Imagine if your ancestors had the power to curse you for… well, general discomfort after death.
That premise forms the bedrock for the South Korean horror movie “Exhuma,” in which a quartet of shamans, geomancers and morticians join forces to deal with vengeful ghosts. This is a movie that could never be remade in another country – not just because it relies on tension and dread rather than jump scares, but because the historical and cultural backdrop are so uniquely Korean.
Shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her tatted apprentice Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) are summoned to Los Angeles to investigate a newborn baby who has been cursed by one of his ancestors. Hwa-rim makes arrangements with the family patriarch to exhume and cremate the child’s great-grandfather back in South Korea, with the help of her friends: feng-shui geomancer Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and experienced mortician Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin).
But the job turns out to be more complicated than expected. The grave is on a mountaintop near the North Korean border, surrounded by malign omens: foxes, an unmarked stone, rumors of graverobbing, and a snake with a human head. The only way the corpse can be exhumed is with a complex ritual that draws out and dissipates the malignant energies (involving knives, a drum and several dead pigs), so they can dig up and then cremate the unopened coffin. Sounds simple, right?
Not so simple, because some brain donor opens it, unleashing a vengeful spirit that decides he wants to kill his entire family – and our heroes have limited time to save the remaining kin from meeting gruesome ends. But it turns out that ironing out this family debacle is only the beginning of the horrors to come, as another coffin is found buried beneath the first – and dealing with this angry ghost will not be so easy.
“Exhuma” is the kind of movie that horror needs. No jump scares, even when something shocking and unexpected happens. This is a movie that slowly builds up a sense of pervasive, eerie dread, filling every shadowy corner until it suddenly flows with splattered blood and soaring fire. It’s also a uniquely Korean movie – without revealing some of the plot twists, the story relies heavily on both Korean history and Korean folklore, so it couldn’t really be told anywhere else.
Director/writer Jang Jae-hyun slowly layers mysteries and atmosphere (so many foxes!) on top of each other, then slowly peels away those layers like an onion. Some of the scenes in the second and third acts of the movie are deeply disturbing, especially when Bong-gil speaks for the angry ghosts. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that it feels a little weird that we go through the entire cycle of dealing with the cursed family… and then, suddenly, that plot Trojan-horses an entirely unrelated evil ghost for the third act. It’s kind of odd. Not bad, exactly, but disorienting.
The actors are all uniformly quite good: Kim Go-eun is cool and collected as an intelligent, businesslike shaman, which makes it all the more unnerving when the character is stricken with bone-chilling fear in the third act. Lee Do-hyun plays a secondary role to her throughout most of the movie, but gets to show his acting chops when Bong-gil gets possessed a few times. And Choi Min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin have delightful chemistry as a couple of old buddies who specialize in exhuming and reburying troublesome dead people, swinging between easy camaraderie to harrowing battles against the supernatural.
“Exhuma” has a slightly odd plot structure, but that doesn’t keep it from being a harrowing, suspenseful movie that slowly builds its way up to the blood’n’fire. Definitely worth watching for those who appreciate atmosphere in their horror.
I didn’t really expect a series about Godzilla to go into detail about the nature of time.
In fact, the series has a distinct lack of Godzilla about 90% of the time, which my brother found to be its biggest flaw – if you’re going into it to watch kaiju punching each other in the face, you will be sorely disappointed. There are kaiju, sure – there are a bunch of pterodactyl-like Rodans, there’s an Anguillas, there are some sea monsters and giant monster-spiders and so on. But they are more like unstoppable forces of nature whose origins and nature are a mystery, and who scare the pants off us feeble humans.
About 90% of the time, the story is divided between dealing with various non-Godzilla kaiju, and examining nonlinear timestreams, such as receiving information from the future, and particles that can’t be detected, and artificial intelligence. It’s a very intellectual series with Godzilla as the primal draw and the ultimate culmination of everything it’s building towards, so if you just want Godzilla in particular punching monsters you are not going to enjoy it. There’s a lot of talking.
Also red dust. Sooooooo much red dust. It makes sense in context.
The rest of the 90% is divided pretty evenly between trying to unravel the mysteries of time and trying to stop kaiju in creative ways. Especially since there are different people with different motives, and different knowledge, sometimes working together and sometimes kind of undermining one another. The story mostly revolves around a small group of oddballs – a nerdy girl majoring in imaginary creatures (now THERE’S a complete sink for your student loans), a crazy old man building a giant robot to save the world (because Japan), and a young man who seems to have a real knack for figuring out the kaiju and programming artificial intelligence.
