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.
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.
Whoops, I thought I’d written something about this movie already. Then I realized that I was probably thinking about the extensive discussion I had with Shaun Duke and David Annandale on the Totally Pretentious podcast. If listening to podcasts is a thing you do and you don’t mind spoilers, I definitely recommend that discussion to you. I don’t really want to rehash too much of it here, so I’m just going to hit the highlights.
A thing you should realize up front is that I don’t generally watch horror movies. I’m a wimp. I lose sleep when things are creepy and I really don’t like excessive gore. So I took one look at the trailer for this movie, and
Then Shaun hit on my only weakness and asked me if I’d like to be on the podcast episode about it. CURSE YOU, DUKE.
In all seriousness, I owe him a thank you for it. I might have lost a night of sleep over how damn creepy some of the movie was, but I’d also put this one in my top five films of this year.
It Follows is about nineteen-year-old Jay, who gets infected with a sort of sexually transmitted curse after deciding to sleep with her boyfriend. The curse is eerie: an invisible (but tangible) monster constantly walks in a straight line toward whoever has been most recently infected. It kills whoever it catches, and then starts pursuing the next person up on the chain.
The monster is incredibly well done, by the way. It can look like anyone or anything at a given time, an ability it always uses for maximum terror and emotional trauma. And its slow, implacable march brings to mind what made walking zombies terrifying in their own special way when Romero put them on film—though this monster is far scarier in that it’s obviously capable of thought. The go-to assumption is that the monster’s a metaphor for STDs, though I think it’s more specifically a metaphor for HIV. There’s some pointed pill popping by the infected boyfriend at certain points in the film, and the idea that if you keep running, you can stay ahead of the monster even if it will inevitably catch you some day. This runs in line with the new reality of HIV positive in modern America; it’s no longer an instant death sentence if you can afford or get the medication, but a long-term condition.
And of course, the way Jay gets the curse also points me toward reading it as the HIV metaphor. Her boyfriend knows full well that he’s infected, and deliberately gets in her good graces and has sex with her so he can pass it along. After they’ve had sex, he chloroforms her and she wakes up tied to a wheelchair in her underwear (one of the movies first multilevel incredibly creepy scenes) so that he can show her the monster and tell her how to survive it.
Something that really struck me about this movie and still stays with me is that, while you can’t necessarily call something with this concept sex positive, at no point did anyone ever shame Jay for deciding to have sex with her boyfriend. There’s no victim blaming that occurs; the censure is always squarely pointed at the lying shitbag boyfriend, where it belongs.
This movie was filmed in Detroit and brings up some strange juxtaposition between urban decay and the suburbs that Jay lives in, which seem caught in a weird sort of 1980s stasis. Also, the film’s score was very synth-heavy, which made it feel more like an 80s horror film. I was half-convinced that it was a story set in the 80s, except no one had scary enough hair, and all of the kids had modern cell phones, e-readers, and the like.
Maika Monroe does an amazing job as Jay, terrified and desperate and just trying to find a way to survive—with the help of her friends. And the scares in the movie? It’s mostly that slow, creeping dread of watching the monster take its damn time. It’s an implacable sort of fear, punctuated occasionally by jump scares that had me huddling in my hoodie.
Excellent movie. Watch it. You can get it on streaming from a lot of different places for $4.99. Watch it even if you’re a horror wimp like me.
It says volumes about this movie that the praise I can give it is, it’s not as bad as you’d expect. Actually, I think it might edge a toe toward good territory, depending on the criteria you’re using to judge if something is good or not. Action sequences, explosions, a white dude with a decent jaw line wearing a black Italian wool coat and a red silk tie and shooting people? Okay.
Though taken another way, in the realm of video game movies it’s pretty fan-fucking-tastic, helped by the fact that it wasn’t directed by Uwe Boll.
Quick synopsis: 47 is an agent blah blah genetic engineering blah blah perfect assassin blah blah no emotions, designed by a guy named Litvenko (whom I kept misnaming “Vanko” in my notes because that’s how everyone said it, I swear) who then promptly disappeared because he realized designing perfect human killbots without emotions was probably a bad idea. Katia is Litvenko’s daughter and is very good at running away and hiding, and weirdly seems unsure if Litvenko is her dad or not through the first bit of the movie. John Smith (oh THAT’S creative), who is played by Sylar shows up to ostensibly rescue Katia from 47, but actually, he also wants Litvenko the human Cheshire cat who can disappear instantly. Sylar and 47 duke it out in a way that should launch 1000 pornographic fanfics if there’s any justice in the universe, 47 kidnaps Katia, and then the really interesting part of the movie starts. Because 47 reveals that Katia is an engineered super badass like him (43 iterations better than him as a matter of fact). So of course they join forces. Bullets fly and things blow up.
