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[Movie] Yesterday

I knew I had to see Yesterday the minute I saw the trailer. It had such a fun concept–the power goes out all over the world, and when it comes back up, failing musician Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) finds himself on an alternate Earth where the Beatles (and a few other random things we find out about over the course of the movie) simply never existed. Jack, who mostly remembers all of the Beatles songs, is faced with a choice: should he “write” all of those famous songs again and take that success for himself? The trailer already tells you that yes, he does. Hijinks ensue.

It’s a really fun, sweet movie that still has a lot to say about the value of art and the feeling of being an imposter–though in Jack’s case, his imposter syndrome is very real, considering he didn’t actually write the songs he’s selling. The film also does a great job of showing what a difference finding a willing audience makes. Arguably, Jack’s songwriting is not terribly brilliant on his own, but we still see him struggle through some tepid gigs where he’s being ignored when he’s playing his stolen Beatles songs. What starts getting the Beatles music back out in the world are two events: First, he’s lucky enough to find one person who really gets in to what he’s doing (Gavin, who helps him record demos and get his music out on the internet), and second, he’s lucky enough to fall on the ear of someone much bigger than he is (Ed Sheeran) who puts him in front of an audience that actually wants to listen. That’s when things take off.

I know it’s a conceit of the movie (and it’s getting put in every synopsis) that Jack’s success is an overnight thing, and it’s all carried on the backs of the brilliant songs that he didn’t actually write. But from the perspective of someone who has been laboring in the word mines for a while, that’s a very simplistic view–and the movie at least subtly acknowledges it. Jack’s a total, unknown failure… until he suddenly isn’t. Arguably, the Beatles songs are what finally bumped him into “being noticed” range, but if he couldn’t have performed them worth a damn, the words wouldn’t have done him any good either. Mostly, it puts me in mind of how many writers I’ve seen being touted as “overnight” successes when they’ve been chipping away at the thing for years. It’s all about getting the right piece in front of the right person at the right time.

Also, I’ll admit right here that I had no fucking idea what Ed Sheeran looked like, and didn’t realize he was playing himself until the credits said so. Go ahead, laugh. But I sure do have a lot of respect for Ed Sheeran and his sense of humor about himself, now.

A lot of the emotional focus of the movie does end up being about the relationship between Jack and his “manager” Ellie (Lily James), who has been carrying a torch for him for years. Once Jack starts to get famous, Ellie feels they’re no longer on equal footing… and also knows that he can’t give her the sort of relationship she wants. I had a lot of respect for Ellie knowing what she wanted, and not compromising on it. I have less respect for the movie later hitting on the “public declaration of love” trope, which is one I really dislike.

All in all, though, a very sweet movie, and one I thought was a lot of fun. I’ll also admit I’m enjoying watching music nerds rehashing SFF nerd discussions about ripple effects in alternate histories. This is probably one where the less you know about music history, the more you can just enjoy it and cheerfully ignore the flaws in the central conceit.

There is a thing or two more I will mention, but they are SPOILERS, so do not read further if you don’t want to be SPOILED.

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[Movie] Mary Poppins Returns

Look, Mary Poppins Returns is a Mary Poppins movie, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you if you just read the fucking title of it. There’s a sequence where Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) and Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda) dance with a bunch of animated characters. There’s silly, surreal sequences involving bathtubs and balloons. There’s a lot of singing. There’s a whole big number where a bunch of working class London dudes dance and do some BMX stunts, except this time around they’re “leeries” instead of chimney sweeps. It’s approximately thirty years into the future of the first Mary Poppins, so Michael Banks has his own kids and Jane Banks gets to wear trousers.

Plot-wise, and the plot isn’t terribly complicated because it’s there to hold all the musical numbers together, it’s about Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) trying to save his family house after his wife has died and he’s been bad about keeping up the bills while caring for their three children. It’s during the Great Slump (aka the Great Depression in the UK) so he doesn’t exactly have a lot of job options; he works part-time as a teller for an evil banker played by Colin Firth, who is the same guy who wants to repossess Michael’s house. Mary Poppins shows up to reignite the joy in the family and incidentally help them not lose their home.

