Three Films Make A Post: What was once in the deep is now in the shallows

Terra Formars (2016): When he isn’t making fantastic remakes of classic samurai films, or doing some really off-beat movie that harkens back to his really wild times as a director, Takashi Miike somehow finds time in his insane schedule to direct stuff like this big budget adaptation of a popular anime and manga series. Because this is Miike, the thing absolutely feels like a live action manga, so except acting so broad you could fit Gamera through it, absurd hair, special effects that really don’t care if they look “realistic” or not, a plot that manages to be straightforward and linear yet also difficult to parse to anyone who has no idea what this Terra Formars business is about (like me), insane moments of gore, kitsch, a Kane Kosugi cameo, Rinko Kikuchi, insect super powers, and a tone so chipper it becomes absurd. It all comes together – as far as this stuff even can come together – into the sort of film I can  joyfully let wash over me, be pleasantly entertained and only mildly freaked out, and love Miike for making this sort of pop art nonsense in between more serious, and (even) more weird and personal stuff, treating all these different types of filmmaking with the same vigour.

Hard Eight (1996): Paul Thomas Anderson’s Reno-set debut feature length film is a gambling movie, a film about guilt, a film about lies, a film about people who are all a lot more dysfunctional than they seem at first look, and a film about people trying to live in the backwaters of Americana,so it’s basically laying the foundation for every film Anderson made after. This one’s a comparatively small movie, concentrating on a handful of characters – played wonderfully by Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, and a few moments in their lives. While he knows how to organize large swathes of characters, Anderson has always been just as good at more intimate portrays of the lost and the lonely, so there’s great richness, depth and texture to these characters and their relations as well as to the unglamorous (Reno is basically Las Vegas without the pretence of class, right?) places they inhabit.


Les glaneurs et la glaneuse aka The Gleaners and I (2000): It is educational to compare great Nouvelle Vague director Agnès Varda’s late career documentaries with those of her lesser peer (sorry, Godard admirers, I’m half joking) Jean Luc Godard. Where Godard’s documentary work is formal and abstract, Varda’s philosophical approach concentrates on the personal and the concrete, treating ideas through their connection to people and seeking truth(s) about the large in the small. Consequently, this digitally shot – often playful in the best of ways - documentary about gleaners and gleaning (very much in the sense of people who pick what is left), their connection to art and the role of the artist – particularly Varda - as gleaner is full of a warm interest for the experience of people – particularly the poor, the destitute and the somewhat damaged who aren’t usually allowed to speak for themselves (even the people honestly fighting for their rights prefer to speak about them and rather prefer to treat them as abstracts).

In short: Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Apparently, Legendary is one of the major Hollywood studios who have their heads on screwed straight when it comes to creating the now mandatory blockbuster universe. At least in so far as the studio seems to realize that one of these shared universe films really needs to be a satisfying film all of its own, with the universe building a secondary element (see also the way Marvel operates). Narrative pay-offs of shared universes, if a company even cares, should really come in later films, and not be the aim of all of them.

As big damn effects cinema, Skull Island stands directly in the shoes of the original 1933 King Kong, which to my eyes always played as an effects extravaganza first and foremost. So this Kong delights with as many moments of various CGI giants slugging it out as can sensibly be packed into a two hour running time – yes, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts even manages to keep the runtime creep in check while also finding the time for some moments of awe and wonder. Given the budget, these scenes are expectedly sexy to look at, but they are also dynamically and excitingly directed. Why, even the action scenes including human beings just work.

Speaking of human beings, while the film clearly comes down on the side of the – in about ninety percent of all cases perfectly accurate - opinion that the audience of a film about giant monsters wants to see said giant monsters first and foremost, the classic pulp adventure business happening with the human beings is actually rather enjoyable too, and while characters and plot are broad and a bit silly (as is perfectly logical and appropriate for the tradition the film stands in), it’s the right kind of broadness, with larger than life characters doing larger than life things.


Samuel L. Jackson is obviously perfect for being Kong’s Captain Ahab, seeing how expert he has become at the right kind of scenery chewing for this sort of big budget monster movie, but there’s also some highly enjoyable work by John Goodman (who even gets a few monologues that suggest Legendary’s giant monster movie Earth is a rather Lovecraftian place) and John C. Reilly, as well as by Brie Larson (who gets more to do than I expected/feared and to whose outing as Captain Marvel I now look rather forward) and Tom Hiddleston. Of course, I am not one of those movie buffs who love to whine about how the blockbuster universes “cost us” incredible movie actors, because it’s not as if playing in this sort of film were easy (just look at how embarrassing otherwise good actors like Morgan Freeman can be in them) or would make it impossible to appear in smaller movies; it’s not as if there weren’t other actors around either. Instead, I’m happy about how even in the most technocratic of surroundings, a good cast still makes a difference.