Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

We’ve now seen Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018), one of last year’s most acclaimed action films. Eh, it was OK.

It starts with a great gag: A terrorist has planted atomic bombs in holy cities around the world. The IMF brings him in but not before the bombs go off. As they watch the news footage, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, they get him to tell them how he did it, including the cancel code. Then they reveal (SPOILER), it was all a put on. The bombs hadn’t gone off, Wolf Blitzer was Simon Pegg in a rubber mask, ha ha! Now they have to go after some plutonium.

The buy takes place in Paris, by the Seine, just like in Ronin. But it goes bad when Ving Rhames get taken hostage and Tom Cruise doesn’t let them kill him. Now the bad guys have the plutonium and it’s all their fault. Because of this, Angela Bassett saddles the team with CIA agent Henry Cavill, with his famous mustache.

So, big car chase through Paris, foot chase in London, blah blah blah. Ethan Hunt’s undercover wife (Michelle Monaghan) is involved, plus his beautiful coworker Rebecca Ferguson and nemesis Vanessa Kirby. There are some amazing stunts, all of which Cruise actually performed, including leaping from rooftop to rooftop (broke an ankle on that one), piloting a helicopter (really learned how), and some zero g stuff in a smashed helicopter hanging off the side of a fjord.

Oh yeah, that fjord is supposed to be in Kashmir. But we just saw Heavy Trip - we know what Norway looks like.

All the running/jumping/flying was great fun. I also liked Simon Pegg’s comic touches, and of course, Ving Rhames just being there. Cavill has a great shambling style, walking with his arms a little ways out from his sides like a gorilla - and that's not even counting his "guns" scene. But the emotional arc of Cruise’s guilt and his wife and all was just “eh” as I said above.

Ms. Spenser declined to watch most of this (very long) movie. But she dropped in for the last 30 minutes or so. She got to see some good stunts (which really reminded her of Heavy Trip), but also had to watch 4 (5?) different women tell Tom Cruise how wonderful he is. Blech!

This is the second M:I movie direct by Christopher McQuarry. I’m afraid they may be settling into a rut. I’ll keep watching for the stunts, but I’m not sure I’m looking forward to the next one.

Symphonic, Post-Apocalyptic, Christ-Abusing, Reindeer-Grinding, Fennoscandic Metal

Heavy Trip (2018) is part of our heavy metal horror comedy series (after Suck) but it is very different - from almost everything.

It is set in Finland, Lappland actually. Four young men are in a metal band, practicing in the basement of a reindeer slaughterhouse. They are

• Jynkky the chubby fearless drummer. He dies in this scene, but they revive him by clearing the food out of his windpipe.
• Lotvonen the speed guitarist. His family owns the slaughterhouse.
• Pasi the goth bassist. His pasty white face is always expressionless behind his long straight black hair. He also remembers every metal riff he's ever heard.
• Turo the lead singer. He is more or less the protagonist, a shy gentle soul with a monster growl.

They sound great, have long headbanging hair, but they have never performed (in the twelve years they've been together) because they don't have any original material. Anything new they come up with, Pasi can tell hem where it comes from.

We get a little taste of their day to day life. Pasi is a librarian. When a little girl asks for a Justin Beiber CD, he gives her Uruguayan speed metal. Turo is a hospital orderly, who has to clean up for an old man who has soiled himself. The old man says, "It's better to shit yourself than be constipated," and believe it or not, that is part of the message of this movie. Toru also has a crush on the cute girl at the flowershop, but he’s too shy to say anything, even though she is being aggressively courted by another musician, a locally successful lounge singer.

Lotvonen is working in the slaughterhouse when he lets a carcass fall into the bone crusher, and finds the sound they were looking for. They record a demo for their new original song and are very happy. When a city slicker comes to the slaughterhouse looking for blood and they accidentally drench him in it, they realize he is a promoter for the big Norwegian Metal fest and give him the demo. They feel they are on their way.

But they are fooling themselves, and when Toru gets the call that they do NOT have a slot at the festival, he is fooling them. But word has spread that they are going to Norway, and they are getting love in the community for the first time.

