Iro's One Movie a Day Thread

#340 - Godzilla
Roland Emmerich, 1998



The city of New York is threatened by a giant lizard-like creature.

The 1998 Hollywood version of Godzilla has earned a very unfavourable reputation since its release for some very understandable reasons and those very reasons are very plain to see when you actually watch it. I'm not particularly familiar with any of the original movies, but you don't need to be in order to find this movie just ridiculous, and not in a way that's particularly fun. The human characters are pretty flat - Matthew Broderick plays the hapless protagonist that also doubles as the ignored expert who figures out what's going on, while Maria Pitillo is his ex-girlfriend and also an aspiring journalist (so you just know their stories will inevitably interlock), and Kevin Dunn plays the inevitable military figurehead who disregards the expert's advice in order to kill the monster by any means necessary. The always dependable Jean Reno does what he can as a French secret agent (why are the French involved? Who cares?) and ultimately ends up being the best character in the film as a result, though that's not hard. The movie even throws in a pair of joke characters involving the mayor and his aide, who are obviously modelled on Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel respectively.

But enough about the human characters, let's talk about the real reasons we're watching a Godzilla movie. Sadly, even if I'm going to disregard the fact that the CGI doesn't hold up, that doesn't stop any of the actual action from being hard to enjoy because of how implausible it is even within the context of such a destruction-happy film. Godzilla is the kind of creature that can't walk (slowly, mind you) down the street without smashing something yet I'm supposed to believe he can silently get the drop on a group of helicopters that have been chasing him? His abilities fluctuate as the plot demands and thus makes it difficult to take him seriously as a threat in any way and also helps to bloat the film out in all sorts of irritating and illogical ways (especially in the finale). Throw in some baby Godzillas that come across as off-brand velociraptors and some egregious filmmaking clichés (such as in-universe camera footage that is clearly just actual footage from the film or characters being unable to notice Godzilla despite both loud noises and seismic shockwaves) and you have a film that only barely redeems itself off the back of its unintentional comedic value because its intentional comedic value is just so horribly executed. Know what you're getting into here.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

#341 - Village of the Damned
Wolf Rilla, 1960



An entire English village suffers a blackout and awakens to find that all the women in the village are pregnant with mysterious blond-haired children.

John Carpenter may be one of my favourite directors but his 1995 remake of this film was definitely one of his weakest filmmaking efforts and just a weak film in general. Even so, I still wanted to see the original because it promised to be a decent little piece of paranoia-based sci-fi straight out of the Cold War era, milquetoast English setting be damned. Having George Sanders play the protagonist is definitely a point in the film's favour; his acidic high-culture drawl and focus on studying the children does give his seemingly heroic character just enough edge to be interesting. The other actors don't get much in the way of well-developed characters but still deliver serviceable (if not too remarkable) performances. The children themselves could have easily been irritating, but here their extremely English monotones actually do still have their intended effect of creepiness, as do the rather decent effects required to give them their freaky glowing eyes.

The film is aware of its B-movie nature and keeps itself short, running under 80 minutes in length and breezing through its story. It's lean to a fault, but it stays reasonably engaging throughout and, though its apparent lack of sentimentality may be a strike against it in general, it's still preferable to the abundance of it that worked against the remake. It's a little dry compared to other science-fiction films of the day that worked as allegories for communism and/or McCarthyism and it's not hard to see why it got parodied so deftly on an episode of The Simpsons, but it's still worth at least one viewing for posterity's sake. The quality of the filmmaking and storytelling be damned, the concept of creepy children (born of unwanted pregnancies, no less) being able to read your mind and control your body to the point of murdering you will never not be effective.

#342 - Godzilla
Gareth Edwards, 2014



Fifteen years after a nuclear power plant explodes in Tokyo, a former employee of the plant and his estranged son get caught up in a conflict involving multiple giant monsters that feed on nuclear radiation.

