"Accomplishments"
In theaters: The appeal in doing a postapocalyptic 28 Years Later is that civilization has fallen (at least in Britain, so expect vague thoughts about Brexit, the dismantling of the NHS, etc. to crop up while viewing) and new cultures have developed. Our main focus in the isolated village on an Scottish island, but there's a strange doctor out there who is fulfilling his own idea of culture, the controversial tribe in the sequel bait at the end, and even the Infected have a primitive culture of their own. But what carries you through is of course the heartfelt tale of a 12-year-old initiated to the mainland, its dangers and its treasures, and his quest to find help for his ailing mother. I'm about sure he has lineage with the first film's characters (inspect the clues for yourself), and his arc has him embrace facts and reject lies, which is also a tale for our times. Ralph Fiennes is a highlight, no surprise there. To address the elephantine dick in the room, the sequel-teasing ending (haha, I zigged there when you thought I would zag) does break the film's own mold, but I didn't dislike it, except very abstractly because making 28 Years a trilogy seems to betray the premise and I really wanted them to go insane with 28 Decades and 28 Centuries Later.
At home: Though the premise and essential structure of the graphic novel is there, Cronenberg's A History of Violence is quite dissimilar, and you can tell where the director's interests lie, because entirely new scenes are created, and vast swathes of the book are ignored to sustain greater ambiguity. And so we have a deep examination of the push and pull of violence, making the audience complicit through thriller and crime film tropes, but always showing us the next, traumatic moment so we regret our punching at the air. The strong relationship between a meek man who may or may not have been a violent gangster in another life and his small-town wife is a highlight (all props to Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello, who have great chemistry). She is both attracted and repulsed by the violence that possibility represents, as is their son who has always dutifully let his high school bully steamroll him, in the name of pacifism. The family has such subtle moments we're asked to interpret that the villains feel like comic book villains (well, in a sense, they are).
I think it's better to ignore Violent's origins as a "companion film" to director/composer Andrew Huculiak's Vancouver-based band, as it just muddies the water in terms of appreciating it. I'm sure there's a relationship between the stories told and some of the songs (none of which are used in the film) and there's definitely a self-insert in the character called Andrew, but I don't really care to make those connections. Dagny Backer Johnsen (later in Vikings) is a very approachable figure as a listless young Swedish woman who is evidently undergoing some traumatic event and remembering and reflecting on the scenes in the film. Necessarily a little fragmented, the encounters are nevertheless told in chronologically and are thematically connected to the dooming event in question, which won't be revealed until the end. A pleasant, lyrical experience, though of course, ultimately sad. Bengt is so cringe!
The eponymous Monsieur Lazhar, a refugee from Algeria, is replacement teacher to a primary school classroom that has suffered an inexplicable loss - the suicide of their teacher on school grounds. How do we discuss this with children? How do they deal with it as opposed to the adults? And perhaps Lazhar is uniquely suited to confronting loss given his own tragic history. It's a beautiful film with no easy answers and a real bittersweet quality. Mohamed Fellag gives an extraordinary performance, and the kids (including a young Sophie Nélisse who would be in The Book Thief only two years later) are very strong as well. What starts as a fish-out-of-water "new teacher" movie that could easily have gone for quirky comedy, instead pupates and becomes a touching drama about grief and all the things we ball up into that word. Will stay with me.
Whenever someone commits some terrible act - in this case corruption of a minor - and their spouse stands by them through the trial, people always ask about that spouse. The Husband is aptly named, then, and the way Bruce McDonald approaches the subject approaches void-black comedy, but is as honest an exploration as possible of the feelings involved, and avoids that label. While the incarcerated wife two weeks from release, and mother to their infant, remains a mystery - her actions are as unfathomable as they are untenable - the title character Henry really goes through it. What would that do to you? Jealousy, inadequacy, shame, PTSD over younger rivals, an obsession with finding explanations, blanket forgiveness balanced against deep resentment and anger, flirtations with the possibility that similar desires may exist within oneself too... He is someone whose life is falling apart, but believe it can be fixed (his lemon of a car is certainly a metaphor). And visually, McDonald gives us a man distracted by playing around with focus and waking dreams. Cringe drama at its best.
Through casting, Bruce McDonald seems to imply that Dreamland is a sequel (of sorts) to Pontypool - or so I've been told. I don't see it. Stephen McHattie plays two characters, mirrors of each other, neither the same as his DJ in the earlier film, one a junky trumpet genius who walks through Europe in a haze, the other a mob assassin with a moral compass that won't allow him to look the other way when his organization starts trafficking kids. It's a surreal piece, with waking dreams, vampires (somehow), and gangster children, never mind the dream-like ending that can't be taken at face value and, of course, the oddness of the two men's intertwined fate. I quite like the strangeness, and it's as if things are are given metaphorical value. A man willing to buy a child bride is therefore a vampire. Criminals recruit young taken to the extreme. And two men whose fates are connected are consequently played by the same actor. This is the kind of logic you can expect from Dreamland. The movie also features Juliette Lewis in the madcap role of a monstrous Countess, quite fun.
