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[Movie] Gods of Egypt: Should’ve got the lettuce wrap

Well, you jerks gave enough money to Act For Change. You paid for my suffering. Here’s what you get.

And by the way? The manager at my local Alamo Drafthouse, who now recognizes me on sight, initially assumed I was there to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Oh no, I told him. Gods of Egypt. His eyebrows went up and he said, “Wow, your job must suck.” (He knows I write reviews for pay sometimes.) No, I assured him, it’s because people donated money to charity to make me watch this. How much? $305. “They didn’t pay enough,” he said.

He’s right. I should have held out for more. But the good news is, you can still donate to the cause after the fact.

So. Gods of Egypt.

Alex Proyas must be some kind of culinary magician. No doubt with help from the studio and a terrible script, he managed to take $140 million worth of metaphorical cinematic vegetables and garnishes and POOF! turn it into a film salad that’s equal parts insulting, lazy, and boring, the kind of salad that strips the skin off your tongue and takes a sour dump in the back of your throat and there is not enough wine in the world to wash that taste away, you just have to wait for the cells to die and slough off naturally.

Here, let me illustrate where this film falls, via Venn diagram.

Hit the sweet spot, aww yissss
Hit the sweet spot, aww yissss

The inexplicably white pantheon of Egypt walks the Earth and rules the Nile valley. Super white Osiris (Bryan Brown) wants to retire and crown his party boy jerk son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), so all the other gods are throwing a party. Then Set (Gerard Butler), sporting an excellent spray tan, shows up and murders the shit out of Osiris while the other gods sort of stand around awkwardly and try not to make eye contact. He then calls upon the powers of computer generated graphics to become a shiny animalbird transformer and beat the shit out of Horus in the first of the movie’s many unarresting fight scenes, rips out Horus’s eyes, and only refrains from killing him because Hathor has a nice rack. Set immediately declares that the afterlife will now be a capitalist enterprise and the only way to get anything nice is to buy your way in with money. And by the way everyone who doesn’t have money right now will be a slave.

As this happens, we get white Aladdin knock-off Bek (Brenton Thwaites), who is a strong, independent man who don’t need no gods. His girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton) is Horus’s number one fangirl, and is enslaved by an architect guy whose main job in the film is to construct a towering black obelisk (with a gold vein on one side) for Set, which is basically the only appearance of wang in a film about Egyptian gods. Zaya gives Bek the plans for Set’s vault, which is basically Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool, and he goes there to steal Horus’s eyes back. He gets one eye, singular, and then tries to escape with Zaya. The architect guy shoots her through the boob with an arrow and she is tragically fridged, except there’s not even really any manpain about it.

Bek decides he’ll help Horus get his other eye back (so Horus can turn into a CGI birdman) if Horus will bring Zaya back to life. They go off on a buddy adventure through fantasy Egypt, during which Bek decides that gods are okay, he guesses, and Horus presumably undergoes some sort of character development. While they’re doing that, Set methodically goes about whacking all the other gods, except for Isis, she already killed herself in grief over Osiris, and yes you just read that sentence. Once he’s collected the whole set of god body parts, Set goes full Satanic Ritual and basically makes himself an Egyptian God Voltron. Bonus points for the part where he literally inserts the glowing brain of Thoth (Chadwick Boseman), the only one of the gods who is black, into his own skull.

Take a moment to let that one wash over you. I’ll wait.

Thus empowered, he goes up to Ra’s awesome skyboat, throws dad out into the void, and then invites the serpent Apophis to eat everything??? because???? it???? will give???? Set more power????

Deep breaths, Egyptian mythology nerds. Deep breaths.

CGI things happen, there’s fighting I guess, Set loses, whatever, I kind of mentally checked out at that point. I just mostly remember that prior to her resurrection by a newly humbled, nice-guy Horus, Zaya had absolutely perfect lip gloss for a corpse.

Entire books could be written about how wrong the mythology is in this film, beginning with the fact that Christian good vs evil framing ruins everything, please stop making chaos gods into the devil, thank you and goodbye. But that would be a waste of someone’s perfectly good time that they could use to pick their nose or scratch their butt crack or a million things more productive than giving this film a second or even first viewing. And by the way? When Set plays God Part Voltron, the piece of Osiris he has, the piece that poor Isis couldn’t find before she offed herself as a side note, is Osiris’s heart. His heart.

The really upsetting thing here though is that there is a lettuce cameo in this movie. (Aha, so that’s why ze started with an incredibly strained salad metaphor.) When Horus, Bek, and Hathor go to Thoth’s library to get his help, Thoth is examining the scientific merits of a head of lettuce. It’s like the screenwriters signaled to us, hey, we totally did this research and know about the jizz lettuce wraps and the wangs and all, but we decided to write this bland as shit movie instead.

I have never been simultaneously so pleased and so angry to see a goddamn head of lettuce. Here’s your lettuce, assholes, but there are no wangs. NO WANGS.

Apparently I talk a lot with my eyebrows when I’m drunk.

Well, no wangs other than Set’s giant black stone Wang of Evil (yes but can you make it taller), which considering the absolutely delightful racism exhibited in the casting, well. Those are some stygian depths perhaps best appreciated from a distance.

