REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GINO-COLOGY

The foremost of all the non-pressing questions I have regarding the 1998 American Godzilla - pro tip: there is no such thing as a pressing question about the 1998 Godzilla - is whether or not it's the worst film of the Godzilla franchise. And I suppose I should really first ask the question if it's part of the Godzilla franchise at all, since that seems to generally be something that fans try to downplay. But, in 1998, Toho certainly regarded it that way: they used 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah to put their own monster in the ground to clear the way for a planned Tri-Star trilogy of movies, and they had an official copyright on the new monster design, created by Patrick Tatopolous, calling it Godzilla. That's good enough for me, even if a few years later, Toho legally had the copyright changed, renaming the creature Zilla and banishing it and its film from the mainline of the series. But that was all ass-covering after the film came out and sucked, and failed to make enough money to cover its production budget and staggeringly comprehensive ad campaign (which I can still remember with crystal clarity 16 years later: "His ___ is bigger than this ___" posters plastered against every flat surface that would stand still for long enough, and a tie-in with that long-gone Taco Bell chihuahua, the idiotic details of which I will recall after senescence has taken from me the faces of loved ones), though it did end up eking out a profit, despite its reputation as a flop. At any case, in 1998, this wasn't some misbegotten Godzilla spin-off, it was a proper Godzilla movie, and I will not assist in a corporate attempt to plunge those days deep into the memory hole.

Back to the question, then: is Godzilla '98 the worst film of the Godzilla franchise? It is, beyond any sane shadow of a doubt, the worst Godzilla film - so divorced from any remote connection to the 44-year, 22- film history of the character as it existed at that point that it's frankly incomprehensible why the studio even bothered to acquire the naming rights when they could have saved a quick $10 million by just calling it, I don't know, Iguanos, Lizard-Bitch of the Pacific. And prior to Toho's re-christening of the central monster, fans had long since taken to calling it G.I.N.O., Godzilla In Name Only. This is reasonable and correct. But "the worst Godzilla film" and "the worst film involving a thing called Godzilla" are not the same thing. And the films that involve a thing called Godzilla include the likes of All Monsters Attack/Godzilla's Revenge and Godzilla vs. Megalon, so it's not nearly as straightforward as case as Godzilla fandom likes to pretend.

But let's not miss the forest for the trees: Godzilla '98 is fucking wretched. It's easily the worst movie in the career of director Roland Emmerich, not exactly a man who has swung from peak to peak; Godzilla came right in between the clamorous Independence Day and the rancid The Patriot, and made both of them look at least decent in comparison. Of all the scripts that Emmerich and writing/producing partner Dean Devlin cranked out in the 1990s (their partnership ended after The Patriot, owing in part to just how badly Godzilla stumbled out of the gate), this is probably the worst, shamelessly aping the formula that put Independence Day over so well with audiences in '96, and hiding the creators' public contempt for monster movies not whatsoever. And yet the writing is hardly the worst thing in Godzilla, a movie that is even worse at dumb CGI spectacle than it as telling a coherent story with plausible characters. It's kind of exciting, really, just how low Emmerich and Devlin were able to go.

That all being said, the opening 25 or 30 minutes of the film suggest a mindless popcorn movie at least on the level of Independence Day. It's straightforward enough to start with: grainy video footage tinted yellow of lizards mucking about in French Polynesia as nukes explode and a tinny version of "La Marseillaise" plays. So, French nuclear testing mutates some kind of marine reptile. Got it? Good. And then the plot begins as so many real daikaiju eiga have begun, with a fishing vessel being destroyed at sea by something very large. Hell, for the first five minutes, it doesn't even seem like a passable piece of junk food; it even feels like a movie.

Which stops pretty much the exact second that we cut to Matthew Broderick singing along with "Singin' in the Rain" in the most alarming douchey way possible. Broderick, our oddly-cast hero, plays Niko Tatopolous (named for the monster's designer, y'see), a biologist studying the effect of radiation on Chernobyl earthworms. He's busy electrocuting them and digging them out of the ground, in that order, when the U.S. government comes along to spirit him off to Tahiti; seems that a very large animal has been spotted, and its gigantic tracks are lousy with radiation. By the time the research time pieces all of that together, it's already moved onto Panama, and by the 20-minute mark, the creature is lumbering around in water outside Manhattan, where it makes a suitably half-seen first appearance as a giant humped back in the water and massive legs storming down the street. Any question of "what" is now officially dumped in favor of "how the hell do we stop it?", with Niko ending up in New York and thus being spotted on TV by his ex-girlfriend Audrey Timmonds (Maria Pitillo), now working at channel WIDF as a wannabe reporter and personal assistant to the loathsome news anchor Charles Caiman (Harry Shearer).

It's right about at this point that the film invisibly shifts from being a modestly (very modestly) effective mystery about the exact details of what Godzilla is in this film - Emmerich and Devlin have the basic decency not to pretend that we aren't all well aware of what's going on in broad terms - and starts to become an unpleasant slog through the worst that effects-driven American cinema of the 1990s has to offer. It's right about now, after all, that the basic shape of the plot starts to reveal itself, and it becomes clear that this wants to be a '70s-style disaster film more than a monster movie, and will largely dedicate itself to this task with lugubrious intensity, starting with the fact that we now have our Broken-Up Couple to be Reforged in the Fires of Adversity. It's also at this point that we become aware of just how much time we're going to spend in the company of some truly awful performances and characters: for Pitillo, this was meant to be the big breakout moment in a career that had been quietly simmering for some years, but it only serves to showcase how profoundly limited an actor she was. Not that the version of Audrey presented in the script was going to be redeemed by any performer who might possibly be interested in taking the role: she's an obnoxious cipher with one whole personality trait and her big contribution to the plot consists of making the worst possible decision at a moment when it's obvious what a terrible decision it is. But Pitillo exacerbates the character, with a petulant, bratty series of expressions and line deliveries that make the character seem like the biggest pill imaginable. And let us not pick on the one person whose career puked out because of the movie: if her Audrey is a simpering nothing, then she is but the ideal romantic lead for Broderick's ghastly, lukewarm Niko, and there's a lot more of him in the movie than there is of her.

The human drama is boundlessly insipid, worse than in any of the Japanese Godzilla pictures, but even that isn't a patch on the comedy that has saturated every moment of the film. I have no patience for the arch-serious, visually dark and ultra-urban style of so many contemporary popcorn movies, but it's instructive to go back in time to see what that aesthetic is in response to: because God almighty, but the 1990s had some awful comic relief going on. Quips, jokey asides, irreverence where it's entirely unwelcome; and Godzilla has some of the worst. It's not merely that there are jokes that aren't funny and shouldn't be there; it's that the film acts like things are jokes which don't even have the apparent construction of jokes. Example: Niko Tatopolous's name is mispronounced by the anti-Godzilla military leader, Colonel Hicks (Kevin Dunn, the only human being in the movie doing anything that feels like halfway decent acting), so the scientist corrects him. "Whatever", says Hicks. Is this funny? Is there anything about this that qualifies as a joke? The way it's staged sure as hell seems to think it is. Or the infamous "That's a lot of fish" line, spoken in front of a mound of a lot of fish. The best I can do with that one is that it's an attempt to copy the Jurassic Park "pile of shit" moment, which is an actual joke for two reasons: it's kind of a play on words, and it has a swear in it. "That's a lot of fish" is nothing. It burbles out onto the screen and waits there patiently, until the moment dies of embarrassment. Most of the film's jokes follow the same trajectory.

This is, mind you, run-of-the-mill stuff. These are the basic problems true of most Emmerich movies, and many other tentpoles of the late '90s. What makes Godzilla so much worse than all of those is that it doesn't even have the goods as a trashy action film; it's shockingly incompetent, actually, ending up as one of the most leaden, painfully boring movies of its generation (its 139-minute running time is a crime against cinema if ever there was one). There is, to begin with, the simply inability to make Godzilla a real threat: when a film is a fantasy, like this, it becomes important for the filmmakers to establish the baseline reality of the fantasy world, so we can believe in it. That can't happen when the reality is as slipshod and inconsistent as it is here. I have no new observations: the fact that sometimes the monster shakes entire city blocks when it walks, and yet can get within yards of a man with headphones on without him noticing; the monster's tendency to change size, dramatically, not merely from scene to scene, but sometimes in consecutive shots. I mean that in the most literal sense: there are moments where its head is barely larger than the taxicab it's chasing, and then it suddenly can fill the entire entryway of a spacious New York subway station, in the span of just five seconds.

