"Accomplishments"
In theaters: You do not need to have seen the old series to enjoy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. It's funny as hell even if you never did. You do not need to be Canadian to enjoy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, but you'll be in the dark on a couple jokes. You do not need to have been conscious in 2008 to enjoy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, as evidenced by the teens in our audience who thought the movie was hilarious, but I'm sure it helps, too. What I'll tell you, even if you don't need to know, is that Nirvanna the Band is Canada's Bill & Ted and its Flight of the Conchords mixed together. They always have this plan to play at the Rivoli and jumpstart their career, but it's always doomed to fail. But they've never had this much budget to try! Surprisingly great integration of old show footage, insane stunts and seamless effects, and their trademark guerrilla film making fills the screen with normal people who just happened to walk into frame to ask questions (the one behind the scenes story I've heard is already bananas - search Nirvanna the Band + Drake to find out more, but maybe after you've seen it). Hugely entertaining.
At home: Between Splitsville and their previous effort, The Climb, Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin could be setting themselves up to be the fresh face of cringe comedy. Not that The Climb comes close to Splitsville's brilliance, but it still has a lot of original details and boldly explores difficult relationships. The roles they wrote themselves are best friends consistently tested by one's pathological selfishness and the other's pathetic selflessness. Two extremes caught in an easily abused friendship. Jumping over years at a time within its chaptered structure, the film is sometimes difficult to get a hold of, and its interest in French things seems a little precious at times (though I, of course, like the French soundtrack), it still contains some great comedy scenes - the funeral, for example - and a lot of truth. It's just more amusing than it is funny. But a sign of better things to come.
Peter Bogdanovich's tribute to old Hollywood's screwball comedies, What's Up, Doc? is an under-discussed gem. Like the Cole Porter song that starts it, the madcap story of four identical piece of luggage is both clever and consistently amusing, often turning left where other movies turns right, and provoking laughs. Barbra Streisand is a charming, fast-talkin' grifter (bag: her necessaries). Ryan O'Neal is a forgetful musicologist henpecked by his fiancée Madeline Kahn, in her first feature role (bag: musical rocks). Two other bags: Priceless jewels, and secret documents. You just know that at some point, they'll be shuffled around to cause trouble, but this is all breakable window dressing to true screwball subjects like falling in love despite yourself. Bogdanovich throws in lots of visual gags and physical comedy, even pulling a car chase the Love Bug would be envious of. Buck Henry's script is fast and funny. You can never be sure where the movie is going and each surprise destination is a delight.
From the title, we should expect that Chantel (Ariyan A. Johnson), for all her ambition, will Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., i.e. unable to escape the projects and share the fate of many young women in her circumstances. And it's frustrating. I think director Leslie Harris plays a neat trick (even if I wasn't appreciating it while I watched), making Chantel someone you can root for - too smart for her own good, politically active, and brash - and, over time, exposing her childish irresponsibility to the point of the audience wanting to reject her. In other words, the very thing society usually does to girls like her. That all said, I nevertheless liked the confidential nature of Chantel's fourth wall breaks, and the early 90s female hip hop soundtrack was a blast! But I also hated to have to side with the adults who, knowing Chantel better than I did, saw it all coming.
Though La Vie de Bohème was Aki Kaurismäki's first French-language film, the use of several of his regulars, and their sometimes thick Finnish accents, meant I needed the subtitles after all, but this won't impact my English-speaking readers. Kaurismäki's take on the famous 1851 novel is an absurdist tragi-comedy about the easy but steadfast friendship between three failed artists, proponents of an avant-garde no one cares about except perhaps Jean-Pierre Léaud's financial angel, but even he's a total Philistine. André Wilms heads the cast as a spendthrift writer, the role he would reprise in 2011's Le Havre, with Kari Väänänen as a cacophonous musician, and Finland's king of deadpan Matti Pellonpää as a painter in love. The three men (+ a very good dog) are always on the verge of financial ruin, taking the women who love them down with them, their friendship the only thing that keeps them warm. But at some point, you stop laughing because it's just too sad. Having run in Bohemian circles myself, I recognize the types, here stretched to amusing extremes. So even it's a film where reality is clearly askew, it's still quite truthful.
