In short: Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

This time around, the proverbial US small town is overrun by a horde of giant spiders of various subspecies. You see, the owner of the local spider farm unknowingly fed them crickets who were contaminated by whatever chemicals a (most probably evil) corporation is illegally dumping around town, leading to a bunch of hungry, aggressive and really rather large arachnids finding a new food source.

Our heroes of the day are single mom Sheriff Samantha Parker (Kari Wuhrer), her young son Mike (Scott Terra) – wearing glasses, and therefore knowledgeable about all things spider – and her teenage daughter Ashley (Scarlett Johansson in the mandatory horror movie you are obliged to make in Hollywood before you’re famous), as well as Chris McCormick (David Arquette), the son of the – now dead - local mine owner come back to not sell his mine to the evil corporation as represented by the mayor and to finally declare his love to the Sheriff. But first, there’s a spider problem to solve through appliance of guns, pointy objects and a very large explosion.

So basically, this is the stuff SyFy Originals are made of, just on a much better budget that buys the film things like an old-style Hollywood score (by John Ottman), enough locations for three SyFy movies, and an effects budget that pays to show a bit more of a small town overrun by giant spiders than most films of its ilk.

The script is of course a semi-parodic rehash of the usual things, not as clever as something you’d have gotten when John Sayles was writing for Roger Corman, but often quite funny, playing with a few genre tropes without ever becoming mean-spirited.

In the hands of director Ellory Elkayem, the script turns into a fast paced little number with a lot of well-timed sight gags, very pretty photography and very decent all-digital effects. Admittedly, there’s not much substance to the whole affair but Eight Legged Freaks is so fun and fast, with a likeable cast of humans and very loud digital spiders that substance is not really the point it is trying to make.

Three Films Make A Post: Entombed for eons - turned to stone - seeking women, women, women!

Her (2013): The really surprising thing about Spike Jonze’s film for me is how little of the simplistic “oh noes, the modern world is so alienated” piece its set-up might threaten is actually in it; this is not beholden to any cult of authenticity apart from that of human feeling. It’s also a perfect portray of loneliness, and longing, and sadness, and oh, by the way, it’s also a mainstream (in the broader sense of the word) SF film that isn’t ashamed of having more than two brain cells to rub together, not exactly expanding on what written SF has thought about its themes and props but putting it on a human level as good as anything I’ve seen or read in a long time.

There’s also a pervading sense of joy as well as of quotidian strangeness running through the film, some fine performances in particular by Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson and Amy Adams, and an absolutely perfect score. Why, the film’s so good I’m even pretending not to notice it doesn’t seem to know what an OS is.

Cutie Honey (2004): Between remaking Neon Genesis Evangelion again and again and again, Hideaki Anno somehow found the time to direct this live action version of Go Nagai’s sleazy yet wondrous magical girl manga/anime, turning down the sleaze quite a bit in the process – leaving only a lot of coy and pretty good-natured shots of Eriko Sato’s shapely behind – and surprising me by how enjoyable the result is when it should by all rights annoy me to kingdom come.

Anno manages to turn elements of the original into a crazy mix of pop-art, kitsch, the grotesque and goofy humour, somehow finding just the right mixture ratio to make the film work as something beyond mere camp. There’s a sense of fun, often actually funny humour and an exuberance surrounding the proceedings that does curious things with the film’s crazy and grotesque side, turning the whole affair into one of the more charming pictures you’ll see in whatever week you watch it.

The Serpent’s Egg (1977): This is generally treated as Ingmar Bergman’s Big Failure (yes, with capital letters) but I don’t agree with that assessment at all. To me, the film seems to do exactly what it sets out to do, show the Weimarer Republik as a sort of hellish state of mind, filled with increasingly bizarre elements like the onset of the insanity that would become the so-called Third Reich. The people in the film can hardly communicate with one another, their actors only given the choice to emote either with very emphatic lacks of expression or through over-heated hysteria, which is of course no communication at all.