Well, at least it's an improvement on Hollywood's last attempt to make a Godzilla movie. Despite that, this version of Godzilla is still somewhat lacklustre in its attempt to bring giant monster shenanigans to the big-screen. This may have something to do with how it's filtered through the lens of a handful of characters who have a strong personal investment in the monsters' existence (beyond the fact that they are killing people and destroying things, of course). While I understand that having human characters function as something to care about in the midst of all the rampaging, it would be good if they were actually at least halfway interesting. In this regard, Bryan Cranston seems to be the initial protagonist as his actions during the nuclear meltdown at the start of the film launch him on a properly paranoid quest to discover the truth of what happened that fateful day, but the focal point soon swaps to his adult son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as he becomes embroiled in the international conflict involving the eponymous lizard. It's a shame, though, because even if I were to disregard the talent of both actors, it's definitely Cranston that is set up to have the more interesting character arc, whereas Taylor-Johnson gets a very standard set of motivations between trying to get back to his young family and also gain some closure regarding his own monster-related childhood trauma. There are other characters that fill out roles that make their necessity far too easily felt, such as David Strathairn as the stereotypical American general and Ken Watanabe as the Japanese scientist in charge of the investigation. At least they involve some talented actors doing the best with that they've got.

I also understand that a movie like this has to draw out its usage of its monsters in order to not wear out its spectacle so quickly, but the onscreen-to-offscreen ratio for the monsters feels a bit too unbalanced for its own good. Sure, you get quite a few scenes of widespread destruction, but there's little going on to distinguish them from other run-of-the-mill disaster films. Though the 1998 version's decision to show off Godzilla quite frequently throughout its running time was a major contribution to how much of a mess it ultimately was, at least it meant that you got a lot of Godzilla as a result of seeing a movie called Godzilla. I guess it's just as well that any time Godzilla actually appeared on-screen in this version it was bound to be at least somewhat impressive; if nothing else, the effects work looks reasonably good (when they're not being obscured by clouds of smog and smoke caused by the apocalyptic levels of wrecked scenery, of course). Other good moments, such as the skydiving sequence, are also too few in number to make much of a positive impression. Ultimately, though, I'm starting to feel like I'm not really cut out for watching movies like this. It's good if you want a nice harmless blockbuster that doesn't completely insult your intelligence and has some decent visuals, but it's a bit too lacking in substance and has way too much wasted potential when it comes to developing its human characters.

#343 - Jurassic Park III
Joe Johnston, 2001


This film made me pull the exact same face.

Dr. Alan Grant is employed to go on an expedition to the same dinosaur-filled islands from the last two movies.

If The Lost World demonstrated that Spielberg himself wasn't able to recapture the magic of one of the most fun blockbusters in recent memory, then what hope did this extremely lean and very unnecessary threequel have? Bringing back Sam Neill as dinosaur expert Alan Grant does very little to endear one to the film as he is both traumatised by his experiences in the first film yet desperate enough to fund his archaeological digs that he decides to work for a couple (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni, the former of which is wasted here while the latter is especially excruciating to watch) employ him, his assistant, and a trio of mercenaries as part of a trip to the islands for what seems to be a mere honeymoon flight but which soon devolves into a disastrous situation as Grant and the others end up stranded on an island that is crawling with dinosaurs.

From there, Jurassic Park III becomes no better than a straight-to-video continuation of the series as it brings in a whole bunch of flat and frequently irritating characters to seemingly serve as meat for the monsters on display. The effects aren't especially awful - it doesn't go overboard on the CGI and actually features practical effects - but they're put to bad use as a result of some badly structured setpieces (even those that start off promisingly, such as the aviary sequence). Not even the fact that it's slightly darker and more graphic does anything to distract from how convoluted and contrived a lot of the developments tend to be even in a film as short as this one. All this would be fine if it had a sort of ludicrous charm to make up for its considerable shortcomings, but no, it squanders any goodwill left over from the first two films and as a result is only worthwhile as an object of scorn and derision.

#344 - The Sky Crawlers
Mamoru Oshii, 2008



In an alternate history where nations no longer exist and war exists mainly as a pastime for a bored population, a fighter pilot who is incapable of ageing must contend with the ramifications of ceaseless war.

