Movie Time 2.0: TT mini reviews

[Octopus Prime]

After being assured it held up better than expected, I rewatched Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

It works really well as a gag dub, and much less so when it was trying to be its own thing. The whole cow sequence went on at least twice as long as it needed to.

 

[Phantoon]

I feel it is a good habit to watch Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World every once in a while. It remains a stunningly well-realized naval adventure, putting a strong emphasis on the hardship of life on a warship and against that backdrop exploring the interplay between leadership and fellowship, and the kind of courage, competence, and fortitude needed just to survive under such extreme conditions. An extremely manly movie, in a good way.

Yes. It's a real shame we didn't get more.

 

[Exposition Owl]

Yes. It's a real shame we didn't get more.

A huge shame. Among many other things, I once heard someone remark that it was one of the best Star Trek movies ever made.

I always feel sad that we didn’t get an adaptation of Treason’s Harbour as a sequel, which would have been a great glimpse into the other side of the Aubrey-Maturin series. It would have been a lot of fun to see Paul Bettany play an early 19th century super-spy.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I watched The French Dispatch last night. That sure was a Wes Anderson movie. I feel like I should have connected with it a bit more, at least with the parts about being a foreigner in a foreign city, but it seemed like when it had something to say that was almost a postscript to the story. The black and white vs color was interesting but seemed a bit inconsistent; like it was just there to make certain scenes pop rather than for a specific purpose. It was still charming enough, being Wes Anderson. I love an auteur, and I really like the Anderson's distinctive style, so his movies always hit a minimum of watchability for me just by being his.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist is... just 1 hour and 40 minutes of William Friedkin talking about the Exorcist. And it's great. I'm not even the biggest Exorcist fan but it's a great movie if you are interested in the art of making film from a confident but not-arrogant director. I love when Shudder releases these kinds of documentaries.

 

[Violentvixen]

Watched Oppenheimer last night. I liked it overall but a lot of the first third of so seemed inconsistent in pacing and direction, and I never really cared about the woman he was having an affair with. My favourite parts were when Los Alamos got up and running, but even then I wanted more of the physics and math. I just realized I am saying I want a movie to have less sex and more math and yeah, that sums me up pretty well and I am aware the general public wouldn't go for that.

What I absolutely freakin' loved about it though was the music and sound design. Brilliantly done in so many ways. There were a couple electronica tracks that used Geiger counter sounds and dang it was cool. Going to look up the soundtrack for sure.

Also loved that Hornig (female scientist who worked on plutonium and is usually ignored) showed up in the movie! I have heard her line about how radiation might affect women before so I think that conversation or something like it did actually happen. Great comeback on her part.

Again, liked it and recommend it (especially watching it with a good sound system), but if you're not enjoying it during the first part give it a little longer.

 

[pudik]

Actually, I liked the first part most of all. What I generally dislike about Nolan as a director is the clinical technician he can often be. The first 15-30 minutes of the film is him actually leaning into the chaotic aesthetic that works with his portrayal of Oppenheimer as a "quantum" person himself. Even in the end of all the hearings and trials, there is an essence that Oppenheimer is unknowable at any standing, a double slit test of a personality, so in the first act there's a sense of duplicity. Of course, my other problem with Nolan is his prescriptive and purely functional dialog, and that's where I think the movie just falls flat for me. I think the argument for this kind of stuff is that Nolan is a "movie writer" so it's got snark and pace and it tries to get everything moving efficiently, but it's just an absolute bore to get through. Then you pair that with some extremely strange audience winks and bad setups and I get an experience that is, to cut it short, not for me.

I think even with Hornig, the movie is pretty bad about women. I'm not gonna harp on that argument too much, because I think at least it is expected when Oppenheimer seems to be a bit of a womanizer (at least as far as the movie portrayed. Don't know much about the man himself and haven't read the source material).

