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[Movie] Vice

I made it my goal to watch and review one new movie per week, so I wouldn’t have a recurrence of the complete lack of any content I had in September and October. Of course, little did I know that my first weekend post-goal setting would be November 4 & 5, which offered up a smorgasbord of movies I could not even give less of a shit about (pack led by Jack Reacher) with a seasoning of movies I refuse to watch – let alone give any money to – on the principle of the thing. (I’m looking at yo, Dr. Strange and The Accountant.)

HBO Now came to my rescue. I have cable for internet but don’t actually have it for TV, but my household decided that each of us ponying up $5 a month was worth getting access to HBO. I wanted it for the Westworld TV show, since I watched the movie last month for my Patreon subscribers and thought it had some really interesting concepts. I’ve watched the first episode now and I’m really excited to see more. I’m going to try to find the time to write about the episodes as I go, I think.

But anyway, this week’s movie.

Vice is a super expensive resort populated by androids (in this world, called cydroids for reasons I never really figured out) who get their memories reset every 24 hours. The patrons of the resort are invited to do anything they want to the androids. And then things go haywire, when one android goes rogue.

Familiar, right? More Westworld TV show than movie, since it’s not about a theme park eating its patrons. And rather than an old west theme park, Vice is deliberately a setting that’s contemporary to the world in which it resides. The movie actually opens with two patrons doing a bank robbery – it’s pretty clearly supposed to be live action GTA, including all the violence against women. With that setting, there’s a little bit of commentary on society. The cop Roy (Thomas Jane) talks about how people practice to commit crimes in Vice and then do them in the real world, particularly violent crimes against women. And it’s explicitly stated that the resort can really do what it wants because it brings in about half the city’s tax revenue. Now there’s a societal implication that could have had some real meat on it.

But the focus instead is on the android Kelly (Ambyr Childers), who through a glitch is able to remember at least portions of her supposedly erased past, most of it involving being murdered by various guests. She escapes, and then there’s a lot of action scenes, because Vice wants its rogue android back, and Kelly, with a few others, wants to take the resort down.

When I explain the plot like that, it sounds like a decently fun movie, right? The problem is that there isn’t much to either of the main characters to care about. Roy is weirdly greasy and incredibly unappealing. I kept waiting on the reveal for his traumatic past (lost his wife, maybe?) that would tell use why he constantly looked like he’d just come off a month-long bender. It never happened. He’s a cipher, whose motivations, while explained, feel extremely thin.

Of course, he still gets better treatment in the script than Kelly. Despite the fact that her supposed gain of self awareness is the turning point of the plot, Kelly herself is functionally a football that various male characters pass around to move things forward. She gets about five seconds of apparent change from a passive to active character, development that is completely unearned by the lack of something even as simple as a goddamn montage, and entirely indicated by her  slicking her hair back and dressing in black leather. Set as it is against a backdrop of constant violence against women and a camera that is remarkably male gaze-y even for an action movie, it’s even more troubling.

If Vice had spent more time on plot and character and less time on its interminable, too-dark, and thoroughly generic gunfights, it might have been a decent film. Maybe. If it had also employed someone on the creative team actually, I don’t know, talking to a female human being for five minutes so that they would realize women are more than sexy robot lamps.

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[Movie] Star Trek: Beyond

Star Trek Beyond makes a for a good apology for the aggravating mess that was Star Trek: Into Darkness. But it fails hard at its most basic job: being a Star Trek film.

This is a trend that’s been endemic since the first new Trek film and has only gotten worse with each movie. The original Trek movies always had their special effects moments, but it was always about the thematic story (even if it was a dumb story sometimes) with the action as a seasoning rather than the point. The new movies? Action set after action set piece with a thin connective tissue of something plot-like, normally driven by a villain who would have a more understandable motivation if they were a cardboard cut-out.

And this is the thing. I don’t dislike action movies. I like big, dumb, explodey movies as much as the next person, particularly when they have a thin veneer of science fiction over them to provide rule of cool physics. But those aren’t Star Trek movies. What always made Star Trek special was its philosophical heart and that the story tried–even if it failed sometimes–to be about something bigger than just blowing shit up.

It’s that heart that’s missing from Star Trek Beyond, just like in the other movies.

