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Restored and Revisited: Godzilla (1954) Celebrates 60 Years

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Godzilla has long stood as a universal symbol of destruction – a mighty metaphorical monstrosity whose roots are embedded so deep into the cultural zeitgeist that few corners of the world would be caught unfamiliar with the city-toppling beast. With over 28 films featuring his prehistoric personage, countless pop culture references and a slew of television, comics, video game, and toy appearances featuring the original kaiju, generation after generation have been clued into the lasting impact of this reptilian icon. But even with such a long line of successors, no film in its pantheon – or in the monster movie oeuvre at large – has left as large a footprint in the world of film and pop culture as Ishrio Honda‘s original 1954 Godzilla. Today, you may be able to pick out a man in a rubber suit but the satirical and tragic symbolism live on in robust, fiery glory.

Rialto Pictures have spearheaded this latest restoration in junction with the film’s 60th anniversary. Their previous endeavors have included such films as Breathless, The Battle of Algiers and The Third Man and have earned them the title of “gold standard of reissue distributors”. With their latest clean-up, the Godzilla of the past looks fit for the big screen again.

As all films age, they lose their original sparkle and dazzle. Not only does a shift towards new groundbreaking technology date older films in the context of the latest and greatest but the original material itself loses its cinematic punch over time. Sound gets stuck in its throat, pictures fuzz and skip, the film becomes washed out. Like a debutante out of her prime, it sags. You’ll be happy to hear then that this newest makeover of Godzilla looks and sounds, quite simply, rip roaring. The bellows have bark, the black-and-white cinematography has bite and the picture, all captured in gloriously old-fashion Academy ratio, is as epic as ever. Though some larger scale set pieces look like they could have been filmed in a sudsy bathtub, the chaotic swirl of Honda’s camera locks you tight in the moment. Dated or no, Godzilla is still a behemoth to behold.  

For those who’ve never actual seen the film, a quick plot synopsis. When a skiff full of fishermen sinks into the sea under mysterious circumstances – with a bubbling vortex reminiscent of a Kraken’s turning the crew to screaming jetsam – authorities are left baffled, and wives and children are left to cry and swoon. As the town seeks an answer, only an elderly islander can rightly identify the beast lurking in their waters. Godzilla, he mutters. Godzilla.

As the buzz of rumors swarm the town, Godzilla finally reveals himself a fire-breathing menace to the scurrying populace of Japan’s coastal regions and greatest cities. A tangential subplot involving young Japanese maiden Emiko and her beloved, but not betrothed, salvager, Hideto Ogata, takes us through the human end of this larger-than-life saga. As Hideto and Emiko flirt around revealing their forbidden love to Emiko’s archeologist father, Serizawa, to whom Emiko is engaged, invents a weapon capable of bringing down the beast that’s bringing down their city. Young love lives in one corner while mass destruction is pondered a few doors down. The juxtaposition of such youthful hope against calloused calamity feeds the tension to Serizawa’s conundrum. If he is to use the likes of such a catastrophic weapon, it would unveil a new level of destructive prowess to the world’s already thirsty superpowers. But the alternative involves the likely death and destruction of his entire country. Decisions, decisions.


This junction of themes of war-time morality, superstitious mythology and thoughtful historical reflection are set against a Japan decidedly haunted by Big Boy. Godzilla even looks like a nightmarish atomic bomb personified. Unnaturally pot-bellied and rounded out like the ghastly hourglass of the world’s most destructive weapon, his figure itself portends destruction.

As a metaphor for WWII-era America, the beastly, thoughtless rampager seems less a condemnation of Japan’s former enemies than an admission of invitation. Honda’s is a film that doesn’t place blame on the enemy for Japan’s history. Rather, Honda takes head-hanging responsibility for Japan’s great calamity. Godzilla is a dark beast awoken, his vengeance hot, his destruction wanton but warranted. Honda’s song is solemn and ponderous, his voice rings through Serizawa’s soulful mantra. There’s a remorseful sense of deservedness to Honda’s waxing morality.

Gojira (Japan’s word for Godzilla) is a hybrid of two Japanese words: gorira, meaning gorilla, and kujira, meaning whale. Originally, Godzilla was seen as a whale-like figure come to roam Japan’s shorelines after a bout of radioactive alteration. It seems a far cry from the spiny, T-Rex-like monster we’re familiar with today, but Godzilla does live on as a whale of a property. With a new version to hit theaters on May 16 of this year and who knows how many more on the horizon, we’re left hoping that the spirit of Honda’s brooding black-and-white monsterpiece can be replicated, or at least properly homaged going into the future. For those who are longtime fans or still unfamiliar with this original classic, be sure to make it out to see Godzilla roam the big screen. Otherwise, you might have to wait for the 75th or, God forbid, 100th anniversary.