I have to hand it to Mamoru Oshii - he knows how to craft an animé that makes me stop in my tracks. Out of his other films, I have only seen Ghost in the Shell, which took a superficially engaging subject like an outwardly female cyborg detective and used it as a springboard for examining a number of existential questions through its tale of various conflicting artificial intelligences and humans. The Sky Crawlers treads similar ground in its tale about the futility of war as framed by its none-too-fantastic alternate-reality setting. While I remember being somewhat disappointed by my first viewing of Ghost in the Shell due to its lack of action in favour of verbose navel-gazing exchanges between characters, here I find that it's the exact opposite problem that works against the film. As befitting a film about fighter pilots, there are more than a handful of plot-relevant dog-fights peppered throughout the film, but they tend to come across as unwelcome intrusions on the grounded narrative about the population in and around one of the airbases. I also wonder how I'm supposed to interpret the usage of CGI when it came to depicting the fighter planes. Skilled though it is, it doesn't gel with the hand-drawn nature of everything else in the film and just comes across as an unwelcome distraction that undoes the fighting sequences.

Fortunately, the rest of the film is decent enough to compensate for some fairly average action sequences. The concept of "kildren" (young soldiers genetically engineered to be eternally young) is an interesting one and is explored in some interesting ways, especially when it comes to the prickly relationship between the earnest young protagonist and his coldly belligerent superior. Though there is a lot of downtime involving the pilot characters kicking around the base and its surrounding area while waiting for new battles to fight, it functions better as a slow-paced and existential film where the characters comment on their incredibly absurd situation and the sheer banality of it. It's not enough to totally redeem the film's sluggish moments but it's strong enough so that the ending (and the post-credits scene, which makes me glad I didn't do what I normally do with DVRed films and delete as soon as they the credits start rolling) were enough to get to me. Not exactly a classic, but it's got plenty of moments that make it stand out and might even make it worth a second viewing.

I think the problem is that you keep watching films which simply aren't even attempting to give you what you're looking for, Iro.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

What am I looking for?

#345 - Inland Empire
David Lynch, 2006



An actress is employed to star in a Hollywood remake of a Polish film that was never finished due to its supposedly cursed nature resulting in the deaths of its leads.

Though that logline might suggest some degree of coherence when it comes to telling a story, it quickly becomes one of many loose plot threads that is swallowed up by the nightmarish pit of cinematic quicksand that is Inland Empire. Running about three hours in length, it shows an incredible disregard for conventionally straightforward narratives even by Lynch's notoriously incomprehensible standards and packs out its running time with all manner of vignettes that barely share the slightest of connections. A lot of it is carried by the type of strong acting ensemble common to your typical Lynch film. Frequent Lynch collaborator Laura Dern proves to be a great protagonist that cycles through a variety of emotions and truly puts her all into a character that is constantly thrust into all sorts of bizarre situations that are tolerable at best and horrifying at worst. There are plenty of good actors scattered throughout the film, but of particular note are Jeremy Irons as a film director, Justin Theroux as Dern's co-star and the inimitable Harry Dean Stanton as a worn-out producer.

Given how much his other films invoke dreamlike states to inspire both wonder and fear, it's not surprisingly that eventually Lynch would just throw caution to the wind and create a film that maintained that same uncertain vibe for a full feature film. His use of incredibly shaky and choppy digital camerawork only adds to the disorienting nature of the film, while the sound design meant that seeing this in a theatre was a thoroughly unsettling and glorious experience. When the film's not looking like an amateur film writ large, it indulges in the sort of sensory abuse that will definitely not endear this film to the sensitive. Flashing lights, harsh drones on the soundtrack, jump scares...they are all used sparingly enough so that I kept expecting every scene to play out like the diner scene from Mulholland Drive. To maintain that level of tension throughout a three-hour film that occasionally veered into Lynch's trademark sense of off-beat humour (often involving some jabs at the filmmaking process) is an amazing feat.

Watching Inland Empire definitely felt like a gamble due to its intimidating reputation and relatively extreme running time, but fortunately it appealed to my sensibilities without necessarily patronising them either. It combines everything that makes Lynch such a distinctive director, and though I don't think it's going to become my favourite Lynch, it's still an extremely impressive experience thanks to its great cast (especially Dern, delivering what might be the best performance of her career) and powerful realisation of Lynch's most idiosyncratic filmmaking talents. Considering how Lynch hasn't directed a feature-length film since this one, one might wonder if he deliberately intended this to be his final proper film. At least that seems to be a more reassuring possibility than the idea that he is working on a film that manages to outdo this one. If I were to see such a film, my brain would probably melt and I might actually be okay with that.