When the monster can't even be presented in a consistent way, and with so many shots of it interacting with objects seemingly hellbent on making that fact clear, there's no real way to believe in it or care about it, and that's what makes Godzilla such a damned easy film to nitpick: the way a trained biologist keeps using "he" to refer to a monster that is pregnant and reproduces asexually leaps to my mind, but it's almost too easy to pick out details. That doesn't just make the film dumb, it makes it not fun, since the creators' contempt for it is so apparent. I think that, more than anything, is the dominant feeling of the movie; Emmerich and Devlin took the project to have free reign to do anything they wanted, and proceeded to not give a shit. The cramped, human-sized staging of all the action, emphasising how reprehensibly uninteresting the humans in the movie are; the unendurable scene with baby Godzillas in Madison Square Garden, a scene that could only possibly be more of a rip-off of Jurassic Park and its raptors if David Arnold's score openly borrowed from the earlier film's kitchen sequence. And since it does borrow the music from that sequence, I guess this could not be any more of a Jurassic Park rip-off, and a particularly lazy and ineffective one it is, too. And since I have mentioned the music, it wouldn't do to pass up mentioning how often the score and the action don't match up: particularly when we and Niko get our first good view of Godzilla, and the music is all awe-inspired and Spielbergian, and the action of the film involves the giant animal being a kill-crazy deathbeast of pure horror.

Hell, the writers even go so far as to portray the mayor of New York as a craven blowhard named Ebert (Michael Lerner) with a simpering aide named Gene (Lorry Goldman), in tribute to the film critics who despised - and rightfully - the previous Emmerich/Devlin pictures, and then don't show Ebert getting crushed by Godzilla. In fact, he lives right to the end, to endure a tremendously unfunny comeuppance involving a thumbs down. When you skip that moment, you're simply not invested in making a crowd-pleaser whatsoever.

Which leaves us with just one thing to talk about, but it is maybe the most important thing, and I have intentionally left it: Patrick Tatopolous's monster design. It's not Godzilla. That's just fact. It is a different animal altogether, one that is not a dinosaur-shaped metaphor but an attempt to mimic the physiology of iguanas, if iguanas were hundreds of feet in length and bipedal.

In and of itself, totally irrespective of the thing it so utterly does not resemble, I have to be honest: I actually like the design. That makes me a horrible person, I know. But taking the filmmakers at their own goals, it's actually pretty effective, with the exception of its strangely overlong, very rectangular lower jaw. But I like the sleekness, the coloring, and the way it moves; during a scene set in Central Park at night, it clambers about like a Komodo dragon, and I will admit myself most impressed by both the idea and execution. The CGI used to bring the creature to life is decidedly spotty (it generally gets better as it goes along; the initial stamped through New York is especially terrible, with the monster possessing no apparent weight), but when it's good, it's as good as anything else from 1998; the baby Godzillas are quite terrible and fake-looking, but the whole 25-minute sequence containing them could and should be removed from the movie anyway, so it's not really a problem.

I might even go so far as to say that I like the American Godzilla enough that I kind of which that Godzilla '98 had kicked off a sequel. Not, for the love of God, one that had anything to do with Emmerich and Devlin. But in the hands of somebody who actually wanted to make a giant monster movie - and with another name attached - this particular giant monster has some merit to it, I think. Just not in the epic steaming shitpile that tried to foist it on an instantly-hostile public.

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STANLEY KUBRICK: A DAY AT THE RACES

With The Killing, we arrive at a very exciting moment in the career of Stanley Kubrick, just shy of his 28th birthday when the film premiered in June, 1956: his third feature and sixth project overall is the very first work of the director's career that he'd acknowledge existed in later years. That's not entirely fair to the previous year's Killer's Kiss, but there's really no two ways about it: The Killing represents a jaw-dropping leap in Kubrick's talents, ambitious, and thoughtfulness. Not too many filmmakers have ever experienced such a staggering step-up in quality between two projects; Killer's Kiss is a fine, wholly generic mid-decade film noir, but The Killing is a masterpiece, one of the undisputed high-water marks of the American crime film whose reverberations can still be felt in a number of ways, and even if Kubrick's subsequent career hadn't included a single project on this level, it would still be sufficient in and of itself to justify him a place in the pantheon.

On top of all that, it's also Kubrick's first film with a non-original source: the young director wrote a story treatment based on Lionel White's novel Clean Break, with the dialogue added to that skeleton by pulp author Jim Thompson. And this perhaps was critical; glancing ahead at Kubrick's filmography, which includes only one project that could even vaguely deserve the tag of an original story, and one project that so thoroughly changed the substance of its source that we might as well call it a new scenario, and both of those co-written by hugely important authors in other medium, we might conclude that for all his many indisputable gifts as a visual artist and cunning experimenter with the details of film language, the gift of imagining interesting stories was alien to him. At any rate, The Killing changes very little of Clean Break, mostly in the streamlining that comes from turning a novel built on a series of psychological vignettes into a chilly third-person thriller, though the climax is heavily shifted to amp up the cosmic fatalism and make the characters a bit less cruel. Both versions are otherwise process stories at heart: the depiction of high ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), after four years in prison, gathers together an assortment of downtrodden schmoes to act as his pawns in a singularly clever plot to rob the money room at a local horse track, watching with anthropological fascination as the various individuals observe their little corner of the plot play out, while we in the audience see the whole tapestry come together strand by strand.

Noir was a good fit for Kubrick's sensibilities, as they'd be more fully laid out in his future work; other than war films, it's the only genre he'd dabble in more than once. The Killing, a noir of the highest order, showcases the first appearance of what would become arguably the key theme of Kubrick's entire career: orderly systems being brought down by an inability to account for the human element. And while this is merely a facet or background element of films like 2001 (with its insane computer) or A Clockwork Orange (with its epically unsuccessful scheme of social conditioning), it's the driving force behind the entire plot in The Killing, which we might summarise as how the perfect crime is ruined because one dumb dupe couldn't keep his mouth shut around his wife in a feeble attempt to save his toxic marriage.

And that's all the more I'll say specifically about the film's plot, since it is a real and tremendous pleasure to see how it all unfolds. What I will say is that the plot structure that Kubrick devised for the film, though it contains nearly all of the same events as Clean Break, makes the movie vastly more exciting and tense: firstly because The Killing does not keep returning to all the characters over and over like the book does, and so we're allowed to forget about one major subplot during the bulk of the film's heist sequence, whereas the book's tendency to keep it fresh in our minds makes it easy to see the ending before it arrives (of course, this if this makes the movie more of a thriller, it also makes the book more of a tragedy; trade-offs do happen). The second and by far more significant and far-reaching change is that Kubrick tells the story in a discontinuous, overlapping chronology: we see an event in the afternoon, then an event from that morning involving different people, then an event involving a third set of people from in between. This fragmentary way of assembling the plot has influenced filmmakers ever since - Quentin Tarantino openly acknowledges his debt, for one - but I don't praise the film for its historical importance alone. The constantly shifting frames of chronological reference are one of the primary ways that the film keeps its headlong pace up; events spilling out in no real order makes everything that much busier and more frenzied, since we have to do so much work to keep up.

For it is a brutally fast film: at 85 minutes, it's neither especially long nor especially short by noir standards, but it screams by like a rocket sled. Even more than the way the plot is structured, this owes a lot to the way the thing has been assembled: editor Betty Steinberg has a marked tendency to end scenes without any kind of "button", a visual or dramatic beat that keys us in to realising that the moment is done now, and so scenes bleed into one another, frequently leaving it unclear what the relationship is until we've had a second to gather our wits (conversely, one fade to black, signifying a sex scene, comes as a purposeful and dramatic rupture in the film's integrity; which, given the nature of that scene in the development of the drama, is exactly appropriate). The result is a reckless narrative momentum that gives the plot the sense of, well, fatalism; a word I already used, and a word that can't really be overstated in regards to The Killing. It is a film where things, once they are started, seem like they can't possibly be diverted from their course; not until a pathetic, whinging argument over a suitcase at an airline luggage counter near the very end does it ever seem like there might be a moment when the choices a character makes will actually change the predetermined shape of the action, for good or for ill.

I am tempted, for this reason, to call it the most perfect of all caper films (I know, I know: Rififi would like to have a word with me). The subgenre is, of its nature, concerned with narrative-as-mechanism: the exact combination of flawlessly-planned coincidences that will trigger just the right results in the right order to spring the traps, silence the alarms, and leave the thief with a bagful of money and the cops with a locked door mystery. A really great one is exciting to watch precisely because of its clockwork precision, and that's a terrific thing to put in the hands of a storyteller like Kubrick, whose overriding personality as a director (some call it a weakness of his form, but that would imply he's doing it accidentally or to the detriment of his films, which is virtually never the case) is one of frosty detachment from his subjects, which causes him to always treat the characters in his films as cogs in a machine. Applying that tendency to this kind of story is a match made in heaven: The Killing is, in essence, a mechanism about the execution of a mechanism. Certainly, Hayden's performance - easily my favorite turn in the very gifted actor's excellent career - encourages this connection, with his mechanical-man patter as he describes his complex plans crisply, brisky, and without a scrap of emotion. So does the bossy narrator (Art Gilmore) whose flat elucidation of onscreen events always and obsessively includes the exact time, frequently noting the exacting precision of those times relative to the plan for the heist.

So does the camerawork, which finds Kubrick working with Lucien Ballard, the first of many cinematographers annoyed to find the photograpy-trained director treating him more like a glorified AC or camera operator than an artistic professional with his own decision-making process. Whatever it took to get it done, and whoever is responsible for the exact content of each shot, The Killing boasts an unerringly exact language of images: movements that glide from Point A to Point B on precise, emphatic beats; lighting (often with just one source) plays at times almost like bare-stage theater, where we are shown only the exact things we need to care about in that moment. Many compositions are totally flat, relegating every point of visual interest to a single line; this causes the handful of deep shots, in which both the action and another character's relationship to that action matter, to explode off the screen.

