Hogback swimming with a new red backpack

Courtland Mall, where I get my alterations done

 

Thomas came and went

 

Film review: Hit Man (2023)

This one was pretty wildly praised as the kind of film they don't make any more and a film for adults.  I'm not sure about that, but it was entertaining enough, although the ending is divisive.  Apparently it's loosely based on this article about a real man called Gary Johnson (like the main character in the film).  The basic premise is that he teaches philosophy and psychology 

(odd combination, I'd say) at the University of New Orleans and lives alone with two cats (and in general, shows certain autistic traits), but is an electronics hobbyist, and because of this, gets involved with providing the New Orleans PD with listening devices.  Then, one day, he's on a stake out (or something) with two members of the NOPD with whom he works regularly (amusingly played by Retta and Sanjay Rao) when Jasper, 

the detective they normally work with (who will turn into the antagonist of the film) is summarily suspended because a video of some violence he perpetrated on some youths goes viral.  Gary is drafted in to take his place as a fake hit man whom the person they're expecting in the diner has attempted to hire.  It turns out that Gary is a natural at playing a fake hit man (one of the contentions of the film is that all hit-men-for-hire are fake, there's literally no such thing) and is a lot more pleasant to work with than the racist, misogynist Jasper.  He uses it as an opportunity to become somebody other than his humdrum self, and in fact tailors his outfit and persona to the hit man he thinks each target wants.  This is a very fun part of the film, as we run through a series of obnoxious marks who get their comeuppance (although we later find out that often the spouses that are their usual targets forgive them and charges are dropped, resulting in them embracing in the courtroom and then both glaring at Gary).  Very quickly Gary establishes a tradition whereby his mark meets him in a diner where he will be eating pie and they say "that pie looks good" and his response (so that they know this is the hit man they've hired) is "any pie is good pie".  Well, this happens with his latest mark, Madison, who just happens to be young, female and drop-dead gorgeous.  

Moreover she is funny and charming.  He discovers that she wants him to kill her husband because (she claims) he is abusive and won't let her do anything and she feels trapped and endangered.  He has a sudden crisis of conscience and tells her to take the money she was about to pay him and go to start a new life.  This she does, as he discovers a few weeks later when she contacts him again at a puppy adoption (they had an exchange about cats and dogs where he ridiculed her belief that cats were known to smother children) and both become further smitten with each other.  (Of course, she is in love with "Ron," the suave hit man persona he purpose-built for her.)  One thing leads to another and soon he is having passionate sex at her new house.  

They both want this to continue, but of course, his life as a hit man makes things difficult.  She is understanding: no meeting at his house, no questions about where he's been, just regular trysts at her place.

Things are going swimmingly when three events throw a spanner in the works.  The first is the return from suspension of Jasper, who is not at all happy at having lost his job to Gary.  (Actually, come to think of it, this happens before the original meeting with Madison, because Jasper tries to use the fact that Gary let her go as a sign that he's not up for the job.  And this is important, because he knows what Madison looks like.)  The second is that on one fateful night "Ron" and Madison go out to a club to dance, and on leaving it bump into Madison's ex. (Apparently not-quite-ex - the divorce that she has told Gary is underway, is not, in fact (one gets the impression she might be Catholic).)  He pesters them until "Ron" draws a gun on him and sees him off.  Following this, the two go to a fast-food place and are sitting outside when they bump into Jasper, who doesn't blow Gary's cover but does recognize Madison.  This causes all sorts of problems when, three, the husband tries to hire a hit man (to kill Madison, and, if possible, her new boyfriend) and Gary shows up and after initially concealing his face, reveals himself before taking the money as a way to intimidate the husband.  Jasper is listening in to this exchange and it puzzles him.  Then Gary warns Madison that her ex may try to bump her off, but she claims not to be worried.  And then the ex shows up dead!  And Gary suspects Madison.  And so do the NOPD.  Can he save her?  Should she be saved?  Is she a psycho?  What will happen if she finds out that Ron is really Gary? Has she been setting him up this whole time (because the NOPD are also very interested in the man who was seen to threaten her ex with a gun outside a club).  Will Jasper figure it all out and make things difficult for them?

