring its dead-eyed lead to wear a woman's wig in about half the scenes to restore his Fabio looks. This mostly affects the action beats as they seem to have prioritized the gratuitous sex scenes in the first shoot. Peak point-and-laugh cinema, this thing is inept on almost every metric. One exception being Dale Cummings' police captain who does his best with terrible dialog and is fun to watch. For an action B-movie nominally steeped in "samurai" lore, there sure is a lot of gunplay, and you'll throw up your hands in surrender as you watch Samurai Cop make zero arrests and murder everyone that moves trying to eventually get to Robert Z'Dar (Face from Tango & Cash) who is first billed here. If there ever was a movie with too many underbosses and side-goons, it's this one. No matter how little charisma is on screen, everyone wants to bang our hero, just not until they have an awkward flirting scene. Shout out to first-banged helicopter pilot Peggy who deserved a lot better than this chump.
In the age of Kickstarter, I suppose Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance was inevitable. But can you make a bad movie on purpose without losing the original's "charm"? The 25-years-on sequel is terrible for different reasons, but you can still get some enjoyment out of it because it's pretty bonkers. Mathew Karedas has better presence as a tired and retired Samurai Cop and he's surrounded by as many SamCop1 alumni as possible. Otherwise, the casting is nuts - like, what's Bai Ling doing in a group that also includes a couple of adult film stars, several plastic surgery victims, and Tommy Wiseau himself? On technicals, it's better made than the original, with some interesting ideas when it comes to flashbacks and hallucinations, more focus on martial arts (more dynamically shot), and better dialog (the bar was extremely low). But of course, it's still got bad acting, dumb plot elements (sometimes, it thinks it's science-fiction), and every scene Wiseau is in is incomprehensible, like drug-fuelled performance art. If you have some affection for the OG turkey, there's some fan service in there for you. Not all the jokes fly (especially the ones made on purpose), but like the first movie, it can be a fun trainwreck.
A mix of live action and grimdark superhero animation, Death of a Superhero stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster as an Irish teenager dying from cancer who translates his inner life as a bleak heroic narrative. It's a teenager's world, so the hero is beset by sexual impulses he can't consummate and a lot of anger and nihilism. There's no single "hope" in this movie, but instead different moments with his family and friends, with the anarchic new girl in school who takes a shine to him (Aisling Loftus), and with the non-traditional therapist (Andy Serkis) who manages to reach him where others failed. Movies often pick a lane, but this one doesn't and is the better for it. Very affecting, and it would have worked without the animated hook. Not that I'm complaining - it DOES work AND it got me to watch a cancer movie, which isn't a given. Pretty theme song too.
From the World Cinema Project![Martinique] Alain Bidard is at the forefront of Caribbean animation and Battledream Chronicle is his cyberpunk, Matrix-adjacent take on the region's history with slavery and slave revolts. In the future, we're all kept alive I imagine in tubes, while our minds become citizens of different nations in VR. But when a powerful A.I. forces every nation to fight for global control in a kind of deadly video game, one nation gets an early upper hand and enslaves the rest. What few heroes are left eventually have to do anime things in these battle environments. Paced a little slower than what people are used to, Battledream is nevertheless an exciting and generally original piece, with pleasant animation and some shocking twists and turns. Because the gaming interface uses English despite the characters speaking French, one might think it's a comics adaptation of some sort, but no. Martinique is at the center of the story and (though this went over my head) there are many analogues to be found between the film and Caribbean history. It won me over.
[Saint Vincent and the Grenadines] A low-budget, 53-minute cautionary tale shot on video, Voodoo Man needs to be given a lot of leeway. I think we can expect, and to a point dismiss, clumsy shooting and acting in a small project from a tiny country with no film infrastructure. And it's not unlikable - the story of a young man who wastes his money on a vaunted witch doctor to get a girl to like him, when she probably already does, has some interesting aspects to it, at least ethnologically. Based on the film, the old ways have lost their general sway, but not their appeal, and perhaps a local audience would find it humorous that a young person would be taken in. There's at least an attempt at mystical phantasmagoria. Where Voodoo Man fails is in its repetitive structure, where the protagonist tells his story and is laughed at by a number of people. Maybe if someone confirmed that each of these people are financiers who insisted on being in the movie, I'd find it charming.
[Barbados] Of all the found footage films ever made, The Barbados Project is probably the closest to The Blair Witch Project, even if it's subject matter is more like that of Cloverfield. We have a small, young news crew trying to uncover the link behind a weapons R&D facility and monster sightings on the island, the footage found of integrated into a faux-documentary about their disappearance. Very Blair Witch. This is a small project with some clumsy acting, but fairly engaging nonetheless. The effects are well done for a film on this scope as well, though the "bad video" is certainly used to hide any faults. Unfortunately, anything after the crew "disappears" is surplus to requirements and one gets the feeling they were stretching it to 60 minutes after the fact. A bit of re-editing might have put the climax nearer the end there. And, well, as a science-fiction story, it overeggs the pudding by throwing too many things into the pot (do we make pudding in a pot? whatever) - from a singular premise, we get into too many sci-fi/horror tropes, requiring supplementary explanations and it's awkward at best.
