"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Paul Thomas Anderson's first Thomas Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice, was a lot of fun, but it was a story that lacked narrative drive, which made it rather unmemorable. If he learned a lesson there for his SECOND Pynchon adaptation, it's to basically jettison 90% of the book and make something simply inspired by it (with almost a surplus of narrative drive). I've had a bookmark in the middle of Vineland for 30 years, so I'm no expert, but flipping pages after watching One Battle After Another, I couldn't spot much commonality, not even the strange Pynchonesque names used in the script. Well, I guess the book does have a father and daughter run from their homes by a federal agent. PTA's version is a Film About Today(TM) despite its 60s/70s radical action - internment camps, immigration raids, ugly caricatures of racist secret societies (which someone aren't any weirder or worse than overt racist politicians), government agitators forcing reasons for violent police action... is it paranoia if they're really coming to get you? It's PTA, so his lead is dumb as rocks and yet extremely engaging. Leo DiCaprio actually excels at this kind of thing, and it's a lot of fun watching his over-the-hill, burnt-out revolutionary try to get his daughter back in the wake of a federal raid. Benicio del Toro is also a lot of fun as the cool and collected sensei who helps him out, as is Sean Penn's unpalatable federal agent, for that matter. One of Anderson's most mainstream efforts, it shines thanks to pitch-perfect performances, but also its setting, which is our own world at the point where absurdity hits the road. Given that movies take a while to make, PTA is on the cutting edge, here. I would call it prescient if it didn't expose the fact that these things had already been happening for a while.
At home: Can't Buy Me Love mowed the lawn so Pretty Woman could run. It's such a John Hughes movie, I remembered it AS a John Hughes movie. But it's Tuscon instead of Chicago, so I quickly realized it wasn't. Obviously, there's something unpalatable (but addressed) about a high school nerd paying a cheerleader to be his girlfriend - if for appearances only - for a month so he can up his cred with the popular crowd, but the movie's heart is in the right place. It wants to explore popularity as a social toxin, something the popular girl (Amanda Peterson) works hard at herself with few tangible dividends. From early on, we realize there's more to her than the cliché would have it. A very young Patrick Dempsey is the aforementioned nerd who gets high on popularity and nearly misses the romcom boat he inadvertently boarded. He's saddled with a sneaky little brother played by an even younger Seth Green, an unfunny bit, to be sure. In the end, I think it plays fair with its characters, and though it has some cheesy resolutions, there's a good "wake up, teen sheeples" message at its core. Also, peak fashions and hair from my own high school years.
My October Horrorthon begins, where I try to watch one horror film a day (minimum) until Halloween! And we start with... Sleepaway Camp. Summer camp is a classic setting for slasher films, and Sleepaway Camp isn't the first, but its twist on the genre, eschewing teens played by adults for actual kids, and letting them be killed, is worthy horror. Lest it be TOO nasty, most of the kills (and all the underage ones) are off-screen or suggested by shadows, but the bodies are gruesome affairs so gore enthusiasts won't feel robbed. Director Robert Hiltzik, who is filming at the old summer camp of his own youth, plays a similar balancing game with the acting. A lot of these young actors are quite wooden and cartoony - they could only look forward to short careers as horror victims - but the adults are playing it sooooo big as to make that part of the style (and it also takes the bite out of children being slaughtered). Which isn't to say this thing isn't nasty. Camp Arawak is rife with bullying and has several (yes, SEVERAL) pedophiles on staff. Modern audiences may frown at the final twist, but before you can process it, the film ends abruptly on it. I SHOULD be more down on it, but its mysteries kept me engaged - or perhaps Hiltzik was right to cast Angela based on the best far-away stare, and I was simply hypnotized.