Probably the best metaphor for the film is Yorktown, the nonsensical, enormous space station that’s been built on the frontier of explored and is densely populated with aliens and humans (including Sulu’s husband and daughter) for reasons that are never explained. The station itself looks like a giant snow globe with a lattice work of open air linear cities built on tubes that star ships go through. There’s free flowing water and air. Every part of the lattice has its own individual gravity. It’s an beautiful design and makes absolutely no goddamn sense as anything that was made specifically to facilitate several interminable action set pieces. It actively aggravated me.

The plot, such as it is, begins and ends at Yorktown. The Enterprise arrives there after letting us know that Jim Kirk and Spock are having individual quarter life crises. An unknown ship comes out of the giant, unexplored nebula (which is apparently full of asteroids, we see later, okay then) and asks for help. Of course the Enterprise goes, and of course it ends up being a trap and of course the Enterprise gets destroyed yet again. The big bad is a complete waste of Idris Elba’s acting talents named Krall, who wants a random MacGuffin off the Enterprise so he can complete his MacGuffin machine and finally make a fucking cup of coffee murder everyone. Because reasons. The crew, stranded on the planet, meet up with an alien named Jayla, free the rest of their people, and take off in an old Federation ship that Scotty and Jayla manage to repair, all in order to prevent Krall from killing Yorktown.

The extremely thin plot careens from set piece to set piece, contorting to come up with reasons for Kirk to ride around on a motorcycle, or have a fist fight, or for people to fly around in ships in a way that’s visually pretty but very difficult to orient in space. I got tired of the action set pieces. The movie feels longer than it actually is because it’s like okay, here’s a little plot, and now we’re going to pause to randomly run away from something.

Krall is paper-thin even as action movie villains go. Why does he have followers? Where did he get the cool swarm ships? Why does he keep dragging Uhura around and yelling her? Why does he want to destroy Yorktown? What the fuck is “here is where the frontier pushes back” supposed to even mean in the context of his character? There’s what should be a really cool reveal on him at the end, but it doesn’t really explain anything, and it’s completely unearned. There’s nothing before that to hint that there’s more, to build up to it. It’s just suddenly there, and flops because it had no scaffolding of plot holding it up. There might be more commentary to be had here, on Starfleet as a non-military organization, about soldiers being left behind by the society that once depended upon them, but as in ST:ID, any point was hopelessly muddled and underdeveloped to the point of incoherence.

I’m probably making the movie sound worse than it is, but that’s because I’m frustrated. There were some things I truly liked about the movie, and I could see where it could have been so much more if they would have just backed off on the fucking action set pieces and focused on the story. And perhaps some of the overbearing action sequences can be pinned on director Justin Lin, but I think the places where the film really shines are also a sign of his influence.

Lin is best known as the director of several of the Fast & Furious films. Which, yes, Kirk on a motorcycle. But the other major strength of that franchise is its strong ensemble cast, and in each film, everyone gets a moment to be cool. This is the first Trek movie since the reboot in which I felt that everyone in the crew really did get a chance to shine brightly–heck, I think this film did a better job giving everyone a moment than any of the older Trek films did either. Uhura particularly got to stand out even more than in ST:ID, and got to have a couple of cool moments that called on her skills as the comms officer. And when it was character moments, that’s when this movie did feel like it was Star Trek in more than name. Sulu gets to take over command again and we see in him the echo of George Takei’s Sulu in command of the Excelsior. Chekhov gets some one-on-one time with Kirk. The dryly humorous friendship between Spock and Bones gets some much-needed and long-awaited screen time. The new character, Jayla, had some great moments as well, and there’s a plot setup for her potential return, which I’m excited about.

And I’ll admit, for all I bitch about the action set pieces, I fucking loved every moment of action that was accompanied by the Beastie Boys song Sabotage. It was a clever ship battle move backed up by campily bullshit Star Trek science, and as weird as it might sound to say, in that moment it felt gloriously like Trek–but yet unique to this younger, new crew.

I’m frustrated because I want to love these movies. I’m frustrated because I care about the cast, which is still absolutely stand out. I want these films to be successful, but more than that, I want them to be successful and still Star Trek. This one has come the closest of the three, and much credit is probably due to Simon Pegg, who was one of the writers for the script and who deeply loves Star Trek in the same way I do. Star Trek Beyond proved that the reboot could finally move past cannibalizing the plots of the original, and I’m grateful for that, make no mistake. But here’s hoping it can also move beyond the soulless action effects blockbuster formula and become the franchise the cast and the fans deserve.

Notes for this film have been posted on my Patreon.

