IN MEMORIAM

Gordon Willis

28 May, 1931 - 18 May, 2014

There are some mornings when you encounter the news and all you want to do is crawl right back into bed and call the whole day a mulligan.

Gordon Willis was the most important cinematographer of the last 50 years of cinema. I don't know of any clearer or more concise way of putting it. If he'd only shot The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, a pair of films that fundamentally altered the way people used lighting and focus and the peculiar film stock of '70s American filmmaking, he would be one of the great masters of his field, and his passing a day of mourning for all cinephiles. If he'd only shot the trio of paranoia thrillers with director Alan J. Pakula, Klute and The Parallax View and especially the technically audacious All the President's Men, he'd be one of the great masters of his field. If he'd only shot his extraordinarily gorgeous quartet of black and white movies with Woody Allen - Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose - some of them lovingly grain-kissed, some of them hauntingly sharp and clear, all of them so bright and piercingly silvery and sleek that they practically glow, he'd be one of the great masters of his field.

But, in fact, he shot all of these, and other great and influential films besides. If the 1970s can fairly be said to have changed the way that American movies were made, that owes as much to Willis's astonishing new rules for how movies could be photographed as to the contribution of any other individual. He taught us new ways of making images and new ways of reading images, and with his passing, we've lost one of the greatest geniuses the medium has known. Generations of cinematographers have labored in his shadows, and all of us who love cinema owe him our deepest debt of gratitude, now and forever.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: GIANT RADIOACTIVE METAPHORS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the fourth distinct film titled simply Godzilla continues the grand tradition of movies in which the uncertain march of potentially dangerous science is embodied in the form of some kind of outrageous monster. As Godzilla'd out as this blog has no doubt become, I thought it was appropriate for one last hurrah with the genre, going all the way back to the same year that the original Japanese Godzilla premiered.

In the immediate wake of 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, two films made on two different continents picked up the idea of giant monsters roused by atomic explosions and ran with it. One of these, in Japan, was Godzilla, which adopted the perspective of a country that, uniquely in the whole world, was on the receiving end of atomic weaponry: the atomic monster as an unstoppable force that leaves unfathomable destruction and death behind it, only defeated by the invention of an even worse perversion of science than the atom bomb itself. The other, in the United States, was Them! - that's an obligatory exclamation point, you'll note - is just as obviously from the perspective of that country that made and launched those attacks against Japan in the first place. It is horrified and cautious about the unintended consequences of nuclear weapons, and by no means triumphalist about Scientific Progress (but then, American genre films in the '50s probably demonstrate a more pervasive hatred and mistrust of scientists and science than any other form of drama in any other era), but it's easy to see the difference between the films. Godzilla levels Tokyo and tuns it into a smoking ruin. They! are only able to severely inconvenience the residents of Los Angeles.

That sounds dismissive, but in truth, Them! is quite damn good. Easily the best of the giant insect movies that were so common in the '50s (a genre it largely created), which again sounds dismissive. The problem, perhaps, is that Them! comes from a genre and a time frame when even being moderately decent would have been an impressive success; there are no comparisons to be made that could really point to how strong it is as a movie qua movies. It had Oscar-nominated effects work, for God's sake (this was before visual and sound effects were given separate awards). How many '50s B-thrillers can make that kind of claim? But then, not many B-thrillers were made by a studios as well-heeled as Warner Bros. (also behind The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), boasting the resources on both sides of the camera that only a major studio could to provide to such an on-paper ridiculous conceit.

The film hides its conceit in a rather nimble way for a good third of the 93-minute feature, even if all the marketing had already spilled the beans. It's about giant ants, created by the nuclear testing in 1945, and as the characters note near the end, if it took nine years for the giant ants to make their presence felt, God knows what other fun surprises the Atomic Age will have in store. But I am jumping so far ahead: first, the movie introduces us to two New Mexico state policemen, Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore), and Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake), following a recon plane in their cruiser through the desert, investigating a weird report that came in. There's a little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering around in a nearly catatonic state, carrying a broken doll; she appears to be the sole survivor of an incident that left a car and trailer stranded in the desert, the trailer ripped open from the outside. The only evidence is an unrecognisable animal track. Later, another attack is discovered, this one leaving a body behind; a body loaded up with an entirely unreasonable amount of formic acid.

Between the track and the formic acid, the federal government gets involved, sending FBI Agent Robert Graham (James Arness) and scientists Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon), his daughter. The elder Dr. Medford has a very good idea of what's going on, but he's too methodical and afraid of causing a panic to come out and say it; instead he brings everybody out to the ruined trailer to investigate, and his unspoken theory proves itself true in a most visceral way, when they're attacked by an ant the size of an automobile. Now that they know what they're up against, our heroes immediately throw themselves into stopping the mutants, but even after destroying the nest out in the desert, the trouble is only starting: there's evidence to suggest that two ant queens left the nest before the human attack, to start their own colonies out in some yet unknown corner of the world.

It's all very close to material that would be unbearably stupid in many movies to come out in the years to follow, so why the hell is Them! so great, while something like The Deadly Mantis is so reprehensibly stupid? A lack of precursors, for a start: since Them! was where this particular subgenre kicked off, nobody involved knew that it was supposed to be tacky and disreputable. So they went and made a legitimate movie - just a fast glance over the cast raises that much of a suggestion. Edmund Gwenn was no movie star in 1954, but he was better than being dumped on a cheap programmer. No, this was a serious production, aiming to function as a legitimately intelligent horror thriller for an audience more sophisticated than the usual junky genre film crowd. Ted Sherdeman's script is damn crafty, opening as a sand-swept mystery that never tips its hat about what's going on until that first ant appears, at which point it becomes an urgent military procedural about the desperate need to figure out what's going on, and fast. There's only so far you can stretch the metaphor, but as thriller made in the Cold War, the sense of confused chaos and terror at not knowing where the threat is or where it's going to end up, despite all the powerful military tools at our disposal, has a real bite to it that makes the film land with more force than just a "we must kill the ants before they kill us!" scenario would ordinarily have.

