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More than five years after the crash, homebuilding is stuck at half its normal level. That's a big drag on the economy. And things aren't looking much better: A report out Thursday shows homebuilder confidence is at its lowest level in a year.

This severe slump in single-family home construction has been going on across the country. We haven't seen anything close to this kind of a long-term construction slump since World War II.

"This is a completely unprecedented collapse," says Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. "What we learned was that if you pump enough leverage into a housing market and then take it out very quickly, you can see collapses the likes of which you've never even imagined," he says.

Homebuilding remains a kind of sleeping giant. If it wakes up, it could create a lot of good-paying construction jobs and manufacturing jobs at companies making everything from windows to dishwashers to lawn mowers. When housing really recovers it can offer a real boost to the economy.

And last spring, it seemed like that boost was coming. "Things seemed to be coming back, and we were seeing a big pickup in house prices, and construction was picking up as well. Everyone got very excited," Shepherdson says.

But then mortgage rates went up. "And at that point things came very quickly to a jibbering halt," Shepherdson says.

To gauge the practicality of investing the long years of speculative writing that it takes to produce a first novel, I asked my agent, Kate Garrick of DeFiore & Company, to estimate the percentage of the first novels submitted to her she considers saleable. Her answer (like all these answers, via e-mail):

I'd probably qualify it a little by saying that I'm only looking for certain kinds of books at any given moment, but I tend to receive queries that cover the whole spectrum of publishing, and so it's absolutely possible a lot of the books I pass on for being outside my wheelhouse will go on to find homes.

That said: probably 1%? Maybe a little less.

This is a monster sold on a sigh. For all of the bombast, the buildings falling, and the brawling beasties, the moment when this Godzilla is most impressive, the moment he suddenly transcends his digital underpinnings and feels like a real presence, is one of his subtlest and quietest. During a lull in a battle among the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, the danger around him briefly subsides; his head droops momentarily, his body heaves ever so slightly downward, and he exhales quietly. The fearsome jaws, knifelike talons, and spiky plates on his back might scream world-destroying lizard god, but that sigh just murmurs, "I'm gonna need a minute here."

Godzilla is nearing retirement age, with nearly three dozen movies under his scaly belt, so as the franchise enters its seventh decade, it's fair to ask any director attempting to resurrect the series whether there's a good reason (apart from box-office grosses) to poke this particular sleeping giant. British director Gareth Edwards' answer to that seems to be that it's time for a return to the creature's sober, serious roots after decades of rubber suits and silly monster-on-monster action.

To that end, Edwards demonstrates a clear understanding of what made 1954's Godzilla such an enduring story. As was the case there, he's attempted to create an allegory about the dangers of militarized science, and one that foregrounds the human drama while the monstrous chaos unleashed by man's dabbling in nuclear power and weaponry goes down in the background. He centers the story on one family, the Brodys, whose fates are intertwined with a Japanese nuclear disaster and its subsequent fallout.

Bryan Cranston plays Joe, an engineer at the Janjira nuclear power plant, which early in the film is destroyed in a series of earthquakes mirroring the real-life Fukushima disaster. His wife dies in the accident, and he becomes a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, trying desperately to prove that the official explanation for the disaster is a smoke screen. Fifteen years later, he's an embarrassment to his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a military ordnance expert now with a family of his own in San Francisco. Ford has to head to Japan to retrieve Dad after a run-in with local authorities, and his visit just happens to coincide with the earth starting its familiar rumbling again. Turns out Joe's theories aren't so crazy after all, particularly to Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), a secret government scientist studying a mysterious phenomenon at the Janjira site.

The characters don't quite escape the thinly drawn traditions of the standard summer blockbuster, but they are full enough to provide adequate personal stakes, especially with Ford's desperate attempts to reunite with his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son amid the carnage. Similarly, the allegorical underpinnings never quite match the grace with which the 1954 Godzilla interrogates scientific ethics in a militarized age, but they're present enough to provoke at least a little thought.

What Edwards is really after here is balance, not just of character and meaningful story, but also of spectacle. This is still a big summer tentpole, after all, and Edwards is committed to making a popcorn flick that thrills without sacrificing brain cells.

