REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GO-GO-GODZILLA FIRES RADIOACTIVITY!

The consensus of Godzilla fandom is that All Monsters Attack (originally released in English as Godzilla's Revenge, an even less accurate title for this movie in there is virtually no revenge and only a small number of monsters attack) is made of pure evil. And this is not a difficult opinion to understand, because if there's one thing that All Monsters Attack completely sucks at, it's being a halfway decent Godzilla movie.

But I will confess to a grievous fault, which is that I don't know that I can hate it with as much fury and blood rage as I'm supposed to. Take a long look at the context of the film; consider what it is trying to be and not what we might wish it to be; it's still a crappy movie, but only a crappy movie, and by no means the crappiest. It's a damn sight better than Son of Godzilla, that's for sure.

This was the first film made after Destroy All Monsters was meant to have finished off the franchise in 1968, but succeeded instead in revitalising it. What we must remember is that the underlying problem was still there: Destoy All Monsters might have well been a hit, but the Godzilla films had been treading water for a while and Toho was still unwilling to throw a great deal of money at an uncertain series. This means two things: one is that All Monsters Attack, in a mercenary cost-cutting move, uses a massive quantity of stock footage to bring live to its giant monsters, so it's almost completely useless as a daikaiju action-adventure. The other is that even more than Son of Godzilla, All Monsters Attack was pitched at a juvenile audience, presumably because that was the only population likely to be sufficiently forgiving of giant rubber monsters in any possible form to stand still for the parsimony of this recycled, sleepy effort.

Committing to making a children's movie, right on the heels of Destroy All Monsters, was decisive and fatal. One must respect the ingenuity with which producer Tanaka Tomoyuki, writer Sekizawa Shinichi, and director Honda Ishirō (his last Godzilla film for many years) solved their many problems, without necessarily having much use for the dodgy results of those labors. All Monsters Attack takes the form of a children's fable, in which Very Special Lessons Are Taught, which is wildly unlike Sekizawa's more characteristic flights of nonsense, so I presume on no evidence that this was Honda's doing. Little Ichiro (Yazaki Tomonori) is a latchkey kid in an unnamed Japanese suburb, barely noticed by his parents (Sahara Kenji and Naka Machiko), and largely friendless. He is frequently humiliated by a bully named Sancho (Ito Junichi), whom Ichiro has privately nicknamed Gabara, and he spends all possible time at the workshop of a toy designer named Inami Shinpei (Amamoto Hideyo, uncomfortably playing a kindly man after a career of villains). The other thing Ichiro does is fantasise about the monsters of Monster Island, and one lonely night at home, he pretends to have a supercomputer transport him to that exotic, wonderful locale.

In his fantasies and dreams, Ichiro pals around with the Son of Godzilla himself, Minilla, now boy-sized and capable of speaking (the player in the suit is, as before, dwarf actor Machan, his voice provided by Uchiyama Midori). Minilla turns out to have bully problems himself: a big monster named - get this! - Gabara is tormenting him, and the stern Godzilla refuses to help, but instead watches from the sidelines over in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. For Godzilla thinks that little monsters need to learn to fight their own battles and become strong that way. Do you get it? You had god-damned well better have gotten it.

Back in the waking world, a pair of bank robbers (Sakai Sachio and Suzuki Kazuo) are sneaking around the neighborhood, and it naturally happens that in a gentle, fantastic metaphor for standing up to bullies, Ichiro gets to put his Minilla-given knowledge to the test by trapping the thieves for the police. It is very weird. I mean, he stands up to Sancho eventually, but his big emotional release is when he fights the bank robbers who haven't been part of his problems at all, and the Sancho thing is more of an epilogue. It's very weird and completely savages the delicate domestic story that is the only part of All Monsters Attack that you can defend on any level.

Setting aside that spectacularly out-of-place finale, the film isn't completely unacceptable on its own very specific level. I do wish that Honda and Sekizawa had come down a bit more clearly on clarifying whether or not Godzilla and Monster Island exist in this reality, or if the film takes place in our world, and Ichiro watches the exact same movies we do - leaving that ambiguous was deliberate, but it's also just about the only thing that excuses the stock footage and maybe even turns it into a strength, if we imagine that Ichiro is just rehashing his favorite movies in his mind. As it stands, it's just lazy and cheap, with no fewer than three visibly different Godzilla designs cropping up, as well as new scenes shot with the Destroy All Monsters suit, in somewhat reedy condition.

