Godzilla (2014)

You Have No Idea What’s Coming.

Though I have never been a fan of the character today’s movie is based on, I found myself getting very excited to see today’s movie.  The only real interaction I had ever had with the character was watching movies that Mystery Science Theater 3000 made fun of, and of course who could forget the Matthew Broderick classic version of the movie that I previously reviewed.  So I really had no reason to be excited to see this movie, but I fear the trailers had the desired effect on me.  And so I finally got in to see Godzilla, written by Max Borenstein, directed by Gareth Edwards, and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Richard T. Jones, and Juliette Binoche.

Project Monarch scientists Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) find a big ass skeleton in a collapsed mine.  Inside they find two eggs, and one has opened.  In Japan, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) are working at a nuclear power plant when strange seismic activity creates some problems in the plant.  Sandra goes to investigate it when an explosion threatens to release radiation, so Joe is forced to seal her in.  This leads to a 15 year investigation into the cause by Joe, and the 15 year alienation of his son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).  But Joe’s investigation eventually brings them together to go back and investigate the exclusion zone around the nuclear power plant, only to find that the government is using it to cover up a giant chrysalis that erupts into a massive winged creature that starts rampaging around the world, feeding off radiation.

You may wonder to yourself how I managed to write a synopsis of a Godzilla movie without mentioning Godzilla himself.  That’s similar to my feelings about how they could make a Godzilla movie with so little Godzilla.  Look, movie!  …Can I call you movie?  Anyway, I did not come to see you so I could watch Bryan Cranston’s family troubles.  I came to see a big ass reptile fuck shit up.  It took an hour for this movie to show us a giant monster and an hour and a half to see Godzilla.  And that wasn’t the only thing in the movie that didn’t make any sense.  For instance, if you catch people trespassing in your exclusion zone, why is your response to bring them further into the center of the exclusion zone?  That’s like catching someone stalking Natalie Portman and punishing them by forcing them to have sex with her!  And yes, I mean it’s EXACTLY the same!  Also, if you know those MUTO Mothra things have EMP attacks, why are you sending in jets … that run on electricity?  Why not send in some of those steam powered jets they’re working on in Area 51?  The truth is out there.  Speaking of which, I don’t remember Mulder and Scully ever having it so easy that they could just walk up to a military person and say, “I’m in the military!” and having them just tell all of their plans to people.  And speaking of dumb military decisions, once you’ve realized that the MUTO feed on radiation, how do you reach the conclusion that you would like to fight them with a nuclear bomb?  I can only assume they seemed so short staffed on Hawaii because half of their troops were off fighting a volcano with flamethrowers.

I would have to say that all the characters in the movie did a pretty solid job.  Chief among them being Godzilla.  Once they actually let him be in his own movie, he was pretty awesome.  I felt like the role could’ve used a little bit more emotional gravitas, like having him show that he’s wondering why the humans keep feeding the MUTO’s with more nukes, or at some point having a moral dilemma over whether or not he should just tell the humans that keep shooting him while he’s trying to save them to fuck off.  Though it took them a while to build up to it (almost as if Godzilla forgot he could do it), it was pretty awesome when Godzilla first blasted the fire breath … and even better the second time.  The worst performance in the movie by far was the lady MUTO.  Is she really gonna sit there pooping out eggs while the dude MUTO gets stomped by Godzilla?  Typical…  The humans all did good jobs in the movie, but none were super notable or exceptional.

I wanted this movie to be spectacular, but I found that good special effects, a pretty strong final battle, and some good performances could not make up for the fact that they seemed to forget they were making a Godzilla movie.  I didn’t buy my ticket to see the family troubles of the Brody family, or a MUTO Rom Com.  I wanted to see a giant lizard do work!  And I cannot in good faith recommend buying a ticket when the only part I really found satisfying was in the last half hour.  Wait to get it on RedBox.  Godzilla gets “You’re not fooling anybody when you say that what happened was a ‘natural disaster’” out of “The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in their control and not the other way around.”

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Total Recall (2012)

Trust Me, Baby, You’re Gonna Wish You Had Three Hands.

Remakes get a really bad rap. But, most of the time, they deserve them. Remakes are usually a sign that Hollywood has run out of ideas and must dig into movies that have already been made instead of supporting a new idea. It typically gets even worse when the movie that’s being remade is a movie that’s generally agreed upon as a movie that does not require a remake. If we already have that movie and it was good, you’re probably not going to add anything to it. All of that lead to me not really having a great desire to watch today’s movie. But when my end of the year review was approaching, my standards lowered and I decided to watch the remake of Total Recall, loosely based on the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, written for the screen by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, directed by Len Wiseman, and starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, Bill Nighy, Bokeem Woodbine, John Cho, Ethan Hawke, and Kaitlyn Leeb.