The film’s an often unpleasant experience, slowly dragging itself along like any good economic crisis does, only waking up for moments of ever increasing unpleasantness, sometimes bordering on the sort of thing that the exploitation movies I talk about more often would indulge in, yet filmed with a palpable sense of revulsion those films can’t afford. Nobody ever said films about people getting crushed by the wheels of history should be a pleasant experience.

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Lucy (2014)

A series of unfortunate events starting with a bad choice in boyfriends leads American-in-Taiwan Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) onto the road to become an involuntary drug mule for South Korean drug kingpin (I assume) Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik). When more unfortunate events bring the experimental drug she’s smuggling from her stomach into her blood stream, Lucy starts to develop better superpowers than you get from being bitten by a radioactive spider. Lucy becomes able to use ever more of her brain capacity, using the 90 percent of the human brain we can’t access according to the bullshit science of the script (seriously, people, I know that’s a much-loved bit of nonsense, but it’s nonsense nonetheless). From then on, the plot increasingly resembles a random assortment of disconnected scenes, with nobody doing much that makes sense, neither on the level of logic nor on that of basic human psychology. Or what, just for example, is Mr. Jang’s actual motivation for his killing spree that includes basically everyone his goons encounter? Lucy for her part tries to give her increasingly superhuman knowledge to one Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman), famous neurologist (tee-hee) before she’ll die, or, as she in fact does, turn into the sort of entity that’ll make people who like some privacy for their masturbation decidedly uncomfortable.

So, as should be obvious writer/director Luc Besson still hates logic, physics, and all that comes with it. Unlike with many a EuropaCorp movie, the resulting film-like entity is quite fun too watch, probably also because it was directed by Besson himself, a man with a keen visual imagination, a classic eye for the staging of all kinds of scenes, and none of the love for video clip bullshit that can make the films of some of his protégés – like the dreaded Olivier Megaton – so difficult to stomach. Sure, neither the science nor the psychology make sense, and the film’s Big Answer to the Big Questions it is supposedly asking in those scenes where no perfectly idiotic bit of violence is happening seem to be “Time’s a bit important. I think.”, but then, I didn’t really expect Besson to make a proper philosophical SF movie, nor even a science fictional action movie with proper philosophic bits.

As nearly always with Besson’s films, it’s not the question if the film’s a mess or not, but rather if it’s a hot one or not. Lucy, fortunately, is the former, at first pretending to use its superhuman basic as an excuse to have Scarlett Johansson do a Liam Neeson (as if we needed an excuse for that, particular since she has turned out to be such an excellent Black Widow in the Marvel movies) but then quickly turning into an excuse for Besson to do the thing he’s really good at: making up weird stuff while things explode from time to time, and – in this case – Morgan Freeman pops in for a few scenes to hold a scientific lecture (not based in actual science), look wise, and manage to not break out into fits of the giggles. If you take it for what it is, Lucy really is pretty fantastic, eschewing sense for the free-floating game of associations of a very loud and flashy dream that culminates in one of the most peculiar nods to Kubrick’s 2001 you’ll ever see.

I’m happy there are many SF films that aren’t like Lucy but I’m totally fine with Lucy being as it is, in particular because it’s a film much too weird to ever bore you, and so random I find it difficult to assume even Besson did see anything that happens in it coming beyond the explosions and Johansson and Freeman putting way more effort in than their characters deserve.

Also, what the hell did I just watch?

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In short: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

By now, I’m actually going into Marvel productions banking on them being at least entertaining and generally non-stupid, but I think I’m going to adjust my attitude and will from now on bank on them being really good, and can still be positively surprised when they turn out like The Winter Soldier, which is to say pretty darn great.