It’s like the original Mary Poppins, but a bit more pacey. Lin-Manuel MIranda gets to do a tiny bit of rap, even though he had nothing to do with the lyrics, which we can all breathe a sigh of relief about. I mean, it’s just really nice? And suitable for small children? And very colorful. The costume design was really great, especially what they did during the animated sequence.

Really, it’s all cute wrapping paper for the fact that Mary Poppins is a terrifying eldritch being that descends to earth once a generation, spreads a particular kind of madness around, and then leaves once she is on the receiving end of enough laughter from people whose reality she’s utterly broken. Okay, look:

  1. She descends to earth from the heavens in a terrifying shadow, one foot cocked up as if about to tap impatiently because it’s been so long since she’s had some delicious mortal souls.
  2. She spends all of her time taking the kids on strange adventures that, when the children try to describe them later, she tells them that of course these things didn’t happen.
  3. She bends reality around herself. Mirrors don’t respond properly, etc.
  4. There’s an entire song she sings (while in the trippy cartoon realm) about not judging a book by its cover. Sure, it’s a warning about Douchebag McBankerface, but more importantly, she’s delivering a winking warning about herself. Don’t judge her by her charming exterior when it’s actually just a flesh bag that contains an unending sea of glittery, chthonic madness.
  5. At the end of this film, Angela Lansbury gives her a fucking bright red balloon like she’s fucking Pennywise the Clown because JESSICA FLETCHER KNOWS WHAT’S FUCKING UP

But come on, it’s not like any of this is a surprise if you saw the first movie. It’s very consistent. The one thing that isn’t consistent, that’s still bothering the heck out of me, is an almost throw-away line at the end of the film. I guess count it as a SPOILER if you’re really concerned.

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Christmas 2018 Airplane Movies, part 1

I love international flights because they give me a reason to sit in one place for long enough to watch multiple movies. On the way over to the UK, I only watched two new ones because I made the attempt to sleep. With as much sleep as I got (about an hour and a half), I should have just watched more movies.

Ocean’s 8

I kept meaning to see Ocean’s 8 in the theater and just never got around to it. I think that was before I had regular access to a car, so that’s my excuse. Am I sorry I only saw it on the tiny screen of an airplane? Ehhhh… it’s a fun movie, that’s for sure. I mean, if you like the other Ocean’s movies, you’ll no doubt enjoy this one. If for no other reason than to watch Cate Blanchett strut around in a variety of beautifully tailored trousers. It’s got a heist, it’s got a ton of talented women in it. It’s light fluff that I enjoyed in the moment but really can’t remember much about now… other than Cate Blanchett. And I did love there was at least a nod to the importance and strength of friendships between women, even if I never quite felt like the group gelled as well as I would have liked. I’ll be happy to watch it again the next time I see it’s around on Netflix.

Searching

Saw the preview for it in front of an Alamo Drafthouse movie, and I was interested. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see Searching before now. John Cho plays a dad whose daughter has gone missing, and he’s frantically searching for her while realizing just how much distance has grown between the two of them since the death of his wife two years ago. The conceit of Searching actually works pretty well… the film is told entirely via interactions on a computer: text messages, chats, facetime calls, streaming videos, etc. There’s a time or two where it feels like the scope of the action is fighting the format a little, but it honestly doesn’t feel as contrived as I expected. John Cho does an amazing job, and the twist was actually not one I expected. It’s great to see a dad searching for his daughter in a way that doesn’t go all Taken and feels quite authentic. I do want to see it again when I can find it on Netflix or Hulu, because the tiny airplane seat screen made it hard to read some of the text-based stuff for the story. (Apparently this caused me to entirely miss a sort of easter eggy subplot.) Definitely recommend.

 

Also, I watched Crazy Rich Asians again. It’s still fucking adorable.

