"Accomplishments"
In theaters: A solidly-built, star-studded crime thriller, Crime 101 is about three people whose fates will converge - a careful, even paranoid jewel thief (what in the old days would have been a "gentleman thief") played by Chris Hemsworth; an insurance broker inveigled into one of his heists (Halle Berry); and the shlubby, righteous cop who is on the thief's trail (Mark Ruffalo). What they have in common is that each has become replaceable/expendable in their jobs, so there's a desperate quality to each of them that fuels the action. Whether it's corrupt cops, sexist bosses, or nasty, violent rivals (like Barry Keoghan - is there anyone better at playing characters you love to hate right now?), our leads are pushed to their breaking point as things start to unravel for them. It's a very glittery picture with its anamorphic lensing and night photography, thematic for a jewel heist picture, and the editing that moves us from one POV to another is pretty clever. Crime 101 isn't as original or funny as director Bart Layton's American Animals, but is very watchable.
At home: Banlieue 13 AKA District B13 (or sometimes District 13) would eventually be remade as Brick Mansions for the American market, but I don't remember Brick Mansions being anywhere as fun as B13, despite the equal participation of parkour co-founder David Belle in the same role, albeit ten years later. Fact is, parkour was fresher in 2004 than in 2014, and Belle's opening fight/chase is a real show stopper (which, yes, does mean it is never equalled by the rest of the film) and you can see how it left its mark on action cinema. Belle is in such top shape that his co-star Cyril Raffaelli, a strong martial artist and stuntman in his own right, almost seems to be artificially positioned to trick the camera into believing he IS as good. But it's more than that. B13 is just incredibly hyperactive and wears its goofiness on its sleeve, its characters' main personality trait being that they are total badasses, and that's where the fun comes from. I don't know that Brick Mansions took itself all that seriously, but it certainly didn't go for it as brashly.
There's a Russian doll structure to Undergods, where characters dream or imagine stories of each other before perhaps doubling back on themselves, and that's perhaps how this anthology explains its title. As imaginative beings, we're all "gods", creating worlds either subconsciously or consciously, but when our circumstances are dreary - such as the human meat scavengers' driving through a bombed-out Eastern European city - there are limits on one's imagination (and therefore, UNDERgod). The irony of human imagination is that it can come up with terrible scenarios, but then, isn't that true of the proper God who created (or let happen) those dreary circumstances in the first place? I don't think the film actually fulfills the promise of this premise, mind you. The connections between stories actually prevent them from achieving closure. It's a little like ending every story with a car accident that kills everyone and saying that resolves things or justifies our investment. It doesn't.
Though Happyend clearly marks itself as being set in the Near Future, Western audiences may wonder if any given piece is science-fiction or just Japan being Japan, or if that temporal notation means to use Japan as an allegorical stand-in for the political climate in Western countries. it's a little bit of all those things, I suspect, and when hyper-surveillance and AI-determined demerits come to the young characters' high school, we discover what the film is really playing at. The reaction to this new (future?) problem, whether radicalizing the kids into taking political action or being met by conformity or ambivalence is what's at stake. And in this way, Happyend is no different from stories where young people fight unjust scholastic autocracy - think Dead Poets Society, for example, or any high school flick where the kids fight discrimination - even if those movies are normally set in the past and therefore attack topics where the audience opinion is well ahead of the presented status quo. Happyend just skips all of that and predicts the next thing a later generation will confidently condemn.
Fresh Kill is a piece of multi-media poetry with some characters speaking in blank verse, performance artists popping in and out, and the language of channel surfing dictating transitions, creating a very 90s near future that nevertheless seems to predict our own time. Director Shu Lea Cheang was cutting edge in realizing which anxieties would bloom into crises, and which realities would enter the mainstream. So a polyamorous lesbian couple is at the center of things, people are on the Internet, a corporation is becoming a pervasive monopoly and manipulating the population with its media control, TV and the Internet send mixed signals (are we always talking about sex regardless?), Wall Street bros show off their amorality like a badge of office, and the world is presented as a massive landfill and the oceans as a toxic soup (so don't eat the fish!). It's a little like was it's like to raise a child in this environment, and indeed, events surrounding the couple's little girl tap into Cheang's anxieties. Movies like this are a little too surreal to really grab me, but Fresh Kill is more entertaining and prescient than most.
What's most amazing about Stuck is that any of it is based on a true story at all, but it is, although it gives the victim of the crime a chance at revenge. Stephen Rea plays an unemployed man living through what feels like the worst day of his life, and Mena Suvari is the retirement home nurse who, high as a kite, accidentally hits him with her car. And then drives home with him lodged in the windshield, where he survives for an absurdly long time. And you'd think, hey, she's a nurse, she's going to help him even while hiding her hit and run, right? Nope. I'm not sure the movie would work at all if it didn't have that "true story" notation at the top, because Suvari's motivations are more and more unhinged, to the point of unbelievability. But people DO panic, and I like Russell Hornsby here, as the boyfriend who plays like a gangster, but isn't much of one. Stuart Gordon is best known for demented horror films, but he's not a bad pick for this blood-soaked thriller. Is Suvari's madness all that far from the Lovecraftian characters Gordon has presented before? But the character work is all up front (I do appreciate seeing Rea's character for a good while before the moment happens), and the back half, while tense, is more mechanical.