I think if you haven't had problems with Nolan's style before, then you'll like the movie though. I think it's ok, just a middle of the road blockbuster that has a couple of sneaky neat moments, and the editing is honestly sublime. Jennifer Lame is a real talent. That also leads into what disappoints me though. Lame previously worked on Tenet, and that's a movie where Nolan seemed to finally get it (to clarify, this is all from my personal valuation, Tenet is generally his least well regarded, so Nolan would probably rather "get" Oppenheimers appeal than Tenets). Tenet gets to be loose, Nolan can be more impressionist and less pragmatic, and he can work on creating an aesthetic that drives the movie. That's really neat. It's not a perfect film but it's the first time I have seen a Nolan and thought "ah this is how people feel about his stuff". Was disappointed to not get that, even if I wasn't expecting it.

 

[pudik]

For a movie that is totally for me though, I saw The Last Wave recently. Now talk about sublime. The style, the theming, the fact that Wier knows how to direct a dream better than anyone (Lynch, Fellini, Jodorowsky, et al included), everything is impeccable. It's hard to write about though, because I'm not sure I can actually describe the experience. Nothing in the plot, on it's own, feels like the descriptor. It's about a lawyer that agrees to represent aboriginals that are accused of murder of one of their own, but the functional "end" of that as a plotline manifests in a 5 minute court scene. It's more about a well-to-do and generally well-meaning center-left dude trying to support and understand aboriginals, but reality collapses so much around him that it's often hard to tell what he believes. Of course that's part and parcel, it's made from a time shortly after Aboriginals were voted to be allowed citizenship, on a land that is rightfully theirs, and it's a movie that deftly understands what it means to offer them a land and a culture that you've already rendered unacceptable and dead. I don't know enough about Australian culture especially of the time, but the parallels are chronologically and ideologically close enough to the American civil rights movements for me to see it as the best movie about the topic I can think of. It was hard to keep up with, and I'm still chasing my thoughts on it weeks later.

 

[Purple]

I ended up watching a bunch of stuff this week! Roughly in the order I saw them...

Guard3ans of the Galax3: There is a pointed feeling of "I missed something" here since I guess these characters got dragged through... 3 other movies between 2 and this? 4? I didn't watch any of them or pay attention, so I don't know where there's Laika a zune and a memory wiped protag. Not that that's super relevant since mainly this is just the Rocket's Tragic Backstory movie. I'd heard it had some rather intense animal abuse in it, which I don't know that I'd agree with, but it does have the amount of bleakness and death as I'd expect from Furry Media, which I think it counts as. Anyway it was pretty good.

The Super Mario Movie: You know when you have one of those scenes that doesn't really work in the movie and is just there to be clipped into a trailer for some implication of vibe? This is like... just 90 minutes of those trailer moment scenes strung together. Was there a plot? Were there characters? I know Chris Pratt voiced Mario, and it bugged me that he insisted on referring to Luigi exclusively as "Lou" but I don't remember him saying or doing anything of consequence? And they kept throwing in songs from the '80s that never really seemed to fit what was going on? Honestly it sucked.

Everything Everywhere All at Once: I feel like this was overhyped to me a bit but hey it's still a movie from the creators of Swiss Army Man with a wacky premise and a surprising amount of solid fight scenes. I'm also still checking my egg timer for the both of'em. Oh and I really like how the protagonist was allowed to start off so genuinely unlikable. It was good!