It is not, by any conceivable means, a warm movie. Every character is to some degree a fool and amoral; unlike the book and so many other films noirs, The Killing can't even bring itself to seriously follow-through on indicting Sherry Peatty (MarieWindsor) for the crime of being a sexual libertine and female, finding her no more capable of real self-directed activity than any of the men, and preferring to blame her dim husband George (Elisha Cook, Jr, also giving my favorite performance of an excellent career) for being gullible enough to believe she loves him, rather than blaming her for using it against him. But blame or not, everybody in The Killing suffers; it's a movie in which people are bugs, captured by a surgical camera lens in the act of being stomped on by a universe that's wholly unimpressed by cleverness. Kubrick would make other nihilistic films - Kubrick would make mostly nihilistic films - but The Killing deserves special attention for basing that nihilism in such grubby, real-world concerns (the documentary-style footage of horse races that opens the film leaves a veneer of realism over even the most baroque compositions to follow), and finding a way to turn even the acidic realm of film noir into something darker yet, where decent people can't be eaten alive by the venality of the world because there weren't any decent people to begin with.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - MONSTER A-GHOGO

Rebirth of Mothra II - its Japanese title is Mothra 2: The Undersea Battle - is a bad movie. That's not special on the face of it. A lot of daikaiju eiga are bad. But ROM 2 has somehow managed the first Toho monster movie which, in my estimation, is just bad bad - not so howlingly incompetent as to be hilariously awful, but conspicuously lacking in just about every important way that a motion picture can lack. It might very well be the least-enjoyable of Toho's monster movies; there is nothing about it that's unironically good, not even the monster fights, and having ironic fun with it simply isn't worth the effort.

A lot of this has to do with its status as a deliberate children's movie. Rebirth of Mothra was also a children's movie, and it was merely sleepy and bland and not horrible. But that turns out to have been the best-case scenario, apparently. Its sequel finds the twin fairy Elias, Moll (Kobayashi Megumi) and Lora (Yamaguchi Sayaka), working with the newly-born son of Mothra, also called Mothra, though the trademark name is Mothra Leo, having merry adventures flying in front of tremendously obvious rear-projection. Or tremendously obvious green screen. Whatever the hell it is, it's tremendously obvious.

Meanwhile, three children are playing: Shiori, the girl (Mitsushima Hikari), Yoji, the skinny boy with glasses (Maganao Shimada), and Kyohei, the pudgy boy (Otake Masaki). And that is just about the complete amount of personality that will be given to them throughout the movie, though Kyohei is wearing an Oakland Athletics t-shirt, which I gather makes him the Japanese equivalent of a U.S. Japanophile. The kids are mucking about when they find a little furry ball-creature with eyes, feet, and damn little else; the Elias' bad sister Belvera (Hano Aki) identifies this as the legendary Ghogo, and also tries to steal it from them, but she is stymied. Eventually, Ghogo will prove to have a key role to play in the plot - beyond its ability to cure wounds by pissing on them, that is - but this doesn't reveal itself until a very long way into the depths of the movie, which allows us to spend most of the running time assuming that it is there for literally no reason but to be odiously cute and sell toys, and since the kids' extraordinarily tenuous connection to the plot is limited mostly to their status as Ghogo's protectors, we get to assume that they're present for no real reason at all. Yet present they certainly are, as the Elias need some human agents to help in their quest, and apparently all the competent adult humans were off napping and drinking, thrilled because Godzilla was staying dead this time, or something.

The quest involves a search for the lost underwater kingdom of Ninai Kanai, which many eons ago created the monster Dagahra as something of a trash compactor: it destroys anything that seems like pollution, releasing as waste toxic creatures called Barem, which look starfish with grapes glued onto them. But, see, in the late 20th Century, we've fucked up the environment so badly that everything looks like pollution, and the newly-revived Dagahra is going to destroy all the world even more thoroughly than it destroyed Ninai Kanai back in the forgotten time. Belvera is eager to help its quest, but Moll and Lora hope to help Mothra stop the anicient threat once and for all. This involves the children running around and yelling a lot on sets that would have been ashamed to have been involved in a 1990s Nickelodeon show.

It is stultifying. No sugar-coating it. It's all so much kid-vid gobbledygook that proceeds along channels as obviously predictable as they are thoroughly arbitrary. Screenwriter Suetani Masumi's work on the last film was hardly elegant or classy, but the insertion of the child protagonists into ROM 1 was as organic and necessary as the most flawless clockwork compared to how randomly to how needlessly ROM 2 crams them in, for obviously programmatic reasons. The environmental themes are applied as gracefully as a rubber mallet to the face, and the lazy reliance on the ol' lost undersea kingdom bit is charming only in that it is applied without a whisper of cynicism. Director Miyoshi Kunio - his first directorial project, and his last - pushes this through while encouraging the worst kind of "bigness" from his young cast, so the whole thing just feels manic and loud, aggravatingly fast-paced despite the fact that almost nothing happens in the film.

Ordinarily, this is the point where I go into my "but the kaiju scenes" bit; instead, we now come to the "oh, the kaiju scenes..." moment. The effects in the film are terrible: ROM 2 wasn't the first Toho film with CGI, though it relies on it to an exceptional degree, and it is reprehensible: there's a shot of Ghogo's eyes bugging out that nearly made me give up on the film right then and there. But everything is bad: the waves, the backgrounds in Mothra flight scenes, literally everything achieved in CGI.

And that would even be find, but the monster scenes themselves are terrible: Dagahra is by no means one of the better suits Toho produced in the 1990s, looking emphatically rubbery and fake, and effects director Kawakita Koichi doesn't even both putting in effort to stage the fights between it and Mothra with any kind of energy. The climax takes place underwater, with Mothra having evolved submarine capabilities (these leave him looking like a cross between an eagle and a bumblebee); the best Kawakita can do to suggest that it's taking place in the sea is to slap a blue filter on. There aren't even bubbles. It was not his best work - I wonder if there's a way to say that without sounding so pleasant and diplomatic - it was downright shitty work, and it was his last project as effects director for any feature film. This fact depresses me terribly. Though not as much as the knowledge that it was the last project put into motion by producer Tanaka Tomoyuki, the godfather of Toho's daikaiju eiga since the very beginning; he died before it was released.

A miserable swan-song. Nothing works: the twiddly, awful, frivolous score by Watanabe Toshiyuki only comes alive when it's actively stealing from Holst ("Mars, the Bringer of War", specifically, but that's hardly a shock), the images are tacky feel like home videography - a massively foregrounded shot of a cat right before a lit cigarette falls on it and makes it jump up like a stagehand just tossed it into the air is one of the ugliest images I have ever seen in a Japanese film - and the redesign of Belvera's robot dragon, Garugaru, makes it less cute and thus ruins my favorite single part of ROM 1. This is an immensely unpleasant film to watch: the humor is zany and shrill, and the story is entirely free of drama, considering the claim that the Fate of the World hangs in the balance. This is, in sum, everything you've ever thought bad when the phrase "children's entertainment" rears its head, and necessary viewing only for the most masochist giant monster completists.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1921: In which rehashing the still-vital wounds of a recent, terrible war can be big business, especially when you throw a hot slab of beefcake at it

Latter-day considerations of the 1921 mega-blockbuster The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse tend to focus on the contribution of one or both of two men when looking to explain its success and effectiveness. One of these was Rudolph Valentino, an Italo-Franco actor born Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina D'Antonguolla, who had spent seven years crawling up the ladder from extra to spear-carrier to bit player before being dropped in as the romantic lead in an epic based on a hugely successful novel, being propelled to superstardom as the protypical Latin Lover. The other was Rex Ingram, the film's director, who though his name is unlikely to ignite much recognition among even semi-serious cinephiles these days, still has something a reputation for quality among intense silent film fans for his facility in managing broad, epic romantic stories in such a way that their basic, everyday humanity bled out from between all the spectacular details. And this division between the contribution of these two has been part of the film's mythology basically since it opened, and Valentino and Ingram - who disliked each other intensely - began to fight publicly over credit for fathering the picture.

But if we actually want to look at the person most responsible for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse existing at all, and particularly in the form which it does, we are looking for no man at all, but for a woman: June Mathis, then the head of the story department at Metro Pictures, and one of the first female executives in the American film industry. It was her passion for Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's monumentally successful 1916 novel (which had been translated into English in 1918) that led her to finally crack the problem of how to reduce such a sprawling family drama, love story, and war epic into something remotely containable even in a long film by the standards of the time (the version of the film currently available is 132 minutes); it was her interests that dictated the elements of the story that would be stressed in the film. The project was her baby; she hand-picked both Ingram and Valentino; she served as the grown-up in the room whenever their disagreements threatened to stall production. In effect, she was what we would now call the film's producer, though that word and even, in its most specific sense, the position it describes were unknown to Hollywood in 1921; and no producer would ever have such cause for immense personal pride until David O. Selznick corralled an army of actors and technicians into re-creating the U.S. Civil War.