Though Possession definitely gives someone those old "WTF did I just watch?!" vibes, it's not even Andrzej Żuławski's weirdest movie. That said, it's pretty weird, and everything is cranked up to 11 from minute one, leaving the film nowhere to go except in one famous scene where Isabel Adjani takes it up to a 12. An acrimonious divorce gave us The Brood (through Cronenberg), and THIS (from Żuławski's layered, surreal point of view), but the Berlin setting also speaks to the Iron Curtain and that city still divided in 1981. A whole split apart, whether a Cold War city or a couple, or the characters themselves as they seem to have doppelgangers who happen to be their partner's ideal -matrimonial fantasy made flesh, and possibly manifestations of a infectious madness since both Adjani and Sam Neill are always on the verge of a breakdown or leaning deep into one. "Possession" thus plays on various meanings of the word - Neill is possessive to murderous extents, the expression "a man/woman possessed" comes to mind, and there's the matter of a potential demonic/Lovecraftian possession. An early non sequitur of a scene, with Neill's job revealed to act as go-between for his organization and... the Devil(?) might be the key, as the "Client" ensures Neill's continued participation. That's if you want a literal explanation for what's happening. It may be a fool's pursuit, however.
Meeting at the crossroads between Shaolin Soccer and Battle Royale (but made on a fraction of either film's budget), Battlefield Baseball (AKA Battlefield Stadium AKA Hell Kōshien) is nevertheless an amusing sports/horror/martial arts/chambara parody. See if you recognize the tropes: A promising high school baseball team has pulled the nasty Gedo High team for their first game, a team of violent, greenish monsters whose games are generally lethal, but perhaps the mysterious stranger (or exchange student, same dif) who just walked into town can help them survive and win thanks to his super-powered fastball. Well, you'd think all the hay made about this special ability would feature more prominently in the finale, but then, when baseball becomes a combat sport, turns out there isn't that much pitching. Battlefield Baseball isn't especially coherent, but it has to be seen as a kind of gory (but goofy-gory, the dead mannequins are pretty bad) Airplane/Naked Gun deal. It's very silly indeed. Enjoy the jokes, enjoy the anime humor in cheap live action, enjoy the absurdity, and enjoy the deadpan umpire. That's all it really goes for.
A pastiche of ghostbreaking (or ghostmaking) documentary shows played straight, Lake Mungo follows an Australian family who uncover secrets, both supernatural and not, surrounding their daughter's drowning after she starts to appear in photos. Is she a ghost, or are they fakes? There might be yet another option which I found rather intriguing. The faux-cumentary has its cake and its eat too, debunking what we see and looping back again to the possibility of spirits walking among us. I have to admit there's one revelation near the end that gave me a chill, though otherwise, this is very much like those TLC ghost shows (once they abandoned the pretense of being "The Learning Channel") without the commercials and "you won't BELIEVE" narration, but with reveals that up the ante almost to the point of parody. But the actors never oversell it and I ended up liking it more than not.
From the World Cinema Project![Djibouti] While football is extremely popular in Somalia, extremist bans and terror attacks have meant young players scarcely had the same opportunities as those of more stable countries (certainly, international home games are impossible). Men in the Arena follows boys from the country's underfinanced team, going to their few games abroad, and for one of them, a shot at the big time, far from home. In a way, it's a lot like watching football itself - at least from my disinterested position on the sport - where a single point or tie is something to be celebrated. These boys don't have much of a chance against other teams and it's not that they don't have raw talent or public support, it's all about socio-economics. The film doesn't really trace a parallel between poverty and opportunity, universally, but it could have. Perhaps it SHOULD have. As is, while it kept me interested in the people and the information on Somalia's civil war, it's just a very ordinary documentary, formally.
