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Post by jhar26 on May 21, 2014 2:53:25 GMT -5
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Post by jhar26 on May 21, 2014 3:02:52 GMT -5
A few reviews.... TIME OUTBy Tom Huddleston 6/10Godzilla has flattened Tokyo, made a fool of himself in New York and teamed up with a cute sidekick for a best-forgotten cartoon series. Now everyone’s favorite mean, green city-stomping machine gets the megabudget 3-D treatment courtesy of British director Gareth Edwards, whose 2010 indie fantasy, Monsters, seriously impressed. If all you need for a good time is full-on shots of wondrously realized CGI creatures turning toward the camera and giving an almighty spit-flecked roar, you’re in luck. But those hoping this Godzilla might have brains as well as bulk will find themelves crushed. It starts strongly, with eerie stock footage of Pacific nuclear tests followed by a nail-biting opening sequence at a Fukushima-style power plant, bluntly but effectively echoing the original 1954 film’s post-Hiroshima atomic angst. Flash forward 15 years and we find chief engineer Joe (Bryan Cranston) obsessed with conspiracy theories about the accident, while his estranged son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), tries to bring his dad back down to earth. Then something stirs in the deep. As he proved in his DIY debut, Edwards is an absolute whiz when it comes to creature design. Godzilla himself is chunky, tactile and pleasingly old-fashioned, particularly in comparison with Roland Emmerich’s ornate, spiky lizard from the 1998 reboot, while his adversaries—like the winged, insectoid Muto (a.k.a. Mothra)—are delightfully grotesque. But his handling of storytelling is not so confident: Following a couple of gripping action scenes (and one frankly unforgivable plotting blunder), Godzilla settles into a simple, fairly standard cross-Pacific chase movie, traveling with the monsters from Japan to Honolulu (which gets beautifully decimated) and ultimately San Francisco. The script is derivative and oddly humorless, and the characterization is weak: Fine actors like Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe have nothing to do but spout exposition, while a bland Taylor-Johnson is miscast as the square-jawed hero. It’s always fun to watch scaly, skyscraper-size behemoths lay waste to civilization, but a bit more human drama would have been welcome. www.timeout.com/us/film/godzilla-2014SALONBy Andrew O'Hehir Very PositiveIt’s a relief to encounter a big popcorn-spectacle movie that people are actually excited about – as opposed to, say, the “Captain America” and “Amazing Spider-Man” sequels, where the public attitude was more like polite compliance with a mandatory directive. Those movies came with built-in excuses, like our friendly president’s national-security state, or like the fact that it’s the middle of May and those of us in the eastern two-thirds of the country are still dealing with PTSD from that horrible winter, and here we are two weeks into “summer movie” season. We can’t do anything about it! It’s the way things are! Better make the best of it! Those people in Hollywood (and Washington, and Manhattan) totally mean well! They just want us to have fun and feel safe and not hurt our brains! No such excuses are needed for Gareth Edwards’ exhilarating “Godzilla,” which arrives as more than a relief. It’s a bracing tonic for the bored palate of the mainstream moviegoer, and one of the most intriguing big-budget breakthrough films since Steven Spielberg made “Jaws.” (Edwards’ only previous feature is the 2010 low-budget indie “Monsters.”) This is a movie of tremendous visual daring, magnificent special-effects work and surprising moral gravity. Its magic lies in the big things – like, the really big things, which take their time showing up but are totally worth it – and the small ones. Those include David Strathairn’s delicate supporting performance as a U.S. Navy admiral tasked with nuking a trio of giant monsters, bringing a note of seriousness and sobriety to what would be a meathead warmonger role in any other movie. When a Japanese scientist shows Strathairn his father’s pocket watch, stopped dead at 8:15 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the admiral is genuinely shaken. That’s just one small indicator of the ways that Edwards, screenwriter Max Borenstein and story author Dave Callaham have created a convincing world and treated its implications seriously. It’s a world threatened by reawakened prehistoric beasties, to whom our existence is irrelevant, but it never feels like a fantasy, a comic book or a franchise-starter. Instead of the ultra-fast, migraine-meets-ADHD editing that reduces most big action films to total incoherence, Edwards, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and their immense production team have designed atmospheric and exciting action sequences you can actually understand, and that support the movie’s