There are actually some things I really, really liked in this movie, enough that I’d actually be willing to watch a sequel as long as it still had 47 (Rupert Friend) and Katia (Hannah Ware) in it. The relationship between the two characters is excellent; even before the big reveal that was already spoiled by the second trailer, they were basically sniping at each other like siblings. It was a different direction than you normally see in “action dude saves woman” movies, and I loved it. See the following conversation:
Katia: What do they want?
47: More of me.
Katia: Why would anyone want more of you?
The older brother/younger sister dynamic just speaks to me on a spiritual level, okay?
I also generally liked the action sequences. They weren’t as flashy as you get in a lot of action movies, and that was all right. They actually did a good job of speaking to character, which often gets lost in the attempt to make things splashy and justify effects budgets. 47 always came across as efficient, no frills, clinical. John Smith always had his giant, insecurity-fueled hateboner for 47 on full display. So that? I appreciated.
And praise be, a movie that kept things short and to the point. 96 minutes, in, out, done. They didn’t have enough there to justify a longer running time, and they didn’t try. So even during the occasionally cringe-worthy expository sections, the movie still moved along at a brisk enough pace that I never found it boring.
On the bad side, there were some definite script-generated problems in there. Some of the bridge scenes between plot points, such as Sylar trying to convince Katia to trust him and help him find her dad, were just awful. Wooden, stilted, nonsensical. There were also scenes that felt weirdly like relics (related to scenes that have since been changed entirely or deleted) scattered around. For example? Katia’s topless swimming scene and the later shower scene. Maybe it was just supposed to be fanservice for the presumed male-dominated audience. But it felt like it was supposed to be setup for some kind of romantic interlude, which was plainly not going to happen thank you. The plot was a bit overcomplicated for what it needed to be (two layers of badguys?) with the “real” villain not introduced until very late, though apparently that’s an inherited video game problem.
Also, I don’t know what kind of drugs they whacked Ciarán Hinds on every time before they shoved him in front of the camera, but goddamn. I could not even understand half the words he gummed out of his mouth.
I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that this movie doesn’t come close to passing the Bechdel-Wallace test. (It does, however, pass the sexy lamp test! Surprise!) And if you trust the setting, apparently Singapore is inhabited by a giant population of white men in suits and five Singaporean flight attendants. Also, all the cars appear to be made of brightly-colored plastic.
Hitman: Agent 47 gets a solid Meh+ from me. It’s not a bad way to spend 96 minutes if you want to just turn off your brain while you stuff the carbohydrate of your choice into your food hole. And I’m a sucker for Italian wool.
Found this review on my thumb drive and realized that I’d never sent it anywhere or put it on my blog. So here you go, for what it’s worth. Notably less profane than my normal review style because I originally wasn’t writing it for myself.
Note: For the purposes of this review, the character Chappie will be referred to as it in the sense of being a non-human person with no intrinsic or self-identified gender, and additionally no clearly preferred pronouns. (More on the gender question later.) For this case, I beg your indulgence in not reading it as innately dehumanizing or insulting, as is often the case when applied to human persons.
Also, spoilers. Sorry, but the ending is what makes the movie worth talking about.
Much maligned by reviewers, Chappie has perhaps been judged more harshly than it deserves. It’s an incredibly imperfect film about artificial intelligence, consciousness, humanity, and family, but quietly dares to ask much larger questions than Neill Blomkamp’s previous film, Elysium.
Chappie has been compared most often to Short Circuit, a 1986 science fiction comedy movie. The basic concept is similar: robot originally intended for more martial uses gains self awareness, grapples with questions of life and death, and fights to survive against humans that are intent upon seeing to its destruction. And Chappie is pretty funny at times, though arguably not as funny as Short Circuit. But while the bones of the plot are the same, right down to the rather hyper-masculine, military-obsessed antagonist who wants to destroy the robot, the details are in many ways significantly different.
Chappie takes place in a near-future Johannesburg, where police forces have become so overwhelmed they’ve turned to buying gun-wielding, humanoid robots from a corporation called Tetravaal. Engineer Deon (Dev Patel) has designed the police robots, while his jealous rival Vincent (Hugh Jackman) pushes his expensive and far more militarized MOOSE robot. Deon is obsessed with creating true AI, though he receives no support from Tetravaal to do so. Frustrated, he steals a robot scheduled for destruction, intent on loading his AI program onto it as a test. Before he can accomplish this however, he is kidnapped by three criminals by the names of Ninja, Yolandi, and Amerika. They owe a gangster named Hippo twenty million dollars, and in order to pay him back need to hijack and armored car, a heist they believe beyond their ability unless they can force Deon to somehow remotely switch the police robots off. Deon insists he’s incapable of doing that, and instead convinces them to let him put the robot he stole together, loads on the AI program, and then Chappie is born. Due to the nature of Deon’s program, the fledgling AI starts out like a child, learning from its surroundings. The criminal gang refuses to let Deon take Chappie with him or stay, and undertake Chappie’s education themselves with only minor moral input from its creator. Yolandi eagerly takes on the role as Chappie’s mother, while Amerika acts more as an older brother and Ninja as an abusive father figure. As another wrinkle, the reason the robot was originally scheduled for destruction was that its battery had fused to the chassis, and will provide only five more days of power, thus giving Chappie a very set life expectancy. Using Chappie’s fear of death against it, Ninja ultimately convinces Chappie to help them perform the heist and trick it into doing violence with the lie that sticking a knife in someone feels good to that person, and will just make them go to sleep.
