Godzilla (*1/2)

GODZILLA
Directed by Gareth Edwards

*1/2

In 1995, during the Fourth of July Weekend, Roland Emmerich's Independence Day dazzled moviegoers with the grandiosity with which it chose to destroy the world. Los Angeles? Boom! The White House? Zap Bang! The Statue of Liberty? Toast. As seemingly juvenile as Independence Day may have seemed at the time, twenty years later it is clear how much of a landmark that film has become. And rightfully so; the film's screenplay is a masterpiece of character study balanced with buildings bursting into balls of flame. No movie before (or since, really) ever had such a dedication to major city destruction. But by 2014, I've become fatigued. We watched The Avengers beat Manhattan to a bloody pulp, we watched the Kaijus and Jaegers turn Tokyo into their own personal boxing canvas in Pacific Rim; even Emmerich himself has destroyed the world so often that he's directed himself into the self-parodying joke of Hollywood action movies. Emmerich was also the director of the 1998 Godzilla film which turned America off of the subject matter so badly that it took sixteen years for another one to pop up (an eternity in today's climate where franchises are rebooted just a few years later - even if the one previous was good). This new 2014 version of Godzilla - directed by new-ish filmmaker Gareth Edwards - is more mature  (more Chris Nolan-y) with a bevy of proven acting talent. It's definitely different from the '98 film in every conceivable way. And yet, it seems just as arbitrary.

Young & Beautiful (***)

YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL
Jeune & jolie
Written and Directed by Francois Ozon

***

It must be embarrassing for Lars von Trier to watch Young & Beautiful and realize that French filmmaker Francois Ozon accomplished everything that he wished to accomplish in his opus Nymphomaniac in nearly a quarter of the time. I must admit that I'm terribly ignorant of Ozon's filmography, and while I've always been interested in watching 8 Women and Swimming Pool, I just have never gotten around to it. I know there has been a common theme of female sexuality in a lot of his films, and Young & Beautiful is another narrative in that tradition. So perhaps I don't enter this film with the same baggage as I did with the von Trier film, since von Trier's often brilliant but occasionally smarmy act of running actresses through the physically emotional ringer felt tired in his two-part, pornographic film. Young & Beautiful isn't anywhere near as graphic - there isn't even a single erection! - and Ozon doesn't force his young actress, Marine Vacth, to encounter the darker psychological aspects of her carnal actions. No, instead Ozon allows the sex to go forward without judgment. It is a truly sexy film about illicit sex that is both revealing and without exploitation.

Locke (***)

LOCKE
Written and Directed by Steven Knight

***

At its basest form, Locke is a gimmick film. Whether it's fair to do so or not, it's easy to imagine the responsible filmmaker creating the basic conceit (for this film: one character driving in a car for the entire ninety minutes of the movie) and then working backwards. The film is by Steven Knight, a man who has written several very good screenplays that went on to become very good movies (Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things and David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises being the most heralded examples). Locke is only the second film that he's directed (the first being the Jason Statham-led Redemption which impressed little, then came and went rather quietly), but the narrative oddity of the script gives it a sort of unique quality - as if Knight may have been keeping this one stowed away for himself. Films of this limited a dramatic arena are always impressive, the difficulty of pulling off such a feet is apparent on the screen. We're watching an actor (in this case, Tom Hardy) boil an entire performance into one sequence, which gives the audience a feeling of purity. It's the reason we're always impressed by this kind of acting and filmmaking: the margin of error is terribly present to anyone who happens to be awake.

