Reel Entropy

Warner Bros. and Gareth Edwards made a perfectly serviceable movie about Aaron Taylor-Johnson and M.U.T.O, but the advertising campaign was all about Bryan Cranston. That means, somewhere down the line, someone pretty high up sat down and acknowledged “Bryan Cranston and Godzilla are what people want to see” and didn’t make a movie about it. This is very not cool. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Godzilla’s trailers are excellent. The feature is completely unrelated.

The film, which was supposed to be about nuclear physicist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and Godzilla, is actually about Navy Lieutenant Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Objects, weird giant bug things that eat nuclear radiation. According to Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), both Godzilla at the M.U.T.O are ancient beings from when the earth was young and radiation was rampant on its surface. They burrowed underground and underwater as the planet developed, only to rise again when awakened by nuclear submarines and power plants. There is literally no way for Serizawa to know this, but it’s a movie so just go with it, OK?

The first thing to understand about this movie is what a terrible bait-and-switch it is. The movie promises Bryan Cranston, but it does not deliver Bryan Cranston. Bryan Cranston’s character dies 20 minutes in. His character’s son, played by Taylor-Johnson, takes the lead role and while Taylor-Johnson is a fine actor, the One who Knocks he is not. People expecting to see Bryan Cranston in his first major role since the end of Breaking Bad, which should be anyone who’s been paying even basic levels of attention to their surroundings for the past few months, will go home feeling cheated.

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There’s also quite a lot of male nudity, for better or worse. Photo courtesy Universal Pictures.

With sterling performances and writing, Neighbors immediately becomes the most solid experience in theaters right now.

The film sets the Radner family (Seth Rogen, who also produces, and Rose Byrne), freshly moved into a house they’ve spent every dime on, against a frat house that moves in next door and that fraternity’s president, Teddy Sanders (Zac Efron). Initially, the Radners party with them as both groups try to gain each other’s respect and cooperation. But when the Radners phone the police, the frat begins to deliberately push the envelope with noise and trash. The situation quickly escalates out of control.

Neighbors is a deeply satisfying comedy, attacking with unexpected body humor and clever jokes but never descending into generic stupidity. Writers Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien have a winner with this script, one that is funny and subtly thought-provoking. Rogen is divisive as a comic actor because his bread and butter — saying things that aren’t funny in such a way that stoners will laugh anyway — is technically not very funny, but here he gets solid lines with which to use his delivery.

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The Amazing Spider-Man’s poor direction and over-the-top script combines with Spider-Man 3’s overcrowded, clustered feel to form…

Electro (Jamie Foxx) adds a great current of cool and a subtly dark undertone of sadness to the film. Photos courtesy Columbia Pictures.

…a surprisingly decent movie.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s story threads (ha ha ha, spider-man threads) are almost endless. The movie is way too long because it features way too many different plot points. Among them: Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) reconcile their inability to keep their hands off each other with Parker’s fear that his presence endangers her; Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan) has a blood disease; Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), a lonely electrical engineer who becomes obsessed with Spider-Man after the webslinger gives him a self-esteem boost, has an industrial accident involving electric eels and becomes Electro; and Richard Parker (Campbell Scott) does some weird governmenty-sciencey stuff in the past as part of the reboot series’ cheap gimmick where he’s somehow an important character. Also, Rhino (Paul Giamatti*) is in this movie.

Normally what happens when a movie is this crowded is none of its aspects are allowed to breathe and they all fall flat, but this movie is mostly saved by sterling performances. Garfield and Stone have palpable chemistry, and context provided by the first movie is helpful. Foxx displays the acting range of a fixed-wing bomber in this movie, coming fresh off strong action leads in Django Unchained and White House Down to play an insecure, bumbling nobody in this film. He’s lonely, he’s sad, he’s angry, he’s schizophrenic and he’s the very epitome of cool after he becomes Electro.

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Overtly Sexist Media Inc. presents The Other Woman.

Leslie Mann, an actor, Nicki Minaj, a singer, Cameron Diaz, an actor, and Kate Upton, a model, star in The Other Woman. They’re wearing heels. They’re always wearing heels. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

The movie follows Carly Whitten (Cameron Diaz), the main character, Kate King (Leslie Mann), the dumb one of the group, and Amber (Kate Upton), the other dumb one of the group, as they avenge themselves on Kate’s husband, Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who had been sleeping with all of them and others. This starts about an hour and a half in — there’s a lot of bonding first.

The film is a Lifetime movie with a bigger distribution. It’s the kind of movie that pulls models and rappers for major roles instead of real actors. It’s extremely skewed toward women, one of those movies  that assumes the target demographic doesn’t know anything about movies, so it ends up being a montage of actors from the demographic being vaguely stupid on camera.

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