"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Eating the rich so you can crawl into their carcasses, or How to Make a Killing, is an entertaining tale of complicated murder, as Glen Powell, the son of an heiress who was kicked out of the family and had to raise him on her own without any support, goes through the kind of rich, sick f***s that make the perfect villains for our times. Inheriting if he's last man standing, he may learn that ambition for its own sake isn't all it's cracked up to be. While his course is set early on, there are plenty of twists and turns, especially in the third act, to satisfy, though trying to pass some kind of message at the end doesn't quite work (who is he narrating to at this point? and what is the film's actual summation?). One of the winners here is Jessica Henwick, the girl you want to be in love with. But watch out for Margaret Qualley as the femme fatale of this black (noir) comedy. I don't trust her at all.
At home: Based on a real thing in Japan, Rental Family places an emotional Brendan Fraser in Japan, where his character has been struggling to find meaningful acting gigs for the past 7 years. He's a clear outsider, seemingly oversized in the Tokyo setting, and still bumbling about culturally even if he speaks the language. Enter an opportunity with Rental Family Inc., which offers actors to pose as long-lost family members, as buddies for lonely people, as proxies to cover for their clients. But of course, Fraser is going to get too close to his clients, with the potential for tragedy just around the corner. There's a very interesting examination of "acting", with Fraser, though a pretend dad/son/friend, often being more genuine than the people around him who ARE playing a part. Notably, his only pre-existing relationship was with a "girlfriend experience"-type sex worker who isn't entirely transactional in her affections. The other people at the agency get some stuff to do, too, and though thing pay off in a touching way, I was most affected when the "troupe" showed each other support. Really liking Brendan Fraser's middle-age...
I really like Extra Ordinary as a funky Irish romcom between a psychic driving instructor (Maeve Higgins) who let it all go when her dad was taken by the supernatural, and a widower (Barry Ward) literally haunted by the ghost of his wife, and would have gladly watched THAT movie for the duration. Unfortunately, the evil Satanist living in the castle down the road is played by Will Forte, whose performance style is SO broad, the charm of this ghost-infested world becomes more and more difficult to buy into. And eventually drags the more grounded characters - people unwilling to move on from their personal tragedies until they find each other - into a ridiculous plot. Once you accept how far the comedy is willing to go, it does resolved into an insane finish that stands on its own merits, but I don't think those merits are as meritorious as what we had before.
Alice Lowe sophomore triple-threat film, Timestalker, is sort of like Orlando (the Virginia Woolf novel, not the Floridian city, although...) with a funny bone attached. Lowe plays a very clumsy woman who falls in love with a pretty boy in 1688, then pursues him through multiple lives - effectively stalking him through time, natch - with a cast of recurring souls following along (including Nick Frost as a most objectionable mutt). History tends to repeat, and therefore a cycle must be broken... Reincarnation as emancipation, from sexist eras, from an abusive husband, from an ideal male who is nothing but. It takes the piss out of the "doomed romance" trope in an amusing and very quirky way, but also features some excellent production design, favorite pinks and recurring motifs, while still making each era its own trove of sight gags. My only complaint is that the gory deaths - played as shock comedy - are tonally askew from the rest, but you get used to it, I suppose.
Alexi Wasser writes and directs herself in Messy, a sort of tribute (or update?) of Sex and the City, as Stella Fox, a new arrival in New York looking for love in all the wrong places. I don't know about love, but she sure finds a lot of sex. She's charming and incredibly neurotic, and while film blurbs call her "brutally self-aware", but it's all talk. Her actions and reactions often reveal the opposite. The film has a frank physicality and is often funny, her wild tour of the NY single life making her come across all sorts of characters (Tom Middleditch and Adam Goldberg among others). We happily follow her through her very messy summer - she's a mess, the boys are a mess, it's all a mess. Comparisons to Girls are on point - Wasser, in fact, once guested on that show - if not exactly as cringe. But pretty cringe (that's a compliment).