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[Movie] Anna and the Apocalypse

The pitch is: Shaun of the Dead meets High School Musical. In Scotland.

If you’re like, “FUCK YEAH GIVE ME THAT IN THE FACE” then you’re going to like this movie. If a zombie musical with Christmas visual jokes sounds awful to you, I’m not going to try to change your mind. This movie absolutely is what it is, and it leans hard on the musical trope of people randomly singing and doing choreographed dance routines, then continuing on with their lives as if nothing at all weird has happened.

Regular kid Anna wants to get out of her little town of Haven in Scotland; her goal is to escape to Australia and travel for a bit, though she assures her janitor dad that she’ll be back and will go to University. (He is, as you can imagine, not convinced.) Anna’s friends/compatriots have their own problems: Steph is a socially awkward lesbian who just wants to bring attention to important social issues while having no idea how to interact with normal humans; John is in love with Anna and just wants to go to art school; Chris needs to figure out how to emotionally connect with the subjects he’s filming and find their humanity; Lisa wants Chris to show up for her when she needs him and for Anna to buck up; and Nick is just a douchebag. Oh, and there’s a new headmaster taking over the school, the bushily-bearded Savage, who is a total dick when the movie starts and just gets worse.

Then the zombie apocalypse happens. In a slight reversal, most of the kids are trapped outside of the school and are coming in to rescue their loved ones, while inside the building things are getting… touchy.

It’s very much the kind of movie it is. If watching comedic gore and Yes-Belive-Us-They’re-Totally-Teenagers deal with their emotional issues sounds good to you, you’re going to have a lot of fun with this. The music’s poppy and engaging; I got earwormed pretty bad by one of the songs for about two days after seeing it. If it sounds not fun to you, I’m not going to try to change your mind.

I think what was an interesting angle in the film was the conflict between the headmaster, Savage, and Anna’s dad, Tony. It’s very much something you could read as a north vs south (UK style), educated middle class vs working class conflict, the the upper class dude (Savage) at one particularly horrific point calling Tony a “pleb” as other very bad things are happening. Though Lisa provides the moral center of the film in an absolutely memorable exchange with Savage, which occurs because Lisa is concerned about the heart condition one of the people trapped in the school has. It goes something like this (per my unreliable memory):

Savage: And what does society do when things start to fall apart?

Lisa: We help each other.

Savage: We prioritize.

I’m betting here that Savage is a Tory. Just saying.

As with many horror-comedy movies, the horror wins out a bit over the comedy in the end. Just don’t get too attached to a lot of the characters is the moral here. But some of the comedy is screamingly funny, with the big winner being Lisa’s song at the Christmas show, which is incredibly, hilariously dirty and involves dancing boys wielding large candy canes in absolutely mortifying ways. About all I wanted out of the film that I didn’t get (other than happy endings for several of the characters I liked, which is just not going to happen because… horror) was more of a character arc for doucheboy Nick. I think the movie was trying to aim at something and didn’t quite succeed, maybe because there wasn’t quite enough room in its lean, 93-minute run time.

[JUST ONE SPOILER BELOW]

As a free service to my fellow queers, however, I’m happy to inform you that the lesbian doesn’t die.

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[Movie] Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Hopefully by now, you’ve had at least one friend shriek at you on Twitter or Facebook about how fucking GOOD this movie is. If not, consider me that friend. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is fucking amazing. It’s definitely the best Spider-Man movie I’ve ever seen. It’s quite possibly the best animated movie I’ve ever seen. It’s in the running to be the best movie I’ve seen all year, and it’s without a doubt the most fun I’ve had at a movie since Thor: Ragnarok.

So that should give you some kind of idea what we’re talking about here. I generally don’t watch animated movies and don’t like them that much, I think because I don’t tend to connect to the characters well for some reason. Or maybe I just don’t find the plots compelling. Maybe the emotional stakes don’t tend to work for me. I don’t know. Combination of factors perhaps. So it’s a Big Fucking Deal when I tell you that I LOVED this movie, that it made me tear up three times because it had so much emotional truth to it, and not just because like someone’s dad got whacked and the actors were really convincing.

