Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014)

[mfunk9786]

What is Scarlett Johansson trying to tell us about herself? Her last three films have featured her looking at humanity from the outside - either from another planet, another plane of existence, and now from a highly evolved mental state. Lucy, the latest and perhaps last in this series of projects, worked as well as any of them for me - it's as close as mainstream action cinema has come to replicating that kind of heightened "Where the fuck did this come from?" giddiness since the Kill Bill films inspired that edge-of-your-seat feeling about a decade ago. Lucy, outside of its main source of surface inspiration, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is less referential and more nakedly kinetic, however. How some of the special effects in this film were storyboarded is beyond me, because their visual style is far too sumptuous to belong in a summer action picture - the colorful visuals whizz around the screen at a thousand miles an hour, only taking a break when Morgan Freeman comes onscreen to continue his scientifically erroneous lecture on human brain capacity. What impressed me most is probably what disappointed me most, too - how darn economical the film is. Lucy is just a shade under 90 minutes long, and right after thrusting itself into its story without any backstory on Lucy (that isn't merely implied), it becomes a freight train in the style of the Neveldine & Taylor Crank films, but with Besson's trademark sense of filmmaking whimsy and humor. While his pictures have had a tendency to drag on a bit with unnecessary asides (like the Chris Tucker stuff in The Fifth Element, for example), Lucy has literally no fluff, in a film where fluff would've been welcomed on my part because it's so damned entertaining that I just never wanted it to end. This is one of the best films of this year because I really can't think of a time when I was injected with more distilled entertainment for the entire time I was in the theater (and this is a year that also had Snowpiercer and Edge of Tomorrow, two more incredibly imaginative action pictures, already!). Sure, logic is completely absent here, but if you're willing to see the gleeful absurdity in, say,

Spoiler

the entirety of the universe's knowledge being stored on a USB flash drive by a being that could've put it anywhere in any way they chose,

then the rest will come easy.

[domino harvey]

I have heard surprisingly good things about this and it sounds pretty wild. Guess I'm going to a movie theatre this summer despite my best efforts

[The Narrator Returns]

The ads were really selling this on the basis of the 10 percent of the brain garbage, which is apparently the last thing it's interested in, the first being complete craziness. That's what I get for believing Hollywood knows how to market its movies.

(Quite the contrary to domino, there are now four movies I wish to see when I get back home, maybe five now that apparently Brett Ratner's Hercules is a really solid, fun movie.)

[mfunk9786]

I can't imagine even disliking this film would be a total loss. There's so much going on visually that at worst you'll walk away thinking your friend let you look at their awesome new kaleidoscope for an hour and a half. It's territory that's been well-trod of late, particularly in video games (Prototype, Infamous), but I'm willing to forgive that when a filmmaker who knows his/her stuff shows me such a good time.

10 percent of the brain garbage

Besson, on this topic, in a Vulture interview today:

Some people are complaining about the fact that the science behind your film — the whole idea that humans only use 10 percent of their brains — is not true. What’s your response to that?
It’s totally not true. Do they think that I don’t know this? I work on this thing for nine years and they think that I don’t know it’s not true? Of course I know it’s not true!

[knives]

The ads were really selling this on the basis of the 10 percent of the brain garbage, which is apparently the last thing it's interested in, the first being complete craziness. That's what I get for believing Hollywood knows how to market its movies.

(Quite the contrary to domino, there are now four movies I wish to see when I get back home, maybe five now that apparently Brett Ratner's Hercules is a really solid, fun movie.)

Though the Ratner should probably be skipped because of how they pissed on Steve Moore's grave.

[mfunk9786]

Hey guys, Knives is here

[colinr0380]

The trailer makes this sound quite interesting, sort of Nikita (for me still Besson's best film with our heroine being treated as expendable and regularly forced into uncomfortable situations and just abandoned to cope, or not) meets Limitless. And presumably the "thing that happens once she reaches 100%" is that Johansson turns into the next in the long line of Besson's strong but regularly betrayed heroines!

Hopefully this will be a return to form for Besson after the Arthur and the Invisibles series, The Lady and The Family. Since this might be the only time on this forum that we might bring up The Family, in which a mob family gets relocated to France and cannot stop killing people, did anyone else get reminded of that quirky comedy from the early 90s called Meet The Applegates, in which a family of preying mantises go undercover in human form as an all American family (as uncovercover agents to prepare for a terrorist attack on humans in reprisal for their destruction of the rainforests) and end up individually falling foul of human vices which inevitably end with them having to dispose of people who find out about their secret identities? If nothing else, The Family made me dig out Meet The Applegates again!

