MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: LINDSAY AND THE PORN STAR

The operating thesis of The Canyons is that movies are awful, the people who make them are awful, and the culture that permits their continued existence is awful. It is perhaps a keen example of form reflecting content, therefore, that The Canyons is itself pretty goddamn awful; and given who director Paul Schrader is, it's possible that this really is deliberate. It is even more possible, particularly given that legendary New York Times Magazine piece from January, that it was such a strained, miserable experience that a certain raging anger could not help but saturate every frame and every cut, and that The Canyons is an unwatchable, miserable piece of crap because it was poorly made.

The genesis of the thing is a gnarled mess, but let's not bother recapping it here. Instead, let's dive right in where the film does: a non-diegetic montage of decaying movie theaters, a motif that the film will return to for individual, equally non-diegetic shots, and eventually a second montage during the end credits. "Movies are dead", says The Canyons, in a stripped-down, dead-eyed way; it is an empty pessismism sharp and bleak even for the world's most famous filmmaking ex-Calvinist, and reliably misanthropic writer Bret Easton Ellis. And having claimed that movies are dead, The Canyons immediately attempts to prove it, in an opening scene that sets the film off on a monumentally poor footing from which it never recovers. We're at a dinner party in a gorgeous but somewhat icy Los Angeles home, where four movie people are chatting: the producer, Christian (James Deen, America's most beloved "boy next door" porn star) is busily telling his assistant Gina (Amanda Brooks) and her boyfriend, his new lead actor Ryan (Nolan Funk), all about his adoration of swinging and casual sex with strangers in the home and bed he shares with co-producer Tara (Lindsay Lohan), who can't get a word in edgewise and grows increasingly brittle as the night wears on. A few things clearly announce themselves immediately: Deen has an unbelievably literal understanding of how to play a menacing bad boy, Funk can't out-act a porn star, and Lohan, permitted to do her own make-up, felt that enormous silent vamp cat eyes were exactly the right choice. And while, thankfully, this never crops again, it's all you can stare at or think about for what seems like 10 solid minutes of endless exposition delivered in a glowering monotone by Deen.

To be fair, The Canyons is never as unwatchable as this opening scene, but it's never as captivatingly bad, either. For something that seems so rife with possibilities for outrageous camp or deliciously comic smut, the film is paralyzingly mordant and bitter in execution, and above all else, boring. Schrader's clever enough to predict his audience's prurient desires (Lohan's ample breasts, Deen's enormous dick, sweaty sex scenes between them and each other and numerous other characters) to punish us by withholding them as long as possible, or by making them joyless, which means that even on the meager level of exploitative trash, The Canyons simply doesn't have any juice. The actors are all weak and stilted without being particularly funny in a The Room sort of way, and Lohan - who does, perhaps against expectations, give the best performance in the movie - is more tragic than anything else. The girl looks like she's been rode hard and put away wet, as they say; 26 years old at the time of shooting, the actress looks like a particularly dazed 40-year-old, the final nail in the coffin of a career that seemed so intoxicating in its promise and freshness back in the Mean Girls days, if there was any lingering doubt left. She has a movie star's ability to command the camera, but it's mixed with obvious desperation and fatigue, and it's not so much that Lohan's performance looks effortful, as it is wearisome to watch.

That the film isn't trashy and fun is one thing, and given the haranguing, moralising tendencies of the authors, not very surprising: that it's so outlandishly repetitive and boring is quite another thing entirely. Whatever little point the film has to make, it makes quickly: Hollywood types are sexually exploitative scum who can't feel feelings but just ragefuck each other into oblivion. That message, mixed and remixed, is a lot to stomach for 100 minutes, particularly with Schrader and his crew heads - cinematographer John DeFazio, production designer Stephanie Gordon - so apparently hellbent on making the most generic, empty version of Los Angeles they can manage, fascinating only in brief moments where its very cheapness (and, we must be fair, The Canyons was an exorbitantly cheap motion picture) enforces a kind of neo-realist awareness of space; the stores and public spaces of L.A. depicted with a plainness and honesty that movies try their absolute best to never depict. But that's not much of a compensation for how barbarically dull all of the first hour is, basically until the showstopper sex scene where Tara finally calls Christian out on his nastiness and flips the switch in his head that turns this nominal thriller into an actual thriller, as the sexually jealous soul-dead monster takes steps to punish everyone who disagrees with him.

The third of The Canyons that's kind of a thriller isn't any more effective as cinema than the two-thirds that are just angry and miserable, but at least it feels like it has a shape and momentum. It's not thrilling; the only scene that feels like it could work (a shock stabbing) undone by a certain mechanical streak in the direction. Though at least it threatens to pay off Deen's one-note acting by suggesting that it's based in actual psychosis, and makes the character something at all besides punishingly selfish male sexuality without pleasure. That's pretty much the best way I could sum up the entire movie, and while I get that being unpleasurable is the "point", being uninteresting surely couldn't have been. And for Schrader and Ellis, in their grubby wallow in D-grade noir cruelty, even human depravity and darkness can be rendered uninteresting if there's too much of it with too little creativity to spice it up.

2/10

Read More

RONIN, RONIN, RONIN ON THE RIVER

Since 47 Ronin opened, mystifyingly, on Christmas Day, it has earned for itself the right to be treated with the warmth and charity of the holiday season. Thus: this movie has, for serious, kind of amazing sound mixing. It is raging and violent during the battle scenes, it's hushed and soothing in the scenes of reflective solemnity, it creates at all times an immersive feeling that is more fluid and ethereal than naturalistic, and yet a kind of naturalism is the result anyway.

Also, the CGI mostly doesn't suck, but in a couple of shots of a dragon, it really does. Merry Christmas, I've run out of nice things.

That being said, the film's not nearly the ghastly, death-haunted train wreck that word of mouth has made it out to be. For that word of mouth is based in no small part on the hideous sight of Keanu Reeves as our tour guide into the world of Japanese samurai culture, which is a horrible notion in every way, but it's also not what 47 Ronin is: Reeves isn't even the main character. That honor goes to Oishi, played by Sanada Hiroyuki, who is, if we might make reference to Seven Samurai (and 47 Ronin is awfully keen on our doing so), the Shimura Takeshi to Reeves's Mifune Toshiro and Kimura Isao combined, in that he's the primary mover in everything that happens in the main action of the plot, the ring-leader, and the strategist. Reeves's Kai has to settle for being the unliked half-breed who wants to be a real samurai but can't, and also has the wan romantic subplot to carry, and still ends up with less screen time.

That only means that 47 Ronin isn't the worst film it could be, not that it isn't still awfully bad, nor even that it doesn't make a mockery of Japanese culture. The very first thing that happens in the film is a grave narrator invoking "ancient feudal Japan, a land of magic", which manages to be vile on three separate levels: feudal Japan isn't "ancient", it was a real place not saturated by tacky fantasy movie magic, and in 2013, English-speaking audiences have had enough access to stories taking place in feudal Japan that we don't need this mind-boggling over-the-top exoticism to add a zesty sense of Orientalism to the proceedings. But we might well ask, without Orientalism, would this 47 Ronin exist at all? It is the first version in English of a story retold so often in all Japanese dramatic forms that there's an entire genre, Chūshingura, that refers only to telling the story of the 47 ronin, and that word is the title of a great many movies on exactly the same subject. At least one, a two-part 1941 epic made by Mizoguchi Kenji, is among the few pre-1950 Japanese films reasonably well-known in America, though I suppose that the new one has more or less shat that bed for the next decade.

The story is irreducibly Japanese, evoking the heart and soul of the bushido code governing honor and morality among the warrior class: a group of samurai, in the employ of Lord Asano (Tanaka Min), were furious when the shogun Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) took no action against Lord Kira (Asano Tadanobu), whose actions precipitated Asano's death. Though specifically forbidden from doing so, the 47 disgraced and masterless samurai - known as ronin - successfully enacted a plan to avenge themselves on Kira, with their commitment to bushido so moving and profound that the shogun permitted them to die by the honorable method of seppuku, rather than having them executed as criminals. Concerned, perhaps, that this story was going to be a hard sell for literally every other culture besides the one that birthed it, the producers of the new movie sexed it up with a witch (Kikuchi Rinko) who can transform herself into a dragon, among other less dubious additions to what is, after all, a matter of historical, not legendary record.

In this extravagantly costly telling (and for the most part, you can see the money: not all $175 million of it, but there have been chintzier looking popcorn movies in 2013), the complexity and dignity of bushido has been replaced by alarming tone-deafness on the part of first time feature director Carl Rinsch, who's absolutely drowning in this environment of big, fancy sets, and big, colorful costumes, and big, glossy CGI. A proper version of 47 Ronin needs to have a certain gravity about it, but Rinsch's approximation of this feeling is almost comically straitlaced solemnity, a sense of all-encompassing mirthlessness that is absolutely the worst way any director can handle Keanu Reeves, for a start, and such a mind-blowing mismatch for the gaudy excesses of the fantasy-laced production that it only draws attention to how much magical swords and all don't belong in this plot.