After a bit of a false start, Tremors 3: Back to Perfection returns to the town where to all started, and it's become a proto-theme park. So of course, they have to bring back Ariana Richards, famous for being the little girl in Jurassic Park as well the original Tremors. One of her rare adult roles (she became a visual artist). There are a couple of other returnees, but Michael Gross is the only main start left at this point, and Burt Gummer will from now on suffer a bevy of "New Kevin Bacons" to partner with. Honestly, Shawn Christian is the best of them. The graboids' third form is introduced, and there's a lot of fun to be had as the town's survivors improvise around new and old threats. Back to Perfection isn't perfect, there's a lot to nitpick - bad CG shots, dodgy acting, and missed opportunities (you bring Mindy back, but you don't pull some kind of pogo stick gag?!) - but I think it's still a better sequel to the first film than Aftershocks was.
More Ginger Snaps 3 than Back to the Future 3, Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, is a nice change of pace in the middle of the franchise, as we look in on Perfection 100 years before the first film. Michael Gross plays Burt Gummer's ancestor, a verbose green horn in the Old West who gives him the chance to play an entirely different color than usual. A number of other ancestors are evoked as well, plus Billy Drago as a cool gunfighter hired to get rid of the graboid problem. It's the best Tremors after the first, with a fourth graboid form highlighted and plenty of wormy action. Western tropes, sure, but also a lot of stuff these kinds of films don't focus on too much, like the immigrant Chinese family (who started Chang's Market, of course), and the steam cars that heralded automobiles. The explanations for future events are well reasoned, and it's all very charming. The natural double feature, quality-wise (and works sense-wise) is 1 then 4 and go to bed.
The year is 2015 and Universal 1440 has bought the rights to Tremors from Stampede Entertainment. Tremors 5: Bloodlines (every long-running franchise must eventually have a movie called Bloodlines) thus marks a dip in writing quality and the adoption of that 21st-century B-movie aesthetic - shot like a commercial, color grading tricks, a lot of padding, and the withholding of money shots. Michael Gross is still here, and the best part of the latter-day trilogy, but he's been saddled with Jamie Kennedy for a 2-film engagement that is always threatening to derail the flick. Kennedy will make you yearn for Aftershocks' Grady. He's not just unfunny, he's gross and annoying, especially with the borderline racist one-liners as the monster hunters move to South Africa to hunt bigger, more lethal, more CG graboids. The CG's actually pretty good, but the redesigns are over-complicated and not in any way better than the originals. Along the way, we do get a couple of cool local characters - the helicopter pilot, the doctor who is also a bow-using Amazon and might as well be in another movie... - but no, we gotta focus on Kennedy for "bloodlines" reasons. Welcome to the step down (pee jokes! direct Jurassic Park steals!), but we still have our foot on the upper floor.
The absolute worst of the Tremors: films, A Cold Day in Hell starts with an aborted punch the air moment for Canadians as the action moves to Nunavut... aborted because the card calls it Nanavut, calls it a province, and places it on the wrong parallel. So not even minimal research was done to make this seem like the Canadian Arctic, and indeed, the film was shot in SOUTH AFRICA, so there's an "unusual heat wave" going on, and they don't even hold to the conceit of white sand playing snow in the film. We're just in the bush again, and even if you accept that the science team is "international", there's an improbable concentration of South African accents, which is especially ludicrous when you hear its American (DARPA) neighbors/antagonists who are all South African, too. Jamie Kennedy is still a sore point, and the introduction of another OG Tremors nepo-baby really amounts to nothing because the cast is just too big. Why do we need all these people if they're not even going to be killed? We were complaining over it so much that we decided to just do a thumbs down every time we were grievously annoyed, and it gave me the giggles. But I can't in good conscience call it "so bad, it's good". It writes a check it can't cash and proves to be a disappointment from jump.
