Seth Harris

Movie Review – Come and See

Come and See (1985, dir. Elem Klimov)

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As we get older, we’re told our views on life will change. That is a somewhat accurate assessment I’ve found. However, as I was told by older people I would become more conservative in my thinking as I aged, I discovered the opposite to be true, at least in the sense they implied. One thing I have become very conservative about is the act of war, conservative in the sense I abhor it. I find people who have a war hawkishness about them to be very liberal about the deployment of soldiers and the dropping of bombs. I am thankful that I have never had to personally experience war and have great sympathy for those who have taken lives and had lives taken from them. I cannot fathom the trauma a person carries with them in the wake of that experience. Come and See is possibly the best war film ever made in my opinion because it is directly about that trauma.

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Masks: Refugees AP Part 1

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This weekend I kicked off a new game of Masks, the Powered by the Apocalypse tabletop roleplaying game by Brendan Conway. Like most first sessions of PBtA games, it is mostly world building and learning the fundamental dynamics and relationships of the characters. The line up for our team of teen heroes is made up of:

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Movie Review – Moana

Moana (2016, dir. Ron Clements, John Musker)

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Moana is captivated by the stories her grandmother tells about her people and their mythology. The story of the demigod Maui particularly inspires a sense of exploration in the young woman. However, she is the daughter of the village leaders and is expected to maintain life on the island as it is. The ocean begins to communicate with Moana, and she learns from her grandmother that their people used to sail across the ocean living on different islands. When Maui stole the heart of Te Fiti, the island goddess, darkness began to spread across the world. That darkness has reached the shores of their island and Moana cannot stay put any longer. She sets out to find Maui and restore the heart of Te Fiti, saving her people.

In 1989, Disney released The Little Mermaid, a film that would serve as the template for princess movies to come for the next 25+ years. Moana very closely follows that formula: A young woman expected to follow the expectations of her parents, she feels a yearning to travel beyond the borders of the land she knows, an event occurs that pushes her beyond the boundaries, she has a weird/silly/funny pet, she conquers a great evil despite feeling apprehensions. It is the traditional hero’s journey story that has cleverly replaced the original Disney style of princess stories. If you haven’t seen movies like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty recently then you may have forgotten how annoying the characters are. Those earlier animations seem more like an exercise in animation technique more than a story about characters with arcs. So, while I greatly appreciate Disney presenting stories about more active rather than reactive princesses, I hope that we continue to see diversity in character but also in the way stories are told and the types of stories being told. Zootopia highly impressed me as a kind of story I haven’t seen from Disney before.

Moana is a lot of fun, but I know I am not the intended audience for this film. It’s a children’s film and thus the story arcs are very evident and classical. There’s not a lot of character complexity but that wouldn’t be appropriate for the intended audience. One element I greatly appreciated was that the film doesn’t have a villain that follows the characters through the whole movie. This lets the movie feel like an actual myth being retold and keeps the focus on Moana’s arc rather than subplots. There are some antagonists who show up, my personal favorite being the Kakamora, animated coconut pirates. The sequence where these monsters attack has been revealed to be a direct reference to Mad Max: Fury Road and it is just subtle enough that it doesn’t come across as a crass pop culture reference. The film’s final obstacle in the form of Te Ka the lava demon has a clever twist that shies away from the act of killing the “final boss”. Lately, I’ve found myself drawn more and more to films that don’t follow the traditional black/white good/evil dichotomy. And it is very refreshing to see this in a children’s film.

I was very impressed with the level of computer animation. It took me awhile to be sold on the aesthetic as a replacement to classic cel animation for Disney pictures, but at this point, they have really perfected it. I’m not one who expects CG to be “realistic,” I’d rather see the technology be used to create the fantastic and impossible. Why recreate something we can already see in the real world when you can make something look real that could never be. While watching Moana, I was captivated by the texture and weight of objects. The previously mentioned Kakamora looked more like stop motion animation than something that was flat and two dimensional. People still look flat to me, but the world around them (grass, trees, water, man-made objects) looked like you could lift and hold them.

With Moana and Zootopia up against each other at the Oscars, I would still have to give it to Zootopia. This is not a slight to Moana, but an acknowledgment that Zootopia was a kind of story we have never had in as much depth and relevance from Disney before. Moana, while an excellent example of Disney creating more diverse characters, follows a very traditional and unsurprising story arc. It’s a film I’m sure kids and parents will enjoy watching again. Zootopia is a larger statement that I suspect will be remembered and studied in a way Disney films don’t traditionally do.