In the near future, war has devastated the Earth … because no movie can let us think that we have anything to look forward to. The world has mostly mellowed out, but a group of resistance fighters still occasionally cause trouble for the Man. A factory worker named Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) decides to visit a place called Rekall to get some artificial memories implanted to add some excitement to his life, even though his bangin’ hot wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale) and straight-jackin’ best friend Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) warn him against it. The Rekall employee, Bob McClane (John Cho), suggests that Quaid try out their secret agent package, but also warns him that past memory augmentations could create problems. Suddenly, Bob gets agitated by something on the computer and pulls a gun on Quaid, but is killed by a SWAT team that arrive and attempt to arrest Quaid, who proceeds to beat the snot out of all of them with skills he didn’t realize he had. Confused, he goes home to his wife, who perplexes him further by going all Death Dealer and trying to kill him. He eventually gets rescued by Melina (Jessica Biel), who tells Quaid that he is a spy working with the Resistance. Is this all a fake memory?! IS IT?!?!?!? ANSWER ME!!!!!

Some people gave this movie a hard time because they have such fondness for the original that they could not stomach the notion of it being remade. The difference between those people and me is that I have no particular fondness for the original. I saw the movie much later in life than most people did, and found it entertaining enough, but dated and extremely goofy in parts. That didn’t stop me from finding the irony in the fact that the studio behind this movie was called “Original Film” though. I mean, that’s balls! To call yourself “Original Film” and put out a movie that is a remake of a movie that was itself based on a book is pretty amusing to me. But, once I got into the movie, I actually found that I liked it more than I liked the original movie. It wasn’t terribly goofy and the action and visuals had drastically improved from the original. The opening perplexed me a little bit because it pretty much gave away the fact that Quaid worked for the Resistance, and only thinly veiled that by writing it off as a dream sequence, but when I got to thinking about it I realized that they were probably well aware of the fact that the people seeing this movie had probably already seen the other movie and that trying to act like it was a surprise would’ve just been a waste of time. But from that point on I was on board with the story pretty much all the way through. Sure, it wasn’t drastically different from the original movie, but who cares. It was a fun movie. I did get a little perturbed by the scene with Harry, where he’s trying to convince Quaid to shoot Melina because he was trying to convince him that he was trapped in the Rekall machine and couldn’t get out without shooting her. I feel like that moment would’ve been really easy for me. Just shoot the guy! If you kill him, then he was lying and was working for the enemy. If you don’t kill him because he wasn’t real, then he wasn’t real and who gives a shit? And let that be a warning to all of my friends: if you try to convince me I’m in a dream world, my first response will be to try to kill you.

The look of this movie took drastic steps in the right direction. The future world was very well-realized. They didn’t go horribly over the top with the future technology, but they also didn’t just set it in today’s world and say it was the future. I particularly liked the LCD Phone he had in his hand that he could touch to glass to display pictures. Take that, Samsung Galaxy Note 2! Acting all big and bad and shit! (This review is sponsored by the LG Optimus G. “If you want a phone, go with the O.G.”) One of the pieces of technology in this movie was the money they used in the future, the Obamoney. …Cute… The action in the movie was mostly over-the-top, but definitely fun to watch, even though the camera could go a little crazy in some of the scenes. I probably could’ve done without a lot of the music in the movie. I assume what I was hearing a few times in this movie would be considered “dub step,” but I really have no way to be sure. I’ve been graced enough in life to have little to no experience with dub step beyond hearing people make fun of it.

I really didn’t have a lot to say about the performances in this movie. Literally. The only note I took in the performances department was: “Bokeem Woodbine. ‘STRAIGHT JACKIN’!” And even that is just a joke meant strictly to amuse my friend Phil and me. Not that anyone in this movie did a bad job; it’s just that I didn’t have anything to say about any of them. …Any of them save for one. The crowning achievement in this movie was the performance by Kaitlyn Leeb who played the Three-Breasted Woman. YAY! THEY GAVE US THE THREE-BOOBED CHICK! That’s almost entirely all I remember about the original movie!

