OGWiseman Live-Blogs!
"Colossal", the Anne Hathaway vehicle you've almost certainly never heard of.
NOTE: It has come to my attention that in last week’s story, one of the characters’ name was not consistent throughout the story. “Shareah” became “Deborah” before reverting back to “Shareah”. No, this was not done as a creative choice, stupid autocorrect just didn’t like my unusual name, and my hurried-by-parenting editing process didn’t catch it before it went out. Here is a link to the story—which has now been corrected—in case you were confused last week and gave up or just didn’t get to it.
Moving right along…
I’ve done a few of these live-blogs now, and what I’ve realized is that it only works if I can spoil the movie. If I can’t explain the plot it’s impossible to discuss or, more important, to make my dumb jokes about. SO: I’m only going to do these about bad movies from now on. Proceed with the idea that this is not a movie you should bother to watch, and the most enjoyment you could ever get out of it is to read me goofing on it for 2,000 words. Enjoy!
BEGIN
COLOSSAL - Starring Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis
(Uhhh… okay?)
4:34 PM. It’s fun to go into a movie knowing essentially nothing. I know the blurb on this, which reads:
“Anne Hathaway stars as an aimless party girl with a freaky connection to the massive creature stomping across South Korea.”
Despite literally making a living in the film business, I know nothing else about this movie. Literally did not know it existed until it popped up on our HBO Max suggestions. Echoing the theme, Anne Hathaway is probably the biggest Hollywood star whom I’ve seen almost nothing of their work. Princess Diaries? I saw the Les Mis adaptation where the camera was way too close to everybody’s mouth, which was fine but don’t we already have enough Les Mis adpatations?
4:38 - Movie starts in South Korea 25 years ago, with a South Korean girl finding a barbie doll, then cuts 25 years later to Anne Hathaway. Good God I hope she’s not playing the grown up version of a Korean girl. This movie already has big “white person saves non-whites” energy and I hope they do something to turn it around quick.
4:39 - Anne Hathaway is listless and parties too much, but still has great skin and lives in a killer loft with her sexy boyfriend. Except now he’s breaking up with her because she’s too much fun, I guess? And now her friends are coming over and she’s devastated by the breakup, and Anne Hathaway is almost *too good* of an actress to make this believable because she looks completely devastated, just gutted, whereas a real loser would at least pretend for a while that it was nothing and really was probably her idea.
(Acccccccccting!)
4:42 - She goes and squats in an abandoned house for the night. Does she own the place? It’s not clear.
4:43 - She wakes up the next morning and wanders down the road, and Jason Sudeikis drives by her randomly and knows her and wants to hang out! Wouldn’t it be great to live in a movie? In the real world you try to make plans with someone nineteen times but they’re too busy or cancel last minute until you decide you hate them just to have it done with.
4:46 - This movie is sort of boring except great actors keep showing up. She goes to Sudeikis’ bar and one of his customers is Delmar from O Brother Where Art Thou and like a thousand other things (looked this up later: The awesome Tim Blake Nelson, of course!). It feels like this movie has to go somewhere fun.
4:48 - So the whole point of this scene really is that Anne Hathaway is an alcoholic. She drinks a beer and then they cut to “later on” and she’s slurring her words and she’s really in trouble, although again her skin is really way too good for somebody who abuses alcohol regularly.
(Her teeth and jawline, too, while we’re at it. Blackout drunks aren’t this put-together.)
4:49 — They’re still in the bar, telling stories and talking about their dreams. Anne Hathaway is a writer who always won the short story contest when she was in school with Sudeikis. Presumably there’s an actual monster somewhere in this movie, right? It can’t just be a metaphor, can it?
4:52 - Hilarious to me that this movie’s idea of “hitting bottom” for Anne Hathaway is sleeping on an air mattress in an abandoned farmhouse and hanging out with Jason Sudeikis. For some of us that sounds like a good weekend!
(You can tell she’s in spiritual pain because the television is close to the bed and not a flatscreen. The horror of it all!)
4:54 - Hey, there’s the monster! So the conceit here is to have Anne Hathaway be in upstate New York but have some kind of special connection with the monster in Seoul, so the only footage of it you see is like from cellphones and on the news and stuff, which makes it way cheaper to shoot. Sort of “Cloverfield” meets “Leaving Las Vegas” (Now there’s a pitch!)
4:56 - Oh and I just got the metaphor, because the monster appeared when Anne Hathaway drank and then disappeared when she sobered up. It’s a metaphor but it’s not. Cute!