[Bangladesh] Beautiful waterlogged black and white photography inhabits A River Called Titas even if not every performer is a professional actor (the leads are strong, thankfully) and the looping is sometimes bad. Spanning several years, it's really about two women in a fishing community. One taken from her village as an ambassadorial bride who falls off a boat and only arrives years later with a son and no way to know her husband is there. The other, a woman once betrothed to the man, who becomes caretaker to these river orphans (if only the very frustrating character of her hateful mother will let her). It is not a supernatural film, but it FEELS supernatural - it's kind of a siren story, kind of ghost story, and kind of a curse story. It also seems to thematically be about Partition, with violent division brewing between farmers and fishermen, and though the Titas isn't one of Bangladesh's borders, an unbearable loss IN that river (provoking more) seems to speak to fractured societies, land issues, etc. The film starts to lose the plot in the last hour for me, as we lose sight of the main characters for things we haven't been prepared to care about, surely a quirk of the novel, but we get back on track eventually. If it's a film about loss, then it makes the audience feel it, too. It's just that these losses made my attention drift off down the river.
RPGs: It's back to the Nile Empire in this week's Torg Eternity game, but none of those dusty Cairo streets (well, a little of that, but not much). Rather, the group is off to the Congo to retrieve a warrior queen's bow as a gift to new allies (upcoming). We didn't get very far into the Lost City of the Congo before we had to call it a night, getting mired in a fight with a "mecha-simian" out of some mad scientist's laboratory which will have to be resolved next time, but the players were certainly a little distraught to find the area tainted by Orrorshan energies. The mixed zone means they can still do highly heroic things, but they soak damage less easily and are more prone to Corruption. Well, the Realm Runner's player pulled a Cosm card that allows a dead PC to return in some comic book fashion and told me I didn't have to hold back on not killing the group. I didn't actually do anything differently (I don't think), but the universe was obviously listening. So be careful what you boast about around the table...
Best bits: I want to commend the card play, this game. When a Great White Hunter type started bragging about his kills at the hotel before the trip, our Demon Slayer dropped a Nemesis card on him making him, at the very least, a rival. So suddenly they were in a competition for the biggest game, and "Killingsworth" invited himself on the trip. He's been pretty useful in taking down swarming zombies and apes while annoyingly counting kills out loud (but no big game yet), though the Deadlands Preacher is racking up kills even more efficiently (just not bragging about it). During the ape fight (which involved dozens of chimps and a giant, sentient, cyber gorilla, the Super-Wrestler staved off one wave by dropping a Sacred Animal card and a snake dropped from the trees and startled the attackers. Meanwhile, though the Wrestler had already freed a wounded archaeologist from the ape's pit/combat arena (after the Demon Slayer put the tainted lion there to sleep with his sleep dust), the Realm runner dropped a card that turned that whole fight into a Dramatic Skill Resolution, too. So we decided the poor man was crashing hard and his insulin kit was in the lion's den. The PCs had 5 rounds to drop back into the pit, sneak by the lion, find the kit and rocket back up with their one-shot rocket belt. It took three (but kept the Runner out of the fight). Fun obstacle bit: Crossing a flimsy bridge with a truck on it (shades of Sorcerer), the Wrestler almost bungled and ended up rappelling the underside like they were monkey bars. The Realm Runner almost screwed up too, and crawled to the other side with much less dignity. Best recurring joke: At the riverside docks, in reference to Killingsworth, they told the boatman (who expected four passengers) not to worry, they'd be four on the trip back. It seems karma wants to prove them right, but it's not Killingsworth accumulating all the wounds.
Improv: It happened two weeks ago now, but so long as I was going to write a section about improv shows, I might as well also recap (and I'm translating names here for the benefit of my English-reading audience) the Ephemerals Gala, which gives awards and distinctions to improv shows, artists and development in our province. I didn't want to toot my own horn too much, but y'know. I knew going in that my French-language podcast - a series of interviews with improv artists in the province, followed by discussions about various aspects of the game/art was receiving the Hommage Award - kind of a life-time-achievement thing - on the occasion of its 10th year (and still going), but I three of the shows I was in were also nominated, so I had a good chance to climb up on the stage a second time. Last year's tour "7 Challenges on the Road" in fact did get the award. Which brings us to THIS YEAR's tour, which just started last weekend...
