"Accomplishments"
In theaters: When Stephen King wrote the novel in the late 60s, The Long Walk was quite obviously a Vietnam allegory, and although you can certainly layer other things over the film version, they surprisingly STILL made it a Vietnam metaphor. It takes place in an alternate universe version of the 1960s, where America was economically devastated by a civil war, and where young men win a "lottery" (draft) allowing them to walk until only one remains, the winner promised he will be raised out of poverty. An apocalyptic landscape, boys with dog tags around their necks, violence and death for those who fall behind, dissenters with big (hippie) aspirations, and the quick bonds of camaraderie... It's a war movie without a war. The walk is a meat grinder that brings only death, trauma, and radicalization. It's not worth it, but it's what these boys have been sold as a necessity, as the "only way out/forward". So whether that's "join the war effort", "graduate, go to college, get married and have kids" (which a gay character may speak to, here), or whatever other conformity would be imposed on us, the message is the same. A strong idea, though as a film, it's like a lot of war stories - misery and hardship, and a probably bleak ending - but here it's done very simply, with little means and flash, and focuses on the men, their bonds, their hopes and despair.
At home: What are ghosts, if not memories? And what are memories, if not ghosts? The premise of The Long Walk (Laos, 2019) promised a kind of haunting, but I was surprised to still find some small science-fiction elements in it... and yet, the time travel (my reason for taking an interest) isn't done with science! Rather, the spirit world is unmoored from chronology, and a man who has been able to see spirits since he was a kid, goes back in time to interfere with his own life, hoping to diminish his life-long trauma over his mother's death, but instead short-circuiting his development into the man he is. An evocation of grief and trauma, and how it molds us, going into sinister territory at times, fulfilling its horror label. Death cannot become your life, folks, and the living need to learn to "move on" just as the dead do.
2024's The Count of Monte Cristo is a lavish and vibrant adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' second-best known novel, an examination of justice that clocks in at almost three hours, but barely feels it. Never a dull moment in this 20-year-spanning epic, though even at that length, the book has been cut down to size considerably. I don't know if purists will like the changes and contractions, but I thought they worked satisfyingly well (I mean, it's based on a 6-volume, 1900-page monster). Dantes is a young man whose life is destroyed when he is framed for a crime he didn't commit by three men. After escaping from prison, and despite being several times asked to choose life over revenge, he purposes to exact veng--JUSTICE on those who hurt him, inveigling himself into their high society under a new identity to strike at their very hearts. It's engaging stuff and Pierre Niney has the chops required to play a young idealist, a bitter avenger, and all the Count's assumed identities. And it looks gorgeous, too.
The portrait of an oddball underground comix artist, Crumb is also the portrait of an oddball family, as Terry Zwigoff follows him to his siblings' homes before he leaves the country (for good, as it turns out, he still lives in France today) for seemingly unimportant farewells. Crumb is a weirdo, whose comics explore his own kink and misogyny (as satire? as therapy? as exorcism?), but his brothers, with whom he had a childhood "comics publishing" enterprise, are even more eccentric and have their own difficult relationships with authority and sexuality. It's pretty fascinating, and while Zwigoff does have a few "talking heads" giving their opinions of the man and his work (all of them with first-hand experience), he mostly just lets things unfold without comment. It's up to you to draw parallels between Crumb's headless women and his friendly choke of an ex-girlfriend on camera, or between his family's struggles with mental illness and his own dark vision. Above all, it's a great document about a seminal cartoonist.
When Wim Wenders is given the task of making a film about fashion despite his total disinterest in fashion, he interviews designer Yohji Yamamoto and discovers fashion designers are really artists. Notebook on Cities and Clothes is the result, a spare documentary enlivened by Wenders' stylish transpositions of interview over image in a very basic, but intriguing way, doing a lot with little (worth seeing just on a technical basis). In Yamamoto, he finds a kindred spirit with the same artistic inspirations and aspirations, but working in different medium. And how does that medium change the art? Through the process, he also becomes interested in video, and that medium, too, has an effect on art, not just how it says things, but what it chooses to say. In the way Wenders correctly predicts electronic media as art, Notebook also makes a strong companion piece of his Room 666.
From the World Cinema Project![Macao] Almost 200,000 (documented) foreign workers act as "domestic helpers" in Hong Kong, and on Sundays, many of these wage slaves participate in their own beauty pageant circuit, for community and prize money. Sunday Beauty Queen is a documentary that uses these events to access the lives and hardships of these migrant workers, telling a universal story despite the specifics (these could just as well be the stories of Latin American housekeepers in the U.S., for example), people drawn to higher salaries walking into often unreasonable working conditions. "Good" bosses are interviewed, well-meaning employers who fail to recognize they're still part of a system of exploitation, but it's clear the horror stories outweigh the good. Sunday Beauty Queen's several subjects paint a rather touching picture of these invisible people who, for a day a week, make themselves visible, at least to each other.
