KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have usually have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts. This week, nothing inspiring, just six middling films which I don't have much to say about.
This Week:
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984, d. Stephen Spielberg - DVD)
Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons (2022, d. Matt Peters - AdultSwim)
Blood and Black Lace (1964, d. Mario Bava - Tubi)
Matango or "Attack of the Mushroom People" (1963, d. Ishirō Honda - Tubi)
Rodan (1956, d. Ishirō Honda - Tubi)
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But it's also deeply offensive and brutally annoying. On the latter, Kate Capshaw puts in a shrieking, whiny, aggravating performance as golddigging chanteuse Willie Scott that begs the question "what is she even doing here?" Seriously, why did Indy bring her along? There's nary a moment that Willie is on screen that she isn't utterly grating beyond the opening song and dance number (a number which transitions into something gloriously huge in Willie's mind's eye, a perspective that we never actually see again...so why, except that Spielberg wanted to do a big musical number?).
Then we get "Indiana Jones: white saviour", as he ventures into a small, impoverished village in India devastated by the removal of a sacred stone (but more a result of the village children being kidnapped by the thugees of the local palatial elite and the river path having been diverted into the mine where the children are enslaved). Indy agrees to retrieve the stone. Visiting the palace leads to the most infamous scenes: first of the dinner of gross things like a snake full of snakes and frozen monkey brains, and later the ritual heart-from-chest-ripping sacrifice that are offensive made-up ideas of Indian culture that wound up becoming entrenched in many ignorant and impressionable North American viewers as actual stereotypes.
Beyond the offensive, is the silly shit, such as Indy, Willie and Short Round jumping out of a crashing plane in an inflatable raft and surviving (disproven by Mythbusters). I actually like the nonsense mine-car chase because I played an immeasurable amount of Temple of Doom video game on Commodore 64 and that sequence was such a pain in the ass.
The climactic rope bridge escape is a classic movie moment that still works, but so much of this film is built of classic movie moments that are not aging well..like, at all.
The most enjoyable aspect of the film, besides Harrison Ford's indelible charm, is Short Round (a very young future Oscar winner Ke Huy Kwan). He has such an endearing and delightful chemistry with Indy that I honestly wish he was in Crystal Skull as Indy's estranged son instead of Shia LeBouef's Mutt. When Short Round finds himself in situations on his own he proves he's a resourceful and capable kid as well as a skilled fighter (though I'm not sure how much damage a roundhouse kick from an 8 year old would really do).
The end result of all this is Temple of Doom is an exceptionally well made awful movie. It's only really enjoyable if you're willing to look past/desensitize yourself to the ignorant white gaze this film is presented through.
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The majority of the content has been adaptations of popular stories moved into 70-ish minute animated form. Both a benefit and a curse of the target audience for these movies is that there tends to be some awareness of the characters, their history, and there may even be connective threads between one film and another, an mini-franchise. But, you're never sure what you're going to get, and invariably, just moving stories out of ongoing serialized comics and into another, more widely accessed medium, there's still a level of adaptation necessary for a more general audience.
Which leads to the cold open of Battle of the Super-Sons, a movie that is ostensibly about the teaming up of Superman and Lois's 11-year-old son, Jonathan Kent, and Bruce Wayne's slightly younger son Damian (who was raised to be an assassin by his mother, Talia Al Ghul). I read most of the Super-Sons comic books (there have been less than 50 of them, so it's not a deep storytelling roster) and quite enjoyed them, so I was keen to see how they would be translated into another medium. The cold open takes us all the way back to Krypton, again, one of the most familiar stories in all of superhero media, and I was expecting some grand, novel deviation on this hoary old story, but no, it's told pretty much as we've seen it told countless times...except as baby Kal-El's rocket zooms away from the dying planet, a starfish hitches a ride. Really, we needed to go through all that, again, just to introduce Starro?
The film takes a while to get to the actual pairing of the super-sons, and I was getting more and more bored (it's not helped by the fact that this film's vocal performance of Superman by Travis Willingham is one of the starchiest reads for the character, just utter milk powder dry). We have to go through a whole segment of Jonathan discovering his powers, freaking out, and Clark revealing himself to be Superman to his pre-teen who is angry that he's never around (real emotions that are just kind of dismissed upon said reveal). But once Jonathan and Damian meet and the super-sons become the focus of the story, the film starts delightfully crackling, both Jack Dylan Grazer (Shazam) and Jack Griffo (The Thundermans) delivering wonderful performances and Jeremy Adams' script really plays them well off each other.
It all would have been so much more wonderful had the film just started with their meeting, because those opening 15 minutes (or so) where we don't have them together just robs us of more of what we came for. The story is already so in media res in many ways (with a Teen Titans subplot for Damian, and a Justice League roster that gets no introduction filling up the background) that we didn't need such a rehashed lead in.
