2014 Summer Retrospective: Godzilla

 

There is a scene near the end of Edward’s Godzilla were a group of men are jumping from a plane into the city below were a battle is raging between Godzilla and another monster referred to as a MUTA. The sky is dark, but it is illuminated by trails of red smoke that mark the jumpers decent. This image is lingered upon and well orchestrated; it is honestly one of the most strikingly beautiful images I have seen in cinema this year.

One of the jumpers is this movies protagonist, played by that guy from Kick-Ass. He is a one-dimensional character, who either has no emotions, or is played by someone who can’t act; I’d believe either. This guy, not Godzilla, is the rock this movie is rested upon, and his story and motivations are wishy washy at best. He seems to do things, not because they are things that a person would do, but because he has to do those things so that the plot can get were it’s going to; This is true of almost all the characters in this movie.

The point I'm trying to make here is that Godzilla Is a bad film directed by a talented director.  Resulting in a movie that plays like a solid film, but fails terribly under the slightest bit of analysis.

The action here is surprisingly limited. Scenes that could have been giant action sequences are often played down. But then at the end, when the movie stops pulling its punches and gives us a straight up monster battle, it is something to behold. The action here isn’t as awesome as Pacific Rim, the closest comparable title, but it also doesn't have the emotional build up that movie did. Edward’s didn’t have strong characters to get us invested in the action sequences, so he wisely used anticipation of an action sequence to keep the audience invested. I think less really is more in this situation.

This new Godzilla is definitely an improvement over Roland Emmerich’s version, but that’s not saying much. I would recommend it to hardcore Godzilla fans, and not really anyone else. Edward’s direction basically turned what would have been a toilet-bowl of a movie into something watch able.

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2014 Summer Retrospective: Neighbors

 

This is the End destroyed 2013 as far as I’m concerned.  It was by no means the best movie I saw that year, but it was by far the funniest.  I hadn’t seen a comedy so blaringly disgustingly entertaining since Superbad.

It made sense then that when I heard about 2014’s Neighbors, which held the same writers, directors and star as the aforementioned this is the End, that I was super excited.  I wanted to see how these filmmakers followed up one of the funniest movies I’d ever seen; but what I got was kind of disappointing.  Though, that was really more my fault then anyone’s.

Neighbors certainly isn’t a bad movie; if I hadn’t gone into the film with such specific expectations then I would’ve probably called it a great one, but it suffered from a problem that a bizarre number of comedies have these days:  It just wasn’t that funny.  Sure there were some really funny parts, but I wasn’t on the floor vomiting with laughter like I was during this is the End.

Objectively though, Neighbors is a very solid flick.  In a way it’s the sequel to the bromantic gross out comedies that have permeated the market in the last decade or so.

In Neighbors Seth Rogan isn’t a drunken young man who has to learn about friendship through the power of marijuana, but a married (slightly less young) man who has a paying job and a young child that he has to support.  Him and his wife are both going through somewhat of a late-early life crisis, because they never go out and have fun anymore, they just take care of the baby, a full time job.

The fraternity that moves in next door are less the antagonists of the film (especially since they too have their own arcs, and aren’t really vary villainous,) and more a reminder to our characters of the fun party days that are behind them.  Neighbors is only superficially about a prank war between a young couple just starting out and a gang of drunken partying frat boy, it’s really about excepting the responsibilities of the present, and appreciating how awesome those things can be.  I may reminisce about the days when I was younger and had less responsibility, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to enjoy the new adventures of the present, or shirk the responsibility that comes with them.  This is an exceptional message for a big Hollywood release, and one that a lot of younger people now-a-days should probably be taught more often.

Along with the strong message come some very funny performances, especially from Rose Byrne and Zac Efron, as well as some legitimately funny scenes and scenarios.  Neighbors isn’t nearly as funny as this is the End, but I realize now that I shouldn’t have expected it to be.  Neighbors is trying to be more than funny, it’s trying to be intelligent; and on top of that it succeeds.  I strongly recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind a little gross-out humor.  Because Behind all of the pranks, swearing and pop-culture references is a story that could give children of all ages something to think about.

Thanks for reading!  Check back in the next couple days for some more awesome reviews and info!

