Rated R. I’m going to feel free to consider that a good sign. One question. If, as reported by several online sources, filming began back in 2010, how on Earth did this cult classic waiting to happen slip past my hypersensitive radar? My fake Vulcan ears are glued to ground on movies about geeky stuff like LARPing and role-playing! I mean, I am a genre whore–I kept track of Trick R Treat, Fanboys, and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane from rumors of their production to their tragic shelving and, finally, their triumphant release (except Mandy Lane. Not bad, but hardly a triumph). In this case, movie purgatory kept a movie down so far that I had never even heard of it until a trailer popped up on IMDb a few months ago. Yes, it is released now. And Peter DInklage is there! And Summer Glau! And Why can’t I find a copy! WHY! Sorry, I went to my sad place. You know what might cheer me up? The trailer!
Please note, before I even started watching the trailer, the promo posters had me frothing at the mouth to watch this bad boy…
Movie voiceover guy starts us off right by hitting the movie’s key demographic where it lives…a parking lot Renaissance Faire style set-up. I used to work at at a Ren Faire, and while we did have twenty pounds of bosom lacked into ten pound corsets, we did not have Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) packed into plate armor. Nor did we have Peter Dinklage camping it up, and hey! It’s that guy from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia who plays that sweaty milk drinking guy!
Hm. So far, three or four main guys–there’s the hot chick! Oh Summer Glau, I missed you. Can you do me a favor and contribute a cameo to all the shows I love over the next year? I can picture you in Mad Men playing, um, yeah, can’t do it. Maybe you can just run a round in that pseudo-medieval boiled leather miniskirt and kick things? Cool, thanks.
Anyway, then Danny Pudi (Community) shows up and does his Danny Pudi thing, but slightly toned down, which reminds me that I’m going to miss Community next year because it is canceled. That’s when things get a little…left of center? It’s like, watching From Dusk til Dawn and having no idea about the vampire subplot that takes over halfway through. Because suddenly, the geeky gang calls up a real live succubus. And maybe, just maybe, that’s where the movie loses it way. From this point on it’s mostly yelling and running and it’s dark, so I guess this is a comedy horror? But not the good kind, like Shaun of the Dead. Because they are taking it to a sort of misogynistic place, at least based on the trailer, and I’m not down with that.
But you know what? It still looks pretty awesome and I want to see it.
In addition to EasternCarolinaStyle.com, Michael Smith is also a regular contributing writer for the Fayetteville, NC weekly newspaper, Up and Coming Weekly.
This week’s edition of Up and Coming Weekly features two articles from Michael.
First there is a feature about the upcoming Out of Sight Dining Event to benefit The Vision Resource Center on June 6th.
Second, Michael sat down with filmmaker Mike Boettcher to talk about, and review, his new movie, The Hornet’s Nest.
Click the link below to read more
(You will be routed to UpandComingWeekly.com)
Michael Smith at Up and Coming Weekly
If you were to go out into the streets and ask people to name the most famous of the monsters of movies I would argue that Godzilla would win in a landslide. In the various installments, the proclaimed, King of the Monsters, has been both a terror to humanity and its hero.
Toho Company was the original film company to bring the monster to the big screen in the 1954 classic Gojira. The film was a made as a metaphor for the impending “monster” that was the nuclear arms race that had gripped the planet. Since that first film, the Japanese studio has gone on to make around 30 more feature length movies that have seen the monster become a near global household name, but slowly losing its moral/socio-political weight.
In the 50+ years of the Godzilla franchise there have been 3 films made by an American studios; 1956’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, a Sony reboot of the character in 1998, and then the most recent reboot; Legendary and Warner Brothers’ Godzilla that hits theatres today.
The 1956 movie that was the first to be made by an American studio was basically the 1954 Japanese version repackaged as a pseudo-documentary with Raymond Burr serving as the narrator. The 1998 dumpster fire that we were inflicted with by Sony was an absolute insult to the history of this iconic character and will never be mentioned again. That leads us to the Legendary-Warner Brothers film that hits theatres this weekend.
Is this Godzilla movie another stinker, a lame repackaging, or a winner?
The story is very close to the one we are all familiar with, actions taken by man awaken monsters from prehistoric earth that rise up to feed on radiation and destroy lots of stuff in the process. But to add a little bit of the human element to this saga, the writers inserted the personal impact the monsters had on the Brody family. This added element fit remarkably well and was easy to follow and believe.