Of course, it's still a really fine giant ant thriller. It was not a massively well-appointed production, but there was still plenty of time and money spent making the giant robotic ants look as... well, not realistic. But in their fanciful, abstract way, they're gorgeous props with an impressive range of articulation and movement, making for genuinely impressive antagonists for the humans in the cast. And after being downgraded from a widescreen, 3-D color spectacle, the full-frame black-and-white cinematography by Sid Hickox is rich and full of smart lighting and framing: the bleached-out New Mexico desert (played by the bleached-out California desert) is foreboding and bleak, while the ants' lairs are wonderfully gloomy and threatening, with the low light having the added benefit of keeping the monsters out of situations where full illumination might call attention to their technical shortcomings.

In short, director Gordon Douglas was taking all of this extremely seriously, exploring the subject with the full gravity of its horror and drawing out some surprisingly stable and earnest performances. Gwenn has a bit of comic relief business here and there (there's a little routine involving military radio etiquette that I find genuinely funny), but otherwise everyone is encouraged to behave as a normal person would under the circumstances: it's not a character-driven giant ant movie, exactly, but it's a movie where the naturalism of the acting and the steadfast refusal to allow even a drop of campiness to infect the proceedings serve to make the giant ants seem like a real and legitimate danger (the film even manages to sell what should, be rights, be a corny sequence with a grieving mother). And that is no small victory, nor a small part of why Them! is able to make the impact it does. From the little girl being plunged back into her memories and screaming "Them!" with all her might, to the sweaty tension exuded by the heroes as they crawl around the Los Angeles storm drains hunting for monsters, Them! honestly cares about what kind of fears and other emotions its loopy scenario would entail, and that invites us to believe in its objectively absurd notions without any kind of good sense holding us back. For all that it ends up suggesting that the might of the U.S. military will always save the day, and for all that there's never really the possibility of Godzilla-style widespread devastation, the film is shockingly sincere in its expression of its concept and themes, and that gives it a potency that no other giant bug picture ever came close to achieving. In it's highly circumscribed, genre-based way, this is an outright masterpiece.

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CHOOSE YOUR OWN MURDER

Is it really that time? Yes indeed, next weekend is the start of another edition of Summer of Blood - the eighth year that Antagony & Ecstasy has played host to a celebration of the low artistry and dubious morality of cheap horror cinema. And if there's one thing that we've learned in all that time, it's that when you get to the eighth entry of a series, the creativity and inspiration that may have been there to begin with is starting to shrivel up altogether. It's at this point that only the most desperate, gullible die-hards still pay out their time and money to the craven producers looking to put the smallest possible effort into giving those die-hards what they'll accept.

Ignoring the part where I'm craven and you're all gullible, I like the idea of making this year's iteration live up to that spirit of giving the viewer what they want, kind of. And so, this year's Summer of Blood is built around theme of Reader's Choice, Kind Of. Every Sunday from now the end of August, I'm going to announce a theme for the following weekend, plus three titles that exemplify that theme; and then we'll hold a vote between those titles (and write-ins, because why not), to see what I'll be reviewing the following Saturday. It is a weird and possibly dumb way to do this; but after seven years, I need to so something to keep it interesting for myself, on top of everything else.

And if you have a horror film in mind that you've always desperately wanted to know my thoughts about, keep it in mind; we'll talk more about that when the time comes.

The first week's poll will be going up later today, but I'll give you a sneak peak on the topic: we're starting with the most basic and essential slasher film trope of them, all, with a week centered on Campground Killers.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1935: In which everything is all about money, and you can sing and dance your way to happiness

The story goes that the extraordinary popularity of musicals in the 1930s in America was a direct result of the Great Depression: the fantasy and spectacle and charm of the genre was an easy way to stay distracted for an hour or two of joy in the face of widespread economic suffering. Another story goes that choreographer Busby Berkeley was the single most important, influential, and innovative creator of musicals during that same time period, whose work in 42nd Street almost single-handedly revived the fortunes of the genre. You can pick one of these, but not the other. Berkeley's musicals, after all, were hardly fluffy escapist fare with no clue that a Depression was on: they were fully aware of the desperation, violence, and poverty of the real world in the '30s, filtering this awareness though romantic comedy stories and ingenious dance routines. And this has as much to with the studio where Berkeley found himself, as anything: Warner Bros. was the grubby, nasty-minded house of relatively realistic urban cinema, while MGM was busy making the most elegant, otherworldly eye candy that money could by, and the other studios occupied some space in between, but mostly facing MGM's direction.

