God… Wait For It… Wait For It… … … zilla.

Posted: May 17, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Brian A. Costello, Movie, Review | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Godzilla: I’m going to go ahead and damn this movie with faint praise right off the bat: Godzilla is… OK.  It’s a movie.  It exists, and it has some good things going for it.

But I wish it had more.

It deserved to have more.

And mostly what it needed more of was the title character.  Somewhere, about 45 to 60 minutes in I said to myself, “hey… where’s Godzilla?”  We had seen plenty of the “bad guy” creature (which very closely (and almost embarrassingly) resembled the Cloverfield monster*) tearing shit up, but all we got of ‘Zills was a shape under the Navy ships here, a protruding spine-plate there… but no real meaty view of the guy (well, sans the poster, trailers, and car commercials for the past month).  But then, suddenly, hey!  There he is in Honolulu!  Standing tall and roaring as he prepares to fight… the… oh.  So, you’re not going to show us that, huh?  OK.  Back to “Underwater Godzilla,” is it?  Fine.  Then we get to San Francisco, all hell breaks loose, and as the frightened humans pile into a makeshift shelter we see him again, bearing down on Cloverfield 2.0 for a big fight and… oh.  You’re going to close the shelter door on that view, aren’t you?  Oh.  OK.  Well, that’s OK, I see the fight’s going to continue from another angle and… oh.  No, no you’re cutting away again.  WHAT THE HELL, YOU GUYS?

We do finally get the battle between the big guy, Cloverfield 2.0, and Cloverfield 2.1, and it is pretty great… albeit only 15 minutes of screen time, at night, in the rain, intercut with a lot of Aaron-Taylor Johnson’s pouty-lipped Navy bomb-diffuser character and his borderline useless subplot.  But it is cool.  Very much a faithful big-budget, capable-digital effects upgrade of the good old “man in suit” aesthetic from the classic Toho days…

…but more of that would have been the way to go.  Seriously.  And, yeah, I understand the concept of teasing the audience throughout the movie to make the final fight more appealing, but after three (or so) false starts, I was just annoyed.  Mostly because the scenes bookmarking the giant monster shenanigans were kinda bland.  And pointless.  They hired some pretty good actors to do almost nothing.  Poor Ken Watanabe walks around with a constant worried look on his face, saying things like, “it’s happening again,“ and, “Godzilla will restore nature’s balance,” and, “please don’t drop another bomb, because, Hiroshima.”  David Strathairn’s whole character arc was, “we’re going to drop a bomb on the creatures… oh, wait… can someone diffuse said bomb?”  And then there was the “Bryan Cranston Problem…”

The “Bryan Cranston Problem” was this- he’s too good.  Not in a, “why the hell is Bryan Cranston doing a movie like this?” way.  That’s not it.  It’s that his character is written out of the movie early on, but since it’s Bryan Cranston, they felt the need to give him so much more to do than was necessary.  Which adds almost ten minutes of awkward pacing at the beginning of a chronically awkwardly-paced movie.  And even though his scenes were the best non-zilla ones in the flick, they end up being detrimental to the narrative, editing-wise.  And the story pretty much abandons his subplot, almost entirely.  Basically, he’s a conspiracy-theorist searching for the real reason his wife died in a nuclear reactor accident fifteen years prior, and his research proves there’s probably some kind of giant monster involved.  And then he’s suddenly gone.  And his influence on the rest of the movie is reduced to clunky comparisons between his and Ken Watanabe’s research (which, in turn, has minimal impact on the storyline anyway).  You see, Watanabe is part of a secret government agency that knows that giant monsters used to duke it out before the dawn of man.  So he and Cranston are opposite sides of the same coin… that really should have been combined into one guy.  The result would have been one important character instead of two borderline useless ones.

And speaking of borderline useless characters… Aaron Taylor-Johnson.  Not really sure what the point of him was, other than to have someone for the camera to follow around for two hours.  Maybe it was his performance that didn’t work.  Not sure.  He’s kinda whiny and squeaky.  Which worked well for him in Kick-Ass, but I’m not sure it was what we needed here.  Although, to be fair, anything more out of him would have further emphasized the film’s serious lack of its title character, so maybe what we got from AT-J was just right.  Hell, if this movie was made five years ago it probably would have been Channing Fucking Tatum in the role, and the result would have been a LOT more screen time dedicated to half-assed, awkward, “funny” scenes involving a totally not-dorky guy being “dorky,” so… I take it back.  Aaron Taylor-Johnson was perfect for this movie.

…but again (and I’ll wrap it up because I acknowledge my bad habit of talking in circles) having your actors apply minimalist performances to barely-nuanced roles (if that was the intention) so that the emphasis can be on giant monsters punching each other is a viable directing technique**… provided you have enough of the latter.  Godzilla did not.

