The Wrath of Godzilla

There's probably no better example of dumb Hollywood trend-following than the 1998 Roland Emmerich blockbuster Godzilla, an American adaptation of the popular Japanese monster movie series of the same name. While it was successful, Emmerich's re-imagining wasn't remembered fondly by those who sat through it. Newcomers were turned off by a stupid plot, annoying characters, and special effects that look dated compared to movies ten years older than itself. Established Godzilla fans were spurned by drastic redesigns of the creature itself, which ended up looking like a cheap knockoff of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park. In the end, it was a movie that pleased absolutely no-one, and it would be sixteen years before the famous city-destroying lizard would ever get back to the big screen, this time with Monsters director Gareth Edwards at the helm.

That's no reef.

This new Godzilla is a very human-centric story as the world is suddenly and disastrously reintroduced to city-sized monsters with our smaller, slightly crunchy heroes left to scurry around avoiding being stepped on. As an American soldier traveling to Japan to bail his estranged father (Bryan Cranston) out of jail, Aaron Taylor-Johnson just wants to get things taken care of and return to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son at his California home. Unfortunately, this trip coincides with the re-emergence of an ancient monster that starts destroying cities and absorbing nuclear power sources all over the Pacific. Soon both soldiers and monster are converging on San Francisco, as the military struggles to contain the destruction and save the lives of all of the world's citizens in the process.

Duct tape is all the rage with crazy people in Japan.

Oh, the problems Godzilla has. The biggest is the fact that the title character has little screen time to speak of. While we get glimpses of the monster throughout the film - and his origins are merely glossed over, by the way - we never really get a good, long look at him until the end of the final act. It's not as though Godzilla doesn't have the opportunity to wreak havoc, as he appears numerous times in scenes setting up grand spectacles, only for the scenes to abruptly cut to either insignificant conversations between insignificant characters about what to do OR to the same scene but immediately after the off-screen carnage that Godzilla fans paid money to see in action. Obviously this was due to one of two things; either it was a budget decision, because that CGI LOOKS extremely expensive to produce (even if 3D added little); or it was a conscious decision to focus more attention on the human characters witnessing this crisis.

Right... what was your purpose here, again?

And we know that's a story angle that Edwards can do; his Monsters was very character-focused, even while the audience seemed to waiting on the edge of their seat for a GLIMPSE of anything alien. There are two reasons why - despite it being a brave idea - Edwards' effort doesn't work here. One is that the movie is called Godzilla, and people did not pay $8 (or more) for their tickets to watch a bunch of humans talking about all the action - and far more engaging action, mind you - taking place off-screen. Second, the characters here are one-note cliches from the annals of monster movies past. Cranston - while amazing - is your standard man driven into obsession by tragedy only to be proven right about the existence of giant monsters in our world. Olsen - while amazing - is your standard wife/mother/love interest whose existence in the film is purely to be an object for our hero to return to. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins - while amazing - are figureheads of a secret society who unsuccessfully tried to keep these giant creatures a secret, and take on a John Hammond-esque desire to not interfere and let nature take its course. David Strathairn - while amazing - is a typical military leader who doesn't hesitate to abdicate nuclear force against what he sees as a threat. And Taylor-Johnson - while struggling to wipe clean his British accent - is the MacGuffin, an American soldier with an unbelievably convenient skill set who gets caught up in trying to take down the monster before it can destroy his home. He also happens to be the luckiest man alive, as proven by the impossibility of the situations he survives. Though the acting is solid, there's not enough development here to make up for the lack of dedicated monster action we get.

Ooh, do we see him now? Wait, wait... no...

So after all that, my opinion on Godzilla must be clear... It's absolutely awesome.

Don't get me wrong, this is a movie with some clear, easily recognizable flaws. Edwards and his filmmakers take WAY too long focusing on things other than the film's main character, and the script - credited to newcomer Max Borenstein but with contributions from mediocre established writers David Callaham (Doom), David Goyer (Blade: Trinity), Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3) and Frank Darabont (okay, he's actually quite good) - just doesn't do this story justice. The actions of the humans are inconsequential (or just stupid), their motivations forced and derivative, and the characters themselves mere caricatures of established cliches.

Amazingly, you can understand almost everything Watanabe says this time around.