It also takes notes from Shin Godzilla by having Godzilla evolve through different forms over the course of the series. In fact, sometimes you can only tell it’s him because of that classic Godzilla musical sting. His final form has a mouth that could eat an entire meatball sub in one bite.
Also: my brother noted that the female lead reminded him of Velma from Scooby-Doo… and I kinda see it. Nerdy, clumsy, chin-length hair and glasses, into weird esoteric stuff… she’s like Velma turned into a cute anime girl, only her interest is insects who are their own grandpa instead of the occult.
I’d say that its biggest flaw, aside from a lack of Godzilla, is that it probably takes a few viewings to understand the theories behind it. The concepts and theories are a bit dense at times, and it sometimes treats viewers as if they are already aware of the science, or the explanations sort of dart by so fast that you might not notice.
If you like thinking-style anime like Steins;Gate and a hefty dose of kaiju chaos, then Godzilla Singular Point is something you might enjoy. Even if you don’t know if you might like those things, it’s worth checking out simply because it is such an unusual beast.
Sometimes, a classic franchise needs to get back to its roots.
And after a highly unconventional outing in “Shin Godzilla,” Toho and director/writer Takashi Yamazaki, decided to do just that in “Godzilla Minus One.” This may be the best Godzilla movie ever made – an emotionally deep, historically-rich tale of disaster, loss, grief and guilt, which just happens to center around a giant nuclear reptile.
Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a young kamikaze pilot, stops at remote Odo Island with the claim that his engine is malfunctioning… but the truth is, he just doesn’t want to die. That night, a large hostile reptile nicknamed Godzilla comes ashore and kills all the engineers, and Shikishima believes it’s because he froze up instead of shooting the creature. More guilt, on top of his belief that he failed his country instead of dying for it.
After returning to Tokyo to find his parents dead, Shikishima finds himself living with a young homeless woman named Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned baby, Akiko (Sae Nagatani). He gets a job as a minesweeper to support the three of them, though his guilt and feelings of worthlessness keep him from explicitly forming a family unit. And he’s still haunted by what happened on Odo Island, and vivid dreams of the men he didn’t save.
Then a vast, mutated creature ravages U.S. ships on its way to Japan – and Shikishima realizes that it’s none other than Godzilla. Not only is he vast and strong, but he regenerates from almost any injury, and he’s able to shoot a nuclear blast from his mouth that can vaporize a heavy cruiser. With only the slimmest chance of success and very few resources, the chances of destroying Godzilla are virtually nonexistent – but if Shikishima can overcome his demons, Japan’s people might have a chance.
It may be a controversial opinion, but I feel that “Godzilla Minus One” actually tops the original 1954 classic, which spawned the entire Japanese kaiju genre. That’s because it’s not merely an outstanding kaiju movie with a slow-simmering allegorical message about the horrors of nuclear war, much as the original was, but a deeply personal story about survivor’s guilt, PTSD, love for one’s people, and what a government owes to the people who serve it.
Director/writer Takashi Yamazaki weaves together all these threads without being heavy-handed or slowing down the story. The slower-paced, more personal parts are never boring because they’re so richly characterized (including the parts with real-life Japanese military ships and aircraft). And the parts with Godzilla are electrifying, like when he monches on a train or chases the minesweeper ship with a look of pure hate on his face. This is a Godzilla who wants the human race dead, not the lovable world-saver of many other Godzilla films.
Much of the movie rests on Kamiki’s shoulders, and he gives an absolutely stellar performance here – he embodies the painful guilt, the fear, the terror, the trauma, the longing for love and fatherhood that he can’t bring himself to embrace because he doesn’t think he’s worthy of happiness. The other characters are drawn with equally loving complexity, such as the sweet-natured Noriko played by Minabe, tormented engineer Tachibana, Shikishima’s lovable fellow minesweepers, and Sumiko, a neighbor who initially blames Shikishima for the deaths of her children but helps care for Akiko despite that.
And since “Godzilla Minus One” won an Oscar for best visual effects, it would be unfair not to praise them. The effects on a movie that cost a mere $10-12 million are absolutely superb – Godzilla has rarely looked this good, and the widespread destruction looks painfully realistic. Even without being compared to the kind of half-baked VFX that currently comes out of companies like Disney, this is a masterpiece.
“Godzilla Minus One” is a movie that is deeply, richly satisfying, both as a kaiju movie and as a human drama – a triumph for Toho and the Godzilla series, and an outstanding film overall.
