GI Joe: Retaliation

The fourth of July this year fell conveniently on a Friday giving me a lovely three day weekend. As a naturally antisocial individual, I spent a majority of the weekend holed up in the cave playing games on my PS3, reading books comic and otherwise, and watching a couple of random movies I'd been meaning to watch on Netflix, including Jack Reacher, End of Watch, and GI Joe: Retaliation. I'm going to write about GI Joe.

I guess I'll say this much about the other two. I like Tom Cruise and I'm secure enough in myself to admit that. Is his religion super duper crazy? Sure, but I'm put more religions in the super duper crazy category. The guy is still probably the world's greatest movie star, and he jumps into every role he chooses with unrepentant fervor. That said, Tom Cruise cannot pull off the stoic badass character Jack Reacher wants him to be. The guy has charm coming out of his ears, let him use it. You can't have a grizzled ex-military police how looks and sounds like Tom Cruise. It just doesn't work. However, I really really liked End of Watch. I remember reading/hearing a weird amount of praise about that movie when it first came out in 2012 and it was totally deserved. I kind of wish that they had committed one way or the other to the found footage conceit, but where they use it, they use it very well as a tension builder. Great stuff. 

Right, this was supposed to be about GI Joe. I have something of a soft spot for the first GI Joe movie. I know it's kind of terrible, but it also doesn't shy away from it's terribleness. The main villain has a giant underwater base for shit's sake. The movie at points hilarious, and I genuinely don't think it was trying to be anything but. 

The second movie took the buzzwords that surround blockbusters these days and went in a more "gritty" and "realistic" direction. This isn't to say that the movie isn't still super dumb, it totally is, but it's way more straight faced about it, which I actually kind of liked. It isn't devoid of a couple of winks and nods to the audience though. My favorite moment in the movie is easily when Bruce Willis, playing the original GI Joe, types in the passcode 1776 to open up a secret cabinet in his house full of rocket and grenade launchers. It seriously had me laughing for like five minutes. 

That's ultimately the movie in a nutshell. It's humorous, but nothing it played just for laughs. It knows the ways in which it's dumb, and it isn't afraid to lean into them. Cobra Commander definitely wants to rule the world. But, it plays it all straight. It's never ironic about the way it presents its dumb cliches and characters, and I loved it for it. It's far from a perfect movie, the dialogue is sometimes terrible in a not very funny way and there's a lot of character backstory exposition that is clunky as all hell. But then there's another character backstory flash back involving Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes in which one of them is framed for killing their sensei that would feel right at home in an old kung fu movie and it veers straight back into being bad in an awesome way. 

I have fond memories of watching a bunch of old GI Joe cartoons on rented VHS tapes when I was a kid. This movie brought all of those right back up. The GI Joe movies ultimately kind of remind of the Schumacher Batman movies. That isn't the damning it sounds like either. I've come to realize that those movies were straight up 90's continuations of the Adam West TV show and movie from the 60's. In that way, they're kind of great. Similarly, the GI Joe movies are modern extensions of the GI Joe cartoon of old. Thankfully, the Retaliation is a halfway decent movie as well.

X-Men Days of Future Past

I've never been a big fan of X-Men comics. Sure, I watched a handful of episodes of the cartoon in the 90's, but I liked the Spider-Man and Batman cartoons better. I've read a couple X-Men books, like Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men or Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men but I've never been able to get into the team in general. It's mostly because the continuity of those books, even in superhero comic book terms, is completely and irrevocably screwed to the point that I would be hopeless to unravel it at this point.

Which is kind of ironic given the state of continuity in the X-Men films. The quality of the individual movies within the franchise aside, the timeline is a mess in both minor and major ways. As a result, X-Men: Days of Future Past has to serve as a sequel to X-Men: First Class, a fond farewell to (most of) the original cast of the first trilogy of movies, and a big fat bandaid for the timeline of this franchise.

It is, surprisingly, pretty successful on all counts. There are a couple of times where the story chugs a bit under those burdens, but it remains an entertaining and well made modern X-Men movie. There is a little weirdness, Wolverine has metal claws in the future in spite of loosing them in The Wolverine. Kitty Pride can suddenly send people's minds back in time. Professor X being alive, looking the same, and being in a future wheelchair is a bit of a stretch too, even with the end credits scene after X-Men: The Last Stand.

Thankfully, the movie doesn't really bother with trying too hard to make everything make sense. The story just forges ahead, secure in the knowledge that everything will be sorted out just fine in the end, which it is. The movie's been out for a bit, so I'm not too worried about this being a spoiler, but the time travel conceit is used how a lot of people thought it would be. They reboot the X-Men movie timeline in a way that still acknowledges the original movies, with X-Men: First Class being the beginning of the new timeline.

It's cool as a long time fan of the franchise to see the old and new versions of some of these characters all in the same movie. It's fun to see the movie embrace the crazy kind of continuity that is present in comic books. The rebooted nature of the story also means that fresh life has been breathed into these characters in a way that makes the future of these movies with James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence's characters being able to go in a number of different directions. Lawrence's Mystique, in particular, has seen a couple big changes that makes me want to see where they'll take her character next.

If you don't like the X-Men movies odds are you won't like this one either, but it is nonetheless a fantastic comic book movie. The performances are all great from cast members both new and old, even if a couple characters end up getting shorted on screen time to make room for the mechanics of the plot. The action, especially with the addition of the portal creating character Blink, is inventive and thrilling. Days of Future Past has proven that the X-Men are here to stay on the big screen. It's almost like they never left.

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.