Two college grads endeavor to get a job they can get fired from in the slackerific Unemployees, a half-hour short signed Joel Potrykus (Buzzard, Vulcanizadora, Ape) and honestly, it doesn't look like any of his features. The dark deadpan comedy is there, but it's just so colorful and, from a production design standpoint, so detailed. I don't think I've seen that from him before. He usually uses real run-down locations, and where there's detail, it's more like accidental clutter. That said, Unemployees doesn't quite work because it feels so "designed". It's a matter of lacking contrasts. The two girls at the center of this story, Patty and Patti, are comic extremes, but each job they try is also a comic, cartoonish parody of a job, so they're never really clashing with the setting or vice-versa. I, however, absolutely tap into the film's anti-capitalist message and its pervasive sarcasm. I just over-eggs the pudding is all.
One Film for Every Year Since Film Existed[1934] Babes in Toyland: Laurel and Hardy's version of the operetta, sometimes (better) known as Laurel and Hardy in Toyland, or (not better) as March of the Wooden Soldiers might use a few of the songs and, of course, the nursery rhyme setting, but it really has very little to do with Victor Herbert's Oz rip-off. I'm not necessarily complaining - I'm not a fan - but the plot about the Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe being evicted unless her lodgers Stan and Olie find the money is pretty tedious. The famous duo isn't particularly funny here, too often up to remedial slapstick or explaining their own jokes. The OTHER plot about the town's mean landlord wanting to marry Little Bo Peep OR ELSE has more meat to it, but it's pretty off-putting. Sure, Bo Peep is played by an actress in her 20s, but Charlotte Henry specialized in playing little girls (she was in Alice in Wonderland the previous year), so it's really icky to see her approached by an old Scrooge lookalike. The amusing sets and anthropomorphic animals only take us so far, but much of this is forgiven because of the wild climactic battle with the Bogeymen. Regardless, give the monkey dressed as Mickey Mouse its own movie.
[1935] An Inn in Tokyo: In Ozu's early work, children are often prominent, and provide realistic comedy in an impoverished world (often realized as a field near industrial works). This is true here, too, but it's really about their father played by Takeshi Sakamoto (A Tale of Floating Weeds), a man looking for a job, living hand to mouth with two young boys, his despair tangible. The kids' insouciant imagination is his only release, but it's an insouciance that often fuels irresponsible behavior and causes problems. Perhaps pooling his resources with a woman and her little girl in similar circumstances could be a way out of crushing poverty. Perhaps an old friend can help. And perhaps the boys' irresponsible streak can be found in the father and lead us all to destruction. Ozu's done it to me again... I smile at the charm and humor and then he punches me in the feels at the eleventh hour.
RPGs: It's one thing to get terrible rolls when dice are spinning on an actual table in front of you. There's an illusion of control - how you held and threw the die - that you don't get in online play. And when you roll as many Mishaps (a 1 on a d20) as we did in our last Torg Eternity session, you start to doubt the fairness of the algorithm running the virtual polyhedrals. When you're inching towards 10 Mishaps in less than 4 hours, and a lot of low rolls, too, across the board (the GM's NPCs, too), you really do start to wonder. Obviously, it's all an illusion. Didn't stop the players from accomplishing their goals. The cocktail party in the penthouse had a clue that led to Pan-Pacifica's new arcology, Monarch City, where the PCs were able to get a crypto-key, but not the laptop with the needed data. That's on a cargo ship veering out of control towards a zombie island in the South China Sea. They got there at the end of the session, which ended on a cliffhanger when they opened the control room door and, well, you can imagine why the ship was out of control for yourselves.
Best bits: A lot of factions in that cocktail party fight (in part thanks to card play to make things more difficult for themselves) - ponytail assassins, bunny head assassins, cops (with cop-bot I voices like Robocop), internal security, Jackie Chan hero types, a sniper three blocks away... - the best moment still being that dumb fight in the changing cabin next to the infinity pool out on the terrace where the Psionic Insider kept rolling Mishaps and giving himself a headache, while a ponytail kept missing him, in close quarters, with a shotgun. By the end, the walls were off the cabin and ponytail got sniped. In the resulting police interviews, the Street Ninja was considered too "simple" to be a problem and let go without so much as a Persuasion roll. Being a Kanawa Corp pretty boy, the Psionic at first refused to hole in the Hacker's choice of hotel, but they all failed their Streetwise rolls and the Street Ninja had a coupon for the bordello, so... After a black light check, the Psionic slept in the bathtub. The Street Ninja's obsession with getting souvenir tat from Monarch City was a hoot - a comedy moment in a chase scene had him run through clothing racks and popping out with a t-shirt on, and he'd later use his Monarch pin to pick a lock. During that foot chase, the courier pursued jumped over a public pool with her psionic powers, so the Ninja bounced on the diving board and kept following, while the Psionic tried to coast off a floating tube and only got wet. When they catch up to the courier, a Romance card drops and the courier recognizes the Psionic from Psi Club and a one night stand. He puts on a good show, but the Break-Up card was already on the table, so his "but baby!" nonsense was bound to fail. Ultimately, the Hacker uses a crane to block the courier's way with a girder and she's grappled and searched.
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