Paddington

Paddington is a carefully crafted, well intentioned, entirely adorable movie that my whole family enjoyed.  If you’re the kind of person who won’t see a kids’ movie without kids present, go make or find some and sit them down for Paddington.

Here’s the setup: Paddington is a walking, talking anthropomorphic bear who journeys from darkest Peru to modern London, there to find a family who will love him.  Upon his arrival, he meets the Browns, led by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville (who got my wife’s attention) and Sally Hawkins (who got mine).

[A quick aside about my feelings for Sally Hawkins: I first noticed her in Happy-Go-Lucky, in which she played a willfully cheerful and optimistic woman who, even though she often exasperated those around her, raised spirits and souls through her example.  Next, I saw her in Made in Dagenham, in which she played a union organizer of uncommon wiliness and determination.  Sally Hawkins could play Hannibal Lecter, and I’d root for her to find a particularly charming Chianti.]

Mr. Brown’s not too keen on inviting a bear into his home, but Mrs. Brown overrules him and opens the door, much to the delight of their boy and horror of their girl.  What follows is a lovely story of a little bear trying to fit in, trying to find a home, and trying to elude the devilish taxidermist / commando / all-around villain Nicole Kidman.

[Another aside, this time about actors, villains, and children’s movies: You can tell a lot about an actor by how he or she approaches the role of villain in a children’s movie.  On the one hand, you look at David Cross in Alvin and the Chipmunks.  He’s clearly slumming it, holding his nose while he goes through the motions and collects the paycheck.  On the other, you admire the gold standard: Peter Dinklage in Underdog.  Dinklage understands that a serious actor can take portraying a comic villain in a children’s film seriously, hitting just the right balance of menace and harmlessness.  It is hard to do, and only the best can pull it off.]

Ms. Kidman makes for a wonderful comic villain: evil enough to give the climax real stakes, yet icily silly enough to avoid actually frightening young viewers.  She measures up to the Dinklage Standard of age-appropriate villainy, turning in her best performance since The Others.  It helps that she has the good taste to recruit, for a henchman, the wonderful Peter Capaldi (In the Loop) – another actor who absolutely nails it.

I sense a theme emerging.  Producer David Heyman lined up top talent for Paddington, from voice actors like Ben Whishaw, Imelda Staunton, and Michael Gambon, to the onscreen performers I’ve noted above.  The talent lineup, however, doesn’t stop with the cast.  Paddington the Bear, himself, is a wonder of computer animated and practical effects.  Falling somewhere between photorealistic and teddy bear, he’s like a real bear, but with the rough edges sanded down and wearing an adorable hat.  The costuming, the set design, the color palette, everything about this film is captivating, serving to create a world just real enough to keep things grounded, yet magical enough to whisk us away. 

In short, Paddington is a wonderful, wonderful film.  Bravo to director Paul King and everyone who came together to make this gem.  I loved it.

Godzilla (2014)

I'm going to preface this review with a little personal background. It'll help if you know where I'm coming from.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories include spending Friday nights with my sister, camped out in our family VW Van in the driveway. Our father would run out a portable tv on an extension cord, and my sister and I would eat popcorn and watch Creature Feature in our own little world. On many of those Friday evenings, the creature of the week was Godzilla, another monster from Toho Studios' stable, or some combination thereof.

When I had kids, I made a family tradition of hanging out on the couch on Friday nights and watching Japanese monster movies. There was something about those artifacts of the '60s and '70s, that combination of giant monsters and visible costume-zippers, that spoke to children. We had a video game for the original X-Box that was basically Mortal Kombat, but with giant Japanese monsters. I can't imagine how many times I've heard an offscreen announcer intone something like, “Space Godzilla versus Mecha Gigan! Monsters, fight!”

When I was a C-130 pilot, I used to travel to Tokyo quite often. I'd always stop by the same toy store near Ueno Park to pick up some Bandai Godzilla dolls. By the time I'd made my last trip, our 3 boys had a collection including nearly every Godzilla monster, as well as quite a few creatures from the Gamera films. These are not carefully preserved collector's items. These are battered and worn everyday toys, the stuff of the imaginations of the next generation of Ellermanns.

My point is that I didn't come to this movie as a casual consumer of summer fare. I came to this movie as a guy who has seen every single Godzilla movie, even the really bad ones. I came to this movie ready to see it as part of a long, long series of sequels, reboots, and reimaginings. I came to this movie ready to be entertained.

I got my money's worth.

The first two major players Godzilla presents are Sally Hawkins (Made in Dagenham, Happy-Go-Lucky) and Ken Watanabe (Letters from Iwo Jima). Next, we see Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Juliette Binoche (Trois couleurs: Bleu). Later, we get Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene) and David Strathairn (Temple Grandin). 'All right,' I thought. 'Even if this movie is terrible, a whole bunch of legitimately excellent actors are getting big, blockbuster paydays out of it. That's a win, right there.' Eventually, we learn that the hero is a Navy EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) lieutenant. 'Hey,' I thought, 'I have a buddy who wrote a book based on his timeas an EOD bubba. This is cool!' Basically, the movie got me onboard pretty early.

Having done that, Godzilla works hard to keep me, the fan, on board. Its secondary monsters (called MUTOs, a marginally more creative moniker than, say Mechagodzilla) leave trails similar to those of the larval giant-moth creatures of Mothra. Godzillla himself gets his first reveal at sea, thoughtlessly making naval vessels bob in the ocean like so many rubber duckies. At one point, our hero rescues a little Japanese boy who looks straight out of Godzilla vs. Megalon. Ken Watanabe gets to pretend he's Takashi Shimura and intone classic Godzilla movie lines like, “Man believes he controls nature, but he is stupid, proud, and wrong. Nature always restores balance.” Jet fighters fly ridiculously low to the ground, only to get swatted out of the sky (as opposed to shooting from a safe altitude and distance). Cities get leveled, flooded, and irradiated. A good time is had by all.