Joe (**)

JOE
Directed by David Gordon Green

**

Nicolas Cage is a fascinating Hollywood persona. He has serious acting chops, but they're so often misplaced in performances and films that can't handle him. He's not like other movie stars, who can just turn down the level of performance depending on the material. Brad Pitt will drop into Mr. and Mrs. Smith and sleepwalk through a role that's essentially guaranteed money; Nic Cage stars in Con Air and you get moments like this. Every role presents a great opportunity for him to flex his muscles, to show off to the world, TO ACT!! There was a period in the last decade where it seemed liked he was making a giant fool of himself. There are entire spaces of the internet dedicated to how ridiculous he is in The Wicker Man, Next and both of the Ghost Rider movies. People forgot that he was once even considered a talented performer. Surely, if all you knew of Nic Cage was from those films you could have never anticipated anything like what he gives in Joe - a strong performance that plays upon the loose cannon aspect of his acting style. You could imagine Nic Cage escaping the world to kill trees in the rural American South. It's the kind of performance that should restore your faith.

A Word About Lars von Trier's "Nymphomaniac" and the Nature of Episodic Cinema

Lars von Trier is a provocateur in the best sense of the word, because he is a real artist. Despite the nihilism of his overall persona and the persona of his films, the messages that lie dormant underneath are usually rather well-meaning even if they are wrapped in a tight, bleak shroud. His latest film was talked about for years before it even came out. Nymphomaniac started getting publicity when it cast professional self-promoter Shia LeBouf in one of the lead roles. The young actor bragged about how the sex in the movie would be real and un-simulated. The whole situation put people in such a tizzy that people forgot that this is something that von Trier has done before with 1998's The Idiots and that his own film company, Zentropa, was the world's first mainstream film company to produce actual pornography. von Trier's ideas about what is pornographic is incredibly different from most people's, especially in America. So, while many may see Nymphomaniac as von Trier taking a step further into the status Premier Controversial Filmmaker, I personally think he blew his wad in 2009 with Antichrist which was filled with so many hard-to-watch elements that I couldn't bear to even finish it (I have since learned of the graphic moments in the end and let's just say that I still feel very comfortable with my decision, and to this day still haven't seen the full film).

The two-part Nymphomaniac teased with an objectively great trailer and delivered a film that definitely has more close-ups of genitals then any other mainstream film that I've ever seen. If we're going for sure quantity of graphic images, von Trier hits them all as if he's playing a turbo round of pinball. Altogether, the whole story ends up coming close to four hours. After going through Emily Watson, Bjork, Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard, von Trier has finally found an actress who will take his abuse and then come back and ask for seconds. Nymphomaniac is the third film that Charlotte Gainsbourg has made with the director, after Antichrist and 2011's Melancholia. von Trier is infamous for putting his actresses through the ringer, pressing them through emotional intimacies in a way that many psychologists would probably call unhealthy. This is the ultimate dichotomy of the Danish filmmaker: almost no one creates as many good roles for women as consistently as he does, and yet seldom does a filmmaker make actresses commit to such physically demanding and emotionally painful set pieces. Nymphomaniac seems like the epitome of that, and yet it's probably the male nudity that's more plentiful. Gainsbourg and Stacy Martin, who plays the younger version of Gainsbourg's character, have a plentiful share of the sexual burden, but a large portion of this film is a parade of faceless, erect penises.

Under The Skin (****)

UNDER THE SKIN
Directed by Jonathan Glazer

****

English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer made his name as a director of music videos and commercials. His videos for Jamiroquai ('Virtual Insanity') and Radiohead ('Karma Police'), amongst others, displayed a man who had a virtuosic ability to both limit his dramatic arenas while stretching those limits and exploring just what is possible within a self-imposed bubble. He's only made three feature films in fourteen years, his first one being a half-cooked English crime film, Sexy Beast, which owed most of its charm to an insanely vain performance from Ben Kingsley. In 2004, he made Birth which seemed like a truer display of his visual style. Birth is aggressive in its formalism and contains one of the greatest performances of Nicole Kidman's career. That film was about a young boy convinced that he is the reincarnated soul of Nicole Kidman's dead husband, but Glazer paid very little attention to the paranormal aspects and focused mostly on the reaction of a mourning widow. His latest film, Under The Skin, is a science fiction story about a visiting alien, but it doesn't spend much time detailing the specific aspects of the species, instead showcasing the procedural elements of this unknown creature.

