"We'll need a miracle to make it work." "Doing nothing won't cause a miracle, either." - That's an exchange of lines in "Gojira -1.0", which somehow catches the essence of this monster movie, in some way like a metaphor, in the sense that I wouldn't have expected that some Godzilla iteration to be so different, positively speaking, from the rest. In any case, we shouldn't forget that what we have here is not the typical made in Hollywood. Even so, I don't remember hearing a lot about the drama depth of the Japanese series. Because, if we draw a line, what we got here is much more drama than monster movie.
The subject is set at the end of WW2, in a disintegrated Japan, where in the beginning of the movie a deserting kamikaze pilot lands on an island hosting a maintenance post for planes, which during that evening is wiped out by a creature risen from the ocean. But our guy survives, together with the chief mechanic, who accuses him of cowardness on confronting the monster, and blames him for the death of the others. What follows is the more consistent drama part, where guilt follows the pilot when returning back to Tokyo, where he tries to find a meaning to live in the ruins left after the war, together with a woman and an adopted child who lost their parents in some enemy raids as he did. When thing look like beginning to settle somehow, Gojira returns, bringing back the memories about what happened on the island. And from here, the movie starts to resemble more a Hollywood monster movie, but still what follows doesn't lose the much more complex drama tone built up to that moment.
"Gojira -1.0" does not have the standard VFX of a summer box-office, where if you take some scene with explosions and shrapnels, you have good changes to interchange it with a some other from a different movie. It's much more particular what we have here, because first of all it moves onwards from a visual experience that seems more real precisely due to lack of exaggeration in what you can see. We don't have all the possible colors splashed over the screen when something blows up. Besides that, I didn't watch the last Hollywood encounters between Godzilla and Kong, but here the monster looks more like extracted from the old Japanese stop-motions and brought into the modern VFX age. You finally get more "blueish" effects when Godzilla starts using its weapons, but even so what's on screen keeps a much more credible look than what you get in many other movies.
To conclude, the movie deserves watching for the story, out of which I didn't reveal much, and which has a decent density, for its visuals and audio, but mostly for the very good intertwinning between drama and action, and for its continuous metaphor that favors life, which comes in a strong contrast with an idea of exaggerated sacrifice oftenly met in the Japanese culture.
I'll continue the series of brief entries, with one that's again a bit different from the rest = a short: "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar". I don't know if I had another subject within this category in the history of my blog, but moving over the motivation + the matching with my lack of time, here I really considered that this movies deserves noticing. After "Fantastic Mr. Fox", from 2009, this is the 2nd adaptation by Wes Anderson of Roald Dahl's work, a short story, and what the movie does is precisely to narrate that story. The central part over which it develops is the history of a hindu magician with capabilities of seeing without his eyes, who apparently drains some influences from a real character. The other half of the story I'll leave for watching, it's not that long anyway. The movie is recognisable as a work by Wes Anderson = it has the typical display of colors and the ensemble cast, with transitions from one character to another as protagonist, even if at the scale of a short. But it's especially filled with the typical optimistic tone doubled by fine humor nuances, sometimes barely noticeable. Somehow, in brief, it's like an episode of "The Outer Limits" or "Black Mirror", but in a much more positive light ;)
I don't have a movie this month, but I need a break (more or less) from other activities. My last entry tagged "chasing rabbits" from 2021 if I'm not wrong, was linked to the first part of "Dune" back then, without much connection to the movie though. Now, I didn't have time to see the second part of "Dune" so we can skip that completely. What made me spent some time during last month was a bit of research on a subject that I wouldn't have touched unless I really had to, but it's not the first time it happens to get on my agenda something unconvenient...
I'll prefer staying more cryptic on the background of all this, but who catched some of my previous entries tagged the same as the current might remember that I was speculating around time travel, unexpected randomness in life, and others (or maybe I remember it wrong, because I'm not in the mood, and I don't have the time either, to re-read my own ramblings). The point is that what follows fits with the same "category".
This time I'm gonna stick to an enumeration of short ideas, probably with a very weak basis, but which connect somehow between them, as much as to produce some questions. So, let's start, with apologies in advance for where I'm completely off-track (that's why we have links to external sources).
We can say informally about a particla in a reference system observed from a quantum physics perspective that it's in coherence at the moment when it's simultaneously in multiple states in isolation (aka in a superposition), and when it decoheres it "chooses" one of these states following the contact with the external environment (getting basically into a typical mechanical physics reference system).
Links: What is Quantum Coherence? + the Wikipedia entry.
There is something called the Penrose/Hameroff model aka Orchestrated Object Reduction (or in brief Orch Or), which again, informally, states that the conscious thinking might be influenced by a physiological process taking place at the level of some microparticles in the brain = micro tubules, following their passing with a certain frequency, from quantum coherence to a decoherence state (= losing their superposition). By extension, we could speculate that the subconscious activity is linked with the period when these particles are in coherence (in superposition).
Links: Orch OR and the Quantum Biology of Consciousness + the Wikipedia entry.
Caveat: As many theories in the realm of quantum physics Orch Or is .. a theory. There are even practical experiments contradicting it, but these also bring up the idea that the model could be extended to something plausible.
Link: Quantum theory of consciousness put in doubt by underground experiment
In a semi-obscure journal, more than 10 years ago, there was another theory based on Orch Or, which in brief says that within the brain of a schizophrenic the physiological processes of micro tubules activity might be altered, more precisely the switches from coherence (superposition) to decoherence (a single state) do not produce quick enough, or at the frequency they're supposed to normally, the consequence being the altered behaviour = basically the delirious state, which again speculating, might originate from the person's subconscious. The journal might be semi-obscure, but it's not the only publication which somehow heads into this direction.
