Godzilla Minus Zero
GODZILLA MINUS ZERO
Whatever else there is to say about writer/director Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus Zero, you gotta give the film credit: It sure knows how to make an entrance.
Not 60 seconds after the the opening production-company logos fade, we're right in the thick of another wildly destructive kaiju attack. It's not the titular lizard on the rampage, though. It's a huge flying dragon, eventually christened Ghidora, who shoots lightning bolts from its mouth and whose wings, appendages, and tail are powerful enough to send people, vehicles, and edifices soaring. As they were in Yamazaki's Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One from 2023, the visual, sound, and production-design elements in this monster-fueled assault are staggering, and as scores of Matsumoto City residents shriek and cower, Minus Zero achieves true gut-level horror, largely through images of the creature from the citizens' POV. You feel as though you've never seen anything so gargantuan and terrifying in your life. Then, as Godzilla did in '23, the beast ends its assault and takes off for a long nap. Over the next half-hour, and at several points during the 135-minute experience as a whole, you may feel compelled to join it.
This proves all the more disappointing, and awkward to admit, given that Minus One's consideration for its humans was perhaps that movie's most unexpected and refreshing aspect. Those scenes of mass demolition were amazing, sure, especially on what was reported to be a $10 million budget. (Earning roughly $110 million globally, the film's success apparently, inevitably, secured a much heftier cash supply for Yamazaki this time around – a whopping $13-18 million!) But when I think back on Minus Zero's predecessor, it's not necessarily Godzilla I think about. It's the endearing makeshift family of guilt-ridden kamikaze pilot Kōichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), newly homeless Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and orphaned toddler Akiko (Sae Nagatani). It's the industrious weapons engineer Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka). It's the haunted Yukikaze captain Tatsuo (Miou Tanaka) and the brave tugboat allies Shirō and Seiji (Yuki Yamada and Kuranosuke Sasaki) and the brittle next-door neighbor Sumiko (Sakura Ando) who proved to be a sound, loving caretaker. All of them return in Minus Zero, empathetic as ever, and joined by Masami Nagasawa's Makoto, a meteorology prodigy feeling her own survivor's guilt over, at her employers' request, not warning the public about a devastating typhoon. Yet as welcome as the performers and their characters are, I kept thinking something that would've felt mildly heretical in '23: “Get back to the kaiju already.”
With the new film set in 1949, two years may have passed since the events of Minus One, but its sequel finds many figures merely reprising familiar beats. Now married to Noriko, Kōichi again agonizes over whether he's brave enough to face the beasts. Noriko, whose miraculous survival has led to severe health issues likely to be explored later, again frets about the well-being of the now-adopted Akiko. Noda again exudes bafflement laced with problem-solving determination, his gray hair extending in all directions. Given their significant screen time, these folks are the lucky ones. Shirō, Seiji, and Sumiko basically make cameo appearances. Tatsuo, who lost his family at Hiroshima, is given an intriguing mini-subplot involving his desire for revenge against the Americans, but the plan is dropped almost as soon as it's introduced. So is a merely hinted-at narrative regarding some dastardly American-military scheme, which was either cut from the film or sidelined for inclusion in yet another sequel. Meanwhile, poor little Akiko cries and cries, her initial, heartbreaking fear over the monsters coming back leading to wailing panic over her parents perhaps never coming back. I don't know how Yamazaki got the performance he did out of young Nagatani, and I don't want to know. The kid appears legitimately traumatized. But we endure far too much of Akiko's suffering – seemingly honest emotion that becomes indistinguishable from gross manipulation.
What the director doesn't give us too much of are the kaiju, and it didn't take long for me to wish he would've. Heartening as it is to again see papers flying and pencils scribbling as Japanese scientists and meteorologists make low-rent, DIY plans for combating the Ghidora (knowing the Americans are essentially worthless), there's a distracting sameness to the sequences' execution; we've been here before, and relatively recently. We haven't, however, previously seen Yamazaki's take on Ghidora, and it's breathtaking, especially after a failed attempt to destroy it leads to the kaiju's severed head regenerating into three heads. Utterly horrifying yet, in its winged anarchy, eerily beautiful, Ghidora is like a nightmare you don't necessarily want to wake from. And while, as in '23, you genuinely don't want to see any humans hurt, you do want as much dragon mayhem as humanly possible. The amount delivered, consequently, feels a little stingy given the movie's two-hour-15-minute running length, 70 percent of which, I'd venture, is subtitled melodrama that grows sadly repetitive. When Ghidora is around, Minus Zero soars, and when it isn't, the film feels uncomfortably static.
