Big Trouble

Trained to freeze the enemy with their icy stares

FILM:


Attack on Titan - 2015
Written by Yusuke Watanabe & Tomohiro Machiyama
From the Comic by Hajime Isayama
Directed by Shinji Higuchi
With Haruma Miura, Kiko Mizuhara & Kanata Hongo

This iteration of Attack on Titan is the live action adaptation of the Japanese animated series which was adapted from a Japanese comic series.  What that means is that there's a huge, built-in audience of geeks who are just waiting to bitch about it on the internet.  What THAT means is that the feedback is going to be tainted with the stink of nerd sweat, potentially driving away the rest of us who don't actually care whether Attack on Titan matches the expectations of Best Buy employees and other hardcore fans.  I came to Attack on Titan looking for an evening's worth of entertainment, and that was what I got.  If and when I decide I'm interested in a story told over weeks, then perhaps I will check out the animated series, but that will be another story.

Attack on Titan actually reminds me somewhat of the popular teen apocalypse fiction we've seen recently in American films.  The tale concerns three young people living in the outer ring of a thrice-walled city 100 years after the "titans" devastated civilization.  Their story is pretty heavily rooted in standard Japanese youth tropes with frequent gravitas-revealing posing and overwrought melodrama in shades from silent suffering to violent rage.  Now me, I don't have a problem with this because I accept certain likelihoods when I watch Japanese action cinema, but it's my understanding that this is one area when one can expect more developed content in the animated series, and that's fine too, but there's only room for so much of it when you've got 2 hours and a lot of that has damned well better be monsters.

And monsters there are.  The three young friends, Eren, Armin and Mikasa are debating the merits of going over the wall to see what's really out there, when the answer comes knocking.  Titans are out there, and they've finally decided to let themselves in.  The titans are part giant, part zombie and part oni -- traditional Japanese demons.  The realistic portrayal of humanoid demons is curiously disconcerting, owing to their deformities and vacant grins.  The misshapen bodies and absent genitalia augmented their visual discomfort.

It bears mentioning that the special effects are a little lower tech than one would get in a similar American studio film (like, say, Jack the Giant Slayer), and that, for the most part, is to Attack on Titan's benefit.  The titans are filmed humans, inserted into shots and altered through makeup and/or CGI post-effects, rather than being full CGI creations.  This lends them a certain credibility, which deepens the creepiness in a way that full-CGI does not.  Jack the Giant Slayer is uncanny valley.  Attack on Titan is just uncanny.  AoT doesn't shy away from the straight gore either, and we get numerous shots of titans devouring humans with gusto.

It's clear that there's a lot of story we're shortcutting given the film's tendency to vacillate between exposition, and not explaining anything at all (human motivations in particular), but that's not what I signed on for.  The film understands this and pares the story back just enough to connect the big scenes, which are exactly what I signed on for.

There may or may not be some story tension between Eren and Armin over the love of Mikasa.  Then again there may not be.  No one ever does anything about it, but they frequently communicate through the language of pouty looks and hair flips.  Soon after the first major titan invasion, Mikasa is presumed dead, although at no point will the viewer actually believe that.  The story jumps to two years later and throws more characters at us (who blur together, save for the charming "Potato Girl.") but as soon as a mysterious bad-ass warrior appears, it's evident that it will be Mikasa.

In the past two years, life within the two remaining walls has declined, given that the farms were in the outer ring.  Let's take a quick look at that.  The outer ring was agriculture.  The second ring is commerce, and the center is royalty.  You may have already noticed the problem with this design.  The most useful ring is treated as fodder.  The farms feed everyone, but they're treated as the most disposable.  In the center, they have the most useless human beings ever conceived; royalty.  So the people who do nothing and still take the most are the best defended, never mind that they'll starve just like everyone else when the poor farmers fall.  In between them stands commerce to take the labor of the poor and channel the benefits to the rich, even though they'll be out of business without the most disposable humans in the outer ring.  Now, I don't THINK that Attack on Titan is meant to be a metaphor for modern Kansas, but the patterns are there.

The remnants of humanity are preparing for their last-ditch assault, to seal the breach in the outer wall and get on with the business of exterminating the titans.  Because the titan's only vulnerable spot would appear to be the nape of the neck, humanity's best weapon against them are hip-mounted grapnel-shooters that allow them to quickly maneuver up and behind into striking position.  The weird thing is that you see humans running around with these big metal tablets strapped to their hips far more than you see them using them.  Eventually, the action ratchets up to Spider-Man rivaling levels, but for a long time they look at a select few awe-inspiring ultra-ninjas before anyone else demonstrates that they even know how to use them.  An American version of this story would want some kind of extra-splodey rocket launcher instead of wire-based mobility.

