THE LIST IS AN ABSOLUTE GOOD

30 November, 1993, represents the dividing point in the career of director Steven Spielberg. Prior to this, he was primarily a director of ebullient, exhilarating popcorn movies; since then, he has primarily been a director of largely serious dramas, with even his genre films tending to be more about investigating society than providing easy thrills. The divide between these phases of his career is simply identified, for it was on 30 November that his 196-minute Holocaust drama Schindler's List premiered in Washington, D.C.

There's not another film in Spielberg's CV that comes with so much baggage hanging on it: the widespread certainty that it's his best film (an opinion I don't share) on the one side, the way that it has been used as the thickest club with which to beat up the director for his perceived faults as a sentimentalist on the other. There was Stanley Kubrick's famous judgment that "The Holocaust was about 6 million Jews who were killed. Schindler's List is about 600 Jews who weren't killed" (and bless his heart, Stanley was off by almost half - the number was upwards of 1100), and Shoah director Claude Lanzmann was downright apoplectic that something so trivial and saccharine could be summoned into the world eight years after his own self-appointed definitive masterpiece came out. 20 years later, it's still the easiest thing to find people who respond with feverish hostility to Spielberg's attempt to do something accessible and populist about the greatest moral crime of the modern age.

On the flipside, the film has also never shaken its media imposed narrative that it was the absolutely be-all and end-all of movies about the Holocaust, a perception that the director at no point attempted to dispute, and which he very well might have agreed with. Spielberg, of course, might be the worst major filmmaker in the world at understanding what makes his own movies work, and I must strenuously disagree with the idea that Schindler's List is the greatest film about the Holocaust (Shoah is certainly better, and so is Night and Fog), or even the greatest non-documentary (right off the top of my head, The Pianist is clearly more serious about its topic). It is a great film, one of the greatest of the 1990s, even, but not just because it is about the Holocaust, and it does nobody any good to pretend that it is somehow a world-changing exercise in that regard.

So let's play a game. Let's not start by wallowing in two decades of conventional wisdom, of fame and infamy, starting with what we already know Schindler's List to be, and look for proof that we're right; let's start with the movie itself, and try to figure out what it is from there. Because I must say, the first thing that the movie itself suggests to me is neither a pandering wallow in tacky sentiment slathered all over the gravest event known to history, nor the profoundest filmed exploration of the Holocaust yet made: it is a morality play about a craven bureaucrat finding his soul. Bureaucracy, at any rate, is the first thing that Schindler's List presents, long before it gets to to the Holocaust, or even its first named Jewish character: after a brief prologue that simply establishes a tone of reflection and Judaic ritual, the first thing that happens in the legitimate plot is watching the isolated moments of a man whose face we do not see assembling himself for a party, putting on his fine clothes, his costly accessories, and lastly, the punchline of a Nazi Party pin. Taken as a whole, this opening scene very efficiently and cleanly presents to us a man putting on Nazism with the same blitheness as his fancy cufflinks, and for much the same purpose: to impress people. And that is very much who this man, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), reveals himself to be: a glad-handling entrepreneur who sees the onset of World War II as an irreplaceable business opportunity, and the military officers of the Nazi Party nothing but the objects of his schmoozing, nothing but the cogs he must grease to ensure that his own money-making endeavors will be as untroubled as possible.

The film tracks this charming but merciless war profiteer as he determines how to use the worn-down, ghettoised Jews of Kraków, Poland as a cheap and anxious-to-impress labor force, allowing himself to be slowly, almost accidentally goaded into regarding them with fondness and a protective eye by his Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), until he finally reaches the point that he would rather drive his career and fortune into the dust in order to save as many of them as he can, making up a list of all the Jewish workers he can afford to "buy" from the particularly psychopathic SS Untersturmführer, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), in charge of the concentration camp from which Schindler's workforce had been culled.

Schindler, with his factory just outside Kraków, had a good opportunity to witness much of the persecution of Poland's Jews firsthand, and Schindler's List, over the course of its long running time, alternates between depicting his gradual transition from amoral man to savior, and showcasing several aspects of the Holocaust from the degradation of the Jews in the ghetto (including humiliation and summary execution), to the debased life in a camp, to the horror of the Final Solution, though since this is a story about 1100 Jews who didn't die in the Holocaust, the full depths of evil practice in Auschwitz and elsewhere are left mostly unexplored. As it is, Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (this is, by a ridiculously lopsided margin, the best screenplay of his career), already get themselves into trouble by trying to include too much "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" material in their film: the one completely spurious and ineffective scene in the film follows a group of women mistakenly routed through Auschwitz, sent to the showers, and washed off. It's one thing that this is unnecessary baggage in an already long movie; the real problem here is that, to dramatise a scene in the death chambers in his movie that's very specifically about people not dying, Spielberg is obliged to stage this non-fatal event in the language of a horror-thriller, and while from a purely mechanical standpoint, it's absolutely great filmmaking (the women's arrival in Auschwitz at night, with white "snow" - revealed at the end to be human ashes - falling against a deep black backdrop - is the most recnognisably Spielbergian moment in the entire feature), there's something immeasurably distasteful about something as real, and incomprehensibly inhumane, as the gas chambers at Auschwitz used as the "gotcha!" moment in a thriller sequence. There might be a film that uses horror imagery to depict the death camps and have it not come off as crass exploitation, but Schindler's List isn't built to be that film, and Spielberg wouldn't be the man to direct it, anyway.

One scene in 196 minutes is a pretty great track record, though (and I'm also counting the problematic epilogue as successful, I guess, as I don't really know what else to do with it). For the most part, the transition between "Schindler's character arc" scenes, and "the complete history of the Holocaust" scenes is done cleanly and effectively, and given the shape of his arc, Schindler makes a tremendously effective witness to the events of those years in that place. Allowing the criticism that The Story Of The Holocaust shouldn't be told from the perspective of a Germany, I'd counter that Schindler's List isn't The Story Of The Holocaust in any real way, and thank God for that - it's much better as something more like a fable of human behavior in the face of utter depravity and cruelty, one that is able to explore the Holocaust in a way that had never been done in mainstream pop culture before 1993. So it's the best of both worlds: a fascinating and deeply engaging human story married to a Very Important Lesson that, for once, actually manages to be largely instructive (and this, I think, is what someone like Lanzmann misses: that in order to make this story, Spielberg needed it to have a dramatic spine; Schindler's story is a hell of a good one; mass audiences wouldn't want to go to a unrelievedly death-focused Holocaust movie, but would go to an almost unendingly grim one if it had an uplifting ending; and nobody but film nerds will ever be persuaded to watch a 9-hour documentary, something I know from having attempted and failed to persuade many, many people to have a Shoah marathon with me).

Spielberg is never not a populist, and this ends up being a huge part of the reason that Schindler's List works: he's able to effectively condense things into easily-absorbed emotional beats that build up over the long term to have a profound cumulative effect. For something so damn long - it is, not by a small figure, the director's longest movie - it's epically efficient filmmaking, using emphatic, almost ironic editing (courtesy of Spielberg's ever-reliable collaborator Michael Kahn) to hammer meaning home in swift, sharp blows. It is not, to be certain, a subtle movie: there's almost a certain fatalism to the way that juxtapositions carry home meaning like hammer blows. But the Holocaust was not subtle, and refusing to treat it cinematically like it was is certainly a defensible aesthetic choice. See also the black-and-white cinematography, gorgeously severe and shot by Janusz Kaminski in the first of the many truly essential collaborations between him and Spielberg: the director's state decision for the choice was that, to him, the Holocaust was a deadening event that stripped all the life and "color" from the world, but it could just as easily be noted that the film is a series of visual extremes, contrasty with very little greyscale, and that it is literally in black and white and very little else. It's visually expressing a Manichean idea of morality - here is Good, and here is Evil. There is no mistaking one for the other. And since very little in human history better justifies a Manichean approach than the Holocaust, this works, almost unbearably well.

(At this point, an aside: the Little Girl in the Red Coat (Oliwia Dabrowska). One of the most contentious elements in the film, and one that, regrettably, I have no settled opinion towards. I'll say this much, if there wasn't just that one shot of her inside a building, still in red, I'd feel a whole lot better about her presence, since in every other shot we see her in color, it's from Schindler's POV, and in this regard she is a great element. Her first appearance is the moment where he's struck by the inhumanity, and not just the meanness, of the German's approach towards Jews; her second, as a corpse, is where he is so outraged that he commits himself fully to a path of righteousness. It would be better for the film if she were never otherwise seen, perhaps.)

Does Spielberg manipulate us? Of course he does, it's what he's best at. It is manipulation in the service of great moral truths, though, and I like that Schindler's List doesn't dance around its themes, but blasts them home with intense righteous passion. It's not even that it lacks subtlety as a character drama, for the way it sketches Schindler's growing awareness of his conscience is a tribute to both the director's and the actor's skill (it's Neeson's career-best performance, easily). I am particularly fond of the emphasis placed on the two times that Schindler is called "good", by a Jew: once at 40 minutes into the film, in thanks from a worker, once at 93 minutes, from a woman looking for help. In both cases, Neeson both delicately and broadly demonstrates Schindler's embarrassment and anger at hearing that word: the discomfort of a man who knows he isn't good, and that knowledge is the first step on the path that leads to his climactic, and often-parodied breakdown at the end. There's no moment in the whole film I feel more compelled to defend: it is syrupy and over-the-top, but it is that way only because it is completely unprotected and sincere: a film about a single man abandoning his careerist cynicism is itself the most sentimental and uncynical scene in the movie. It's easy to mock, because all mockery is itself cynical, and broad-strokes, I-will-make-you-cry filmmaking is the diametric opposite to such cynicism. It is the release valve being turned all the way open after hours of misery, and no matter how vividly aware I am that Spielberg, and the shameless, shameless John Williams score are demanding that I feel exactly what they mean me to feel, I also appreciate being given a piece of catharsis. No, the Holocaust was not cathartic, but as established, Schindler's List is not the Holocaust.

