Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

It’s become customary, as we approach the end of a year, to complain about the dearth of good cinema in said year.  It’s almost a new Christmas tradition for film writers. There were no classics; there were too many lazy efforts; why do we still have to contend with all these remakes? No doubt according to your tastes, all of the above could be said about 2014, and any year which precedes or follows it. Personally, the number of films I’ve enjoyed out of films I’ve seen has been pretty high this year. The issue for me isn’t that there are no good films being made; it’s more that I haven’t yet gotten to see a lot of the films which I can see are now appearing on other writers’ lists. What can I say? All of the regular BAH writers have demanding full-time jobs and/or young families; we don’t necessarily always have the luxury of the time or the money (which need to closely coincide) that it takes to get to see absolutely everything which we might otherwise choose to see. Therefore, on this list you will see no Babadooks, no Guests, no minute dissections of the second ABCs of Death – and if I talk about them at all in future (which I sincerely hope to do) it’ll be as a viewer fashionably late to the party.

All of that said, I have been lucky enough to see some great films. The ones which have really stuck with me this year have been the ones which surprised me pleasantly (it’s easy to get glib, especially when you get hit with a run of screeners you don’t particularly love) or unnerved me in some way, either by pulling apart horror/sci-fi convention in some intriguing manner, or riffing very successfully on a tried-and-tested horror theme, bringing something new to it. In nearly every case, it’s taken a while for the film in question to bed in – a few days, or even weeks before I could really say I loved it. Perhaps that’s the ultimate compliment for a film – to suggest it has that sort of staying power, in a climate which sees such a rapid turnover of movies and so many filmmakers vying for the attention of their audiences, before they move on to the next thing.

Without further ado, then, here are the films which I’d say are my favourites this year.

10 – Lucky Bastard

I’ll start off with a film I had no high hopes for, but which impressed the hell out of me. Maybe pleasant surprises have more weight than banal disappointments? It’s a nice thought. Anyway, I received a link for an online screener for Lucky Bastard, something which looked to be a type of found footage film, based around the adult film industry. Hmm, thought I – it’ll be headache-inducing camera spin all the way, with the odd pause of course reserved for some crowd-sating T&A. How wrong I was. Lucky Bastard, first of all, doesn’t exploit the premise of adult film for cheap laughs, or use it as a pretense to moralise whilst covertly enjoying the nudity, Daily-Mail style. Instead, this is a well-written story in which the characters are completely humanised; these are good people who just happen to work in porn. When they are threatened as the story progresses, they show that they care for each other and you, by proxy, care what happens to them, in a series of escalatingly tense situations – though the filmmakers never forget that a well-timed moment of black comedy needn’t derail the whole story or that tension. Furthermore, here’s one occasion when it’s completely believable that there would be cameras everywhere, thus lending credence to an otherwise tired-and-tested framework. Lucky Bastard shows that found footage can still be done very well indeed, in the right hands; many people have rated The Borderlands for the same reasons this year, but for me, Lucky Bastard is streets ahead. You can check out my full review here.

9 – Soulmate

It is both a blessing and a curse that Axelle Carolyn’s debut feature, Soulmate, has become so well-known as the film that got the BBFC wagging its finger (and its scissors) at the opening sequence, of a young woman attempting suicide – which the censors deemed imitable, and thus beyond the pale for us poor, fragile filmgoers. On one hand, many people became aware of the film via the furore, but on the other, many of those new viewers have as yet found themselves unable to see the film in its entirety, a fact which I believe sadly and significantly impacts upon the film as a whole. You may, however, watch the scene for yourselves on Youtube here – and I strongly advise that you do. Not just to circumvent the BBFC, but because it’s actually a very moving scene, beautifully directed and sensitively done. Taking this scene as part of the whole, as it was always intended, Soulmate moves beyond a supernatural horror – though it does this very well – and turns into something else: it’s not about scares, really, it’s about extraordinary events befalling a woman, turning her from a victim into a victor, someone who wants to live. You can read my full review here.