So with all that going against it already, the sheer badness of the directing and acting in Gods of Egypt is really just the oh-god-that’s-not-actually-dressing on the lettuce. This movie should make it into a screenwriting course as exhibit A for this is how we don’t do voice over. The dialog is forgettable at best, awful at worst. And I don’t know if it’s an artifact of the extensive CGI shit they had to do to make the actors playing the gods twice as big as the humans so maybe they were all just acting in isolation in green closets, but none of the dialog actually sounded like dialog. There was no flow. It was actors, many of whom we know can turn in a decent performance, barking out lines by rote without any kind of interplay or response. It was weird, disturbing, and really fucking annoying. We’re talking Plan Nine From Outer Space levels of woodenness, here, but without any of the bizarrely kitschy charm lent by tiny plywood tombstones and pie-plate UFOs. Instead we get overblown visuals that are occasionally breathtaking (Ra’s spaceship hauling the Sun up over the edge of a flat Earth springs to mind here) but probably squarely to blame for the fact that every actor appears to be shouting their lines from a green screen vacuum.

And it’s boring. This movie is so. Fucking. Boring. It’s 127 minutes (still shorter than Transformers 4‘s 109 hour running time, mercifully) that should have been maybe 90 minutes, padded out with boring as shit action sequences with random moments of bullet-time slomo so I guess we can appreciate how cool this is. This film is fucking genre salad all thrown together (buddy comedy, action, romance, family drama, etc) and dressed with cheap exploitation because they spent their god semen budget on birdman transformer effects. The only character whose motivations make any sense is Bek, who presumably loves Zaya because we’re informed of this fact, even if they have the emotional resonance of two slices of plastic-wrapped American cheeze being rubbed together. Set wanting to let Apophis consume the entire world only makes sense if you consider it’s his only way to escape this fucking movie and then okay, maybe he’s doing us all a favor.

In that thoroughly awful way, maybe there’s one tiny, very well-disguised blessing to the unforgivable whitewashing of Gods of Egypt: at least no cowardly studio exec will be able to point to this shit salad and bleat that it somehow “proves” no one wants to watch fantasy movies starring black (and other non-white) actors. If any real lessons stick, like oh maybe it’s past time to stop trying to make movies about ancient (fantasy or otherwise) Egypt that headline white people, that remains to be seen. I don’t do sucker bets.

And remember, kids, if someone wants to sell you a salad, take a good, long look at it first and see if that dressing is really what they’re advertising.

As promised, here are my handwritten notes I took in the movie! You can track my inebriation by how bad my handwriting gets. Not as bad as 50 SoG, I’d say: Gods of Egypt notes

 

Think this movie sounds awful? Feel bad for me? Donate money to a good cause, to prove my suffering was not in vain!

And if you like what I do in general, hey. I have a Patreon.

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[Movie] The VVitch

Hey you! Yeah you! I’m raising money for Act for Change, and in exchange I’ll drunk watch Gods of Egypt and chronicle my suffering for your enjoyment. Details here.

I don’t even do the horror thing, why do I keep watching these movies? It’s all David Annandale‘s fault, basically.

I saw this trailer for The Witch some months ago, and my immediate reaction was
tumblr_m641p2JoAH1qbl202
Because gosh that looks scary and tense and I bet there aren’t any fart jokes. (I was right. There aren’t.) But then David started retweeting all sorts of interesting pieces about the film, about it being different and comparing it to It Follows and FINE. I got curious.

I didn’t think it was as scary as It Follows. I saw the movie with Sunil because he is a god among men, and did not actually attempt to burrow into him until about twenty minutes from the end. Which as horror movies go for me is pretty tame. No jump scares, which I appreciate. But the tension in the film was just unending once it got rolling.

Plot is simple: family gets kicked out of their Puritan village because dad doesn’t agree with the elders 100% on religion. They strike out into the wilderness to make a new home for themselves. Times are hard, and bad things keep happening, and happening, and happening, and then shit really goes sideways.

Several things were striking about this film. First off, despite the reason for the family being out by the creepy woods being religious differences, the patriarch of the family isn’t the villain; he’s religiously not any wackier than the rest of the Puritans at the time, as far as I could tell. The family is one of generally good people who make little mistakes such as lying to each other in an effort to avoid conflict, that balloon into terrible familial conflict later.

Much has been made about the historical accuracy depicted. As a non-expert, I can’t confirm or deny this, but it certainly feels like the work’s been put in to make this feel like we’re just following a 17th century Puritan family around. The language and accents took me about 10 minutes to get used to, because it was very different from modern American English. That was actually pretty cool.

The horror is played very close to the chest here, in a way I could appreciate. While it’s very clear what happened to the missing baby, much of the rest is left ambiguous. Is the rabbit we keep seeing actually a manifestation of evil, and we’re afraid because we’re seeing it through the eyes of a family that’s isolated and afraid? Nothing blatantly supernatural starts happening until very close to the end.

The film rests almost entirely on the backs of six actors, who comprise the family that’s heading for a terrible end. Everyone did excellent work, but Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the oldest daughter Thomasin, was particularly excellent.

I don’t tend to be a fan of witch-as-monster stories; they just never sits right with me, considering the history of innocent people getting executed for witchcraft in the early modern period. In the light of day, I can’t say I feel any better about it, though in the moment I was too busy squirming in my seat to think about it over much.

