Get Touched Back

TV Review: Fringe, "Reciprocity"

Spoilers ahead. Following Fringe's strong return last week is an episode with a number of problems, or at least enough silly moments to have me rolling my eyes. It is still a good episode but it's probably among the weakest of the season. Massive Dynamic has reconstructed the universe-shattering doomsday device, but can't figure out what it does or how to power it, and it is unresponsive to all input until Peter enters the room and gets a nosebleed. Until now, the doomsday device has kind of been a side project of importance to the series but never thrown around in our faces. Seeing it full constructed in a hangar-sized laboratory raised some concerns, chiefly: why the hell did they build it? The interdimensional arms race only makes so much sense, and the most widely accepted theory seems to be that the doomsday device with either destroy our universe or both. Broyles, Nina, and Peter all insist that they need to understand what it does so that they can combat it, and only Walter is the voice of dissent, pointing out that they are building a doomsday device, and his concerns are dismissed as Walter's usual crazy diatribes. Plus, since it's Massive Dynamic that's running the show and Walter owns it, I don't see why he can't just shut down the operation completely. I can ignore these questions and enjoy the show, but it would be nice if we had more logical reasoning from our major characters.

So anyway, meanwhile Fauxlivia's computer has been decrypted and right afterwards, people identified as shapeshifters start popping up executed with their hard-drives removed. The shapeshifters are still a cool device and the series seems to know well enough to keep them scattered so that we're not getting bored of them. Making them the victims here as opposed to the predators they usually are does dull their teeth a bit, though, and I found myself really missing a cool headlining villain like Newton. Having to review Fauxlivia's data brings once again brings up the newfound tension between Peter and Olivia, but in the end it works to solve as opposed to exacerbate the problem, which is becoming something of a pattern that I hope they don't stretch too thin. Even here I was getting a little tired of the same conversation happening between them.

Also meanwhile, Walter is continuing his attempts to regrow the parts of his brain that were lost so that he can stand toe to toe with Walternate, smartswise. This was a somewhat silly subplot last week and it only gets worse this episode, as after getting assistance from Nina, Walter takes an unlabelled formula which turns out to be ape DNA, and then he starts acting like a monkey. Luckily, this never goes beyond having cravings for bananas and making animal grunts, but it was still a facepalm moment. I hope that they wrap this thing up soon, because it sort of undercuts the implication we faced last season that pre-lobotomized Walter was not a good guy, and it will cement it if he manages to recover his losses and is still doddering apologetic Walter.

One of the major drawbacks of this episode was that it was very focused on Peter and had to thusly lean heavily on Joshua Jackson and his acting abilities. Peter's a weak link on the show for a number of reasons, chiefly Joshua Jackson, but also because he's been written as some kind of genius jack-of-all-trades, which comes back into play here when it's revealed that it's Peter tracking down and killing the shapeshifters. Not only is he a master cryptologist, as he solves Fauxlivia's cipher before Astrid, a team of FBI code-breakers, and even Olivia herself manage to, but he's also an exacting assassin able to overcome shapeshifting cyborg agents even when they get the drop on him. Making Peter more sinister may be a smart move, as I find bad actors have an easier time acting evil (see Sarah Michelle Gellar as the First), but it also threatens to pull Peter back into the centre of the show when he'd been sidelined most of the season by much more interesting characters and plotlines. I guess we'll have to wait and see. This Walter and Peter keep a secret from Olivia thing is dangerously similar to Walter and Olivia keeping a secret from Peter last season.

I'm bashing the episode a lot but it was still better than most shit on TV, and the final fight between Peter and the shapeshifter was more exciting than not. I hope the writers inject a new bad guy into the show soon, though, because as threatening as Fauxlivia, Walternate, and the other Fringe division are, they're pretty much non-entities, and even so are no match for the exacting villainy of earlier foes like David Robert Jones and Newton.

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

A Twin Peaks Retrospective

Watching Twin Peaks today, it's easy to see the ways it impacted a lot of television drama to follow, perhaps even moreso in the wake of Lost. A great, solid story, excellent cast and unique style made it, at its best, one of my favourite series. But at its worst, unfortunately, it really really sucked.

David Lynch seems to be something of a take-it-or-leave-it kind of guy. I've heard a lot of criticism lodged at him and it's sometimes difficult to argue with. Not everyone is satisfied coming away from a movie unsure of what actually happened in it. Twin Peaks is a more accessible example of his work in many ways, maybe because it was tempered by the involvement of Mark Frost. But that's just a guess, since I don't know much about the rest of Frost's catalogue except for his more recent and disappointing efforts. Fantastic Four, for example. I mean, geez.

