"Accomplishments"
In theaters: When you tell me Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) is adapting Stephen King, I do not expect an uproariously funny horror comedy, but that's exactly what The Monkey delivers. A goofy cursed object falls into the hands of twin boys in 1970s-looking 1999, something they will struggle with for the next 25 years, well into the 1970s-looking 2020s. When the title monkey beats its drum, you just never know who will die from an unlikely, convoluted, and extremely gory accident. Very nicely shot and edited for laughs, The Monkey also makes use of visual gags and amusing characters (Tatiana Maslany as the mom is especially funny, but so is Elijah Wood and Nicco del Rio's "Rookie Priest") in addition to its violent, imaginative, crowd-pleasing death gags. See it with an audience if you can, the reactions really add to the picture.
At home: Sebastian Stan is really over playing the Winter Soldier, isn't he? In A Different Man, he's Edward, a somewhat miserable would-be actor with neurofibromatosis who, cured through experimental treatment, at which point he "kills" his former self and takes a new identity as a relatively handsome man. At this point, the film because a Kaufmanesque magical reality and not at all what I was expecting (like an exploration of body dismorphia or something like that). Edward has the opportunity to play himself in a play written by his crush, but no longer looks the part, and becomes jealous of someone who really does have neurofibromatosis (indeed, actor Adam Pearson, notably in Under the Skin, really does) who threatens to take his role. The film essentially flips the narrative on the beautiful person who gets everything they want because of an "unfair advantage", and it's clear the only difference between the two men is that one is comfortable in his skin and the other isn't. But we also feel like we're in an alternate reality when Edward becomes "a different man", one that's never acknowledged, but always under threat of being exposed. Small discrepancies crop up, leitmotifs creep in, and the movie asks the questions you're asking too. I just could never shake the feeling that Edward was going to wake up from a medicated fever dream at any moment. It's those ambiguities that make the film rich and fun for me. And the dark comedy is pretty funny too.
Some may ask why we need September 5 when we have Spielberg's Munich to tell the story of the terrorist attack on the 1972 Olympics, but I'm always quite interested in media's role in such events. And in this case, it's a pretty amazing procedural showing how a sports news team close to the action managed to capture and broadcast it with the technology of the day. Moments of creative thought are balanced against disastrous mistakes, in an environment where people want to do what's best, but are also sometimes led by their personal ambitions. While the human drama has a Sorkin vibe (which, I confess, I'm into), perhaps what's most interesting is that the film doesn't rely on recreations, but uses, in more than 95% of cases, on ABC's file footage of the events. So just putting this together must have been quite an endeavor, but it certainly feels authentic. John Magaro heads this cast as a junior producer in over his head and has real, low-key star power. Leonie Benesch as the translator should get more high-profile work.
I did not get what I was expecting from Sing Sing, and that's for the good. From the trailers, one might imagine this as a cheesy "prison inmates' souls are redeemed by white savior staging a show and teaching them about the joys of musical theater" (you know, to make the title a pun). But it's not that. Not even any singing. Sing Sing's arts program does exist and it doesn't take long for you to wonder if, then realize that, most of the people in the theater troupe are playing themselves. Colman Domingo is Divine G, a actual playwrite jailed for a crime he didn't commit, co-founder of the program, and co-writer of the film. And though initially it's Clarence Maclin (also playing a shade of himself), the new guy who needs saving, before long it will be G who needs the very thing he's been offering others. And while they don't give us any onscreen singing, the Frankensteined comedy the guys are trying to put up is really quite insane and provides the same comic relief the inmates are trying to give their audience. So it's not all prison movie hardships. Obviously, the point is to say that arts are a bridge to rehabilitation, but the film achieves more than its didactic intent, and I especially love the last few minutes.
The essential story of Nickel Boys is no surprise to this Canadian, as my country has been morally struggling with the abominable and murderous practices of Native residential schools up through (even more shockingly) the 90s. Here it's a reform school in the American South during the late 60s and it's black kids, but same difference. So yes, a necessary story to tell, but I am uncertain as to whether the stylistic conceit helps it. Getting noticed, perhaps, but I otherwise found it often distracting. Basically, we're always(ish) in the POV of either of two boys serving a sentence at the Nickel School, but that's just it, not always, with cuts to reference footage, impossible inserts, and a video game 3rd person POV in later-day sequences. The POV has two functions. First it allows for impressionistic images that work like memory and makes the film gorgeous to look at. Second, I suppose it places you in the act as if you were one of the boys, but that spell is broken, not just by the inconsistency, but by the fancy editing. And in the finale, it's a conceit that perhaps aims for ambiguity, but perhaps hits confusion. Unconvinced.