A little spoiler here for the end.

Continue reading “[Movie] The VVitch”
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[Movie] Hail, Caesar

Hey you! Yeah you! I’m raising money for Act for Change, and in exchange I’ll drunk watch Gods of Egypt and chronicle my suffering for your enjoyment. Details here.

I’m guessing that if you’re a big enough fan of the Coen brothers, you will convince yourself that Hail, Caesar! is a work of genius. I’m not a big enough fan to be able to do that. Setting aside the douchey stuff the Coen brothers said when questioned about the blindingly white cast of this movie, which left me annoyed enough that I felt more compelled to see Deadpool a second time on Hail, Caesar!‘s opening weekend, it’s honestly not that good of a movie.

It’s got some of the quirky fun that made O Brother, Where Art Thou? fun and worth rewatching. It just doesn’t have anything like the narrative coherence that made that movie an excellent piece of art.

Hail, Caesar! is nominally the story of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), in charge of Capital Pictures, and follows him through about two days while he’s trying to get principle filming finished on the titular movie. (So yeah, it’s one of those film with in a film things that can sometimes get a little too masturbatory for anyone else to enjoy.) The star of the film,  Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), gets kidnapped by communists and throws the whole thing into disarray. Then there are a lot of other side issues that Mannix is dealing with, showing how busy and stressed he is, and at the end he decides that as hard as his job is, he’s going to keep it. There is also a narrator that sounds straight out of a Biblical film, which is fun I guess, since in the fictional movie Hail, Caesar! is actually about a Roman coming to believe in Jesus Christ.

There are a lot of fun little set pieces in this, little homages to the films of the 50s and 60s, including an extended synchronized swimming sequence involving Scarlett Johanson, and a gay sailor tap-dancing revue with Channing Tatum where they sing about how there are no dames. I would have rather watched the whole “no dames” musical, since I do love me some singing and tap dancing. But these things ultimately end up feeling self-indulgent and almost all (except the tapdancing, but I love tap so much) go on long past the point of boredom. There isn’t a narrative thread that binds all of this together; the plot in this movie is damn weak. And yes, I get that perhaps this is supposed to be more of a comedic character study of Mannix, but the Coen Brothers spend so much time in the minutiae that Mannix is completely lost. I don’t care about him as a character. He’s supposed to be struggling with if he’s going to keep his job or move on to something less stressful, and there’s no room for that between the minor plot lines that he’s trying to juggle.

This doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like a collection of index cards with “wouldn’t this be fun?” ideas that got pulled of a cork board and filmed. I enjoyed individual funny scenes because they were clever and had some fun stylistic and visual gags. I could not have given less of a crap about the whole.

And it’s not surprising that the Coen’s were jerkily defensive about their casting choices. I saw only three non-white characters in the entire film, two of whom were the staff at a Chinese Restaurant. (Yeah, they used that trope.) The third was Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio), who was absolutely cute for the few minutes she was on stage. I wish we’d seen more of her and less of her studio set-up boyfriend, Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich). Sunil claims he saw an African-American extra in one of the scenes too, though he was not in focus and behind another actor.

The best thing about this movie was that I got to see it with Sunil. And that has nothing to do with the movie and everything to do with, you know, Sunil. If you cannot convince Sunil to go with you (not bloody likely), ask yourself if ten minutes of Channing Tatum tapdancing are worth the price of admission.

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movie

Deadpool, Zoolander 2, sexy fighting, and transmisogyny

Spoilers for specific scenes in both movies.

I saw two movies this weekend: Zoolander 2, and Deadpool. Actually, I saw Deadpool twice because I liked it that much. I don’t know jack shit about Deadpool as a comic book character, but the movie is hella funny and I think Ryan Reynolds finally got the movie he’s been craving for years. It’s crass and profane and earns the R-rating without ever going the full Tarantino, which I appreciate immensely.

Zoolander 2 isn’t terrible; it’s got its funny moments, but it kind of feels like a collection of cameos held together with a thin veneer of plot. (The Neil Degrasse Tyson and Kiefer Sutherland cameos make it, by the way.) It’s not really as coherent or weird or funny as the original Zoolander, which I’m not ashamed to admit I loved in all its stupid glory and regularly rewatch. I’m not sad in a general sense that I watched the sequel, but I’m not feeling a burning need to own a copy, like I do for Deadpool.

Two things strike me after viewing the movies so close together. There’s a scene near the end of Zoolander 2 where Fashion Police agent Valentina and henchman Katinka have a fist fight, and it’s called out by Mugatu as “Look, they’re sexy fighting!” And they sure are rolling around and making porn faces in a way that’s not really that much exaggerated from the way such fights are in “serious” action films. I appreciated it as a moment of calling out how bullshit and ridiculous woman versus woman fights can be in action movies and making fun of it.

But in that vein, I liked what Deadpool did even more. There’s a scene about midway through when Deadpool is hunting down a bunch of bad people and he’s taking on two women. He hits one of them (just like he has with the male bad guys he’s taken on) and then when she screams he says in what sounds like sincere distress, “I’m so confused! Is it sexist if I hit you? Is it more sexist if I don’t?”