At times, Rinsch and cinematographer John Mathieson manage to stumble into some well-chosen images: Japanese architecture has too much of a linear geography to it for anybody using a rectangular frame to strike out completely. And Penny Rose's glowingly colorful costume designs help the film stumble into a few Ran-like moments of human figure as graphic element. But mostly, the visuals are just like the storytelling: too grim for the content of the film, too klutzy for the original story. The camera moves with plodding intensity, and the blocking offers plenty of pauses for the actors to hold dramatic poses, and it feels too damn much like a teenage otaku's daydreams about making a movie for words to express. It is tremendously unmodulated in its seriouness: everything has all the oxygen sucked out of it, and there's no attempt made - not a successful one, anyway - to change the feeling between scenes, or to give any of the characters a personality beyond "teeth-gritting constipation". This endless, aching earnestness, whether it belongs there or not on a scene-by-scene basis, makes the film more of a slog than a genuinely awful piece of crap, but that leaves it almost less tolerable, and harder to recommend for any viewer anywhere.

4/10

Read More

COMPUTER DATING

There is much to love in Her, and there is a little bit to be hugely frustrated by, though on the whole the concept and world-building is beguiling enough that getting through the rough patches en route to the terrific stuff is no real chore. But there is a flaw so obvious and basic that I'm puzzled nobody seems to have brought it up yet, which is that the film ends three times. That is to say, three times the editing and the blocking are cue us for a cut to black as the lovely Arcade Fire score plays out in its tentative, romantic, melancholy way. And twice, more movie happens - which is good the first time, since it would have left a dismally unfulfilled movie in its wake. But still, maybe don't structure a scene that way if there's 40 minutes of movie left. The second time, though is a different story, because that's when the film enters its last phase, and the last phase of the movie is really darn ill-advised.

Basically, Her is a fable, of life and relationships in a heavily computerised world. Sometime in the future in Los Angeles, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), in the last stages of a divorce, invests in one of the new OS1 programs that use the world's first artificially intelligent operating system. The AI that is installed on his home computer, a female voice naming itself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), begins to evolve and learn, just the way it's supposed to, and then to develop a personality and will, just the way it's supposed to, and then it - she - Her - and Theodore fall in love.

In case you missed the bit where this is a metaphor for the detached, dehumanised relationships that people form over things like social media, where people strike up real, deep, meaningful connections with people they only know as a voice or even just text, Theodore's job is writing richly emotional letters for people too busy to do it themselves. He's too brittle to feel his own feelings, but he's the best in the business at faking other people's feelings, so they don't have to feel them. Do you get it? Her will take its time establishing and lingering over this in case you don't get it.

In the grand tradition of sci-fi, Her is clearly about the time it was made, not the time it takes place, and the fact that so damn much of the film can be so gallingly contrived if you take it seriously - the handwritten note website is probably the most clear-cut "love it or hate it" point on this front - only further encourages us to think of it as a feature-length metaphor. And then along comes the final 20 minutes, making it all literal. Good breeding forbids me from revealing the details of what happens, but suffice it to say that, having spent the opening act of the film wondering all sorts of practical questions about what life in a world with intelligent operating systems in every home would look like, and then having concluded that since the film is working at a more abstracted, fabulistic level, it doesn't need that kind of sustained story logic, it's shocking and upsetting when, in the final lap, the film decides that, what the hell, it's going to go right ahead and explore the very plausible and realistic ramifications of a scenario which has actively and purposefully shunned plausibility and realism. Inevitably, this involves some conclusions that really don't feel like they follow naturally, and the final moments try, hard, to shift back to symbolism in a way that the film can't, at that point, earn back.

Thankfully, outside of this (to my mind) wholly unacceptable finale, Her mostly hits the most exquisite sweet spot between exploring its concept and using its concept for emotional resonance. Spike Jonze - earning his first writing credit for a film he also directed - has found a way to rejuvenate the miserably overworked post-divorce love romantic dramedy by abstracting it, and by explicitly making it about very modern ways of being in love instead of aiming for something universal and timeless. The results feel fresher than they perhaps are: if Samantha was a human woman from a different class or race, and the film took place in a real time period, Her would require very little re-writing, and would undoubtedly feel like a boring parade of trite observations. It's exactly because of the "weirding" that happens with the very visually precise and gratifyingly low-fuss vision of the near future that the film is able to make these well-worn tropes seem bright and new, and to tap into emotional currents that a more traditional setting would have to sacrifice due to overfamiliarity.

And it is an immensely well-built world at that, with Jonze, costume designer Casey Storm, and production designer K.K. Barrett attempting, not to wow us in the fashion of so many cinematic futurists, but to inveigle us with a world that very deliberately, effectively, and elegantly seeks to depict a wholly reasonable extension of the way things are right now. The onscreen interface of the OS1 is precisely what we've been heading towards ever since tablets became a thing; the physical world is sleek and clean, trimmed in soft primary colors, perfectly evoking a society that has grown so invested in shiny computers of the post-Apple era that it's not comfortable with square lines and grottiness. The unifying pinkness of everything, particularly the clothing, suggests a friendly but also slightly infantilised world.

And against this cheery but somewhat drab and uniform setting, the human element plays out sharply and with tremendously rich acting. Phoenix is a miracle, evolving the foggy disarticulation of The Master into something that's more immediate and humane, but every bit as internally confused and blank; I'd certainly call it the best performance of his career, and at any rate it's almost objectively the most appealling and recognisable. Johansson's warm, comforting voice work is awfully good, but to my mind the most striking woman in the cast is Amy Adams as Theodore's friend Amy, probably the most lived-in, relaxed performance she's ever given, one of the many dour women in Spike Jonze pictures, but the first one for whom her dourness is a real plus, giving her depth and truth and a range of everyday feelings to draw from (and actually, my favorite supporting character is a peevish video game avatar played by Jonze himself, but that's just some good, high-spirited comic relief).

This is every kind of cliché, but Her is such a rich, warm story about people, it hurts. There's a whole lot of shagginess, of the sort that will happen when a director is too invested and fond of his characters to cut random moments of them just inhabiting their world. It also boasts a fairly musty and ancient message (it's hard to trust people after you've had love ripped away, but it's even harder to keep yourself locked away from feeling messy, uncontrollable human emotions), though it's the kind of ancient message that has lasted through as many iterations as it has because it's so worthwhile. Her is baggy and imbalanced and it does, absolutely, tap into the genial quirkiness that makes Jonze and his whole breed of lilting indie artistry such a hard sell for many people - it's "twee", there, I said it, though the only place the tweeness bothered me was a cutesy-pie Karen O song. Anyway, twee or not, Her is a hugely pleasant and intimate showcase for human feelings, expressed by wonderful actors in a vivid setting, and the fuzziness that creeps in throughout is, for the most part, inseparable from the clarity and accuracy of the very best parts.

8/10

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: THE MOTHERING INSTINCT

Bradford Young! Say it soft, and it's not really at all like praying, with those two shovey "D"s and all, but it's still an exquisite and important name to get to know. I feel as if Young has been my big discovery of the year, which is bad on me, since 2013 is not also the first year of prominent movies to be shot by him - going all the way back to 2011, he was the cinematographer on Pariah, a film that even had some pretty damn noteworthy cinematography. But the back half of 2013 has been as revelatory for Young as 2012 was for Greig Fraser: in the span of less than two months, Young saw the release of Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Mother of George, two outstandingly confident and sophisticated examples of the cinematographer's art utilising two entirely different stylistic handbooks; they are similar only in that they are both among the year's most beautiful films. Of the two, Mother of George is the even more exciting and innovate piece of work, for while Ain't Them Bodies Saints is essentially a tremendously gifted act of pastiche (the question seems to have been, "Can you do ersatz Lubezki?", and the answer came back "Hells to the yes, motherfucker"), Mother of George is made up more complicated and challenging images which are brought more to the foreground by a film whose narrative and psychological concepts are expressed primarily through visual means. It's also the third film I can personally vouch for, after Pariah and Middle of Nowhere, in which Young establishes himself as our reigning genius in the nearly empty field of making cunningly-lit images chiefly populated by people with very dark brown skin.

And for all that, I can't even say that Young is the obvious MVP of a movie which would quite fail without him, for Mother of George is an awfully great piece of filmmaking that makes excellent use of many talented people. The most readily apparent of these is probably Danai Gurira as the titular figure, though George exists as a more conjectural figure to have a mother than an actual flesh and blood person. The plot, which does not make any significant attempt to surprise, goes about like this: Adenike (Gurira) and Ayodele (Isaach De Bankolé) are members of the Yoruba immigrant community in Brooklyn, and the film opens with their marriage. At this joyful event, Ayodele's mother (Bukky Ajayi) blesses Adenike with a prayer that sounds awfully like a command: they will have a child, it will be a boy, and he will be named George. 18 months later, Adenike is not pregnant, and starting to go from panicked to soul-despairing; worse yet, the deep-set conservatism of the tradition-addicted Yoruba community means that Ayodele is openly antagonistic to Adenike's pleas to go to a fertility doctor and see what's going on. Eventually, her mother-in-law, acting from a position of dictatorial kindness, raises a suggestion that seems perfectly reasonable given her cultural preoccupations, and totally horrifying to the more Americanised Adenike: sleep with Ayodele's brother Biyi (Anthony Okungbowa), get pregnant that way, and never bother telling a soul, because it's all the same bloodline, and it doesn't count as infidelity.