It’s probably not a popular opinion to admit that I enjoyed this movie more than I enjoyed the original Total Recall. The story was roughly the same but thankfully much less goofy than the original, and the visuals and the action were far better. And the performances included Bokeem Woodbine and a chick with three boobs, so I’m down with them as well. I don’t know if I’d feel the need to buy the movie, but it’s definitely worth checking out as a rental. Total Recall gets “The past is just a mental construct” out of “And by the way, you haven’t even begun to see me try to kill you!”

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Rock of Ages (2012)

This Place is About to Become a Sea of Sweat, Ear-Shattering Music and Puke.

My interest was piqued in today’s movie while listening to the Nerdist podcast. Chris Hardwick was talking about this movie because he was in the original LA cast of the musical that this movie was based on. Another thing that drove me to want to see the movie was the ridiculous hotness of some of the actresses in the movie. That’s always a driving factor for me. But it didn’t drive me hard enough to bother to go and see the movie when it was still in theaters. When I was perusing a RedBox, I saw this movie along with the movie I was looking for and decided that I might as well watch it. If nothing else, I would enjoy the hotness and tune out the movie. Did I have to do that? Find out as I review Rock of Ages, based on the musical by Chris D’Arienzo, written for the screen by Justin Theroux and Allan Loeb, directed by Adam Shankman, and starring Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bryan Cranston, Malin Ákerman, Kevin Nash, Jeff Chase, and Will Forte.

A girl named Sherrie Christian (Julianne Hough) moves to Los Angeles to become a singer, but realizes pretty quickly that most of LA is a cesspool when her prized record collection gets stolen from her. A barback named Drew Boley (Diego Boneta) rushes to help her and the two later start dating even though this pansy didn’t even try to run the guy with her records down. Maybe it was because he gets her a job as a waitress at The Bourbon Room, a famous rock club that’s fallen on hard financial times. To help their situation, bar owner Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin) and his right-hand man Lonny Barnett (Russell Brand) book the famous band Arsenal – and their temperamental lead singer Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) – to perform their final gig at the club before Jaxx embarks on a solo career. Also going on, Patricia Whitmore (Catherine Zeta-Jones), wife of Mayor Mike Whitmore (Bryan Cranston), is trying to shut down rock and roll, Constance Sack (Malin Ákerman) has sex with Jaxx and writes a scathing review about him in Rolling Stone, and Paul Gill (Paul Giamatti) tries to make a star out of Boley, knowing that Jaxx is unreliable.

I’m admittedly torn about Rock of Ages. I’m about dead center in my feelings for it. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it. I think it was mainly the story that didn’t work for me. It just didn’t strike me as all that funny. And, without the comedy, it’s basically just a run of the mill love story/musical. There’s also a little bit of Empire Records in the people trying to keep their dream of rock and roll alive in the Bourbon Room, and perhaps a little bit of Footloose in the religious crazies trying to shut down something for whatever stupid reason. But I’ve already seen those movies, and I didn’t really like them either. And I think I wanted it to be funny, but it never managed to pull that off. Stacee Jaxx got a few laughs with his wackiness, but he also frequently bordered on depressing. I also always appreciate a good shot at boy bands, but then I get depressed because – let’s face it, rock fans – they’ve kind of won. Sure, they don’t have staying power, but that genre has made far more unworthy millionaires than rock has, at least recently. I think the only thing in the movie that got a good, solid laugh out of me was when Sherrie applied for a job by saying, “I can wait tables! I’m good!” Fer real? That’s what you’re gonna put on your list of special skills. Not writing, sketching, speaks limited French. You’re gonna post up with, “Excellent waitress.” I think there’s about one job that qualifies you for…

One of the things that definitely worked for me in this movie was the music. Gangnamed that’s a good soundtrack! Check out some of these songs: Paradise City, Sister Christian, Juke Box Hero, Wanted Dead or Alive, I Wanna Rock, Pour Some Sugar on Me, Here I Go Again, Any Way You Want It, Rock You Like a Hurricane, We Built This City, Don’t Stop Believin’, and the list goes on. Add some Metallica to that and I could survive on just that soundtrack for the rest of my life. I know everyone’s taste in music is not the same as mine, but if you don’t agree then your opinions are wrong. The reason this movie was so easy to get through even with the mediocrity of the story was because of the kick ass music throughout.