I think the reason that scene just stuck with me is it’s been a staple of so many superhero movies that when there’s a female hero on the team, there’s got to be a female villain, and those two fight. I think there’s a deep discomfort with seeing cross-gender violence in these kind of action movies just because female heroes and villains are universally sexualized. (Extra points here for the number of spandex-clad and au naturale ass shots we get of Deadpool, the most sexualized character in his own movie.)

And as weird as it sounds, I appreciate very much that Deadpool is an equal opportunity puncher/stabber/shooter in that sense. The female villain in Deadpool, Angel Dust, does eventually fight Negasonic Teenage Warhead, but her longest and most protracted action sequences is with Colossus, and there is nothing sexy about it.

Of course, the bothersome thing about Angel Dust is that when she first shows up and we learn her mutant power is super strength, pre-Deadpool Wade of course has to make one of those fucking “jokes.” You know, the you are strong therefore you must not actually be a woman hey I bet you have a dick jokes.

And before you crawl into my comments and tell me all about how Wade is crass and nothing is sacred and he’s supposed to be an obnoxious dickbag, please stop. Every line in this film was a choice, by the writer, by the actor (if adlibbed particularly), by the director, by the editor. Wade was a lot of things (obnoxious being number one) in the movie, but he was far less sexist compared to what he could have been and what I expected. He wasn’t disgustingly racist, just think about his interactions with the cringe-y stereotype of a cab driver (Dopinder) and with Al. The transmisogyny there, so reminiscent of the whinging bullshit you hear every time a female athlete excels, was unnecessary. (eg: going with the athlete vibe, how about sensing some steroids instead of wang?)  Wade manages to be a dickbag to Angel Dust plenty of other times without playing to a harmful stereotype that resides entirely within the audience and makes even less sense in a world where the X-Men exist.

Of course, this pales in comparison to the “All” scene in Zoolander 2. If I have to pick my transmisogyny poison, I’ll take the throw away line versus whatever the fuck this scene was supposed to be. After seeing the entire thing in context (because it does go on way longer than in the trailer, unfortunately), I’m still not sure what the actual point was, though I am sure I didn’t like it.

The scene starts out with Derek and Hansel being nosy about what All’s got stashed in their trousers, which is  bullshit way too many trans people have to deal with already in real life. Then on one hand, you have someone defending All and calling out the notion of the strict binary. On the other hand, it sure feels like mockery considering it’s coming from the hipster fashion designer who continues on about All being in a “monomarriage” with “hermself.” All in the movie is the hottest model in fashion because I guess nonbinary gender is supposedly “trendy” and thus deserves mockery. Somehow, I don’t think any fashion gender ambiguity trend outweighs the “trend” of trans people being murdered or committing suicide or being targeted by shitbag lawmakers who are more obsessed with genitalia than Derek and Hansel.

The only other time we see All, they’re dressed in a weird fashion angel outfit and diving down to lash Hansel and Derek with a whip on the runway. I got nothin’, other than the fact that I really wish this scene hadn’t even existed. And yeah, Derek and Hansel are dumb, that’s part of the joke. But I’d ask: is the real joke in this shit show of a scene supposed to be that Derek and Hansel are dumb for thinking they have any damn business asking about All’s genitals, or that All is a caricature played by a cis male actor and All brought it on themselves by being ambiguous and weird and is making Derek and Hansel uncomfortable?

To end on a positive note, yay Deadpool. It was a good Valentine’s day choice, believe it or not. The movie has an emotional core to go with all the quips and fourth wall breaking and Ryan Reynolds snarking about the Green Lantern movie. Vanessa and Wade are disturbingly cute and have a strong, emotionally healthy relationship. One of the big questions of the movie is if that relationship can survive how Wade has changed, and the answer is pretty satisfying. Not what I expected out of an R-rated superhero movie. The opening credits alone are worth the price of admission.

Hashtag fuck cancer.

 

BTW I’m raising money for Act For Change, an organization that helps and promotes diverse artists. You should check it out.

 

(PS: I am not perfect at writing about gender issues. If I have been an asshole unintentionally, I appreciate very much being told so I can stop being an asshole.)

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[Movie] Brooklyn

This movie was pretty good. You should support Act For Change and make me watch a bad movie instead so you can feast upon my sarcastic rage.

I’ve been trying to catch up on as many best picture nominees as possible for special podcast-related reasons, so I jumped at the chance of seeing this one at the Alamo Drafthouse last weekend. (I am also trying to find a showing of Creed I can watch, for potential talking shit about the nominees purposes.) Like most of the other nominees, this Isn’t My Kind Of Movie, which means it’s the sort of movie I should still watch anyway in the interest of expanding my horizons out of the genre dungeon.

Brooklyn is about an Irish immigrant with a name that’s completely unspellable without referring to IMDB (Eilis, played by Saoirse Ronan) who comes to the titular city in the 1950s, looking to make a future for herself after she can’t find decent work in Ireland. She meets and falls in love with an Italian plumber who is regrettably not named Mario or Luigi (Emory Cohen) and eventually has to decide if her home will be in America or Ireland. There’s not that much plot to it; this is more a character study built on scenes of fairly ordinary days that add up to a life.