A triumph of style over story, Steve Martin's L.A. Story is an underappreciated gem, probably because of its forgettable, generic title. And yet, it plays wonderfully INTO that title by giving us a Los Angeles that's fantastical and expressionistic , essentially the mythic L.A. that we think we know. I.e., a combination of weird fads, wild lifestyles, celebrity and car culture, sunny weather, and Hollywood tropes. This is a world where things happen because they always seem to in movies and TV, and the film is cleverly shot in a variety of styles to match, including that of commercials. The humor is referential, but universal - it doesn't spoof anything specific (unless you count Hamlet's Gravedigger scene), but a pervasive corpus, meaning it's aged quite well. So it's a bit of a mixed metaphor to put Martin in a Woody Allen romcom, right down to Victoria Tennant's style. Cuz that's New York, right? Still, a lot of funny, absurdist business, shot and edited for both comedy and meaning, and filled with recognizable faces and star cameos (Patrick Stewart finally playing an actual French character?!). Very rewarding.
Why in the Seven Hells is JCVD's Inferno (AKA Desert Heat) not called Coyote?! But no, there seems to be a Van Damme curse that his films should have the most generic action titles possible (just look at his filmography). Despite a pimped cast - JC, Pat Morita, Danny Trejo, Larry Drake, Bill Erwin, Jaime Pressly - everyone here has seen or will see better days, especially director John G. Avildsen who gave us the first two Rockies and the first three Karate Kids. In this one, JCVD is a suicidal veteran who goes John Wick on a tiny desert town's hick mafia after they steal his motorcycle, though more trickster god (Coyote) than direct killer. Plenty of quirky characters and moments to give this at least the potential for cult status, but it's too cheap to fulfill it. Dumb dialog, horrendous editing, and several actors unforgivably playing characters that don't match their evident ethnicity (even a little brown face). It's still a pretty wild "first draft" of a film, more fun to watch in a group than alone.
Today best known for its whistling theme's use in Tarantino's Kill Bill (Vol. 1), Twisted Nerve is a nasty British thriller that wears its perversion on its sleeve. No wonder Tarantino is a fan. Hywel Bennett is Martin AKA Georgie, whose crimes start out small - shoplifting, getting out of trouble by feigning an intellectual disability... and that's how he meets the girl of his dreams, Pollyanna herself, Hayley Mills, and has the keep the pretense. But it's all part a bigger, more criminal plan, and if he'd left well enough alone, he might have been able to get away with it. The terms used to discuss Down syndrome and mental illness are strictly (and off-puttingly) 1968, but like its sexist and racist characters, they add a certain vile atmosphere that plays to the film's strengths. Billie Whitelaw also commands the screen as Mills's mother, a woman who entertains less than pure feelings for "Georgie". Throw in some great shots and editing ideas, and you've got more than an exercise in twisting your nerves.
Italy does Gogol in Il cappotto (The Overcoat), an adaptation that replaces 19th-century St. Petersburg with 1950s Northern Italy, and has to invent a number of comic incidents to counter the short story's interiority. Minor government functionary Akaky Akakievich is here Carmine De Carmine, a small man who gets - nor deserves, honestly - no respect from his peers or his bosses. Longing for the attentions of a statuesque beauty played by Yvonne Sanson, he finally decides to spend all his saving on a new coat that does get him a tiny bit of recognition. But people are punished for having a dream in Gogol, so things take a nasty turn (which I always found striking because years later, Gogol himself would share Akaky's fate). You can beat the dream out of the man, but can you kill the dream? Gogol asks. Renato Rascel gives Carmine some pathos, but while Gogol's socio-political satire and powerful irony are part of the film's fabric, this Carmine is also a slapsticky clown who, awkward, clumsy and more than a little dim. The comedy is more overt than it needs to be, and perhaps undermines the ending. But if you don't know anything about Gogol, this version of The Overcoat is solid enough. It says something about corruption. The tailor has more to do than in the original tale. And I almost want a series to take place in Carmine's shared apartments.
1880, Northern Italy, a textile factory... Marcello Mastroianni appears only 30 minutes into The Organizer as the title character, a teacher turned into a union leader when the community he's passing through suffers a labor strike, and that's a smart thing to do. We get to know a good tranche of workers, and just what's wrong with their working conditions (imagine fighting for a 13-hour day!), and they are distinctive enough to carry our sympathies all the way through. For all the attention Mastroianni's intellectual gets - a bit of romance, some action beats - we're never disappointed when we leave him behind in favor of one of the other characters. Director Mario Monicelli draws a tragi-comic picture of labor rights and class warfare, with villainous bosses that could be pulled right out of the present day. The more things change...