It's true that the series started to fall apart and unraveled with alarming speed after Laura Palmer's killer was revealed. Storylines became increasingly fragmentary, irrelevant, and zany - I suspect the writers mistook the first season's surrealism for absurdity. Nadine gets amnesia and becomes convinced she's in high school; James becomes involved in a murder plot at some remote lavish estate; Ben and Catherine engage in an over-convoluted battle for the Ghostwood development. It suffered too from leaning heavily on the new antagonist, Windom Earle, who had a cool backstory but ultimately was played too flamboyantly insane by Kenneth Welsh. His elaborate metaphorical chess game with Cooper was too long and pointless. Earle became more interesting in the last couple of episodes, when his ultimate motives were revealed and he started directing his ruthlessness at characters we actually cared about. Maybe if Lynch had stayed on he could've been a real hit, but especially when considered in contrast to the earlier villains of the series, he fell way short.

There's a lot of places to lay the blame for why the series deteriorated. The network was eager to give an audience clamouring for the identity of Laura Palmer's killer what they wanted; it was apparently their hands in the pot that ultimately drove David Lynch to leave the show, and it floundered aimlessly without him. Had he just toughed it out and stayed on, maybe we would've been spared some of the lower points of the series. Low points such as the episode directed by Diane Keaton, which quite profoundly sucked despite Keaton's trying so very very hard (you could tell). Of course there's no use pointing fingers now, twenty years after the fact, and Lynch's return on the finale and finishing off the saga with the film Fire Walk With Me, ending the whole thing on a high note. In similar fashion, I'm now going to move on to the good things about the series.

When the reflection of set dresser Frank Silva was accidentally caught in a mirror during the filming of a dream sequence in the pilot, Bob was born. And man, what a stumble-upon. Bob never looked otherworldly; he wore regular clothing, no makeup, and had regular enough features, and yet his seedy grin and wild eyes managed to convey something so sinister and insane it made you believe - or maybe want to believe - that this wasn't a man so much as it was a creature. Ultimately Bob was the villain of Twin Peaks - the Big Bad of the whole show - and it's a mantle he carried well. He appeared only fleetingly, in disturbing dreams and visions, and there was never any elaboration on his character. What he is, what he wants, and what he can do were never explained in any coherent fashion. Defeating Bob never even seemed to be a goal, if indeed it's at all a possibility. He was occasionally thwarted, though to small degrees and at great cost. In the Twin Peaks approach to evil, that's the best you seem to be able to hope for.
 

As is usual of David Lynch's work, Twin Peaks was chock full of hot babes, and their queen was Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne. Audrey's involvement in the plot as a friend of Laura's was pivotal, to be sure, but what I liked most about her was her relationship with the protagonist, Dale Cooper. Audrey and Cooper had an immediate attraction for each other from the first scene they share. Audrey found Cooper fascinating, and came to be an important asset to his investigation purely out of an effort to impress him and insinuate herself into his life. They exchanged flirtations and wistful gazes culminating in a pretty powerful scene in the finale of season 1, in which Cooper came back to his hotel room to find Audrey naked on his bed. Audrey never seemed like a silly little girl with a crush, she was always a capable and self-reliant character, and her feelings for Cooper were never capricious or juvenile - perhaps reinforced by the fact that Cooper shared them. His professionalism and duty always prevented him from taking it anywhere, but that only made it feel more tragic. In season 2 Audrey and Cooper's storylines branched away from each other, and they were both given other love interests (Billy Zane and Heather Graham) to keep them occupied. Watching those romances play out only made me appreciate the quiet passion they shared which was far more meaningful and way sexier, and a testament to the acting chops of both.
 
Twin Peaks followed in many ways the classical structure of a soap opera - the whole series spanned a relatively short period of time, was set in a small town, and involved a number of families. This was probably handled best in the case of the Renault brothers, a French-Canadian family of criminals with hands in illegal gambling, prostitution, and drug running. The Renaults were introduced one at a time, and each was more ruthless than the last. I really love this fashion of shaping villains, it requires patience and forethought but really puts a sense of dread in the heart of your audience. By the time the eldest of the Renaults appeared, we knew this was a man who was very dangerous and depraved, and he lived up to that expectation well. The Renault brothers were only occasionally in the spotlight, but even so, they really emphasized to me how well crafted the earlier series was in contrast to its later episodes. Jean Renault seemed a much more serious and deadly adversary than even Windom Earle who came to monopolize the villainy of the last episodes.
 