And Godzilla, man, this Godzilla is great. The film retains the classic roar. Godzy dispatches one of his enemies with a move cribbed directly from Godzilla: Final Wars. The reveal of his atomic fire breath is so awesome that it had my now - 14-yr-old son bouncing in his chair with delight. Perhaps best of all, this Godzilla takes a page from the later Showa era, when the King of Monsters served mainly as a defender of the natural order (and, by extension, humanity). I walked into Godzilla expecting a standard rehash of the original Gojira. I got something like that, but with a heaping helping of Invasion of the Astro Monster. What a pleasant surprise.

'All right,' you're thinking, 'this guy likes Godzilla movies. Godzilla is, obviously a Godzilla movie, so he likes it. But will I like it? Is it actually, y'know, good?'

Well, taken in the broader context of contemporary American popular film, Godzilla's just ok. It has a terrible score, wastes the talented Elizabeth Olsen in an underwritten part, and takes a mighty long time to get to the rompin' stompin' giant monster action. Taken in the context of the mostly-terrible (beloved, but terrible) films that preceded it, however, it's marvelous. It looks gorgeous, it respects its unique filmic tradition, and it sets up a world in which we can look forward to continued sequels. It's everything you could ask for from a Godzilla movie.

I (and my progeny) approve.

PS You may enjoy the Godzilla movie reviews I've written since starting this blog in 2006:

Godzilla vs. Megalon

Gojira 

Son of Godzilla 

Godzilla: Final Wars 

Godzilla vs. Gigan 

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 

Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster 

Terror of Mechagodzilla 

Invasion of the Astro-Monster 

Ghidorah:The Three-Headed Monster 

Godzilla 1998 (written by my then – 10-yr-old) 

Godzilla vs. Gigan (written by my then - 11-yr-old) 

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (written by my then – 12-yr-old) 

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go is basically Parts: The Clonus Horror, but for chicks.  Is has the same premise as Parts, but it goes for melancholy romance instead of horror thriller.

It would have been better as a horror thriller.

Never Let Me Go, which is about three clones and their love triangle, is supposed to make us cry as they try to find happiness in the face of mortality.  It made me think about how much better it would have been if they’d set out to confront an unnaturally long-lived Peter Graves.  This is a drab, depressing, ultimately dull film, and I wish I had a clone so it could have sat through it instead of me.

Bummer.

Made in Dagenham

I’d watch Sally Hawkins walk her dog. 

This is not a beautiful or glamorous woman, but I’d have a thousand dinners with her before I’d so much as share a happy meal with Angelina Jolie.  Hawkins has an intelligence and vitality that makes her absolutely fascinating. 

In Made in Dagenham, which tells a true story, Hawkins plays Rita O’Grady.  In 1968, O’Grady led the women of the Dagenham Ford plant on a strike for a revolutionary proposition: equal pay for equal work.  It was something nobody else was even thinking about – most people just accepted that women should make less than men because, well, because that’s the way it had always been.  The film takes O’Grady from just another happy worker to full-fledged labor leader, and it shows how she grew into the role while maintaining her decency and discovering her extraordinary ability to lead.  Working with Albert Passingham (the brilliant Bob Hoskins), she carried her fight all the way to the top levels of British government and won.  She won because she was right, but she also won because she realized she could.

Hawkins endows Rita O’Grady with all the traits of an outstanding leader: drive, vision, empathy, organizational skill, and the ability to make her case.  She’s a pleasure to watch, and she transforms Made in Dagenham from just another earnest biopic to a bright, compelling, and wildly entertaining time at the movies.  I loved Made in Dagenham, and I can’t wait to see what Hawkins does next.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Here’s a review of a film that happened while I was writing it. I opened a blank page thinking that I knew what I was going to set down, but once the writing process forced me to give HAPPY-GO-LUCKY serious consideration, the film grew and turned into something quite remarkable. I liked HAPPY-GO-LUCKY when the credits rolled. Now that I’ve thought it over a bit, I see it as a laudable achievement.

Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is one of those people who chooses happiness. She’s quick with a smile and a laugh and a silly quip, and she borders on irrepressible. She’s so relentless that, for a while there, I thought there was something wrong with her. If there weren’t more to Poppy than meets the eye, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY wouldn’t be much of a movie. In revealing her, however, the film doesn’t go where I thought it would: into an inner world of pain or sorrow. Rather, the film does something marvelous: it explores the depths of her goodness and the reach of her will to happiness.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the difficulty of the art of joy. How many films focus on desperation, or revenge, or depression, or greed, or fear, or any one of the myriad traps we may encounter on our lives’ paths? How many filmmakers (and audiences, for that matter) confuse darkness with maturity, desolation with wisdom?

Depression is easy. Anyone can write the blues.

But happinesss, real happiness, is hard. It’s hard to live and it’s especially hard to create in film. In HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, Mike Leigh doesn’t give us an idiot or a stunted human being (though we can see how some may regard her as such). Rather, he gives us a woman who sees the world as it is and responds to it with an almost Christlike compassion and love. He does this through a barely perceptible dramatic arc, inviting us simply to spend time with Poppy and her friends, to observe her and those whom she touches. He puts Poppy in a world of bright, inviting colors, surrounds her with cheerful music, gives her real conversations with real people, and watches her try to find what joy there is to be found. Poppy doesn’t always succeed, and she may occasionally have to walk away. But that’s life. The point is, Poppy gets it. How often do we see that?

Mike Leigh has created a wonderful film here. If you haven’t yet seen it, give it a spin. You’ll be happy that you did.