Iro's One Movie a Day Thread

#453 - Lucy
Luc Besson, 2014



A young woman who is forced to become a drug mule starts to absorb the brand-new drug she's carrying and it turns her into a hyper-intelligent superhuman.

In the past, I have bought into some admittedly ludicrous science-fiction premises for the sake of good action sequences (most notably Equilibrium building a world where becoming an efficient marksman can be reduced to a martial-arts discipline rooted in complex mathematics), but these days I'm not likely to forgive such a premise since they're just too damn ridiculous for their own good (case in point - Wanted). Lucy takes things to an especially absurd level by taking a long-debunked myth (namely, that since humans only use about 10% of their brain's potential then what would happen if we could use the whole 100%?) and uses it to build an incredibly soft science-fiction premise that allows for its eponymous protagonist (Scarlett Johansson) to go from hapless everywoman to a superpowered freak of nature.

Of course, to get there first the film spends its first third setting up Johansson as an unwitting victim of a Taiwanese mob (led by Choi Min-sik), who have plans to smuggle several packs of a brand-new recreational drug out of the country by using Johansson and a few others as mules who get the packs surgically inserted into their abdomens. Of course, thanks to the extremely implausible plot development where Johansson is kicked in the stomach by one of Choi's subordinates (who you'd think would know about the whole drug mule situation and would, y'know, not kick a drug-mule in the part of her body that was carrying a pack of drugs), the pack breaks and leaks the drug directly into her system, which causes her to start unlocking her genetic potential and before long she escapes and starts to go on a journey that initially seems to be about revenge against her captors but soon develops into something far greater than something as petty as vengeance. This, of course, means enlisting the help of a professor of scientific theory (Morgan Freeman, who helpfully spends a sizable chunk of his screentime providing us with exposition and undesirable flashbacks to Wanted) and a French detective (Amr Waked), even though Choi and his gang are in relentless pursuit.

The problem with Lucy isn't so much the bogus science that gives it its premise (though that does beggar some considerable belief) so much as...well, everything else. Johansson's rapidly evolving state of consciousness means that she soon evolves into a Dr. Manhattan-like humanoid who loses her empathy for humans to the point where she has no problem shooting and running over innocent bystanders yet will conspicuously leave most of the film's actual villains alive, (mostly) unharmed, and free to come back and attack her later because this film needs to generate conflict somehow. Speaking of conflict, the fact that Johansson's abilities include not just increased power and intelligence but also the increased power to manipulate the people and world around her also sucks any real tension out of the conflict as she can work her way out of every situation (and it's not like Freeman and Waked being endangered as a result of the plot makes for much in the way of stakes due to their sheer lack of characterisation). This lack of tension is very much present in the climax, which draws inspiration from a handful of different movies (including Besson's own Léon) but fails to make anything impressive out of it.

Lucy drew some ire when it first came out due to not only its scientifically ridiculous plot catalyst plus its somewhat racist overtones (almost every villain in the film is Asian, the token white villain never suffers any comeuppance, the white American protagonist non-fatally shoots an innocent Asian taxi driver simply for not knowing how to speak English, etc. in ways that not even the casting of Freeman and Waked as heroes can compensate for), but now that I've actually seen the film it's easy to see that it's quite simply a horrible film in general. The premise serves as a launching pad for an incredibly hollow and low-stakes film as Johansson gets progressively more powerful and is only as competent or incompetent as she needs to be in order to pad the film out to 90 minutes. It gets to the point where even attempts to add some emotional resonance to the film (such as Johansson's tearful phone call to her mother before she evolves beyond human sentiment completely) come across as failures at best. Lucy in general comes across as a failure at best where bad science ends up being the least of the film's problems and the action sequences aren't remotely good enough to justify the rest of the film's existence.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Have you ever seen The Lawnmower Man, Iro? Is this like a C21st version of that?

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

I have not seen The Lawnmower Man. It might be because of the proximity in viewings, but my main association was with Akira considering how both films revolve around an ordinary person being forced into circumstances where they develop increasingly powerful abilities that allow them to manipulate reality as they see fit (and that's without taking the extremely similar endings into account, to boot).

Well if you ever get the chance to watch it for free, I'd be interested to hear what you thought about it.

The full movie seems to be available on YouTube. I'll report back when I do.

#454 - THX 1138
George Lucas, 1971



In a dystopian future where people's emotions are repressed and, a man and woman end up rebelling against the oppressive regime.