As you can see, there are the bones there of a killer film noir.  The Coen brothers could really have made something out of this.  But Richard Linklater and his co-writer (and leading man) Glenn Powell evidently want to keep things light, perhaps because the whole falling-for-a-client thing never happened to the real Gary Johnson, and they evidently want to honor him.  I must confess, I'm not as bothered by the ending as most people (including Jami) seem to be, in part because it's thumbing its nose at certain, perhaps moralistic conventions, but I recognize that the end result is to make Madison look a little unhinged.  Anyway, any film that stars a philosophy professor is okay in my book, and the nearly two hours flew by, so I can't complain there.

June Gloom

 The West Coast is under a heat dome, but it's low 70s here.  We still swam, though.

Hot again

 

Film review: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

I'm pretty sure this is pronounced like "-1" and not, as Jami pronounced it, to rhyme with "minestrone."  Why it's called that, I'm not sure, except that I suppose it's meant to be a prequel to the original Godzilla (although that's not the reason according to this), because we meet him before he has been blown up to gigantic proportions by the atomic tests.  In fact, the film begins with a Kamikaze pilot (Koichi Shikishima) landing on a tiny Pacific island (Odo) that has been set aside for plane repair.  The main mechanic (Sosaku Tachibana)looks the plane over and reports that his team can't find anything wrong with it.  Koichi gets very defensive about this and storms off, but Tachibana follows him and says he doesn't see anything wrong with refusing to sacrifice oneself for a war that is already lost (not something you expect to hear in a Japanese movie!)  That night they are awakened by an attack by a Tyrannosaurus-size creature that Koichi says must be Godzilla (apparently he's spoken to the natives and they have talked about it).  

Everyone runs into a shelter but Tachibana tells Koichi he should go to his plane and shoot it.  Koichi gets to the plane and has the creature in his sights, but freezes.  Meanwhile it's getting perilously close to the shelter and one of the mechanics panics and shoots it with a rifle, which (predictably) enrages it and it proceeds to kill everyone (either by squashing or seizing in its mouth and hurling like a rag doll (interestingly, it never seems to bite down - perhaps to ensure that this doesn't get a prohibitive rating?)) - everyone except the two named characters.  Koichi is knocked out and wakes up to find that Tachibana has dragged all his dead comrades into a line, and that his leg appears damaged.  Tachibana is furious with Koichi for not shooting when he had the chance.  Next we see them on a troop carrier returning to Japan, and Tachibana hobbles up to Koichi and angrily hands him a bundle of something that we later find out is all the family photos the dead men had with them. 

Things don't get better for Koichi any time soon: he arrives home to find that his parents' house is a charred wreck and their neighbor Mrs. Ota, who also lost her children (in the firebombing of Tokyo), aware that he was a kamikaze pilot, berates him that if it wasn't for his cowardice her children (and his parents) might have been saved.  

He has no alternative but to make a makeshift shelter in the ruins of the house and rely on a charity soup kitchen.  And then one day a young woman is being chased through the crowd and she deposits her burden in his arms as she runs by, and that burden turns out to be a baby.  He tries to abandon the baby but can't bring himself to, and is forced to sit around and wait for her.  He has just given up and is walking home when she pops up and reveals that she's been hiding nearby for hours but couldn't appear in public, so had been waiting for him to move.  She is confused as to why he didn't abandon the baby, and when she sees he's a softy, she latches on to him and comes home.  There it emerges that her parents died in the bombing too, as did the mother of the baby - so it isn't even hers.  The baby has a name tag that says Akiko, and she's called Noriko.  There then follows a bit of a montage of the weeks passing and the house being improved and Akiko getting bigger.  

(Where's Godzilla, you might wonder?  Well, we do see the bombing of Bikini Atoll and a giant eye opening...  We also see maps showing the path of destruction of a sea-borne Godzilla that the Japanese government can't do much about because they've been forced to give up their navy and airforce, and the US government (in the form of Douglas McArthur) apologizes that it can't help with because of tensions with the Soviets. But in general, this film is different from most Godzilla movies by wisely focusing on developing the stories of the humans so that we actually care what happens to them.)  Then one day Koichi comes home to tell Noriko that, miracle of miracles, he's got a good-paying job!  The catch is that it's mine-disposal.  But he assures Noriko that they have special mine-proof boats for the purpose.  Then the next scene is him staring in horrified disbelief at the tiny wooden boat that he will be working on.  And this is where we meet the rest of the core cast, who will be his work-buddies henceforth.  The wild-haired "Doc," 