The Revisit – Unbreakable

The Revisit is a place for me to rewatch films I love but haven’t seen in years or films that didn’t click with me the first time. Through The Revisit, I reevaluate these movies and compare my original thoughts on them to how they feel in this more recent viewing.

Unbreakable (2000, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

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I can remember exactly when I decided I needed to see Unbreakable. I was in my sophomore year of college, and my friend Sam had seen the film over Thanksgiving Break. He insisted that I needed to see it because of my love of comic books. That struck me as odd because nothing I had seen in the promotion materials had made me think of comic books and superheroes. I had really loved Shyamalan’s previous film, The Sixth Sense, so I was totally up for it. We went to the theater a couple days later.

Rewatching Unbreakable, I was astonished at how many images from that film are burnt into my psyche. I loved the picture after that first viewing, purchased it as soon as it was DVD and watched it dozens of times for the next couple years. I was very likely over-hyped when Signs came out and found myself underwhelmed. Like many filmgoers, the following decade will cause the director to lose most of his cachet with the audience. But Unbreakable serves as a reminder of how amazing a director Shyamalan was/is/could be again.

What struck me the most on this viewing was how measured and quiet the film was. This was a couple years before Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man would shift the movie superhero paradigm and the late 1990s were very unkind to the genre. There is a deliberate sense of grounding the fantastic, but not in a way that disparages their roots. Comic books are lauded through the picture, but the conceit of the film is these four-color tales are exaggerations of a more sedate reality. Yes, David Dunn is incredibly strong but that means he can lift around 400 lbs not and entire jet airliner. The super heroics of Unbreakable are not global or against alien hordes. The evil that is being pointed out is racism, rape culture, sociopathic violence.

I also found myself reconnecting with every character in the film. The aforementioned quiet moments are always character-centered and are intended to build on what we know, either adding to our knowledge or subverting it. We deeply understand the strained relationship between David and Audrey, the admiration of Joseph for David, the tug of curiosity Elijah elicits from David. No character ever makes a move that feels contradictory to what is previously established and so you find yourself floating effortlessly through this organic story. There is the now cliche Shyamalan twist, but it doesn’t play as contrived. It fits with the groundwork lain through the entirety of the film. It also does something I find myself to drawn to more these days: forgoing having a purely black and white conflict.

The villain of Unbreakable isn’t even really the bad guy. He does evil things, but we spend a lot of time getting to know him, not as much as David, but the moments in his life we’re shown establish humanity and a particular, though skewed, perspective. It’s a perfect example of empathy, which is not agreement but understanding a perspective different than your own. You feel sorry for this person despite the horrible things they have done. I cherish that sort of internal conflict as a viewer, not being able to come down hard one way or another on the character.

I find this period of Shyamalan to be comparable to Nolan in the first part of his career. Both directors have an unyielding sense of aesthetics and the sort of stories they want to tell. They both enjoy building up expectations and then subverting them to varying degrees of success. Where they differ is in Shyamalan’s ability to connect the audience with the characters on an emotional level. He is much less interested in the gritty details and technicalities of the world and more in how these fantastic elements emotionally affect our characters. Nolan is very talented with building intelligent plot machines that unfold in exciting and interesting ways, but ultimately fail to make me feel anything about the characters. The closest I could say Nolan ever got to that was with The Prestige. I don’t think there is any argument that Shyamalan has not ended up with the level of critical acclaim Nolan has garnered, but these early films feel emotionally stronger than Nolan’s work.

If you haven’t watched Unbreakable recently, I highly recommend it. It has definitely held up, better than a lot of films from the early 2000s. It still has relevant things to say about the superhero genre and stands an example that the Marvel formula, as fun as it is, is not the sole method to tell these stories. With the buzz that Shyamalan is working on a direct follow up to Unbreakable, I really hope he understands that the tone and focus on characters is what made us fall in love with the picture in the first place. It would be an incredible shame if he ignores those facts and tries to deliver a more action-oriented film.

Movie Review – Toni Erdmann

Toni Erdmann (2016, dir. Maren Ade)

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German music teacher Winfried Conradi is happy in his simple life, playing oddball pranks that no one actually falls for and just create awkward moments. His favorite prop is a pair of novelty teeth he wears and fails to get a laugh out of anyone. His daughter, Ines, is a business consultant working out of Bucharest, Romania currently trying to outsource labor for the oil industry. Winfried decides to surprise her with a visit and discover she not the sort of person he hoped she’d become. Ines has been consumed by her work and adopted a very corporate philosophy through every aspect of her life. The trip goes south when Ines sleeps through a meeting with a client because he father wanted her to get her rest. He retreats back to Germany and Ines goes about trying to salvage things on her end. But then man in a tangled messy wig and novelty teeth pops up calling himself Toni Erdmann. He claims to be a life coach and looks a hell of a lot like Ines’ father.

