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The narrative idea that has made the Jurassic Park/World franchise so ludicrously successful from a financial point of view is not really the presence of dinosaurs in our world, but rather the insatiable desire of “science” to fiddle with the building blocks of existence, meaning genetic information. Of course, people go for the big set pieces depicting reptiles threatening the stupid humans, but the reason these humans deserve to be threatened is because they just have to act like God. Otherwise, what’s the point of living in the 21st century? Four years after the previous installment showed the destruction of the huge island resort where tourists could observe dinosaurs “in the wild,” the lizards are at large in the world and terrorizing humans as a matter of course. It’s a natural, albeit too fast, result of the decisions that have anchored the franchise, and would not have required much in the way of imagination to make the concept work as a new installment, but the producers want more: another big arrogant corporation that is trying to monetize genetic engineering, though in this case, not of dinosaurs per se, but of the food supply. Despite its relevancy to how we live today, the concept has been done so many times before it feels old and tired. 

The first third is certainly the most entertaining portion of the film while remaining quite confusing, since it grapples with a world where dinosaurs have become so ubiquitous that there’s already a healthy black market in dino trafficking and the attendant PETA-like do-gooder types, which brings our heroes, the dino wrangler Owen (Chris Pratt) and the former resort manager Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), out from their secluded forest Eden into the world to recapture some poached creatures and the adolescent girl they are raising by proxy. The girl (Isabella Sermon), Maisie, is the cloned daughter of the biogenetics scientist Charlotte Lockwood, whose provenance in the story I don’t remember (4 years, you see), but whose work is at the center of the intrigue. The head of a company called Biosyn Genetics, Dodgson (Campbell Scott), kidnaps Maisie in order to study her sequencing to understand how Charlotte did it and then corner the market on…what, exactly, is never specified, but Dodgson has already created a species of giant locusts in what can only be described as an “oops” project, since, if let loose, they can destroy most of the world’s food supply.

Director Colin Treverrow’s job is to make the various plot threads, which also includes the reentry-for-the-hell-of-it of three original Jurassic stars, Ellie (Laura Dern), Alan (Sam Neill), and Ian (Jeff Goldblum), who all come together in a big, violent denouement where stray dinos wreak havoc on the Biosyn facility, thus threatening to let loose all these deadly locusts. It’s a total clusterfuck of competing action vectors and impenetrable motivations. Goldblum, who can be counted on at this point in his career to offer immediate comic relief has no real purpose and just happens to be at the Biosyn lab doing things against his better interests. But it’s not a spoiler to say that he survives the mayhem, because it seems they want to bring everyone back for another round of dino pursuit and gene-manipulating nonsense. The world can’t end too soon.

Opens July 29 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Jurassic World Dominion home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Universal Studios

Originally released in 2010, Srdan Spasojevic’s purposely repulsive meditation on his country’s spiritual rot is being rereleased in Japan in a sparkling renovated 4K version that seems hardly necessary given what the viewer has to watch, and yet much of A Serbian Film‘s transgressive energy relies on the way its visual tone changes from one medium to another, since much of what takes place on screen is something recreated either on old tape, new tape, or within the mind of the protagonist, a semi-retired porn star named Milos (Srdan Todorovic). Moreover, the parts of the film that are supposed to be taking place in the cinematic “present” are carefully lit for maximum effect so as to throw the viewer off the scent of where the story is going.

That story starts out simply enough. Retirement for Milos, considered the greatest porn actor of his generation, at least in Serbia, isn’t quite as relaxed as he had hoped. He finds it difficult to support his wife, Marija (Jelena Gavrilovic), a freelance translator, and young son, and when an offer comes through an old associate to do one last film with a shadowy but hilariously pretentious director named Vukmir (Sergei Trifunovic) for a lot of money, he reluctantly takes it, even though he doesn’t really know what the movie will entail except that, as Vukmir explains, it will be a work of art like nothing ever produced in Serbia, which he describes as being “one big shitty kindergarten.” But once production of the movie starts in earnest, A Serbian Film abandons its linear development for a more patchwork structure that seems to be dictated by Milos’s drug-addled consciousness, or lack thereof. The film is being shot in an institution for orphans and abused children, who end up figuring heavily in many scenes, and not just as witnesses to the violent debauchery that Vukmir stages and Milos, pumped up with cattle aphrodisiac, partakes in with little of the professional nuance he brought to his more conventional work. In fact, he sometimes wakes up bloody and doesn’t remember what he did, and thus has to clandestinely secure the tapes and watch the horrors on a camcorder screen. 

