REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - Y2G

It's wonderful what desperate humiliation will do. 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was announced and sold, with great purposefulness and gravity, as the final Toho-made Godzilla film until the character's 50th anniversary in 2004, while the Japanese company would silently remain on the sidelines as Tri-Star over in Hollywood made its own trilogy of movies with their reinterpreted version of the character. When the 1998 Godzilla came out and fizzled, it made such a mockery of the character - they took the "god" out of Godzilla, in the later words of the series' guardians, turning a figure of awesome destructive power beyond the human sphere into a giant hungry animal - Toho immediately threw all of their weighty proclamations into the bin and flung themselves straightaway into making a new movie where the great kaiju would be played again by a man in a suit, and have not a damn thing to do with irradiated iguanas. The result was Godzilla 2000: Millennium, which opened in Japan in December, 1999, not even a year and a half after the American Godzilla came out in that country; it created a brand new epoch in Japanese monster movies, the Millennium Era, the last to exist so far.

The film was patently designed to clear out the foul taste of the Roland Emmerich & Dean Devlin botch, and in this it was successful, though it's hard to imagine what wouldn't have been. The film was a massive hit in Japan, massive enough that for the first time since Godzilla 1985, the film was given a theatrical release in North America (with the aid of the 1998 film having primed the pump, no doubt). This happens to mean that first time since Godzilla 1985 we also have to deal with a significantly different cut prepared by the U.S. distributor, TriStar, under the undeniably cleaner title Godzilla 2000. There's a little bit of good and a little bit of bad to this localisation, and for my tastes the bad outweighs the good: having concluded that 'Murkins liked our Godzilla films to be good and silly, on the model of the '70s films (the VS Series weren't available in the States in any sort of legal capacity until the very end of the '90s, making it virtually impossible for most fans of the character to have any well-formed opinion on the matter), the studio elected to dub the movie with a deliberately hokey, joke-filled script that suggests the easygoing matinee camp of Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and its descendents, and not at all the serious, damn near mordant tone of the Japanese original. For fairly inevitable reasons, Godzilla 2000 was the first Godzilla film I ever saw in a movie theater (prior to 2014, the only other was the 2004 revival of the Japanese cut of the original Godzilla), and until watching it for this very review, I had only ever seen that American dub; the shift in tone is absolutely mind-blowing, and the English-language version is a humiliation and willful act of disrespect in comparison.

So that's the bad. The good is that the American cut snips 8 minutes out of the movie for general-purpose pacing reasons, bringing a 107-minute film down to 99 minutes, and at the risk of seeming a philistine, the tighter version of the film is better, without itself being anywhere close to perfect. The Japanese cut - the only one I will henceforth be concerned with - is at times a downright lugubrious film, seeking to restore the gravity and impact of the great monster Godzilla that was so horribly stripped from it by the terrible events of 1998 by slowing everything down and going seemingly out of its way to never permit things to be too much fun. The sheer drama and sense of awe that the movie goes for is deeply admirable, and Okawara Takao's direction (his fourth and final Godzilla film) reaches some extraordinary heights of visual sophistication and tonal management: I think, for example of a shot of the human protagonists driving down a road at night, away from the monster, whose silhouette plods along in the background against a deep dark orange sky, and I am literally chilled by the sublimity of the moment. By the same token, the drama and awe are effectively unrelenting, and G2K: Millennium is left, frankly, mirthless and lumbering as a result.

Let's put that on hold for a minute to take a quick look at the plot. This first film of the Millennium Era sets the rule that will guide all the rest of them: it is totally without inter-series continuity. The 1954 film took place in its backstory, but nothing else did, and this film itself informs none of the subsequent movies. I like this, honestly. It reminds me of superhero comics, where almost all of the very best work comes in the series explicitly tagged as being one-off stories that don't need to take place in reference to any other stories ever told about that character. It frees up a certain flexibility and sense of experiment, a "what if we do this?" approach that lets the filmmakers explore different things to do with Godzilla that might not work at all if they had to be sustained.

In the particular case of this film, that realm of openness and possibility hasn't been exploited to nearly its full potential, largely because the opening act presents such a dithering, unfocused depiction of its baseline reality. Apparently, Godzilla attacks are not an infrequent occurrence now, since there is a group called the Godzilla Prediction Network set up with the sole purpose of, y'know, predicting Godzilla attacks; but this group is a rinky-dink operation consisting of, apparently, nobody but Shinoda Yuji (Murata Takehiro) and his young daughter Io (Suzuki Mayu). So maybe it's just a fringe crackpot group; but then, reporter Ichinose Yuki (Nishida Naomi) has been assigned to follow the Shinodas as though they were important, newsworthy figures. And yet, if Godzilla is such an all-present threat, why doesn't Japan's infrastructure, done in by 46 straight years of monster attacks, seem to be even moderately compromised?

