It never ceases to amaze me how often the first day of a new month surprises me. Here we are in September already, which means new fiction at Futurismic: this month, the always inventive Lavie Tidhar provides us with “In Pacmandu,” which may raise a few eyebrows at first — but by all means, keep reading! I hope you enjoy it!
The Lady Vanishes (1938) is one of nine Alfred Hitchcock films on the list — and based on some its weaker selections, there probably should have been more. Like most Hitchcock adventures, this one mixes healthy doses of humor in with the suspense, and for the most part it’s an enjoyable romp — structurally messy and tonally curious, perhaps, but overall an engaging entertainment, and an interesting window into the psyche of pre-WWII Britain.
The film opens in an obscure mountain village in a fictional European country, where a number of stranded British tourists are waiting out an avalanche before they can head homeward. Here we meet, among others, Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a young party girl heading home to settle down and get married, and Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a wisecracking musician who gets under her skin at the hotel during a noise complaint. The tracks finally cleared, Iris makes her way to the train, along the way befriending a kindly old lady named Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who assists her when she takes a bump on the head. Iris falls asleep with the smiling Miss Froy sitting across from her, but when she wakes up, Miss Froy has disappeared. Iris begins a search, but it turns out everyone on the train has excuses not to help — some for selfish reasons, others for nefarious ones — and she finds her investigation obstructed at every turn. Her one ally, of course, turns out to be Gilbert, who helps her unravel the mystery of Miss Froy’s disappearance, which spirals into dangerous intrigue.
The plot is a convoluted sequence of comic encounters and spy switcheroos, and it’s not one of Hitchcock’s tightest films: the point of attack is late in coming, and it opens at a leisurely pace before finally ramping up to its intrigues. But it’s a fun concoction, and an early look at many of the techniques and elements Hitchcock would master in later films. Viewed in the context of its era, the film is also politically interesting, providing some pointed commentary on British attitudes regarding the possibility of a renewed European war — some of the British characters, sucked into the action against their will, are clearly stand-ins for public sentiment during those troubled times.
The Lady Vanishes may ultimately be a better example of a Hitchcock film than of a spy film, but it’s certainly a worthy entry on the list.
This year my M.O. for vacation time has consisted of scheduling it out piecemeal into various four-day “staycation” weekends that give me a chance to get away from the office and recharge my batteries — in the company of my favorite person and my two favorite cats, of course! Since home is my favorite place to be, I’m perfectly happy to spend my vacations this way — and the fact that it’s both cheaper and lazier is a nice bonus!
This weekend held particular significance, though: Thursday represented the four-year mark since Jenn and I met at Worldcon in Anaheim. It’s been an exciting and wonderful four years so far, full of change and adventure for both of us. We rang in the occasion with a spectacular dinner at our favorite restaurant here in the Valley, Café Carolina. Jenn’s post describes the meal perfectly, so I won’t try to elaborate, except to show you the dessert:
We filled our Friday and Saturday with food and fun as well. One highlight was an outing to Dark Delicacies in Burbank, a horror bookshop where Amelia Beamer was signing her new novel. There we met up with friends and made some new ones, then stopped over at Porto’s for a pile of pastries.
It wouldn’t be a four-day weekend without TV, movies, and games, of course. I’m catching up on season five of Rescue Me (about halfway through so far); I always seem to forget how good this show is when I’m not watching it. I find elements of it problematic, but there’s something refreshing about how unapologetic and gutsy it is, and the ensemble cast is consistently amazing. (I think Steven Pasquale in particular is a brilliant comic actor, and his story arc this year has been filled with entertaining surprises.) We also instant-streamed the weird Belgian animated film A Town Called Panic, a wonderfully strange, frantic movie I found a little too stream of conscious for a full review — suffice it to say, it’s the best weird Belgian stop-motion animation you’ve ever seen. And on Saturday night we enjoyed some World of Warcraft instancing with friends, where I got to heal my first heroics with my neglected resto druid. (If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it…)
The weekend wrapped up with Jenn’s birthday, and I made my first solo batch of chocolate chip cookies — a personal baking milestone. Not only that, but they look and taste like cookies. Holy shit!
It was nice to shut down and relax for a while, but it’s Monday again and time to resume some responsibility. Back to work, to editing, to blogging and bill-paying…and soon, to writing, as I’ve decided September will ring in draft two of Subnetworks (or, more likely, draft 1.5, the last pre-critique version).
For now I’ll leave you with our anniversary photo — I do believe we are as happy as we look in this picture, so it’s a great way to remember a great weekend!
A mountain-climbing film dressed up in spy clothes, The Eiger Sanction (1975) is one of those oddball selections the list seems to include now and then just to stir up conversation. How this one ever crept so far up the list is beyond me, though; it’s not a very good film.