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[Movie] Independence Day: Resurgence

In news that should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever spent five minutes in a room with me, I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.

Please note here, I am not going to make any claims that it is a good movie, by whatever measure of good you want to pretend is in some way objective. To me? It was fun, it was enjoyable, I want to see it again, but it certainly was not: innovative, groundbreaking, special, excellent, unexpected, exceptional, or artful. On the other hand, you have seen the original Independence Day, right? It wasn’t any of those things either, but it was hella fun and caused the consumption of mass quantities of popcorn. Considering the size of the shared popcorn bucket my friend and I consumed in ID:R, we’re right on track.

Independence Day: Resurgence takes place 20 years after the first invasion. Humanity has recovered, the world’s basically become multinational and peaceful thanks to humans having something bigger to worry about killing than each other, and alien technology has been incorporated fully into this alternate 2016. On the anniversary celebration of humanity’s epic win, people who were psychically exposed to the aliens (like Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore, prematurely aged by the experience) are Having A Bad Feeling About This. The aliens show back up in an even more ridiculously enormous ship that has even less of a passing relationship with physics as we know it, and decide to drill to Earth’s nougatty center because reasons. It’s up to the old and new generations to fight impossible odds and save the Earth again, though this time there might be some mysterious help that I won’t describe further because it’s a bit of a spoiler.

There were a few things here that were a bit stupid even for me, which had me rolling my eyes at the movie rather than grinning along with the fun dumbness of it–namely the 3000-mile-wide alien mothership (for reference, that gives is a bigger diameter than the Moon) that has its own personal gravity field when it’s convenient for the purposes of special effects and then doesn’t every other time. If nothing else, even if it’s got a larger diameter than the Moon, it’s not spherical, so I have a hard time believing that it actually out-masses the moon; beyond that, the Earth is still a hell of a lot bigger. And while I don’t come to movies like this for the science–GOODNESS NO–that was a bit too dumb even for my popcorn-addled brain. Particularly when the disaster special effects that it’s used to explain really are a bit to the boring side. At some point, the thing you’re attempting to blow up is just too big and impersonal and it looks like you’re throwing a box of tinkertoys up in the air. The whole “drilling to the Earth’s core” thing was also derisive snort-worthy, particularly when they had to find a melodramatic way to ratchet up the ticking clock even more. Then again, basically any alien invasion movie that works under the assumption that the aliens are after some kind of resource we have (most often water) that they can suck away and leave Earth a lifeless husk really shows laziness on the part of the writers; either they don’t know that any resource of that nature on Earth can be found more easily and more abundantly by harvesting asteroids and comets, or they just don’t care.

That said? I loved pretty much everything else. Many of the beats in this film mirrored ID4; fair enough since they are both alien invasion films and big budget action tentpoles, which means there will be certain required beats that have to be met. But those story beats are accompanied by a world that has indelibly changed in 20 years, and that keeps it from feeling like an exact retread. To me, the best part of ID:R really was the alternate 2016 imagined in the film. The alien technology incorporated into human military technology makes for some fun variation on standard alien invasion fare, because it does touch on something that so often gets ignored–of course we’d try to figure out what makes the technology tick and then incorporate the helpful bits to prepare for the next invasion. And it makes the fun point that after twenty years of prep time, humanity has really stepped up its game–while the aliens are pretty much coming at us with the same bag of tricks they had before. The film tries to address the aftermath of so much worldwide destruction in the first movie, including the large number of orphans left behind, and the effect that had on the kids who have grown up and are now taking on a fight they’ve believed might be coming for their whole lives. Even the fact that the older generation told those kids that if the fight came, they’d be ready, and they’d win again is brought in–as a moment where the older characters fight off despair and try to find a way to keep that promise. (Look at the Baby Boomers and Millenials cooperating in alternate 2016; all it took was a world-wide disaster induced by alien invasion.) I loved the world of ID:R. I loved the setup it makes as a springboard for another film that promises to be significantly different.

International cooperation is placed at the forefront. The casting is more diverse in a lot of ways than in ID4. I loved Rain Lao (Angelababy) and Patricia Whitmore (Maika Monroe) flying jet-spaceship hybrids around. Both old characters and new had great moments, the only exception being I’m still not sure what purpose Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch) really served in the narrative. Things get blown up. Aliens get punched in the face. Female fighter pilots get to be badass. American exceptionalism has been replaced by human exceptionalism, which is still cringe-worthy in context, but a vast improvement that cannot be understated. But my favorite part? The return of Dr. Okun, and I have very specific reasons for that, which I’ll explain past the spoiler wall.