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Out in Theaters: BRICK MANSIONS

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A silver lining to Paul Walker‘s death: the world has been spared a Brick Mansion‘s sequel (2 Brick 2 Mansion?). This rat-faced nincompoop of an actioner begs for franchise play with hands outstretched like a Cambodian child with a nub for a leg, hawking tin whistles and salivating for a hot bowl of gruel. You pity it, look down on it, wish that someone out there in the world had the decency to clean it up, give it a good meal and place a little Grinch pat on its misshapen Cindy Lou Who head. If someone served up this movie to the Grinch, you better believe his heart would have shrunk three sizes. Had Brick Mansions been my sad, dilapidated child, I would have never let it leave the house dressed like such a drunken buffoon and whoever did was borderline abusive (to its unsuspecting audience most of all). Like the inhabitants of the eponymous Brick Mansions (a walled in ghetto distinct of Detroit), everyone involved in making this failing, flailing, faltering deuce of a movie must have been on mild to “Chase the dragons!” amounts of sweet black tar heroin.

Brick Mansions is a movie so discordantly dull, so mindlessly thickheaded, so enduringly tongue-tied that bounding from plot point to plot point is an exercise in parkour itself. From a French man, who is over and over again referred to as such, trying his (half-hearted) hardest at an American accent (WHY?!) to Wu Tang Clan’s finest actor, RZA, slicin’ and dicin’ up red pepper after red pepper (don’t ask), there’s just no amount of yarn to string together the many cacophonous plot elements. And RZA? Seriously?

From the performance to the character itself, RZA is everything wrong with the film. He enunciates through a mouthful of marbles, the well-manicured fine-point beard that is his face drooping like a guy hopped up on Vicodin and about seven bong rips deep. His “performance” is the equivalent of purple drank – it’s mind numbing and will fill you with regret. Watching him act is like being roofied. It’s supposed to hurt so good but leaves you clutching at your hind parts. How anyone keeps handing this guys roles is a mystery for the likes of the Twilight Zone.  

Co-star David Belle, as the incessantly dim but limber-legged Lino, is equally as interesting as a pet rock. For a man who all but invented parkour, Belle’s acting abilities couldn’t be more out of line with his impressive physical feats of physics-defying gymnastics. As he zips and flips off walls, crawlspaces, and rooftops, he’s like a firecracker in action. When he’s poised to spit out a line, he’s a man who trips over his shoelace at the report of a starting pistol. And even his “amazing” ventures of athletic prowess are edited down to footloose irrelevance.  

Parkour loses its “kour” – read: core, as in hardcore (*guitar solo*) – when it’s split up into millisecond by millisecond snippets. A sequence involving a guy who sprints off a building grabs a ladder, swings down that ladder and smashes through a window would look patently hardcore if captured in one fluid shot. Having said that, I would pay good money to see Alfonson Cuaron’s Brick Mansions. What we get instead is a sharp series of events shot from different angles, smashed together so haphazardly and so mindlessly that each piece of the puzzle looks rehearsed to death and wallpapered with safety nets. Anyone can edit a sequence together to achieve the unreal but few people can actually achieve the unreal. Camille Delamarre‘s hackneyed direction robs any and all thrills from what would be otherwise breathtaking entertainment of the simpleton variety, the likes of a daring YouTube video or a David Blane stunt.

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Oh Jesus, we haven’t even gotten to the plot. Just imagine Fast and Furious snuck Dredd into a showing of Dances With Wolves. All the horrid cliches are there, waving their hands over their heads like fools, begging to be recognized and called on.

Roguish undercover cop playing fast and loose with government resources? Check. Misrepresented noble savage in the form of heroine-shooting ghetto dwellers? Check. Bringing only fists to a gun fight? Check. Oh, and unlikely duo. Double check!

We’re so many layers deep in the knock-off assembly line that Brick Mansions doesn’t mind stealing from ANOTHER FUCKING PAUL WALKER MOVIE – the original Fast and Furious, which in turn stole from Point Break which probably ripped off a caveman’s painting somewhere down the line. There’s so little to the plot developments that explaining it is just a waste of your time and mine. Just take my word when I say that after Brick Mansions, we’ve now witnessed one of the dumbest movies of the year.

See a flat-chested Russian brute fight two men leaping around like flying squirrels, a vaguely foreign woman chained to a ticking bomb that’s in turn hogtied to a USSR-era Russian nuke and car chases that sprout out of thin air … .because Paul Walker (*guitar solo*)!!! Also, acting on par with The Canyons.

Precariously balancing on Walker’s already not-so-gilded legacy, this is nothing short of an embarrassment for all involved. Brick is so recklessly conceived and shoddily written that by the end of it, it’s as if the writers entirely forgot what movie they were making in the first place. Plot resolutions are such an afterthought that pretty much everything wraps up with a shrug and a “Nah, JK!” In all its detestable glory, it’s a shining example of cocktail napkin scribbles gone horribly wrong, now complete with a happily ever after ending so flat and lifeless that you’ll be pining to watch a Rush Hour marathon in its stead.

It’s a ton of fun, if your idea of fun is wasting an hour and thirty minutes of your life. Brick tries out a few jokes here and there – mostly backflip-centered – but the real joke is on you for seeing the damn thing. This is a movie destined for the recycling bin, begging to be forgotten after it earns its keep, and crossing its fingers at Walker’s legacy equating to box office bucks. The sad reality is that the execs behind it are probably doing a smug little victory dance since this probably would have gone straight to Redbox if not for Walker’s early exit.