Less subtle and more in the realm of moral fable is the sparring between Schindler and Goeth, played by Fiennes in a devastating performance that, love Tommy Lee Jones as much as I do, is probably the single most ridiculous loss of an acting Oscar in the last quarter-century. It's a portrayal of evil that is at one unmodulated (there's nothing decent in the character's entire onscreen appearance), and thoroughly human - Goeth has feelings and sensibility, he recognises suffering, he doubts. His first line includes what I believe to be the first use of the word "fuck" in Spielberg's filmography. There's a scene where the editing nervily implies that the two men are each other's reflection (they're both shaving, and Kahn deliberately confuses eyelines in cutting between them), and this plays out in small ways throughout the film, as Schindler becomes aware of essential morality and thus leaves behind the pragmatic ideology he adopted, while Goeth uses a fierce commitment to ideology to deflect and flickers of morality he feels. A sufficiently eager symbolic reading could even position him as the devil tempting Schindler while Kingsley's Stern (a third truly great performance, but unlike the other two, not a career-best one) is the angel saving him, but I can't quite go there.

Still, I think that's the right register in which to appreciate the film best: with nuance, without subtlety, as a rich depiction of one man's struggle to moral awareness presented in bold, essentialist tones. Schindler's List is a furious movie, in which sharply-defined images batter us constantly, weeping violins lacerate us, and human behavior is presented in emphatic scenes that are so distinct in themselves (the narrative flow of the film is actually quite jumpy, when you stop and think about chronology and the links between consecutive moments) that it almost feels like a pageant. There's nothing about this that's meant to be clever, and like most of Spielberg's work, it is more anxious to engage with the viewer's emotions than thoughts. It does this with an impact rare even among his films, and clarity of purpose, and visual precision, all of which are enough to make it one of the essential films of its decade. Not so important socially as it thinks it is, perhaps, but even more important aesthetically and thematically, and no less necessary now than 20 years ago, 20 years before that, or 20 years in the future.

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LITTLE BOYS LOST

These Birds Walk is a documentary about the life of poverty-ravaged boys in Karachi, Pakistan; and it is unmistakably made for a Western audience.This bothers me more than it has any reason to, for the film is absolutely not a sad-eyed ethnography or exotic exploration of culture - no Slumdog Millionaire or the like here. In fact, it's pretty transparently the case that directors Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq actively intended for These Birds Walk to be a direct counterpoint to that kind of story, exploring life in Karachi as it is genuinely lived and not as it is filtered through ideology and media. Still, there's something about it I find a tiny bit brittle and predetermined; it might be nothing so simple as the unnecessarily pretty cinematography by Mullick, a professional photographer whose work errs on the side of beauty where it might not belong.

Anyway, whatever lingering feeling that the film might be more of a lecture than it admits to doesn't stand up much at all to even the briefest exposure to what the film emphatically and unmistakably is: an exceptionally clear-cut, unadorned example of cinéma vérité in its most pristine and pure form. One forgets, in the face of so many narrative films cynically co-opting the aesthetic style of cinéma vérité, and so many documentaries acting like they're dabbling in that tradition when they're actually doing something far cruder and less truthful, how rich and rewarding it can actually be to watch as filmmakers using limited equipment nestle in right next to their subjects and watch them intensely over a period of time, saying nothing and inferring nothing, but never pretending like the camera somehow isn't there.

These Birds Walk begins with a scene that, arguably, errs on the side of being too charming and cute: a young boy running through the water on a beach, near dawn or dusk. It's the one moment in the film that works on a predominately impressionistic, emotional level: the idea of childhood freedom and innocence, expressed through unmediated imagery of joy and energy. It's a moment that ties back into the rest of the movie in a literal sense (the boy, who we'll later learn is named Omar, is one of the main focuses of the documentary), but its position in the movie has less to do with literalism or narrative than with feeling: by opening the film with an expression of exuberant freedom, the filmmakers cast a shadow over the rest of their fleet 71 minutes that rather conspicuously aren't about freedom at all. The opening is a counterpoint to everything that follows, keeping it from ever descending into just a wallow in misery, and reinforcing the idea that the boys we'll see throughout the film are resilient survivors.

From here, it shifts to an introduction: we meet the octogenarian Abdul Sattar Edhi, and his great national humanitarian organisation, the Edhi Foundation, which provides health and safety services to people throughout Pakistan. The aspect the movie is most focused on is its shelters for wayward children: runaways, orphans, or those abandoned by their families. To explore Edhi's work, the film trains its eye on a handful of boys in one home in Karachi, and a few administrators: its main characters, if you will, are Omar, and Asad, once a resident of this facility, now in his 20s and working as a driver for the Edhi Foundation in gratitude for what it did to save him.

The film is far more complicated than it sounds from that little description, though. Nothing about this can be summed up in beatific, "look at the children being saved!" bromides, since it's not entirely clear that These Birds Walk is depicting children being saved in the customary wide-eyed, noble and saintly, Bing-Crosby-in-a-priest-costume manner. Rather, the film's idea is that the Edhi Foundation, though the work it's doing is clearly and objectively good, is simply part of a much bigger society that deep down inside doesn't know what to do with these kids, and every proposed solution is just fumbling to find something that works better, even if it's still ultimately compromised. Though These Birds Walk has more than its fair share of scenes of children being cute and lovable (it's still an uplifiting, populist documentary, at the end of the day), the moments that stick in the mind the most are of a much more ambivalent cast: Omar struggling with the other boys, clearly not feeling like he belongs here or anywhere else. The film's primary sense is not that of security, but of dislocation - the boys' home might be a safe place, but it is also an institution that is by no means a pleasant place to live.

Having a pervasive undercurrent like this helps to keep the film from being as cloying as some of its earliest and latest scenes suggest might have been the case; so does its fixed sense of embedded journalism, with the camera occupying a very watchful position, letting life happen in front of it. There is no flashy technique, which is not to say that the film isn't aware of cinematic language, only that it doesn't want to draw attention to itself (that being said, the most striking sequence, in which Omar runs from the camera through a blasted-out, Taliban-controlled village, certainly calls attention to the breathless way in which it's been filmed; as it might be, given that it's one of the most tense action scenes of the year). Careful use of focus and framing to dictate what we're looking at does give the film a certain editorial perspective, though this is more about limiting spurious information than interpreting things for us: the movie is about the very specific place and the very specific people living there, but all the sociology it raises is in the background and comes in the form of an unanswered question.

This is, all told, a tremendously satisfying film, though perhaps a bit slight and burdened by too many early scenes with talking heads explaining things that would fit more in an advocacy doc than something this studiously objective. Whatever. It shows us a slice of life that I imagine the great majority of people who will see the movie have never given a moment of thought to, and the small amount of rockiness in amongst so much sophisticated and smart filmmaking frankly doesn't matter very much in the face of that.

8/10

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - HIROSHIMONSTER

The whole movie is so completely nuts that trying to select a single element and declare "this is the most interesting part" is totally useless, but certainly one of the things that is particularly interesting about Frankenstein Conquers the World is the window it provides into how Japanese pop culture shifted in its relationship to the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the course of a decade. Its release date was specifically tied to the 20th anniversary of those events, in August, 1965, which puts it eleven years after Godzilla, a film which treated the national trauma of that event and its aftermath with heavily allegorical abstraction in the form of a giant rampaging monster. Frankenstein Conquers the World - or Frankenstein vs. Baragon if we want to play a bit more fair by the Japanese title - has absolutely no interest in allegory: it doesn't just name drop the Hiroshima bomb in almost every scene of the first hour, it actually depicts the Hiroshima mushroom cloud in its prologue. And from here it launches into a phenomenally weird and warped story that is, throughout all of it, just as much of an allegory as Godzilla itself, though that allegory makes a whole lot less sense.

The plot is a decade-spanning bit of all-encompassing weirdness, that begins with crazy-eyed Nazi scientist Dr. Riesendorf (Peter Mann) investigating a living heart that keeps beating despite not being in a body. His experiment is smuggled out via U-Boat to Japan for safekeeping, where it studied by a nameless Japanese scientist played by the great Shimura Takashi, in what amounts to a cameo role that I wouldn't even bring up, except that it was Shimura's last role in a daikaiju eiga, and I wanted to give us all a chance to bid him farewell. What matters about this scientist is less what he discovers, and more that his lab is in Hiroshima, and it is 5 August, 1945.