#346 - The Incredible Hulk
Louis Leterrier, 2008



A reclusive scientist who fights to suppress a violent superhuman alter-ego is forced into a confrontation with the U.S. military, who want to experiment on him for a super soldier program.

Maybe the Hulk isn't that great a superhero in the first place. His Jekyll-and-Hyde nature should provide considerable depth while his destructive tendencies should at least flesh out a superhero movie's demands for thrilling action. Though Hulk was fundamentally a fiasco, I didn't ultimately mind Ang Lee's attempt to bring some degree of high-art gravitas to what should have been a fairly simple blockbuster full of destruction. In rebooting the green guy for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Incredible Hulk decides to take a much more prosaic turn that pulls the Evil Dead II trick of recapping its predecessor in the first few minutes before launching into the next adventure of Bruce Banner (now played by Edward Norton) as he attempts to keep himself away from high-stress situations and military attention while also trying to develop a cure for his condition. Naturally, this plan backfires in some rather contrived and hard-to-believe ways so as to get the plot going, which once again involves him being pursued by the military and also contending with an antagonist who is trying to steal Bruce's power for himself (this time it's an elite commando played by Tim Roth).

I understand that this is supposed to be sort of a reboot, but the fact that it recycles so many of the same details from the plot of Hulk seems to suggest a lack of imagination when it comes to telling stories about the Hulk. The military understandably want to contain and study him, while he has a complicated relationship with a colleague (Liv Tyler) who just so happens to be the daughter of the general (William Hurt) who is hell-bent on trapping him. Even the superficial differences concerning the power-hungry villain do little to distinguish him in any positive manner, though at least it guarantees the climax isn't nebulous and hard to follow. At least the introduction of a "cure" sub-plot involving an anonymous scientist makes for something different, though it's not explored in a lot of depth. The plot as a whole is rather utilitarian in terms of both external and internal developments; having some good actors like Norton or Hurt or Roth isn't enough to sell these characters most of the time. The action is okay and the effects work isn't especially terrible, but there's nothing I could say about it that wouldn't sound like damning with faint praise.

In the years since this film's release, Marvel have introduced more new heroes and not only given them standalone films but also standalone sequels, whereas the Hulk has only appeared as part of both Avengers films with no current plans to give him a spin-off film of his own. While that could be justified by how Bruce wants to spend as little time hulking out as possible, on a meta level it's also entirely possible that, after being in two films that run through such fundamentally similar stories to wildly different yet equally mediocre results, maybe the character just can't support a sufficiently engaging film on his own.

#347 - Now, Voyager
Irving Rapper, 1942



A frumpy spinster gets a physical and mental makeover before embarking on a romance with a married man she meets aboard a cruise ship.

Now, Voyager is another one of those classic Hollywood melodramas that isn't bad by any measure but it's still hard to think of it as anything more than alright. It's reasonably well-made, even if it does invoke the tiresome trope involving a homely bespectacled woman becoming highly attractive once she drops the glasses and gets dolled up, which has gone beyond cliché by now (and I do wonder how fresh it was in 1942). Fortunately, Bette Davis is a good enough performer to sell such a transformation as she plays the black sheep of a well-to-do Boston family due to her unsightly physical appearance and various psychological problems. Her new psychiatrist (Claude Rains) decides to push her to extremes in order to bring her out of both her internal and external shells - before long, she's looking like Bette Davis and on a cruise ship where she meets a debonair gentleman (Paul Henreid), exploring the highs and lows of their tumultuous courtship.

The film does betray its assembly-line nature a bit with its cast of familiar actors, somewhat utilitarian romantic storyline, and appropriately emotional yet none-too-distinctive background score. Of course, when it comes to films like this I don't mind the more boilerplate aspects provided there's some good talent involved. I'm still yet to see a genuinely bad performance by Davis and she has some decent actors backing her up here. The melodramatic aspects are handled rather well as Davis is constantly at odds with various members of her family, especially her domineering mother (Gladys Cooper), as well as her relationship with Henreid's charming family man going in some rather unexpected (but not entirely disappointing) directions. Definitely recommended to those with a fondness for old-school Hollywood romance, though I can't see its appeal going further than that.

