Colossal (2016)

Warning: I’m not going to spoil everything about the film, but some spoilage is inevitable in this case!

Writer Gloria (Anne Hathaway) has hit rock bottom in New York, suffering from an alcohol problem, a feeling of alienation, a bad relationship to a tool (Dan Stevens) and an aimlessness that is rather difficult not to confuse with self-destructiveness.

When she’s losing her job too, she moves back into the empty house in the small town where she grew up, which is sure to help with her depression. There, she reconnects with some of the guys – Gloria’s clearly not a woman with much time for other women – who never left, especially Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), now the owner of the local drinking dive.

All seems set for a very typical romantic comedy plot but things take a rather different turn when a giant monster appears in Seoul for a bit of city smashing. After some time, Gloria realizes something bizarre: the monster only appears when she is at the local playground at a very specific time in the morning, and it seems to mirror whatever she does there.

I am honestly confused by the very mixed reception Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal receives, because for me this is one of the best, most touching and most clever films of the last ten years – and that’s not just because there are giant monsters in it, though that certainly never hurt a film in my appreciation. Rather, I admire the way Vigalondo starts from this extremely typical romantic comedy set-up (including the casting of Anne Hathaway who becomes pretty damn impressive once the film stops pretending to be a romantic comedy) and goes in a very different direction.

In this context, the darkness the film reveals in a certain character works for me on many levels: there’s the simple shock thanks to Vigalondo’s execution of the twist, even mirroring the moments of denial Gloria goes through, the critique on the romantic comedy way of looking at characters, where everything potentially dark in a person is at best treated as a minor quirk, and the sense of betrayal of trust and violation that comes with all this for Gloria. The film also manages to not go too far in this regard; there might have been a temptation to go full on Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the audience, but the amount of violence we get to see is perfectly measured to be just as effective and feels deeply disquieting in its context.

I also love how the fantastical and the quotidian intersect in the film, both containing an element of the horrific (Gloria’s monstrous projection really does kill people, after all) but both also grounded in the world as we know it. This isn’t a pure case of the fantastical as metaphor either, in fact, metaphor and the (fictionally) real mix in a way that can’t just be solved like an equation. That’s apparently not the sort of the solution the film is interested in. Instead, Vigalondo uses the fantastical as a way not just to get Gloria into trouble but also to get her out of it. The fantastical becomes a way towards empowerment once Gloria starts taking a degree of responsibility bordering on the heroic. Which, obviously, is very much a feminist turn on core values of the superhero narrative where with great power has to come…well, you know.

Yet the film is at the same time as it talks about rather serious elements of the (shittiest side of) the female experience and a half-metaphorical way to cope with it also just oh so very fun. I love the monster sequences, specifically because they are small-scale and personal, seen on television and heard through stompy monster effects put on scenes of Hathaway on a playground, suggesting another way for some giant monster movies to go.


Sometimes, you just gotta love a movie, and that’s how it is with Colossal and me.

A short rant about Open Windows (2014)

While I’m usually all for weirdness, Nacho Vigalondo’s hacker bullshit/unlucky stalking thriller really does little for me except to cause annoyance. Vigalondo films the whole affair with a showy real time/everything we see takes place on a laptop monitor POV gimmick that would probably work better if it were a) used in a script that seems less like it was written by a hyperactive kid that needs a twist a second, never mind if said twist makes sense or actually fits what the film has been about for the last five minutes, and b) would stay at least vaguely in the realm of the believable (no need to drag out the possible for me but even I have my standards).

A lot of Open Windows is a series of missed chances: a plot that could say interesting things about the idea of celebrity in the Internet age, or about obsession, or about fandom really contents itself with functioning as a random twist delivery machine; a director with huge technical chops and a decent acting ensemble preferring to make a film that isn’t actually about anything, because TWISTS, and so on, and so forth, in a truly dispiriting presentation of emotional and intellectual emptiness by people who could oh so very obviously do so much better.

Now, as regular readers will know, I’d be all too willing to overlook a lot of Open Windows’ problems and enjoy its implausible plot, ignore the fact that nobody involved seems to have any idea about how hacking works (or really technology at large), or the entertainment industry (which is absurd, given that this is a product of said industry, but there you have it), or internet fandom, or human psychology, or even just windows on what must be the most humungous laptop screen known to humanity. If, and there’s the rub, there were anything about the film apart from empty posturing, like some core of obsession, or an attempt to get at truths you couldn’t get at with a more realist or believable approach, or even just weirdness that doesn’t just feel as if it were in the movie because it would take effort to actually come up with plot twists that make sense.

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In short: Timecrimes (2008)

Hector (Karra Elejalde) learns why it is not a good idea to poke through the woods around one's home. He finds a quite dead looking naked woman and is chased by a guy with a bandaged head who's brandishing a pair of scissors.

As it is customary in cases like this, Hector's flight from the faceless killer leads him into a nearby research facility and into a time machine. Did I mention Hector is not the luckiest of men?

Of course, if you step into a time machine once, you're bound to fuck some part of the past up badly, which just leads to the next badly planned attempt at putting the plot threads together again, and so on, and so on. If you now add to this Hector's impressive talent for bad luck and his equally impressive stupidity, you'll know where this film is bound to go.

Don't make the mistake and think Timecrimes is as intelligent as some of its reviews will let you think. It is not necessarily a dumb film, but far away from a film like Primer's interest in the philosophical dimensions of its concept.

On a technical level, the movie is flawless, if lacking a little in character and/or a style of its own. Everything is streamlined, designed to be as clear as possible and to keep the film moving, which is perfectly fine, yet a little disappointing if you like your time travel films to use their basic concept for something a little more ambitious than mere excitement. Of course, one should take what one can get, and I'll be damned if I continue criticizing a film for trying to entertain me. It's not the film's fault when it has other ambitions than I wish it would have.

Be that as it may, as a thriller with some nice moments of black comedy, Timecrimes is very effective, thanks to an unrelenting (but not too fast) pace and real fine acting all around. Karra Elejalde's Hector is a convincing Everyman and his transformation into someone who will do whatever it takes to achieve his goals would be a lot less believable in the hands of another actor.

I have some minor quibbles with the script - Hector starts out so clueless as too be annoying and not every of the characters' actions make as much sense as I would like them to do - but Nacho Vigalondo's direction is assured enough to help one ignore these flaws.

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,comedy,thriller,sf,nacho vigalondo,karra elejalde