For The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wasn't just a hit: it was a hit to a degree that barely made any goddamn sense, blasting past the million-dollar mark four times over, when a million was already quite an eye-popping amount of money (if I have done my research right, during its initial release, this was the highest-grossing American film ever directed by somebody not named D.W. Griffith). It was a seismic cultural event that turned Valentino into the male star for the rest of his horrifyingly short life (he'd die in 1926, at 31 years old), inspired a new wave of epic dramas, and make Mathis (until her own stunningly premature death in 1927) the most influential woman in the film industry besides the cottage industry named Mary Pickford.

When faced with this indescribably massive popular hit, my reaction is a vigorous and resounding, "that was fine". All apologies to Mathis and Valentino, who remained close for the few years remaining to them (their remains are in the same crypt to this day, for accidental reasons that suggest a particularly macabre episode of a '90s sitcom), but everything about the film that wears well more than nine decades later can be pretty securely laid at the feet of Ingram and cinematographer John F. Seitz: the film boasts more than its share of grand, high-impact tableaux. It's stagey to a degree that was hardly cutting-edge cinema in 1921 (for a considerably more dynamic and kinetic Ingram/Seitz collaboration, I would urge interested parties towards the following year's The Prisoner of Zenda), though there are certain clear reasons why a slightly out-of-date aesthetic fits the movie.

The most obvious of these is that The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is primarily about the passage of time and how The Way Things Were has been thoroughly scuttled by The Way Things Are Now. The story opens sometime around the dawn of the 20th Century, in Argentina, where wealthy landowner Madariaga (Pomeroy Cannon) rules his family like a king of old, lavishing favors upon his French son-in-law Marcelo Desnoyers (Josef Swickard) and openly disdaining his German son-in-law Karl von Hartrott (Alan Hale). Most of all, old Madariaga adores and worships his grandson Julio Desnoyers (Valentino) spoiling the boy into oblivion and encouraging him to grow up into quite a shitty little dissolute young adult. When the old man dies, his family fragments into two halves, returning to Europe; here Julio continues to be a callous libertine, involving himself with a succession of other men's wives in his status as the most famous tango teacher in Paris at a time when that dance starts to explode in popularity. It is the particular case of Marguerite Laurier (Alice Terry), wife of Etienne Laurier (John St. Polis), that nearly sends Julio's indiscreet, adulterous ways headlong into marriage, but then war breaks out, and everybody but Julio is gripped with feelings of nationalistic urgency and shifts their way of thinking over to fighting for whatever the hell it is they're fighting for. Eventually, the young man decides to make something of himself as a soldier, while Marguerite becomes a nurse, tending to Etienne (who, blinded, does not know here), and the Desnoyers home in the French countryside is turned into a German garrison.

A plot synopsis like that, while accurate, doesn't remotely give the correct flavor of the film. Based as it was on a generational epic, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse spends a huge length of time in Argentina before it ever arrives in Europe, to say nothing of finally addressing itself to the subject of the war, and this is the film's secret. Customarily, it is called an anti-war film; the first American film to seriously think about the recently-concluded war, and certainly, the grim later sequences must have landed with enormous impact at the time it was new, when imagery of the hideous warfare of Europe had not yet had any real avenue to penetrate the American consciousness. But the great majority of the film has nothing to do with war at all, instead depicting with great care the kind of lifestyle of romantic splendor that the events of 1914-'18 extinguished, particularly as centered in Julio, the metaphorical embodiment of easy pre-war life being woken into violence and anguish by the war.

Anyway, that provides a reason for the somewhat stuffy aesthetic, though I cannot say with a straight face that it makes it any less stuffy. And while this sprawling story may or may not have been glorious stuff on the page, in the context of a movie, it feels a bit overwhelming and draggy. The most impressive parts of the film all take place during the war: Ingram and company go to some fairly extreme lengths by 1921 standards to depict the hell of war with brutal honesty, but there's just so little of it. Ultimately, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse isn't a war story; it's a family epic in which a war occurs. And a lot of the material in Argentina just sits there, swallowing up screentime to no real effect; the best part of the film's opening act is the tango scene introduced by the filmmakers solely to showcase Valentino's own dancing skills.

Even as an anti-war film, it has a certain reputation that it doesn't earn. There's still a tang of heaving melodrama to the proceedings, particularly as concerns the German characters; so soon after the war, the German people were still viewed as outright villains of the worst sort by the Americans, and regardless of whether this was an appropriate attitude or not (the history of 1934-'45 would tend to suggest, to me, that a modicum of forgiveness couldn't have hurt), it harms the film's polemic. Basically, the message doesn't play as "war is a brutal hell that crushes goodness and breeds suffering", but "war is brutal, but it was necessary to beat down the Germanic hordes and it was profoundly noble of those who fought them". It's not my place, in 2014, to say if that was the wrong attitude to hold in 1921. But it surely doesn't support the idea that this is a significantly anti-war work of art.

In a lot of ways, the film embodies so much of what future blockbuster epics would attain: a lumpy mixture of sedate moments and beautiful, invigoratingly cinematic ones; muddled themes that imply the intent was also for spectacle and experiential impact rather than any kind of intellectual experience; acting that can't be rightfully called "good" or "bad", since the performers aren't really called upon to do anything but embody simple characters and look pretty doing it. I will openly concede to preferring the easy seductive Valentino of The Sheik, made later in the same year, though he's certainly fine in this movie. Heck, everything about this movie is fine. It's rousing, heartbreaking, beautiful, ugly, and full of human activity, some of which sings with insight and emotion, some of which plods. It's just that it's not really great by any measurement I care to use, and though I have no seen it twice (which kind of befuddles me), I'm no more sure why it made such a hit in its day than I am why any of its descendants, with their largely indistinguishable CGI and explosions, end up as the biggest film of any given year of the 21st Century. Plus ça change...

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1921
-Charles Chaplin appears in his first feature, the six-reeler The Kid
-D.W. Griffith directs Orphans of the Storm, the last agreed-upon masterpiece of his career
-French import Max Linder makes Seven Years Bad Luck, which you probably have never heard of, but it is a damned masterpiece that everybody should see

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1921
-Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage released in Sweden
-The now-lost Dracula's Death, from Hungary, is the first film to feature Count Dracula
-21-year-old Alfred Hitchcock takes his first job in the British film industry, designing title cards

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IT'S NOT STARTING OVER, IT'S JUST GOING ON

When Disney conducted its grand experiment in rebuilding the Muppet brand name in 2011 with The Muppets, the results were inconclusive: pleasingly off-kilter and nostalgic, but in the most punishingly authoritarian way possible. Nostalgia was, at a certain point, the only driving element of the plot and the only thing to get back out of it.

So in some regards, the new Muppets Most Wanted is a step in the right direction: it is actually a thing that exists mostly in reference to itself, and not as a feature-length exercise in wish fulfillment on the part of its co-writer and top-billed actor. It's not even as blunt a remake of The Great Muppet Caper as much about the plot seems to promise, including some extremely specific details of structure. And at the same time, Muppets Most Wanted feels like a mighty, determined act of wheel-spinning: there's a profound sense of fatigue and non-creativity that overwhelms the movie and leaves its handful of undeniable top-shelf moments (nearly all of them involving musical numbers) feeling like a chain of lonely islands.

The film's best moment, at any rate, is the one that opens it: in the immediate aftermath of The Muppets, as the camera stops rolling everyone looks to Kermit the Frog (Steve Whitmire) to decide what to do now that the franchise has been reborn. This triggers a rollicking musical number, "We're Doing a Sequel", that has more than a little of Great Muppet Caper's "Hey, a Movie!" opening song in its DNA, and is the one place in the entire film where the guileless postmodernism of the Muppets at their best pokes through with something of the "Let's put on a show" attitude of the best of the earlier movies and The Muppet Show itself.

From here on, the film descends into an adventure-movie rhythm that's never draggy or dull, but is also frequently no more than wistfully amusing. Short version: the Muppets are encouraged by obvious conman Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais) - pronounced "badji", he insists - to go on a European tour to make the most of their newly regained fame; this is merely a pretext to allow international thief Constantine (Matt Vogel), a dead ringer for Kermit but for his mole, to swap places with the frog showman, and for he and Dominic to use the Muppets' appearances as covers to rob local museums of their treasures, all clues that will aid in a heist to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.

That offers plenty of room for genial culture-shock comedy, with knowing caricatures of several Western European cultures drifting across the film's bow as it goes along, and I will happily admit to being hugely grateful after The Muppets for there to be a Muppet movie in which the actual Muppets are the main characters, with the flesh-and-blood humans (the usual constellation of cameos, with Ty Burrell and Tina Fey joining Gervais as the featured people) serving strictly in supporting roles. And without the heavy weight of reintroducing the characters, they get a good chance to breathe and express themselves in this new scenario - Whitmire's Kermit has certainly never been better, as the performer finally frees himself up to express some frustration and desperation that feel totally in-character for the iconic frog, and yet also like emotional places that Jim Henson would probably not have taken the character.

