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Black Mirror (2011) s01e01 – The National Anthem
I spent all of The National Anthem waiting for someone—anyone—to turn to the camera and say, “David William Donald Cameron.” Hell, they could’ve done an animated Peppa Pig saying it. But "Black Mirror" started in 2011, when the world was a much different place. Not just Cameron, but in the intervening years, the whole British Prime Minister office doesn’t come with much regard (or even less regard than before). And "Mirror" is all about commenting on technology and its effect on the world. I assume the title refers to screens; I’m not Googling… right now.
Writer (and co-showrunner) Charlie Brooker thought way too much of people. He attributed much more grace to the species than we deserve.
That observation made, it’s a perfectly reasonable example of absurdist comedy done straight-faced as prestige television. To some degree, Brooker’s definitely making people talk about the episode’s “big twist”–"Black Mirror" probably led to spell-checkers no longer squiggle-lining meta, which they might’ve still done back in 2011.
Politely put—I mean, Google David Cameron and "Black Mirror" if I’m being too discreet–National Anthem is a tense political thriller about a prime minister in a tough spot. Someone has kidnapped the people’s princess (no, not Princess Mia) and will only release her if the prime minister does something reprehensible on live television, humiliating himself and the concepts of polite society and decorum in the digital age.
Now, there are a couple moments in the episode when the law enforcement goons miss very obvious technology things, but it’s from 2011, not like 2016, which is what I assumed. All the “Downton” references play different too. Though it still means in the universe where Diana and Charles (presumably, there aren’t details) had a daughter, “Downton Abbey” was a sensation. Heck, it’s even possible Diana’s queen in this universe.
Anyway.
The decent enough observations for 2011 are a time capsule of a more ignorant time (i.e., more ignorant of reality).
As a dramatic thriller, it’s solid prestige television. Rory Kinnear’s good as the prime minister, who finds himself under unimaginable pressure (he should’ve been reading The Pet Goat), which leads to… well, not a character arc–lots of dramatic moments, but not character development. Lindsay Duncan’s his chief assistant who makes some bad choices, leading to contentious moments with Kinnear. She’s fine. It’s a crap part. No one else makes bad choices, just the older woman, but it was 2011 and making a powerful woman incompetent was progressive. She’s powerful, isn’t she?
Despite “Mirror” being co-run by Annabel Jones, Anthem wants nothing to do with the ladies. Anna Wilson-Jones plays Kinnear’s absent from the plot but physically present on set wife, who’s a plot accessory for Kinnear. Chetna Pandya’s the too-eager young reporter who knows how the future of media’s going to work (only she doesn’t—according to the show, anyway—and then she gets punished). Odd flexes.
Tom Goodman-Hill’s kind of pretty good as Kinnear’s boy Friday. So many qualifications. All the acting’s fine, sometimes excellent—there’s just not much for them to do with their performances. Anthem’s on a strict schedule, and director Otto Bathurst keeps the trains on time.
Bathurst’s also fine without being notable. He can direct prestige–big shrug.
But there are some great “cameos.” The show’s trying to be classy by not drawing attention to the stunt casts, but they’re still a lot of fun.
It’s fine. I’ve only said “fine” like five times. It’s a prestige anthology show with a gimmick.
It’s fine.
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Werewolf by Night (1972) #33
It’s a lackluster but not bad Werewolf by Night, which is one hell of a compliment, but what else are you going to do with this book. Writer Doug Moench finally resolves the mysterious Committee out to get Jack Russell since the first issue. Or at least by the third issue. They hired Moon Knight to deliver him, promising $10,000 in U.S. greenbacks, then make Moon Knight wait until human Jack wolfs out. Will mercenary Moon Knight let the Committee turn Wolfman Jack into a relentless killer, probably starting with the Committee’s latest captives—Jack’s best girl, Topaz, and his little sister, Lisa.For a thirty-three issue plus story arc (Marvel Spotlight and Giant-Sizes), the Committee resolution is a bunch of bumbling capitalists confused how step one: werewolf doesn’t lead to step three: profit. I don’t even think the lead one has a name. He’s just the head of the organization who’s been behind every bad thing to happen to Jack since… they killed his mom, didn’t they?