Two friends set out to make a secret movie that tells "the truth about high school" in Therapy Dogs, and I don't know if it manages that exactly, as its seems to be mostly focused on partying and doing dumbass stunts. So it would be more true to say it's telling the truth about the teenage experience, and in its cross between documentary (as most of the footage is shot guerrilla-style among the class of 2019) and self-staging, certainly shows something of this particular generation. They graduated 30 years after I did, and I certainly didn't go to an arts-focused school, but boy, do all high schools in Canada, at least from the Maritimes to Ontario, shop at the same building store? Gave me PTSD (and no, this is not what American schools typically look like in movies). Anyway, the experience is wilfully disjointed and I'm not sure I like the ending, but critics have been right, I think, in celebrating this strange hybrid as the portrait of a generation. Bonus points for the Grand Theft Stripper scene.
[Sudan] Though A Camel is categorized as a documentary, it's more than that. There's a definite narrative as the camel, sadly fated to run a claustrophobic mill all day, has waking dreams and memories, a whole interior life. Yes, it says something about the way we treat beasts of burden, but it also connects to the grind many humans put themselves through, as well - why else have that odd personification sequence near the end? - and I found the animal both sweet and relatable.
[South Sudan] Look, folks. If I wasn't trying to watch one film from every country on the map, I certainly waste even the required 9 minutes on something like Dowry of Life. But beggars can't be choosers. It's basically an amateurish PSA about (checks) not immolating your spouse. The more you know. Jeepers.
[Central African Republic] Nascent looks at a civil/religious war through the eyes of children on either side, and its lyrical assembly of crisp images is quite beautiful. I wasn't sure how you could address such a complex topic in only 6 minutes, but it's a nice, hopeful angle.
[Eritrea] Three boys go out looking for fruit in Beles, which we're told is based on a true story. This makes you wait (fruitlessly) for the other shoe to drop, but maybe it never dropped that first shoe. I love the color scheme, but absent any incident... I suppose, yes, days without incident definitely HAPPEN and a TRUE, but are they STORIES?
Books: Simon Garfield wrote a book about fonts and typography, and Just My Type is apparently, yes, just my type of non-fiction book. It could have been a dry subject, but Garfield's prose is light and fun, and he knows how to describe a font so as to reveal its character. If we hate Comic Sans, what gave rise to it? How did ubiquitous fonts like Helvetica evolve? Is there tea to be spilled about font designers' private lives? The non-linear history of typography is broken up by spotlights on certain important fonts, and most usefully, each font is usually written in its own style, so the examples literally write themselves (give or take some exclusives Garfield couldn't get the rights to). It's the kind of book that changes how your brain is wired, and I'll be distracted by fonts for at least a few weeks. I've already started dreaming about them, waking up with cold sweats because of some terrifying Garamond or other, and having aggressive arguments with friends about the virtue of Calibri over Times New Roman.
Terrance Dicks made many changes to Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks (adapting the first serial of Season 9), mostly leaning into the action. The before-Terminator Terminator story was never a favorite of mine, but Dicks does his best to at least restore some explanations cut from the show and make UNIT more active and professional. For example, the weird bit where the Doctor and Jo meet themselves in Part 1 is actually resolved (the director had famously refused to shoot the scene for Part 4). We get more of the Dalek timeline in prologue, too. That said, neither the show, nor its adapter some years later, really had a handle on what NuWho fans know as "timey-wimey" storytelling, and some of the Doctor's explanations are rather clunky. I think the modern reader (if not the contemporary one) can actually infer something tighter from the events, but Dicks is too beholden to the televised dialog, perhaps. The illustrations are fair to good.
It was cool of Brian Hayles to redeem his own Ice Warriors in The Curse of Peladon, but the novelisation does the story few favors. I do like Jo's appeal to the warrior who the Doctor must fight, and King Peladon's address to Aggedor's spirit, and obviously, the action is more fierce and detailed. But, and it's a big capitalized BUT, expanding the story here means Hayles blows a lot of its surprises well before the TV version did so, even the solution to the whodunit! (Admittedly, the serial wasn't too good at hiding it either.) What is UP with that? I also fault the author for too often contradicting himself, stating one thing in a paragraph, then something that doesn't line up with that a couple paragraphs lower. The accompanying illustrations also don't seem to want to follow the descriptions, or even the look of the show. Definitely one that needed a stronger editing hand, and therefore, a disappointment.
In 1941, Leo Bachle was 17 when he was drummed out of the Canadian Army for lying about his age when he joined age 15! He went right to work on one of the best remembered comic strips of the "Canadian Whites" era - Johnny Canuck! And boy, you can tell he's sort of imagining the kind of adventures he would have had he gone abroad. Johnny punches Hitler in the face on three separate occasions in the first story arc! He even drew Johnny as himself. There's certainly a lot of adolescent energy on show, especially in those first efforts. It's action beat to action beat to action beat, the spelling is abominable and knowledge of the countries showcased nearly absent (the jungles of Libya, eh?). But you wouldn't be able to tell the author's age from the art, which is pretty strong (the reason Johnny is so often inexplicably bare-chested - don't let the cover fool you - isn't due to clothes being harder to draw, because the Nazis are in uniform). This is a lot of fun, kind of like an old matinée serial, and the hardcover collection edited by comics historian Rachel Richey is gorgeous. Eventually, Bachle leaves and other creators briefly come in, with Johnny moving to post-war adventures (the strip ended in 1946) at the last second. Big pulp vibes, and only in late stories does the era's common problem of Japanese caricatures rear its ugly head. Truth be told, Johnny sees a lot more of the world's fighting arenas than do most similar strips. The collection includes a nice foreword by Palookaville's Seth, and a cool biography of Leo Bachle.
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