None of this questions appear to be of even tertiary concerns to writers Kashiwabara Hiroshi & Mimura Wataru, who blast though what I am forced to call "exposition" solely because it comes first in the movie, moving through a clever and exciting initial appearance of Godzilla to get to the good stuff: the hour or three or four in the middle of the movie when nothing much happens. Or rather, what happens is that Crisis Control Intelligence, an all-purpose defense agency, finds a peculiar asteroid at the bottom of the ocean, which turns out to be a rock-encrusted extraterrestrial ship. The aliens - Millennians, they are called, but not anywhere in the movie that I noticed - immediately set themselves to the task of stealing all the available human research into Godzilla, and into studying the monster itself when it attacks them; finally, after an hour of all this being reported to us by terrified lab technicians, the Millennian ship actually does something, using Godzilla DNA to create giant alien kaiju that quickly mutates into a horrid mass of teeth and deformed tissue named Orga, which fights Godzilla throughout Tokyo in a battle so terrifically staged and beautifully shot that it manages to at least temporarily wipe clean all the memories of what a very long trek it took to get to this point.

Incidentally, the generally impressive quality of all the practical effects (the fairly extensive use of CGI hasn't aged all that well, though I definitely remember liking it in 2000) sets me up with a little rant: in the six films making up the Millennium Series of Godzilla films, there were four different special effects directors. Which I imagine had to do with the desire to make distinct identities for the movies, or some such, but as the careers of both Tsuburaya Eiji and Kawakita Koichi demonstrate, there's such a thing as effects that improve with the effects team's increasingly familiarity and comfort with the character. Never letting any one director build up a head of steam, as it were, in this run of Godzilla films seems like it needlessly hampers the heights that could be reached with some practice and increasing ambition.

But as I was saying, I do very much like the effects work here: great models, solid CGI, and a fine performance by Kitagawa Tsutomu in the Godzilla suit; for all that it was his first time, he did some pretty good work creating the rather amorphously-described "Godzilla as a force of nature" of the new series, something both animalistic in its movements, but also with a thread of intelligence and intention - the way that Kitagawa rocks his head around as Godzilla "works up" a mouthful of atomic breath is pretty fantastic. And the slim new suit leaves him with plenty of opportunity to move and gesture.

The new suit... boy, do I have mixed feelings. The one word that best describes this Godzilla is "scaly": its entire body seems rough and jaggedy, looking more menacing than ever before in a lot of ways (the face is extraordinarily mean and angry), but also kind of feeling a little bit like somebody glued tiny spikes all over a smooth object to make it "serious". And then there is the wholly different matter of Godzilla's dorsal spines, which are gigantic, purple-tinted shards of jagged bone that almost bigger than the monster's torso. I hate, hate, hate the spines on this suit; they are enough to make an overall strong design one of my very least favorite of all Godzillas, simply because there's no angle where you can't see them. It look like late-'90s edginess gone to its most insane extremes, because it basically was just exactly that.

Orga is a terrific enough monster, with distorted features and a hideous gaping maw that tries to swallow Godzilla like some kind of hideous hellborn Kirby, that I am willing to concede the terrible Godzilla spines. But it is an ordeal.

So, monsters good; humans boring; just about the usual par for the course, though the urgent science fiction boilerplate of the human plot seems exceptionally present, and the designated protagonists unusually devoid of personality, which makes G2K: Millennium seem maybe a little duller and more lifeless than a lot of more-or-less equal Godzilla films. But it is a fine response to the '98 film, quoting it openly (a close-up on Godzilla's eye taken directly from the American film's poster, a scene set in a Godzilla footprint, and so on), and even copying some skyscraper destruction scenes from Emmerich & Devlin's Independence Day, perhaps to prove that they could do better knocking off that team than that team did knocking off them (there might even be a sly joke in the way that this film's equivalent to the ID4 saucers looks uncommonly like a bedpan; but probably not). It did the one thing it had to do, restoring dignity and graveness to the movie monster to end all movie monsters; that it it did not do so in a slightly more effective film taken on its own terms is disappointing, but thing was a bit rushed, perhaps. For this was an emergency situation, after all, and desperate measures were required.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - ALL MOTHRAS ATTACK

It became eminently clear halfway through 1998, with the release of the American Godzilla, that Toho's planned retirement of their most prominent kaiju superstar wouldn't end up being as long-lived as had been the intention, and plans for a proper Godzilla movie to come out the following year were put into place. But their back-up plan to force Mothra onto the A-list with a new series of movies still had one title left in it, and thus it is that the Mothra trilogy of the 1990s came to its swift close in December of that year with Rebirth of Mothra III, or according to the original Japanese, Mothra 3: King Ghidorah Attacks.