Hayao Miyazaki is one of those artists that needs no introduction, a brilliant storyteller whose characters and richly-developed stories include tales of flying pigs and walking castles, forest gods and floating cities, preschooler mermaids and fantastical bathhouses. So even when nobody really knew what the plot was, “The Boy And The Heron” was already an alluring prospect.
And while perhaps not his most accessible film, it’s nevertheless a gripping piece of work – half semi-autobiographical tale of a young Japanese boy during World War II, half fantasy story about a strange fantastical world of long-forgotten family secrets. It often feels like Miyazaki is musing on the exquisite yet flawed process of creating a fantasy world, the unique minds that nurture them, and the creativity that future generations should have.
During World War II, a young boy named Mahito Maki (Luca Padovan) loses his beloved mother in a terrible hospital fire. A year or so later, his father Shoichi (Christian Bale) marries his late wife’s sister Natsuko (Gemma Chan). Mahito isn’t pleased by this – including the fact that his aunt/stepmother is pregnant – and he definitely isn’t happy to be moving to her remote country estate. His schoolmates are hostile, and the only company in the house is the bickering elderly servants.
But he soon finds himself fascinated by a strange grey heron living in a pond nearby, and a strange stone tower that everyone warns him away from. When Natsuko wanders off and disappears, Mahito is drawn into the tower by the heron (actually a little man in a magic suit), who lures him with the promise of finding his mother again.
Instead, he finds himself in a strange fantasy world dominated by oceans and stone monuments, of blobby little spirits and a pyrokinetic girl named Lady Himi, who fends off hordes of talking pelicans. With the heron-man as his companion, he finds that his stepmother has fallen into the clutches of a civilization of talking, meat-eating parakeets – and to help her, he may have to take on responsibility for the entire world.
“The Boy And The Heron” is not Hayao Miyazaki’s most accessible film in many ways. It’s one of those films that may be a little confusing on your first viewing, but which increases in richness with subsequent watchings. It’s also one of those stories that lends itself to multiple symbolic interpretations, the most obvious – in my view, anyway – being that the existence of the other world is symbolic of a creative mind constructing its own universe in the process of storytelling, its flaws, and the need for younger creatives to take up the mantle.
And those mysteries and schemes are coiled around a hauntingly melancholy fantasy story – the world Mahito encounters is oddly empty despite its beauty and strangeness, like a vast cathedral with no people in it. It has an edge of wrongness and danger that always makes you feel like the hero is balancing on a knife’s edge, even from things that seem like they should be ridiculous (the man-eating parakeets are surprisingly unnerving). But even in that, Miyazaki works in some fun moments as well, such as Shoichi thinking Mahito has turned into a parakeet, or when Mahito has to deal with the heron-man.
And because this is Hayao Miyazaki, the entire story is lusciously animated – this is 2-D animation at its peak, distinctively Studio Ghibli in style, and detailed to the point where you can practically feel the frogs, the mossy stones, the feathers, the creaking wood. Miyazaki crafts visuals that are hauntingly beautiful and dreamlike, allowing Mahito to drift through strange, sometimes ethereal landscapes populated by strange creatures.
Mahito is a slightly weak spot in an otherwise lovely movie, simply because he’s much less expressive than many of Miyazaki’s other heroes. We know that he desperately misses his mother and isn’t happy about his father’s marriage, but it’s hard to tell what his exact emotions are much of the time, or how they will naturally lead to actions like constructing a bow-and-arrow. Fortunately he opens up more once he travels into the other world, especially when interacting with the exuberant Lady Himi (whose true identity is pretty easy to guess), the tomboyish Kiriko, or the heron-man (whose weird, slightly sinister and sometimes pathetic personality is a good contrast to Mahito’s more restrained one).
The English voice acting is uniformly good in this film, with actors such as Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Mark Hamill and Willem Dafoe all giving excellent performances. Special shout-out to Robert Pattinson, who immediately earns his voice-acting cred by giving an excellent performance in a creaky, slightly sinister voice that sounds completely unlike his usual voice – watching the movie, you completely forget who’s performing the role, and just lose yourself in the voice-acting.
“The Boy And The Heron” has a few rough spots, but it’s still a strikingly lovely, symbolically-rich fantasy adventure that leaves you feeling melancholy yet hopeful. May Miyazaki give us more worlds to explore.
For someone as pedantic and desperate to be seen as intellectual as Doktor Skipper is, he certainly has a very childish view of movies. “Movie has American military? Movie must be propaganda! American people clap for Godzilla? That means Godzilla is hero who cares about America! Original movie doesn’t delve into Japanese war crimes? That means movie bad! American Godzilla doesn’t symbolize nuclear weapons and instead is about the relentless and unstoppable qualities of the natural world, against whom we are but leaves in the wind? American Godzilla means nothing!”