This mostly seems like a sort of a sweet comedy about a small community - I kept wondering when they would make a pact with Satan and the killing would start. About 40 minutes in, a demon-like character shows up, but it turns out to be Pasi in makeup and a costume - he wants to be called Xytrax now. “I’m on a mission from Satan.”

So the movie doesn’t get supernatural, but there is death. After that, the movie gets a little surreal and silly, not so much Finnish slice-of-life. So if you find the first part a little boring, you might enjoy the last part.

We liked both. The boys in the band were basically very sweet. When Toru is working in the hospital, we see the supervisor, a middle-aged woman, looking at him in a certain way - it seems to combine aggravated annoyance mixed with affection and even at little pride. Maybe she is thinking he’s a nice boy, who should stop fooling around and get serious, but at least he’s his own man.

Also, the metal music is great, if you like that kind of thing. And if you don’t, maybe you’ll learn.

YesTsongs

Yes was one of the first big concerts I went to - Boston Garden, nosebleed seats, Tale of Topographic Oceans tour. It was awesome: they had the Roger Dean sets with the chrysalis pods that the band came out of like in Spinal Tap. So I was pretty psyched to watch Yes: 35th Anniversary Concert: Songs from Tsongas (2004). For me it was more of a 45th anniversary, but whatever.

The concert comes on two discs (for a single queue slot - bargain). I figured that meant a lot of additional material. The first disc had a good solid set, about an hour and a half. I figure the second disc would be the encore and additional material. But I was wrong. There was about another two hours of the concert. After the first encore, I gave up and said, "Don't let them do another encore."

The band was the classic Anderson, Howe, Wakeman, Squire, and White lineup that I saw so many years ago. Anderson, Howe, and White looked like prosperous, stylish middle-aged Englishmen - I'd say they have aged well, although Squire's feathered hairdo may be a little out of date. Rick Wakeman has dropped most of his pudginess and looks quite formidable, sort of like Iggy Pop in a Dutchboy wig. Steve Howe, on the other hand, looks like a monkey who has been turned into a wizard. On him, it's a good look.

The Tsongas Center in Lowell looked like a much better hall than the Garden, and they had (slightly less elaborate) Roger Dean sets again.

The second set starts out acoustic, which was interesting, but actually doesn't sound much different than their electric numbers. Then, for the set change, Steve Howe sits down to play a little solo ragtime number. This number represented for me the whole show, because every verse would get close the end, then he'd through in a little flourish, an extra riff, a digression, and before you know it, your back to the start of another verse. Hey Howe, if you get near an ending, jump off!

OK, so it was long. They sounded great - Anderson could hit all the notes (he claimed to have some trouble remembering the words, but I didn't notice). Wakeman made all kinds of orchestral noises, and had some very cool miniMoog mono solos. Howe played those complicated lines on a series of guitars, including the pedal steel and a Portuguese guitar, which is sort of like a 12-string guitar played like a mandolin. The old songs were perfect, but I wasn't too impressed by the newer (post-Topographic Oceans) stuff. "Going for the One" was better than I remembered, and I even kind of liked "Odor of a Lonely Fart" (as I call it), but some of the others were downright embarrassing.

Anyway, we watched the last encore the next day. It was "Starship Trooper", one of my favorites. But I didn't really love this rendition. Maybe they were tired, maybe I was. But overall, great concert.

Fantastic Crimes

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) is an entertaining movie that we saw. Not sure how much else there is to say.

It starts with Johnny Depp as Grindlewald being transferred from USA back to London in a flying enchanted hearse-coach. Of course, he breaks out.

Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is asked by the USA Magic Council to go with his brother to look for Credence Clearbone (Ezra Miller) as a strong untrained magician. He may be related to the Lestranges, like Lita (Zoe Kravitz), who is engaged to Newt's brother.