4:59 - Anne Hathaway wakes up from another blackout looking like she just got a seaweed wrap and a facial. Her hair is terrible in this movie (does she have these awkward bangs in everything she does?) but the complexion is on fleek.
(She looks like she’s wearing a wig or possibly a medieval battle helmet.)
5:02 - Sudeikis hires Anne Hathaway to work in his bar after he finds out she’s actually quasi-homeless and unemployed, because when you pick up a falling down drunk on the road and she repeatedly cannot remember conversations you’ve had, what you think is “I gotta hire this woman if I possibly can!”
5:06 - Anne Hathaway, increasingly convinced she’s responsible for the monster attacks on Seoul, is so far drinking through it without appearing to consider stopping, like a freshman going outside the party to puke and then returning for more beerpong and pretending like they were just peeing instead.
5:08 - Anne Hathaway’s ex-boyfriend in this movie is the single nicest guy ever, and keeps taking her phone calls for some reason instead of going “I’m a super-good-looking dude with a kickass apartment and I’m almost inhumanly nice, I could get a new girlfriend!” Maybe he’s got a thing for perfect skin and knows that’s the one thing about her he’ll never be able to top?
(“I cannot let this train wreck with bangs out of my life. Being a single man in his thirties with disposable income, piercing eyes, and a perfectly coiffed beard is just too horrifying to contemplate.”)
5:11 - We’re like five attacks in, and Anne Hathaway has not even *tried* to stop drinking. This is commitment to the sauce!
5:13 - Now she takes Sudeikis and his dudes to the park and literally shows them her powers, conjuring the monster and screwing around enough to accidentally destroy a helicopter and I guess kill a couple of pilots! Man, this movie just got freaking *metal*, this is not where I thought this was going at all.
5:17 - Okay, *now* she’s freaking out at breakfast the next morning, and Sudeikis—who now appeared next to the monster as a green robot figure—is taking it all pretty casually. They decide not to turn themselves in, yet somehow don’t discuss the importance of not getting drunk and going to that particular park at 8:05 AM anymore. (They have now figured out that’s now they activate the monster.) Instead they’ve decided to discuss Sudeikis’ previous engagement and the importance of chasing dreams.
(To stop the killing, they would have to not go to this specific playground anymore, which is obviously impossible. Dilemma!)
5:24 - The “Cloverfield” parts of this movie are fun and it’s a high concept which I love, but the relationships and the script are kind of a bummer and make no sense. Like she’s not forced in any way to go back to the park and become the monster, and she’s not like blackout drunk, but she just keeps doing it.
5:26 - This is a perfect example of a particular genre of Indie Hollywood Movie that might as well be called “Actors thought it would be fun”. Meaning: The way a movie like this gets made is for a couple of name actors to sign on to make it. They will make almost literally anything with the right actors. So they pitch it to these actors in word form, like “the monster inside you is the monster in Korea, and as you stomp your way through the emotional ruins of your life, the consequences reach out and touch the whole world”, and then suddenly they’re filming Anne Hathaway stomping through a playground at dawn and nobody wants to be the one to say out loud that it’s pretty stupid once it’s real and not being pitched over drinks on a rooftop bar.
5:28 - Anne Hathaway gets drunk again and goes home with one of the non-Sudeikis guys? She doesn’t ever even seem that drunk to be honest. It seems insane that she’s not trying to get with him instead. He seems jealous but they should’ve got an uglier guy cause Sudeikis just seems like such a chiller.
5:31 - Now Sudeikis goes pack to the park and starts screwing around, and Anne Hathaway has to go and stop him and it’s totally setting up a monster v. Robot battle, which is fun even though a lot of the decisions that get them to this point seem kinda random and pointless.
(lol, yeah, okay. *massive, Liz Lemon eyeroll*)
5:33 - So it’s coming out now that Sudeikis is a messy drunk too, but again, his skin, teeth, and waistline just are not commensurate with that backstory. The scenes are starting to have more conflict now, though, and that’s fun. Sudeikis is better at acting like a drunk asshole than Anne Hathaway. The writing is also really good here. This screenwriter (who I just looked up and he also directed it, his name is seriously “Nacho Vigalondo”. I’ll bet he came out of the womb with feathered hair and tight jeans on.) must have some real life experience with mean drunks.
