"Accomplishments"
In theaters: A "haunted hotel" movie that actually my hair stand on end, Damian McCarthy's Hokum is actually also a very cool thriller, jumping between genres - horror, mystery, thriller, even the bleak historical adventure story Adam Scott's character has been writing - seamlessly. So Scott is a caustic novelist - a real a-hole, actually, but amusingly so - haunted by an event from his past. He goes to a remote hotel in Ireland to scatter his parents' ashes and finish his book, but then... Well, I don't want to say too much, because the shocks and surprises start coming pretty early. But let's just say that, despite his contention that all the folktales surrounding the hotel are "hokum", things he can't explain start happening anyway. Or perhaps they're not and we're just letting our imaginations get away from us. Or maybe both are true. Would have worked as a simple thriller - I love the mechanics of the story - but the supernatural elements are proper spooky and it earns its jump scares. And I already had a mental health problem about hotels, too...
At home: I don't think I've ever not like a Park Chan-wook film, it's just a matter of how demented it'll turn out to be. No Other Choice tracks a man who has lost his job to automation, and desperate to regain a position so he can continue to give his family the life they're accustomed to, decides to murder the employment competition. It may not be as easy - logistically and morally - as it first seems. Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin are parents ready to go far for their loved ones, but we, of course, understand there are indeed "other choices". But we also understand their drive, and what they're sacrificing of themselves. Once you start, it's hard to stop, and I think we all know who the real monster is here. As with director Park's other films. the cinematography is impeccable, but he does some very arresting things with music and sound design in this one that made several key scenes very memorable. The protagonist's business is specialty paper, and there's a nice reverence for the material in the film.
I'm sure an Occidental director would have focused on the voyage, but in Filipino hands, specifically Lav Diaz's, Magellan is an anti-epic that practically skips over the "big historical bits" to instead expose the sins of imperialism and colonialism. Formally, the film subverts expectations, opting for still tableaux despite it being about a voyage, which perhaps better captures the time dilation we would experience if we travelled to those days. Similarly, you'd expect a film rich in images to fill the screen, but Diaz goes for a more constrictive frame, which suggests that its characters are prisoners - Magellan's slave, certainly, but the explorer himself, who, thanks to the casting of Gael Garcia Bernal, is sympathetic, but still on an evil enterprise. So no matter Magellan's kindness, family like, or faith, he is at best a tool of that evil. Diaz's choices are geared towards results rather than process - the first act is essentially prologue to the feat we'll then mostly gloss over, and the Filipino natives more or less become the protagonists in the third - but I entirely respect the approach.
Partly "rotoscopic" animation in the Waking Life style, a technique Geoff Marslett used on Mars as well, Quantum Cowboys keeps changing visual styles, moving from live action to various types of animation, to suggest changing quantum states. It's a pretty heady concept - requiring an odd narrator that's perhaps too philosophical to really make things clear - but the film proposes that history, like memory, isn't concretized until it is captured by art - filming, drawing, etc. And time agents are in the background of this western trying to "gel" the story into its proper shape, which is complicated by two time travelling villains (including David Arquette) being caught in a loop where they keep killing our protagonists, two drifters whose savior turns out to be LIly Gladstone, who is great in this whether live or animated. In fact, I dare say she puts it over the top for me, as the rest is admittedly a little clunky. I appreciate the strangeness (I usually do), and the ambition (calling this out as the first of a trilogy - Marslett has only managed to get three features off the ground in the past 15 years), and I WOULD watch further chapters, but you gotta love "weirdo watchlist" movies to really tap into this one.
With André Bonzel's Flickering Ghosts of Love Gone By (Et j'aime à la fureur, which does NOT translate as that English title, AT ALL, but then, it's hard to translate Baudelaire), I was expecting something not unlike Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, and there's certainly some cousinage there, though it's more meditative and less immediate an exploration of family secrets. Bonzel (whose other credit is Man Bites Dog) collects old film strips, in particular, home movies, some stretching back to the early 20th century, and he uses them as filler for what's missing in his own family life, even with the stash of film cans recently inherited from a relative, going back a hundred years or so. Supplemented by a scandalous old aunt's notebooks, Bonzel discovers his link to cinema through similarly-minded relatives, tries to see his own parents in a different light, and meditates on why people film themselves. And it's true that watching these old ghosts, caught on film at their happiest (and sometimes nudiest - I guess some things never change), is somehow emotional, even if people were just as likely to dramatize rather than document themselves, just as we do now. You'll probably insert your own memories in the narrative. As usual, could have done without the animal slaughter moment.