Enemy (***)

ENEMY
Directed by Denis Villeneuve

***

Last year's Prisoners proved that director Denis Villeneuve wanted to be included in the club of contemporary filmmakers trying to become this generation's Hitchcock. David Fincher, generally considered the best, most formalistically proficient director of Hollywood suspense thrillers leads a group that also includes Chris Nolan and Darren Aronofsky. These filmmakers have found a way to use noir techniques that translate into the ironic morality that is sought out by the movie audiences of today. But their films are also made with the utmost seriousness. Villeneuve is a Quebecian diector who seems controlled by these same technical and thematic motifs. Prisoners seemed a bit pulled in different directions; that film was grasping for the chilliness of Zodiac (made by Fincher) but one half of the film's story - one that included a deliberate, overacting Hugh Jackman - forces the movie into the melodrama of Mystic River. The more interesting half, to me, dealt with Jake Gyllenhaal, and Prisoners gave the young actor a role meatier than one he'd had in a while. His latest film, Enemy, also stars Gyllenhaal in another good role. His co-star this time around? Another Jake Gyllenhaal.

Ernest and Celestine (***)

ERNEST AND CELESTINE
Directed by Stephane Aubier, Vincent Patar & Benjamin Renner

***

The quality of narrative within American animated films has risen so incredibly within the last two decades, so much so that Pixar is far from the only animation studio making delightfully entertaining movies for all ages to enjoy. And yet, computer animation has completely consumed domestic entries, and there is very little formalistic innovation. Not to say that the animation itself is subpar (quite the opposite, the attention to textual detail in Frozen alone is quite astonishing), but like many other Hollywood genres, the studios have decided what sells tickets and have limited the formal criteria with which these films choose to tell their story. Which is why we have to turn to foreign markets to see animators who are still free to experiment with radical styles - or at the very least, not use computer animation. Miyozaki has long been the main success with regards to hand-drawn animation, and his last film from last year, The Wind Rises, was another hit for the legendary filmmaker. With the French film Ernest and Celestine, we get something a lot more preciousness; a film made with a childlike consciousness that doesn't pander, nor condescend to make you feel like it's anyway made for adults.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Tomorrow is not just another regular Wednesday, but it is also the tenth anniversary of the release of the brilliant Michel Gondry-Charile Kaufman collaboration Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film, a cultural staple and one of the fundamental building blocks to contemporary hipster culture is one of the great masterpieces of that decade. It's modern classic status is completely warranted, and when the great Film Experience blog decided to dedicate an episode of its great series "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" to the film, I used it as a perfect excuse to revisit one of my personal favorites and write about it from a perspective that I never considered before. I remember seeing the film twice in the theaters when it originally came out in 2004 (then just a high school freshman, still smarting about the recent Lord of the Rings Oscar takeover), and I have watched it at least a dozen times (probably more) since then. This time around, I became compelled by Gondry's wondrous direction. I've always felt that Eternal Sunshine is one of the most visually innovative films I've ever seen, but so much credit usually goes to Charlie Kaufman's Oscar winning script - and rightfully so, he was already considered a screenwriting master and this was his finest work. But while Kaufman's stamp is undeniable, Gondry's unorthodox style is all over this film.

Here is the shot that I went with:

Gondry went to great extents to visualize the tenuous nature of memories and dreams. In this shot, from earlier in the film, Joel is getting a memory erased from just a moment before the procedure began. The way Gondry disorients the viewer, keeping the background out of focus, is very disturbing - we are still in the film's first half hour and are not yet acclimated to the film's visual style. I remember the suffocating feeling I had when I first saw this sequence, the way it makes you try and force your eyes to see things that can't be seen. It's an inspired stroke and an incredible example of visual storytelling. As the film continues, his techniques become less severe and his choices have more of a charming flourish. Baby Joel being bathed in the sink, characters and objects disappearing in front of our eyes, etc; but this moment is the one that begins the process and it's the most effective, I find. Gondry never really capitalized on the promise of Eternal Sunshine (not that Kaufman fared much better; his next film, his directorial debut, Synechdoche, New York was a brilliant deconstruction on the misery of life, but it was never truly understood in its time and became a rather large failure that he still hasn't truly recovered from), but his work in this film showed what he was capable when provided with the right material.

