Here is a very strange combination. Actually let me formulate this as a question. Can a team of film makers take a completely ridiculous ‘kaiju’ (Japanese monster) story, combine it with a sweet and teary romantic story, and make out of the combination of the two an entertaining movie? The answer is yes, the name of the film is Colossal, written and directed by the Spaniard director Nacho Vigalondo at his second film in the American studios.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4680182
Monster stories are usually laughable. This one is so unbelievable that I will not spend any time analyzing it. The script takes no pain in making it otherwise, and no efforts were made either for creating special effects that would be any better than the ones in the classical Japanese or American movies of the genre from the 60s or 70s. There is a romantic story here, about an alcoholic messy girl (Anne Hathaway) returning twenty years or so later to her small, frozen in time childhood city, after breaking with her boyfriend in New York, meeting a former elementary school colleague, and trying to make sense of her life. And than, while she gets even messier and more drunk, strange things start to happen. None of these are bright and convincing, and yet the combination works.
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What is the secret? It may be in Anne Hathaway‘s acting, or maybe in her eyes, the biggest on big screens since Goldie Hawn. Her counterpart – Jason Sudeikis as the bar owner Oscar who ends in a very different place than where he starts – provides also a nice acting performance. It may be in the touch of humor that makes the unbelievable seem … well … reasonable? It may be in the fact that there is a touch of humanity and emotion that is being added to all the incredible events taking place on screen. It may be to the fact that the rules of the horror genre are never taken too much in serious and that they are so barely and rudely exposed that they invite the viewers to understand that this is just another story about monsters made of clothes or paper and cities made of wrapping boxes. It may be the combination of all these, or something else, but whatever it is, the film is very watchable, odd, and funny.