8 – Big Bad Wolves

During my initial review of this film, I remember noting my ignorance of Israeli cinema, and in the months since I’ve watched Big Bad Wolves, it’s had me thinking of just how many countries and film industries there are out there which mostly pass us by, alongside their own abilities to dramatise topics which may yet be beyond at least mainstream European/American cinema. Certainly, it feels next to impossible that you’d get such a skilled, engaging, but ultimately unflinching take on the topic of child abduction from our neck of the woods. Hollywood would rope in Liam Neeson a-fucking-gain, throw in a few car chases, demonise a nationality or two and ultimately come out in a blaze of redemption. Without getting into specific nation politics, perhaps things can be done differently in Israel. A fascinating watch, Big Bad Wolves may be no horror film, but it deftly weaves a number of elements of horror into its crime drama. Its twist in the tale is one of the most understated shocks I’ve ever received from a film. Absolutely superb stuff.

7 – The Sacrament

The Sacrament, directed by Ti West, served as an excellent palate-cleanser for me. See, I hated The Innkeepers, and I was all but ready to give up on Mr. West; with his newest film however, one very different in direction, he’s restored my faith that he is capable of good storytelling with likeable, believable characters. In so doing, he’s also (in all but name, really) taken on the potentially risky real-life story of the Jonestown Massacre, where a notorious cult were persuaded by their charismatic leader, Jim Jones, to off themselves with spiked Kool-Aid. The tale of Jonestown has been much considered and debated in the decades since it happened. But what makes a normal person with a normal upbringing throw everything in to live an isolated, precarious existence in the back of beyond? By updating and retelling the story – yes, with hand-held cameras – West has made a good show of charting the escalating paranoia of an isolated, vulnerable community, via some interested parties trying to track down a missing sister. The results are impressive, especially in how West communicates the panic of the cult members on screen, without exploiting it all for kicks. Saying it provides insight into the mindset of the cult member may be pushing it a little far, but it’s a deft, worthwhile dramatisation in any case. The central performances are superb too. You can read my full review here.

6 – Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

I’m so, so happy that my malingering suspicions about the (so far) two Planet of the Apes prequels have been greatly disappointed. I really am. In getting us up to the point at which, in the original, Charlton Heston touched down on an unrecognisable Earth (in one of my favourite films ever made), these prequels have developed the story sensitively and cleverly – but also given the subject matter a high-gloss Hollywood look, which actually fits very well indeed given the fantastical developments we’re asked to accede to, using frankly genius SFX to flesh out the subject matter (and it’s getting harder and harder to wince at CGI these days – things have moved so quickly that developments have quite overtaken my cynicism). This most recent prequel may have started on relatively safe territory with the whole ‘virus decimates humanity’ riff, but from here on in, the story moves in new directions entirely, whilst quickly jettisoning the ‘apes good, men bad’ dichotomy which not only would have severely limited the success of the film overall, but hardly have paved the way for what we know, plot-wise, is to follow. Andy Serkis has become the go-to guy for these sorts of hybrid CGI/acting performances, but let’s face it – there’s a reason for this. Through his skilled work, Caesar the chimpanzee is an incredibly well-developed character. The film has some faults but nonetheless this is an engaging and surprisingly moving piece of work. You can read my full review here.

5 – Godzilla

From a prequel of a classic, to a remake of a classic which has spawned many other remakes and sequels and may well now, at the time of writing, be back in business via the Japanese studio which launched the original. Leaving aside this complicated family tree, I have no qualms in having Godzilla on my best of the year list. In fact, I’ve been quite surprised at seeing so many ‘meh’ reviews of it this year, or even downright hostility towards it. Look, it’s a fucking big monster movie, a nod of the head to the ultimate fucking big monster movie, and I for one would take a fucking big monster movie over a whole cohort of its peers any day of the week – especially when it looks as glorious as Gareth Edwards has made it look. Edwards earned his monster movie chops, for me, when he made the (again often maligned and misunderstood) Monsters in 2010; he was clearly the guy for the job on the Godzilla remake, albeit a film drastically different to the study of human folly that is Monsters, and I love what he’s done here. As for criticism on the family focus in the film – well, this is right there in the incredible original Godzilla too, a film that has been with us now for sixty years. Sure, it’s a little saccharin in the 2014 version, but Edwards does enough around and outside of all of that to make this one of the most fun films of the year for me. And that’s the thing, really: I don’t want morose and subtle all the time. Godzilla is pure entertainment, and whether we get the next film from Toho or from Hollywood, or indeed both, I hope they’re just as entertaining. You can read Ben’s full review of the movie here.

