WOMEN SCORNED

There's a terrific and deeply necessary movie that could have been made out of the basic DNA of The Other Woman. It is, for starters, basically a platonic rom-com about how a pair of mismatched women come to rely on each other as friends, and cinematic depictions of female friendships are achingly rare (contra the general buzz, the film manages to meagerly pass the Bechdel Test - two named women have a conversation that's not about a man - though not nearly as easily as a film whose three leads are all females should have done. I believe there's a hefty total of three brief conversations in 109 minutes that qualify). And the notion of these two people bonding because one of them is sleeping with the other's husband, and they both feel horribly betrayed is, I'd say, a genuinely durable and smart plot hook with a sophisticated, old-school tang; it recalls the 1932 Rachel Cruthers play When Ladies Meet, twice adapted into solid, rewardingly grown-up movies.

But The Other Woman is neither terrific nor deeply necessary; it is, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty damn bad. Not as bad as the reputation it has already built up for itself: at an absolute minimum, it boasts one good and one surprisingly open performance, from Leslie Mann and model Kate Upton, respectively (the third leg and de facto main character is played by Cameron Diaz in unyielding "Come on, I deserve better than this, right?" mode), and anyway I did not choke to death while watching it, which some of the reviews had suggested might be a realistic possibility.

The film is basically a showcase for the comic and dramatic stylings of Mann, who dives into her role with nearly frightening gusto, like setting off a nuclear bomb in a tea party. It's honestly difficult to say if it's amazing acting or terrible; committed and fierce and energetic beyond a shadow of a doubt, but also prone at every moment to knocking all the balance out of the film. Particularly in the moments when Mann heavily emphasises the raw red pain and disorientation of a woman who has just learned that everything she's been building over the many years of a marriage that has left her without a profession or life of her own is null and void. There's a dizzying mania to that, which reads as "comedy" very often; not always funny comedy. No sir, The Other Woman is not, at any rate, invested in funny comedy. Its humor is of a particularly guttural, shrill level, in which most jokes are either "it's funny because the ladies are screaming invective" or "it's funny because the ladies are taking about sex and vaginas". It is better for the film when it does not leave this area, for its efforts to expand beyond the most limited idea of what comedy can be typically goes horribly awry: on two separate occasions, the film puts a complete halt on any kind of momentum to tarry and linger over a shit joke. The second, and by far the more robust, even requires shifting perspective for the first and only time away from one of the leading women, as though it was such an exciting and innovative and life-changing shit joke that the filmmakers were fully willing to break the basic narrative structure of their movie to make sure that it could be included. Even setting aside the basic intellectual and comic poverty of the shit joke, this was the wrong one for this movie.

But back to Mann. Her wild mania can play as comedy, but just as often it plays as savage emotional naturalism, a desperate woman swinging from moment to moment of sheer existential terror which can only be put off by eager self-medication or by grasping onto whatever passing human being she can make some kind of emotional connection with, even - especially! - if that's the other woman whose unwitting actions have been the source of all this trauma. That is also potentially the meat of a great movie, though probably not a great comedy (or, at least, not a very funny one), and when given this shockingly intense performance, director Nick Cassavetes and company are plainly at a loss; thus the whole thing is is treated as the ditzy lark it was written to be, and Mann looks dangerously unmodulated and overly Big.

Nothing else about The Other Woman is remotely as interesting to talk about, though I legitimately admire Upton's gamely self-effacing performance as a sexy blonde idiot with enthusiasm and good cheer and no illusions about who she is ("I see a dolphin", in context, is a genuinely funny delivery of a genuinely funny line). It's a lazy attempt to cross-breed The First Wives Club and John Tucker Must Die, the first of which had some minimal charm owing to its charismatic cast, the latter of which is truly without merit; it is this genealogy that points out that the film in its current incarnation lives and dies not on its cynical "women get revenge on a man" plot that comes from no kind of feminist place that I have ever heard of (it's nominally in favor of empowered women, but it doesn't seem to have any real sense of what such a creature might look like in the wild), but on the chemistry in between its stars. With Diaz being plainly disinterested in a role that makes her recite perfunctory lines about self-reliance and sex, from beneath a deeply unfortunate amount of mascara, there's no real spark of chemistry to speak of, and Cassavetes seems content to assume that by having Diaz in his movie, he's got that famous Diaz Spunk lined up already and doesn't need to do anything to coax it out of her. The result is three leads who feel like they're in three movies: Mann in some kind of sobering dramedy about betrayal and recovery, Upton in just a chill hang-out movie where everybody's having too much fun to bother with characterisation, and Diaz in a shitty cash-in comedy that has feeble jokes and unhealthy attitudes about humanity. Diaz, of course, is correct; but it doesn't make The Other Woman any more survivable when it's specifically trying not to be better than its worst impulses.

4/10

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MAY 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

It seems disingenuous to talk about the start of traditional blockbuster season when what's likely to end up the year's biggest superhero movie is already going strong, but that's the giddy world we live in today. So anyway, here's the kick-off to one of the more peculiarly quiet-looking summers we've had in a long while.


2.5.2014

Having already showed up in most of the world, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hits the States. And if you know anybody who's excited about that fact, you're one up on me. Whatever fans The Amazing Spider-Man was able to gin up back in 2012 seem to have faded back into the woodwork, and the opening film of the new summer is, I would say, indisputably the blandest looking.


9.5.2014

The weekend where movies go to die is led by Neighbors, a dirty comedy with Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, who is just enough of a weird casting choice that I'm kind of intrigued. The rest is all silence: Jon Favreau's Chef is an obvious metaphor for the pain of being forced to receive large sums of money to direct Iron Mans, Moms' Night Out is yet another of those Christian-themed movies that have been doing such astounding business in 2014, and Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return, which from the footage available so far looks like the ugliest animated movie ever made. Like, literally ever. I kind of can't wait.


16.5.2014

GODZILLAAAAAAAAAA!

(and Million Dollar Arm, some tediously sweet Disney sports movie about Indian kids being dazzled by Jon Hamm and the United States, nothing sociologically terrible about that. But it has Lake Bell, and I would cross broken glass in my bare feet for Lake Bell).


23.5.2014

I, for one, have largely abandoned hope for the X-Men franchise, but if nothing else, X-Men: Days of Future Past has Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen again. But really, at this point I feel the series has nothing left to prove one way or the other, and we all know exactly what we're getting into.

I feel the same way about the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore romcom Blended, which is shaping up to be the most obnoxious movie of the summer, and without a single CGI robot to its name.


30.5.2014

The sole justification for Maleficent is obviously Angelina Jolie's presence as the title character, though it's quite a hell of a justification. Still, the "dark fairy tale that explains the villain's point of view" shtick is one of the most unbelievably tedious in the world, and as the directorial debut of the production designer of Alice in Wonderland, so I don't see room for even a sliver of optimism.

Seth MacFarlane brings his whole deal to the Wild West with A Million Ways to Die in the West, with an extraordinary cast, and based on the trailer, a grand total of one joke, repeated infinitely, till we all die.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1927: In which we ain't heard nothing yet

1927 is perhaps the single most important year to date in the development of the film medium. It is the year when first the Hollywood continuity system and subsequently the cinema of the entire world was at a turning point between two paths, that of pure image, or that of image combined with sound. The latter of these does not inherently suggest a greater level of realism, though in practice it has nearly always been the case that sound is used to create a more naturalistic, authentic mise en scène in narrative films, particularly in American cinema. Thus the sound/silent distinction can be sketched as the difference between poetic abstraction versus solidity and narrative clarity, and committing definitively to the latter of these fundamentally shifted the development of American cinema forever after. In recognition of the sheer magnitude of this development, our Hollywood Century marathon will be spending a little extra time in 1927, considering two of the most important and iconic movies of that year. Let us now consider the movie that sealed the doom of silents and proved that sound cinema was going to be the only way forward hereafter.

It is a funny thing that the two most technologically important films of the early Hollywood era - 1912-1929 are the dates I'm using - are both impossible to talk about in the modern age without first grappling with the fact that they are unpleasantly, irreconcilably racist. The first is, of course, 1915's The Birth of a Nation, the film that invented editing in its modern form by thrillingly assembling in an almost unprecedented series of cross-cuts an action-packed adventure in which members of the Ku Klux Klan heroically save a white woman from the impossible fate of being touched by a black person. The other film, 1927's The Jazz Singer, isn't nearly as jaw-dropping in its odiousness: the first feature-length film with synchronised dialogue just has blackface. But let's be blunt, "just blackface" is one of those relativisms that you only get to trot out in the presence of something as profoundly problematic as D.W. Griffith's Klan epic. I would expect no sane modern viewer to make it all the way through The Jazz Singer without being deeply concerned by the great narrative privilege granted to blackface, not even to the degree that I can take a deep breath in front of the 1936 Fred Astaire film Swing Time, or the 1921 Buster Keaton short The Play House - masterpieces both of them, you understand - and release it with a hissed "the times were different, weren't they?" The Jazz Singer is, among other things, about blackface, in a really complicated and specific way that has much to say about ethnic and racial attitudes in America, in some awfully depressing if singularly historically illuminating ways.