I do greatly admire the design of Gabara, feeling more like a folkloric monster than a lot of Toho's kaiju (he's got some oni in him), but that's absolutely as far as I can take anything that looks like praise for the monster action in the film (which, while honorifically credited to the ill and dying Tsuburaya Eiji, was directed by Honda himself), which already steals from some of the less-exciting fight scenes, and has been crudely edited in. Particularly where Minilla is concerned; size continuity isn't even remotely a consideration in scenes that show human-sized Minilla cutting to Godzilla-sized Minilla in the space of seconds. And with Minilla being even more of a draggy irritant when he talks, that leaves basically nothing of substance or merit in any of the kaiju sequences.

The film doesn't really care, though. Those sequences are just frosting on the actual story, which is decent. Decent-ish. It feels awfully like Ozu Yasujiro's film's about the children of working class stiffs, without the twinkle or the sociology, but if I were a child in 1969 Japan, I suppose I might find Ichiro a tolerable surrogate, and his durability in the face of parentless misery to be inspiring. At the very least, Yazaki is one of the less-annoying child actors in 1960s and '70s Japanese genre cinema, and given that the film is a brisk 69 minutes, we don't have to spend too much time with him anyway. Take out the kaiju material, and All Monsters Attack is mostly painless life lesson stuff for bored kids; but "take out the kaiju material" is one of the worst things you can say in praising a daikaiju eiga. Outside of a deliriously awful, wonderful theme song (absent from the English dub, which is all the justification one needs for watching the film in Japanese), All Monsters Attack has virtually nothing in it that's much fun at all, its bargain basement production sees to that. It's not outrageously stupid enough to be as bad as the very worst Godzilla films, but it certainly deserves to be ranked among the most tedious.

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JANUARY 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

A new movie year stretches out before us like a virgin field of glistening, beautiful snow, untouched and full of magic and promise. Let us take a moment to enjoy it, before we start to deal with all the slush and black ice and backbreaking shoveling of the movies shortly to pockmark that snow. Because it's January, after all, where decent movies go to die.


3.1.2013

And here's a particularly icy patch of yellow snow to kick things off: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, a Latino-themed spin-off of the little franchise that wouldn't die. It would take very little effort for it to be better than the last two in the main line of the series, but "very little effort" is the clarion call of the entire found footage horror genre, so let's say that I'm not stocking up bottles of champagne to celebrate.


10.1.2013

Your standard-issue prestige movie expansion, as Her and Lone Survivor both start widening their nets, but the only really new, really wide release is The Legend of Hercules, an old-school sword-and-sandal picture that, to judge from the advertising, doesn't realise that Greece and Rome weren't the same place. And Renny Harlin directs! Truly, this will be a fantasy epic for the ages.


17.1.2013

Almost half of the movies coming out all month are being dumped in one day, with the breakout film clearly set to be Ride Along, a cop comedy with Kevin Hart doing his Kevin Hart thing. It's even probably going to be the best movie in a generally miserable, wintry landscape, though maybe Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit will find some way to be surprising, because films getting shoved to January at the last minute is a good sign.

In the Land of No Hope, the year's first animated film is a viciously generic-looking comedy, The Nut Job, which wants to be the Rififi of sassy talking animals. And even that's still going to be better than Devil's Due, a "pregnant with Satan's baby" picture that has had the shamelessness to finally adopt the title that every film in its subgenre must have passed by with a shudder at some point.


24.1.2013

In I, Frankenstein, Aaron Eckhart plays Sexy Frankenstein's Monster fighting an army of evil angels. My vote for the "get drunk and go with your friends" release of the month.


31.1.2013

Jason Reitman's Labor Day, having been quietly smacked with an Oscar qualifying release, sneaks out to let the rest of us for Kate Winslet. Also, That Awkward Moment is probably the best way to describe the experience of sitting in the dark, watching a movie in which Zac Efron and Michael B. Jordan can't pee because of their raging Viagra erections.

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: LINDSAY AND THE PORN STAR

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

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

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

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

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

2/10

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RONIN, RONIN, RONIN ON THE RIVER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/10

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COMPUTER DATING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: THE MOTHERING INSTINCT

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

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

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

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

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

9/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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