Click here for the second part of Keri’s Top 10…

By Keri O’Shea

For as long as there have been sources of tremendous anxiety and terror – things too incomprehensible or too unseemly to be met head on – mankind has used the medium of monsters to come to terms with them. It’s the oldest trick in the book. As long ago as the eighteenth century, the spectre of takeover by the rabble under the banner of revolution was prompting cartoonists to represent this threat as a monster – a colossus, all too able to cross the sea from France to Britain, were it not stopped in its tracks. Literature, as it swung into Gothic mode, reinvented or even invented an array of monsters in line with the contemporary concerns of the day, with perhaps Victor Frankenstein’s lumbering Creation – a creature often viewed as ambiguous, rather than evil – the best known example of monster-as-anxiety of them all. Frankenstein’s Monster, incidentally, made for one of the first examples of the monstrous to cross from the written word onto the silver screen. The novel formed the basis of a short film as early as 1910, though it was in the 1930s and 40s that cinematic monsters had their first true heyday, with the Creature, the vampire, the werewolf, the mummy and the cryptozoological marvel of King Kong all finding their way to appalled, but engaged and engrossed modern audiences. Horror had transformed itself into popular entertainment in a new medium and made itself into a lynchpin of big studio success, but it retained its potential as a pressure valve, a way of handling the unconscionable, or at least the unpalatable – sex, death, disease, conquest and war.

This was not just true of Hollywood, as much as its successes reverberated around the watching world. Certainly, the team behind Godzilla (1954) or, to give it its original title, Gojira, wold have been aware of King Kong (1933), the story of a prehistoric and, shall we say, single-minded giant that decimated New York after science disturbed him in his own natural habitat. However, though the physical scale of the creatures is similar, Gojira is a very different movie, and its tale is borne out of a very different sent of concerns – though it’s just as true that this particular Jurassic monster operates as a pressure valve for his own milieu, a milieu with unprecedented issues.

Gojira is a quintessentially Japanese entity. As a nation which consists of so many islands, the sea figures significantly in an abundance of malign Japanese folklore (in entities such as the Ikuchi, the Isonade and the Umibōzu) and – as a country which has an ambiguous relationship with its land and its seas, with a cataclysmic history of earthquake and tsunami – it’s little wonder that its first foray into monster movies should use the sea as a basis for terror. However, acting as a balance between old and new, folklore and history, is the monster’s role as a conduit for Japan’s pent-up horror and frustration post-World War II.

Having been prey to the devastating nuclear attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan had to wait for an opportunity to make any sort of reply. These attacks may have precipitated Japan’s surrender and the end of the war, as such rendering them justifiable in the eyes of many, but even accepting this, and also accepting that many Japanese still haven’t come to terms with their own nation’s war atrocities preceding the Hiroshima bombing (if they’re aware of them at all) it’s not difficult to see how the event tore through Japanese national consciousness – yet, as the Americans occupied the country until the 1950s, any expression of the feelings held by the Japanese, in popular culture or elsewhere, was muted. Accordingly, when Gojira was made in 1954, it came stacked with references to what the country had been through (and, incidentally, when America bought the rights to the film from Toho Studios, it excised all mention of nuclear attacks, as well as altering the title to its better-known incarnation – Godzilla: King of the Monsters. It seems that, in the aftermath of war, each side has its own inconvenient truths).