A little bit of pleasantly low-key comedy goes quite a long way, though. And as the film moves on, relying on the same small range of gags (the Muppet gang is all a bit short-sighted and unobservant! songs that are parodies of other song forms! the French have incredibly generous labor standards compared to the United States!), it gets sleepier and sleepier, feeling less and less creative. Without having any reason whatsoever to suppose that this is true, I can't help but feel like this is not a script that was filmed because the creators felt passionate about the opportunities it presented, but because a new film had to be made, and when it was time to commit, this was the material they had. It lacks inspiration, and even more, it lacks the squishy, profoundly sincere sentiment and love of humanity that animates all of the best stuff made during Henson's life, and in brief moments since his death. When Muppets Most Wanted starts to pivot to lessons about want vs. need, and the bonds of friendship and family, it doesn't feel like the heart of the movie bleeding through the comedy, but like kiddie movie boilerplate.

Also, the film puts a lot of emphasis on Walter (Peter Linz), the new human Muppet introduced as one of the main characters in the last film, and it's becoming increasingly clear that he's just no damn interesting. No slight to Linz; not even to writers James Bobin & Nicholas Stoller, whose attempt to turn the little beige man's simplicity in something charming and positive. But bland human Muppets just aren't that appealing.

Anyway, all this being disappointingly true, Muppets Most Wanted still offers plenty in the way of charming, light humor - those song parodies, however one-note the gag starts to feel, tend to be awfully good - and the breezy way that the plot is blitzed through in quick dialogue and short scenes keeps things moving without sacrificing the stakes. Bobin, who also directs, has learned quite a lot in the intervening years: the compositions favor the Muppets this time in a way that they didn't (and given the human focus, often couldn't) in the 2011 film. He and his crew - these are massively complicated films, it doesn't do to pretend like shots are set-up on the fly - also manage the feat of putting Muppet and humans in the same frame, without letting it feel like there's far too much headspace (a savvy combination of wide shots and unobtrusive high angles; there's also some smart use of deep compositions, especially during Kermit's sojourn in a Siberian prison). All of this contributes quite a lot to the sense that the Muppets are the focus and the stars, and their reality is quietly insisted-upon in a way that hasn't been achieved since Henson's death, really. This is, I want to be entirely clear, a Very Good Thing. The technical and to a large degree the performative aspect of the Muppets have been entirely re-learned and perfected (I remain vaguely unenthusiatic about all of Eric Jacobson's versions of Frank Oz's old characters). If they can nail the script next time, then we'll have some actual Muppets on our hands, and not these fan-fiction Muppet analogues who go through the motions well, but really just don't have the wit or the heart.

6/10

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - MOTHRA AND CHILD REUNION

Having killed of Godzilla in 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, sending the corpse off to America to be violated even further, Toho found itself in the unprecedented position of having no giant monster franchise to go along with a marketplace where giant monster movies were still doing pretty decent box office numbers in Japan. The good news was that Toho had a whole damn zoo of monsters for whom the rights had not been locked away in the deal with Tri-Star, any one of whom could be called up to serve as the star of a brand new movie. And it comes as no surprise that, in the search for a headlining monster who was neither Godzilla nor a robotic simulacrum of same, the execs would tap the two most popular and famous of their guest-star daikaiju: Mothra and King Ghidorah, the latter given a fairly extensive face-lift to serve as the villain of Rebirth of Mothra in 1996, the less than wholly apt title assigned in English to a film cleanly and plainly called just Mothra in Japanese. Somehow, this feels like the right juncture to mention that I've watched enough of these movies close enough in a row that I've begun thinking of the giant insect's name as "Mosura", owing not least to the flowing, rhythmic chant that puts it in yet another appearance in this picture, but I feel kind of racist whenever I say it out loud.

What, if any, connection this film has to the 1961 Mothra or any of the five films (at that point) in which the titular kaiju appeared as ally or enemy to Godzilla is unclear, though the characters seem quite baffled by the existence of a giant moth who acts as protector of Earth and the natural world, and that seems like something you wouldn't forget about after the first time it happened. So let's assume that this is a complete and total standalone, which ends up doing a lot of good to film anyway. Rebirth of Mothra, you see, was unambiguously conceived and made as a children's film, something that hadn't been true of the Godzilla films since the early 1970s. And while it is the case that many, perhaps most, adult fans of Godzilla can credit childhood (or adolescent, at least) enthusiasm for their affection for the series, there's a big difference between movies that are easiest to love when you are a child, and movies that actually expect that you are a child right at this moment. It takes some significant re-adjusting from Destoroyah, with its apocalyptic tone and frequent brutality, to get oneself in any kind of mindset to appreciate Rebirth of Mothra on any level; the clear severing of any ties with the Mothra last seen flying into space to save the world from an asteroid helps with that process somewhat.

Only somewhat, though. It's still odd to be thrust back into a story centered around children and family at this date, though Rebirth of Mothra does showcase the differences between Japanese and American children's entertainment, being as it's far less tacky and sweet than the film surely would have been if it were made on the other side of the Pacific. A case in point: almost at the very beginning, there's a scene of animals gawking in anthropomorphised horror at an earth-mover moving into their forest: a shot of squirrels looking out, a shot of a bird, all looking as aggrieved as possible for non-cartoon forest creatures, thanks to the magic of editing. And then there's a shot of the bird's nest being run over by the treads of the earth-mover, destroying its eggs. An American movie, no two ways about it (and even with a fully grown-up target audience), would have allowed that nest to escape destruction. That director Yoneda Okihiro (a former assistant of Kurosawa's, making his debut) and screenwriter Suetani Masumi would effectively open their movie with such a casually brutal moment speaks well of their willingness to have stakes of life and death that are not typically witnessed in American children's entertainment.

That earth-mover, anyway, belongs to a company developing land on some virgin island in the Japanese archipelago, where 65 million years ago the guardian spirit Mothra sealed away the extraterrestrial destroyer Desghidorah (which I gather is meant to be analogous to "Death Ghidorah") beneath the rocks. Taken by a fit of curiosity, one of the employees of that company, Goto (Nashimoto Kenjiro) salvages the seal pressed into the rock as they're blasted away, thinking it will make a good memento for his daughter.

It's Goto's family that we'll be mostly dealing with: his patient but long-suffering wife (Takahashi Hitomi) is starting to get very tired of his frequent absence (and in one chilling moment that passes by without comment, she screams at him for drinking alcohol in their sleeping children's room; one wonders what he might have drunkenly done in the past), and the genre-savvy will quickly note that we're looking at a film where a damaged family is rebuilt as a result of fighting adversity. Mostly, though the film is about the kids themselves: Taiki (Futami Kazuki) and his little sister Wakaba (Fujisawa Maya), who are chased by the tiny magical woman Belvera (Hano Aki), who wants to raise Desghidorah using the seal that Wakaba now wears as a necklace. They are aided and protected by the Elias, Moll (Kobayashi Megumi) and Lora (Yamaguchi Sayaka), this film's re-conceived version of the Twin Fairies of yore, who are sent as emissaries from Infant Island by Mothra, riding on the back of a smaller version of the moth goddess named Fairy, to stop Belvera, who proves to be their long-estranged sister.

Of course this all fails, since if Desghidorah isn't released, then there can be no battles between it and Mothra, which is patently the reason that we're all here, regardless of what age we are. But the Goto family remains the primary human agents helping the Elias and Mothra recover the seal, fight the monster, and learn important lessons about leaving the Earth's natural resources safe and sound, and the hard work it takes to fix a broken environment. Unless a moth goddess fixes it all for you in a few seconds, which kind of teaches exactly the wrong message about conservation.

It's all pleasant enough storytelling, though like its big siblings in the Godzilla franchise, Rebirth of Mothra has a hard time figuring out why we should care about our human protagonists, and this feeling is only amplified by the kid-flick reliance on having children as the main characters, in order to give the young viewers somebody to serve as their surrogate within the movie. It might even work on that level, but at the basic level of establishing conflict, it's a lot harder to take Desghidorah seriously as a threat powerful enough to destroy all life on Earth when it can be successfully resisted by a single Japanese family; conversely, it's outright impossible to still care about the Gotos' domestic situation when they're surrounded by giant moths and widespread destruction.

As is hardly uncommon, then, the film lives and dies not on its narrative or its humans, but on the staging of its monster action; and with effects director Kawakita Kochi having nothing more pressing to do with his time, he got the assignment, so that monster action is even pretty fantastic. Certainly, the battle between Mothra and Desghidorah is nothing shy of fantastic, the moth exploding a dam to set a trap for the three-headed beast in a manner that is creative, exciting, and excellently-staged using terrific models - the film's too inexpensive for urban action, but the forest settings look absolutely fantastic. The climax between Desghidorah and Mothra Leo, the son born of Mothra's egg as she lays dying from her wounds in the first battle, is in every way a step-down; but it's still solid, if unexceptional entertainment.

I'm ambivalent, generally speaking, about the monster designs: Desghidorah is fucking unbelievable, with grey and red details that make it look every bit the monster out of hell, its three heads topped by spikes and angles that look, if anything, even meaner than the already wonderful King Ghidorah of 1991's Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. And Desighidorah has forelimbs! It's amazing how much more of a legitimate animal and threat it seems just from being made a quadruped. I'm also smitten with Belvera's steed, a little dragon animatronic named Garugaru, with a broad, expressive face that looks way cuter than anything, but cuteness isn't a failure in this case.

