Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: “Godzilla”

Box Office Democracy: “Godzilla”

I needed Godzilla to give me more monster fights.  Not monsters destroying cities or people running from monsters but monsters fighting monsters.  They knew that’s what I wanted too because sequences would build to those moments where two kaiju would look at each other, screech, and charge at each other only for the camera to cut away to some human doing some dumb thing or another.  I know that this movie already cost $160 million and that’s with almost no money spent on cast so I have to assume they put all the special effects in that they could but this movie made almost $200 million in its first weekend and I assure you I do not care what the humans are doing in Godzilla, not even a little bit.

The monsters look fantastic.  I tried to parse exactly how they made them through studying the credits and it seems to be some alchemical combination of digital effects and performance capture and I can’t stress enough how perfect and plausible they look.  It probably helps that they are usually in dark smoky environments but it works better than any attempt I’ve seen with the possible exception of Pacific Rim and this is certainly trying for a grittier, more realistic look than Rim was going for.  The climactic fights are over-the-top brutal but all the way through I was impressed at how it looked like these massive creatures had actual weight and interacted with their environment in consistently plausible ways.  A sequel has already been greenlit and I’m beyond excited to see where they go with these monsters.

The humans are another matter entirely.  I mean, I guess they always look like they have weight and they interact with their environment in a plausible manner but I’m not sure they ever really affect the story.  You could take the actions of every human being out of this movie and it would affect the outcome not at all.  Nothing the humans do to stop the rampaging monsters is successful on any level.  In fact, the climactic actions of the main human character, Lieutenant Ford Brody, only serve to save people from a mistake the humans made earlier in the film.  Godzilla is the title character and he solves the problem all by himself.  I never quite got invested in the drama they tried to insert with Brody and his wife or Brody and his son or Brody and some strange other child.  I completely failed to care at all about the faceless, practically nameless, other military operatives.  I only cared a little about Dr. Serizawa because Ken Wantanabe played him and I honestly can’t tell you what happened to that character in the third act.  Everyone just sort of fades away in the backdrop of better monster action.  As much as I want to see them expand on the monster action I want them to throw all the other characters in this movie and start over with every entry.

A common lament about film in the last decade or so is that every film is either a remake or a sequel and no one is willing to try new things.  While there is undeniable truth to this, Godzilla is proof that there are plenty of new ideas and good movies to be made from old properties.  This is as different from the original film as is possible with only passing similarity to what came before.  It would be a huge mistake for anyone to dismiss this as creatively bankrupt when it’s such a fresh take on a property that was honestly run in to the ground by The Toho Company some time ago.  This is a fantastic action movie and one worthy of praise no matter what its origins are.

 

Box Office Democracy: “Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return”

Box Office Democracy: “Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return”

Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return is simply irredeemable. I’ve been sitting in front of a blank Word document for over an hour trying to figure out where to start and have experienced new waves of outrage every time I think of another part of the movie. The characters are bad, the story is basically nonsense, it’s ugly, the songs are bad, even the credits are confusing. I don’t know another way to judge this movie to make it look like a success. The 3D stereography didn’t make me want to throw up. That’s the best I can do.

The movie opens by explaining that the filmmakers had no understanding of the story from The Wizard of Oz. Having gotten their gifts from The Wizard in the first film Scarecrow is now a super genius, Lion is ready to fight literally every adversary he meets and Tin Man expresses big emotional responses to even the most trivial events. In this universe The Wizard was not telling these characters that they had these qualities in them all along he literally made them all the best at all of these things by magic. It also means they have none of the character traits they had in any other media you might be familiar with them from. These characters feel like the supporting characters from a bad 90s Saturday morning cartoon.

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Box Office Democracy: “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”

Movies based on comic books have had to fight a practically never-ending battle for respectability but, for now at least, it seems that they’ve won.  Superheroes are hot commodities at the box office and studios have embraced the idea that making them more like their source material is preferable to making movies that anger the core fanbase for an attempt to appeal to the mainstream.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is what happens when that faithfulness goes too far and instead of making a simple movie filmmakers try and cram in all of the ancillary subplots of an ongoing series with none of the capacity to pay any of those threads off.

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Box Office Democracy: “Transcendence”

Box Office Democracy: “Transcendence”

I’m always rooting for good dystopian science fiction so it’s hard for me to report that Transcendence does such a bad job, not so much at building a world or introducing key concepts, rather, it fails at telling a story.  Characters swing factional and ideological allegiances rapidly with seemingly no regard to the events going on, there seems to be no memory for specific events after the story gets going, most importantly the movie has no sense of morality at all making a rooting interest nearly impossible.