Anyway. Moench’s ready to be done with them.
He’s also apparently done with Lissa being a werewolf. She very definitely doesn’t turn this issue (I think there’s the implication the Committee knows she should be changing too, yet doesn’t cage her). Again, Moench’s ready to be done with a lot.
Sadly, he’s clearing the decks for his worse subplots. Like Raymond Coker in Haiti hunting zombies. Marvel’s added a “cultural insensitivity” to new releases of the issue, but it’s unclear if they’re talking about the characterization of the voodoo priestess and Coker’s Haitian relations or if they’re talking about the LAPD cop telling the Haitian cop he’s worthless and poor.
Either way, it’s nice once the scene’s over. Apparently, Coker is going to fight a zombie of his grandfather with the racist LAPD cop come to Haiti to kill him. I thought the cop was a werewolf now. I’ve lost count of all Werewolf’s cops. There are either two or three. One became a werewolf. I’m sure it’ll matter lots.
There is some exceptionally bad writing and editing in this sequence (and not just the characterizations). Coker’s niece sees zombie great-grandfather or whatever, who died thirty-two years ago. The niece is a kid. Sure, it could be from photographs, but it doesn’t play like it.
So that subplot actually has three separate scenes, not poorly assembled for brevity, just… problematic and lazy.
Then Moench checks in on Buck in the hospital. I forgot Jack almost killed him, and then Moench immediately rolled it back, including all the emotional heft. But checking in on bad subplots without doing anything bad is a wash.
Plus, mixing up the bad isn’t the worst move. The Buck subplot’s bad because it’s narratively craven, and the Coker subplot’s bad because it’s problematic and thin. But neither of them is obnoxious like Moon Knight. Moon Knight’s sucks the life out of the page. And Werewolf’s still got art by Don and Howard Perlin. It doesn’t have much life on the page (though there aren’t any staggeringly bad panels this issue).
The issue’s a cop-out, but… at least the comic’s operating within its limitations. It doesn’t aim high; it doesn’t fall too low. It’s fine. For Moench, Perlin, and Perlin Werewolf by Night anyway.
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Mad Monster Party? (1967, Jules Bass)
Mad Monster Party? spends a solid portion of its runtime only slightly amusing. It’s technically competent stop-motion animation with a charming voice performance from Boris Karloff as Boris von Frankenstein. He’s just discovered the anti-life formula and has become destroyer of ravens, potentially worlds. Having run the gamut from creating life to creating anti-life, Karloff decides it’s time to retire, and he’s leaving the whole thing to nephew Felix Flanken (voiced by Allen Swift). And he’s going to reveal both his achievement and his succession plan at a meeting of the Worldwide Organization of Monsters.
So Karloff invites all the monsters to come down to the island, have a few laughs, have their dreams of world domination crushed.
The opening titles are a usually amusing, always competent series of bits involving the various monsters getting their invitations to the party. There’s Dracula (voiced by Allen Swift), there’s the Invisible Man (voiced by Allen Swift), there’s Dr. Jekyll (voiced by Allen Swift), and there’s Mr. Hyde (voiced by Allen Swift). Swift has two more major characters—the zombie and the Frankenstein Monster. Phyllis Diller plays the Bride of the Frankenstein Monster, though Mad Monster doesn’t do the obvious hair bit.
Finally—at least in terms of unique performers—there’s Gale Garnett. She plays Francesca, Karloff’s ample-bosomed assistant. She thinks she ought to be the heir and starts plotting against Karloff, enlisting the aid of Count Dracula.
Swift plays Dracula as a Borscht Belt Bela Lugosi. Outside Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Swift has a bit for all the voices. Invisible Man is Sydney Greenstreet, specifically in Casablanca, including the fez. The zombie character is Peter Lorre (looks like him too). Felix, the lead (who looks like a variation on Hermey from producer Rankin/Bass’s Rudolph), is Jimmy Stewart. It’s very disconcerting to watch the Stewart bit fail over and over; like, did they really think it would work?
Swift will also voice “Mafia Machiavelli,” who is the chef. It’s a surprisingly intentionally problematic scene with the killer chef threatening the Lorre zombie, who’s busy mooning over Garnett.
