Submarine: If You Like Wes Anderson, Amelie, and Getting Caught in the Rain...

There are a handful of movies on my Netflix queue that I always happen to skip over for one reason or another. Bread and Tulips took me literally about two years to watch and then when I finally did I loved it. The same is true of Submarine, whose cover has intrigued me for years, but which I also suspected would end up being a lofty indie drama that I wouldn't like. Well, this is a quick thank you to the Netflix algorithms: for your patience and persistence. God bless you.

Submarine follows a boy named Oliver Tate (played by Craig Roberts), a teenager living in Wales (which is next to England/part of the UK, just sayin). Oliver has two main halves of his life that are constantly occupying all of his time. On the one hand, his parents (played by Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor) are having marital issues, which have only worsened since his mother's high school sweetheart just moved in next door. On the other, he's just fallen in love with a girl named Jordana (played by Yasmin Page), and his relationship is a little bumpy as well. A well-intentioned kid, the movie follows Oliver as he tries to patch up his parents' marriage and pursue the girl of his dreams.

Too cool.

I'm a sucker for movies like this. What I was expecting was something along the lines of I Heart Huckabees or something equally stupid. But Submarine ends up being something like Amelie crossed with a Wes Anderson movie. The cinematography is gorgeous. Following Oliver's every mood, it can go from quick, clean, and observational to romanticized and warmly lit, to even upright absurd and almost avant garde at times. But every scene is meticulously thought out, and voiced over with Oliver's clever and overly adult insights. Really, visually, this movie was a treat. It's hard to pull off clever editing without falling into the trap of trying to copy another film auteur, but I thought that the pacing of this was original and downright beautiful. The chill, placid soundtrack is a great compliment to it as well.

Craaazy cool

Oliver is an extremely likeable character. Well-versed in Neitzsche, Salinger, and Shakespeare, he tries to help his parents, Jordana, and even more minor characters to resolve their problems. A fascinating mix of flat deadpan and touching sincerity, Oliver has trouble fitting in at school and doesn't have a ton of friends. But his relationship with Jordana proves to bring out his personality, which he hadn't fully tapped into before. And his overanalyzed and sweet approach to everything is extremely well played by Craig Roberts (who, IMDB tells me, was also recently in Neighbors and 22 Jump Street, whaaat...).

Lil obsessed..

Submarine is also subtly hilarious. From Oliver's ill attempts at being the "Best Boyfriend in the World" to the tiny idiosyncrasies of each character (He always types on a typewriter, his dad drinks hot water and lemon when he's in a funk, and Jordana is a mild pyromaniac.), there are a lot of quirks that the underplayed performances keep from being too zany.

Yup.

The story is extremely sweet, and hearkens to the teenage mindset without being angsty.

9 outa 10. Full disclosure: I watched it twice.

Godzilla: Back in (Greenish) Black

Ever since I had seen the teaser trailer for Godzilla a few months ago, I couldn't wait to see what the studios had come up with this time around. The last 'Murrican attempt at a Godzilla flick was, let's face it, incredibly embarrassing.

Studio execs couldn't figure out why making it look like a giant

iguana on roids and turning it into a girl was a bad move???

This round, they moved more carefully and the film is a VAST improvement over the last one, but I'm sorry to say I think that they still missed the mark.

But first! Let's discuss el plot:

The movie kicks off with Walter Whi--I mean Joe Brody (Brian Cranston) and his wife (played by the ever-fabulous Juliette Binoche) getting mysterious readings of seismic activity. They both work at a nuclear plant and are therefore concerned that the activity might affect the facility. Before you know what's going on, the factory has blown up and Sandra Brody is dead, along with a ton of other people. Flash forward 15 years and their son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who is now a military lieutenant or something, has just come home to the US to his wife and little boy, but receives a call from Japan asking him to come get his father, who has just trespassed onto the site of the old power plant.* While over there, one thing leads to another, and they discover that scientists are monitoring a creature that they discovered there. (Obviously the one that is going to eventually fight Godzilla.) Mayhem ensues as the creature hatches, and then hops from Japan to Hawaii to California searching for more radioactive material to eat (a.k.a. nukes) as the U.S. tries to think of ways to kill it.

I should also mention that the plot is woven with details about Godzilla. The scientists have been tracking him for decades and trying to kill him but--get this--nothing works. That's why they call him Godzilla or something.

SO. LOTS HAPPENING. 

Which may be part of the problem that I have with this newbie...

Unfortunately the plot trips along, adding more and more gratuitous layers to a story that could've been pretty simple if it were not for the stupid Hollywood formula getting in its way. For example, if Ford Brody didn't have a wife and son tuggin' on the audience's heartstrings, making them think of his own tragic past, it would be a much more straightforward action movie. These elements, which are supposed to add heartfelt drama, really just end up weighing the movie down with gratuitous feels, and throw character development to the side.

Look, a woman with a child! Now you're personally invested right!?!

Additionally, I find it really cool that they were acknowledging the creature's country of origin, but the transition of the plot moving from Japan to Hawaii to California becomes clumsy. It would be one thing if these monsters were just moving themselves and our main character guy was tracking them, but the fact that he's just trying to get home to his family (but is he really trying though?) and keeps on bumping into them seems a little...forced. 

SPOILERS BELOW--YE BE WARNED.

I guess the main problem that I had with it is that it seemed to feel like every ten seconds there was another "BUT WAIT--LOOK OVER HERE--THERE'S MORE!" to take into account. 

Oh, we found some crazy alien radioactivity-eating monster.

Also, look at all these people that are dead now.

Parenthetically, we've been tracking this other monster, Godzilla, for years.

