Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Despite everyone's best efforts, you can't totally ruin Indiana Jones.

Let's try and remember 2008. It was almost May, the summer movie season hadn't started yet, but there, looming in the distance was a golden treasure. It had been more than 20 years since the last Indiana Jones movie and almost nothing could dim my excitement. Then the early reviews came and they were rough. My excitement became tempered with fear and somehow I avoided seeing the movie for nearly four years. I won't put this bluntly, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is one of the most upsetting film watching experiences I have had in a long time. As an action movie, it's fairly mediocre, but as an Indiana Jones film it's an abomination.

3/10

BUtterfield 8 (1960)

I'd feel bad for the girl, but she is kind of a whore.

3/10

The Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

Adding sexy cyborgs into a Godzilla movie seemed like such a good idea.


3/10

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)

Japan's answer to Planet of the Apes.

The word mediocre fails to describe some of the Godzilla movies made in the 1970's. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla is another feeble attempt at making an entertaining movie out of really nothing good and it does a great job of summing up the problems the Godzilla movies of the era had. It's easy to see where the film goes wrong and watching Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla feels more like a chore than anything else.

As the original Godzilla series was beganing to wind down, long-time Godzilla director Jun Fukuda gives us his last entry in the series. This time around Godzilla must fight a giant robotic version of himself with the help of some sort of monster half lion, half dog creature named King Caesar. This time, the goal is to stop an evil race of monkeys from taking over the earth. The film was, technically, a success. It sold more tickets than the previous entry in the series and managed lukewarm reception from fans and the general public. Honestly it's hard to see why though.

Somewhere between it's lackluster plot and it's cheesy rip-off of planet of the apes aliens, I found myself dozing off during Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. In a pleasant change of pace, the monsters show up pretty early this time around, but that seems to prolong the wait for the final climax of the movie. The sooner you show the monsters, the more jaded you feel when they don't show up again until the last several minutes. Ultimately, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla has the same problem as nearly every movie in the original era. It lacks creativity and it focuses far to heavily on it's non-monster plot. You can't title a movie Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla and only spend about fifteen minutes with them fighting. That's just disappointing. I'm nearly done with the original run of Godzilla films and I have to say that I'm looking forward to moving on in my viewing. I sincerely hope the 80's and 90's have better things in store for me.

3/10

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

Stopping two pyromaniacs in rubber suits from trashing your model train set requires twice the faulty science.

Everyone seems to be talking about sequels nowadays. Movies are spawning 4 or 5 sequels, coming out a year apart, in a never ending string of franchises and poor, rushed film-making. This isn't a new trend though. Godzilla Raids Again is probably the most rushed, cash-in, sequel ever made. Released less than a year after the first movie's success, the film is a really poor follow up to the pleasant surprise that Godzilla turned out to be. The film, while it introduces some of the hallmarks of the later entries in the series, struggles in almost every area that the first film succedes in. Character, pacing and simple creativeness all seem to be thrown out the window in favor of a quick and dirty follow-up.

You might be asking yourself, what exactly is Godzilla Raids Again. If you've never heard of it, that's probably because it was never released in America under that title. The film, which was released in a bastardized, dubbed form in America under the name Gigantis the Fire Monster, is the second film in the Godzilla series, a direct sequel to the first film. On a remote island, two pilots discover a new Godzilla doing battle with a 200 foot tall hedgehog. The new creature, and my favorite Godzilla monster, Angurius harbors a prehistoric grudge for Godzilla, probably over some dino-bitch Godzilla stole from him. The monsters give Osaka the same treatment that Toyko gets in the first film, but this time it's filmed in fast-forward. Their wrestling match and the subsequent resolution of our plot require two times the questionable science, including some mind-boggling physics and some revisionist paleontology, and more bottle rockets than you can shake a fist at. The movie did well at the box office, but was, unsurprisingly, shunned by critics and fans of the series.

The main reason for this shunning is probably the lack of creativity with the second film. In a lot of ways, it's a simple re-hash of the first film, except that this time there are two monsters. The new monster is, surprise, pretty much the same creature as Godzilla except that he was created from a different fictional dinosaur. Angurius, although I have professed my love for him many times, is an unremarkable accompaniment for Godzilla and both monsters lack any form of distinct personalty. In the first movie, this could be ignored because of the fact that Godzilla was just a simple force of destruction. In this movie, the extra monster creates a layer of complexity that wasn't present the first time around. Neither monster ends up being all that interesting and their show down in Osaka is boring as a result. This issue gets remedies in later films as the monsters become characters instead of simple, mindless creatures. This, coupled with the movies poor pacing and unremarkable characters makes it, unfortunately, boring to watch.

The pacing in the Godzilla Raids Again is really odd. The showdown between Angurius and Godzilla, which is certainly fun to watch, takes place in the middle of the movie. Once that conflict is resolved, all we're left with is underwhelming characters and a surprisingly uncreative solution to the Godzilla issue. The characters are really the big problem here. Most of them can be seen as inferior versions of the original cast and the one real compelling character, Takashi Shimura's Yamane, only appears briefly before disappearing entirely. With our boring personalities, we also have some odd, misplaced humor, and some convoluted character relationships that bog us down even more. All this leads to a fairly interesting first half and a painfully dull conclusion. While the solution in the first film is laughably silly, it at least carries some emotional weight and creates for interesting character dilemmas. In Godzilla Raids Again, we get a equally silly solution, but without any real conflict or drama. The solution in Godzilla Raids Again is silly in a different way than the first film. Rather than being a result of absurd science, it's just a matter of simple physics and and common sense. How exactly do you bury a 200 foot tall monster who breathes fire under ice?