I was, at first, wary of all the narration in Adam Elliot's stop-motion Memoir of a Snail - yes, despite it kind saying that's what it would be, right there on the tin - but it works, creating a bizarre and mostly terrible Australia for its main character, Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook). She's not a snail per se, but someone obsessed with snails, and in that way, very slow to progress as a person. A twin separated from her brother after the death of her parents, she keeps plugging on, becomes friends with an eccentric old lady (Jacki Weaver's Pinky is the highlight of a film filled with interesting characters) who gives her direction, and a lot of other stuff happens to her. While I was charmed by Memoir, perhaps in part because of its contrast between child's animation/storytelling and adult elements like sex and violence, it does, like the character's home, have a bric-a-brac feel, throwing everything into the narrative and all the kitchen sinks of a sizeable suburb. And for all the misery in Grace's life, the way it avoids a completely depressing ending is... suspect. So I liked it, but I do have issues with it.
There isn't a lot of call for a Donald Trump biopic. On the one hand, he's one of the most famous and described persons in recent history, so it feels like we know everything before The Apprentice puts it on screen. On the other, he's one of the most loathed figures in modern history, so you feel nauseous just thinking about pressing Play. But I bit the bullet and came out relatively unscathed. What if feels like - and this might take the edge off for some - is a two-hour humiliation reel that, had it been a straight documentary, would have been a series of self-owns. Young Trump is a loser until his evil super-lawyer Roy Cohn "makes" him, and he's characterized as pathetic in various ways throughout. When he grows in power in the 80s, it's what makes him an unfeeling, shameless monster. Cohn is Dr. Frankenstein and indeed ends up alone on the ice. I do think there's too much political talk to foreshadow Drumpf's later political career - those moments didn't ring true - but overall, I'm mostly here to support film makers daring to attack someone like him who is known to attack back. Good performances from Sebastian Stan and, especially, Jeremy Strong.
Pablo Larrain is the king of unusual biopics, but he seems singularly interested in sad women from 20th-Century history. And I'm sure Maria would be more interesting to me if I knew much of anything about opera, and that I would get more out of its references. As it is. I can't even tell when La Callas is supposed to be singing badly or well, so mixing in specific operas probably means something I don't have the culture to decode. That said, Angelina Jolie gives a muscular performance as the diva who buys into her own hype, in her final days, not so much struggling with, but leaning INTO, mental illness, hallucinating elements necessary to tell her life story. I'm not sure Maria is a likeable figure, but it is interesting to see an icon dealing with the loss of what made her iconic, all facade and regrets. Larrain creates an intriguing collage of memories and performances - the picture certainly looks terrific - with the final half-hour getting an emotional rise out of me in spite of my outsider status.
Set in post-WWI Denmark, The Girl with the Needle is at once beautiful, with its luscious black and white photography, and ugly beyond measure, in terms of its sordid story about a seamstress who eventually gets involved in a back room adoption scheme. The film will make you think of the polemic between pro and anti-choice stances, but that's byproduct of our modern age. This is really a piece of naturalism where characters born in the gutter simply cannot climb out of it, every moment of potential happiness snatched away with a kick sending the starring seamstress (Vic Carmen Sonne) further down that where she started. Well, the creepy opener should have given you a clue. The film does end on a positive note, a final moment of grace, a hopeful glimmer that makes you think a step up, even a small, incremental one, is possible. That's because movies have endings. And if the story told teaches us anything, it's that you'd be right to suspect an end to the woman's tragic problems. But that's perhaps too bleak a vision, and therefore let the finale wrap you into its cathartic arms.