So they all get to London and meet up with Dan Fogle and Alice Sudol. Fogel was supposed to be MiB mindwiped in the last movie, but it didn't take. Which is great because him and Queenie are my favorite parts. He is so period - a chubby man with a little mustache who sometimes a bit Oliver Hardy, sometimes Jackie Gleason. Sudol does a lovely Judy Holliday take for Queenie, making her just needy enough for it to be convincing that she could love a guy like Fogel.

Meanwhile, the love of Newt's life, Kathryn Watson, thinks he's marrying Kravitz, and doesn't want to see him. And we all go to Paris.

Paris, and the art direction in general, is probably my favorite part of this movie. Lovely Art Noveau ironwork, tiled hallways, and the depths of the tombs at Pere Lachaise. My favorite part should have been the fantastic beasts, but I never felt like they got as much attention as they should have. Maybe too many romantic subplots.

The direction, by Harry Potter specialist David Yates, is mostly fine, but clunky in parts. For ex, we get a long expository chunk with one person talking and shots of everyone listening (with furrowed brow). Then another character gives her version of the story, but this time we get a long flashback under her narration. Why?

Anyway, since Johnny Depp is icky now, it's just as well they made him the villain. Since he can shapeshift, I suppose they could have recast, but oh well. The ending shows that they are doing a Star Wars prequel plot: strong, innocent character turned to the darkside. That's fine, I guess. I'll watch the next one, but not especially for the plot.

Death Smokes a Pipe

Sometimes you just feel like a spaghetti western; we did so we queued up Death Rides a Horse (1968). It stars John Philip Law and Lee Van Cleef, and that alone was enough to convince us.

It starts with a gang of bandits invading a rancher’s home, killing him and raping his wife and daughter. The son sees it all from hiding, memorizing the characteristics of the four bandits. Finally, they light the house on fire and ride off. A fifth man leads the boy out of the burning house.

Years later, the boy has grown up to be John Philip Law, a crack marksman intent on revenge. He gets news of one of the gang, the first clue in years, and heads out. Meanwhile, Lee Van Cleef is getting out of jail. To skip ahead, he was one of the gang who was set up to take the fall, and he wants his cut - and revenge as well.

So these two, the young man and the older, are tracking the same men, but they don’t want anything to do with each other. Nonetheless, they keep running into each other, and sometimes one makes the kill, sometimes the other gets there first. Sometimes one has to save to other. There’s a nice buried-to-the-neck-in-sand-in-the-hot-sun-sand. And finally, Law figures out the Van Cleef was one of the robbers and challenges him to a duel.

I wouldn’t place this in the top tier of spaghetti westerns. It was directed by Giulio Petroni, who had a  what looks like a respectable careeer - even directing Olson Wells once. I enjoyed it, but Ms. Spenser sadly had to work through it. I was willing to rewatch with her another night, but she told me to send it back. So that will give you some idea.

God Save The Queen

I guess our take on Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) is pretty much the same as everyone else’s: extremely ordinary biopic, extraordinary performance by Rami Malek.

Malek plays a Parsi immigrant in England, working as a baggage handler. He goes to the pub to see the local band Smile, and approaches them after the show. They’ve lost their lead singer, and he reckons he could be the replacement they need. They look at his overbite, and don’t think he’d fit in to a band called Smile - but he gives them a sample and tells them that his extra teeth give him extra vocal range. Later, they rename the band Queen.

I’ll skip over the touring, the recording, the problems with Freddie’s traditional Parsi family, problems with management, Freddie’s love life, or his sexual orientation. All of these are covered, with a concentration on the sex and drugs and empty hedonism that can be part of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. At least, in these biopics it always is. This is all pretty conventional, although well done.

But Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury is amazing. The only thing we’d seen him in was silly video game movie Need for Speed, where he plays the guy who quits his job by stripping nude. Here, he has a silly dental prosthesis, and completely seems to inhabit Mercury. We get a lot of great songs - and I’m not a big Queen fan.

I also liked Gwilym Lee as Brian May, although it wasn’t much of a part. In fact, one of my favorite parts was that the whole band pretty much just went along with what Freddie was putting down. Very positive and supportive even when they were fighting.