However, I hope they make a sequel.  Yes, I spent most of this write-up talking about what didn’t work, but that’s because, overall, it wasn’t a bad flick, just a misguided one.***  It squandered its potential, often, but was occasionally visually exciting, had some excellent action sequences, and made you feel for the big guy in the end.  So, you know, bring on Mothra!!! Or Rodan!!! Or Gamera!!!

Just leave Godzooky at home, OK?

*unless maybe this was the point?  To show the makers of Cloverfield who the King Of The Monsters really is?  Nah.  Six years is too long to make a point like that.  And Cloverfield is a better movie, anyway.

**a technique that I reeeeeally wish Guillermo del Toro had used in Pacific Rim.  It would have turned an annoying movie into a fantastic one.

***I wish this movie sucked, actually.  It’s a lot more fun to write about a sucky movie.  Mostly because I enjoy employing snark whenever possible (no, really?).

The Tears Of A Spider.

Posted: May 8, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Brian A. Costello, Movie, Review | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Amazing Spider-Man 2:  OK, a refresher- after 2007’s Spider-Man 3 tanked, critically, Sam Raimi didn’t return to direct a fourth flick.  But Sony Pictures needed to make one anyway, because if they didn’t, they’d lose the rights and Marvel Studios would do their own reboot.  And they were running out of time.  So, in 2012, we got The Amazing Spider-Man– a boring, empty bit of product that only resembled the classic Spider-Man in that a guy wore a blue and red suit with webs on it while he punched people.  Kick-Ass was more Spider-Man than The Amazing Spider-Man.

So, OK, as lame as it was, it made them a little cash, so, sequel!  And with no legal time constraints, there would be no rush.  Which, in a cinematic world populated by great comic book flicks like Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and The Avengers, should mean a slam dunk for Sony.  I mean, how hard could it be to make an engaging movie starring one of the most popular superheroes of all time?

Oh.  That hard.  Got it.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a bad movie.  An embarrassing movie.  But, above all else, a really, really boring movie.  Unless, you know, you’re really into a teenage boy crying a lot as he breaks up/makes up with his girlfriend a few times and/or misses his daddy.

The former is understandable on a (very) basic level, I guess- they want all the hormonal tweens in the audience to have something to relate to, and all… but the latter?  Useless.  Remember when Spider-Man was Spider-Man because he inadvertently got the actual guy who raised him killed?  Remember how that was motivation enough to carry him through 50 years of comic books and a trilogy of successful (if not uneven, for sure) movies?  “With great power comes great responsibility,” and all that?  Me too.  But this movie is written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (the team behind Transformers 1 & 2, so, you know, quality), and Orci is a conspiracy nut(case).  Like, a truther-level nut(case).  So, Amazing 2 clearly needed some daddy-conspiracy to spice things up a bit.  Or, wait… I think I mean slow things down to a crawl.  And add twenty minutes to a movie that would have been too long at two hours, anyway.  Something like that.

But I digress.  Maybe a brief synopsis is in order.