Links: Quantum Logic of the Unconscious and Schizophrenia + altceva prin zona Understanding Schizophrenia as a Disorder of Consciousness: Biological Correlates and Translational Implications from Quantum Theory Perspectives.
Up to this point we can say we have known facts. Actually now we start speculating (much more)...
In somebody's subconscious we don't know what can we find, that's why it is called a subconscious. But typically, what someone who's diagnosed with the above condition says in a delirious state is, or seems outside the reality that all of us know. Now, there's a question - why in a quantum coherence of some micro tubules in subconscious, the brain produces something that's not in its known realm of reality, but outside of it?
In a completely different direction we have something called the Everett-Wheeler model or Everett-DeWitt or Many-Worlds-Interpretation (MWI), which in brief, tells us that from a quantum perspective, anything that might decohere to a certain state it actually generates a new reality, and consequently a new distinct temporal line with its own evolution, and practically... we don't actually have a loss of superposition to a certain state - we have a continuous superposition, but the realities are somehow distinct and do not interact.
Links: Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics + the Wikipedia entry.
Now, wrapping (well, time is limited in this reality), we can ask two questions:
the light one - how does time flow in each distinct reality? (there are probably hypotheses for this but I didn't have time to look)
the hard one - if Orch Or and MWI wouldn't be just theories, and somehow we could have a possible intersection between these models, meaning not being completely incompatible, could someone with deranged micro tubules get somehow access in a subconscious state to a different image of other realities? (from where could extract firm beliefs about stuff that does not exist in the current reality)
To note that what's above is sheer speculation, and the undersigned with all responsibility does not have any firm belief about their validity. I have a background as researcher, but it's not in quantum physics, and the linked resources were barely skimmed, not read in detail, so I don't have any claim that what's above has much soundness in it (by the way, if there's any error on any interpretation of some reference, please send corrections). Besides that, sometimes is dangeorus to speculate over sensible matters.
Still... even though I finished writing this entry on April 1st, I dated it when I started it = on March 31st ;)
I don't know if my subconscious was guided by some late problems to choose "Anatomie d'une chute"/"Anatomy of a Fall" as subject for the current entry, but what is certain is that I don't have any other subject left that I've seen this winter, for which I could give a higher rating. Besides that, I also don't have the time today, in the last day of this February (luckily it's a leap year), to put something on the blog for this month too. This movie has the advantage that it can be summarized quickly. We have a german writer, in a remarkable interpretation of Sandra Huller, relocated in a mountain area in France, together with her husband a son left almost blind after a former accident. The woman gets charged as a suspect when her husband is found dead following a fall from one of the floors of the chalet they're living in. What follows is a trial revealing the background of a disfunctional family, untangled, at least as it seems to be, in the end by the son who proves a surprisingly mature objectiveness in analysing the case. Cinematographically, the movie doesn't really stand out. Maybe the editing raises a bit more above the average. However, it's a production that overall can be perceived as... consistent, or better said, heavy, concerning the analysis of a family's life. What's contradictory though is that sometimes is too thin - besides the appearances, there are some parts where it is superficial compared to what can, unfortunately, exist in reality. What's certain is that's good to be watched as warning. But I get to contradict myself on what I was saying years ago about a movie being meant to remove you from reality, at least for a couple of hours :) Maybe I'll get back with something more optimistic next month ;) It depends up to where the falls go.
If I should make a top for the discrepancy between the feel a trailer leaves you with and a movie, for what I've watched in the last two-three years, "Fast Charlie" would probably come up somewhere among the top positions. Now well... the impression is subjective after all, both concerning the trailer, and the movie.
At least the subject you can get partially from the two minutes attached at the end of this entry. Charlie Swift (Pierce Brosnan) is a "fixer" for a criminal outfit from.. Biloxi, Mississippi (fact: the city has less than 50k inhabitants). Which organization, after 30 years of dominating the territory under the rule of the "godfather" Stan Mullen (James Caan in his last part), becomes the target of a "hostile takeover" by a young gangster who decides to eliminate everybody close to the leader. The story is predictable if you look at the trailer, Charlie escapes and seeks revenge. What's not that predictable is that this action thread is less major than it looks to be, and the movie is actually quite far from the typical standard B-series payback action thriller. First, we have plenty of nuances of black comedy. Second, we also have another set of more fine nuances of slow drama with insertions related to the late midlife chrisis of the main character. In some way, it feels a bit like the movies of Martin McDonagh ("In Bruges", "Seven Psychopats", etc.), but it's not really on par with these. However, you can feel there's a novel behind it = the story is not as thin as it mai seem at a first sight. We also have romance insertions and others, leaving the main thread somehow in background as I said.
It's not a movie that I could recommend besides the reasons written above. The actors do their job fine. The director (Phillip Noyce) does his job fine - the movie progression keeps you there, you don't feel any unnecessary length. Still, especially from a technical point of view, there's nothing remarkable about it. Maybe just the final minutes when you get a visual/audio arrangement meant to get a final thumbs up from you. Otherwise, it feels more like a made for tv movie, from which you expected a bit more. In the end it probably depends a lot of your mood. And in my case it came up in a moment when what I can do is to say again :) the impression is subjective.
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