meaning rather than replacing it. Believe me, there’s no shortage of grand spectacle, from a train derailment in the Sierra Nevada mountains to a monster-inflicted tsunami on Waikiki Beach to the near-total destruction of Las Vegas. But you always feel the suffering and destruction, which some viewers may not welcome; this isn’t empty, adolescent apocalypse-porn in the Michael Bay style. There are several breathtaking scenes of visual poetry in “Godzilla” that I can’t wait to see again, perhaps none better than when a team of paratroopers, streaming flares attached to their ankles, drops toward San Francisco from 30,000 feet, set to the haunting buzz of Györgi Ligeti’s “Requiem.” It made me think of the demon likened to Hephaestus in “Paradise Lost,” who falls from Heaven for an entire day, “from morn to noon … from noon to dewy eve”: From the frozen mists of the stratosphere the soldiers fall into sunlight and then into clouds again, and then out of clouds into a gray city where, shockingly, a giant reptile is locked in mortal combat with a giant insect. Not only is it not ridiculous, it’s amazing, and the comparison to epic poetry isn’t as dopey as it sounds. Serizawa, the Japanese scientist played by Ken Watanabe (his name is a nod to Ishiro Honda’s original 1954 “Godzilla”) has already observed that, compared to us, Godzilla is essentially a god. We’re already hearing complaints about the limited scale of human drama on offer in “Godzilla,” and it’s true that buff young naval officer Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his E.R. nurse wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) make for a highly generic version of separated-couple-in-disaster-film. I’m not going all the way to claiming that this is a deliberate postmodern strategy, but this just doesn’t seem like an important complaint. Edwards is battling against the established clichés of the big action movie in every frame of “Godzilla,” and he uses the bland, brave blankness of Ford and Elle for a purpose. They’re only the heroes of the film in the sense that we keep returning to their struggle to survive. Neither of them brings down a giant monster with an improvised slingshot while mouthing nonstop wisecracks; neither of them demonstrates that the power of Mom and Dad’s love is superior to the power of a newly hatched giant energy-sucking mantis-thingummy from beyond time. (I guess those are spoilers, and I’m deeply sorry.) Essentially the characters, Ford and Elle included, are there to provide back story and exposition, and to lend a human scale – an infinitesimal human scale – to a story that suggests that our entire planetary history of love affairs and great novels and dance parties is just a meaningless squiggle, liable to be wiped off the dry-erase board at almost any moment. There’s only one real hero in “Godzilla,” and it’s the guy who can swim under an aircraft carrier in the open Pacific with the ease of a gator going under your canoe. As Dr. Serizawa explains at one point, Big G is the all-time alpha predator of the prehistoric world. Nuclear testing of the ‘50s roused him from the ocean’s depths, and the world’s governments have kept him a secret until now, more or less. When Godzilla finally rises to his magnificent height, a dripping, brutal, beautiful monument to the unmastered essence of nature, and utters that ear-splitting roar, the preview audience I saw this with lost 100 percent of its shit, and no wonder. Elvis never had an entrance that good. Long before we get there, Edwards has crafted a tense, dense drama that borrows extensively from real history and real disasters, natural and otherwise: the H-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the South Asian tsunami. This “Godzilla” reboot has a slight Neil Gaiman or Philip K. Dick flavor, in that it presents an alternate universe strongly resembling our own but subtly distinct. I won’t say much about the plot because it features several important early twists, but Ford Brody, Taylor-Johnson’s character, is the son of a pair of nuclear scientists, played by Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche, who were involved in a mysterious 1999 nuclear meltdown that contaminated large sections of Tokyo. Those areas remain fenced off and quarantined today, and when Ford gets back to San Francisco from an overseas tour of duty he gets an unwelcome phone call from Japan: His dad, now an embittered old crank in a tiny apartment, has been arrested for trying to sneak back into the quarantine zone. Apparently it isn’t the first time. Given the title of the movie, and given that we’ve also seen Serizawa and his colleague Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) make an alarming subterranean paleontological discovery in the Philippines, we already kind of know that Cranston’s crazy theories about what went wrong in ’99 aren’t that crazy. He convinces Ford to make one last trip into the quarantine zone to explore the family home they abandoned 