He very much sounds like a child in the throes of “look how smart and adult I am,” which is a sign of immaturity.
And his automatic stance of “American movie bad, big budget movie bad, foreign low-budget movie good” smacks of elitism. Do I think Godzilla Minus One is superior to Legendary’s? Yes, I do. Does that mean Legendary’s is bad, meaningless or fails in what it set out to do? No. I kinda suspect that along with his “oh yeah, baby, criticize the government!” perspective, he only likes Minus One because it uses the only symbolic value that he believes the character should have, and because it’s a low-budget foreign film. Because he seems like the kind of person that will only admit to liking films he thinks will make him look good.
Actually, the whining about America in general is kind of tiresome. He came into this project with a predetermined thesis (“America bad, America no can do Godzilla!”) and then warped the plots, characters and facts around it to support that thesis. Doesn’t make for very good analysis, does it? If I were a teacher and a kid turned this in, I’d give him a pretty bad grade.
And some of the blatant mistakes he makes make me wonder if he fast-forwarded through the movies or played on his phone during them. Because the flask in Godzilla Vs. Kong did not contain water, and that fact was stated IMMEDIATELY after it was emptied.
And there are so many claims he makes that are easily disproven with the slightest amount of research. Like claiming that Japan replaced “Gojira” with “Godzilla”… no, they didn’t. To my knowledge, all the Japanese films have called him Gojira. The English subtitles/dubs might call him “Godzilla,” but that’s just the translation and not indicative of what the Japanese call him. Even the hideous 1998 movie had a Japanese character calling him “Gojira”!
Or the idea that people don’t know Godzilla is Japanese, when he’s best known for stomping around Japan. Or the public domain thing. The fact that ONLY Legendary is making American Godzilla films shows that that is not true, even without looking it up. If Godzilla were public domain in the US, he would be in SO many movies.
And considering that he all but says the Japanese deserved what they got, it’s very sinister that he laughed when talking about the Lucky Dragon, and flippantly described Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “turning that bitch into Fallout 3.” Funny how he demands that the effects of the nuclear bombs be used as a metaphor in every Godzilla production, or be dismissed as empty and meaningless, and claims the original symbolism makes it impossible for Americans to depict the character… but can joke and sneer about the actual bombings themselves. It’s not a terribly good look.
He also seems to think that the depiction of a country without explicit condemnation of its sins or government is political propaganda. The American military in Godzilla 2014 is… not glorified at all. They are, like all humans, ineffectual against the Titans, and they’re hesitant and anxious about the potential apocalypse if they get it wrong. Only one member of the American military contributes anything to the conflict. And Godzilla is not helping the American military – he spent 98% of the movie IGNORING them, because they are not a threat to him. It just so happens that his goals coincide with those of the American military – they both want the Mutos dead. He’s indifferent to what we tiny squishy ants think. THAT is the whole point of the Titans.
Which makes it even more annoying that he misrepresents American Godzilla as some kind of patriotic symbol. No, he doesn’t care about America, and such an idea is never even suggested. He doesn’t care about any country. And he’s not even FROM America in it – he only comes to the US because he’s tracking one of the Mutos there. As soon as the Mutos are dead, he dusts himself off and trundles back into international waters.
Not to mention “We know he’s American propaganda because he messed up a city in China!” despite the fact that he leveled an American city for the same in-story reason at the beginning of the movie. And Boston. And San Francisco. If he was a symbol of America only there to protect America alone, why would he have destroyed three major American cities, showing zero concern or remorse? Riiight, it doesn’t make sense.
Also, the Mutos weren’t Japanese. They were from the Philippines. One of them cocooned in Japan, but one of them also cocooned in Nevada.
It’s also notable that he leaves out entire ERAS of Godzilla’s reign, where the stories became darker, grittier, and did address the events of World War II. Or those very dark and gritty anime films. Instead he posits that it started dark and gritty, every movie after it was dumb and cartoony kids’ fodder, and then it became dark and gritty again recently. But that would involve watching the movies instead of playing them in the background while he romps through Fortnite.
I’m also not sure where he got this idea that the American public has ignored Godzilla Minus One because it’s too deep and smart for them. It topped the US box office for a week! That doesn’t happen to many foreign-language films! But it was #1 for a week, before being dethroned by another complex and beautiful Japanese movie. Its run was originally supposed to be very brief, but the rave reviews and popularity caused them to extend the run!