After scoring a few big hits, Berkeley was given the keys to a whole movie musical with Gold Diggers of 1935, the second movie he directed (the grimy pre-Code shocker She Had to Say Yes was first); he had already choreographed the previous entry in the series, Gold Diggers of 1933. And before we go any deeper into it, the Gold Diggers films allow us a chance to look briefly at the very different expectations that referring to something as a "series" brought along with it in the '30s. Between the five movies in the franchise (the first, Gold Diggers of Broadway from 1929, is mostly lost beyond two reels and its soundtrack), there are several overlapping cast and crew members but no overlapping characters, and plots that do not intersect expect on the level of theme: all of them involve some people with no money or jobs and some people with lots of money, and the way that the former extract money from the latter by means of putting on a show. Sometimes on Broadway, sometimes not - in Gold Diggers of 1935, it's a resort-town hotel - and sometimes there is more venality involved than others. Insofar as the films need to be related at all, it's in the fashion of a brand name: Warner's way of saying, "if you've liked our other movies about backstage ingenues staging a musical, you'll like this one too". It was a successful enough gambit that MGM even got in on the game in 1935, with a similarly disjointed series of non-sequels under the Broadway Melody moniker.

It's mostly nonsense and froth, except for the constant, itchy focus on money. This is a deeply class-conscious movie, this GD35 (I have no idea how else to abbreviate it); not in the way that is angry and political, like Warners' message films from earlier in the decade, before the Production Code went into effect - oh, yes! We are now on the back side of the Code Years, and now sex, violence, politics, godlessness, antisocial thinking, and bodily functions are all going to be scrupulously scrubbed from the movies for many years to come. And it is noticeable that GD35 has less of an acute interest in sex than other, earlier Warner musicals. But it was never, at any rate, likely to be a political firebrand: as I was saying, there is class awareness here, in a way that has an extra tang to it with the Depression bubbling in the background, but there is no rage. The rich are not like you and me; they are easily buffaloed out of the money that they guard so zealously but with such lack of imagination.

The plot, anyway is set in one of the swanky hotels where the wealthy flock together: Wentworth Plaza at Lake Waxapahachie. The desk clerk here is is Dick Curtis (Dick Powell), and he's part of the nasty, smiling hierarchy that exists wherein the hotel staff are paid literally nothing, on the promise of magnificent tips to come; except that those tips are bullied down to fractions by bosses and bosses' bosses. This information is presented in the very beginning, in a crisply edited scene where the dialogue flows from one conversation into the next, providing a fluid and organic sense of just how widespread and pernicious the game goes; that's a simple trick, even by 1935 standards, but it's done awfully smoothly, in a time when sound editing was still an uncertain process. I linger on this because both the privileged place of the sequence (the first lines of dialogue) and George Amy's bravura editing, showy in a way that absolutely none of the cutting is for the rest of the film, except in musical numbers, both want to make absolutely certain that we notice what's going on: a cycle of money based predation. You can make your movie a frothy confection, but there are still ways of sneaking a "society is fucked" message in there if need be.

Anyway, Dick is hired by the neurotic, penny-pinching Mrs. Prentiss (Alice Brady) to chaperone her daughter Ann (Gloria Stuart) for the summer, never dreaming that her daughter might possible waver in her devotion to her pre-fiancé, the wealthy T. Mosley Thorpe (Hugh Herbert), a drifting sort of fellow current deep in the throes of writing his opus, an historical study of snuffboxes. But Powell is first-billed, Stuart is third, and Dick's fiancée Arline (Dorothy Dare) didn't even get a card all to herself during the credits, so we can get ahead of shrill ol' Mrs. Prentiss pretty easily.

Meanwhile the impoverished genius Nicolai Nicoleff (Adolph Menjou), a great theatrical creator, is dodging his bill, when the hotel manager, Louis Lamson (Grant Mitchell), makes an offer: why not stage Mrs. Prentiss's upcoming annual musical extravaganza to raise money for the Milk Fund? The results will be glorious, the small fee he'll collect will pay his bills, and everyone will be happy. Nicoleff knows a good chance when he sees it, and instantly sets to planning with his set and costume designer, August Schultz (Joseph Cawthorn), a scheme to shake Mrs. Prentiss for significantly more than the production will actually cost; they're joined by the hotel's scheming stenographer, Betty Hawes (Glenda Farrell), who is also hatching a plot to blackmail Thorpe.

So, again: money. How do you get as much as possible from other people, and/or how do you spend as little of it as possible. Dick and Ann are mostly exempted from these concerns, but they're also mostly exempted from anything resembling a plot: while the story whirls around, they saunter through quiet moments falling in love and have the two songs that serve a narrative function rather than hiding under the fig leaf of "it's on stage!", "I'm Going Shopping with You" and "The Words Are in My Heart" (the latter is given a reprise, with the aforementioned fig leaf). The former in which shopping together is used as a euphemism for either having sex or getting married, depending on the verse. And even here, the specter of cash raises its head: Ann spends wild sums that amuse more than alarm Dick, mostly because he knows that Mrs. Prentiss has an essentially inexhaustible pocketbook; and yet it's also clear from his very amusement that this is all remarkably strange and alien behavior to him.

Still and all, while the awareness of money and poverty linger of GD35 and clearly reflect the concerns of its audience, while a Paramount or MGM film would be doing their best to assuage and hide the concerns of the audience, this isn't a social tract. It's a light comedy with moderately appealing leads (I never much cared for Powell till he made his late-career shift into thrillers), and far more appealing bit players; seeing the reliably prim Menjou going to town on a cartoon Russian accent is one of those privileges that make being a classic movie buff all worth it, and Alice Brady's self-centered blustering and freaking out is always delightful to me. Berkeley's staging shows the clear hand of someone who thinks in terms of human bodies moving in relationship to each other: it's even fair to say that he has a musical sense to playing comedy, particularly in a sequence where the three conspirators get into an argument over how to split the money they're going to swindle out of Mrs. Prentiss and Thorpe, with cutaways to Mrs. Prentiss's oblivious irritation as perfectly timed as the choruses of a song.