The film starts with a group of fishermen off the coast of Odo Island, making their way back with their catch when a brutal burst of light and a vast disturbance in the water wrecks their vessel. In a clear nod to the nuclear testing which took place off the coast of Japan even after the end of WWII (although it is not succinctly spelled out at this stage) the men are burned, and most drown. The authorities launch a rescue, as relatives on-shore wait desperately for news of survivors from the boats in the area, but it seems that there is more going on than simply a nautical accident. Older residents of Odo, when they see the empty fishing nets next being brought back to shore, suggest that it’s a portent for the return of a folkloric monster they call ‘Gojira’. A series of disasters does seem to point to something more being amiss, leading to scientific experts from Tokyo coming to Odo to investigate. “Today’s world is still full of mysteries,” says one of our key players, Doctor Yamane – and true enough, he and his team soon see the gigantic creature for themselves. The creature must be stopped, of course, stopped from assaulting the major cities – but how do you kill a creature not only impervious to thermo-nuclear charges, but now imbued with radioactive strength? The secret lies with one scientist.

“May peace and light return to us…”

It’s curious that one of the chief criticisms levelled at Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla this year was that it was far too family-focused, too aligned with the fate of one small group of people in particular, because that is exactly the same focus offered up in the original. In fact, although it gets the low-key treatment you might expect from 1950s Japan, at the heart of the film’s plot is a love triangle. Doctor Yamane’s daughter, Emiko, has formed an attachment to the dashing alpha male Ogata; it’s not a conventional boy-meets-girl, however, as Ogata is not currently her intended. They each try to find the right moment to tell her father about her change of heart, somewhat ignoring the fact, at least at first, that there is a third man involved. His name is Doctor Serizawa, and to be fair to Emiko, he’s clearly not a man for heart-to-hearts. War-injured (WWII cost him an eye) and clearly troubled by the nature of his research work, he comes across as a deeply damaged man. However, the unhappy personal circumstances of these three people (four, if you count Yamane, himself desperate to preserve the creature) is what eventually allows Japan a way out of its crisis. Emiko struggles with her conscience, but eventually reveals what she knows – that Serizawa has a weapon which could conquer even Gojira. Serizawa, in his agony, eventually agrees to use his ‘oxygen destroyer’ against the lizard – but his horror of more war, of his invention ever being used to inflict harm against others, leads him to the ultimate sacrifice.

The understated suicide of Serizawa is, to my mind, still a very affecting sequence. It’s all too easy to scoff at the creature FX or the premise itself from a rather pampered modern point of view, but the human element in this story is unmistakably tragic. A broken man, devastated by war, abandoned by his partner and on the precipice of gifting the world yet another weapon of mass destruction, Serizawa decides instead to burn all of his notes and then, having set up the weapon on the ocean floor, he severs his lifeline, ensuring he will never surface again. No one will get the technique for making the oxygen destroyer; no ‘politician’ (referred to as ‘devils’ in this film) will ever get to use it, but his death is the only way to guarantee this. It’s a tragic end for a quiet, but assured man. His final words, for all of this, are words of acceptance. He wishes Ogata and Emiko happiness; he observes the weapon working against Gojira, then he is no more.

The poignancy of all this is enough in itself – less is definitely more here – but the gravitas of the scene owes so much to the accompanying music (the film was scored by Akira Ifukube). The score throughout Gojira is remarkable; the last song, in particular, is one of the greatest ever used in a film soundtrack. Serizawa’s suicide is touching in its modesty, but the soundtrack provides all of the emotions absent from his composure. It’s a bombastic, heart-rending piece of music which I always find moving.

Serizawa is overt in his reasoning for self-sacrifice, but his is not the only reference to war in Gojira. War runs throughout the film, an almost spasmodic urge to document and dramatise the events of the decade before, even if via the ‘safe’ medium of entertainment. Little wonder that the American censors stripped away so much of this discourse. From the nuclear testing which unleashes the beast in the beginning, to the expressed fear on behalf of the Japanese that the spread of knowledge about Gojira could “harm international relations”, to the woman on a tube train bewailing the threat to Tokyo by Gojira, saying she “went through enough in Nagasaki” – the film is a fantasy, sure, but the language is all post-war trauma. Then, there are all-too familiar scenes and sounds of mass destruction throughout: the sirens, evacuations, the fleeing crowds, fire storms, mass casualties. Serizawa was right – Japan had had enough of war. But then, only a cataclysmic weapon could prevent more and more destruction. Only his weapon could kill Gojira. That’s the unhappy contradiction at the heart of the film, and perhaps more than that, an oblique reference to the difficulties of truly starting anew. As Yamane warns, once you open the floodgates on these types of weapons or this type of warfare, nature can’t just wipe the slate. There could be more Gojiras, he warns…