Psycho Goreman: This one's been on my to-watch list since it came out and I dunno why it took me so long to get to it. I was expecting it to be good. The premise (little girl lucks into artifact that commands the loyalty of some kinda demonic space warlord, forces him to do her petty bidding) is solid enough that it could totally coast by on just that and some blood hose rubber monster effects. And if you cut everything else out, yeah, I'd have liked it. But this is a movie that is just never satisfied with itself. We have our rotten little girl, and yeah she absolutely carries the whole thing, outstanding performance, and I'm still unnerved by the degree to which she is just a tiny female Arnold Rimmer in baseline presence, but then we ALSO have this whole fleshed out quirky family around her, who collectively have enough going on and enough weird chemistry they could carry a movie that didn't have this premise. Our demonic space warlord doesn't need to do anything but constantly chew scenery and feel put upon, but he's got this whole complex backstory and supporting cast and cool space opera adventures he keeps trying to narrate about but nobody cares. There's... multiple other factions of weird space people who are pretty fleshed out as both groups and individuals who uniquely, on a character by character basis each have a very distinct, very tokusatsu-interesting design. And then on top of everything else I swear the script just got like 50 polish passes to go through and look for anywhere there wasn't a good laugh for 5 whole seconds and cram in a joke that comes completely out of nowhere but totally works for these characters. This one goes up on the high shelf with like House 2 for me. A must see.

The Crow: I think I had previously seen this but it's been a while and while I remembered its mid-90s-as-all-hell aesthetic and the huge influence that had on everything else at the time, I kinda forgot how uh... guy just comes back from the dead, puts on dumb looking clown makeup, and just kinda straight-forwardly kills people for revenge. Like... there's not really a whole lot going on here. Gonna say it was OK because I just like Alex Proyas too much to be mean.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: Holy crap, everyone, please, see this in theaters while you still can. This visual technique they have going on looks absolutely stunning on the big screen. Every frame a blacklight painting. I was just gasping at how fantastic something looked like every 5 minutes. Plus it's just kinda fun/cute. I knew from the initial teaser trailer that this was actually playing up the "teenage" angle of things by making them a dorky bunch of kids, and that it was going for the deep pulls and filling out a huge cast of random other mutants that generally aren't well-known, but I was totally blindsided by the tweaked origin story where Splinter is just some rat. Nothing special about him. No martial arts background. No connection to any other characters. He was just living his best sewer rat life, got some ooze on him along with these turtles, and just decided too be the best dad he could for them. That actually works a hell of a lot better than it sounds like it would, and it throws such a wrench in every character dynamic that... well, this movie happens. The rest of the LARGE cast of mutants exist because a particularly... haunted and troubled iteration of Baxter Stockman (who is in the movie for all of one minute despite the impressive voice casting) just kinda wanted to harness the power of plot goo to make some animal friends. He gets taken out by his secret masters in the opening shot, and his first experiment/child along these lines/the one unique-to-this-movie character Superfly just kinda ends up raising this whole pile of random mutant weirdos as a sorta father/older brother who like everyone else in this is still kind of just an idiot teenager with an impulsive streak rather than some kind of big villain with an evil plan. April's a teenager too here, which really works, makes her a real character. All of this also means that when we hit the big showdown scene the big surprise is there isn't one. We've got Bebop and Rocksteady piling out of a van looking amazing as the turtles hunt down this spooky lead on criminal activity, but there's no reason for them to fight. There's no Shredder here, no big revenge motive, it's just, "oh hey! More weird little freaks we didn't know about! You guys wanna like hang out, we all go bowling?" and it's just refreshing as hell. It's not a totally non-violent conflict-free movie or anything, but yeah all these scary looking characters except you know, Superfly are just cool new pals on team good guy, and our one proper villain works as a really good dark reflection of THIS version of Splinter. They're both mostly well-intentioned father figures who rightfully fear humanity, just the one has a more drastic response. So yeah, just this really fun cute romp that feels like a perfection of a vision of cool/gross/fun absolute weirdos for the pure sake of that, that this franchise has always strived for but kept getting distracted by angst and standard action plots. Just a real good time. Also I loved the other surprise that with half these other random mutants, they just kinda quietly made them girls. Zero changes to anyone's visual design, wouldn't even know it until you hear'em talk, but yeah let's just have the freaky monsterous giant alligator with the night vision eyes be a weird nerdy girl. Why not? Was great.

