"Accomplishments"
In theaters: It's an impossible choice for Elizabeth Olsen in Eternity, when she finds herself in the afterlife with her two husbands - the one who widowed her early (Callum Turner) and the one she spent more than 60 years with (Miles Teller) - and must choose which to spent, well, eternity, with. "Impossible" is relative, here, since I think movie rules kind of make this obvious, but the film at least takes a twisty road to the conclusion, and has some emotional truth. I don't think it comes near other "afterlife waystation" films like Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life or Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life, but it's still a pleasant conversation piece, which will have you discussing what choices you would have made or have been made for you. The Afterlife Consultants are mostly in charge of the humor, with Da'Vine Joy Randolph, of COURSE, being a highlight. For a character described as decisive, Olsen's portrayal seems a little wet, and I feel like there were more opportunities for background gags than we ultimately get, so I'm going to classify Eternity as just slightly better than fine (and you can take that as a prediction for my own afterlife in the presented universe).
At home: Though director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi wraps Asako I & II in a thematic blanket of duality, it's essentially about how our attractions are built on a foundation of other people we were once attracted to or loved. There are some people you also have a hard time getting out from under your skin, unresolved feelings, that may contribute, not just to the initial (but second) spark, but to that relationship's destruction. Asako is a timid girl who, in the most anime sequence I've ever seen in live action, falls for a wild boy called Baku who has the unfortunate propensity to leave everything behind without warning, and one day, does. Years later, movie magic makes it so Asako meets his physical double, the otherwise completely different - even opposite - Ryohei. This develops into the better relationship, but what happens if Baku returns? Is the movie heading for heartache or for a reckoning? The attendant feelings are complex and Hamaguchi acknowledges that. It might be a dramatic romance, but I was on the edge of my seat wondering how it would end. Specific shout-outs: I thought the best friend played by Rio Yamashito was especially great, and the cat actor was superlative.
An ebay thriller? Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud is an unusual crime story about an unscrupulous reseller called Yoshii who, when he's scammed perhaps one too many people, starts to fear for his life (or his business, his priorities aren't often in the right place). What, at first, feels like a niche procedural - which I enjoy immensely - turns into something more expressionistic at the mid-point, when it becomes clear that online hate manifests as real violence. It's metaphorical, unless you want to believe absolutely everyone Yoshii has ever met is psychotic. Sure, the movie gives an in-story explanation or two, but we're definitely in a world separate from our own by the end. So it's a case of "buy the premise, buy the bit" (+shipping and handling!), but I'm not entirely sure I do. The protracted finale just leaves me wanting more of actual reselling business and less of the genre tropes triggered by the pivot.
Sometimes, a premise goes a long way, as in the case of The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq is a famous - and controversial - French writer (which is why I'd never really heard of him) here playing himself in what I can only guess are mostly improvised scenes shot like an impossibly-shot documentary. The wild conceit is that, in 2011, Houellebecq stopped disappeared for a few days and the media speculated that his islamaphobic comments had him become the target of extremists. His wi-fi was down, was all, but this film proposes to show the truth: He had been kidnapped for ransom. What unfolds is a quirky indie comedy that turns the tables on the Stockholm syndrome, or at least, makes it go both ways. The hapless kidnappers - who don't seem to know much more than he does about what's going on - go maskless and let him inveigle himself into their family. The idea, which requires most of the cast to play themselves or some shade of themselves, is quite an amusing one, and so even if I'm not into French intellectualism (which Houellebecq represents), I got a kick out of this.
Gus Van Sant's almost shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1998) is an exercise for movie nerds/film students. It asks questions like, given the use of the same script, music and storyboards, how do other choices affect a classic film? Some of it is technical - Van Sant changes shots to accommodate the differing locations - others have to do with advancing the story to 1998, or seem to represent ideas a director might have during the process, taking the result away from the Hitchcock original. The two biggest choices/changes,which I blame for this version not working anywhere close as well as 1960's, is 1) the color film, and 2) the casting. In the former case, even with Christopher Doyle (who is brilliant when working with Wong Kar-Wai), the color just makes the story lurid rather than atmospheric. In the latter, P1998 makes you realize how Hitchcock, who disliked working with actors, was a genius at casting. By casting correctly, he didn't have to talk to actors too much to get results. Oh, the new cast does its best (and you have to look down the cast list before you stop recognizing names), but Anne Heche is dead eyed compared to Janet Leigh and Vince Vaughn is no Anthony Perkins (who is?). There are some interesting ideas here and there, but also some moments that feel incredibly silly (the Mother's final attack). So if I'm rating it as a film, it doesn't work and rather feels like you and a bunch of your friends just remade a movie you like, and it's fun for you, but pointless to everyone else. As an experiment Van Sant somehow got financed, the main takeaway is that Hitchcock is essentially irreplaceable. Those thanks to John Woo, tho.