You may have noticed that I haven't really referenced Godzilla's participation in this movie bearing the Lizard King's name. That's partly because it takes its sweet-ass time – more than 40 minutes – showing up. But it's also because, one day after seeing the movie, I barely remember anything the creature did. The climax, of course, features the battle royale we've been waiting for, and it's a doozy. But the nature of Yamazaki's latest, with its (admittedly noble and worthy) post-Hiroshima focuses on grief and duty and what we leave our children, is such that Godzilla almost can't help but be an afterthought in its own starring vehicle.
To be sure, the kaiju does all the cool stuff it did in '23: roaring, trampling, its body glowing an iridescent blue from tail to snout as it prepares to laser-belch. Yet by the time it belatedly shows up, we've already been so knocked out by Ghidora that Godzilla's own arrival feels somewhat anticlimactic. It's hardly a spoiler to say that, when his island business is finished, the big guy makes his slow, steady, still-destructive clomp back to the ocean, where it'll no doubt hibernate until the global box office demands a return. I still would've preferred that the lumbering beast came to the party earlier – or maybe that 20 to 30 expendable minutes had been shaved off to make the über-reptile's limited screen time feel more substantial. Godzilla Minus Zero is another masterful feat of craftsmanship that looks like it cost 10 times its reported budget, and a decent-enough time at the movies, to boot. Considering the semi-draining human element, though, this followup is still a bit of a bummer, its radioactive scales unfortunately tipped in the wrong direction.
WILD HORSE NINE
Halfway through my screening of Martin McDonagh's alternately uproarious and melancholic comedy Wild Horse Nine, I realized I was having trouble understanding the narrative. Not because it was hard to follow, but because there didn't appear to be one.
Set in 1973, the film finds CIA operatives Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) stationed in Santiago, recruited to help overthrow Chile's recently elected Democratic government. Before the coup transpires, however, Chris and Lee take a plane to Easter Island, presumably to get a bit of R&R before some really bad shit goes down. They secure hotel rooms. They drive through the luscious green hills. They walk among the monolithic stone statues, the Moai, that Chris continually refers to as “the big heads.” They eat. (Lee eats a lot.) They attempt to flirt with a pair of profoundly unimpressed university students (Mariana di Girolamo's Monica and Ailín Salas' Alicia) whom the agents previously met at the airport. They see wild horses, though I didn't note whether their number stopped at nine. And through it all, Chris and Lee banter and bicker like an old married couple, trading profanity-laced observations on everything from Chris' habit of publicly voicing state secrets to the physical makeup of the Moai to whether, in Chris' parlance, only “gay countries” such as Belgium and France can make a decent cheese. What this pair doesn't do, in the first of Wild Horse Nine's two hours, is much in the way of advancing a plot, or even signifying a plot. That's what I loved about these guys, and about the film itself.
Unlike most of its writer/director's movies and plays, Wild Horse Horse is essentially a Martin McDonagh hangout. Its nearest equivalent, and it's an awfully close equivalent, is 2008's sublime In Bruges, which found hit men played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson sightseeing through the Belgian city while Ralph Fiennes' faraway mob boss demanded the sealing of one of their fates. Substitute Farrell, Gleeson, and Fiennes with Malkovich, Rockwell, and Steve Buscemi, Bruges with Rapa Nui, and “mob” with “CIA,” and this new outing is largely identical. Yet as in any McDonagh, even an apparently plotless work such as this, there's a lot going on under the surface that we're only gradually made aware of. As it turns out, Chris and Lee doing their tourist-y thing and killing nothing but time is the plot – or rather, the preparation necessary to give the plot completion. It may look like nothing much is happening beyond our being entertained by Malkovich and Rockwell as they share dynamic chemistry and tear through McDonagh's inordinately juicy dialogue. Lee, however, is waiting for a signal, and Chris is in charge of giving that signal, and it's not until the true motive behind the Easter Island vacation is belatedly revealed that you realize, retrospectively, how fraught with complex emotion Wild Horse Nine's “aimless” hang really is.
