Godzilla Talk about crunch time: It’s now or never for Warner Brothers to re-establish that the King of the Monsters is a fearsome irradiated beast who smacks up Tokyo while Blue Öyster Cult serenades him, not a spindly reject from Universal’s Islands
of Adventure who meanders around Madison Square Garden for an hour and then grabs a cab back to the Bronx. Yet the movie’s official synopsis takes pains to position Godzilla as humankind’s only defense against other monsters created by Science Gone Too Far – meaning that WB isn’t just going back to the character’s roots as a walking cautionary tale of the atomic age, but also retracing his subsequent and logical development into a Japanese national hero. Personally, I won’t be happy until we get a Gamera flick; then again, I really thought Dukakis was gonna pull it out. (PG-13)
Million Dollar Arm In a perfect world, Jon Hamm would be on the set of Batman vs. Superman right now, pulling on a pair of red booties and practicing his delivery of the line “I like pink very much, Lois.” (That’s the same world, of course, where Clive Owen is shooting his fifth Bond picture and the winner of The Voice gets to attach electrodes to Carson Daly’s testicles.) Instead, we have to live in reality, where we now only get a paltry seven goddamn episodes of Mad Men per year, and they’re interrupted by promos for Million Dollar Arm, a Disney family sports flick about a baseball agent who journeys to Mumbai to scout potential pitching talent. Slumdog Rookie, anyone? Oh, and Aasif Mandvi is in the thing too, instead of starring in a Comedy Central series about an embattled Al Jazeera correspondent, like he would be doing in that hypothetical nirvana I’ve been describing. Meanwhile, the pitching coach who gets the boys into shape is played by Bill Paxton, who in a perfect world would … scratch that, he’d probably be doing the exact same thing. (PG)