Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has been one of tremendous progress in terms of my own community projects, as my former housemates gathered to complete our first D&D campaign, and also carry our second me-written one within at most two sessions of completion. It’s been a delight to actually resolve these stories we’ve been crafting for the last several years, even if my efforts to avoid D&D’s generally “roll a dice to decide the outcome”-centered conflicts have been less effective than I’d hoped. We’ve basically got half a table that genuinely enjoys mastering the game’s mechanical systems, and half a table that sees those systems as an awkward translation of the emergent creativity the game is designed to facilitate (myself included), which can at times lead to some strained interactions. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to sending my players to hell for their final adventure, and in the meantime, I’ve got plenty of film reflections for you all. Let’s break down some fresh features in the Week in Review!
First up this week was the film adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. Set in 1862, Deborah Kerr stars as Anna Leonowens, a British school teacher sent to instruct the children of King Mongkut of Siam (Yul Brynner), who is intent on modernizing his nation. Mongkut is a passionate and fiercely intelligent man strung between the past and the future, whose advisor suspects that Anna’s presence will undermine his ability to embody a king’s poise. He is right to worry; Anna undoubtedly changes Mongkut, and Mongkut Anna, as the two spar intellectually and emotionally over the course of her employment.
The King and I was the role that made Yul Brinner a star; he performed the part over 1,200 times on Broadway, and maintained Mongkut’s shaved head as a professional signature long after he’d transitioned to Hollywood. Watching this film, it’s easy to see why Mongkut so raised his profile; Brinner is persistently absorbing in the role, charming and conflicted and stranded between worlds, frequently raising very good questions as to why Anna possesses some or another assumption about life, yet also playful in his application of his king’s mandate. Brinner is fantastic in absolutely everything I’ve seen him in (The Magnificent Seven, The Ten Commandments, Westworld), but I’ve never seen him play a heartthrob before, and he is absolutely swoon-worthy.
The rest of the production is suitably lavish, as well – excellent costuming and set design, with worthy actors playing out the rest of the roles, including a variety of fine children’s performances. But even our ostensible protagonist Anna fades in the presence of Mongkat, so compelling is Brinner’s charisma. The show is essentially constructed around the process of Anna falling for Mongkat, which means it’s all about us in the audience falling for him as well, and Brinner simply could not make it easier. In his easy bluster and guarded charms, he actually feels reminiscent of anime’s tsunderes; one standout scene involves him asking Anna to “guess his strategy” in order to surreptitiously seek her advice, but there are many similar examples of Mongkat being so earnest and likable it’s hard not to fall in love. A generous feature, one that leaves you with the feeling you’ve been forced to bid farewell to Brinner far too soon.
Next up was another Shaw Brothers feature, the somewhat awkwardly titled Dirty Ho. The ever-welcome Gordon Liu stars as Master Wang, an alleged jewelry dealer who is secretly the 11th prince of Manchuria. Wang is perfectly happy to maintain an idle life of jewelry dealing and art appreciation, concealing his formidable martial arts skills even as he contends with the plots of a local jewelry thief (the titular Ho Ching, played by Wong Yue). However, when his brother’s assassins discover his true identity, Wang will have to team up with his nemesis-slash-apprentice to save his own skin.
Basically any Shaw Brothers production starring Gordon Liu is destined to be an excellent time, and Dirty Ho demonstrates both the man’s extraordinary physical prowess and his winning comic sensibilities. The trick to this film is his attempts to conceal his abilities, as he pretends to disarm opponents and win fights through pure happenstance, rather than martial arts ability. The result is a visually delightful comedy of errors, with Liu pinning his opponents’ limbs via tables and chairs, deftly dodging blades while commenting on their age and artistry, or propelling a maid like a marionette, declaring her his “bodyguard” as he flings her limbs to dodge and counter.
Simply presenting an exciting, convincing martial arts bout between two skilled combatants is no easy feat; Liu doing so while pretending he’s simply inspecting art and appreciating wine is something else entirely, a flex of one of cinema’s all-time greatest martial artists. Between those displays, the late-film open battles, and the natural chemistry of Liu and Yue, Dirty Ho proves itself a superior feature in all respects, and an easy entry point to the venerable Shaw Brothers collection.
Our next viewing was Project Gemini, a recent Russian feature about a spacefaring mission intended to terraform a distant planet. A crew of intrepid pilots accompany a creepy magical sphere through some kind of wormhole; unfortunately, the creepy sphere fucks up their traversal, and they end up being flung far into the earth’s past. Then some monsters emerge, deaths stack up, gotta deal with the sphere, etcetera.
There’s little to say about Project Gemini because there’s little reason to recommend it; the film is one hundred percent a riff on the original Alien, and not a particularly good one. Same claustrophobic industrial corridors, same eerie lunar walks, same nasty kills, but with no passionate performances, no real sense of tension, and none of Ridley Scott’s visual invention. Taking inspiration from a prior film is far from a crime, but as has been said before, a film that simply reminds you of a better film you could be watching is bound to fail.
Speaking of films that only remind you of better films you could be watching, we also attempted to check out The Baker, a riff on Taken or John Wick starring Ron Perlman as the titular baker, who must pick up the torch after his son is killed in an unfortunate drug-running incident. Perlman is a delightful physical presence, but The Baker has no idea how to use his physicality to construct a compelling action scene – it instead attempts to ride almost entirely on tone, establishing an ostensibly unspoken but in truth merely superficial bond between Perlman and his mute granddaughter, and featuring plentiful scenes of Perlman moodily driving around his decaying city. Even with such a commanding presence at the lead, this emperor is unmistakably bereft of clothes.
Our final viewing of the week was Talk to Me, a recent horror feature starring Sophie Wilde as Mia, an awkward seventeen-year-old who’s feeling all the more isolated on the two-year-anniversary of her mother’s suicide. Mia finds solace in her close relationship with her best friend Jade and Jade’s younger brother Riley, joining them on an expedition to check out the town’s hottest new craze: seances featuring a mysterious rune-inscribed hand, which their friends claim let people talk with the dead. Eager to fit in, Mia volunteers to grapple with the hand, and finds herself trapped as the lines between the living and the dead become increasingly blurry.
Talk to Me bears its “prestige horror” influences proudly (It Follows, The Babadook, a touch of Hereditary), but never feels genuinely derivative. The intersection of ritual, adolescent identity-forging, and grief is fertile ground for all manner of horror stories, and Talk to Me finds its own voice quite literally, in the exceedingly lived-in dialogue and convincingly insecure performances of its lead actors. Mia, Jade, and Riley talk around their feelings in the way of all anxious and desperate-to-be-cool teens, while the one-upmanship of their gatherings carries an edge of menace that barely requires any supernatural spice. The ambiguity of the spirits they summon matches the ambiguity of their own feelings; when characters get hurt, neither the cast nor the audience can definitively assign blame.
The rituals that define the film’s threat are also a marvelous riff on Bloody Mary-style traditions, with the ambiguity of what exactly is happening, and who precisely is being contacted, allowing the audience to share in the cast’s giddy, nervous curiosity. The threat of spectral invaders is consistently tethered to the mundane horror of grief and social ostracization; in fact, if anything, I could have used a little more supernatural shocks, as my one complaint regarding the film is that it never actually scared me. One truly horrifying setpiece in the manner of the film’s influences would have done it a world of good (though the central ritual mishap comes close) – as is, it’s a remarkably promising debut for its fresh-from-Youtube directors.