On the other hand, the times were different, weren't they, and there is a remake of The Jazz Singer which saw fit to put Neil Diamond in blackface also. And that happened in motherfucking 1980. In comparison with which the '27 picture is the most decent, progressive thing you will ever watch.

Let's return to that, because it matters, but it's also not the only thing that matters. As everybody knows, The Jazz Singer is the first sound movie, because everybody is wrong. It's not even the first movie with synced human speech, only the first feature-length film with sync-sound passages. The Vitaphone technology (sound on phonograph discs) had already been used in multiple features with full music soundtracks and an assortment of sound effects released by Warner Bros., and this was not the only sound technology available to filmmakers in '26 and '27 - there were also three distinct sound-on-film formats in use at the same time, and of course this much more foolproof system would end up winning out just a couple of years into the sound era. And primitive attempts at sound cinema are as old as the so-called "Dickson Experimental Sound Film" from 1894 or '95.

So like everything important, The Jazz Singer wasn't as monumentally revolutionary as it's meant to be. But it still matters more than all those many shorts and musically-scored features and God knows what else, because it made an enormous shitload of money. And it is perhaps the first time that sound dialogue - straight-up, unadorned dialogue of people communicating thoughts to other people - was used in a narrative context, and this is key. Of the great national cinema styles - poetics in France, Expressionism in Germany, experimental editing in the Soviet Union - only the Hollywood style was explicitly about increasing clarity and realism. Every major development in the American filmmaking vocabulary to that point, and ever development in the decades since other than, perhaps, widescreen, was focused on answering the question, "how do we make these movies more akin to daily human life?" This being the case, the appeal of hearing people speaking words is obvious; particularly in the case of The Jazz Singer's big showcase dialogue scene, in which the words are of an entirely flat, small, domestic sort. It is not by any means a flashy scene: just a singer talking this his mother comfortably and pleasantly. It is, I believe, entirely because the talkie scene was so utterly unexceptional that it made such a gigantic impact, for it demonstrated the ability of sound to seem quite absolutely normal, presenting people just like you or me doing things that you or I do.

(Separated from The Jazz Singer by almost nine decades, I will confess that I still don't understand why movies that make artifice look like real life are considered desirable; if I want to see real life I can look at everything in the world but movies. I acknowledge, though, that I am on the wrong side of history in this intransigent distrust and dislike of cinematic naturalism; indeed, I was on the wrong side of history before I was even born).

But we still haven't really talked about the movie at all. The Jazz Singer is based on a play based on a story based on the life of Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson the cantor's son who became one of the most popular singers in the world in the '10s and '20s. In a fortuitous redundancy Jolson plays "himself", Jack Robin né Jakie Rabinowitz, taking over the role after George Jessel, who played the part on Broadway, rejected it. This worked out well for everybody, given that in 1927 as now, the film's primary value lies in its preservation of several Jolson performances - as perhaps the single most acclaimed performer of the first quarter of the 20th Century in America, being able to analyse and study Jolson's performance style and the relationship he attempted to bridge with the camera in place of his theatrical audience is a thing of clear value to the student of theater, music, and film history alike.

Which is not the kind of phrase you trot out to discuss a really fun movie to watch that has all sorts of keen artistic achievements to keep you coming back, because The Jazz Singer is very much not that movie. It's as close as I can think of to a film whose appeal is almost solely historical, for a multitude of reasons: the unfathomable gap between the way that Jolson performs and the way anybody more modern than he by even just a few years does, including the dreadful fact of blackface; the drawling tedium of the hopelessly overbaked melodramatic plot, a silly and hokey thing even by the standards of backstage biopics; the incredible limitations of early sound filmmaking, though to give full credit to director Alan Crosland (the first sound specialist in cinema history, we might say - his work includes Don Juan, the most important Vitaphone production prior to this one), he did as much as possible to give The Jazz Singer a kind of visual flexibility that wasn't found in just every early sound movie, with their arid static camera set-ups and bunched-up compositions that make it easy to tell even from a still where the microphones were hiding, since all the actors were facing a single point. Virtually all of its numbers (six performed by Jolson, four by others) involve cutaways to people listening in the audience, though the singing is all presented from a static angle; this sounds like absolutely nothing, but it does represent a certain leap of faith to edit a talkie scene like any normal sequence, and it leaves The Jazz Singer feeling more like a movie than a lot of its immediate successors. Even more cunningly, there are moments in which silent scenes viewed from a distance are overlaid with random background sound effects, as though the reason we're not hearing people even though we see their mouths move is because there's too much noise. And this is an outright brilliant gesture that we find nowhere in the trenches of 1929, for example.

Still, a few attempts to do things with the gimmick of sound beyond sheer novelty doesn't disguise the fact that The Jazz Singer is a parched movie, with a completely bland visual style that does nothing to help grind the story along. The quick version of the story, for those not in the know: Cantor Rabinowitz (Warner Oland) expects his son to follow along in the family business; but Jack would rather become a great singing star, and he is banished from the family, ending up in Illinois where the pretty gentile star Mary Dale (May McAvoy) helps him get a leg up. Eventually, Jack has to choose between the devotional music of his fathers or the emotionally roiling pop songs that his heart adores, and he finds a way to get both, pleasing his dying father and bringing tears to the eyes of his ever-adoring mother (Eugenie Besserer). It's stock nonsense, but even stock nonsense has to come from somewhere, and it was kind of Jolson's own life.

Heck, the movie might have even worked as a pleasantly corny family melodrama, with somewhat stronger performances and a director more eager to go for broke, instead of a director who seems palpably disinterested in any scene that doesn't have audio (the film was, essentially, a silent film with songs: all the talking is contained in scenes involving singing, and there are only about two minutes of dialogue, including the all-time legendary "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet" - a preexisting bit of patter from Jolson's show that is only the perfect first line of dialogue in the history of talking pictures by sheer accident). The film is at its unmistakable best when it involves Besserer or especially Oland, whose performance is several levels above anything else in the movie; it is raging, gesture-driven piece of Old World theatricality that fits the milieu perfectly. Jolson, bless him, was a singer, not an actor; he has a genial charisma that carries him through the worst of it, but there is hardly a single moment where he seems to project any kind of feeling whatsoever, particularly affection for his nominal romantic interest. He's just smiling pleasantly, nodding a bit, sometimes sweeping his arms; a poseable mannequin who fits precisely the wholly generic medium shots that dominate the film, biding their time until the next song comes along. And I will confess at this point that I can't stand Jolson the singer; his breath sing-speak technique annoys me a little, and his taste in songs does not align with my own by much (though who, in the 21st Century, could claim to love "Mammy" without feeling at least slightly horrified with themselves)?

The film has at least some sociological interest as a depiction of Jewish community identity in the early 20th Century, and for its fascinatingly queasy implication that the reason Jolson performed in blackface was because it was the best way for him to utterly disguise his Jewishness - the scene where he finally applies the burnt cork is played as a weirdly triumphal moment, the instant in which he finally achieves his dream of shedding Jakie Rabinowitz for Jack Robin, become just a white guy pretending to be a black guy. It's kind of awful on two levels: first because of the inherent distastefulness of minstrelsy, in which black identity is appropriated and black musical art warped into something carefully denuded of cultural markers for mass - i.e. white - consumption; second, because it is explicitly cast in this case as a victory for Jewish assimilation into a white Christian majority culture (it is a very assimilationist film overall really, and it feels right that it should come from the Warner Bros. studio, given that the Warners were among the most successfully, prominently assimilated Jews in America). There's no way to claim with a straight face that The Jazz Singer is "ashamed" of Judaism - the depictions of the "Kaddish", sung by superstar cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, and the "Kol Nidre", are too loving for that to be the case. I suspect, indeed, that for a huge percentage of the film's early audiences, this was their first exposure ever to Jewish liturgy, and by that measure, we could call it an outright piece of pro-Jewish boosterism. Still, the plot very emphatically presents Jack Robin's consistent growth away from his Jewish roots, and his brief stopover to sing on the first night of Yom Kippur doesn't remotely imply that he intends to arrest that development. The film's last image, after all, is not of Jolson in a prayer shawl, but of Jolson in blackface and white gloves.

