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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The Bourne Legacy (2012)

How Many of Us Are There?

Today’s movie had arrived in theaters without me even knowing it, which is really strange because it’s the fourth movie in a series that I’ve loved so far.  I’m not entirely sure why I wasn’t paying attention.  It could have been because they changed the main actor, but I doubt it because I like the new actor just as much as I like the old one.  It could have also been because the movie didn’t look that good, but it’s probably not that because nothing that I had seen made me doubt it could live up to the other movies.  It also could have been that the movie looked like they were just trying to grab some more cash from the movie series.  I don’t really have a counter point to that one.  But, when I realized that the movie had been released, I set my sights on checking it out as soon as I could.  And that brings us up to speed and I can review the Bourne Legacy, based on a novel by Eric Van Lustbader, based on characters created by Robert Ludlum, written by Dan Gilroy, co-written and directed by Tony Gilroy, and starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney, Scott Glenn, Zeljko Ivanek, and Louis Ozawa Changchien.

Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) is traversing an obstacle course through Alaska as a test of the effectiveness of Operation Outcome, a secret government operation to use chemicals to help the human body reach its physical and mental peak.  He eventually reaches a cabin to meet his contact, another Operation Outcome agent called Number Three (Oscar Isaac).  The fact that Operation Blackbriar and Treadstone were exposed by Jason Bourne in the previous movie leads to CIA operative Eric Byer (Edward Norton) to wise up for a few minutes and realize that these tests are not working out for the government, so he decides to scrap this version of the project and kill Aaron and everyone in the facility that provides the chemicals for them, including Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), but she survives.  Aaron does as well, so he’s going to have to go and punch some faces to teach the government a lesson.  But the government will probably strike back with their other projects that they are completely confident will never turn against them like the other two.

This movie disappointed me with how thoroughly okay they were.  It wasn’t a bad movie, but the other three movies set a high bar for this movie and it never managed to reach that level.  I found myself starting to get annoyed that our government is apparently smart enough to develop these programs to make these super soldiers, but not smart enough to realize that it’s not working in their favor.  This is the fourth movie that should teach them that this is going to blow up in their face, but they’re all going to get the idea in their head that the others failed, but this time will be different.  I like to believe that the government would move on if the Manhattan Project blew up in their faces four times, killing everyone involved and making them look bad publically each time, but maybe that’s just me.  It felt in the early parts of the movie as if I should have gotten a discount because they seemed to delight in using scenes from the previous movies.  I understand tying the movies together, but at a certain point I just start thinking I would’ve been better off staying at home and watching the DVD’s that I already own.  But they slowed down with that soon enough in the movie that I wasn’t that annoyed.  I was a little annoyed by the ending, but mainly just because it was kind of quick and pretty lackluster, like they just ran out of steam and just slapped “The End” on it.

One of my favorite parts of the previous Bourne movies is the fact that their solid story was backed up by some badass action.  They decided that this movie needed to be too much subpar story and we could leave the action by the wayside for the bulk of the movie.  The first decent fight of the movie was an hour and a half in!  The bulk of the first part of the movie is people talking and reaching the conclusion that they should wipe out the project mixed in with scenes of Aaron Cross walking through snow.  You know what I don’t come to my Bourne movies to watch?  20 minutes of a psychologist session with Rachel Weisz talking about how she feels about Zeljko Ivanek shooting her coworkers.  Just after that is when they realize that the Bourne movies are supposed to be action flicks.  It was a good bit of fighting though and I was dying for it to happen by this point, even though it left me thoroughly confused about how a guy died from getting a table kicked into his head.  Unconscious, sure.  But dead?  That should take something more like a drill bit being fired out of a fire extinguisher.  There are one or two more good fights in the movie, but the action was spread out way too far for my taste and left me disappointed in the movie overall.  There was a spectacular motorcycle crash near the end of the movie that came out of nowhere and surprised the hell out of me, but it also annoyed me because I felt like it robbed us from a good fist fight that needed to happen.  The part where Aaron grinds the motorcycle down the handrail that you can see in the trailers was pretty sweet though.

I even took issues with the performances, even though they got a lot of great people that I really like to be in the movie.  I guess it’d be more accurate to say that I took issue with the characters because the performances themselves were solid.  Jeremy Renner is a great actor, and when I saw that he was taking the reins from Matt Damon I decided it was an acceptable substitution, but I didn’t really like this character or how it was portrayed.  Jason Bourne was a cool and collected badass; Aaron Cross is a pill addict who talks too much.  But Renner did a good job with the action, and he also played his less interesting character well.  Rachel Weisz did have to bust out the acting chops a little more often, like in the scene where we’re watching her debriefing with the psychologist, but I was too busy being angry that I was having to watch that scene to pay attention to how well she pulled it off.  She mainly had to be scared and run around as her performance, and she did it well.  I was a little confused about why her character lived in a haunted house, but it apparently wasn’t important.  And the ghosts never showed up.  Also the house was just old and looked haunted.  Edward Norton was in the movie, but surprised me by never really doing anything to make me pay attention to him.  That’s not usually his MO.

