June kaiju frenzy

I don't think I've been intentionally tailoring my viewing to what can broadly be defined as kaiju movies, but the fact remains, June is only half over and I have already seen four movies that can be said to feature kaiju. 

Two of them have Japanese origins and two do not.

The first -- chronologically, but also in my heart -- was Godzilla Minus One, whose title made think it was going to be some sort of high concept movie. Having watched the movie and gaining no clearer understanding of what "minus one" means, I've decided that it must be a numbering convention to indicate a prequel, although I don't know what it would be a prequel to. (I looked up if there was a movie called Godzilla Zero, but there are no exact matches for that on IMDB.) Anyway, I thought it was great.

The next weekend, it was Netflix again as Ultraman: Rising debuted. This film has game-changing animation, but still gives a nod to its anime origins. It involves the titular superhero from Japanese comics, who is about the size of a kaiju and whose purpose is to save Japanese cities from them. In this instances, he also comes into possession of an orphaned baby kaiju and tries to raise it, though even the baby kaiju is massive and can do a lot of unwitting damage. As a cherry on top of this, it's also a baseball movie as Ultraman's alter ego is a massive baseball star in the mold of Shohei Ohtani. (And incidentally, this also has a title that sounds like it should be a prequel.)

The same night that I finished Ultraman, which I had started too late on Friday night, I also watched The Mist, which I wrote about yesterday. Although you would not call the creatures in this movie traditional kaiju, mostly because the movie is set in Maine, some of these beasties are as tall as a kaiju and just as bloodthirsty.

Then finally on Sunday afternoon I watched the original King Kong from 1933. That's right, just like that without any fanfare. I say "without any fanfare" because for some ten years now I have been considering this the movie I am most embarrassed about never having seen, so I thought when I finally did see it, it would have to be some special occasion. The special occasion was that I still that the projector set up from watching the Celtics game the day before, and this had been in my Kanopy queue for too long. I ended up being pretty wowed by how much they were capable of doing, only six years into the sound era -- and I use that just as a general gauge of cinematic sophistication at the time, not specifically because King Kong's achievements are groundbreaking from a sound perspective. But I found the stop motion pretty damn good, and was surprised they could do it as well as that at the time. I can only imagine the movie magic people must have felt when they went to the cinema that night.

Now that I've noticed the pattern, any future June kaiju movies will be tainted.

Audient Outliers: The Mist

This is the third in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I rewatch a movie I was cool on, from a director whose other work I like.

I knew there was going to be some cheating in this series.

I had hoped to have each of the six movies fit perfectly into the formula of a movie I disliked from a director whose other work I not only liked, but whose other work I had seen the entirety of.

I got through the first two installments of the series following that concept pretty closely. But knowing that there were a lot of square pegs fit into round holes in the movies I identified and added to my Letterboxd list, which I created specifically to keep track of these movies, I knew I'd have to deviate from it somewhat. And that first instance is Frank Darabont.

For one, I have not seen every movie Frank Darabont has directed. There's only one I've missed, but when you've only directed four feature films, that's a pretty significant percentage. The Majestic (2001) escaped me -- which is unusual given how much I also like Jim Carrey -- but I wasn't going to go throw it on my watch schedule and hope I liked it, just so I could do a Frank Darabont movie this month. 

Actually, I'd been even further from Darabont completism up until recently, as I only just saw The Green Mile in 2018, a full 19 years after it was released. I did like it quite a bit, though, which is a bit surprising, because that isn't necessarily the sort of movie that ages well.

So the second way I'm cheating is that in using a preponderance of evidence to determine that Darabont is a director I really like, making the one movie of his I didn't like an outlier, I am throwing in a TV show. Darabont, you may remember, was the creator of The Walking Dead, which actually seems like a natural offshoot of this one movie I don't like that I haven't mentioned yet. I used to love The Walking Dead and still think of some of the shocking deaths in it today, even though it's been a couple years since I finally broke down and paid to rent whatever season I had gotten up to when I lost access to it. (It went to one of the streamers I don't have, I think, and I may still have as many as three seasons to catch up on, to say nothing of the multiple spinoff series.)