The Mothras, though, aren't terribly exciting, with the Mothra Leo larva in particular standing out as clearly the worst larval Mothra in any film yet. The primary Mothra looks very much like the last one we saw, but somehow even more flocked and colorful, more like a toy - and as for the diminutive Fairy Mothra, that looks so much like a toy that the plot even calls it out. Leo is interesting if only for being the first significantly new revision to the basic monster design since it was introduced in 1961 (more green and white, less yellow, and the wings are reshaped), but doesn't really fix his mother's basic problem of looking more like a toy than an animal. I also can't help but be vexed that we needed a male Mothra in the first place, but that's a completely different argument.

Still, I've got to hand it to Kawakita: despite being made on a budget, Rebirth of Mothra really does look polished and as fully-realised as its Godzilla cousins, and my problems are almost exclusively with the design of the monsters, not the execution. Even the process shots look good, for the most part, and there are a lot of them, given the interactions between the Elias and the kids. There are slip-ups, like the horrendous fire backdrop when they sing their Mothra chant; it has something like a 4-per-second framerate, and it looks like they're doing karaoke in front of one of those Christmas yule log videos that's skipping. Moments like that are outliers, though, and mostly the film looks just as polished as anything else Kawakita had done, if not quite as ambitious.

It has the kaiju goods, then, and it doesn't even scrimp on the impact and violence of a "real" daikaiju eiga, despite being a kids' movie (the treatment of the Leo larva is genuinely unsettling). None of this counteracts the trivial storytelling, or the "set-up the camera and walk around in front of it" staging of virtually every human-based scene (the early sequence with Balvera and Garugaru tormenting the kids has a certain higher-level comic energy to it, though). It doesn't outright hold its audience in contempt, though it does suppose them to be somewhat undemanding and receptive to slack storytelling that states rather than demonstrates its stakes. But kids' movies have been a lot worse, and the action is good enough wipe at least some of the aimlessness of the human story from memory.

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WHEN A GIRL'S DIVERGENT, PROBABLY IT'S URGENT YOU DEFER TO HER GENTILITY

An open question for which I would honestly and none-snarkily beg for an answer: could anybody who likes up-and-coming actress Shailene Woodley - and a quick peek at the internet promises me that there are many of you - please explain why? Is it a The Spectacular Now thing? Because I still haven't seen that. But I have seen Divergent, Woodley's shiny new Jennifer Lawrence-esque coming out party as the anchor of a can't-miss YA adaption series, and while the problems keeping it from being anywhere remotely near even the distinctly modest pleasures of The Hunger Games go deeper than the lead actress, I still find her to be a weirdly anxious-making bundle of non-charisma who looks actively nervous to be in front of a camera, and whose presence severely limits my ability to buy into the movie whatsoever.

Based on the first book in a massively popular book trilogy by Veronica Roth, Divergent takes place in a future where Chicago is, apparently, the only outpost of human civilisation left, and to protect itself, a wall has been erected around the remains of the city at a distance of some miles. For reasons that make absolutely not a whisper of goddamn sense at this juncture, society has been divided into five factions, each based on one overriding trait practiced uniformly by all those who belong to it: Abnegation, the selfless folks who are trusted to run government; Dauntless, the fearless soldiers who act as Chicago's security force; Amity, the peaceable love-everyone types responsible for growing and distributing food; and Candor and Erudite, truth-tellers and intellectuals whose function in society is not really even a little bit clear. It's not really in the book, either, but it comes a lot closer; Divergent, bless its heart, represents something of a case study in how to make the very worst decisions in translating a novel to a screenplay.

Anyway, everyone is born into one faction, and at age 16 is given a test that determines whether they are optimally suited for that faction; after this, they are able to choose where they want to live the rest of their lives in a grand ceremony that almost exactly splits the difference between the Reaping in The Hunger Games, and the Sorting Hat of the Harry Potter films. It is thus that Beatrice Prior (Woodley) leaves her parents in Abnegation to join Dauntless - incidentally, the grammar scold in my heart never stopped being annoyed that the faction names include three nouns and two adjectives - for she has admired the athletic, el-track climbing of Dauntless for her whole life, and she learns during her test that she is "Divergent", at odds with the perfectly one-note nature of her compatriots, and thus able to choose her own destiny. Obviously, choosing her own destiny turns out to be a lot more complicated than joining the faction of her choice, when it turns out that Erudite, in the form of the obviously-evil Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet), is trying to do evil throughout Chicago, destroying Abnegation for reasons that are also really not even a little bit clear.

As a narrative, the film version of Divergent suffers from two massive problems, one of them easily-avoided, and one not avoidable at all. Going in reverse order, the inevitable problem was that the story, at least in this leg of the trilogy (I haven't read the other two books), is largely backgrounded to conceptual development and ideas, two things that almost, but not quite, add up to world-building. It is a thought-driven narrative, in other words; this is fine in a text-based medium which can be experienced at the reader's own pace, and not fine at all in an image-based medium that goes at a specific pace. And that brings us to the easily-avoided problem, which is that Divergent, the movie, crawls like a dying snail on ice. Something like the first five hours of the 139-minute film are dedicated to Beatrice's - renaming herself Tris - initiation into the Dauntless society and training to be kept in the Dauntless ranks after they slough off the new recruits who couldn't hack it as soldiers. It's symptomatic of the biggest problem with Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor's screenplay, which fiercely mangles the book in translation, favoring the most momentum-deadening and anti-cinematic moments while leaving the characters uniformly indistinguishable on any grounds but their physical appearance, besides Tris and her hunky trainer Four (Theo James), whose leap from authority figure to boyfriend is as inevitable as it is unconvincing and abrupt. To say nothing about making any attempts to clarify anything, leaving a patchwork dystopia whose internal logic is stalled at the "because the writer said so" level of cohesion and sociological insight.

It's a pity the story is such a tangle of under-expressed concepts, stock characters and stock ideas, and pacing misfires, because on the level of basic craftsmanship, Divergent isn't half-bad. It's not a massively-budgeted affair; you can see that in the slick, often unconvincingly-applied CGI meant to apply a layer of ratty future tech and post-apocalyptic wear to the real-life Chicago settings (this movie is unabashed, unapologetic Chicago location porn, for which I will concede a reservoir of affection that would remain even if the whole project was a lot worse in every respect). The action setpiece of the first two hours, a zipline flight from the John Hancock Center (and holy shit, talk about location porn), is delightfully kinetic, but never feels remotely real, for example.

But director Neil Burger, an unexceptional but competent workaday sort of filmmaker, has a good sense of how to keep things punchy and active, as he and cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler weave and whip their camera around without too much recourse to the dreaded handheld shakycam (and when shakycam arrives, it actually works, sort of, at its express purpose of making things seem chaotic but not visually illegible). The visuals are, on the whole, a bit drab - the film's color palette is flat and dominated by too much yellowed-out footage - but there are busy, active compositions and sets that successfully communicate a lived-in and living world that looks vaguely like our own but bent through a funhouse mirror. It succeeds at one of the most important tasks of all post-apocalypse dystopia films, creating a physical reality that seems like it actually could exist in the form we see it. Now, giving a good, clear reason for that physical reality to exist is another thing, and using that reality as the backdrop for a story of any kind of urgency and emotional connection is quite another thing yet. But they have a couple more movies to get it right, and I enthusiastically doubt that they will.

5/10

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BEST SHOT: L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

The hardest movies to do justice to in the Hit Me with Your Best Shot series hosted by the Film Experience are the movies with the best cinematography: the ones where, almost by definition, every shot contributes meaningfully and deeply to the narrative, emotional tone, and thematic meaning of the film in question. I thought it was rough last week, when Nathaniel assigned Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with its wall-to-wall assortment of wonders courtesy of the great and maddeningly under-used Ellen Kuras, but it was just a pleasant warm-up to this week's selection of L.A. Confidential. I hadn't seen the film in years, and I knew it had excellent cinematography, but I was quite unprepared for just how excellent: it is very nearly the best work done by Dante Spinotti at the very height of his powers as a cinematographer (Heat was three years in the past; the ungodly perfection of The Insider was just one year in the future). Bluntly, L.A. Confidential at least belongs in any responsible conversation about the top 10 or so best works of cinematography in any American film of the 1990s, presenting a vision of midcentury Los Angeles soaked in maddeningly cheery sunshine, smokey noir darkness, and the kitschy-chic colors and lines of 1950s interior design, all while contributing immensely to director Curtis Hanson's remarkably successful creation of a sustained mood of creeping tension and mystery.

