It’d be stolen valor for me to call myself a Godzilla fan, but I felt personally insulted on all Godzilla fans’ behalfs watching this. Hell, I wouldn’t call myself the biggest apologist for the 2014 film, but I could still get down with its “let them fight” ethos—and here we’ve got, what, “make them fight”? Unbelievably ill-conceived. Add in disted fight direction (Dougherty is embarrassingly out of his depth here) and one of the worst blockbuster scripts I’ve ever seen…
Overlong, for sure—this isn’t doing anything that couldn’t have been done in an hour 40. But if every media franchise on this bitch of an Earth is destined to become a “cinematic universe” or die trying, this is a fine origin story template. And as with the Zack Snyder DCEU entries, despite not loving the movie, I find myself compelled to go to bat against its most common criticisms, because they’re all kind of bad. “Godzilla doesn’t show up until…
Watched the Ultimate Edition. Like many, I wasn’t in a headspace to give this a fair shake on release, and I don’t think having seen Man of Steel would have helped matters. Five years out…well, I still don’t like it much, but I have better reasons than just spouting buzzwords like “joyless”. My main issue is that both Zack Snyder DC movies have fascinating things to be about, and then they spend most of their runtime being about anything but that. BvS should be…
Better than I’d been led to believe. The messianic imagery, ripe for ridicule as it is, actually mostly worked for me—the “superheroes as gods” conceit was bound to be applied to the icons of the genre on the big screen eventually, and there’s never been a more fitting director to make that happen than Zack Snyder, a man whose entire brand rests on his fixation on the aesthetics of power (Evan’s wording, not mine). He rightly treats the concept of…
Not the worst Romeo and Juliet adaptation I’ve watched in the past week, but not the best Romeo and Juliet adaptation featuring the voice of Dame (you’re welcome Evan) Maggie Smith I’ve watched tonight. This would’ve been perfectly inoffensive as a 45-minute animated special, but it’s a tough watch at feature length. No wonder Disney didn’t want the company name on it.
And with that, I have completed my rather stupid goal of watching every “major” cinematic Romeo and Juliet to prep for…
2018 Robin Hood-ass production design, except 2018 Robin Hood at least had a little bit of excess (oh me oh my) to move things along. If this had been the movie I stumbled into after consuming an overpriced burger and too much hard cider at the Mall of America food court, I would have had a much, much less pleasant time. Genuinely can’t imagine how a Shakespeare adaptation could be directed worse than this? All is forgiven, Baz.
Baz Luhrmann’s complete vision for this movie sprang from the lines in Act I, Scene I where Romeo and Benvolio call each other “cuz”. There’s no other explanation.
Virtually every directorial choice here is conceptually amazing but godawfully executed, because my man Bazmark doesn’t know how to make movies. Almost saved from dialectical mediocrity by DiCaprio and Danes’ chemistry—where’s she been these past 25 years?—but dragged back down by Acts III and (most of) IV. It’s been four centuries; we know those are the boring bits, so why does Baz “Anything But Boring” Luhrmann treat that axiom like doctrine instead of a challenge?
Liked this better than my vague memory of my high school viewing, though I’d attribute that more to my greater knowledge of Shakespeare than any revelations about filmmaking. I’m mostly just a fan of the naturalistic interpretation style that was common practice by this point, where the emotion and intent of each line takes precedence over the particulars of the language. (Too bad it’s almost always accompanied by hootin’n’hollerin’ ad-libs. At this point I consider those a necessary evil, and…