Godzilla (2/5 Stars)

Godzilla is rated PG-13. Whole cities are wiped out so two enormous bugs can be prevented from having sex.

- A.O. Scott

“Godzilla” is about a big fat lizard that fights two giant sized moths. The cities that are destroyed are Honolulu, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. You see, a long time ago the US Government dropped a big nuclear bomb on this big fat lizard thing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and such was the arrogance of mankind that we believed that to be the end of the story. But no, two cocoons with two large moths survived and in the present day release havoc upon the world. The two moths are the bad guys in the story. If they like totally have sex with each other they could make lots of babies, presumably more giant moths. Godzilla is the good guy in the story. He lives on the bottom of the sea (that’s why we never found him) and surfaces to kill the moths and save humanity. Why he would want to do this is not explained. Actually nothing is explained. All you should know is that this whole thing is due to the arrogance of mankind. For Pete’s sake people, stop being so arrogant.

Godzilla is really big, like the size of a skyscraper and like when he fights amongst skyscrapers they like get knocked down. Godzilla’s like Crash-Bam-Boom and the skyscraper is all like Kablooie! To the fans of Godzilla this might be enough of a reason to go see the movie. To everybody else I hope it is not enough. For instance, this movie should draw comparisons to last year’s “Pacific Rim,” a superior movie about big monsters who battle each other had several features conspicuously absent here. The first would be a sense of style. Guillermo Del Toro directed “Pacific Rim” and his brilliant artistry saturates the entire movie. Compare the night battle in Hong Kong with its brightly lit modern skyscrapers with the lumbering slugfest in San Francisco with all of its lights conveniently blown out by an electromagnetic pulse. Also the monsters and robots had distinctive personalities in “Pacific Rim,” whereas in “Godzilla” they are essentially the 3D IMAX version of those cardboard/rubber suits from the original 1950s movie. Secondly, “Pacific Rim” had a sense of humor. It cast the gifted comedian Charlie Day from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” as an excitable scientist. “Godzilla” has no jokes in it at all and is completely bereft of funny people. Given that this is a movie about big things destroying cities, that is a major oversight. Third, and this is just a general thing, but haven’t we got to the point where movies can’t simply get bigger with bigger things destroying even bigger things. I mean ‘Avatar’ had a pretty simplistic plot but it also happened to be a gobsmackingly new visual kind of experience. ‘Godzilla’ won’t ever have that same type of novelty no matter how big the lizard is now or in some future version. This is not the first time I’ve seen skyscrapers knocked down by something big in a movie. There are several of those scenarios every year. That’s all I have to say about this movie.

I would like to a take a moment now and explore the idiocy of movie ratings in what is becoming an annual tradition at this blog (The Absymal State of Movie Ratings, The Avengers, War Horse, Iron Man 2). “Godzilla” is rated PG-13. As is pointed out above, whole cities are wiped out. These cities are populated with people. They are generally in the background running away but sometimes they are right in the middle of the action or in one particularly unsettling shot looking through the windows of their office buildings at the big monsters fighting outside. The astute observer can infer that when Godzilla knocks down a building, we have just witnessed the deaths of several thousand people at the very least. Sometimes it is even more obvious. There is a scene on the golden gate bridge that shows many vehicles with people inside falling into the ocean when the bridge is broken up by a giant bug. In another scene an airport tram is broken up and at least ten people fall to their deaths outside of the hole in the side. Given the overwhelming presence of death in this movie, why is it not Rated R? The reason is because there is no gore. This is especially noticeable when dead people are carted away from collapsed buildings largely intact. Looking at them you would think they all died of heart attacks. As for all the poor souls in the office buildings, to placate the censors, their dead bodies are not shown at all.

Human life is cheap in “Godzilla,” but that does not stop the movie from manipulating the very humanity it so plainly disregards. The result is a few absurd scenes where some lives are arbitrarily assigned more value than others. Take the scene on the Golden Gate Bridge where our hero’s son is on a school bus in the middle of the bridge when Godzilla strikes. The bus driver disregards all the authorities and takes liberties with the traffic rules brazenly passing all the other cars that will soon meet their fate on the bottom of the ocean. Do we not care about anybody else but this one kid in this one bus? When that kid survives, in a way that unnecessarily endangers all the other people on the bridge, are we supposed to feel relief?

Presumably the point of movie ratings is to protect children or whatever from what I wonder. Whatever the reason, the effect of the MPAA ratings is the proliferation of ignorance concerning the nature of violence. Imagine if you took just PG-13 blockbusters as your basis for looking at the world. You would think that you could outrun fireballs, dodge a hail of machine gun bullets behind a car, and never be hit by falling debris from buildings or shrapnel from explosions. Is that a moral way to teach kids about violence, specifically gun violence? To only allow violence that has no physical consequences and shield them from every instance of violence that shows what it can actually do to the human body seems to me to be a rather immoral thing to do. Consider the Rated R movie, “127 Hours.” It concerns the true story about a hiker whose arm gets pinned underneath a large rock. In order to escape and save his life he has to cut off his arm, the process of which the movie shows in full detail. It is gory as should be expected from a realistic version of what happened. But is it immoral? It is an act of violence depicted truthfully perpetrated to save a life. What part of that is immoral? How? The movie would have gotten a PG-13 rating if it had not shown any blood during that scene or at least made it look like the amputation didn’t hurt. But shouldn’t an amputation look like it hurts? Shouldn’t there be blood? 