15 years later, Hiroshima has recovered quite a bit, and has become the adopted home of Dr. James Bowen (Nick Adams), and American humanitarian who feels that his government's use of the A-bomb was morally unsound. He works to further understand the effect of radiation on the human body, including its thereapeutic uses, alongside Drs. Kawaji Yuzo (Takashima Tadao) and Togami Sueko (Mizuno Kumi); but when we first meet them, they're more consumed by the strange mystery of a teenage boy (Furuhata Koji) running amok through the streets, devouring animals raw. It isn't until a full year later that they finally catch up with him and make two hugely important discoveries: one is that despite his Japanese features hidden underneath a heavy brow, the boy is a full-blood Caucasian, and the other is that he absorbs and processes radioactive energy to fuel unusually fast growth, rather than growing sick and dying from it. Eventually, Bowen, Kawaji, and Togami conclude that the boy is related in some way to the amazing regenerative heart that was recovered from Germany, the heart taken from Dr. Frankenstein's famous monster, created so long in the past. The boy is, in fact, becoming Frankenstein's monster, though whether this is because a run of the mill feral boy found and at the heart, or if (my preferred reading) the heart generated for itself a human body - we learn soon enough that it's no thing at all for Frankenstein to regrow body parts that have been severed - is left pointedly unclear. The main point is that he comes into existence through a horrible, nuclear-inflected perversion. The notion of a genetically European pseudo-human terrorising Japan as he eats living creatures with particular savagery, thriving on the same radioactivity that poisoned so many Japanese citizens, is plainly symbolic of something, though the film is frankly too crazy to figure out what, exactly, it wants to symbolise.

Also, I take this costume to be symbolic:

Whatever political implications accrue to Frankenstein Conquers the World, the actual experience of watching is involves bathing oneself in one of the very strangest daikaiju eiga that Toho ever made: crawling disembodied hands, a wildly out-of-nowhere new backstory for the most famous monster of world literature, animal-eating, the plan to address the common movie scientist complaint, "don't kill the rampaging monster, we have to study it!" with the promise that its hand will just grow into another monster, anyway. Weirdest of all is when the film decides to incorporate the back half of its Japanese title, Frankenstein vs. the Subterranean Monster Baragon. There's not a goddamn thing about this scenario as it is developed over the first hour that suggests that there wasn't enough story; I don't know if somebody at Toho thought that audiences would rebel if the only building-sized monster was a human with some facial make-up. But along comes a giant prehistoric reptile, anyway, the aforementioned subterranean monster Baragon, and he is one of the most unbelievable monsters that the almost always-reliable Tsuburaya Eiji ever developed: big googly eyes, giant ears, a cartoon grimace, and the whole effect is way the hell more cute than anything else (it basically resembles a rubber, malicious version of Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon, with a nose horn). I kind of love Baragon, but not without irony; it is, in fact, the single thing that pushes a movie with some real narrative problems into a place that it's bad enough to be fun.

For honestly, a huge chunk of the middle of Frankenstein Conquers the World is just redundant and uninspired monster movie boilerplate: the scientists furrow their brows and wonder how to stop the monster, the monster steps on things. Only the hypnotic oddness of what the film does to the Frankenstein mythos keeps it from dragging altogether, especially since the makeup Furuhata was covered in so unmistakably takes its cues from the famous design for the monster in Universal's Frankenstein, and it's impossible not to be freshly reminded of the connection every time he shows up onscreen. Far better when the film is stuck in the random-ass opening third, with the most open acknowledgement that "yeah, we used to be buddies with the Nazis, what of it?" that I've ever personally scene in a Japanese movie, the magically bad science, the strangest deviations from Mary Shelley of any film nominally based on her characters that I am aware of. Even the ending bit is more fun, no matter how dubious Baragon is, and how it eventually reveals its secret attack movie to be jumping really far from a standstill. It's goofy as shit, but the right kind of goofy.

The strangeness of the movie is even stranger in light of the fact that it was the first Japanese daikaiju eiga co-financed by an American company: Henry G. Saperstein, owner of UPA (a company known to me almost solely for its groundbreaking limited-animation cartoons in the '50s), helped Toho finally get the project after the ground, after years and years trying to get a "giant Frankenstein" movie produced (a process extending even further back than King Kong vs. Godzilla, which began life as exactly such a picture). Not only was Saperstein on board with the random loopy weirdness of the film Toho was making, he wanted to be even odder: he insisted on a final battle between Frankenstein and a giant octopus, a sequence that was shot and cut (restored, a long while after, in what is currently called an "international cut"), apparently because even that was too much of a non sequitur for screenwriter Kimura Takeshi and director Honda Ishirō to stomach. For something apparently meant for an American audience - hence Nick Adams as the closest thing to an individual lead - it's remarkably Japanese in its narrative logic and world-building, and the English dub changes virtually nothing, except in that it removes just a hair of the WWII material, and a few random shots here and there.

Other than the joy of staring, amazed, at something that probably should not exist, the best thing I can think of about Frankenstein Conquers the World is the generally strong quality of the effects work, including the single best process shot of Tsuburaya's career up to that point.

This is counterbalanced by things like the charmingly dippy Baragon and a stunningly awful boar, but in general terms, the effects work is as good as anything in any Toho kaiju to that date. Plus, the odd spectacle of seeing a recognisable human as a kaiju makes this rewarding as a novelty. It's got the monster spectacle goods, which the least it could do for us.

Beyond that, though, it's something of a slog: the three leads aren't really interesting, and the plot lacks anything that modestly resembles momentum. Frankenstein is an intriguing off-kilter character, but that's only enough to make this essential viewing for a kaiju junkie, and nothing else about the plot or the filmmaking (Honda was unusually checked-out this time around) is good enough to let the film emerge from the background radiation of its genre.

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THE THANKSGIVING POST

Having a commemorative day always makes it feel a lot less gooey and sentimental to do this kind of thing, but it applies every single day of the year: I am truly thankful to have all of, my readers, without whom there'd be no point to my doing this charming nonsense that I do. And I like doing this nonsense. All this seems especially important to say at a time like this, when my IRL job has been handing my ass to me pretty much nonstop ever since halfway through the Film Festival back in October, and there have been times when keeping up with the blog has been a bit more of a pain that a pleasure. But knowing that people are reading and, for whatever absurd reason, like what I put out there takes a lot of the bite out of it, and so I say again, and simply: thank you for reading my blog. I'm so very glad to have you here.

Happy Thanksgiving. Even if you're not an American. I'm still thankful for you.

Now, back to your irregularly-scheduled daikaiju eiga.

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TIM AT TFE: FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FOREVER

Disney animation being something of a thing around here, I'm planning my customary book-length review of the newly released Frozen, almost certainly to go up on Monday. In the meantime, my short, initial thoughts are available right now at The Film Experience.

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TRAVELS WITH MY DAD

Update: This review was based on what was in retrospect a screening plagued by a highly deficient projector resulting in unusually poor image quality. While I don't suspect that I'd ever come anywhere close to actually liking the movie, it's safe to say that my actual thoughts are more of a 6/10 than a 5/10, and this review should probably be disregarded.

Among those who just don't like the work of director Alexander Payne - and given how much more I dislike The Descendants, his worst film, than I love Election, his best film, I suppose I qualify in that company - the commonest criticism you'll find is the charge of misanthropic superiority. The idea that he thinks himself both smarter and morally superior to his characters, and enjoys mocking them. Which is not an easy charge to refute, though I think it misses the point (and not least among the reasons I prefer Election to all other Payne films is that it's far and away the most overtly cruel thing he's done). What I have found, and this was made clear as a breaking dawn by his newest film, Nebraska, is that Payne wants to tell very humane, kind stories of people trying their gosh-damnedest to get by, only he doesn't really know how to do that without setting his likeable, nuanced, realistic protagonists in contrast to cartoon gargoyles in the supporting cast. And the supporting cast in Nebraska is broad and wicked indeed, sitting very uncomfortably and unpleasantly next to the film that Omaha native Payne thinks he's making and even occasionally does make, which is a subdued and melancholy love letter to his home state. And it is very, very clear from the evidence of the film that Payne loves Nebraska. It's Nebraskans that he apparently has a problem with.

The film centers around a father-son relationship, because American screenwriters (first-timer Bob Nelson, in this case; the first Payne film without a writing credit for Payne) have more problems with their dads than anyone else in the world. Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) is getting old and starting to enter the earliest stages of dementia; his younger son David (Will Forte) is the only one who's trying to deal with the old man's confusion and stubbornness with patience and love, while Woody's wife Kate (June Squibb) and elder son Ross (Bob Odenkirk, whom I'd have much preferred seeing in Forte's role) tend to view him as a burden, with his muddy intellectual state merely the last inconvenience of an entire lifetime of shitty husbanding and fathering. Before the film begins, Woody has latched onto an idée fixe, believing with religious certitude that the "You might already be a millionaire" contest ad he received in the mail is a guarantee of riches, and David, acting out of much more kindness than common sense - and the script doesn't seem to think of it that way, an early sign of the crippling intellectual inauthenticity to follow - decides to drive Woody from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to humor the old man, who wants to claim his prize in person.

