Last summer, Pacific Rim disappointed me. I wanted to love it, but it was so predictable I couldn’t get with it. Godzilla, on the other hand, turned out to be everything I wanted Pacific Rim to be: An awesome spectacle made up of giant monsters punching each other in the face, and a plot that holds together just well enough to not distract from all the monster face-punching. It was also fun and well-made and clever in spots and delightfully cheesy in others, and it had a STELLAR sense of pacing. By the climactic battle between Godzilla and the Mutos in San Francisco, I was literally on the edge of my seat, white-knuckling it.Continue reading “Godzilla is the movie I wanted Pacific Rim to be”
Category Archives: Movies
Days of Future Past is the (nonsensical) X-Men movie we’ve been waiting for
As you read this review, please keep in mind that I loved X-Men: Days of Future Past. It’s everything a summer movie should be—fun, engaging, funny, exciting, entertaining, full of likeable characters and stakes that feel like they matter. I’m about to say a lot of stuff that’s actually critical of the movie, so it’s important to remember that DOFP works in spite of itself, and it’s tremendously fun along the way. It’s just that it makes no fucking sense.Continue reading “Days of Future Past is the (nonsensical) X-Men movie we’ve been waiting for”
Batman Forever + Iron Man 2 = The Amazing Spider-Man 2
While laziness in filmmaking makes me angry, the thing it pains me the most to watch is a would-be good movie that can’t get out of its own way. Sometimes that’s worse than watching a just plain bad movie. It’s easy to dismiss the awful and lazy, but it’s incredibly frustrating to sit through a movie that is making some good decisions and can be at times engaging and compelling, but also makes terrible decisions and swings into boring/uninteresting territory. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 falls into that latter category. It’s frustrating and sometimes outright annoying to watch what could have been an incredible movie stumble repeatedly over its own ill-fitting clown shoes, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Not the worst Spider-Man movie—that title still belongs to the execrable Spider-Man 3—but the most disappointing for sure.Continue reading “Batman Forever + Iron Man 2 = The Amazing Spider-Man 2”
Only Lovers Left Alive is dreamy, erudite romance
Jim Jarmusch’s new film Only Lovers Left Alive is a moodily lit, moodily acted languid piece of cinema that does not concern itself overmuch with story or character, yet strangely engages on both levels. Starring Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as a pair of centuries-old vampires who are, though they live apart, deeply in love and committed to one another, Lovers exists as much “in the now” as a movie can. It’s less a recounting of events and more like peering into an alternate dimension and seeing lives being lead in the moment. Time is, in many ways, the real protagonist of the story as the vampires have simultaneously too much and not enough of it.Continue reading “Only Lovers Left Alive is dreamy, erudite romance”
Johnny Depp has officially lost his touch
Transcendence, Johnny Depp’s latest movie about a guy who gets sucked into a computer that somehow isn’t a reboot of Tron, is dumb. It’s really dumb and it’s no surprise it completely shit the bed over the weekend. It’s dumb in many ways, one of which is the supremely baffling “How did so many smart people end up in such a dumb place”, aka the Tijuana Jail Theorem (smart people + Tijuana jail = how did we get here?). I wish the movie had been called Tijuana Jail Theorem, because then I would have known not to bother. But I was curious about Transcendence because it’s the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s long-time cinematographer, a man who has been one of the consistently best DPs working in film over the last 10+ years.Continue reading “Johnny Depp has officially lost his touch”
Introducing the Winter Soldier: The creation of a truly terrifying Marvel villain
A couple weeks ago film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a plea for fellow critics to include discussions of form in their film reviews, to at least mention how the language of film is helping or hindering the movie being reviewed. It was an eloquent point well made, and also apropos of what I want to talk about in re: Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I’ve already reviewed the movie (available here and spoiler free), so what I want to get into now that we can talk about stuff without people yelling SPOILERS (seriously, if you haven’t seen it, stop reading now) is how all of the elements of filmmaking worked together to bring to life the Winter Soldier, the most memorable, bone-crunchingly scary villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet.Continue reading “Introducing the Winter Soldier: The creation of a truly terrifying Marvel villain”
Noah is grand, ambitious, messy
There is a lot to admire in Darren Aronofsky’s big-budget, large-scale epic, Noah. There’s so much to admire, in fact, that it’s hard to call it a bad movie, even if parts of it feel shoe-horned in and it’s overblown and it’s not particularly fun to watch. And no, I don’t mean that every movie has to be upbeat and positive in order to be good. 12 Years a Slave was not upbeat but I was never bored or disengaged by it. At points in Noah, I was checking my metaphorical watch (because seriously, who wears a watch anymore?) because it was about twenty minutes too long and the pacing was slightly too uneven to affix my interest for the entire run time.Continue reading “Noah is grand, ambitious, messy”
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