Elizabeth Olsen Talks Godzilla 2014

Elizabeth Olsen plays nurse Elle Brody in Godzilla 2014

"GODZILLA is just so deserving of a good American remake, and I really hope we did it and I really feel like we did" --Elizabeth Olsen, Actress

In an interview at AintItCool.com Elizabeth Olsen, who plays the character Elle Brody in Godzilla 2014. Elle Brody is the wife of Ford played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. read the part where she teases more details about the upcoming Godzilla reboot below:

Capone: I hear a lot about his rehearsal process and how so much changes and gets locked in that period. Have you ever been though a process like that in terms of rehearsal?

EO: I hadn’t, and it was an amazing two weeks. Actually, we had a little bit of that for GODZILLA. Gareth, Aaron [Taylor-Johnson, who plays Olsen's husband] and I, just for dialogue reasons, character development, and things like that, we did do that for GODZILLA. But before OLDBOY, I hadn’t had that experience where someone was like, “Hey, let's do this movie, but you're allowed to re-write anything that you don't feel comfortable with. What do you think isn’t working, and let’s figure out how to make it work. What lines do you like saying, what lines do you not like saying?" It was amazing.

Capone: Ok, you brought up GODZILLA, and I gotta ask: In my mind, I look at that cast and that’s one of the best casts of any film in recent memory. [It includes Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe, David Strathairn and Victor Rasuk.]

EO: It’s ridiculous!

Capone: And I’m just thinking, are we just going to see these amazing actors running away and pointing at something in the sky for two hours? What is going on?

EO: Absolutely will not. [laughs]

Capone: I’m dying to know.

EO: I do that once. It’s Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s film, but the ensemble, we all are somehow connected to Aaron’s character. He’s the root, and I play his wife and I'm the person who holds down the San Francisco prospective of it all. I’m a nurse and I work trying take care of this chaos. GODZILLA is just so deserving of a good American remake, and I really hope we did it and I really feel like we did. 

Besides Godzilla 2014, Elizabeth Olsen also talks about her role in Spike Lee's Old Boy and her role as Scarlet Witch in the upcoming Avengers movie. Read the rest of the interview at Aint It Cool News. 

Pacific Rim from a Feminist Perspective

Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) sorting things out.

"This is what I mean when I say that Raleigh is a 'strong female character.'" -- Deborah Pless, BtchFlcks.com


Bitch Flicks is a self-described website devoted to reviewing films and television through a feminist lens. The premise of their review is Pacific Rim flips the script on traditional gender roles in a movie while allowing Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) maintain their dude-ness and femininity respectively. This is quite a refreshing review and a must-read unique perspective on Pacific Rim.

Read an excerpt from Bitch Flick's post titled ‘Pacific Rim’s Raleigh Becket Is a Strong Female Character, and That’s Great.

"In fact, the central emotional story of the film turns out not to belong to Raleigh, but rather Mako. An orphan of the Kaiju War, Mako wishes desperately to become a pilot in order to avenge her family, but is deemed too angry and emotionally volatile to make a good pilot. As it turns out, it’s Mako, not Raleigh, whose grief and rage endanger their connection, and it’s Raleigh’s job to emotionally balance her out and soothe the tempers around him.

This is what I mean when I say that Raleigh is a “strong female character.” Raleigh’s role in the film is that of friend, counselor, and emotional support–commonly the role given to a girlfriend or wife in a movie like this. He’s the Peggy to Mako’s Captain America, the Jane to her Thor, the Katara to her Aang. Raleigh is the supportive, emotionally intuitive counterpart to his impulsive, rash, and angry best friend. His journey is over in the first 20 minutes of the movie. Hers has just begun."

You can read the rest of Deborah's Pacific Rim review at BtchFlcks.com

Guillermo del Toro is Praised for Building Worlds Like Pacific Rim

Concept art for the kaiju skull city

 Ryan Lambie from DenOfGeek.us praises Guillermo del Toro's world building; from Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) through to Pacific Rim (2013).

Below in an excerpt you can read the high praise and interesting insights Mr. Lambie  has specifically for Pacific Rim:

In terms of world-building, Pacific Rim is arguably the most expansive movie del Toro’s yet created. Set in a near future torn apart by giant beasts which have, for reasons initially unclear, emerged from our oceans to wreck havoc on our cities, it sees a dwindling defense force gather together a handful of skyscraper-sized, human-driven robots to repel the incursion.

Proudly inspired by Japanese giant monster movies and anime, Pacific Rim creates its own realm of fantasy logic. We come to accept the strange, majestic movements of these towering robots, whose limbs move in time with the pilots’ own. Like all of del Toro’s films, it communicates so much through images rather than words; Pacific Rim’s designers draw from the symbolism of World War II tanks and submarines to give the machines a rusted, battered, lived-in sense of history, while the screeching kaiju have their own unique markings and individual videogame-like killer moves.

Like Mimic, Pacific Rim isn’t at all ashamed of its own inherent goofiness, and del Toro pulls off an impressive high-wire act of giving the movie both a sense of violent impact and also a childlike, playful sense of awe.

It’s this child’s eye perspective, perhaps, that is also key to the director’s world-building. Not all of his films are literally seen through a child’s eyes (though several of his best are), but they are all invested with the same childlike fascination for minute details and exotic, surreal images. Take, for example, a location somewhere in China, where an ad-hoc city has been arranged around the gargantuan bones of a fallen kaiju.

It’s a detail that is largely incidental to the plot, but it’s an idea that tells us so much about the history of this world without anyone uttering a word: the corpses of the kaiju are so utterly enormous that they’ve simply been assimilated into the landscape, and formed the part of a new and strangely beautiful place.

Things like this abound in Pacific Rim, and if you take the time to see them, they add depth to a story that is constantly thundering along like an untethered beast. Look how the little blue highlight in heroine Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) precisely matches the color of the coat she was wearing when she was almost killed by a kaiju as a child - a little bit of her traumatic past still clings to her as an adult.

Continuing with the same theme, they take the kaiju skull city a step further by not only building around it, but by turning it into a temple.

You can read Ryan Lambie's  praise for Del Toro's other works at the Den of Geek article Pacific Rim and Guillermo del Toro's world building