[Movies] Flick Notes

John Wick 3 -- This, along with the previous entry in the series (which will be at least 4), suffer from trying to impose a rational and institutional justification on what was, in the first movie, an expression of existential emotion. Like 2, it is wall-to-wall fight scenes, often gorey. The writers overwrite and the actors overact in an attempt to make the oddball supporting characters become iconic. All fail. The motivations are manufactured. Much emphasis is put on a ragged looking Keanu Reeves ruefully responding in monosyllables, like it's totally badass. In sum, it's a decent film to shut your brain off to, but it's a mere shadow of the one where a guy got revenge on the people who stole his car and killed his dog.

Godzilla: King of Monsters -- awful. Made even more awful as it is theoretically a remake of one of the most amazing cult films of all time: Gidorah, the Three Headed Monster. I wrote about the original 5 or so years ago:

Then came Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster, a movie that simply could not have been made without the consumption of untold quantities of LSD.

To wit: A south seas island whose natives worship an enormous and deeply creepy-looking caterpillar. Twin fairies, about a foot tall, who speak in unison, can summon the caterpillar via song, and live in a what appears to be a modified make-up kit. An androgynous woman who is clairvoyant and claims to be from Mars, but may actually be the resurrection of a human princess. (In the original Japanese version she was from Venus. They changed it to Mars for the US release for reasons that I'm sure it made sense when they were tripping.) A group of assassins in black suits from the princess' homeland; these men are referred to as "the killers". And lastly Ghidorah itself, a three-headed, two-tailed dragon from outer space that shoots lightning out of its mouths and has no purpose other than wanton destruction.

The events are surreal. At one point the twin fairies appear on a sort of TV talk show and are challenged by some wise-ass kid to sing to the caterpillar. The androgynous woman is heckled by a crowd and told to do a striptease. The caterpillar has to convince Godzilla and Rodan to stop fighting and team up against Ghidorah by imploring them not to be "bullheaded". Pause to consider that one: A giant caterpillar called a giant bird and a giant reptile "bullheaded" as translated by twin telepathic foot-tall fairies speaking in unison. The mind reels.

Then there is the three-headed monster itself. It appears to have no purpose other than malevolence. It doesn't eat, sleep, breed, or do anything but break things and kill people. Visually it is actually quite disturbing. It's three heads fly about haphazardly in all directions firing lighting wantonly, without any targeting intent. It emits an earsplitting shrill mechanical sort of shriek without pattern. It's a Lovecraftian vision of unfeeling, meaningless destruction. If I had to fight Cthulhu I would sick Ghidorah on him. It's clear at least one of the special effects team must have gotten a bad tab of acid.

The remake does away with the flights of imagination. The bad guys are environmental terrorists not mysterious black-suits, the singing fairies are replaced with some sort of sonic frequency generator, and so forth. It would be fine if they truly attempted to make a movie about how the world would deal with such a threat, but they didn't. The actions are almost uniformly poorly motivated and incoherent. That is to say, nothing anybody does makes sense even after you have suspended disbelief about giant monsters. An incoherent movie that aims for realism fails. To do an incoherent movie properly, you need to add madness for it to make sense.

I'm sure there are more sequels in the works. It's clear Universal Pictures needs to invest in a robust supply of hallucinogens.