In the end, there's a big heart-rending sacrifice that creates a story-altering catharsis via a massive and unexplained metamorphose, and rather suddenly wraps up the most present conflict, but it's pretty clear that there's more to be explained and conquered in the inevitable sequel.

The story isn't deep, in this version, and that's fine.  The character development is largely trope-based, and that's fine too, particularly knowing that I have options should I wish to see these elements explored more deeply.  Recent re-watches of Spielberg films have reminded me how much more less can be.  It keeps the action moving and that's the part that works.  The titans are much creepier and more disturbing than one has come to expect from the creatures in giant anything movies.  I don't know if they'd play as creepy in Japan as they do here, given the cultural familiarity with their design source.  The foreignness may indeed account for a portion of the unsettling "otherness" of the monsters.

There's a certain amount of corn that I'm accepting here, and part of that is because it IS the product of another culture, and part of THAT is because I do still enjoy those particularly Japanese flavors of crazy.  As films go, Attack on Titan showed me some new things and some not-quite-new things remixed in new ways.  It was never obviously stupid, and that's not something I can say about most of the box-office blockbusters of the current age.

Now, I don't rate, rank or score films, and I'm more glad of that than ever when looking back at Attack on Titan.  If you are a devoted fan of the anime, you're going to have to go into the live action film with a firm grasp on realistic expectations, and that means that no, you're not going to get ten hours of character development.  If you can accept that and understand that the film is, by necessity, a big old actiongasm, then you may have fun.  If you're NOT hung up on preexisting expectations, you're much further ahead.  Yeah, it's going to be weird in those Japanese ways, but if knowing that it's Japanese hasn't already scared you off, odds are as good as not that you're fine with that.

They'll be back.

A Runaway Hit -- Really, A Smash!

The next collaboration isn't ready yet, so I decided to treat myself to one of Cannon's most atypically lauded offerings...

FILM:

Runaway Train - 1985
See link for complete writing credits
Directed by Andrey Konchalovskiy
With Jon Voight, Eric Roberts & Rebecca DeMornay


While the history of Cannon Films is defined by low-brow id-chow, Menahem Golan occasionally liked to hire a prestigious director (often from Europe) to make a movie for Cannon that would dilute their reputation for crap.  He bundled these with the usual brain-dead carnography so that theater owners who wanted the latest Bronson or Norris xenophobic murder porn would also have to take the fancy-pantsy art-house fare.  While I don't think that necessarily implies that he secretly had a sense of taste that he otherwise chose not to use, he still didn't have to make Zefirelli's Otello or Reggio's Powaqqatsi.  Maybe his ego needed the legitimacy, but his business model didn't necessarily.  They could have gone just as far if not farther by continuing to shovel the shit -- McDonald's certainly has.

Runaway Train was one of Cannon Films' biggest and most successful "prestige" titles, and not without cause.  It's a gritty, rock-solid action adventure film that eschews the traditional Hollywood need to make everyone likeable, and lets some of the light of actual character depth shine through.

The story is more-or-less as simple as it sounds.  Notorious criminal and habitual jail-breaker Oscar "Manny" Manheim (Jon Voight as his most anti-social) and his hero-worshipping sidekick, Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts) break out of a brutal Alaskan penitentiary, then hop a train to freedom, little realizing that the train's conductor has just had a heart attack and pitched over the side of the train.  By the time they discover they're on a Runaway Train it may be too late to do anything about it.  That's the plot, but it's not the whole story.  That structure is ornamented with tense action on both small and grand scales, and embossed with moments of humanity where Buck's admiration for Manny becomes evident, and where Manny's reactions reveal that he wants nothing of the sort for Buck, recognizing that it was that kind of naive, young buck stupidity that made his life the kind of waste that necessitated a talent for jail-breaking at all.  Indeed, he wants nothing of the sort for himself, but fatalistically accepts the limited number of choices with which he has left himself.