What follows isn't the road movie it promises to be. One night, Woody sneaks out to get drunk, and cracks his skull open. Rather than push the rest of the way, David decides to stop over in Hawthorne, Nebraska, the ancestral Grant hometown, where Woody and Kate first met; they stay there with Woody's brother Ray (Rance Howard) and sister-in-law Martha (Mary Louise Wilson), and their two awful sons Bart (Tim Driscoll) and Cole (Devin Ratray), and whatever mostly feigned sweetness the film has whipped up in the Woody/David car ride goes straight to hell as Nebraska parks in Hawthorne for almost the entire rest of the movie, as the deeply confused Woody manages to convince everybody that he's rich, and thus does everybody set themselves to the task of separating him from the largest share of his money that they can manage.

The consensus of opinion is against me on this, but Nebraska strikes me as a tiresomely mean-spirited film. And not because I read the film as Payne mocking his characters for being rural rubes - the people who see things like the taciturn gathering of Grant brothers to silently watch football and discuss, with great difficulty, the make of a 30-year-old car as being the filmmaker's attempt to make fun of the culture he's depicting are missing out on a very clear sort of affection that comes from familiarity. Yes, that is actually how people in the Plains States and Midwest live, and there's nothing about the film that implies this they're contemptibly unsophisticated as a result (it reminds me of the profound misreadings that still accrue to Fargo as showcasing the Coens' hatred for Minnesota). In terms of capturing the physicality, the pace of life, and the social interactions of life in the middle of the country - and while I have never lived in Nebraska, I've driven through it many times, and spent a great deal of time in similar communities - Nebraska gets everything right.

But the actions of the characters when they're called upon to be anything other than silent figures in Payne's Norman Rockwell painting of small town life reek of the filmmakers' misanthropy: the vast majority of people we meet are specifically painted as being craven idiots, or selfish bastards, or shrill harridan wives who do nothing but speak awful things about how much everyone is worse than they are (and how Squibb, lustily striking the one note of her character over and over again without modulation, can possibly be getting the amount of praise she's received thus far is going to be one of the great mysteries to me of this awards season). It paints a grossly one-sided depiction of humanity, reducing every character but David to basically one single character trait, and it's never a nice trait; if there's any insight into humanity, America, or anything else, I don't know what it might be, because neither the script nor the limited performances (the rapturous praise for Dern's deliberately glassy face and frustrated mumbling confuses me even more than the praise for Squibb does) do anything to suggest more than the most superficial themes and psychology. Some people are nice; most people are assholes, and they were even bigger assholes 50 years ago. Nebraska, ladies and gentlemen.

And all this I would feel less sour about, except the thing is motherfucking ugly as sin. Shot in black-and-white by Phedon Papamichael, putting in his best claim yet to being my least-favorite working cinematographer, the film is openly aping Peter Bogdanovich's exercises in monochrome from the early '70s without having any reason to do it; Payne has suggested in interviews that the motivation was primarily, "nobody said not to", and while you can squint and come up with something about the lens of nostalgia and revisiting the past and such, that's meeting the movie so much more than halfway that you're waiting in its kitchen for it to finish getting ready. Besides, even if it had a discernible purpose, it's still the crappiest-looking B/W I have seen in many years: smudgy images in which no effort has been made in the lighting or physical design of the movie to translate a full-color world into a greyscale one. A few landscape shots are dark enough that it has a certain dramatic look, but otherwise, this is a nonstop horror of smeary grey-whites bleeding into muddy grey-blacks, looking like Papamichael and Payne just hit the "destaturate" tool in Photoshop and called it a day.

I'd say, in fact, that the vile cinematography is enough to make this my least favorite Payne movie, but after a couple of days reflection, I think I should walk back from that. For one thing, its physical depiction of the bars and stores and fields of the Plains is close to flawless, and it succeeds on the "essence of being on a road trip, watching the scenery" front better than any movie since Cars. For another, whenever the film consists of absolutely nothing but Forte and Dern sitting along, Forte trying with (deliberately) painfully forced enthusiasm to find any means to bond with his distant dad, it actually feels like it has something to do with real human emotions, and the actors have a very nice rapport with each other that is natural and engaging. And to be fair, more of the movie is just Forte and Dern than it is the screeching parade of harpies around them, so strictly by the numbers, I probably like something around 65% of the movie. But that 35% leftover is a goddamn agony, and it makes the whole thing seem much worse than it probably is.

5/10

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GETTING THE GANG BACK TOGETHER

The Best Man Holiday - which possesses a truly awful title, I hope we can all agree; even a simple apostrophe-s after "Man" would have helped - is the weirdest sequel of the year, greeted with some awfully hostile "why on earth are you bothering?" criticisms. I wish more films would do exactly the same thing, because it's a terrific idea.

Basically, it's pulling a page from the Before Sunset playbook: many years ago, we left these characters in a place where they were pretty good, but there's no reason to assume that their lives have stopped, and why not drop in to see how their lives are now that they had some years to mature and become fuller adults? In this case, it's been 14 years since The Best Man, which was a not completely successful ensemble film about the emotional tightrope of transitioning from the freedom and irresponsibility of college to the more more constrained world of early adulthood, and that's surely been enough time for these people to have kids, marital problems, big houses, careers, career problems, goes the logic. So it is, enough so that The Best Man Holiday, I'd argue, is an improvement on its predecessor, for at least two reasons: it's more tonally flexible (that is, the comic moments don't feel so badly taped on to a dramatic spine), and it has a lot more for people to do that aren't frustrated novelist Harper Stewart (Taye Diggs).

Fleshing out the situation from the earlier movie doesn't really matter much for the new one, but suffice to say that in '99, Harper was the best man at the wedding of Lance Sullivan (Morris Chestnut), presently a New York Giants running back approaching retirement, and at that wedding, it came out that Harper and Lance's bride Mia (Monica Calhoun) had slept together some time earlier. This, we understand, has left a rift between the two former best friends, that Mia hopes to mend with her unusually insistent invitations to the Sullivan Christmas celebrations, not just for Harper and his pregnant wife Robyn (Sanaa Lathan), but the whole gang from last time: Jordan (Nia Long who, not to be lookist, might be the most gorgeous 42-year-old actress in America right now), now a successful TV executive building a new paradigm for African-American media, while dating the absurdly white white dude Brian(Eddie Cibrian); Julian (Harold Perrineau) and his ex-stripper wife Candace (Regina Hall), operating a private school coming into financial difficulties since evidence of Candace's past life surfaced on YouTube, scaring off a moralising old investor; Quentin (Terrence Howard), still a huge pothead and schmoozer, but now using those skills to succeed as the head of a consulting firm; and Shelby (Melissa De Sousa), venal and nasty and starring on Real Housewives spin-off.

All sorts of plotlines attach to all of these characters, but they're all building up to the same theme, which is that we all have difficult, unpleasant things to deal with in our lives, and the whole entire point of having friends is to have somebody to help you get through those rough patches; so for the love of God, don't try to muscle your way through setbacks alone. Also, I gather that writer-director Malcolm D. Lee has the love of God particularly in mind as the bestest buddy you'll ever have to stand by you, though I appreciate that The Best Man Holiday doesn't go for nearly as much proselytising as a movie could when it's set during Christmas, and its only wholly decent character is also its most emphatically Christian. Heck, it's not even as messagey and aware of a "you need religion if you're going to make it" message as The Best Man was.

But anyway, this is basically a film about people attempting to reconnect, finding it difficult, and doing it anyway, because that's the sort of thing that you damn well do with friends who matter. It is marvelously generous film, more generous than the first (shrill bitch Shelby is given a completely natural-feeling opportunity to be more pleasant and she takes it, something that never came close to happening in 1999), and very much fond of the characters it walks through some helliciously brutal melodrama (in which one person's very obvious even before the surprise reveal cancer isn't even all that much darker than some of the things happening to other characters). Perhaps even too generous, as it becomes a little sleepy and stretched out long before its indulgent two hours and three minutes have wrapped up; when it's this clear that nobody is going to be a major fuckup, because they're all basically okay human beings, there's just not that much room to build conflict, which leads to a lot of ginned-up misunderstandings in the last 40 minutes, just to keep the thing moving along.

Plot and conflict aren't the driving forces here, though. This is a quintessential hang out movie, and it knows it: dropping the characters into a pornishly large house, and letting them meet in pairs and threes, and just talk and share thoughts on life (meanwhile, their assorted kids are being totally ignored and forgotten about, except when it is time to be cute, tearful, or both). Cinematically, there's not a lot here, and Lee and editor Paul Millspaugh manage to get themselves into real trouble with some shot-reverse shot sequences that follow the rhythm of dialogue too literally, and end up creating a feeling rather akin to motion sickness. Really, though, this is a film only interested in characters and actors, and though sometimes the lack of aesthetic flattens those two elements out more than they should be, for the most part it works on that level: generally speaking, the best actors are given the most to do, with Lathan, Hall, and Long forming a Murderesses' Row of absolutely terrific women etched clearly and with great warmth and personality, and Howard giving the easiest, most likable performance he's had in years. There's nothing great about it, but there's a whole lot of good enough, and I'm not sure that there's any sane argument that can be made against a movie where the whole point is watching likable people learning to heal their wounds. It's comfort food and not art; but it is about the holidays, after all.