It is not the world's most flexible story, true, but if anything, that works in its favor. This is above all things a story of conflict between sub-Saharan African tradition and modern American social codes, both at the plot level of family drama and the psychological level of character study of Adenike's increasingly desperate state. And the primary way that director-writer Andrew Dosunmu works this out is through a highly presentational and theatrical - a hater might describe it as "stagey" - evocation of a certain kind of exoticised African-ness. Or at least, what sub-Saharan African cinema presents as African-ness. It is a film in which the eye-searing colors and heightened drama of a certain thread of African cinema is situated in places where we'd be led to expect an American indie kind of grainy hand-held urban realism, with Dosunmu and Young capturing everything with many arrestingly outré frames that aren't what we'd naturally expect from either. The film is positively rotten with shots in which the camera height is much elevated from anything normal or safe, marginalisng the characters not at the side of the frame, but at the bottom, and in such a way stressing the out-of-placeness Adenike feels in trying to navigate her life in a manner that really stands out and startles us, when other, more standard ways of emphasising "this person doesn't belong here" through the visuals would tend to go in one eye and out the other, if you will.

The most rewarding thing about Mother of George is that its feints towards exoticism are absolutely never as simple as just coding the Yoruba population as a non-American "other" for the audience's convenience, a simple counterpoint to the feisty assimilation practiced by Sade (Yaya DaCosta), Adenike's best friend and the exact counterpoint to her mother-in-law. The bright colors in the sets and particularly in the costumes are always used as a means of pinpointing exactly where we are in the emotional arc of the film, even more than the script does; I half wonder if you could correctly sketch the shape of the drama simply by tracking the costumes Gurira wears throughout. Nor is this the only primarily visual way the film communicates meaning: the evolution of the several sex scenes in the film, from shy passion to routine lovemaking to bitter, mechanical humping, niftily sketches out Adenike's increasing detachment from her life and marriage, and all because of the way that Dosunmu chooses to frame Gurira in each of these moments, and the amount of emptiness she allows to show in her face in each scene. Hell, even the editing is keenly precise: the more cutting within a scene, the more positive and optimistic the mood of that scene - the more life in it, if you will, which is such a stupidly obvious trick that I can't understand why it also seems so rare.

All of this would all be so much aesthetic wankery if it wasn't tied to a clear and vital emotional drama, and this is something that Mother of George absolutely is in every way. It is simple, almost reductive: a woman is devastated that she can't have a child, and this makes her feel like less of a person. But the filmmakers and actors bring that spare skeleton of a drama to life with passion and intensity and beauty, and the dramatically sparse, visually lush film they've collaborated to make is one of the greatest human stories and greatest formal exercises in recent cinematic memory.

9/10

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - IT'S BETTER DOWN WHERE IT'S WETTER

Here's a switch: Latitude Zero of 1969 was the first, and I believe only, Toho tokusatsu (effects-driven film) shot in English, for an English-speaking market, and only groomed for Japanese release afterward. So the "proper" version of the movie, and the longer cut (by 15 minutes), is the English language one. And it's that one that we'll primarily look at now, though in my zeal for completeness, did watch both cuts. The biggest difference between them - besides the psychological gulf that comes from watching a rinky-dink B-movie with subtitles, something that for most cinephiles insistently confers a presumption of class - is that the English version is a bit more expansive and clearer, with the connecting ideas given a bit more expression. The vibe one gets is that the producers assumed that American audiences needed a bit more coherence and storytelling rigor than the Japanese. Which is almost certainly true. Also, I just used the words "coherence" and "storytelling rigor" in the context of Latitude Zero, which is an outrageously daffy thing to have done.

This film was the last collaboration of the Big Four of Toho's tokusatsu and daikaiju eiga films: producer Tanaka Tomoyuki, director Honda Ishirō, composer Ifukube Akira, and effects director Tsuburaya Eiji, though the attitude is strictly that of writer Sekizawa Shinichi, whose tendency towards live-action cartoons and kiddie glosses of James Bond is very much the name of the game here. Sekizawa was not the prime mover of the plot, though: Latitude Zero was adapted from a radio serial by Ted Sherdeman, who receives a writing credit himself. Whatever its parentage, the film is a stunningly loopy ride, a fervid mixture of Japanese and American generic tropes that manages to be impressively conceived and executed in almost as many ways as it its phenomenally campy. And boy, are there plenty of ways in which Latitude Zero is camp of the first order.

It's sort of a gloss on Atragon, the 1963 Toho production about an evil undersea empire and a magical submarine built by a crazed World War II veteran, with an incomparably sunnier outlook on the world. In this case, the advanced society hiding on the ocean floor is unmixedly good, even messianic, and the specter of war exist solely in some dialogic asides that acknowledge the martial existence of the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. It is a film where the villains are easily identified and far too incompetent to represent a serious threat, occupying such a hammy register that it's impossible to suppose that they were being pitched at anything but a juvenile audience.

Also, this is all quite a bit of fun, though I wouldn't care to predict how it would play to a viewer whose tolerance for whimsical idiocy is on the low side. It's not quite in "so bad that it's good" territory, because it's not quite bad: my impression is that for the most part, the parts that seem most stupid were understood to be thus by the filmmakers. At a minimum, Caesar Romero and Patricia Medina, as the bad guys - Dr. Malic and his lover Lucretia - certainly understand exactly what they were doing in playing their parts with such lip-smacking pomposity, and it's not likely a coincidence that the most fun bits of Latitude Zero are those which are specifically focused on those two characters and their fiendish machinations. And in this bucket I do include the film's frontline monster, a hybrid lion-condor that probably represents the very silliest suit ever put together under Tsuburaya's watch, though that silliness comes with a certain ironic flair, a sense of "I dare you to tell me this looks dumb" that separates it from his worst suits.

But neither Malic nor his homebrew gryphon are the actual focus of the movie. It is, much like Atragon, primarily about a wonderful seagoing vessel, the Alpha, which rescues three men deep in the Pacific Ocean, near the intersection of the Equator (which lies, of course at 0° latitude) and the International Date Line. The three - Japanese Dr. Ken Tashiro (Takarada Akira), French Dr. Jules Masson (Okada Masumi, who looks very little like a "Jules" and not at all like a "Masson"), and American Perry Lawton (Richard Jaeckel), an Associated Press reporter - are on a UN-sponsored research voyage in a bathysphere when an undersea earthquake nearly buries them, but the Alpha, under command of Captain Craig McKenzie (Joseph Cotten, Medina's husband), has been studying that earthquake and saves them in the nick of time. Masson is too badly injured to be patched up by the young-looking but hugely accomplished medical officer, Dr. Anne Barton (Linda Haynes), and with only a flicker of regret and none of doubt, McKenzie cancels the research trip and heads home to Latitude Zero, an undersea paradise that plays like Galt's Gulch written by an Ayn Rand whose chief interest was humanitarianism. For here, science is at a hugely advanced stage, leaving to unimaginable longevity - McKenzie is over 200 years old - and an elevated ethical system that involves the Latitudiners, or whatever we're supposed to call them, encourage above-water scientists on the verge of making important breakthroughs to come down to their paradise to refine those ideas into something that will benefit all humanity without having any obvious application as a weapon.

Not everyone is so enlightened: Dr. Malic is a longstanding enemy of McKenzie, who has hatched a scheme to kill the kindly submariner. First he will kidnap a certain Dr. Okada (Nakamura Tetsu), an atomic physicist who is about to make untold new advances - but also untold killing - possible, and use him as bait to lure McKenzie into the path of his warship Black Shark, captained by the unstable Kroiga (Kuroki Hikaru), a nightmare version of the unhinged female. Eventually, her brain is put into the gryphon, with the exact results you'd expect if you put a resentful psycho woman in control of your giant killbeast and expect here to keep doing your bidding after you've betrayed her.

Boilerplate swashbuckling with an odd Shangri-La backdrop, but a few things help put Latitude Zero over: Tsuburaya's exuberant visual effects, for one, which aren't as lush and polished as in his best films, but put over the idea of an essentially magical submarine and an essentially magical underwater kingdom with flair and panache and just the right amount of old-fashioned Jules Vernian charm (the film, with its unabashedly utopian vision of scientific advance, is emphatically Vernian in the context of the dour late-'60s genre film world). The excellent trinity of old pros, Cotten, Romero, and Medina, certainly is another major plus: the two villains with their High Camp theatrics, and Cotten with his more measured gravitas, that still doesn't try to hide the essential frothiness of the material, and in concert with his outlandish costumes suggests that he's playing the role as Vincent Price as a gay pirate. Ifukube's music isn't a great thing, unfortunately, for it's a bit more anonymous and generic than much of his work, and the best pieces is a lift from Handel that might not have been quite so obvious six years before Barry Lyndon came out, but it's pretty damn unmistakable now.