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Box Office Democracy: “Noah”

I suppose you can’t make a movie about a global flood and a man building an ark to store all of the animals of the world without people drawing the comparison to the story of Noah from the bible.  That’s a shame though because there’s an interesting movie in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah that might never get it’s due because it is so divorced from the story we’ve all heard a million times that I fear it’ll never get a chance.  This is a story everyone knows and changing the answer to questions like “Why did God flood the earth?” or “How many people were on the ark?” or even “How many rock monsters are in this story?”

This is a dark unpleasant movie Aronofsky has made.  This sentence could also be run in a review of [[[Black Swan]]], [[[Requiem for a Dream]]], or really any of his other movies with the possible exception of [[[The Wrestler]]], which I only found unpleasant.  This is unpleasant on a whole other scale though.  This movie features the death, by drowning, of the overwhelming majority of the population of the planet and it isn’t even the most messed up thing that happens in the film.  Most disturbing scene has to go to the one where Noah is about to stab his newborn twin granddaughters to death because he’s convinced that God wants the human race to die out with his children.  What’s that you say?  In the bible all three of Noah’s kids bring their wives with them and there’s no question the human race will continue?  I don’t know what to tell you.  Your bible probably doesn’t have rock monsters in it either.

Aronofsky is a great director and while this isn’t a great film his talent comes through in the visuals.  The spiritual side of things is heavily stylized and colorful while the earth is all muted grays.  It creates solid contrast and will almost get you to accept that man has ruined the earth provided to him.  There’s also a fantastic sequence where Noah tells his children the biblical story of seven-day creation while we’re shown a much more scientific creation montage including evolution.  It’s visually stunning but probably not worth the shit storm I’m sure is forthcoming from the more devout religious groups.

In the movie they identify the rock monsters as members of a group of angels called The Watchers and while doing a bit of research for this review I came across a fun fact.  There are no examples of fallen Watchers in the actual bible but in the Book of Enoch, a non-canonical Jewish text, does describe a group of Watchers who fell including some that share names with characters in the movie Noah.  This group of Watchers was kicked out of heaven because they couldn’t control their urges and started having sex with human women leading to a race of monster giants.  None of this is in this movie and I probably would have rather seen that.

Box Office Democracy: Muppets Most Wanted

muppets most wanted photoI feel bad for The Muppets in the same way I feel bad for aging rock bands.  They used to be cutting edge but now they’re content to be a nostalgia act making money by playing the hits.  I don’t begrudge them the work and frankly I might be a little jealous of how much money they’re making doing the same old thing but I wish they doing new and exciting things rather than just jamming out on “Sympathy for the Devil” one more time.  Muppets Most Wanted is a fun movie but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.

The plot of Muppets Most Wanted centers around an international jewel thief frog who is identical to Kermit with the exception of a mole on his lip.  Using his underling Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais), Constantine switches place with Kermit, taking over running the Muppet world tour while Kermit rots away in a Siberian Gulag.  The movie then breaks in to three threads with Gervais, Constantine, and the duped Muppets going on a world tour that corresponds to where robberies need to be made leading to a heist of the crown jewels while Kermit tries to escape his captors at the Gulag (led by Tina Fey) and a pair of mismatched cops (Sam Eagle and a Clouseau-esque Ty Burrell) try to solve the crime.  It doesn’t break any new ground in any of the three threads but the live-action actors are giving it everything they have even when they seem a little over their heads in the musical numbers.  Muppet purists might be a little upset that Walter is still front and center in this movie instead of some of the more established characters.  Muppet purists might also find this film too similar to The Great Muppet Caper to really warrant a whole new film.  Are Muppet purists a real thing?  Is this a demographic that moves tickets?  Wouldn’t they have given up when Jim Henson died, Frank Oz retired and Disney bought the company?

There are two lengthy sequences where you can see all of Constantine’s body and he moves around on his legs and Disney needs to promise they won’t try this with any other Muppets until the effect gets much better.  Everyone knows these are puppets and is willing to accept the limitations that come with that.  I don’t know if it was a marionette or a CGI effect or some combination of the two but it looks atrocious.  There’s a classic look to the Muppets and it all looks fine introducing new for the sake of new (you cannot convince me a dance number was essential to the plot) is a dicey proposition even when it doesn’t look like you’ve hastily inserted a frog puppet via green screen.

I’d like to close by briefly scolding whoever had the idea to have Usher do a cameo as an usher.  I groaned over the next two lines.  You almost pissed away all the good will you generated by having Salma Hayek appear exclusively in a red spandex bodysuit.  Almost.

