Monday, April 13, 2009

More Godzilla. Drinkin' Wine Spodee odee.

A pretty light week for me.

Horror and related:

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000, directed by Masaaki Tezuka), in which Godzilla is attacking nuclear power plants for their energy. The G force, tasked with taking Godzilla out, has a new toy that creates artificial black holes. Unfortunately, it goes haywire and lets something IN to our reality (well, the Godzilla reality, anyway). Monster mayhem ensues. Frankly, I don't like the design of the Godzilla suit in this movie. It never truly looks like Godzilla. At least, not to me. Still, it has an interesting premise, and it's always fun to watch guys in rubber suits wreck model cities. I always thought that building those model cities would be a fun job.

Civilian:

Bottle Shock (2008, directed by Randall Miller) is an amiable recounting of the so-called "Judgement of Paris," a 1976 wine tasting in which a panel of France's elite wine snobs blindly picked a California wine as the best of show, to the horror of French wine snobs everywhere. The movie follows wine snob Stephen Spurrier (Alan Rickman) to the Napa valley, where, expecting vinegar, he finds ambrosia. He also finds struggling vintner Jim Barret (Bill Pullman) and his underachieving son, Bo (Chris Pine), and the various characters in their orbit. They don't make these characters "quirky", thank god, but they do spend an ungodly amount of time on sweeping panoramic shots from helicopter fly-overs of the Napa valley. Alan Rickman is always fun to watch, so my partner and I had a fine time watching this. Minor, but fun.

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