The performances in this movie were fine enough, but I was focused mostly on a different kind of “fine.” Namely Julianne Hough and Malin Ákerman. SO hot! Want to touch the heiney! Amongst other things. I guess the same could be said for Catherine Zeta-Jones, but she never really did it for me. Certainly not when I have Hough and Ákerman to distract me. They did fine jobs in the movie, but you also get to see them in underwear and other such skimpies! The only thing that bothered me about that is that there were times in the movie when Hough wore less clothes then when she was acting as a stripper at one point. When she was a stripper, she rocked something that looked like an old-timey one-piece bathing suit that was low cut in the front. She wears much hotter stuff when she’s not supposed to be getting naked for money! Tom Cruise also made me take note fairly frequently. I thought at first that I would be watching him do this part and be mostly thinking about how Chris Hardwick would have done it, even though I’ve never really seen Hardwick do it. But Cruise does an interesting enough performance of his own that I never really got to thinking about that part. But, y’know what? To hell with complimenting Tom Cruise! He got to make out with Malin Ákerman AND touch Julianne Hough and Catherine Zeta-Jones boobs! ALL IN THE SAME MOVIE!

Rock of Ages was an underwhelming but totally watchable movie. Its mediocre story was elevated drastically by the awesome songs in the musical numbers. The actors also did a very good job, especially Julianne Hough and Malin Ákerman who did an exceptional job being hot and Tom Cruise who did very well at being interesting to watch. But altogether, this is probably a skippable movie. You can buy the soundtrack without sitting through the movie, and you can see Julianne Hough and Malin Ákerman being hot with a Google image search. Rock of Ages gets “It’s not an improvement” out of “I just threw up. In my pants … out of my ass.”

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John Carter (2012)

You Are Ugly, But You Are Beautiful!

The inspiration behind seeing today’s movie is going to be hard to explain, mainly because I had no inspiration to see this movie whatsoever.  I saw the trailers and thought, “Yup.  Looks like a movie.”  And that was it.  I saw a couple of people on Facebook talk about how great the movie was, but I would not be swayed.  One friend asked me if I wanted to see it, and I said no, but probably would’ve gone anyway had I not been at work.  When my roommate got a free ticket and offered to pay half of mine, I decided the universe was telling me to see this movie already.  Let’s see how it did in my review of John Carter, based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, written by Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon, directed by Andrew Stanton, and starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Dominic West, Mark Strong, Willem Dafoe, Ciaran Hinds, Samantha Morton, Thomas Haden Church, James Purefoy, Bryan Cranston, and Daryl Sabara.

John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) of Virginia has died suddenly.  When he fell ill, he had sent for his nephew, Edgar “Ned” Rice Burroughs (Daryl Sabara), but he arrives postmortem, but is given John’s diary by his butler and told that only he was supposed to read it.  His first thought is to release this book, slap his name on it, make millions, and then get a movie made about it with the guy that ruined Gambit in the Wolverine movie, but then his second thought is to read it.  It details a story about John looking for gold and finding a cave with a pasty bald dude who tries to kill him.  John shoots the pasty dude and gets transported away by the dude’s medallion.  He wakes up in a desert slightly different than the one he was already in and finds himself able to jump really high.  He meets a giant, green, four-armed creature called a Thark who is named Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe).  Eventually, a couple of airships commanded by by the ruthless Sab Than (Dominic West) pursues a ship carrying Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) into Thark territory.  Sab Than has been given a powerful weapon called the “Ninth Ray” by the pasty bald Therns and is pursuing Dejah because she is trying to escape marrying him to save her people.  John uses his new powers to save her and bring down the majority of the ships, though Sab is able to escape.  Through Dejah, he finds that he was transported to Mars.  John resolves to get back to Earth, Dejah resolves to get John to defeat Sab, and Tars Tarkas’ secret daughter Sola (Samantha Morton) resolves to follow them around and be relatively ineffectual.