[Grenada] I probably would have found The Sailor fascinating if it had remained as dialogue-less as it began - simply a camera crew following an old man who lives on a boat and is thinking of setting sail for the last time. That it eventually lets Paul Johnson speak for himself is a disappointment in terms of style, but he led a pretty incredible life, so it's worth going in a more traditional direction. Even so, the film is too long by half and there is some repetition. The coming of Hurricane Maria also provides less tension than you think it would. The more universal point The Sailor hits on indirectly is that as age catches to anyone living untraditionally - replace the boat by self-employment and single/widowed life, for example - a lot of anxiety is generated as to how such lifestyles can be maintained and just what happens to that person. At least Johnson seems set to go out on his own terms.
[Trinidad and Tobago] Except for its exotic location and characters, She Paradise is just another dance movie, which is either going to be aspirational "coming up from small beginnings" story, a cautionary tale, or both. And yes, that's what it is, with some fun tunes and routines. Onessa Nestor (Sparkle) is an engaging performer, and easy to follow through this journey's ups and downs, but I'm rather more interested in the Soca dance troupe, which acts like some kind of street gang. These dancing queens are MEAN, but then, downtown Trinidad is a relatively rough place to set a dance movie in. Ultimately, I think the audience should be satisfied with where the film takes us once things get serious, as Sparkle goes from timid wallflower to someone who is ready to fight for a corner of her world. Dance movie fans take note.
RPGs: After what felt like the Keeper delaying an inevitable Total Party Kill, our Call of Cthulhu of Cthulhu game finally got to our Christmas adventure climax. Three people against over 80 cultists who are actually slimy slugs in skinsuits as a rift to a netherdimension opens in the sky - our only hope, destroy the strange stone they worship, currently being guarded(ish) by a Byakhee. Well, if I'm going to complain about my own players sometimes lacking strategy, I was going to full strategic on this one. Skirt the edge of the ritual glen, someone gets the car, the rest of us get to a shed (save a kid locked in a chest), roll a barrel of sherry (a sherry-bomb, as our Gravedigger called it, clever) into the bonfire, shimmy down to the stone in the confusion, switch it for a tiki idol I always carry with me (honestly, I just wanted to use my Sleight of Hand skill so I'd get a roll to raise it), throw the rock into the rift to close it (a calculated gamble, basically calculating that the Keeper would think this is cool enough to replace whatever solution he had if I was wrong), and get the hell out of Dodge. One thing you have to understand about our Keeper, Ian, is that he's very very good at creating complications on the fly. He should run heist games. No matter how sound your plan is, there's always One More Problem to solve after you succeed. Like my cat Lucifer starting to rise into the air as the cultists started getting raptured into the rift (almost lost my totemic "possession" there), or as the rift closes, it turns the sky into giant shards of iron that crush our getaway vehicle. Nothing's easy, not even in the epilogue. Thankfully, when I play a "face" character, I really push the limits of my "powers", and Phelps' dulcet tones (Charm) getting various NPCs to calm down and essentially save themselves. Given that the Gravedigger and the Battlenun are both brawny combat monsters, SOMEone has to be tricksy. Anyway, it's a little by surprise that we managed to get out of this one to investigate another day.
Meanwhile, in Torg Eternity... The PCs are in side-quest hell, as freeing their guide to the Big Bad in Liverpool from one set of creatures only uncovers a different, more immediate danger from another set of creatures - by Dunad, the also-freed paladin wouldn't let them off the hook! - and they did try to get out of it. And they could have, but my NPCs are always having to push against the group's psychotic, sociopathic leanings. I don't know why Torg breeds this into PCs, honestly. I'm hearing reports from all over the community about characters who kill, torture and disregard heroic opportunities. Maybe I should be negating Hero cards after such incidents. Hm... This was a fairly combat-heavy session, even though I had built the middle piece with negotiation and stealth options. To their credit, the players used much more strategy in that one, creating a diversion and running instead of standing their ground. Having escaped the lizard men, and easily mowed through a Lurk (think of Orcs here) camp, can they destroy the undead-making Abomination Machine that's threatening continental Europe (and has displaced the reptiles so they became a threat in the first place)? We had to leave it before it could happen.
Best bits: I took a one-shot PC from Day One: Aysle and injected him into the NPC group - he was a role-playing fanatic before his transformation into a wizard, so I had him speak in D&D game terms all the time. Fun bit. The Freedom Magician played a naughty Trap card that gave him mucho Possibilities for deploying a killer trap on another PC (the Frankenstein survived the falling stalactites). The diversion included rolling a grenade into a group of reptilians, drawing the tribe to that spot while the NPC group was rescued. The Core Earth zealot Realm Runner had harsh private words with another Runner for putting other-cosm filth in his veins (i.e. adapting a power only available in Aysle) - sheesh! The Monster Hunter finally used his recently levelled stealth to sneak past creepy ululating alarm skulls. Glory Moment for the Frankenstein when, hasted by the NPC wizard, he went through a bunch of Lurks with his silver cudgel, making a Babe Ruth motion to warn them it was coming. This so inspired the NPC group, they charged the Lurk camp and massacred the lot. It also imbued the cudgel with magical strength and will give the PCs extra Destiny draws in the next Act!
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