BREAK (DAD STUFF)
6:18 - Jason Sudeikis is delightfully unlikeable in this movie! This is a cool turn where suddenly he’s so mad *he’s* the one pushing to go back to the park and be the monster more. It’s absolutely the weakness of the script—the fact that there’s no good reason they *have* to go to the park—but it’s fun to solve that with “Jason Sudeikis is a heel” instead of some contrived BS.
(“I get to do something that’s not ‘exude aw-shucks midwestern charm’? I’m in! I don’t even need to read the script, I’m sure the premise makes enough sense. Where do I sign?”)
6:20 - Two drunks fighting in a sandbox at a park as monster spectacle is definitely a movie moment. It’s metaphorical and literal at the same time in a totally weird way.
6:22 - I remain worried that they’re gonna get to the end of this thing and Anne Hathaway is going to learn an emotional lesson and they’re going to just sort of forget about the fact that she accidentally killed a couple hundred South Korean people. That would be too bad.
(You don’t just get to walk away from the wreckage of Seoul at the end of this, Anne. You’re a mass murderer at this point. Own that.)
6:24 - The most unbelievable part of this movie about people remotely controlling monsters from a sandbox is how good everyone’s skin is when they wake up after a blackout drunk night.
6:27 - Tim (the ex-boyfriend) comes back into the picture when he drops in to visit for some unknown reason—this is the most desperate super handsome and rich guy ever depicted on screen. And Anne Hathaway just blithely takes him to the bar she works at and introduces him to Sudeikis the unstable asshole. What could possibly go wrong?
6:33 - I can’t even really describe the bar scene that ensues here. I haven’t seen a group of white people this good-looking be this awkward since N’Sync broke up.
6:35 - This is the most range I’ve ever seen Sudeikis display, and Anne Hathaway is actually kind of getting out-acted! I’ve heard she’s great, but this ain’t The Princess Diaries no more, and your singing can’t save you from this freaking psychopath green robot and Sudeikis’ commitment to this character. Good stuff!
(Yes, he’s being squeezed in the giant hand of a scaly monster being controlled by a drunk chick stumbling around a child’s play structure, but you *believe* him!)
6:41 - After days of bender sleepless nights, exposure to the mentally ill, emotional turmoil, and the unimaginable guilt of “accidentally” killing a bunch of innocent South Koreans, Anne Hathaway turns to the camera, and her white, white skin is crystalline, supple, pure as the driven snow. How does one learn this superpower?
6:45 - It’s amazing how much this movie is not about monsters.
6:47 - Nacho Vigalondo has some tricks up his sleeve in terms of cinematography and sound that really sell this silly concept. It’s a tiny budget movie, but you get a sense of scale that’s hard to fake. They’re literally stomping around a sandbox and you can feel the terror of the Korean populace. I’m not sure at this point that there’s any way to solve the “Dead Koreans as expression of the feelings of white people” problem for this movie, but in its intimated racism it’s entertainingly done.
(It’s a pretty movie. Nacho Vigalondo is a better cinematographer than screenwriter, that’s for sure.)
6:49 - As my wife just pointed out, it doesn’t really make sense that the monster and robot have attacked well over a dozen times at this point, and yet there are still people left in Seoul. (Side note: Because of the threat of North Korea just a few miles away, Seoul actually has a world-class city evacuation plan and would *definitely* have gotten their people out long ago, but replace it with any city you like—it’s been weeks and dozens of attacks, people would have left on their own no matter what. Like just in general Koreans should have way more agency in this movie. (Or at the very least, a Korean character should have a name, I mean come on.)
(Monster is disappointed at the total whiteness of this movie. For shame.)
6:53 - Anne Hathaway has gotten the shit kicked out of her and flown on a red eye all the way to Korea, and her skin is still flawless.
6:55 - Well that ending was kinda stupid. None of the sci fi parts of this movie make any sense. Anne Hathaway seems to have forgotten about the hundreds of people she killed, and the non—Sudeikis handsome white man she randomly boned at some point during this weird movie is waiting to welcome her home. Yuck. Perfect skin does not have the redemptive moral value Nacho Vigalondo thinks it does, which, like, just going by the name you’d think he was a sensitive and thoughtful soul. An interesting second act, but overall this movie is a pass. Instead watch “Leaving Las Vegas” and set some Godzilla action figures next to the TV, you’ll get the idea.
END
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Some sixth sense must have kept you from seeing Anne Hathaway movies. She is a horrendous actor and I just can’t figure out all the fuss. Sitting through Les Miserable ( yes, I did) was worse than Heavens Gate, The Notebook and Mama Mia 2 combined.