He also doesn’t seem to be aware that he himself is what is wrong with a lot of fandoms today – something becomes popular, and a lot of tourists who don’t actually like the property want to come in and change it into what THEY think it should be, rather than what it is. See Rings of Power and its Twitter fanbase of “Tolkien fans.” Or they just show up to complain about it, as if their viewpoints have importance and the actual fans should bow. I’m not really a Godzilla fan. But I don’t demand that all Godzilla movies be revamped to fit my sensibilities or what I like, without experimenting with other themes or metaphors or plots.
You can really see his film analysis perspective in how he claims the Mutos were innocents “unfairly vilified” by an empty simplistic stories, when it is literally a fight for survival. The Mutos are threatening to overrun the earth with hundreds of their spawn, and it is literally a matter of killing them or dying ourselves. Also, the movie does show empathy towards the Mutos – when the eggs are destroyed, the camera lingers on the female Muto grieving, and then flying into a rage.
I also find it amusing that he praises Godzilla Minus One’s depiction of Godzilla as a “natural disaster”… when that is literally how he is depicted in the Legendary films. He’s depicted as a dominant force of the natural world that cannot be stopped by anything less than King Ghidorah, above the machinations of mere mortals. He is indifferent to humans and our struggles, because he is a force of inhuman power. The films effectively state this is what the Titans are, and he is the one who stands above them all… so, yeah, he is as much a natural disaster as a hurricane or an earthquake.
He also doesn’t seem to realize that Godzilla Minus One does not have a $15 million dollar budget (inaccurate, because it was actually more like $10 million or $12 million) because it dares to criticize the American military… which it doesn’t do. It has that budget because it’s a smaller production from another country where budgets are drastically lower in general. If it depicted the American military in a positive light rather than mostly ignoring them, it would not have a $160 million budget.
“What is art?” Art is not just one thing, or represented by only one perspective or goal. It’s like saying “what is food?” and then claiming that a cheeseburger cannot be considered food because it isn’t a finely-marbled steak festooned with truffle oil.
And hey, Doktor Skipper? It’s “new-cleer.” Not “nuke-u-ler.”
The year 2022 was a weird one. For some reason, there were three different Pinocchio movies released to the public: one so bad it was unintentionally funny (the Russian one), one so bad it was just painfully bad (the Disney one) and one that was… sublime.
The last one – the one that people actually wanted to see – was the Oscar-winning stop-motion adaptation by the magnificent Guillermo del Toro, which reimagines the tale during the rise of Italian fascism. Despite the grimness of that setting, it’s the “Pinocchio” that you would expect from del Toro – darkly exquisite, whimsical in an disarmingly alien way, and bittersweet in nature.
During World War I, talented woodcarver Geppetto loses his beloved son Carlo to a bomb. After many years of loneliness and grief, he drunkenly chops down the tree that grew over Carlo’s grave, and carves it into a wooden puppet that looks like a young boy. Then a blue, winged forest spirit decides to grant life to the puppet, and enlists Sebastian, the memoir-writing cricket living in his chest cavity, to guide and help the wooden boy.
But navigating life is difficult for Pinocchio, since Geppetto isn’t sure what to do with a spontaneous and overly-inquisitive child that causes trouble wherever he goes. The wooden boy becomes a circus performer to earn money for his father, and soon discovers that he is immortal – every time he dies, he comes back from the afterlife, albeit a little later each time. This attracts the attention of the Podestà, who wants him trained as a soldier for the ongoing war with the Allied Forces. But Pinocchio’s only goal is to protect his father.
Guillermo del Toro’s quest to make this film stretches over more than a decade, and unlike Disney’s crassly soulless remake of their own classic property, it overflows with heart, passion and bittersweet beauty. It’s also a story that rings deeply with Guillermo del Toro’s unique style and sensibilities, from the reframing of the narrative against the rise of Italian fascism (Pinocchio personally offends Benito Mussolini) to the mixture of darkness and whimsy (the eccentric designs of Death and the Sprite, who have extra eyes, horns, snake body parts and other such parts).
The darkness/whimsy is due to del Toro and Patrick McHale (responsible for the enchanting “Over The Garden Wall”), weaving together themes of paternal love, mortality, freedom, grief and self-sacrifice. But it also has lighthearted scenes like a newborn Pinocchio wheeling around causing chaos in Geppetto’s home. The entire story is rendered in absolutely beautiful stop-motion, which still manages to have a luminous quality that swings between the ethereal and the grounded.
