Quezon's Game follows Manuel Quezon in the late thirties as he tries to save Jewish refugees from extermination at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi party. The Philippines has yet to join the fight; the attack at Pearl Harbor is still years away.
Despite being set in the past, Quezon's Game is also about the present. It is a call for empathy and understanding in the face of overwhelming bigotry and apathy. Throughout the film Quezon tries to outmaneuver political foes and allies alike, who try to stop Quezon because of their internalized prejudice or their own political interests. And here's Quezon, his health fading, wanting not to be remembered by statues or plaques, but by the goodness of his actions.
For a film that is composed almost entirely of meetings, the film is relatively engaging. The film's two hour run time is barely felt because of a capable edit. There's a bit of old fashioned hokeyness to the dialogue, but the film's tone calls for it, in my opinion. This could have been a very staid, bland film, but there is personality in Quezon's Game's earnestness, and it shows.
The film shows its limitations early on but it does the best it can with the limited resources it has. The camerawork is mostly simple with a couple of inspired shots, though one could argue that you can only shoot a meeting scene so many times.
My mother, who typically doesn't watch movies (local or otherwise), really enjoyed the film and the messages it contains, and that's a testament to the reach of this film. Quezon's Game is a timely plea for humanity in a world that is quickly becoming isolated, tribal and self-centered.
Note: Implied spoilers for Godilla: King of the Monsters.
Picking up five years where the previous movie left off, Godzilla: King of the Monsters feels like a distillation of the semi-serious Heisei-era Toho Godzilla films, where Godzilla has to face off against a number of monsters while being assisted by the relatively insignificant humans on the ground. Off the top of my head, it reminds me a lot of Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001).
This movie seems to have heeded the audience reaction to the first movie, in that it focuses more on the monster fights than the human characters. However, that decision leads to even more problems. Yes, there are more monster fights, but you can barely see them, since most of the action takes place at night, or during a storm. The human character arcs that are left are not that interesting, either, save for one or two characters, notably Charles Dance's ecoterrorist character and Ken Watanabe's role as Dr. Serizawa.
While I enjoyed the spectacle of the film, something did bother me about it. Godzilla has always been a symbol of the neuroses and anxieties that Japan faced at the end of World War II. In this film, however, Godzilla's origin and motivations are tweaked to say he was there from ancient times, even giving him an ancient radioactive power source (instead of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) There's also a scene where the sole Japanese character in the movie seems to pass on the torch to the next generation. There's a sense that Godzilla is no longer of Japan, but of a larger world, and I have to ask: if we take away the Japanese-ness of Godzilla, what else is left?
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