D-

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Documentary Dossier: JODOROWSKY’S DUNE

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Four critics were sitting in AMC’s Pacific Place Theater 7 when I walked in. It was instantly noticeable: a strange, syncopated rhythm of staticky beat-box. Kind of like the sound you hear when you rim the audio jack on a speaker system with your finger. The crackling and buzzing grew worse as we sat, until it was operating at about four beats per second. More critics walked into the cramped space, all to the same static, electronic concerto. Louder and louder it grew until even thoughts became inaudible. Then it stopped, and Jodorowsky’s Dune began.

 

Alejandro Jodorowsky is what results when lunacy is inbred with sadistic perversion. He’s an acid trip embodied. His ideas are just as wild. As you watch him throw his thoughts around, you can’t figure out if he disgusts you or thrills you. He’s reminiscent of the old homeless folk you run into on a public bus, the type that’s dying to tell you his crackpot theory: Jesus Christ is building a golden city in the sewer and George W. Bush killed Franz Ferdinand.

The French-Chilean director is teethy. A spritely 85 years old, his blindingly white grin is huge. His choppers spread from his mouth like a horse’s smile. His hair flops around as he gesticulates wildly, describing his imaginations and mental illusions. His “r’s” roll off his tongue with the weight of bowling barrels. But those bright pearly whites draw you in.

Jodorowsky’s Dune is about this man’s failed journey to create Dune, a film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel of the same title. Early on, Jodorowsky tells us, “I never read Dune.” The film is more a face-to-face conversation than it ever is documentary. Jodorowsky and the crew he assembled to make Dune, as well as a clan of historians and filmmakers, sit in front of the camera to recount how Dune was never made. At one point, a cat wanders into the scene. He picks it up and just keeps going.

“What is the goal of life? It’s to create yourself a soul. For me, movies are an art, more than industry. And it’s the search of the human soul, as painting, as literature, as poetry.” Jodorowsky walks us through the history, about half the time in English, the rest in Spanish. He tells us he wanted to create a movie that causes an experience equivalent to that of an LSD trip. In Dune, he wanted to create a prophet.

He pulls a massive book—the size of two phonebooks—from his shelves: Dune is written in big white font on the cover, overlaying a drawing of a zebra-striped purple and yellow spaceship. Contained within this monumental bible are all the scenes, concept art, scripts, storyboards that were never brought to life. Drive’s director, Nicolas Winding Refn, explains how Jodorowsky once showed him the book. “I’m the only guy who ever saw Jodorowsky’s Dune… Let me tell you something. It is awesome.”

Jodorowsky’s goal is to rape our minds, he says, and slowly, he inseminates you. What starts out as a lunatic’s ranting soon becomes an exploration into the soul’s deepest crevasses. Brave director Richard Stanley tells us that Dune’s the greatest movie never made, and we have a hard time believing him. Then, we see Dune.

A design by H.R. Giger for Jodorowsky’s Dune that was incorporated in Alien. 

Just as he somehow recruited famous artists Pink Floyd, H.R. Giger, Michel Seydoux, Orson Welles, Salvador Dali (who requested $100,000 a minute), Chris Foss, Jean Giraud, and even forced his own son to do years of martial arts to star in the film, he sucks you into his cosmos. What begins as an impossible dream becomes an insatiable reverie. Jodorowsky becomes the drug, the hallucinogen that pulls you into his world-bending soulscape. He’s Alfonso Cuaron with Jules Verne’s imagination and Hitler’s ambition.

Somehow, he fits all the pieces together, and then everything falls apart. As written, Dune would have been 14 hours, it would have cost millions, and no one wanted to finance it. We weren’t ready. We weren’t equipped. We weren’t worthy.

Hollywood told Alejandro he couldn’t join in the fun. You can’t play with us, Hollywood said. Little did they know, he built the playground. The woodchips and tree scrap they were rolling around on? His design; his team of artists and writers and producers went on to work in the industry, infecting the film world with Alejandro. Movies like Alien, Blade Runner, The Matrix, any sci-fi or blockbuster film, they’ve all been influenced by Jodorowsky’s failed dream.

Jodorowsky—this insane old perverted Spaniard dripping with crazy—pulls the world as we know it apart and then forces it back together with his hands, like an accordionist rending the world with every note. Dune was some sort of calamity, a virtual reality, a rift in time, a temporal split of magnanimous proportions. Jodorowsky broke the universe into two when he set about making his film; we’re just living in the reality where we got Star Wars instead.

So the playground carries on, not with him but within him. Somehow, he became the prophet he set out to make. Shine us with your light Alejandro. How glorious it is!

When Jodorowsky’s Dune ended, it was as if my mind was set free. Not so much as a spiritual or metaphysical awakening, just an awakening to the mind and soul. I couldn’t stop thinking. Jodorowsky had convinced me just like everyone else who clung to this doomed project. His charm, his conviction and passion, somehow it opened my eyes to the world. I began to rethink everything. Maybe that static beat-box had a purpose. Maybe that was Alejandro’s way of communicating to us, of implanting that initial seed, of reaching through space and time. Maybe that was an alternate universe Jodorowsky trying to connect. “Hello? You can hear me?”