6/10

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THREE HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster represents the most profound shift in the fortunes of the Godzilla franchise throughout the first 20 years of its existence. On the most essential level, it's the point where outright science fiction entered the picture, and as a direct result, it's the point at which the series' evergreen screenwriter Sekizawa Shinichi finally perfected the unbelievably weird and warped storytelling style that he'd employ nonstop in the Godzilla films he wrote from that point. As far as the monsters we see onscreen, it's the first of the truly epic-scale monster rallies, the one where the monsters become fully anthropomorphic in their behaviors and personalities, and the one where the monster-on-monster fights come to resemble wrestling matches more than brawls between giant animals. Most importantly to me, it introduces my favorite daikaiju ever, the titular King Ghidorah - according to the Toho-sanctioned English title, anyway. The Japanese original translates as Three Giant Monsters: The Greatest Battle on Earth. Which is more descriptive and really, no less hokey. Though it undersells the thing: there are in fact four giant monsters, and for that reason it very much is just about the greatest battle on Earth; at any rate, the climactic monster mash is better than any of the fight scenes in the "huge monster ensemble" films that Toho would intermittently release thereafter.

And we'll get back to all of that, but first, the biggest, most shocking shift of all, which is that, perhaps uniqely in the Godzilla series, the human half of the narrative in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster is so captivatingly loopy and well-expressed, that the film would be just as good if there were no monsters in it at all. Okay, so not "just as" good. Still, it's a rare enough achievement in these films when the non-monster material is enjoyable enough to fill the space in between monster scenes. For it to be, arguably, the best part of the feature is absolutely ridiculous to even imagine.

What happens, in its briefest form, is that Japanese police detective Shindo (Natsuki Yosuke) has been assigned as bodyguard for the visiting Princess Selina Salno (Wakabayashi Akiko), of the apparently central-Asian nation of Selgina. That country is rife with political uneasiness, and the princess doesn't even make it as far as Japan before a strange force urges her to simply walk out of her plane, thousands of feet in the air, just before rebel forces blow the plane apart. So much for Shindo's big chance to meet the princess.

Except, there is at this point a huge media circus surrounding a large meteor which many people took to be a flying saucer at first, and UFO mania is gripping the country. Which makes it a pregnant moment for a woman to emerge, claiming to be a 5,000 year old psychic from Venus. And not just any woman, but the very spitting image of Princess Selina. Shindo thus has a big job again, but it goes beyond an apparent case of free-fall inspired amnesia: the self-described Venusian begins making prophecies about the giant monsters soon to arise: first, the devastation around Mt. Aso, where a pair of giant pteranodons were buried years ago in the movie Rodan, has been upset by the passing meteors, and this has revived Rodan. Second, a ship in the Pacific Ocean is attacked and destroyed by Godzilla, who was merely inconvenienced by his incapacitation in Mothra vs. Godzilla, earlier the same year (it should be clarified that Ghidorah doesn't make mention of chronology, or even allude to in-series continuity in more than a glancing way). These two monsters rampaging across the country are merely the appetizer for the greatest monster yet to come: the same intergalactic beast, King Ghidorah, who destroyed the civilisation of Venus, and whose arrival on Earth is directly linked to those weird meteors being studied by Professor Miura (Koizumi Hiroshi).

None of that, even the amnesiac princess reborn as a millennia-old Venusian, is the really random and absurd part. While all of this is happening, a new TV show is all the rage, giving regular citizens a chance to meet famous people. One day, their guests are two little boys who want above all to meet the heroic daikaiju Mothra, and the producers accommodate them by bringing the twin fairies (Ito Emi & Ito Yuki, making their very last appearance in a daikaiju eiga, I am sorry to say) to sing a new chant to their god, who appears in a vision to the TV audience. Or maybe just to the movie audience. It's really hard to parse out what's going on, except that it's awesomely "pop-art from the mid-'60s" in the editing. Anyway, the fairies are so impressed by the Venusian's predictions, saving them from death by Godzilla, that they proclaim her as a great prophet. This does not stop the Selginan assassin Malness (Ito Hisaya) from pursuing her even through monster attacks, nor Shindo from packing her off to a psychiatrist (Shimura Takashi, in his very last daikaiju eiga) to try and cure her of a delusion that the doctor isn't even quite sure exists, nor are we given that every word she has so far said has turned out to be true.

It's damn stupid in a lot of ways, but I unabashedly love all of this. Spy movie, fantasy, mystery; the film picks up whatever idea looks like it isn't pinned down and runs with it as long as possible, creating a giddy sense of unpredictability and weirdness. At the same time, director Honda Ishirō's continued reluctance to direct his kaiju films like the comedies they were rabidly becoming means that the tone of Ghidorah is relentlessly sincere, serious, and measured, so that even as things become weirder and weirder, we're never invited to look down on the material as absurd junk. It might not sound like that's valuable or even desirable, but once the Godzilla films dove off the cliff, something like the essentially camp-free Ghidorah would thrown into sharper relief as the far more noble and effective approach. But we're not to that point yet, not in 1964.

The film is often criticised for the isolation of its human and monster halves, which is much more true of the American cut (which retains almost all of the same material but radically re-shapes its order) than the Japanese original, in which the arrival of the monsters is almost staged in religious terms: first there are the harbingers Rodan and Godzilla, then the end comes in the form of King Ghidorah. And we are saved by supplication to Mothra, whom the Japanese government entreats to leave Infant Island to act as intermediary, negotiating with Godzilla and Rodan to fight on Earth's behalf against Ghidorah. Because no, sir, this movie ain't done with being all kinds of what-the-fuck bizarre by any stretch of the imagination.

The protracted monster battles that end the movie are fun, but they are even more silly: the silliest moment of all being a scene in which Godzilla and Rodan lobby a large rock back and forth while Mothra (in her larval form; there is no Mothra imago in Ghidorah, I imagine because that would make for three winged monsters in one picture, and that would be gilding the lily) patiently watches back and forth - it is clearly meant to evoke a tennis match, of all the random things in the world. This is merely the most overt moment where the film makes absolutely no effort to pretend these are animals: they are people now, big, skyscraper-sized people who look like dinosaurs and dragons. The fighting is openly modeled on wrestling, as I said, and the monsters all have vividly-defined personalities expressed through reaction shots and body language. Body language! How is a daikaiju even supposed to have body language?

But they do, and it's delightful as all hell - it will not remain so, but in this moment, it works splendidly. This despite all three of the returning monsters looking a bit raggedy: Godzilla and Rodan are frequently played by puppets with realistically swiveling eyes and jaws that drop open with an almost palpable plastic clack. Rodan, incidentally, now looks like a cross-breeding of an eagle and a pterosaur, not remotely the sleek beast he was before; and the Godzilla suit, salvaged from Mothra vs. Godzilla as much as possible, looks absolutely wretched above the neck, more rubbery and fake than any Toho daikaiju to that point.

It's all redeemed, though by the energy with which Tsuburaya Eiji staged the action, and even more by the monster they're teaming up to beat: King Ghidorah is a damned masterpiece of design and execution. The first outright fantasy monster in the franchise, and the most openly Asian in mentality, he's a three-headed, two-tailed golden dragon with giant wings instead of arms, and long necks that flail around violently but never hectically: there is a sense of raging giant snakes straining to dart forward at speed. Later Ghidorah suits would look better than this one, so I'll save my gushing for those, but even now, the feeling is not that we have an animal, even a giant and destructive one, but an object of malice and evil. He's the first real monster in these monster movies, looking angry and acting angry and gigantic and physically overpowering even next to the excellent heft and muscle of the Godzilla suit. There's plenty to love in this random, strange exercise in warped imagination and genre-busting plotlines, but Ghidorah is the thing I love the best, and while I know in my heart that this is a very daft movie overall, it's one of my top-tier favorite Godzilla pictures regardless.

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JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT, THEY PULL ME BACK IN

There's nothing, as I recall, specifically wrong about The Hunger Games, the massive smash hit that sent a brand-new franchise into the stratosphere early in 2012. There's also nothing specifically right about it - it's a perfectly satisfactory piece of consumer product with some smart casting choices and a humongously forgettable script. While its first sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is also, first and foremost, a piece of consumer product, it's also better in pretty much every imaginable regard. If nothing else, it demonstrates with considerable clarity and urgency why it's better to put a director with post-apocalyptic action film experience in charge of a post-apocalyptic action film than a director who made a biopic of a horse.

As the sequel to a colossally successful hit film gets to do, Catching Fire plays the "rabid fanbase" card extensively in the opening hour, recapping the story of the first entry not one iota. And this is not the only time it scrimps on the exposition, though it's the only time that it can be argued even a little bit that it's playing fair. Fact is, the first act of the film is an unholy nightmare of screenwriting, speed-walking through details and character beats that aren't set up properly, never pay off, or both. The impression one gets is that screenwriters Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt (working under his "Michael deBruyn" pseudonym) weren't looking to tell a rich, involving story of life in a totalitarian post-apocalyptic state, but to slough off every single plot point from Susanne Collins's novel that could be removed while still leaving enough of a skeleton that what's left is a narrative and not a collection of interconnected sketches. And if this was the goal, it is met uncertainly:even having read the book, and not so very long ago, either, I found myself a little mystified at every single thing that happened, or why it was all happening so fast, or why it was happening at all, come to think of it. This is, in fact, the only single regard I can think of in which Catching Fire fails to improve on The Hunger Games: that script also had its rocky patches of leaving info out, but not so much, nor for such a lengthy uninterrupted stretch as the chaotic and undernourished opening 30 minutes of its sequel.