This movie perplexed me.  I didn’t find the movie hard to follow as the story is not really that complicated.  What perplexes me about the movie is that it’s inexplicably boring.  But, because I’m writing a review, I must find a way to “explic” it.  It’s strange to me because it has all the components of a really cool, really interesting, and/or really fun action movie, but it never comes to fruition.  The story is an interesting enough concept.  I like the idea of a human being transported to Mars where he turns into a superhero because he comes from a place with higher gravity, allowing him to jump higher and hit harder on Mars.  I don’t really get behind the idea that he’d EVER want to return to Earth, though.  His family died long before the movie started, so he didn’t need to get back because of that.  He did have a cave full of gold waiting for him, but you know what a cave full of gold can’t buy you?  Fucking super powers!  And you want a reason to hang out with your super powers on Mars?  How about the sexy as Martian woman you just met?  Sure, their romance came out of nowhere, but who cares?  She’s hot!  Their relationship never really worked for me.  He saves her life with his superpowers, but all she’s concerned about is getting him to save her city.  A while later, he helps her up off the ground and you see that they’re crushing on each other now.  That’s how he wins her?  Helping her stand up?  Neither one of them had given the other any reason to like the other before that, so it must’ve been his ability to help her off the ground.  She was constantly trying to trick him into helping her people, and he was completely unconcerned with helping her people.  No reason whatsoever.  Though this story had elements that should entertain me, it never really did.  One of the few parts that gained some interest was the Thark tradition of letting loose some babies and having mother pounce on them and fight over them to gain motherhood.  So, with a story that never catches your attention, you’d have to rely on the action to do it.  There was lots of action, but none of it interested me, and I’m still a little curious about why.  There was a guy or two with superpowers, some sword fighting, some giant creatures, but it all eventually devolved into people randomly swinging swords and blue blood flying around a little.  That’s about it.  It could have been the look, I suppose.  Almost every setting was identical, or not far removed.  It goes from desert, to desert, to desert with some water, back to desert, then ends up in a city … surrounded by desert.  I’m sure that’s what Mars looks like, but Mars looks boring.  The CG all worked really well though.  The creatures looked like they were talking, animated like real creatures, they had personalities, weight, and lighting to all look really good.

I had been trying to figure out where I knew Taylor Kitsch from every time I saw the trailers.  I wasn’t able to figure it out until the actual movie started, but then it worked against him because Gambit was my favorite X-Man and he ruined him.  He did fine enough in this movie, but I didn’t like the character because he looked the superpowered gift horse right in the mouth.  He did introduce himself as, “Carter.  John Carter,” and I’m pretty sure no one’s ever actually introduced themselves that way.  I was a big fan of Lynn Collins from her work in her own hotness from the moment I saw her.  I didn’t pay much attention to her performance though.  I did get supremely irritated by her character though.  It takes her the greater majority of the movie to stop being a selfish bitch.  She’s basically told that Sab will kill her people unless she marries him … so she runs off.  That means he’ll kill your people!  You care enough to try to get a guy with no interest in your people to help out, but you could’ve just married the guy in the beginning and not been a selfish bitch.  She figures it out about two hours later and does it, but now John loves her and stops it from happening.  Everyone else in the movie was either forgettable, a voice of a CG creature, or both.  Most of the characters in the movie made so little impact on me that I genuinely found myself much more interested in what was happening with the giant, alien, dog-like creature called Woola.  I loved that little guy, mostly (I’m sure) because he reminded me a lot of my own dog, Jabba.  He had an oversized head, big sloppy tongue, cheerful demeanor, and tendency to lie down and go to sleep at random.  The similarities were damaged some by the fact that the dog could run super fast instead of running for a few seconds, getting bored, and going to sleep. But so disinteresting were the human characters that, in a battle between a large army of aliens and John Carter, with Woola helping out a little, I found myself ignoring what John was doing and looking to make sure Woola was okay.

John Carter is a movie that seemed to have everything, but actually offered next to nothing.  The story was in interesting idea that didn’t deliver.  The action had all the ingredients but turned out bland.  The performances were fine, but all of their characters were overshadowed by a dog.  The CG was great, but the settings all looked the same and were visually boring.  Like I said, this movie is inexplicably boring, but it’s been explicked to the best of my ability.  I would say this movie is a waste of two hours plus, so I would recommend you steer clear of coughing up theater prices for it.  When it comes to RedBox, that might be the time to give it a look, but you’ll also do well to avoid it there as well.  John Carter gets “To those who seek the solace of eternity” out of “When I saw you, I believed it was a sign … that something new can come into this world.”

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Drive (2011)

Drive Sleepy

Today I headed out to the theater with my roommate to watch a movie.  I had not heard much about the movie beyond Ryan Gosling plays an assassin (which he actually doesn’t) and I made the assumption that there was to be some driving in this movie, based mainly on it’s title.  The movie was Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Oscar Isaac, and Christina Hendricks.

Drive is about an unnamed stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who works in a garage belonging to Shannon (Bryan Cranston) and also moonlights as a getaway driver.  He’s apparently really good at driving.  So good that Shannon goes to mobster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) to get financing in order to back the Driver and enter him into NASCAR.  Bernie agrees once he’s seen the Driver live up to his namesake and parallel park like no other.  Bernie’s brother, Nino (Ron Perlman), isn’t excited about his brother’s new business venture, but doesn’t pay it much mind.  Back at the Driver’s apartment (which is super shitty for someone with 3 high paying jobs), he starts getting close with his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio.  But then her husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), comes back from jail to rejoin the family.  The Driver comes home to find Standard badly beaten with Benicio looking on.  He finds out that Standard owes protection money and was beaten because he refused to take on a job to rob a pawn shop.  The Driver agrees to help Standard with the job in order to get him and his family out of the situation for good.  The heist turns out to be a set up by Nino to steal a million dollars from the East Coast mob and Standard is killed.  Driver takes this opportunity to show off his other skills in killing people, but does not change his name to Killer.  I think that movie’s already been made.