Basically, it's a really damn hard film to like: visually bland, dramatically lumpy, and lustfully infatuated with fitting in with the broadest culture you can. For all its technological radicalism, it is an exaggeratedly conservative movie, in its themes and its aesthetics, competent but never truly well-made, and almost punishingly straightforward, as though the desire to foreground the talking sequences came with the charge to make sure that nothing would pull focus from them anywhere else in the film (the only - only - scene that seems cinematically aware of the developments of the last four or five years is a double exposure where Rabinowitz's spirit is seen to briefly put his hand on Jack's shoulder during the "Kol Nidre", one of the film's handful of actively fine moments). It is safe, it is generic, and it is boring. And this, my friends, is the movie that set the stage for the rest of American film history. The cynicism feeds itself.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1927
-Clara Bow shows she has It
-WWI epic Wings, the future winner of the first Best Picture Oscar, is released
-Cecil B. DeMille directs the massive life of Christ film The King of Kings

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1927
-Fritz Lang's monumentally influential sci-fi parable Metropolis is made in Germany
-Alfred Hitchcock directs his early masterpiece The Lodger in Great Britain
-in the U.S.S.R., Sergei Eisenstein's contribution to the 10th anniversary of the revolution is October: Ten Days That Shook the World

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STANLEY KUBRICK: A LOVELY, LILTING, LYRICAL NAME

"How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" screamed the breathless, wink-wink ad campaign in 1962. And this question was obviously meant to ask: how did they ever make a movie, under the moral auspices of the American film industry at that time, based on the 1952 novel about a middle-aged literary scholar and his systematic rape of a 12-year-old girl? For while that kind of story would at all points in film history have been tricky to present on its own terms, it would take an especially elliptical form of storytelling to present such material in the days when, nominally, the Production Code still existed.

But I would like to add another layer to the question: how did they ever make a movie from such a bookish book as Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's complicated tribute to the English language and the unreliability of first-person narrative, an ephebophilic fantasy told from the point of view of a man who has only his words to concoct a vividly self-serving story out of details that might not have ever happened to him, buried under layers of metafiction. It is a book that has already announced its commitment to the woozy intoxication of language usage by the end of its glorious opening paragraph:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

That kind of prose never really lets up anywhere in the book, and the story itself is such a patent hallucination of broken and awkwardly re-assembled memories that even calling it a "narrative" is begging the question: a narrative of the act of recollection, yes, but a narrative about the events that happened to people at a certain period in time, probably not. So, how did they ever make a movie of Lolita? As best they could, but it wasn't really enough.

That being said, movies are not books, books are not movies, and a half of a century later, hopefully we can do better than to say, "Stanley Kubrick's Lolita is problematic as an adaptation of Nabokov's literary triumph"; we might, for example, say "Stanley Kubrick's Lolita is a different thing that needs to be considered on a different level". Though I am not so mature about this that I will fail to observe that Nabokov's Lolita is a much better novel than Kubrick's Lolita is a movie (full disclosure: the book is very possibly my favorite work of fiction of the post-WWII era).

Anyway, let's not spend the whole review in that singularly unproductive space. Kubrick's Lolita - the screenplay credited to Nabokov himself, though it was significantly re-worked by the director and producer James B. Harris to bring it down to a filmable shape and length - is a generally cleaner and more straightforward piece than its predecessor, smartly opening with a scene in which a haggard European, Humbert Humbert (James Mason), enters the disastrously cluttered manor home of playwright Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), finds the resident drunk and incoherent and prone to delirious fantastic rants, and shoots him, citing a someone named "Lolita" as the reason for his act of vengeance.

This thriller-style opening giving the film more dramatic focus and momentum than the novel, we are free to jump back four years, to find a much more polished and debonair Humbert arriving in Ramsdale, New Hampshire, for a summer's rest to do some writing before traveling to Ohio to teach French literature. Here he rooms with a widow named Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), an insufferable intellectual poseur whom Humbert tolerates solely to be near her gorgeous daughter Dolores (Sue Lyon, an older-looking 14-year-old; the character is at any rate certainly no longer 12), nicknamed Lolita. The Haze women have a fairly acrimonious relationship, both of them responding rather warmly to the European gentleman in their midst; eventually, Humbert marries Charlotte to ensure that he can continue being close to Lolita. Things get more fucked up before... they never actually do get better. We already know, after all, that Humbert will kill a man before all is said and done. And knowing that Quilty is that figure, we're in a good position to observe how frequently Quilty seems to inveigle himself with Humbert and the Hazes, giving the film Lolita the aspect of an fatalistic tragedy whereas the book is an erratic backwards mystery.

Prevailing standards made it not just impossible for Kubrick to state outright that Humbert is habitually raping his stepdaughter, it was almost impossible for him to imply it at all. Certainly, it required just about totally throwing out the book's pubescent-obsessed lech with a life's history of bent sexuality, and replacing him with a figure so pathetic as to be almost pitiable. And this, perhaps, explains the film Lolita's most important characteristic, as it distinguishes it from the book,; charts the development of Kubrick's style, and simply as it fits into the expanding modernism of 1960s cinema: its utterly deadpan sense of black humor, and its bitterly ironic treatment of sincere topics. The film is a travesty of romantic stories, melodramas, the relatively new form of the TV sitcom, of Father Knowing Best, all done with a flat, nastily absurd tone in which the put-upon sad-sack whose tribulations are treated with such warped amusement is guilty of arguably the two worst crimes an individual can commit: murder and the sexual abuse of a minor.

This is especially true in the first half of the long (over two and a half hours) movie, when Charlotte is still alive and Lolita's purity untouched, at least by Humbert. To a fascinating and virtually indescribable degree, Lolita is a movie told almost entirely through double entendres and puns both verbal and visual; unable to state directly "Humbert wants to fuck Lolita", Kubrick instead makes jokes out of the moments when Humbert is most directly aware of his lusts and the horrible universe that makes it so easy for him to act on them: the only way to get the punchline is to understand what the film can't say, and the only way to puzzle that out is to have the information smuggled to us inside a joke. It's impossible to imagine any of this working on any level without Mason's impeccable expressions of befuddlement and discomfort, a quintessential straight man in a mad world; and of course the mere fact that the straight man is also, objectively, a villain is what gives Lolita the same kick of morally hopeless comedy that Kubrick would develop to more sophisticated lengths in his very next film, the majestic Dr. Strangelove.

That being said, Lolita pulls back quite a bit from committing to the pitch-black nihilism that Dr. Strangelove would exploit so ruthlessly; it understands, in an intellectual way, that Humbert is Bad News, but does quite a lot to obviate his worst traits. Part of this was censorship-related: he can't be as obsessed with sex, can't be as active in his pursuit of Lolita, and can't be as loathsome in his possession of her, and so for most of the film, he feels less like a predator than a regular middle-aged man who, through sheer accident, has happened to be involved in a long-term sexual relationship that he doesn't apparently enjoy with his underage stepdaughter. Another factor is the opening scene's depiction of Quilty, who in Sellers's energetic performance is so dissolute and reptilian that it's hard not to prefer Humbert just for being a relatively stable and sane human being.

The greatest factor is the physical embodiment of the women in Humbert's life. Shelley Winters, an actress I have very little enthusiasm for in general, has one thing going for her that absolutely nobody could ever deny: she knew no embarrassment. Time after time, she played women who were whingey wet noodles with pathetically obvious sex drives, utterly humiliating shrews and frumps, and never is there a sense that she felt constrained or personally attacked in such roles. And Charlotte Haze is perhaps the greatest of them all: a desperately middle-class nobody trying with all her might to let slightly airy vocal cadences, utterly self-conscious "poised" gestures, and an insinuating series of conspiratorial leers sell the lie that she is in fact sophisticated, worldly, and sexy. The one thing she's surely not is appealing: more sad than horrifying, but deeply off-putting either way, and it's really impossible, from the way Kubrick shoots her (his bugs-under-glass style shades into revulsion around Charlotte) not to feel sorry for Humbert having to put up with her.

As for Lolita herself, Sue Lyon gives the first truly great "Kubrick" performance on film, as I see it: most of her work consists of doing things in a flat way (stare, sit, shout, smile) and letting the editing and camera movement work its way around her to do the effort of creating her character. This is especially prominent in her famous introduction, wearing a bikini, broad hat, and sunglasses, and looking with a perfectly neutral expression off-camera; it's all the cutting to Mason's nervous, hammy look of overheated zeal that sells the lust which drives the rest of the film, after the very best teachings of Lev Kuleshov. This does two things: one is that it strips away any concern that Lolita will play as too invested in sex, in this heavily, deliberately de-sexed Lolita. The other is that it leaves her a pretty but entirely non-descript young woman of no specific personality, only a kind of frustrated, loud teenager-ness. Which, coupled with the film's retreat from foregrounding the sexual relationship between the characters, makes her feel more like the petulant kid that Humbert is stuck with, instead of the book's depiction of her as the petulant kid that he distorts through a lens of self-serving eroticism. And this too makes us feel a little sorry for Humbert.

