Monsters, When Evil Lurks, Napoleon Dynamite, Godzilla Minus One, Dream Scenario

- Monsters [2010] - 43 DNF

Monsters is the 2010 feature debut of Gareth Edwards, who is largely now known as the cohesive piece behind 2016’s Rogue 1, and/ or the director of the 2014 American reboot, Godzilla. He’s also come out with a film this year, The Creator, which I have cued up, but not gotten to yet. Praised for his use of creative and gritty visual effects, Edwards started with this small film about a monster invasion of sorts. While the premise is plenty interesting [think District 9 meets Stalker], the execution is horrendously boring. As you can see in my score, I didn’t finish this one. I record numbers for stuff as I view it, so I can’t be 100% sure a week out, but I think I gave this one point for every minute I survived this insipid slog of a concept that manages to drag on for 100-minutes. While it plays with ideas that Cloverfield did a couple years earlier, it does so in a less focused and less urgent way that leaves the whole thing “sluggish” at best.

- When Evil Lurks [2023] - 58

Speaking of movies with concepts that are as cool as their execution is bad: When Evil Lurks has a fantastic opening act, incredible props/ set pieces, excellent lore and concepts, an impressive commitment to violence… and is so boring and inept at telling its own story that the four people I watched this with couldn’t stop going “wah” every time the character that kind of looks like Waluigi popped up. This is a very cool possession film that takes a Game of Thrones approach by dropping the viewers straight into the middle of a world that the characters understand well. Where it goes wrong is that it fails to establish enough rules or pieces of lore to justify nearly any of its elements and, when it realizes its done that, suddenly finds a hackneyed excuse to simply hand them over as a bulleted list. This film is extremely creative and interesting in some ways, and frighteningly lazy and unprocessed in others. Had I watched it alone, I definitely wouldn’t have finished it.

- Napoleon Dynamite [2004] - -

Before anyone thinks the wrong thing about my rating of “-” here: Napoleon Dynamite is one of the movies that I regularly point to and say, “This is the reason I am the way I am,” more than most others. This film influenced my entire generation from quotes, to intonation, to clothing, to dance moves. There’s not a piece of my life that this absolutely bonkers, idiotic film hasn’t touched. And, for that reason, I simply can’t assign it a number. Watching it again as an adult is a really interesting experience though, because you see a lot more of the filmmaking behind it… and that filmmaking is actually really impressive and interesting. All of the framing is weird, all the editing is strange, all of the performances are hardly performances at all; feeling instead like true glimpses into real [if exaggerated] people. Napoleon Dynamite is a horrendously offbeat organism that simply shouldn’t have survived the early stages of evolution… and yet, is entirely perfect for all its utter nonsense.

- Godzilla Minus One [2023] - 63

Godzilla Minus One is the latest entry from the original side of the pond where the big G-Man came from. The long short of this one is that, if you already love Godzilla in all his skreeonk glory, you’ll have a good-to-great time with this: the effects are awesome, Godzilla is big, proud, and aggressive, and the human elements are just as good [bad] as anything else in the genre. If you don’t like Godzilla… this film is not going to convince you. The editing is lazy, the story is absolutely vacuous, self actualizing, and insistent, and the whole thing feels like Bernie Sanders did become president and made anime real. Talk about formative experiences for me, Godzilla is one of my earliest memories. As such, there were parts I really liked about this but, as a snobby critic… there were a lot more I didn’t.

- Dream Scenario [2023] - 88

A24 doing what A24 does with this one here: taking a fairly regular, tried story, and telling it in such a way as to make it fantastical, strange, and obtuse right up until the very end. The third feature film from Kristoffer Borgli [writer/ director/ editor], Dream Scenario isn’t likely to be anyone’s favorite movie, but it is one that people will remember for several different reasons, and one that will give them pause to consider where it falls on their list. While I mentioned that the editing in Godzilla Minus One was lazy and juvenile, the editing here is an absolute masterclass in intentional storytelling. Combined with some very weird cinematography, Dream Scenario tells you twice as much as its script conveys through visual flair and intelligent manipulation of our own expectations within the medium of film itself. While it isn’t quite as strong in recreating the wheel as Aftersun, there are elements of this film that deserve serious accolades.