The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a movie made for streaming, but it opened in theaters 6 weeks ago and only pulled $21 million domestically. It has a good cast, used poorly.
Category: Movies (Page 9 of 10)
When was the last time a Godzilla movie was a good movie? Not good for a monster movie, but a good movie? Godzilla Minus One is a good movie and is available on Netflix. It won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, has a 7.9 on IMDB and 98%/98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Godzilla Minus One cost $15 million to make and pulled $56 million at the domestic box office. For comparison, Godzilla x Kong has an IMDB rating of 6.2, cost $150 million to make and pulled $196 million in domestic ticket sales. Godzilla x Kong turned a profit, but is a forgettable movie.
Why was Godzilla Minus One so much better at a tenth the cost?
- It’s not funny or even a fun movie. G M 1 is an action movie with emotional depth. The movie takes the time to introduce characters and get the viewer to care about them. The characters are normal people for their time and place. They are not hilariously inept or cowardly, they don’t make quips, aren’t extraordinarily brave or super smart. They aren’t fashionably casual, or trendy.
- The characters don’t come with a bag full of trauma to justify why they are petulant and unlikable. That was a big problem with the TV show, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which is part of the same franchise as G x K. The setting is post-WW II Japan, so the trauma is obvious and everyone is doing their best to survive with some humanity.
- The movie doesn’t try to overwhelm with spiffy technology, spectacular scenery, teams of government scientists, or unlikely weapons. Godzilla looks believable, but there aren’t scenes meant to look impress the viewer with awesomeness.
- Japan is threatened, but the movie is about an impromptu family. The stakes are human sized. The tension comes from the people in the family surviving, not saving Japan, the world, the multiverse or other stakes too big to care about.
One aspect of Godzilla Minus One was unusual. In Independence Day, and some other American movies, there is a national pride that is central to the plot. For Americans, we are proud of our military, our ingenuity and our ability to pull together despite our differences. That isn’t often shown in foreign movies. Since this was post-WW II in Japan, the kamikaze tradition comes up and along with other aspects of culture that develop in a country that just got their ass kicked in a world war that they started.
Godzilla Minus One is not a perfect movie. Everyone was Japanese, so no diversity at all. When the little kid cries, she sounds like a baby crying. The aircraft used in the final battle was too unconventional.
Godzilla Minus One is a movie that will stick with me for a while. 9/10.
The movie reviewer, Critical Drinker, does a better job explaining it.
NYT: Will the Force be with The Acolyte
NYT: Will the Force be with The Acolyte
In two days, a Star Wars spin-off TV show, The Acolyte, will premier on Disney+. The eight episode season will cost $180 million. It’s hard to believe anyone thinks this show will be successful.
Disney spent a quarter billion dollars to build, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel, and it only remained open for a year and a half. This girl spent $6000 to be immersed in the experience. Fortunately, she’s cute and made an engaging 4-hour video about her Star Wars adventure that’s been viewed by 7 million people. She should recoup her expenses.
Somehow I missed Oblivion when it came out in 2013. This is the kind of science fiction I like. Nothing to do with time travel, not a futuristic soap opera, humans aren’t the bad guys and it’s not all CGI action scenes. Just a great story with cool technology and aliens.
It’s a very nice looking movie. Everything looks almost artistic. A couple of scenes look to have been designed to make Tom Cruise look cool. And he does.
Unfrosted was written and directed by Jerry Seinfeld and is currently playing on Netflix. The movie is set in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1963 and provides a fictional account of the development of the Pop Tart. It shouldn’t be watched by anyone born after 1963.
On IMDB, Unfrosted isn’t rated highly, because it’s a tricky movie to categorize. It isn’t a satire or a parody, or even especially funny, but it is fun to watch, for people born before 1963. Imagine an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry and George have to explain how Pop Tarts were invented to Kramer. Jerry and George make up an elaborate tale while Kramer asks questions about superfluous details.
It’s hard to imagine how this movie was made. The cereal companies, Kellogg and Post, are in a race to develop a new breakfast product. Both companies and their actual products are mentioned dozens of times. Neither company is portrayed favorably, but it’s clear that everything is fictional except for the details. The details are what make the movie fun. Characters, products and music are all from the era, and familiar to people of a certain vintage. It isn’t nostalgia, because the story is absurd, but it’s entertaining to hear a bunch of shout-outs and references that we understand.
This is a pop culture movie that covers two eras. I’ve never seen Jack Lalanne referenced in any contemporary TV show or movie, but people of a certain will enjoy the shout-out. I also liked seeing Bill Burr play JFK. It seemed like every actor was recognizable from a TV show or movie.
Unfrosted isn’t a great movie, but for people eligible for Social Security, it’s a comfort movie. There is no strong language or message, just the joy of watching familiar actors playing long-gone characters to a good soundtrack. I’d give it a 9/10 for what it is.
Of course I don’t watch the Academy Awards, but I posted a review of Poor Things and noticed that the awards show was scheduled for later in the day.
Emma Stone won Best Actress for her part in Poor Things. She had to act like something that didn’t exist. She did it convincingly. She completely sold the performance. That seems much more difficult than acting like a particular person or type of person.
For instance, Da’Vine Joy Randolph won Best Supporting Actress for her part in The Holdovers. She acted like the fat, Black ladies who used to serve at the cafeterias at Ohio State. Da’Vine had some extra dramatic work that she did convincingly. I really enjoyed The Holdovers. It was a subtle movie, but very relatable. It was nominated, but didn’t win, for Best Original Screenplay.
Poor Things also won Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling and Best Costume Design. Those are all aspects that go into making a unique and plausible world. It’s much more difficult when it’s a fantasy world.
Oppenheimer won a bunch of awards. I liked it well enough, but I’m more interested in the physicists of era, and they weren’t very prominent in the film.
Godzilla Minus One was awarded the prize for Best Visual Effects. I’m happy for them. I haven’t seen it yet, but many people are impressed with the film and it only cost $15 million to make. Domestically, it’s made $56 million. That should be wake up call for Disney who spend 30 times that much on big franchise films, but only sell two or three times more tickets.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is about hubris. Man playing god, creating life, that sort of thing. Poor Things is a Frankenstein movie without a moral or message.
John Cena seems like he could be another Arnold Schwarzenegger. A big meat lunk who can do action believably, but is smart and self-aware enough that he can do drama and comedy.
Everyone knows that the replacement women of the MCU have been a disaster, but nobody is supposed to point that out.