It is not a very good movie, but it's a goddamn sight better than Rebirth of Mothra II, and it suggests, at least, that the studio learned all of the right lessons from that movie. Among them: bring back Yoneda Okihiro (who had directed 1996's Rebirth of Mothra), don't rely so much on CGI, King Ghidorah or variants thereof makes for a better villain than some brand new creature built around a tortured metaphor for poor waste disposal systems, and - the most important - kids' movies though these be, it's not inherently necessary that there plots be immovably focused on kids. Not that ROM 3 completely eschews young people in the cast; it's just that Suetani Masumi's third consecutive script in the series finally makes a choice that should have been considered from the get-go: making for-real protagonists of the Elias, the tiny fairy sisters Moll (Kobayashi Megumi), Lora (Tate Misato, new to the role), and wicked Belvera (Hano Aki). This is a wise shift, given that their complicated family history is a constant underlying the stories, whereas the rotating clutch of indistinguishable young folk pulling focus throughout the trilogy don't really matter on a personal level; their inner lives are totally generic, and their function solely that of cattle being run through the details of a story that needs human-sized objects.

Lo and behold, the Elias scenes in ROM 3 are the first in the trilogy where the non-monster plot elements actually have any kind of emotional resonance; right from the opening, when a surprisingly muted Belvera visits her sisters to unexpectedly give them advice and hints about protecting themselves from the impending arrival of the King of Terror, it's clear that the film's treatment of sibling relationships and the push-pull dynamic within them will be a bit more compelling than if it just threw a couple of random kids at the story and let them work out their problems on a level that has absolutely nothing to do with the main action. Which, to be scrupulously accurate, does happen; the film boasts a trio of human siblings, Shota, the eldest, and his sister and brother Tamako and Shuhei (I haven't been able to scrounge up the actors' names), and while Shota does contribute some decent amount to the development of the actual narrative, the feeling is always that the kids are commentary on the Elias' relationship, not the other way around.

Regardless, the film is broadly a story about how siblings sticking together in the face of adversity is more powerful than siblings breaking off into bickering (a pleasant change from the thudding literalism of the "save the environment" themes of the last two), and how this saves the world from King Ghidorah, the aforementioned King of Terror. Specifically, it's about how Mothra travels millions of years back to the end of the dinosaurs (130 million years, said the subtitles of the version I was watching; I won't hold that against the Japanese original just in case, but being exactly twice the accurate figure seems very odd regardless), to defeat King Ghidorah during his first visit to Earth, when he himself was responsible for destroying the great creatures; this backfires, and in the present, the nasty version of the three-headed space dragon that had been rounding up Japanese schoolchildren to eat them was replaced with an even nastier version. This forces Mothra, who has already gone through, like, a dozen different incarnations so far in the movie, to adopt her strongest form yet in the desperate hope of saving the day.

That would be another important lesson learned: ROM 3 is far heavier on monster fighting than either of its predecessors. This is good up to a certain point: that point is somewhere near the end of the first fight between Original Ghidorah and Whichever Damn Mothra (Rainbow Mothra, I Think), a battle which the mighty moth handily looses, and one starts to really think about the fact that Mothra is just a big old moth. And it starts to become increasingly hard to watch fight scenes between two winged creatures without a single forelimb of note between them, and not be a little annoyed at how much that limits the possibilities for the fight choreography.

That being said, all the monsters look pretty good: the three subtly incarnations of King Ghidorah, in fact, look pretty great, with the ancient version found in Earth's past rather effortlessly becoming my all-time favorite embodiment of one of my particular favorite daikaiju, with its craggy, rock-like skin and all. The parade of Mothras range from the totally unacceptable (Rainbow Mothra's mouth looks so plasticky that you expect it to clack when she shuts it) to the fully impressive (the last one, with an especially lovely wingspan, and the last toy-like fur on any Mothra puppet yet seen in close-up), but that's about par for this particular puppet-based monster.

All of the non-monster effects work, while a definite step above ROM 2, is pretty dodgy, though. And even that's overlooking the dinosaurs, seen relatively briefly: they are the absolutel nadir of Toho's output, looking like toys being shaken about by children whose hands are just offscreen. Beyond that, one of the other worst moments comes right after one of the best scenes in the whole film: without yet having seen King Ghidorah, we've seen flashes of his body and his shadow, and we've seen his handiwork in the form of of a school room devoid of children, but full of the bits and pieces of their busy day. It's genuinely creepy and unsettling, horror of a sort that I'd have never expected from a movie of this sort, and then just a couple of minutes later it's resoundingly spoiled by a scene that shows some other kids taken from a playground by means of one of the cheapest video distortion effects you could possibly imagine. There's the usual bad CGI (some worms pursuing Shota that look like they exist in some other reality completely), and some unusually bad compositing of the very small Elias against the very large monsters, and the whole thing has a really hard time maintaining its reality in any kind of persistent way.