Clint Eastwood stars as a retired assassin named Jonathan Hemlock (ugh), whose pedigree also includes a past in mountain-climbing and a current gig as an art professor. Hemlock is lured back to the intelligence world by his former boss in the top secret agency “C2,” a man named Dragon (Thayer David), who blackmails him out of retirement for one last job, taking out a pair of enemy agents who stole a microfilm detailing a germ warfare formula. Hemlock performs one hit, but the second one looks to be more of a challenge; the target, as yet unidentified, is suspected of being a member of an international mountain-climbing expedition to scale the notorious north face of the Eiger in Switzerland. Hemlock’s mission: join the team, identify the agent, and take him out.
Is there a spy movie plot tying together the sequences of The Eiger Sanction? Sure, and it’s even got some classic elements: the retired agent pulled off the shelf for one last job…the nefarious intelligence organization with murky motives…heroes just as morally questionable as the villains…dastardly misdirections…sexy femme fatales…a cynical (if not nihilistic) message about the costs of the intelligence world on its agents. It sounds reasonable on paper.
But is it a spy film? Not really. It feels more like a macho ego-stroke for Eastwood Circa 1975, with his iconic monotone, square jaw, and bad-ass behavior. The plot is serviceable, but fails to engage because it’s consistently trumped by its function as an action vehicle, an excuse to watch Eastwood scale mountains, thump thugs and bed babes. The performances are wooden, and the script is full of lazy cliches — not to mention casual racism, sexism, and homophobia, a sad timestamp of the more politically incorrect characteristics of its film-making era.
Eastwood also directs, and not without some skill. The film makes good use of its western U.S. and Swiss mountain landscapes, and some of the mountain-climbing shots are impressively hairy. Eastwood obviously did much of his own climbing, which contributes greatly to the authenticity of those sequences. On the other hand, he overuses the wide helicopter tracking shots of nature, and the film’s pace is all over the map. Interestingly, a massive section of the film focuses on his rigorous training for the big climb. I appreciate that — most action heroes wouldn’t bother practicing, they’d just automatically be awesome — but it has a brutal effect on the film’s pace.
Meh. Most of the films on the list at least make a case to warrant their inclusion: even Modesty Blaise, in its bizarre way. But to me The Eiger Sanction is rated way too high at #67, and probably wouldn’t even get an honorable mention on my list. Fans of Old School Clint might get a kick out of its testosterone-heavy exploits, but most spy buffs will probably be repelled. Or is that rappelled?
I watched Chuck with half an eye during its first season, liking it without quite loving it. Its premise is ridiculous spy fantasy camp: an immense database of intelligence data is downloaded into the mind of an aimless college dropout named Chuck Bartowksi (Zachary Levi). Chuck, squandering his potential working at an electronics superstore, instantly becomes an intelligence asset, and to oversee his well being, he’s assigned two agents as handlers: the CIA’s Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) and the NSA’s John Casey (Adam Baldwin). By day, Chuck is a mild-mannered “Nerd Herd” computer tech trying to hold together a semblance of a normal life, but at night, he’s off on top secret missions, his unique ability to instantly access information on objects and people he sees helping Sarah and John overcome the threat of the week. The first season was silly fun, easily watched and forgotten, held together chiefly by the goofy Levi, who I think is an outstanding comic lead, with timely support from Baldwin, who serves as a perfect grumbly foil for Chuck’s bumbling charms.
Season two elevates the show to a new story-telling level, though, and particularly in its early stages it really hits its stride, providing engaging A-story plots intertwined with increasingly effective lore and a nicely developing ensemble feel. Chuck’s puppy dog infatuation with Sarah matures into a credible will-they-or-won’t-they romance, and the often incongruous elements of Chuck’s personal life — sister Ellie (Sarah Lancaster), future brother-in-law Captain Awesome (Ryan McPartlin), best friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez) — finally start to feel more integral to the the events of Chuck’s secret life.
The season definitely has missteps, most notably a two-episode arc where Sarah alledgedly falls for a sleazy MI-6 agent — and everybody mysteriously decides to start acting out of character. Chuck’s occasional tendency to feel like it’s being written by giggling adolescent boys is at its worst here. The season rescues Morgan from his irritating, show-stopping presence in season one, making him more sympathetic and noble — but does so at the expense of the rest of the Nerd Herd. Lester (Vik Sahay) and Jeff (Scott Krinsky) merely turn up to exhibit repulsive male behavior, while Anna (Julia Ling) is just completely destroyed as a character — when she’s even given any material. The Buy More sequences are still kind of an albatross around the show’s neck in season two, even with Tony Hale turning up to provide some quirky retail villainy.