Toni Erdmann is being referred to as a comedy, but it does everything it can to defy many audiences’ expectations of what makes a film comedy. The traditionally set up and pay off formula for gags is not present. Scenes open without any clear sense of where we are going, and sometimes we get a pin on some moment. Other times the scene just ends, and we move onto the next one. This is all very intentional and not the sign of poor writing. Rather this is a deliberate subversion and makes the film a representation of everything Winfried is trying to do to his daughter. There are some scenes where he pulls the omnipresent novelty teeth from his pocket, pops them in his mouth, begins to play out a bit, and just as quickly slumps his shoulders, and the teeth go back in the pocket. He perpetually seems to be met with incredulity by Ines and her associates. An incidental laugh will occasionally occur but never for the reasons Winfried intends.

Ines is forever frustrated by her father and focuses on gaining the respect she believes she deserves in her very male dominated profession. Her adherence to stepping in line with Western capitalism elicits a quandary from her father about her humanity. That comes at a very tense moment and acts as the crux on which the film flips. She has tolerated him to this point but after this she tells him he must leave. Later, her boss labels her a feminist as he goes on about the direction he believes their business proposal should take. Ines replies “I’m not a feminist, or I wouldn’t tolerate guys like you.” This is less a commentary on a feminism than it is the way in which the world she finds herself is systematically erasing a sense of self. Every decision she makes is calculated based on the effect it will have on her career interests. Winfried seems to believe he can save her through his shtick and that eventually her shell will crack.

Toni Erdmann is a long film, just short of three hours. This is also a part of the subversion. Jokes are meant to be punchy and quick. The film, like Winfried, lingers longer than we expect it to. The awkwardness increases and we wonder when this nuisance will just move along. We also see Ines as the pestered working parent and Winfried as the obnoxious child fawning for attention. Through all of this subversion and intentional annoyance, there is a genuinely real story about parent and child trying and failing to reconnect. It’s a situation many of us have faced as we get older and find ourselves distanced physically, emotionally, and ideologically. Even the way the film brings about it’s “happy ending” doesn’t follow the conceits you would expect to see. Toni Erdmann is a truly bizarre but fantastic film that earns the “it’s not for everyone” motto.

Movie Review – XX

XX (2016, dir. Jovanka Vuckovic, Annie Clark, Roxanne Benjamin, Karyn Kusama)

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Okay, horror anthologies. I keep wanting to love you but, dammit, you keep fucking it up. I was looking forward to this one quite a bit, much more than the last few anthologies I’ve sat down to view. It had only four films meaning we should have some good quality control, not flooding the picture with too many. You had Kusama has your big headliner and a first time director in the form of Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent). One of the shorts was based on a great story by Jack Ketchum. The trailer had me hooked the first time I saw it. So what went wrong?

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Book Review – Lost Signals

Lost Signals: Horror Transmissions (2016, Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing)

Edited by Max Booth III and Lori Michelle

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Certain things click with me as horror tropes more than others. Numbers stations, haunted baby monitors, signals coming from the deep dark woods. Something about radio waves can be genuinely creepy. No matter how secure your door is, they can get in. That’s why I was delighted to discover this anthology full of stories that touch on these very elements.

Some of the highlights of the collection are:

“If He Summons His Herd” by Matthew M. Bartlett

Finn Groomer is obsessed with the legends surrounding his small town community. One of these is a phantom FM station that comes and goes and seems connected to the disappearances of some kids. Finn is also troubled by the death of his mother and believes that through this station he can speak to the dead. There are some great classic devil worship type notes in this story but how it ends is unexpected and deeply disturbing.

“Transmission” by T.E. Grau

Max is zooming through the Nevada desert in the middle of the night when he stumbles upon what he thinks is fire and brimstone religious station. Something bolts across the road and forces the man off the road, but despite his predicament, something about this station keeps him from going for help. The more he listens, the more he realizes this isn’t about saving your soul but about being awakened to reality most can’t see.