Oddly, it's when McDonagh imposes traditional narrative elements onto his shaggy-dog tale that the movie tends to falter. As the operatives' CIA handler, Buscemi is powerfully aggrieved as he barks phone orders to Lee. (For her part, Parker Posey, who's hilarious in reliably Parker Posey fashion, literally phones in her two scenes as Lee's acidic wife; following season three of The White Lotus, it's Posey's second shared credit with Rockwell, and the co-stars still haven't appeared face to face.) But the film's momentum and dramatic stakes wither, rather than escalate, after Buscemi's bureau chief MJ arrives on the island and becomes personally involved in matters – a rare instance of the actor's presence dialing down the heat. Those far-left students Monica and Alicia keep showing up like bad (or at least pissy) pennies, and unconvincingly turn into pronounced figures whose roles inspire more questions than are adequately answered. And while there's a measure of Forrest Gump-y fun in Chris seeming to have been involved with every global political assassination perpetrated over a quarter century, the employment of 1973's Chilean overthrow as a MacGuffin feels cheap even for McDonagh, whose frequent use of dwarfism as a punchline continues unabated. Ditto the routine references to JFK's assassination, which become a major storyline point, and seem included merely to make generations of conspiracy theorists turn to their moviegoing companions and say, “I told you so.”
Sue me: I still had a blast, given that I could've watched and listened to Malkovich and Rockwell bitch and bond like this for many more hours than the film lasted. With his cowboy hat and insatiable appetite, the character of Lee is hardly a stretch for McDonagh veteran Rockwell, who performed in 2010's Broadway production of A Behanding in Spokane before appearing in 2012's Seven Psychopaths and 2017's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, winning an Oscar for the latter. Rockwell, here, isn't asked to bring anything new to the table. What he does bring is supreme facility with McDonagh's rat-a-tat rhythms, easy confidence in Lee's contradictory nature (unfailingly genial with strangers, unfailingly hostile with his boss and spouse), exquisite nonverbal reactions to Chris' more outré pronouncements, and so much visible love for his best-friend partner, even while castigating him, that your heart melts even in moments when it shouldn't. For what he's required to do in Wild Horse Nine, Rockwell does it not merely exceptionally, but damned close to perfectly.
It's his on-screen better half who, I'll posit, is legitimately perfect. Like many, I've been deeply in the tank for Malkovich since the 1980s, when he enjoyed about as astonishing a period of credits as any actor ever has. The '84 “Here I am!” duo of Places in the Heart and The Killing Fields, both nominated for Best Picture and the former earning him an Oscar nomination. Death of a Salesman for Broadway and TV, his Biff Loman earning him an Emmy. Steppenwolf Theatre credits including Sam Shepard's True West, whose taped rendition eventually got tangled in my VHS from too many repeat watches. Spielberg's Empire of the Sun. Paul Newman's The Glass Menagerie. Dangerous freakin' Liaisons. Lanford Wilson's Burn This – an '87-'88 Broadway production some college pals and I traveled to New York to see just because he was in it. So yeah: I'm a fan. I'm a super-fan. And over 40-plus years, I've never seen John Malkovich do anything close to what he does in McDonagh's latest.
That the actor can be funny, obscenely funny, is no surprise. That he can be unsettling is no surprise. That he can be poignant is no surprise. Yet what surprises, what shocks, in Wild Horse Nine is Malkovich's seemingly effortless ability to routinely be all three at once, and all the while giving his lines that ethereal, mellifluous, gonzo spin that makes them sound simultaneously otherworldly and like the only way those words could conceivably be said. I don't think a single sentence uttered by Malkovich's Chris is predictable. The CIA agent's decades of dark professional obligations have given him a who-gives-an-eff insouciance that routinely manifests itself in (sometimes tasteless) jokes. Yet in his lightly faraway cadences, you also hear decades of regret, longing, and a haunting kind of peace. And just when you think you might have Chris pegged, he'll start in on gay cheeses and misshapen statues and the imperative of never, ever, getting into a car at a government official's request. (In a movie chock-full of weighted phone conversations, he also gets the finest one, opposite Tom Waits.) What Malkovich brings to Wild Horse Nine is nothing less than a towering, career performance, and he's such a natural fit that it seems inconceivable that this is his first McDonagh ever.