One can spend their entire life finding great things within Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's a masterpiece of melancholia and romance, both funny and heartbreaking. Like all great films, it changes with each viewing. Different shots take on different connotations at different points of your life. I did not expect to choose a shot from the "McRomance!" sequence in the movie, but alas, it's a sign of this movie's greatness that it keeps on surprising me.

Le Week-End (***)

LE WEEK-END
Directed by Roger Michell

***

The list is endless with film titles detailing the taxing burden of marriage, the soul-sucking slog that follows the 'Happily Ever After' so many other stories like to finish on. Two for the Road and Blue Valentine, two very different films from very different eras and starring two very different couplets of movie stars, contrasted the good times of the past and the bad times of the present, a particularly heartbreaking storytelling device and a pessimistic one at that. But both of those films are brilliant and enlightening in a way that a film like Le Week-End is not. Le Week-End is made by Roger Michell, who also made 2006's Venus which gave us Peter O'Toole's his last great performance and spoke about the daunting arrival of mortality in a way that was sweetly perverted by old man horniness - it was an acting piece, and it knew it. Michell's latest film is just as cynical about growing older, but Le Week-End is not wrapped in the sort of "Final Chance" fantasy that Venus builds its plot around. If anything, it's the exact opposite, as the starring man and wife fail miserably at nearly every effort to manufacture that always mentioned spark to their suffocating relationship.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (***1/2)

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Written and Directed by Wes Anderson

***1/2

The overall majesty of Wes Anderson is tough to pinpoint. There's a downright stubbornness to the dedication he brings to his precious, dioramic stories, and with each film, there is a creeping feeling that the filmmaker is becoming more and more hermetic in his cinematic view. One might worry if the Wes Anderson world has begun to replace reality for him. And yet, I really feel that he is one of the very best and unique voices that we have in the movies today. His films strike a tone between melancholy and whimsy unlike any other before or since, and while you can usually accuse him of being intentionally stylized, there's always unquestionably a heart at the center of all his tales and while the humanity is always mannered in a specific way, his movies are always, in fact, humane. And so the latest venture of the American Empirical troupe of cast and crew makes its way to another exotic locale in Eastern Europe where we are privy to the styles and tribulations of a small republic named Zubrowska. All of the regulars for Anderson are here, his dependable stable of actors following him from film to film no matter how meaningless the role; but there is one exception: the inclusion of the absolutely exquisite Ralph Fiennes.

The Wind Rises (**)

THE WIND RISES
Written and Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

**

The empire of Studio Ghibli is about to lose its foremost patriarch, the legendary filmmaker Hayao Mayazaki - or so he says. His latest film, The Wind Rises, is meant to be his final work before retirement. This is a threat that Mayazaki has posed to his fans several times, but this time it's been taken with the utmost seriousness. So what to make of his last film? It certainly feels like the most adult, the least whimsical. Like all of his films, it feels intentionally paced and requires patience to truly absorb, but it's charms feel muted and suppressed. It expects its audience to be on a different reading level than those of say My Neighbor Totoro or Howl's Moving Castle. Mayazaki's final film is less of a cathartic goodbye but a quiet walk behind the curtain, and while his usual beautiful visual style is well intact, The Wind Rises is not equipped with quite the same engrossing story from his best work. The Wind Rises peddles on as a fictional biography of one of Japan's most polarizing figures, Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed the deadly Zero airplane's the Empire of Japan used during World War II.