After the heist, Chappie realizes that Ninja’s promises that money would save its life were a lie, and hatches a new plan to survive. Using a neural input helmet intended to let humans remotely pilot the MOOSE, it has found a way to back up its own consciousness digitally and save it. Vincent has all the while been attempting to convince the head of Tetravaal (Signourney Weaver) to let the MOOSE loose. He uses a virus to take all of the police robots off line and then sends the MOOSE out to track down and attempt to destroy Chappie. He succeeds in killing Amerika and Yolandi, and grievously wounding Deon before Chappie and Ninja destroy the MOOSE. Chappie takes Deon back to the Tetravaal plant, exacts a non-lethal but thoroughly violent revenge on Vincent, and uses the neural input helmet to transfer the dying Deon’s consciousness into a police robot test unit. Thus saved, Deon quickly transfers Chappie into another nearby robot and then escapes.
While the setup for the plot is very ham-handed—why doesn’t Deon just lie to the criminals? how on Earth is the CEO of Tetravaal so completely short-sighted about the possibilities of true AI? why can’t they just put Chappie’s head on a different robot body? and so on—once the pieces have all been shoved to their necessary positions on the board and Chappie created, the rest unfolds well enough. Outside of Chappie, most of the characters suffer from a paucity of development, with Deon and Vincent particularly underserved. Vincent is a caricature of an antagonist; while South African, he feels like a sketched out model of toxic American masculinity, from his Christianity to his bullying to the fact that he swaggers around with a pistol on his belt. (I do not know enough about South African culture to speak to the accuracy of this caricature in that context.) At one point he even threatens Deon with the pistol, tackling him onto his desk and pressing the barrel against his cheek, and then claims that this assault was only a “joke.” Ninja, Yolandi, and Amerika (the members of the group Die Antwoord) are as far as I can tell playing caricatures of themselves, and aren’t particularly interesting for it. But the star of the movie is Chappie, and we see its progress from infancy to rebellious teenager-hood over the course of the movie.
Chappie as a character is one that a viewer will either find exceptionally endearing or extremely annoying. Well-voiced and acted in a sort of “poor-man’s motion capture” by Sharlto Copley, Chappie speaks with distinctive vocal quirks, and displays the full range of emotions one would expect from a sentient being using tone, body language, and a set of lights that stand in for eyes. The robot is lied to constantly by the humans around it, caught in a tug-of-war between Deon’s egotistical self-righteousness and Ninja’s self-conscious, bullying swagger. Much of the character’s development is seen in painful realization after realization of the lies it has been told, the cruelty and inhumanity of others, and of its own impending death. Chappie’s own emotional core is provided mostly by the inconsistently characterized Yolandi, who on one hand authors Deon’s kidnapping and is perfectly happy threatening to kill him, and on the other reads Chappie bedtime stories and assures it that it is loved despite all emotional crises. It’s the title character’s inner journey that ultimately makes the film and its incredibly rough setup worth viewing at all.
The pay-off for Chappie comes when, wanting to survive, Chappie develops a way to save its consciousness digitally. Considering the earlier discussions that Chappie has with Yolandi about the existence of souls, this is actually a bold statement to be made by writer/director Blomkamp in a time when mind-body dualism is still a hotly debated topic. And it becomes even more pointed, considering Chappie’s greatest opponent, Vincent, despises AI as soulless. That Blomkamp supposes a world in which a sentient robot is able to record the consciousness of a dying human and copy it into a robot body as the dramatic conclusion to his film deserves far more attention than it has received, no matter how much of a hot mess the first two-thirds of the movie may be. Following the ending plot stinger, he’s offering us a fictional world in which humans stand on the precipice of functional immortality, and that is heady stuff.