While D.O.A. has a powerful premise - a poisoned man is on a ticking clock to solve his own murder - I don't think anyone's ever done it justice (including the original's production). The 1988 reinvention has as good a claim as any. What I remembered from seeing it in the early 90s is 1) the premise and 2) Meg Ryan's Freudian slip joke. Ryan is here on the cusp of stardom and would become quite ubiquitous after this, cementing D.O.A.'s success as a rental, I'm sure. It starts as a Noir tribute, even beyond its black and white opening, with some cracking dialogue, but then loses its way. The 80s soundtrack hurts it, but it's mostly that it tries too hard with its action beats. The whole thing with "chaining" Meg Ryan (in a negligee) to Dennis Quaid while they're attacked by a nail gun assassin feels incredibly contrived, for example, not to say silly. But I will say making the protagonist a failed author and setting the story in the back alleys of the publishing world is more interesting than what the OG DOA did (I mean, an accountant?!), and once our boy is fatally dosed, everyone seems like a suspect. Even Meg, who is just about the farthest thing from a femme fatale, but you start thinking that maybe it's a double bluff? Certainly entertaining, but I always want more from it.
I generally dislike voice-over narration and I'm afraid the VO in Jacques Tourneur's Berlin Express really does my head in. There's too much of it, and while it sometimes feels like a nice piece of prose from the novel, it's too often instructional, used in lieu of subtitles, or just play telling us what we can already see for ourselves on screen. Set in a devastated Germany only a few years after the war - with the explicit permission of all three occupying forces - it's aim is to promote peace. People from various nations work to foil a Nazi assassination plot coming from an insurrectionist cell, among them Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan, who have a low level flirtation going. She's French, and he's the American required to do the action bits. While Berlin Express is a pretty good thriller ripped from the day's headlines, it's those action scenes that are most memorable and where Tourneur shows his real value as a director (making me wonder if all the narration was forced on him) - the cistern fight is an especially great visual, for example, and the final sequence works well.
[1955] Lola Montès: You can always count on Max Ophüls to be clever with structure, but Lola Montès's was rejected at the time and badly recut without the director's involvement, and only fully restored in the 2000s - thank you, French Cinémateque. It's perhaps appropriate that Ophüls's innovations were considered "scandalous" given that it's about a real-life dancer and courtesan from the 19th century who was followed by scandal everywhere she went, here told in achronological flashbacks as if part of a circus act. A woman simply can't sin without it becoming a spectacle, whether in her era or a century later when the Ophüls made his last film. "Celebrity" hasn't changed much in the last 200 years... That said, I'm lukewarm about the structure, myself. Not the way it's told, but rather WHAT we're told. The film comes alive in the final part where Lola's relationship to the Bavarian king offers both comic and dramatic opportunities, and it feels like it should have been the whole film. Previous flashbacks are far from as interesting. A major inspiration for Moulin Rouge, that's quite obvious.
[1956] Moby Dick: What John Huston (and co-scriptwriter Ray Bradbury) nail about Melville's classic is the absolute fire and brimstone religiousness of the piece. While it doesn't start at the shipwreck and work its way back, there's a heavy sense of foreboding throughout and it's shot like a horror story. Fans of the book seem to be a bit down on this adaptation - that Gregory Peck isn't insane enough, etc. - but I think it picks a lane and streamlines the story for cinematic consumption in an effective way. Melville's dialogue is retained, turning this into a lost chapter of the Bible, and the third arc is DRENCHED in water. For 1956, those watery scenes look amazing and immersive (I guess there's a pun in there), and the use of miniatures very well done. There are only a couple or ropy process shots (or is that rotoscoping?) and they're not where you'd think. I've only seen a couple of Moby Dick adaptations, but this is by far the better one.
Gaming: (Mostly) completed Mafia: Definitive Edition, Hangar 13's 2002 classic not "remastered", but entirely remade with beautiful animation, gorgeous environments, re-recorded dialogue, and even story tweaks. You play Tommy, a cabbie who gets roped into working with the fictional city's mob in the 1930s, as told to a cop when Tommy has had enough with a life of guilt and violence. The old-timey cars feel heavy, and this is a more realistic sandbox experience, where the police are after you for simply driving dangerously (at one star, you can just pay the ticket), you might run out of gas, and Tommy takes damage when you hit something. You can make it even more realistic by switching on manual drive and a speed limiter. Where you realize it's an older game is in how brief it is. I was always expecting a betrayal from one of the other characters, but in a longer (newer) game, that would be the mid-point pivot. Here, it actually is the climax. There are also few "sandboxy" things you can do - and mostly do them in "Free Ride" mode, like collectibles (which may required some chapters be replayed), secret cars and costumes, and some "phonebooth missions". If I say I "mostly" completed the game, it's that one collectible was behind a bug, and the UFO-chasing bonus mission was just too hard for me (so I realize that locks me out of the final side-mission, but since I never really played the original game, the dog head inside joke would have been lost on me.) Similarly, I don't want to replay the game with "classic" difficulty just for that achievement. But I had a good time and cared about the characters, bring on Mafia II.
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