[Nicaragua] I don't think I've seen a film with a tone that can only be expressed as SARCASM like 1987's Walker. In the mid-19th Century, William Walker's mercenary unit went to Nicaragua to install a new government friendly to American interests, but even before the movie shows its final hand, it's quite clear that this is about Reagan's then-recent meddling in the region. The narration is lofty and "told by the winners", and Ed Harris as Walker is a cool figure strolling unscathed through the battlefields of history, but what we SEE and what we're TOLD are two very different things. Imperialism's iron fist will continue to make this film relevant, but even beyond that, it's about terrible leadership, which I think is universal as well. Director Alex Cox went into this with no thought to how it could be marketed, received and understood, but a predictable commercial failure of the time is a intriguing gem for later generations to discover.
[Costa Rica] Some films made abroad looks like they've been bought and paid for by the host country's tourism board, and it's hard to imagine a better example than After Words. Marcia Gay Harden plays a depressed librarian who goes to Costa Rica to die (is she also physically ill? The movie seems confused on the issue), unless experiencing the ultimate vacation saves her soul. Óscar Jaenada becomes her gigolo tour guide, desperate to make money to keep sending his precocious daughter (a tiny Jenna Ortega) to private school, and platonic sparks start to fly. It's a cute, even sometimes touching little story, liberally padded with travelogue scenes that show off Costa Rica through the tourist's point of view. Don't quite buy the ending - feels like a studio put the breaks on what was planned (everything works better if it goes the opposite way) - but it's fine. Who needs their vacation ruined by narrative reasoning?
[Panama] In Plaza Cathedral, Ilse Salas plays Alicia, a depressed architect in striking Panama City, whose isolation is broken when she forms a bond with a boy hustling on her street. It's an interesting relationship, and it's all played quite well, but I'm mostly taken with the visuals. Taking off from her profession, the film plays very effectively with space and architecture, and uses verticality, horizontality and depth almost as act motifs. Act 1 - Verticality: Up/down, social status between the characters, mood swings associated with grief and divorce. Act 2 - Horizontality: Building a bridge between those realities, flattening the plain, equalizing the power dynamics. Act 3 - Depth: Going deeper into back story, into psychology, for the first time entering the cathedral that faces Alicia's apartment, itself a kind of sanctuary, moving towards something, an understanding perhaps. I do think the ending is a bit abrupt and the final card steals the show and seems to make the movie about something else, despite feeling necessary, but I've made my peace with it.
Books: Gerry Davis' adaptation of The Moonbase is titled Doctor Who and the Cybermen, if you're having a hard time finding it, and it's one of the few books in the range to offer illustrations. Cybermen on the Moon, I mean, yeah. It lends itself well to that. While the book adds Moonbase crew or switches their roles around (Roger Benoit as a fit strongman?!), and expands on the architecture a bit to make it seem bigger than they could manage on screen, it hinges pretty close to the original material as broadcast. The 2011 edition comments that Polly is too wet in the book, but I don't think it's out of character, and besides, this is a strong story for her. Yes, she's serving everyone coffee, etc., but she also makes a weapon that works against the Cybermen and is given a little more action than on the show. In fact, Davis often gives the companions more play at the expense of the guest stars, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Apparently, line editor Nigel Robinson directed Ian Stuart Black to adapt The Macra Terror as a more adult story by leaning into the mind control element. He didn't. Black is the king of old-fashioned sci-fi Doctor Who serials so he doesn't stray too far into modernity. This story's Orwellian/Huxleyan vibes are, in fact, pretty modern for him. The adaptation improves some parts of the story, with more details on the Macra and how they might have evolved, the Colony feeling much bigger without television's production limits, and a better epilogue. But at this point, Troughton has really grown into his Doctor and just using his dialog and describing his shenanigans accurately makes for a breezy, bouncy book. I do wish Black had tracked Ben's brainwashing a little better - as it is, he's just suddenly cured and everyone accepts it.
The Second Doctor era is replete with base under siege stories, so I think we should cherish the ones that go a different way, even if they're not as flashy. Okay, maybe not The Underwater Menace. But The Faceless Ones is quite a good story, with a fun setting (the airport, which in the adaptation, feels less like a series of small sets), a good sci-fi mystery, and a memorable almost-companion in Samathan Briggs. Terrence Dicks is THE Doctor Who adapter and his pacey prose gets us through a six-parter very efficiently, somehow even ADDING to the televised story. The Chameleons' schemes are better explained, there's humor injected into characters' thoughts and motivations, and (though you might consider it a mistake) the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver about a year before it would actually be introduced. The Faceless Ones didn't give us a key Doctor Who monster, but it's still a lot of fun.
Comments