Wit

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke ; why swell'st thou then ?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.

--John Donne

Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson), a formidable professor of English Literature and authority on the works of Donne, has metatastic stage IV ovarian cancer. As she informs us, there is no stage V. She's an academic, a researcher and thinker. She doesn't hesitate to submit to an experimental treatment that probably won't work, but that will yield valuable data for the researchers and thinkers treating her. She has no relatives. She has few friends. Her only pillar of support is her wit, defined as her "intellectual ability or her facility of thinking." (Wiktionary)

Get ready for a hard movie. I've spent little time in hospitals, submitting to one minor surgery over two decades ago. I was in at 6:00 am, done by 10:00, and out at 5:00 that evening. But those hours between regaining consciousness at 11:00 and getting picked up at 5:00 stand as some of the loneliest of my life. Vivian Bearing spends hour after hour, day after day, in the dehumanizing role of just another guinea pig in a teaching and research hospital. No one cares for her wit. No one gets her jokes. No one's intimidated or impressed by her knowledge or carriage. And studying the contemplations of a great poet is different than contemplating for onesself. I haven't spent much time in hospitals, no, but WIT put me there and led me to some contemplation of my own.

Margaret Edson, who'd worked in a hospital, wrote the Pulitzer-prize winning play upon which this production is based. Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson adapted it for the screen, with Nichols Directing and Thompson starring. They did a magnificent job of avoiding the staginess of some stage - to -screen translations, and Thompson reaffirms her standing as one of the very best actresses of her generation. I believed in Vivian Bearing from the moment I saw her. She scared me; she impressed me; she motivated me to pull my copy of Donne's collected works down off the shelf and thoughtfully peruse his Holy Sonnets. Most importantly, she touched me.

All I know about the experience of cancer treatment I know from reading Jim Beaver and watching this movie. I pray to God that if I should ever hit that unlucky lottery, my wit can get me through.

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla

I don’t know how to write about GODZILLA AGAINST MECHAGODZILLA.  It isn’t particularly … anything.  Not particularly bad; not particularly good; not even particularly mediocre.

It’s just there, competently made mid-nineties kaiju product, boasting excellent miniatures and battles that captured my boys’ imaginations.  It’s adventure stuff, the kind of stuff I generally enjoy, and it rocked along well enough.  But it’s so slick, so blandly competent, that I can’t get an angle on it.  There’s no in, nothing to write about.  This Godzilla provokes no thought, creates no empathy, offers nothing more than pretty pictures of carefully designed monsters stomping their way through well made sets.

The premise is simple enough: Japan creates a giant, robotic Godzilla to do battle with the real thing.  There’s a conflicted heroine, a little girl in need of a mommy figure, and a likeable bioengineer dad for some human interest.  Oh, and there’s tension on the team and all that kind of thing.  But there’s not much else.  The battles rage and buildings fall and Godzilla roars and the human arcs go as we’d expect.

Here’s a film that inspires no jokes, no ruminations, nothing beyond simple entertainment.  It’s fine for what it is, I guess.  I’ve already mostly forgotten it.

The Machine Girl

A Japanese schoolgirl with a prosthetic Gatling gun for an arm takes on the Yakuza.

I’ll just say that again: A Japanese schoolgirl with a prosthetic Gatling gun for an arm takes on the Yakuza.

Reading that, you probably thought one of two things: 

A) Give me a break!

B) Where have you been all my life?

If you fall into Category A, stop reading now.  THE MACHINE GIRL is what you’d expect from a movie about a Japanese schoolgirl with a prosthetic Gatling gun for an arm who takes on the Yakuza.

If you fall into Category B, have I got news for you!  THE MACHINE GIRL is everything you’d expect from a movie about a Japanese schoolgirl with a prosthetic Gatling gun for an arm who takes on the Yakuza!  Dismemberments!  Decapitations!  Destruction of human bodies in ways that defy the imagination!  So much arterial spray that you cannot help but laugh out loud at its sheer and utter awesomness!  Oh, did I mention ninjas?  Not just any ninjas, but a crack junior high school ninjitsu team, complete with Spirit Pyramid?  And at the end, when she winds up with a katana in her hand, you know who forged it: that’s Hanzo steel, baby! 

That’s right.  THE MACHINE GIRL is absolutely awesome.  Comically gory, creepy in ways that only Japanese films can do, and loaded with so many stunts and gags and throwaway references that it becomes Tarantinoesque, THE MACHINE GIRL takes its supercool premise as far as its supercool premise can go.  This is exploitation done right.

If you only see one movie about a Japanese schoolgirl with a prosthetic Gatling gun for an arm who takes on the Yakuza this year, make THE MACHINE GIRL that movie.  It’ll blow you away.