Some of the film is actually terrible, but fun to watch anyway. The Japanese actors, all dealing with English lines they learned phonetically, are a mixed bag: Takarada manages to look somewhat comfortable, while Okada sounds flawlessly European, though in the latter case, this is maybe because he has virtually no lines, and could dedicate more time to perfecting them. Everyone else is stiff and awkward and visibly unsure of what they're doing, including Haynes, a native Floridan, who probably did not speak such clipped, mechanical words in everyday speech, but it was her first movie, so who knows. The obvious standout is Kuroki, who clearly doesn't understand a goddamn moment of her character (even in the Japanese dub, hers is the most out-of-control performance), and attempts to compensate for clarity with gigantic enthusiasm, and it is one of the all-time great masterpieces of hilariously shitty acting in a B-movie by a non-native speaker. To appreciate Latitude Zero is to adore the derangement of Kuroki's no-fucks-giving acting, and vice versa.

The whole thing is ebullient schlock, possibly the most effectively lightweight film Honda ever directed. It is breezy and defiantly unserious, but not so much as to seem like crappy juvenalia, and in the "let's make kid-friendly B-movies" phase of Toho's genre film production, this is an obvious standout: romping, campy adventure that has been made by people on both sides of the camera who cared about it, with none of the implicit resentment for the project and its audience that mars a lot of American films on roughly the same model from the same time. It's dumb fluff, but made by people who wanted to craft the finest dumb fluff they could. And damn it if they weren't pretty much successful.

Read More

AUGGGGHUST

Sometimes, one's biases are simply so great that it's impossible to do anything but acknowledge them and move on. Here, then, is mine: I saw Tracy Letts's Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County during its 2007 premiere run at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, playing in the space it was written for and starring actors that, in some cases, the parts had been written for, and it's simply the best live theatrical experience I've ever had. The best imaginable film version could not possibly be good enough to supplant that memory. And the Letts-scripted, John Wells-directed, Meryl Streep-starring August: Osage County that now exists is, to be generous, not at all the best imaginable film version in the first place.

The big, if not insurmountable problem is the distance between cinema and theater as media: onstage, August is a terrifyingly intimate, inescapable proposition, in which we are thrown into confined space with very loud, very angry people, and left there for three hours until some loving god hears our screaming for mercy and lets it end. Movies can approximate that feeling - look to the iconic 1966 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, one of the most successful play-to-movie adaptations in history - but it takes a sublime collision of visual talent and properly-calibrated acting to even think about approaching that place, and Wells is not nearly a talented enough director to put either half of that equation across (this is only his second movie; he's spent most his career as a TV producer/writer/showrunner, none of which require the same skillset).

Indeed, more than any other consideration the overriding flaw of August the movie - and it is by no means short on flaws - is consistent misdirection of everything from the big screaming character moments, down to the most implicit background details of the set. One immediately thinks of the title - the story is set in the hottest month of the year in Oklahoma, and the unspoken background of the dramatic fireworks is that it's fucking hot out, and all these people are miserable even before the family drama comes along to make them furious and shouty on top of it. There is not the smallest sense in the movie of that heat: Wells's immaculately pedestrian direction and Adriano Goldman's glassy cinematography see to that, stripping personality and detail out of the images and leaving just a handsome set with a digitally yellow wash over it. It is as flat and static as any piece of choked-off Oscarbait you could imagine; a thuddingly mediocre prestige film of the sort we always used to have, and have been luckily dodging for the last couple of years.

This is the worst conceivable problem for this play to have. August is not tony chamber drama, but a verbal wrestling match in which one extravagantly awful woman and one awful but potentially redeemable woman vie for dominance in a family that has been so fucked up by years of mismanagement that even something as pure as true love has to be tainted by it. These are the Westons, headed by newly widowed materfamilias Violet (Streep), whose husband Beverly (Sam Shepard) goes missing after the first scene, leading her three adult daughters to travel out to see her and wait to find out that, yes, he is dead - yes, it was suicide - yes, it was probably because he hasn't been happy for any period of his adult life, just like his wife, and just like their children. Each of the second-generation Westons deal with this in their own way - those being eldest Barbara (Julia Roberts), middle child Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) , the only one to stay behind by Bev and Violet, and baby Karen (Juliette Lewis) - dragging their own loved ones into the muck with them.

This should play as pitch-black comic tragedy, a Greek family story domesticated but made even more savage in the process, and there's no way to completely remove that from Letts's heaving scenario, even with Letts himself so actively working as co-conspirator to gut his material in a dubious attempt to streamline it and "open it up", as though setting scenes in Weston's yard makes it feel less stagey in its structure. Mostly, though, it's done in by the common habit of directors staring Meryl Streep in the face to concede the entire movie to her in preproduction; this is Barbara's story, but it's not weighted that way at all. Streep does give the best of the movie's major performances (Shepard is light-years ahead of the rest of the cast, not least because he's one of the few people who isn't obviously too young for his part, but he appears only in the first 8 or 10 minutes, before most of the characters have been introduced), but it's not a fair fight, with Roberts outright sacrificing the big dinner table scene that should play as a screaming battle of wits to her co-star. Roberts is also the most overtly mis-cast woman in the film, which doesn't help (the most overtly mis-cast person is Benedict Cumberbatch, a dismal choice for a scrawny Oklahoman man-child or an American-accented person in general).

The whole thing is despicably inert, with a few sparks of life that come along only because the dialogue is too pungent for people like Streep, Margo Martindale, or Chris Cooper to do anything with it but have it sound lacerating and punchy (these three, along with Nicholson, are the only main cast members I'd particularly want to salvage for a better movie with a wholly different crew). But it looks boring, it moves stiffly, and it is hobbled by a grotesque Gustavo Santaolla score that makes it sounds like the world's most emotionally severe ad for maxi pads. It is so detached from the emotional reality of its story that even its final scene, a horrifying bit of misguided audience-pleasing inserted by producer Harvey Weinstein, doesn't feel out of place or unearned; everything up to that point has been so saggy and moderate that nothing would have felt earned, and a milequetoast sop to the middle-aged culture hounds who wanted to see the play but never quite got around to it, and are absolutely the only people who might be able to extract and pleasure from this at all. It is emphatically and deadeningly a film for the most unimaginative and middlebrow among us, and as far removed from cinematic or literary inspiration as it is possible to be.

5/10

Read More

HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF

The Wolf of Wall Street isn't done. That's the thing that has to be cleared out before we can do anything else at all with it. It might very well be a film that Martin Scorsese can live with for the rest of his life without ever considering for a minute that he and editor Thelma Schoonmaker need to revisit it for a home video re-edit somewhere down the road, and in that sense can be described as "finished"; but it's not done. There are several scenes, particularly in the first of its three hours, that rank among the worst in Schoonmaker's massively successful career, scenes that have been "assembled" but not really finessed all that much: beats go on for too long or are snipped off, continuity isn't even a tertiary concern, the sound editing is at war with the visual editing rather than in concert with it.

It's not hard to encounter the idea that the draggletail pacing of individual scenes, many of which go on for too long and start to lose the thread about halfway or two-thirds through, is reflective of the main characters' life driven by money, drugs, and sex, in that order, until he reaches a point where nonstop hedonism is more about keeping himself from falling behind rather than actually receiving pleasure. And this is a tempting, appealling reading, except it fails to account for how some of the worst-assembled scenes occur before he ever even becomes a coked-out trainwreck of a human being. It's fun, I totally understand, to play Apologise for the Auteur, but sometimes a locked-in release date is too much, and Scorsese and Schoonmaker just couldn't make it happen with this time.

That being said, the film is still a pretty solid and enjoyable watch, and an exemplary character study, thanks in huge part to Leonardo DiCaprio, in the best work he's done in his now five collaborations with Scorsese, and his strongest performance overall since Catch Me If You Can in 2002. It's quite a dizzy and demented tightrope the actor must walk: first to take a character who is, on the page, totally irredeemable and disgusting in every detail of his behavior, and make him so immensely appealing and charismatic that we never doubt for a second why so many people would look up to him as a leader and role model, nor do we doubt the infectious enthusiasm he has for his overclocked lifestyle; then, having done this, he must also make that charisma seem hollow and trivial, so that the film's indictment of the lifestyle which the character spends so much time praising can actually stick. The successful performance of real-life stock fraudster Jordan Belfort (whose business model and indictment inspired the 2000 movie Boiler Room, as well) is the movie, to a certain degree: the emphasis on moment-by-moment incident over plot tends to make the film more about Belfort's personality and how it was externalised in the activities of Stratton Oakmont, the brokerage firm he founded. DiCaprio puts over his subject's character with unbelievable verve and precision, perfectly capturing the manic glee of that kind of lifestyle in a way that's both exciting and offensive.

So at the very least, The Wolf of Wall Street goes down easily, though one doesn't exactly forget about its punishing running time (it barely edges out Casino as Scorsese's longest film), which it absolutely does not come remotely close to earning. It is, anyway, crammed full of incidents, and tricked out with a pretty solid cast who do terrific work in delivering the lines in Terence Winter's screenplay with easy, off-the-cuff casualness (Jonah Hill, with readily the largest part after DiCaprio, makes the biggest impression, though my favorite small performance was probably Jean Dujardin as a shady Swiss banker), and these things both serve to make it a largely pleasurable, high-spirited exercise in watching debauchery and enjoying it, but also enjoying the people involved getting their comeuppance. It isn't an especially fangs-bared evisceration of the excesses of American financial shenanigans, but there's enough of that to keep the film from being just smutty froth.