Also, we're going to get you home, Lt. Ford Brody.

But also, the monster might be there when you get to Hawaii.

Also there's another monster.

Now here's the military working on something.

Also, here's your wife, freaking out about finding you.

And here's you not freaking out about your family at all.

Also, here's that Japanese scientist looking like he's realized something horirble for the 1,634,646,376th time.

Omg, I just realized a horrible thing. Again.

The one COOL THING that you've been WAITING FOR FOR THE ENTIRE MOVIE is for these creatures to have a craaaAAAAaaaazzy faceoff, and the only time it happens is...AT THE FREAKIN' END. They also give way less screentime to Godzilla in favor of explaining his new nemeses: the Mutos, which I found to be a bit of a bummer. We revamp this guy's image and turn back him into a boy and he only gets about a third of the screen time that the Mutos do. No respect.

OK, KIDS, IT'S SAFE NOW.

So. In conclusion. Is Godzilla a good movie? Yes. The effects and the monsters alone make this worth watching. But if the movie hadn't gotten so caught up in trumping the previous failure of a flick, it could've been SO MUCH BETTER. Movies like this are for entertainment value, so I would've loved to have seen more creature fights and less half-assed drama.

6.5 outa 10. Probably could've been more, but I was so hyped up for this one and I feel seriously disappointed.

*Side note: I kid you not, he is home for a day before he gets a call from JAPAN being like "Hey we found your dad trespassing in the quarantine zone so uh...you're gonna need to come pick him up." So he's all "Crap. Okay, lemme hop a flight to Japan real quick," and then takes off for the land of Asia. I probably could've left that part out but I couldn't get over that he had been home from his 14 month deployment for like 8 hours before having to ship back out again to Japan because his dad couldn't be bailed out by ANYONE ELSE? Dafuq.

Blue Jasmine (Seriously Blue. And Also Crazy.)

Had a "me party" yesterday and went into Philly to see such sites as the Philadelphia Art Museum, Ultimo Coffee's new coffee shop on Catharine St, The Continental, and (of course) The Ritz 5 movie theater, where I saw Woody Allen's latest Blue Jasmine.*

May I firstly say that I love Woody Allen as a director? The jazz music, the black and white 20's style intertitles and alphabetical credits, the funny/tragic realistic characters--you had me at Small Time Crooks. He is truly a craftsman and I tend to love everything that he puts out. Even To Rome With Love, haters. (Although, as a side note, I frequently ignore all of his 80s-90s films that include Mia Farrow as a headliner. Except for Hannah and Her Sisters.) I kind of pre-loved Blue Jasmine right after I saw the trailer. So let's get to it.

Jasmine (née Jeanette) has just moved in with her sister. She has just suffered a nervous breakdown following her husband (Alec Baldwin) being charged with fraud and subsequent prison suicide. After a life of luxury (Actual luxury. Like five houses and a personal jet.) she is staying at her sister's lower-middle class apartment and trying to figure out her life. But Jasmine has never had to do this before. She states more than once throughout the movie that Hal, her husband, swept her off her feet before she could graduate from college.  Resultantly she doesn't have any life skills. And has never had to be a real adult.

Pre-real life. Like an episode of Downton Abbey.

After a friend of Ginger's finds her a job as a receptionist at a dental office, Jasmine begins taking computer classes with the dream of eventually getting a degree in interior decorating online. But when one thing after another happens at the dentist's office, she quits and approaches a WASPy friend with the question "Do you know any men?" The rest of the movie is spent with her quitting everything to become a rich man's girlfriend, lying to him about her past and masquerading as a qualified interior decorator, which (predictably) doesn't end well. Her story is also cut up with vignettes from her past life, hosting parties, telling friends how she and her husband met, talking to their adopted son, listening in on deals that her husband was making, etc.

This movie was fascinating for a number of reasons. In some ways it reminded me of The Queen of Versailles, the real life tale of the Segiel family and their fall after the recession. But Jasmine, in a lot of ways, is so much more pathetic. Here we have a look at the inability of the rich to function in lower-middle class life. Relying on the increasingly imaginary "American Dream," Jasmine originally plans to pull herself up by her bootstraps and go back to school. However, faced with the harsh reality that school costs money, she then realizes that she has to fund it by getting a job appropriate to her resume (which is presumably blank).

Don't we look ravishing today.

After becoming uncomfortable with things at her menial job, she moves onto the only thing that she knows how to do: relying on a man. And this method of survival, which is pretty archaic in this day and age, does not end up panning out. We see her struggle through her life in denial of her surroundings and acting a bit like lost child looking for her mom. Or, rather, a lost wife looking for her husband.

By contrast, her sister Ginger is totally happy being a member of the lower-middle class. She bags groceries, she has two nice kids, and a boyfriend who is a mechanic. When Jasmine comes in like a tornado of judgement, though, Ginger starts to falter and question her romantic and lifestyle choices. It's a hard road back to reality for Ginger, but she gets her happy ending. Jasmine not so much.

It's ok though. She's got her vodka.

This movie seems to be making an interesting commentary about women's options today. Whereas in the 80s women may have been excellent trophy wives, it seems to be less and less acceptable for a woman to function today without an actual function. Even stay-at-home moms do more than Jasmine does. And while she's not a bad person, she doesn't seem to have the first idea as to how to pick of the pieces of her life. It also tells the eternal moral: money isn't everything.

Excellent excellent acting by Cate Blanchett. I totally believed that she was going off the deep end. If for nothing else, I would recommend the movie for her excellent acting.

8 outa 10. 

I literally had to go through this entire post and delete all of the times I'd written Blue Ivy. Thanks Jay-Z and Beyonce. Rude.