#348 - Camille
George Cukor, 1936



In 19th-century France, a high-class socialite from extremely humble beginnings must juggle the comfortable social standing granted by her fiancé with her love of another man.

Between this and Ninotchka, it's good to see that Greta Garbo is living up to her reputation as a classic actress from the first era of Hollywood talkies. It is this talent that definitely carries a splendid-looking but rather hollow costume drama. Between her exquisitely sculpted features and distinctive accent, she proves to be a good core for the film to build around. Other characters don't leave too much of an impression in comparison, whether it's her wealthy and powerful fiancé or the dapper young man who wins her fancy. There is a stand-out scene late in the film that does involve the young man's father, but that's one remarkable scene among many unremarkable ones (though at least the film sticks its ending fairly well). There's some lavish production detail that goes into recreating the fashion and setting of the time and it's shot reasonably well.

Of course, the problem is that the story at the heart of the film is a very dry one. Class differences both open and secret, forbidden love, costume balls - so very French, is it not? Unfortunately, it didn't really leave much of an impression on me beyond the fact that it was technically competent. Watching it back-to-back with Now, Voyager probably didn't do it any favours; they are both very different takes on romantic drama, but Now, Voyager has enough character to make up for its somewhat simple premise, whereas Camille promises a captivating period piece with an evocative combination of actors and storytelling but still falls considerably short of classic.

I attended an exhibition on David Lynch and his artistic output on Monday afternoon, which featured several short films from all across his decades-long career (though I didn't get to see all of them - there was one screen that was looking Rabbits, but I didn't think I had time to watch it). Due to their brevity and relative lack of content, I decided to give them some bite-sized reviews here because...why not? Films are films, no matter the length.

#349 - Six Figures Getting Sick (Six Times) (1966)

An early animation by Lynch that involves some crude yet fascinating collage-based techniques to depict...just what the title indicates. Abrasive soundtrack strikes again. Interesting enough for a few loops.

#350 - Head with Hammer (2001)

It is literally ten to fifteen seconds of an elaborate clockwork machine winding up and hitting a man in the head with a hammer. It barely counts as a movie, but it is somewhat amusing to see this looping on a small screen again and again and again.

#351 - Pierre and Sonny Jim ()

Another animation, this time about a pair of puppets with inflated rubber gloves for heads as they flail around for three-and-a-half minutes. Also hard to see the point of this other than just Lynch being Lynch.

#352 - Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1995)

Filmed using a Lumière camera to celebrate its 100th anniversary and tells a decent enough little story in the space of a minute with police officers, concerned citizens, and a bizarre experiment being conducted by grotesque figures. The use of an antiquated camera (that doesn't allow for editing, which made for some interesting scene transitions) in tandem with Lynch's more unsettling sensibilities makes for a rather evocative minute - enough so to make me wish it had been slightly longer. As far as the shorts I saw during the exhibit went, it was probably the best.

#353 - Intervalometer Experiments (2007)

A trio of experiments that Lynch did using time-lapse digital photography complete with droning soundtrack. The one involving the growing tree shadows and the one involving the time-lapse shot of the foliage outside a window are interesting enough to watch, but the one that involves a wide landscape as day turns to night is not nearly as interesting as it sounds.

#354 - The Alphabet (1968)

Another early short, this time about the anxieties of learning conveyed through both animation (the opening involving the reciting of the alphabet is the highlight) and live-action (depicting a girl who is made violently ill by learning the alphabet). Sounds ridiculous, but it plays out rather well.

#355 - The 3 Rs (2011)

Played back-to-back with The Alphabet because it covers similar thematic ground, except this time it's more concerned with, well, the three Rs (mainly arithmetic). Despite the passage of time and improvement of technology (this is shot on digital video rather than film, for instance), it doesn't necessarily make for a better short.

Sorry you didn't like Camille

For what it's worth, I didn't hate it.

#356 - Lost Highway
David Lynch, 1997



While serving a sentence on death row for the murder of his wife, a middle-aged saxophonist is suddenly replaced by a young mechanic.