Garnett is Mad Monster’s secret weapon. When she does her song about betraying everyone—in alliance, at that time, with Dracula–the movie suddenly gets strangely good. At first, it seems like a brief flash of goodness, but then Garnett keeps going, both in her performance and the occasional song numbers. She and the Felix puppet get a good moonlit duet and such.
There’s a surprise monster—a deus ex machina in a movie about a literal deus ex machina—but there’s enough humor in the finale for the movie to surpass the contrivances. Even the worst characters have some charm to them, and the stop-motion’s always fun. There are a couple of great action sequences, including one coming immediately after Diller and Garnett’s puppets start wrestling, and the soundtrack plays cat yowls. Repeated ones, like the sound editors demanded more, drilling in the “joke.”
But then the movie immediately recovers with a phenomenal action sequence.
Mad Monster Party?’s got lots of moments ranging from fun to actual funny, a surprisingly good performance from Garnett, a fun one from Karloff, way too broad work from Swift, and superb stop-motion animation.
It all evens out well enough.
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Sudden Impact (1983, Clint Eastwood)
At least a third of Sudden Impact is director, producer, and star Eastwood doing a Hitchcock homage starring Sondra Locke. Locke doesn’t speak during the Hitchcock homage sequences; she just walks silently, staring at various things, remembering her horrific origin story, then shooting some rapist in the balls and then the head. Now, Sudden Impact is Dirty Harry 4, coming seven years after the previous entry; Eastwood’s in his fifties now. There aren’t young chippies throwing themselves at him (I mean, Locke’s fourteen years younger, but she’s still a grown woman), but he’s still got to contend with unsympathetic police brass. They don’t understand how dangerous the world has become, and only a man like Dirty Harry can get results.
The movie opens with Locke offing her first rapist, but we don’t know he’s a rapist yet. She’s just killing some guy in a Hitchcock homage. Then it’s off to court for lady judge Lois De Banzie to disrespect Eastwood’s authority and let young punk Kevyn Major Howard back out on the street. Eastwood didn’t have any evidence. Then Eastwood goes and interrupts a coffee shop robbery where he kills the only four Black people in the movie so far, just before Locke has an interaction with some Hispanic toughs. Impact’s main villains will be all white, but the movie is determined to remind the audience cities are full of ethnic types who are just criminals.
Also, one of the main villains will be a lesbian. Audrie Neenan. She hopefully fired her agent after this one.
But we’re getting ahead because it takes Sudden Impact forty minutes to get the actual plot, which will be Eastwood investigating the secrets of coastal city “San Paulo” (filmed in Santa Cruz), where Locke just happens to have returned to kill all her assaulters. See, ten years before, Neenan brought coworker Locke to a party (along with Locke’s little sister) but as a set up for some local boys to rape them (occasionally under Neenan’s direction). Sudden Impact is Eastwood doing a seventies exploitation picture in the eighties, with the Hitchcock vibes, and then all Eastwood’s one-liners about how all those liberals, and intellectuals, and smooth-talkers don’t understand how policing needs to be done. From the business end of a very special .44 Magnum, because it’s the eighties, and there’s got to be some kind of tech angle to it.
Just to pad out the run time, Eastwood also stars a gang war with uncredited Michael V. Gazzo, so there can be lots of shootouts in scenic San Francisco. Eastwood, as a director, does a great job showcasing the locations. Impact’s got a great crew—Joel Cox’s editing is great, and Bruce Surtees’s photography is muted and lush—even if the action set pieces are a bit blah. It’s just Eastwood going from shootout to shootout. Occasionally, boss Bradford Dillman yells at him. Dillman’s back from the previous movie playing the same part but with a different character name. Eastwood’s only friend—his Black friend, no less—is played by Albert Popwell. Popwell’s back from the original Dirty Harry, where he was at the business end of a one-liner; apparently, since 1971, Eastwood rehabilitated him and turned him into a cop.
Better movie, no doubt.
Lalo Schifrin’s music varies from inspired to grating–his Hitchcock-y music for Locke’s great. The opening music’s weird, though, especially since the titles are an homage to The Maltese Falcon’s San Francisco Bay shots. Shame Eastwood didn’t realize they could’ve nodded towards movies with good stories for the plotting.