Gregory Mann is absolutely charming as the titular character, capable of depicting Pinocchio throughout his entire journey. There’s also a superb cast including Ewan McGregor as the erudite insect; David Bradley as Geppetto, who learns to love his new (possibly reincarnated) son; Tilda Swinton as the ancient spirits of death and life; Ron Perlman as the cruel fascist official who wants Pinocchio to be a child soldier; and a number of other like Christoph Waltz, Cate Blanchett, Finn Wolfhard, and so on.
Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” is not only a charming, timeless stop-motion tale, it is also a heartwarming example of when passion and art triumph. Bittersweet, whimsical and enchanting.
Even if you’re not a gamer, you’ve probably heard of “Five Nights At Freddy’s.” Scott Cawthon’s hit video game franchise is about employees (and occasionally children) being pursued by anthropomorphic ghost-robot animals. Also, serial killers.
And it’s not surprising that the “Five Nights At Freddy’s” movie shines the brightest when it dives into mascot horror and the lore of the franchise. It’s substantially weaker when it focuses on the human characters’s familial conflicts and internal turmoil, which means that it rebounds solidly in the final act when the various loosely-wound plot threads are finally tied together. Still, did we need custody drama?
Michael (Josh Hutcherson) is a young mall security guard obsessed with the abduction of his little brother when he was a child. But then he loses his job, and faces the possibility of losing custody of his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) to his vicious aunt. So he takes the only new career path available: a night security guard at the arcade/pizza restaurant known as Freddy Fazbear’s, where he’s mostly there to guard the animatronics. He also encounters Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a friendly cop who seems to be very well-informed about the place.
But he soon realizes that the animatronics are actually “alive,” possessed by the spirits of children murdered many years ago – and they seem to have a special bond with Abby. Unbeknownst to him, they also kill people who break in. As he tries to enlist their help to find out who abducted and murdered his little brother, Michael soon discovers that the animatronics are far more dangerous than he ever expected – and they aren’t alone.
“Five Nights At Freddy’s” is easily at its best when it sticks to being “Five Nights At Freddy’s.” The most gripping and engaging parts of the story are when the animatronics are prowling around chewing people’s faces off or biting them in half. It’s not too bloody or graphic, considering this is a Blumhouse movie (it’s actually rather tame for a horror movie) but it does capture some sense of dread and creepiness, especially in the unnaturalness of the animatronics’ movements.
Unfortunately, you also have to wade through a lot of Michael’s personal problems to reach the “Five Nights”-ness, and… they’re not terribly interesting. Obviously some kind of personal stuff is required for the security guard, but the movie needed fewer custody fights and more spooky nighttime conflicts with the killer animatronics. We also didn’t need a scene where the animatronics build a giant blanket fort with Abby, which was just… awkward.
Fortunately, things improve drastically when the third act rolls around, when the animatronics go back to being homicidal, and the backstory behind their deaths is finally explored. There’s a real sense of dread at the thought of dead children brainwashed into amnesiac killers who don’t even remember what they are, so that you both pity them and want to run away from them at top speed. As for the mastermind of the whole scenario, his arrival gives the story an extra jolt of fizzing energy, and I honestly couldn’t get enough of his villainy.
While Hutcherson’s character spends too much time on non-“Freddy” stuff, he gives a very good performance as a young man who has been fundamentally damaged by loss and guilt. Mary Stuart Masterson and Elizabeth Lail also give solid if uncomplicated performances, and Piper Rubio’s performance is pretty good, even though her character seems like she was written to be several years younger than the actress. Matthew Lillard has little screen time, but he absolutely dominates the screen and has just the right amount of scenery chewing. Chef’s kiss.
“Five Nights At Freddy’s” is weaker when it tries to incorporate more original elements, but is at its best when it sticks to what “Five Nights At Freddy’s” is all about. For those who enjoy tales of killer animatronics and serial killers, it’s a mixed bag but one still worth seeing.
Do you want to become stupider? You probably don’t, but I have an excellent method for lowering your IQ, should you want to do so. It would involve watching “The Meg 2: The Trench.”
Obviously the original film wasn’t exactly cerebral cinema meant to make you think about… anything. It was a fun dumb movie about a giant prehistoric shark causing mass mayhem and carnage. But “The Meg 2: The Trench” is almost criminally stupid – stupid enough to shatter your suspension of disbelief – and it lacks any kind of self-awareness about how stupid it truly is.
The story begins with a prehistoric glimpse of various animals eating each other, climaxing with a megalodon swimming into perhaps ten feet of water to gobble down a T-rex, and then popping right back into the ocean. That was pretty much when I knew the movie was going to be bad.