Bringing some kind of closure to the 1440 trilogy, Tremors: Shrieker Island finally uses the graboid form it had completely ignored in the previous two, and Jamie Kennedy has been replaced by Jon "Napoleon Dynamite" Heder, so... is it a winner? Well, it's got better cinematography for sure, with the Thailand locations doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's got Barbarian's Richard Brake as a villain pulling a Dr. Moreau (or a, well, Jurassic Park) in the area and he's pretty entertaining. There's another cool archer. So in a lot of ways, it's on par with Bloodlines. But it's a step down from that film because it tends to fall flat on almost every metric. Whenever something is about to happen, we cut away, trying to build tension, but only building impatience. They want to do something poignant with Burt, but my feeling was closer to "huh? oh, okay". And Napoleon Dynamite's delivery is so flat that none of his jokes sound like jokes. Shrieker Island just doesn't really want to be FUNNY, which is something that can't be said of other poor instalments in the franchise. So Tremors ends (for now?) with a whimper more than a shriek.
Joel Potrykus, possibly at his bleakest (which is saying something), Vulcanizadora follows two friends into the Michigan woods - Potrykus himself as a chatterbox who really wants out of their mysterious plan, and Joshua Burge as his disaffected friend who would rather get on with it. It's not that much of a mystery once the clues start dropping during the "faffing about" portion of their trip, but the means and consequences are surprising. Ultimately, it's about honor and friendship, how far you're willing to go to for a friend, and how far you SHOULD go. Not all support is positive, but I has to involve consent, and that's at the heart of this dark story. One friend doesn't know what he is consenting to (not really), while the other recognizes what must be done given he didn't get true consent from the other. If I'm being cagey, it's because I don't want to spoil it, but come back to me if you do watch it, and it'll all make sense.
Ian Richardson is probably the most Strand-accurate Sherlock Holmes - he looks just like the pictures - and in the made-for-TV adaptation of The Sign of Four, he gets to do and say all the Sherlocky things and do them well. There's some sanitation going on, perhaps (the one thing he DOESN'T do is take drugs), but his is a genial performance - a Sherlock Holmes who is a pleasant fellow. After all the a-hole Sherlocks of our current era, it's kind of nice to watch one that's having fun. The Sign of Four is one of the more exotic Holmes novels and, well, not in a particularly good way. It fits the Victorian mindset, but its depictions of pygmies, for example, is probably objectionable. And its shifting point of view, giving us many scenes with the villains, means it's often more about HOW Holmes figures things out rather than WHAT he's figured out, but Richardson's deductions are so well paced, I hardly minded. Shame about the racist content, because this is a pretty good primer to what Holmes stories are like.
[1930] Hell's Angels: Howard Hughes's World War I aerial epic dazzles with its special effects, combining model shots, real precision flying, and I'm not always sure what to create realistic dogfighting (the Red Baron even puts in an appearance). It tells the story of two brothers caught up in the war, one of them virtuous to a fault, the other a craven coward who often lets others take the fall for him. When we're doing the war stuff, the film has credibility (down to some fairly strong language for the era). When it turns to its romance subplots - largely starring Jean Harlow as a saucy minx who can't be attached to just one man - it's sheer melodrama and the film starts to lose altitude. The ending is very theatrical, though by that point, Hell's Angels has probably earned it. Just don't think too hard about the characters' various accents (are they NOT British?!), which you'd think would be more of a concern in a movie where the Germans speak German and the French speak French, without subtitles.
[1931] The 3 Penny Opera: G.W. Pabst, by way of Bertolt Brecht, by way of an 18th-century English ballad opera, makes London a gangland of criminality, inequity and debauchery, something that (despite Pabst being Austrian), feels like a German propaganda piece in between two world wars. A hugely entertaining one. Brecht's play was only three years old at this point, and it still seems incredible to me that "Mack the Knife", a song everyone can recognize, originated there. On film, it makes for a crazy musical about what happens when a criminal gang leader marries the daughter of the beggar king (John Wick owes something to Brecht, never would have thought) without permission, sparking a battle of influence to see who can best weaponize corruption in their favor. It's played for comedy and the social satire should work for any country, in any era, regardless of who is seemingly lampooned.