At any rate, if you’re looking for dumb, explodey fun to accompany shoving popcorn into your food hole, I recommend it. I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.

Brief SPOILER discussion below

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[Movie] The Boss

The Boss isn’t getting very good reviews. As of right now, it’s at 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. (For what it’s worth, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is only at 19% and I thought that was pulpy fantasy fun, so maybe I just have terrible taste.) But I decided to see it anyway, for exactly one reason: the cookie seller street fight scene.

I don’t know if it’s because I was a Girl Scout for years, and put in a lot of time selling cookies, but to me, that alone was worth the price of admission.

The Boss is about Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy), who has made a ton of money doing nebulous business things and screwing over everyone, including her former flame Renault (Peter Dinklage). He turns her in to the FTC for insider trading and gets her thrown in white collar country club jail for five months, during which time she loses all of her assets. She emerges, deposits herself on her former assistant Claire’s (Kristen Bell) doorstep, and comes up with a new scheme quickly: selling Claire’s amazing brownies with a knock-off, capitalistic version of Girl Scouts.

This is definitely not the most well put together comedy movie I’ve ever seen. It’s got its problems with internal consistency, has some weird pacing hiccups, and at times feels like a loose collection of sketches for McCarthy to ad-lib her Michelle Darnell character. The plot at times doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, and the Michelle Darnell character arc is incredibly predictable and pat, something that feels steered by script beats rather than organically developed.

It also, I’m sorry to say, has the Lazy Trans Joke. Bleh.

On the other hand? It had a lot of really funny moments. I never really bought Claire as a character or her muddled arc, but her love interest Mike (Tyler Labine) was delightful. The interplay between Michelle and Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) had some great moments. And Chrystal (Eva Peterson) the resident “giant” for Darnell’s Darlings was the MVP of every scene she was in. And Renault? Fucking hilarious, I thought. And Lazy Trans Joke aside, like many of McCarthy’s movies, it showcases women being hilarious with other women in an expansive rather than self-hating way.

I’ve heard from a lot of people that Spy is superior in every way to this movie, and I’m looking forward to watching it. (Still mad that I didn’t get a chance to see it in the theater.) Hopefully it’ll be On Demand with my cable company, I just haven’t had a chance to check yet. But I’ll probably write a little post about it when I do and let everyone know they were right. As for The Boss, I’m kind of on the fence whether to recommend it or not. If you really love Melissa McCarthy and did your time in the Girl Scouts, you might find it suitably amusing, but your mileage may vary.

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[Movie] The Huntsman: Winter’s War

As half-prequel, half-sequel to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman, The Huntsman: Winter’s War pretty much nails everything that was fun about the first film (namely, the Huntsman and the Evil Queen Ravenna) and leaves behind the less arresting bits (eg: Kristen Stewart’s Snow White). If you liked the first movie, you’re going to like this one. If you didn’t, then I’d be shocked if Winter’s War changes your mind.

The beginning of the movie explains the origin of Eric the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) and identifies the source of his deep font of manpain, Sara the Huntsman (Jessica Chastain). It also brings us a new evil queen, Ravenna’s little sister Freya (Emily Blunt), who has her own utterly tragic reasons for being evil and wearing some incredibly beautiful costumes. Freya, driven into the depths of despair by the murder of her infant daughter by her would-be husband, decides the best way to deal with all that pain is to conquer the entire north (lots of planets have a north) and take all available children so she can craft them into an army of badass, leather-jerkin-wearing super soldiers who are admonished that only chumps believe in love. Eric and Sara are among these children and as they grow up, they develop a forbidden love for each other, which Freya Does Not Take Well.

Fast forward seven years to after the events of Snow White and the Huntsman, and we find Eric once again living in the woods and apparently avoiding baths if his hair is anything to go by. He’s dragged back into the world of having to interact with other humans when he’s told that Ravenna’s mirror has gone missing, and sets off to find it before Freya does.

This movie is utterly gorgeous, far more so than the first. There’s actual color, and lots of it. The costumes that Freya and Ravenna wear alone deserve to have a shrine built to them. The story is pulpy fantasy fun, as are the action sequences. The comic relief dwarves (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon) are well overmatched by the absolutely delightful she-dwarves (Sophie Cookson and Alexandra Roach). It’s predictable in places, and a bit weirdly discontinuous with its own mythology in others (more on that later), but all in good fun.