Box Office Democracy: “Divergent”

Divergent is a rather cynical reminder that Hollywood is all about making money and never taking any chances.  Twilight blows up and everyone scours for Young Adult books with supernatural elements and love triangles.  That search eventually leads to The Hunger Games which makes a ton of money leading to another wave of searches for YA books about dystopian futures and that is how we got to Divergent.  If this movie makes enough money expect a round of films where everyone refers to groups of people with needless SAT words.  I think that’s the takeaway here.

In the Divergent world all life exists in a post-apocalyptic Chicago where everyone exists in one of five factions Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Erudite, or Dauntless.  Everyone is tested for their appropriate faction but that is rendered moot as you are allowed to pick your faction when you reach some late teen age that somehow makes it so our main character Beatrice chooses on the same day as her older brother. Beatrice is a Divergent, someone who tests equally well for more than one faction.  This makes her dangerous somehow.  People will try and kill her if they discover this information.

This might seem like a lot of basic exposition and the film struggles mightily with it.  Establishing the previous paragraph and showing Beatrice (later just Tris) training for acceptance into the Dauntless faction takes the overwhelming majority of the film.  The actual story with real consequences and stakes doesn’t start until awfully close to the two-hour mark of the film.  This is a trilogy and I understand the need to lay groundwork for future movies (especially when they come pre-greenlit) but it really feels like they sold this movie out for excessive exposition and one too many training montages.

I also strongly feel that good science fiction needs a clear philosophical bent and I’m just not sure what that is in Divergent.  It might be about accepting people who are different, it might be about the importance of family, or it could be as simple as condemning people who want to throw violent coups.  It could be that this will also be clearer as the series goes on but I knew after one film that The Hunger Games would be about rebelling against an oppressive government.  Divergent just leaves me confused and disinterested.

The bad guy for most of the middle third of the movie, Eric, looks so much like hip-hop artist Macklemore that it’s honestly distracting.  It’s a choice I can’t understand unless this movie is intended as a propaganda piece to turn the young girls of America against Macklemore.  I would fully support that agenda and would be prepared to change this entire review into a rave if that agenda came out.  If anyone at Summit Entertainment or Lionsgate would like to comment on these please send a note through official ComicMix channels.

Box Office Democracy Review: “Veronica Mars”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I backed the Veronica Mars movie on Kickstarter.  In addition to a myriad of cool perks this gave me, and thousands of other backers, access to regular updates on the process of making this movie, a level of access rather atypical today and totally unheard of a decade ago.  I watched this movie grow from a cool pipe dream to an actual thing that is actually playing in theaters.  This all adds up to a movie that I liked a great deal but am unable to assure myself that this affection is genuine, or is it more like the love a parent feels for their potentially mediocre child?

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Box Office Democracy: “Mr. Peabody & Sherman”

I was a big fan of [[[The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show]]] as a child and while I enjoyed almost all of the segments “Peabody’s Improbable History” was a particular favorite.  I don’t know what it is but time travel and know-it-alls have always appealed to me.  It was because of this fandom and the horrific earlier attempts to make films out of the Jay Ward cartoons that made me approach Mr. Peabody & Sherman with particular trepidation.  I’m happy to report that these fears were unfounded and that Mr. Peabody & Sherman is a generally delightful movie.

After perhaps a bit too much exposition (the original cartoon never seemed to need much more than talking dog, pet boy, time machine) Mr. Peabody & Sherman gets right into a trip to Revolutionary France that plays like a more action-packed version of an old-school Peabody short.  It even closes with a pun.  From there the movie packs on a rather stunning amount of plot when all I really wanted was more of the classic formula.

This is the peril of the modern reboot movie; they often lose the fun in favor of a more modern approach to storytelling.  I don’t care about Sherman being bullied for having a father that’s a dog, I don’t care about irrationally angry school counselors that want to involve Child Protective Services, I only care about Mr. Peabody hosting a dinner party because the characters attending are voiced by Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann, and I don’t really need Mr. Peabody to learn a lesson about being a good father.  I just want time travel and jokes and for a good percentage of those jokes to be terrible puns.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask and the movie delivers on this frequently but I left the theater wanting more.

Mr. Peabody & Sherman is better than it is bad and I enthusiastically await a sequel (it seems on pace for those kind of numbers assuming the rights aren’t a mess) but there are so many tiny flaws holding this one back from the excellence that was in its grasp.  I’ve seen enough terrible kids movies the last two years that very good is more than enough for me but if I were Rob Minkoff and I had directed this and The Lion King I would feel like this one could have been a bigger deal.