When everything is fantastic, nothing is, which made picking this week's best shot an especially grand ordeal. I finally got it down to around a half-dozen, two of which were NSFW (one nudity, one violence), and one of which was a terrific expression of narrative but not in and of itself abnormally attractive (which I did, yes, consider a priority in choosing). Anyway, in the end, more so that I can write a damn post, I've landed here:

We are at this point in the film - right about a half-hour in - finally kicking off from the immensely slow burn of the opening act and its introduction of the characters, the setting, and the warped mores of Southern California in the 1950s, as Detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), the officious prig of our trio of central anti-heroes, enters the Nite Owl diner, the site of a killing that we'll soon learn to be an outright massacre, with a literal pile of bodies waiting in the men's room (one of my NSFW picks, by the way).

It is one of the handful of lynchpin scenes in the film, and Hanson and Spinotti and editor Peter Honess do it up beautifully, layering tension upon tension and creating a sense of muted but very real and very palpable danger. We know already that death has happened in this space, and so does Exley, but that's all we know. And so, we arrive at the shot: a fantastic use of anamorphic widescreen to make things seem opened up and unnervingly close at one and the same time. We see so much of the interior space of the diner, which would ordinarily give it a certain opened-up feeling, but thanks to the tremendous amount of wall present on the left side of the shot, it has the paradoxical effect of making the whole room seem tiny and crushed, with Exley in the middle like a little bug. I am no apologist for the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, but there's no way this could have worked without it. For a crude demonstration, I would ask you to take a quick look at the same shot cropped and re-centered to the more sedate 1.85:1-

-and notice if you will, how much less desperately meaningless Guy Pearce looks here, and how much more air there seems to be in the room above his head.

But back to the actual shot as it exists in the film.

So there is the cramped central portion of the frame, with the diagonals in the frame drawing our eye towards that part even as they help to define how little it is, creating a swell sense of not-rightness and foreboding. But there is more to consider than that, much more. The use of color, for one, with the hints of red all around (this is basically a trichromatic image: red, yellow, green) announcing and echoing the images of blood splatters and streaks that Exley is about to notice in cutaways.

There is also the ever-popular film noir use of lighting, which might seem like an odd thing to say about such a relatively light shot, but if you take another glance at the composition, all those diagonal lines aren't pointing at Exley. They continue past him, bring our attention to the front window, with the hollow L.A. night waiting outside. Darkness is, literally, at the back of everything (and also in front: note that Pearce's body divides the floor into brighter and darker halves). And the only thing that competes with it is the diffuse, fuzzy lighting of the lamps on the ceiling, surrounded by foggy and indistinct haloes - white and clean, but also unfocused and thus feeble. As perfect, obvious, and direct a metaphor for the morality explored within the film itself as you could hope for.

And God, that's without saying even one blessed word about the design and set decoration that makes the Nite Owl such a precise, physical place, something real that gets violated by the savagery of the film's narrative. But that's great cinema for you: you can talk as much as you want, and it just makes you realise how much more there is to say.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1920: In which iconic character actors and long-forgotten leading ladies both contribute, and genre is toyed with

Above all else, the best reason I can think of for adopting a historically-oriented approach to art appreciation is that there's so damn much history just sitting there. Limit yourself to only the stuff produced in any given year, and you're going to make some discoveries and have a great deal of random dross to get through; but open yourself up to years and decades and centuries (depending on exactly which art we're talking about), and suddenly you have piles and piles of unknown treasures to stumble across.

I bring this up in connection with the 1920 Universal gangster film Outside the Law because it was almost completely by accident that I watched it for this series: I'd made a horrible mistake in building my schedule, and found myself anxious to find literally any 1920 film from a Hollywood studio that could be gotten in less than an hour on the internet. Which is how I ended up with a film typically cited nowadays as being interesting mostly for being the second of ten collaborations between director Tod Browning and rightfully legendary character actor Lon Chaney, following 1919's The Wicked Darling. And my thanks to the Internet Archive for being there in my hour of need.

But it's not Lon Chaney's film - he's the villain and absent for a huge chunk of the middle. It is instead primarily a vehicle for Universal's biggest and brightest female star of the late '10s and '20s, Priscilla Dean, about whom I knew literally nothing at all before stumbling unto what is not, apparently, a specifically important or meaningful entry in her canon. And so I return to my first point, stumbling across hidden treasures: not just Outside the Law, which is an odd and rewarding little gangster picture that isn't, in and of itself, a real contender for Great Forgotten Classic status, but Dean herself, a galvanising actor whose work in this film isn't always as perfect as it might be, with some distinctly B-grade silent mugging in places where it especially hurts, but who grabs the camera in every frame where she appears and refuses to let go of it, giving a performance that I can honestly and without hyperbole say isn't exactly like anything else I've ever seen in a silent film.

Dean plays Molly Madden, the daughter of one of the most important gang leaders in San Francisco, Silent Madden (Ralph Lewis). As the film begins, Silent has been spending a great deal of time with local Chinese community leader and Confucian scholar Chang Lo (E. Alyn Warren), who has been impressing upon the gangster lessons in eschewing violence and crime to live a moral, good life, and to lead by example. Molly thinks this is all so much loopy twaddle, but part of her is genuinely moved by her dad's shift in attitude; a less charitable interpretation is held by Black Mike Sylva (Chaney), a particularly cruel-minded criminal who decides that Silent Madden's newfound generosity of spirit makes him an easy target to frame for murder.

Seeing her father sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit is enough to turn Molly off of the path of peace and love but good, and she immediately works on a plan to get back at Sylva. Working with Dapper Bill Ballard (Wheeler Oakman, Dean's husband at the time), Molly concocts a plan to steal a massive clutch of jewels with Sylva, double-crossing him and going into hiding to let the cops hunt him down. This leaves Molly and Bill trapped for weeks in a small apartment with nobody but a little boy (Stanley Goethals) from across the hall for company. And you know what happens to two people stuck in each other's company for weeks at a time, especially when the lady doesn't bother to telegraph her disdain for her male companion, right? It happens here, too. But the main thrust of the plot concerns Bill being turned by the tow-headed little child that keeps poking his head in all the time, and he immediately sets himself to the task of convincing Molly that they need to go straight, return the jewels, and give up her angry quest for revenge against Sylva.

Outside the Law turns out to be a weirdly psychological thing, far less concerned with the doings of gangsters than with portraying the effects of cabin fever (in its current form, at least. Only one print is known - the last two reels are in pretty bad shape, too - and it is from a 1926 re-release that allegedly cut a great deal of content out). Browning and cinematographer William Fildew's visual treatment of the apartment where Molly and Bill are holed up is emphatic and cramped, using much closer compositions than anywhere else in the film to stress not just the closeness of the two protagonists, but even more the maddening sameness of the space in which they're stuck. The door that is the single outlet to the world now closed off to the characters is at the center of several of the most dynamic, deep compositions in the film (one outstanding shot of Sylva standing just outside the door anticipates Browning's evolution into a thriller and horror specialist, something this film resolutely is not). It's surprisingly modernist of the film to spend so much time flaunting the expectations of the gangster genre, by not merely avoiding action but openly bragging about how much not-action is taking place; even more so since Browning's focus is on making the apartment seem crushing and tedious, rather than playing around with more kinetic, diverting stagings that would make the film more superficially watchable but sacrifice its meat.

Anyway, back to Dean, who does something quite fascinating and extraordinary: she foregrounds, at all moments, the action of thought. Molly is a strategist first and foremost, and Dean emphasises this above all things, with expressions and sideways glances that reveal multi-layered calculation and precision in when smirk, when to frown, when to go blank, that feel not like choices the actor is making but choices the character herself is making, in what amounts to a film-long performance for the benefit of everyone else in the cast. And in so doing, Dean is surprisingly, and excitingly willing to make herself unappealing: visually, on the one hand, since many of her furrowed brows and expressions are nobody's idea of traditional movie star beauty, and those traditions extend back as far as the first women to appear in one-shot novelties in the 1890s. On the other hand, she's whole-heartedly committed to letting herself be unappealing ethically, playing a truly hard, mercenary criminal to Oakman's forgettably soft-edged Bill, snapping and sulking and making cutting gestures and remarks with so much focus that you can hear the sarcasm in her voice even through the lack of a soundtrack. She's unable to do anything with the sudden moment in Browning's story where Molly decides on very little pretext to start being nice to the kid; but I do not claim for Dean the merit of being a flawless, or even a great actress. She's something better: a hypnotising, dominating screen personality.

It's lucky for the film that when Dean isn't onscreen, Chaney usually is, since those two are by and large the only humans in Outside the Law that give it any kind of spice. Chaney plays two roles: he has a small amount of screentime as Ah Wing, a follower of Chang Lo, notable mostly for how thoroughly unrecognisable the actor is under his yellowface makeup, either as himself or as anyone we might willingly call Chinese. But no matter: the plain Chaney face of Sylva is a special effect all its own, with the actor playing a truly nasty piece of work of idle competence and cunning, a villain who smiles wearily at his prey with the satisfaction of somebody who never expected that failure was ever on the table. It's a great performance from a perpetually under-appreciated actor, menacing as hell without being in the lest bit florid or melodramatic.