the younger "Kid" (who is sad that he never saw action in the war, something that makes the older men very snappish (not that he didn't see action, that he's sad about it)) and the gruff boat captain Yoji Akitsu.  Turns out the boat is wooden for a very good reason: most of the American mines are magnetic.  In fact, there are two twin boats, one which is unmanned but that is attached with a cable to the main one and that lifts the mines, that float below the surface, attached to cables on the bottom, and snip the cables so that the mines bob on the surface, whereupon they shoot them.  It's fun, and they're impressed by Koichi's marksmanship.  But then one day they are instructed to go and hang out by a ship that has been mysteriously crippled, and Doc reveals that this is the work of a mysterious creature and they are to stall until a larger armored battleship is got out of mothballs (the US has given permission to delay decommissioning).  Suddenly Koichi sees fish surfacing and he realizes that (a) they are deep-sea fish, and (b) he'd seen them on the night of the attack on the island, so he knows it's Godzilla coming, but doesn't know how big he's gotten until he surfaces.  There follows a bravura action sequence which begins with Godzilla just munching the unmanned twin boat.  Koichi gets to shoot Godzilla this time, but to predictably little effect other than to draw his attention.  So they crank the engine into gear and peel out of there, with Godzilla (that is, his head and spines, a la Nessie) in hot pursuit.  

How they did Godzilla in this film, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it was a mixture of practical effects and CGI.  In this scene it looks like the Godzilla is a real solid object chasing the boat in reality.  This could be cheesy (as with the classic films) but manages not to be.  Their only defense once the gun fails is to throw mines at him, and in fact, in what might be an homage to Jaws, they get a mine in his mouth and then shoot it.  And it blows the side of his head off!  But what's this?  A brief blue glow and the flesh grows back!  

And he's madder than ever!  And just as they realize they're doomed, he is hit in the side by massive shells from the arriving warship!  But what's this x2?  He attacks it and cripples it as they train the guns on him.  He sinks out of sight below them but then an unearthly blue glow lights up the sea and a ray of death comes up from the bottom of the sea and the battleship is vaporized in a mushroom cloud!

Major scenes in the rest of the movie: Godzilla attacks Ginza, the suburb of Tokyo where Noriko works, 

and she is picked up in a train and forced to hang on for dear life before dropping into water below.  Then she is part of a crowd running from Godzilla when she is knocked down, and is about to be trampled when Koichi shows up and drags her up and they sprint away.  (Sidenote: when Godzilla is stomping about on land he really does look like the original man-in-a-suit, which is to say he has very heavy-looking hindquarters and a tiny head.  

In fact, I would venture to say that he actually is, but with incredibly creative SFX to make him look gigantic and superimpose him over actual humans and collapsing buildings.)  Something makes him mad and he engages his heat ray again 

(you know he's about to do this because a blue glow works its way up his spine and each of his stegosaurus plates pops up on little stalks, something that also looks very practical-effects-y) 

and we have mushroom cloud in Ginzu.  The shock waves are bearing down on Noriko and Koichi when she pushes him into a side-alley.  When he emerges the street has been swept clean and there's no sign of Noriko.  Koichi's bellow of pain and rage is an echo of Godzilla's.

From then on we're in the endgame (although it's surprisingly long).  A group of ex-sailors band together to fight Godzilla and our friends are surprised to see that Doc is the main ideas man.  

His plan is to attach Freon tanks to Godzilla (no, really) which will release bubbles, destroy his buoyancy (apparently) and cause him to sink to the bottom of the sea (which will be the deepest trench off Tokyo according to their plan) where the pressure will crush him.  And just in case that doesn't finish him off, they will trigger a balloon attachment that will cause him to float so rapidly to the surface that the removal of pressure will kill him.  Meanwhile the skeptical Koichi has offered to be the lure if they can find a plane for him to fly, but secretly he plans to turn it into a bomb-laden kamikaze mission and get Godzilla in the mouth again, only this time with much more explosive than one mine.  They do find a plane - an experimental model that needs repair, and Koichi knows just the man for the job.  The trouble is, tracking down Tachibana proves difficult.  Meanwhile Doc is convinced that Tokyo is now in Godzilla's "territory" and he will be back in 10 days at the longest, so it's a race to get everything ready.

Can Tachibana forgive Koichi?  Will Koichi be persuaded to live so that Akiko is not orphaned?  What is the mysterious telegram that Mrs. Ota receives?  What is that on the neck of a certain person just before the credits roll?   I won't tell you, but I will tell you that they save the classic Godzilla theme for the very climax of the movie and it's as iconic as the Jaws theme or the Imperial march.