With the cheats thrown in, I do think The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Walking Dead are enough to tell me I think Frank Darabont is capable of great things, and usually delivers them. (Shawshank, which has gone unmentioned until now, is currently #27 on my Flickchart, and I don't think my affection for it requires any further elaboration.)

But my goodness did I hate The Mist.

If you asked me to name a movie that made me spitting mad when I saw it, The Mist is one of the first I'd think of. I wrote a pretty epic takedown of it in the very first year of this blog, which you can read here if you want to. (The "Lord Vader" referenced in the opening line was another blogger whose stuff I read at the time, back when we all used to read each others' stuff, and when other bloggers actually, you know, existed.)

If you read that piece I just linked, you'll note that I focused the lion's share of my negative energies on the character played by Marcia Gay Harden, the religious nut job who doesn't show an ounce of kindness to anyone, even when they are overtly trying to be kind to her. I still have problems with this character -- would it have killed them to give her a little nuance? -- but I think I appreciated it more this time as the actress just deciding she was going to chew the scenery and going for it. 

Oh, in order not to bury the lede, I will say clearly: I don't hate The Mist anymore. 

Before I started to watch it on Saturday night, I did momentarily ask myself what the point was. One of the things about being a cinephile is that you think your opinion of a movie is correct. That makes you hesitant to rewatch a movie you didn't like, because you feel like you had a pretty good handle on it the first time and there's little chance your opinion is going to be changed.

Little does not mean none.

Although I came away from the first two movie in this series, Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast and James Cameron's True Lies, feeling very similarly to how I felt about them the first time, The Mist did improve significantly for me on this viewing. I must have had something in my craw that night I first watched it in 2009.

Before I get into the substance of my reappraisal, I wanted to mention that it was interesting to watch this movie in the context of already having watched The Walking Dead. No fewer than three speaking roles in this film were essayed by actors who would go on to appear in the first season of The Walking Dead, though I won't spoil how long they may have survived on that show. Melissa McBride had the biggest role on The Walking Dead -- Carol, who found herself at the center of many dramas -- but the smallest of the three roles here. The two bigger roles were Jeffrey DeMunn and Laurie Holden, who played Dale and Andrea, respectively, on the zombie show. (I'm going to list all of them in past tense because the series is over now, not because I'm tell you which ones died.) (Incidentally, both of those actors also appeared on The X-Files -- Holden memorably as Marita Covarrubius -- which is interesting, because it does not appear Darabont had any involvement with that.)

Okay I am getting sidetracked.

I think The Walking Dead helps with context for The Mist because it clearly shows Darabont's interest in investigating how people behave in a crisis. The Mist can be seen as a rough draft for The Walking Dead, in a very real way. Inside that Maine grocery store where the patrons are trapped, trying to hide from oversized bugs from another dimension, a Lord of the Flies type scenario plays out that is at the core of Darabont's interest of the breakdown of society under duress. In both cases, the external threat -- zombies, oversized bugs from another dimension -- is secondary to the internal threat, which is what humans will do to each other when there are no rules. In fact, the shocking deaths I continue to think about from The Walking Dead are not those perpetrated by zombies, but by humans against each other.

Led by Marcia Gay Harden's religious fanatic, I had thought these characters were a bit overdetermined, as Darabont wanted to hit us over the head with his ideas. I also thought there was a weird miscalculation by the director to make all the heroes be of a very liberal mindset, leaving all the country folk to be weak-minded bigots. 

This stuff didn't bother me as much this time, and there's a contradiction to one of my assumptions about the film's political perspective that I will get to a bit later.

Anyway, in 2009 I thought the creature effects were bad and I did not feel very scared by them. I'm softer in this complaint this time as well. Of course, it's hard to put yourself back in the necessary 2007 mindset to remember how good or not good these effects looked 17 years ago. But even if they were not all totally on point or up to the current standards, what these bugs get up to is pretty scary. The spider web that burns your flesh. The tiny spiders that burst out of your body. The way your face bloats until you die when bitten by one of the oversized mosquitos. It was grim in the right ways. 