It’s a very pretty movie, with a softness to the way everything is shot that reminds me of old photographs. I think there’s a lot of that sort of nostalgia filtering going on throughout the film; everything looks exceedingly clean, society is startlingly polite. Maybe 1950s Brooklyn had a Leave-It-to-Beaver air to it, I don’t know my history granularly enough to say. On one hand, that gives room for Eilis’s conflict to be entirely a choice between old and new lives, without any outer social distraction. (And Time magazine seems to feel it was pretty accurate in some ways.) But I felt entirely unmoored, since I didn’t find any distinct sense of history beyond the costuming to really remind me where we were.

One thing I did love about the movie, which was highlighted in my mind perhaps because I’d seen Lazer Team less then twelve hours earlier, was just how many women there were in it. It was about mothers and daughters and women helping each other make it in a new place or occasionally trying to destroy each other. Men mostly exist in the film as arm candy for the supporting characters, and while one of Eilis’s conflicts is choosing between two equally nice men, it’s secondary to her choosing if she will go back to her life in America generally, or stay in Ireland with her mother. I also loved that some female characters I expected to be quite nasty thanks to common film tropes ended up being immensely supportive of each other.

Ultimately, it’s like eating cotton candy; it fades away almost immediately but for that lingering memory of sweetness. I didn’t find it to be terribly substantial, and while I can’t say I regret watching it, not by a long shot, I’m really not sure what it’s doing up against movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, or even The Martian.

(Still to go: Spotlight and Room. And Creed because I’ve heard it sure as hell deserved a nod.)

Like what I do? Want to see the notes? There’s a Patreon for that.

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Box Office Flop for 13 Hours?

Saw this piece from the Hill crowing about the Benghazi film flopping at the box office. A Michael Bay movie about an annoying conspiracy theory not doing well? Doesn’t break my heart.

Though of course there’s arguments going on (generally drawn along political lines, unsurprisingly) about if it actually is a flop, because hey, $19.6 million is not an amount of money to sneeze at. So I got curious and decided to look a little more into the context. What exactly does constitute a flop?

To begin with, the operational definition of a “flop” seems to be: a movie that fails to make back its production budget. This is actually fairly generous, considering that advertising/distribution/marketing isn’t included in that number and would make the bar notably higher. For 13 Hours, the production budget is $50 million. So on opening weekend, it got back about 40% of its production budget, which is… not great.

It means that in the following weeks (and with whatever [unlikely] international success the movie might enjoy) 13 Hours could conceivably make back its budget, though this is by no means assured. It’s been getting middling reviews at 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences have it at 88% and word of mouth is a thing. And it’s not like good reviews are required for a movie to make money, just look at Ride Along 2 at 13%. Oof.

Now, if you look at the biggest opening weekend flops of 2015, which made less than $4 million their first weekend, it could have been a lot worse, yes, though I’m not sure “it had an opening weekend five times better than Victor Frankenstein” is really that much of a comfort. But it is fair to say that burying 13 Hours next to Jem and the Holograms might be a tad premature. It could still hobble to the finish line!

On the other hand, consider that American Sniper ($58.8 million production budget), which presumably had a similar target audience, scored $105.3 million on the same opening weekend in 2015. And 13 Hours is a film by Michael Bay who, love him or hate him like I do, normally brings in the money. That cinematic effluvia that almost destroyed my liver, Transformers 4, made $100 million domestic its first weekend on a film with a $210 million budget. While that might sound comfortingly closer, percentage-of-production-budget-wise (47% versus 39%) to what’s going on with 13 Hours, keep in mind that Transformers 4 was an international powerhouse. Almost 80% of its money got made internationally, which is highly unlikely for 13 Hours. Domestically, Transformers 4 only made $35 million over its budget. (See Box Office Mojo for where I’m getting my numbers.)

Anyway, there’s some serious mental gymnastics (and a deep desire to see one’s favorite conspiracy theory on the big screen, I suppose) required to see $19.6 million as anything other than highly disappointing.

Another thing to consider: the movie that blew 13 Hours out of the water this weekend, Ride Along 2, made $48.6 million upon opening, on a movie that had a $40 million production budget. (And I’d be curious what its advertising budget looked like in comparison to 13 Hours as well.) See, that’s what success looks like.

(Just for funsies, I looked up the opening domestic weekend for The Force Awakens. $248 million on a film with a $200 million budget.)

So anyway, is it fair to crow about 13 Hours being the floppingest flop that ever flopped, take that Benghazi conspiracy theorists? Eh, it could have been much worse, and it’s not inconceivable that it’ll at least recover its production budget, which is more than a lot of other movies with bigger budgets (ahem, 47 Ronin) ever manage. But you’ve got to be kidding yourself if you think $19.6 million is “good.” Maybe in the same universe where 13 Hours isn’t conspiracy fanfiction.

Just a little update on 3/18/16: Per the BoxOfficeMojo numbers, 13 Hours has managed to make back its production budget and score a little besides. (Numbers here.)  $63.6 million on a $50 million production budget. So technically, it has clawed its way out of being a flop, barely! Definitely not anything to write home about, financially.

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[Movie] 400 Days

400 Days is the first theatrical release film from a company (SyFy) that’s been cranking mediocre to howlingly (we hope intentionally) funny terribad movies out onto its cable station for years. Getting in to movie theaters is a big deal, a major investment, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee a movie’s actually good, right? Let me tell you, I’d rather watch a SyFy offering any day than Transformers 4. But is this Syfy going legit, so to speak?