The situation, anyway, is that 17-year-old Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), co-victor of the 74th Hunger Games, is called upon with fellow champion Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) to tour the 12 colonies of the dystopic Panem, to keep the population cowed and horrified, just as the Games themselves are largely meant to do. Unfortunately for the forces of authoritarianism, Katniss's particularly defiant gesture that won the Games has made her the rallying point for rebel groups in all 12 colonies, and the psychopathic President Snow (Donald Sutherland) has taken her aside privately to promise that if she can't reassert control for his government, she and Peeta and their families and everyone she likes even slightly will be killed with very little hesitation. When this fails horribly, due mostly to Katniss's inability to express joy or any other kindly emotion in front of people, Snow hits upon another idea: use the numerically emphatic 75th Hunger Games to drag Katniss back into the arena along with 23 other former victors - including Peeta - and dispose of her that way.

The movie makes it far more clear than the book that this was a deliberate act by Snow and Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, a new addition to the franchise), and since I talked so much shit about Beaufoy and Arndt up top, it pleases me to say something nice now: Among the many ways that Catching Fire improves upon its predecessor is that it takes advantage of the almost inevitable shift from the novels' first-person present-tense perspective, rather than simply accommodating it, and it adds quite a bit of plot material outside of Katniss's presence that serves greatly to deepen and flesh-out the film's world, which feels a lot more defined here than the "rich people with tacky taste" mode of the first movie, which I liked, though I know many did not. Simply put, the screenwriters and director Francis Lawrence (whom I suspect got the job based on I Am Legend) put a lot more care into their depiction of the society in which the plot occurs, and it feels more real - and a shitload more explicitly Roman Empire Reborn - than in the last movie.

Nor do Lawrence's improvements end there. He and cinematographer Jo Willems employ a more strapped-down camera than Gary Ross and Tom stern used last time, and the visual clarity that results is better in pretty much every respect imaginable: the drama is more intimate, the action in the Hunger Games arena clearer and more brutal (though like the last film, there's a distinct sense of a movie straining hard not to get an R-rating, something that I expect to become quite debilitating in the back half of 2015's impending Mockingjay - Part 2). Particularly in the cool-down at the end of the film, leading into an impressively well-handled cliffhanger - the final shot is pretty terrific given how boring it would sound if I described it - Lawrence's approach makes both the stakes and the character psychology clearer than they were in the last film.

All that being said, they're still not that clear, though a well-assembled cast does what it can to make figures who barely register among the chaos of the plotting pop off the screen - that Lawrence is once again best in show largely by default is not surprising, given the overwhelming focus on her from the script and camera both (she's certainly no better nor worse than in the last one), but Hutcherson is hugely improved from the suffocating vanilla blankness of his performance before, or in most things, and Jena Malone, of all people, is a pretty fantastic addition as an angry, nihilistic former victor. Along with the great big list of people showing up for extended cameos, or little more than that, some of whom are limper in this go-round (Elizabeth Banks), some better (Stanley Tucci).

The biggest problem with the film, once again, is that it ultimately sort of hollow: Collins's social commentary wasn't the most complex and insightful thing ever penned, but it's pretty deep for YA genre fiction, and that's almost completely absent from the carefully de-politicised movies (it doesn't help the first third of the novel, the best storytelling in the trilogy of books, from my perspective, directly corresponds to the worst-written part of the movie). The action is well-paced and handsomely naturalistic - you forget what a popcorn movie without intrusive color correction even looks like until you see one - with some uncertain CGI at points; the last hour of the film is as exciting as any popcorn film of 2013. That's less than half the movie, mind you, and in an ideal world, we'd have better praise for films with laughably gigantic piles of money by the end of their third day in theaters than "almost half of it is exciting, but kind of shallow". Still and all, it is exciting, appealing to look at, and it ends on a well-paced high note. Fun nonsense is better than annoying, muddled nonsense, anyway. And since this is highly likely to be the best of all four Hunger Games pictures, it does well to enjoy it while we can.

7/10

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PERSONAL CANON: SEA-CROSSED LOVERS

You know Tay Garnett? You probably haven't heard of Tay Garnett. The fact of the matter is, Tay Garnett really isn't a terribly important film director, though there are those among us who perk up at checking out what promises to be yet another '30s or '40s programmer, and unexpectedly find his name attached. I think that in order to be such a strange and rare creature as a Garnett fanboy, one must have come to two very particular films first in his whole canon, though I don't know that the order within those two matters very much (this was, at any rate, the way I did it): one of these is The Postman Always Rings Twice, the most frustrated and fatalistic of all early films noirs, and the other is One Way Passage, a hyper-melodramatic weeper from 1932 that nobody has seen, and everybody who has seen it seems to adore beyond measure. Which, I want to make clear, is absolutely the correct response. This isn't just a top-notch "women's picture" or "4-hankie movie", as they used to call torrid romantic melodramas back in the day: catch me in a mood to make hyperbolic, definitive statements, and you might well find me calling it the very best women's picture of the 1930s.

Statements like that need backing up, and I shall do so presently, though part of the joy of One Way Passage is that it offers so many avenues for praise. It is a magnificently sophisticated piece of filmmaking for 1932, coming right at the end of the early sound period and demonstrating how infinitely far technique had come in the three-and-a-quarter years since The Broadway Melody (or hell, in the year-and-a-half since Dracula). It is a mercilessly crisp act of storytelling, plowing through scenes at an unflagging pace without ever feeling rushed, and coming in at an exactly correct 67 total minutes. It mixes wry humor, blowsy comic relief, sudsy tragedy, and swoony romance in exactly the right measure to keep the tone balanced such that we're never encouraged to stop and think about how ludicrously histrionic the scenario really is (this worked well enough to net the film an Oscar on its sole nomination, for Best Original Story). It offers a chance to see William Powell in a slightly rougher, more curt incarnation than the luminous playboy of The Thin Man, paired with Kay Francis in the best of the (too, too few) performances I've seen that unjustly overlooked ex-superstar give. It has an ending that has every reason to be the corniest thing you could imagine and no reason at all to be so gloriously beautiful and moving and elegant.

When I tell you what the notion is behind the film, you will instantly understand what I mean with words like "torrid" and "histrionic" and "hyper-melodramatic". The shortest version of the movie: Dan Hardesty (Powell) and Joan Ames (Francis) have a glorious love affair during their four-week voyage on a liner traveling from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Neither of them knows that the other has a secret: Dan is an escaped murderer in custody of policeman Steve Burke (Warren Hymer), and he's being brought back to the United States to face his executioners, and Joan has a disease so terminal that her doctor (Frederick Burton) isn't convinced that she'll make be alive long enough to see the sanitarium that she's notionally sailing to.

Is that overwrought and shameless? YES! Is it hokey and campy! ABSOLUTELY NEVER! Certainly the most unexpected achievement of the film is that Garnett manages the film's tones so mercilessly, creating a film that could not be more unabashedly a weeper, but is entirely free of the perceived cheesiness that makes so many people disdain '30s melodrama (quite unfairly, in my estimation, but there are some fights you can't win). Partially this is because of its efficiency - I've already mentioned that it clocks in at 67 minutes, but it's worth repeating, because even in an age when movies were so much shorter than they are now, 67 minutes was a pretty damn short feature, and it leaves no chance to linger on moments, or more to the point, to wallow in them. Partially, it's because of the comic relief con-artists Skippy (Frank McHugh) and "Barrel House" Betty (Aline McMahon), colleagues of Dan who are both on the boat for entirely unrelated reasons, but decide to pool their resources and help keep Steve off his back - the policeman has given him some freedom of movement onboard, thinking that Dan's attempt to drown him was actually a fearless attempt to save him from the sea - and who keep things light without ever tipping over into fatally unbalancing the movie, though McHugh's shrill way of delivering lines is lot harder to defend than any other individual element of the film.

Mostly, it's Powell and Francis, who are both unbelievably wonderful. One Way Passage is essentially a star vehicle, though to a viewer eight decades gone, it's a weird one, given that Francis's star power has been mostly lost to time, and Powell remains familiar for playing a very different kind of person in a very different way. Nevertheless, it has all the functioning of a routine star picture, in terms of the way that the actors are privileged in the shot and in the drama, the roles written around them more than they are adapting to the roles (and if he's miles away from Nick Charles in the elegance department, Dan Hardesty is still awfully fucking dapper and suave for an escaped killer who has run three-quarters around the globe).

Most importantly, though, neither Powell nor Francis were given, at any point in their careers with which I am familiar, to pleading for the audience to like them. As a result, there's never a moment in this most tragic scenario where either of the leads plays the tragedy, and Francis particularly has a few wonderful moments scattered throughout where she very conspicuously isn't playing a woman haunted by the encroaching shade of death. Seven years later, Bette Davis - who I love - played a similar arc in Dark Victory - in which I especially love her - and gave full expression to her character's awareness of mortality; it makes a good comparison for what Francis is up to is, which is if possible even more impressive. For Francis, without ever letting a scene imply that Joan has forgotten her affliction, plays a lot of scenes in which Joan is happier now than she is worried about the future, and not because she's opportunistically using love as a distraction from death, but because she is genuinely and enthusiastically in love.