In conclusion, a digression: when I was in high school (~1972), there was a discussion on the school bus about whether Queen was gay. My position was, no, just outrageous. Nobody called Mick Jagger gay, did they? Or David Bowie? Also, who cares? We just wanted to know if they rocked. And they did.

Body of Work

Jennifer's Body (2009) is a movie I've known about for a while, but never got around to seeing. Now it seems to be going through a critical re-appraisal, so I queued it up.

It stars Amanda Seyfried as "Needy", a bookish high-school student, and her BFF Jennifer (Megan Fox), the hottest cheerleader in the school. They have been friends since the sandbox and even though they don't seem to have much in common, they stick together. In fact, Fox keeps pulling Seyfried away from her boyfriend Johnny Simmons. Simmons is one of those great lowkey boyfriends, like Gabriel Mann as Alan M. from Josie and the Pussycats. One night, she drags Seyfried to a dive bar to see an indie band featuring Adam Brody, hoping to jump his bones. A fire of suspicious origin starts and Brody stuffs Fox into a van and they take off.

She shows up in Seyfried’s house, drenched in blood and vomiting black goo, then runs off. The next day at school, Seyfried is numb with grief but Fox is her usual bitchy self. While the school is grieving, she just wants to move on. But she seems to be losing her looks and vitality. About a month after the fire, she goes on a date with one of the school’s goth boys, and kills him.

Seyfried, meanwhile, has been having awkward, amateur sex with Simmons, but her psychic connection to Fox makes her run out, get in the car, and hit Fox - who survives no problem. Fox gives her the lowdown: Brody and the band sacrificed her as a virgin offering to Satan - that’s the only way an indie band can get ahead. But since she wasn’t a virgin in fact (“not even a backdoor virgin”), she is reborn with powers and a thirst for blood.

I won’t tell you how it all ends up - but the movie starts with Seyfried a violent patient in a psych ward.

We loved director Karyn Kusama’s first feature, Girlfight, also our first exposure to Michelle Rodriguez. I also really liked Aeon Flux, although I may be alone in this. I haven’t seen a lot of scriptwriter Diablo Cody’s stuff, but I like what she did here. Very naturalistic friendship and highschool scenes, with witty and sometimes surprising dialog. I can see why this movie is trending.

Turtles All the Way Down

My Dinner with Jimi (2003) is a cute, funny memoir of the 1970. Howard Kaylan, one of the singers for the Turtles had a time, and wrote this movie about it.

Basically, the Turtles were a slightly bubblegum pop rock band from LA. They gigged at the Troubador and the Whiskey a Go-Go, with the Doors opening for them. They are doing pretty good, but due to the ugliness of the front men (Howard and the fat and goofy Mark Vollman), they wonder if they can make the big time. There’s a cute scene of an after-gig trip to a deli where Frank Zappa is holding forth to an audience of Mama Cass, when Jim Morrison comes in and doesn’t leave until he has to go “drain the lizard”. Then there’s an extended “fool the draft board” scene that was done better in Big Wednesday, and for that matter, “Alice’s Restaurant”.

But after that, their hit “Happy Together” replaces “Penny Lane”  as the No. 1 hit, and they go on a tour of England. Graham Nash invites them to listen to a pre-release tape of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and then to go to a hot club. They actually meet the Beatles there, and Paul is a sweetheart - but John is as total dick to them. So everyone leaves but Kaylan, who meets Brian Jones, who introduces him to Jimi Hendrix. Now, Hendrix is a god in the UK, but still unknown in the US. But in the course of the conversion, Howard learns... well, something.

This movie is a lot like listening to Kaylan tell some stories, with exaggerations and punchlines well-honed from the telling. You aren’t likely to mistake the actors playing the various celebrities for the real thing - Zappa’s beard looks like it was cut out of construction paper, and the Beatles can be identified by facial hair only. But they do seem to convey the essence in a certain way - at least in the way the Kaylan saw them. And he really did see them, meet them, work with some of them and party with others. There’s even a little tidbit about Jane Asher, if you like obscure rock references.