Mortal Kombat: Yeah for the first time somehow. It's actually surprising how much it's like, a movie. With production values, and a sense that the people making it were trying to make something good. Especially stark contrast to the many other fighting game movies I've seen. Really carried by that soundtrack. Surprisingly OK!

Stingray Sam: Less a movie than a 6 episode series of youtube shorts/framing devices for showcasing wacky songs like this one:

But it takes its weird Atomic Age Space Opera with cowboys and late-stage capitalism absurdity just seriously enough to be oddly compelling. Pretty great for what it is.

The American Astronaut: A whole different older movie by weird auteur Cory McAbee that is ALSO about a cowboy working as some sort of mercenary courier in this Atomic Age Space Opera setting where hypercapitalist forces have largely eliminated crossgender reproduction. This one is a bit more of a serious Art Movie (I feel like it innately draws comparison to like, Eraserhead) but does still have wacky stuff like the huge build-up to the biggest celebrity on Jupiter- The Boy Who Saw A Woman's Breast Once and Describes it to Crowds (eventually paying off with just "It was round and soft. Now get back to work") and... yeah. Following that up with the M-Preg genealogy song is something. Still good, less fun than Stingray Sam.

Avatar 2: Aquatic Boogaloo: The perfect movie to watch while stuck on a very long flight and held effectively hostage. The cynical take would be that it's more of the same but with "woah, the majesty of the ocean" instead of "woah, the majesty of the rain forest" because that is unabashedly what the whole middle third is (and I'm pretty sure these fish were designed by one of the concept artists the Subnautica people contracted and wow did I ever keep expecting to see a peeper or a reaper appear). There's some actually interesting things going on though. It's a full on one generation later thing that almost completely ignores established characters to focus on the pile of 5 kids those characters had between movies, a few of whom have fairly interesting things going on. The main villain is the first movie's scenery chewing hoo-rah racist space marine was encourged to back up his memories to get resleeved Eclipse Phase style into a new blue catboy body and he deals with the resulting existential crisis in an interesting way. We end up going for a save the whales sort of angle, but the whales in question are very explicitly people. Like, full understanding of eachother's languages, treated as specific individual characters, there's a sidetrack into the world of space whale politics and history. I appreciate it. Felt a little weird that they took a second swing at the whole "unobtanium" angle though. We already have "there are magic rocks we need for Reasons" as a perfectly good justification for Earth to just send in more troops, AND we're doubling down by saying "also Earth sucks enough we wanna just colonize here" but then we've also got this additional precious resource to harvest. Anyway, gonna give that one a pretty solid OK.

 

[Beta Metroid]

Which Mortal Kombat flick?

 

[Purple]

The one from 1995, with the Lords of Acid music everyone loves.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Regrettably it seems that The Toddfathers own favorite son, the 1997 Spawn movie, is in that grey area where it’s too bad to recommend but not good enough to enjoy.

John Leguizamo was giving his all, Martin Sheen is there making me think he’s actually Micheal Douglas and the costume work was top notch, the CG swung wildly between “serviceable” “pretty good” and “PS1 Visuals” (not even cutscenes, the in game stuff).

Spawn rarely had his mask on because, hey, Micheal Jai White, why hide that? But also they put him in make up to give him a Badly Incinerated Face, so… kind of… a weird choice to still leave him looking unrecognizable.

I’d give it a 5?

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Finally got around to seeing the original Godzilla in Japanese. I saw Godzilla, King of the Monsters forever ago but the difference is literally stark and this is a dark movie that isn't even trying to be subtle that this is about grappling with the bombing of Japan. It's a great, powerful movie about a rubber puppet that breaks atomic fire and it's wild that it became what the franchise became... namely that it became a franchise.

