Lone Survivor

Based on a true account of a four man Navy Seals sent after a Taliban leader, Lone Survivor delivers on all levels.  You've got a great leads in Mark Wahlberg playing Marcus Luttrell and his band of fellow Seals played by Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, and Eric Bana who's performance and committment to the film really shows.  With so many films inundated with characters and tales of special forces, it's hard to argue with a depiction from an actual true and incredible account of one man's survival from 2005.  Simultaneously crowd pleasing, visceral action, and heartfelt.

Godzilla

I get the hype over 2014's Godzilla and how it immediately wowed at the box office initially. But after sitting down and watching it on dvd, I just don't get. Yeah, its a lot better than that Matthew Broderick shit from 15 years back, but that ain't hard to do. In this reboot, there are great quality actors in mostly supporting roles. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Ford Brody, a Navy Explosive Ordinance Disposal Technician, who's father (Bryan Cranston) has been haunted for 15 years by his work at a nuclear plant run by Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Wanatabe) that ultimately caused the death of his colleague and wife (Juliette Binoche). The nuclear energy has all this time been feeding a species called the MUTO that seeks to mate with another that it tracks from Asia to the west coast of the U.S also feeding on nuclear energy with Godzilla in tow as their predator and movie protagonist. Well, the elder Brody is quickly killed and so the typical generic action falls to his son, Ford, full of motivation/revenge/military duty for whatever killed his parents, threaten his current family, and ultimately threaten the world. Well, you've got plenty of motivation in the story on paper, but the execution of it all, is the main problem. Taylor Kitsch (Battleship) or Channing Taylor (White House Down) could just have easily been cut and pasted into the lead in this movie and nobody would have known the difference, as the predictable acting, action, and writing is generically the same. Consult the military and watch them run around, show us some not too spectacular special effect, ya di ya di ya, etc. We've seen all this before in the aformentioned movies and quite frankly, we've seen it done better. I didn't even see the point of many of the actions the military as a whole was taking and how it was so coincidentally dependent on one man (Ford Brody) among all those other specially trained military guys, scientist, and technology to be the primary key to leading everyone in the right direction. In fact, this wasn't even a movie primarily about Godzilla. Even the Transformers had more screen time and story relevance than this. And where were the presidents and world leaders in all this? At one point, I was just hoping some transformers or even Pacific Rim robots would just come out of nowhere and kill the monsters to put me out of my misery, because the generic un-urgency of this film was just hard to ignore as easily as it was hard to care about anyone here. As I write, I see there's a Godzilla 2 slated for 2018. If they just have to make another one, I suggest just calling it Godzilla and reboot it better.

Enemy

2013's Enemy starring Jake Gyllenhaal is an interesting psychological thriller about a history teacher (Gyllenhaal) who one day finds his exact look alike in a small part of a local film recommended by a work colleague.  From here, the curiousness of finding his double gradually becomes an obsession that gets out of hand and permeates his life.  Ultimately, this is one of those cleverly written (novelist Jose Saramago and screen adaptation by Javier Gullon) and directed (Denis Villeneuve) films that leaves the audience with enough enjoyable ambiguity to watch over and over with perhaps a deeper understanding or perplexity.  Gyllenhaal's acting subtlety is astonishing to watch here and it's a fresh break for him that mainstream films rarely afford.  In that same unorthodox vein, great affect is made of interior and exterior locations and the cinematography to give a heightened suspense to the story, much as a someone like Hitchcock would have done.