Lost Highway is a film that I have some rather mixed feelings about (never mind the rating). Looking at Lynch's feature films before and after makes me think that it somehow manages to be a culmination of everything he'd done up until that point and yet still feels like a very rough draft for the sort of truly mind-bending work he'd do with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. I do take some issue with its especially lurid and pulpy subject matter, which no doubt as something to do with the fact that the film was co-written by Wild at Heart scribe Barry Gifford, which I incidentally cite as my least favourite Lynch feature (as of writing, the only one I haven't seen is Dune, so time will tell if that supposed fiasco manages to overtake Wild at Heart in that regard).

Lost Highway starts off promisingly by introducing us to a halfway-comprehensible narrative involving saxophonist Fred (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) receiving a series of increasingly intrusive videotapes of their home, as well as Fred meeting a supernaturally disturbing mystery man (Robert Blake) at a house party. After some dark, ambiguous (and occasionally unsettling) scenes, it's revealed that Fred is guilty of murdering Renee and is put on death row. During his time on death row, freaky stuff happens and Fred is inexplicably replaced by Pete (Balthazar Getty), who then gets released under police surveillance and ends up falling in with local gangster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and his mistress Alice (Patricia Arquette). It is this extended middle section beginning with the introduction of Pete that the movie starts to drag a bit. I do have to wonder if the lacklustre acting on the parts of both Getty and Arquette is a deliberate choice on Lynch's part, as if the film is attempting to put out a parody of noir films with its very clichéd plot. Blandly handsome male lead, doe-eyed femme fatale, homicidal crime kingpin, half-assed attempt at both a big score and a getaway...it's peppered with some very Lynchian moments such as Mr. Eddy giving a foul-mouthed yet safety-conscious beatdown to an errant tailgater or the reappearance of the Mystery Man or the actual "big score" (complete with one of the most gruesomely bizarre death scenes ever made even by Lynch standards), but the whole relationship that develops between Pete and Alice is easily the worst thing about the film. Even taking into account the possibility of dark parody or any interpretations of the film's dream-state nature, it still feels like a chore to watch these two.

That being said, the rest of the film plays out reasonably well. Pullman, Blake, and Loggia make the most of their screen-time; though Loggia may be playing a character that's almost identical to Frank Booth in his mixture of down-to-earth charm and twisted menace, he more than makes it his own in every scene he's in. Blake, meanwhile, becomes one of the most memorable things about the film with his uncannily pale appearance and sinister affability making him a quintessential scene-stealer. There's the usual interplay of sound and vision that makes Lynch films quite the aesthetic treat despite their occasional lack of substance - in almost stereotypical fashion, he once again goes back to the "friendly small town with seedy criminal element" well but is sure to update his younger characters for Generation X. On that note, the musical soundtrack once again includes the usual combination of cool jazz, foreboding strings and straight up drones that we've come to expect from regular collaborator Angelo Badalamenti (as well as chilled-out lounge numbers from Barry Adamson), but the stuff that really makes an impression (for better or worse) is the collection of rock songs curated by none other than Trent Reznor. While some of the numbers serve to date the film horribly (Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson come to mind, both of which stand out for the wrong reasons), the Rammstein numbers are used to surprisingly good effect with the weird keys, thudding guitars and ominous German vocals (though they are still sort of goofy underneath it all, it serves the film well enough in context). It is worth noting that the rocking songs don't kick in until the Pete section of the film, which underscores both the best and worst parts of that section.

To me, Lost Highway is either David Lynch's best bad film or his worst good film (probably the latter). The first and third acts build up such a great atmosphere that it even keeps the sub-Twin Peaks antics of the second act (what is Pete if not a carbon copy of James Hurley, one of the cult show's most markedly useless characters?) from sinking the film completely, deliberately hokey and somewhat-sensible-in-context narrative be damned. Everything else about it - visuals, audio, performances - is so haphazard in terms of quality that I can't uniformly praise it all, yet it has this indescrible charm to it that elevates it far above the station of the similarly trashy Wild at Heart (though I am due for a re-watch of that, I can't imagine it's one of those films that improves with the passage of time - hell, even Lost Highway wasn't one of those films). I still like it, but I doubt I'll ever truly love it - honestly, given what this film is like, it makes sense that I wouldn't.

#357 - Seconds
John Frankenheimer, 1966



A middle-aged banker follows through on a friend's suggestion to visit a secret company that specialises in faking a person's death before providing them with a new appearance and life.