I do have some fresh complaints as well though.

Although I don't remember focusing on this at the time, I do think it's funny how there are basically an unlimited number of people in the grocery store. Even after we've already lost as many as a dozen, due either to death or departure, there might be as many as a hundred others still in the store. Even with people stocking up after a storm that had just come through, I have a hard time believing this store was so chocked to the gills with customers. 

And I do still have a problem with the ending. 

At the time, I thought this ending was a sick joke. Maybe I still do. We see Frank Darabont consciously transition from a man who stared into the bleakness but found hope, as he did in his two Stephen King adaptations from the 1990s, to a man who stared at the bleakness and just saw bleakness. What the main character, played by Thomas Jane, does at the end of this movie is just so out of scope with the actual desperation of their situation, at least in terms of how much time they have been living with that level of desperation, which was not nearly enough to have resorted to what he does. And then to experience an immediate reversal is almost more of a punishment by the filmmaker than the comeuppance delivered to Harden's zealot.

And yet Jane's character, a man of action whose decisions thus far have demonstrated both courage and kindness, is the one traditionally drawn as a liberal. He's a visual artist who does not seem to originate from here, and has a career painting movie posters. (Interestingly, I saw in the credits that his posters were painted by Star Wars poster artist Drew Struzan. I may have forgotten this when I first saw it, but the painting themselves are clearly for already famous properties, such as The Thing and King's own The Dark Tower.)

So what are we to make of Darabont reserving his most twisted last gasp for this man who has been our hero the whole movie? Which is not, I should say, the way King's novella ends?

I don't know, but I do know that not knowing makes this movie more interesting to me.

Darabont has not directed a feature film since The Mist, which I find very interesting. His reasons probably don't have to do with a lack of opportunity, but rather, a different direction for his interests. The old me, who felt the way about The Mist that I used to feel, would have said this was his just desserts for making such a piece of crap.

But I don't know. The bleak Darabont who sees nothing but bleakness has a certain appeal to him, and I might like to see another movie from that guy. 

Case in point

With apologies in advance to Lord Vader ...

Yesterday I wrote about religion in movies, and how religious characters in Hollywood films usually get a bum rap. I wasn't getting all pious on you -- I'm still the same non-affiliated guy I've always been, and don't relate particularly well to people whose faith dominates their lives. But that doesn't mean I'm blind to cinematic injustices perpetrated against people who believe in God.

And so the timing couldn't have been better for me to have rented The Mist, or Stephen King's The Mist as the title is more regularly listed, yesterday. My wife and I were babysitting for people who have a BluRay player (we haven't made that leap yet ourselves), so we wanted to rent something that might take advantage of that format. We were on our second time through the BluRay section at the local Blockbuster when we noticed this 2007 release that had intrigued both of us. I'd read Stephen King's -- novella? short story? -- back in my King days (the late 80s and early 90s), so I might even have seen this one in the theater if it hadn't gotten lost in the holiday shuffle (it was released just before Thanksgiving). Knowing there would be a bunch of CG creepie crawlies emerging from the aforementioned mist, which trap a bunch of locals in a small Maine town in the grocery store, I figured this would be a perfect choice. Plus, it was directed by Frank Darabont, whose other King adapations -- The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile -- were both highly praised. I haven't seen The Green Mile, but I frequently describe Shawshank as a movie I will watch until the end if I come across it on cable.

Boy were we wrong.

I really didn't like anything about this film, but even if I had, the ending would have totally ruined it for me. I'll do you the honor of not spoiling that ending, but I'll also urge you not to see it if you haven't yet. (And warn you that there is a spoiler or two in this post, but nothing serious). The creature effects are terrible, and the acting ... well, let's just say I can't believe this is the same director who coaxed such subtle performances in Shawshank. But then Darabont actually does us one worse by also being responsible for the terrible script.

But what I want to focus on today is the weird application of liberal values in this film, first and foremost with regards to the film's resident religious nutjob, played by Marcia Gay Harden. She's not the only example, but she's a good place to start.