He’s not good. He’s bored all of the time, annoyed some of it. The director’s cut must be about him having to pass bladder stones. Locke’s awesome during her silent walking around scenes. Once she’s got to talk, she’s terrible. Except when she’s got the exploitative but prestige scene where she tells her catatonic sister how she killed the first rapist. From that scene, it seems like Locke will have some pay-off dramatically.
Not so.
Not even after Eastwood gives her an excellent thriller chase sequence on a carousel.
By the third act, Impact’s gotten over its intentional casual racism and dog whistling. It seems like there’s nothing anyone can do to stop the momentum, especially not after that great thriller sequence. But then it turns out Eastwood had one more homage up his sleeve; for some inexplicable reason, which either has a great story or a tragic coincidence, Eastwood directs his Dirty Harry action scenes like he’s the slasher in a slasher movie.
So bad.
Then it’s nice the end titles have a Roberta Flack song, but it’s not a good Roberta Flack song. Sudden Impact makes some very intentional references to the previous Dirty Harry movies, but only their very seventies technical choices.
Again, the whole thing’s fascinating. But certainly not rewarding. Certainly not any good.
There is—eventually—a cute bulldog, however. Though Eastwood really leans in on bulldog’s farting. Uncomfortably so.
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Dead Man’s Curve (1998, Dan Rosen)
Dead Man’s Curve’s opening titles are intercut with someone meeting with Dana Delany—playing a college campus therapist—and asking questions about signs of suicidal thoughts. Delany makes a joke about how first-time efforts from writer-directors might do it. Then the title card cuts to director Rosen’s writing and directing credit. All his other references are on the nose. Some of the plot involves the latest gaming craze on campus—you write a bunch of names on scraps of paper, mix them together in a glass bowl, then your partner has to identify them–Trivial Pursuit but from when they first invented paper.
There’s a lengthy sequence where the players list off famous female actresses of the era; it’s surprising no one turned to the camera and informed the audience they were the actresses who turned down Keri Russell’s part.
For her part—no pun—Russell does almost all right. It’s a lousy, good-girl coed femme fatale part, and Russell handles a lot of it. Starts falling apart halfway through and never comes back. It’s a bummer because her performance gets more impressive just around the time Matthew Lillard’s takes off, so it seems like it’s a rising tide raises all ships type situation.
Even Lillard cannot hold on for all of Curve’s twists and turns. Rosen homages almost seventy years’ worth of thrillers but forgets he might want some sympathetic characters. While Rosen’s clearly overconfident from jump, he does have some great instincts, and it seems like—given the movie wants to take “nothing is what it seems” to the nth degree—he might pull it off.
But then Russell starts falling apart, Delany goes nowhere, and top-billed Michael Vartan finally assumes the hero spotlight. The real question of Curve is whether or not Vartan is going to be able to hold the water on his own. Rosen knows when Delany’s good; he knows the movie mostly rests on Lillard and spotlights him monologuing at least twice—Rosen knows Vartan isn’t cutting it, but nothing’s to be done. The Curve spills out of Vartan’s barely cupped hands.
And it’s not just about Vartan playing a bland white guy. Randall Batinkoff plays a bland white guy; he’s (relatively) great. Let’s say… surprisingly good. Even though he looks way too old. They’re all supposed to be college seniors; all the guys are clearly in their late twenties.
Russell’s about the right age. She’s Vartan’s girlfriend.
Tamara Marie Watson plays Batinkoff’s girlfriend. He’s terrible to her, so it’s okay his roommates are plotting to kill him. Lillard’s only got a love interest for a scene, though apparently, it’s a steady thing, so her not being around doesn’t help things.
Watson’s awful. She’s in a thankless spot—Batinkoff berates her, and all their friends ignore it because they’re all rich together, and she’s poor. So there’s this wonderful collision of misogyny, patriarchy, and classism.
The movie’s on location at a college campus but on a tight budget. The lack of scale doesn’t help things.
Kevin Ruf plays the dipshit campus cop. He’s terrible.
Dead Man’s Curve doesn’t exactly have its moments, but it has moments where it has potential. None of it pays off. Surprisingly decent soundtrack, though.
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