All this leaves the film only ever really successful at the level of morally warped sitcom, though in that capacity it is a damn good one. Still, compared to its immediate successor in Kubrick's career, there's a constant sense that it wishes not to be a comedy: it has a very serious aesthetic. There is, for one, the incredibly gorgeous, sleek look of the thing, with the cinematography credited to Oswald Morris (we as always do not look too closely at such matters, with Kubrick) that offers a tiny little sense of painterly elegance to the all-Americana trappings of the houses and streets and landscapes that make up the movie. And of course the opening itself, in Quilty's manor, is straight-up Gothic mystery, with a foggy tracking shot behind a car that starts the whole movie off, directly predicting The Shining, 18 years on. The film also boasts a seemingly limitless supply of graceful, supple tracking shots from first floors to second floors, through walls and doors, around rooms, treating the simple, generic spaces of the film with the grandeur of a ballet or waltz. The style of it is overwhelmingly romantic, in fact, with grand sinewy gestures and deeply suggestive, atmospheric lighting. And this too could be a joke, though an inordinately straight-faced one.

Still, the sarcasm will out: Mason's constantly deflated looks, Sellers's grab-bag of accents and caricatures, the crude double-entendres, and the shift from the aching "Lolita's Theme" composed by Bob Harris in the opening credits to the vapid, hellishly catch pop nonsense "Lolita Ya Ya" by Nelson Riddle, maybe the first time in Kubrick's filmography that he uses straight-up musical irony. It's a caustic film disguising itself as a love story, and an entirely admirable attempt to find any way of dealing with the source material given impossible strictures. That said, as a Kubrick film, I find that virtually everything it does well was done better in his filmography, and it is quite possibly the most visually straightforward movie he made on professional money, tracking shots or no. Still, the lessons he learned from it are quite obvious, particularly the ones he'd apply on his very next film, the first of his fully mature works and the beginning of an uninterrupted run of world-class masterpieces that ended only with the filmmaker's death.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - MONSTERS, MONSTERS EVERYWHERE

Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. Far and away the wordiest, clumsiest English-language title of any Godzilla movie - any Toho daikaiju eiga at all, for that matter. But simply a direct translation of the Japanese, and if you look at some of the original names for the classic movies in the franchise, they're no less bogged down in syllables that look more and more fake the longer you study them. Custom holds that the shorthand is to simply call the film GMK; let us not break with custom.

Custom also holds that GMK is one of the all-time great masterpieces of Godzilladom; if there's a consensus pick for the best film of the Millennium Series, this is plainly it. And here I will break with custom so vigorously that the crack can be heard echoing in the dells and valleys for miles around. For much of the film, I was baffled why the film was broadly liked at all, let alone regarded as one of the great high water-marks of the decade-spanning franchise; but that's easy enough to resolve. This is a spectacular action movie, with some of the most dramatic and powerfully-expressed sequences of destruction and brutality in any Godzilla film. In fact, it's almost a better action movie than it is specifically a giant monster action movie, in which regard it suffers from some choreography that cuts back on the brawling in favor of tense stand-offs and military thrills. But we do not need the same damn monster fights movie in and movie out, year after year, generation after generation. GMK wants to switch things up a bit; it ends up with action sequences that still work well, even if they feel different.

"Wants to switch things up a bit" is, if anything, a uselessly genteel euphemism for the game GMK is playing. To understand this, we must first understand where it comes from: with this film, Toho handed the keys to the franchise to Kaneko Shusuke, a decision that fulfilled the #1 wish of pretty much every daikaiju eiga fan in the world, circa 2001. In the '90s, Kaneko had directed a reboot of Daiei's flying turtle-beast Gamera starting with a 1995 film that was widely regarded as having handed Toho's ass to it, in terms of creating a giant monster movie with emotional depth, real dramatic stakes, and world-class visual effects. It took a creature that had never been anything but a campy joke and made it the center of one of the era's most successful, beloved genre series. Finding out what mad alchemy Kaneko could work with a monster who started off with such an astronomical series of advantages over Gamera was obviously exciting, though it turns out to have been mostly the same mad alchemy: turn the character into the most serious, grave version of itself possible. Kaneko openly discussed how much he missed the true villain version of Toho's lizard king, as seen way back in the very first 1954 Godzilla, and had been missing since 1964's Mothra vs. Godzilla as the character shifted back and forth between hero and anti-hero.

That's a hard instinct to quibble with (my own feeling is that no Godzilla film has ever matched the level of those two), but Kaneko's execution was perhaps a little too eager. This isn't just a grim, serious monster movie: it's downright bleak and nasty at points, anchored around a new Godzilla that is totally and purposefully devoid of any appealing, sympathetic characteristics. I will confess that my problems with GMK are to some extent inextricable from its Godzilla suit, towards which I feel unrelenting hostility: it's a skinny, lithe beast that doesn't hide even slightly the human build of the man inside of it (Yoshida Mizuho, his only performance in the series), designed perhaps for fleeter movements that give the monster speed and grace at the expense of weight, intensity and impact. But the face is much the worst of it: with blanked-out white eyes and extra-prominent leonine teeth, this looks basically like what you'd get if Godzilla had been attacked by a vampire, and while I enjoy the horror-tinged absurdity of that kind of interpretation, and the Millennium Series of films was all about new and unique one-off interpretations of Godzilla, there's still a point where "make it dark! make it edgy! make it cruel! make it serious!" glosses into "make it fucking stupid", and too many filmmakers of the 21st Century have paid no heed to the place where that line exists. To look across the Pacific for a comparison that would have been impossible to make in 2001, GMK wanted to do The Dark Knight with Godzilla, but it ended up at All-Star Batman & Robin instead.

The script by Kaneko, Hasegawa Keiichi, and Yokotani Masahiro is, in general, predicated on fascinating and wholly unique ideas, some of which are explored better than others. 50 years after the great Godzilla crisis of '54, there are strange indications afoot; missing submarines, a recent attack by a giant monster in New York (the film's best joke finds two Defense Force cadets discussing the rumors that the New York monster was Godzilla, something that Japanese experts have tended to doubt - as good a response to the 1998 American Godzilla as ever needed to be made). The stage is setting itself for a terrible event, clearly, one that Admiral Tachibana Taizo (Uzaki Ryudo) is doing his best to prepare for.

Someplace far away, his daughter Yuri (Niiyama Chiharu), the host of a humiliatingly cheap and crass show on paranormal phenomena, is trying to gin up some dippy docudrama about a lake creature in the wilds, when a freak earthquake hits; the carefully attentive might notice the shriek of something giant, far away, during the quake, but neither Yuri nor her crew seems to pick up on it. She does, however, spot an old man (Amamoto Hideyo) watching her and her crew, who promptly vanishes.

Signs and portents keep piling up: teenagers found dead, covered in silk, a trucker who was the sole survivor of a cave-in swearing that a giant monster caused it, and at this point Yuri's science writer friend Takeda Teruaki (Kobayashi Masahiro) hands her a book about the guardian monsters of East Asia, spirits that aim to protect nature and the land from all dangers, three creatures called Baragon, Mothra, and Ghidorah. The book was written by a certain Isayama Hirotoshi, a sort of Godzilla doomsday prophet; he's also the disappearing man Yuri saw after the earthquake, and he spouts off with the most fascinatingly bent theory: that Godzilla, an ancient dinosaur given strength from nuclear radiation, is also the embodiment of all the souls of Japanese soldiers who died during the Second World War, and it's hear that the gulf between the movie GMK could have been and the movie GMK is becomes most pronounced. Because that is a massively complicated, potentially wretched idea, one that could tell all sorts of truths about Japanese nationalism half a century and more after the end of hostilities, and could just as easily become some kind of nightmarishly exploitative attempt to steal gravitas. That it manages to be neither is due ultimately to how much the film ends up not caring about exploring any of the possible ramifications of that concept; given how much GMK is about spirituality and the paranormal instead of science fiction - a shift that works well, given the increasingly samey sci-fi trappings of the '90s films in the series - it has a dispiritingly limited interest in grappling with spirituality on any real level, not when there's achingly bland boilerplate about Yuri and her dad both coming to grips with responsibility and family to be ground through.

So anyway, the film's four monsters end up arriving - Kaneko wanted Baragon (coming back 46 years after Frankenstein Conquers the World) to be joined by Anguirus and Varan, with Toho insisting on more marquee creatures - and the all-out attack does begin in earnest, to the film's immense benefit: a more tendentious than usual human story (Yuri's connection to anything feels like the flop-sweatiest strain on the screenwriters' art) and the utterly insipid comic relief of the low-rent station where Yuri works makes the human angle of GMK rather harder to sit through than when it's just anonymous meat puppets shouting out technobabble. It also lets the film focus more on the military operation, which is probably the film's most effective attempt to break with tradition, adding a sort of realism, inasmuch as realism is a thing you get to have in a movie with four giant monsters battling throughout Japan. The film depicts the military response to the four creatures as one of tightly contained panic: fast decisions that are frequently wrong, confusion, shouting, frayed nerves. Uzaki gives the best performance, by a long margin, and this helps too; he has a beleaguered authority and stability that helps to anchor the action.