15 years ago, which is now overgrown with tropical vegetation and inhabited by unusually large cockroaches. This leads to the discovery of what exactly Serizawa, Vivienne and the U.S. military have been hiding in the old nuclear plant: It isn’t good news for the human race, their belief that they have it contained is incorrect and it wants to bust loose and find a mate. Oh, and it isn’t Godzilla. He’ll be along in due course, and given the unexpected powers and appetites of this newly hatched nemesis – after it encounters a Russian nuclear submarine, the sub winds up in the Oahu rain forest – Godzilla, as little as he gives a d**n about us, may be our last hope. Any number of monster movies preach karmic sermons about war or prejudice or environmental destruction or whatever; the hidden message in the genre is nearly always that we had it coming. But “Godzilla” never defaults to the myth of the heroic individual, in which one man stands outside the mass of human mediocrity, and can bring down any opponent with pluck, ingenuity and a few well-timed zingers. Taylor-Johnson’s character is brave and resourceful beyond any ordinary measure, but the movie repeatedly makes clear that he has no shot at standing alone against these eldritch monstrosities. This is one of the few Hollywood films where a character says he’s prepared to face death, and you can feel how big a thing that really is. According to the pop psychology that governs Hollywood blockbusters, the teenage male audience requires an impervious, superhuman ego-boosting hero, as symbolic salve for its immense insecurities. I’m interested to see how this movie will play beyond its undoubtedly huge first weekend, since it does not offer that variety of reassurance, but another kind that’s a bit more grown-up and harder to swallow: As big as we think we are, nature is ultimately a lot bigger, and the consequences of our actions are likely to be things we never expected. If it takes getting stomped by a ginormous lizard to drive that lesson home, at least it’s one hell of a lizard. www.salon.com/2014/05/15/godzilla_is_the_best_action_movie_since_jaws/
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Post by jhar26 on May 21, 2014 3:11:25 GMT -5
TIMEBy Richard Corliss NegativeThe trailers were great. They showed glimpses of devastation: a long trough of earth clawed by some huge beast on its way to the sea; a high-rise building with a bite taken out of it; the Statue of Liberty missing its raised arm. We saw flashes of You Know What, the Big G, as flare guns briefly illuminated its scales, plus the metallic crab foot of another giant creature crashing onto the street of a city it was in the process of leveling. The sound track crackled with prehistoric roars, a keening choir and the urgent warnings of scientists in the know. “You have no idea what’s coming!” Bryan Cranston screams. “It is gonna send us back to the Stone Age!” Sally Hawkins, when asked if this It is a monster, whispers, “No. A god.” Even a movie critic is allowed to hope. This one dared dream that English director Gareth Edwards, whose only previous feature was the low-budget post-apocalyptic sci-fi film Monsters, might show the same ingenious savvy in updating the Godzilla brand that Rupert Wyatt, also from the Brit indie scene, displayed with the 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes — a witty rethinking of, and improvement on, a venerable fantasy franchise. If ingenious simians could be reborn, why not a dinosaur awakened from a hundred-million-year snooze by nuclear tests? Ishirô Hondo’s original Gojira opened in 1954 and was released a year later in an Americanized version as Godzilla: King of the Monsters. (Nice coinage, by the way: God + gorilla, to link him to King Kong.) Surfacing from his cold, deep storage, this 200-ft.-tall metaphor for Atomic Age anxiety snacks on fishermen from remote islands, then comes to Tokyo to be a star, carrying all the modern star’s baggage: nasty disposition, need to demolish things, insatiable appetite for mischief. The big brute spawned 27 Toho sequels, in which he devolved into a friend and defender of children, and a 1978 animated series from Hanna-Barbera. Twenty years later, director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) imported him to New York City — an expensive, lazy remake. Somebody figured that for the first film’s 60th birthday, the mutant deserved to live again, in all raw majesty. Nope. Edwards’ Godzilla dawdles toward its Doomsday climax; the movie could win a prize for Least Stuff Happening in the First Two-Thirds of an Action Film. The title character looks imposing, in the CGI work of Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital sorcerers, but the movie is often so dark, using a palette of gray and brown, as if coasted in rust, that he’s hard to see. (The sound effects do most of the scary work.) And he gets little screen time. Godzilla isn’t even the main monster: he is the referee, rival or