Imagine the wiggly hand gesture here. Yes and no. I’ll be the first to admit I’m a tough sell when we’re talking relatively small/low budget independent scifi, because we’ve seen some amazing shit in the genre recently, mostly dominated by the UK. So I’m probably a harsher judge than I could be. On the other hand, I really, really want SyFy to succeed, because I want to see more small, weird, good genre films. And SyFy’s generally got the weird part down at least. I went in to 400 Days wanting very much to like it and wanting it to succeed.

Spoiler: I was disappointed.

The movie’s got a pretty straightforward plot: A sleazy corporate dude in a suit, representing a private company that’s breaking in to space exploration, puts four astronauts in an underground bunker for a 400 day experiment to simulate a long term space voyage and ascertain the psychological effects. The simulation astronauts are named Bug (Ben Feldman), Neil (Brandon Routh), Dudebro (Dane Cook), and Emily (Caity Lotz).

(Okay, actually, according to IMDB they’re Bug, Theo, Dvorak, and Emily, but I swear to god for the first half of the film everyone sounded like they were saying Neil instead of Theo.)

Not long into the experiment, the crew loses contact with their corporate, simulated ground control. They assume it’s part of the simulation and keep going, at which point things get increasingly weird in a way that indicates the film really wants to be a psychological thriller.

The sets (and filming style) all have that faintly unreal, cardboard-y look to them that seems endemic of SyFy movies, but in this case it actually works for the film, since the crew isn’t actually in a space ship–just an underground bunker that’s been tarted up to look like one. We’re always supposed to be in doubt about what is actually real, so everything looking a bit fake does lend itself well to that. Nothing too remarkable in the filming style, standard teal and orange color grading. Sound was… all right, though I had a hard time understanding the actors now and then, which is why I was convinced for about half an hour that Theo was actually named Neil. I thought the actors turned in decent performances, though Tom Cavanagh (playing Zell, creepy survivor guy and possible cannibal) was over the top in a way that really clashed with the rest of the film leading up to him. I also had a hell of a time telling Brandon Routh (Theo) and Ben Feldman (Bug) apart.

What let 400 Days down wasn’t the acting or the direction or even the fact that Evil Co apparently buys their space ship trash cans at Target, but the script. The characters (except for Bug) were cyphers with no past and no real internal emotional life to feed what they were doing or make their decisions sensical. This could have been forgiven in scifi/horror fare where you just sit back and watch the blood spray and CGI aliens gorge themselves on livers or pituitary glands or what have you, but not when we’re supposed to actually care about the struggle of these supposed “ordinary” characters against the unseen forces that seem to manipulate them. Worse, what starts as a decently solid plot unravels completely by the end. I’d recommend not bothering with this one until you can just watch it on the Syfy channel.

Spoilers as I get a bit more detailed into the plot.

Continue reading “[Movie] 400 Days”
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movie

[Movie] The Revenant

The Revenant is one of those movies where the trailer tells you everything you need to know about the fairly simple plot while still leaving you woefully unprepared for the actual film. Spoilers below, I suppose, though the plot is really not what moves any of this.

Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) have been hired by Captain Hot Ginger (Domhnall Gleeson) to guide a party of trappers from a local fort. After escaping a raid by a party of angry Arikara tribesman, the men who remain try to make it overland back to the fort. Not long into the journey, Glass gets mauled by a mother grizzly bear in the first of many downright harrowing scenes. He survives somehow, but Captain Hot Ginger is forced to leave him behind in the care of Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Bridger (Will Poulter) after the promise of monetary compensation. Fitzgerald attempts to kill Glass, murders Hawk when he tries to intercede, and throws Glass into a shallow grave–which Glass promptly crawls back out of. After that, it’s Glass surviving against increasingly squirm-inducing situations, moved by the promise of revenge.

That’s really it. There’s a parallel plot thread not revealed by the trailer, in which we find out the Arikara are pursuing Glass’s party because one of the men’s daughter, Powaqa, has been abducted by a group of white men. It turns out that she was actually taken by a group of French trappers, but one can see how the groups of incredibly racist, murderous white trappers start to blend together after a while. Glass ultimately saves Powaqa while on the path of vengeance, but this doesn’t  provide him with any sort of redemption or peace. If you want either of those things, this is not the film for you.

This isn’t a movie about the plot, though. It’s not even really a character study as such; Glass and Fitzgerald expand a little upon their pasts, but it’s a bare framework that supports their chase across the wild and a provision of basic motivation, not a deep dive into what makes either man tick. This is all about watching a man struggle and survive against impossible odds, and then…

I still don’t know how I feel about this movie, to be honest. I came out of it feeling like a small piece of my soul had died, but not in the Michael Bay sort of way. The same way after I finished watching There Will Be Blood I needed a hug from one of my cats and a large amaretto sour.

