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K. Waste posted:Like, there's calling the military protagonist of a giant monster film whitebread, and then there's saying the solution to this is to have a story about an baby boomer granddad journeying across the world to see the daughter-in-law and grandson he's never met. I think most of those wishing for the cranston scenario are basically leaning on how he's a much better actor and would do far better at holding our attention. I actually don't mind the plot we got, but the character itself is TOO much of an audience proxy. The actor has been largely uninteresting even in exciting roles. More importantly, he doesn't really seem to do much besides hapoening to be near the action for at least 2/3rds of the film; not to mention disposable all his motivation beats are. I already mentioned passing his wife and kid off that he spent the last half hour trying to find. There's also the kid that gets separated from his parents that the protag watches over. In a better written script there'd be moments of bonding, better fleshing out his dad instincts in place of his incommunicado actual son, and they'd gain connection. Instead it jump cuts to him handing the kid off at the aide tent emotionlessly. Because of a lack of interest in or from the guy, the human plot becomes filler more than anything
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Aug 3, 2018 06:24
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K. Waste posted:Like, there's calling the military protagonist of a giant monster film whitebread, and then there's saying the solution to this is to have a story about an baby boomer granddad journeying across the world to see the daughter-in-law and grandson he's never met. Again, when people suggest making him the main character, they don't literally mean just swapping hum out for the dumb son. They mean keeping some of the story beats, wife dies, son dies and rewriting his role in the plot to one where he has a more direct affect on the plotline than he would have had if he'd lived. They want this because the sons plot is boring, convenient and cliché. A plot where the dad is the only one who realizes the muto is spawning and braves the danger of the city so he can angrily murder their family in response would have at least been more novel than 'man tries to reach family during disaster.'
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Aug 3, 2018 06:43
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The big problem was that Disney had already snatched up all the talented young white male actors for their Marvel movies and for some reason Godzilla '14 decided to drop to sub-par young white guy actors instead of choosing to cave and change age, race, or gender.
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Aug 3, 2018 06:49
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Caros posted:Again, when people suggest making him the main character, they don't literally mean just swapping hum out for the dumb son. They mean keeping some of the story beats, wife dies, son dies and rewriting his role in the plot to one where he has a more direct affect on the plotline than he would have had if he'd lived. That's literally the plot of every disaster movie except the disaster is a big bug What you're suggesting is that "the scientist no one listens to is right and he saves the day improbably" is a novel concept
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Aug 3, 2018 06:57
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Burkion posted:One thing I love is that a good portion of the fandom have (correctly) just decided that Monster Zero is one of the BEST Godzilla movies over time It helps that it was a film made with the US market in mind- they didn't just hire an American actor, they took some suggestions from Henry G. Sapirstein as regards pacing, etc. (the film was going to open with a scientific conference about the discovery of a new planet, but he told them to cut to the chase.)
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Aug 3, 2018 07:07
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G14 would have been saved if the main guy was replaced with Shia LaBeouf or Christopher Mintz-Plasse.
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Aug 3, 2018 11:54
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Terrible Opinions posted:The big problem was that Disney had already snatched up all the talented young white male actors for their Marvel movies and for some reason Godzilla '14 decided to drop to sub-par young white guy actors instead of choosing to cave and change age, race, or gender. And yet they went with a marvel actor anyways...
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Aug 3, 2018 11:57
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I am sick to loving death of people making GBS threads on Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the film. He's perfectly fine in the role. I will repeat this till the end of time each time some idiot brings it up.
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Aug 3, 2018 15:44
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He bad. Sorry.
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Aug 3, 2018 15:50
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Vintersorg posted:I am sick to loving death of people making GBS threads on Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the film. He's perfectly fine in the role. He was fine, but when you combine his mere adequacy with the vacuum left by Cranston's early exit, he ends up looking bad in the comparison. Had he been able to work with Cranston throughout the movie and play off him, it would've worked a hell of a lot better. Like, I don't think Hiddelston is really much better in Skull Island but he's got a whole cast around him to fill in the gaps.
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Aug 3, 2018 15:53
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Hiddleston didn’t just phone it in for Skull Island, he barely sent a telegram.