And oh, how smutty and frothy it is: it is a vulgar, sex-addled film, though virtually always in ways that strive to further the comedy, rather than serve any other purpose. Indeed, The Wolf of Wall Street is primarily a can-you-believe-this? comedy more than it's ever a biopic or critical study or anything, and it frequently becomes difficult to tell if it's condemning or celebrating Belfort's lifestyle, or if it cares which of the two it's doing. Which maybe weakens it a little bit; I won't pretend that it's entirely to my own tastes, but it's funny far more than it's not, and that has to count for something.

It is also flabby, however, and this hurts it in all possible ways: it's less focused, less insightful, less funny, less entertaining, than a more streamlined effort would have been. The shaggy editing is absolutely the biggest problem, but there other things: the redundant scenes, the scenes that are redundant in and off themselves, the dodgy music cues (for a director noted for the excellence of his soundtracks, Scorsese really dropped the ball on this one: a lazy and clichéd use of "Ça plane pour moi", grating covers of "Mrs. Robinson" and "Sloop John B"), the inconsistent use of cinematic flourishes, which can be as giddy as the battle of voiceovers between Belfort and that Swiss banker, only to give way to fifteen straight minutes of conversations in medium shots. The two most inspired moments in the film - a Quaalude-suffused day preparing for a trip to Geneva, and a scene where Belfort attempts to navigate his way home as his body shuts down on him completely - are both such obvious retreads of the sublime "Sunday, May 11th, 1980" sequence from Goodfellas that it's hard to respond to either of them fully on their own terms.

From any other director, would this exact same movie seem better? Perhaps. But from any other director, this movie wouldn't necessarily have been released in such an indulgent, rough shape. There's a lot of fun to be had, and DiCaprio single-handedly makes it worth the significant time commitment, but this is not filmmaking at the level of creativity and panache of the best Scorsese, even by the somewhat muted standards of his 21st Century work. There might not be a masterpiece-level Wolf of Wall Street to be edited and cleaned up out of this footage, but there's definitely a better one, even if the film in its present film is too ebullient to remotely qualify as "bad".

6/10

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: COMMEDIA DELL'MORTE

There's an insurmountable argument to be made that, most of a year later, there's no merit to kicking Movie 43 anymore. On the other hand, writing shell-shocked, visceral pans of fucking dreadful movies is fun, and it's Christmas Day. So here's my present to myself, and hopefully to you as well, my readers. God bless us, every one.

Now, I have not seen every wide-release American film of 2013, but I do not need to in order to know with all my heart that Movie 43, an ineptly-conceived anthology of comic sketches, is the worst of them. It's almost unimaginable to think that anything might possibly have found some deeper crevasse of badly-made anti-comedy to explore,* and certainly, to imagine a movie that made worse use of a bigger cast of major actors, many of them still in an emphatically bankable period of their careers. The complete absence of anything resembling creativity or comic panache is mind-blowing; I am convinced that I spent the entire movie with a look of taxidermied dismay akin to the ones being worn by the theater audience in The Producers before they concluded that Springtime for Hitler had to be some kind of postmodern joke. Not, mind you, because Movie 43 is so durn morally outrageous, which is what it desperately wants to be. But its bad taste is profoundly unimaginative and repetitive. It is like a petulant eleven-year-old who just learned the word "cunt" and says it at every opportunity, far more tedious than anything else. Although, with its hard "k" opening and and the humming puff of "nt", the word "cunt" is, itself, much funnier than just about anything said in Movie 43.

The biggest problem with Movie 43 is that every single one of its sketches (twelve and a commercial parody) operates the exact same way: think of a gag, repeat it until you hit your target running time. There's no escalation, no twist of expectation, no modulation. Just the joke, and the joke, and the joke, and then you cry a little bit and the next sketch starts. This is not clever comedy writing; it's barely even functional comedy writing. The only way to to distinguish between the relatively complex and sophisticated sketches and the crude ones is that the complex ones need a complete sentence to describe the concept. "Homeschooling parents sexually and socially humiliate their teenage son to give him a complete high school experience" is sophisticated, in this universe. "Neck scrotum" is unsophisticated.†

It is, in an infinite universe, possible that someone could laugh all the way through Movie 43 without being heavily augmented by illicit chemicals, but I can't imagine why. It's not merely that the jokes are scatological and crude (they are), but that they are graceless - the execution amongst the sketches is rarely less than clumsy and obvious, and there's not a single one of the sketches that doesn't go on for a third or more of the running time it actually requires, irrespective of it being funny or not. Just to make the ghastly train-wreck complete, the film is saturated with important actors: two Oscar winners and an additional five Oscar nominees, alongside a handful of major young stars, some less-major 30somethings just a couple years past their sell-by date, a pair of old warhorses, several important comedy character actors, and the inevitable Anna Faris, the patron goddess of shitty smut-based comedies wasting the talents of actors who really should know better. Honestly, it's this aspect that pushes Movie 43 from "unfunny, leadenly 'shocking' comedy" to "instant contender for the Bad Movie Pantheon" - any hack can crap out a sketch of a blind date where the woman is grossed out that the man has testicles on his neck, but it takes a deal with Satan to have that woman played by Kate Winslet and that man played by Hugh Jackman. Presumably, this was easy money - nobody could have had to contribute more than two days of shooting, based on their ultimate screentime. But money could not possibly have been worth the fact that five years from now, puckish talk show hosts will still be reminding Jackman of the time he wore latex testicles under his chin.

Truth be told, the neck testicles sketch is one of the film's strongest: it's one of only a few that actually heightens its stakes as it progresses, and it was directed by Peter Farrelly, who knows at least something about gross-out humor (he also directed what is, far and away, the best part of the film, in which Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant taunt each other with an escalating series of dares). And weird as it is to say, Winslet's idling speed (and make no mistake, virtually everyone in the cast is idling, except, oddly, for Gerard Butler as twin killer leprechauns) is so vastly higher than almost everyone else involved that even her playing the grossed-out reaction shots in a one-note genital-joke sketch is more interesting and effective than virtually anything else on display.

The film plummets elsewhere: a bit in which Chloë Grace Moretz gets her first period (also a feature in one of 2013's other worst films), causing all the men around her to freak out like the plague just came to town is built on the nugget of an insightful social observation, but the actual humor of the thing relies to such an extent on people bellowing and pointing that any humor is smothered in its crib; a speed-dating sketch featuring Batman (Jason Sudeikis), Robin (Justin Long), Supergirl (Kristen Bell), and other DC figures immediately realises that it has nothing interesting to say about the private lives of iconic pop culture figures, and retrenches into a grueling iteration of jokes about Batman using filthy language to discuss female anatomy. Which would have been way funnier if Sudeikis had done a Christian Bale voice, instead of just being Jason Sudeikis. The most inscrutably anti-funny sketch, directed by Griffin Dunne, involves Kieran Culkin, Emma Stone (whose estimable comic skills are as helpless as Faris's), and violent sex talk over a grocery store intercom; there are neither discernible gags nor a payoff. The dumbest, by Stephen Brill, involves a new iPod shaped like a life-size naked woman that mangles teenage boys' penises when they try to have sex with it; I think the joke is that Apple is clueless and sexist, but it's so transparently an excuse to have images of a naked woman onscreen that it doesn't even remember to write setup-punchline jokes. The biggest missed opportunity is perpetrated by the sometimes-reliable James Gunn, who gives us a story of a gay animated cat who tries to murder the woman (Elizabeth Banks) trying to come between him and his owner (Josh Duhamel), which is at least structured like a narrative, with rising action and all, but never comes up with a joke more profound than "animated cat erections".

But worst of all is the most viciously dysfunctional sketch, the frame narrative. Directed by Farrelly (and this is the U.S. version only; parts of Europe got something that sounds at least modestly more coherent), it features Dennis Quaid plays a washed-up director pitching ideas (the sketches) to Greg Kinnear's studio executive, to which Kinnear consistently replies with some variant of "that doesn't make sense and isn't funny", which is a noble thing of the movie to admit, but then, if Movie 43 is itself aware that the bits in Movie 43 suck harder than any sane person with a modicum of taste would want to suffer through, then why does it have the effrontery to expect us to sit through it? It takes balls bigger than the ones on Jackman's neck to invites us to watch a 90 minute movie, and then announce in the first minute "by the way, all of this is going to be completely awful". But at least Movie 43 can keep that promise, even if the rest of it is a fire-scarred wasteland of stale and repetitive jokes and actors whose palpable confusion is even more pathetic than their anguish. Though, to be fair, plenty of them seem to be having fun. Somebody had to, I guess.