But at least it's not as persistently stupid and aimless as ROM 2. The monsters look good, and the ridiculous time travel plot happily recalls the similar cornucopia of half-logic that accompanied King Ghidorah's last appearance in 1991's bizarre Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. Nothing about it sticks out with any kind of personality or cinematic achievement, but at least Toho's last attempt to make a daikaiju eiga centered around any monster besides Godzilla went out on a relative upswing. The trilogy was not the best latter-day tribute that Mothra could have received, but on balance, it was at least reasonably harmless and playful.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1922: In which a famous person plays a famous character, because that's just how it's done; and we tip our hat to the hard work of the archivists and restorers

The truly exciting story of the 1922 Sherlock Holmes, starring John Barrymore, has nothing to do with the mysteries encountered by the titular sleuth in the course of the movie, but rather the amazing fact that we can, in 2014, talk about the film to begin with. Sherlock Holmes was one of the many, many silent films long thought lost, and one that was particularly grieved for: an early feature revolving around one of the most beloved characters in English-language fiction, starring one of the most famous actors of his generation would obviously be considered quite a desirable relic. And it was with that in mind that, 1975, historians Kevin Brownlow and William K. Everson threw themselves into the task of salvaging the movie from the mountain of footage held by George Eastman House. This material was in literally no order, nor anything close to a polished, edited state; it took consultation with the film's octogenarian director, Albert Parker, for Brownlow and Everson to even determine what footage belonged with what sequence, and what story the movie was even telling. As it was, it took another reconstruction in 2001 incorporating newly found material to get the film up to the coherent 85-minute feature presently available for all to watch and enjoy, and it's still quite a long way from the running time reported in 1922.

Rebuilding Sherlock Holmes was nothing shy of a heroic effort: it took time, care, cleverness, and an amount of research and study that probably none of us can truly imagine, and I frankly believe it to be one of the great triumphs of film restoration, willing something basically like what audiences say in '22 back into existence through nothing but grit and determination (that said, it is very important to keep in mind that this is Brownlow's interpretation of what the original film looked like, and we can never be truly sure exactly how close he came). It was not, perhaps, one of the most conspicuous gaps in the history of 1920s American cinema, but few lost films were ever won back with such labor and expense of time.

Now, as to whether it was worth it... I mean, it obviously, objectively was. Any lost film that can be made un-lost should be and must be. But Sherlock Holmes, to be completely unromantic about it, kind of sucks. There is always a possibility that the missing 20+ minutes would give it more weight and complexity and richness and turn it into a wholly involving masterpiece. But based on the version we have, I bet that at least ten of those minutes were title cards.

It is not, that's to say, especially sophisticated filmmaking, telling its story through text more than through visuals, and this is never the way you want silent film to go. To be entirely fair to Parker and the writers, Earle Brown and Marion Fairfax, they were starting off with source material that isn't inherently well-suited to silent filmmaking technique: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective is, above all else, an genius of thinking and explaining, the latter of which involves thick paragraphs of exposition in the stories and in most of the films based on them. But pointing out that it was a daunting task to overcome a limitation is not the same as excusing the filmmakers for failing to overcome it. Especially in the first half, Sherlock Holmes is honestly a bit of a chore to get through, with the momentum getting bogged down in so many intertitles. And not just simply little one or two-line intertitles: big slabby ones, where the screen is full of words. It's not a very exciting way to watch a movie, and "not very exciting" is one of the worst phrases you could possibly attach to a film that is, nominally, a thrilling mystery.

By no means is the film a write-off, though. For one thing, it has a largely great cast, starting with Barrymore: a perfect visual fit for Holmes, though he wasn't on his best behavior in this particular case. In his defense, he's saddled with a lot of close-ups looking thoughtfully offscreen at some important clue that nobody else has noticed, and there's just not much you can do with a shot like that after it's showed up three or four times. Of far greater concern is Barrymore's visible detachment from playing the story's more emotional elements; he's great when the story concerns the machine-like genius version of Holmes that is, I think, what most of us think of first when we imagine the character, with a certain smug pride hovering just below the hyper-competence, but he checks out completely from the romantic subplot that ends up contributing quite a lot to the film. And to be fair, a romantic subplot in a story even modestly attempting to present itself as a great Sherlock Holmes adaptation is exactly the sort of thing that oughtn't work. But it's there anyways, a relic of the fact that this was an adaptation of William Gillette's stage play more than any particular Holmes story, and just because something is stupid doesn't mean that you get to not try to do the best with it that you can.

Regardless, the standout member of the cast wouldn't be Barrymore anyway; Roland Young, whose film career wouldn't really pick up until the sound era, made his onscreen debut in this picture as Dr. Watson, and he is among the very best incarnations of that often-bungled character that I have ever seen: prim and officious where Holmes is erratic, but without ever coming within a mile of the bumbling doofus who has become the popular conception of Watson ever since Nigel Bruce played him that way in the Universal series of Holmes movies in the 1940s. He is an especially competent Watson, a professional Watson, a Watson of enough intellectual capacity that one can easily understand why Holmes would have wanted to keep him around as assistant and sidekick. Young pulls focus from Barrymore without even trying, no small feat when a newbie is sharing the screen with one of the most movie-looking faces in movie history.