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Aug 3, 2018 15:55
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Vintersorg posted:I am sick to loving death of people making GBS threads on Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the film. He's perfectly fine in the role. He's fine, the character is just kind of generic most of the time. he has his moments though.
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Aug 3, 2018 16:13
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Like what would you change? What should he have done in each of his situations? Cranston dead so what does this character do to make him better in peoples eyes? Spout one liners? Climb on Godzillas shoulders with guns? Tell me.
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Aug 3, 2018 16:26
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Choco1980 posted:I think most of those wishing for the cranston scenario are basically leaning on how he's a much better actor and would do far better at holding our attention. I actually don't mind the plot we got, but the character itself is TOO much of an audience proxy. The actor has been largely uninteresting even in exciting roles. More importantly, he doesn't really seem to do much besides hapoening to be near the action for at least 2/3rds of the film; not to mention disposable all his motivation beats are. I already mentioned passing his wife and kid off that he spent the last half hour trying to find. There's also the kid that gets separated from his parents that the protag watches over. In a better written script there'd be moments of bonding, better fleshing out his dad instincts in place of his incommunicado actual son, and they'd gain connection. Instead it jump cuts to him handing the kid off at the aide tent emotionlessly. Because of a lack of interest in or from the guy, the human plot becomes filler more than anything Cranston is not a better actor than Taylor-Johnson, people just like him more. All he's doing is amping himself up to the point of histrionic exasperation and yelling. Meanwhile, nobody cites the opening where he forgets his own birthday as emblematic of his acting ability, because nobody actually cares. By extension, folks describe Taylor-Johnson's performance as "emotionless" or "blank" because there's no authentic interest in what the motivation behind the performance is. The character is distant because it's an extension of his unique relationship to a traumatic moment that he and his father shared. Whereas Joe saw his wife die, Ford saw his parents die from a distance. Whereas Joe responds to this trauma with obsession in uncovering the truth, Ford responds with denial. Joe even literally tells his son that he's in denial. Whereas Joe makes it his life's mission to try to either expose (at the very least to his son) the complacency and falsehood that destroyed their family, Ford submits himself entirely to the social apparatus and becomes a soldier, more or less disowning his father. He is not emotionless or blank - his emotion is resignation to a sense of duty, which is very well expressed in the scene where he has his last phone call with Elle. This is the sort of motivation beat that folks find "disposable," the one where he actually undergoes a significant change from just trying to get back to his wife and kid, to accepting that he has to prematurely let them go. And, yeah, the part where the kid he saves just finds his parents again without his help and he's left on the fringes. This is, of course, a parallel to the scene in the first act of the film where he watches the conservative Japanese parents bailing their punk teenager out of jail. There is a persistent motif of the family (specifically the "nuclear" family) that is running throughout the film, which directly informs the characters' motivations, but which is simply being developed primarily through visuals, with Ford as this thankless observer isolated or alienated from interpersonal relationships. The fetishization of Cranston's histrionics also inevitably leads to this projection that Ford just "happens to be there," when the film is actually very straightforward about how the decision (spurred by Elle) to try to salvage his relationship with his father leads him directly back to San Francisco, where he helps Godzilla destroy the MUTOs. He doesn't just "happen" to be in Hawaii when the monsters make landfall. He's been put there by the military for a commercial flight back to his family. He doesn't just "happen" to be on the military transport team that is preyed upon by the nuke-eating MUTOs. He volunteers. Caros posted:Again, when people suggest making him the main character, they don't literally mean just swapping hum out for the dumb son. They mean keeping some of the story beats, wife dies, son dies and rewriting his role in the plot to one where he has a more direct affect on the plotline than he would have had if he'd lived. Ford's experience has a direct effect on the plotline of the movie. You aren't paying attention.
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Aug 3, 2018 16:28
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holy moly will you guys chill
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Aug 3, 2018 16:40
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I think maybe the suggestion someone had earlier of adding just one or two more big monster beats, maybe showing more of the fight in Hawaii, would have helped. It's not necessarily any strength or weaknesses of the actors, it's just that we spend so much time with it at once, and an extra Godzilla or MUTO scene would have helped break it up.
