Just watched...

...the delightful "Everything Everywhere All At Once."

With a name like that, it could be a Charlie Kaufman film. Is it a fantasy, multiverse/alternate reality story? Yes. Is it a statement about existence and human connection? Yes. Is it a comedy or drama? Yes. It stars Michelle Yeoh, so is it a martial arts film? Of course. Is it a love story? Yes, on a few levels.

Poor Evelyn Wang (the funny, touching, incredibly talented Michelle Yeoh) is being audited by the IRS with her family laundry business vivisected in front of her by a grizzled, irritable IRS worker named Deirdre Beaubeirdre (the hilarious--and frightening!--Jamie Lee Curtis). Her husband has served her divorce papers. And she does not know how to handle introducing her daughter's girlfriend to her aged, very traditional and presumably homophobic father. So she does not have time for much of anything else, until figures from parallel universes convince her to save the entire multiverse from a dark, evil force bent on ending all space and time. It is a mindbender, it is a kooky zany silly romp, it is a comedy, it is a love story, and it is a fantastic action film with seamless fight sequences that never feel like they are inserted from some other kind of "kung fu" film. The special mix works well and is marvelously engaging. Look at the trailer below to get a hint of the energy and texture of this wonderful film. I loved every second of it from the supremely imaginative script to the acting to the sets to the choreographed fight scenes to the costumes!

Recommend? YES, it is a great colorful explosion of a film, not too arty and not pandering. It's juuuuuust right with a stellar cast and direction from Daniels.

https://a24films.com/films/everything-everywhere-all-at-once

BEAUTY: Ceramics--Godeleine de Rosamel

The sweet, whimsical ceramic work of Godeleine de Rosamel is enchanting. I love how her figures are unidentifiable mash-ups of animals and humans and nature spirits. I love even more that she has pieces of driftwood perched on their heads. At first I took these for stylized horns, but the more I saw of her figures, I wondered about that assumption.

http://www.gderosamel.com/

de Rosamel's lumbering, lovable animals remind me of a poem I wrote many years ago.

Dense Beasts

I know of a place
that’s much darker,
where I can hear them
talking to each other
from the forest.
I crouch by the trees
and listen to them
jabber.
I can hear their
innocence
in the noises they make.
I can hear it
in their chirping,
in their grunting,
in their sigh
and the beasts
from the forest say,
“It’s OK.
We know what’s wrong.”

Through the trees
I see their wide button eyes
shining in the dark.
I can feel
their warm fur.
I hear them breathing
and chattering,
they don’t mean harm.
Sitting on branches,
sleeping in dirt,
the beasts say,
“It’s OK.
We know what’s going on.
We’ll stay here.”

©JEF 1983

"Fantasy" by Wildhart

Smooth, sultry..."Fantasy" by Wildhart, a trio from Gothenburg, Sweden.

http://wildhart.se/

Currently watching...

..."The Magicians" on Syfy while I have had the stomach flu for several days. This bug hit me hard and I was really not in a position to do much of anything but catch up on what's on the DVR in between naps (um, very long naps).

Maybe it's because I have been steeped in that weird, sick, delirium/fever dream way of looking at reality when one is ill but the show just struck me right. Based on author Lev Grossman's Magic Trilogy (THE MAGICIANS, THE MAGICIAN KING and THE MAGICIAN'S LAND), the story could be compared to a cross between the Harry Potter and Narnia books but with clear adult themes. I've not read the books, but I can see the comparison. Yet it feels a little unfair to suggest such an idea because somehow it all seems fresh. Quentin Coldwater (played by Jason Ralph) grew up reading a series of books called "Fillory and Further," about three British siblings who can enter a magical realm through a tall case clock (invoking Narnia) and spends his life longing for a sense of magic here and now. He gets his wish when he is summoned to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy where he learns that, indeed, magic is real and that there is a reason he feels a connection to the books he loves.

The story presents the actual practice of magic not in a Harry Potter way, but more in a Harry Dresden way (previously here) in which magic is a physical act that requires energy. To create something, that something must come from something else. And Newton's Third Law plays a big role too: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." It's fun to see "magic" more as science than impossibility. After all, Arthur Clarke himself suggested that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Go to the official website at Syfy to watch the first four episodes if your DVR can't find them...
http://www.syfy.com/themagicians

Just watched...

...the 2014 Daniel Radcliffe film "Horns."

I watched this film without knowing much about it. Yes, I had seen a trailer, but as we know, trailers are often one-note. So, without knowing that it was directed by Alexandre Aja (whose resumé boasts "The Hills Have Eyes" and, ahem, "Piranha 3D") and that the script is based on a story by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King), I settled in.

We follow Ignatius, known in the film as Ig, (Daniel Radcliffe) a young man who is accused of murdering his young girlfriend (played by Juno Temple). But the catch--and the premise of the film is--he didn't do it. Ah, a crime story. But the sudden appearance of horns on Ig's head (hence the name of the film) veers us off into a horror story. And that's okay. Genre mash-ups can be fun and at this point in the film, it seemed to be working just fine. A who-dunit fantasy horror story is fun. Everyone in the cast is great. Radcliffe has proven himself to be a very talented, versatile actor and I am glad he made the leap from child star. He deserves it. And his American accent is really quite good! The art direction and special effects are marvelous too--the horns looks absolutely real.

