BuysI got my copy of Outside In Can Live With It - 171 New Perspectives on 171 Star Trek DS9 Stories by 171 Writers this week. As with every hardcopy volume published in this series, my name is in it. I'm one of the 171! If this interests you, you'll find it on order at ATB Publishing's website.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I think that if you're going to resurrect Airplane/Naked Gun-type comedies, you could do a lot worse than have The Lonely Island's Akiva Schaffer at the helm. The new The Naked Gun is a lot of fun, even if can't quite maintain the jokes-per-square-inch pace of its opening sequence. Liam Neeson is great at the deadpan required of a Frank Drebin Jr. and Pamela Anderson, too, is a lot of fun in this, a refreshingly age appropriate fatale/romance for Neeson (there's still a 15-year difference, but you know). It's Kiv, so there are a couple of musical moments, and while the parodies tend to the Police Squad world for the most part - dinging real police abuses, John Wick, Mission: Impossible, and a villain that's basically Elon - there are also some wild ones that I won't spoil for you here, leaning into the absurdity. The audience I saw it with was very game, and laughed much of the way through. If I can't quite say it provokes non-stop laughter (the plot mechanics have to take hold from time to time), it did provoke non-stop smiling. A lot of background gags might be worth a rewatch or two. Stay through the credits, not just because there's a button at the end, but there are some silly credits in the scroll (have always loved that). A clever and worthy successor!
At home: You would think the problem with getting life-saving drugs in a communist country like China would be availability rather than Big Pharma's price-gouging and protectionism, but Dying to Survive shows me wrong. Sufferers of a kind of bone marrow cancer entice a failing entrepreneur to smuggle cheaper generics from India and change his life, theirs, and potentially, the country's. Xu Zheng is actually pretty great as a man whose financial concerns at first outweigh any kind of righteousness before flipping the script. He builds a nice little family around himself despite also being a failed family man. A manhunt, led by his ex-brother-in-law, ensues, providing some satisfying crime/action beats. And really, the only real clue that this is a biopic is in the fact it keeps going after a fictional tale would have found an ending.
I find that a lot of auteurs start with a crime film, probably for their bankability, and this is true of Lee Chang-dong and Green Fish. The Korean director would go on to great acclaim for his unusual subjects, characters and turns, and strands of that DNA are here, too, just not to the same extent. Propped up by gorgeous neon cinematography, this is the tale of a young man returned from military service who, not too surprisingly, doesn't really know what to do with his life. Lured by a beautiful, but broken songbird, he falls in with gangsters, and one gets the feeling that, if we're heading for a tragedy, it'll be because he naturally gravitates towards her. But it's not so simple (it's still Lee Chang-dong), and the play on loyalty proves more complex. Ultimately, however, Green Fish (a title that refers to things one wants, but that cause others hardship) feels a little unfinished. The family drama provides a lot of material that doesn't pay off enough, and ambiguities are too numerous to all be pleasant (though many are). Still lesser Lee Chang-dong is still better than most people's efforts.
Hey, Emilio Estevez, if you're going to do Brat Packish movies while married with a baby, expect things to go pear-shaped and get chased all night by a murderous Denis Leary. Just sayin'. That's Judgment Night in a nutshell. Emilio and his boys run their party bus aground and witness a murder, and from then on are running or fighting for their lives in a thriller coded to be about maturity/masculinity and how to prove it, but the fact that I've put a slash between too unrelated concepts may expose how confused I think the movie is about its own theme. Sure, "I'm a man now" can mean "I've aged", but also "I've done a masculine-coded thing", but while the movie's lesson is surely that Emilio (giving the performance of a Wednesday night) is more mature for having a family, while his friends are man-children who are still living high on their early twenties, and surely - SURELY! - their macho posturing, shooting guns, flashing cash, readily getting into fights is NOT mature, is NOT "being a man". It's just convinced of its own lesson. In the end, Emilio has to "prove" he can fight/use weapons/be a badass and therefore "has balls", so it's certainly not convincing us either. Leary is some kind of force of nature, not really beholden to any realistic motivation, and the inner city where the action takes place is an empty postapocalyptic wasteland, so I could imagine a more stylish director could have given this a more nightmarish and intriguing feel. A fair action thriller, but felt a little dumb.
