Contemporary 2024 – Page 3 – The Magnificent 60s

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) ****

Monster mash-up that delivers. Hollow Earth hits the target, a better parallel universe/ multiverse/monsterverse than all the other verses put together, not to mention it’s also of the versus inclination with any number of big beasties (I lost count to be honest) going head-to-head and super bonkers malarkey of giant apes riding prehistoric monsters. Plus, if you’re of a sentimental nature, and given that this week I’ve been hit from all side by tales of a maternal bent, whose heart would not give a whimper to see big bad Godzilla all curled up for the night in the Colosseum in Rome. Or for that matter Kong taking a paternal interest in a bad wee mini-Kong. Compared to the emotions stirred by these giants, boffin Ilene (Rebecca Hall) struggling with her maternal issues comes over as rammed-in and wishy-washy.

Having taken Mother’s Instinct to ruthless task for its illogical plotlines, I am happy to do a complete somersault and let the monster punch-up off scot-free for all its inconsistencies and coincidences because, heck you know it, fun always triumphs. Plus we’ve got a hippie vet Trapper (Dan Stevens) who, despite awkward accent and Hawaiian shirt, is loose enough to chill out straight-laced Ilene with podcaster du jour Bernie (Bryan Tyree Henry) on hand to add humor.

Throw in some Aztec/Inca-style ancient civilisation, the revival of another Japanese kaiju in Mothra, people who communicate with telepathy, all sorts of daft exposition, Godzilla snorting up radiation like it was coke, pyramids of various kinds, more rabbit holes than you could shake a bunny at, an ape that goes all Raiders of the Lost Ark with a whip made out of bones and full-on Planet of the Apes knockdown.

I’m not even going to bother with the plot, what I can remember of it, except to say Ilene and Trapper need to get Godzilla and Kong together to take on the giant ape villain and the monster he rode in on otherwise (guess what) (I think) the world as we know it (or at last this invented world) will cease to exist.

The humans do their best not to get in the way of the fun. Trapper is smart and glib and occasionally a genius and Ilene is smart but weighted down with maternity while the object of her affection is stuck with the where-do-I-belong trope and mostly stares off soulfully into the distance. It’s the monsters that bring the humanity. That little scamp of a baby giant ape takes some handling, always ready (literally) to bite the hand that feeds him while you gotta feel sorry for Godzilla having to tramp through all those cities that someone stuck in his way when all he wants is a nice nest close by a nuclear plant.

Plus we get ice ice baby. The bad ape’s chained prisoner blasts out ice instead of fire, like he’s an exile from the Night King, but at least he’s not like the latest Ghostbusters iteration that’s been heavily trumpeted in the trailer only not to appear till what seems like the last five minutes in order to give Bill Murray a weak punchline.

This was easily the best part of this week’s Quadruple Bill. I’m not even going to review Ghostbusters – it seems to have got lost in the family nonsense that’s infecting virtually every decent series, meaning we’ve now got to accommodate the size of casts that used to be an attraction in pictures like Lawrence of Arabia, but now feels like an overstuffed very threadbare cushion, and could we care less.

Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs Kong, 2021) directs though spare a nod for the CGI team.

Let’s hear it for these mean mothers.

Immaculate (2024) ***

As you know we live in a Big Brother pampered society and even going to the movies comes with a health warning. But, I have to tell you, Dear British Censor, “strong bloody violence” doesn’t cut it. Now, I’m as happy to be scared out of my wits as the next guy, jump-out-of-your-seat shocks are part of the fun of horror pictures. But having to close your eyes to plain sadistic action – tongues cut off, feet branded, bellies of pregant women cut open, babies stoned to death – sorry that’s a bit more than “strong.” Maybe torture porn should have a category of its own.

Which is a shame because this is a clever twist on the old trope of the demonic child as proferred by Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976) – possibly no coincidence either that’s beaten the Omen remake to the punch. Instead of satanic satanists it’s satanic priests and nuns mainlining on some kind of more scientific genetic Da Vinci Code.

And thanks to the runaway success of last year’s Anybody But You, there’s another element at play here, the breakout star’s follow-up picture to gauge if breakout picture was fluke or welcoming a new star into the firmament. Julia Roberts followed up massive hit Pretty Women (1990) with tepid thriller Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) and the soppy Dying Young (1991) but nobody cared how indifferent the follow-ups were and both turned into big hits and wow a star is born. Sandra Bullock arrives out of nowhere in Speed (1994) and follows up with ropey romance While You Were Sleeping (1995) and tepid thriller The Net (1995) and bingo a star is born.

So this is breakout star Sydney Sweeney’s follow-up – excluding Madame Web of course – and I’m not sure if it will sweep up that many of her newfound followers in its wake. Not because it doesn’t deliver the horror goods because outside of the torture porn it’s pretty creepy and with effective twists and if you want to see a bloodied Sydney creep out of a hole in the ground and give birth and then, as if confounding her newfound bubbly screen personality, beat the baby to death then this one is for you.