Those two men are enough to keep the human element of Sherlock Holmes largely interesting, a feat in and of itself, given how clunky the plot is. The desire to have, all in one film, an introduction to the main characters, a "Holmes in love" story, a self-contained arc in which his archenemy Moriarty (Gustav von Seyffertitz) is defeated, and a peculiar opening act about Holmes and Watson and everybody in their university days, setting up the rest of the movie with its own self-contained mystery, leaves the movie feeling horribly overstuffed, with the university sequence in particular feeling wildly out of place and ill-paced. By the time it becomes mostly a straight-up action film near the end, it is able to shake enough of the stiffness and meandering quality of the opening hour that it manages to be enjoyable, but the film's density, coupled with those title cards, and with Parker's limited vocabulary of images (close-ups, group shots, and a few inserts, and pretty much nothing else), certainly make it hard to remain interested in the thing. But Barrymore and Young put it over, somehow.

A couple other things that manage to work: the film opens with a stunning aerial shot of London, before immediately leaping into a dissolve comparing Moriarty with a spider, a gesture straight out of the German Expressionist playbook that wasn't meant to have started influencing American cinema for another half-decade yet. There is, in general, quite a lot of London location footage, and it is all beautiful; for that matter, all of the constructed sets are themselves fantastic, and even when Sherlock Holmes is depicting nothing of interest, it sets that nothing against some really lovely backdrops with some really evocative atmospheric lighting (which also suggests German Expressionism). It's not nearly stylish enough it to redeem how plodding so much of the writing and directing are, but it does set it out as being more than just a bland waste of an ideal combination of star and role on a tedious story.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1922
-Robert Flaherty completes the groundbreaking early documentary Nanook of the North
-17-year-old Anna May Wong becomes Hollywood's first non-white leading lady in The Toll of the Sea
-The talented comic performer Marion Davies stars in When Knighthood Was in Flower, one of the first of the films paid for by her lover William Randolph Hearst, a relationship that tends even today to overshadow her very real talents

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1922
-Two of the great masters of German silent cinema release the first outright masterpieces: F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu and Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
-Dziga Vertov begins the Kino-Pravda newsreel series in the newly-established Soviet Union
-The Swedish/Danish co-production Häxan, a documentary/horror hybrid, is released

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CAN'T STAND IT, I KNOW YOU PLANNED IT

Nobody wants to out themselves as a moral scold about art, but sometimes a fella stumbles out of a thing like Sabotage and just can't form any clear thought beyond "that was vile". As a plot (super-macho DEA agents who work best outside the system are rocked by betrayal and the knowledge that someone is targeting them for murder one-by-one) it's as achingly generic as its title, totally wasting Arnold Schwarzenegger (even the aging, stiffening Schwarzenegger of the 2010s) on a "creaky, cranky old boss of the team" part that could have been played by any actor over the age of 50 without materially affecting the ultimate quality of the film.

The only thing that distinguishes it in any ways is that virtually the entire cast is made up the most deeply unpleasant people, and it's pretty clear that the film understands that they're deeply unpleasant people, except that director and co-writer David Ayer (expanding an original by Skip Woods, whose career is uniformly shitty) can't quite shake the wide-eyed, child-on-Christmas-morning awe that tends to color his depictions of the bro-ish camaraderie of people who serve in law enforcement, even when the plot hinges on the awareness that the camaraderie being depicted is objectively toxic and destructive (cf. his script for Training Day, which he did not direct, but which acutely demonstrates this tendency: the entire point of the thing is that Denzel Washington's character is actually evil, but the film keeps backing away and retrenching in a meek "but... but he's so cool!" stance). What is worst about Sabotage, though, is not that it sets up a situation which demands a collection of chilly antiheroes, only to find every possible excuse to spend time with them like they're just a collection of likable everyday joes; it's that the film has an even cruder and more reductive view of people than the characters themselves, which takes some real doing. This is a film in which everything and everyone is awful, with a specially problematic view on women: in this universe, the female gender comes in two flavors, either slutty or slutty and dangerous, the latter with a fuzzy intimation of bisexuality.