[Nepal] My personal feelings are at odds with what The Man Who Skied Down Everest wants of me. Told through a reading of champion skier Yūichirō Miura's journals, the documentary follows his attempt to ski down (part of) Mount Everest, and of course, the long journey there. But do we need these kinds of "exploits", and are they worth the risk? If this were just one guy, hiking to a tall peak and trying to do the impossible, that would be one thing. But literally hundreds of people are involved, so... That said, the fact that Miura's journal achieves a kind of religious poetry, the crisp photography - whenever I see something like this, focusing on the explorers, I'm always reminded that SOMEONE, unseen and unheralded, had to film it - and the very real tension that something could go wrong at any minute and that Miura may fail (unless one knows the history, I suppose) make this a powerful document... in Man's hubris, if nothing else.
[Christmas Island] If I didn't know going in that Gabrielle Brady's Island of the Hungry Ghosts was a documentary, she could easily have passed it off as a straight drama - the atmospheric lighting, the few brief lyrical inserts, the metaphorical playfulness of the editing... They all point to something constructed rather than lived, and yet... The idea of "the crossing" is explored in each of her subjects. For millions of years (I imagine), the red crab has been migrating back and forth across Christmas Island, and we (humanity) have decided to help and protect this endangered creature. 100 years ago, Chinese settlers died on Christmas Island and weren't properly buried, and now their descendants make annual offerings to appease their ghosts, but never enough, it seems, to allow them to cross over. In the here and now, a detention facility on Australia-owned Christmas Island "indefinitely" holds asylum seekers whose stories are told through their therapy sessions with Brady's lead focus, a trauma specialist at the end of her own rope, an unwilling cog in a system that inflicts harm on her patients. Filmed with great sensitivity and surprising intimacy, it's unlike any other documentary I've seen, and as beautiful as it is sad.
[Brunei Darussalam] The Visible is a quick video selfie of three queer women living in the religiously repressive country of Brunei. An important statement of existence, but it doesn't (or can't) delve under the surface.
RPGs: This week's Torg Eternity game had my players in a somewhat obstructionist mood. When asked by the residents of their "magical moving street" NOT to bounce back to Venice (which caused all that water damage last time) despite being called there, they say "orders is orders" (but eventually move it to a landbound suburb). But then when ordered to rescue a teenage girl from the Cyberpapacy so she can be reunited with her tearful mother), they don't want to do it! Make up your minds, boys. Sometimes, PCs only want to stick it to the GM, as non-existent an entity as that is. Well, in this day and age, I can't blame anyone for being anti-authority (though it'll get you in hot water with the Church Police). The crux of the problem here was that the girl was insolent, pig-headed, and had an artificial heart that would stop ticking if she crossed over, so they had to convince her an artifact would indeed heal her heart. On the planning side of things, we hadn't been to the Cyberpapacy in two years (real time), and I suddenly remembered I'd had the PCs steal the artifact from a tomb even earlier than that, with the expectation I would bring it up for this "Sacred Heart" mission. Well, their next rendezvous with a Nile Empire contact was in a week, so... might as well do it now while there's time and geographical proximity.
Best bits: When told they angered "Madam Mayor" of Eternity Street, they later assumed it must be Old Maggie, the bag lady who they just had words with; after getting wined and dined (well, Irished and coffeed), she denied she was (who ever heard of a street with a mayor?), but with a smile that might actually confirm it. The Super-Wrestler saved a child, but it turned into a demon in his arms; while he had it in a chokehold, the Aztecan Demon Slayer finished it off. The Church Police opening up an interrogation at the scene with a prayer (they took a suspect in, the PCs assumed he would just be questioned and knew he wasn't responsible for summoning the demon, much regret when they read the chyron above the next morning). The Realm Runner drew an Angst card and connected the mother-daughter thing with his own difficult (but never really stated before) relationship with his mom, who abandoned him and who he later rejected. A narrow escape through Eternity Street as Church Police (and a giant Angel) bore down on them, the Realm Runner moving the street just in time to see the Angel spark and explode. But it was really the Deadlands Preacher's time to shine, emotionally supporting the girl in her attempt to heal herself (a close call, as her artificial heart tried to burst out of her chest in the initial failed attempt), and he was rewarded with getting to say mass at the E-Street church (amusingly, his player was the only person at the table who had never even stepped one foot inside a church - that's so French! - so he had to improvise - I gave him a verse and theme at random).
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