Still, Berkeley the director would never be as good as Berkeley the choreographer, and that's clear from the very beginning, in which the hotel employees interact with the film's underscoring as they ready the place for the season (this sequence involves the sole depiction of black people in the entire movie, as the smiling cleaning crew; the really depressing part is that makes the film decently progressive for a Hollywood production in 1935). It's even clearer in the end, when he does the usual trick of these films, staging the Milk Fund show in ways that no stage in the history of mankind would be able to accomodate. "The Words Are in My Heart" is the geometric number, with the usual Berkeley glamor girls sitting at bright white pianos spinning against pitch black backgrounds, and it's very striking; but it's got nothing on "Lullaby of Broadway", which I'd rank behind only "Shanghai Lil" from Footlight Parade and the title number of 42nd Street in the echelons of Berkeley's work. The lightly sarcastic but affectionate song (written, like the other two, by Harry Warren and Al Dubin) is song first by Winifred Shaw, who also plays the protagonist of the story the dance depicts; it's about a party girl who carouses at night, sleeps all day, and who dies in a freak accident caused by the widespread off-kilter drunkenness surrounding her. It's a scolding moral fable, I guess, but so keenly aware of the fever energy of the young and urban that it feels like a bad dream version of "42nd Street", and it's shot with some of the most exciting camerawork in Berkeley's canon: severely acute angles, an especially fluid moving camera, and even shots from below a tap dancer's feet, showing off the talent and energy involved in being a professional dancer - and really, that's the only true requirement of a good dance number - while also further emphasising the pounding, heavy, nonstop movement of the lifestyle the sequence is condemning. Which is what those intent, stylised camera angles are for, too. The cheery music says one thing, but the visuals say another: "this can't be sustained". And indeed it is not.

It's not unusual - in fact, the opposite - for the big climactic number to be more interesting than the film as a whole; that said, GD35 is upbeat, good fun with enough characters making enough plans that it buzzes by (at 95 minutes, it's the shortest of the surviving Gold Diggers films). It is frivolous, ultimately: what depth it has comes through implication only. But well-mounted, intelligently framed, and above all sharply-cut frivolity can still have its place. Making handsome trifles as this was something of a specialty in the 1930s; there were talented people involved at every step of the production, and the airiness of this film is the result of hard, focused work that needed to be all the more precise so that none of the strain would ever show. It's not high art, but it's about as impressively disciplined as filmmaking craftsmanship can get.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1935
-RKO releases the first 3-strip Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Miriam Hopkins
-A major wave of prestigious literary adaptations begins to kick off with Dickens's David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities at MGM, and A Midsummer Night's Dream at Warner Bros., among others
-James Whale directs Bride of Frankenstein at Universal, breaking ground in both horror comedies and horror sequels

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1935
-Leni Riefenstahl directs the peerlessly beautiful, peerlessly effective, and peerlessly evil propaganda film Triumph of the Will, at the personal request of Adolf Hitler
-Jean Renoir directs Toni, a major work of early realism, in France
-The Bengali-language film Devdas, of which no complete version survives, is a major hit with audiences across India

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THE RETURN OF THE KING

Of all possible outcomes for the new American-made Godzilla, one that I wasn't prepared for at all was that, at the macro level, it would have exactly the same structural problems that the last Godzilla film, 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars did. To wit: in a movie just a smidigen north of two hours, the best stuff tends to bunch up in the back half, and the whole thing would be immeasurably improved if the second quarter was either severely reduced or cut out altogether. And not, as many of the film's more impatient naysayers have been bitching, because Godzilla '14 has too little of its titular daikaiju, or that director Gareth Edwards keeps teasing action sequences that he then pulls back from with a little wink. I actually think the film has just about exactly the right amount of Godzilla to accomplish what it's trying to do, in fact. But we'll get back to that.

And it's not because Godzilla is more interesting than people, either. On paper, the idea of spending a lot of time with the human characters affected by Godzilla's massive, destructive presence is a worthy one. Some of the 28 Japanese films to feature the creature have done exactly that, to good effect, and some have not; some of the films that mostly shortchange the humans as anything but observers have been good, and some have not. It's all in the execution, and there's the problem, and the other way that this Godzilla resembles Final Wars: the issue isn't that the human subplot exists, but that it exists for such a long time while also being so trite and unimaginative and propped up on genre clichés in ways that the filmmakers seem unaware of.

There are a couple of significant problems with this Godzilla, but the most obvious one is simply that, out of a reasonably full cast of characters, played by a remarkably overqualified roster of actors, the film is mostly interested in the least compelling one, played to worst effect by the most consistently underwhelming member of the ensemble. I refer to Aaron Taylor-Johnson's soporific Ford Brody,* recently released from the U.S. Navy, where he served as a bomb disposal specialist; as depicted in the screenplay by Max Borenstein (from a story by Dave Callaham), Ford falls into the exact worst spot between being too generic in his personality to be at all pleasant to watch for any length of time, while being far too specific in his professional skill set to be a reasonable analogue for the audience staring with amazement and horror at the giant creatures that threaten humanity in this go-round. Taylor-Johnson's physical carriage and aimless line readings only serve to call maximum attention to how deficient Ford is as a character, and the result is a profoundly useless central human, even by Godzilla movie standards.We spend so much time learning about him and his family to give us a "hook" for when the monster action starts; instead, he's an active detriment, the tedious, boring, and functionless thing we have to wait for while in between the good parts. It would be tremendously easy to remove his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen, given only little to do, which is still more than any other female cast member has) and young son Sam (Carson Bolde) from the movie entirely, and redistribute Ford's role to two or three various soldiers throughout, and take out all the most draggy and meandering parts of the film, just like that.

