Tag: Screens

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Godzilla: King of the Monsters stomps previous beasts

The action-packed Godzilla: King of the Monsters brings the summer blockbuster season roaring to life. WARNER BROS

As other non-Marvel cinematic universes either crumble (Dark Universe), or limp along on life support between occasional jolts of excitement (DCEU), the MonsterVerse has been slowly gaining momentum like a long-dormant giant. It started in 2014 with Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, a technically solid monster flick with excellent creature design that was unfortunately more invested in the thin human characters and the procedures of FEMA camps than in its namesake. In 2017, Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island defied expectations with genuine emotions, great action, and an exciting story that remembered to put the namesake monster front and center.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the latest installment directed and co-written by Michael Dougherty, lives up to its predecessors and its name by getting its priorities right. We’re living in the Titans’ world, not they in ours, so the goings-on of humans is only interesting inasmuch as it is in service of or reaction to the Titans. The beasts wreaking havoc, whether sympathetic or not, are characters in their own right and need to be treated accordingly. Each monster has a personality, a backstory, strengths and weaknesses, and a larger mythology based on eons of life and interactions with civilization. They look great and sound even better. I couldn’t even tell you the name of a human character without looking it up—and that’s the way it should be in a monster movie.

Some years after the destruction of San Francisco, humanity wrestles with how to react to the existence of these monsters. Do we try to destroy them? Control them? Or simply accept them and not interfere in their ancient conflicts? This schism is responsible for the split between members of the Russell family, scientists who lost one of their two children in San Francisco. Emma (Vera Farmiga) lives and works with her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), looking to further our understanding of the Titans. Some are long dormant, some are ready to emerge, and miraculously, some appear benevolent towards people. Mark (Kyle Chandler) invented the technology that Emma uses to communicate with the beasts, but has sworn off all participation after losing their son Andrew in San Francisco. Between the insecure populace with murky intentions, competing ideologies and tactics, and new monsters being discovered all the time, an explosion is building—literally, in the form of volcanic three-headed dragon Ghidorah.

After this overlong setup, all other plot developments are only in service to seeing and learning about the Titans—the might and terror of Ghidorah, the resolve of Godzilla, and the grace of Mothra, deservingly dubbed Queen of the Monsters. There is some top-shelf talent here in Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Bradley Whitford, Charles Dance, Joe Morton, David Strathairn, O’Shea Jackson, Jr.—all of whom sell the awe of the spectacle.

Visually, King of the Monsters is a treat. Dragons, beasts, quasi-gods—these are all primal ideas in our collective psyche and lore, and the design keeps in mind that these things will eventually need to punch each other. To this end, the Titans look and sound physically real, even when serving as manifestations of our deepest fears. Godzilla has a bright future stomping on the cities of America. Will yours be next?

Godzilla: King of the Monsters / PG-13, 132 minute / Violet Crown Cinema

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema 377 Merchant Walk Sq., 326-5056, drafthouse.com/charlottesville z Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213, regmovies.com z Violet Crown Cinema 200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000, charlottesville.violetcrown.com z Check theater websites for listings.

See it again
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service / PG, 142 minutes / Alamo Drafthouse Cinema / June 10

Categories
Arts

Due diligence: The Wife is an intelligent look at love and conflict

In The Wife, Glenn Close plays a woman trapped in a gilded cage of being only the wife of a Nobel Prize-winning author. Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

There may be no better time for The Wife than this moment, in which the role of the male genius whose achievements came at the expense of unrecognized or exploited women is under scrutiny. (A few months in the doghouse, it seems, is plenty of time for celebrated entertainers to atone for sexually assaulting or intimidating women.) But the enforcing of male dominance at home or in the workplace need not only be specific acts of violence to be monstrous; denying a woman’s voice and right to be recognized for her achievements, then patronizingly claiming to love and value her, is not only maddeningly unjust but manipulative, whether malice is intended or not.

With that as its underlying theme, The Wife goes deeper than a bad man doing bad things to a good woman—it is just as interested in the society that made this situation permissible to begin with. The man in this case, is celebrated author Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Price), who has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His wife, Joan (Glenn Close), is excited, supportive, and protective of Joseph’s body of work. He frequently praises her and publicly declares gratitude for her love and support, while always including a bit of devaluation, along the lines of he wouldn’t be a great man without her love and support. Joan, on the other hand, has specifically said she does not like the spotlight, so all of this seems like a typical relationship between two slightly quirky and intelligent people from a previous generation who love one another in spite of their insecurities.

Where The Wife expands is by looking into the past, when Joan and Joseph first started their relationship—he was her writing teacher, praising her work with little moments of vague negative criticisms to assert his dominance. It is in this period that she both learned of her talent and grew cynical about the likelihood of succeeding as a woman in a male-dominated world of publishing. Without giving anything away, decisions made at that time were norms of the 1950s, but doing so locked in layers of resentment that went unaddressed for decades, until the Nobel Prize and the trip to Stockholm shined a light on problems and emotions that always existed.