Overall: a bit talky in places (as are all Godzilla movies), a bit melodramatic, (as are many Japanese movies), but genuinely gripping action scenes where the amount of time invested in drawing the characters really pays off, because your heart is in your throat for them.  This is like a classic 70s or 80s action film - kind of slow by today's standards, reliant on practical effects, but where the music perfectly complements the amazingly choreographed action.  The only Godzilla movie since the original that manages to capture the original's combination of anti-war message and seriously apocalyptic monster mayhem.  More like this, please!

Film review: L'Avventura (1960)

Apparently, when this premiered at Cannes there was booing and laughing in equal measure.  I'm not sure either response is warranted, but the film is a bit confounding.  The fact that it's about 2 hours and 20 minutes long doesn't help much, as "gripping" is not an adjective that springs to mind as you're watching.  It looks like it might be, for a time there, because there's a central mystery that, in another film, would make for a possibly satisfying whodunnit.  The setup is a bored rich daughter, Anna, 

goes against her father's wishes to go on a cruise with her architect boyfriend (Sandro, who seems rather older than her), bringing along her friend Claudia (the iconic Monica Vitti).  

The catch is that Anna doesn't seem all that enthused about the trip.  She has been separated from Sandro for a while as he works on a job and has decided she rather likes being alone.  However Anna is very changeable, and is more than willing to leap into bed with Sandro (while Claudia waits outside in the street).  

In general, Anna is a bit of a piece of work - when the (surprisingly small) boat that is carrying our party of rich folk to volcanic islands off Sicily arrives within striking distance of one, she jumps off with no warning, and later causes a panic by claiming to have spotted a shark, something she reveals later to Claudia was a fabrication.  "High maintenance" indeed.  And then it is Anna who sets the real film in motion by wandering off on the island and vanishing.  They realize she's gone when they're ready to depart and comb the (small-and-easily-combed) island (which is covered with sharp-looking volcanic rocks and in general looks less than idyllic, although the views are fairly special), with no result.  Occasionally, they think they hear a boat.  There are very dangerous gullies and sea caves that could easily conceal a body.

Some of them stay the night in a primitive hut that is the only structure on the island, only to have the current inhabitant arrive in the night.  So, another movie would have all of this become more-and-more sinister and perhaps turn into a folk-horror scenario.  But no, that is not the film Antonioni has in mind.  Instead, we leave the island and Anna is steadily forgotten (and never seen again).  Sandro has become infatuated with Claudia, and after initial revulsion, she (fairly rapidly) capitulates, and if anything, becomes more infatuated with him.  They move about the countryside half-heartedly following up reports of sightings of Anna (reported to a newspaper that published an account of the disappearance), and we learn that Sandro's job is no longer fulfilling, although very profitable, because he just makes estimates for rich clients rather than designing beautiful things.  And we watch him pettily sabotage a young artist's architectural sketch for no apparent reason.  There are other characters as well: Patrizia, a rich woman on the cruise who appears even more blase than the rest of them (albeit content).  She is married to Ettore, who is Sandro's current employer, and not on the trip (although we visit them at their huge house later).  She has a younger male hanger-on, Raimondo, who is constantly pawing at her to her amused detachment, 

and who is a caricature of the obnoxious idle rich (at one point they find an ancient vase on the island and he just drops it and it shatters).  Then there's the middle-aged, balding Corrado (Uncle Junior!) who seems to have some sense about him (he stays with Claudia and Sandro on the island the first night) but who is constantly belittling to his female companion (who could be his daughter but seems to be his lover), Giulia, who later punishes him by allowing herself to be seduced by a randy 17-year-old "artist".  Not really a likable character in the bunch.  And the movie ends with Claudia, who has spent a romantic day with Sandro, and drops off having agreed to marry him, wakes up in the night to find him gone, and searching the hotel they're staying in, finds him canoodling with a woman we've seen earlier and we know to be an expensive prostitute.  Distraught, she runs off out of the hotel, to be followed by Sandro, who finds her on the hotel terrace and, rather than approach her, goes off and sits on a bench where he cries, and she is again drawn to him.  The end.

So what's it about?  The impossibility of connection?  The essential shallowness of the rich?  How any one of us could disappear and life will just go on?  How love is endlessly fleeting?  How Italian men are just insatiable hound dogs?

Is it any wonder someone coined the term "Antoniennui"?  I can't say I enjoyed it as I have some of the classics in our collection, or even some of the smaller films, like Il Posto.  But I did like the scenes on the island, at least.  Although I'm sure Claudia got tired of the wind...