Plus, they really are a fun band.

Cat Women

We’ve watched a lot of samurai movies, but not too many classic Japanese horror movies. Now we’ve seen Kuroneko (1968).

It starts in a small hut by the edge of a bamboo forest. We see a band of samurai filtering out of the forest, looking ragged and battle worn. They go into the hut and find two women, a mother and her daughter-in-law. The soldiers steal their food, rape and kill them, and set the hut on fire. The women die, and a black cat (kuroneko, in Japanese) licks their corpses.

Soon, warriors who travel through the grove might meet two mysterious noblewomen. They seduce the men into joining them in their remote mansion. There, they kill them, ripping their throats out with their teeth.

Meanwhile, a poor soldier manages to kill the opposing general. In recognition, his general makes him a samurai. He goes home to his mother and wife, but all he finds is the burned-out hut. His general tells him about the ghosts that are killing off samurai, and orders him to dispatch them. But when he runs into them, they seem familiar, and he finds that he is in love with the younger. Before long, he recognizes them, and finds out what has happened.

This is a spooky movie, full of action, horror and romance - kind of sexy too, in a Japanese way. It moves quite quickly - I might have liked a little more deliberate pacing. All in all, a great classic Japanese horror.

In conclusion, no relation to the Kuroneko moving company in Japan.

Want to Hear My Dog Imitation?

Opinions on Deep Rising (1998) seem to be split: It’s a lousy dumb B-grade monster movie, or it’s a great dumb B-grade monster movie. As soon as someone told star Treat Williams “I thought you’d be... older”, I know which it would be.

Williams stars as the shady captain of a ship, hired by mercenaries to take them to a spot in the ocean. As the quote above indicates, he is kind of doing Snake Plisskin. He works with a cute Asian, Una Damon, and a stoner mechanic, Kevin J. O’Connor (AKA, Oddball from Kelly’s Heroes). The mercenaries are lead by our current favorite Native American actor, Wes Studi, and the team include Djimon Hounsou.

Meanwhile, on a luxury liner also somewhere at sea, owner Anthony Heald is telling his rich patrons what a great time they are going to have on his ship. Meanwhile, someone is sabotaging the radio. And something huge is spotted on sonar, rising up out of the deep directly below the ship. Soon, there’s a hole in the ship and some kind of monsters are killing the clients.

As you probably guessed, the mercenaries are planning to rob the ship. But when they get there, they find nothing but blood stains in a wallowing, disabled ship. The only survivor seems to be a passenger, glamorous jewel thief Famke Janssen, who had been locked in the brig/pantry.

Now we get “Alien in the Poseidon Adventure” - a small group in a wallowing ship (it doesn’t seem to be actually sinking) getting picked off by a monster or monsters that could be anywhere. Yes, even to the old “something’s dripping on your head, you look up and...” gag. And they have to swim underwater through a flooded corridor, in a scene that had us singing, “There’s got to be a morning after”. (Note: we haven’t seen Poseidon Adventure, but we have read the MAD magazine parody, “The Poopside-Down Adventure”.)

We found this to be a very satisfying romp. Each trope or homage (Janssen’s character’s name was Trillian, like in Hitchhiker’s Guide) let us know that they knew what they were doing. Treat Williams was a respectable bad-ass, Famke Janssen made a good crook, Wes Studi had a great death. And it all ended with a sequel setup. That sequel never happened, but if it had, we would have watched it.

Quiet Village

Tanna (2016) is a different kind of foreign film - it is filmed by natives in the local language of Tanna, an island in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu.

It takes place in the village of Yakel. Wawa, a granddaughter of the village seer, is in love with Tain, a son of the headman. At the start, we see a morning in the village as the people live their traditional lives. They follow what they call in Pidgin “kastom road”, the customary way. Wawa’s little sister steals a boy’s clothes (well, his penis sheath), and her grandfather takes her to the volcano to teach her about the importance of obeying her elders. But when they get there, men from a hostile tribe club him to nearly to death.