Another worthwhile and largely ignored question in the film—and in this case, one the director likely wasn’t so interested in asking—has to do with the question of Chappie’s gender. Robots, if sentient, are arguably beings without latent gender, wholly asexual. The robots in the film are nominally coded as male—they’re blue because they’re police robots, they have voices that sound male. But when Chappie is awakened to sentience, there is not anything obviously in its behavior that is indicative of one gender or another—it is wholly childlike. Yet immediately, a male gender is assigned to the robot by all of humans around it, including Deon. Is Deon’s knee-jerk identification of Chappie as male due to an urge to see himself in his creation, an assumption of male as a default gender, or something else? It’s a question worth asking, and one the movie never gets around to, which seems a shame.
The identification of Chappie’s gender comes not from within the character, but is imposed from without by observers who seem in general agreement that it is male, judged by behavior that is at that time purely reactive and not at all coded in one direction or another. The infant personality in the robot is skittish and exceptionally curious, and eager to please. Later we see Chappie play with the items given to it by Deon, one of which is a Barbie-esque doll that it actually styles to look like Yolandi—and then act afraid upon being caught doing so by Ninja. Is this because Chappie believes itself to be male in some way and knows it ought not play with dolls, or far more likely because Ninja has given it ample reason to fear him in general?
In fact, all of Chappie’s more masculine-coded behaviors and ways of speaking are specifically taught to it by Ninja and Amerika in order for it to seem “tougher” and convince it to be more willing to engage in violence and intimidation. With the sole exception of Deon as the token, thoughtful nerd, masculinity in this movie is generally presented as bullying and violent. And while Chappie is willing to engage in the swaggering, arguably to convince Ninja to like it the way Yolandi and Amerika do, the only way it is compelled to actually act intimidating or violent is with lies that use its desire to please its perceived parents against it. In the same way, any apparent acceptance of assigned gender on Chappie’s part seems to come entirely from a desire to please rather than out of inherent identification. Chappie’s final, knowing acceptance of violence when it enacts its revenge upon Vincent is particularly notable on these grounds.
There is an unexpected amount of meat to be found on the bones of a movie too easily dismissed in light of a comedic predecessor. Chappie is worth watching for that reason, if you can handle wading through the repetitive antics of the human caricatures—and deal with the frustration over what could have been.
I went on Saturday. I had two beers and three hurricanes in a little over two hours. I am not ashamed to admit that I got really fucked up in a way that had nothing to do with the movie. I also took notes. 14 pages of notes. I am kind stunned by how bad my handwriting gets by the end.
By the way. If you guys want all 14 pages? Pony up another $156.61 to the charities and I will hand over the scans. Want to know what you’re missing? This is page 5. Of 14. (By the way, my housemate claims that she has a video of me drunk calling one of my friends and telling her about the movie. Which goes on for something like 9 minutes. She says you can have it if you hit $1250.) After thinking it over, I decided to scan my notes after all. Enjoy.
I invite you to think about that for a moment and shed a tear for my liver.
Assholes that got thrown out of the Alamo Drafthouse while watching 50 Shades of Grey review by Rachael Acks
I sat in the theater and drank alcohol. There were people talking loudly in the back of the theater, which was very unusual, due to the fact that I was at the Alamo Drafthouse and talking is verboten. But man those plucky patrons! Going on about Dornan’s butt and oh my god the book, and did you see that, and look he has a helicopter oh my god!
I am so glad this table was in the theater, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to follow the extremely complex plot of this geopolitical thrill-ride. I would never have known, for example, that Jamie Dornan has NIPPLES. HE DOES, YOU KNOW. TWO OF THEM. RIGHT THERE. OH MY GOD. His slightly bulging right eye and pained expression invite you to look closer if you dare, but we all know you can’t handle this sort of difficult truth: the nipples are capitalism and the surging buttocks the corporatist state that is the inevitable result of the unfettered free market, which doesn’t give oral. Oral is for closers.
As Christian used one of his approximately six million grey ties (HE LIKES GREY. GREY GREY GREY THERE IS A COLOR THEME YOU POOR FOOLS DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND, GREY LIKE THE MORALITY OF OUR INCREASINGLY COMPROMISED STATE) to tie up Anastasia as a daring commentary about the tangled issues of international trade and the corporate espionage it often encourages, these fine explicators were thrown out of the theater. Realizing that they would be leaving us without their guidance, they threw their drinks glasses on the ground in despair. And apparently at some other customers, but is there anything wrong with wanting to put someone else out of their misery?
“Bitches! Fuckers!” “I can buy this movie! It’s good! FUCKERS!” were the last words of these brave souls as they were herded from the theater by the extremely large and friendly manager. It’s true, you know. We were indeed the fuckers and bitches for being stuck in the movie, now rendered completely incomprehensible without their help.
But! Every cloud has a silver lining. The fine drama of their exit was a damn sight more interesting than watching Anastasia bite her lip while I cringed at the sad mistreatment of an otherwise nice, if boring, tie. And even better, the manager came in at the end of the movie and gave us vouchers that I can spend on something that isn’t 50 Shades of Grey. As much as it tears at my heart to do so, of course. Seeing the movie just wouldn’t be the same without the interpretive commentary running in parallel.