The issue, I think, is that the film wants to serve two masters: the structure of a Japenese genre film (which tend to focus more on process and problem-solving than a single protagonist's "hero's journey" arc) is very dissimilar from the structure of a Hollywood tentpole (which focus on heroes' journeys to the point of distraction), and Godzilla tries to resolve them in a way that probably cannot happen. A more talented, or at least seasoned director might have been able to disguise the seams, but Edwards hasn't the facility of touch to do that. For the most part, he shows all the same strengths and limitations he displayed in his debut and only previous feature, 2010's Monsters: entrenching too deep in character moments that aren't clicking, shifting awkwardly between that material and some absolutely sublime construction of mood, setting, and tension throughout.

And I don't use the word sublimity by accident: as much as the human A-plot lets it down, the parts of Godzilla that work put it on par with any blockbuster of recent years. In all his wild cribbing from as many different Godzilla films as possible (to the point that it feels a bit like fan service in some respects: the reveal of Godzilla's atomic breath in particular is staged with an unmistakable tone of "oh, you all know what's coming next, right? and could you possibly be any more excited?"), Edwards picked up the most important lesson of all from the original, 1954 Godzilla: the horrible, devastating fact of the monster is more important than the immediate presence of the monster. Or SPOILER ALERT I PUT IT OFF AS LONG AS I COULD, BUT THE REST OF THE REVIEW IS DANGEROUS NOW rather monsters, plural. Godzilla '14 is at its very best when it is at its most grandiose, casting its giant creatures in roles that owe a debt to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos as much as to anything in the Japanase daikaiju eiga: Godzilla and the pair of vaguely insectoid MUTOs exist on some plane of awareness where humanity simple doesn't exist at all, fighting their ancient battle as profound forces of nature that can only be reacted to, not predicted and not stopped. If every generation of Godzilla film places its own fears into the movie, 2014's edition suggests neither the spectacle of nuclear warfare, nor the more modern concerns of 9/11 and the Fukushima meltdown, both of which are alluded to (the latter far more directly than the former), are the dominant terror of the modern world. It is instead about the fear of outright apocalypse, with destructive forces beyond understanding or control swallowing everything without even the decency to notice the human beings dying along the way.

And oh, how human beings do die. This is, in some ways, the PG-13 CGI blockbuster I've always longed for: one in which death isn't sanitised but presented as an awful, active thing. A scene with a derailed airport monorail shows several people sliding, screaming, to their deaths; dead bodies are scattered around the site of a trainwreck. Even at the height of the climactic monster battle, the collapse of skyscrapers is presented with an eye towards horror rather than the amoral spectacle of a Man of Steel. What Edwards has done, not just better than most disaster-porn summer movies, but even better than any previous Godzilla director, is invest the movie with the right sense of scale: the monsters, when we seem them, feel genuinely huge (even at their most masterful levels, the Japanese films never feel like they're showing anything but a man in a six-foot suit among four-foot buildings), and even when we do not see them, but merely the results of their devastation, that devastation has real scope and impact, a soul-sapping feeling that holy shit, how could something like this happen? Edwards and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey - responsible for some impressively moody wide shots that are among the highlights of his career as I know it - crank out scenes of carnage, death, emptiness, and despair by the fistful, mixing up the exact methods used to build those feelings enough that the film never falls into a pattern of unrelenting intensity that begins to feel repetitive and dull. Though having done such a good job exploring the essential non-humanity and world-ending power of the monsters, the film spoils everything with a garishly ill-advised final five minutes that make the jump from "Godzilla the antihero force of nature" to "Godzilla the superhero with triumphant fanfare", contrary to everything that has been built up for the preceding couple of hours.

In between the peak of the apocalyptic grandeur and the valley of the Brody family nonsense (Brody, incidentally, is one of several more-or-less explicit lifts from the Spielberg filmography throughout - the family name in Jaws, of course - with my favorite being a "foggy car window owing to the occupant's panicked breathing" gag taken from Jurassic Park), the great bulk of Godzilla is largely an ordinary though unusually slow-paced summer movie. It has a murderer's row of worthy actors - Bryan Cranston, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn - given far too little to do: the men come out better than the women (Hawkins and Binoche combined don't even hit 15 minutes of screentime, I'd wager), and Cranston is the only one who actually gets to do anything that I'd comfortably tag with the word "acting", though after a fashion, I like the degree to which all these famous faces slide by without making an impact; it reflects the film's own awareness that the actions of titanic monsters are beyond the ability of normal people and celebrities alike to do anything but gawk and run, or gawk and die. Alexandre Desplat's score has a couple of memorable cues (which, unfortunately, are also the most overtly "gongs and chimes" orientalist), and sadly, no lifts at all from the great Ifukube Akira, whose music still rings in my ears any time I hear the word "Godzilla"; but there's enough personality to even the most generic cues to give the film a bit more sonic depth than is typical. There's also a completely off putting re-use of a composition that appeared in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and cannot help but feel like it belongs there and nowhere else.