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Aug 3, 2018 16:49
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Vintersorg posted:Like what would you change? What should he have done in each of his situations? I don't think anything could've been done specifically with Ford, because Taylor-Johnson isn't the kind of leading man who can do it all by himself. The answer would've been to give him other people to work with where he could play to his strengths without his weakness being as apparent as the are in the movie. Instead once Cranston dies it's basically just Ford going from place to place meeting random mooks who barely have any lines. It's all on Taylor-Johnsons shoulders and he's just not quite up to it(few actors are). Peanut President posted:holy moly will you guys chill Chill about what? Seems like a perfectly friendly conversation to me. Go check out what's going on in the Star Wars thread for some people that need to chill.
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Aug 3, 2018 16:57
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Basebf555 posted:Chill about what? Seems like a perfectly friendly conversation to me. Go check out what's going on in the Star Wars thread for some people that need to chill. It's just people running in circles in larger and larger posts, it's a powderkeg!
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Aug 3, 2018 17:01
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K. Waste posted:Cranston is not a better actor than Taylor-Johnson, people just like him more. All he's doing is amping himself up to the point of histrionic exasperation and yelling. Meanwhile, nobody cites the opening where he forgets his own birthday as emblematic of his acting ability, because nobody actually cares. I'm not really sure what I'd change with the movie because I have no idea where things went wrong and I'm not sure how to articulate why the human human interactions involving Taylor fell completely flat for me. I mean I'm not one of the people who thinks Cranston replacing him would have saved the movie, but Cranston's earlier human human scenes were better at selling the emotion they were working for. Which is why I think people assume just replacing Taylor-Johnson with Cranston would improve the movie, even if it probably would have made no goddamn sense and would have been just as flat. After all I get why on the page all of the current scenes that I don't think work are there and I understand how they're supposed to work, but they just don't land for me and don't land for a lot of people.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:04
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Taylor-Johnson can act, he's proved that in Nocturnal Animals, but he's just not the effortlessly charismatic leading man that G'14 seemed to be written for.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:07
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You're kinda missing the meaning of the coincidences of Ford being present for so much. The male muto just so happens to spring to action when he's there visiting his dad. Godzilla and the muto just happen to fight at the airport in hawaii when he's about to make tgat deliberate flight home. The meeting point of the mutos just happens to be San Francisco where he and his family live. He just so happens to be in earshot when the plan with the analog nuke is announced and just so happens to somehow be the only soldier on site trained for this vital piece of equipment just shipped in by the top brass. Him flying out of Hawaii or being on the strike team are not what we mean by coincidences.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:08
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Honestly it's a movie, of course the main character is going to be near the action. Specifically in a movie and a series held together by big emotions and dumb bullshit as Godzilla I don't think getting nitpicky about coincidence is going to bode well.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:11
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I thought Taylor-Johnson did fine given the 10 or so lines he had to work with after Cranston dies. Which is probably for the best, because his voice is comically high-pitched, especially for a leading-man role.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:18
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I don't think K. Waste is wrong about Taylor-Johnson's characterization, I just think a lot people of our generation and of the political stripe to be posting on this forum don't care about the inner drama of someone who "submits himself entirely to the social apparatus." It's less to do with inattention and more to do with a spectrum between apathy and outright hostility. Or put another way, this is basically the same conversation as "it's not a Godzilla movie if there isn't a scene of the military being useless and getting dunked on." People don't fetishize Cranston out of a desire for paternalism, they appreciate him because a Boomer who's furious with the inadequacy and corruption of the government is perhaps uncommon, but relatable, while a young soldier motivated by a stoic sense of duty in TYOOL 2014-18, especially portrayed as heroic (and unappreciated!) for this reason, might as well be from Planet X.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:22
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In short, Ghost in the Shell 2017 is an actually good version of Godzilla 2014. 
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Aug 3, 2018 17:24
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:In short, Ghost in the Shell 2017 is an actually good version of Godzilla 2014. So you're saying Scarlett should have played Godzilla?