Anyway, let’s backtrack. Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), a young American who had a near-death experience, hives off to an Italian convent filled mostly with the devout, the lost and the broken. It’s not Nun of Monza, and it’s not terribly strict either and even though she couldn’t be bothered learning Italian (don’t these nuns speak English?) there’s always someone on hand to help translate. She makes one friend and one enemy, but, hey, like any boarding school that’d be par for the course.

So, here she is settling in, becoming a bride of Christ, taking vows of chastity, obedience and poverty when suddenly charming Fr Tedeschi (Alvaro Monte) comes over all nasty, questioning whether she is a vigin or not. Just when that is established to everyone’s content comes the zinger – she’s pregnant by what is known in Catholic Church parlance as immaculate conception. Quite how this occurred is never explained, except the convent has an artefact claimed to be one of the nails that stuck Jesus to the cross and therefore containing remants of blood (we’re going Jurassic Park here) and thus his genetic code.

You won’t be surprised to learn that she’s not the first victim of this kind of conception. Things start to get fairly nasty after this – someone tries to drown here and then we’re in for the tongue-cutting, branding etc – and Cecilia goes from docile to vengeful. She comes up with a clever trick to escape and when that doesn’t work has to find another way out of her dilemma and if that involves strangling someone with rosary beads that seems nicely ironic in the circumstances.

It was certainly a day of mean mothers in my Quadruple Bill on Monday, this being the last of my quartet. It was certainly well done and the concept no more barmy than any of the demonic baby tropes, if a bit more up-to-date medically, and there was enough of the claustrophic creepiness that comes with the convent territory and the throwback barbarity of the Church (Spanish Inquisition, anyone?). Apart from the torture porn, a good entry into the genre but, despite Sweeney’s performance, this would not have put her in the break-out league. So I think this will just be put behind her as she charts a new rom-com course. Incidentally, like Anna Hathaway and Jessica Chastain in Mother’s Instinct, she was the producer.

Worth seeing for Sweeney, though, and the clever plot ploy.

American Fiction (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

I thought we were in for a treat when our hero is told not to be rude to anyone important. Kick ass, here we go. Nope. Worthy but dull. One part cosmic joke, three parts soap opera, only relieved by the kind of subdued acting that’s become very much the contemporary Oscar-nominated trend (see The Holdovers, Oppenheimer). And with a narrative thrust that is, unfortunately, laughable. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, which for generations lived under the cloud of No Mean City, a portrayal of the city as gangster heaven, and we are nothing on what Hollywood did to the Native Americans so, spare me, anyone saying they have been unfairly treated by any part of the media.

Let’s get the soap out of the way first. Monk (Jeffrey Wright) is an out-of-fashion literary novelist eking out a living as a English professor whose students are on the verge of cancelling him. He hives off to the family home where he discovers – discovers! – his mother (Leslie Uggams) is suffering from Alzheimer’s, brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) is gay and a coke addict and his sister Lisa (Tracey Ellis Ross) is so ill from heart disease she drops down dead in front of him.

When his latest novel is rejected he decides he will rip off current bestseller Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) and write a book in gangsta patois. Lo and behold it works and what began as him cocking a snook takes on a more serious dimension when he is offered a $750,000 advance. And guess what, suddenly his principles go hang, and not because he’s just a greedy skunk like everyone else but because he’s been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card in that how, otherwise, with a divorced coke addict brother more interested in his latest lover and a dead sister – both I hasten to add high up in the medical profession, sister a consultant, brother a plastic surgeon – is he going to pay for his mother’s care. So he goes along with the gig and the problems multiply as he lives the hypocrisy he claims to abhor.

The idea of someone duping the publishing industry is hardly new. Bestselling British literary author William Boyd sent in a novel under a pseudonym but written in his own style that had attracted a gazillion sales and that was rejected. Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski sent in one of his own award-winning novels without a word changed and had that rejected. So the publishing industry, like Hollywood and like the media, is just too easy a target unless the weapon is a lot sharper than this.

And hopefully this is a short-lived trope (Argylle went down a similar route), but we see his characters come alive in front of him and play out terrible scenes from his joke fiction.

Yep, so someone is making a point, that Black Literature has lost its way and why can’t Black authors be heralded for writing about ancient Greece (obviously not in your typical blood-sex-and-thunder fashion) or other arcane subjects or even, as shown here, take as their subject matter well-off university-educated rather than poverty-stricken characters and explore their issues (the same as everyone else’s since you’re asking).

Outside of Monk who spends most of the time locked in his head with a bit of light relief with fan-turned-lover Coraline (Erika Alexander), the only person who doesn’t take this stuff seriously is the sister who died too soon, deflating our literary hero by telling him his books come in handy for steadying loose table legs. Debut offering by writer-director Cord Jefferson based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett.

Kept afloat, just, by Jeffrey Wright (No Time to Die, 2021) mainlining on repression but that’s about it.