The latest Godzilla film is terrible… and wonderful

The new Godzilla is likely to be the worst movie I’ll recommend seeing this year, or maybe ever. Because bad, you see, sometimes is good - especially when its comes to the large-monster movie genre.

It was a little shaky at first. Godzilla Director Gareth Edward's opening scene of tender loss was so earnestly played that I worried that his would be the first of the 28 Godzilla movies to take itself seriously, or, in other words, that the movie might try to be good… which would be bad, if you see my logic. I shouldn’t have stressed. Immediately after that short scare, the film dropped down to its natural level and began to demonstrate all of the ridiculous (or glorious) attributes that are just part of the DNA of any really bad (or maybe good) movie with the name Godzilla in it. These asinine (or genius) elements include:  

Trait 1 - Multiple large monsters for more monster-on-monster battle fun: The best Godzilla films (or the worst, where worst might mean best) have matched the big aquatic lizard up against other big… ah… things, like Mothra, a radioactive moth and her caterpillar young, or the three-headed monster King Ghidorah (Monster Zero) from Planet X. This time Godzilla is up against giant reptile-bug things - prehistoric animals hatched from spores buried deep underground eons ago. One might presume the film’s creators are harking back to one of Godzilla's past nemeses, Rodan, a mutated pterosaur that gave the big guy all sorts of trouble back in the 70’s, but these creatures really look more like a combo of the Cloverfield monster and the bugs from Starship Troopers - they’re cool, but not very original.

Trait 2 - A horrendously ridiculous premise for where these big guys come from: We’ve been trained over time to understand that Godzilla and his associates are mutations caused by radiation - payback to the humans for mishandling the power of the element U. Close, but not quite the case in this reboot. Godzilla’s new enemies are mega-predators from prehistory, not just mutating from radioactivity but actually feeding on it. The reptile-bugs, referred to in the film as MUTO’s (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms), eat radioactive material like food, somehow converting small amounts of it into large amounts of mass (them) - you experts on the relation of energy to mass times the speed of light squared will have to help us out with that one - feel free to use the comment box below to derive whatever equations you need to. And what of Godzilla? Well, he’s been lurking deep in the ocean near areas of high radioactivity and returns once the MUTO’s appear – why you ask... to "bring balance to nature". Of course… balance nature - it’s so clear.

Trait 3 - Monster road trips: All bad (good) Godzilla movies need a road trip. The giant beasts need to travel long distances from different parts of the world for some outrageous reason. The great part of this tradition is that the path of this long trip must intersect with at least three major population centers containing massive city skylines providing awesome battle arenas. What are the odds that among all the vast valleys and plains, Godzilla would stumble onto say... Vegas? – Exactly 100% in this series… lets just say you might want to cancel your reservations at Circus Circus this summer.

To these key pieces, the film’s writers add the obligatory military leader (David Strathairn – The Bourne Legacy - as Rear Admiral William Stenz) whose strategy is always the opposite of what the obligatory scientist (Ken Watanabe – Batman Begins - as Dr. Ishiro Serizawa) suggests. It doesn't really mater whose plan they take, there's never much we humans can do to stop the inevitable Godzilla-movie monster throw down. Even the thick-tongued Watanabe’s Dr. Seriwaza finally relents uttering the most repeatable line in the film... "Let them fight". And here is where the fun really begins in Godzilla. For those of you who read this blog with some regularity (all four of you), you know my aversion to the requisite action-film final battle scenes which are just a series missiles fired and blows delivered while we’ve-seen-them-before explosions go off around the good guy and the bad guy. But it’s different in Godzilla. We fans of the genre long for the final battle, especially because now Godzilla and his foes are so nicely rendered. And Godzilla does not disappoint in this area, with the beasts using every inch of dense urban territory to gain an advantage and every nonsensical special power they possess to do in the other guy. I believe that the end game alone of this cheesy bit of guilty pleasure is worth the price of a ticket for fans of Godzilla and maybe for a lot of you others too.

Regardless of how well the final scene plays for you, odds are, as the credits role, you will count the 123 minutes you spent watching Godzilla as squandered. But give it time – some banter with your fellow movie goers maybe. You might just end up admitting that it was kind of fun... and what were you expecting anyway. A silly 6 out of 10.

