REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GINO-COLOGY

The foremost of all the non-pressing questions I have regarding the 1998 American Godzilla - pro tip: there is no such thing as a pressing question about the 1998 Godzilla - is whether or not it's the worst film of the Godzilla franchise. And I suppose I should really first ask the question if it's part of the Godzilla franchise at all, since that seems to generally be something that fans try to downplay. But, in 1998, Toho certainly regarded it...

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STANLEY KUBRICK: A DAY AT THE RACES

With The Killing, we arrive at a very exciting moment in the career of Stanley Kubrick, just shy of his 28th birthday when the film premiered in June, 1956: his third feature and sixth project overall is the very first work of the director's career that he'd acknowledge existed in later years. That's not entirely fair to the previous year's Killer's Kiss, but there's really no two ways about it: The Killing represents a jaw-dropping leap in Kubrick's...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - MONSTER A-GHOGO

Rebirth of Mothra II - its Japanese title is Mothra 2: The Undersea Battle - is a bad movie. That's not special on the face of it. A lot of daikaiju eiga are bad. But ROM 2 has somehow managed the first Toho monster movie which, in my estimation, is just bad bad - not so howlingly incompetent as to be hilariously awful, but conspicuously lacking in just about every important way that a motion picture can lack. It might very well be the least-enjoyable...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1921: In which rehashing the still-vital wounds of a recent, terrible war can be big business, especially when you throw a hot slab of beefcake at it

Latter-day considerations of the 1921 mega-blockbuster The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse tend to focus on the contribution of one or both of two men when looking to explain its success and effectiveness. One of these was Rudolph Valentino, an Italo-Franco actor born Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina D'Antonguolla, who had spent seven years crawling up the ladder from extra to spear-carrier to bit player before being...

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IT'S NOT STARTING OVER, IT'S JUST GOING ON

When Disney conducted its grand experiment in rebuilding the Muppet brand name in 2011 with The Muppets, the results were inconclusive: pleasingly off-kilter and nostalgic, but in the most punishingly authoritarian way possible. Nostalgia was, at a certain point, the only driving element of the plot and the only thing to get back out of it.So in some regards, the new Muppets Most Wanted is a step in the right direction: it is actually a thing that...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - MOTHRA AND CHILD REUNION

Having killed of Godzilla in 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, sending the corpse off to America to be violated even further, Toho found itself in the unprecedented position of having no giant monster franchise to go along with a marketplace where giant monster movies were still doing pretty decent box office numbers in Japan. The good news was that Toho had a whole damn zoo of monsters for whom the rights had not been locked away in the deal with...

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WHEN A GIRL'S DIVERGENT, PROBABLY IT'S URGENT YOU DEFER TO HER GENTILITY

An open question for which I would honestly and none-snarkily beg for an answer: could anybody who likes up-and-coming actress Shailene Woodley - and a quick peek at the internet promises me that there are many of you - please explain why? Is it a The Spectacular Now thing? Because I still haven't seen that. But I have seen Divergent, Woodley's shiny new Jennifer Lawrence-esque coming out party as the anchor of a can't-miss YA adaption series, and...

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BEST SHOT: L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

The hardest movies to do justice to in the Hit Me with Your Best Shot series hosted by the Film Experience are the movies with the best cinematography: the ones where, almost by definition, every shot contributes meaningfully and deeply to the narrative, emotional tone, and thematic meaning of the film in question. I thought it was rough last week, when Nathaniel assigned Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with its wall-to-wall assortment of...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1920: In which iconic character actors and long-forgotten leading ladies both contribute, and genre is toyed with

Above all else, the best reason I can think of for adopting a historically-oriented approach to art appreciation is that there's so damn much history just sitting there. Limit yourself to only the stuff produced in any given year, and you're going to make some discoveries and have a great deal of random dross to get through; but open yourself up to years and decades and centuries (depending on exactly which art we're talking about), and suddenly...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, from 1995, was literally advertised in Japan with the slogan "Godzilla Dies". But even if you didn't know that going in, it's a film that positively oozes fin de siècle gravitas and sincerity and gloom, making it very clear that whatever the story the film intends to tell, it will arrive at a point of intense, permanent change, and perhaps not for the better.(As for why Toho decided to kill off their cash cow: it was to clear...

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