The monsters, meanwhile, though they get only a little screentime, are pretty great - the CGI, anyway, is close to flawless, even if I have my moments of doubt in the design. The MUTOs, though sleek and terrifying, don't feel like something that could have evolved. Godzilla itself is magnificent the lower we go on its body (one of the best scenes, and one that does the best work of driving the idea that these are unfathomably large organisms, shows its massive feet clomping down like mountains), with something close to my ideal amount of stocky, powerful musculature and strength without being puffy and fat, under a layer of ragged, spiky skin that feels like the design of the Millennium Series suits (1999-2004) without any of their sometime curious mistakes (no magenta spines here!). The face, I am not crazy for. No, not even the face. The snout. It is like a bear's snout, not a lizard's.

Still, the sheer weight and size that the filmmakers suggest about these creatures and their enormous destructive capability matters more than anything about their particular shape. The fight between Godzilla and the MUTOs is a damned impressive thing, brutal and animalistic without being impersonal in any way (the partially performance-captured Godzilla has far more inner life than the last all-CG version of the character, from the dreadful 1998 Emmerich/Devlin Godzilla), among the most creative fights in the series - Godzilla's finishing move, in particular, is a work of art as far as rah-rah fanboy moments go.

Anyway, all that leaves a film that is generally all-around good and just not quite special. It is methodical and willing to be about enjoying the mood more than cumshots, unlike virtually everything else in modern popcorn filmmaking; but it's got too much that holds it back in in the two-thirds of the movie where the mood doesn't really manifest itself over undernourished character scenes. The spectacle and terrible gravity are great; I bet they'd have been even greater in a movie that could have trimmed maybe 20 minutes of human deadweight off. Anyway, the notions are great even if the execution is a bit stiff, and I think it proudly occupies its space as one of the better-not-best films in the Godzilla franchise. No American-made Godzilla movie could ever say that, before.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1934: In which a charismatic child lifts a society's Depression

It is not possible to talk about the Hollywood star system or film culture or really mass media in general as those things existed in the 1930s without talking about Shirley Temple. She defines her era in a way that very few movie performers have: she was the most popular movie star in the world for four consecutive years, 1935-'38, enough to make her among the most internationally-recognisable human women of the decade, reaching a level of fame and ubiquity that only a tiny handful of movie stars could ever conceive of. And she did all of it before celebrating her 11th birthday.

The reason for Temple's appeal is and was obvious (and has nothing to do with Graham Greene's insane postulations about a cult of middle-aged pedophiles): little kids are adorable, and little kids who can sing and dance and sell a joke doubly so. The actress's later crack attributing her fame to audiences in the Depression cheering themselves up with a dog, Rin Tin Tin, and a little girl, is obviously reductive, but obvious explanations don't have to be wrong explanations, and you'd have to be deliberately ignoring the whole history of pop culture to deny that in rough economic times, people generally prefer easy, escapist fare (consider the explosion in America of nihilistic crime dramas and biting, sarcastic comedy in the economic heyday of the '50s, contrasted with the rise in popularity of simplistic adventure movies in the late '70s, perfectly overlapping with the debilitating spike in gas prices. Or, hell, the plethora of superhero movies in our own current downturn, offering straightforward answers to bluntly delineated problems that resemble modern life not at all). Watching Temple mug and charm her way through a field of cooing adults is soothing, and the fact that all of her movies tended to espouse a hugely optimistic worldview (any problem can be solved by smiling at it, and maybe throwing a corny song its way) certainly couldn't have hurt audiences' enthusiasm. The calculated innocence on display is appealing because it requires very little energy to engage with it, in exchange for a pretty hefty payout of momentary pleasure.

The limitation of that line of thinking is also pretty obvious: like her contemporary Frank Capra, the idea that Temple was some kind of dispensary of simplistic sugary-sweet nonsense unendurable to sophisticated and/or contemporary tastes hold up only as long as you don't watch any of her films. It's the case, sure, that most of the films in that '35-'38 window are saccharine tosh, but Temple herself is always, eerily talented in everything she does. Even at the height of the studios system, you couldn't become a triple-A box office draw without any skills, and Temple was a better than solid dancer, singer, and comic performer, limited only by the material she was handed.

Which is why, all things considered, I generally prefer her work from 1934, the year she broke out of the novelty short ghetto, to all of her subsequent starring vehicles combined. In '34, the "Temple Formula" wasn't in place yet, and she could be called upon to provide things other than dewy-eyed charm to the movies she appeared in. Particularly in Little Miss Marker, for which Fox Film loaned her out to Paramount, Temple provides surprisingly able, surprisingly knowing (or just magnificently well-directed) in a register of acerbic sarcasm that's startling in any tiny girl, but especially one who is best known ethereal innocence.

All of which ultimately brings us to the subject at hand - for we've had a subject at hand all along, y'see - the Christmas release Bright Eyes, which looks now and was designed initially as the first "Shirley Temple film", instead of merely a film in which Shirley Temple appears. It was the first project expressly designed for her, and is the first to introduce one of the key elements of her later vehicles, the crabby old man who is turned into a bleeding-heart humanist by the kindness and preternatural wisdom of the innocent girlchild. At the same time, it avoids the godawful sentimentality that mars all but the absolute best of her later pictures, and still allows her to play a relatively normal little girl, with none of the over-written attempts to play to her persona. Neither the film nor Temple match Little Miss Marker, and William M. Conselman's script is unashamed to be bathetic; but it's easy enough to see what audiences responded to in '34. It is full of cute behavior by children, and everything works out well without it being too easy on the characters; that stuff sells, yesterday, today, and forever.