enabler — we won’t say which — to a pair of other creatures. And the human drama, mostly involving Joe Brody (Cranston), his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) and his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), never clicks. The problems of these three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans when San Francisco is getting Sanforized. (No spoiler alert needed for the news that the creatures never get to New York Harbor to disarm Lady Liberty.) David Callaham, who scripted Sylvester Stallone’s first Expendables movie, wrote this film’s story, which was poked and polished by a trio of pricey scribes: David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight, Man of Steel), Drew Pearce (Iron Man Three) and Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Walking Dead). The only screenplay credit goes to Max Borenstein (Swordswallower and the Thin Man — no we haven’t seen it either), but the movie carries echoes of the debate that must have gone on during rewrites. We have an iconic monster, but what’s he to do? And: How can we get audiences to care about the humans fleeing from him? The final film doesn’t answer those questions, doesn’t fill the two-hour running time. It’s a concept lacking a magnetic story, a package without a product. In 1999, Joe Brody is the sensitive American sensei at a Japanese nuclear power plant. An unknown catastrophe requires the plant to be shut down, endangering Joe and Sandra and leaving their young son stranded. Fifteen years later — right now — Ford is an Army officer with expertise in bomb disposal, and Joe is still pursuing his conspiracy theory about the cause of the plant meltdown. Like Kevin McCarthy in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which matched Gojira as a vibrant Cold War parable in sci-fi garb, he is the lone sane man in a world myopic to the truth; his research got him a serious prison term. When Ford comes to Japan to get Joe out of jail, father persuades son to join him in the supposedly radioactive waste of his 1999 life. Back home, Joe’s wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) had reassured him with a smiling “It’s not the end of the world.” But she doesn’t know she’s in a disaster movie. Joe does, and now Ford agrees with him. I may have erred by making the emotional dialectic of this Brody family seem as fraught and compelling as that of the Brody clan in the first two seasons of Homeland. This one is strictly formula, plus shouting. Cranston plays Joe with so much high-decibel huffing and such a preposterous hairpiece in the 1999 scenes that the Emmy committee may consider rescinding his Breaking Bad awards. And Taylor-Johnson, the young English actor so fine in Nowhere Boy, Kick-Ass and Anna Karenina, can invest only the terse strength of a War on Terror combatant. (Toward the end we learn he’s the only bomb-disposal expert available to the Army in all of Northern California.) When not fighting to keep the world from ending, Ford is shepherding lost children out of peril — the cheesiest stratagem for an audience’s sympathy. But you’re no more interested in the people than the screenwriters were. You want to know: What about the new monster? That’s the Muto (for Massive Unidentifiable Terrestrial Organism), a flying insect that snacks on radioactivity, looks like a spawn of H.R. Giger’s creature from Alien — in other words, like most sci-fi creature villains since that 1979 classic — and has an appetite for destruction. But no personality, for all its ferocious power in demolishing property values. The Muto could be an earthquake, a hurricane or a tsunami, on stilts. But when the creature eventually finds a mate, it provides the movie with its one fabulous weird moment. For purposes of reproduction, the male gives the female a nuclear warhead, which she inserts inside her body — leaving the moviegoer to wonder: Is she using the warhead as a suppository or a dildo? The two Mutos, you see, were born in the 1950s near sites of atomic testing: the male in Japan in 1954, as collateral damage from a deep-sea mission by the U.S.S. Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine; and the female in Nevada, where the government tested its H bombs. References abound to other nuclear events, from Hiroshima in 1945 to the Tohoku quake and tsunami three years ago. Plenty of action films have exploited the World Trade Center nightmare. This one leaps halfway around the world, and a decade ahead, for a different tragedy: from 9/11 to 2011. Either way, these movies say, it’s all our fault. As Godzilla scientist Ken Watanabe notes, “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way round.” All these political implications are for screenwriters and critic to purr and wrangle over. Every other moviegoer just wants to see the end of the world threatened and averted. This coming weekend, with that simple pleasure in mind, millions will be off to see the lizard. I may be in the minority: disappointed by Godzilla because the trailers teased me into expecting too much. Anyway, I’ve decided to bide my time and stoke my fervor for the next Nature’s Revenge movie: the Matt Reeves’ sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, due July 11th. My spring optimism proved groundless; but for this critic, hope summers eternal. MIAMI HERALDBy Rene Rodriguez PositiveIn Godzilla, director Gareth Edwards sets out to revive something that has practically disappeared from big-budget Hollywood spectacles: A sense of awe. Instead of revealing his hand right from the start and then trying to top himself a la Transformers or Pacific Rim, Edwards makes you wait for the good stuff, teasing you along the way with crumbs but keeping his main attraction offscreen until the second half (Spielberg is an obvious influence here, specifically Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Everyone knows an enormous fire-breathing lizard is eventually going to emerge from the ocean and stomp on puny humans. But by raising your expectations and making you anticipate the star’s entrance, Edwards ramps up the excitement, so the payoff is even bigger. Here, finally, is a giant monster movie made in the anything-goes CGI era still capable of making your jaw drop. That’s not to imply the first hour of Godzilla is all set-up and talky exposition. Working from a script by Max Borenstein, who cleverly pays homage to the 1954 original and the sequels that followed, the movie opens in 1999 Japan, when a nuclear reactor disaster sets the plot in motion. The film then flash-forwards to the present-day, and the consequences of the accident become evident. Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche play nuclear scientists; Aaron Taylor-Johnson is their U.S. Marine son, who is married to Elizabeth Olsen. Ken Watanabe is another scientist who may know more than he’s letting on, and David Strathairn is the American military commander whose resources are about to be sorely tested. The previews for Godzilla have thus far done a stellar job of preserving the movie’s plentiful surprises, so you won’t get any plot summarizing here. The performances are fine, even though the characters are on the thin side, the way they always are in this genre (Taylor-Johnson and Olsen do exactly what’s required of them, which is to make you care for them as a couple and hope they manage to survive the carnage). Edwards, whose previous (and only) movie, the low-budget Monsters, centered on the effects of an invasion by giant aliens, uses the big-bucks studio resources for ingenious setpieces and scenarios, such as a suspenseful sequence in which a train must cross a trestle bridge while a huge creature is hiding in plain sight from the audience and the characters. And when the director finally pulls back the curtain on the big guy, Godzilla eschews the rapid-fire editing of most contemporary blockbusters and lets you take in the monster and the disasters he’s causing in long, uninterrupted takes (Edwards’ version of Godzilla is so humongous, this is the rare movie that really deserves to be seen in IMAX 3D; the sense of size and dimension is astounding). Unlike Roland Emmerich’s lousy 1998 take on the character, this new Godzilla plays everything seriously, although the film is littered with funny Easter eggs for the hardcore fans. The picture doesn’t quite cross over into must-see territory; Godzilla can’t impart the shock of novelty the 1954 version had (and just last summer, we had Pacific Rim). But Edwards manages to balance the monstrous with the human to engaging effect: The movie is a cartoon, and it doesn’t leave much of an imprint, but watching it is a blast, and Edwards proves he knows how to craft a memorable image or three. This is an impeccably made movie. See Godzilla on the biggest screen you can and you’ll come away tickled, if not entirely entranced. And the film manages to appropriate a Japanese cinematic icon with the utmost respect and care, paying homage to its roots while relocating the action to America. To paraphrase Blue Oyster Cult, there goes Las Vegas. Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Watanabe, David Strathairn. Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins. Director: Gareth Edwards. Screenwriter: Max Borenstein. A Warner Bros. release. Running time: 123 minutes. Vulgar language, violence, monster mayhem. Opens Friday May 16 at area theaters www.miami.com/039godzilla039-pg-13-article
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Post by robertaxel on May 22, 2014 9:54:31 GMT -5
Truth be told, I don't plan on seeing this... not in theaters, anyway.. However, all the many Godzilla sequels generally miss the point of the original - a metaphor for the atomic devastation wreaked on Japan in WWII. Some of the earlier 'big bug' movies of the 50s also got this age of anxiety context. My favorite of the era were 'Them' and of course 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'...
