"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I don't really know anything about Tim Robinson, but Friendship seems a good showcase for his brand of cringe comedy. He plays Craig, a socially awkward, very beige man who somehow landed Kate Mara 16 years ago (clues point to a surprise pregnancy, but that opens the door to other questions) who gets a life-changing man crush on his new neighbor Austin, played by Paul Rudd. Well, who wouldn't, probably. But he gets comfortable too fast too soon and makes an ass of himself, and basically ruins his life obsessing about Austin and the cool things Austin does. Lots of funny bits and repeatable lines, and while we all wished the movie's ending confirmed what we were all thinking was really going on, I don't know if it might be better to leave it as something you have to interpret individually. The clues are there. Maybe we don't need to put a button on it.
At home: After Prey, Dan Trachtenberg could have basically spent the next half-dozen years making more historical Predator films. Instead, he turns to animation to produce Predator: Killer of Killers, with sequences featuring Vikings, Japanese swordsmen, and World War II aviators, sequences that somehow relate to one another by the end - this isn't STRICTLY an anthology. Make no mistake, this is all action with only the briefest of character developments, and yet each of the aliens' deadly prey are their own unique individuals, with their own styles, motivations and attitudes. It's just that we quickly cut to the chase and the climactic battle a full movie would have spent an hour foreshadowing. And we do it four times. Some of the animation elements (like cloth and hair behavior) can be on the video game cut scene part of the spectrum, but the action is so fast, furious and clever (not to mention hyper-violent), that's quickly forgotten. The film prefers melee weapons by virtue of its settings, but no other Predator flick gives you this much spaceship action as well. And the environments are varied anyway, almost in a water, earth and air kind of way. Very, very cool addition to the Predatorverse. I hope Trachtenberg hasn't spent it all in one go.
A lot of Tolkien fans don't like it when his text is expanded or changed (see The Battle of the Five Armies), but I'm not so precious. I think The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is, while certainly overlong for what was a 2-page appendix, a fine anime action-fantasy story set 8 kings of Rohan before the events of the trilogy. As told by Éowyn (which is to say, Miranda Otto), the movie focuses on Helm Hammerhand's (in the book) unnnamed daughter (now Héra) and makes her the last of the shieldmaidens (at least in spirit) before Éowyn herself takes on that mantle. Instead of your being the trigger for a civil war among the horsemen, she also becomes the key to a resolution that wasn't really explained by Tolkien. Being a "legend", it feels like the villain has slim motivation (sure, to revenge his father, but the latter is such an evil caricature, one questions the loyalty). The large battles are often too claustrophobic to be interesting, and the Lord of the Rings implants unnecessary. But still, we get the origin of Helm's Deep, a clever heroine, strong music, a great finish, and even a couple of voice cameos.
While a bit loud and chaotic, the Taiwanese ghost comedy Dead Talents Society is a lot of fun. It imagines the afterlife as richly populated and haunters as celebrities raking in "offerings" from the living trying to exorcise these ghosts. Haunters are rivals in award shows (but also to keep their licenses lest they slip into nothingness) and that competition is often translated as a sports program or reality show. Enter a wallflower of a ghost who has no talent for scares, but doesn't want to vanish. Her crippling feelings of inadequacy, central to the film, bounce off those of the "agency" that nevertheless tries to make something of her - the failed pop star and the haunting has-been diva - so that "life as a competition" becomes a sort of "unlife", or at least something that seems hardly worth living. But despite the heavy theme, it's still a very funny movie, and once you start counting giraffes (what could they mean?), you never stop.
What if Thelma and Louise had a third person who was more level-headed? That's kind of how Boys on the Side starts (it even acknowledges that previous film), with goodie-two-shoes Mary-Louise Parker in that role, balancing out Whoopi Goldberg and Drew Barrymore's more borderline personalities. But whatever crime comedy is eked out by this premise, the film soon turns to less interesting melodrama, featuring the issues of the day. There's something dated about how various characters question female solidarity as if it were necessarily Sapphic, even though the actual LGBTQ+ content seems well handled. Whoopi gets to use her singing voice and leads us to a heartbreaking finale, though I'm not sure the notion of a romantic bond is earned. Ultimately, the story is a little all over the place, going from an "odd couple cross-country trip" to an interlude about female support, to a courtroom drama, to a medical tragedy ripped from 15-year-old headlines. Likeable, but unfocused.