As for Gojira itself, it’s easy to overlook this monster’s qualities now, so deeply entrenched is he in global modern popular culture, but this is a remarkably novel beast, one which reflects the peculiar circumstances of his conception. He’s a ‘Jurassic monster’ ostensibly, a dinosaur awoken from the ocean floor by nuclear tests, but not destroyed – Gojira is very much alive, and he’s pissed off. But what is he, really? A bipedal dinosaur living submerged somehow? Mentioning the science of the study of Earth’s great pre-history, and the age of the colossal giants – the Jurassic epoch – is all well and good, but here we have a creature that shouldn’t be, let alone a creature capable of surviving a nuclear explosion (or indeed using nuclear energy as a weapon of his own, assuming that’s what his death-breath is – which makes him more like a dragon than a dinosaur). Then again, the locals seem to know what he is already, which transposes him into the folklore of the island, even makes him into a folk devil, a creature that has risen from the depths before. Yet, the predictions of the locals that Gojira will come to land because there is no food doesn’t seem to be borne out by the way he behaves when he reaches Japan. He’s not there to eat, simply to destroy. He’s not hungry, he’s seriously ornery.

He’s not evil, though. Gojira doesn’t seem to act out of malice. Like many other monsters before, his behaviour is ambiguous – he doesn’t have a grand plan, rather he stomps through (a magnificently well-realised, miniaturised) Tokyo simply because that is what he does, and because of what has been done to him. Later incarnations of Gojira/Godzilla have pitched the monster differently, but there’s none of that in his first incarnation, and the film is all the stronger for it. Equally, Ishiro Honda’s film understands that less is more – Gojira occupies rather less full screen-time than you’d first think, and his scenes benefit hugely from the film being shot in black and white, as he looks like more of a believable being, part of the surrounding landscape even as he ruins it, and rendered more striking by the abundant use of shadow throughout. Yes, it’s a guy in a suit. But I think Gojira, in the first film, is still a formidable presence on-screen.

He’s also a monster with a massive legacy. Gojira is one of the most instantly recognisable Japanese cultural exports, as well as the source of a seemingly endless array of films back home in Japan. Rarely has he been the ambiguous creature he is in Ishiro Honda’s original vision, though; over the years, he’s frequently been recast as a hero, saving the world from a whole host of other gargantuan monsters. As the originator of an entire genre – the ‘kaijū eiga’, or simply ‘monster movies’ – it’s perhaps not such a surprise that this particular monster has gone through a few changes via a whole host of TV, comics, cartoons and similar, but he remains one of the most versatile in how he gets used in a film’s plot. You can see the influence of this film on modern horror and sci-fi too, particularly in films like Cloverfield and Monsters. The popularity of Gojira is such that, even this year, sixty years after its first appearance, it’s still deemed suitable for a big-budget American remake (which turned out to be a damn fine, fun film, by the by). Not bad going. The word ‘Godzilla’ has even entered the English language, usually used to refer to anything gargantuan in scale – in a similar way that ‘Frankenstein’ is a prefix for any sort of harmful science. Quite something, to turn into an adjective…

Gojira is now part of the bedrock of our pop culture consciousness, and this can make it harder to consider its impact – but as it reaches its sixtieth birthday, it seems our taste for monsters on screen isn’t going anywhere. We owe so much of that to Gojira. It’s also a film which still deserves to be considered on its many merits, not least of which is how it provided an outlet for the frustrations and terrors of a nation. In that, Gojira (1954) gives us a monster in the truest sense of the word, as well as a game-changing movie.