The truth is that movie ratings are not concerned with morality. They are concerned with the presence of blood on the screen. In any case, that is why ‘127 Hours’ which cares deeply about human life is rated R and Godzilla which treats human life as casually as spilt milk is PG-13. Will somebody please think of the children?!?!?

Okay, that’s enough. I will keep quiet about this for another year. 

Inception (5/5 Stars) July 20, 2010

A movie of immense ambition perfectly realized

I recall a scene from Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Being John Malkovich’ where the title character starts crawling into the portal that will lead into his own head. Another character looks on and remarks, “What happens when a man goes through his own portal?” It was a very good question, particularly because at that point in movie history it had never happened before. There was no genre outline for what was supposed to happen. The movie had defied genre and boldly stepped into the realm of the truly original. I remember the sense of suspense and wonder that came from watching that particular scene. Where will this movie go? What will I see? What is going to happen next!? Now take the suspense and wonder from that one scene in ‘Being John Malkovich’ and prolong it for an entire movie and you will get a sense of what it feels like to watch “Inception,” the new movie by Director Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo Dicaprio. It is an experience that must have accompanied the people who first saw such movies as “Apocalypse Now” or “Citizen Kane.” It is an experience that occurs only when a movie reaches for that zenith of Ambition and realizes it perfectly. I don’t have to see any more movies this year to say that “Inception” will be the best one. It is quite possibly one of the best movies ever made. 

Now let me think, what was the movie about? It was very vivid when I first watched it. It would be best if I saw it twice but I will take a crack at describing it anyway. Right now there is a unique form of Corporate Espionage called ‘Extraction.’ A group of specialized corporate thieves drug a person, invade his subconscious through his dreams, and steal an idea. It’s a bit complicated. One person, usually the architect, is the actual dreamer. They create and control the dream world. The others involved in the heist and the actual victim are voyeurs in the dream and their subconscious fill in the blanks and details of the dreamer’s world. There are several dream rules that you may remember from your own experiences. Some of them include: You can never remember how a dream started. The dream is especially realistic because when a dreamer is dreaming they can’t tell that they are in a dream. You can escape the dream by dying or falling but ordinary pain won’t wake you up. The time in a dream is prolonged because of the amount of brainpower you exert. For example, ten seconds in the real world is a minute in a dream. Most interesting is the concept of a dream within a dream where all the previous rules apply but even more so.

But alas there is just too much to explain for a dinky little review. I can only say this: that the enormous amount of exposition was always exceedingly interesting to learn and exhilarating to watch. Most importantly, it made sense. Writer/Director Christopher is a master storyteller in that sense. Recall what he taught us in “Memento,” about memory and what he taught us in “The Prestige,” about magic. Both had convoluted plots but we always understood what was going on and why. In this movie he teaches us with the same skill about Dreams. But that’s not all. In this movie, the intellectual exercise is just half the equation. Let’s not forget that Christopher Nolan is also the man who gave us “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight.” Those were both great big summer blockbusters with incredible action sequences. “Inception” is the successful combination of Nolan’s two disparate talents: Intellectualism and Spectacle. Oh and what a powerful fusion of imagination it is! The thing about Dreams you know is that they are bound only by imagination. Thus huge special effects sequences fit right into the story seamlessly. They never feel forced. In fact, these action sequences will make you think even more about what is happening. This is best combination of smarts and physicality since “The Matrix.” It’s like Charlie Kaufman wrote a James Bond script. One of the best scenes has Joseph Gordon Levitt involved in a fistfight in a hotel lobby where the laws of gravity keep on shifting. Wow! No, I don’t have the space to explain why, but it was awesome! If Christopher Nolan doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Director this year then the Academy has a hole in its head. 

Wait, I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning. Leonardo Dicaprio is the leader of the group also known as the Extractor. His long time associate is played by Joseph Gordan Levitt (3rd Rock from the Sun, (500) Days of Summer). He is the Point Man. These two are approached by a very powerful corporate man played by Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai). He is the Tourist. Watanabe wants Dicaprio not to steal an idea from a corporate rival played by Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Batman Begins) but to give that man an idea. This is known as “Inception.” If you thought Extraction, something that you had never heard of before was hard to pull off, Inception is twice as tough to accomplish. Too succeed in this mission Dicaprio hires Dileep Rao (Avatar, Drag Me to Hell). He is the Chemist and will provide the hardcore sedatives to lull everyone into a 10-hour deep sleep on a plane flight across the Pacific. Dicaprio also hires Tom Hardy, a man who specializes in shape-shifting. Within dreams he can impersonate friends, enemies, and beautiful women. He is the Shade. Then Dicaprio visits his father, played by Michael Caine, and asks for his most brilliant student. This turns out to be Ellen Page (Juno). She is the Architect. The Chemist will drug everyone. The Architect will design the Dream Space. The Shade will trick the corporate rival. The Tourist will provide backup. The Point Man gets to beat up bad guys in gravity changing hallways. The Extractor will plant the idea. 