2014 Summer Retrospective: The Amazing Spider-man 2

I was pretty ticked off at the first Amazing Spider-man movie for recycling most of the plot from Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man, but That movie's great in comparison to its sequel. I should have been thankful for what I had.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a bad movie. It’s not all bad, but most of the things that are good about it are just things that were already in the first Amazing Spider-Man. What’s new here is a bizarre tone, some incredibly shoddy screenwriting and an ending that ruins the core message of the movie, rendering the whole thing totally pointless.

I wish people would stop saying that these new Spider-Man movies are better then the other ones. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 exhibits most of the exact same problems people have with the first set of movies. There are too many villains, the romance between our leads is constantly being put into contention for stupid arbitrary reasons and the movie can’t decide weather it’s supposed to be campy and fun, or dark and serious.

Seriously, this is so much worse then Spider-Man 3. Sam Raimi’s great talent has always been mixing goofy and dark in a weird way that works, that’s what he did in the Evil Dead movies, and he accomplished it to a lesser effect in spider-Man. In The Amazing Spider-Man the movies bits of silliness and seriousness just sort of cause whiplash in the viewer. We jump cut between spastic silly moments, like anytime Jaime Fox is on screen to darker brooding moments like Spider-Man being haunted by a dead man’s memory without any kind of melding crossover at all.

Then there’s the ending, which is terrible. The movies entire plot is about Parker and Gwen Stacy trying to save their relationship, and the main message is really about love, and how it’s worth going out of your way for. That is the one thing audiences were supposed to take away, but they messed that up. (Spoilers) at the end of the movie Gwen Stacy dies and we see a short montage of Spidey getting over her death; This changes the message of the movie from, “Love is worth going out of your way to fight for,” into, “Love is doomed, but you’ll get over it pretty quickly.” And no, I don’t care if Stacy dies in the comics; her death totally ruins one of the big good aspects of the movie. I don’t mind it if movies have sad endings, but only if they further the movies message or tone. This sad ending only serves to make everything worse.

Not even the Villains work. Not a single one of the three main villains does anything other then suck. Electro is silly, his origin makes no sense, and neither does his motivation; and Green Goblin’s motivations don’t make sense either. He seems to only do things that are obviously self-destructive. Rhino is perhaps the most entertaining of the films villains, just because he’s so over the top that it’s laughable, but he’s hardly in the movie. The movie never takes the time to develop it’s villains, I actually wonder if everything would’ve been better as just a love story between Parker and Stacy because that’s the only conflict in it that makes any freaking sense.

There are good aspects of this movie. Garfield makes a good Spidey and Stone makes a good strong female lead and the two have a lot of chemistry. There’s also the action, which is pretty fun, as are the effects. But all those good things are also in the first Amazing Spider-Man, which is the far superior movie. I would only go see this one if you’re a hardcore Spidey fan, or if you can watch a two and a half hour film with your brain firmly in the off position. It's the worst Spider-Man movie that has ever been released.

Thanks for reading!  This retrospective is a slightly edited version of a review I posted on Filmcrave.com at the beginning of the summer.  If you like reading movie reviews from every day schmucks like me, then it's a great place to go.  If you want to get updates on Atchley-O-Saurus or you want to communicate your own opinion you can like Atchley-O-Saurus on Facebook, follow Atchley-O-Saurus on Twitter or email me at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com.  Check back in the following weeks for more great reviews and articles!

2014 Summer Retrospective: The Other Woman

 The Other Woman may be the worst movie I’ve seen all year.  Its characters are nonsensical, it’s humor humorless and its plot deranged and aggravating.  This is the kind of movie that give Girls Night Out flicks such a terrible reputation.  It’s difficult to find a movie as poorly crafted, stupid and lacking in fun as this one.

The plot revolves around three women, all of which who are the mistresses and/or wives of the same guy, and their attempt to get vengeance on said mutual lover.  This is an intriguing premise to say the least, especially from a comedic standpoint, but unfortunately any potential the premise has is wasted on its terrifyingly underwritten script. 

The plot of the movie, a revenge plot, doesn’t even get started until the movies already half way over.  The first fifty minutes or so of the thing meander around plot points in what seems to be the slowest manner possible.  It feels like it should be getting ready to end before we even meet Kate Upton’s character, but at that point it’s only just beginning.  How long could it take to establish a grand total of five main characters?  The first act of a movie is usually the shortest of the three act structure, but In the case of The Other Woman it takes up nearly an hour of the hundred minute run time.