The meat of the story, anyway: little Shirley Blake (Temple) is the daughter of a maid, Mary (Lois Wilson), in the household of a wealthy pair of dreadful Californian snobs, the Smythes (Theodor von Eltz and Dorothy Christy). Shirley's father was an airman who died years ago - "cracked up", she says, in the assured tones of a child reciting by rote a concept she doesn't quite understand - and since then, she's been taken up as something between a mascot and a group adoptee by his buddies at the airfield, but especially "Loop" Merritt (James Dunn). All the pleasure she receives in life comes from visiting these friendly faces, the Smythe home is a depraved hole, with the snobby family having birthed an indescribably wretched daughter slightly older than Shirley, Joy (Jane Withers), and hosting at present the openly resentful Ned Smith (Charles Sellon), a wheelchair-bound uncle who despises the young folks who clearly only tolerate his crankiness in the hope of receiving a nice chunk of his estate when he dies, which they also clearly hope will happen really soon. Ned starts to be nice to Shirley, for no obvious reason other than because he knows it will piss Joy off; that's one ally on her side, which she'll need when her mother dies. On Christmas Day.

That's a lot of weepiness for a family comedy, but Bright Eyes doesn't really want to commit to any kind of glum emotion for too long: the point, after all, is to dramatise little Shirley's durability, not her trauma. So even after this jagged interruption in the film's "the dogged poor find ways to enjoy their lives, regardless" scheme, it pretty much immediately shifts into a second half that proposes the tragedy of too many people wanting to love and care for this little orphan: Loop (her godfather), Ned, and the Smythes' cousin, Adele Martin (Judith Allen), who was also Loop's fiancée long ago, before abruptly calling it off. This would be, arguably, the exact opposite of an intractable, unsolvable conundrum, especially given the Hollywood convention that you always still love the person you loved that one time, but the characters spend enough time not arriving at that solution until the story has hauled itself over the 80-minute mark.

I snark, but in truth, Bright Eyes goes down easy. Temple is an enormously appealing performer, for one thing, and in Withers she is wonderfully matched with a kind of negative-image of herself: a brunette with a foul attitude and a penchant for violent fantasies (sample playtime: emergency surgery to cut off a doll's legs). There's an unmistakable pre-WWII cant to Joy's characterisation, with its airy dismissal of psychiatry as so obviously bunk that we don't need to do more than name it to prove what idiot hippies her parents are; that and the unspoken notion that hangs over every one of the bad little girl's fetishistic descriptions of punishing her dolls that if only her parents would give her a good wallop, she'd turn out halfway decent. Still, Joy is a delightfully acerbic character, and Withers's performance is stellar; I don't quite know what to make with a movie whose two best performances are both given by child actors, but that's what we've got here. The brittle patter between the girls is easily the most engaging, funny part of the whole affair.

Outside of those two, it's stock filmmaking of an overly sensational narrative, one that the modestly-talented director David Butler (I can't entirely dismiss anybody whose later career included Road to Morocco) is content to present in fairly obvious broad strokes: the close-up of a cake for Shirley with a frosting airplane that has been shattered as the punchline to the scene where her mother dies is one of those moments where the filmmaker's terror of the audience not Getting It shades into outright contempt for our intelligence. And he's a little too free with close-ups of Temple doing nothing but grinning, but hell, that might have been a contract thing, or who knows. Mostly, the film provides a satisfactory neutral canvas for Temple to filigree with all her talents: the usual not-too-short takes that, in '30s cinema, signify a willingness to let us soak in the mere charisma of a star, with just enough sense to cut before things feel static. The only moment he really muffs is the film's sole musical number "On the Good Ship Lollipop", which somehow became Temple's signature tune despite being introduced in a bizarrely-staged, claustrophobic bit where she simply walks from one end of an airplane cabin to the other, as manly airmen hum along and occasionally spit out one or two words of the chorus when not waving around highly improbable candy props (a moment where one of the airmen takes an enormous powder puff to dabble some faux-powdered sugar on her face - in a really conspicuous cutaway shot, no less - is one of the most inscrutable things that I think I have seen in a '30s musical number).

Great cinema it's not, but great cinema it doesn't want to be. At heart, this is just one of the many star vehicles of the 1930s that all mostly resemble each other: basic staging of scenes that linger lovingly on the top-billed performer. In this case, that performer happens to be one of the most singular headlining individuals in Hollywood history. This early, more flexible Temple is, I'd say, a lot easy to handle than the increasingly ritualised one of later years, and Bright Eyes has enough glumness (including a well-staged storm scene) that it feels like it has some weight to it. Still, if you're looking for that one single Temple film to watch, I'd push for Little Miss Marker; Bright Eyes is charming as all fuck, but it's not really anything else.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1934
-Columbia's release of the Frank Capra-directed It Happened One Night crystallises the rules of the emerging screwball comedy genre
-At MGM, Director Ernst Lubitsch and stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald make the finest of all their various collaborations, The Merry Widow
-A year after their first onscreen pairing, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers debut as co-leads in RKO's The Gay Divorcee

Elsewehere in world cinema in 1934
-French director Jean Vigo makes the second and last narrative film of his bitterly short career, L'Atalante
-Wu Yonggang directs Ruan Lingyu in The Goddess, arguably the best-known Chinese silent film
-Basil Wright's The Song of Ceylon, from Britain, represents a new level of aesthetic sophistication (if not in overcoming cultural bias) in documentary filmmaking

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THE PEOPLE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD

By all rights, Neighbors ought to be just another brick in the wall built up by Judd Apatow and the many people whose career he started (Apatow, we should be clear, had nothing to do with the film, outside of being mentioned in the special thanks; but the writers, director, and lead all come from the Apatow Comedy Finishing School): boorish dudes learning, through filthy-minded misadventure, how to be somewhat less boorish. And that's basically the framework going on here. It stars Seth Rogen (because of course it fucking does) as a new father who is first kind of quietly pleased and then increasingly horrified when a fraternity movies into the house next door, and his initial flush of big-brotherly affection for the substance-fueled party life that he now gets to enjoy by proxy, and occasionally directly, turns into a slow-dawning awareness that he's too old for this shit. It is yet another facet of the character that Rogen always, always plays: caught on the cusp between "hedonism and a lack of responsibility is unbelievably fun and anything else must be a grating punishment" and "actually, responsibilty is kind of cool", always inching a little bit more towards full-fledged adulthood as the 32-year-old Rogen does the same thing himself.