0/10

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

The Canadian indie horror film American Mary is good enough that I wish it were better. That's a weird way of phrasing what's meant to be a statement of praise; but American Mary is a weird movie. It's the second feature by filmmaking twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, following the 2009 Dead Hooker in a Trunk, which I have not seen, though I have a sneaking suspicion I can guess what it's about; their production company is named Twisted Twins, which sounds about right. On the evidence of this sophomore effort, I'd describe them as having pretty terrific instincts, and a great sense for how to make the viewer twist and squirm though unnerving concepts carried through unfussy, brutalising images. And I'd also describe them as suffering from that common screenwriter's ailment, Can't Write a Third Act syndrome.

What they can write, though, is a hell of a character. That character being, of course, Mary: Mary Mason, to be precise, a medical student training to be a surgeon, vividly played by Katharine Isabelle as a sardonic idealist who is a little bit shocked to discover about herself that she has virtually no ethical scruples when the possibility of making money raises its head. Though even putting it that way begs the question: defining "ethical scruples" in the context of American Mary would require making assumptions that the film never asks you to make, and in some cases specifically proscribes.

Which is both the extremely refreshing and boldest part of the movie, and also the most weirdly misfiring and self-defeating. I guess I need to talk about the content of the film if I want to go any further: Mary is broke as all hell, you see, and the job where she scrambles to make enough to keep the lights on and the bill collectors angry and impatient but at arm's length winks out of existence soon into the movie. Depressed and at the end of her tether, Mary heads to look for work at the local strip club, but gets a different job offer than the one she expected: the club owner, Billy Barker (Antonio Cupo) has a badly beaten human body in the back, and he's looking to spend $5000 to have somebody with surgical training and a willingness to ask absolutely no questions whatsoever patch that body up, presumably for more beatings. This Mary does, with surprisingly little moral handwringing - some, of course, but $5000 is a titanic sum of money given her current situation.

The real fun begins when one of the strippers comes calling a little while later: this is a certain Beatress Johnson (Tristan Risk), who has invested quite a gigantic sum of money into body modification surgery to make herself look and sound as much as a physically functioning human being can to the grossly dysmorphic '30s cartoon character Betty Boop. She doesn't want Mary to help her along that path any more; she's actually look for help for a friend of hers, Ruby Realgirl (Paula Lindberg), a body modification enthusiast with less resources than Beatress herself, who wants more than anything to resemble a human Barbie doll. For the kingly sum of $10,000, all Mary has to do is remove Ruby's nipples and sew up her vagina. Reasoning that her patient is an adult capable of making decisions on her own, Mary acquiesces even more quickly than she did with the victim in the strip club's back room.

This is enough to make Mary a celebrity surgeon in the body modification underground, and American Mary spends the great majority of its running time playing around with the ramifications of that, considering the sort of weird things that such a person might be asked to do. The really remarkable thing is that the Soskas (who cameo as twins and probably lovers who ask for a few things that don't include being conjoined, which caught me off guard) don't offer up even an iota of judgment for the world they're depicting, and only a very little bit for Mary's gross violations of professional ethics in contributing to that world. So while we might be tempted to file this away under the "body horror" label, it's not really horrifying.

And this actually causes the film some issues, because it dearly wants to figure out a way to make Mary a mad scientist, drunk with her newfound power and money, and build a downfall for her. This is achieved in part by splicing in a subplot that mostly works and then ceases to as it goes on: in one of her classes, Mary is taught by a supercilious, condescending ass named Dr. Grant (David Lovgren). It's worth noting that everything he says is true, and Mary knows it; it's the vicious, sarcastic, leering way he says it that tips us off from the first scene that this guy is a huge problem. And lo and behold, he eventually invites Mary to a party with the single intention of drugging and raping her. Mary's revenge is blunt and immediate: she kidnaps Grant and makes him the canvas for her most extreme modification experiments. And this is horrifying, and the delayed reveal of just what shape Grant has come to is maybe the single most viscerally upsetting image I've seen in a horror movie in the 2010s. But that doesn't change how artificial the rape revenge subplot feels at all turns, like the Soskas were somehow aware that they hadn't built in a mechanism to demonstrate Mary's inability to distinguish right from wrong and needed to have her do something that was thus awful.

After all, the title makes it clear that this is an assault on something. Greed? The amorality of money? It's hard to say, but you don't put "American" in a title if that's not your intent, even if you're Canadian. Thankfully, it's not belabored at all; though this is in no small part because the film simply can't round the corner on Mary's downfall character arc. We have this very broad-minded depiction of a subculture; we have a revenge horror flick; we have a twist ending that makes sense logically but not dramatically and seems to exist only to depict Mary getting her comeuppance for sins that the movie didn't demonstrate as being all that sinful in the first place. And somewhere in all of that, the protagonist goes from being a charmingly innocent young woman to a callous femme fatale whose acidic wit makes her seem aloof and merciless even when she's being nice. Isabelle does her absolute damnedest to sell this, and her performance is committed enough to make it work on a scene-by-scene basis (it's a seriously great performance, not only by genre standards but by normal, everyday film standards), but it still feels like two or three scenes in the middle have to be missing, where we actually see Mary's morals start to slip.

For all the dramatic slip-ups, the film is still intensely memorable and effective, for the Soskas know how to come up with an unforgettable image. It is admittedly the case that the images are more mind-blowing for their content than because of they way they've been filmed; in fact, the film relies to an irritating degree on a certain industrial-grey lighting scheme that feels like it dates from the 1990s, and the overreliance on stock medium shots robs some moments of their impact (the reveal of Ruby's body, which actually comes quite late in the film, is a particularly unexceptional moment that feels like it shouldn't have been). But the imagination of the body modification, and the filmmakers' directness in depicting it, is intoxicatingly vivid. At the risk of gendering things, there's a distinctively feminine sensibility to how the film emphasies sexuality and body identity without being terrified of it, and for a genre as repelled by strong female sexual impulses as horror, that's quite an achievement already. The inherent conservatism of the form still shows itself in that oddly misguided finale, with its punishment of kinksters and "deviants", but the horror world could use more voices like these even so. Enough of American Mary is truly impressive that I'm pretty confident the Soskas have something outright great in them, if they can refine their talents and instincts just a bit more.

6/10

Read More

DESPERATE TIMES

Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin is in some ways a harsh departure for the filmmaker, one of the reigning masters of Chinese cinema; the quiet gracefulness of his films best-known in the English-speaking world has been replaced by anger and violence, a lingering despair clinging to the movie like a bramble. But at the same time, it's business as usual for a director whose work has all explored the trauma of a swiftly-changing China caught in the gap between tradition and modernity, Maoist Communism and robber-baron capitalism. Each of its four episodes, centering around a different character in a different province, is about the sin perpetrated by a single person, as promised by the title; but is even more about the capricious, inscrutable society that turns human beings into scrambling scavengers, sketching out quickly but crisply how it is that they were driven to lash out with destructive violence.

The script was based upon four news stories Jia encountered in his perusals of The State of Modern China, and there is a certain formulaic quality to each of them that does absolutely no favors to the movie's pacing; but boy, if you wander into A Touch of Sin expecting something that's in any way easy to watch, like the wuxia-influenced thriller that the director has weirdly indicated this was meant to be, then you're screwed regardless. If it's formulaic and repetitive, that's only because it's also essentially ritualistic, and its four individual stories only build up such an excellent whole due to the sense of fatalism that pervades them - the sense of the same bad things happening over and over, seen well in advance and impossible to stop anyway.

That's not to say that Jia's script isn't a little distressingly schematic, though that comes less at the level of structure than in the somewhat arch way that each of the four chapters seems hellbent on representing a different aspect of Chinese life; there's a little strain in the way the film attempts to find a completely different psychological and economic register for each new protagonist even after having already determined that they need to be thematically linked. This is only notably problematic in the third segment, the clear "one of these things is not like the others" winner of the movie, and not just because it's the only one anchored by a woman; it's also the place where the climactic outburst of violence is presented in the most fanciful, stylised way, perhaps because it's also the only chapter in which that violence is self-evidently justified (she's lashing out at attempted rapists). Which doesn't make it bad, necessarily; it's just a little off. Sort of like how the fourth segment ends up feeling weirdly light and trivial compared to the first three - it's not "bad", either, though it's perhaps not a great finale.

At any rate, the film's clearest and most well-articulated segment is the first, in which a rural miner named Dahai (Jiang Wu) is so outraged by the imbalanced local political scene, so divorced from the egalitarian society Chinese policy supposedly encourages, that he spends all of his free time agitating for reform and punishment meted out to the guilty. When no such satisfaction comes, something snaps in his head, and he goes on a blood-soaked killing spree to weed out everyone he perceives as being unjust. That's broadly the pattern followed by the film's later stories, all of which are equally pointed and angry about some failure in China's national character (the most sublimely peculiar is in the final segment, which largely takes place in what I can only think to describe as a patriotism-themed brothel, where the hollow promise of Communism and the avarice of capitalism are free to mingle in a most leeringly symbolic way).