In the early 90s, Rebecca De Mornay was very much the "It" Girl, and one of her key roles - perhaps because it ran on TV a lot - was The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. All I really remembered was John De Lancie as Dr. Molesto, but the one we really have to worry about is his demented widow who inveigles herself into a family by posing as a nanny. I think I confounded a lot of this movie with the next year's The Crush, as indeed, they have a lot of beats in common, but that's just what thrillers were like in the early 90s. There were a lot of "home invasion by way of friendly-seeming person", and Hand That Rocks is perhaps the most iconic. The family is television-strength (we needed more of the spunky best friend played by early-career Julianne Moore), and Ernie Hudson's mentally-disabled workman is rather cringe, but the villain is clever and mean, and almost wins, so it's still a good example of the genre.
From the World Cinema Project!
[Northern Mariana Islands] What in the Seven Hells is Peter Fonda doing in It’s All Right, My Friend? Well, he plays a super-powered alien who befriends a bunch of Japanese young people while on the run from an evil, misogynist, secret society (who even have a musical number explaining their dogma). The kids must help him learn to fly again through some tedious extreme sports, and the bad guys pull out his kryptonite, tomatoes that he can hear laughing at him and undermining his confidence. This is a very horny movie, with some terrible jokes in the "Woman of Tissue Paper" mold, and pointless nudity. I do appreciate its moments of ambition, but as a parody of Superman, E.T. and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (which you wouldn't think NEEDED a parody), it's an ambitious mess. Weird in all the wrong ways, which may be the reason to watch it. A year later, John Carpenter's Starman would come out.
[Kiribati] Allison Janney narrates Expedition Amelia, a National Geographic special that follows the guy who found the Titanic on his quest to find the remains of Amelia Earhart's plane, using a fairly convincing theory that she emergency landed in a certain island atoll. Meanwhile, National Geographic's resident archaeologist is out on those islands looking for her possible remains. And meanwhile the meanwhile, Janney is going back and forth between the mission and the history of the world's most famous female pilot (we might remove the epithet there and still speak the truth), with various talking heads providing additional biographical information. It's actually quite interesting to see what technologies are brought to bear in archaeology these days, but the narration is, woof, very cheesy. Decent, but definitely television-strength, come back after the break, material.
Books: TwoMorrows takes aim at the DC Implosion in Comic Book Implosion - avoiding putting DC in the title, but then, one of the things the book makes clear is that while DC asked for it by bragging about their EXplosion, Marvel was just as hard hit by the same factors, just not so much in their pride. A commented assembly of quotes from the comics professionals who lived it, the book plays like a talking heads documentary and isn't too far from what, say, Marvel: The Untold Story was doing, except Sean Howe built them into paragraphs there. Covering half a decade, it really sets the table with the pre-Explosion years, showing where the industry was and what led to those decisions, and eventually takes us to how DC got out of the slump in the early 80s. Perhaps the Implosion was a contraction before a better expansion. Marvel and, to some extent, other publishers get dinged along the way, as is proper. It's all very interesting even to older comics fans who know at least PART of the story, but my favorite part is about the lost material - where it went, how it was repurposed, and seeing all those wonderful Joe Kubert covers (among others, but Kubert is my favorite comics artist, so) that were criminally shelved, sometimes, forever. And Comic Book Implosion doesn't skimp on the art whenever available.
Improv: Every year for the last four, my French language interview
podcast about my province's improv scene played a Fiasco (for which I'll
have to some production). We let our audience pick the "playset" and
they chose Regina's Wedding. So my partner Isabel and I invited two
improv players who had HAD weddings - Valerie who got married last year
and Yves who was married so long ago, he had timed to have four kids and
a divorce - to play with us, on mic. Great fun. Regina (Val) is a
locally famous daughter of a hubcap baron, about to get married in the
wedding of the century, but in a twist, no one plays the groom. Jeff is
just a guy we refer to. Yves instead plays her secret lover. I was the
father of the bride who, for some reason to be revealed, never lets
himself be photographed by Isabel, wedding photog and best friend of the
bridge, so... why isn't she the Maid of Honor? Regina's Wedding is one
of the examples of a Soft Fiasco (a Fiasco without murder and such) in
the Fiasco Companion, so maybe there's a possible happy-ish ending here,
but not before all the drama-rama can be had.
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