“How the Light Gets In” by Michael Paul Gonzalez

A filmmaker and her partner are traveling through and documenting the people who live in the Salton Sea. They meet one strange, older woman who claims her husband discovered something in the area that was responsible for his death, a strange shimmer in the sky, a place where reality bends. Deciding to investigate for fun the couple ends up an abandoned hotel and experience a night of horrors as the sky splits open.

“Eternity Lies In Its Radius” by Christopher Slatsky

Molly is roommates with her fellow punk bandmates when one of them, Mark, discovers a strange pirate radio station he finds songwriting inspiration from. Now the music is evoking visions when she closes her eyes of railroad tracks leading off into a jagged cave in the side of a mountain. The images are so vivid she’s unnerved and discovers the place in her dreams is real and in their small town. All the while, Mark is spending more time locked in his room and getting lost in this strange radio station.

“All That You Leave Behind” by Paul Michael Anderson

A couple is living in the aftermath of a miscarriage. Told from the wife’s perspective, she is becoming increasingly distressed that her husband spends all day on a computer listening to the ultrasound heartbeat recording on a loop. She keeps trying to throw away objects that are connected to the late child, but her husband appears to be digging them back out of the trash. As their relationship deteriorates, she begins to have significant questions about her sense of reality. A horror story that ends with some poignancy.

More than just a one-note collection, Lost Signals gets a lot of mileage about of its concept. In our current era, there are a lot of signals crossing the globe and the opportunity to glean some horror from that is perfect.

Valiant Comics – X-O Manowar and Archer & Armstrong

valiant_comics_logo_april_2012-svg When I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, there were two big comic companies, DC and Marvel. Very little has changed. Now we have Image, metamorphosing from a garish pastiche of the big two to the incubator of great creator-owned work. Dark Horse has become a steady presence, churning out Hellboy/BRPD among some other small titles.

When I was a kid, I remember seeing Valiant Comics, the company owned by wunderkind Jim Shooter. The stories of his career in comics are legendary: a teenager sick in the hospital brought some Legion of Super-Heroes comics, wrote and sent in pitches, and ends up a writer on the series while he is still in high school. By the 1990s, Shooter was a very established writer and editor, particularly due to his run as “the boss” at Marvel Comics. He oversaw the Claremont/Byrne X-Men run, John Byrne’s Fantastic Four, Frank Miller’s Daredevil, Walt Simonson’s Thor, and many other iconic periods of Marvel characters.

In 1989, Shooter gathered enough investors to strike out on his own with Valiant Comics. They initially began with licensed material (WWE, Nintendo) but broke into the superhero market. In 1992, Shooter was ousted by his board. The video game developer/publisher purchased the company in 1994, turning the line into “Acclaim Comics.” By 2004, Acclaim filed for bankruptcy and with it went the Valiant line. In 2012, after a lengthy court battle to figure out who owned what from Valiant, the company was relaunched into the current incarnation: Valiant Entertainment.

Many of the characters from the 1990s were back, albeit with rebooted and updated origins. As of this writing, I’ve read 27 volumes of this line and will be talking in generalities about each series. After my writing catches up with my reading, I will likely focus on specific trades. For this first article, I’ll be talking about X-O Manowar and Archer & Armstrong.

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Movie Review – My Beautiful Laundrette

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, dir. Stephen Frears)

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Omar Ali (Gordon Warnecke) is a young Londoner adrift. He’s dropped out of school and spends his time caring for his father Hussein, bed-ridden and increasingly inclined to drink since the suicide of his wife the previous year. Hussein realizes his son needs to expand his horizons, so he sends Omar to Uncle Nasser who sets him to work washing cars in a parking garage before handing over his failing laundrette. Omar envisions this facility becoming a place the reinvigorates the neighborhood and beginning his fortune. Through circumstance, he reunites with Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), an old schoolmate who got caught up in the right-wing nationalist movement. Johnny breaks away from his mates but struggles. He and Omar have romantic feelings for each other but exist in two very different communities in their city.

Laundrette is a film very much of its time. Within minutes, the hardships brought by Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister are felt. London is run down, slum lords rule the roost, and anyone who can’t find a job is tossed out on their ass. The Pakistani community is not feeling the purse strings tighten as much and are seeking out fairly non-glamorous avenues to keep the money rolling in. Omar’s father is a socialist and journalist, two things that stand in contrast to the other highlighted members of his community’s ideals. While Hussein rails against Thatcher to Omar, Nasser talks with delight about how he has benefitted from her policies. Many Pakistani characters admit they feel torn between two homes, but Nasser bluntly states that as Pakistan became increasingly theocratic, it was obvious that people like him who enjoyed Western values had to leave.