I’m hoping this is a movie that’s going to get all of the ticket sales it deserves because of people like me, howling about how damn good it is at all of their friends and family. Because let me tell you, I couldn’t have been less interested in the trailer, which made it look like a cute-but-forgettable direct-to-dvd release that had unaccountably gotten bucked into theaters. I could not have given less of a shit about this movie until I saw Venom… because for whatever reason, they’d nailed about five minutes of Into the Spider-Verse on after the credits and I’d stayed to watch it in case there was a credit cookie. THEN I was hooked.

So why is it good?

The plot on its face sounds cartoonishly wacky. Ordinary (but brilliant) high school student Miles Morales gets bitten by a radioactive spider while he and his uncle are putting up some graffiti art in an abandoned area in the subway. Hijinks ensue, and then by accident Miles runs into Peter Parker Spider-Man as he’s trying to stop Kingpin from using a giant McGuffin machine to connect to all the alternate universes in an attempt to get his wife and kid back. During the fight, the machine instead yanks several Spider-People from other universes into Miles’s: Spider-Gwen, a schlubby burnout version of Spider-Man, Spider-Man Noir (voiced AMAZINGLY by Nic Cage), Penny Parker (an anime girl from future NYC who pilots a spider mecha), and Spider-Ham (a Warner-Brothers-esque 2D animated pig). They all join forces to save the world.

Yeah, I know. I wasn’t convinced either.

What summarizing the plot can’t do without spoilers is explain the massive, beating heart of emotion that moves this film. All of the various Spider-People get their own mini-arc, and Miles struggles to find his place in his own life, in his powers, in his family, and in the rest of the world. A lot of superhero movies give lip service to the idea that they’re a blown-out metaphor for the way the ordinary actions of regular people are still important. This is the first one I’ve seen that actually believed it, and really questioned what heroism is in the context, up to and including self-sacrifice.

Into the Spider-Verse gives us a vision of what it means to be a blue-collar hero in the modern world in the most life-like New York City I’ve ever seen in a Spider-Man movie. Miles’s dad is a cop and his mom is a nurse (neither of them are white) and they’re both moving heaven and earth to put him in a more upper class school that the obviously doesn’t feel comfortable in. The movie addresses the trauma of survival, the need to accept pain and not being defined by it, the true power of personal connections and sense of self, and the vital necessity of empathy. I could go on forever about Miles’s relationship with his dad alone, but I don’t want to spoil it.

And as a work of art of itself, it’s fucking gorgeous. As someone who is no aficionado of animation, I won’t make claims about if something is groundbreaking or not. But this was an animated movie that felt like it really lived in the medium and made very specific artistic choices because it exists so comfortably in its own skin. It freely references comic book tropes, mixes 2D and 3D animation to great effect, and even does some absolutely gorgeous shots that look almost like traditional cell animation with a painted background. I was blown away by it. Even just little things, like the way the animation has halftone gradient effects subtly all through it.

Oh yeah, and it’s fucking HILARIOUS.

I was not prepared for this movie and what it did to my heart while I was laughing hysterically. I don’t think you can be. And I haven’t even touched on the spoilers–let’s talk about challenging expectations and examining preconceptions–because for once I’m glad I went into something unspoiled.

You should go see it.

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[Movie] Pacific Rim: Uprising

Easiest review ever: If you liked the original Pacific Rim, you’re going to like Pacific Rim: Uprising. If giant robots punching things left you cold the first time around, this one isn’t going to change your mind.