Not too surprisingly from the director of The Hole, Jacques Becker's Touchez Pas au Grisbi has a slow-burning procedural style that makes me believe he knows exactly how gangsters fence stolen goods or prepare for a banger of a night. Jean Gabin is a cool, slick, but aging criminal who has already pulled his last job, but can he keep the loot (the aforementioned "grisbi", lots of French slang in this, merci subtitles) when a rival gang gets wind of it? Gabin's "Max" has one fatal flaw - he's completely loyal to his friends. Doesn't sound like a flaw, but in a world where his partner is prone to getting himself into trouble (in particular with a young Jeanne Moreau - so young it took me a while to spot her), the situation has all the makings of a fiasco. Though a bit slow early on, it's time well spent to get us invested in the violent third act and its ramifications.
From the opening scrawl of the 1921 Hamlet, with all its quotes from great thinkers who condemned the Danish Prince's melancholy and self-reflection as unmasculine, I get the feeling the idea behind this (very) free adaptation of the play was born of misogyny. Its claim: The historical(?) Hamlet was a woman, raised as a boy to keep the throne secure! Well, regardless of the intent (which I have no proof of), this version has incredibly interesting, especially in the context of trans stories not exactly understood over a hundred years ago when the film was made. It's a silent, so it can't really lean on dialog even if it acts as a "tell-all". It's a "show-all", then, with an extra act devoted to Hamlet's youth, making Laertes and Fortinbras her colleagues and developing a romance that can't happen with Horatio. When you're not beholden to the text, anything can happen, and there are many more surprises awaiting the Shakespeare fan in spite of recognizable story beats. And VERY surprisingly, despite German cinema's interest in Gothic expressionism, we don't get a Ghost! At the center of it all is (the actually Danish) Asta Nielsen who gives a great and believable performance and is eminently watchable. I rate this one highly even if it's not really Shakespeare, but as an armchair Shakespeare scholar, I couldn't help but be fascinated by the choices it made. I will have a podcast out soon about the film, you can bet on that.
Be careful what you wish for... In It Happened Tomorrow, Dick Powell is a budding journalist who gets a hold of tomorrow's edition and finds that knowing the future can be a curse, with some very fun "solid time" gags proving you can't change the future. As a precog film, it works, but it's really in service of a cute romcom between our newspaper man and a concert hall psychic (Linda Darnell) who doesn't really believe you can predict the future. And yet we, the audience, play the role of fortune tellers. Thanks to a prologue set IN the future, we know what should and shouldn't happen. In a sense, we've been given "tomorrow's edition". Even without the fantasy elements - which give the film a sort of screwball energy - those romance beats hit well, with all the banter and ridiculous misunderstandings you expect from the genre.
From the World Cinema Project![Réunion] Set on a sugar cane plantation in the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia) at the turn of the century, Sweet Dreams is a lush dissection of colonialism, where those "dreams" are of freedom for some, riches for others. Through the family at the center of the drama (which has both Dutch and Native elements), a larger national malaise is represented. Leaving the colony and its "unrest" is chief on people's minds, but for most, that can't be done before everything of value has been stripped from the land and its people. The wages of colonialism have already damaged the country beyond repair, perhaps, and "assimilated" Natives seem as destructive as their white masters, and what we might think is coded as resilience might actually be a broken spirit. Writer-director Ena Sendijarević doesn't make as simple as that. Behind the beautiful cinematography is a complex web that evokes the story of Cain and Abel, Macbeth, and the complicated feelings behind people's sense of belonging, dragging us towards a frankly hallucinatory final reel. A beautiful, thought-provoking film.
[Mauritius] I can't say I give much of a hoot about the mission in One More Orbit to break records by circumnavigating the Earth in a plane, by going through the poles, in under 48 hours. In contrast to the Apollo 11 mission whose 50th Anniversary this project was marking, it's small potatoes. It's not really exploring new territory, it's just doing it faster than anyone has before. And the documentary makers KNOW there isn't much of a story here, because they pad things out with other topics - Magellan, Apollo 11 (where my ears perked up because I'm a big fan), the I.S.S., and climate change (very much shoe-horned in). It basically feels like an extended commercial for the corporations involved in the project, and a reality TV program with its driving music and "oh, will there be a disaster?" moments that resolved into "no, no, it was fine actually" when you get back from commercial. When you compare this flight to the previous record holder, you realize the stakes weren't that high. It's fine, some interesting information about air travel in the contemporary era, etc., but it all feels very stale and corporate.