This time, however, there is an unprecedented change to that scenario: an actual, plausible, psychologically resonant female character, in the form of Alter-Rogen's wife. She's played by Rose Byrne, who has been perfectly fine in many things, acutely good in a couple, and turns in the kind of film-stealing work here that absolutely just has to set her on the road to persistent stardom, if we're to keep up the pretext that we live in a moral universe. It's easy for Rogen to play a neurotic semi-mature enthusiast for parties and acts of pop-culture regurgitation; what Byrne's up to is far more interesting on every level, playing a woman who is slightly mature but doesn't entirely want to be, and gets increasingly thrilled at having chances to act out her desire to remain young and "with it" in increasingly dark ways. In the film's revenge-driven scenario, Rogen is the one who's overtly violent and obsessed; Byrne is the one who's actually dangerous, with maybe just a touch of real psychotic drive to her. And that she can do that while also having flawless comic timing - Rogen has never, ever had such fluid chemistry with anybody as the two of them have here, with blithe back-and-forth dialogue passages too lived-in to qualify as "banter", or the way the actors feed each other perfectly organic reaction shots that come just a half-beat off from what we might expect, to the exceptional benefit of the comedy - for that, Byrne is the film's easy best in show, giving one of the absolute best comic performances by a woman in a mainstream American film comedy in at least a couple of years. Which says a lot more about how mainstream American film comedy likes to utilise its females (the ones that aren't mocked for being fat are shrill nags) than anything, maybe, but it still counts.

Rogen and Byrne play Mac and Kelly Radner; the frat next door is headed up by Zac Efron as Teddy and Dave Franco as Pete, the leaders of a gangly club that's willing to let the adults in with open arms at first, only to have things turn south when one miscommunication leads to the cops coming in to deal with the noise. And from this point,the Radners and the college kids engage in a series of mutual attacks that range from petty annoyance to potentially life-threatening physical pranks (the movie plays - only once, which makes it land better - the "could this actually harm my baby" card in a way that manages to not kill the comedy dead). It being the case that director Nicholas Stoller (making his best film after three not-quite-there attempts) and writers Andrew J. Cohen & Brendan O'Brien prove this way that they understand a rule that the fuzzy "we're all cool bros" school of comedy that Neighbors largely belongs to frequently ignores: nasty people are funnier than nice people. Mac and Kelly, though our designated protagonists, are by no stretch of the imagination heroic; take a couple of objective steps back, and they probably do more clearly unethical and immoral things than Teddy does. This isn't something that Neighbors stresses; and the fact that it doesn't it part of why it works. But it's there, and the film would be nowhere near as electric without it.

Thematically, the film is stuck in a familiar wheelhouse, though the actors do a lot to sell it: Efron gives far and away the best performance of his career as a young libertine with just barely enough intelligence to know that if he were any smarter or more resistant to a steady stream of hedonism, he'd have to confront how empty his future looks; but for all his braggadocio, he's never able to completely block down panic about growing up. In this he is an excellent foil for the Radners, who (one suspects) aren't living exactly the life they'd have picked out, but are mostly happy with the way things have panned out; things like money and bad jobs are touched on, but never made the focus, and it's clear throughout that they're well-adjusted and settled in a comfortable way, not a quietly desperate one.

All that being said, the film has a cluster of flaws that keep it mired in "good enough" territory. The most pressing of these is that it's simply too damn shaggy: for something with such a clear driving conflict, Neighbors has a remarkable problem with building momentum, and it ends up feeling completely episodic. Clearly-improvised scenes dwindle on and on, and even the scripted moments trail off rather than ending with a snap (more than once, a scene hits its obvious button, and then goes on long enough to introduce some unresolved wrinkle that makes it feel deeply unsatisfying when it finally does cut). Like most narratives about parents but not about parenting, the baby (played by Elise and Zoey Vargas, an unearthly darling set of twins) has a remarkable tendency to evaporate in scenes where she's not inherent to the drama (the Radners, shall we say, have an extravagantly forgiving babysitter).

And it's also, frankly, a bit redundant in the joke department: it's one thing to present a bunch of 18- to 22-year-old boys as obsessed with dicks, that's just good documentary realism. But the film's own reliance on dick jokes is a bit tedious at times, maybe because those jokes tend to pile up in scenes where Byrne doesn't appear. And Byrne not appearing is the biggest problem Neighbors ever has.

Still and all, I found it funny enough - insert "comedy is subjective" boilerplate - if hardly revelatory at the level of theme or creativity. It's genuinely character-driven in a way that modern comedy isn't, often enough, and best of all, it dances in at just 96 minutes, a length of time that a comic film can actually sustain. For that rare nicety alone, I am prepared to offer it my soul.

7/10

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