As for the monster scenes, they are generally terrific, boasting the first good CGI in any Toho daikaiju eiga to that point, and while its not flawless (there is one shot apiece of both Mothra and Ghidorah in flight that looks perfectly dreadful), the added sense of scale and violence thus permitted helps the film out greatly. The best fight is certainly the one between Godzilla and Baragon, in which we first get our sense of how the new version of the starring monster will fight, what his skills are, and so on; the fight between Godzilla and Mothra is laughably short and one-sided, while the fight between Godzilla and Ghidorah tends to showcase the shortcomings of the latter monster's design, which aggrieves me almost as much as the new Godzilla suit: instead of three heads on serpentine necks animated with rod puppetry, the new Ghidorah's left and right heads are just arms with hand puppets on the end, and when he grapples with Godzilla, the degree to which it looks like two men in rubber costumes dicking around is incredibly hard to overlook. Besides the which, the dragon's three faces are goofily over-expressive, attempting to make the character look more heroic than menacing and giving him an expression of intoxicated curiosity.

I will confess again to a certain personal limitation, in that King Ghidorah, as a nearly indestructible villain, is one of my favorite members of Toho's bestiary, and making him smaller, weaker, stupid-looking, and non-threatening strikes me as vigorously useless bullshit. Any film in which a friendly King Ghidorah reanimated through the power of magic and a glassy fantasy music cue saves two people falling into the sea by breathing bubbles into the water for them to land on would have no real chance to redeem its use of that character in my eyes.

Still, the glossy blacks of Kishimoto Masahiro's cinematography, the smoothness of effects director Kamiya Makoto's team's work, and Kaneko's pronounced desire to keep any whisper of silliness out of the picture all combine to about 35 minutes of some of the most intense and unrelenting action the series has to offer, which is a good enough percentage. Even if I kind of can't stand looking at two of the four combatants (Baragon is terrific, Mothra looks the best she ever has, with the most complex and detailed points of articulation). Ohtani Ko's thunderingly generic music, spiked with a few synth-heavy passages of utter nonsense, is no substitute for the militant grandeur of a good Ifukube Akira score, but it keeps the action pounding along, and the lengthy absence of Niiyama and her shrill gyrations makes it easier to tolerate the human action.

It is, on balance, a fine Godzilla movie; one that comes in on a pile of hype that fine doesn't begin to accommodate, but that's not the movie's fault. It's an accomplished piece of filmmaking at a level of scope and grandeur only intermittently seen in the series, but without the sense of moral weight that the '54 film had, which might have counterbalanced to some extent the filmmakers' weirdly passionate intention that it be be joyless: going so far in the direction of eradicating camp that it eradicates any real sense of fun. There's more to Godzilla than just fun, of course, but the dark grimness of GMK simply isn't enough in itself to keep the movie propped up.

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In which the blogger is in a state of repose

Let me tell you what the all-time biggest pile of bullshit is ever: food poisoning.

My current hope is for posting to resume tomorrow. In the meanwhile, you know you're sick when watching a Godzilla movie sounds like too much physical work.

Update, 4/22: Well, food poisoning sure turned out to be a wildly optimistic self-diagnosis. New plan: the blogger, lighter by the weight of one gall bladder, expects to be back to business as usual tonight. Or definitely for sure tomorrow.

Thanks everyone who's chimed in with best wishes for my health!

Final update, 4/24 Gall bladder is out, I'm home, and the recovery is gliding along nicely. There's some obvious soreness, and no-so-obvious (do you have any idea how many abdominal muscles are involved in clearing your throat?), but that's what pills and bed are for, and the rest of my system is holding together nicely. Back to business as usual, I do hope, and thanks to everyone who chipped in with words of encouragement and their own stories!

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1926: In which sex is sexier with a smoldering Swede

The title card of Flesh and the Devil trumpets itself as a vehicle for John Gilbert, king of the romantic leading men at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (and even just a couple of years into its formal existence, the lavish MGM was not going to cut corners on its romantic leads), leaving the pair of recent Swedish imports Greta Garbo and Lars Hanson relegated to merely "with" status below the title. But anybody watching the film can tell in an instant that it's not Gilbert's movie - it's Garbo's. Director Clarence Brown, who would work with Garbo six more times, certainly got that, piling one rapturous close-up on the actress after another, frequently leaving both of her co-stars on the edges of scenes in a story where, by any measure, they are both more important than she is. Gilbert definitely got it; he'd become instantly enraptured with the star, kicking off one of those Hollywood in the '20s myth-romances that are best precisely because of how ridiculous the details can get in the retelling (they'd co-star four more times; the last of them in the sound era, as part of Garbo's last-ditch attempt to keep his career afloat when studio politics - and not a legendary but nonexistent vocal squeak - scuttled his career).

And audiences got it: the film was Garbo's third in her American debut year of 1926, and the one whose gigantic box office presence (in the uncertain world of 1920s box office reportage, it fairly consistently gets cited as being one of the year's top five hits), and set her up as one of the most shimmering, glowing stars in the cinema firmament. This status she would never relinquish; some of her films would be less popular than others, and a few would lose money, but it would be due almost entirely to her own fatigue and insecurity, and not at all because she wasn't in demand, that she retired from the film industry in Hollywood or anywhere else after 1941 (the war didn't help either - like Michael Bay after her, Garbo tended to require international markets to help her massively costly productions turn a profit).

And now, separated by generations and human lifetimes, it's still easy to get it. Garbo was terrifyingly complete: some of the most sophisticated and nuanced acting of the late silent era (and it wasn't even in silents that she did her best work) wearing one of the most gorgeous, camera-commanding faces that cinema has ever known. Even now, decades after we've been able to put literal, unsimulated sex scenes in respectable movies, there have been only a meager number of performers who were Garbo's equals in communicating the psychology of sexuality so clearly: not merely the lust and passion that a thousand actors could gin up in every era, but a very clear, tangible thoughtfulness, the self-awareness of desiring and enjoying sex. Cultural mores have as much to do with talent in explaining why we don't see more of that in film, particularly in the case of women, but sometimes lightning will strike and we end up with an actor like this, who could communicate so much by the speed of her responses, the way she presents herself with calculated aloofness to her co-stars, and especially the sheer volume of expressions she could evoke through her hugely elastic eyes.

Flesh and the Devil presents Garbo as the quintessential wicked woman out of melodrama, unfaithful to no fewer than three men and deeply unconcerned when the first of them dies because of it. And yet Brown cedes so much of the movie to her perspective, and Garbo so exactly delineates the complexity of each emotion to leave her character as a feeling person and not a devouring spider, that it's really hard to watch the film and say, "she's no good and she should get what's coming to her". Even the film's SPOILER IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE RULES OF SILENT MELODRAMA factory-produced moral ending that finds Garbo dying alone for her sins can't bring itself to play her death as just (it's shocking and haunting), not least because it is the direct result of her doing the only "good" thing she does all movie.

But anyway, while it's Garbo's movie, it's also a movie entirely about everything but Garbo, and it turns out be a pretty damn fantastic one on the non-Garbo merits. Adapted from Hermann Sudermann's novel, The Undying Past by screewriter Benjamin F. Glazer, the film opens in an Austria army camp, where childhood friends and inseparable colleagues Leo von Harden (Gilbert) and Ulrich von Eltz (Hanson) train together, cover for each other, share in each other's punishment, and generally act as emphatically, aggressively homosexual as is even slightly plausible for two characters who will both end up fucking Greta Garbo before the movie is out. Leo's turn comes first; while on a furlough week home to visit his mother (Eugenie Besserer) and Ulrich's sister Hertha (Barbara Kent) - the latter of whom his unofficial future wife in the eyes over everyone in town - he spots the devastatingly gorgeous Felicitas (Garbo) at the train station. At a ball in the boys' honor, he approaches her for a dance and goes home with her, all in the same passionate trance; it's only late that night, drunk on lovemaking, that he meets her husband, Count von Rhaden (Marc McDermott), and it's immediately understood that they will duel to settle the matter, though the count insists that to protect his reputation after he kills the boy, they tell everyone, even their seconds, that it was over a disputed card game. Because the 19th Century was FUCKING MESSED UP.

Things go wrong when, at the end of a duel that is one of the most gorgeously Impressionist things I have seen in an American silent, all grey silhouettes and compositions cramped at the bottom of the frame, Leo ends up killing von Rhaden. The law is the law, and he is no criminal, but the rules are the rules, and he's a liability to everybody. He's immediately sent on military exile to a post in Africa for five years, begging Ulrich to take care of the widow he has made of Felicitas, even now implying it's his guilt over killing her husband alone that drives him. So it's his own damn fault, really, when at his return three years later - Ulrich having been tirelessly advocating for him - he finds that his best friend and the femme fatale of his dreams have gotten married. It looks thrillingly happy; Ulrich certainly plays it that way. But Felicitas makes very little effort to hide from Leo that she is in the marriage mostly for the von Eltz fortune, and she'll leave on the spot if he wants her to. For she professes, at least, that she adores and craves Leo as much as he adores and craves her, and given the intensity of the real-life porking happening between Garbo and Gilbert, the actors have an easy time convincing us of their sincerity.