[Heard Island and McDonald Islands] Scientists Go to Antarctica to Study Weather... This is the kind of vintage newsreel that parodies and pastiches are made of.
Books: Terrance Dicks does Robert Holmes proud in his novelisation of Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, even, I think, injecting little bits and pieces that either enhance the plot or make the story's television satire a little more obvious, if not exactly in your face (after all, you're reading a book, so it fails to be meta). I do miss the humans being called Tellurians, but that's just my nerdy Whovian brain short-circuiting there. However, I do feel that, in someone else's hands, this one could have been truly exceptional. There's plenty of room for new POVs and extensions (imagine Donald Cotton doing it) or some wild meta-textual take (imagine Paul Magrs instead, not that he would have been available at this time). Our Uncle Terry does it well, but it's always a pretty strict screen/script-to-page adaptation.
Despite the realpolitik, the striking appearance of the Draconians, and the last appearance of Roger Delgado as the Master before his untimely death, Frontier in Space is still a clunker - just a tedious series of captures and escapes for Jo and the Doctor, spending an inordinate amount of time in a variety of jail cells. It's like The Reign of Terror on speed. While Malcolm Hulke injects a lot of world building in his novelisation - retitled Doctor Who and The Space War - he can't save it, even after he removes one potentially redundant action beat and makes the final monster a more reasonable lizard. At the books' breakneck speed, the story's structure seems even more repetitive, and the galaxy has never felt so small (unless our heroes were in this time frame for months and it's never mentioned). Interestingly, Hulke provides a new ending so as to remove its cliffhanger for the book-reading public. Unfortunately, that doesn't match the start of the next novelisation, so it'll only be confusing. I like all the new details, but the story is just a dud.
I usually quite enjoy it when Terrance Dicks turns a 6-parter into a cracking 80-page freight train, and Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks fits that bill. The book is lean and exciting, and of course, unrestrained from any kind of budgetary constraints so it all feels more epic. But I don't think Planet of the Daleks needed that much help, personally. Though I now understand it to be a bit like "Terry Nation's Greatest Hits" - a jungle planet with killer plants, invisibility occurring in nature, themes of bravery/cowardice and action/pacifism, engineered diseases - it happened to be the point at which I jumped onto watching Doctor Who in sequential 25-minute episodes (before that, I'd only ever caught the PBS omnibi), so it has a special, nostalgic place in my heart. But I think it stands up, especially in book form, and the Doctor has at least three great speeches.
I'm afraid Malcolm Hulke's adaptation of Doctor Who and The Green Death reads like the TV serial with all the witty bits taken out, and makes you realize - I dare say - how much of Doctor Who was worked out by the script editor, director and (largely, in this era) actors. The charming relationship between the Doctor and Jo feels absent, and her departure is given short shrift. He also has a pacing problem, spending a lot of time on the first couple episodes' worth - expanding the Metebelis III stuff, putting us in the miners' heads, etc. - but has to race to end before blowing up the page count. Hulke never cares for action, so he omits it and has characters mention it in passing, giving the back half especially a certain choppiness. Given that this is one of my favorite stories (for sentimental reasons, perhaps, but I think it's worthy), this preachy substitute is rather disappointing.
Doctor Who and The Time Warrior opens on cool Sontaran-Rutan space action - partly written by Robert Holmes himself before handing it off to Terrance Dicks - a prologue to Linx landing in Medieval England. Dicks follows up by getting us into Irongron's mind (such as it is), and cracking on with Sarah Jane Smith's first story. She's great. IT's great. What more do you want? The first mention of Gallifrey by name? Okay! (Although I don't think that holds true in the novelisations.) A fun turn from Professor Reubish? That too! Dialog changes that don't eliminate the general wit of the story as broadcast? After The Green Death doing just that, yes please! The only thing I'm missing - and this has to do with when they published the adaptation - is some accompanying illustrations. With two key introductions and a vivacious setting, it would have been a cool inclusion. They just weren't doing that by 1978.
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