The Revenant is simultaneously sublimely beautiful and viscerally repulsive. When dirty, bleeding men aren’t trying to murder each other on screen, it could be a tourism brochure for Alberta, Canada, showcasing breathtaking natural landscapes. We get sweeping mountains and pristine snowscapes in wide and continuous shots, marred only by one man in complete isolation struggling through them. The absolute savagery with which those landscapes attempt to murder Glass is only surpassed by the brutality of the humans trying to kill each other. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has made certain that there is nothing artful or beautiful about the violence and blood; he’s put as much work into the realism of that as the costume designer did for the accuracy of the clothing and Loren Yellowbird Sr, the Arikara tribe member who consulted for the film, put into the accuracy of the spoken Pawnee and Arikara. There is nothing glamorous about watching Glass and Fitzgerald clash with hunting knife versus hatchet; violence and survival are both depicted as uncompromisingly ugly. And if there’s any kind of relief from the horror of survival, it’s in the existence of family and the kindness of strangers, which with one exception are swiftly and wrenchingly torn away.

The sound design is fantastic and often focuses on highlighting the sound of nature, whether it’s the distinct sound of clumps of snow falling through tree branches moving water. The score is mostly low strings, sound like wind, or drums that blend in with what is happening on screen. During some of the most uncompromising scenes there’s nothing but the sound of harsh breathing; maybe it’s because in the real world we don’t get a soundtrack when mother nature or our fellow man tries to kill us.

The acting is fabulous. I don’t know what well of blood and energy Leonardo DiCaprio keeps digging in to, but despite large stretches in the middle of the film being nearly silent except for his ragged breathing, he never stops communicating forcefully just how much it sucks to be Hugh Glass. Tom Hardy makes a disturbingly banal villain motivated entirely by self interest and happy to show the audience just how he talks himself into nearly everything. Forrest Goodluck succeeds, with very few lines and a lot of emotion, in showing the complex relationship between a mixed boy and his white father and how deeply important the two are to each other.

The film is over two and a half hours long and doesn’t drag. Rather, scenes go on far longer than you would wish because Iñárritu doesn’t have any mercy for his audience. The scene in which Glass gets mauled by the grizzly bear felt like it was approximately 45 minutes long, not because it was bad or boring, but because there is only so much Leonardo DiCaprio getting shaken like a bloody ragdoll a body can handle.

I’m not sorry I saw The Revenant, but I can’t think of any circumstances under which I’d watch it again. The fact that this movie made me use “tauntaun” as a verb in my notes is not something I think I’ll ever forgive it for. But for the love of god, please give Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar before someone gets hurt.

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movie science fiction someone is wrong on the internet

Luke vs Rey, a point-by-point comparison

Since there’s been shit talked about the comparison between Rey and Luke (and how “realistic” Rey is as a character in a universe where there is sound in the vacuum of space and magic exists but okay) I wanted to actually sit down and granularly compare the two characters. Rey’s information comes in after my fourth viewing of The Force Awakens. I filled out the Luke column last night and tonight, while rewatching A New Hope. Note that I suffered through the CGI-ed up version with the incredibly stupid, added Jabba the Hutt scene in there, so you should send me pity donuts.

I decided since Rey’s arc in The Force Awakens basically takes her from zero to dropping her in front of a Jedi Master, who had better be training her in the next film or Luke and I are going to have words, I should pick a similar point for Luke for comparison. That basically gets him through the battle on Hoth (beginning of The Empire Strikes Back), when he goes off to find Yoda and get himself some proper training too.

EDITED TO CORRECT: Apparently time elapsed between Yavin and Hoth is three years? I got pointed toward a better timeline. Damn, Luke. Obi-Wan took his fucking ghostly time telling you where to find a teacher, didn’t he.

This does make my inclusion of Luke’s lightsaber grabbing a little more ehhhh (imagine me wiggling my hand here), though I’m still of the opinion that if it would have been of narrative use in A New Hope, he could have done it just fine. But your milage my vary there and I’m really not looking to argue this particular point.

Of course this contains spoilers for The Force Awakens, gosh. And A New Hope, if you have managed to avoid that for all these years.

Luke Rey
2
 Background Moisture farmer; actually Anakin Skywalker and Queen Amidala’s kid, adopted by a family on Tattooine, a desert planet, for his own protection. He’s a secret prince! Abandoned by her family at 5 years old on Jakku, a desert planet. Became scavenger to survive. Other background as yet unknown.
3
 Age at the start of the adventure 19-ish 19-ish
4
 Major character flaw at start Immature (whiney, unworldly) Unable to move on from past abandonment, a little too fiercely into the self-reliant loner thing
5
 Develops past character flaw? Yes (definitely no longer whiney, goes from unworldly to otherworldly by the time he hits RotJ thanks to a stop at the dramatic cloak store) Yes (stops trying to return to Planet Bumfuck, comes to trust her friends will come through for her thanks to Finn)
6
 Has boobs*** No Yes
7
 Skills going in to film Good at fixing droids and other machines

Good enough pilot to be considering the Imperial Academy; later compares the Death Star trench run to doing a canyon run back home. (Getting the impression that he’s only flown on-planet, but he doesn’t specifically say that.)

 Proficient at fighters and freighters via flight sim; has flown actual freighters on planet only**.