Beyond those two, honestly, Outside the Law has nothing of particular note to recommend itself: the surprise of a 1920 American movie whose Chinese characters are uniformly heroic - indeed, the most obviously moral and decent people in the movie - is offset by how many of them are played by white people (though Anna May Wong, at the very start of her career, pops up in a single shot that puts her front and center). Browning's attempts to create an atmosphere of foreboding by underlighting the city streets and criminal dens where most of the first and last acts take place doesn't work remotely as well as it would in his films later in the '20s, as he committed more thoroughly to horror (or, at any rate, the thing that horror was in that decade in America). The atmosphere is there, yes, but it feels plastered atop the film rather than drawn up through the film, and the film is never better than when it takes place in the well-lit, clear interiors of that cramped apartment.

Not a masterpiece, then; just a good delivery system for a pair of actors doing some very interesting things to look at. Still, there's enough going on here that I can't really compare to anything else I know from the same period that the film registers, strongly, as a worthy curiosity.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1920
-Buster Keaton appears in his first solo feature, The Saphead, and short, One Week
-John Barrymore stars as the title characters of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
-Douglas Fairbanks stars in the genre-defying swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1920
-Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the major films of German Expressionism
-Carl Theodor Dreyer makes The Parson's Widow in Sweden, his first major film
-The Kelly Gang, a remake of the first known feature-length film, is released in Australia

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, from 1995, was literally advertised in Japan with the slogan "Godzilla Dies". But even if you didn't know that going in, it's a film that positively oozes fin de siècle gravitas and sincerity and gloom, making it very clear that whatever the story the film intends to tell, it will arrive at a point of intense, permanent change, and perhaps not for the better.

(As for why Toho decided to kill off their cash cow: it was to clear the boards for a new American-made Godzilla franchise that was then just starting to rev up, with TriStar working busily on their own Godzilla that was eventually released in 1998. The idea was that a new Godzilla franchise made with all the resources of a Hollywood studio would be an even bigger international hit than the good old rubber suit Godzilla films; this plan backfired spectacularly, but that's a story for another day).

The result is a Godzilla movie of particular grandeur and seriousness, certainly the most grim-minded entry in the series since director Honda Ishirō hung up his spurs, maybe even since the very first Godzilla of 1954, a film to which Destoroyah orients itself as an especially specific sequel. Like that film, the story hinges on humankind's capacity for making things worse through the overuse of technology that we haven't fully thought-through, whilst not-so-incidentally managing to make the tragic ending of that film even sadder: Dr. Serizawa having deliberately sacrificed himself in '54 to ensure the secret of his potentially world-ending oxygen destroyer would be kept away from a humanity far too prone to misusing such power, it now comes as something of a sucker punch to find that his sacrifice was in the end, only kicking the problem 42 years down the road: not only has some new scientist with more passion than common sense effectively re-invented the oxygen destroyer, we now learn that Serizawa's original had the unlooked-for side effect of birthing a giant creature even more devastating and horrifying than Godzilla itself - a monster ultimately named Destoroyah or Destroyah, depending on what year you saw the film in English; it's the only monster name not more cleanly transliterated for the unanswerable reason that Toho couldn't trademark the word "Destroyer".

The film wastes absolutely no time, opening with Saegusa Miki (Odaka Megumi) on a helicopter, discovering to her horror that Birth Island, the Pacific home of Godzilla and its juvenile adopted child, simply no longer exists. Godzilla sure as hell still exists: it makes landfall in Hong Kong and wreaks havoc, looking quite freakish and wrong in the process: huge parts of its body are glowing red, as are its eyes, and its atomic breath has become hotter and shifted from blue to orange. All this in a pre-title sequence, I believe the first one in the series; and that alone says something about how much we need to shift our expectations with this one, n'est-ce pas?

Only one person in the world seems to have any explanation for this freakish, abrupt shift, and he's a college student: Yumane Kenichi (Hayashi Yasufumi), the adopted grandson of the legendary scientist Yamane Kyohei, who was such an important figure in the first Godzilla attack back in the '50s. Kenichi's theory is that Godzilla doesn't have a heart in the traditional sense, but that it's essentially powered by an internal nuclear reactor. And based on the recent evidence, it appears that reactor is about to have a meltdown of enough severity that a huge portion of the planet will be wiped out in the blink of an eye when it happens, to say nothing of the fallout that will afflict the straggling creatures on the opposite side of the globe who managed to live through the initial explosion.

Kenichi thus comes to the attention of G-Force, but he's not the only researcher making huge strides in the science of Godzilla. Dr. Ijuin Kensaku (Tatsumi Takuro) has lately stumbled across a formula for "micro-oxygen", an agent that works on much the same principles as the late Serizawa's oxygen destroyer. The thought of bringing such a nightmarish project back to humanity is of no pleasure to Kenichi, his reporter sister Yukari (Ishino Yoko), or their aunt Emiko (Kochi Momoko, cameoing as the character she played all those decades earlier) - Serizawa's fiancé, lest we forget - who have a whole family identity centered around the unspeakable evil of oxygen-based weaponry, Kensaku soldiers on with his research, when he discovers something horrible: the '54 oxygen destroyer event changed the soil enough that some unfathomably ancient dormant life-form, something like a microscopic Precambrian crustacean, has been brought back to life, and several individual organisms manage to escape to an aquarium near Kensaku's lab, where they grow to human size. Those creatures, by the way, are just about the most horrifying kaiju ever seen on film, hideous Giger-esque collisions of horns and chitinous flesh and penile inner mouths that come so close to the Alien monster, with so little intent to hide it, that I'm kind of amazed no lawsuits came of it.

Eventually, Godzilla, the long-missing Godzilla Junior (this film's official name for the creature previously called Baby Godzilla and Little Godzilla), and the Precambrian monsters, combining themselves into a single hideous bat-crab monstrosity dubbed Destoroyah, all converge on Tokyo, G-Force throwing everything they have at the monsters in a desperate battle to stop them; key to these efforts is a new cryo-gun that might be able to freeze Godzilla solid and stop its planet-destroying meltdown. This results in, naturally, the most self-consciously operatic and violent battle in any Godzilla film to date. And it's really violent. The scene in which Destoroyah attacks Godzilla Junior is genuinely shocking and upsetting, as the hellbeast uses its giant clawed mouth to rip a huge hole in the young monster's chest, which geysers up blood that leaves Destoroyah's mandibles shining red in the light of all the fires that the fighting has caused.

It's horror, is what it is; the action of the rest of the VS Series is present, but this is genuine horror imagery above all else, and it lends Godzilla vs. Destoroyah a terrible weight and grandeur like nothing else in any of the Godzilla films of its generation. Especially the scene in which Godzilla itself dies, an overwrought and arguably silly exercise in fire and light and explosion with the skin literally melting off the monster's skeleton in front of our eyes. I wonder, perhaps, if all of this goes a little too far to extremes; wallowing in ugliness and brutality for the sake of cheating its way into gravity. But then, the death throes of Godzilla Junior are genuinely upsetting in a way that truly does elevate the film; it even elevates poor Miki, who never really paid off as a character in the six movies where she appeared, but whose ability to act as our conduit for being shocked and aggrieved by the actual death of a generally sympathetic kaiju justifies her presence in a way that the films have never managed to make stick.

Director Okawara Takao and writer Ohmori Kazuki (the latter working with Godzilla for the last time) certainly deserve credit for the intensity and focus of tone they bring to bear (as does Old Reliable himself, Ifukube Akira; his score was the last he ever composed, and made up mostly of reheated cues, but he does have one new piece with an achingly earnest and simple orchestration, harsh and melancholy, that I completely adored), even if the film doesn't really work as a story any better than it has to: more than any Godzilla film in decades, it does feel like the scenario is just a conduit for getting us to moments of emotional impact, and I will confess to really liking that approach to a giant monster movie. At least in this case.

The battles are also, I am inclined to say, the best since at least Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, though it could be easily argued that they are over-long and messily edited; certainly nothing that follows Destoroyah's shockingly fast disposal of Godzilla Junior meets it for sheer visceral impact. But the massive drama and theatricality in the lighting and sale of destruction, along with the three absolutely terrific suits in play, end up having a lot of impact even if I'm sure we could all point to ways that things could be snugged up. And they are, mind you, beautiful suits: Godzilla Junior is perfectly proportioned, though also a regrettable shade of jade green; Destoroyah is a fantastic perversion of some of the nastiest animals on Earth, made to look like a genuine bat out of hell. And Godzilla's effects-heavy suit this time looks the best it has since Godzilla vs. Biollante, for my tastes: more frenzied-looking, especially with its crazed eyes and smoke pouring out of its body, and in his last performance as the monster (one that involved a lot of passing out, apparently), Satsuma Kenpachiro continued to find news ways to explore its body language and express a real delicacy and tenderness in its relationship to the broken Godzilla Junior.

I would go so far as to say, not without some hesitation, that it's the best Godzilla film of the VS era: visually robust, focused on great heaving gestures and emotions that work so much better in this franchise than the attempts at human-scaled storytelling that some of the more recent sequels gestured towards. It flags its seriousness and desire to have an impact maybe a bit too eagerly, but the results are hard to argue with: it is a sufficiently epic finale for an iconic character, and our foreknowledge of how far awry things would go with the plan to bring a temporary close to the Japanese Godzilla saga shouldn't color just how bold and roiling that close succeeded in being, in its moment.

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