"Accomplishments"
At home: I was expecting Grand Theft Hamlet to be a full machinima production of the Bard's greatest play, but I'm not entirely disappointed that it's instead a documentary about how two out-of-work actors (and one's documentarian spouse) attempted to put on a live production of the play inside GTA Online during the COVID lockdown for an audience present in the game. It's a monstrously difficult undertaking, what with all the randos killing everyone, gamers auditioning for parts and having to both read and "emote", and the cops showing up whenever there's a murder (it's Hamlet, there's a LOT of murder). There's enough of the play there - even if I wish I'd seen the stream - for Hamlet fans, and something quite touching about the non-professionals who get involved in the production, some of them experiencing theater for the first time (I hope they started going to theaters once they reopened). Relatable to this improv artist, as the performance is necessarily chaotic and requires smooth adaptation. Putting on a show DOES feel like this. But also relatable as a COVID-era piece - the depression, the strange obsessions, the unhealthy online life... The gamers' lives also sideswipe the events of the play in various ways, proving Shakespeare's universality once again. Worthwhile if only for its sense of the absurd, but it made me more emotional than I anticipated.
If the first Platform film was straight up about capitalism, The Platform 2 instead takes aim at religion, though "The Law" could also be interpreted as Communism, the opinion being that all systems can be abused. Religious or Marxist , it's about Revolution, and the denizens of the PIt actually find a way to live peacefully and feed as many floors as possible (at least until religious intolerance begins - it's a Spanish film, so must have the Inquisition in it). Which makes it feel like a sequel, but as characters from the first film return, it seems to rather be a prequel. Here's the thing. If you haven't seen the first movie lately, some of "El hoyo 2" will feel confusing (the ending mostly). If you DID, the elements don't join up exactly. But I still rank it equal to the original, making its own points and giving us different insights into the world - really weird insights, honestly - though I'm less sure than ever how to interpret the idea of kids down the Pit. Given this film's themes, it now takes the bent of religious allegory, and perhaps these pure souls are ones passing through Purgatory to reach new, reincarnated (or first incarnated) lives. Perhaps they'll make a third one to confuse the issue more.
One of the first films I "professionally" reviewed on a local-access TV show when I was in 11th grade, Born in East L.A., is a Cheech-without-Chong comedy that, were it remade today, would be a savage satire of immigration policy. Maybe it SHOULD BE. In 1987, it takes its shots, and its climax is ESPECIALLY good, but it's mostly silly stuff and an eclectic plot so Cheech can do various things, like play music and have a sweet (but unconvincing) romance. His direction is as all over the place as his writing, with gags playing out with music video logic (all the stuff with the girl in the green dress), but that kind of frenetic comedy isn't kept up (mercifully). I don't remember my original review, but I expect it was lukewarm (which is why I have no recollection now). But in a way, American citizen Cheech Marin getting deported by over-zealous immigration agents feels more relevant today than it did then, so to modern eyes, it's like it's missing the mark when it wastes its time on musical numbers or fails to punish Daniel Stern's migrant exploiter.
In 1957, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd really kind of predicted where celebrity worship was going to go, and seems to speak more to our moment than its own. The story: A venal, crass, but charismatic television personality wins the hearts of millions, becomes an "influencer" (no, really, the film uses this terminology), and soon becomes a destructive "influence" in American politics (before facing "cancellation"). So while I admire the prescience, I also found it an irritating watch for the same reasons. Due to Andy Griffith's energy, when he's just a country bumpkin with a guee-tar, he at first seems quite charming. To us, and to the woman who discovers him for her radio show. But you're not watching some variation of A Star Is Born, and the characters sours on you after a while with his braying laugh and terrible actions/opinions. I suppose there's some comfort in his getting some kind of comeuppance, but unfortunately, the film is more optimistic than the real world.
Fellini's And the Ship Sails On is set on a cruise ship at the start of the First World War, filled with opera glitterati and princely music fans attending a funeral at sea for the world's greatest soprano (perhaps inspired by La Callas who had died 6 years prior the release of the film). It's all shenanigans until Serbian refugees are brought on board at the pivot point. Form and subject are pretty brilliantly combined in the film's highly stylized format. It starts as a silent documentary, adds sound and fiction, then dialog, then color, then cinematic contrivances like (operatic) musical numbers and a fourth wall-breaking narrator in the character of Freddie Williams' journalist. At its crescendo, it will turn to more modern metatextual elements as a way to expose cinema's artificiality. The Ship Sails On, and that ship is cinema. But this is really the Gilded Age veneer, disconnected from the lower classes and suffering. The pivot might push the elite to political thought here, but not to political action. And what seems like a waking up call of naturalism is proven to be just another layer of stylism. Even beyond the political message, Fellini juggles a large cast effortlessly - despite the furious introductions, everyone stands as memorable - and impresses with old-school effects and charming moments.
Canadian director Bruce McDonald has made road trip movies through Central and Western Canada, even the States, but Weirdos finally brings him to Atlantic Canada, as a pair of teenagers set off from Antigonish, Nova Scotia to, well, Sydney a couple hours away, but still. This 1970s period coming of age isn't REALLY much of a road trip (had it been, they'd have gone through Cabot Trail and its dramatic landscape), as it's more about hanging out at the destination and making the kinds of realizations that aren't possible at home. The catalyst is the boy's mother (Molly Parker), an artist with mental health issues, who puts his life into sharp focus. Dylan Authors is good, his best/girl friend, Julia Sarah Stone, is even better. Allan Hawco (Republic of Doyle) is actually the MVP here, in a restrained performance as the father. It's largely slice of life, but enlivened by the boy's Jiminy Cricket figure, a wise(?) and amusing Andy Warhol. Summer in Atlantic Canada is a mood well captured.