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Post by erik on May 22, 2014 18:36:40 GMT -5
Truth be told, I think Godzilla has been "rebooted" one too many times. One misses Raymond Burr and the beyond-atrocious dubbing of the original Japanese actors (LOL).
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Post by jhar26 on May 23, 2014 3:41:16 GMT -5
I will probably watch it at some point. I often end up being disappointed after watching one of these type of mega spectacles though. It probably won't be boring in terms of a visual experience although you're unlikely to feel for any of the characters in a movie that is likely to be all about explosions and special effects. But we'll see.
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Post by erik on May 23, 2014 8:38:10 GMT -5
Quote by jhar26:
The other problem is that it looks like one of those films that is at the service of the special effects, instead of the other way around. This has made for a lot of unmemorable movies in the last twenty-five years (IMHO).
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Post by jhar26 on May 23, 2014 17:09:01 GMT -5
Quote by jhar26: The other problem is that it looks like one of those films that is at the service of the special effects, instead of the other way around. This has made for a lot of unmemorable movies in the last twenty-five years (IMHO). Yes, I agree. But it gets mostly positive reviews, so it's likely to be entertaining on some level. It creates enough doubt for me to give it a fair chance anyway. Not every movie has to be deep, original or smart. Sometimes two hours of escapism are ok. Not everything can be Mozart. There's room for a little bit of AC/DC as well.
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Post by erik on May 23, 2014 18:48:44 GMT -5
Quote by jhar26:
True. I suppose I am one of those people who doesn't really care too much for the kind of lazy filmmaking that relies so much on the superficial; and so much of Hollywood is like that now. Granted, there have always been spectacles in Hollywood, from the original silent versions of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and BEN HUR up through STAR WARS (the original trilogy) and all the $200 million comic book films (THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN, et. al.) of today. But there is a threshold, a limit to it, and I guess I reached it years ago, though I can't remember when it was (probably MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II).
I like escapism. I don't, however, like totally mindless escapism.
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Post by egoodstein on May 23, 2014 19:00:23 GMT -5
No desire to see this, which actually sounds tedious from the reviews/descriptions. But then such fare isn't really my thing in general I admit. (I thought Jaws was boring for example). The original '50's one does at least have some camp fun value though I admit. It is though nice to see that a very good actress like Sally Hawkins (maybe) got paid a decent amount to be in this anyway .