Gaudy, tawdry, tragic balderdash; but a sublime central trio puts it over so quickly and potently that it took all of my attention to even notice the contrivances, after which I certainly had no energy left to call those contrivances into question. The casting here really is impeccable: each leg of the triangle has its own specific dynamic and striking chemistry; Garbo and Gilbert's desperate, hormonal urgings, obviously; Garbo and Hanson's more cagey, play-acted relationship is pretty great itself, though (the two co-starred in 1924's Saga of Gösta Berling), with Hanson's preening joy and Garbo's canny pretense of love cutting against each other neatly. The film relies most on Gilbert and Hanson's intense homosocial bond, though; and I use that word only because it's not really culturally accurate to say that two men passionately in love with each other in Europe in the 19th Century are necessarily or even probably in erotic love, though it would take a spectacularly disciplined modern viewer to keep their gaydar from shooting off into the red by the end of the first reel.

The point being, the three actors start selling it and keep selling it and despite Brown's obvious, understandable, and dramatically defensible (if unconventional) preference to stage the movie around Garbo, the director does exceptional work in balancing the flux of emotions as they play out in various combinations of people. If melodrama is about the easy access to rich, primal feelings, well then, Flesh and the Devil is a master melodrama; the longing glances and the almost physical expressions of pleasure and loneliness keep coming until the last beat of the movie's 112 minutes. And it includes one of the most gloriously sordid, fleshy, erotic moments of the decade, as Felicitas pointedly rotates a Communion chalice to place her lips on the rim where Leo took his sip of wine, with Garbo's look both transporting and fervently in the moment.

In between the great character moments, Brown and cinematographer William H. Daniels stage some terribly elegant compositions throughout (it is the most visually accomplished of Brown's films that I have seen), using depth and shadow box-like stagings to give a sense of stateliness to the proceedings, but also of social constrictivness; this is a fussy, precise movie about a fussy, precise place, where the frenzied, messy feelings between Leo and Felicitas can only be destructive. On a more immediate and practical level, the use of depth lets the filmmakers quickly, dramatically demonstrate the relationships of the main three characters: the are separated from each other by a distance; they are near to each other; they are in tight embrace and we are enjoined to get right next to them and take part in their intensity; they embrace, but we are removed so that they might have the moment to themselves. And so on. You could call it simple and even programmatic stuff, but then, more people ought to do things like it, if it was so gosh-damned simple. Because whatever it is, it's effective as hell.

Not a film to all tastes - it is lustfully melodramatic - and more a sign of Garbo's raw potency than a demonstration of the peerless heights of acting and sex she'd reach in her sound masterpieces, Flesh and the Devil is pretty altogether terrific regardless. The fact that this is basically a well-made genre film and still triumphs in so many ways speaks volumes of the level of accomplishment that the Hollywood silent aesthetic was beginning to approach as the mid '20s started their shift into the late '20s; still, you could watch a lot of very fine movies from that period and not come up with too many as robust and gorgeous and achingly, desperately full of feeling and desire. It's trite but could not be more true: they do not make 'em like this anymore, and even when they did, the results were rarely this emphatic and grand.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1926
-Buster Keaton makes the Civil War comedy masterpiece The General
-The now-lost Aloma of the South Seas is one of the biggest hits of the era
-The seminal war comedy What Price Glory?, directed by Raoul Walsh, opens

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1926
-Lottie Reiniger creates the earliest surviving animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, in Germany
-Soviet director Vsevelod Pudovkin makes his feature narrative debut with Mother, one of the masterworks of Soviet Montage
-The hit German adventure epic The Holy Mountain stars, in her acting debut, future director/propagandist Leni Riefenstahl

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WHO'S THE DEADLIEST ONE OF ALL?

Nearly until the end, and I literally mean, like, up until the last four minutes, Oculus makes a great argument for itself as being the best mainstream horror film since... I guess "since The Conjuring" isn't really at all impressive. But the spirit of my point is clear, yes? It has all the stuff to be a great horror film and it ends up being a very good horror film with some intensely dubious ideas about how to wrap up all of its clever themes and narrative conceits. Given the batting average for the genre, this is more than enough to qualify Oculus as a modern masterpiece the likes of which you'll tell your grandchildren about.

Also, "oculus" is one of those words that barely looks real in the first place, and when you keep typing it just looks more and more fake and ludicrous. Oculus, oculus, oculus.

Anyway, the film is built on a fascinating gambit: it's attempting to develop one core theme, which it does in two somewhat distinct halves that each approach that them from a different perspective. Basically, Oculus is about human perception and memory, and how easy it is to screw with both of those things, and for the first bit of the movie, it explores this in a very talky, script-driven way. The story centers on the Russell siblings, 23-year old Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and 21-year-old Tim (Brenton Thwaites), who have a shared trauma buried eleven years in their past: the facts of the matter are that their father killed their mother, and Tim then shot their father. For Tim, newly released from a psychiatric care facility upon attaining his majority, this event caused such a profound break in his mind, needing to absolve himself of guilt, that he crafted an absurd fantasy to create to protect himself from his own actions, and only years of treatment in a safe space have permitted him to come to grips with the truth. For Kaylie, their dad was possessed by the malevolent spirit living inside a haunted mirror.

Horror cinema being what it is, it's obvious long before Oculus lays its cards on the table which of the siblings will be proven correct, but for a surprisingly lengthy stretch in the first half, the film isn't so much a psychological thriller about the unreliability of memory, as an expository series of dialogues in which the two Russells clearly speak their interpretation of events and go out of their way to poke holes in the other's certitude. The reason this isn't death onscreen has a lot to do with the fussiness of the plot happening underneath the speeches: Kaylie has recently tracked down the mirror, and has laid out a phenomenally complex system of safeguards to make sure that she's able to destroy it, with full video evidence to prove that it is haunted, and their dad wasn't a murdering psycho, and the same scenes where the masses of chatter about the unreliability of perception play out are intertwined with her Rube Goldberg theatrics. And, too, it helps that the actors have a certain easy ability to make their jargony conversation feel naturalistic, particularly Gillan, who speak with a clipped patter that verges on robotic, and by all means shouldn't work; yet it's so heightened and discordant with the rest of the film, like a screwball heroine who landed in a ghost story by mistake, that it's madly captivating.

So that's the first part: open and blunt conversations about how easy it is to convince yourself that something that isn't true actually happened, and how much that framework can inform the way that you interpret what's happening right now. Once the mystery resolves itself, surprisingly early, that yes, the mirror is a demon, the film ceases to explore this theme narratively and begins exploring it structurally: at this point, the film dissolves into a full-on editing freak-out in which the grown-up Russells start to lose track of when they're themselves and when they're the eleven-years-younger versions of themselves. For all throughout, being in the house where all that bad stuff happened so long ago has been triggering flashbacks, as both siblings recall the physical details of what happened to them (Annalise Basso plays young Kaylie, Garrett Ryan plays young Tim), and how they separately perceived the slow descent of their father (Rory Cochrane) into a kind of madness brought on, apparently, by too much exposure to his mirror - or maybe just the shiny-eyed ghosts that hover around it - and the equally inexplicable turn towards cruelty in their mother (Katee Sackhoff). Throughout, these flashbacks have been spliced in through all the normal cues; at a certain point, they start to bleed into the movie proper, with child and adult versions of the characters rushing past each other in the same hallways, and both siblings losing track of what they're looking at, when they're looking at it, and where they are, with the audience increasingly encouraged to lose track as well, thanks to the magic of cross-cutting.

In essence, if the first half of the movie states "your perception is a half-assed jerry-rigged series of shortcuts that you can't trust", the second half demonstrates it by openly flaunting continuity in a way that's terrifically disconcerting and, in a few well-timed moments, even really creepy, as those mirror wraiths pop up and vanish in the best fashion of J-horror knock-offs. And I must congratulate director Mike Flanagan and his co-writer Jeff Howard for so thoroughly balancing psychological concepts with the grubby mechanics of a ghost movie. If anything sucks the wind out of the film, it's that the brunt of this doesn't feel like it adds up to anything; Oculus doesn't end up having any "point" bigger than its sage observation that the demon living in the mirror wants to kill and eat souls, and the grand fandango of themes and psychothriller is just a spectacularly obtuse way of getting at that profoundly limited conceit. It's astonishingly shallow, really, for how many complex ideas it explores with relatively deep thought and success.

