test: Guillermo del Toro

Showing posts with label Guillermo del Toro. Show all posts

Friday, July 26, 2013

Movie Review: Pacific Rim + POSTER CONTEST

Pacific Rim is a prime example of the fact that simplicity can go hand-in-hand with quality when it comes to summer blockbusters. Instead of giving us a convoluted plot and surprises at every turn, we’re treated to a simple premise and simple characters with straightforward motivations. Some of these characters are archetypal to a very high degree, but they fit well within the framework of the story and are (in most cases) perfectly portrayed by the actors (particularly Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman, and Ron Perlman).

The simple plot that we’re introduced to is that giant monsters called Kaiju have been attacking cities all over the planet and that humanity needs to fight back using giant machines called Jaegers in order to save themselves from certain destruction. Our simple but effective cast of characters is comprised of a jaded former pilot looking to reclaim his former glory (Charlie Hunnam), a rookie pilot looking to prove herself (Rinko Kikuchi), a hardened military leader willing to do anything to win the war (Idris Elba), and a pair of scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) trying to discover how to put a final stop to the beasts threatening mankind. Even though we’ve seen virtually every element of this story before in other films, television shows, comics, and books, there is still never a dull moment.

Drawing clear influences from anime and other giant monster movies in terms of the setting and plot, Pacific Rim is still intended to be wholly original in terms of the design of the Jaegers and Kaiju; and it definitely shows. They’re recognizable on a basic level as mechs and kaiju but are completely their own at the same time, part of an established world that was clearly made just for them. If I were a young child, I’d be begging my parents to buy me all of the Jaeger and Kaiju toys and would probably spend hours bashing them together on the battlefield of my bedroom floor.

While making you want to buy action figures might not seem like a great reason to categorize Pacific Rim as a good movie, in a strange way it really is indicative of the success the movie has in world-building. It builds such an entertaining world in such a short time that you want to get lost inside it and make your own adventures within it. The film is just as much about the world it creates as it is about the singular story within that world.

In that incomplex story of human survival we’re treated to spectacle in its purest, most heartfelt form. Yes, some of the character beats are a bit cheesy. And yes, some of the action is a bit over the top. But all of these exaggerations come from a place of love of the genres that are being referenced, clearly from the influence of Guillermo del Toro and his childlike love of storytelling, and I had a grin stretching across my face for almost the entire movie.

The fact that such an indulgent but well-done movie like this can still be made by a director with such a passion for the subject is something to celebrate in itself. We always see summer blockbusters with tremendous action sequences and incredible effects, but all too often it seems like they’re done only to showcase those effects, the story being cobbled together as interludes between those action set pieces. *cough Transformers cough*

However, Pacific Rim gives us elementary concepts and tools that have been proven to work in order to make you care about what you’re seeing. Any time action is on the screen, the stakes are understood and the characters’ motivations are clear. Because of that, it will make you laugh, cheer, and will even make you want to tear up a bit. (Or at least it made me want to...) So frequently in advertising for films you’ll see a phrase along the lines of “Like nothing you’ve seen before.” While Pacific Rim may show us things we certainly have seen before, it puts them all together in a really awesome new way, proving that just because you’ve seen something done before doesn’t mean it can’t still be good when it’s done right.

Grade: A

Pacific Rim

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro

Written by: Travis Beacham, Guillermo del Toro

Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Rinki Kikuchi, Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, Burn Gorman

Release Date: July 12th, 2013

POSTER CONTEST

Details:

NGU Online has five (5) Pacific Rim posters to give away to you guys. The poster (pictured below) is an awesome anime-style depiction of a Jaeger and Kaiju from the film locked in an epic battle. The artwork comes from Sergio Grisanti, who was hand picked by Pacific Rim director Guillermo del Toro to design the poster. Each poster measures 13.5" x 19.5".

Directions:

In order to win one of the posters, all you need to do is log onto Twitter and tweet us the name of either one of the of the Jaegers or one of the Kaiju featured in the film. Send your tweet with the Jaeger/Kaiju name to @NGUonline and include the hashtag #GoBigOrGoExtinct. If you're a winner, we'll contact you for your mailing information and send you the poster. Simple as that!

Good luck!

Feel free to reach me on Twitter @JOKftw or post in the comments if you've got any questions or comments!