That said, the major plotlines and season arcs of season two are much more impressive and engaging — watching Chuck come into his own as a reluctant spy, learning a bit more about Sarah and Casey, developing the family dynamic with Ellie and Awesome, some heroic moments and character growth for Morgan, and the overarching plot of Chuck’s attempts to get “the intersect” out of his head. There are definitely moments of emotional connect here, not on a par with, say, Buffy at its finest, but moments where the terrorist threats (or vampires) stop mattering as much as the characters’ personal struggles and interactions within the tense framework of those situations. I wasn’t expecting this much from Chuck when I started watching it, so it comes as a very pleasant surprise.
As with Inception, I’m tempted to open this review of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) with a spoiler alert — or maybe just an “expectation prevention warning.” I entered the theater with no foreknowledge, except that it was based on a comic book and starred Michael Cera. The film surprised me in all sorts of spectacular ways, and it’s probably my favorite movie of the year so far; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it worms its way onto my all-time favorites list.
Set in Toronto, the film stars Cera as the eponymous Scott Pilgrim, a twenty-something slacker bassist in need of a few valuable life lessons. On the rebound after a bad relationship, Scott’s fake relationship with a high school girl is thrown for a loop by the arrival of the (literal) girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Ramona comes into his life with a lot of baggage, though — in order to secure Ramona’s love, Scott needs to deal with his insecurities and defeat her seven evil exes, all while his band is working its way through a Battle of the Bands competition.
The film opens as a stylish, hip coming-of-age comedy peppered with unique and creative comedic flourishes, and it pretty much maintains that tone and mission throughout, but along the way it morphs into something else, too — a fantastical, celebratory fusion of geek culture filled with superhero comic action, gleeful video gamery, and thundering indie music. The dialogue is witty, the pace is snappy, the characters are memorable (almost all of them are, which is amazing), and the action scenes are both brilliantly choreographed and emotionally charged. Cera’s shtick is familiar, but he’s in pitch-perfect form, and the ensemble surrounding him is superbly cast.
I could rain more superlatives on the film, but I can’t really do it justice — it’s hard to describe the unique awesome that is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It’s just one of those movies you just want to write GO SEE THIS!!! about — highly recommended!
I woke up in the middle of the night with a Cairo-scratch on one arm and my mind roiling with a weird kind of negative writing energy — cool ideas gestating, but also a nagging dread about my ability to realize them. When my mind starts churning like that, there’s no sense trying to go back to bed, so here I am composing a Saturday morning linkdump:
I don’t generally get hooked on shows this quickly, which of course makes me think its demise is imminent…I was certain I had more to post about when I started this…maybe I shouldn’t write blogs before 7AM on a Saturday. Oh, well — have a great weekend, folks!
And now, a belated review of Salt (2010), which I saw last weekend at the Arclight. Salt is an all-too-plausible cautionary tale about the dangers of…no, wait, it’s a preposterous action vehicle for Angelina Jolie. But it’s not without its silly charms.
Salt is a rather odd film: a campy 1960s spy-fi premise wrapped up in ultraviolent, modern thriller trappings. Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, an agent for a clandestine outstation of the CIA, and it’s just another day at the office until she and her boss Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) are informed they have a “walk-in” — a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) has shown up on their doorstep, bearing gift-wrapped intelligence. According to Orlov, there is going to be an assassination in New York City later that day. The name of the assassin? Evelyn Salt. “Outed” as a Russian spy, Salt goes on the run — but is she really an enemy of the state, or is something more complicated afoot? Winter isn’t sure, but counterintelligence officer Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) isn’t taking any chances, and the pursuit is on.
Salt opens as a fairly conventional spy story, but descends quickly into non-stop, often irrational-seeming action. Filled with video-game-like stunt setpieces, wild firefights, and insane switchback plotting, the film aims for and mostly delivers big budget spectacle and frequent (if often silly) surprises. Its complicated twists and turns are pretty out there, but if you surrender to the camp early enough, the ridiculousness of it all actually works in the movie’s favor; the story keeps going places it just shouldn’t, and doesn’t care, which is kind of liberating in a way. It somehow manages to engage and insult your intelligence simultaneously.
Curious to note that Salt was originally written for a male lead, and was retooled as a vehicle for Jolie. In fact, this film is next-to-nothing without her. Jolie is becoming one of those screen figures whose celebrity persona is constantly threatening to consume her every role, but I’ve got to hand it to her: she can totally carry a film, and it’s hard to imagine Salt working at all without her. Schreiber and Ejiofor provide solid support in a cast that is otherwise undistinguished.