Grade: A+, would heartily recommend again while watching a similar movie
Okay you want the actual review? Fine. See below the fold.
Blackhat is a spy-fi movie about good hackers trying to stop bad hackers from doing nasty things to manipulate the stock market. It also involves a not inconsiderable amount of shooting and blowing things up, and eventually death via screw driver. Like most spy-fi/thriller movies, the actual details of the plot are perhaps needlessly convoluted, but things make enough sense as you are conveyed from point A to B to C that even if you can’t make sense of it a few hours later, at the time it’s not a bad ride.
To a certain extent, this movie appealed to me by just making some unexpected story and casting decisions that were entirely too charming. Of the four main characters in the movie? Nick Hathaway, played by an only muscular rather than positively Asgardian Chris Hemsworth, is the only white guy. Of the other three, we have FBI Agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis), and Chinese super computer nerd siblings Chen Dawai and Chen Lien (Leehom Wang and Wei Tang respectively). The opening conceit of the film is the Chinese and Americans teaming up to stop an evil hacker, with the Chinese siblings acting as the real heart of the team instead of it all orbiting Chris Hemsworth’s muscular mass. That was definitely an unexpected turn, since the first few minutes of the movie were shot more like the Chinese might be the villains. When Nick and Lien end up sleeping together (because of course they do) Dawai doesn’t act like a macho shithead, but rather has a reasonable and adult conversation with Nick about his concerns in regards to the fact that if their mission fails, Nick goes back to prison and that would kind of suck for Lien–all without demanding dramatically that the two break up. The hackers work with command lines rather than ridiculous, fancy GUIs, and much of what they do is accomplished by just being clever bastards rather than brute forcing things. (Eg: At one point Nick gets a password by tricking someone into changing their password and using a keylogger.)
Leehom Wang and Viola Davis were the standouts of the cast; it’s refreshing to see Davis in such a different role for her and she plays it well. (Favorite line of the movie is when she looks disbelieving at Nick’s attempt to be cool and says, exasperaed, “Chica? Do I look hispanic to you?”)
All of that? Exceedingly charming. It’s those unexpected factors that made me willing to forgive a lot of the weaknesses, and are what stand out in my mind even now when, over a week later, I couldn’t tell you what the hell most of the plot actually involved, other than noting that the romance between Nick and Lien comes out of the blue and makes about as much sense as some of the more tortured jargon. That’s perhaps the biggest problem, is that the plot has only one twist startling enough to stand out, while the rest is a little too caught up in spy novel intricacy without having quite as much driving tension as less arcane spy movies. While it’s refreshing to hit several points in a movie where you go Oh, that’s not what I expected, I can’t help but think the best definition for a movie is being able to tell you what it is as opposed to what it isn’t and then the rest being fairly unmemorable. But fun, worth watching, and and I think worth watching again to see if more of the plot sticks this time.
The fights (with a bit too much steadicam for my tastes, rendering them almost incoherent as those in the Bourne Supremacy) are short, indelicate, and brutal, which is something I’ve come to appreciate in movies that are trying to be a bit more gritty and realistic. That’s the tone the movie goes for, gritty and dark and more than a bit brooding at times, though the use of the various cities and the urban color scheme are gorgeous. More of those and less of the Tron-esque watching light track through circuit boards, which was baffling as to what it really meant to add. As for the hacking? I don’t know enough about computers any more to actually say how silly it was. But I think the most unrealistic part of the entire movie was actually a man inserting a USB drive into his computer on the first try.
What if it’s not that I don’t understand people, but that I don’t like them?
Nightcrawler is… unsettling. But not in the same way as, say, Filth. It’s the kind of movie that makes you cringe into your seat in the theater, because there are awkward things, and things that go on that just are profoundly wrong, and you can see them all coming.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a rather creepy man who is self-educated, loquacious, and desperate for work. As the movie opens, he’s stealing scrap metal to sell, and tries to ask for a job with an absolutely stunning display of memorized internet business-speak. The owner of the scrapyard turns him down cold, saying he won’t give a job to a thief. Lou happens across a freelance news crew (“nightcrawlers”) immediately after and concludes that it’ll be the job for him–which he sets out to do with not so much dedication as eerie intensity. He has no morals, no compunctions, and absolutely no boundaries, which sets him up to be king of if it bleeds it leads. He sells his disturbing and morally questionable footage to Nina, played by Renee Russo, and it escalates from there.
There’s not much question that something is seriously wrong with the amoral Lou, and Gyllenhaal disappears creepily into the role in the best way possible. But the ability of Lou to pull people into his vortex is still unnerving, as if he’s somehow finding and strengthening what is worst in them, all while being exceedingly pleasant. It’s an amazing acting job, really, and the way Nina and Lou feed off each other is particularly distasteful, which is to say the movie accomplished what it set out to do extremely well.