The concept of the Black Lodge is introduced as a dwelling place of strange spirits, interpreted in visions and dreams as a minimally furnished room with a checkerboard floor walled by rich red curtains. There's no scene set in it that isn't worth watching. By filming the characters speaking and moving in reverse and then playing the footage backwards, Lynch created an incredibly alien yet recognizable atmosphere, and some sequences within the Black Lodge are extremely unsettling despite having no outright gruesome or disturbing imagery. The Black Lodge was instrumental in making Twin Peaks what it was, and remains one of the most memorable trademarks of the series to this day. 
 
Finally, one of the greatest gems the show uncovered was actress Sheryl Lee, who played Laura Palmer, the dead girl whose murder the series revolved around. Sheryl Lee's not done much since, which is odd, since her performance of Laura is a highlight of the show. Lynch was so impressed that he gave her a second role as Laura's cousin Maddy Ferguson, but Lee's major showcase was the movie Fire Walk With Me that capped off the series and followed Laura in the days before she was killed. Lee brought to the role the winning smile of a popular high school knockout, but also a very impressive portrayal of all-consuming anxiousness and trauma that brought Laura to and beyond the brink of insanity. The movement away from Laura's character in the second season was probably one of the show's more subtle pitfalls.
 
Twin Peaks has often invited comparison, but there's not been anything like it since and I can't imagine there will be any time soon. It's something of an investment to watch, but to those who are wary I say dive right the fuck in, and to those who are having trouble slogging through the last half of the second season, I say steel yourselves and carry on. Finishing the series is its own dark reward.

Where Paradise Ends

Movie Review: Innocence

This review may have spoilers. I guess that depends on what constitutes a spoiler. Innocence isn't really a movie that could be spoiled, but I don't know if just saying that spoils the movie. If I'm already treading on dubious territory, you should probably turn back now.

Innocence, a 2004 film by director Lucile Hadzhilalilovic, begins with a young girl being released from a locked coffin by six slightly older girls in matching white dresses and different coloured ribbons in their hair. They take her in, accept her as one of their own, and explain that this quaint little house in this verdant and idyllic forest is now her home. Details come slowly. There are five other houses in the park, each with their own set of girls. The park is surrounded by a wall; if they try to escape, the girls will be "punished." During the day, the girls learn science and dancing from adult instructors, and at night they are tended to by elderly women. At nine o'clock, the eldest girl leaves the house and goes somewhere, and the rest of the girls go to bed at ten.

There's something about this movie that makes you look for a big reveal. I half-expected it to become a science fiction movie, and at the very least, I thought one little girl was going to get raped. It's called Innocence, for god's sake. But the audience is never let in on the secrets guarded by the girls' caretakers, and it's at times difficult to know whether or not the caretakers know these secrets themselves. We know whatever the girls know, and it's not much of anything.

The park in Innocence is a lot like childhood itself. It seems sinister as often as it seems friendly, and there are rules that are unclear, consequences that are also unclear, and elaborate systems predicated on reasoning which is again unclear. The film focuses primarily and one at a time on Zoe Auclair's Iris, the youngest girl of the house who arrives at the beginning of the film; Lea Bridarolli's Alice, who is near the middle of the age range; and Bérangère Haubruge's eldest girl and junior matriarch Bianca. Each girl is faced with specific concerns - Iris tries to learn the rules and get along with the others, Alice is focused on a dance recital whose winner is chosen to leave the park early, and Bianca is attempting to prepare her protege Nadia to take her place when she leaves for good. But despite their varying goals, they still have many things in common - they have theories about the outside world but are unsure what to expect, they are confused about the elements at play in the park and have no idea what they mean, and they at times resent their virtual imprisonment yet fear moving beyond it.

In one scene Alice ventures to the wall surrounding the park and climbs it to successfully peer over the other side. As she's climbing, it's easy for the audience to get caught up in guessing what she will see, as if this is the scene that will explain the rest of the movie for us. Will it be a dystopian ruin?  Will it be an endless sea? But what she finds is just more of the same. Though they might not be contained to single instances like in the case of Alice, I feel like children face the same revelations as they grow up. Adults walk around like they know something children don't, and we all come to hope that we'll stumble upon whatever secret it is that they know that makes the world make any kind of sense. In Innocence, as in the transition from child to adulthood, the only big reveal is that there are no secrets to learn.