Books: After The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen was set to potentially become a favorite author. The reality is that it took me two tries to read Freedom over the years, and while I found the experience often enjoyable, I have a lot of problems with it. I do like the competitive yet fragile main character of Patti. Main character because we get some of the story in her own voice, and even when she's not on the page, she's lurking in other characters' thoughts. But that's it exactly, I think I resent any time not spent in her point of view, especially given that the men in her life (husband, lover, son) are objectionable to me in various ways. And the women in THEIR lives (Patti included) have impossibly potent desires and loyalties (even in disloyal moments) to their men. I find the male leads obnoxious and undeserving, and the female ones obnoxiously pliant. The book started well enough as a satire of suburban America, with hardly a sentence going by without a joke in it, and it more or less ends there, too. And the relationships are relatable to anyone who's had someone they just couldn't get out from under their skin. But in the middle, there, Franzen gets into political and ecological territory and despite being generally on board with his conclusions (if not his characters', exactly), the didactic tone does the novel few favors. And that's why I resent the time spent away from Patti, since these are things she doesn't really care about. The post-9/11 setting makes me wonder if there the couple's breakdown isn't allegorical in some way, but there's just too much thrown at a wall for me to decipher it. Memorable, at times funny, but like its characters, perhaps too intent on self-sabotage.
RPGs: Some games genres may require the GM to retrain the players, and I feel that mine are quickly adjusting their approach to challenges as we completed the first Act of Torg Eternity's Operation Soft Sell and jumped into the second this week. Undercover spy work has its unique challenges, and while the PCs have difficulty with not blabbing their plans to hostiles (I guess we just spent months in the Nile Empire where that's a given), they're getting quite good at strategizing and hammering out a plan before jumping into some kinf of infil situation. (I hope that carries over into their main PCs when we return to the campaign.) With strong plans backing them, the heroes were able to pretty easily get to the crime boss and get him to call off his hit on former High Lord Ryuchi and get in the latter's good graces. Enough to be given a loyalty mission in Shanghai and another infil to get precious data before it's sold to a competitor. They were on a timer for this - real world 45 minutes - and got to the seller's penthouse before my phone rang, but something may still happen when the clock hits zero (8 minutes left, guys). The virtue of this is forcing the strategies to more efficiently be laid, and to increase the tension. Left it on a cliffhanger as armed gunmen attacked the high-rise party.
Best bits: Knowing of an informant's hydrophobia, the team threatened him by placing his head in the toilet, but he fought back and incidentally hit the Street Ninja in the crotch; thankfully, the fridge had an ice machine. An original ploy to get into crime boss' club involved the Street Ninja replacing one of the VIP lounge bodyguards, then using his natural dumbness to engineer a "mistake" in letting the Hacker and the Psionic Insider waltz into the boss' booth. I had Ryuchi signed into an automated hotel under an assumed name, but the Hacker's joke about it being Asume (we play in French, so the word was assumé) was too good not to retcon into the story. When confronted by Power Ranger types (anti-heroes, since the PCs have to act villain roles) on a maglev train, the Psionic pushed the overhead bags on their heads to stymie them, while the Hacker patched herself into the train systems and opened the doors right next to the Rangers - their leader was sucked out (but his suit had a parachute), so the others bailed after a single attack that blew another door open and almost sucked out an old woman. The Street Ninja quickly went to save her, getting a round of applause and no suspicion thrown on the group at the next stop. Having found a suspicious vinyl logo on a van outside their target building, they brought it to the guards inside, thus sending most of security to the floor where an competing team was posing as exterminators. The Psionic then used the distraction to alter various guards' memories to fake himself onto the guest list. The other two, dressed as punks, had to show off their "entertainment" skills (some ninja acrobatics, hacking a bluetooth with club music to pose as a DJ) to get into the penthouse party.
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