Nebraska - Recent DVD Release

A son arrives to pick up a father in a place that a son and father should never plan to meet. He sees his dad, sitting, head in hands, disheveled, confused - but still dad. From that opening, I braced myself against Nebraska, believing that this late-life, father and son road trip might lead too close to home and heart. But Woody Grant (played by Bruce Dern), it turns out, is not my father. In fact, he’s not really much of a father to his now adult sons David (Will Forte) and Ross (Bob Odenkirk) either. But he’s still their father… and he’s convinced he’s about to become a millionaire. 

Woody has won a magazine sweepstakes you see. He’s got the letter to prove it. All he has to do is get from Montana to Nebraska to claim the million-dollar prize. And he’s been found more than once walking the freeway out of Billings to Lincoln to do just that. Weary of trying to convince him of the scam, his son asks him why he just doesn’t take the bus if he wants to go so badly. But Woody doesn’t know the answer to that question nor many others - or maybe he just doesn’t want to answer. He’d rather have his son David take him. The passive David is the younger of the two brothers and the one who gets called for when Woody’s aged and drink-riddled mind causes issues. Ross is the older more driven sibling who would rather just put the old man in a home and move on, and the one that reminds his brother that their father never did anything for them and paid more attention to his alcohol than the family. But David relents and gives Woody the ride he’s so desperate for… he’s still his father after all. 

The ensuing trip to Lincoln takes the awkward duo through Woody’s past, both physically and mentally. Along the way they run into, or are joined by, the odd branches and twigs of the Grant family, all of whom believe Woody’s tale of treasure and are either eager to congratulate him for his luck or scheming to separate him from his future winnings. The character of this family tree is recounted for us by Grant’s fouled-tongued wife Kate (June Squibb) during a stop in Woody’s old home town. We learn quickly that whatever filters Kate once had between her thoughts and her mouth have long worn away as she airs the dirty laundry of the Grant clan and associates at every opportunity. The story’s pace is slow on the road - low key, and director Alexander Payne gives us plenty of time to study the diverse and sometimes ridiculous characters we meet along the path and to ponder the motivations for their actions. But the Fargo-like askewness that Payne seems to be shooting for here sometimes hits a non-resonant tone with the inane canceling the more poignant and worthwhile parts of the film - is it a darkly-comic caricature or a poetic study of human behavior? - it’s never quite clear from Nebraska's simultaneously bleak and oddball accounting.


Within this bipolarity are some stellar pieces of acting, particularly from Dern whose crumpled Woody won him a Best Actor nomination at this year’s Oscars. The film also offers several layers of meanings and morals for you to dig through. I found Nebraska to be more than a tale of binding ties. Yes, there’s some bonding along the road and David learns of a history that he should have known about his father that provides insight into who and what they all are. But just under that is a parable of turning points… decisions made by us or upon us that we allow to fashion our lives. Decisions that we might doubt deep down in places we don’t like to often go or speak of. And of a need for redemption - some single act that might recover us to some degree. Sometimes we want to think we can move beyond our past with that act… then we see it staring back at us from the side of the road. 7.5 out of 10

Captain America: Winter Soldier

I didn’t want to go to the new Captain America movie The Winter Soldier – I was pressured into it. I justified my cave in by noting that Soldier had been getting some positive reviews. Lesson learned: stick with your instincts and pay no attention to movie reviews… except my own of course.

Winter Soldier is the sequel to Joe Johnson’s 2011 introductory effort – Captain America: The First Avenger. The first Cap film was easy enough to forget, so I’ll remind you that we were all introduced back then to Steve Rogers, a scrawny WWII army enlistee who, after being deemed unfit for service, volunteers for a top secret research project that transforms him into Captain America – a super soldier dedicated to defending America’s ideals against all those who threaten them like the evil Hydra organization. It’s now two years after the Battle for New York in which Cap participated as part of The Avengers in the 2012 film of the same name. Although he’s been thawed out for a while now from the deep freeze that allowed him to time travel to our present, he’s still trying to decipher the new tech and the post-9/11, war-on-terror infringements on the freedoms he fought for back in the WW-2. 