I should also mention that the Extractor has something dark buried in his subconscious. It is the vision of his wife who used to be a part of his team. She is played by Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose). Since the Extractor’s relationship with his wife ended somewhat violently, his vision of her in his subconscious is quite a dangerous thing. Let’s just say she tries very hard to wake everybody up (i.e. she has a habit of killing people). 

By the way, I have only described the setup to the heist itself. So everything I just told you about is exposition. When we get into the heist, which plays out on several levels of dreams within dreams, then it gets really really interesting. I won’t give any spoilers because you wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. It would be impossible to understand what happens in the second hour until you have actually watched the first. There is no way to jump into the middle here. Every single minute of the 2 hours and 40 minute movie is important. (By the way, those two hours and forty minutes seemed like a half hour watching this movie. I couldn’t have been more entranced.)

I think it is fair to say that Leonardo Dicaprio has the best agent in the world. He has done nothing but superior movies for about a decade now. (Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road, The Departed, Blood Diamond, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Catch Me if you Can). When you think about it, he also has an odd habit of picking roles that involve doomed romances. For instance have you noticed how many times his love interest has died/gone crazy (Inception, Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road) or that he’s died/gone crazy (Titanic, The Aviator, The Departed) or they both have died/gone crazy (Romeo & Juliet, Shutter Island). Then there are also instances where he just dies (The Quick and the Dead, Blood Diamond) or the love simply goes unrequited (Catch Me if You Can, Body of Lies, This Boy’s Life). I think his most successful romance was with Cameron Diaz in Gangs of New York and I can’t really even remember if that relationship was ever consummated. He plays J. Edgar Hoover in his next movie, a closeted homosexual who openly despised gay people. Hoover did have a long-term relationship with another FBI man though. It seems hard to believe that a story about Hoover just might be Dicaprio’s most successful romance, but it might have that potential. With Dicaprio’s fine performances in two movies this year I believe he should be a front-runner for a Best Actor Oscar. If I had to choose which movie to nominate him for, it would be Shutter Island, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t also do a great job here. 

If I had to choose a performance I thought looked like the most fun though it would have to be Joseph Gordan Levitt’s. His fight in the hallway was just ridiculous. Also I had a blast in the scene where Ellen Page realizes an entire city landscape is at the whim of her imagination and starts rearranging the physics of it. What can I say, this movie is special. A freight train runs through a city street without the aid of railroad tracks. Yes it makes sense. Go ahead and take a leap of faith with a master storyteller.

A final note on the ending of the movie, which I believe was about one second to short. I believe that it would have toppled. I say this because I would be extraordinarily confused if it didn't. Right now, I am certain that it was wrong of Nolan to end the movie on an ambiguous note at all. To think he diligently led us all that way only to cut us off at the last moment is decidedly uncool. Of course, I remember being underwhelmed by the endings of both "Memento" and "The Prestige" when I first saw them also. But After watching both those movies again, I became much more accepting of what Nolan was trying to teach me. That's normal. When a movie introduces a new way of thinking about something (whether it be memory, magic, or dreams) it is hard to accept the new thought process right away. I know it is quite possible that "Inception" will be an even better movie the second time around. I'll add to this review my thoughts about the ending as soon as I get to see it a second time.

Letters from Iwo Jima 03/16/07

This is a far better movie than Eastwood's 'Flags of our Fathers.' Why? because the mistakes he made in that movie are fixed here. In this movie, we no longer have an uncertain narrative droning though the story. We always know who is talking and what they're talking about. And the stilted old man dialogue that passes for young jokes in the other movie? In this movie it is still there, but it is covered up by a Japanese language that I don't understand. I assume that what I hear sounds normal. For those reasons Letters from Iwo Jima work as a superior film.

Also in the storyline we have a more distinctive story. Instead of American's complaining about how in war there are no heroes (Boo hoo) we have Japanese who are complaining that they are going to die in a futile suicide mission for a sadistic country. Its a bit more dramatic and it works. This is like watching the Japanese Alamo. It makes for a better movie. 

The two main charachters are great. Ken Watanbe playing the general, and (what's his name) playing the insignificant private who only wants to go home. Along with other charachters that play into the Imperial code this provides a somewhat rounded view of the Japanese defense. I would very much like to know what the Japanese thought about this movie. I especially liked it.