When I saw Boyz n the Hood back in the day, my general impression was "a depressing time at the movies". The news talked a lot about gang violence and drive-by shootings, and this was the movie about that, not entirely original at the time, but getting a wider release than most. Because "inner city naturalism" has many more examples today, you can't avoid spotting the tropes, tension on that score remaining only in WHICH of the "promising kids" will be killed before the end. Honestly, over-familiarity makes me regret we didn't stick longer (or entirely) with the sort of "Stand by Me" with the characters as little kids. Moving to 1991, the lead kid grows up to be an early-career Cuba Gooding Jr., but it's Ice Cube who, in his first movie, steals the show. It's not hard to draw a line between Boyz and Friday. Laurence Fishburne is great, too, as the militant dad. There's, in fact, a great cast surrounding young writer-director John Singleton here, and he makes a lot of salient points just using visuals - street signage with pregnant meanings, the tension-building boading balls, etc. - but I just lose interest when he delves into soapy melodrama.
A mix of Marxism, The Magnificent 7, and dark version of The Ant and the Grasshopper, A Bug's Life is filled with amusing insect gags and makes the micro-world interesting and dangerous. Those photo-real birds are absolutely TERRIFYING, and there's something somewhat violent about the film that gives it an adult vibe at times. At the time, I remember people imitating the caterpillar a lot, but I don't think the other bugs are all that quotable and, well, it's a little out of focus, isn't it? It's about the exploitation of labor on one end (for the grown-ups) though it perhaps only gets there through the bandits vs town set-up of the Seven Samurai. It's also about trusting yourself and trusting others (for the kids), though Flik, our inventive hero, was already there. The ant colony has more of an arc than he does. And sometimes they act like bugs, and sometimes they don't (the parentage of the ants is suspect, for example). Regardless, it's fun, colorful, and exciting. Full transparency: I crushed an ant while watching this, and another while writing this review. What kind of a monster does that make me?
When I first absent-mindedly saw Bullies, it was probably how an 80s Canadian hicksploitation thriller should be watched: In a university residence, projected on a wall in the common area. Grungy. Of course, all I thought I remembered from the film is actually in Snake Eater, a different hicksploitation flick shot on the opposite end of Canada. Didn't bode well for a rewatch, but it was much better than I thought it would be! A new family moves into a small British Columbia ski resort town and immediately runs afoul of the family that runs it through terror and violence. Teenager Jonathan Crombie might get help from the only friend he makes, an older Native man, or fall into a honey trap that is the evil family's one daughter (Olivia D'Abo, unusually pretty in this genetic context). Prom Night's Paul Lynch gets some great shots (there's a murder that happens on BC's only sunny day of the year), even if the night shoots are almost too dark. The bad guys are nasty (trigger warning for sexual violence), but good news, it means they can die in horrible ways and we clap. It's just a lot to go through to make a boy finally bond with his stepfather, y'know?
I've liked Omar Sy in other things (most recently in 2024 The Killer), so I was perhaps an easy mark for Lupin. He plays a modern-day gentleman-thief who bases his crimes and methods on the famous 19th-Century character of that name, effortlessly slick, cool and always (it seems) one step ahead of the game. And if this were a show about the con/heist of the week, I would have been happy enough. It's the better for telling a single story (at least through its first two short seasons) in the style of Revenge or Arrow. When he was a boy, his father was framed for a theft he didn't commit, and now he's trying to find out what really happened and punish those responsible. Indeed, like the other shows I mentioned, there are flashbacks to the character's youth - and boy, the kids playing all the particulars are IMPECCABLY cast, both for looks and talent - a big part of why the story works. It's such a contained story, I was worried about giving it a third season, and it may strain credulity that there's another menace from the past and another mystery surrounding a family member, but it's fun too, and actually does manage some unconnected cons/heists, which makes me happy.