While this unexpectedly pleasant and not-at-all strident love affair is playing out, Garnett and his crew were busily employing some of the most accomplished technique of 1932 to give the melodrama an opportunity to make its fullest impact. The shot I always remember, both for its impressive craft and for its emotional impact, is a POV shot from Dan, down in the water where he's pushed himself and Steve, noticing Joan on the boat's deck, watching the commotion with several other people (they've already met, at this point). The camera pushes up and towards Francis, looking for all the world like a routine zoom, except that zooms weren't even close to existing yet. It's impressive in its own right, but also the perfect way to indicate how magnetic the attraction is between the two lovers, and how Dan's perception literally blocks out everything but Joan, thus explaining why he immediately throws away his freedom to be with her.

Beautiful stuff, in a movie full of beautiful stuff: it starts off on that foot, in fact, with a glorious opening tracking shot that suggests the multinational polyglot of Hong Kong by drifting across a bar divided into international segments based on what kind of drinks are poured there. There's also a fantastic visual motif that starts in this same scene (following an unbelievably literate and sexy flirtation over liquor between the two leads) in which the lovers break martini glasses and lay the stems over each other. It's a crafty enough way to visualise physical and romantic connection, but the real pay-off comes at the end: we've seen the same basic shot set-up three times, always on the customer side of the bar, looking at the glass stems, but the film's last shot looks from behind the bar down on them, an inversion that nicely compliments the out-of-nowhere but totally earned gesture of romantic anti-realism of the last scene. Which I will not further describe, because it's a gorgeous ending and worthy of being seen blind, the first time.

It is, all in all, a crisp, clear-headed, adult movie, selling its heightened conceit so smartly and sincerely that it barely even registers as a contrivance by the 15-minute mark. There's a kind of earnestness to the melodramatic action here that is entirely unlike anything American filmmakers would even dream of doing today, but even by '30s standards, not that many films are as effective at all levels both artistic and narrative as this; it's a masterpiece both of cinema and of its genre, two things that are not necessarily the same achievement, and as worthy of rediscover as any lost classic from that period which I can name.

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FAULK OFF

In the first place, there's absolutely no shame in failing to successfully adapt William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying into a cinematic form, as self-indulgent multi-hyphenate James Franco has so conspicuously failed to do. It is one of the most formally bookish books ever written, and while I think the word "unfilmable" really means that the person using that word is only admitting to their own lack of creativity and imagination, As I Lay Dying comes about as close to justifying that adjective as anything not written by James Joyce.

Franco, who is by absolutely no criterion a natural-born filmmaker, clearly didn't go about this idiotically, like some yahoo dilettantish actor who got enough fame and money to play-act at being a scholar and artist. It's obvious just from the evidence onsceen that he's been thinking long and hard about how to translate the film's compulsively literary prose to something that might carry off the same effect cinematically as Faulkner achieved in words. It doesn't end up doing that, mind you, but not out of laziness. More because Franco's two big ideas - split-screens and direct-address monologues - are applied somewhat arbitrarily and randomly, two words that do not apply in any measure to the exacting and precise novel.

At which point I should bow my head in the direction of those with no knowledge of the book, though I can't imagine that Franco intends this for such a crowd; and as far as that goes, I agree with him, considering as I do that As I Lay Dying is the best American novel of the 20th Century. It is a family story, set in Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, concerning a most grueling experience in the life of the Bundren family. It begins with matriarch Addie Bundren (Beth Grant), sick and about to die, expressing her will that her body should be buried in the town of Jefferson, some distance away; after she passes, her husband Anse (Tim Blake Nelson), and her five children set off to bring her body there in a homemade coffin built by eldest son Cash (Jim Parrack). A string of terrible events happen that blur the border between farce and cosmic tragedy beyond distinction.

To tell this story, and to explore the sprawling cast to whom it happens, Faulkner divided his 59 short chapters between 15 different first-person narrators, most frequently falling back on second son Darl (the largest role, which Franco graciously gave to himself), but also including a virtually incoherent and possibly mentally underdeveloped child, and the corpse of Addie Bundren herself, among several other vivid and distinctive voices. This, and not the corpse-carrying plot, is the most salient and characteristic element of As I Lay Dying in its literary form, and any attempt to film it must absolutely grapple with that structure.

The thing about the film Franco made is that it captures the letter of the book's subjectivity through the very odd method of splitting the frame in half with two different camera set-ups, while failing entirely to capture its spirit. Cinema is, by default, an objective medium, after all: put up the camera point it at a factory, record the people walking out of the factory without commentary. But that's by default, and it can be forced into subjectivity and perspective by a sufficiently gifted artist; this is the calling card of some of the greatest directors in the history of narrative filmmaking. As I Lay Dying, for all its experimental glee and the frequently beautiful images that result (the content in the two split screens frequently overlap in graphically appealing ways), isn't great filmmaking; at times it's barely even professional filmmaking, feeling more like Franco and a lot of his film set buddies got together to make a home movie in period costume. Which I imagine Franco to have in his possession already. It has the feel of a movie made with a lot of attention to form, but no real insight into what that form actually means, and it occupies a stubbornly third-person perspective that keeps us locked away from the characters even when they stare at the camera and talk to us.

None of which means that As I Lay Dying has to be bad, just that it's not a very good adaptation of Faulkner, but the ugly fact is that Franco's formal experimentation, however ineffective, is easily one of the film's triumphs. For all the energy that he and cinematographer Christina Voros sunk into figuring out which complementary angles to shoot the action from, and how to make the period setting look gorgeously picturesque on a budget, the director seems to have abandoned the actors entirely, unless it's just that no director now living would be able to coach 21st Century actors how to deliver Faulkner's thick, literary prose as though it were ever meant to be spoken as dialogue. At any rate, the acting, across the board, is comically bad; Nelson, who adopts a plummy accent that sounds a redneck version of the Swedish Chef, leaving only a handful of words legible from every sentence, is both the worst and the best - the worst in that he is inscrutable and hilarious in the wrong ways, and the best in that at least he's hilarious, and gives the film a liveliness it craves (not to mention that his outrageous, scenery-devouring accent is the only thing that remotely approaches the 15 different voices that Faulkner gave to his narrators. There are decent moments throughout, almost all of them involving silence: Ahna O'Reilly's defeated, empty body language as Dewey Dell, only daughter of the Bundrens, trying to pay for an abortion, Cash's increased disorientation as his broken leg begins to rot (I'd be reluctantly inclined to give Parrack best in show honors, but nobody hear deserves that kind of praise). There are far more moments that are out-and-out irritating and humiliating to watch.

So, while there might not be such a thing as an As I Lay Dying movie that works, this is clearly not the best or most well-thought out As I Lay Dying movie that could be made. It feels, overall, like what it is: a work of fan art made by a fan in a position to indulge himself with a paying audience. That somehow makes the whole thing more distasteful, but it doesn't take finding Franco an egocentric dilettante to find fault with his movie; the movie does a great job of that all on its own.

4/10

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MONSTROUS DISAPPOINTMENT

In the grand tradition of blog series throughout the internet, Review All Monsters! has hit itself a snag, Owing, undoubtedly, to Netflix's hellbent urge to stop having DVDs involved with its DVD-by-mail service, there apparently aren't enough discs of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster to go 'round, so I find myself staring an unyielding "Long wait" in the face, as I have done for some days now. Meanwhile, my customary back-up plan of accidentally finding perfectly legal copies of rare or never-on-home-video movies underneath rocks in the magical forest has also come up short: it is unbelievably hard to find a Japanese-language torrent of Ghidorah on any of the sites I have ready access to. And so we wait: either for whoever is hanging onto my disc to mail it back, or for this fucking slow drip download to wrap up. Review All Monsters! will return, I promise, but right now I haven't the damnedest idea when it will be, or how much time it will take to get back on schedule.

In the meantime, I hope to share with you all soon the fruits of James Franco's limitless dipshittery.

Updated: Good news! Copy acquired, and while I have a sort of theme day planned for tomorrow, it might go up then at some point, or definitely Monday.

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: ARBITRARY AND CAPRICIOUS

In the wake of tragic, violent crimes, there's a ubiquitous, easy, and simple response: shake your head, look downcast, and intone in a very mordant tones, "What sort of person would do a thing like that?"

What's not ever supposed to happen, is somebody actually going out and answering that question, and that's the most outrageous, stunning, wonderful thing about music video director Alexandre Moors's feature debut, Blue Caprice. Here is a film that casts its eye upon the horrifyingly random sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area in 2002, and attempts to answer questions that aren't polite to talk about in a media landscape that much prefers to partition criminals and killers into the Bad People bin, so broken and devious that you cannot possibly think of them as human. Questions like, where did the two killers come from? What was driving them? How did they come up with their schemes? Who were they?

This is absolutely not the same as trying make excuses or justifications for John Muhammad and Lee Malvo - the film pointedly eschews surnames - like some of the more outraged negative response to the film have made it out. If anything, Blue Caprice is more troubling and disturbing as a direct result of allowing John and Lee to emerge as undeniable human beings: when we can write off every single murderer and villain in the world as some kind of bogeyman, we aren't obliged to grapple with the reality that actual people like the sort you see at the store or on the street are, in fact, capable of doing unbelievably terrible things when just one little thing goes wrong in their head.

