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Let 1998’s “Godzilla”
stay dead. Jump 16 years and add director Gareth Edwards (“Monsters”) and the King of the Monsters is back in “A” shape. From the conspiracy-churning
opening credits, this “Godzilla” sets a dark path while looking back to the Japanese
original and riffing strong on Spielberg: Watch for “Jaws” and “Close Encounters” homages. Edwards proves he’s not joking with an upfront scene that left me awed
with anticipation. Bryan Cranston is a scientist convinced a disaster years
prior was not natural, yet no one believes him, least of all his soldier son
(Aaron Taylor-Johnson). A visit to a fallen nuclear plant proves Cranston right
as a beast -- not Godzilla -- emerges. The lizard king soon surfaces. And
he’s a rare CGI thrill. Yes, we get the ordinary, plucky staple of disaster-movie
heroes, and some great actors get lost (sorry, Sally Hawkins), but the city-crushing monster
fights and ways Edwards keeps us trapped just out of view of his beasts is a
marvel. The serious tone recalls those so-called “B”-grade originals were
grimly paranoid, despite the models and zippers. In a superhero top-heavy
summer, it’s cool to see a classic wisely reborn, breathing fire and roaring
loud. A-
“Kick Ass 2” is a
shit sequel to a razor sharp comic book movie that fingered the caped avenger genre
and reveled in and questioned its own grisly violence. Love it, hate it, “Kick
Ass” did just that. No shock: It was directed by Matthew Vaughn of “Layer Cake”
fame. This downer has some guy named Jeff Wadlow at the helm. Plot: Vigilante/hero-complex teens Kick
Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) do battle with the -– wait for it -- Mother Fucker, the now super villain son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) of the NYC mob boss
(Mark Strong) killed in film one. MF dons his mom’s S&M gear and
dishes out murder and rape. Too much. In one scene, policemen are chomped to
death by a lawn mower. Rape gets a joke. Vaughn skated the line of taste,
turning hero fantasy into grim shocker. Wadlow’s delivery is a tired echo and oddly
boring with action scenes so haphazardly shot as to bring on indifference. The sick
thrills thus become merely sick. Jim
Carrey’s role as a psycho-for-Jesus G.I. Joe is over before it finds air,
and Mintz-Plasse’s trip in a “Mean Girls” spin relies on diarrhea gags. Dumb
ass. D+
I’ve
not read Tolstoy’s phone-book thick novel “Anna Karenina,” but I know how
Russian love stories end. Not well. The same holds true for Joe Wright’s Brit-heavy
adaptation with Keira Knightley (they also did “Atonement” together) as the
title aristocrat who rips late 19th century rules and has an affair
with an army officer (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to the anger of her bureaucrat husband
(Jude Law). This is a wild-card visual beauty that plays on the Shakespeare
adage that, “All the world’s a stage...” Much of the movie is set inside a theater
with the characters moving from the stage out into the audience and up through rafters
and balconies, sets changing around them. Scenes set at a farm where true love
and hard work abound are shot with no artifice. Yes, Wright is saying the
wealthy are fake, while the people of the land are true. Pretentious? I dug it.
It’s the love triangle that disappoints: Taylor-Johnson -– looking like he should be playing live guitar at the
vegetarian restaurant three doors down from the theater I was at –- is miscast
as the officer who women swoon for. The scandalous romance, then, pales beside the sets and music. B-