But as the film progressed, I had a little trouble with the direction of the story...or perhaps I should say that I had trouble with its own internal logic the story itself generates. Joe Hill makes Ig turn into some kind of devil, paying for a sin, or becoming evil since he, according to the people of the town he lives in, committed an evil act. But we the audience know he didn't commit murder and has done absolutely nothing wrong. So why does he have to turn into a devil and suffer? The concept itself seems totally wrong and counter to what they story is about. Ig eventually does discover the identity of the true murderer but at that point, the trajectory of the inconsistency is cemented and unfortunately, the horns are never explained to Ig or to us, the audience. Oh well. It's a hoot while it lasts, and there are a lot of great visual puns and black comedic moments on the way to a gruesome and non-sensical ending. Don't get me wrong: I don't expect a fantasy film to make everyday, real-world logical sense. Of course not. I adore fantasy and have had great fun with, and profound reactions to horror films. But I do expect things to make sense within the fantasy world if that is what an author or filmmaker is going to use as a vehicle to tell a story. Once I found out that Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King, I realized that the apple falls close to the tree...I am not a fan of Stephen King who seems to have had only a handful of good ideas in him which he exhausted decades ago. A lot of King's novels have left me scratching my head at the end and I gave up reading him long ago. And the fact that King hates Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," truly the best adaptation of any of King's stories, tells me all I need to know about his sensibilities. I guess Hill grew up around his father's stunted ideas.

Recommend? Um...I guess so. Yeah, sure, why not. Good acting. Good effects. Just don't expect fullfillment or for the partiuclars of the story to make sense.

BEAUTY: Painting--Toshio Ebine

Japanese painter Toshio Ebine creates vast, windswept scenes full of balloons, lone animals, and a sense of odd foreboding in what should, by rights, be sweet illustrations for children's books. Yet there's something about it all that feels a bit off, like a Miyazaki film...

Top to bottom: Forgotten Railway; Fox and Fireworks; Into Somewhere Dream; Move On! Move On!; Nocturne; Star Falls; The Other Side

http://ebineyland.deviantart.com/

Just finished reading...

...SKIN GAME, the most recent novel in the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher.

In a past review of another Dresden book, I was going to write that the Dresden Files books are a guilty pleasure of mine, but when I stop to think about that turn of phrase, I simply don't feel guilty. I like them--even though I am not a "fan-boy," a role-playing gamer, or a Comic-Con attendee. Jim Butcher has created a total world with a stunning variety of creatures, animals, people, places, and history that are all based on or around ideas of "magic." For those unfamiliar, Harry Dresden is a Private Investigator and modern day wizard in Chicago, and across fourteen--now fifteen--books, we have discovered wizards, monsters, vampires, fairies, ghosts, goblins, ghouls, angels, shape shifters, and other supernatural beings, in a sort of hybrid of Sam Spade and "The X-Files." Lest this sound a tad too Dungeons and Dragons/ role play for some, Butcher has a wonderful way of presenting these stories rooted in reality. He makes everything seem so utterly possible and believable... and I will tell you again that I am not a D&D fan. What I particularly like about the Dresden series is that everything is true: Butcher puts in everyone's gods and monsters, from across all time and all cultures. Greek gods are real, Norse gods are real, Native American beliefs are real, there is a heaven and a hell, but then the rest of the world as well as the supernatural world operates as if there is no heaven or hell. It's all true and it all exists side by side. I wouldn't be surprised if, in some future book, we meet Krishna, Shiva, or Ganesh!

This newest installation in the series, SKIN GAME, is just as fast (it moves at break-neck speed), fun, entertaining, suspenseful, funny, and wildly imaginative as the fourteen that came before it. Jim Butcher is one of those writers who knows exactly how to end a chapter so that you can't wait to start the next one... which leads to many late nights ("Oh, I'll just read one more chapter, then go to bed..." and this is of course followed by, "Well, just this one more, this will be the last one..."). He has a talent for ending chapters in mid-action, mid-plot, mid-secret-being-revealed, so one MUST start the next chapter. As you can imagine, this makes it hard to actually turn the light out and go to sleep when reading at night.

If you haven't followed any of the Dresden books, I certainly recommend them and it is not too late to get caught up. Butcher plans twenty-ish books in the Dresden Files series which will be finalized with a trilogy he has already titled (and presumably outlined!). In this installation, Harry, in his role as Winter Knight to Mab the Queen of Air and Dark, is loaned out to a rival to pay off a debt. But the rival turns out to be a demon Harry has fought in the past. And this demon's plan is to break into a vault and steal one of the most precious and powerful objects in all space and time. Regular readers have the pleasure of catching up with old characters, some of whom come to occupy a very central place in the supernatural world once again. I won't say any more for fear of spoiling the twisty plot and surprises. Even at four hundred and some pages, it was a fast read, for precisely the reasons I mentioned above.

Recommend? Yes! But just like anything in a series, you must read the others first. None of the Dresden Files books are stand-alone affairs. The series is a continuing unfolding of events and you need to be up to speed. It makes no sense to come in without any prior knowledge: you need to grasp the importance and history of certain places, people, and things. Go to Butcher's site and see the list of HARRY DRESDEN books in order, starting with STORM FRONT:
http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresden/

Time to set out for the vacation house...