[domino harvey]

I've really got to stop reading HuffPost

[mfunk9786]

Why did ClickHole post one of their articles on Huffington Post? Weird cross-promotion.

[wattsup32]

I've really got to stop reading HuffPost

There is so much to love about this article. I'm going to subscribe to her blog.

[Brian C]

First, let me note that I am white.

No. You don't say.

[pandroid7]

I can't imagine even disliking this film would be a total loss. There's so much going on visually that at worst you'll walk away thinking your friend let you look at their awesome new kaleidoscope for an hour and a half. It's territory that's been well-trod of late, particularly in video games (Prototype, Infamous), but I'm willing to forgive that when a filmmaker who knows his/her stuff shows me such a good time.

This is a good attitude to have. I just saw this film last night and have been discussing it with fellow women who have been expressing a desire to see more action and sci-fi films with female heros. However, they couldn't get past the pseudo science and are acting like the fact that they disliked it means that this film was a total waste of time and not progress toward getting more films with strong female leads. I hate that sort of reaction. Just because a film isn't a picture perfect depiction doesn't mean it isn't a step in the right direction or is completely worthless.

Besides, there are so many action and sci-fi films with male leads that are far, far worse and yet still get greenlit and make a lot of money every year. I was surprised to see the women I was talking with move so quickly to criticism in their discussions. I was hoping there would be just a brief minute of, "Wow, so Lucy's really raking it in at the box office! Between this and Gravity, maybe studios will see that moviegoers WILL pay to see women in films like this!" before they jumped into, "But I hated it, so it doesn't count". Sure, it was flawed, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. And you're right, it was incredible visually, particularly toward the end, and, above all, it was a good time.

Sorry if this is a half-formed, incoherent rant. I've just been getting a little heated about this film in other areas of the internet today!

[YnEoS]

Spoiler

My unfair oversimplified summary: The Matrix if Neo became The One a third of the way the film and then we get Samsara/The Tree of Life narrated by Morgan Freeman. (And lest you think I'm reaching, the film actually does use clips from Baraka and Samsara)

I'm not exactly sure what to say about this film, it is continuously entertaining. The opening dramatic bits are really well done, and the ending meaning of life journey through time visuals are really cool, and its consistently funny which helps quite a bit with this type of content. So overall I have to say I enjoyed the whole experience.

But I also kind of wish the action scenes were better, and that the film didn't dissolve all of its narrative tension by having Scarelett Johansen become all powerful so soon in the race to find a way to write the meaning of life down for scientists. And towards the end I was sort of wondering why we're still watching guys running around with guns, why the secret to the universe resembles so many other recent movies that didn't get bogged down with action-y drug smuggling plotline, and why so much of the film is Morgan Freeman talking new-agey ideas over nature footage.

I dunno, it's a film I'm struggling to come up with any sort of final judgement on. It's a fun ride, it's pretty well made, it's a rehash of things other movies done, but it does them well it it's kind of interesting to see a film go from drug smuggling into a huge journeying through time/universe thing. But kind of like the scene where Amr Waked questions his purpose in the narrative, it just felt like a lot of stuff didn't need to be in the film, and I'm not sure why all these specific elements have to be combined this way.

I guess I just feel like the conception of the film gets off on the wrong foot, but I can't think of any particular reason why it shouldn't be, and Luc Besson keeps the materials pretty lively, and I'm just having trouble reconciling those two sides, even though I'd have no problem with a simple well executed revenge film.

Curious what others make of this.

[wattsup32]

First, let me note that I am white.

No. You don't say.

You left out the best part of that. She goes on to say, "I am a white woman who goes to the theater to see probably a dozen films (if not more) in a given year, . . . I love film."

When a readily available, comparatively inexpensive commodity gets consumed an average of a whopping once a month? That's when you know it's love.

[Shrew]

Well, I assume she lives in NYC, so that would make it a significantly less comparatively inexpensive commodity.

Besides, the best part is her byline: "Poet, Author, Activist" I'm not how she hasn't spontaneously suffocated from insufferableness.

[mfunk9786]

Her YA novel

[R0lf]

The sequel will obviously be called LUSBCY.