Several years after the original Breach is closed in Pacific Rim, Jaegers are still around because thankfully humanity isn’t dumb enough to think its safe. We find out that Stacker Pentecost had a son named Jake (John Boyega), who is a sriracha and oreo-hoarding party boy rather than following in the footsteps of his father. Jake runs across Amara (Cailee Spaeny) while they’re both trying to steal the same junked Jaeger parts–only Amara wants them to finish her tiny Jaeger, Scrapper, who is small enough for a single person to pilot. Jake and Amara get caught and dragged to Ranger academy, where we find out that Jake was a full-blown Ranger and crapped out of the program for… daddy reasons. Then things get real when Liwen Shao’s company wants replace Jaegers with remote-controlled giant robot drones. Too bad that’s not the only existential threat facing the scrappy Jaeger pilots.

This movie is mostly special effects fun of giant robots throwing down in a way where you can actually tell what’s going on at all times. Unlike another giant robot franchise I could name (*coughcoughTransformerscoughcough*). Visually, it looks cleaner and more streamlined than the first Pacific Rim; you can tell that Guillermo del Toro wasn’t at the helm of this one.

I felt Uprising managed to leave a little more room for characters than the first movie, surprisingly. John Boyega seems to be having a ton of fun as Jake, bouncing off his even-more-generic-than-Charlie-Hunnam white boy foil, whose name is apparently Nate (okay) and is played by Scott Eastwood (sure). There were multiple female pilots, and they all got to talk and have little moments of their own. Newt and Gottlieb get to be quirky and interesting and consequential again. But the real show-stealer is Tian Jing playing Liwen Shao.

And I can’t really tell you why without getting into spoilers. Which follow below the fold. But anyway, enjoy this movie if it’s the kind of movie you like.

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Thor: Ragnarok

The first thing you need to know about this movie is that it’s fucking awesome.

I saw it twice this weekend. I’ll be seeing it more times before it leaves the theater. And after several days to collect my thoughts so I can write something more coherent than a high-pitched squeal of delight, I’ve calmed down to the level of OH MY GOD COLORS AND FUNNY AND LOKI AND VALKYRIE AND SO MANY JOKES PLEASE TAIKA WAITITI TAKE MY SOUL IT’S YOURS.

If you’re not familiar with Taika Waititi’s work, it’s time to get right with the world. A great place to start is with What We Do in the Shadows, which is a mockumentary about vampires living in New Zealand–and bonus swearwolves. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is also freaking amazing and easy to find. I first encountered his work in Flight of the Conchords, and was hooked. His sense of humor (heavy on the irony and diminution) and aesthetic sensibility are both right up my alley, so I’d already just about lost my mind when I found out he would be directing Thor: Ragnarok. Finally, I thought, if someone was going to get Loki right as a character, it would be him.

Well, I was right. And so much more. SO MUCH MORE.

The non-spoiler plot summary for Thor: Ragnarok is that Thor’s been having a lot of premonitions about the end of Asgard, so he’s doing his best to stop it. Unfortunately for him, Hela shows up with the intent to ruin everyone’s day and rule Asgard. Thor (and Loki) gets diverted to the colorful garbage-land of Sakaar, ruled by Jeff Goldlum being fabulously Jeff Goldblum, where he meets Valkyrie and gets forced into fighting as a gladiator. It’s up to Thor to put together a team to stop Hela and get them all back to Asgard before it’s too late.

The big thing that doesn’t really show up in the summary is how fucking hilarious this movie is. It just doesn’t stop the entire time, even in the action sequences. And the humor cleverly disguises–and also sharpens–some incredibly fucked up things that the film examines. And between jokes, there are quiet character moments that have more impact because they occur in the ten seconds you aren’t laughing–or you are laughing and then you realize just how important this is to that character and it’s like a punch to the sternum. I’d also recommend this piece about the Maori spin on Waititi’s brand of humor as seen in the movie, though it could be considered spoilery depending on how sensitive you are about that stuff.

It’s a gorgeous, and immensely colorful film. Between that and the humor, it feels like an unsubtle rebuke and mockery of the DCEU’s relentless, desaturated grimness. Like look, here’s an entirely unserious superhero movie that’s a hell of a lot of fun. The MCU movies have often played with genre, and this is definitely their take on the comedy–which makes it a really nice other half to the tragedy that Kenneth Branagh filmed into Thor 1. I also really love the way it was filmed… you get a lot of sweeping, colorful, epic-feeling vistas (particularly on Asgard), contrasted with a lot of close shots that give the important conversations (like when Valkyrie makes some big decisions) feel incredibly intimate.