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Post by robertaxel on May 23, 2014 21:29:04 GMT -5
I'll probably pass.. I'm much more interested in a film like the one below which looks like part of Godfather II with similar gorgeous cinematography and starring Jacquin Phoenix and the great Marion Cotillard:
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Post by jhar26 on May 24, 2014 2:44:18 GMT -5
Quote by jhar26: True. I suppose I am one of those people who doesn't really care too much for the kind of lazy filmmaking that relies so much on the superficial; and so much of Hollywood is like that now. Granted, there have always been spectacles in Hollywood, from the original silent versions of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and BEN HUR up through STAR WARS (the original trilogy) and all the $200 million comic book films (THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN, et. al.) of today. But there is a threshold, a limit to it, and I guess I reached it years ago, though I can't remember when it was (probably MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II). I like escapism. I don't, however, like totally mindless escapism. Well, perhaps it isn't totally mindless. I can't tell before I've seen it. But I agree with you (and Ed and Robert for that matter). I guess that all that I'm trying to say is that the fact that a movie has a lot of special effects and a lot of WHAM! PATS! BOEM! in it doesn't necessarily make it bad. It usually does, but it doesn't have to be. There are exceptions. The Ring trilogy for example was very well done (not as well as Wagner's version, but good nonetheless ). The Alien movies - especially the first two - great stuff! What is important imo is that you have a set of characters that you as the viewer care about. That they are not just part of the scenery. The lack of that is why (for me) many of these type of movies fall flat on their face - but not all of them.
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Post by jhar26 on May 24, 2014 2:49:39 GMT -5
No desire to see this, which actually sounds tedious from the reviews/descriptions. But then such fare isn't really my thing in general I admit. ( I thought Jaws was boring for example). The original '50's one does at least have some camp fun value though I admit. It is though nice to see that a very good actress like Sally Hawkins (maybe) got paid a decent amount to be in this anyway . Really? I liked Jaws (only the first one) except for that last scene which is almost laughable because that thing looked like one of those plastic things that you'd throw in the pool for you kids to play with. But apart from that I think it was quite good.
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Post by erik on May 24, 2014 11:22:02 GMT -5
Quote by jhar26 re. JAWS:
Of course, you realized that most of the time that mechanical shark didn't function properly, and that (Steven) Spielberg had to "imply" the shark's presence, which accounts for what would seem to be its slowness, but also its Hitchcock-influenced approach (less is more). By today's standards, JAWS is practically an art-house movie (IMHO).
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Post by egoodstein on May 24, 2014 21:26:02 GMT -5
Quote by jhar26 re. JAWS: Of course, you realized that most of the time that mechanical shark didn't function properly, and that (Steven) Spielberg had to "imply" the shark's presence, which accounts for what would seem to be its slowness, but also its Hitchcock-influenced approach (less is more). By today's standards, JAWS is practically an art-house movie (IMHO). **I agree that Jaws by today's really dumbed-down standards is pretty 'arty.' Whiz bang effects alone don't make a film, more just a video game. I think Williams's score really does enhance the film and carries pretty much all the 'suspense' for me. The Hitchcockian 'implied' suspense doesn't work that well here for me though as it does for many folk.
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Post by erik on May 24, 2014 21:57:12 GMT -5
Quote by egoodstein:
The other thing I would point out about JAWS, and a lot of films from the 1970s, is that filmmakers took the time to establish the characters and get into their mindsets. Spielberg did it in JAWS, as I think did Sam Peckinpah at his peak (from THE WILD BUNCH up to PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID). That is definitely not done anymore in Hollywood, except by the top-tier directors, and that is one thing that I think has contributed to the absolute dumbing-down of popular cinema.
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Post by jhar26 on Oct 9, 2014 9:51:59 GMT -5
I saw Godzilla earlier this week. The special effects are impressive even though the "Mutos" don't look like birds or insects or whatever they are supposed to be. They look robot/metal-like to me. The story is full of clichés which is sort of inevitable in this genre I guess, but the characters are made of carbon and the male lead lacks the charisma/ability to carry a movie like this. 5.5 out of 10 since I'm in a good mood. It's not a complete bore, but it's not even close to being worthy of the hype that was created imo.
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Post by robertaxel on Oct 9, 2014 12:44:29 GMT -5
None of the Godzillas matches the original for me; it is the only one which really gets the metaphor of the horror of a nuclear holocaust. Since the original was made only 9 years after Japan was bombed, this is to be expected..
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