Repaired a wrecked light freighter (Ghtroc Industries 690) and made it space worthy**

Has survived on her own as a scavenger since early childhood, capable of repairing and refurbishing components in order to sell them.
8
 Good with blasters? He can sure bullseye some Womp Rats! Not bad with the Millenium Falcon’s turret guns either. Not at all going in, mediocre coming out
9
 Melee? Manages to wave around the lightsaber immediately without hurting himself or alarming Ben, decent with it by the time he hits Hoth in Empire Strikes Back Expert with staff, basically wields a lightsaber like it’s a half staff
10
 Non-Force skills they show off during the course of the film Talks Han into rescuing Leia like a canny little shit

Swings Leia across a chasm-ish thing in swashbuckling style while being shot at by Stormtroopers

Apparently went to the Han Solo school of door repair

Unveiled as the best X-wing pilot EVAR, hotdogging it all around the Death Star. (Leia later compares Poe Dameron, the “best/most daring pilot of the Resistance,” favorably to Luke**.)

 Does some darn good repair work on the Millenium Falcon, earns Han’s respect

Navigates around Starkiller base very cannily while rescuing herself

Good enough pilot that Chewie doesn’t mind flying with her on the Falcon

Beats up a group of thugs on her own to protect BB-8; manages to get the drop on Finn, who was a squad leader before he left the First Order**
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 Major in-film mistakes His plan to rescue Leia isn’t exactly A+, though a lot of that can be blamed on the influence of actual human disaster Han Solo Accidentaly releases the Rathtars in Han Solo’s freighter by resetting the wrong fuses. Almost gets Han, Chewie, and Finn killed in the process.

Runs off into the woods and gets captured by Kylo Ren. Finn, Han, and Chewie come rescue her, and Han gets killed by Kylo Ren while there.
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 Does Han Solo offer them a job? Yep, right before the attack on the Death Star Yep, right before introducing her to Maz
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 Do they speak droid? Yes. Yes.
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 Nemesis Sith Lord Darth Vader, who was supposed to be Jedi Jesus before Palpatine got his hooks into him, fully trained and badass for the last twenty years

(Darth Vader blocks multiple blaster bolts with his fucking hands in the Empire Strikes Back)

 Kylo Ren, who has lots of raw power but is not well trained (Snoke says his training isn’t complete, Han implies Snoke isn’t training him properly because he’s just using him), and has temper tantrums because his self control sucks that bad. Also, his lightsaber is literally called “the junk saber” in the script because it’s badly made, unstable shit.

(Kylo Ren stops a blaster bolt mid air)
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 Do they fight their nemesis? Sort of? Darth Vader chases him down the trench in the Death Star while flying a TIE Fighter. Yes. Toe to toe lightsaber battle.
16
 Advisor Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, who gives Luke the Force 101 before fucking off into ghosthood; Luke gets like a day worth of lightsaber training while flying on the Millenium Falcon, followed by some noncorporeal coaching Maz Kanata, self-described as someone who isn’t a Jedi but “knows the Force,” who tells Rey she needs to close her eyes and feel the Force
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 Is their advice useful? Luke trusts in his feelings and blows up the Death Star Rey closes her eyes and feels the Force, then defeats Kylo Ren
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 Force powers utilized prior to proper training Uses the Force to make the torpedo shot no one else can make and blow up the Death Star right before it destroys the Rebel Base at Yavin, when failure is really not an option.

Doesn’t get his ass killed by Darth Vader, who is in a TIE fighter at the time and chasing him. Presumably partially due to using the Force, since Vader even remarks on strong he is before Han comes swooping in.

Force grabs lightsaber (beginning of Empire Strikes Back); my presumption is he could have done this at the end of A New Hope if the script had called for it. It’s not like Ben trained him how to do this particular trick before getting evaporated by Vader.

 Jedi mind trick on Stormtrooper James Bond to get him to release her from Kylo Ren’s villain chair and leave the cell door open, getting it right on the third try when failure is really not an option.

Stands up to Kylo Ren’s telepathic attack on the second go round, turns the tables on him.

Force grabs Luke’s lightsaber away from Kylo Ren in the most epic scene of the entire movie

Manages to “trust in her feelings” enough to beat Kylo Ren in a lightsaber duel, notably after he’s been shot by Chewbacca and poked in the right arm with a lightsaber by Finn
19
 Blows up the Empire’s/First Order’s giant super weapon? Yep. No, that was accomplished by Poe Dameron, after Han and Chewie blew an X-wing-sized hole in the Scientifish Jargon Generator Housing
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 Gets a medal? Yep. No, but General Organa hugs her.
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 Leia hugged Luke too, you know. Sure did! :D Yeah but his was a creepy potential incest hug!

** – Information from the Before the Awakening stories.

*** – This should not actually be relevant, yet somehow is to some people.

In conclusion, Rey and Luke are each shining, precious space babies in their own way. She gets more badass Force tricks and beats the snot out of disgruntled Mini Snape. He gets to single-handedly blow up the most pants-shittingly terrifying megaweapon the galaxy had seen at that point, by using the Force. Please stop undermining Luke’s enormous, medal-earning accomplishment just because Rey has boobs and made Stormtrooper James Bond drop his blaster.

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movie squee

Random Brain Spew for the Force Awakens

This is pretty much nothing but spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie, fuck off until you have. Or don’t complain to me about getting spoiled.

Continue reading “Random Brain Spew for the Force Awakens”