A little bit of functional humor and likable characters can go along way to make an audience ignore bad plot structure, the recent Guardians of the Galaxy is a good example of this.  But the Other Woman has neither Humor nor likable characters.  It’s just not very funny or interesting.  I never at once laughed at the situation the three women were in, nor did I believe that, given each of the characters individual character traits, that they would ever become friends with each other in the first place.  The three of them are either despicable, annoying or both, and It is not a particularly pleasant experience to see them interact on screen.

Then there’s the villain, at least he’s supposed to be the villain.  Despite the fact that his adultery is what brings the three leads together,  he is surprisingly absent from any important plot points until near the end of the picture, when they discover that he’s got some kind of money laundering scheme or something going on.  In the final scenes the women actually get revenge on him, by revealing to the world his maniacal schemes.  It bizarre to me that the filmmakers found it necessary to make the main antagonist of their movie not only a lying cheating twerp, but an international criminal as well.  He is one of the most unrepentantly evil characters in cinema since Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies.  This one dimensional nothing-villain is the final nail in the coffin that, with any luck, all of the blu-ray copies of The Other woman are being buried in.

If you watched only the ending of The Other Woman you would think that the whole movie builds up to the destruction of one villainous human being, but that is simply not the case.  The movie is really about three unlikable characters being unlikable around each other; and then at the end they decide to get revenge as an afterthought.  This movies script is worse then bad, it’s incompetent.   It’s not good drama, it’s not good comedy, and it’s not even so bad it’s good.  The Other Woman is just bad, almost entirely bad.  I agree that there need to be more movies marketed towards women in Hollywood, but there is no excuse for this.

Thank you all for reading!  If like what you read you can follow Atchley-O-Saurus on Twitter at @atchleyosaurus or on facebook.  If you don't like what you read, feel free to email me a piece of your mind  at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com.  Be sure to check back later this weekend for my Sin City 2 review!

2014 Summer Retrospective: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Since I am starting this blog at the end of what I would call a very interesting summer movie season I have decided to post a review of every movie that has had a #1 box office weekend over the summer.  This series will be called 2014 Summer Retrospective, and will begin with the following review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Captain America’s first movie, Captain America: The First Avenger, was a mediocre entry in the so called “Marvel Cinematic Universe.”  While its world war setting helped to set it apart from other movies in the Avengers cannon, it didn’t really have much else going for it.  It just wasn’t particularly interesting.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I’m glad to say, is a much stronger genre movie.  The original Captain America focused on establishing “Caps” origin story, resulting in an uninspired movie with surprisingly little punch, But Captain America 2 explores the character to a much further extent.

This may be, objectively speaking, the best Marvel film yet.  It explores Captain America’s difficulty with the modern world, in a brilliant extension of the characters arc.  And brings some fast paced interesting action sequences, villains and twists to the table.  I’m not going to so far as to say it’s a perfect movie, but it’s a pretty good one.

One of the most important things a movie has to get right in order to work is its characters, and Captain America 2 has plenty of them.  We get to learn more about characters we’ve seen in recent Marvel flicks as well as a few new faces that stand out.  Nick Fury, Black Widow and Captain America finally get the interesting arcs that they didn’t get in their other movies, and Robert Redford’s villain and his Assassin, The Winter Soldier, are some of most interesting Marvel movie villains yet. 

And it’s not just the characters that set this movie apart,  the surprising thought provoking message also plays apart.  It portrays a message that was touched on, in a much less subtle way, in Iron Man 2:  a battle of freewill, and the line between government protection and government oppression.  When you finish watching Captain America 2, you may not only find your brain a-buzz with adrenaline, but with philosophical questions as well.

Most of the problems I have with “Cap 2” are problems I have with the Marvel series as a whole.  The visual style is uninspired, and the tone overly cheesy.  You could show me a random screen shot from this movie, and I would likely not be able to differentiate it from any of the other Marvel Studios productions.  I walk out of every Marvel flick feeling like I’ve seen it before, because they’re all basically the same.  Captain America is less predictable and same-y feeling then the other movies in it’s extensive series, but that’s not saying much.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not the best blockbuster that came out in the summer of 2014, but it’s definitely up there.  It’s a worthy choice for movie geeks and comic geeks alike.  My personal vendetta against Marvel and it’s vile mind control over the movie-going public aside, Captain America 2 was a fun experience.  I’ll bet people who actually like Marvel will like this new adventure even more then I did.

Thanks for reading.  If you have any comments, questions or commentaries feel free to comment, or email me at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com!  Check back for my reviews of The Other Woman later this week and my review of Sin City 2 this weekend!