I’d be hard pressed to recommend Salt over the scads of other, higher quality spy films I’ve seen recently, but despite my snobbishness I still kind of got a kick out of it.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a TV round-up post, so here’s a summer viewing report:
New seasons are underway for two shows I’ve been following casually for a while now, TNT’s Leverage and USA’s White Collar. To me, the quality of Leverage has dropped a little this season, while White Collar has shown some improvement. I wouldn’t consider myself a diehard fan of either series — taken as a whole, I still have more loyalty to Leverage – but I’m still enjoying them both.
On the “catching up” front, Jenn and I are working our way through the second season of Chuck, a campy, funny contemporary spy series that has been steadily improving as it goes. The early stages of season two feel like a show hitting its stride, to me. Long way to go yet to catch up here, though — I don’t quite have the series marathoning chops that I used to!
My completism for 24 took me through the two-hour, between-season movie 24: Redemption, which bridges the gap between seasons six and seven of the show. On the run after the events of season six, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) has settled in Africa, helping an old Special Forces buddy named Benton (Robert Carlyle) run a school for boys. But civil war in the fictional nation of Sangala jeopardizes the kids, who are being kidnapped and press-ganged into military service across the border. Fortunately Bauer is on hand to protect them. It’s definitely a step up from season six — which was, on the whole, pretty awful — but lacks the complexity of a full, multi-threaded season arc. Its main mission seems to be laying the groundwork for season seven — introducing the new president, the new villain, and some other figures — meanwhile delivering its usual doses of intense action and taking advantage of some refreshing scenery from its South African locations.
The main reason for this post, though, is the new AMC series Rubicon, which looks very promising indeed. I’ve only seen the first two episodes, but I haven’t been this excited about a new show for a long time. This dark, intriguing spy mystery centers around a New York City think-tank full of intelligence analysts. The central figure is Will Travers (James Badge Dale), a brilliant, introverted analyst with a tragic past, who starts piecing together a complicated conspiracy involving his father-in-law (and fellow spy) David (Peter Gerety). Slow, subtle, and mysterious, Rubicon builds with a kind of quiet intensity, taking its time to lay out its clues and develop its storylines. It’s populated by immediately likeable and interesting characters, an office drama in a truly unique office, where the stresses of the secret life play out in quirky, awkward, tense interactions between the officers. It conjures both the fascinating personal politics of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the premise and paranoia of Three Days of the Condor. I will be following this series — which feels like it was made just for me! — with considerable interest.
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is a curious film, an Aaron Sorkin script largely populated by non-Sorkin-ish actors (with apologies to Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman), and dealing with a subject not exactly tailor made for Sorkin’s highly stylized dialogue and sense of humor: the covert U.S. war to support Afghanistan in their war effort against the Soviets in the 1980s. As an unlikely blend of subject matter and approach it’s not entirely unsuccessful, but it’s certainly an odd bird.
Texas senator Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a smarmy, sexist liberal hawk, whip-smart under his hedonist lifestyle. On a whim, he doubles the CIA intelligence budget against the Russians in recently invaded Afghanistan — which doesn’t help them much, but does put him onto the radar of a wealthy, right-wing activist named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts). A militant anti-communist, Herring maneuvers Wilson into meeting with the president of Pakistan about the severity of the situation on their border, and Wilson — along with his erstwhile aide Bonnie (Adams) — is so moved by the plight of the Afghanis that he undertakes to clandestinely support their war effort with every means at his disposal. To that end, he liaises with curmudgeonly CIA officer Gust Avrakatos (Hoffman), and they work together to secretly get the needed weapons to the resistance fighters, meanwhile escalating Soviet defense spending to unsustainable levels, which contributes to the collapse of the USSR.
Sorkin and director Mike Nichols bring an oddly cheerful, rah-rah aesthetic to this period piece biopic, which has all the earmarks of a bitter, grim spy tale but doesn’t play any of them up. Unlike Sorkin’s The West Wing (which it resembles in tone), it’s hard to determine which political end of the spectrum the film is playing to; if this covert war is depicted as something of a Pyrrhic victory, it’s also shown as a heroic effort to down an evil regime, and the bizarre tone makes the message seem a little muddled. (I’m not well schooled enough in the history here to know how accurate the depiction of events is, which makes it even harder to render judgement.)
Hanks performs adequately in the lead role, although he’s definitely not a natural fit for a “bastard with a heart of gold” role — as a persona, he might be just a little too nice-guy for this. He’s also not a natural with Sorkin dialogue, nor is Roberts or most of the cast; there’s a certain rhythm to Sorkin’s writing that only Adams and Hoffman seem adept at rendering. (The great Hoffman, by the way, is easily worth the price of admission.)
In the end, I enjoyed Charlie Wilson’s War without loving it. If nothing else, its oddly upbeat tone makes it a refreshing change of pace to the genre’s characteristic cynicism.