Simply put, Gay Harden is the personification of all the worst things about Christianity in one grating character. But she doesn't get killed off right away. In fact, she sticks around for most of the movie, whipping others around her into the same blind fervor, basically eradicating the idea that faith in God could be anything but a crutch of the weak-willed and weak-minded.

As soon as the mist rolls in, she starts quietly quoting chapter and verse, only loud enough for the people around her to hear a few distracted mumblings. But as things grow a little more confusing, long before they grow dire, she's accusing various others around her of being sinners, even when they aren't doing anything particularly sinful, and suggesting this is God's vengeance against them. Then she rejects an overture of friendship from a nice woman, telling her that if she needed a friend like her, she'd squat and shit one out. Huh? See, that's what really tells me this film hates this woman -- a truly godly person would accept offerings of love and friendship from another person. Harden's character thinks the woman is making fun of her, but there's nothing that would suggest that other than Harden's paranoia.

I won't tell you how her character ends up playing out, but let's just say that everything she does for the rest of the movie can be considered a misapplication of religious teachings. Often, an egregious misapplication.

I'll give the movie this -- it's perfectly believable, in a scenario where the world seems to be enveloped in a fog containing giant tentacled bugs, that the most religious people would interpret it as some sort of coming of the end of days. But if this movie wanted to make us believe in it, it would have shown a flicker of this woman's charity or goodness. Instead, she is one-dimensionally hateful.

As I mentioned earlier, The Mist's liberal agenda goes awry in other ways as well. The second least charitable character in this film is a hayseed played by William Sadler, who first comes to prominence when he threatens the college-educated protagonist (the eternally bland Thomas Jane) for trying to fool them with talk of monsters in the mist. He gets all tough and bullying and threatens to knock out Jane's teeth. Well, what follows is a string of indignities for this character, basically intended to indicate that such people are all bluster and no action. First he stands back in horror as a young stock boy is dragged out the loading dock by a giant octopus leg. Then he screams like a little girl when confronted with an over-sized bug at the pharmacy next door. Finally, he falls in with the religious wacko's flock and starts mindlessly chanting her God-fearing hocus pocus.

More evidence? The three military men stuck in the grocery store are passive and ineffectual. Instead of helping barricade the store against the intrusion, they huddle in a group in the middle of one of the aisles, looking glum. This after they complained at the beginning that they were just moments from going on leave when the leave was canceled due to this crisis. And oh yeah, two of them later hang themselves. (Sorry for the spoiler).

On the flip side of the coin, the guy who takes the leadership role is Jane's character, a graphic artist seen at the start painting some kind of book cover or movie poster. Traditionally, he'd be the passive intellectual, not the man of action. But he jumps in as the only courageous person in numerous scenarios where he's surrounded by trained professionals or rugged country types. And oh yeah, the only guy in the store who knows how to shoot a gun (including the military guys) is the jowly, balding, bespectacled cashier played by Toby Jones, whose most famous previous role (pun sort of intended) was in Infamous, where he played Truman Capote. As far as I can tell from my searchings on the internet, Jones is not actually gay -- and in fact, he played quite the opposite as Karl Rove in W. -- but let's just say they wouldn't have picked him to play Capote if he reminded anyone of Dirty Harry.

One of the things I value about myself as a thinking person -- which I hope I indicated in yesterday's post -- is that I can recognize when my enemies are right, and when my guys are wrong. I know it's pretty facile to take two films (Fireproof and The Mist) and force them to represent their core political philosophies. After all, each is only one movie. And The Mist may not have even intended to peddle an overtly liberal agenda -- it could have just been Darabont's massive failure to check himself, which resulted in him writing a bunch of unbelievable caricatures. But the film he made ended up being just the kind of fodder the church crowd needs, if it wants to say that Hollywood is out of touch with this country's many Christians. I don't want to see a bunch of Christians become the heroes of summer blockbusters, but making Christians as unsympathetic as pedophiles and pet stranglers doesn't do anybody any good either.

Maybe if Darabont gets back to basics -- I don't see another directing job slated on his schedule, but I can't imagine he's done -- his next movie can function as "the Darabont redemption."