So again, moral scolding, and that's not a fun place to be. But then, this is merely my gut reaction to Sabotage; after having lived with it a little while, I am happy to observe that there is much good reason to dislike the film above and beyond its corrosive worldview. The shallowest and most inapt complaint I have is that it's a complete dud as an action film or as a thriller, which it honestly isn't trying to be. Until the very end, that is, when it very abruptly and on virtually no pretext jumps the rails from being a somber, grim study of outside-the-system agents being turned into freaked-out paranoiacs ready to jump out of their own skin into being an '80s-style Schwarzenegger vehicle with a gonzo, physically implausible car chase (one character should really have gone flying out of the back of a pick-up at least 15 or 20 times before it's all done), that is in and of itself a likeably goofy exercise in excess and kineticism, but jars horrendously with the tone of everything that has gone before; it's like the bit in Adaptation. where it goes from being a Charlie Kaufman script to a Donald Kaufman script, only in Sabotage there's absolutely no hint of a suggestion that it's being done on purpose.

Much worse is the problem that as a somber, grim study &c., the film suffers from having powerfully unconvincing characters played without a note of distinction between them. Besides Schwarzenegger, playing "Breacher", our cast includes "Monster" (Sam Worthington), "Grinder" (Joe Manganiello), "Sugar" (Terrence Howard), "Neck" (Josh Holloway), "Pyro" (Max Martini), "Tripod" (Kevin Vance), and "Lizzie" (Mireille Enos) - and if there's a more concise sign of how Sabotage conceives of its women, I don't know what it is - whose names are, by and large, the closest any of them get to a personality, and who are easier to tell apart by how they are killed than for anything they do, which raises the possibility that Sabotage is just an extravagantly cunning crypto-slasher. At any rate, they are dull people who barely register (fun game: watch the movie and then come up with the most outlandish explanation for why Terrence Howard decided to take such a meager role), except as a sort of unified field of douchey obsession with violence, drugs, and scatology, perhaps not in that order (this is a movie greatly enamored of its fart jokes). What happens to them is far too bleak and cruel for how much we are encouraged to invest in them; nor are they sketched clearly enough - besides Lizzie, whose unfathomable trashiness has a kind of negative energy that leaps off the screen more than any other character - for their moral ambiguity to play with any kind of philosophical insight. And even then, they all make far more of an impression than the cops investigating them: a paper-light Harold Perrineau, and a visibly checked-out (and monstrously overqualified) Olivia Williams, smacking out all her lines in a uniform monotone.

It doesn't help matters that they're all so damn dumb: the film opens with the team trying and failing to steal $10 million from a cartel, and it never really occurs to any of them to ask until almost all the way till the end of the movie what made the money disappear, and this is the kind of plot hole that so much of the film keeps focusing our attention on that it doesn't really count as a nitpick to bring it up (the entire first act revolves around the investigation into that $10 million - 25 solid minutes - and yet the characters who took the money never wonder where it got to?), since it so thoroughly invalidates any kind of baseline reality, not just similar to our own, but on the film's own terms. These are not people; they are plot objects, and Ayer never bothers to treat them as anything else.

There's a point to all this, spelled out leadenly in the final scene (which represents a third tonal shift, while also calling upon Schwarzenegger to do things as an actor that he is simply not equipped to do), which has to do with the corrosive effects of living surrounded by violence, even if you're trying to stop the violence; but nothing about the way the movie is handled seriously works with that theme, except as a fig leaf. There's so much that Sabotage tries to be - morality play, microscopically detailed procedural, Ten Little Indians thriller, gore effects showcase, weary autumnal role for Schwarzenegger - but none of these impulses cohere with the other, and the whole thing descends into just a couple of hours watching bad things happen to bad people. It is clumsy, minimally artful, and as pointlessly unpleasant as anything I've experienced in no small while.

3/10

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APRIL 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

I like to start these previews off with a theoretical bit of noodling about the nature of the month to come, but this time, it's so tightly linked to the big release on the first weekend that I'm just going to save it. Let's jump right in!


4.4.2014

So, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. A film that I should not be indifferent to, given that Captain America: The First Avenger is probably my favorite of the Marvel movies that exist so far (not the one I think is best, just my favorite), but I am far more fascinated by its position in the ecosystem than I care about it as a work of cinema. See, we've had March blockbusters for a while, and April blockbusters for a couple of years, anyway, but something about the exact position of this film, with the usual release overseas a week earlier, makes it feel like Disney isn't trying to extend summer earlier, or force a brand new blockbuster season; it feels sort of like they're trying to connect the spring and summer movie seasons, making one long stretch of popcorn blockbusters reaching from March to August; and that, honestly, is not a future that I am terribly excited to contemplate. The sameness and ubiquity of Big CGI Action Event Pictures has made it virtually impossible, for me at least, to find any of them genuinely special, and the idea of a wave of indistinguishable tentpoles covering fully half of the calendar sounds as much like the death of cinema as anything else ever has.

But then, here to make me feel better is Under the Skin in limited release, finally showing up Stateside. The third film by Jonathan Glazer, whose Sexy Beast and Birth I both love, is surely cause for celebration, all the more since it's been such a long decade since his last release.