George Lucas's first foray into feature-length filmmaking is a pretty standard example of 1970s dystopian cinema that takes place in a world where humans are referred to by serial numbers (for example, the title is the name of Robert Duvall's protagonist) and have their humanity repressed by a combination of factors such as mass-produced medication, booths dedicated to religious worship, and robotic enforcers that are very willing to resort to physical violence to keep the humans in line. As with many other dystopian films, the plot is driven by a need to escape from the film's oppressive reality by any means possible, and Duvall eventually conspires to escape with his roommate (Maggie McOmie) with whom he has developed a romantic connection that is outlawed by society. Thus begins a journey through the reasonably well-developed but not too inventive world of the film as Duvall encounters all manner of obstacles in his bid for freedom, most notably when he gets imprisoned over his rebellion.

THX 1138 is decent enough for a feature-length debut that draws in some considerable talent (aside from Duvall, distinguished character actor Donald Pleasence shows up as a fellow citizen) and has an interesting enough visual aesthetic with its metal-faced police officers and bright white prisons, but it's let down a bit by the fact that it's not an especially inventive film in terms of plot or characterisation. The characterisation can't really be helped due to the fact that every character is supposed to be an emotionless drone with no personality, but at least Duvall sells his own character's doubts reasonably well on occasion. The plot suffers because, well, it's a pretty standard dystopia plot and thus it only seems to exist in service to the world as opposed to vice versa. The satire on display is pretty entry-level, but at least the visual style is decent. While THX 1138 doesn't exactly do anything especially new when it comes to dystopia fiction, it's still a short and somewhat watchable film that might be worthwhile for sci-fi fans looking to see a different take on a familiar sub-genre, but if that sounds like you then you shouldn't get your hopes up over this being amazing.

#455 - Blue Steel
Kathryn Bigelow, 1989



When a rookie cop shoots an armed robber, a bystander acquires the robber's gun and becomes obsessed with violence.

Blue Steel marks the fifth Kathryn Bigelow film I've seen and it marks the first film of hers that I have genuinely disliked. Sandwiched between a pair of cult classics, 1987's vampire neo-Western Near Dark and 1991's extreme-sports caper flick Point Break, it is ultimately a rather disappointing cop movie that was co-written by Bigelow and her Near Dark collaborator Eric Red. Granted, it does offer a somewhat unusual premise in having a female NYPD rookie (Jamie Lee Curtis) get caught up in a convenience store robbery during her first day on the job. It results in her shooting the perp, but the perp's gun goes missing when a yuppie bystander (Ron Silver) picks it up and, inspired by the events he's just witnessed, begins his own gradual descent into wanton violence. Meanwhile, Curtis must go through some serious struggles as her superiors question her use of deadly force on a supposedly armed robber when no gun was recovered from the scene...

I give Blue Steel some credit for doing something slightly different with its takes on both protagonist and antagonist. Curtis's gender does understandably draw some derisive comments from her male superiors and her partner (Clancy Brown, who becomes the subject of one especially forced romantic sub-plot), plus it adds a somewhat interesting spin to her relationship with her parents (Louise Fletcher and Philip Bosco), especially when it comes to her abusive father. Silver, on the other hand, makes for a somewhat interesting villain due to his being a rather ordinary Wall Street type whose growing obsession with mindless violence as a release from his everyday drudgery feels like an antedecent to characters like American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. Of course, this is about all the depth there is to these characters before they are both plunged into a excruciatingly standard cat-and-mouse game that's given only the slightest of variations on the generic Hollywood cop movie formula. Other films have shown Bigelow to be a reasonably talented filmmaker who has worked with some intriguing high concepts, but here that talent just gets wasted on a series of sequences that fluctuate between slow-motion shoot-outs and slasher-like suspense. As a result, Blue Steel feels like a horribly dated and inconsequential piece of work that takes a somewhat interesting premise and yet doesn't make a sufficiently interesting film out of it, which is very disappointing considering what the director and her collaborators have otherwise been capable of doing.

I was never really interested in watching Lucy. And after that review, I definitely didn't become more interested.

It just seemed ridiculous from the very beginning and from what I have read and seen the actual execution of it was just as silly as the plot.

But a good review!

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MovieMeditation's Cinema Reviews // Film Diary 2015 // Letterboxd Profile // MovieMeditation's Top 50 Horror

When I heard bad things about Lucy, I thought people were being stubborn about it. Yes, the premise is stupid, get over yourself. A lot of great sci-fi movies have dumb premises. Then I actually saw the movie. It's pretty terrible. It almost makes me disappointed, because if I was told about how awful the characters and storyline were instead of just the premise I wouldn't have seen it at all. Oh well. You nailed a lot of the problems I had with it, mostly at how the hero is murdering innocent people. I can't root for that.