Apparently, though, he did previously come close. On Seth Meyers' late-night show, the actor recently told the host that he was offered two McDonaghs opposite Rockwell in years prior, with scheduling conflicts forcing him to turn both projects down. He didn't mention names or titles, but it was pretty evident that the works he was referencing were A Behanding in Spokane and Seven Psychopaths – both of which featured roles ultimately played by Christopher Walken. He's a marvelous, inventive, intensely distinctive actor in his own right. But Christopher Walken, I'd argue, is who you get when you can't get John Malkovch.
POSSIBLE LOVE
Because both works are politically charged tales of class struggle set in present-day South Korea, it's inevitable that director/co-writer Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, newly released on Netflix, will be compared with Bong Joon-ho's 2019 masterpiece Parasite. (Also like that Oscar winner, Lee's drama has been chosen as South Korea's Academy Awards entry for Best International Feature Film.) Possible Love could be Parasite's slower, more somber, less funny cousin, and at 164 minutes, the movie lasts a full half-hour longer than Bong's. This information, however, is included merely as advance notice, not as reasons to avoid it. Rather, as co-written by Oh Jung-mi, Lee's first feature since 2018's critically revered Burning is a magnificent slow boil of ambition, regret, and, per the Bible quote that opens the film, covetousness, and in Jeon Do-yeon, it boasts the female-lead performance of the year … or at least, from what I understand, until Julianne Moore and The Debut arrive on the scene.
As with all narratives involving haves and have-nots, Possible Love finds sympathetic protagonists among the latter: Mi-ok (Jeon), a factory worker and mother of grade-schooler Cheol (Jeong Seop), and Mi-ok's husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), a former welder whose unsuccessful strike against his company made him and his co-workers social pariahs. Two years have passed since the attempted strike was violently, fatally ended by police, and Ho-seok and Mi-ok are still attending funerals, this latest one for a friend of Ho-seok's who committed suicide. The memorial leads to Mi-ok confronting her morose husband about his drinking – an argument that perks the interest of documentarian Lee Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong, who played the unwisely trusting Park-family matriarch in Parasite). Attending the funeral with her Porsche-owning husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), Ye-ji plans to make “invisible laborers” the focus of her next film, and in the drunken Ho-seok, she thinks she's found an ideal principal subject. The man isn't interested in her pitch. Mi-ok, though, very much is, though perhaps more taken by Ye-ji's and Sang-woo's evident wealth than by the doc project. After agreeing to meet for coffee in the hopes of securing Ho-seok's participation, a reminiscence from the bright, forthcoming factory worker inspires the documentarian to pull out her camera and film Mi-ok instead. It's a turn of events neither woman, particularly Mi-ok, seems to mind at all.
And so off we go, the lives of these haves and have-nots becoming increasingly entwined, with Possible Love hinting that it will morph into a feature-length metaphor for one-percenters taking unsparing advantage of the other 99. Yet thankfully, Lee's film isn't cruel, and like Parasite, it doesn't have any identifiable villains. Ye-ji may seem fanatically invested in her doc, sometimes to the point of deep insensitivity, but she's also genuinely curious about, and sympathetic toward, the people she captures on film. Sang-woo, meanwhile, may be a rich smoothie hyper-aware of his image and married to his phone, but he isn't hateful – just self-centered and casually, obliviously tactless. (After Mi-ok compliments the man on his expensive sunglasses while taking a stroll, Sang-woo removes them, saying with a smile, “I don't want to be the only one looking cool.”) Likewise, our “heroes” are occasionally anything but heroic. Ho-seok can indeed be the angry, messy drunk his wife accuses him of being, though gradually incorporated flashbacks reveal the torment behind his more upsetting behavior. As for Mi-ok, the movie's introductory “Thou shalt not covet” reminder may have been included for her specifically. She's consistently shown to be actively wanting what she can't have – everything from Ye-ji's designer handbag to Sang-woo himself – and her escalating heedlessness keeps complicating the enormous fondness we've felt for Mi-ok from the start.