If the Bourne Legacy had a different title, I probably would have liked it more.  I would have definitely thought that it was a Bourne rip off, but it wouldn’t have had to live up to its predecessors and fall short.  The story was fairly typical for the Bourne series, full of stuff that shows us how untrustworthy and stupid our government is, but the action could not elevate this movie as it was able to in the previous movies because there just wasn’t enough of it.  The movie winds up being okay, but probably not good enough to inspire seeing it in theaters.  Good enough for a rental when it comes out though.  The Bourne Legacy gets “I wanna stop thinking” out of “I’ll get my bag.”

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L.A. Confidential (1997)

Off the Record, On the QT, and Very Hush-Hush

My roommate and I did two movies back to back, but thankfully the second one originally came out well within our lifetime.  It was one I knew about, but never really found myself that interested in watching.  But he got the movie, so I figured we might as well watch the thing.  While watching it, I found myself completely unable to stop thinking about a certain video game that I really enjoyed last year, but I’ll be mentioning that later.  For now, let’s get into my review of L.A. Confidential, based on a book by James Ellroy, written by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson, directed by Curtis Hanson, and starring Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, Kevin Spacey, David Strathairn, Danny DeVito, Ron Rifkin, Graham Beckel, and Simon Baker.

Detective Wendell “Bud” White (Russell Crowe) and his partner, Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel), are delivering alcohol to a policeman party, while periodically stopping so Bud can whoop on some guys abusing their ladies, something he has a big problem with.  At the police station, narcotics detective Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) shows up along with a group of Mexican guys rumored to have recently attacked and beaten some police officers, and they get turned over to the night’s watch commander, Sergeant Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce).  Alcohol and rumor make their way quickly around the office, inciting the police officers to go down to the cells and attack the Mexicans.  Reporters get some pictures of it and call it “Bloody Christmas”, which makes the LA Times and tarnishes the reputation of the LAPD.  District Attorney Ellis Loew (Ron Rifkin) and Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) interview officers to figure out who will testify and who will have this pinned on them.  White won’t testify, Exley is totally on board, and even suggests using the TV show that he works on to gain leverage on Vincennes and get his support.  This whole plan gets a couple of officers, including White’s partner Stensland, is expelled.  Exley gets promoted.  Shortly after, Exley is called to the Nite Owl coffee shop and finds a large group of people murdered in the bathroom.  One of these people is Stensland.  For the rest of the movie, we follow Exley, White, and Vincennes as they try to find out what truly happened that night in the Nite Owl, but what they find may go much deeper than they expected.

I really liked LA Noire … I mean Confidential.  This was a really good movie, but all I kept thinking about the entire time is how similar this movie is to LA Noire, which gained respect for this movie, but lost a little for LA Noire.  The movie had a really interesting story, but it was perhaps a bit predictable, and it was elevated by some really good performances and some really good action.  The story of the movie is fairly classic noire movie fare, with corruption and betrayal happening with the police that’s being battled by a few good cops, and there’s a little mob action going on to boot.  You can probably figure out who the bad guy is before the movie tells you, but it’s much harder to figure out why and how.  Either way, having guessed the culprit didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the movie.  A lot of the movie was just back to back intense scenes of puzzle solving.  It could not go without saying that the movie reminds me of LA Noire.  Not just the noire style and the LA setting, but there were some scenes of collecting clues, some pretty intense interrogation scenes, and even some entire plot points that were shared with the game.  They worked really well in both.  The movie is not one that I would call “action packed”, per se, but there’s a couple of scenes with good, solid action.  One in particular that stands out is the one that ends the movie in a giant shootout that was pretty awesome.

The performances are another great part about this movie, and I can scarcely think of one that did not hold up their end of the bargain.  Crowe was the bomb in this movie.  He was a total badass, but also put in some serious acting in parts.  His part of the final shootout in the movie was particularly badass, and a later scene with Basinger was particularly well acted, but he’s pretty great throughout.  Guy Pearce is a good contrast to Crowe in this movie.  As the movie moves along, we find that they’re both good cops, but in different ways.  Pearce is all by the book and Crowe is all about seeing justice served.  Pearce is Superman, Crowe is Batman.  Unfortunately for Pearce, him being the by the books cop made me dislike him until near the end of the movie.  I’m more of a Batman kind of guy.  Spacey is still a good guy, but he’s barely a cop until the end of the movie.  He’s more of a celebrity who does police work on the side.  Kim Basinger puts on a great performance as well, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how amazing this chick looks and she was in her 40’s in this movie.  She’s almost 60 now, and I haven’t seen her in a bit, but I’d wager I would still smash.  James Cromwell did a great job as well, being very charming and likeable for the greater majority of the movie.

LA Confidential is a movie I’m happy that I finally watched.  If you’re not into games, but you heard good things about LA Noire, you can basically just watch this and get the gist of the game because they borrowed so heavily from it.  Good story, great performances, and some intense scenes and action make this a good watch.  I watched my roommate’s copy of the movie, but I would totally buy it myself as well, so it’s at least worth a rental for you.  LA Confidential gets “You look better than Veronica Lake” out of “Lookie here, the great jerkoff case of 1953.”

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