Meanwhile Godzilla, King of the Monsters is a pretty boring adaptation. Elements of the original shine through and too my surprise, less of this movie is dubbed than you might think. Instead, characters have a conversation and Raymond Burr stands to the side and someone tells Burr what was just said. Also, though it's there a little, it REALLY tones down the analogies to the bomb. So the film is reduced to some of it's weakest elements and really tones down the sense of dread. It's not awful but it really is a crime that a little editing can drain a lot of life out of the source.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I like to treat KotM as a supplement to the original, rather than an alternative. Treat it more like the story of a guy who was caught in Godzillas attack rather than a story about Godzillas attack and it holds up better.

it’s absolutely a weaker product, but it’s serviceable.

Also, weird that everyone in Japan speaks flawless English without a trace of an accent whenever they’re not facing the camera

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Godzilla Raids Again is no Godzilla by a wide margin but for the first half it isn't bad. It introduces the monster vs. monster format but actually finishes that at the midpoint and then drags in the second half, when Godzilla is sort of... stuck somewhere and everyone tries to make sure he stays stuck. A Godzilla just stuck in a mountain is not that compelling cinema.

King Kong Vs. Godzilla is interesting. It's very much in the vein of the later films but Godzilla is still very much the villain and King Kong... just has weird rules, like electricity makes him stronger. It's the campiest one yet by a WIDE margin with lots of mugging for camera. It's also supposed to be a satire on the media but it doesn't translate super-well I don't think and is mostly just silly. But good silly. It's full of loopy ideas and is a fun time. It's also the only one not available on Criterion Channel, probably because it is connected to Universal so I watched the free one on Youtube.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Joker is... I'm still not sure what Joker is. It feels like it doesn't want you to sympathize with its "hero," but ends up portraying him sympathetically anyway. Like, it almost feels that it presents murder pretty neutrally and leaves it to you, the audience, to acknowledge that murder is bad, actually. It expects you to keep that in mind while you watch the movie, because it's not going to spend any effort itself on saying that murder is bad. In a sense, it's a film with no moral compass of any sort. Just like its titular character, I suppose?

Do we need a movie to tell us that murder is bad if we're going to make a movie about a murderer? Is this movie a case of trusting its audience implicitly in ways we're not used to movies doing? Is it amoral on purpose, because it's a movie about a villain? Or is it irresponsible in ultimately sympathizing with a murderer and portraying murders in a neutral, potentially sympathetic way?

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I've been holding back on watching Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood until I felt I had enough time in an even (I was under the misapprehension is was a little over three hours. A lot of the broad strokes were spoiled for me but that's fine because it's really about luxuriating in a world we know is in the midst of a sea change and hanging out with some characters and then occasionally it becomes a tense thriller. Despite threatening to over-Tarantino in terms of setting, mannerisms and feet, it's a really good movie with the two leads being really likeable even despite their flaws (and that Brad Pitt is likely either a straight-up murderer or a manslaughterer). I think in the edges is a slyer message continuing the theme of extreme violence changing history for the better but also a protagonist who is charming, caring and seems to have a good ethical code but also might be a monster under the proper circumstances but only in the fringes of the film up until the end (and even then his monstrosity is on the side of justice). Definitely going to revisit sometime... eventually.

 

[Octopus Prime]

In order to inaugurate The Season of the Witch, I decided to watch a movie I was completely on board with from the word “Nic Cage is Dracula”, Renfield

Perhaps unsurprisingly, “Nic Cage is Dracula” is the reason to watch the movie, as it’s otherwise… not the movie that lives up to that simple pitch. It’s one of those movies where two different stories keep crashing into each other, and there’s some parts that would work really well on their own, but then it decides to be a horror comedy or a cop movie or an action comedy and it… really shouldn’t try to be funny as often as it does because those are the weakest parts of the movie (despite Ben Schwartz being one of the leads).

At one point Renfield literally says “Well, that, just happened” after exploding a guy.

Actually, a Renfield explodes a lot of guys with ludicrous geysers of blood and never once gets a drop on him.

