Colossal

I enjoyed this. Look, there are a lot of people who I'm sure are perfectly fine who are leaving low, head-scratching reviews, but if you're a fairly damaged person, like myself, you'll probably get a kick out of the movie.

Don't expect a moral payoff, any wisdom, any heartwarming feels. It's a perfectly good way to kill a couple of hours.

Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is unemployed and often drunk. Her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens) dumps her and kicks her out of his New York apartment. She moves back into her family home and reconnects with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). She discovers that she is directly connected to a monster destroying Seoul. It's the result of a childhood incident with Oscar twenty five years ago.

It's a fun and different take on the monster movie. Hathaway is good. I like Oscar's heel turn. I would rather not tell Joel and Garth about the secret. If it's kept only to Gloria and Oscar, the tension could be much higher. I don't see Joel going along with Oscar's turn. Joel's character could be combined with Tim to make this more of a love triangle. There are some questionable logic with the ending but logic can't be taken seriously in this movie. This has a fresh take and stays compelling despite some bumps along the way.

Fist off, this is a good film. Let me get that out of the way. To h*ll with the haters. It's smart. Clever. Unique. If you pay attention there are plenty of gags. Hathaway shines and all the rest. It's just NOT the film the trailers lead people to believe, and I really hate that. The trailers filled seats with people who were expecting to see some quirky romcom and instead they got 'Annie Darko' and wound up hating it. And this is a major pet peeve of mine. The same thing happened with "White God" This kind of advertising always backfires. The PR dpt just puts together any trailer they think will fill the seats on opening night, then it brings the wrong audience and hurts the film in the long run. Colossal should have been advertised like "Motorama" or "The Dark Backwards"... or "Eating Raul". It's a dark edgy comedy and it's not supposed to be of the 'wacky wild hilarity' genre'. OK, it's not a life altering cinema, but it is far better than most of the critiques I've read. And one thing all those critiques had in common...? They all said it wasn't what they were expecting, or it couldn't figure out what it wanted to be. Wrong. The film was exactly what it was trying to be. The viewers just couldn't figure out what it was doing because they all thought it was trying to do something else.... primarily because of the way it was presented. Not that it's easy to describe. Just abandon your preconceived notions before you watch. I actually like it better than the film I thought it would be.

This is a love-it or hate-it movie. If you were looking for a RomCom or Kaiju movie, you may be in the hate-it camp. If, however, you want the clever outworking of a dark metaphor presenting itself as a mystery, you may have found a film you can appreciate. That might, also, have been the draw for the cast. Unusual roles for all the actors, performed well. Anne Hathaway held our attention. In terms of storytelling, there were times when the metaphor and the mystery collided with each other and the audience may be left (ironically) scratching their heads, trying to fit the pieces together. With that said, I am giving this film a 7 (clever) out of 10. {A Dark Metaphor}

Greetings from Lithuania.

I found "Colossal" (2016) much more interesting, dark and deep then i thought i will be after reading a premise. This isn't your typical comedy staring Jason Sudeikis - it isn't funny movie, except if you are looking for some very dark comedy.

Premise here looks like from a mind of Spike Jonze of Charlie Kaufman. Although it isn't as brilliant as those two might have made this movie - i loved the story overall and movie itself.

Ovreall, "Colossal" is a kinda fresh take on a premise. There is a very dark humor down below, but i enjoyed it very much in a first place because of very solid writing, pacing (at running time 1 h 43 min this movie never dragged) and not by "a numbers" movie. Good, underrated movie.