Fast forward to present day: Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) has inexplicably become a James-Bondian eco-vigilante who singlehandedly beats up dozens of criminal waste-dumpers. How and why he started doing this when he was a rescue diver in the first movie, I don’t know. His love interest from the previous movie has also died – presumably Li Bingbing didn’t want to reappear – which means Jonas is raising his precociously annoying maybe-stepdaughter Meiying (Sophia Cai), and hanging out with his maybe-brother-in-law Jiuming Zhang (Wu Jing). Oh, and Jiuming has a captive megalodon that he’s clicker-training. Not kidding.
But a dive into the trench goes horribly awry, leaving Jonas, Jiuming, Meiying and a handful of characters we don’t really care about at the bottom of the sea. But escaping back to the surface won’t keep them safe for long – not only do they have the minions of a poorly-written evil billionaire attacking them, they also have been followed to the surface by more megalodons, a giant octopus, and these air-breathing lizard creatures that apparently have not evolved at all in all those millions of years. And of course, all of them want to eat the partying tourists who happen to be nearby.
Hollywood sequels usually follow a certain pattern – they have to be bigger, more bombastic… and much dumber than the first. “The Meg 2: The Trench” follows this pattern from the very beginning, and never manages to even briefly transcend its witlessness – it’s crammed with explosions, bloodless violence, suspension-of-disbelief-snapping action stunts (Jonas is able to prop the body weight of a Meg over his head with a piece of metal) and random bursts of Marvel-style comedy.
Yes, the first “Meg” movie was a big dumb action movie too, but it had a certain measure of restraint. Here, there’s no restraint – there are so many movie monsters that you can’t keep track of them all, and some of them – like the giant octopus – don’t actually add anything to the story except more bloated CGI ‘splosions. Why are the lizards living at the bottom of the ocean, and why have they not evolved into sea creatures in millions of years? Because the writers are huffing paint.
It’s also one of those movies where the characters are all idiots whenever they’re not required by the plot to be smart. The villain’s dastardly plans would be easily uncovered by a nine-year-old by a magnifying glass, but she literally exists just long enough to get the creatures to occupied territory, at which point she’s dragged off and eaten. Meiying is a mass of idiotic decisions from beginning to end. And while Jiuming is depicted as smart and knowledgeable, he is shown to have zero common sense. Think floating around in a meg enclosure with nothing but a clicker and optimistic thoughts to protect himself.
Jason Statham isn’t a great actor at the best of times, but he is clearly operating on autopilot here, looking vaguely uncomfortable in almost every scene. Wu Jing gives a pretty decent performance as Jiuming, and he’s obviously trying much harder than Statham. Most of the other actors have nothing to really chew on, like Sienna Guillory’s evil billionaire or Sergio Peris-Mencheta’s mercenary Montes, who is fueled by vengeance against Jonas for some past conflict that we didn’t see. Melissanthi Mahut has the closest thing to a fleshed-out supporting character, and has some good moments where her characters reacts to loss and/or blackmail.
“The Meg 2: The Trench” seems to be aiming to be brainless fun, but it shoots so far beyond “brainless” that it ends up not being fun at all – just insultingly witless, chaotic and full of blithering idiots.
It was a glittering, sumptuous time when hypocrisy was expected, discreet infidelity tolerated, and unconventionality ostracized.
That is the Gilded Age, and nobody knew its hypocrisies better than Edith Wharton. And while you wouldn’t expect Martin Scorsese to be able to pull off an elegant, delicate adaptation of her novel “The Age of Innocence,” this movie is a trip back in time to the stuffy upper crust of “old New York,” taking us through one respectable man’s hopeless love affair with a beautiful woman — and the life he isn’t brave enough to have.
Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is the scion of a wealthy old New York family in the 1870s. He becomes engaged to pretty, naive May Welland (Winona Ryder), a very suitable match between two respected families. But as he tries to get their wedding date moved up, he becomes acquainted with May’s exotic cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who has dumped her cheating husband. That was pretty scandalous at the time.
At first the two are just friends, with Newland finding Ellen’s attitudes to be fresh and real. But after Newland marries May, the attraction to the mysterious Countess and her free, unconventional life becomes even stronger, as he starts to rebel against the conventions of his own existence. Will he become an outcast and go away with the beautiful countess, or will he stick with May and the safe, dull life that he has condemned in others?