 

[Purple]

Reading that basically did this to any desire I might have had to watch that one.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Mothra Vs. Godzilla tones things down considerably after the mugging of King Kong Vs. Godzilla. Mostly it works but I will say... Godzilla is kind of a chump. He's nearly beaten by Mothra who dies of what I assume is a congenital heart defect, then the army completely has him beat except they good "yay hubris!! Overload the circuits". And then he is defeated by two baby Mothras.

Then we have Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster. Kind of wish they didn't spoil that because Ghidorah is top tier kaiju and I feel like seeing him for the first time would have been a cool surprise for people who didn't see this uber-monster coming. The Godzilla mythos gets wilder; the monsters talk to each other in monster language and finally Godzilla is the good guy/antihero. This is the only logical step; if the story is "we introduced a new monster to beat Godzilla", it's not going to mean much anymore, is it? He's already been beaten by two monsters. This guy needs to stop losing. The mutation of the series also means a weird subplot about a princess being stalked by assassins and... why introduce THESE stakes when huge monsters threaten to end the world?

 

[Purple]

The false belief that we need to give the human characters something to do?

 

[Johnny Unusual]

The First Power is kind of a boring action-horror movie but I will say when the villain possesses an old homeless lady, it has a slight injection of Sam Raimi-style fun.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Going forward, the Godzilla series has essentially become other films that happen to have Godzilla in them. Invasion of the Astro-Monster is really just an alien invasion movie with Godzilla as the book-end. It's pretty weak.

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep is shipwrecked people vs. secret army of villain that Godzilla wanders in and out of and defeats the big monster that... doesn't feel essential to the movie. It's like Godzilla kills a giant guard dog.

Surprisingly, Son of Godzilla is actually a lot of fun. It has some serious weaknesses; very broad comedy (with wacky soundtrack) about Godzilla being a dad (and let's face it, a Homer Simpson-esque abuser) and Minilla, the baby zilla, is weird and ugly and a little annoying. But the movie largely IS about the monsters (introducing Monster Island @JBear ), the antagonist monsters are kind of cool (some big preying mantis and a surprisingly creepy giant spider puppet thing named Komuga, who despite being a "this animal but bigger" monster, left an impact on me, more than Ebirah) and the final scene where Godzilla and Minilla hug as they go into hibernation is weirdly beautiful to me.

Godzilla, meanwhile, is moving from villain to antihero. Also one that is doing much more anthropomorphic and human-like stuff including "Sheeh"-like dancing and rubbing his nose defiantly. By the end of Ebirah, the good humans are screaming at him to escape an exploding island, forgetting that a decade prior, he killed, like, thousands of people in Tokyo. No, wait, that was the first Godzilla who is technically a different character. This one killed thousands of people in Kyoto.

 

[Voncaster]

Dredd is on Netflix. I re-watched it. Dredd is and always has been great.

Some stuff that I picked up on this watch that I didn't pick up on before:

There is a skateboard ramp built on the outside wall of the Peach Tree housing building. When Mama comes after Dredd and Anderson with a chain gun Dredd and Anderson jumps of the floor and lands on the skateboard ramp. A nice call back.

When Dredd is about to enter the first fire fight with Mama's gang he tells Anderson "You don't look ready." Later in movie before confronting Mama, Dredd tells Anderson "You're ready." A nice call back.

4 crooked judges come after Dredd and Anderson. The crooked judges try talking to Dredd and Anderson to get close and make an easy kill. Anderson, with psychic powers, immediately kills the judge pursuing her.

I'm hoping that Dredd on Netflix generates some more interest in the movie. It would be great to get a sequel or tv show continuing the story. Judge Anderson in particular feels like there is more to explore. There was a lot of world building in Dredd. Mutants (some with psychic powers and some with appendages), rival gangs, and a war on crime that is being lost by the Judges.

I also love how totally bleak the movie is: There is a major crime every minute and only 6% of the crimes can be handled by the Judges.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

All Monsters Attack (also known as Godzilla's Revenge) sounds like a great time. After all, ALL MONSTERS ATTACK!