However, these ideas are never really explored in depth. This is because Laundrette is a film so stuffed with ideas and wanting to say so much about them it never gets the opportunity to say much about anything. It intends to be a slightly light slice of life type film, but also a commentary on contemporary politics, but also a love story, but also a movie about Anglo-Pakistani identity. I kept thinking the picture had all the potential to be a fantastic mini-series, a Pakistani Shameless, about communities in the poor neighborhood in conflict. The romance between Omar and Johnny is meant to be the core of the film based on promotions but I felt it was secondary to the exploration of racial identity in Thatcher’s England.

When the film comes up in conversation, it is often to highlight the breakout performance of Daniel Day Lewis. I found him to be a little dull and nothing spectacular. He wasn’t terrible, the film just didn’t have the time to develop his character to become anything interesting. Omar, the protagonist of the movie, is more interesting but I never felt the deep struggle between his love for Johnny and his community in the way I believe Frears intended. The romance is never something the characters suddenly begin confronting their family about. It’s left a little ambiguous as to where they go from here. The third act shows that life isn’t going to run smoothly for the couple. When the film ends the story doesn’t. You can feel that life will continue for these people and it won’t go smoothly. But in times of government austerity life is a struggle that only those we love can help us through.

Movie Review – Christine (2016)

Christine (2016, dir. Antonio Campos)

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The story of Christine Chubbuck is fated to end in tragedy. To most people, she’s known for the stories of a video of her suicide. During the early morning on 1974, while delivering the news, Christine produced a gun from beneath her desk and announced that “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts,’ and in living color, you are going to see another first—attempted suicide.” She proceeded to pull the trigger and fire a bullet into her skull. Fourteen hours later she was pronounced dead at the age of 29. To the public who heard of this event the most looming question has always been, “Why?”

Antonio Campos’ dramatization of the last few months of Christine’s life begins in a way that might surprise someone who was only familiar with the story of her death. She is an energetic, passionate reporter struggling to tell positive human stories while up against a news media that is learning sensationalism corresponds to higher ratings. She isn’t willing to give up so easily and argue viciously with news director Mike. While she fights for principles on the news, Christine is also experiencing severe abdominal pains that she attributes to stress but seem to be something more serious.

Taking on the task of capturing who Christine was is actress Rebecca Hall. I’ve seen in some supporting roles in various films but never really felt very impressed. Apparently, she had just never been given an active enough role to show off her talents. Her absence from Best Actress nominations at any of the major awards is yet another sign that the mainstream awards are out of touch. It has been a very long time since I have seen a performance that so transformed an actor. Her voice, the way she moves, just watching her hands tense and grasp at objects, so encapsulates a real person. Christine’s pain is real, but even more surprising is her joy at producing stories about people. It’s hard not to get caught up in her passion as she takes the mundane and attempts to transform it into the remarkable.

Surrounding Hall’s central performance is a brilliant cast of supporting actors. Michael C. Hall plays George, the news station’s main anchor who shares the awkward flirtations of Christine. He could easily have been off as a pastiche of Ted Knight’s archetypal pompous newsman from Mary Tyler Moore, but a moment in the third act reveals a layer to the character I didn’t expect and changes the audience’s perception of him. The always great Maria Dizzia plays Jean, Christine’s best friend at the station and camerawoman. Jean sees Christine’s moments of breaking down and is deeply affected in the wake of her suicide. The final moments of the film choose to focus on Jean and they almost wordlessly convey the real emotions and reaction a friend would feel in the aftermath of such a tragic end. There is a numbness in her eyes and a deliberate effort to try and move past this. Tracy Letts plays the role of Mike, the film’s antagonist, who worries over the station’s dwindling ratings and aggressively pushes Christine to change her angle on the news. But even he is given brushstrokes of character development that reveal he does care about the station beyond just ratings.

The film gets across a sense of alienation that is suffocating. Christine continually spirals further down, never giving up her sensibilities that she can find a way out of her problems. But at every turn something gets in her way, kicking the legs out from underneath her. By the time the film reaches its climactic moment it feel heartbreakingly that there was no other way this could have ended. In the larger context of the news media, everything she represented was going down the drain. Throughout the picture news reports about Nixon and Watergate can be heard. Even the opening has Christine shooting footage for her reel, alone on the set, pretending to interview the president. She points out the idea that you can’t really be paranoid if people are actually out to get you. And for Christine, everyone did seem to unintentionally be out to get her.