Jodorowsky raped my mind. And I loved it. Yeah. Or maybe that’s just the Stockholm Syndrome talking.

A

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Out in Theaters: JOE

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Joe populates a stretch of XL bible belted, confederate flag-waving backwoods Texas with rapists and murders of the worst degree, painting a picture so unrelenting bleak that a repeat drunk driver that spends his days in whore houses and/or dog fighting is our closest thing to a hero. It’s a place where slavery may as well have been yesteryear, where molestation lurks around every corner, where hope goes to die. It’s a small nowheresville of inexplicable evil. Like a flash sideways where Jack didn’t cork the Island’s malevolent juju (“Lost” reference alert). Joe lives in a land where morals come to roast on skewers and are snacked on by open-mouthed buffoons. This is Kentucky Fried hell. But even hell must have its fallen angels. Read More

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Out in Theaters: TRANSCENDENCE

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Every once in a blue moon an unsung talent breaks out of their wheelhouse to extraordinary results.  Quentin Tarantino famously emerged from a video store, learning his craft at the film school of VHS rentals. Ron Howard was a can-kicking child actor before stepping in to direct acclaimed films like Apollo 13, Rush and Academy Award winner A Beautiful Mind. Even Japanese auteur and samurai-lordship himself Akira Kurosawa trained as a painter before ever stepping behind a camera. The lesson is: great directors can come from pretty much anywhere. Wally Pfister, longtime cinematographer for Christopher Nolan (another cinebuff who did not receive formal film school education) and head hancho of Transcendence, has spent the better part of two decades behind a camera. But this is the first time he’s sat in the black foldout chair etched with the word “director.” In this 100 million dollar dry run of his, he’s all but sullied the name.

Pfister directs Transcendence with the style of a National Geographic cinematographer. He looms on intimate nature shots – drops of water claim close ups like they’re signing off Sunset Boulevard – before casting panoramic crane shots of jumbled mountains cloaked in forest or tumbleweed-kicking stretch of desert lit up by solar panels as far as the eye can see. Pfister’s settings are beautifully lighted and wonderfully scenic but they still feel like the work of a DP showing off in full masturbatory fashion. Any certifiable director would have slashed wasted minutes lingering on Kodak moments without blinking.

While Pfister flexes his eye for topography, the story beats from screenwriter Jack Paglen quickly become the biggest point of contention. Paglen’s plot follows Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp), a brilliant scientist on the verge of breaking new ground on AI technology that will forever change the world. Talked into a presentation to secure grant money by wife and partner Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), Will (Paglen’s cipher) brings up some interesting questions about our relationship to technology. Since SkyNet, we’ve had a general distrust of technology overtaking their human creators. The threat lies in supremacy. While human minds are capped by biological limitations, machines face no such boundaries (a theme that Spike Jonze‘s Her explored in much simpler and yet more compelling and grandiose terms). This goes on to become the central theme of the movie: can we trust technology that outgrows us?

As one might expect, not everyone in Paglen’s tale thinks an all-powerful machine is a good thing so anti-technology, terrorist network Rift, lead by an inexcusably bleach blonde Kate Mara, are willing to do whatever it takes to prevent a future that involves Terminators, the Matrix, and whatnot. Cue an assassination attempt on Will that proves slowly successful (radiation poisoning FTW!). Will’s ticking clock leads Evelyn to take the next step in their research by “uploading” Will’s consciousness into the existing model of AI, code name PIMM. While his body withers and dies, his “self” is transferred into a super computer. Colleague and trusted friend of the Crasters, Max Waters (Paul Bettany), says that the thing in the computer ain’t Will no more but Evelyn just won’t hear it. Like Joaquin Phoenix, she’s seduced by Depp’s Him.

And speaking of Depp, can we all just finally own up to the fact that he’s just not a good actor? He depends on hairdos to express his emotional status (also, why does every movie scientist need at least one scene with frazzled bedhead?) and not caked in makeup or prancing around a Tim Burton set, he’s just dull to watch. Even without the weird, he’s still oppressively meh. It doesn’t help that his lines and those of his co-stars sound like they were scrawled into a napkin hours before shooting. Some of Paglen’s philosophy masks itself as high concept but with dialogue this trawling, Paglen reveals his cupboard isn’t filled with China. Pfister, likewise, proves inept at directing his actors, a cast that by all means ought to bring more to the table than they do. As things are, they’re like the guests who all cheaped out and brought baguettes to a wine party.

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Pfister’s begged and borrowed a cast from cohort Nolan only to have nothing to do with them. Morgan Freeman only seems here to give a brief voice over (that adds nothing to the film). Otherwise, he looks confused and is always a few minutes behind the other characters. He looked more engaged in his infamous Now You See Me interview than he is here. Cillian Murphy, on the other hand, just has absolutely nothing to do. He might be an under-appreciated talent but not so much that he would sign off for such a flat and lifeless role ad nauseum. Are production re-writes to blame or was Pfister cashing in favors across the board? I guess we’ll never know.