The first Captain America film (The First Avenger) felt like a rushed, and obligatory effort made just to get Cap introduced to the world in time for the first Avengers movie. Winter Soldier breaks out a bit, but still feels like simply one more cog in the big Marvel money-making movie wheel. I’m not going to call Winter Soldier a bad film. But it’s not a good film either. It’s a really, really, really average film – like smack-dab-in-the-middle, nothing-special, mainly forgettable, how-many-times-is-he-going-to-slug-that-guy, super-hero film. Punch up the definition of “average” on your iPhone Dictionary App and this movie should come up. And it’s not that I am holding the bar too high on these Marvel films. I grew up reading these guys in the 12-cent drug store comics. I understand the genre – they’re not The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men – I get that these movies are based on outrageous premises and plots that accompany colored pages inside really thin little magazines. But the good ones can still move us a little beyond the POW! and BANG! of it all – maintaining the fantasy and maybe the camp of their source, but adding something special and sophisticated. Batman Begins and Spiderman II (Doc Ock) are examples of this type of moderate transcendence. And Winter Soldier does try to step up… it tries hard not to be ordinary. The story’s creators (directed by Anthony and Joe Russo) serve up a present-day-relevant security vs. freedom theme in a conspiracy/espionage wrapping, and the addition of Robert Redford to the cast definitely brings some weight to the screen. But the nothing-is-as-it-seems and don’t-trust-anybody (Col. Fury actually vocalizes this cliché) plot tools eventually devolve toward heavy, and not so special, CGI mayhem and the ritual audience-endurance test that is the final battle between the super hero and super villain.

One could think that the odd selection of directors Anthony and Joe Russo, whose previous work has been almost exclusively in comedies, was made to add some spark to this bland entry into the Marvel film universe. At the least, I expected the film to have a sharp comic undertone. But there are few laughs in Winter Soldier. What we are offered, however, is a lot impressive ninja moves. Everybody is a ninja in this one. It appears that both S.H.I.E.L.D and Hydra have top-notch ninja training programs. And that is important in a Captain America film because Cap is not nigh immortal like some of his other Avenger teammates (i.e. Thor and the Hulk – by the way… where were the rest of these S.H.I.E.L.D heroes while all the chaos was going on? – Cap could’ve used the help). Cap is just a suped-up mortal and you can’t have too many bombs blowing up or shots fired off around him since they’d actually do some damage if contact were made… hand-to-hand is a better option for Captain America. Oh, shots were fired every now and then but the aim wasn't quite right – memorandum to the bad guys… when you finally get a chance to shoot your weapon at Captain America, don’t aim at the shield… it just bounces off you see. And so it went. Really nothing new here, although the film's makers would like you to think there is. Don’t trust anyone. 5 out of 10.

Philomena - 2014 Oscar Nominee for Best Picture

What is Philomena? None of us common folk (didn’t make it to the Sundance festival again this year dang it) would know. Do we go to a show with this title? Take a look at the theater poster above... that’s not doing much for us either. Nobody’s exclaiming to their buddy after gazing on that advertisement that “they’ve just got to see this one.” But choose the most boring looking film on the marquee and you’ve probably got the one with the most weight - sometimes you’re a better person for seeing it. I think this is the case with Philomena. A few others think so too… it’s been nominated for four Oscars in this years Academy Awards including best picture.  

Philomena is a 70 year old Irish women who has kept a secret for a very long time. The film is based on the true story of Philomena Lee (The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by journalist (Martin Sixsmth)  who, as a pregnant teenager, is exiled by her ashamed father to a type of convent known as a Magdelene Laundry - institutions that had been established at the time ostensibly to house “fallen women”. There Philomena labors and in return receives shelter and care during her pregnancy. The convent’s nuns deliver her baby son but she is forced to give up all parental rights. At 3 years of age her son is taken away by an American family as Philomena watches from afar - gone without trace. All this, she is told, a penance for her grave sin. 

She reveals her secret nearly 50 years later to her daughter who connects with an un-employed journalist she hopes can tell her mother’s story and help with the search for her son. This links Philomena, played with expected perfection by Dame Judi Dench (M of recent bond films) with journalist Martin Sixsmith played by comedian Steve Coogan (Night at the Museum, Tropic Thunder). They form a magnificent odd couple - the simple, naive (maybe), and faithful Philomena juxtaposed with the educated, jaded, and agnostic Sixsmith. Dench’s performance is poignant - never over the top. Coogan is sharp but not overbearing. 