But that's not really a problem at all: I went into Oculus expecting a ratty fast-food hamburger of a film and I got a ratty fast-food hamburger of a film, but with a warm home-baked bun and sublime artisan cheese, and those were sufficiently pleasing surprises that I choose to be delighted by their presence, rather than disappointed that the burger itself was still gristly and burnt. The greater problem, the one that I cannot forgive, is that Oculus ends badly - intensely, boringly badly. I have no idea what ending might have worked, but the one that the film went with is as bad an idea as I can imagine, diving with childlike zeal into clichés of the dodgiest sort, resorting a nihilistic "fuck it all!" gesture instead of following up on the real complexities of the script or paying off the moments when it's a generally spooky ghost story. Horror films that work at all well are so rare that I'm not about to write Oculus off because the last few moments are utter trash, but I have to say, the film leaves a spectacularly bitter feeling on the way out.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1925: In which the most generous and humane filmmaker of an era finds tenderness and wit in the wilderness

At the time it was still new, Charles Chaplin called The Gold Rush, from 1925, the film he wanted to be remembered for. He's gotten his wish, and then some - we still remember The Gold Rush along with City Lights, Modern Times, The Kid, The Circus, and so on, and will undoubtedly do so as long as there is cinema.

And yet The Gold Rush is still something special. I do not believe that it's anything like the consensus pick for his best film - on the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, the best we have for the temperature of current CW, City Lights is more than 100 spots above it, with Modern Times and The Great Dictator also coming in higher - but I wonder if it might be his most beloved, or most famous. It is iconic; beyond a shadow of a doubt it's iconic. The scenes where Chaplin's Little Tramp, here in the guise of a lone prospector in the Yukon, fussily eats a boiled shoe with all the care of a diner in the finest Parisian restaurant, the sublime physical performance of the dinner roll dance, and the mad slapstick of the prospector and his partner, Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain), attempting to survive a cabin teetering right on the edge of an icy crevasse; these are among the most famous, instantly-recognisable moments in the career of a character and star who's still, a century after his creation, the most perfect embodiment in one person of the whole sprawling concept of "The Movies".

If there's a reason for this, I wonder if it has to do with the film's accessibility and emotional resonance. Nothing in The Gold Rush is as holy and transcendent as the final scene of City Lights - not much in the annals of American film is, of course - but then, not much in City Lights is as breezily watchable as The Gold Rush. The earlier film is perhaps the single best marriage of the two threads that warred with each other for most of Chaplin's career as a self-directed auteur: the desire to make earnest, heavily sentimental pronouncements about humanity and society, and the desire to be a grand, playful clown to make the whole world laugh. The later one goes in his career, the more the balance shifts towards sentiment, particularly in his part-sound and sound films; it was in '25 that he was exactly in the middle, and the result is a film that shifts between registers effortlessly and beautifully, so that we might be in one moment heartbroken to realise, as the little prospector does not quite yet, that he's been taken for a fool by the band of pretty dance hall girls in the nearby town, and just seconds later be transported with the delight of his dancing rolls, performed by Chaplin with an intensely controlled precision of his arms and body, while on his face is the most ethereal of expressions, gazing nowhere in particular as he acts out, for my tastes, one of the funniest bits in silent comedy.

Whatever the case, we have the film, and it's an acknowledged masterpiece of the medium according to almost any source you want to consult. This despite being, in the main, fairly straightforward as cinema (certainly compared to what he made later): like Buster Keaton and unlike Harold Lloyd, among the era's great solo comedians, Chaplin made do with a lot of long wide takes, to showcase his interactions with the the environment around him, whether in an intimate setting like the boot eating, or a spiraling mess like his pratfalls in a dance hall (in this he is unlike Keaton, whose long takes were more like Fred Astaire's, meant to show off the incredible versatility of his body and the choreography he could put it through), and the result, for most of The Gold Rush, is a film with plenty of the stage-like framing typical of much older films - there is one great joke, involving snow shoveling, that's communicated entirely through editing, but this is untypical. It is not, however, an unsophisticated piece of filmmaking, it's just that the sophistication is hiding: in the voluminous use of dissolves to create, for example, the hallucinatory chicken that a starving, cannibalistic Big Jim sees in place of his colleague. Or in the genuinely amazing combination of models, a pivoting set, and double exposure to create the final setpiece on the cliff edge. But the purpose of The Gold Rush was to hide its technique and foreground its comedy, though it took a great depth of talent and ambition behind the camera to make that comedy look so simple.

Besides, there are still moments of outright cinematic greatness: the opening shots, all done on location, showing ragged lines of desperate men crawling through the snow and mountains, a great wide-view consideration of history and the individuals who got caught up in it. Chaplin's desire to make the Tramp an everyman rarely worked as effectively as it does here, in the cut between all of those nameless, faceless figures and Chaplin himself in rags scrambling along an icy ridge. Funny, yes, but there's enough genuine cold and isolation in the film that we never quite forget those opening images, and their intimation of loss and hopelessness. The tramp succeeds, against the odds; he is an aspiring figure, not a downtrodden one. Never before or after The Gold Rush did that success play so richly, as never before or after The Gold Rush did Chaplin make the chance of failure so clear and sobering. And, weirdly, precisely because the stakes are higher here than anywhere else in the Tramp's career, so is his flailing struggle to overcome them funnier than in any other Chaplin film. This is as true of his success in the Yukon as in love; the flirtation between the prospector and the dancer Georgia (Georgia Hale) makes no sense on the level of human psychology, but the Tramp in love is such a sweet, endearing, goofily enthusiastic figure that it feels right emotionally that he'd win in the end. We love him, so why wouldn't everyone else?

17 years after its first release, Chaplin re-cut The Gold Rush, added narration (which he delivered) instead of title cards, and included music throughout. This version was, for years, the only one available, until a reconstruction of sorts was attempted by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill (who acknowledge that the results were a version of the 1925 film, not the actual exact film seen in 1925), and even now the Chaplin estate prefers the 1942 release as reflecting the filmmaker's ultimate wishes. That may be, but it only suggests that even Chaplin could be straight-up wrong: the '25 film is better in every way. The removal of title cards, the sped-up framerate, and the tighter editing ruins the pacing of many jokes, making the wonderfully precise physical movements in so many scenes feeling rather too hectic. Worse still, a few shots are removed, taking with them an entire subplot that makes Georgia less complex of a character, and the film's ending is totally wrecked, with the removal of a final kiss and a wonderfully irritated gesture by the Tramp, shooing away a cameraman, in favor of an abrupt close with an insubstantial wrap-up in the narration. I can think of literally no reason to bother with it besides curiosity and completism; the '25 version is warmer and funnier. Of course, in any incarnation, The Gold Rush is a masterpiece, undeniably one of the funniest and sweetest movies ever made.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1925
-King Vidor makes the World War I masterpiece The Big Parade
-Lon Chaney makes his iconic appearance as The Phantom of the Opera in Universal's first true horror film
-The groundbreaking visual effects vehicle The Lost World, with Willis O'Brien stop-motion dinosaurs, premieres

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1925
-Sergei Eisenstein debuts with the unbeatable one-two punch of Strike and Battleship Potemkin
-The first feature-length (and still the longest) adaptation of Les misérables released in France
-The Italian-German co-production Quo Vadis flops, ending the career of producer Arturo Ambrosio, father of the Italian historical epic

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FLIPPING THE BIRD

What I love about animation is its capacity for creating things that you did not realise could exist. Even in the days of just about every "live" action movie with any kind of budget behind it half existing in computers full of invented locations, something about the medium of animation purchases the right to go deeper into unreality and totally new worlds to evoke brand new experiences for the viewer. For example, here's something that just happened to me: even with my fervently dim view of Blue Sky Studios, the animation company for those days when you want all the demerits of DreamWorks without the accomplishment, I wouldn't have assumed that they'd have it in them to bother making Rio, the 2011 kiddie film about bird sex, any worse than it already was. Boy, I sure had my horizons expanded: Rio 2 is a marked decline in every way from an original that really couldn't afford it, painfully dredging up every scrap of the first film to diminished returns and slapping them into something with the shape of a narrative rather than the function of a narrative. In so doing, the result is a film with the awful feeling of being at once overstuffed and totally empty.

There are three almost entirely distinct conflicts going on. The main one is that Blu (Jessie Eisenberg) and Jewel (Anne Hathaway), the pair of rare macaws whose breeding formed the entirety of the last film's dramatic stakes, learn from the television that they and their three children are not the last of their species, but that out in the depths of the Amazon, an entire population of their kind has been discovered, by Linda (Leslie Mann) and Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro), the now-married humans responsible for hooking Blu and Jewel up in the first place. For reasons that even now fade from memory but surely made sense at the time, the bird family leaves their sanctuary in Rio de Janeiro to explore this lost colony, finding that it is in fact Jewel's childhood home, with her dad Eduardo (Andy Garcia) lording over a population of macaws far braver and more capable than the hopelessly urbanised Blue. Particularly the handsome - and god damn, but do birds ever look stupid when you put 2010s human signifiers for "handsome" on their bodies - Roberto (Bruno Mars), a childhood friend of Jewel's..

Yeah, so it's a kids' movie about how a marriage is threatened by the sexual insecurity of the husband. Big deal. The last one was about bird fucking, and that makes it awfully hard not to linger over the thought, in the first 20 minutes, that if they hadn't found the new population of macaws, Blu and Jewel's children would have to interbreed to keep the species alive. I fucking hate this fucking franchise.