Of course, seeing that it’s highly influenced by Ed Brubaker’s excellent run on the comics, the last decade or so of mainstream-yet-intelligent spy movies like the first three Bourne films and the Daniel Craig James Bonds, 70s conspiracy thrillers, and – quite obviously if you look at the fights – martial arts and action cinema from all around the world (The Raid quite heavily comes to mind), and does all the right things with a character that should by all rights be a horrible jingoistic mess but nearly never becomes one, Winter Soldier seems a bit made for me. Particularly because it uses the synergy of the already established Marvel movie universe very well without running into the trap of thinking this synergy replaces the actual plotting, and knows that Captain America in this century is very much a character belonging into an ensemble. By all rights, this should be called “Captain America, Black Widow & The Falcon: The Winter Soldier”, but then, that’d be a really unwieldy title. The film really does a lot of cool and interesting things with Natasha and Sam, thanks to a script that knows how to write the personal stuff into the explosions, and actors in Scarlett Johansson and Anthony Mackie who have proven themselves highly adept at the particular acting style you need to apply in blockbuster cinema.

As a pinko commie, I’m also quite happy with the film’s politics, not because I perfectly agree with them (I’m not the kind of pinko commie who needs that to appreciate a film, fortunately), but because they are as coherent as can be expected in a film genre that can do subtlety only to a degree, and are a perfect fit for a Captain America film in 2014 that wants to stay true to the character’s origins of Hitler-punching and taking the promise of America by its word.

All these elements, as well as Chris Evans’s still note-perfect performance and many a nice nod to established comic characters, I mostly expected (or at least would have bet minor amounts of money on). What I didn’t expect is that Anthony and Joe Russo, both directors with mainly experience in sitcoms (even though one of them is the sainted and seemingly indestructible Community), were this great as action directors, with so many propulsive action sequences that also just happen to be often really cleverly and beautifully choreographed there should by all rights be not enough breath in anyone watching left to complain about them as “empty spectacle”. Which of course they aren’t – as in all good action movies, these action scenes are actually saying a lot of things about the characters the dialogue scenes don’t, all the time not just working to drive the film forward, but working as a physical connection between theme, characters and plot.

Needless to say, I’m very, very happy with the resulting movie.

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In short: The Avengers (2012)

Sometimes, it's easy being me. I'm not one of those cult movie fans always in desperate need to proof they're part of the cool kids (not unlike certain friends of art movies who would not be found dead ever being entertained by a movie, or smiling watching one), so I can allow myself to like those blockbuster concoctions that are good, or - as is the case here - pretty fucking great.

Given the overabundance of money director/writer/king of nerds Joss Whedon had to blow up (often quite literally,) it's not much of a surprise The Avengers' spectacle is fantastic to watch. Although even that part is not always a given if one keeps the body of work of Michael Bay in mind, who knows how to make big explosions and giant robots boring. Whedon, on the other hand, knows how to make the big and loud things big and loud and actually interesting.

Not surprisingly, he also understands that the big and loud things become inherently more interesting, more fun and more important to an audience if you anchor them in smaller and quieter moments that are in reality much more important, and therefore spends as much - if not more - time and effort on these.

As an old comic fan, Whedon also inherently gets what his characters are about (so no Bendis-style Captain America silently condoning torture, and no Kenneth Brannagh-Thor as a jock with a hammer), and uses this knowledge, a cast that can act their asses off if given the opportunity (and isn't by the way, Mark Ruffalo the best Bruce Banner you've seen, and Scarlett Johansson a much more convincing Black Widow than anyone could have expected?), and a script that manages to squeeze an insane amount of subtlety in to make what would in a lesser movie be just the connecting tissue between action scenes sing.

Other typical Whedon virtues are also in and accounted for - the quick and clever dialogue, the sudden reversals of genre tropes, and the ability to naturally shift from comedy to tragedy and back again in the course of two lines of dialogue. The real beauty of the film is how well this aspect of The Avengers connects with the more usual blockbuster virtues, as if having a heart and a brain and big explosions in a movie wasn't a big thing.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,superheroes,joss whedon,scarlett johansson,robert downey jr,chris evans,mark ruffalo,chris hemsworth,jeremy renner,tom hiddleston