Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Here's another one from Ian:

Ever wonder why it is called “Gamera Guardian Of The Universe”?  It’s not as if he’s guarding the universe. He’s only guarding Earth, which is just one planet. Sheesh.

 Gamera came out at the same time as Godzilla Vs. Destroyah. In this movie, Gamera fights gyaos, the only monster to appear in more than 1 Gamera movie, not counting Gamera. Gyaos might not be as powerful as Destroyah, but he still packs a punch. He can fire a yellow beam from his mouth, which never fails to make Gamera bleed his greenish-blue blood. Things blow up, and monsters fight.

Even though the talking scenes are boring, this is one of those rare instances where you should watch all that talking. They could be saying something important that you will need to remember in later Gamera movies.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus

Here's another review from my 12-yr-old son, Ian, whom I suspect will take over this blog before I know it.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus was a good movie, but it had too much talking.

When will I ever learn to skip through the talking scenes? Godzilla and Megaguirus do some fighting and things blow up. What more could you want? Well there’s nothing more I want, I just want less of something. The talking!

This movie was fun to watch, so you should see it. The female main character was kind of a jerk, but not that much. 

Haywire

Haywire stars MMA & Muay Thai champion Gina Carano as a spy-for-hire who finds herself trapped in an espionage thriller made by people who appear to have no love for the genre.

We’ve all seen plenty of action thrillers headlined by women who look like they couldn’t hurt a fly.  I like waif-fu as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: force equals mass times acceleration.  I had a great time watching wafer-thin Zoe Saldana beat up grown men in Colombiana, for instance, but at no time did I believe her punches would actually hurt.  Gina Carano, on the other hand, is no waif: she looks like she knows her way around a steak dinner, she moves like the trained and experienced fighter she is, and I didn’t have to forcibly suspend my disbelief to accept her besting her foes.

Problem is, she’s a terrible actress.  Director Steven Soderbergh puts her onscreen with people like Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, and Michael Fassbender, and she comes across as wooden and overmatched.  I believed her when she was in action, but I couldn’t believe her when she was setting up the situations and motivations that put her in action.

And the action itself?  It isn’t much fun.  In fact, it feels like it was made by people who felt they were slumming.  The music just sits there, the fights are poorly edited, the double and triple crosses carry no heft, and the production has no sense of joy.  Compare Haywire with, say, Tai Chi Master.  Tai Chi Master is standard wuxia fare, but it’s made by people who love wuxia.  There’s an exuberance in the stunt work, the music, the performances, the editing, that you just won’t find in Haywire.

Look, I like action pictures.  I enjoy good fight choreography, I like fireballs as much as the next guy, and I’m a sucker for a good chase scene.  But you’ve got to meet me half way.  You’ve got to cast a lead who can act.  You’ve got to give your picture a sense of urgency and propulsion.  You’ve got to love the genre.  Haywire doesn’t, so I’m marking it down as one of Soderbergh’s failures.

The Mill and the Cross

I’ve never seen anything quite like The Mill and the Cross.  The film, a Polish production, takes us inside Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Way to Calvary (pictured, above), painted during the runup to the Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands.  Not only does it take us inside the painting, an already awe inspiring undertaking; it takes us inside Bruegel’s creative process, showing us his milieu and his sketches and his ideas and his vision for this masterpiece.

It does so while casting aside the constraints of narrative film.  There’s a general flow to the picture, but it feels more like a series of tableaux vivants.  In many sections, the painting comes to life with actors, extras, and animals doing their best to stay in position.  In others, the film gives us movement and dialogue that feels painterly, with a painter’s attention to compositions of light, shadow, drapery, and overall composition.  I’m no expert on Dutch painting – like most people with liberal educations, I have only a general knowledge of the “greatest hits” – but I felt like I was walking through a gallery, soaking in the very best of the art form.

Filmmaker Lech Majewski worked with International Herald Tribune art critic Michael Francis Gibson (author of a detailed analysis of the painting entitled, shockingly, The Mill and the Cross (2001, Aucatloss, Lausanne)) to build a film around and in this work.  He cast Rutger as Breugel, Michael York as his patron, and Charlotte Rampling as both the peasant mother of a Flemish youth tortured and killed by Spanish-paid mercenaries and Mary, Mother of God.  They’re fine.  They’re just right.  But Rampling, oh, she’s everything the devastated Mary should be.  With her stately beauty and her sad, sad eyes, she creates a gaze that takes in not just her own heartbreak, but the heartbreaking panoply of human cruelty through time. 

So, what is The Mill and the Cross?  What is it, really?  It’s an illumination, a meditation.  It’s one art form exploring another, to the enrichment of both.  It is, quite simply, amazing.  You haven’t seen anything quite like it.