Nightcrawler works best as a character sketch of a manipulative man that’s probably a sociopath, and as an indictment of the manufacture of news stories. When Nina tells Lou what kinds of stories she wants–her viewers want–she emphasizes very plainly that it’s about “urban” crime creeping into the “suburbs” and ideally victims should be wealthy and white, while perpetrators should be poor and minorities. Graphic is better, and she does her best to hype up the fear of every news story she puts together. In her own way, she’s just as gross and amoral a character as Lou, motivated entirely by the self-interest of keeping her own job.
And there are still more disturbing things waiting beyond that, such as the relationship between Nina and Lou, and what happens to Lou’s hapless assistant Rick, a man who is simply desperate for a job and incredibly vulnerable because of it.
Nightcrawler is a movie where everyone is a shitty, horrible person, and they do shitty, horrible, creepy things. It’s interesting, and well-shot, and excellently acted, but you still have to be willing to roll with the fact that the character are all fucking terrible human beings. And this without even the protection of Filth‘s disturbing layer of humor and manic surrealism. It’s dark, and unavoidable. Character sketch with excellent acting, yes. But it’s definitely not for everyone.
I imagine a lot of people have been comparing Interstellar to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s not a bad comparison to consider, though Interstellar is definitely rather more action-oriented than 2001. Interstellar touches on a lot of similar themes, like the vastness of space versus the fragility of human life, man’s relationship with the greater cosmos, and the spiritual and evolutionary journey of the species. Like 2001, Interstellar has given us silent space, and used that silence to great effect much like Gravity did recently as well. And like 2001, sassy artificial intelligences do play a major role–and so does betrayal. (These two are not necessarily connected.)
In Interstellar, the Earth is a lost cause, torn by environmental disaster, and humanity must once again set its sights on the stars if there’s to be any hope of survival. This is made more difficult by the fact that the government of near-future America is now run by moon hoaxers. (And in a scene that alone would make me love Chris Nolan, Cooper reacts with dawning horror and then snarky anger when he’s confronted by people who want to punish his daughter for bringing books to school that talk about the moon landing.) The underground remnants of NASA have found a wormhole orbiting Saturn, generated there by some mysterious “others”, and discovered possible worlds that humans could colonize on the other side. Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, via his brilliant daughter Murph, receives the coordinates to the NASA base due to gravitational intervention by the same mysterious species that created the wormhole. He’s apparently been “chosen” and thus pilots the ship that is sent through the wormhole, to a system where habitable planets orbit the massive black hole Gargantua.
That’s really only the beginning of the plot. I can’t explain much more of it without getting into supermassive spoilers, and this is one where I think I’d rather avoid the spoilers. Which is shocking, for me. But so much of the first emotional impact of the film is created by the slow revelation of the story–and it is a bit slow at times. Interstellar clocks in at just shy of three hours, and there are a few pacing hiccups that feel more like snarls in otherwise smooth fabric than anything deal-breaking. The plot is pretty complex and twisted for a movie (at least one that doesn’t use unreliable narrators) and involves some timey-wiminess; it’s generally well explained, though at times a little over-explained by the characters. There could be fewer repetitions of the (to me) cringe-inducing phrase “we need to solve gravity” and the movie wouldn’t have suffered.
Interstellar is a movie about desperation, and love, and loss, and betrayal, and the commonalities of human experience that reach across insurmountable times and distances. And I think it’s very worth noting that it’s a movie about all kinds of love: the familial, and the romantic, the love for one’s people and even ideas, and the greatest love story in a movie shockingly full of love stories is that for family.
The film is absolutely gorgeous, and that cannot be emphasized enough. The visuals are just stunning, and largely done with practical effects, which is a thing we’ve come to expect from Chris Nolan. If you can find a copy of Empire‘s article about the movie, give it a read. For example, apparently a lot of the starscapes were projected on white screens outside the Ranger set during the filming, so that when the actors looked out the windows, they were actually seeing what we see. And many of the shots didn’t have to go to post-production for special effects because of that. That’s incredibly cool. That’s a reason to hope that perhaps special effects are looping back into a more practical realm, which still looks more real than even the best CGI. The visual effect on watching is just stunning. Vast, gorgeous, and awe-inspiring.
And also, worth noting, the movie contains the best simulation of a black hole ever done. One that will spawn papers for Kip Thorne, who generated the mathematical equations for it. Still not certain, however, about the wisdom of wanting to colonize planets orbiting said gorgeous black hole. (How does that even work?)