11.4.2014

Kevin Costner is Brad Pitt in Moneyball for football, AKA Draft Day. Who'd have thought in December that this would have such an easy shot at being Costner's best movie of the year?

A pair of horror films, because Captain America notwithstanding, it is still the offseason: Oculus, which is somehow crossed with a murder mystery; and Rio 2. Now, the latter of these is not being marketed as a horror film, but surely we all know better.

Once again, the limited releases come to the rescue: I don't actually expect Only Lovers Left Alive, an art house vampire film, to be any good, but it's never wise to count out Jim Jarmusch or Tilda Swinton, and when they're collaborating? Mercy me.


16.4.2014

The unexpected glut of Christian themed films in the first third of the year continues right along to Heaven Is for Real One of these days, one of these movies will go to #1 and I'll have to see it, but it's not going to be this one.


18.4.2014

The fact that A Haunted House made enough money to generate A Haunted House 2 depresses me. Like, literally.

Meanwhile, we can all enjoy the spectacle of Disney making another documentary that shamelessly anthropomorphises animals with Bears, whose poster is confusingly and unpleasantly similar to their 2003 obscurity Brother Bear. Or we can enjoy watching Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan's cinematographer, make his directorial debut with Transcendence, which happens to exactly look like the kind of product that Nolan secretly knows himself to be too good for nowadays. But hey, anything that throws a paycheck at Rebecca Hall deserves my attention.


25.4.2014

There is a 2004 Luc Besson production, District B13, which kicked off the most ambivalent review I have ever written, wondering if its phenomenal, legitimately masterpiece-level opening act justified the tedium of the rest. I do not expect to be similarly ambivalent about its weirdly late American remake, Brick Mansions.

Other sacrificial lambs being put on the chopping block to be completely forgotten in a week, once summer proper starts: The Other Woman, a peculiarly mean-looking female-driven comedy, feeling oddly like a relic from the '90s and the days of The First Wives Club; and The Quiet Ones, the newest horror picture from the revived Hammer Films. Having thus far thought that the studio's attempt to navigate the 21st Century has been noble and intelligent if not uniformly successful, I think I can count myself excited for this one, kind of.

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HEART OF ARKNESS

Darren Aronofsky has, we are told, been nursing the idea behind Noah for fifteen years, or basically immediately after making his feature debut with π. It was only the spectacular and unexpected success of his 2010 Black Swan that finally convinced a studio to give him the giant sum of money needed to make it, because if there's one thing that obviously equips a man to make a tremendously costly Bible epic, it's the skills he learned in making a movie where a ballerina imagines having destructive lesbian hatesex with her alter ego.

I do not know what drives a man to nurture this concept for so long, but it clearly wasn't religious faith. And it also clearly wasn't an irreligious tendency leading him to critique the faith of others. I'm not sure what that leaves, but Noah isn't the kind of movie that's interested in being easily pegged down. The one word that best describes it above all others is "weird"; if we allow ourselves two, I would go with "fucking weird".

At any rate, it's vintage Aronofsky: where Black Swan and The Wrestler both suggested a certain flattening-out of his aesthetic into something reasonably conventional and even realistic at points, Noah jumps headlong back into the metallic colors and expressionistic cutting of his early, idiosyncratic ones. It is not the film's signature moment, nor by any means its most characteristic, but the scene in Noah that unquestionably has stuck the most in my brain is a montage, against a pungent, cherry-red sunset, of silhouettes of murder and war, with a quick succession (like, "two or three frames per image" quick) of profiles of soldiers from the Paleolithic right up to the 20th Century attacking, and a quick succession of profiles of their victims falling back in death agonies. It is garish and brave and stupid and wholly visionary, in the sense that it makes an emphatic point using image and editing and sound without any need to rely on words, and it is a moment that made me think two thoughts at the exact same time: "I am so thrilled that Aronofsky is back in his gonzo phase without a hint of apology" and "Wow, I'd forgotten how goddamn annoying Aronofsky's movies are."

But you know who doesn't care what I or anyone else thinks about Darren Aronofsky's filmmaking? Darren Aronofsky. Good, bad, or ugly, Noah is a transcendently personal piece of cinema, telling a weird version of the iconic story that, while not contradicting a single word of the Torah, ends up a piece of overheated fantasy in ancient Hebrew drag, colliding ideas from the religious text, the rabbinical texts elucidating the religious text, and the author's own mind, and turning out something that's half '50s Bible movie, half Lord of the Rings (the rock angels are a dead ringer for the Ents in The Two Towers - oh, yes, there are rock angels), half Soviet Montage, half work of grimy historical realism that finds Aronofsky and his longterm cinematographer Matthew Libatique parading around a series of muddy greys in between the more dazzling, chromatic fantasy landscapes and evocatively deep shadows of the Ark interior.