Yes, Philomena is sentimental, it is a tear jerker… but of course it is, it’s about a mother’s worse loss - how can it not be? But the sentiment is heartfelt - the kind that feels real because it is something close to what we’ve all felt - loss and understanding - at some time. So don’t let the odd name and lack of hype keep you away from this one - you’ll be a better person for seeing it. Ok, maybe you wont be but at least you’ll feel something. 8 out of 10.

Enders Game - Coming to DVD in February

I read the book - Orson Scott Card’s Nebula and Hugo Award winning novel - back in 85. I’ve read a lot of science fiction, before and since, and I still put Enders Game near the top of the best list. Card’s concepts back then were fresh and engrossing… and disturbing – children bred, filtered, and trained to lead the human race in a war against an alien force, waged through what is effectively an elaborate video game. But it has taken so long for Ender to reach the big screen that many of its key points may now seem old hat. Some of Card’s themes, such as push-button, virtual war, are now real life. Others, like the story’s prepubescent battle school, have been duplicated in more recent pop literature like the Hunger Game series. But Ender’s story still carries weight and although the film does not have enough time to do more than touch the surface of some of Card’s more complex statements, it’s still worth experiencing.

Ender’s world is a future earth that has narrowly survived an invasion by bug-like aliens and is now in a state of heightened paranoia over, what is assumed to be, an inevitable second attack.  The planet’s youth - intuitive, malleable, and unbiased by long-evolved and tried strategies - have been found to be the best suited to plan or improvise unanticipated battle strategies and lead the world’s forces in a preemptive first-strike against the bug nation. Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfied) is a “third”. Although the film does not spend much time on this concept, one can intuit that earth’s families are generally limited to two children and that Ender’s allowed birth had much to do with a bloodline that promises a potential battle leader. His siblings have both been in and out of the same battle-training program that Ender is now starting as a pre-teen. His sister washed out because she was too companionate, his brother was on the other side… booted because he displayed overly violent tendencies. Ender seems to have both pieces in his make up and he battles throughout his training and ascension to command to understand and balance both. He confesses this core paradox of his story to his sister while contemplating his role in this ultimate battle - 

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”

Butterfield (Hugo) is well cast as Ender – slowly convincing the audience, as his character does his peers, that he is something special… a standout. Harrison Ford, as Colonel Hyrum Graff, the head of the selection and training program, seems out of place early in the film but revs up nicely as the Colonel becomes obsessed over the possibility that Ender might be “the one”.  Ben Kingsley is also good as Ender’s mentor but Nonso Anozie’s doughy battle-school Drill Sergeant Dap strikes fear into no one.

Enders Game is a handsome film, shining in the battle-room training skirmishes and the final remote control engagement. The film is a generally faithful, although limited, presentation of Card’s outstanding novel and nicely balances the glint of its sci-fi environment with the core questions of the cost of victory and if it really matters how we win. 7 out of 10

All Is Lost

“All is lost here.” The movie begins with that line… one of the few uttered in this film. It is a black screen behind the opening voice over. “Our Man” (the title given to Robert Redford’s sailor in the films credits – we never learn his actual name) words a letter, to his family maybe, relating his desperate state… his dwindling rations, his battle to survive, his regret.

Sunlight and noise… we are moved back 8 days in time as Our Man awakens to the sound of a loud collision. His yacht has struck a stray shipping container and is taking on water. The box’s freight of cheap tennis shoes bobs in foot-deep water in the cabin.  Our Man is alone in the damaged yacht in the Indian Ocean. Why is he there? Why is he sailing alone? Who is he? What is he? We know none of these things. We know only that there is a man in a boat far from land and that the boat has hole in it.