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Aug 3, 2018 17:31
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Davros1 posted:So you're saying Scarlett should have played Godzilla? Let's just say I'm looking forward to the sequel about a misanthropic ecoterrorist.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:37
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Another thing I really didn't like about Godzilla Anime #2 was that they killed off their only female character to punish sakaki. The Mothra fairies don't count because they're barely a character. But sakaki already paid for his hubris at the end of the last film when he deservedly got most of his men killed in a pig headed attack on Godzilla. Killing off his love interest reeks of fridging to motivate him for movie #3. It doesn't help that she's also the only person in the movie to get attacked by the obligatory tentacles. And I can't even remember her name. She literally only exists to "be victim" and be sakaki's love interest.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:47
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Vintersorg posted:Like what would you change? What should he have done in each of his situations? Someone climbing on godzillas shoulders guns blazing would be cool as heck
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Aug 3, 2018 17:56
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I don't think K. Waste is wrong about Taylor-Johnson's characterization, I just think a lot people of our generation and of the political stripe to be posting on this forum don't care about the inner drama of someone who "submits himself entirely to the social apparatus." It's less to do with inattention and more to do with a spectrum between apathy and outright hostility. Exactly. See Zizek’s commentary on David Lynch’s The Straight Story: “perversion is no longer subversive: the shocking excesses are part of the system itself, the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself. Perhaps, this is one of the possible definitions of postmodern art as opposed to modernist art: in postmodernism, the transgressive excess loses its shocking value and is fully integrated into the established artistic market. So, if Lynch's earlier films were also caught in this trap, what then about The Straight Story, based on the true case of Alvin Straight, an old, crippled farmer who motored across the American plains on a John Deere lawnmower to visit his ailing brother? Does this slow-paced story of persistence imply the renunciation to transgression, the turn towards naive immediacy of direct ethical stance of fidelity? The very title of the film undoubtedly refers to Lynch's previous opus: this is the straight story with regard to the ‘deviations’ into the uncanny underworld from Eraserhead to The Lost Highway. However, what if the ‘straight’ hero of Lynch's last film is effectively much more subversive than the weird characters who people his previous films? What if, in our postmodern world in which the radical ethical commitment is perceived as ridiculously out of time, he is the true outcast? [...] What, then, if THIS is the ultimate message of Lynch's film - that ethics is ‘the most dark and daring of all conspiracies,’ that the ethical subject is the one who effectively threatens the existing order, in contrast to the long series of Lynchean weird perverts (Baron Harkonnen in Dune, Frank in Blue Velvet, Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart...) who ultimately sustain it?” The call for more batshit mega-acting Cranston is basically a call to bring back Randy Quaid’s pathetic/ridiculous abductee character from the notably unthreatening blockbuster ID4.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:57
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https://twitter.com/GoodWitchLeigh/status/1025035822452498432?s=19
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Aug 3, 2018 18:30
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Vintersorg posted:Like what would you change? What should he have done in each of his situations? Act good.
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Aug 3, 2018 21:21
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Davros1 posted:So you're saying Scarlett should have played Godzilla? I'd be down.
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Aug 4, 2018 06:26
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didn't she get to do that in that kaiju movie she was in that was horribly marketed as a comedy when it wasn't?
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Aug 4, 2018 07:14
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You're thinking of Anne Hathaway in Colossal. Easy mistake to make, all white women look a like.
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Aug 4, 2018 07:15
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Terrible Opinions posted:You're thinking of Anne Hathaway in Colossal. Easy mistake to make, all white women look a like. I am and some do
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Aug 4, 2018 07:25
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JBP posted:Act good. You don't know what you're talking about but ok. Do you even watch movies or do you just post about em adhering to the group think because you're simple? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vzL0R1s_RY How else is he supposed to act in this scene? Jump out the window with the kid in his arm? His acting is perfectly fine in this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOpD2wfTVWM He emotes as one should when confronted with such a thing. There is nothing wrong with his acting. People are just mad he wasn't some dumb 80s action star. Vintersorg fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 16:37
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There's nothing wrong specifically with boiled lollies, but that doesn't make them good.
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Aug 4, 2018 17:26
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awesome
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Aug 4, 2018 17:30
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Maybe I don’t get “bad acting”. To say that I think like, Tommy Wiseau or the Sharknado movies. Absolute schlock.
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Aug 4, 2018 18:34
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