And it’s actually a fantasy movie that manages to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, believe it or not. Ravenna and Freya manage to have some evil queen back and forth that does not center around men. The main casting is delightfully female heavy: two male dwarves, two female dwarves, one male huntsman, one female huntsman, and two evil queens. Lovely! I was also charmed by the equal partnership between Eric and Sara–and Sara’s fierce independence as she tells Eric, “I choose for me, not for you.” She has an excellent speech about how their relationship is not determined by the man passing some test and then she has to love him. It’s a nice jab at fairy tale tropes when that normally is what it boils down to. Ravenna remains the most compelling character of the franchise, though I’m not sure I’m on board with the implicit statement that both evil queens have their magic because they have eschewed love and family for various reasons.

Winter’s War is ever so slightly less lily-white than Snow White and the Huntsman. There are non-white background actors in Freya’s kingdom, which is… something. Sope Disiru plays another of the Huntsman, Tull, who has a speaking role and feels curiously like he should be much more vital to the movie than he really is. I came out of the film wishing I knew more about him, his motivations, his relation to Sara and Eric, because he feels like he must have been pulling some narrative weight that ultimately (and disappointingly) fell to the cutting room floor. I’m also not really sure about the depiction of goblins in this fantasy land as midnight-black, savage, horned gorilla-like creatures with tar for blood.

I also could have done without the aggressively heterosexual ending, in which every male-female couple possible shows the audience that they will be getting together happily ever after, because love conquers all and saves the day if you’re straight and monogamous, I guess. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being straight, I get that it’s not a choice or anything, but do they have to flaunt it like that?

Not flawless but fun, worth a watch if you want to see Chris Hemsworth run around in leather pants and be cute. As you do.

(A few short, spoilery things below the cut.)

Continue reading “[Movie] The Huntsman: Winter’s War”
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[movie] I Saw the Light

I was legally required to see this movie, because Tom Hiddleston. Well, and because I actually really like Hank Williams, so I was excited about a biopic for him, even if my initial reaction to the announcement was oh dear god but Hiddleston sounds so British.

Silly me.

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I’m not a native of the south (and I’m also not great at accents), but Tom Hiddleston made for a convincing enough Hank Williams. More importantly, I think he did justice to the music. For example, Move It On Over (original) and Move It On Over (movie), even if it never sounded quite twangy enough. (Though how much of that is due to differing recording quality is open to question.) When I have some extra money (sob), I’ll probably see about picking up the soundtrack. It’s on the list at least.

I Saw the Light covers about eight years of Hank Williams’s life, from his marriage to Audrey in 1944 to his death in 1952. It’s a simultaneous career ascent and personal descent that ultimately kills him, and the movie’s not shy about the fact that the man had some serious substance abuse problems and was no angel. In many ways, it plays out like any other biopic of an artist tragically dead at a young age because he (or she) is pulled in too many directions at once, has no stable home life, and is enabled in the abuse of drugs by so-called friends and doctors-in-name-only.

There’s a lot to like about I Saw the Light. The principle cast–Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams, Elizabeth Olsen as Audrey Williams, Bradley Whitford as Fred Rose–all turn in excellent performances. It’s a very nicely shot movie. The sound is excellent. There’s a different tone here because the artist in question did country music rather than rock, which lends some extra interest. Country music (and its fans) don’t get a whole lot of love in film, so it’s refreshing to have a movie that seems to really get why this music speaks to people.

But–and this kills me to say this because I wanted to like this film so much more than I did–it feels like a collection of at times disconnected scenes out of a man’s life rather than a movie. The music and the good performances aren’t enough to really pull together what suffers from a fundamental problem of writing and editing.

Books and movies are obviously two very different media that approach things in very different ways, and nowhere is that more evident than in biographical film versus biographical books. Human life generally doesn’t have a discernible plot arc or an overall theme. We’re far too messy for that. Good biographies in book form not only transmit the dry facts of someone’s existence, but find a way to weave together events to show the whole person, their development, the way they touched the world, the way the world touched them. But it’s not something that’s generally going to fit ye olde three act format. And you can get away with that in a book because you have so much more time and space to build.