Let’s see… Peter Parker is, uh… graduating High School… with his valedictorian girlfriend Gwen Stacy… whose dad died in the last movie, just after making Peter promise to stay away from her because Spider-Man has dangerous enemies, and stuff… so, they break up… but that makes him sad… like, A LOT… uh… wait.  I swear there’s more… uh… OH!  Jamie Foxx plays Edward Nigma- a nerdy scientist who works for a big company that doesn’t appreciate him, and accidentally falls into a vat of electric eels that are powering the whole city, which kills him, but then he gets reincarnated as Dr. Manhattan- a big blue badass who can control electricity, but not his emotional outbursts.  They catch him, though, and a lipstick-wearing Nazi-esque scientist does experiments on him in a secret lab in the local prison.  This makes him mad.  Like, A LOT.  Meanwhile, Chris Cooper dies of some rare degenerative disease he’s had for decades and leaves his entire company (the one that accidentally turned Nigma into Dr. Manhattan) to his son, Slimy, played by Smirky McBadactor.  And it turns out Slimy has the same degenerative disease.  But since we’ve only got two hours and twenty one minutes to get this shit done, the disease shows up out of nowhere and threatens to kill Slimy by the beginning of the third act.  So, to heal himself, he tries to get some of Spider-Man’s blood.  But Spider-Man doesn’t think Slimy’s ready for this jelly… which we know because he actually shows up to tell him, “no, sorry, one vial of my blood ain’t worth your life, sucka,” like a total Spider-Dick.  This makes Slimy angry.  Like, A LOT.  Meanwhile, Parker-Man and Gwen Stacy break up outside of a Dim Sum place.  But then they get back together, despite this weird unsightly bullseye she’s got on her face for some reason.  But she’s not totally useless- she helps him build a better, stronger, faster web shooter because, “every time I fight Dr. Manhattan my web shooters get fried.”  And by “every time” he means “that one time.”  And by “web shooters” he means “web shooter.”  Because one of Parker-Man’s super powers is exaggeration.  Or maybe dyslexia.  Wait, what’s the term for an inability to count?  Whatever that is, he’s really good at it.  Anyway, Parker-Man then goes on a soul-searching mission to find out why his daddy left him all those years ago.  I mean, since Uncle Ben wasn’t his real dad, why should he spend any time thinking about him?  Hell, Aunt Sally Field has forgotten about him.  Her really interesting character development scenes told me so.  Like the part where she volunteers at the local hospital.  And that bit where she argues about laundry with Peter(-Man).  Uncle WHO?  Fuck it!  So, the mission leads Spider-Pete to a secret underground subway car that has an old computer with the data Spiderdad-Man gave his life to upload from a crashing plane ten years prior.  And on that computer is the most important scientific information Parker-Man could possibly find- a message from Spiderdad-Man telling him he loves him.  Like, A LOT.  Also, something about DNA.  But that’s secondary.  Meanwhile, Slimy has found the secret lab in the building he owns and injects himself with the serum that will only work with Parker-Man’s blood.  But it works on him, anyway.  But in a “straighten your hair and give you perma-grin with ink-teeth” kind of way.  So, Slimy looks around, does an eenie-meenie-miney-moe with all the bad-guy suits they’ve got stashed there (Dr. Octopus, The Vulture, The Rhino, etc…) and settles on the exact same one James Franco wore in Spider-Man 3.  Oh wait… he also sets Dr. Manhattan free.  Can’t remember which happened first.  Doesn’t matter.  Dr. Manhattan goes to a big power plant with his new Lightningbolt Supersuit and Scalp-Mounted Battery Life Indicator so he can become more powerful.  But Parker-Man and Gwen Stacy (and that weird black cloud hovering above her head) show up with a plan to kill him by giving him more power.  You see, their plan to give him more power will kill him, but his plan to take more power won’t.  Because, science.  Anyway, Spydra-Mæn fights Dr. Manhattan in both his corporeal and lightning-storm form, ignoring the warnings from people who hated when The Hulk did the exact same thing with Nick Nolte back in 2003.  But the plan to overload him with the electricity he wanted to be overloaded with anyway works, because science, and he poofs out of existence.  The En… OH WAIT!  We still totally need to deal with all those black cats we saw crossing Gwen Stacy’s path, so Slimy swoops in on his Franco-glider and destroys the ancient, gear-laden structure she was standing on.  Spider-Man divides his time by punching Slimy with one hand and stopping Gwen from falling, several times, with the other.  But then she falls really far, really fast, and… oh. Better not tell you that she dies, because that would be a spoiler.  Anyway, Parker mourns the death of some character that I won’t name because that would be a spoiler, at her gravesite, for exactly four seasons.  Then everything’s OK, and he finally transforms into Spiderquip-Man while fighting Russian Paul Giamatti in his very own Iron Man suit.  But we don’t see the fight, because that would be waaaay too many action sequences for a superhero movie.  I mean, what do you want, The Avengers, or something?  That movie totally blew.  Like, A LOT.

You know, I was going to delve deeper into the idea that all movies are, essentially, product, but that doesn’t mean they have to be stupid, what with all the good writing and basic care the Marvel Universe flicks get… and wax technical on how this movie plays out like a bunch of high-budget webisodes awkwardly glued together… and maybe talk about how The Amazing Spider-Man 2 simply oozes cold, cash-based decisions with literally no emphasis on cultivating a future audience beyond the people who they assume will gladly eat shit with a side of action-figure tie-ins,* a la Transformers… and mention that the proof of Sony Pictures’ flippant hubris lies in the mid-credits, non-tie-in, non-crossover, completely unrelated X-Men: Days Of Future Past commercial… and stuff…

…

…but I think I’ll just leave it at that (not so) brief synopsis.**  And the knowledge that, for Sony Pictures, with great power comes no responsibility.

foxx

*Hey, if you liked this movie, don’t take offense.  Just because I believe Sony thinks of you that way doesn’t mean I do.  In fact, basically, I’m offended by the way Sony Pictures thinks of us all.  But that’s just, like, uhh.. my opinion, man.

**Some of the names mentioned in this synopsis may have been changed to protect the stupid.  Other than that, it’s actually what happens.