Act one and two have their issues but are by-in-large competently compelling bites of fiction, especially in the context of the ghastly third act. When Pfister, Depp and Co. round the bases and start the journey to home plate, everything gets totally sacked. Rome wasn’t build in a day but it sure could burn in one. Like Will’s late stage admission that “There’s not enough power!”, the internal logic of the film goes haywire in a thoughtless ending that I still can’t make heads or tails of. Instead of offering up an earned and earnest conclusion, Pfister and Paglen eschew explanation like a student who’s “dog ate their homework”. It’s as unsatisfying as one pringle, as tasteless as a whole wheat bun.

Plot mechanics are omnipresent and omnipotent until the script demands it not so, characters unfold incompatible reveals without satisfying explanation, and by the end… well it’s hard to even say how the thing even ended but I’m pretty sure the Apes won? It’s like if Inception had forgone the spinning top for a closing shot of a grinning Leo clone. Keep the WTFs in the can of worms please. Pfister’s shown he can replicate Nolan in broad strokes but, like an AI’s inability to prove its self-awareness, he misses the inexplicable piece that makes a story feel human… oh, and good.

C-

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Out in Theaters: DOM HEMINGWAY

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Bozer, loser Dom Hemingway may be renown for his safe-cracking fingers, but they don’t get an entire soliloquy dedicated to them like his little Dom does. In riotous, far-out hyperbolization, a madcap Jude Law as Dom describes his lowers bits with the candid immodesty of a Manson Family member. The camera jammed tight in his spittle-frothing face, he professes his undying love for his nethers. His Johnson is his fleshy David, his uncut Mona Lisa, his pube-riddled Sistine Chapel. It’s his masterpiece. You don’t hear of screenwriting lessons that teach starting a movie on a three minute penis-focused speech but after Dom Hemingway, they should. It’s a glorious beginning, a magnificently off-kilter snickerfest and character magnification that showcases Law’s brilliance in the role and the boldly misanthropic directions writer/director Richard Shepard is willing to take us. Oh and it turns out that during this whole sequence, Hemingway is being orally pleasured by a dude with a cheap mexistach. The movie could have ended there and been an A+.

After Hemingway receives prison-grounds fellatio, talking through the whole sexventure, we’re given a rock-hard idea of who he is and the extent of his unscrupulousness. He’s the kind of guy who answers phone calls during sex or cuts you off and then gives you the finger or waxes philosophy on his junk while his prison bitch is forced to satiate him. That meticulously claustrophobic, tantalizingly verbose opening scene is our window into Dom’s mordant soul. In his eccentric vernacular, everything is a delicious metaphor, a roundabout simile caked in cusses and c-words.  In another world, he may have been a poet. In this one, he’s getting blowies from dudes in lockup. Such is life.

Outside the prison walls, he dresses like a booze cruise skipper and stomps around town with the purpose of an avenging cuckold. The first thing he does after release is clomp to the auto shop to brutally beat down the man who married his ex-wife. Dom’s actions are that of a world-class megalomaniac with a chip the size of a hatchet on his shoulder. There he stands with bloody hands over the man who raised his bastard daughter and took care of his heart-broken wife. 12 years waiting didn’t work for her so she moved on. Dom, in this and other matters, has not.

He’s a man out of touch with the world. From iPhones to women’s rights, he’s can’t seem to navigate what has become of the world he once was the cream of the crop of. From one scene to the next, it’s Hemingway’s inability to cipher the world of prison rules from outside civilization that gets him so quickly into deep doo-doo. His uncaged loquaciousness is both his charm and his worst enemy, a truth known by colleague and unlikely friend Dickie (Richard E. Grant). While Dom whittled away years in the joint for keeping his uncommonly large trap shut, Dickie whispers assurances of fortune and glory upon his release. Cue a wonderfully tense meeting of the minds as Dom comes face-to-fact with would-be benefactor, Mr. Evan Fontaine, played by the always terrifying Demian Bichir. As Hemingway helplessly unleashes volleys of libelous offense, we see just how much of a big fish in a small pond he is. In everything, the Dom Hemingway model is outdated.

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All that transpires up to here makes for a riotous first half but there’s a notable turning point where penance starts to take hold and everything that makes Dom such an parasitically compelling character start to fade to lighter hues and knee-bending. Law never loses hold of his commanding presence but the script steers him in directions that we would have rather it forsaken. We’ve seen the man trying to win back his family back (even if their family doesn’t include a tragically-hip-haircut-sporting Emilia Clarke) and it fits the ravager Dom like a three-dollar suit.

Suffering from my ‘daughter hates me’ woes, Hemingway looks like a Cocker Spaniel with junk clogging its eyes. He’s a pitiable lunk whose legacy will measure up to his effusive tenure in prison and a propensity to crack out-of-date safes. In the age of electronic everything, even his specialization has outdated him.

As Shepard weaves the character of a bygone criminal braggart into a head-hanging old fool “alone and full of regret”, the bittersweet lark loses its bite. But I guess that’s the point. At some junction, we reassess life, and usually only in circumstances forced upon us. We can’t fight battles of the future with the weapons of the past. Regrettably, Dom Hemingway’s life reassessment feels a bit too much like a guy getting a vasectomy but at least it allowed Jude Law the most daffy, bombastic and peculiarly distinguished performance of his career. For a movie that starts about a guy spewing about the glory of his ding-dong, by the end, everyone’s got him by the balls.