It's been a while, but I remember liking Blue Steel. I'm a big Bigelow fan; my favorite of her's is Strange Days, just ahead of Near Dark-have you seen it?

Lucy sucked-agreed!

I do have to wonder if the fake brain science was supposed to be a smokescreen for the fact that the whole movie makes very little sense aside from that, and what parts do make sense suck anyway for reasons I mentioned in the review. Even from a "switch your brain off and enjoy" point of view (which is ironic considering the premise), it's an extremely dissatisfying piece of work.

The other Bigelow films I've seen are Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days, and The Hurt Locker. Near Dark is probably my favourite by default, though I've been meaning to revisit Strange Days and The Hurt Locker (Point Break is fun, but not enough so to be my favourite).

you didn't like it, but you make Blue Steel sound kinda interesting so i'm gonna take note of it. thanks

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letterboxd

Yeah, Blue Steel is somewhere between a and on the basis of its premise and leads alone, but I obviously wasn't fussed about the execution in general.

I tried to watch Blue Steel once. The key word is "tried."

#456 - The Shop Around the Corner
Ernst Lubitsch, 1940



A pair of employees in a Budapest store share an extremely belligerent co-existence in person without realising that they are in a romantic pen-pal relationship with one another.

It's a credit to any film where you can know just about everything there is to know about a film before going in and it still manages to win you over just fine. The Shop Around the Corner uses a very tried-and-true formula for its story - that of the people who hate each other in reality but who have unwittingly forged a secret relationship through another medium. Here, it is between two colleagues at a leathergoods shop in Budapest, one a stubborn veteran (James Stewart) and the other a newly-employed go-getter (Margaret Sullavan) who instantly step on each other's toes in their attempts to appease their boss (Frank Morgan). The film's main variation on this familiar formula ends up being something of a heavily foreshadowed twist when it is revealed that Stewart and Sullavan are pen-pals who got into contact through an anonymous classified ad. Their passionate and intelligent correspondence naturally makes for an ironic counterpoint to their passive-aggressive work environment.

Even as the film's A-story follows a somewhat easy to predict progression, it is buoyed by a good cast of characters and some capable performers. An interesting thing I've noticed about old Hollywood films that are set in foreign countries and feature characters native to the region is in how most of the cast members don't even bother attempting any remotely European accents (while some of them coincidentally do have such accents), though it's a forgiveable trait that I figure makes things more convenient for actors and audiences alike. Imagine James Stewart trying to sound Hungarian - yeah. He still makes for a sufficiently earnest and likeable protagonist anyway, while Sullavan makes for a good counterpart as they both avoid completely descending into acid-tongued antipathy and thus don't come across as boring. The supporting characters don't all ring true (the shop's wise-cracking errand boy is more than a little irksome), but they flesh out the film and its setting impressively enough so that when the film ends up dedicating time to a sub-plot involving the shop's boss suspecting his wife of infidelity, it doesn't feel like a weak attempt at padding. Throw in some clever little jokes (often involving the cigarette case that doubles as a music-box), surprising yet believable plot developments, and a general sense of warmth to the shop and those who work in it and you actually have a reasonably well-developed old-school romance film that is definitely worth a watch.

#457 - Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Kevin Smith, 2001



When a pair of low-level drug dealers find out that a comic book loosely based on their lives is being turned into a movie, they set out for Hollywood in order to stop production on the movie.

I don't think I've seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back all the way through in at least a decade and not since I first went through a Kevin Smith phase that involved me watching his first five films (Jersey Girl's reputation put me off watching it for a long time), all of which take place in the same inter-connected cinematic universe that is colloquially referred to as the "View Askewniverse" in reference to Smith's View Askew production company. The most prominent connection between the Askewniverse films is of course Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith himself), a pair of marijuana dealers who play a classic comedy odd couple. Jay is rude, talkative, and not very bright, whereas Silent Bob lives up to his name as a perpetually mute character who tends to communicate through small gestures and generally comes across as smarter and more polite than Jay. The two of them have played supporting roles of various sizes in Smith's other films, though here they get to be the leads as they set out on their own adventure after they finally get banned from their favourite spot to hang out and deal - the Quick Stop from Clerks. They soon learn that Bluntman and Chronic, a superhero comic based on their actual selves, is being turned into a movie and is prompting anonymous Internet commentors to start mocking the duo themselves. Naturally, Jay and Silent Bob decide to trek from New Jersey to Hollywood in order to stop the movie from being made and therefore stop people making fun of them on the Internet.