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Movie Review: Mama

Guillermo del Toro is synonymous with quality macabre filmmaking. So it’s no surprise that with del Toro as executive producer, Mama gives us a ghost story that is not only very chilling, but also has some heart to it. Too often do we see simple slasher films in which the characters spend the whole film running around, just trying to escape a monster/ghost/psycho killer. But in Mama we get something seldom seen in horror films: actual character development. This mainly comes courtesy of our main character Annabel (Jessica Chastain).

Although at the age in life where most women have started a family and/or a serious career, Annabel is still still enjoying a life mostly lacking in responsibility. With dyed black hair and a gig playing bass in a punk rock band, she clearly prefers the alternative lifestyle to the conventional. When we first meet her she is celebrating a pregnancy test that has come out negative, ecstatic at the fact that she can continue to lead her carefree lifestyle. But her ecstasy doesn’t last long.
Annabel’s boyfriend Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has been bleeding his savings dry looking for his brother and two young nieces ever since they went missing 5 years ago. When the girls, Victoria and Lilly, are finally found in a cabin in the woods they are feral and animalistic. Barely recognizable as human children at first, they are kept in psychiatric care for some time and eventually released into the custody of Lucas and Annabel in hopes that a loving environment will help ease them back into society. However this change is much to the displeasure of Annabel. “They’re already fucked up,” she complains. “I didn’t even get a chance to fuck them up. They came that way.” This leads us to believe Annabel’s unwillingness to have children stemmed not from the freedom she would lose, but from a lack of confidence in her own ability to properly care for another life.

But the question still remains: Since there was no sign of their father upon discovery, how did two little girls girls survive in the wilderness on their own for so long? It is made clear to us as the viewers that this is possible because of a being the girls call Mama. And it is also clear to us that Mama has followed the girls back into the world. We see Victoria and Lilly constantly staring at and lovingly interacting with a menacing presence just offscreen. As the film goes on we get closer and closer glimpses at Mama, each more eerie and frightening than the last.
When the girls are brought back into society, the elder sister, Victoria (Megan Charpentier), is given a pair of glasses to correct her vision. Seeing familiar things she used to know with clarity, she is able to distance herself from the cloudy and obscure world she spent the past five years in and grow closer to Annabel. But her sister Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse), who was only an infant when left in the woods and has never known anything but the woods and the love of Mama, has more trouble readjusting and remains wary of Annabel. The ability of these actresses to portray the development from a completely animalistic nature to Victoria’s loving yet fearful personality and Lilly’s cautious and defiant one is very impressive considering how young they are for such roles.

And just as the girls develop different emotions towards their new surrogate mother, Annabel slowly and begrudgingly learns to accept her new role as a caretaker. Maybe she has what it takes to be a mother after all. But Annabel is tested beyond what she imagined when Mama starts getting jealous.

Just like in any ghost story, details concerning who and what Mama is are slowly unearthed. In this aspect, Mama is undeniably a bit cliché. Whether through nightmares and premonitions, unexplained visions and messages from the dead, or the obligatory superstitious public records worker with all the right information, different characters retrieve individual pieces of the puzzle on their own, but no one ever has enough of the whole story to know exactly what’s going on. And no matter what time of day someone leaves to go investigate Mama’s cabin, they somehow always seem to arrive right around midnight.
But even though Mama is built with some of the classic horror storytelling tropes, they aren’t just thrown together, but are handled with finesse and built upon a foundation of characters that grow and change as a result of their predicaments. Like with some of del Toro’s other projects, we’re given something we’re familiar with that’s raised to another level and has some unexpected twists along the way. The fact that we expect certain things to happen plays to the film’s advantage, upping the anticipation and sense of foreboding that’s present in nearly every scene.

Definitely one of the scarier ghosts in recent memory, the most frightening aspect of Mama is that she is always just out of sight, revealing herself only to the wild children who aren’t scared of her only because they can’t comprehend what she is in the way that we can. For a majority of the film we only see shadows or catch glimpses of the eerie way she moves and hovers. And the unnerving feeling of her presence follows us out of the theatre, causing every small movement we see out of the corner of our eye make us think of her.

Grade: B

test

HEADING HERE

HEADING HERE

HEADING HERE

HEADING HERE

HEADING HERE

Recent Posts

Movie Review: Pacific Rim + POSTER CONTEST

Movie Review: Mama