It’s a bit of a head-trip to find out that the guy who did “Raging Bull” and “The Gangs of New York” was the one responsible for a subtle, bittersweet movie set in a gilded, upper-crust New York. But it shows his considerable skill that Scorsese was able to make “The Age of Innocence” so adeptly, sticking close to the original novel — we even have an omniscient narrator who quotes directly from Wharton’s book as she describes New York society.
He preserves Wharton’s portrayal of New York in the 1870s — opulent, cultured, pleasant, yet so tied up in tradition that few people in it are able to really open up and live. It’s a haze of ballrooms, gardens, engagements, and careful social rituals that absolutely MUST be followed, even if they have no meaning. And he depicts this with directorial skill that makes almost every shot look like an exquisite painting, framing the characters with flowers, art and cultivated backdrops.
And he delicately brings out the powerful half-hidden emotions that the story revolves around. One great example: a carriage ride where Newland slowly unbuttons Ellen’s glove and gently kisses her pale wrist — it’s sensual and erotic without being explicit.
Day-Lewis gives the awesome performance you would expect — his Newland is stiff and repressed, and nowhere near as awesomely unconventional as he thinks himself to be. Pfeiffer and Ryder round out a trinity of spot-on performances: Ryder plays a seemingly innocent, naive young woman who shows hints that she’s a lot smarter than Newland believes her to be, while Pfeiffer plays a sweet but sad noblewoman who craves love and kindness, and knows more of the world’s ways than Newland does.
“The Age of Innocence” is an exquisite painting of 19th-century New York’s upper crust — the hypocrisy, the beauty, and the sorrow. A truly sublime experience, and not a film to be missed.
For the record, “Detective Dee and the Four Heavenly Kings” is kind of a deceptive title. The Four Heavenly Kings have no actual part in the story, and their statues only play a passing role. It might as well be called “Detective Dee and the Umbrella Stand.”
But the title is the least of the problems that plague the third Detective Dee movie, once again directed by the legendary Tsui Hark. While the cast mostly produce good performances and there are some good ideas here, the actual plot is a rather confusing mess — the plot feels like it is only half-baked, both simplistic and overcomplicated, with awkwardly-woven subplots and a thuddingly clumsy final battle.
Following the events of the previous movie, Dee Renjie (Mark Chao) has been given directorship of the Department of Justice, as well as the powerful Dragon-Taming Mace. This angers the Empress (Carina Lau), who sees him as a threat to her power. So she enlists his friend Yuchi Zhenjin (Feng Shaofeng) to steal the mace from him, as well as a troupe of formidable illusionists, the jianghu.
But the jianghu’s (literally) poisonous tricks aren’t enough to thwart Dee, who is two steps ahead of the Empress. And as the Empress prepares to take over his department, Dee discovers that a sect of masked sorcerers are pulling her strings, scheming to take the Dragon-Taming Mace for themselves. As strange and impossible things happen — including Yuchi being framed for murder — Dee must unravel a plot that threatens the entire country.
I’m not sure exactly what is missing from “Detective Dee and the Four Heavenly Kings” that makes it unsuccessful. It’s directed by Tsui Hark, features the same core cast as the previous movie, and the special effects are still quite impressive. Furthermore, the ideas behind it — sorcerous tricks that can warp the mind, the Empress scheming to get the Mace — aren’t bad. But somehow, this movie just doesn’t quite gel together.
A lot of that comes from the fact that the plot doesn’t feel like it was entirely finished; it feels like it could have used a few more rewrites. The central plot is a pretty simple one, but the subplots are woven in awkwardly to make it appear overcomplicated. There are some elements like Dee’s mysterious illness that are just sort of dropped, but admittedly there are some stunning moments, such as when a golden dragon wall decoration comes to life and starts terrorizing the Imperial court.
And the final battle is clumsily handled. It feels like writer Chang Chia-lu just sort of didn’t know how to resolve the battle, so a character we’ve barely seen is suddenly the key to victory, and everything just sort of crashes into finishing without a proper denouement.
The saving grace is the cast, who are all quite good — Chao gives a smooth, deft performance as a Sherlockian genius who can see patterns that elude everyone around him, and Lin Gengxin is excellent as his best buddy Shatuo, who finds himself entangled with a jianghu assassin. Shaofeng has a lot of wide-eyed intensity as an officer who finds his loyalties divided, and Lau is quite good as the fiercely ambitious Empress.
After two very solid movies, “Detective Dee and the Four Heavenly Kings” is something of a stumble — a plot that doesn’t entirely come together, buoyed up by the solid cast. Hopefully any fourth installment will be a return to form.
The Forest 