What most viewers take away from A Serbian Film is Spasojevic’s willingness to push every taboo way past its acceptable limit, which is to say that while it gets really disgusting you never entertain the notion that these scenes are anything more than ingeniously staged slices of horror, and thus lack the truly disturbing element that Gaspar Noe brings to his own peculiar brand of transgressive cinema. But while the movie doesn’t impress as much as Spasojevic—who, I suspect, used himself as Vukmir’s scummy model—likely thinks it does, its jaundiced portrayal of a larger society through a very circumscribed subculture is convincing. I imagine Serbians don’t appreciate Spasojevic’s title, which implies the film is some sort of last word, but even if I don’t have firsthand experience with his country, I understood exactly what he was trying to say. (Note: The press screener I saw was the uncut version, which is banned in most countries. The new Japanese version for public consumption may be altered somewhat, but no scenes will be taken out.)

In Serbian. Now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551.

A Serbian Film home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2010 Contrafilm 201

Because of its function as a recording medium, cinema’s entire history is fairly well represented. Pamela B. Green’s documentary purports to bring to the public’s attention a woman filmmaker whose pioneering accomplishments, because she was a woman, have mostly been ignored, though if you run a cursory Google search you’ll find lots of information about Alice Guy-Blache, including extensive collections of her works available for sale and streaming. This isn’t to say that Guy-Blache has received her due at the same level as her male contemporaries and heirs, but only that if her story is approached from the standpoint of the development of cinema, she’s already, relatively speaking, something of a star. Even Hitchcock was a fan.

Her tale is certainly fascinating. Born in France to Chilean parents, Alice Guy was hired as a secretary in 1894 for a camera company that was eventually bought out by four men, including the early entrepreneur Leon Gaumont, who started using the company to produce films. Guy worked her way up to the production side of the business and, frustrated by the company’s fixation on film as a novelty, she became one of the first visionaries to see it as a story-telling medium. She started directing films, but Gaumont neglected to give her proper credit for her contributions, even after she ascended to head of production after the turn of the century. She eventually moved with her husband, Herbert Blache, to the U.S. to head Gaumont’s American operations, but in 1910 they struck out on their own and set up Solax Studio, first in Flushing, New York, and then in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which, thanks to her efforts, became the center of film production in America, well before the emergence of Hollywood. Her success as both an artist and a businessperson was notable, though her husband took much of the credit for her work. By the time she divorced him and the studio became insolvent in the 1920s, she had made about 1,000 movies and in the process invented many of the narrative film techniques that we now take for granted.

Much of Green’s film is narrated by Jodie Foster, whose command of French, especially while reading the epistolary materials, gives the doc a gravity it might not otherwise have. Green manages to talk to almost every scholar who has a stake in Guy-Blache’s legacy, but she also talks to well-known actors and filmmakers whose input mostly comes down to, “Wow, I never knew about this woman!” She also frames the development of the second half of the film around her detective work in tracking down relatives of Guy-Blache who may still have relevant artifacts hidden in boxes in the attic. None of this is boring, but it tends to reduce Guy-Blache’s story to a mystery that, in fact, was solved years ago, even if Green’s own sleuthing uncovered several film fragments that were thought to be lost. Of course, any movie nut who knows nothing about Guy-Blache will definitely want to check out Be Natural, but it sometimes feels a bit cluttered, like one of those attics. 

In English and French. Opens July 22 in Tokyo at Uplink Kichijoji (0422-66-5042)

Be Natural home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2018 Be Natural LLC