The other two plots go a little something like this: Linda and Tulio run afoul of an illegal logging operation run by a nameless thug (Miguel Ferrer), whose facial animation represents some kind of inconceivable low for American big-budget character animation: his lips have no meaningful relationship to the sounds coming out of them, nor to the muscles presumably supporting them. Elsewhere, the angry, insane cockatoo Nigel (Jemaine Clement) left for dead at the end of Rio turns out to be alive and anxious for vengeance against Blue, toting along a lovestruck poison frog, Gabi (Kristin Chenoweth), and a silent comedian anteater. All of these stories ultimately converge, but the marital drama is the only one that actually matters whatsoever, and coupled with the film's general aura of "goddammit, we will fit every character from the last movie into this one", it's clear that Nigel's presence is almost solely a function of Clement's willingness to cash the check the producers offered him (that said, Chenoweth's rendition of the woozy romantic anthem "Poisonous Love" is not merely the film's high point, it might very well be its only good moment).

Much as was true of Rio, the only real justification for any of this is the bright colors used to depict the Amazon fauna: the searing pinks on Gabi's skin, the seemingly limitless variety of blues used in the macaw tribe, a few key splashes of red and yellow to keep things lively. There are a few indifferent, stylistically generic musical numbers that try to showcase this element using sprawling Busby Berkeley-like choreography, though in this respect the film's nowhere near as successful as its predecessor; it doesn't help that the big showstopper is mostly limited to green and blue, and only a couple of remotely interesting ideas for what to do with movement.

Everything else is achingly mediocre, at best: the need to invent a whole bunch of new character designs for largely similar birds starts to get ridiculous before very long, and only the anteater, out of the whole cast, is animated with any kind of playfulness or freedom. The entire vocal cast sounds hugely bored, other than Chenoweth (and really, what might a bored Chenoweth sound like anyway?), though with the rote situations and dialogue they're asked to play, it's hard to say that we can blame them.

And it can't be overstated: the story really just isn't. Conflict upon conflict upon ginned-up conflict that anyone older than the most undemanding and innocent of children can predict from hours in advance, and too many nominal threats that take place in some entirely different arena than anything involving the protagonists, all stuffed together in a lazy action sequence near the end that plays the old "if we can survive violence together, all of the problems that have not been meaningfully addressed will up and vanish" card. It's bad enough to throw this sort of trite nonsense at kids and pretend like it's harmless normally, but when the primary story is about the tensions of a couple of parents and the ageless threat of hostile in-laws, one really has to wonder who on Earth is supposed to get any remote measure of enjoyment out of any of this. Warmed over fake rap and shiny plastic colors notwithstanding, this is a profoundly dreary domestic drama disguised as a kids' adventure film, and as complete a waste of time as I can imagine a cartoon being.

4/10

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GODZILLA BUGS OUT

We now arrive at an exciting moment, for me personally: starting with 2000's Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, the series wraps up with a run of five movies which I've never seen and about which I know basically nothing. In the most extreme cases (Megaguirus is one of these), my knowledge extends literally only to having seen still images of the Godzilla suit. Comparatively, I'd seen more than half of the 24 preceding films, and I had some sense of the content of all the rest. So it's time to start flying blind.

Happily, this final phase of out Godzilla marathon starts out on a strong foot: while Megaguirus is, on balance, an awfully darn silly movie, it also has some terrific bits of popcorn cinema histrionics strung out along its entire running time. Most notably, it's a film where one plucky hero, the obsessed anti-Godzilla fighter Tsujimori Kiriko (Tanaka Misato) hitches a ride on Godzilla as it plunges through the waves, for a few seconds of one of the most gosh-darn cool images that have ever happened in this franchise.

That's a bit of the way in, though. First up, Megaguirus leads off with a fake newsreel that quickly recaps an entirely new history for Godzilla, in which every film but the first is swiftly discarded. Godzilla, we are told, reappeared 12 years after its initial attack in 1954, to decimate Japan's first attempt at building a nuclear power plant; later, in 1996, it attacked again, forcing the government to abandon an attempt at making a completely new power source. It was during the last of these attacks that Kiriko gained her passionate hatred of the beast, as it killed her commander during their attempt to contain its attack; this has caused her to join G-Graspers, the rather daft name of this movie's anti-Godzilla strike team (I get that G-Force was tied up in a different continuity, but it just sounds so much better). The main plot takes place in 2001, during which Godzilla persists as a threat even as Japan has given up all energy research; to combat this, Dr. Yoshizawa (Hoshi Yuriko, who we last saw fighting Godzilla all the way back in Mothra vs. Godzilla in 1964) has been developing a new weapon, dragging along irreverent independent scientist Kudo Hajime (Tanihara Shosuke) to help finish it up. This superweapon, inscrutably named "Dimension Tide", amounts to a black hole gun fired from an orbiting satellite; and so we begin to see how little Megaguirus scribes Kashiwabara Hiroshi and Mimura Wataru understand or care about astrophysics and geopolitics, for starters. As the film progresses, they will also demonstrate a singular lack of comprehension about paleontology, insect biology, radioactivity, and basically everything that has anything to do with science. Upon deliberation and reflection, I have elected to find this charming.

There's no real option but to find the film charming, really, or to find it shrill and dumb and dull. Basically, Megaguirus has the feeling of an attempt to make a film with the frothy sensibilities of the 1970s Godzilla films (and director Tezuka Masaaki, an outspoken fan of the character making his first of three movies in the franchise, has more or less confirmed that was the intent), minus the single biggest liability of those films: their desperately impoverished budgets. Now, the visual effects in this film aren't the best in the world, not even as good as the previous year's Godzilla 2000: Millennium, with some particularly rough CGI: a horde of prehistoric dragonflies that look like a screensaver has occupied space between the action and the camera; a super-advanced flying weapon that looks like it came from a mid-'90s flight combat video game. And the compositing ranges from the excellent (Kiriko astride Godzilla) to the abysmal (missiles exploding on Godzilla's hide, as though someone hand-animated them on the frame). So it does not look like a spectacularly expensive movie, necessarily; but it has ambition. Grand, out-of-control ambition to do things that had never been done in a Godzilla film. When the film underperformed, effects director Suzuki Kenji took the blame and was dumped from the series after just two movies; it's a damn shame, because for all the problems he ran into here, I'd have loved to see him get more opportunities to keep going bigger and bolder, developing his ideas along the way.

So back to the story: the Dimension Tide accidentally rips open a hole in time that allows a prehistoric egg to slip into the present, from whence spring a host of ancient insects, Meganula (a creature exhumed from the 44-year-old Rodan, of all the random damn things). There are enough of them to cause problems for the humans and Godzilla alike, but the worst is yet to come: having siphoned nuclear energy out of Godzilla's body (dragonflies in the past were actually mosquitoes, apparently), the Meganula take them back to a giant member of their race - a Meganula queen, functionally, inject it with energy, and cause it to turn into Megaguirus, a giant insect monster that looks powerfully like Battra from 1992's Godzilla vs. Mothra. Godzilla and Megaguirus have their fight, of course; this gives the humans barely enough time to figure out how to get ride of the giant lizard once and for all, though their final attempt proves inconclusive.

Despite the somewhat bland design of both competitors, the climactic monster fight is an absolute stunner. There's nothing wrong with Megaguirus, other than how redundant and derivative it feels; meanwhile, the Godzilla suit is unchanged from the last film, this time shown almost exclusively in full sunlight that make its head, and especially its deep eye sockets, look atrociously fake, while calling maximum attention to the still-stupid pink tint of its still grotesquely oversize dorsal spines. But these things are of little matter once the action starts, intense and creative, violent and high-impact. It is right up with Godzilla vs. Destoroyah as the best final fight scene since Godzilla vs. Biollante, in my opinion, with an absolutely fantastic finishing move, and some really exciting music by Ohshima Michiru, channeling Ifukube Akira, to push it over the edge (this has, in general, one of the better non-Ifukube scores the series has coughed up).

All that has to contend with the usual limitations of a mid-level Godzilla film: a human story that relies on bland, functional characters, in this case bogged down with two of the more irritating lead performances in the series; Tanaka because she is unyielding stern and joyless; Tanihara because he's so laid-back and goofy and clownish. But compared to a lot of the modern (post-'84) Godzilla films, the tone of the whole thing is so light and fanciful, starting right at beginning with the bouncy urgency of that newsreel, that the one-note human characters don't rankle as badly as they do in some of the '90s movies. It's not so frivolous as to fall into the trap of being a kids' movie, like the worst of the '70s films; but this is a distinctly deliberately breezy and light Godzilla adventure with no pretensions towards any kind of thematic meat or tonal complexity. This puts a very clear cap on how good the thing can end up being, but it also takes a lot of the sting out of its worst faults, and leaves a perfectly fun, and somewhat empty popcorn movie behind.

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