While I have a lot of negative things to say about Godzilla Raids Again, it's still an important part of the Godzilla cannon. It's the first movie that features a monster fight and it's problems lead directly to the changes in the series that make the later movies worth watching. It's also still fun to watch because it's just so silly. Godzilla didn't reappear for seven years, but his return in, the glorious, King Kong vs. Godzilla is a film I loved as a kid. In fact, it's the first Godzilla movie I cried in. While that movie waits another week, I will remember Godzilla Raids Again as the Godzilla movie that shouldn't have been made and one I won't ever bother to watch again.

3/10

Magnolia (1999)

It's probably going to be impossible for me to hide my bias against Magnolia in the review, so I won't try too hard. Why I let the film siphon more than six hours of my life away is a question I will be asking myself for a long time to come. Personally, I view it as a blight on the landscape of American cinema. It's an obnoxiously long and masturbatory film that would have drifted into obscurity long ago if it wasn't for the incessant cries of it's devotees. It's the definition of trivial in every way; full of connections, in the loosest sense of the word, references and symbols that amount to nothing really profound. It's a very plain movie with a fistful of easter eggs that goes on an hour longer than it should.

Since it's nearly impossible to give a brief plot synopsis of Magnolia, I will spare you. Suffice to say, it's the story of about a dozen loosely, and I mean extremely loosely, connected characters and what happens to them on one specific night where it rains frogs. Lost yet? The cast is more like a character actor, all-star team, featuring Tom Cruise, who got an almost deserved Academy Award nomination, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, John. C. Reilly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and a laundry list of other recognizable faces, than anything else and their collective performances are about as lazy as a typical all-star effort.Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the film clearly never went through any filter other than Anderson and it suffers greatly because of this. It's a bloated and pretentious movie that will had me asking for the three hours of my life it wasted back.

We'll start with Magnolia's most apparent problem. It's length and clear disregard for the principles of economy. There's nothing too fundamentally wrong with the things in Magnolia. It's mediocre at best, but at least, most of the time, it's not laughably bad. There are a few interesting characters and some interesting territory for them to explore, but there is just too much here. For every character worth focusing on, there is at least one that isn't. You're dying and you are wrecked with guilt over sexually abusing your daughter? That's no big deal, we're gonna cut back to Julianne Moore dropping the f-bomb a few more times. This bogs down the experience until your knee deep in the film with no way to pull yourself back out. This happens about forty-five minutes into the movie and for the next two hours you drown slowly and painfully. A few less characters, and about an hour chopped off the run time, would work wonders for the film, but Magnolia's problems run a lot deeper than simple issues of pace and economy.

I lied when I said Magnolia isn't laugh out loud bad at times. From the juvenile script, to some woefully pitched performances to, finally, some odd ball moments, that elicited hysterical laughter from me, the movie just misses the mark in a lot of ways. In a lot of ways I like Paul Thomas Anderson. As a director, he has a lot of skill, but his screen-writing leaves a lot to be desired. Even his best films, There Will Be Blood for example, feature some eye-rolling lines. Magnolia is, downright, full of them. Now, I'm not the kind of person who has a problem with obscenity. In fact, I have a fouler mouth than any of the characters in the film, but if you are going to use as much obscenity as Anderson does in Magnolia, you better be David Mamet. This was amplified, but some really awkward performances by the a few of the film's stars; in particular, John C. Reilly and Julianne Moore. Reilly, who comes off as a goofy characterture, and Moore, who seems to be constantly hyperventilating, give performances that lead to a large amount of inadvertent humor. Throw some in some woefully misconceived montages, a sing-along involving most of the characters and frogs falling from the sky and you've got yourself a film that teeters on the verge of downright stupidity.

I've tried to understand the love for Magnolia, but I just can't buy into it. It certainly has some worthwhile moments, but they are few and far between. The introduction is pretty interesting, but it creates unrealistic expectations of how the movie is going to pan out. It creates the expectation of some sort of profound, solid connection between all these characters, some sort of hidden surprise or connection waiting for us, but that connection is not there. Under other circumstances, I may have applauded Magnolia for not giving us a cut and dry connection between all of our characters, for using a thematic connection rather than a tangible "ah-ha" moment, but it doesn't work here. There are too many characters, that are too loosely connected to it all, for that to work. I will say that, as much as I generally dislike him, Tom Cruise does a solid job for most of the film. It's not too big an accomplishment, since he got, by far, the most interesting and entertaining bits to himself, but I won't disagree with the Academy Award nomination he received. The Exodus 8:2 references and all the hidden stuff in the film doesn't appeal to me. I need to like something before I care to delve that far into it and the stuff hidden in Magnolia really isn't that special anyway. I get it, frogs fall in Exodus 8:2, try some subtly for a change.

Rather than trying to sum up my hatred for Magnolia with more words, I will leave you with something that demonstrates my loathing in full. This being my second viewing of the film, I took my anger out on a blank sheet of paper as the film crawled through it's three hour run-time. I now present to you, a visual representation of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia.

3/10