Five years after Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses, and Moses is really their old grifting manager Vladimir (Matti Pellonpää in one of his last roles - he died too young) who has been reborn as the Biblical figure (still grifting, perhaps delusional, and yet...). He has a divine quest for them: To return home after they've had their ups and (currently) downs in Mexico. Like the previous film, it's less a plot than dryly humorous vignettes, going through several countries on the band's way to Siberia. Is it me, or is the structure more disjointed this time around? I expected the musical numbers (fun music, off-putting crowd work), but the subplot about the Statue of Liberty's nose doesn't really pay off, and I was often wondering where we were (in the story, not in the geography) and why we were there. And still, there are a number of good moments, and in Vladimir's new identity, one might see subtext from even the original film brought out - perhaps equating capitalism and religion as two sides of the exploitation coin. I liked it okay, but necessarily have to mark it down from Go America.
[1932] Boudu Saved from Drowning: It didn't take long for me to realize this Renoir film was remade as Down and Out in Beverly Hills decades later, and itself seems inspired by Voltaire's Ingénue (the uncivilized man in a "civilized" France that hides its sins under a poetic veneer). Boudu is a proud tramp, who generally refuses charity, and is ungrateful even when he accepts it, one day saved from drowning (some might want to say, from swimming) in the Seine by a generous bourgeois bookseller who more or less adopts him. Boudu - played by an irrepressible Michel Simon - turns the household upside down. The outrageous fellow is often referred to as an animal, and treated like a misbehaving, but beloved, pet, until he is given personhood when he adopts the outward signs of civility. In this we find an allegory for the class divide, with well-meaning, but patronizing, liberals forcing their help on a lower-class character who was quite content, thank you, to live and die as he chooses. It's a theme that sometimes gets lost in Boudu's slapstick shenanigans, but it's hard to resist the sociopolitical metaphor.
[1933] Zero for Conduct: The French title has a subtitle translatable as Young Devils in College, and is properly about the kids at a boys' boarding school pulling pranks and imagining their grand revolution against their fascist educators. More If... than The 400 Blows, though we might call both of these fruit from this cinematic tree, as the film quickly takes a surreal turn despite being nominally based on Jean Vigo's own school experiences. But in this world, what the boys imagine becomes real. We have a bearded kid as headmaster (a power fantasy) and an easily pulled-off revolt, making you doubt even things that are presented as real (is that cool new teacher really doing handstands in class?). It's anarchy. Not what kids are doing in school, but what they wish they could be doing, maybe what Vigo thinks they ought to be able to do. France banned it in fear that chaos would erupt in schools. Man, adults are such snowflakes.
Books: Scott McCloud's The Sculptor is at once a very personal work (as the text piece at the back reveals) and entirely fantastical. And wow wow wow wow. A brick, but a pageturner. All about a down-on-his-luck sculptor who makes a deal with Death to win acclaim for his art, but he only has 200 days before thr Reaper comes for him. But he didn't count on falling in love in those 200 days, complicating matters greatly. The author of Understand Comics, of course, understands his medium and creates some transcendent moments using all the tools at his disposal, some images absolutely indelible. And in the simple every day moments, his eye for detail makes you linger on every page, background characters always filled with a life of their own. Would you give up your life for artistic immortality? The Sculptor asks the question, but despite the character's rendezvous with Death, the book is a celebration of Life. The real question is, do you know what you'd be giving up? One of the best graphic novels I've read in a long time.
In Exercices de style (Exercises in Style), Raymond Queneau retells the same, brief story 99 times, using different "styles" for each. Among the devices used are shifts in point of view, genre play, linguistic permutations (some illegible), phonetic accents, literary structures, verb tenses, and stylistic choices. He explores his dumb little tale through senses, attitudes, and specific lexicons. From what I've seen, translations have had to rewrite some of these entirely to since the various French patois sometimes utilized just doesn't exist in other languages (and so translators had to imagine pig Latin and black slang versions of the story). In any case, this is a fun and breezy literary experiment that manages to end on a punchline. One of the things that got me into postmodern writing is its sense of fun, and Exercices de style certainly has that going for it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a button to sow.