Legendary Japanese director is credited with the original story idea, which appears to have gone through a number of drafts along the way.  As a viewer who approached this not merely as another movie, but the product of Golan & Globus, I experienced a kind of tension throughout, wondering where the next words spoken were going to come from.  Would it be a moment of insightful humanity?  Tense exposition?  Uber-macho and heavily stereotyped prison color?  The director, Andrey Konchalovskiy doesn't appear to have made an action movie before this, but he handles it with all appropriate tension.  Runaway Train apparently got him hired for Tango & Cash (an above-average Stallone film), and Tango & Cash apparently put him off action.  His refined palette of film-making choices smooth out some of the rough spots in the script and make Runaway Train much more than it needed to be.

Jon Voight was still doing some of his best work at this point in his career -- not the mere casual gravitas that he's settled into, but when he was really cooking, and filled his characters with yearning, fire and pain.  It's not often that you see a character thinking while they're speaking.  The last time it really struck me was Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, but Voight has that here in Runaway Train too.  Manny is not an innocent man falsely accused.  He is a lifelong con who knows nothing else and is only too happy to take violent offense at the least perceived sleight.  He is a desperate criminal, and shows it.

Now, I've developed a pretty solid rule of thumb over the past few years.  Is Eric Roberts in a given movie?  If yes, then you can usually be pretty sure that it's not a good movie.  It's not that Roberts is terrible (he's wildly inconsistent), so much as he makes terrible, horrible choices.  In Runaway Train, he has a director that figured out how to get the most out of him, even if that's still inconsistent.  Roberts is sort of the Lenny to Voight's George.  Rather than asking about the rabbits, Buck fantasizes about the next big score, hopefully with Manny as his partner, and their eventual flight to the criminal equivalent of "milk & honey."  Much of Roberts' career has been spent playing seething creeps and sneering villains, but it's here, as an ignorant, dumb punk, that he gives one of his better performances, inconsistencies and all.

The surprise member of their trainbound trio is Sara (Rebecca DeMornay), the conductor's young assistant.  Like Roberts, she's playing against what would later become her established "type."  She's not just scared, she's vulnerable.  The strength she displays doesn't come from any inflated sense of confidence, but from that place of calm certainty that comes from accepting one's own responsibility for keeping oneself alive.

I really found the production texture interesting on Runaway Train.  There IS a sort of sheen of cheapness on it, but it's also clear that they spent on the kind of things that show up on the screen in a more direct way.  There's a lot of external action on a train speeding through snow (and other obstacles) and that clearly cost money.  In fact, a lot of the snowy exteriors look like they must have taken effort and expense to get to and shoot.

While I certainly enjoy the occasional spectacle, Runaway Train is the kind of movie that's just a good movie.  It doesn't have to rely on explosions to give it life.  It focuses on lives to make it explosive.

2015's Best 80s Movie

VIDEO:

Kung Fury - 2015
Written & Directed by David Sandberg
with David Sandberg, Jorma Taccone & David Hasselhoff

Six months ago on Media Bliss, I shared a poster that I designed for an imagined 80s action flick called Exterminandroid.  The world was supremely disinterested.  I find it heartening to know, however, that there are people like David Sandberg out there, who would know exactly what I was going for, because he's going for it too.  Totally going for it.  All the way.  To the MAX, dude.

Kung Fury was a crowdfunded movie project, paying homage, satirizing, and applying modern techniques to the kind of cheesy 80s action movies of which the Cannon Group reigned supreme.  It is pure indulgence ...and pure entertainment.

The video went live on YouTube yesterday, and it is viewable for free.  You're not going to find a more action-packed 30 minutes in this dimension of time and space.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

FILM:

Robot Overlords - 2014
Written by Mark Stay & Jon Wright
Directed by Jon Wright
With Callan McAuliffe, Gillian Anderson & Ben Kingsley


I'm kind of geeking out right now.

Thirteen months ago, I wrote an article about Grabbers; an entertaining horror-comedy film by Jon Wright that, I felt, evoked the adventurous sense of fun represented by classic 80s cinema.  So while I'm certainly geeking out that Robot Overlords is an entertaining sci fi-adventure-comedy, the only thing that geeks love more than finding something new to geek about is, well, something new to bitch about -- but the only thing they love more than that is being proven right.  Doubleplus thanks, Jon Wright!

Once again, the British Isles face an inhuman threat from outer space.  This time, it's mechanical.

Now, let me just say how nice is was to see robots as a menace again.  It's been zombies and supervillains for a while, and unabashedly campy giant robots from outer space came as a breath of fresh air.  I realize that Transformers exist, but they're abashed in their campiness.  There's no wink, no sharing of the joke.  Think real Star Wars versus prequels.