[Cabo Verde] Djon Africa tells the story of Miguel, a young man born in Portugal, who travels to Cabo Verde to find the father he never knew, and if he doesn't, at least find himself on the islands where his parents had their roots. It's a meandering picaresque from village to village, from party to party, from meeting to meeting, from dramatic landscape to dramatic landscape, leaving a country where he suffers systemic racism to another where he's considered a foreigner, too. But it's perhaps less about connecting to a place where the grass seemed greener, than understanding one's place in the world, regardless of geography. Miguel may have to reject the father image and go his own way, even an opposite way. I was happy to take this trip with the character, even if it seemed to be leading nowhere, but the ending, ambiguous but not too ambiguous, made me like the film more. Cool music, too.
[Gambia] As far as documentaries go, Jaha's Promise discusses an important problem through the lens of the activist trying to put an end to it, but it's not doing anything special formally. That's fine, but it means I'm lukewarm about it as cinema. Jaha's attempt to have female genital mutilation banned in her home country (after raising awareness for it in the States, where she was essentially trafficked as a child bride) makes her a worthy heroine, and without revealing where the doc ends, I'll admit it really hit me in the feels.
[Guinea-Bissau] How do you film a poem? Parsi does so with Mariano Blatt's "No es" (It isn't), read at a breakneck, exhausting pace, as a digital camera moves through African streets, a visual overlay that gives the text an added layer of meaning. Overwhelming at times, especially when there's cross-talk or microphone noise, it turns a poem about the uncertainty of perspective into a world view akin to flipping through Instagram accounts. Though perhaps, that was in the text all along...
Books: Terrence Dicks' adaptation of Doctor Who's The Ambassadors of Death makes the Action by HAVOC as exciting as what was one TV, perhaps a bit more, but it's hard to get too excited about a story that has so much padding. People escape and get re-captured so much, you'll think this was a First Doctor historical! I'm being facetious. It's not all escapes and captures, but it might as well be. For every step forward by the heroes, the villains make them take two steps back, until the head honcho finally explains the plot, all in one go, in the final episode (i.e. the last 15 pages). None of which means it's a bad book, or even a bad Doctor Who story (it keeps the mystery going, has lots of action, and upends the usual invasion narrative), but I feel like Dicks could have collapsed the story into fewer pages. Notable changes/additions include a backstory for the nasty Reegan and Dr. Lennox being a little more self-serving.
RPGs: It's friend David Gallagher's birthday this week and he wanted to spend it running several groups through a Marvel Super-Heroes (FASERIP) adventure of his own making - World War 2 heroes in 1945 Latveria, seeking a powerful mutant boy, well, you put the clues together - and I wasn't involved until my CoC GM had an emergency and I picked up his character (Agent Peggy Carter). I don't think anyone was too impressed with my role-playing, considering I spent the first half just trying to catch up with Roll20 (which is very finicky on my computer), FASERIP (which I hadn't played since I was a teenager), and the group dynamics (not people I normally play with). But my real problem was that Peggy was always at the bottom of the initiative order, so anything cool she wanted to do, she had to wait to the end. I wasn't the only one in that situation, because the dang Whizzer was in the team, and superspeedsters not only act first, but tend to multi-action, not leaving much for the rest of us. Peggy's bid at immortality was using a rocket pack to fly back into a burning plane to get parachutes for everyone else, at which point another hero found another way that superseded her heroic action. It was fun - lots of jokes and nerdy continuity-patching - but it was better for Peggy to stay out of combat, lead civilians out of danger, make a cutting remark here and there, and (my OPUS!) baldly state we were leaving the murderous Destroyer (that's a Golden Age hero, folks) in a room alone with the comatose Arnim Zola AND WE DIDN'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED, OKAY?! Narrative ambiguity and Destroyer didn't lose any Karma by not saying if he killed him or not. Now, this is was a fast run in order to help David debug the many coded special effects he puts into his games (Roll20 allows for a lot of customization like that), so I'm sure the other Invaderz (sic) are going to have more opportunities for role-playing than we did. Shout out to my podcasting and blogging friends involved: Gene, Whizzing over all our actions; Alex Osias as an Iron Fist precursor, the calm center of the chaos, and the Irredeemable Shag, who makes a very entertaining Soviet zealot (here, the Red Guardian).
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