Seeing this so soon after The Face of Another naturally makes me think of this as an unintentional companion piece to Teshigahara's film, which also came out in 1966 and was a black-and-white experimental film about a man receiving a new face and identity. While the protagonist of Teshigahara's film deliberately pursues a new face and identity out of a sense of embittered self-interest generated by severe physical disfigurement, the protagonist of Seconds (John Randolph) is a buttoned-down businessman who is pressured into the procedure by an old friend who promises him a new lease on life if he takes the offer. After a prolonged first act where he is introduced to the mysterious company, he undergoes the surgical procedure and becomes a handsome artist (Rock Hudson) who is then relocated to a whole new life.

Seconds functions well as an all-encompassing allegory for a number of different subjects that are both pertinent to the time period and also hold up reasonably well in 2015. The most obvious target of the film is the American Dream itself, with its protagonist being a rather wealthy family man who may have his suspicions about the clandestine nature of the company but still goes through with it because it sounds preferable to his bland existence (and that's before they blackmail him into staying on anyway). The fact that his new lifestyle consists of a swinging condo complete with a job as an artist offers more than a few jabs at bohemian counterculture and gentrification, especially when there are some amusing-in-hindsight moments such as Hudson being extremely reluctant to participate in a Bacchanalian festival teeming with naked women. Of course, the company rears its head soon enough to provide the film with a much-needed third act (and, if we're being honest, then the second act does flag a bit as Hudson has to get used to his new life). The creativity behind the camera definitely shows through some cinematography that is eye-catching and disorienting in all the right ways, grounding this rather fantastic tale in some serious realism. Despite being very much of its time, Seconds hasaged rather well and, though the middle of the film is a bit on the flabby side, is a decent slice of arty science-fiction and is definitely worth watching for that ending.

Addendum: I thought about rating it higher, but I'm not sure it deserves a higher rating than The Face of Another. They both complement each other so well and to pick one over the other would be too difficult.

You've seen 357'movies this year? Damn. I think that's extraordinarily impressive.

I think Mark F recently claimed that he had seen over 1700 this year alone, so I reckon it could be more impressive. Honestly, I think the fact that I find time to watch at least one a day no matter what is the impressive part. I also count shorts, though they make up a very small percentage of the films on my list.

#358 - Ex Machina
Alex Garland, 2015



A computer programmer is invited to a remote research facility by his tech-genius boss in order to help him test the self-awareness of an artificially intelligent gynoid.

Novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland made his name by writing screenplays for science-fiction films like 28 Days Later..., Sunshine, and Dredd, so it makes sense that his directorial debut is working off another science-fiction story. While those other films have tended towards using their premises for entertainment and spectacle above all else, Ex Machina attempts to wring out something with a bit more depth by plumbing a subject that always proves to be an extremely reliable source of deep (or "deep") sci-fi - artificial intelligence. The premise, which revolves around a base cast of four characters all secluded in a bunker-like mansion in the middle of nowhere, is obviously going to provide some tension and does anticipate a savvy audience's predictions reasonably well. It's obvious from the second we see Oscar Isaac's chummy, alcoholic tech-genius interact with Domhnall Gleeson's gawky programmer that something is going to go very wrong before too long, even when Alicia Vikander's semi-realistic gynoid shows up and starts getting tested by Gleeson. Of course, the film manages to balance its not-especially-deep exploration of the implications of artificial intelligence with a persistently tense atmosphere that plays up the relationships between the three leads (as well as Sonoya Mizuno as Isaac's mute servant) as the true conflict.

The effects work is fairly basic and only really extends to rendering Vikander's transparent "skin" and shiny, fluorescent innards, but its relative lack of ambition means that it is accomplished reasonably well. A score co-written by Portishead's Geoff Barrow is appropriately low-key and minimalist, only veering into typically dreadful drones at the most appropriate moments. As for the performances...Isaac delivers another great one as the extremely affable designer who rolls with his character's obviously suspicious nature and provides someone a bit more complex than that as he waxes existential about the inevitability of artificial intelligence becoming a reality, while Vikander does a reasonably good job at playing an AI developing a consciousness considering how hard it is to perform such a role without overplaying or underplaying. Gleeson is something of a weak link but that's at least part of the story as his status as a neutral party is fundamental to the plot and he underplays appropriately. On that note, Ex Machina does a pretty good job of justifying its shortcomings within the context of its narrative (including the all-too-familiar problem with stories involving female robots, namely that they exist to serve as sexual/romantic interests for male humans). Indeed, Garland and co. even anticipate several of the audience's predictions and subvert them at the earliest sensible opportunity. While that's not quite as good (or difficult) as avoiding said shortcomings altogether, it really is the next best thing and makes for a good slice of sci-fi with the right mix of characterisation, thrills, navel-gazing, and technical achievement.