The Yakel villagers want to go to war, but cool heads in the village prevail. They will make peace by exchanging kava plants and pigs, and arrange a marriage between one of their men - and Wawa.

The tag line for this movie might be “Romeo and Juliet in the South Seas”. But it is much more than that. First, it is based on an actual occurrence, which ends (spoiler) with mandatory arranged marriages abolished. So we are watching a recreation of something important to these people. In fact, the seer shows Wawa a picture of him and Prince Philip, who he assures her had an arranged marriage. And it is an actual picture - the person playing the seer had actually met the Prince.

So the movie is an amazing record of traditional life in a Vanuatu village. It shows them pounding plants for fiber, snacking on bugs and playing games in the beautiful forest. But the actors, especially Wawa, are compelling and charismatic. (Her boyfriend, Dain, was chosen because he was the handsomest man in the village, but you don’t get to know him the same way.) She may be a little less traditional than the character she is playing - she is pretty careful about not letting her breasts show, and they seemed to have a bit of a tan line. But that’s pretty minor compared to the authenticity of her acting. Her little sister is a hoot too.

If you are interested in different cultures or just want to see an old-fashioned love story, I recommend Tanna.

Kith and Kim

When I was in grade school, I won some kind of contest, and the prize was a paperback copy of Kipling’s Kim. Since I was more into astronauts and death rays, I wasn’t too impressed, but I read it anyway. However, I hadn’t seen the movie Kim (1950) until now.

It stars Dean Stockwell as Kim, the son of an Irish soldier orphaned in India. To avoid the orphanage and classes, he runs the streets, doing odd jobs for the underworld, including Errol Flynn. He plays an Indian horse trader who seemed to be called Ma Bubbali (but is actually Mabub Ali). I am going to assume he is actually an Englishman disguised as an Indian, because otherwise I will go mad.

Flynn gets Stockwell to run errands for him, as he is a spy for the English, rooting out Russian plots to destabilize the Empire. Meanwhile, Stockwell meets a Tibetan Buddhist monk - Paul Lukas. And why shouldn’t a Tibetan monk speak English with a Hungarian accent? So Kim apprentices with the monk, begging for him and traveling throughout India while secretly carrying messages for the British.

OK, two bad things and two good things:

• The brown face and colonialist racism is not good. But it could be worse - This is Kipling, after all.
• A lot of this was filmed in India, so there is some good spectacle, including elephants.
• The overall “Adventure” feel of this is a little weak, except the climax - a fight in the Himalayas.
• The love of Kim for his monk touched me as a Buddhist.

For me, the terrible politics balance out the mild pleasures and I found this slight but enjoyable. I don’t know if you’d agree.

The Ballad of Princess Raccoon

Seijun Suzuki’s Princess Raccoon (2005) is a bit of a surprise. You may remember him for the odd, bleak and violent Japanese gangster movies of the 60s, like Branded to Kill. Maybe you saw the very odd, colorful and violent Pistol Opera. This one is just as odd, but not violent at all! It’s actually a kid friendly fantasy.

It starts with the king of a magical kingdom - represented by painted backdrop and simple props. The magic well tells him he is the fairest in the land (he’s actually kind of old and weird) but that his son will soon be more beautiful. So he casts his son out into the world. There he meets a beautiful tanuki princess - tanuki being Japanese magic badger-dog-raccoon creatures. Since they are shapeshifters, this princess looks just like a Zhang Ziyi. Now, it is specifically a bad idea for a human to love a tanuki, and so they have many adventures and trials.

But the story isn’t what is so much fun about this. It is done is a completely theatrical style, with painted backdrops for everything. Suzuki uses Japanese folk dance, kabuki, and Japanese musical theater stylings. So there will be a slow formalized dance number to express the love of the two stars. Then a chorus of an old style J-Pop tune. Clouds that are just painted flats roll in, to change the scene. It’s kind of magical. And definitely, like all the Suzuki movies I’ve seen, odd.