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Blood and Black Lace is a film I knew only from its title having penetrated into my brain somewhere along this 40-some-odd-year long road I've been on. I knew nothing about what the film was about, nor the genre, nor the actual critical consensus around the film. Hell, I didn't even know it was a Bava film until I was flipping through Tubi's bizarre catalogue (a favourite way to kill an hour) and it told me. Whatever, it was an instant play (despite being on Tubi).
The opening credits are stunning, as each of the film's players are introduced in a living still frame (the actors holding a pose) that are just gorgeously composed like, well, fashion photography. The colours are warm, lush, and romantic but juxtaposed with threatening shadows. The horn-heavy soundtrack overtop is (and remains) sultry and dangerous, like what you'd find in a 40's Noir...yet there's a bit of soap operaticness to the whole presentation. The film does kind of peak this early, but the rest of the film is a wild ride.
A windstorm brews outside a fashion house, where secret affairs, substance abuses, and rivalries all percolate under the haughty, intense surface. And then, murder!
One of the models is murdered, and there are no suspects, but everyone is suspicious, especially when the dead model's diary is discovered...darting eyes, panicked looks. Everyone, it seems, had motive. Motive enough to kill again and again.
The original title that appears in the credits is 6 Donne per L'Assassino, or "6 Women for the Killer", which tells us exactly how many deaths to expect. The marvel is at how this film doesn't play into any real conventions of slasher films, basically because it's not a slasher film. It plays at being a whodunnit but then unfortunately gives up the ruse early in the final act. It's the last act where it not quite falls apart but doesn't uphold it's unexpected twistyness.
It's a film that is utterly style over substance, it doesn't care about any of its characters, but still goes through the preformative motions of telling us just enough about them to let us love to hate them and secretly be okay with whatever cruel fates are in store for them.
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Also unfortunate is this film was sold to me as one of Honda's "better" sci-fi films by a certain Director-cum-podcaster who shall remain QuiTe nameless. And the title, the English one at least, put together with Honda's background, leads to certain expectations. And those expectations are that there will be mushroom people attacking.
It's a sub-90 minute film and at the pass of the first hour we've only had one glimpse of a mushroom person and no attacking!
The film, in reality, is a bit of a psychological drama/thriller, as a few upper-crust friends and two less than upper-crust crew are on a boat when it gets in trouble and spits them out on a remote island. There, tensions rise as food grows scare and their cultural disparities start to reveal deep-rooted resentments and prejudices, plus two women and five men...things could get ugly.
Honda tries, but doesn't quite succeed at showing us the impact of starvation on one's brain, and the pervasive fungi that seems to be coating various surfaces of the island is the elephant in the room, as everyone's told to be wary of them, but wind up hungry enough to risk mowing down. In the final 15 there's a sort of Sid and Marty Kroft-esque trip out scene as the Mushroom People attack (unfortunately these are literal mushroom people and not metaphorical ones) and it's quite ridiculous. On top of it all, it's told in a framing sequence that, by the end seems like a sub-rate Twilight Zone than a satisfying feature.
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I backed up watching Matango with watching Honda's other, other classic kaiju feature (no, the other one), Rodan. You know, the giant bird one. No, you're thinking of the giant moth one, this is the giant pterodan (sic) movie.
Like Gojira before it, Rodan is much about wrestling with the aftereffects of man's use of weapons of mass destruction. Where Gojira takes more of a view on how these horrors impacted Japan and the Japanese people, Rodan posits more the concept of "what is the impact on the world, on Mother Earth? Shouldn't she be angry? How would she defend herself?"
The answer is, basically, by releasing a pair of gigantic, supersonic dinosaurs from beneath the Earth to wreak havoc upon all. Its flapping wings create devastating winds, and the sonic boom it produces in its wake swiftly devastates all in its wake.
Honestly, I found Rodan kind of boring. As much as this is Honda's complete bailiwick, and all the usual great miniatures (and destruction of miniatures) are there, the rodan as creatures (they are a romantically linked pair) are not nearly as compelling as Godzilla, and they don't look nearly as good as vintage big-G. There aren't really any human characters worth giving a damn about, and the film seems to cycle through them.
I've seen many, many kaiju films and I typically enjoy them, but this one wasn't doing it for me.
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"Like Gojira before it, Rodan is much about wrestling...."
ReplyDeleteNo, that would be the other kaiju movie, The Calamari Wrestler !
I recall, having first seen it in the theatre, rather disliking TToD. Over the years, the few times I have seen it again, I stuck with that opinion, but now, ages and ages since I last saw it, and having changed more in the past 10 years that the previous 30, I wonder what my opinion might be.
Maybe I need another tag --- What Kent Watched.