#359 - Bad Boys II
Michael Bay, 2003


Will Smith pulling the same face I pulled throughout this film.

A pair of detectives are tasked with chasing down an international drug cartel.

Hoo, boy. I know Michael Bay doesn't have the most favourable reputation, but The Rock at least made me think that he could craft a decent blockbuster at least once. The original Bad Boys was far from the best movie but it still made for a half-decent movie that had its occasional fun moment here and there due to the fact that it padded out its fairly standard cop movie narrative with some sporadically funny odd-couple banter between its two leads and also the occasional chuckle due to its extremely illogical comedy of errors. As such, I did have some small degree of hope that Bad Boys II could at least live up to the admittedly middling (but not horrible) standards of its predecessor, but unfortunately it fails in just about every regard possible. It's too long, too boring, too unfunny, and too...well, bad.

Even in the first film, the relationship between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence never quite had the sort of charisma or chemistry to entertain me, let alone seriously convince me that these two were actually good friends who would die for one another if need be. Smith is a snarky ladies' man while Lawrence is an insecure married father, and their constant bickering during every possible moment (whether it's walking down the street or in the middle of a high-speed car chase) never actually gets funny enough to remotely justify its existence. In a variation on the "idiot plot" from the first film, there's a sub-plot when it turns out that an undercover agent (Gabrielle Union) that is working on the same case as they are is not only Lawrence's sister but also the current (and surprisingly steady) love interest of Smith. The only reason that sub-plot doesn't feel awkward and overdone is because, in the context of this particular film, everything feels awkward and overdone - and not in an entertaining way either. What little goodwill was engendered by the original's comedy is completely undone here as Smith and Lawrence play off each other's boring stereotypes in the least amusing way possible, especially when the former brusquely rejects the latter's attempts to psychoanalyse him or the pair of them have a heart-to-heart that is broadcast publicly throughout and implies that they are gay lovers. Including the scene where Lawrence gets high on ecstasy and also the constant racist barbs they exchange with a pair of Latino rival detectives (but it's okay because they totally help each other out in the end), the humour here is Bay at his worst (the worst that I've seen him - from all accounts, the Transformers sequels are even worse). The first film at least had the odd laugh here and there, but it's as dire as a funeral home here (speaking of which, there are several gags involving a funeral home and no, none of them are funny either).

This could at least be a tolerable but not insignificant flaw if the action (you know, the main focal point of any action movie) was any good, but unfortunately it's not. When the most memorable action sequence of your film ends up being one that rips off Jackie Chan's Police Story (a film that was almost twenty years old by the time this one came out), that shows a lack of imagination that no amount of big-budget destruction can overcome. Otherwise, it lapses into car chases and gunfights that are repeated to hell and back while deciding that gross implausibility is an adequate substitute for genuine suspension of disbelief. I think what pushes Bad Boys II into irredeemable half-a-popcorn-box territory isn't just that it's ludicrously implausible (I mean, I weathered Armageddon reasonably well and that was an atrocious excuse for a film). At least Armageddon had the benefit of being an unintentional punchline when its attempts to be serious just came across as ham-fisted and tone-deaf. Bad Boys II undermines its action elements with an especially painful comedic side to the point where a bullet list of everything wrong with this film would consist mainly of the bad jokes (such as the lead duo mocking an extra by comparing him to Ludacris while a Ludacris song plays on the soundtrack) more so than the terrible excuses for action. The film even ends on the rehashing of not one but two jokes that weren't even funny the first time around. Until I end up seeing one of the Transformers sequels, I think I'm ready to call this my least favourite Michael Bay movie, which definitely makes it one of my least favourite films ever. Good God.