It's funny, when I wrote about Grabbers, I specifically noted how Grabbers seemed to have tapped into that 80s film vibe, while at the same time making a complete end-run around the gang of foul-mouthed kids save the day bit of business.  Here, Jon Wright has come right back with a big fat "Oh YEAH? Well just you watch THIS!"

Eleven years after the robots invaded, humanity is still on house arrest.  The film opens with one man's unceremonious dispatch for "breaking curfew" -- being out of doors without permission -- right in front of his son, Connor.  It's tragic, but with a glint of black comedy.  The local human representative (read: collaborator) of the robot order, Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley) is able to intervene at the last possible second, to save the son from the same fate, and allow the boy to relocate to the home of Kate (Gillian Anderson), a neighbor who has already taken in a brother and sister pair along with her own son.  Ladies and Gentlemen, meets your rowdy kids.

The robots have only one rule; stay indoors.  They promise that they will leave the Earth in peace once they have completed their research, humanity is assured via regular broadcasts from the Mediator, a super-creepy robot clearly meant to look like a child.  The rest of the robots are function-driven, lacking any sort of personality, not that the Mediator is remotely personable.  He's just human-appearing enough to get his dictates across -- you know, like the automated Ken & Barbies on Fox News.  Filling in for the machines in the menace department, we instead have Ben Kingsley with the vindictiveness and passionately issued threats.  It's a wise distribution of villain duties.

While the mediator represents the robots' best effort to bridge the gap between robots and humans, they've also attempted to bridge humans to robots by implanting each person with a tracking node at the base of their skulls.  This allows the robots to know in an instant if anyone has strayed out of doors.  One night, while dabbling with a little home electronic repair, the kids discover that they can disable their trackers with a little incautious self-electrocution.  Naturally, this is key to evading and resisting the robots, setting them on a course to discover the fate a lost father.  Of course this kind of resistance can't help but to bring them into direct conflict with the entire robot hierarchy.

One thing that really struck me as I was watching Robot Overlords was the story structure.  This is a refreshing change of pace from the standard 21st century action-adventure story formula.  The story has a natural way of unfolding, necessitating the progression from Point A to B because that's the next thing they have to do.  It avoids many of the modern contrivances such as the first big loss followed by a restatement of purpose, and training sequence and ultimate thumping victory.  Our heroes have become too strong in the post-9/11 no-way-can-I-appear-weak era and our hero formula requires an equally overpowered thumping just to check off the "remember folks, he's really human" box.  The kids don't need that.  We know they're no match for the robots, and it's a step-by-step fight for survival for them, with each one getting the opportunity to lend their unique abilities to save the rest at one point or another -- not unlike the Goonies.  Refreshingly, these kids are much less obnoxious than the Goonies.

The story is going to have lots of recognizable pieces, but arranged in its own way.  Tweaked one way or another it might have gone the direction of parody or slavish tribute, but the wit and energy with which Wright pulls it all together manage to evoke many of those sensations of 80s action-adventure-comedy in a welcome, fresh way.  Actually, we never had to call those things "comedy" in the 80s.  It was simply understood that things could be funny as well as being everything else that they were.  Things were just funnier.  Jokes didn't have to be translated into international box office numbers.

Jon Wright is a magnificently skilled director.  He knows what he's doing and he delivers taut and energetic cinematic experiences.  Give this guy a real budget and creative control, and suddenly JJ Abrams will be looking like the overrated story-agnostic hack that he is.  Wright can do more with less, and still have a story that makes sense.  I may come to regret this if he ever DOES get a budget, and becomes beholden to the corporate interests that come with it.  By not designing his film as a collection of action set-pieces and by using not-totally-cutting-edge computer graphics, Wright is still capable of telling a story well without having to make those kind of lowest-common-denominator capitulations.

The performances were all good if not better.  Kingsley brought a restrained complexity to the character we knew was going to be "bad," but didn't have to be one-dimensionally so.  Smythe was allowed to be tragic and flawed, but still undeniably a bad guy worthy of comeuppance.  Gillan Anderson was perfectly fine in an essentially thankless "mom" role.  The kids all ended up being much better than expected.  There were a lot of surprisingly likable characters in this film, and that really makes the difference when separating the one-watchers from the repeated-viewers.

There's been a suggestion that one of the robot machines bears some resemblance to the squiddy aliens from Grabbers, and I like the idea that they may be parts of a bigger story.  They certainly share a feeling, and have firmly established Jon Wright as a director with his priorities in the right place... even if that place is 1983.