Rêves Lucides (Lucid Dreams) is our newest tour and we went up to Bathurst, NB for the first show, and this time around, we cranked up the difficulty level. The premise: One of the four artists is selected to sit in the Chair, the others hover over them as scientists. The audience chose a genre at the door, this time voting for a murder mystery. We then call out to them for a category of problem to be resolved (they picked Family). VR glasses are placed on the guinea pig's head and offfffff we go into his dreams/memories/psyche/mind palace... which, of course, takes the form of a murder mystery. What results is an 80-minute play, and our local guest-star, Sebastien Haché, selected for the Chair, was a real trooper... unlike the rest of us, he couldn't very well get off the stage! There are many places this could have gone, but it went a little surreal and run on dream logic, more Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind than Agatha Christie, and was essentially about a man who resented his family of six, but felt guilty about having dark thoughts about his wife and kids. It materialized in the dream world as multiple murders within the family unit for which Seb felt falsely accused, but had to come to terms with his responsibility for the life he had ended up with. Hilariously, the lady who runs the daycare where Seb takes his kids was in attendance - hopefully she didn't think this was autobiographical. Though some might say, it's perfectly normal for young parents to hate having kids while also loving them.
Sounds heavy, and parts of it were, but there were also some goofy characters - Marty (who my podcast fans know as one of the Lonely Hearts) played an inappropriately jolly coroner, and I had both the "weird son" and a quick-witted police detective to punch in some humor. From a nuts and bolts perspective, however, it was oHOTmu OR NOT?'s Isabel who was most in control of the atmosphere and narrative. She's the one pushed the metaphors (mystery fan + psych major, no surprise there) and was rewarded by the audience who, when asked which of the three "detectives" should resolve the action in the third Act, chose her even though her character was the least likely (the girlfriend/wife of the memories who asked pointed questions). It was a pleasant surprise to us that they went the unusual route, and it did make the most sense in the "psychology" of the story. So we're off. Three more dates to go over the next couple months (with different artists, but I'm still in them), and we had a good response despite the weird sci-fi twist. Oh, and speaking of Isabel, she had her OWN show this week, and I get to talk about it as an AUDIENCE MEMBER, this time...
Rondelle Libre (Free Puck) is an improvised play in the style of a sports comedy. I know that its artistic director, oHOTMU's Isabel, watched a ton of sports movies over the last few months as research, preparing - as a non-sports person - for a sporty show featuring a bunch of our funniest improv artists (Marty and Seb again, plus Mathieu Lewis, Renée Perron, and Nick Berry). Competitive improv in French Canada has a long history with hockey - we make our matches LOOK like a hockey game, complete with small rink, jerseys, referees, penalties, etc. - so this HAD to be a hockey story, even beyond the "Canadianness" of it. Conceptually, the best part was that the audience was treated as arena-goers, and we got to cheer and jeer during the (surprisingly-long) game sequences, sometimes provoking reactions in the players. A kid was even cajoled into singing the national anthem (we stood up), and the announcer threw t-shirts with the show logo into the crowd (hey, I BUILT that logo!). We voted at the door whether the final game would be a win or a loss, and DEFEAT won apparently by one vote. I feel responsible because I voted for DEFEAT, but at the end really wanted a VICTORY for the audience-named Skunks (in French, it's Moufette, which is much more fun to make cheers with, with great puns attached). I was impressed at how they recreated hockey plays with only four players on the ice and still made it engaging, and there was a lot of physical humor attached to this story of a train wreck of a group who win the moral victory of finding out they're a team and can lean on each other. Definitely fits the spoof column, using so many sports tropes and "big speech" moments as to expose just how formulaic the genre is, yet I couldn't point to a single movie one could say was the inspiration. Good work, all, and I think Seb just scored himself my nomination for Best Performance in an Alternative Show for next year's Ephemerals.
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