But while the film struggles narratively, it still has excellent action, amazing special effects, and it uses its title monster effectively when we finally DO see him let loose. Whether or not you're a fan of the classic Japanese movie creature, seeing him smash buildings or fight other giant MUTOs (yes, they look like derivatives of the Cloverfield monster, but that design was awesome so I'll forgive it) gives a definite feeling of awe and excitement, much like last Summer's similar epic Pacific Rim. Better, Edwards knows to treat Godzilla as a heroic figure, as opposed to Emmerich's more neutral stance in 1998. Sure, he directly causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people (off-screen, naturally), but at the end of the day this is a monster you're still rooting for, if only because Hollywood got him right. Simply put, the best parts of Godzilla give you instant happiness, despite whatever else it does wrong. You might mentally tick off all the issues that this film has as you watch it on the big screen, but as the closing credits roll you'll find yourself putting down your 3D glasses, glancing at the screen, and uttering:

"Please, sir, I want some more."

A Mr. Anderson Double Feature: Silent House & Friends With Kids

I took this past week off from work, tired and worn down from the stresses of a job that sucks forty hours of life from you on a good week. I'm sure you all know the feelings that can sometimes accompany that, even if it's a job you absolutely love. Sometimes you just need to take time off, even if you don't plan to go anywhere or see anyone. Since this is me we're talking about, that meant watching movies. Some TV and video games, certainly, but mostly movies. Because I DID see so much, and because I don't need (or want) a two week buffer for potential reviews, I thought I'd take this opportunity to look at two of the titles I saw last week: the supernatural horror film Silent House and the romantic comedy Friends With Kids.

Silent House is a remake of the Uruguayan horror film La Casa Muda, originally released in 2010. Olsen Twins reject Elizabeth Olsen plays Sarah, a young woman who is helping her father repair their worn down old lakeside summer home in hopes of selling it. While exploring the house, Sarah hears something making noise upstairs, and her father disappears while investigating. What follows is Sarah doing being hunted by something in the house, and her trying to escape whatever it might be. But the closer she gets to freedom, the closer the house's secrets get to revealing themselves to the world.

One of the main draws for seeing Silent House is of course Olsen, who impressed many with her debut in last year's Martha Marcy May Marlene to the tune of several industry awards and nominations. While Silent House does have multiple characters, they do little but provide a backdrop for Olsen, who really proves that her success last year was no fluke. While there's little at first for Sarah to do besides creep from room to room, it is that steady deliberation that makes you fully appreciate Olsen's performance as a modern-day scream queen. And as her character slowly develops over the course of the film, you garner respect for just how deep her role really is.

That tank top is otherworldly.

Unfortunately, directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (who were the creators of the popular 2003 film Open Water) can't seem to make this great short story idea run properly over the length of a full feature film. The film's main gimmick (and it IS a gimmick) is that it is meant to look like the entire tale is shot in one continuous take, with no breaks or sudden shot changes. The fact that much of the film actually looks like it easily follows this formula is impressive, though in the mostly-dark house there are several times when the directors could have stopped the cameras without anyone noticing. More impressive is during the film's many slow moments, when it is far more difficult to get away with cutting off your shots. I don't know how much the directors had to get JUST RIGHT, but their technical prowess is all but unquestioned when you consider the impressive look of the final product.

Okay, NOW she looks a bit more like her sisters...

The story however... Kentis and Lau do an amazing job building tension as Sarah moves from room to room, but all that work is worthless if you don't let some of that out from time to time. True to the film's slow pacing, the tale doesn't feel as though it's going anywhere, and when it does, we've seen it coming a mile away. With the exception of a few small scares, there's also not much frightening going on, with the film in the end taking on a more psychological thriller aspect that changes the whole makeup of what I thought I was watching. Silent House is utterly a disappointment; an excellent performance by Olsen utterly sabotaged by a predictable script and a distinct lack of scares.

On the flip side of that equation is Friends with Kids, my new #1 film for 2012. I feel kind of bad cramming this film into a double feature review, and I hope this doesn't go unnoticed down here as the film likely will be in the outside world. Written and directed by Jennifer Westfeldt (who also co-wrote and acted in 2001's Kissing Jessica Stein, but is probably best known for her relationship with John Hamm), the film tells the story of best friends Julie and Jason (played by Westfeldt and Piranha 3D and Parks and Recreations star Adam Scott) who, in their thirties and wanting children, don't want to fall into the traps that have befallen their married friends. After stating that having children would not change things, their friends seem eternally miserable with their lives and marriages after having their kids. As neither Julie nor Jason have found "The One", they decide they will have a baby themselves, sharing equal responsibilities for raising their child while dating other people, thus avoiding the relationship drain from which their friends suffer.

