Godzilla

The fiance and I tend to be "wait until we can rent it" people when it comes to seeing new movies. I mean, really, who likes leaving the house? We really only make the exception when it comes to summer blockbusters. Sure, we have a nice big TV at home, but we don't have an awesome sound system to go along with it, and there isn't much that can compare to seeing Godzilla tear through San Francisco on a big screen with some powerful surround sound to back it up. Unfortunately we only have one theater here in Bozeman, so opening weekends tend to be pretty crowded. This whole paragraph is basically a round-about way of me explaining why I'm writing this review a week after the movie came out. Expect the same for X-Men next week.

Godzilla is a fantastic summer movie in a style we don't see much anymore. The blockbuster has kind of become a bloated mess in the last couple of years. As much as I enjoy movies like Man of Steel and The Avengers, I'm starting to feel a bit of fatigue for the big, convoluted plots and action sequences that have started to plague them. It's why some of my favorite summer movies from the last couple of years have been stuff like Dredd andLooper because they focus on telling a smaller, well crafted story.

Godzilla certainly bears some of the trappings of the modern blockbuster. There's the line from the trailer where Bryan Cranston yells "It'll send us back to the stone age!" It establishes the threat posed by Godzilla and MUTO as a global one, but the story is more about Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character trying to find his way back to his family than anything else. It's a grounded, human story wrapped in special effects that keeps the stakes personal and gives the action much more impact than it would have had otherwise. A lot of reviewers said that the human characters are essentially unnecessary, but I'd disagree with that wholeheartedly. Without them, the destruction would have felt completely lifeless. The characters in the movie aren't especially complex, but they still serve a vital role.


Plot wise, this movie really isn't what the trailers made it out to be. In that Cranston line I references above, he's not referring to Godzilla, but a new monster called MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism).Godzilla is structured like one of its classic predecessors; Godzilla is basically the hero, fighting off another monster and saving humanity in the process. That isn't to say that he's just an oversized superhero; it's clearly established that Godzilla is a force of nature that exists to restore balance. A whole bunch of people die in a tidal wave caused by him coming aground in Hawaii, for example, but he still ends up being the hero of the movie.

This combined with its simple human story and some nods to classic monster fights make Godzilla feel like a modern version of the kind of summer movie we don't really see much these days, and it's a great return to form. Godzilla exercises a patience we don't see much in blockbusters these days, waiting until about halfway through before even showing the audience Godzilla in all his glory and until the very end before really showing the monsters throw down. It lends the whole thing an amount of suspense and awe that wouldn't have existed if they'd structured it any other way, and I absolutely loved it.

Up Jumps the Devil

So, I just finished reading a book called Up Jumps the Devil. It's a debut novel (I think) from someone named Micheal Poore. I can't remember how I came across it, but it was likely a random book that seemed intriguing and also happened to be on sale for a couple of dollars on Kindle, so I picked it up on a whim. I read a lot of really random books this way.

Anyway, the premise is both simple and inventive. John Scratch, the Devil himself, strives to make the world a better (in his mind, anyway) place in an attempt to lure the love of his life away from Heaven and to life on earth. In the process, he ends up going on a Forest Gump style romp through history. If Forest Gump was an immortal fallen angel. Over the course of the book, the reader gets to see John Scratch meet everyone from George Washington to a member of a band who ends up starting Liberty Mutual insurance because he sells his soul to be rich.

The book is really excellently written. It's genuinely funny and reads kind of like an American and modern Douglas Adams book, sarcastically winking at the reader throughout. For example, God speaks all of creation into existence on a whim and almost by accident. Shortly thereafter, when some of his angels discover sex, he condemns the act because, being the only God, he's lonely. The whole of the book, in this way, is both very funny and touching, all at the same time.

All in all, I really enjoyed the book. The ending was a bit predictable given the love story angle, but the journey to get to the end is so enjoyable, that I didn't mind it being a little rote. Up Jumps the Devil is a fun book with an off kilter take on the master of all evil that I'd definitely recommend. Especially if you pick it up on Kindle for a couple bucks.