"Accomplishments"
In theaters: A fun little bottle thriller, Drop creates the conditions for a woman with a past rooted in abuse to be forced into killing her date in a high-priced restaurant, lest her family at home be taken from her. Tense and filled with reversals, it sparkles so long as we stay in the restaurant, and you might resent the final minutes where the plot can no longer sustain the setting and turns into rote clichés. Hey, she was TOLD not to leave - the movie should have followed its own edict - but that's fairly brief and doesn't undo the good will it generates in its first 80 minutes. Meghann Fahy does a great job in the lead. While it works for the character, Brandon Sklenar looks too tired to be as charismatic as the movie would have it, but he's fine. A lot of nice support performances otherwise and more humor than you'd expect. Chicago is well used as an overall location (even if it's filmed in... Ireland?!) and for once, past trauma is actually integrated into the plot, not just something to be nominally overcome. Nice lighting cues and stylish ways to show the online terrorism going on in the background. Bound to make vibrating phones more sinister from now on.
At home: Is Matthew Rankin the new Guy Maddin? Both are experimental film makers from Winnipeg and ostensibly part of a similar tradition, though Universal Language, while it does mythologize Winnipeg in a way one might call similar to Maddin's My Winnipeg, is something very different. An absurdist comedy that merges Canada and Iran - there seemed to be a strong influence coming from classic Iranian cinema like Where Is the Friend's House? - in a way that expresses something about immigrant populations. The new local is converted into the past (now foreign) local, making the space odd to both locals and immigrants. It's also a world where minority communities are immediately accepting of strangers who share their creed, an experience the majority may not understand, but has triggered. Stylistically somewhere between Abbas Kiarostami, Wes Anderson, Quentin Dupieux and Chris Ware, the visuals are alienating tableaus and the humor is hilariously deadpan. The world's most terrible city tour alone... As for the somewhat mystifying ending, I think it follows the same theme as all the endings in the film - things must return to where they belong. And when speaking to the immigrant experience, that "where" has been moved geographically, and yet still does exist.
If 65 minutes counts as a feature, then Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic) is David Cronenberg's first, an it's really an experiment in using what little technical means you have. Aside from academic voice-over about strange experiments in provoking telepathy in subjects, there is no sound, which I surmise was a technical step too far for the production. It fits the "story", in that the subjects - young people evidently fooling around in a brutalist campus buildings during the summer or at night (I've participated in things like this) - have been rendered mute to force their brains into ESP mode. The ideas are heady (if you'll pardon the pun) and even at 65 minutes, it tests one's patience as one waits for some kind of story to develop. It doesn't help that the images don't necessarily have anything to do with the VO. That said, what does develop is a kind of science fiction premise that prefigures a lot of Cronenberg's later work, a story told if not entirely shown. I liked it as the curiosity it is.
While there's one element of 1970's Crimes of the Future you'll find in Cronenberg's 2022 film of the same name, it's very much a follow-up to his previous 60ish-minute experimental film, Stereo. The improvements are color photography and a spare, electronic/foley soundtrack. The voice-over is more personal, a kind of diary rather than an academic article, but we're still on campus grounds, looking at scientists involved in weird experiments, with no sync-sound. There's less of a focus than in Stereo, and we find ourselves on a tour of different "institutes" of the weird with our languorous narrator. There's no story to speak of, and I don't like that we end on vaguely pedophilic imagery. Cronenberg completists and scholars - to whom this almost only applies - will find the true start of Cronenberg's universe, a universe of "squish", although he doesn't yet have the resources to create attendant effects. But it's mostly interesting in that respect and that respect alone.
File the numbers off and you really couldn't tell Fast Company is a Cronenberg film. It's not on account of being early - this is after Shivers and Rabid - but rather because he did it "for the money". Regardless, this foray into the world of professional drag racing is actually very watchable, and there's some style to the way the races are shot, both to give you a sense of the driver's experience, and make each one different. I like the cast of characters, including William Smith as the over-the-hill showboat, ubiquitous Canadian actor Nicholas Campbell as the fresh-faced "Kid", and Judie Foster as not Jodie Foster, the oil company's mascot. Race car movies are often sports movies, and in this case, it's about purity in sports, and I'm always for that. Shot in Alberta, it becomes a kind of Canadian Smokey and the Bandit, with a crime plot run by John Saxon's slimy manager, ending in a truly ridiculous climax where the film finally falls apart. But certainly better made than it has any right to until then.
Chantal Akerman seems to put into practice lessons learned from her voyeuristic New York output in Toute une nuit (A Whole Night - although a better translation would have been Quite a Night, since we never see sunset and the third act is all morning), in which her camera intersects with the lives (and mostly love lives) of dozens of characters during a summer night in Brussels. Very little dialog, engaging the audience's imaginations to fill in the blanks, either with experience or digested love stories, of these beginnings, middles and endings. We eventually do return to some of the characters in the back end, but on a single viewing, it's not always easy to tie both ends of their story together, and perhaps unnecessary. All these fragments create a picture of loneliness, sometimes as a driving force for the relationships - physical contact often translates as awkward clinging for dear life - or as, simply, itself. That's not meant to be a cynical take. There's a real yearning quality to the film, and it's therefore hopeful.