B-

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Out in Theaters: OCULUS

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My girlfriend is afraid of mirrors once it’s dark. She’ll slink uneasily past them at night or throw a switch to blanket them in florescent light. When she’s staying in new places, she’ll turn foreign mirrors towards the wall before sleeping so they don’t dare reflect back under cover of dark. Early years spent reciting “Bloody Mary” have taken their toll.

Like a malevolent Cinderella story, once the clock strikes sundown, mirrors do take on an evil – or at least eerie – quality. In the absence of light, reflections don’t read true. Cast in shadow and peppered with hazy contortions, fear lives in not being able to see things clearly. It’s the absence of yourself – the shadowed dimples and half-worn portrait – in the mirror’s reflection that’s unsettling; the distortion of what ought be.

Years of horror shlock that made us shout, “Don’t close that mirror, there’s someone behind you!” – one of the oldest tricks in the book – have spoiled the mirror reveal. There’s always something that wasn’t there. Then it’s gone. We’ve been equally worn down on mirrored reflections changing their pantomime, refusing to mimic its subject and subsequently frightening them into a Hollywood favorite; the mouth-covering gasp. It’s old. Mirrors, in their slim margin of possibility, have been tilled into a desert of scares, all but relegated to the corner of slipshod horror no-no’s. Oculus sets to right the course.

Mousey children reciting folklore hymns have made the mirror the perfect vestige to express a cultural fear of the unknown and it’s this unknown that Oculus takes advantage of. While Obsidian mirrors date back to 6000 BC (Dragonstone mirrors? How could that not be creepy?), the mirror in question here looks oaken – strong, sturdy, old wood. It’s stained dark and carved with decadent inlay, curving and twisting like the horns of a demon. At first glance, it perfectly fits the part of haunted mirror, however absurd such a MacGuffin might be.

Though Oculus presents the fantasy of haunted mirrors as fact, it gives the audience credit in doubting said facts. Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) is the vessel for such doubt. After a traumatic event early in his and sister’s Kaylie’s (Karen Gillan) childhood, Tim is sent to a mental hospital to unlearn the “facts” that he had convinced himself of – that a haunted mirror possessed his father into killing his mother.

The stooges at the mental lockup have indoctrinated him otherwise (is there anything less trustworthy than a horror movie psychologist?) and his newfound predilection towards disbelief becomes the film’s first albatross. Kaylie sets out to show Tim that he was never crazy, having recently come into possession of the mirror and dead set on them destroying it once and for all.

But like anything haunted, it’s never as easy as just taking an axe to the thing and turning it to splinters. Instead, the mirror has a will of its own. And like the one ring to rule them all, it sets out to get what it wants by a form of unspoken mind control. Rory Cochrane as the father of the young siblings is the mirror’s first mark and his descend into madness harkens to the shuddersome ambiance of the Overlook. Emulating the best of Jack Nicholson’s iconic performance and the worst of sanity-slinking Jack Torrence, Cochrane’s performance is easy to have fun with. He is unsettling wallpaper as a vessel of psychological horror and domestic abuse both with his uneasy relationship with wife Marie (Katee Sackhoff) working to up the stakes scene to scene.

A tactful script from Mike Flanaghan (pulling double duties as director) saturates the reined-in proceedings with disqueting and sordid exposition. While Gillan’s airless portrait of Kaylie leaves little room for character growth, it paints a nimble picture of a sacrosanct devotee to her unpopular convictions. “What’s happening is real.” At least someone knows what’s going on. Like the great heroines of late, she’s a woman on a mission and listening to her report her findings is one of the many joys of Flanaghan’s insoluble narrative web.

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Though Tim’s journey is more arc-y than Kaylie’s, his is underwhelmingly performed. So it’s a bit of a disappointment that the franchise’s future lay at his feet. It’s hard not to look at his situation and quiver though. It’s like a life lived practicing forced atheism only to stare God in the face. Shitty.

The best scenes in the movie are born of this somewhat novel idea of auto-voyueirsm – where the characters are watching themselves, unsure of whether they are where they think they are or if they’re trapped in the bodies that they’re looking at. It sounds confusing but Flanaghan makes it work well on screen. This crafty visual twist presents a Shrodinger’s Cat issue. Once the mirror takes hold, there’s no way to tell what’s make believe and what’s reality and that opens a lot of doors for the audience.

Flanaghan’s other great achievement is in the pacing department as he’s born a film that slides along like its riding KY Jelly roller-skates. It’s also unlikely to gross you out which can be a bit of a double-edged sword in the horror community, in that it will only slightly satisfy horror buff’s effusive need for bloodletting. Smartly, it’s always ranking the huh? over the gore.

Every once in a while a movie comes along that’s so terrifying that it slips into your dreams, taints your nightmares and has you looking cockeyed at creeks in the night. Oculus is not that film. Happy to be a well manicured vestige of frights, where dread prevails over scares, it’s pecking order rightly starts at the noggin. It’s more Psycho in nature than Scream, heralding suspense and mood building as models of import over attempts to sporadically lift you from you seat with a bump and a shout.

Oculus does for mirrors what Hitchcock did for showers. We’re not afraid of them, they’re just a little creepier now.

