Three Films Make A Post: The lucky ones freeze to death.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011): One of the many fascinating aspects of Sean Durkin’s film about a woman, Martha, (Elizabeth Olsen) who has freshly escaped from a cult to the home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) is how it manages to be enigmatic and precise at the same time. But then, it uses its precision exactly to (re)create the imprecision of memory, inducing in its audience the same confusing floating sense of reality, identity and memory its titular character is existing in. There’s great clarity to Durkin’s portrayal of things not being clear at all, so to speak.

Beetlejuice (1988): Ah, remember the time when Tim Burton was young, his aesthetic still fresh to the audience’s eyes, and critics weren’t complaining this auteur was exactly doing what auteur theory asks of him? This is very much prime Burton, in the weirdness of his preoccupations as well as in the sweetness of said preoccupations (Burton always being the nicest weirdo in any given room), as it is in the accomplished and peculiar way the director presents them here. Sometimes, I do believe that his falling out of critical favour has less to do with his films as with their general lack of cynicism. These are films made by a guy who loves the macabre, but who also wants the characters in his movies to end up happy (as a rule).

If we just forget about Ed Wood for a second, Beetlejuice may very well be the director’s best film, with nary a second on screen that isn’t meant to still pop eyes and open minds, or turn the viewer into a child again.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): Speaking of sweetness, Peyton Reed’s lovely bit of Marvel superhero comedy is a prime example of how far a film can get on a mix of likeableness and technical accomplishment. Very much directly into my heart, that is.


There’s nothing at all world-changing about this entry into the Marvel universe, but the chemistry between the actors, the light touch of the script (and if you’re a comics nerd like me, also the clever way it uses elements from actual comics), and the general joyfulness and imagination of the film’s shrinking and growing business come together into the perfect shape of a popcorn movie that may theoretically only be made to take your money, but is really working very very hard to make you smile.

Godzilla (2014)

I was rather hopeful about this second Hollywood attempt to make a Godzilla movie given how much I enjoyed director Gareth Edwards’s fantastic Monsters. But then, Edwards wouldn’t have been the first director who had a hard time going from low budget cinema to mainstream blockbusters, and that’s before all the inevitable troubles of making a studio movie are taken into account.

Fortunately, this US Godzilla is at least as good as optimism could could convince one to hope for, doing very little wrong in the difficult job of making a blockbuster kaiju film. Because I am like that, let’s start off with the film’s downsides, namely the script’s – understandable – insistence on keeping its protagonist Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) close to nearly every central development in the plot, going through quite a few contrivances to get him there. I know, it’s meant to provide dramatic unity and give that part of the audience always in need of having somebody to “identify” with their due, but I honestly think you could have achieved the same goal with half a dozen characters taking on smaller individual roles in the tapestry of what’s going on; perhaps even characters of different gender and skin colour? It doesn’t exactly help that Taylor-Johnson seems to be another one of these extremely bland young male actors the last few years have brought up in Hollywood, all pretty indistinguishable from one another, serviceable actors, yet rather vacuous presences; which to me seems particularly ironic in a generation that has so many extremely talented actresses yet still too often finds little for them to do. Which neatly fits into the film’s next problem, namely that Godzilla has fuck all for Ford’s wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) to do.

Still, having said all this, it’s surprising how well Godzilla works in practice, its heavy emphasis on the human side of the story not feeling distracting – or as artificial and Hollywood-like – at all, and while I’m not really happy with concentrating all the humanity on one bland guy who just happens to be the son of the not-so crazy Bryan Cranston character, as well as a military bomb disarming expert, as well as the father of a family that just happens to live exactly in the monsters’ way, the film executes this problematic idea as good as humanly possible. Mostly, I think, because a lot of the reaction to the monsters we see from Brody (very much standing in for the way the film sees its monsters) is awe, a mixture of wonder and fear Edwards already managed to evoke – for much less money and on a more private level – quite wonderfully in Monsters. Awe seems to me the only proper feeling towards the sort of forces of Nature the monsters here are, accepting the beauty and the horror as different sides of the same coin.

I think it is this sense of awe in its treatment of its kaiju that grants this Godzilla its sense of gravitas, its characters witnessing occurrences they are barely able to comprehend, the attempts to resolve the situation through the rules and regulations that already don’t help in normal human existence (when in doubt, nuke it) bound to fail and possibly to make the situation worse. The film would be nearly Lovecraftian if you look at it from that angle, if not for the moments when the film insists – and that’s Hollywood to you – that human actions do matter, at least when it comes to inadvertently helping out Godzilla with a distraction. Of course, there’s a degree of irony in the fact that what’s a distraction to the film’s monsters is not done to distract them by the film’s characters, and that a desperate heroic deed by a human is only ever a short distraction for a monster/nature/whatever you want it to stand for.

Another thing Godzilla does that works out as a plus for it against what you’d expect (or well, against what I would have expected) is how coy it is about showing its monsters at work before the final grand – which it truly is - throw-down, the film only ever showing bits and pieces of what’s going on literally above characters’ heads, yet never looking away from the destruction caused, nor its aftermath. Edwards uses this technique not to deny his audience the big destruction set-pieces it came to see but rather to put the monster action in the right perspective, which is to say, put the audience in the perspective of ants staring at a mountain, an effect not even Shusuke Kaneko in his classic Gamera trilogy strove for quite this hard.

So, despite my misgivings, I found myself quite riveted by Godzilla, enjoying – if you can call it that – its moments of awe and carnage, appreciating its philosophical level (there’s also some obvious political allegory here, if you prefer that sort of thing), and ending up convinced this is not just a US Godzilla better than the last attempt but one that can see eye to eye with many of the better kaiju eiga.

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