This is not a review, it’s just some thoughts on the movie and the characters. Briefly, though: four and a half stars, superb acting, beautiful sets, funny but ultimately quite tragic.{{ double-space-with-newline }}
This is a perfectly good movie about fighting giant monsters, even when judged on an absolute scale. There is a plot with an interesting twist. Steven S. DeKnight has a good feel for action; the fight scenes play out clearly, even the ones in the middle of dense urban centers. I never lost track of where the combatants were. There are no characters really. I apologize to John Boyega for this but he really doesn’t have much to do. He’s kind of a bunch of swaggering dialogue and charisma draped on top of a mannequin. He does what he can with the role, it’s just not a convincing part. ...
Should you ever happen to be in Singapore and desirous of spending a thousand bucks or so on me, this is what I want. (original) It’s the nearly complete Shaw Brothers collection, 668 films, on one set-top box. Presumably there’s a hard drive in there. HDMI output, 720p picture quality, from the Celestial Pictures remastered rereleases. Man, that would be awesome. At a thousand bucks, it’s reasonably priced on a per movie basis, too. Alas, they won’t ship outside Singapore.
This book is not the best book, but it’s an OK book. A year ago I entered about half of it on the Lists of Bests site. I’d like to finish that up. It’ll take an hour sometime.
I like film festivals a lot. The minimum number of movies means I can’t finish this off by just hitting the Boston Film Festival once; I have to do the festival thing, read film listings, and participate. I would count Harry Knowles’ Butt-Numb-A-Thon for the purposes of this, although it’s unlikely. More likely candidates: Fantasia, the Boston Independent Film Festival, maybe the Tribeca Film Festival if I get ambitious, or the Boston Fantastic Film Festival (which didn’t run this year).