Pacific Rim has ended up being more divisive than I would have expected. As an example check out Will Leitch (positive), and Vince Mancini's (negative) reviews. While I think all the criticism is completely fair (the characters are generously described as thin, the dialogue is marginal, and story derivative), I still ended up generally enjoying myself. This movie is all surface, but that surface is Monsters vs. Robots as done by the guy who made Pan's Labyrinth, and starring Idris Elba (Stringer lives!), so the surface goes a long way. Del Toro does a real nice job with fights scenes (you can follow what's going on, and they actually involve some deliberate pacing) which counts for quite a bit. Sure I would have preferred to have there be actual acting outside of Elba (and to a lesser extent Charlie Day and Ron Pearlman), but I'll take what I can get. And in this case what you get involves a scene of a Robot hitting Godzilla with a tanker ship. That's not nothing.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Much Ado About Nothing
Joss Whedon is one of those guys I'm completely in the bag for, so of course I was going to see his adaptation of Shakespeare, shot at his house in 12 days while taking a break from editing the Avengers.
Overall he does a nice job capturing the playfullness of the original play, and adds some wordless flashback scenes between Benedick and Beatrice which actually gives some context to why there's so much beef between them. He also makes the smart choice of having most of the characters spend the entire proceedings hammered. This makes all of the mistaken identities (or at least perceived mistaken identities) more tolerable since its difficult to believe anyone sober could actually believe any of the plot machinations. Unfortunately he's not able to get rid of the most problematic part of the play. The fact that the central conflict revolves around an idiot plot point that could have been solved with any number of people just asking one relevant question. But whatever, the film is still a lot of fun (even though like every Shakespeare play I see it takes about five minutes to get used to the language) and Nathon Fillion is still the man.
Overall he does a nice job capturing the playfullness of the original play, and adds some wordless flashback scenes between Benedick and Beatrice which actually gives some context to why there's so much beef between them. He also makes the smart choice of having most of the characters spend the entire proceedings hammered. This makes all of the mistaken identities (or at least perceived mistaken identities) more tolerable since its difficult to believe anyone sober could actually believe any of the plot machinations. Unfortunately he's not able to get rid of the most problematic part of the play. The fact that the central conflict revolves around an idiot plot point that could have been solved with any number of people just asking one relevant question. But whatever, the film is still a lot of fun (even though like every Shakespeare play I see it takes about five minutes to get used to the language) and Nathon Fillion is still the man.
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