B

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Out in Theaters: DRAFT DAY

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“Draft Day”
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Chadwick Boseman, Frank Langella, Sean Combs
Sports, Drama
120 Mins
PG-13

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Every year, one sports movie comes out of nowhere to become a classic. Last year, that honor belonged to Ron Howard’s Rush. This year, that honor might belong to Draft Day.

 

Rarely do I find myself enjoying Chris Berman’s blowhard baritone. Yet, something about hearing his voice as shots of the NFL Draft at Radio City in New York fly by made my heart beat. Draft Day, a propaganda film of the most subtle kind, calls upon an inner craving for America’s greatest sport in a time of absence: football.

Kevin Costner is back to star in another sports movie, this time as Sonny Weaver Jr., the Cleveland Browns’ general manager and chief decision-maker. Cleveland hasn’t been good at football, well, seemingly ever. With a top-10 draft pick and a chance to change the franchise forever, pressure mounts for Costner and his girlfriend Jennifer Garner, the team’s Salary Cap Manager who’s pregnant with his baby and salary cap knowledge.

Shit’s hitting the fan for Costner, who must decide between three players: the ‘local legacy,’ the ‘star QB’ and the ‘hardworking heart kid.’ Things start off pretty rough: he trades away three 1st round draft picks to get the 1st overall pick. Players rage over the decision, coaches applaud, Twitter explodes and the team’s owner (Frank Langella) tells Costner his job’s on the line.

Of course, there are other problems going on here too. Costner’s not ready to be a dad as his father just passed away, his secretary’s on vacation, and he just can’t figure out what to do with that top button on his dress shirt. To non-football fans, there’s enough fluff (a ticking clock, beautiful people and a decent romance) to make it worthwhile. Don’t get me wrong though: this movie is 100% football.

Aerials of football stadiums across the nation (notably CenturyLink Field in Seattle) fly you right into the action—there’s no better way to set the stage than a team’s home stadium and screaming fans. Coaches and General Managers cuss each other out over salary cap numbers, draft picks, and young football players with two first names.

Whether it’s incredibly real football highlights of young players concussing each other at game-speed or real-life talking heads going at it (the aforementioned Chris Berman, Mel Kiper, Jon Gruden and Deion Sanders to name a few), everything looks, smells, feels, tastes and sounds real. Filmed at the actual 2013 NFL Draft and on location at the Browns’ headquarters, NFL’s got its ‘authentic’ stamp all over it. Even NFL star running back Arian Foster shows up to act. Draft Day gets adrenaline flowing like Opening Day.

Only, watching Draft Day is like working your ass off all preseason only to tear your ACL stretching before the first game of the year—well, except for the excruciating pain part. There’s so much football that you’re left with a massive pair of blue balls once you realize that there’s no actual football in it. It’s more offseason than regular season: it’s a two-hour foreplay session with Kate Upton. Hey, at the end of the day you’re still hooking up with Kate Upton.

Draft Day wants you to lust after it—the fame, the flair, the football. Stadiums and team buildings are gorgeous, the actors are all handsome, New York’s lights shine off of players’ bleach-white teeth. It’s The Blind Side from the hind side, Jerry Maguire if Tom Cruise could sext.

Seriously, everyone’s in this movie. Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson in last year’s decent 42), Frank Langella, Denis Leary and P.Diddy/Sean Combs/Diddy Combs even pulls a Jay-Z to act as the potential number one draft pick’s slimy agent.

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Costner looks like Brett Favre and plays like Andrew Luck. He wields a football like a NYPD Chief brandishes a .45 caliber pistol. His grizzled look that didn’t work in 3 Days To Kill works well in the confines of a football compound, his cool demeanor amplifying as time begins to run out while rumors and numbers fly all around him. Costner’s calm in the huddle, a flawed but passionate quarterback leading his team through the tunnel. He makes random decisions on the fly, tosses draft picks around like hot cakes and lays his balls on the table at every moment. He’s so jittery and reckless you figure he might be high on painkillers: he’s Whim Irsay.

On the other side of the spectrum acting spectrum we find Garner, who seems completely out of place and out-matched by her peers. Garner’s repeated attempts at realistic football-speak end up sounding more like she’s reading factoids off the back of a Wheaties box. She brings the movie down.

Chadwick Boseman’s role is notable here. As Ohio State Linebacker Vontae Mack (the aforementioned ‘hardworking heart kid’), he’s thrilling. His manner is completely changed from 42, he’s much more light-hearted and clever. His relationship with Costner is almost father-son, calling on him for help when he needs it and throwing a tantrum when he doesn’t get what he wants. Boseman might be the best in this movie.

As the clock hits zero, Draft Day will likely go down as the year’s best sports movie. Though non-football fans might find it a hard pill to swallow, the elements of a great story are there in spades. For football fans, this film will be like watching the Food Channel on a diet. Draft Day always plays more like fantasy football than real football. It might be more addicting.

Another Sunday’s come and gone without pigskin. How many weeks till football?