Bryan Cranston plays Joe Brody who is the supervisor of a nuclear power plant in Japan. His plant is the epicenter of an uprising of monsters. Cranston does a wonderful job in the role, the emotional destruction of Joe Brody following the meltdown at the plant and the near psychosis that he falls into are very well done. Joe Brody’s son, Ford Brody is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Ford is married with a kid of his own and serves as an ordinance officer in the Navy. Elizabeth Olsen plays Ford’s wife, Elle. The main cast is rounded out by Ken Wantanabe who plays Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, the lead scientist/investigator that oversees the monster events. Outside of Cranston the cast is adequate with no one really standing out as particularly noteworthy either in a good way or a bad way. Considering the star of the movie is the monster… that is a very good thing.
We all have an image in our minds as to what Godzilla is supposed to look like. 50 years of movies have seared that image into our minds. Obviously, in 2014 there is no way that a studio is going to make a movie by putting a guy on a scaled down city set in a rubber suit to achieve the look we have in our minds. Today we use motion capture technology and other forms of CGI animation to pull off this type of movie. We have seen what kind of work can be done with this scale of monster in movies like Cloverfield and Pacific Rim. So how did this incarnation of Godzilla do? I will say that purists will be happy and newbies will be impressed. The monster kept the classic feel, while also looking more lifelike than the original rubber suit.
All things considered, I am very impressed with the work that was done with this movie. With that “other” movie in the back of my mind, I had low hopes for what I was going to see. I am very happy to report that I was pleasantly surprised by the movie and will happily recommend it to anyone that is a fan of the classic Godzilla movies. For the rest of society that just likes to see a good big budget action movie, you are in for a treat as well. This movie has set the tone for the summer of 2014; hopefully the rest of the summer can follow Godzilla’s lead.
The X-Men franchise has turned into a cash cow for Fox with 6 movies already done and at least 3 more on the way. Disney is taking in cash by the dump truck load based off of the 8 or 9 movies that have been released in their Avengers based film franchise. They have 5 or 6 more in the pipeline to come!
With Disney and Fox bringing in BILLIONS off of their franchises you know Sony is going to do all that it can to cash in on the Marvel heroes they have the rights to. With their luck in being the owner to the film rights of one of the bestselling of all time, Spider-Man. How can they go wrong?
Let me tell you how they can go wrong. They can bring in a team led by Sami Rami to give life to the character over the course of 3 films in 5 years. They can let that team make BILLIONS (yes with a B) for the studio. They can ask the team to develop 3 more movies to continue the franchise. Then they can give the team the most unrealistic timetable possible. That deadline will send the team packing and forcing Sony to promptly reboot the series from scratch. Wait! What? Huh?
The first part of the reboot hit the big screen in 2012. The Amazing Spider-Man movie wasn’t a bad start despite only taking in about 60 million in its opening weekend. The new guy playing Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield, seemed like a good fit and the supporting cast seemed to be ripped right from the pages of the comics without any adulterations. Fans seemed to accept the new younger version of the wall crawler without much complaint or confusion.
Fast-forward two years and the next installment, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, is now ready for fans to enjoy and spend copious amounts of money on. The cast from the first movie has returned and a big name, Jamie Foxx, is brought in to be the main villain. All things considered, this movie should be as good as money in the bank.
Too bad it has so many issues. That money in the bank might end up being a series of small deposits that take years to get in. The movie has some very real problems that are going to be hard to overlook.
First, the story is too broad, maybe even to the point of being diluted. The cast of characters that appear in the movie feel crammed in and have too many sub-plots attached to them. It makes the story feel massive and unwieldy.
Peter Parker is actually the worst for having too many sub-plots to follow. He has to deal with girlfriend drama, daddy issues, buddy problems and saving the city from the crazy blue skinned guy that can shoot bolts of electricity from his hands. I think you could have done away with all of the love interest related build-up and been just fine in the end, all things considered.
Eventually, all the various sub-plots from the diverse cast of characters do come together and feed back into the main story. The story arc of the Sinister Six that is teased in the trailer is set in motion, Harry is fully into being the Green Goblin, also from the trailer, and the Peter-Gwen girlfriend issues are all cleaned up. Sadly, by the time all of the plotlines converge, the damage is already done. The sprawling story takes so much time to develop you find yourself to be the victim of fanny-fatigue from sitting in a theatre for two and a half hours.
Despite the weakness of the story itself, there are some very real positive to the movie that can’t be overlooked either.