Dahai's story is the most direct and effective, though it's not fair to use it as a stick to beat up on A Touch of Sin, except insofar as it is also the most clearly based in genre, and thus makes promises that Jia isn't really looking to keep. This is much more a film about desperate people making bad, but defensible decisions, like spa receptionist Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao), or bad, and humanely pathetic decisions, like Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan), who falls afoul of a peculiarly Kafkaesque bureaucratic rule after a workplace accident, and tries to find some way to keep himself afloat economically as a result. Or just bad, but not without reason, as in the case of Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang), who opens the movie with a prologue in which he, riding a motorcycle (that most romantic icon of independent will), blankly guns down a trio of gangsters in the middle of the countryside. It's the perfect start to a film describing a moral universe in which random, even arbitrary violence is only a sane response to the implacable institutional decay and corruption that infects all of life.

The film is impeccably shot by Yu Likwai with an eye towards just this dynamic, creating a world that is obviously rotten and crumbling, yet which is also quite shockingly beautiful in every moment as well; there's a hard kind of dignity to the images of poverty in the film, which helps it to avoid exploiting its setting whatsoever. It is not realist, though it flits with a realist aesthetic at times; it's something much closer to a rough working class poetry, finding moments of beauty in all contexts and contrasting violence and grubbing with art and culture (the film is somewhat bookended by operatic performances, though I don't know if Chinese opera has anything like the snobbish cultural cachet of European opera) in a way that eliminates any distinction between them, much as the story structure collides four disparate locations and four unique protagonists in a single flow of ideas that makes them feel like part of a whole, rather than individual actors. In this way, the film considers Society-with-a-capital-S from simultaneously general and specific perspectives, and feels like Jia considers not just four stories of sin but the entire way that people exist in the world to be the real subject of his movie.

It's daunting, and more ambitious than any one film could maybe survive - the seams show, and it's hard not to wonder if the energy is slowly evacuating the movie, particularly in the fourth story. But even as a flawed, maybe over-complex movie, A Touch of Sin is gloriously messy and humane, a passionate exploration of humanity that bends cinematic conventions and tones back and forth with energetic willfulness. It is a film that could only be made by a fearless director fully aware of his powers, and unafraid to grapple with ideas that might break him. It is emphatic, alive cinema.

8/10

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - AND THEN DESTROY THEM!

The English title of Destroy All Monsters - not meaningfully similar to the Japanese title, which I've seen translated variously as Charge of the Monsters, March of the Monsters, or Attack of the Monsters - very nearly proved to be prophetic, for the 1968 film began its life as an intentional finale to the Godzilla series and to the whole matter of daikaiju eiga at Toho. It was, indeed, very nearly all monsters that would be involved; not just the "core group" of recurring stars Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah, but a grand total of no fewer than eleven monsters taken not only from the Godzilla films, but unrelated projects as far away as Frankenstein Conquers the World and Atragon, the latter of which wasn't even meaningfully a kaiju film.

In the grand tradition of best-laid plans, this star-studded epic, intended to provide a suitably grand farewell to the iconic Godzilla character whose movies had been leaking air at the box office, instead rejuvenated him. Destroy All Monsters was quite a big hit altogether, giving the giant lizard enough of a boost to carry him into the 1970s before falling admissions sent him back to the chopping block. One assumes that this was mostly because of the marketing wet dream of having all those kaiju gathered in one place, but there's also the simple fact that Destroy All Monsters represents a huge course-correction for the series after the trivial, junky Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla, cost-cutting measures for a juvenile audience. Destroy All Monsters plainly was not made on the cheap: there are many fancy and expansive sets, instead of empty tropical islands, and effects aplenty; and many of those eleven monsters are represented by brand new suits.

The biggest impact on the film's quality, though, might simply be the creative team brought in to make it: for this grand finale, producer Tanaka Tomyuki brought back Toho's daikaiju eiga master Honda Ishirō to direct, and he brought with him composer Ifukube Akira. It's not the complete A-team; the cinematographer was Kankura Taiichi, with whom Honda had not previously worked, and effects director Tsuburaya Eiji was still "supervising" the effects, while the real work was being handled by Arikawa Sadamasa. Both Kankura and Arikawa did splendid work, let's be clear about that - the latter man in particular hitting some really impressive heights with the film's enormous climactic battle that are at a completely different level than anything he did in Ebirah and Son of Godzilla, which we can perhaps chalk up to the impoverished budgets of those films.

What we have, in between everybody, is a glorious explosion of kaiju spectacle, the most ebullient popcorn movie of all Toho daikaiju eiga, and the one that feels most like a modern blockbuster, though not for entirely becoming reasons. Because, despite Honda and Kimura Takeshi replacing Sekizawa Shinichi on screenwriting detail, Destroy All Monsters still has an utterly dopey human story counterbalancing all of the monster action, redeemed almost solely in that it is so tightly linked to the monster material that we can't even rightly say that there's a "human plot" and a "monster plot". They're all the same; and unfortuntely, in their sameness, they are an alien invasion thriller of a sort that had played itself out before the dawn of the 1960s, and which was already done in this exact same franchise (and much better) three years and three films earlier, in Invasion of Astro-Monster. Obviously, it's not enough to seriously imbalance the kaiju action that works so well in the film, and anybody heading into a Godzilla picture for the excellence of its storytelling ought not to be heading into a Godzilla picture, but there's still a continuum. And on that continuum, Destroy All Monsters is skewed heavily to the "idiotic pretext for monster scenes" side.

The film skips ahead more than three decades from the 1967 in which the preceding film, Son of Godzilla presumably took place, to find that in 1999, all the Earth's giant monsters have been kept to an island in the Ogasawara chain, now referred to as Monsterland. Here, as a sensible-sounding narrator informs us, such creatures as Godzilla, Rodan, Anguiras (not seen since all the way back in 1955's Godzilla Raids Again) Manda (from Atragon), and Gorosaurus (from King Kong Escapes) live in quiet peace, far from major human metropolitan centers to rampage through. Here they are studied by scientists deep in an underground bunker. Also, in this immensely far-flung world at the end of the 20th Century, there are frequent trips to and from the moon, and our hominid protagonists are the crew of a vessel built for just such a purpose, the SY-3. The only ones we need to bother with are Captain Yamaba Katsuo (Kubo Akira) and Manabe Kyoko (Kobayashi Yukiko), whose functions beyond being a pretty girl are unclear. They happen to be at Monsterland when the film opens, which puts them in a perfect position to investigate after strange things start to happen: both the Monsterland scientists and the monsters themselves are starting to acting in dangerous, unpredictable ways. This leads to the first monster attacks in years, as five major cities are simultaneously attacked (making this the first movie where Godzilla attacks New York, and by far the better one).

The SY-3 and her crew quickly discover that this is the work of an extraterrestrial humanoid species, named either the Kilaaks or the Kiraku, depending on which subtitle translation or dub we trust (or, y'know, if we speak Japanese). Either way, they're an old-school "race of evil beautiful women" species, and their queen (Ai Kyoko) has a nefarious scheme to take over the world with mind controlled kaiju from her base under Mount Fuji. All of this is discovered with breathtaking speed: the first monster attack sequence and the first pitched space battle between humans and Kilaak-controlled slaves have both occurred before the one-third mark, a far cry from the pacey longueurs of several of its predecessors.

Reckless speed is certainly one of the best things Destroy All Monsters has going for it, since it means we get through the empty, pedestrian B-movie shenanigans of the space invasion plot, to arrive at the massive monster smashes long before we get bored. And those are generally terrific things, though nothing is as breathtaking as the four-part battle that ends Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. Still, there's unexpected impact and brutality here, and a weighty grandeur to the framing that gives the warm-up to the final battle, as Godzilla marshals his monsters to square off against King Ghidorah (who, expectedly, turns up as the aliens' secret weapon) on the plain before Mount Fuji.

It helps that the monsters are almost uniformly of topmost quality; the Ghidorah suit was starting to look a bit patchy, but the new Godzilla is terrific, with a meaner face and sleeker build (my only complaint is his legs: they're too skinny and human-looking). The updated Manda, who gets a surprising amount of screentime, is a much more impressively scary beast than in Atragon, the new Anguiras is a terrific fantastic dinosaur whose relative brief appearance is disappointing, and Rodan, though only modestly changed from last time, has a bit more flexibility and elegance to him. Unsurprisingly, the only really ugly creature is Minilla, the suit being re-used from Son of Godzilla, but except for an appearance at the start of the battle royale that even deflates the commentator (the final battle is rather ingeniously narrated like a sporting event), he barely registers. The Mothra puppet - only as a larva this time, sadly - is re-used, but in good shape; Baragon and Varan are also re-used but kept to flashes to disguise the lousy shape of the suits.

But really, all-star cast or not, this is a movie deeply in love with its Godzilla, and he justifies every bit of that affection. It's probably my second-favorite suit of the first phase of Godzilla movies after the one from King Kong vs. Godzilla, animalistic and genuinely dangerous and offering Nakajima Haruo plenty of flexibility, maybe more than ever before. This suit got a lot of use over the next few years, and even aside from the cost-cutting measure involved there, it's easy to see why: this is Godzilla as he's meant to be, rough and nasty and powerful.