Vacation

Let's Make Sandwiches

October 2006

This installment turned out to be a bit controversial. After two weeks in a row of comics involving explosions, we decided to give explosions a rest, but every idea we had ended with an explosion. So we ended up with this. What we were going for was to personify inanimate objects and equate their relationship to one of predator and prey. Apparently the best we could come up with was a pencil hunted by a pencil sharpener. Unfortunately, setting it in Africa and having one character forcefully penetrate another from behind led to it being misinterpreted as a rape, and the whole comic further misinterpreted as being about the rampant AIDS crisis in Africa.

Bigger Badder Louder Meaner

Part 2 of a Mortal Kombat Retrospective

Only a year after Mortal Kombat's release came its bombastic successor. Mortal Kombat II expanded on the original in many obvious ways, but in general it made the fighting considerably faster, added multiple finishing moves, and movesets with greater variety. The style of the game was darker, and the story more involved, although the serious tone was undercut by the addition of Friendships and Babalities, silly finishing moves that allowed victors alternatives to killing their opponents. Nevertheless, setting the game in Outworld allowed the backgrounds to look considerably more creepy and weird, and even with the joke finishers it stands as one of the more atmospheric games in the series.

The game leaned heavily on the Malibu comic to do its storytelling for it, but established that in the final stages of the tournament, Liu Kang had engaged Shang Tsung and bested him. Sonya, Kano, and Johnny Cage fought Goro, but after Shang Tsung's defeat, the island began to deteriorate beneath their feet, and only Cage was saved due to Rayden's intervention. Though Goro disappeared, Sonya and Kano were recovered by Shang Tsung's forces and brought back to Outworld as they fled. During the chaos, Scorpion confronted Sub-Zero and killed him, then vanished back to the Netherealm, his task complete. Shang Tsung's master, Shao Kahn, was furious as Shang Tsung's failure to win conquest of the Earthrealm, and decided to host his own tournament in Outworld as opposed to waiting another ten generations.

Aside from Sonya and Kano, all the fighters from Mortal Kombat returned, as well as a revitalized Shang Tsung and former hidden character Reptile. Newcomers included Baraka, the leader of Shao Kahn's mutant army; Kung Lao, descendant of the original hero who fell to Goro and a friend of Liu Kang's; Jax, another FBI agent looking for Sonya; Kitana, Shao Kahn's daughter and personal assassin, and her twin sister Mileena. Capitalizing on the popularity of the many secrets of its predecessor, the game also featured three challenging hidden fighters - silhouette Noob Saibot, green ninja Jade, and grey Lin Kuei Smoke. And to round out the bosses, Kintaro preceded Shao Kahn himself.

My friend Derek got Mortal Kombat II for the Genesis and I remember going over and playing the fuck out of it before borrowing it for a very long (inexcusably long) time. Luckily there was no need for a blood code this time. I became strong with Baraka, Mileena, and Reptile, but there were no outright bad characters and they all had fairly diverse movesets. Mortal Kombat II remains my favourite of the 2D sprite era, and it was this game that really got my into the franchise and its narrative, despite being frustrated by its fragmentary and disjointed telling.

I think Mortal Kombat II reached a peak that the series never really got back again even with its stronger late-generation titles. I know lots of fans consider Mortal Kombat II to be the best game in the series, and I've heard it called one of the best fighting games of all time. It was so popular that there were multiple reports of fans breaking into arcade machines and stealing the boards so they could install them on their own arcades and play them at home.

I Will Civilize This Land

Movie Review: The Proposition

I already knew Nick Cave was super cool. Maybe not the King of Cool but easily the Grand Admiral or something. Not only has he enjoyed large-scale musical success even while indulging his less mainstream predilections, but he's also been featured in wicked movies, is a goddamn novelist, is from Australia, and looks sexy even if he's never what I would call "traditionally handsome." Oh and then, it turns out, he wrote a 2005 film called The Proposition, which is nothing if not a cool movie.

The Proposition is a western movie that takes place in Australia. The outlaw Burns brothers are captured by lawman Captain Stanley, who keeps the younger Mikey and sends the older Charlie to kill their eldest brother and depraved family patriarch Arthur or Mikey is to die. The film focuses equally on Guy Pearce as Charlie and Ray Winstone as Stanley, and benefits on excellent actors not only for these two leads but the surprisingly extensive supporting cast as well.