In other words, these four characters feel like recognizable, flesh-and-blood people, and Lee's and Oh's script treats them with deserved dignity. No one here is above suspicion or beyond redemption, and the director floods the proceedings with lovely indications of how everyone, to the best of their ability, is trying to reach places of empathy and mutual understanding: Sang-woo teaching Cheol a few Taekwondo moves; Ho-seok agreeing to a vacation he desperately wants to avoid; Ye-ji sending a simple, sad text in the wake of an ugly confrontation. Even as it approached three hours, I was never bored by Possible Love, which boasts the depth and breadth of a masterful, epic novel you don't want to put down even to rest your arms. And in Jeon Do-yeon, Lee's film finds its compassionate, complicated, resplendent center, the actor's portrayal as nuanced and subtly, emotionally devastating as the dramatic marvel showcasing it. You'll no doubt be hearing more about this one as the long trek to March's Academy Awards progresses. Stream it now and feel ahead of the curve.
JIMMY
One of the greatest things about James Stewart, as an actor, was that he never seemed to push. Every line, every reaction and expression, seemed to come honestly, instinctively. In director Aaron Burns' bio-pic Jimmy, all you see is the pushing.
This isn't necessarily an impugning of Stewart portrayer KJ Apa, who goes about his unenviable task with respectful, if ultimately fruitless, sincerity. He looks enough like the legendary performer to mildly pass, and whenever his accent doesn't slip (which it tends to whenever Apa appears to legitimately act in the moment), he's got the stereotypical vocal imitation down pat – though my guess is that even newborn babies have a go-to Jimmy Stewart impression tucked into their diapers for future use. But Burns' movie, which covers Stewart's life – most fundamentally, his U.S. Army Air Force tenure – from 1941 to 1947. is a sad, tacky outing, cheap-looking and resolutely unconvincing. I found the film too earnest to outright hate, yet was also grateful for my Saturday-morning screening being entirely devoid of other patrons, as it allowed me to audibly groan and quietly heckle when necessary. That wound up happening a lot.
As someone who knew about Stewart's military history following his 1940 Oscar win for The Philadelphia Story without really knowing the particulars, I was mildly anticipating Burns' and screenwriter Justin Strawhand's exploration into the actor's World War II tenure. But this portion of the film, which encompasses roughly 80 percent of it, is so rife with cliché that it feels as though we're not learning anything at all. We get zero scenes of WWII troops initially recognizing that movie star Jimmy Stewart is their new overseas leader (how on earth did they react?), and whenever our hero addresses his troops – inevitably named Tex, Red, Sparky, and such – the Hollywood icon moves them with fraudulent inspirational speeches accompanied by composer Grant Fonda's trumpet-heavy attempt to outdo James Horner's Field of Dreams score. None of this extended European segment feels like life. It feels solely like Hollywood pandering, down to the demise of Stewart's closest WWII ally Martinez (Julian Works), who may as well have a bullseye on his chest the moment he flashes Jimmy his sweet smile and shows him a photo of his gal back home. I immediately anticipated Martinez's death. I did not expect Jimmy to present it in a fashion so forced and cheaply melodramatic that I fought the urge to giggle.