All of which maybe doesn't excuse how vanilla the story and non-monster scenes are. Or maybe it does, I don't know. Honda directs with a light but detached touch (other than a few scenes of devastation, the artistry of the man who made the first Godzilla is nowhere in evidence), and the emphasis on spectacle leaves the feeling that this is still a bit of a kiddie-friendly matinee Godzilla picture. The best thing about it, other than the sheer delight of the monster scenes, is Ifukube's magnificent score, roaring and martial and relentless, adding a layer of pageantry and gravity that the film otherwise completely lacks. Let's not lose sight of the important thing: this is an awfully fun Godzilla movie. It is, however, a slipshod and inconsistent movie movie, and with Honda at the helm, it's not unreasonable to have hoped for a bit more depth to it than just "oh, look at all the big monsters! whee!"

Read More

PERSONAL CANON: NOTHING MORE FOOLISH THAN A MAN CHASIN' HIS HAT

Miller's Crossing may or may not be the Coen brother's "best" movie. I think that argument exists to be made, but it's hard to get all the way through it with Barton Fink and Fargo over there in the corner, flexing their muscles. It is, though, almost certainly their most complicated and dense movie, both as a narrative and a character study - I have found it uniformly necessary to see Coen movies twice to fully suss out everything they have going on in terms of mood, symbol, and theme, but Miller's Crossing is unique in that it me two tries just to understand what was happening in the story. There is and has always been a subset of critics that view this complexity as a blind, disguising what is ultimately just a particularly elegant genre riff without much meat on its bones, and that's not a completely baseless accusation; certainly one of the reasons that the film is extra-hard to parse is entirely a function of how much of a genre film it is. It's something of a mash-up of Prohibition-era storytelling with '80s American indie filmmaking (though this film, the Coens' third, was their most studio-bound to that point), and the most obvious element of a very idiosyncratic screenplay is a exuberant passion for '20s slang used in a way that's not exactly period-correct, but is also much too brittle and artificial for it to come across as in any way timeless or fresh, no more in the 2010s than at its debut in 1990.

The most useful way to think of it, in my estimation, is not as a faithful recreation of a vintage gangster picture, nor as a faithful (and uncredited) adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest and 1930's The Glass Key - it's not really "faithful" in either of those capacities - but as something like a performance piece based on those ideas. It is a wildly artificial, mediated thing: nobody has every talked or acted like this in reality, nor even in any other movie. Perhaps the right way to describe it is as pageantry, an act of recreating the idea of a gangster story in a way that calls maximum attention to the artifice of it; other Coen films function in a similar way, as heavily abstracted ideas of a genre film rather than an actual version of a genre film (especially early on - The Hudsucker Proxy, from 1994, is the other clearest example of this tendency), but Miller's Crossing is probably the film where this trick pays the most dividends. It is to a great degree a film about performance, for its central character is a man whose entirely personality is mostly a matter of what he chooses to show to other people, and the somewhat arch brittleness of the whole exercise is a good context for that character to exist in.

That's another point of distinction: Miller's Crossing was the first Coen film that was primarily a character study, though like everything else about the film, it's not immediately apparent that this is the case. But what else do you call a movie in which every scene but one is told from the perspective of one man, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne, in what is by miles and miles the best performance I've ever seen of his), and whose final shot openly invites us to apply what we've learned about him to a stunningly enigmatic expression on his face? It's a character study through and through, and that's not even the weird part; it's also a love story in which this same man devotes all his energy to protecting, destroying, and redeeming the only human being for whom he feels any demonstrated kind feeling. But we'll get there in a minute.

Miller's Crossing is, at its simplest, a Red Harvest-esque tale of a gang war, in which the vivacious Irish mobster Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney) decides against the strenuous suggestions of Tom, his closest adviser and seeming best friend, not to let the Italian gangleader Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) kill a chiseling Jewish bookie, Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro). This is in part because Leo doesn't want to let the uppity Caspar get his way; it's also because Bernie's sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), a noted piece of Bad News, is currently sleeping with Leo, and making him awfully happy. Once Tom fails to keep things from escalating, he splits with Leo and joins up with Caspar, apparently in the hope of entrenching himself high up in the trust of the city's new mob boss, but it's immediately clear that whatever game Tom's playing, Caspar's success and well-being are of only incidental concern.

There's so much going on in the script, in the performances, and in the aesthetic that it's almost impossible to synthesise it all into one simple reading, so I won't pretend that any of what I'm about to say is definitive, but to me, Miller's Crossing is above all about Tom's love for Leo, which doesn't necessarily have a homoerotic tint to it at all, though that's certainly a common enough reading among academic critics. Certainly, Miller's Crossing is unusually concerned with homosexuality, with three men identified as being involved in a destructive love triangle - the centrally problematic Bernie among them - and the word "queer" appearing in the dialogue far too often for it to simply be for period color. After all, while "queer" simply meant "odd and dysfunctional" in the '30s, by 1990 it had definitively transitioned into a synonym for "not-heterosexual nor traditionall-gendered". If the word was merely peppered in for flavor, like plenty of other archaisms, there'd be no point in digging in further, but "queer" is used a lot in Miller's Crossing; it is easily the most common obsolete slang term in dialogue. And with the obvious foregrounding of the gay supporting characters (which could simply be seen as literalising the coded homosexuals in movies like The Maltese Falcon or The Big Combo) in concert, it's really hard to doubt that the Coens meant for the audience to have gayness much on their mind in watching Miller's Crossing.

None of which proves, or even implies, that Tom is lusting after Leo, or that his affair with Verna is sublimating his desire to sleep with Leo, though that's a fine and durable reading. What it does absolutely demand is that we look at the film and see in it a muddying of gender constructs, and this is certainly something that we can see in Tom, right there on the surface. Compared to the usual gangster picture or film noir hero, he's not very "masculine": one of his defining traits is a tendency to be badly beaten in any physical altercation, even those with old men and women, not least because he typically doesn't even move to defend himself. He's a spectacularly incongruous figure in the hard-boiled surroundings, with people spouting out florid lines of dialogue that verge on self-parody, and multiple people dying in wide-eyed, unblinking machine gun barrages. He's passive, thoughtful (the only character who both thinks clearly and comes to the right conclusions), soft-spoken, and turned off by violence, none of them "tough guy movie hero" tropes, and certainly none of them shared by the other straight men in the movie. Even Verna (the only prominent women) and two of the three gay men act in more traditionally-male ways than Tom does.

This leaves him a dislocated protagonist, genderless and sensitive and physically weak in a genre that is one of the most quintessential masculine in the history of American film - doubly so if we allow that this is as much a noir pastiche as a gangster film pastiche. It is a universe which Tom can manipulate more easily than any other character, filling the role of a seer or wiseman or god among the rest of the cast (the much-repeated phrase "Jesus, Tom" is irresistible in suggesting that he is in but not of the world he walks in); but it is also a universe where he doesn't fit and isn't happy. Leo is a protective figure and focus of Tom's kindly feelings - prospective lover, prospective father, prospective friend, it's largely immaterial. Leo is the thing that enables Tom to function well in this environment, and he repays Leo with all of his love. The tragedy of the thing - and it depends a lot on how one reads the hugely ambiguous final scene, but it fits my interpretation - is that by fully giving himself over to Leo, Tom enables the exact unconscious betrayal by Leo that leaves him without a home or meaning in the end.

It's a sign of how much Miller's Crossing has going on that I can have wandered about for that many words and said so little about so much of it. Not even a word about the exquisite craftsmanship! That includes an absolutely perfect opening scene that rivals only the mini-movie at the start of Raising Arizona as my favorite sequence in the Coen filmography, a perfectly-timed tour of Polito's sweaty anxiety and Finney's blunt authority (both men are terrific throughout the film, but at their best in this scene), introducing Tom slowly and methodically; the sound design guiding our attention with laser precision; the dialogue warming up the film's strange vocabulary, plunging us into it but not without a guidemap; the driving editing by the film's namesake, Michael R. Miller (I believe this was the last Coen film that the brothers did not edit themselves). The Carter Burwell score is hands-down my favorite of his many glorious Coen soundtracks, drawing from Irish folk music, traditional Hollywood, and Italian influences to tell the entire emotional story in a way that you can follow without any other cues. And Barry Sonnenfeld's luminous cinematography is both beautiful and psychologically flawless, depicting the claustrophobic city with menacing but chiaroscuro-free shadows, and reaching masterpiece-level work in the nightmare setting of the eponymous woods, a hazy place of flatness and danger that deliberately quotes The Conformist without in any way copying it. It was his second to last project as director of photography, before jumping into the director's chair; and as much as I love some of his movies (and despise others) Miller's Crossing is all the evidence we need to know what a fantastic alternate career was cut short.

It is, if I may crudely try to wrap things up, the most thoroughly inexhaustible movie the Coens have ever made. It says less about humanity than Fargo, explores the boundaries of cinema less than Barton Fink, and is less altogether flawless than No Country for Old Men, but I'd reach for it ahead of any of them. It is complex and deep and slow to reveal its secrets, but I have consistently been thrilled to do the work necessary to pull them out, and am wholly content to call this my favorite, if that has any value, among all the Coens' films.

Read More