A basic story of man against nature follows. The struggle hits fairly predictable plot notes – storms, thirst, near-miss rescues. It is writer/director J.C. Chandor’s minimalist approach to moving through these points that truly sets this film apart from the common. Elemental sounds – wind, rain, sea - and a spartan but haunting sound track (from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros) fill in where dialogue might have been. We watch Our Man move wordlessly, pragmatically through the logical, by-the-manual steps to survival. He is experienced at sea, but not with this type of challenge. He is practical and realistic and he is whatever else we can deduce from his labored movements and exhaustive attempts to stay alive. But we really don’t know this person. The depiction seems like an exercise that uses the main character as a variable… a fine experiment in story telling to see if such an approach can produce a compelling film. That said, All Is Lost is certainly more than a curiosity. Chandor’s tactics are effective. The film is intriguing… even captivating in parts. Yet I watched this hypothesis and proof unfold from afar – more intellectually engaged than emotionally connected. Chandor’s bold strategy holds the film apart but also ties it down. It was interesting to watch but I didn’t really care that much about what happened to Our Man in the end. 7 out of 10. 

Gravity… or the lack there of

“Zero Gravity” or “The Quest for Gravity” might be more appropriate titles for director Alfonso Cuaron’s (Children of Men) stunning outer-space obstacle course of a movie. But maybe Cuaron was going for the double meaning in his one-word title to symbolize his setting of the beauty and strangeness of weightless space against that cold vacuum’s hostility to life. Gravity’s space is breathtaking, but also a place where danger is only millimeters away… and most grave.

The skill and technique with which these two – the spectacular and the terrifying - are combined in this film are rare… maybe even unique. Cuaron's Gravity is an epic spectacle, obviously taking a nod from Kubrick’s iconic 2001 Space Odyssey in its use of imagery in place of traditional narrative or dialogue. But Gravity is even more stunning and balletic than 2001 in its framing and choreography. The long opening shot moves us toward a space shuttle, a piece of the blue globe earth and its sun glistening behind… pure silence is finally broken by the faint sound of communications between working astronauts. The film’s opening scene is truly glorious and I felt it almost a shame when my silent trance was broken by human voices. Sandra Bullock, playing Dr. Ryan Stone, a medical research engineer on her first shuttle mission, is speaking to George Clooney who is mission leader astronaut Matt Kowalski. If you can’t picture Bullock as an astronaut, that’s ok because she’s really not in this one. She’s a novice, on board to implement and oversee experiments she designed back on earth. Clooney’s Kowalski, on the other hand, is an old vet on his last mission and looking to break the combined mission space-walk record in what appears to be a routine workday in the void. As Bullock’s Dr. Stone struggles with the weightless work environment, the gallant and self-assured Kowalski putts around the outside of the shuttle in his jet pack telling stories about his glory days, fast cars, and fast times. Early, Clooney teeters precariously close to a caricature of a G.I. Joe action figure with his phlegmatic Kowalski, but it works here somehow and fortunately the quick-arriving chaos forces a more serious commander before he becomes distractingly corny.

You already know from the trailers that the shuttle they’re working on is destroyed, leaving the astronauts marooned in space – even Houston falls silent in the initial mayhem. What follows is a Rube Goldberg-like chain reaction that poses increasingly more treacherous and impossible challenges to our space walkers and their rescue. The trip is truly stunning, heart pounding… griping. If you go, be prepared to find yourself gasping for air along with Stone as her suit oxygen level drops slowly… 10 percent… 5 percent… gone – or twisting in your seat to help her grasp on to a passing hand hold. But know that Gravity is first a real-time disaster movie and foremost a visual experience. You’ll not find the cerebral and supernatural elements of other acclaimed sci-fier’s such as 2001, or Solyaris, or even last years Prometheus. Gravity will not give you a point of view on man’s purpose or origin – it simply pits the possibility and will to survive against the seemingly insurmountable barriers of a magnificent but completely foreign realm. The film does have poignancy, however, and is strongest emotionally when conveying the human need for anchor and the power of the concept and the hope of going home. It’s just that these more ethereal points are no match for the awesomeness of what is pictured on the screen.

Watch Gravity three dimensionally. I suppose you can’t be disappointed in this film whether it has a z coordinate or not, but the imagery will have more weight and depth (literally) if you’ve got the glasses on. You’ll find Bullock and Clooney are fine of course – playing to type. And you may find Gravity more substantial emotionally than I did. But it doesn’t matter either way… you’ll be glad you bought the ticket. 8.5 out of 10.