Writer Mat Johnson exorcises his grief over his mother's death in Backflash, a fantasy in which the protagonist discovers a subculture of nostalgia-fuelled time travellers, and his own innate talent for it in the wake of his mother's death. Of course, be wary of what you might discover when going back in time to see your parents when they were young, even if you think you want to know all the family secrets. For a Gen X-er already wired to live in the past, could that reframing be deleterious, or might it help one move forward from loss? (Not to say there isn't some excellent comedy throughout, this is no depressing slog.) For the reader, it's a fine mystery with well-realized characters, but I might not have come to it without Steve Lieber's art. I love his stuff - it's so playful and clever - and while that's true here, too, he knows when to pull back and keep things grounded so the emotion can play. It shows a maturity that only enhances the moments of fancy.
Out in concert with the original Torg role-playing game, Storm Knights is the first tie-in novel of a trilogy and therefore not a complete story. There's some slim closure on a character's goal, but the book have the same problem gamers would have when being introduced to the RPG setting - it's too big and varied to explore efficiently, yet its defining characteristic demands we at least touch on the various worlds involved in the invasion of Earth. This first book is set in the opening weeks of that invasion, and is largely concerned with "assembling a party", which isn't obvious given each character's provenance. The Living Land gets some development, but other cosms are sometimes only glanced at. Writers Bill Slavicsek and C.J. Tramontana show off some surprisingly good prose for this kind of material, never falling to third person omniscient, but rather third person point of view. There's always a character behind the perspective, though it means there's a "cast of thousands" feeling, and characters who are unlikely to reappear later - they're just eyeballs. As someone who's been running Torg Eternity (the reboot), there are some surprises here, like Kadandra playing a role, and the foreshadowing of Tharkold. If I'd read this earlier, it would probably have changed the way I described certain things (which I would call a compliment). It's main flaw is that it really isn't self-contained in any meaningful way, and sets up many problems (the slowing Earth and the invasion of certain cosms) that can't and don't pay off. Same for characters. We have a core group, but many NPCs (so to speak) sure to become PCs in later books. But for a Torg gamer, it's interesting enough to keep going.
The high concept behind Brian Joines's and Jake Elphick's Backtrack is a fun one. A time travelling villain offers various characters the chance to drive in a race to use his powers to undo some regret in their lives, a deadly race that of course takes place across different time periods. Thematically cogent, it's really about learning each of their backstories and seeing them come together or split apart according to what we/they discover. And while it recalls Do a Powerbomb or the stated inspiration of the Fast and Furious movies, the vibe, at least in the dialog scenes, is rather more something like The Plagform and similar dystopian/metaphorical films about strangers thrown into a weird circumstance as a kind of social experiment. I like all those sources. Elphick's art is dyamic and pleasantly gooey, but his action isn't always the clearest. I don't dislike it, I think if fits the book's energy. The Deluxe Edition includes all 10 issues and offers a complete story, while leaving room for sequels, plus some odds and ends - the pitch, character designs, sample page layouts.
RPGs: Our monthly game of Call of Cthulhu was this week, and it's really become insane (similarly: my character has dropped under 25% Sanity). Our characters, including a new (and possibly temporary) trans seaman who I am finding fairly useful (the fresh SAN I'm sure helps), have entered a giant black cube that is apparently a Yith space-time ship, but to me, from the Keeper's descriptions, is really a TARDIS. The mushroom console, the crystal rods in the middle, the roundels, white interior, roundels, and starfield hologram on the ceiling (from the 8th Doctor's TARDIS). Of course, it doesn't work the same way, and the Yith pilots/observers (a pair of very funny "superior" characters, are unhelpful at best. The session was mostly our attempts at different rod combinations sending us back and front through time, at the location of space-time "shatterings" (likely our lizard people enemies messing with time). We were our own worst enemies in this. Our cowboy attacked a possible ally (I mean, she used to be a PC in the group) with a crowbar, and I went mad and started attacking my own party with a knife. I started the game with two fumbles (rolling 99 then 100 on the percentile die) so I should have known it wouldn't go well.
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