The things that go wrong for 17-year-old Lee (Tequan Richmond) have an easily-pinpointed cause, at least as Moors and screenwriter R.F.I. Porto have it (the film hardly pretends to be a docudrama): he was homeless, without a parent, and far away from his native Jamaica when he met John (Isaiah Washington), the best father figure immediately available to a kid who needed a father figure right now. Unfortunately, in addition to having a kindly eye on the boy, John suffered from a hell of a persecution complex, in which an indefinite Them was responsible for everything wrong in his life, from the difficult time he had buying guns to the way his ex-wife mysteriously had a problem with him kidnapping their children and traveling to Antigua. Fed a steady stream of misogynistic, anti-social, paranoid ravings from the charismatic man who was the only person whose love and approval he craved, Lee naturally and inevitably drifted into anti-social freakouts of his own. Eventually, whatever thin dam was holding John in check broke, and that's how you get a cross-country trip from Washington state to Washington, D.C. that left 27 people dead or wounded.

Blue Caprice is not "about" the murders, which occupy less than a third of its 90-minute running time, and are presented as a chronologically imprecise, impressionistic series of elliptically-staged images (which isn't to say that they don't have potency: the first murder Lee commits is presented as a close-up of his face with just a small splash of blood on it, and Richmond's staring, open-mouthed expression is as unnerving as all the split-open dummy heads in all of horror). It is much, much more about the way that a murderous psychology is nurtured, developed, and intensified, presenting the relationship between John and Lee as a bubble (only sometimes punctured by a deranged-in-their-own-right married couple played, unexpectedly, by Tim Blake Nelson and Joey Lauren Adams), in which they are able to live only in their own stewing fantasies of oppression. This is carried off with excellent skill by the filmmakers, whose grey- and blue-dominated color palette and frequent overcast lighting (the cinematographer was a certain Brian O'Carroll, whose career I look forward to following) add an unmissable sepulchral feeling to the already nasty content; and it must be said that the acting is pretty incredible, as well. Particularly from Washington, whose reined-in portrait of raging paranoia is wonderfully unexpected and effective, more about the immensely slow burn of his character than grabby "I am a psycho!" showboating.

Not everything is flawless: the movie has all the feel of an ambitious, overreaching first feature, with many individual moments that probably wouldn't happen if a little more discipline and judgment was available on-set. There is a particular scene, in which Lee and John are in a car during a rainstorm, and the droplets are shadowed on their faces: it's showy and pretty and complex, but also remarkably corny and unoriginal, while proving an especially anti-subtle moment in a film that thrives on its subtleties. And there's the usual gamut of little misjudgements in the hand-held camerawork, which is indifferently and arbitrarily applied; and in the staccato editing pattern, which especially near the beginning make it all too clear that Moors got his start editing videos. There's a lot of style that just doesn't cohere, throughout the movie, and plenty of times where the atmospheric, tone-poem feeling of the whole shades into some kind of misery-camp mush.

Even more than in most movies, though, what emerges from Blue Caprice isn't the excellence or hamminess of any individual shot or scene, but the feeling of the whole thing overall; the way that the aesthetic creates an almost Biblical feeling of potential destructive energy, and the way that the two leads reveal deeper and more horribly blanked-out registers of amoral detachment as the film progresses. The longer we spend in their heads, the more uncomfortable the film is to watch, which is obviously the exact point of the thing; to plunge the viewer right into the blackest heart of darkness. Ultimately, the filmmakers can't truly communicate what sort of people Lee and John were during their crime spree, and the editing turns increasingly disjointed near the end in a not entirely effective attempt to make their unknowable natures part of the aesthetic and not simply a limitation. Still, we get awfully close to who they are and what that means, and it is by no means a pleasant or enjoyable experience. But for the viewer willing to undergo that kind of nastiness in pursuit of a greater understanding of every kind of human behavior, it's certainly a rewarding and memorable piece of cinema.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: PERSECUTION SIMPLEX

Director Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 sophomore feature, The Celebration (or Festen; I'm never clear on which is the preferred U.S. title), is one of the agreed-upon masterpiece of 1990s cinema. That being said, I don't personally have much use for it at all, owing in part to it being the flagship of the Dogme 95 movement, for which I also don't have much use at all. So the awestruck praise that swirled around his latest, the apparent return-to-form The Hunt, at its 2012 Cannes premiere inspired, I will confess, very little in the way of confidence. Also, disliking The Celebration is one of those things that makes you a cinephile pariah, so I've put it up here first just to make sure that nobody reads this and only finds out at the end that I'm a huge asshole whose opinions aren't worth noticing.

That all being said: The Hunt works better than The Celebration, at any rate. I'm not absolutely certain how much it works, and my suspicion is that without the sobering performance of Mads Mikkelsen in the central role, it wouldn't end up working at all.

The story, as co-written by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, is not unlike Arthur Miller's The Crucible, updated to modern Denmark: it is a story about how one person's off-the-cuff lie can whip up a community's paranoia and bigotry to destroy one person's life solely on the basis of rumor and scandal. In this case, Lucas (Mikkelsen), is a kindergarten teacher of the absolute best sort imaginable: he treats his students with dignity and respect, talking to them at a level that they can fully comprehend and appreciate, making sure they are cared for in all respects. This has made him a beloved fixture among the adults in the country village where he lives, and an icon to the children, especially a little girl named Klara (Annika Wedderkopp). To express her passionate crush on the teacher, she has made him a small present, which he very gently and kindly and in the most respectful way possible declines; this pisses her off, and - armed with the knowledge of a porno she saw her brother watching - she mentions oh-so-casually to a member of the school staff, Grethe (Susse Wold) that Lucas was in the habit of exposing his erect penis to her.

We have, at this point, hit the first point where I can't quite shake the feeling that the film is having me on; not that I spend too much time around five- or six-year-olds, but Klara seems to be acting with a degree of calculated, malicious intent that I really can't wrap my head around (the story most directly comparable to this that I am aware of, Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, situates its resentful student at a much more reasonable 12 or 13). But let's not get bogged down by plot logic. Vinterberg and Lindholm didn't, after all. Suffice it to say that Klara's father, Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen), who is also Lucas's best friend, doesn't stop to wait for evidence, any more than the blabbermouth Gerthe does, and in very little time at all, the whole town is convinced that Lucas is a habitual child-rapist. The ostracism and ice-cold hatred he receives is bad enough, in no small part because of its Kafkaesque arbitrariness; but things get really bad when Lucas's teenage son, Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm) starts to be caught up in the witch hunt against his father, and then the physical intimidation starts to kick in, and Lucas finds himself in the bottommost pit of a nightmare, utterly confused about how he got there and horribly aware that he has no way out.

Mikkelsen is great. Let's just clarify that, and keep on doing it. When The Hunt triumphs, it is absolutely due to the way that actor captures the panicked fear of being caught in a wrong man thriller, as well as anybody ever did in the most severe of Hitchcock films. The title already suggests, and the opening scenes state it outright, that there's symbolism at play between the deer hunting that makes up one of the only forms of entertainment in this community, and the way Lucas is flushed out and abused by his former friends. And this, too, Mikkelsen captures gorgeously: the flitting, nervous energy of a prey animal is in the subtext of every part of his coiled, wiry physical performance.

The parts of the film that aren't Mikkelsen, though, are... problematic? Ineffective? Grimly one-note and miserabilist? Oh, so one-note and miserabilist. It's not fair to compare anything to The Crucible, one of the most iconic of all midcentury plays, but The Hunt courts those comparisons so readily, and it doesn't come out good from it. Vinterberg's approach to the story is unusually uniform and inflexible, and it doesn't take very long after the big pedophilia scare kicks in (about a third of the way into the movie) for it to become clear that The Hunt is a film with one single idea, that it rides into the ground and deep into the soft earth below the surface. Much like The Celebration, it isn't so much cynical as nihilistic, so involved in the worst of human behavior that it feels as much like a celebration of suffering as an exploration of it. It lacks any nuance in any character besides, arguably, Lucas's doubting girlfriend Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport) - even Lucas himself possesses no subtleties but those that Mikkelsen provides to him, for he is otherwise a cardboard martyr propped up for our sympathetic veneration, but not remotely our appreciation of human behavior, except in its most extreme and repetitive form. It's too emotionally vicious to be a slog; but it's not nearly varied enough to be much of anything else.

A few things redeem the film a little bit, enough that I feel a bit wobbly deciding between a passing and a failing grade. One of these, of course, is Mikkelsen. Another is Charlotte Bruus Christensen's cinematography, which has its problems - far too much of that damnable handheld camera "realism" that European cinema has been very slowly weaning itself from in the last several years, and the filmmakers are much too reluctant to try anything that isn't a close-up - but is far more nuanced and atmospheric than strict realism would permit for (let alone the dictatorially stringent Dogme 95), attaining a sickly kind of intimacy that allows us to fully experience Lucas's miseries along with him. And the first thirty minutes, when the film is strictly observational and interested only in how this community hums along in its resting state, is genuinely engaging and solid character studying and world building. Stacked up next to things like the unremitting, manufactured bleakness of the plot, the ludicrous epilogue, and the shallow characterisations, that's not much, but it's something.

Anyway, there's not doubt that the film gets a big emotional reaction. It might not be fair, it might not be truthful, and it might not have any discernible point, but it's there. So that's something too.

6/10

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