"So, there are no cameras, right?" "Sure."

A lot of the marketing buzz surrounding this release focused on a reunion of sorts, with much of the cast of last year's sensation Bridesmaids returning together to the big screen once again. Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Hamm and Chris O'Dowd all do excellent work together as couples who go from happy-go-lucky to miserable with the difficulties of child rearing introduced to their lives, but any going to see this film with the expressed intention of seeing these actors in action will be disappointed: this is Westfeldt and Scott's show all the way. Jason and Julie are those friends you know (or maybe have been part of): they live in the same apartment building, they've been friends with one another since just about forever, know everything there is to know about one another, have secret games they play constantly, and mesh on just about every level you can imagine with perfect ease. They're also the friends who aren't attracted to one another in the slightest and you CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHY, since it's obvious that together they'd make the perfect couple. For their part, Westfeldt and Scott put forth two of the best performances I've seen so far in 2012, their motivations and characteristics feeling more like those of living, breathing, and thinking human beings than you ever see in typical Hollywood fare. Westfeldt is incredibly sweet and brilliant as Julie, and Scott is roguish and charming as Jason, the actors succeeding in making both characters impeccably likable and easy for the audience to relate to.

They're just angry that I ended a sentence with a preposition.

The secondary cast does get some opportunities to hog screen time, but anyone hoping for the hilarity of Bridesmaids should be reminded that Melissa McCarthy was one of the main reasons that film's humor margin was set so highly, and she's nowhere to be found in Friends With Kids. Also missing from this film is the low-brow level of smart humor that made Bridesmaids a widely-revered modern classic. Instead Friends with Kids prides itself on being merely incredibly smart, with only a few poop jokes present (there are diapers, after all) while the main focus of the film is the dialogue concerning adult relationships and how children affect that dynamic. Both couples (consisting of Wiig with Hamm and Rudolph with O'Dowd) have their issues, but Wiig and Hamm seem eternally miserable being around one another, while Rudolph and O'Dowd still seem affectionate even while they're shouting at each other. The few times the film actually focuses on these pairs are wonderful moments; it's a shame the filmmakers couldn't fit them in a bit more to diversify the story a tad. Other notable performances come from Edward Burns as a divorcee and Megan Fox (!) as a modern dancer, both of whom are considered "The Ones" by Julie and Jason respectively. Burns does some of his best work in years, and while Fox really only manages to play herself, she is still tons better than anything else in which I've actually seen her.

Scarier than any part of Silent House.

The only detraction I can come up with for Friends With Kids is that the romantic comedy storyline is still too normal and predictable to fully get behind. If it wasn't for the excellent performance of the cast, especially Westfeldt and Scott, this could easily have flopped into forgettable territory, even in a year when great films seem to be a true rarity. Instead, this is a success for first time director Westfeldt, who creates a nice twist for a classic story, much like the one by the late Adrienne Shelly in 2007's Waitress. It might not be as raunchy as Bridesmaids before it, but Kids With Friends would be well worth hunting down even if there were viable alternatives in the world of cinema right now.

Four Name Free for All

Every week, there are brand new movies released. Whether they can be found in every major movie theater in the country or just a few, a new film gets that chance to break in an audience, or to capture a whole generation's imagination in one fell swoop. Often there is so much out there that even when I really want to see something on the more limited/indie scale, it is wedged out of my schedule by other, more widely-released titles. More than a few times this year I have earnestly meant to see a film in the theater, only to have it fall by the wayside as bigger fare bulldozes it's way through. That's why when Another Earth came out, I was watching Captain America and Friends with Benefits. When Hobo with a Shotgun came around, it was Thor and (hurk!) Something Borrowed. Gnomeo and Juliet was put aside for The Eagle, while Oscar-bait A Better Life was passed up for Bad Teacher, possibly the worst movie of 2011. When Fox Searchlight drama Martha Marcy May Marlene came to theaters the same weekend as Paranormal Activity 3 and The Three Musketeers, it tempted the same fate as those those other limited release films. Thankfully, it stuck at local theaters a bit longer than those previous misses had, and once all the mainstream films I really wanted to see in the theater dried up, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this mysterious film festival favorite was still ready and waiting to be seen. While I suspect most people who wanted to see this film on the big screen already have (I was in fact the only person to sit throughout the entire showing), I was glad to finally get some quality indie film viewing into a schedule packed with so many mediocre blockbusters.