For a quick version of the differing views between my roommate and I; he loved this movie, I fucking hated it.  But I’m the reviewer here, so his opinion can wait.  This movie moved so slow that I might have preferred a movie called PaintDry about a painter who moonlights as a painter and is the best there is at what he does.  And we watch that paint come to completion of it’s drying process.  There is a bit of a car chase in the very beginning where nothing really happens, so much so that I hesitate to even call it a car chase.  He gets spotted by a helicopter, then hides under a bridge and waits till it leaves.  He gets spotted by a cop car, speeds up a little, and hides in a stadium that’s just letting a game out.  After that, expect no action until about an hour into the movie when Standard gets shot.  In between, lots of awkward conversations between the Driver and Irene that move at about a sentence per minute.  When the action finally does happen, it’s somewhat exciting but usually brief, with a handful of really graphic deaths like stomping a man’s head to putty.  But this is one of those movies you see with a friend and ask them what they think afterwards and are completely shocked to find out they had the exact opposite reaction.  My roommate thought it was amazing.

This movie made a couple of odd decisions that pissed me off too.  (SPOILER ALERT)  And I say spoiler alert but I’d also feel pretty bad if you sat through this movie because of me anyways, but if you want to see this movie come back and read this after.  At one point, when the Driver has decided to take out Ron Perlman, he goes to the trailer of the movie set he was doing stunt driving on and grabs the mask he wears during the scenes; a creepy mask reminiscent of Michael Myers from Halloween.  But he didn’t use or need this mask!  All he does is drive up to the pizza place Nino owns and stands outside.  Then he wears the mask as he kills Nino.  But if you kill him on a beach away from everyone, why do you need anonymity?  And at the very end, the Driver kills Albert Brooks and leaves the million dollars with his corpse.  I know this is supposed to say something about the character of the Driver, but to me it says he’s a fucking idiot and the screenwriter is as well.  (END SPOILER)

The setting of this movie had me very confused throughout.  I could see that it seemed to be in LA, or at least somewhere very similar, and based on the cars being driven and the clothes Gosling wore (some really gay silver blazer with a gold scorpion on the back), I thought the movie was happening in the 80s.  The movie’s strange 80s-like soundtrack kept me thinking the same.  It wasn’t until about an hour and a half into the movie when I saw a stripper texting on an Android phone or something that I finally figured out this was supposed to be the present.  At that point I was probably more interested in the fact that I had managed to stay awake that long.  My roommate, however, loved the soundtrack.

The performances were the one good thing to the movie.  When Gosling wasn’t awkwardly talking with Irene, he was cool and calm in the most dire of situations.  The kind of badass character that I’d like to see in an action movie one day, and not so much in a pretentious art student’s version of an action movie.  Ron Perlman was probably at his least annoying in this movie.  Albert Brooks’ character was pretty awesome.  He was a very bad man that did very bad things to guys we liked.  I liked this for Albert Brooks.  I’ve never seen him play a character like this.  He was interesting every time he was on and, again, I think I’d like to see this in a good movie.  Bryan Cranston was also very good, but he typically is.  My roommate tells me that Christina Hendricks is famous from television, but I don’t know who she is and she left no impression on me whatsoever.  The problem with the performances is that I never gave a shit about any character in this movie.  But that’s not the fault of the performers, it’s the fault of the screenwriter.  Probably the director too, but he seemed more interested in throwing in unnecessary glory shots of LA at night than character development.  We don’t even get to know the name of the main character, for crying out loud.

When I left the theater, I looked on Rotten Tomatoes to find out if I was the only one who hated this movie.  I apparently was.  This movie received a 93% at the time I’m writing this.  I’m not sure if I just went into the movie with bad expectations or if this movie just sucked.  But since I’m the only one that hated it as far as I can see, my review is that you should see it and either agree with me or tell me why I should’ve liked it.  I give this movie a “Zzzzzzzzzzzz” out of “Wake up, we’re at Grandmas”.

And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others.  It may help me get better.