I honestly haven’t been the greatest fan of Matthew McConaughey, but he does brilliantly for this movie, going from world-weary and bitter to determined, visionary, and self-sacrificial. There wasn’t anyone in the cast I could complain about. And considering the multiple layers of untruths told in the plot, performance was absolutely key. They all stuck the landing, but Anne Hathaway was particularly good. There’s a lot of love and pain in this film, because the more vast the landscape, the more intimate the emotional framework becomes, and they all nailed it.
Special mention should be made of TARS and CASE, the rather monolith-esque modular robots. The idea behind them is very clever, but the best part is the sassy personality that particularly TARS displays. His humor setting is at 100% at the beginning and very dark; during launch he jokes to the crew, “You’ll all be slaves for my robot colony.” TARS was a highlight of an already excellent movie.
Which is not to say that the movie is without flaws. Already mentioned were the pacing hiccups and some rough parts with the plot. While the Cooper-as-the-chosen-one gets explained in a way that didn’t make me want to chew on things, there were some other moments that knocked me out of the film. One was Romilly, who is one of the scientists, saying “There’s some things that aren’t meant to be known.” Considering that the topic in question here was the inner mechanics of a black hole as opposed to, say, evil genetic experiments on humans, that made my inner scientist shriek in rage. And while the themes about love and distance were important, Amelia trying to justify her intuitive feelings fueled by love as valid or perhaps better than science was also pretty frustrating.
On a technical note, the score was Hans Zimmer good, because Hans Zimmer. But I’m not sure if it was due to me seeing the film in 35mm, or if there was something off on the sound system, but there were times when I could not hear the actors over the score. And perhaps that was intentional, and meant for dramatic effect, but man it was kind of frustrating because you could hear people speaking but not quite what they were saying.
The plot, while interesting, definitely has flaws that can be picked to ribbons the minute the movie lets go of your tear ducts and gives you a moment to breathe. Particularly if the picking is scientific in nature, it can easily go down to the bone. But this reminds me of the argument I had during the Skiffy and Fanty episode on Snowpiercer: it seems particularly unfair that movies that take chances (and there’s a lot about Interstellar that qualifies in this, from the lack of a main romance, to the scope, to the number of questions it asks) tend to get judged much more harshly than those that are just out to have a good time, so to speak. The sheer ambition and scope of the movie, the fact that it’s not trying to posit easy answers or simple concepts, is what makes it special and incredibly worth seeing. If anything, I’m forced to wonder if Interstellar would have benefited from offering fewer explanations to the questions opened by its plot and been a bit more like 2001, where it’s left up to us to draw our own meanings.
Go see this movie. Even if you don’t really like McConaughey. I still would have enjoyed it even if it had been Tom Cruise. If nothing else, it’s good to see the point made, and made beautifully, that space exploration is important, and not something that should be put off as frivolous.
Well, you did it, so I did it, so here we are. Charity gets $300 and you get to make me suffer for a little over an hour and a half. There was unfortunately no drinking accomplished during this movie, but that was because I had two tablets of vicodin on board to help defeat the rawness of the healing incision in my foot. This may be why Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made not one iota of goddamn sense to me, though my housemate assures me it made no sense to her, either, and she was completely sober at the time.
But I’m going to try to be positive about this.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Lips for the lipless
Remember how, back in the heady days when Transformers didn’t have lips and no one had even conceived of the idea of making a movie out of a fucking board game, the teenage mutant ninja turtles were either animated or played by dudes in costumes obviously made out of rubber, the way god and nature intended?
Remember when practical effects were a thing? I miss those days.
Now you get this endless protean horror that’s the result of a weird and highly illegal genetic experiment that involved Shrek, college frat boys who just desperately needed some beer money, and something unidentifiable, perhaps the last shreds of Michael Bay’s conscience which had until now been kept preserved in a jar of pickled eggs in the recess of some broom closet. It looks something like this.
I LIIIIIIIIIIVE
Which is a fucking cruel thing to do to someone who is one prescription pain medication, let me tell you. There is shot after shot of all four of these horrors grouped around and staring down on an unconscious or confused character, and every time it felt like I’d been caught in the kind of bad trip I could expect if the drugs I was on weren’t legal and had potentially been cut with some kind of weed killer. I’d experience this full body twitch of terrified revulsion while I waited for a set of those rubbery CGI-lips to press against the screen and begin to siphon my soul from my body while another chanted Y’ai’ng’ngah / Yog-Sothoth / H’ee-L’geb / F’ai Throdog / Uaaah.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: A significantly shorter movie than Transformers 4
Pretty much all of the fighting takes place between rendered characters. And while there’s more visual coherence than you get in the average Transformers movie, where it looks like bundles of scrap recycling getting battered together over and over, this made up for being able to tell what was happening by bring incredibly fucking boring.