No twin Olsens here!

Two years after her younger sister Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) disappeared off the face of the planet, Lucy (Sarah Paulson) is shocked when that same girl calls her out of the blue and asks to be picked up from a remote suburban town. Without talking about what happened to her with Lucy or her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy), it is obvious that Martha has picked up some odd and out-of-the-ordinary habits from her time away. At the same time, Martha becomes increasingly panicked as she believes she has been followed by the cult she had just escaped. The farm from which she escaped is only a few hours away; there she was "cleansed" (drugged), "loved" (raped), and brainwashed into thinking she was cleansed and loved by the men in the community and their enigmatic leader Patrick (John Hawkes), and then told to turn around to induct other women in the same manner. Becoming more steadily paranoid and delusional, Martha drives a wedge between herself and her sister, creating a gulf that might never be again crossed.

Yup, he plays the guitar, too

The story is told in a smooth blend of current day, memory and dream, each moment giving us just a little more insight into what has happened to Martha over the past two years. As she tries with much difficulty to adapt to everyday life, normal activities so natural that her family doesn't even notice brings back horrific memories of the things Martha experienced and the things that she has done. Haunting in its execution, the story never gives you too much at once, allowing each morsel of news to wash over you so that you can take in the horrific things that happen in these cults. Not bad for a first effort at feature film-making by director and screenwriter Sean Durkin, who eerily knows what strings to pull at appropriate moments.

Cut-off shorts and guns; sexy in the sixties, sexy now

It helps when the cast does such a good job of building the story, especially The OIsen Twins' baby sister Elizabeth. In her feature film debut, Olsen is a blank slate as the movie opens, only to gradually reveal more of her character as her story is presented to us. How she made such a splash out of nowhere would be worthy of a paragraph all by itself, but suffice it to say that we are so entranced by Martha's paranoia mainly because Olsen convinces us that it must be true. Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy sadly can't match Olsen's natural talent, but both do a good job playing "normal" types who can't wrap their heads around Martha's strange behavior. Paulson especially does her best in scenes opposite Olsen, as both sides struggle to find any common ground in their conversations, trying desperately to be sisters again but not understanding how. While most of the cultists are a dry bunch (with small exceptions for young actresses Louisa Krause and Julia Garner), John Hawkes once again bursts forth with a performance that hearkens back to his Academy Award-nominated role in 2010's Winter's Bone. While never raising his voice above a barely hushed tone, Patrick's potential for violence and inflicting harm is never doubted and obvious from scene one. Manipulative, cruel, and determined are never good character traits in a man, let alone one in charge of his own private commune, which is why Hawkes does well by never letting us forget how evil he really is, even in scenes of relative good times, such as when he plays a song on guitar for the others in the cult. While this role might not be as remembered (or as well-loved) as Winter's Bone's Teardrop, but Hawkes definitely deserves credit for what he brings in a relatively quiet role.

"It's okay; I'll win the Oscar next year"

Of course, Martha Marcy May Marlene wouldn't be a true limited release title without some sort of perceived flaws to mar what could have been a truly great experience. In this case it's the film's often slower than necessary pacing that does its best to dull some of the quieter moments present. While those issues fix themselves somewhat the closer we get to the story's conclusion, they do a lot of damage early on. Speaking of the ending, the final act also suffers a bit from an apparent lack of conviction, falling short of fantastic and instead residing securely in "Huh?" territory. Still, there is a good film in here for those willing to wait it out, and the great performances more than make this a good option for when you're desperately trying to avoid the mainstream's worst offenders (yes, I'm looking at you, Breaking Dawn). You might want to wait until it comes out on DVD (wait much longer and you won't likely have a choice), and there are a few difficult-to-watch moments, but whatever way you choose to see this title, it's very much worth the time and effort.