190sFeaturing excellent performances and terrific direction by Björn Runge, The Wife tells an engaging story about a relationship, but makes a broader statement about power imbalance at home, in the workplace, and in society. To the world, Joan is “the wife,” and though many claim to love and recognize her, she is trapped in a gilded cage of being only the wife of a supposed genius, squashing her talent and individual voice, yet she actively resists being painted as a victim no matter how many affairs or indignities she endures. There is what could be called a twist that sheds more light on her character, but it is neither artificial nor cheap, growing naturally out of the emotions simmering beneath the surface. The Wife is an intelligent, tense, terrific movie whose narrow narrative scope allows it to deeply explore issues critical to society through excellently crafted characters, without cheapening the story or its message.

The Wife

R, 100 minutes; Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Playing this week:

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema 377 Merchant Walk Sq., 326-5056

A Simple Favor, Crazy Rich Asians, Mandy, The Nun, Peppermint, The Predator, White Boy Rick

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213

A Simple Favor, Alpha, Assassination Nation, Christopher Robin, Crazy Rich Asians, Fahrenheit 11/9, God Bless the Broken Road, The House With A Clock In Its Walls, Life Itself, Pope Francis—A Man of His Word, The Meg , Mission Impossible: Fallout, The Nun, Peppermint, The Predator, Searching, White Boy Rick, The Wife

Violet Crown Cinema 200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000

A Simple Favor, BlacKkKlansman, Christopher Robin, Crazy Rich Asians, Fahrenheit 11/9, Juliet, Naked, The Nun, Peppermint, The Predator, Searching, White Boy Rick, Whitney

 

Categories
Arts

Two historical episodes that need movies now

The cinematic vision for The Life of Pi is a great template for telling the story of the modern marathon. Image: 20th Century Fox

There’s no one way to make a fact-based film, as 2018 has shown. From the satiric heights of The Death of Stalin to the self-parodic depths of Gotti, and with many major contenders to come (Bohemian Rhapsody, Beautiful Boy, Welcome To Marwen), all have different goals, from education, to poetic re-imaginings of familiar tales, to outright entertainment.

There are far more stories to tell than there is time to tell them, but there are a few episodes from history that are ripe with potential, and are glaringly omitted from the cinematic canon. Here are two fact-based films we’re desperate to see made:

The Yerevan Heist

Though we may tend to think of Soviet authorities as stodgy men who were overly fond of pinning military medals on themselves, there was a time when the Bolsheviks were a hardscrabble, rough-and-tumble bunch, being sent into exile for organizing a strike or distributing their newspaper illegally in Tsarist Russia. There were even a few high-profile bank robberies, the most daring of which was the 1907 heist in Yerevan Square, Tiflis, Georgia (now Tbilisi) of a stagecoach carrying hundreds of thousands of rubles (millions in today’s U.S. dollars) using bombs, a man on the inside, and even codenames—Kamo (Simon Arshaki Ter-Petrosian), Koba (future dictator Joseph Stalin), to name just a few. The event was controversial, causing a rift between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and the high death toll (up to 40 people) was seen by the public and other European parties as a bridge too far.

This one has it all: explosions, idealism versus reality, the foundations of later conflict and post-revolutionary schisms, and the potential for excellent costume design. It even has a genuine use of the “unmarked bills” cliché, as the Bolsheviks were not even able to use all of the stolen money.

Ken Loach or Michael Mann (or both) should direct. With Mann’s set piece mastery and Loach’s understanding of how politics weaves into the dramatic narrative, they’d be best as a producer-director team.

Pheidippides and Pan

The origins of what became the modern marathon are a bit muddled, but filmmakers have worked with less (looking at you, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah). Ancient chroniclers give related but different accounts of this story; in Lucian’s, Pheidippides, one of Ancient Greece’s long-distance couriers (hemerodromes) who specialized in running long distances in short amounts of time, ran from Marathon to Athens to deliver news of Athenian victory, immediately collapsing dead after uttering “Joy to you, we’ve won. Joy to you.” This story was enmeshed with popular myth and the writings of Herodotus, who recounts Pheidippides running from Athens to Sparta to plead for Spartan support in the battle against Persia at Marathon. Sparta is sympathetic, but cannot act in the middle of its religious festival. Pheidippides claimed to have been visited by the god Pan on his journey, who asked why the Athenians no longer worship him. Pheidippides promised they would, and in return, Pan inflicted the Persian troops with—you guessed it—panic.

Picture it—one man on a lonely quest in the scenic countryside, with visions of what might happen if he fails, and his only companion is a messenger god.

Ang Lee is the choice for director. He’s shown the ability to understand a wide breadth of cultures, from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon to Brokeback Mountain. And tell me you can’t see this getting the same treatment as The Life of Pi.

 

Playing this week

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema 377 Merchant Walk Sq., 326-5056  Ant-man and The Wasp, BlacKkKlansman, Christopher Robin, Crazy Rich Asians, The MEG, Mission Impossible: Fallout, The Spy Who Dumped Me

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213  Ant-man and The Wasp, Christopher Robin, The Darkest Minds, Dog Days, Eighth Grade, The Equalizer 2, Hotel Transylvania 3, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, The MEG, Mission Impossible: Fallout, Slender Man, The Spy Who Dumped Me

Violet Crown Cinema 200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000  BlacKkKlansman, Blindspotting, Christopher Robin, The Darkest Minds, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, Eighth Grade, Leave No Trace, The Spy Who Dumped Me, Sorry to Bother You, Three Identical Strangers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?