Oh, and while we’re talking visuals, I have to mention the amazing moments of 1980s pulpy scifi/fantasy movie nostalgia. We already knew we were in for a particular sensibility when we saw the title text for the film, but Waititi keeps it going. Large portions of the score are done on synth and feel like a direct nod back to all the films that made me love fantasy as a child. And the setup of some of the sequences and shots feels like an ode to 80s and early 90s metal band album covers–particularly the sequence with the Valkyries. It’s got nostalgia, but not in a way that excludes those who won’t get that joke–there are plenty of other nods and winks.

I also want to mention that this film has more women (and women of color, at that!) and men of color than any of the other MCU films so far by a long shot. The fact that it’s got a female villain (Hela, played by Cate Blanchett having way too much fun) who doesn’t get shuffled off to the side so she only fights the female hero is immensely fucking cool too, by the way. But it’s even little things like when you look at crowd scenes, particularly on Asgard, there are a significant number of non-white faces you can pick out at all times. This stuff matters.

If you need a happy thing, I think this will provide.

(And now if you’ll forgive me, I need to go on a bit about some SPOILERY stuff, so I’m putting that below the cut.)

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[Movie] Moana

I’m not that big of an animation person any more, but I’ve been excited to see this movie ever since I heard the Lin-Manuel Miranda was involved in the music. And I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, though not without reservation.

In Moana, the titular character is the daughter of her village’s chieftain, so will follow in his place as chief. There’s a blight that’s spread to their island, thanks to the mischievous demigod Maui having stolen the heart of the goddess Te Fiti. Moana embarks on a journey to find Maui and make him fix his mistake, and in so doing, takes her people back out onto the open ocean.

In all honesty, the main bits of this movie I wasn’t utterly charmed by involved Maui. The character felt very off, going from egotistical trickster to suddenly having a sort of angsty backstory to… justify him being a jerk, I guess. I make no claims to know how accurate or inaccurate he is to his legends (though I get the impression after some googling that he is upsettingly inaccurate), but he came across as a very standard sort of bully boy character who eventually makes good more because the script says so than because his character development makes that much sense.

There were also things I was puzzled about, like the Kakamora–evil little animated coconuts, as far as I could tell–showing up in a rig that looked like a homage to Mad Max: Fury Road. My only guess is it was a sequence created to justify a line of toys, because it really didn’t to anything in the movie. Though I actually did find them less offensive than the random troll things in Frozen, perhaps because they still somehow made more sense.

But aside from Maui (and that’s a big aside considering he’s the main supporting character to Moana), there is so much about the movie that I loved. I loved that Moana’s story doesn’t pivot on romance, but rather a quest to discover who she is, who her people are, and to save their way of life. I loved that Moana is a gorgeous brown girl that my nieces (who are also gorgeous brown girls) got to watch saving the day. Moana is truly their princess. I loved that Moana’s grandmother is a independent and happily odd old lady, who is her granddaughter’s spiritual guide. Grandma was the MVP of the film and tied with Moana for being my favorite character.

And then there was this:

Not ashamed to admit it: this song made me cry. Not because I was sad, but because I was so awed by the sheer ingenuity and beauty of humanity. This song is about the Polynesians traveling vast distances between islands in their voyaging canoes, which is one of those historic wonders that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. And reading more about this wonder lead me to find out about the Hōkūle’a Voyaging Canoe, which is a modern recreation of those ancient voyages.

I’m not too big into animated movies any more, but this was a good one and worth watching. If you want to read a bit further about the history of the Polynesian voyages (among other things), this was a good place to start: How does the story of Moana and Maui holds up against cultural truths?

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[Movies] In short, four movies

Another transatlantic flight, another round of movies watched because I can’t sleep and find it utterly impossible to work on my laptop in the extremely limited space available in economy.