Final Oscar Predictions (Including "Analysis" and Personal Choices!)

I guess it should be said that I am historically bad at choosing the Oscars, because I too often pick with my heart as opposed to what logic and precedent seem to be pointing toward. That being said, a good percentage of the fun comes from the prognostication, the deliberating and the predicting. So, alas, here are my choices for all 24 categories, including partial "analysis" (*giggles*) for the major categories and my own personal choices. So let's start with the Big Seven:

Best Director
Nominees: Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity; Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave; Alexander Payne, Nebraska; David O. Russell, American Hustle; Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

The inclusion of Payne and Scorsese are exceptional choices and outside of J.C. Chandor (All is Lost), I cannot complain too loudly about omissions as this ballot would not look too much differently from mine. Scorsese is a living legend behind a film that many are calling his best in decades, but Wolf of Wall Street has been greatly polarizing and the strong force behind this movie's success in awards season comes from enthusiasm for its main star (more on that later) and less to do with Scorsese's filmmaking. Payne's films are always phenomenally crafted and Nebraska is one of his best, but the film still holds the dubious title of being the "lowest grossing Best Picture nominee" - I think he's happy just to be around. Which leads to the three directors behind the three most-nominated films. David O. Russell is beloved by the actor's branch and has been riding a lot of awards traction with his last three films - but his style is defined by controlled messiness and his notorious reputation make him seem like a rabid filmmaking personality which puts him just behind the next two nominees, I think. Cuaron and McQueen are both nominated for work that is awards-worthy, and both made films that are top-to-bottom illustrations of their pointed visions. Yet, their visual styles could not be any more different, with Cuaron exploring the limits of visual stylization and McQueen rubbing up against you with his aggressive formalism. Either choice would be correct, but I think Cuaron's style is easier to notice which gives him an edge.

Prediction: Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
Personal Pick: Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave

Click Here to See The Rest of the Predix

The Monuments Men (**)

THE MONUMENTS MEN
Directed by George Clooney

George Clooney's directorial efforts come pre-packaged with ideas and statements, with thought-provoking ideals meant to help the human race improve. Perhaps the one exception is his first film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but that was from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay and was so preoccupied with the thin line between sexual deviancy and obsessive violence that Clooney's direction had a little bit of trouble keeping up. Good Night, and Good Luck earned him a Best Director nomination and was probably the closest he ever came to truly embodying his idealistic morales, but most of the power in that film came from the brilliant, all-consuming performance from David Strathairn who played Edward Murrow with the perfect balance of celebrity mimicry and metaphor mouthpiece. He's only really made one bad film, and that was 2011's Ides of March which seemed a lot more outraged about political corruption than its audience did. And yet, his films never seem to feel as important as it seems he wants them to be. The Monuments Men is another installment in that tradition.

Gloria (***1/2)

GLORIA
Directed by Sebastian Lelio

***1/2

A performance like Paulina Garcia's in Gloria is difficult to appreciate properly. On the surface, it seems dictated by its physicality and carnality, which is why more sexually explicit storytelling doesn't translate as successfully in American cinema. It's been thirteen years since Halle Berry won an Oscar for Monster's Ball and still people only think about the sex scenes when they're forced to recall that performance. Sex scenes aren't at the core of Gloria the way they were with Monster's Ball, and Gloria treats its sexual elements more frivolously, without all of the therapeutic subtext. Garcia's work here is just as bold as Berry's was in 2001, but she's not the same star nor does she possess the same movie star beauty. Garcia doesn't have to depend upon the sex scenes to elevate her character, even though they do so all the same. Garcia's work here is similar to the terrific work Julia Louis-Dreyfuss did in last year's Enough Said, which also dealt with an upper-middle-aged woman dealing with complications of being single and dating at an advanced age. But Enough Said was made by the great Nicole Holofcener, an expert at extracting great work from veteran actresses. Gloria is made by Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Lelio, who may prove to have a similar ability down the road.