In a movie, you’ve got about two hours, and the need to hold someone’s attention for that entire time. Part of it is a matter of audience expectation–I go into a movie with much different expectations than I have going in to a documentary film. You expect a story out of a movie. That’s the reason biopics infamously play fast and loose with details, because reality bends to serve the art–and the art it’s serving is the story, the theme. I came out of 42 and Lincoln and Walk the Line feeling the satisfactory open and close of those stories, knowing what the director and actors were trying to say and how they felt the life of that particular person fits into the human experience both past and present.

And sadly, I Saw the Light misses out on that. I got some hints that there were dots the film was trying to connect, between the titular piece of music that makes its two appearances (the second in a heart-breaking and historically accurate way), the time or two Hank Williams talks about darkness in his music. But it failed to gel into a coherent thesis from where I sat, never quite connecting the details to the music in a satisfactory way.

I think it’s a movie that’s worth watching if you like Hank Williams. Maybe you’ll like it more than I did and it’ll work for you where it failed to work for me. I’m just sad that a movie I anticipated so much didn’t stick its landing for me.

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[Movie] Hardcore Henry: what happens when you make an FPS into a movie?

Hardcore Henry is a scifi action film shot entirely in first person. Unlike handheld camera movies like Blair Witch or Cloverfield, there’s never an outside look at the protagonist; we’re supposed to be literally seeing through his eyes. It feels like someone’s taken a first person shooter game and rendered it in film, which is its strength as a gimmick, but also a major weakness.

First off, if you have any problems with getting motion sick in movies that have a lot of shaky camera movements, I do not recommend this one. That’s the number one problem with the first person format here. We’re getting all the shakiness of a mounted camera, which actually works counter to the first person shooter effect because it reminds us that we’re looking through a camera, not actually experiencing the film first person.

Let me explain what I mean.

When you’re running, jumping, doing whatever as a person, you’ll notice that your vision doesn’t actually shake that much, even if you’re really pounding ground. That’s because there are a ton of physical factors, from the stabilization of your neck muscles to your inner ears to the way your brain processes the visual input that work to make what you see relatively smooth. You experience, say, some bobbing motion if you’re running, but not a lot of the vibration or shaking even if that’s literally what’s happening to you. You’re compensating for it.

This is what makes first person shooter games work. The movement you get on the screen is very smooth, with at most some up and down indicating running. (Here’s an example of gameplay from Destiny.) But you’ll notice a lot of the indicators of physical motion we get are from seeing the arms move, for example. So in a weird way, a first person shooter looks more real than something like Hardcore Henry because it more closely apes how we visually experience movement. Even if in a technical sense, Hardcore Henry is more real because it’s literally a camera that is strapped to someone.

This is something that the people who made the Doom movie really got when they shot the film’s famous first person shooter scene. (Though arguably, they made it a tad too smooth.)

Unfortunately, with Hardcore Henry, we’re spending an entire movie watching a camera get flung around rather than perceiving what’s going on in a much more stabilized way, like the character Henry would. This works against the movie, because while I’m sure a lot of the action sequences were extremely cool, I couldn’t tell what the fuck was going on in most of them. There was too much unstable movement for me to be able to track it. So it’s an interesting gimmick, but I wish it had worked better.

As far as the actual plot goes, it really does feel like standard video game setup. Hello, player, here is your cipher character that you occupy, here’s your goal (save your wife Estelle), here’s the major antagonist, here’s your contact Jimmy who will give you the various missions you need to run to level up. The fight at the end certainly felt like Epic Final Boss Battle. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some  fun stuff in there if you’re a fan of action movies and just want to see some badguys get punched. There’s also a couple little twists to be had, including the deal with Jimmy (Sharlto Copley) apparently being the master of disguise, and the denouement with Estelle.

On the other hand, I really could have done without the extended bordello scene, which highlighted the fact that other than Estelle, there really weren’t any women in the movie who weren’t gun-wielding prostitutes. (Guys, you do realize that many a non-dude-bro plays FPS games and thus might have an interest in your film, right?) And I still don’t know what the deal was with the villain, Akan, other than he just wants a private army of cyborgs because reasons. Reasons only an albino with psychic powers could possibly understand and doesn’t see fit to share with you, the viewer. Which is really another contributing factor to the FPS game feel, because let’s be honest, some of those games are pretty thin on the plot. Who needs reasons when you can grab the heavy ammo drop?

I think we’re pretty close to having a full, first person film that’s not going to make people motion sick. This just isn’t it. And here’s hoping that when that film finally comes out, we can skip the whorehouse scene.

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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
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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] 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.)

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