B+

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Out in Theaters: UNDER THE SKIN

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Of the many masters of cinema, Stanley Kubrick bulges out an esoteric monolith; an unbound vision of dystopian tomorrowland. Knowingly or no, he redefined cinema and still has a hulking influence over modern pictures. He started making movies in the age of Hays Code, a totalitarian, aggressively Calvinist model of censorship that restricted the depiction of such things as “pointed profanity”, “any licentious or suggestive nudity – in fact or in silhouette”, “illegal traffic in drugs”, and other horrors like “white slavery” (…). According to the master himself, these stringent policies ruined his 1962 adaptation of the controversial novel Lolita, a source riddled with sexual affront unsuitable for the likes of pre-Vietnam War gentleladies and gentlemen. Read More

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Out in Theaters: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

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“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
Directed by Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Starring Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Redford, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp, Toby Jones
Adventure, Action, Sci-Fi
136 Mins
PG-13

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Growing up in the 1940s gives Steve Rogers an excuse to not understand the mechanics of speed dial. But when neo-Nazi’s threaten the freedom of the entire world, you have to wonder why he’s not more focused on contacting his nuclear suit-wearing chum, Tony Stark, or the bad Shakespeare in the park actor/Norse God, Thor. Unless he’s gone on some spirit journey to be explained away in extra Blu-Ray bonus material, Tony’s probably just shambling around Stark Towers in his drawers. His billionaire skyline must be literally cast in shadow by the helicarriers of doom that Captain America’s trying to take down with the only weapons at his disposal: record-breaking sprinting skills and a shield.  The fate of the entire world is at stake and here’s good hearted Steve clearly taking a hell of an ass-whopping and he still doesn’t see fit to call up his Avengers pals? Or at least try? I’m sorry but you lost me there.

The one thing that Kevin Fiege and his Marvel Movie Universe croonies tend to get right is they suit the adventure to the adventurer. The threats Iron Man faced in his third outing were largely personal. A wronged colleague becomes a viable villain, he’s forced to deal with PDST from a near death experience and his personal arsenal of humanoid WMDs transforms him from a private citizen into national defense mascot numero uno. There were larger implications at play had he not gotten his guy but Stark at least felt well equipped to handle the charge. Thor’s arc in The Dark World involves intergalactic worm holes, gigantic frost monsters and 8-foot tall Dark Elves. But Thor wields a hammer forged in a dying star that gives him the ability to fly around like a blonde, bearded Superman. Being, you know, a god, Thor was the Avenger best equipped to handle such a mark. Sure, having other Supers alongside wouldn’t have hurt but this was a mission that suited Thor’s pedigree. Equipped only with a hunky body, a pure heart and strips of pure sinew for legs (made for putting fellow long distance runners to shame), Captain America (Chris Evans) just seems out of his depths.

Look at him in The Winter Soldier. His big mission involves a retread task (one we already saw a version of in The Avengers) that he’s simply unfit to handle because, well, his superpowers aren’t really that super. His third act heroics necessitate a flying wingman because he’s simply not equipped to handle the mission solo. Joining him is snarky sidekick Anthony Mackie as Falcon, an ex-Marine with a winged exoskeleton, because calling up Tony Stark or Thor was just… out of the question?

Part and parcel of enjoying these Marvel movies is digesting them with a spoonful of salt, especially when we’re looking at them from a logical standpoint and not a logistical one. Omissions are necessary from a budgetary standpoint and we have to be willing to overlook that… to some degree. But rather than make these shortcomings apparent, smart screenwriting would try to mask the need for the whole gang. This is where Captain America: The Winter Soldier fails hardest; an especially sad reality when contrasted to the contained spy thriller that it’s established as.

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Since the events of The Avengers, Cap and his shield shield S.H.I.E.L.D. Before this, Iron Man 2 was the first MMU film to tackle the build towards The Avengers head on and got far too bogged down in the goings on at that shadowy organization to stand as a film itself. The Winter Soldier has becomes it’s Phase 2 predecessor. Like Iron Man 2, it suffers from a fatal diagnosis of teaser syndrome. It’s all about what’s to come, not what’s happening in the now. By the end of the film, the chapter isn’t closed, it’s just beginning. Even it’s titular character, that mysterious Winter Soldier (played by a hollowed out Sebastian Stan), is relegated to a minor role with only an inkling of character.

If only Marvel would realize that not ever venture needed a third-act calamity, that millions must not be dumped on visual effects and that telling a self-contained story is a virtue in itself, then this could have been a rousing triumph. As it is, Cap 2 works so much better when its sights are centered on the smaller scale, when Steve and Scar Jo‘s Black Widow are traipsing around hunting for clues, trying to put a name to faceless villainy.

Give me more super-noir, less hapless explosions. Give me the humor and tragedy of Cap being a man lost in time. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely show savvy sneaking in some current political hot buttons as subtext but fail to tell the more personal story of a lost man adapting to a whole damn new century. But this is bane of the Russo Bros’ film; it takes one step forward, two steps back. Every cheer is followed up with a few jeers. With character resolution left dealt with in post-credit stingers and a third act that may as well have been helidropped in from some other movie, the modest enjoyment one gets from Captain America: The Winter Soldier just doesn’t justify the $170 million dollars spent. It’s too busy shoulder tapping you to go see The Avengers 2.

C

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