Edwards' only previous feature was the 2010 indie Monsters, which impressed its small audience with how effective a monster movie could be even if it barely had the budget to really show the monsters. Godzilla has the budget, but it maintains commitment to the notion that the unseen is more impressive than the seen: Godzilla doesn't appear until over halfway into the film (after one nicely executed bait-and-switch), and really doesn't take center stage until the very end.

When we do see him and the movie's other creatures — because this does still share some DNA with the later monster-vs.-monster iterations of Godzilla — it's most often from specific human points of view. They're partially obscured by goggles, by blurred binoculars, by smoke, by foregrounded buildings. Everything Edwards does visually creates a sense of scale as compared with humans, and when he does open Godzilla up to wide shots, it makes him all the more impressive.

Edwards' willingness to not always go over the top, to not try to be bigger than Godzilla, is what drives restrained moments like that labored sigh, or the stunningly executed paratrooper sequence teased in the poster, with troops falling from the sky trailing red smoke while the eerie Ligeti Requiem made famous by Kubrick's 2001 winds up the tension in preparation for another release.

This is exactly what big summer movies ought to aspire to: never short on dazzle, but unafraid to let us catch our breath once it's been taken away.

Where does Don Draper's formidable presence come from in Mad Men? From his impeccable style, sure, and from his brooding good looks, of course, but also from his stillness. A few drug-induced exceptions aside, Don is as restrained in movement as he is in his speech. The combination gives him an irresistible, if unsettling, allure; in meetings, it's his solid stare that holds your attention as much as his words.

Jon Hamm's stillness playing Don in Mad Men became particularly noticeable after I watched him in Million Dollar Arm, which, among other things, lacks a noteworthy performance to ground an otherwise loosely constructed film. Hamm doesn't play Don in Million Dollar Arm, of course, but he does play another salesman: the sports agent JB, who, after leaving a large agency to start his own business, is struggling to sign a big-name athlete and pay his bills.

In fact, Million Dollar Arm begins with a pitch from JB to a superstar NFL linebacker he hopes to represent. JB doesn't quite offer the same satisfactions as Don, though. He's something closer to Jerry Maguire in need of an editor, concluding his promise to secure countless riches with a supplication: "Will you let me help you do that?"

JB leads a hurried existence, rushing around LA in his Porsche convertible. Eventually he takes that energy to India, where, with the prospect of a billion new baseball fans on his mind, he hopes to save his career by converting Indian cricket bowlers into professional pitchers. To that end, he holds a contest called Million Dollar Arm, offering two finalists an opportunity to try out for the major leagues in the U.S. And when the winners, Rinku (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh (Madhur Mittal), return with JB to LA, one of the first English words they learn is the essence of JB's way of life: hustle.

Looking at Hamm's previous roles, you can chart his range by whether his characters default to a smile or a stone-faced stare. If deadpan, he's Don — assertive, composed, unflappable. With a smile — which, unlike most things about Hamm, is generally strained and awkward — he flips: Now he's goofy and approachable, characteristics he used to great effect on 30 Rock.

Either way, he has presence. In Million Dollar Arm, he disappears. And he's not the only one: Between director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl), writer Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) and co-stars Bill Paxton, Alan Arkin and Lake Bell (who is good enough to make you realize how wasteful her love-interest-as-motherly-sidekick role is), there's a lot of potential talent subsumed here by plain studio fare.

Whoever you want to blame, Million Dollar Arm is a film that, like JB, is in a needless rush. This isn't the hurry of a tense thriller. Instead, with time to kill, the film resembles a long car ride, with McCarthy and Gillespie producing the closest approximations to excitement possible so no one realizes they're bored. The scenes in India stuff a series of montages in between jokes about animals roaming the streets and a brief, preposterous stop at the Taj Mahal. (A Disney movie isn't where one ought to search for nuanced multiculturalism, of course, and here, at least, both sides are reduced to stereotypes: America is baseball, luxury and cultural insensitivity; India is spicy food, crowded streets and poverty.) In other moments, when a montage is too clearly out of the question, the film resorts to sudden leaps in time: anything, that is, but a stop for breath.

In the end, Hamm is most affected — there's a strain to his performance that suggests something about JB, perhaps, but also strips the character of any charisma. As a result, Million Dollar Man may be the first hint that Hamm is unable to rise above mediocre material and demand our attention regardless (an essential feature of any leading Hollywood actor or actress). But before passing judgment, I'd like to see a film that lets him sit still and prove otherwise.