Andrew Garfield is absolutely perfect for the wise-cracking super hero role. He has the right delivery and witty charisma to make even the staunchest of fanboys happy. His portrayal is good enough that it can effectively offset the awkward performance of Max Dillon/Electro by Jamie Foxx and the annoying Gwen Stacy from Emma Stone. If he could have put on just a little more muscle to better look the part, I would be able to say that he offset Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn performance too.
Another overwhelming positive is in the special effects. The effects designers’ attention to detail is very obvious right from the start. As Spider-Man dives from the height of a skyscraper at the onset of the movie you get to see the back of the suit actually flap and ripple in the wind as he falls. In Spider-Man incarnations past, that level of thought was just not applied.
The quality effects are not just limited to Spider-Man swinging around either. When the fight scenes between our hero and Electro occur, as well as the fight between Spidey and the Goblin, they are exactly what you would want them to look like. Another example of the exacting attention to detail is in the way the electrical current is seen flowing throw the small veins and arteries in Electro’s skin before he releases a bolt of lightning from his outstretched arms.
In the end, if you can accept that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a movie meant to bridge the chain of events that started two years ago with the storylines that are planned for the near future, you will probably enjoy this movie. If you are one that likes to really get into the story and pick apart the story and sniff out hints and clues of what is to come, you are in for a busy night trying to keep up with this story. Eat your Wheaties and bring an extra butt cushion, you will need it.
The Other Woman was supposed to be a “hilarious girl power movie” about a man’s mistresses and wife going after revenge when he gets caught repetitively cheating. “Hilarious girl power movie” is not what I spent 109 minutes watching.
Cameron Diaz was okay in the role of Carly and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was okay as Mark. Outside of those two actors is where we find the first flaw of the movie, acting.
Leslie Mann as the wife; Kate, and Nicki Minaj as Lydia were both very hard to enjoy because of their choices in the way they portrayed their characters. Mann’s whiny delivery got very old very fast and Minaj’s accent sounded like a ratchet Barbra Streisand. They could have been delivering some of the funniest, most poignant lines ever spoken in a comedy, but I will never know it. I just wanted them to stop talking!
Obviously, I could also back a truck over Kate Upton’s acting, but I won’t. She was brought in to play a role that she was perfect for; the younger, blonder, bigger breasted mistress. She can do that effectively by just standing there and waving to the camera. No need to criticize that.
Setting aside the acting, the material they were working withdidn’t really give them much of a chance. I’m not saying there is nothing funny about the movie because that would be untrue. The scenes that are intended to be funny are often funny at first and then fall flat because they are taken too far. The writer, Melissa Stack, seemed to work on the mindset that “if some is good, more has to be better.”
Scenes that focus on Leslie Mann’s character of Kate are the worst for this. In the audience’s introduction to her, she takes a funny joke about needing “brain camp” and proceeds to run with the joke to the point where it becomes truly awkward to watch.
The scenes with Mann and Diaz together are also very predictable. The two actresses have good chemistry, but that chemistry is wasted due to some bad writing and direction.
Where the comedy failed the most is in the revenge plot itself. The truly petty acts that were chosen by the women led to pay off scenes that were mildly funny, but completely unoriginal. The execution of the revenge plot finale also seemed to be an afterthought. The petty acts are supposed to be part of a larger “master plan” that you quickly realize doesn’t exist.
There were some other issues that I picked up on that a casual viewer may not notice. They are subtle, but reflect an overall lack of attention to detail:
There is a scene where Don Johnson’s mouth is moving, but you hear Cameron Diaz’s voice. It is like an old Kung Fu movie or something. It was a sign of some half-assed or rushed editing.
In an unintentionally funny scene, they dubbed over Cameron Diaz dropping an F-bomb and thought no one would notice! It was so badly done that I thought I had initially misheard her. After conferring with a colleague, we agreed that Diaz’s lips read “Fuck” but voice said “Freak.”
How could a movie as flawed as The Other Woman make it to the screen to be seen in public in the first place? Conventional wisdom would state that someone in authority would have said, “Whoa, we have some issues here that we need to address first.” I know that bad movies get made every day, but this is not supposed to be a bad movie!
I have a few theories as to how it happened:
Root cause aside, if you do decide to go out and give this one a chance, you will laugh, albeit not as much as you should. Diaz does her thing and the rest can be passable to the right person. Overall, if you keep your expectations super low and can drink enough to get your standards for acting down to the right level; you might even enjoy it a little.
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