Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. It was just one of those movies during a year where I was eyeball deep in the first season of The Fourth Wall. Never got back around to it, and when I found Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) kind of underwhelming, I didn’t get in much of a hurry.

But now, as there is a better than even chance that my first movie back in the theater will be Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), felt like I should at least try to get acclimated.

Did I Like It: Tragically, I’ve been down on fiction films as a general rule lately, so it felt as I started this one that I was going to continue my resolute ambivalence. But, ultimately, I found myself kind of enjoying the proceedings in a low-impact, lazy weekend afternoon sort of way. Everyone involved has done better work elsewhere, but that’s hardly a complaint. Many films can feature John Goodman, but not every film can be Matinee (1993).

The time the film is set in—the 1970s, just as the Vietnam War is ending and the Watergate scandal is heating up—give it an undercurrent of political commentary that consistently threatens to either weigh down the proceedings or become trite, and it is surely to the film’s credit that it never fully surrenders to the temptation. The film’s secret weapon, however is John C. Reilly. His performance as Hank Marlow gives the film a rationale for an enlightened sensibility, and provides its comic relief. One might think that the film is a bit too measured in the pleasures it offers, but it’s hard to knock a film that gets the mixture right. It may want to be a bit of Apocalypse Now (1979), but it knows that people are really here for the giant ape getting into fights.

I just hope the man lived to see 2016. Go Cubbies.

I don’t know if the latest entry in the Monsterverse canon will be my first trip back to the theater post-vaccination, but if I do, I’m reasonably sure I’m Team Kong all the way, if only because I enjoyed their most recent film far more than the other. That’s a reasonable basis to pick sides in a fight, right?

The Flintstones (1994)

Director: Brian Levant

Cast: John Goodman, Rick Moranis, Elizabeth Perkins, Rosie O’Donnell

Have I Seen It Before?: I think so? I have some degree of memory that Halle Berry was in the film, but the rest of it is hazy. I actually have far stronger memories of commercials embedded in my VHS recording of the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale than I do of the film itself.

Did I like it?: Early on, I became a little concerned that I may actually like the movie. The creature work is sublime, bordering on actually bringing the improbable location of Bedrock to something resembling life. Dean Cundey as DP is always the thing a 90s movie needs. Whatever happened to him? Rick Moranis is pretty well cast, and he doesn’t appear in movies at all anymore, so it’s worth relishing the time we do have with him. John Goodman is a delight, because he is himself a delight. Here, he is indentured to the movie simply because he kind of looks like Fred Flintstone, and is relegated to doing a 90 minute long impression of Jackie Gleason, but that is hardly his fault. This is a movie based on a TV show that itself was a shameless rip off of The Honeymooners.

And so one is tempted to give the film a pass. This has got to be the best possible version of a movie based on The Flintstones possible. If they had to make a movie based on the material (and one supposes that they did), things could have gone far worse. Right? I would have thought the same thing, too, but then I read the recent comic book series featuring the characters. It was subversive and satirical, whereas the writing on display here (legend has it that the script was forged by a never-ending army of screenwriters) doesn’t elevate beyond the blandest sitcoms of the era. This movie could have reached for that level, but if there is one thing that Batman Returns (1992) taught us, it’s that subversive doesn’t sell Happy Meals.

But then one sees what I imagine is a Loch Ness Monster swimming around Bedrock lake, or half the scenes involving Dino, and realize that there may not be a pixel of CGI that has a shelf life of anything longer than fifteen minutes. Ever time I saw one of these polygonal monstrosities, I winced, and I winced far more than I did for any other part of the film. If the movie had only been Henson puppets, I just might have given it that pass for which it was reaching.

Matinee (1993)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz

Have I Seen it Before: Many long years ago, it was one of those movies that I absolutely wanted to go to see, and indulgent parents allowed for it, as Goodman was a pleasing weekly presence on TV at the time… and… um, that’s still true, as it turns out.

Did I Like It: Absolutely. It’s a perfect tragedy that both Charlie Haas doesn’t get to write major motion pictures anymore, and that Joe Dante isn’t directing like he was in the 80s and 90s.

While not as manic as the other film that assembled this director/producer/screenwriting team—Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)—it is still a sweet movie that plays to my own tastes beautifully. Loving movies, even/especially the bad ones, and the places where they are played, all while the world is coming apart at the seams. 

It’s a special thing when a filmmaker can go to work, and as the viewer I can get the sense that we’d get along pretty well, with are tastes being so perfectly aligned.

There’s one scene that’s about as good as anything else gets. Goodman describing the magic of a theater. And yet, the film never forgets to have a fun time. Both films-within-films are delightful running gags, but The Shook-Up Shopping Cart—the less prominent of the two side-productions is a blissfully absurdist gag amid an otherwise mainstream film.

One wonders if they could have leaned into that more, as the film was ultimately doomed to be a drag on poor Universal’s resources. Naturally, no one knew that at the time, and there really isn’t any reason that the film shouldn’t have been one of the big moneymakers of the year.