The Proposition is one of what I'd call a modern tradition of westerns, with less focus on grandiose machismo and more on the realism of the brutality of that time, and its effect on those who lived through it. Setting it in Australia at a time when much of the country was still essentially lawless gives it a particular fixation on the line between civilization and the wild, and in an extension of that, the separation of what makes us people as opposed to animals. Captain Stanley tries to bring order to an untamed land, and in his home we see an island of Imperial nicety amidst a harsh and feral desert. His tactics are gruesome, and yet he's one of the more noble characters in the film - which is saying something. Even Emily Watson as his wife Martha, struggling to remain composed, gives into her dark animal impulses when it comes down to it. Charlie, meanwhile, knows the wild well and has lived amongst people who feel no need to be any better than animals, killing indiscriminately as it suits them, and seeks to remove himself to something better. Unfortunately for Charlie, the film proposes that civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be.

It's always hot. There are flies everywhere and in multitudes. The inhabitants in this world almost seem to begrudge their being in it. For a film made by two Australians, it is starkly unsentimental about Australia, indifferent to the cruelty of its history. It easily stands its ground amidst all the other high profile westerns that came out in the past few years.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Movie Review: Enter the Void

I imagine I'm quoting what a number of movie critics have already said, but hardcore weirdo Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void is a film unlike anything else out there. Which sounds like an overblown compliment, but it comes with ups and downs. Expecting anything from it is probably a mistake. If you stop and ask yourself what's going on, you'll probably be disappointed. I have a feeling it's a movie that benefits greatly from heavy drug use, and would recommend it to anyone looking for something to watch for their next acid trip. I would, however, advise against it for people with epilepsy or anything like it, as the bombastically frenetic opening alone will likely hospitalize them.

Once you get past the main titles it grinds to an incredibly slow pace. The film is told entirely from the first-person perspective of Oscar, a low-level American drug dealer living in Tokyo and played by Nathaniel Brown. While he's still alive, the cinematography emulates human vision with a number of details that sell it well, the camera properly jostling and frequently "blinking," and shortly into it we are treated to a sequence of Oscar's drugged out hallucinations. After musing with his sister, Paz de la Heurta's Linda, he travels with fellow junkie and best friend Alex played by Cyril Roy, and Alex explains the philosophy of life after death according to Tibetan Buddhism. The spirit lingers and observes until it is reborn. Afterwards, Oscar walks into a drug bust, everything goes to shit, he dies, and his spirit lingers and observes.

What follows is two hours of stream of consciousness storytelling. Oscar, or whatever it is that remains of him, files through memories, spirals into surreal flashes, ruminates on his life and the lives of his friends, and we watch him do it. There's a lot of down-time, repetition, and psychedelically kaleidoscopic light shows. Scenes flow into each other with the same jilted rhythm that thoughts do. At some points the audience is presented with imagery that reminds us of an earlier scene, and then see that earlier scene immediately repeated. It's disorienting at times, but worth experiencing.

That said, Enter the Void doesn't escape all criticism. While it tells a story in a spectacularly unique way, the story it tells has very long portions that aren't that interesting. It's made worse by leading man Nathaniel Brown, who isn't actually an actor and it shows. His delivery of inner monologue felt like watching a Youtube video. The flashbacks manage to remedy that by casting two pretty phenomenal children, Jesse Kuhn and Emily Alyn Lind, to play the young versions of Oscar and Linda respectively - these kids have incredibly demanding, highly emotive roles and perform them so convincingly it can be upsetting. Though his flashbacks reveal a great depth in Oscar, this never comes across in Brown. Ultimately the premise - an exploration of the death of a life shaped so heavily by death - is cool, but all the characters kind of suck (with the exception of scene-stealing and underused Alex) so it's difficult at times to give a shit about them.

For a movie that goes all out in so many ways, it feels like it's holding back in some key ones. Enter the Void is full of what seems to be unsimulated sex, and while there are frequent and explicit suggestions that Oscar has been romantically involved with both his good friend Victor played by Olly Alexander, as well as his sister Linda, we never see any of these sexual encounters, and in a stream of consciousness we would. There's also no gay sex involving Oscar's hardcore gay drug dealer Bruno (Ed Spears), including the sex scene he's involved in. We got one guy-on-guy blow job that's obviously fake, which I guess is something, but again: this is a film flush with graphic sex, but the rule seems to be only so long as it's a penis going into a vagina it's not related to. Blame international censorship complications or whatever, but this isn't a movie that's going to get wide release, so they might as well just go all out.

I'll say that Enter the Void is guilty of trying a bit too hard, but it can't be offhandedly discounted despite it's shortfalls. It's a really cool movie that merits viewing (if perhaps not owning), and I can see it being the inspiration for a better film later. Which might sound like a dick thing to say, but regardless, Noé has achieved something very interesting here that deserves to be paid attention to.