The Girl With All the Gifts: This movie shows the British still reign supreme in zombie cinema. And this one with a twist, where the main character isn’t a survivor, but a second generation infected girl who may be the key to the development of a vaccine for the infection—if the involved survivors can be reconciled to treating her as an object rather than a person. Weird, gorgeous, creepy, and utterly heartbreaking. Do yourself a favor and see this movie. It’s already out in the UK, and should be released in the US in February. If there’s any justice in the world, this film will get nominated for a Hugo, but I fear the confusion over release dates (2016 in the UK, 2017 in the US) and the fact that it’s not a major franchise will probably scuttle its chances.

The Secret Life of Pets: I mostly liked this for how all of the cats acted, not going to lie–particularly Max’s friend with that immortal and fundamentally cat like, “As your friend you should know I don’t care about you or your problems.” The plot, such as it was, didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense and just had the characters careening around between random bits. Glad I didn’t bother seeing it in the theater, but I’d still take this one over Frozen any day of the week. Plus, thank you for a dog movie that doesn’t involve a protracted fart joke scene.

Far From the Madding Crowd (2015): I wanted to like this, because I’m honestly a bit trash for romance stories of this sort. The problem was, I didn’t really get an impression of chemistry between any of the characters. (And I really, really didn’t get why everyone was so about Bathsheba, other than Frank wanting her money.) So it was a decent enough movie, but I just felt disappointed because I wanted more.

Edge of Winter: A thriller that could be subtitled “the dangers of toxic masculinity.” A divorced, emotionally volatile dad takes his kids out to teach them how to be men (eg: shooting a gun, making fun of each other for crying) and then escalates to outright kidnapping when he finds out that their mom and stepdad are planning to move. There’s some good acting, it’s got a deliberate and creepy buildup, and the realism of the situation really adds to it. But goddamn the score was aggravating. For example, we hear the dad tell his son, “listen to that, you can hear every little sound” in the woods as the soundtrack goes BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Stop trying to help.

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The Bourne _____________

Jason Bourne is in a foreign country doing things that guys do when they have manpain. He just wants to be left alone. Then a shadowy part of the US government, headed by [old white guy] decides to do something sketchy that sets up the overly convoluted B-plot and also decides that this time he is going to get Jason Bourne. [competent female character] who assisted Bourne in the previous movie, has something important to tell him. Just then a government hit squad shows up and chases Bourne and [competent female character] through [country that has been in the news recently enough that American audiences might recognize it]. Bourne is about to get away before the government spooks kill [competent female character] in front of him.

Now Jason Bourne is really peeved. Bourne embarks on a path of revenge and self-discovery in which he cleverly avoids the shadowy government agents while the familiar score by John Powell and David Buckley plays. [new competent female character], a government agent introduced slightly earlier in the movie as helping out [old white guy], gets put in charge of running the op to capture Bourne. Because gosh darnit, this time they are going to get Bourne to come in. For really reals.

Some stuff happens with the B-plot, which involves [current buzzwords such as “social media” and “privacy” or maybe “kale”]. No one really cares, because the B-plot is overly complex and poorly explained, and really just exists to get [old white guy] into a position where Bourne can foil his plot, confront him, and then shoot him.

Afterwards, Bourne finds out a little bit more about his past and gets in a fight with [agent from yet another secret government program that no one has heard of before now], who wants to murder Bourne because he has been ordered to do so and also maybe because murdering Jason Bourne sounds like a great way to spend an evening. There is an extended car chase, things blow up, and Jason Bourne limps away with his newly acquired [information about his past that is still not quite enough] while his opponent does not.

[new competent female character] attempts to contact him, and Bourne lets her know that he has been stalking her, only it’s cool instead of creepy because he’s an ex-spook rather than a sexual predator, and that he would really please like to be left alone this time. Or else. He means it.

A new remix of Moby’s Extreme Ways starts to play. Roll credits.

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