It is, in fact, the worst Godzilla movie. Not because it is aimed at kids, though it doesn't help, but because it teaches shitty lessons (beat up your bully and fight kidnappers), Minilla is even worse than usual and lots of stock footage. It tries to add a tinge of sadness, as it is about a boy living with absentee parents but rather than the 400 Blows with monsters, this is Home Alone where the boy imagines he's hanging out with Godzilla in Monster Island (first overt reference to it. Last movie it was called Monsterland and before that it was "an island of Monsters" but not really branded. Despite trying to have it's sadness, it's even more juvenile than the kid-centric Gamera series. Anf Gabara is the dullest Godzilla monster.

At least it can't get worse...

 

[ASandoval]

If you are like me in that, especially around this time of year, you watch horror movies on streaming platforms at random of any budget and regardless of critical/audience reception just based on the title or it sounds interesting to you, a word of caution:

At The End of Eight on Amazon Prime is transphobic trash. Do not watch it.

 

[Purple]

Hey remember when they made that 4th Men in Black movie with the actors from Thor 3 and that seemed like it'd probably be pretty fun but everyone who saw it said not to waste your time on it? Everyone sure was right, that freakin' BLEW!

Spoiler

So the first problem is we're trying to do a buddy cop movie with two characters who just... don't have any sort of personality at all. One is the new rookie gal, so you'd figure she'd be all "woah hang on, what the hell are we doing now? Is that some kind of space squid?" like Will Smith's character in the first one. But... no. We just sort of handwave any sort of fish out of water stuff with her just really really studying before her first assignment so nothing is really surprising and confusing to her. OK, well, we could work with that. She's like, absurdly hypercompetent then and everyone's all shocked? No, not doing that either. She's just kinda... there.

Meanwhile here's her partner who's... charming? Totally incompetent? Corrupt? Disillusioned? Kinda seems to depend on the scene and there's no consistency at all, but mostly he just, kinda smiles and is vaguely pleasant. So the buddy cop dynamic just doesn't work at all, and they both just kinda end up... standing there awkwardly every scene. Like it feels like someone just assumed these two have comedy chops and they'll probably just improv and carry every scene with it, but... nobody told them to do so and they're just kinda... there.

And then the plot is just... kind of a bizarre mess? It keeps setting things up and not paying them off, like, here's some character potentially putting what's-his-personality in a compromising position and then falling out of the movie. Here's someone trying to hire these chess set assassins and then that scene just kinda ends and... the people doing the hiring do the assassination themselves, and later we see the chess assassins are dead, so, what was the point of that? Besides having one pawn who sticks around as an annoying wacky sidekick who... never really contributes anything or has any sort of resolution. And we have this bit at the start with no personality girl rescuing this little fuzzball child MiBs are after, and while we do pay that off with his adult form showing up as a threat later and they recognize each other it's in this total nothing filler scene and doesn't really work in it logically.

It's constantly bringing in new characters with like elaborate space mafia/royalty connections and suggesting there's maybe some elaborate mystery that's going to unfold but, no, they don't show up past those scenes. The closest we have to villains are these two twins who basically don't talk and just kinda go around... wreathed in auras of special effects I kinda figure the whole budget went into bu aren't really that impressive... and ultimately they have so little impact on things you could almost cut them out entirely.