Sadly, though, that became my go-to response to most of this well-meaning (insert “forced and phony”) examination, though barring the overripe portrayals of Jason Alexander, as Louis B. Mayer, and Sarah Drew, as gossip hound Hedda Hopper, the Tinseltown sequences are the only ones that deliver any real pleasure. (The less said about scenes set in Stewart's hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania, with eternal mood-killer Neal McDonough as Jimmy's stoic dad, the better.) The ever-great Max Casella adds some energy and welcome horse sense as Frank Capra, and arriving late in the film, I smiled at the unexpected, unexpectedly effective casting of Christopher McDonald as Stewart's It's a Wonderful Life co-star Lionel Barrymore. There's also a solid idea, as presented, in Stewart's George Bailey breakdowns coming less from acting skill than from undiagnosed wartime PTSD. It would, however, take a much, much stronger film to adequately explore that notion. What Jimmy gives us, instead, is a protracted SNL sketch masquerading as drama. Had Kristen Wiig shown up as Donna Reed, I wouldn't have been at all surprised.
THE CAT IN THE HAT
Is one perfectly executed joke enough to make an entire movie? Probably not. But in the case of writer/directors Erica Rivinoja's and Alessandro Carloni's Dr. Seuss adaptation The Cat in the Hat, I'm forced to at least ask the question.
If you haven't seen the movie, the moment's description won't mean much. If you have, you'll perhaps agree that the sight of pet goldfish Waffles (voiced by a rather lethargic-sounding Matt Berry) making his slow, slow, sloooow trek through an underwater circus hoop is a sustained visual gag with few equivalents in 21st-century comedies, animated or otherwise. It's one of those “protraction makes it funnier” bits reminiscent of Sideshow Bob stepping on all those rakes in The Simpsons' “Cape Feare” episode, and the filmmakers, here, don't yell “Cut!” – they let Waffles' journey last a full minute. Maybe longer. I laughed at the start, laughed further as the bit went on, and was nearly beside myself as I realized that, no, Rivinoja and Carloni weren't going to interrupt Waffles' hysterically gradual voyage with reaction shots, snarky asides, or anything else designed to interrupt the goldfish's mission. When Waffles finally made his way through that hoop, seemingly a month later, I wanted to applaud. The animated characters watching him actually did.
It sucks that this inconsequential narrative detour (one smartly, if less effectively, resuscitated for the climax) is not only Cat in the Hat's easy highlight, but among very few reasons to see the movie at all. During the first third, I laughed out loud a full dozen-plus times, principally at the offhanded hilarity of the Cat's vocal portrayer Bill Hader. Through Hader's wonderfully nonchalant weirdness, this incessantly rhyming kitty is a cartoon id – happily singing the lyrics to his theme song and delivering most of his riotous readings from under his breath. Unfortunately for him, and us, the Cat's chief purpose in Rivinoja's and Carloni's feature is to reunite depressed middle-school tween Gabby (Xochiti Gomez) with her fun-loving, if somewhat geeky, side who adores marching band, her brother Sebastian (Tiago Martinez), and her single mom (America Ferrera). Earnest though they are, the pre-Cat scenes with this recently relocated family are formulaic and boring as sin. You almost miss those dull scenes, however, after the Cat appears to make the kids' lives more entertaining, throwing the three into a trio of cardboard boxes in which all logic and claims to coherence fly out the window.
Visually, this Warner Bros. animation is quite something. But as the Cat and his young charges burrowed through moving boxes filled with childhood memories and ephemera, I began to realize I had no earthly idea what was going on. We see skyscraper-sized evidence of Gabby's past as our intrepid heroes try to locate the elusive Go-Backer that will rewrite history. A gigantic, malevolent Something (literally the character's name) wants the doohickey, too, the creature mildly resembling a Satanic version of Lupita Nyong'o's Wild Robot. Meanwhile, apparently, the future of the world lies in the balance. Seriously? In a Dr. Seuss flick?! The Cat in the Hat starts as a charming, clever, funny family entertainment and ends – in an ending that feels like forever – as just more of the same ol' Hollywood world-building overload, the enjoyable vocal performances of Hader, Quinta Brunson, Giancarlo Esposito, Titus Burgess, Paula Pell, and others offering limited respite. Somewhat breaking the fourth wall, the Cat himself mentions that Dr. Seuss' silent-comedy Things – clearly this hopeful franchise's version of the Minions – will no doubt be headlining their own feature soon. Granted, these blue-haired being are kinda cute. And I would be on board with a Things v. Minions feature. But only to see those Seuss figures getting the unholy hell slapped out of them.