Proving every franchise needs a European vacation sequel, Peanuts gave us Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (And Don't Come Back!), and like most European vacations, it's not very good. Charlie Brown and Linus are chosen to become exchange students from their school, travelling with Peppermint Patty and Marcy from another school (really? Marcy goes to another school?), and for the smaller kids watching, Snoopy and Woodstock accompany them. But while most cartoons try to have something for the parents, this one has something for the GRANDparents. How else to explain the weird sustained bit in which Snoopy acts like an American G.I. in France... In 1980, that's weird nostalgia for my grandpa! Unless they really think an enlisted Snoopy getting drunk is for the kids. There's also a weird plot that plays like a ghost story, but really isn't. Patty is a little insufferable talking about how the French boy is into them, but I kind of like it as a holiday fling for Marcy. She's a good French speaker too. My favorite bit is just how awful a desk mate Patty is. I'd clip that. But maybe I can't get behind a Peanuts movie where a bunch of adults (a teacher even!) speak clearly.
[Colombia] I look at Jungle and similar true story films about young men who decide to brave the elements for what I can only guess are hormonal reasons (Into the Wild is another one), and I frown. I guess I'm a sedentary creature, though I AM taken to off-roading on hikes through national parks, so maybe I shouldn't frown so much. In this one, three young men are led into the Bolivian jungle by a guide and judging from the poster art, they either get separated or Daniel Radcliffe survives alone. The fact that this story is told at all should tell you how some of it ends at least - the film reserves its biggest twist for the cards at the end. A perfectly fine survival movie with gorgeous locations, exciting moments and gross ones as well. Its use of hallucinations is kind of all over the place, however, unable to pick a consistent look for them. And ultimately, there's not all that useful to the narrative. Don't go into the woods remains my takeaway.
[Venezuela] The tension in The Box derives from just what the young protagonist is thinking at any given time. It's otherwise a very quiet film, punctuated by moments of violence. It explores just how far one might go for an absent father returned, when the boy finds the dad he never knew running a racket on migrant workers in Mexico and easily accepts to help out. Will he succumb to the criminal life himself, or will his conscience win over? He came to bury his father, found him resurrected, but is that really the best outcome? Through this rather dark coming of age story, we also discover how Latin America's migrants are being used and abused long before they reach the United States' border. There are many horror stories on the way to what they think will be freedom, but I've never seen this particular one. Any frustration felt because of the lead's silence is eventually rewarded.
Books: 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man is a strange graphic novel by Matt Kindt, about a boy suffering from a form of gigantism that will take him to building size. A 3-story man, if you will, but also a life told in three "stories" using the points of view of three women - his mother, wife and daughter, and never his own. It's really a book about emotional distance, so a directly unknowable character is at the center of it. His height makes him more and more distant to those around him, and even his body's extra-long nerves delay sensation to his brain. His mother feels the distance between her and the father, killed in WWII. The wife feels the distance growing most immediately. The daughter seeks her vanished father through the clues and footprints he has left behind. In every case, we are at kept at a distance from the man himself and like the latter women, are discovering him through secondary sources - the comic is filled with newspaper clippings and the like that fill us in on the details. Kindt's art is very sketchy, but I've always liked it. I think his watercolors in this are especially beautiful.
After Garth Ennis' Babs series wrapped, I was craving something similar. His Marjorie Finnegan - Temporal Criminal is also about a foul-mouthed, violent, mercenary beauty, but the setting is time travel unchained. Babs was really about incels, but Marj's adventures is more scattershot. It's about having fun with the premise, and it's anything goes as far as the world-building goes. Though "origin" chapters are included, we catch up to Marj as a pair of villains set her up while they steal one of her ill-begotten treasures so they can use to change history. She has to team up with her sister, a hard-assed time cop, to stop them and so it goes. Along the way, we'll meet a lot of crazy characters - including a dinosaur bridesmaid - in many time frames (including some insane futures), and unlike most time travel stories, religious figures aren't safe from lampoon. It's Ennis, after all, so expect the most blasphemous roll through History. The art by Goran Sudžuka is cute and fun - somewhere between Jacen Burrows on Babs and the late, great Steve Dillon on Preacher (Ennis has a type) - more pleasantly cartoony than Andy Clarke's covers would predict. Marjorie Finnegan isn't to be taken very seriously, just a bit of scatological fun.
Gaming: While I have little interest in the cod-poetic storyline behind the indie side-scrolling puzzle game, Hue, I did enjoy the game play quite a lot, and there are a lot of screens to get through, adding new mechanisms as you go to create new challenges. You play a little boy (Hugh, geddit?) living in a world of black and white until he gets a letter from his missing mother about... colors?! Moving through the game, you unlock pieces of a color wheel, allowing you to change the background to that color, which makes objects OF that color disappear. With 8 colors in all, this creates a surprisingly large number of puzzle permutations. I do find some of the colors finnicky, based on their position and the way my thumb works, but since dying only resets the current puzzle, you can just try again and again until you complete the game. This is for RELAXING, and the visuals and music contribute to exactly that. Once you complete the game, you still have an incentive to go through the maze all over again to get the collectibles now accessible because you have all 8 colors. That's where I'm at. Just some lackadaisical play when I have a bit of time until I get all 75 beakers, and that's all I really need from it.
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