Anyway we don't have any real plot but the one thing that gets foreshadowed and not just completely dropped by the end is oh some MiB person is secretly corrupt and evil and it's plainly Liam Neeson because he's the only one besides the main characters in more than one brief scene. There's this whole bit where he and what's-his-personality are supposedly big damn heroes who stopped this world-threatening invasion only it turns out they didn't and what's-his-personality was mindwiped into thinking that... and I can imagine a movie where that's a good plot point and he's all like self-doubting and falling apart because everyone thinks he's cool for doing something he can only vaguely recall doing, but, this isn't the movie we got, this backstory detail is half-mentioned once, no real effort is made to establish either what the fake big damn heroes moment was really all about OR what evil stuff Liam Neeson was covering up. This just kinda gets crammed in right at the end where oh, he's evil, and he's gonna give a big gun to some unseen baddies (and again, like, he kinda could have just done that, nothing that happens in the rest of the movie really effects that)... and I guess we're not comfortable with the idea of having an actual human villain so here he just totally randomly turns into a big tentacle monster after this is revealed so it's OK to just shoot him with the special gun.

And then everyone lived happily ever after and nothing girl gets to just be a government agent with no personality and what's-his-personality somehow becomes the head of British MiB despite his only distinguishing moment proving to be a lie and him just kinda being this vague weirdo who's constantly sleeping with and/or doing drugs with various space mafia dons and again nobody has any actual arc in this so he never turned over a new leaf there.

Apparently, when this movie was early in production, the idea was there was going to be this whole thing about helping space refugees hide out on earth, because people behind the original movie felt really gross in hindsight about our heroes BASICALLY being unaccountable border patrol agents and honestly really on the nose about it, but then some producer decided that was too spicy of a message and wanted just a lighthearted message free comedy instead, so NOT ONE SCENE connected to the refugee stuff make it in, and... I dunno, I guess they didn't have time to shoot a bunch of funny stuff to add in instead? Seriously it feels like they just took everything they cut from some early draft because nothing was happening and used it as filler to pad this out to like 2 hours while somehow lacking any jokes, plot beats, action scenes, or even just neat looking CGI setpieces.

Just... one of those movies it seemed like nobody wanted to actually make, that thus didn't end up having anything you'd want to see in it. Wow.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Godzilla Vs. Hedorah - My biggest Godzilla movie complaint is that they don't have enough story for a big monster movie so they make a spy movie and/or alien invasion movie and bookend it with Godzilla. This one doesn't do that. This is all about the monster. Loopy in the best way, Hedorah is changing and brings a weirdness the series sorely needed that is also organic to this wacked out movie that starts with a theme that feels like James Bond theme meets Silent Spring. It rocks.

Godzilla Vs. Gigan isn't as good but it's a pretty pleasant time. The series is skewing kid-friendly but this is a wild premise: an amusement park (secretly run by space cockroaches) is planning to wipe out monster island. It starts out really fun and the monster fights have more and more of a pro-wrestling aura. It takes a long time for Anguirus to do shit but he finally does in the end. Also, Ghidorah is now something of a jobber, as Gigan's sidekick.

Godzilla vs. Megalon is a further step down. Gigan just... shows up. And now with Jet Jaguar, the monster introductions for the good guy side feels less like "Dragonball villains lose, become good guys" and more "this could be it's own series, right?" Gigan and Megalon are both too much which I love but it does feel like each monster has a few wacky powers to make them stand out. Weird for the sake of weird in a way that only kinda works.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla is the introduction of everyone's favourite monster King Caesar. Seriously, these monsters are just showing up. This one is fairly fun and surprisingly bloody in a shonen manga way. Mechagodzilla's introduction is great and I love his big band music theme.

Terror of Mechagodzilla also has Titanosaurus but who cares. Weirdly, the director really wanted to take the series away from the kid-friendly run. Godzilla is a little scarier again (his introduction is awesome) but it's still very comic booky with a mad scientist and his robot daughter and space invaders. But it also is the first Godzilla movie with "female presenting nipples"... and it is weird. As a whole movie it's OKish but the fights are fun. I feel like as the Showa era ended, as dumb and ridiculous they got, that was usually the best part.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla is the introduction of everyone's favourite monster King Caesar.

Hail to the king, baby.

 

[Olli]

Was Mechagodzilla the one where Godzilla just randomly manifests a new power because it's needed at the moment?