There's so much visual and tonal excess that it would almost be possible to lose sight of the family drama that Aronofsky has fashioned out of the story, except for the operatic rage with which he and the actors portray that drama. Here, Noah (Russell Crowe) isn't just a personality-free patriarch, but a tormented man of principle who believes deep in his soul that he has been charged with stewarding the whole of creation though a massive apocalypse, and who is certain that he and his kin have no place in this new order other than to observe it and die, saving the planet from the ravages of mankind that have brought it so close to ruin (that is, incidentally, the whole of the alleged "environmentalist" message, and anyone who lets that offend them, out of all the wacky shit going on here, went in looking to be offended). It's a role written in bold, broad strokes and emphatic emotions, and Crowe breathes life into with the most robust, alive performance he's given in a decade or more.

And the rest of the characters are… that's part of the problem, ain't it? As much as Noah is enthusiastic about providing a totally modern experience in some ways, in others its as ossified and dusty as any plodding epic from the days of The Robe, and that includes its treatment of the supporting players, who with the possible exception of Ray Winstone as the unnuanced villain Tubalcain, the human king looking to steal the ark and replace Noah as the chief conduit for the unnamed creator of the universe, play stock characters with stock emotions. It's all well and good for Aronofsky's script to specifically indict the authority of old men who insist that they alone can correctly interpret the lessons handed down by God (and he so indicts), but it's hard to give the film any anti-patriarchy points when the best it can do for its female characters is to cast Jennifer Connelly as the Loyal Wife Who Is Clearer-Headed Than Her Husband (Who Cries), and Emma Watson as the Clever, Preternaturally Wise Young Pregnant Woman (Who Cries). And they're robust paragons of human drama compared to Noah's sons, Shem (Douglas Booth) and Ham (Logan Lerman), the latter of whom at least gets to shade some resentment into his bland meat prop of a role, but only in the film's last half.

The balance between the realistic, the heavily stylised, and the insipidly hokey is one that Noah proudly ignores: achingly corny dramatic touches and overwrought visual metaphors sit right alongside some brilliantly fragmentary, high-contrast dream images, effectively high-scale fantasy-style action scenes, and an outstanding sound mix (the damp wooden creaks and sleepy animal noises inside the Ark make for one of the most persuasive movie spaces in a long while). Undeliverable wooden dialogue gives way to some wonderfully tiny and humane character moments. Anthony Hopkins is more subdued than he's been in some years, and then starts babbling about berries for like, 40 minutes in the next instant.

It is messy as all hell, and wonderfully incoherent, pummeling along with enough momentum that it's not hard to overlook how utterly it fails to draw all of its shifting moods and thematic threads into any kind of conclusion. But at the same time, it doesn't disguise that failure, either. Anyway, I am very glad that I saw the movie, and I am also virtually certain that it's no damn good at all: but it's completely singular and an obvious passion project, and its sloppy weirdness has the merit of being very much unlike anything else out there.

5/10-ish. But number ratings are really not appropriate in this case.

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BEST SHOT: CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC

It's April Fool's Day, and for this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel at the Film Experience has given into the spirit of the day by picking one of the iconic Good Bad Movies: 1980's Can't Stop the Music, winner of the very first Razzie for Worst Picture, and the first of that year's three magnificently awful disco musicals (the others are Xanadu and The Apple). I had never seen it before, but it's been on my radar for years, and I am very happy to report that it full lives up to all of my expectations for it. It's a wholly fictitious "how the band was formed" biopic of the Village People, casting them as the background characters in the story of how a limp noodle played by Steve Guttenberg becomes a successful song writer. It is quite possibly the un-gayest Village People movie with onscreen penises that could imaginably exist, with all of its campiness - and it is campy enough to affect the orbit of a small planet - of the wholly accidental sort that comes when people think they're doing something fun and playful, when it is actually insane and beyond incompetent.

It's obviously too much to expect Nancy Walker, an actress who dabbled in TV directing and made no other features besides this one, and cinematographer Bill Butler to indulge in actual, legitimate good image-making in what amounts to a deranged commercial for one of disco's tackiest sideshows at the exact moment that mainstream disco was about to die of consumption, so I changed my usual strategy for picking a favorite shot. I wanted to find, in one image, something that summed up everything magnificent about this gloriously awful musical: its ugly visuals, its inability to ever be anything else than a rinky-dink B-movie, its tasteless excess, its massively ineffective attempt to split the difference between the look and mood of the 1970s versus the 1980s, ending up in a place where it just ends up feeling manic, unhinged, and blitzed on cocaine.

It proved to be shockingly easy to find such an image.

I believe that I have nothing to add to that, though it's a real pity that it's not moving, so you can't get the full majesty of the glitter effect on the text. I will, however, share my second choice, which I might have even gone with if I'd been able to scrounge up a widescreen copy of the film:

The Village People can walk on water, y'all. The Village People are the resurrected Christ.

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