Image courtesy Toho.
Shin Godzilla is a monumental achievement in filmmaking. It’s a gleefully atypical disaster film. It’s an inspiring vision of the human spirit.
More than anything else, though, it’s Japanese.
Manmade and natural disasters
On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by a magnitude 9 earthquake that originated 43 miles off the coastline. It was the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since the modern recording system began in 1900. The earthquake physically shifted the Earth’s axis by 4-to-10 inches and permanently shoved Japan’s main island, Honshu, eight feet to the east. It triggered walls of water 133 feet high that traveled six miles inland. The disaster left 4.4 million households without electricity and 1.5 million without water. Almost 16,000 people died, and that’s just what’s officially confirmed.
As hated as he has been, Ben Affleck was a great choice. He’s always been great at not putting any layered meaning into his lines or making facial expressions or showing emotion of any kind. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
We’ve already had one movie this year where Ben Affleck throws an autistic tantrum, and it was one too many. Now it’s two too many.
The Accountant tells the story of the title character (Ben Affleck) and how awesome and amazing and cool he is even though he has autism. The accountant is a contractor who uses his wicked autistic math skills to perform internal audits for international criminals — and a ninja, who can kill anyone who comes after him! In the movie, he’s auditing a boring, not criminal Chicago-based tech company after a saucy young accountant of their own, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), discovers some inconsistencies. But we know he does audits for criminals, too, because treasury agent Raymond King (J.K. Simmons) tells us so. He’s looking for the accountant, but can’t find him because, despite his autism, the accountant is a super-badass who uses all sorts of fake names based on famous mathematicians!
Hey, did you know Lewis Carroll may have had autism? Autism!
The choice to title this film Birth of a Nation is an ironic reappropriation… or something. I actually don’t understand Parker’s thought process here. I’ve wanted to see the 1915 landmark remade to be not-racist for a long time, and this film took its title and applied it to a completely different but still racially charged story. So… yay? Image courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Birth of a Nation fails to effectively tell its story on several fundamental levels. It is an inept execution of a concept that was weak to begin with.
The Birth of a Nation is a dramatic retelling of the Nat Turner (Nate Parker, who also writes and directs) slave revolt in 1831, which lasted two days and claimed the lives of 60 white people. Turner teaches himself to read at a young age, and instead of immedaitely murdering him, his owners give him a Bible, and he grows up to deliver sermons for his fellow slaves. Instead of portraying him as a crazy person who thought God talked to him, the film has young plantation owner Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer), who grew up alongside Nat, pimping him out as a black preacher to other plantation owners who think he can calm their slaves down. Nat Turner is exposed to groups of slaves in worse and worse conditions over the course of the film, and he eventually snaps and leads a rebellion.
Emily Blunt is wonderful and perfect and the standout reason to see this movie. The entire cast is perfect, really, and there’s even a Lisa Kudrow sighting. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.
The Girl on the Train is good. It comes recommended. But I left it thinking about how much better it could have been.
The film follows Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt), who sketches during her daily train commute to New York City. Over the course of the first few minutes, Watson slowly reveals the truth about herself — first, that she’s become obsessed with a couple, Megan and Scott Hipwell (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), whom she can see every day as the train passes, then that the Hipwells live three doors down from her former home, where her ex-husband and his mistress-turned-wife, Tom and Anna Watson (Justin Theroux and Rebecca Ferguson), raise their child. Finally, Rachel Watson reveals her crippling, embarrassing alcoholism.
One night while blackout drunk — she’s almost perpetually blackout drunk — Watson returns to her old neighborhood to give Anna a piece of her mind. That night, Megan Hipwell goes missing. Watson becomes a primary suspect, but also wants to help with the case.
Reel Entropy 