[Montenegro] Ralph Fiennes directs himself in the 2011 production of Coriolanus, setting the action in a "Place That Calls Itself Rome", essentially evoking the wars in the Balkans, though the political system feels weird and anachronistic in this context. The battles, right out of Shakespeare, make or a bit of a heavy shoot-em'up in the first act, action (against Gerard Butler, no less, not someone I expected in a Bardic film, though he can certainly do it) when I really want language. The other kink of the modern setting is having newsreaders do Shakespeare in their own unique cadence, and that's pretty fun. Fiennes is, no surprise, terrific in a post-interiority role, giving us a man who defies Polonius' advice from Hamlet - He is true to himself to a fault, and is therefore false to every other man. His integrity (such as it is, since the Bard doesn't make him a good person), seen as the sin of Pride by others, makes him too rigid to be loved. Except by his mother, perhaps, a terrifyingly patriotic character here brought to life by powerhouse Vanessa Redgrave. On the political side, we get strong performances from Brian Cox and James Nesbitt. Jessica Chastain does well with what she's given, but Virgillia is such a nothing role. Coriolanus, long ignored in the canon, really made a comeback in the 2010s, with several productions. No wonder. It's about political expediency, propaganda, the elite's disdain for the masses, and democracy being led off a cliff by charismatics. No, you won't like many or any of the characters in this story, but don't look in the crowd, you might see your own face in there.
[Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia] Hive is a hard story, all the more for being true (though can we stop with the showing of the real people in the credits stuff? it just pulls me out just as I should be absorbing the themes and lessons). I did not realize how patriarchal Kosovo's society was that, even with hundreds of men disappeared/killed in a recent massacre, there would be a stigma for women in the 2000s for driving, getting jobs or starting businesses. That's a little bit shocking. But that's what Fahrije feels she must do after waiting years for any news of her husband's death or survival. A "hive" of activity for the village's widows becomes their salvation, but also the cause of much anger in the community. A lot of the film is slice of life material, as Fahrije deals with her children growing up, her father-in-law's interference, and so on, and it's all in the service of showing life moving on in spite of strongly-motivated anxiety and depression. This is a rather dour film where seeing a simple smile is cathartic and poignant. And that's why I like it.
Books: While not the first immortal man narrative in comics, Keanu Reeves' BRZRKR is certainly the most violent. Born 80,000 years ago to be a weapon thanks to... mystical? alien? intercession, a man who sometimes looks like a beefier Keanu, goes into a rage fugue and uses his super-strength and healing factor to absolutely destroy his tribe's enemies (and any friends who get in the way). Today, he's being used by the U.S. military for wetwork and is being studied and prodded according to different agendas, the unfolding and revelation of which makes up the book's intrigue. It's a set-up that allows for a lot of historical flashbacks (and indeed, plenty of side-stories have been published, taking place before the main action of the this "Volume 1" (all 12 issues). Things get rather bizarre and more superheroesque in the back half (I haven't completely accepted it yet), with some Twilight Zone twists providing multiple cliffhangers for a possible or eventual Vol.2. Reeves is working with Matt Kindt (one of my favorite comics writers) and their collaboration is defined in this collection's "creators' commentary" for issue 1. The art by Ron Garney and Bill Crabtree is somewhere at the intersection of Frank MIller and Marc Silvestri - well-colored too - probably better at the blood and gore than the later, surreal sequences. Collectively, they know how to create cool action sequences AND make the talky bits interesting to look at.
RPGs: A lot of laughs this week in our Torg Eternity game, in large part - I'm neither proud nor ashamed - because the look of the "abomination machine" on my battlemap was a bit anal (anus dentata, at any rate) and everyone was making butt puns. So they completed that side-mission and finally found their way to Liverpool, now a Necropolis and the seat of Uthorion (think Sauron)'s power. Good decisions got the players through to the wizard's tower without nasty encounters - where they had to cheat their way inside because no one takes notes and they couldn't remember the password. (Well not true, one player has 75 pages worth of notes, but it's never the stuff that's important to remember, apparently.) Just some light exploration for the rest of the night - and loot! Aysle has a lot of loot. I'll cover spontaneous objects below, but there are also cards that help you find magic treasure and, in this case, a lab full of cool ingredients. But uh-oh! Fooling around in there (the Monster Hunter will be getting bonus potions and bullets) has triggered on the elemental pools! But that rock troll will keep until next time...
Best bits: The evil lich was cudgelled several paces into the mouth of her undead-making machine, which started munching on her to create grist for its zombie maker. The Incredible rolls this week, including a record-setting 80, and in Aysle, that means great rewards, like items on your person spontaneously becoming magical. Last session, part of the same Act, the Frankenstein's cudgel became +2. In the final battle this week, the Realm Runner's phone got iCantrips, apps that cast minor spells even outside Aysle (and I later let him use it to access an "app store" in the Elemental Lab and get an appropriate new cantrip - hey he rolled the Near Impossible Difficulty Number 20 I asked for). Then our Freedom Mage got a Knife of Eternal Pain after rolling high on the Agony spell, AND THEN also a potion after yet another high roll. Not only are they already riding on a Glory (larger card hands), but they provoked one that will carry into the next Act as well! I'm not so worried about the fact they're in a Pure Zone surrounded by hundreds of enemies now. Of course, the high rolls petered out in Liverpool and the guys had trouble doing stuff like inspecting books in a library or casting spells without magical backlash. That's not a "good bit", but they had some fun making themselves fail, like the Freedom Mage (who draws power from pain - he's from Tharkold) bumping into tables in the dark on purpose, for TMI thrills, you know. They dragged this tall barbarian woman with them who was the evil wizard's old team mate and who resents his betrayal, and she really came into her own this time by drawing a lot of "accidental" parallels between that douchebag and our Realm Runner who ALSO acts like he's the leader even though he's not, etc. They signed his guest book with troll stuff (in the online sense, not the monster sense).
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