The plot of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is fundamentally rooted in metafictional irony - it's a Jay and Silent Bob movie that ends up being about sabotaging the people who are making a Jay and Silent Bob movie. This spreads to the jokes that leave no target untouched in search of a laugh. There are many call-backs to other Smith films, self-deprecation, biting-the-hand humour aimed at Hollywood (especially Miramax, who produced this film), random pop-cultural parodies ranging from Charlie's Angels to Scooby-Doo, and when all else fails there's some easy juvenile humour thanks to its two immature leads. Indeed, it seems like the most genuine laughs I got out of this film now can be credited to Jay and his tendency towards either spouting foul-mouthed one-liners (case in point - the scene where he and Silent Bob get online and write their own response to the Internet trolls) or ending up on the receiving end of some rather painful and humiliating circumstances (such as his surprise encounter with "the Cock-Knocker", who does exactly what you'd expect). Unfortunately, easy jokes at the expensive of the more insufferable member of the leading duo only throw into sharp relief how bad the film ends up being when it tries to genuinely be clever. A blatant example is how the film recycles the "movie character complains about movie's badness before facing the camera and staring" gag from Top Secret! at least three times, but plenty of the barbs end up failing, especially when they invoke self-deprecation. This much is clear with Chris Rock playing a militant black director whose cracks about Hollywood's inherent flaws just tend to induce groans and fond memories of when Smith could actually write decent jokes for characters like Hooper X from Chasing Amy or Rufus from Dogma.

On that note, so many of the call-backs to earlier Smith films just feel horribly forced, especially since the film with the greatest relevance to the wacky stoner-buddy road movie adventure of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back ends up being the extremely tragicomic and realistic relationship drama that is Chasing Amy. Even the parodic non sequiturs based on films like The Fugitive and Planet of the Apes tend to fall flat more often than not and do feel like weak padding (the best example of this being the Scooby-Doo segment, which could easily have been cut without anyone noticing). The biting-the-hand humour that starts appearing in droves once the pair finally reach Hollywood also leaves a lot to be desired even as it parodies iconic Miramax properties like Good Will Hunting or Scream and the people involved in making them (such as indie darling Gus Van Sant being too busy counting out stacks of cash to actually direct - ho ho). That's without getting into how weak the sub-plot involving the van full of female jewel thieves posing as environmentalists tends to be even for a broad comedy, though at least that gives us Will Ferrell in one of his more bearable roles as an incompetent wildlife marshall intent on chasing down the pair. That's without getting started on how downright obnoxious the film's tendency towards resorting to gay jokes can be regardless of any spontaneously amused reactions one might get out of them.

While Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back isn't the worst movie that Kevin Smith ever made, knowing that he intended it to be the final film in the View Askewniverse does make me feel that this is really is the beginning of the end for Smith as it showcases a lot of the same narrative and comedic flaws that would be exacerbated to greater levels in each subsequent film (with the possible exceptions of Clerks II and Red State, which I contend are the only truly decent films he's made in the past fifteen years). Jay and Bob make for funny enough comic-relief characters in other movies (and I'm not just saying that so that they don't threaten to find me and kick my ass), but in trying to fill an entire feature-length film about them he throws in just about everything that he hopes will stick and the film ultimately becomes a serious mess as a result. It did get enough laughs out of me so as not to be a total failure as a comedy, but they are stretched far too thin across this film's running time to make it a genuinely decent film. It also made me feel like re-watching Purple Rain, for whatever that's worth.

I've not seen it for two or three years now, but I love this film. It's just stupidly funny.

Glad to see you are not a huge fan of Love Story

I bought Lucy on bluray for $10 I over paid for it

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Buddha

I knew you were going to qualify it like that! . Although the movie is not well received by people I enjoy it! However, it's a fact that it's not a good movie as you said there is no conflict, she is so powerful that it's boring. I enjoyed watching the cinema sins version of it and constantly repeating why didn't she just kill all the enemies and stuff. People often say the same about Superman, that he is really powerful and boring, if it weren't because of his weakness he will be like a God but I think I enjoy God-like people so I am totally okey with it .

Superman is action hero so it is problematic that he is too powerful. Lucy is not an action film, it is philosophical sci- fi.