What I can’t blame on the vicodin is the bit where they felt the need to make Shredder’s suit sort of… transformer-ish? Partially mechanized? Come on, guys, Shredder was badass enough on his own, making him half swiss-army-knife is really not the way to impress. I think at one point he might have wielded a corkscrew or the wine bottle opener.
Apparently the hellturtles learned their techniques from Splinter, who literally taught it to himself from a book that he found discarded in the sewer, which thankfully was a pictorial instruction manual in the way of ninjutsu. I wish I was making that up. I wish I was making any of this up. I wish this had just been some sort of anesthesia-induced fever dream, and I’d soon wake up to find it was still actually Thursday and I’ve just fallen asleep with a copy of The Mountains of Madness over my face, then I’d think about the horrifying turtle-lips and vomit a lot.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: If you like exposition, then have I got a movie for you
Because there’s a lot of it. Exposition, I mean. Really meaningless exposition. I never thought I’d accuse old-school TMNT of being sort of intellectual, but in comparison, yes? Because at least the old ninja turtle writers seemed to realize that certain things could be left unsaid, and that certain bits of exposition didn’t need to be repeated over and over again. It strikes me that in a movie that barely made it to 100 minutes, maybe the director could have gone out on a limb and, I don’t know, shown us a few things instead of telling.
When Sacks gets mentioned to Splinter, he takes the opportunity to explain why Sacks is evil and in league with Shredder (which he knows because…reasons?) instead of the movie having a couple of scenes to say develop Sacks as a character, have him betray April and the turtles, and show he’s evil. Why make this decision? It wasn’t in the interest of running time.
And if you like background info dumps, this is a wonderful movie. Want to hear several times about April and her dad and her connection to the turtles? Got you covered. What about the foot clan? There is like a foot clan forecast in every scene in which they tell you what activity level to expect! Useful! (They are also apparently the only evil ninja clan in the history of ever to be so terrible at ninjutsu that they use guns, but then have worse aim than the average Stormtrooper.)
I don’t know, maybe the turtle lip budget was running severely over at that point. If there had been less exposition, there would have been more scenes with the turtles, and more souls would have needed to be harvested for Shub-Niggurath the Black Goat of the Woods With A Thousand Young.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: One third the female characters, slightly less sexism.
So the movie is about April, a lady reporter who, as far as I can tell, suffers from severe, untreated exercise-induced asthma, because she’s always short of breath in every scene no matter what she’s been doing. And Vernon, her camera guy, with whom she has a pretty awesome kind of bro-ish friendship except at incredibly random and awkward intervals the script has this hiccup and decides that oh yeah April is a girl so Vernon should hit on her. Because that’s what boys do. Like the time Vernon drops April off at Sacks’s house and literally says, “Nothing better than dropping off a pretty girl at a rich guy’s house.” He was randomly neckbeard fedora-y, except he has no neckbeard, but at one point he literally does wear a fedora. A fedora that he immediately disavows in apparent confusion when called on it.
It’s almost like there was this script for a boring but fairly normal movie, and then someone realized Michael Bay was involved and thus ran it through a random creepy sexist comment generator. Or maybe there was a whole subplot with Vernon that got left on the cutting room floor, in which Vernon has at times been replaced by a terrifying clone made from mutated white bread, and the only way you can tell them apart is that the real Vernon is just sort of doofy and doesn’t creep on his coworker.
But anyway, Vernon and April team up with the four ninja turtles who are, if I recall correctly, named Nerdy Turtle, Manpain Turtle, Generic Turtle, and Creepy Turtle. Or if you believe the script, Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, and Michaelangelo, but I think my names are much more accurate. There are sad attempts at witty banter. The only turtle who is even slightly likable any more is Nerdy Turtle, but he still looks like he’s going to eat your soul from within the film so that doesn’t help at all.
Yeah, that? That’s Donnie.
I found Creepy Turtle personally upsetting, because Mikey was actually my favorite from when I was a kid. And yet the moment he shows up on screen he starts hitting on April, including uttering the immortal line: “She’s hot. I can feel my shell tightening.”
Hello ladies, you can call me Dr. Reptilove
Back in the day, Mikey was a kind of free-spirited party turtle. Apparently in the year 2014 that translates to “let’s party like it’s Steubenville.” It’s gross. And every time Creepy Turtle said something fucking creepy, you know who I heard laugh? Not the kids in the theater. The dads. And that made it approximately a million times creepier.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: It could always be worse
There were actually two scenes in the entire movie that I really liked… because they were the ones that reminded me most of the turtles I grew up watching. Early on, there’s a scene where Splinter is trying to get the boys to admit where they went, and he finally breaks their silence by tempting them with the mystical “99 cheese pizza.” That was cute. And then toward the end, all four of the turtles are in an elevator going up a long way, and then they start beat boxing using the beeps from the elevator. That, too, was cute.
The rest?
Maybe all you need to know is that the word Cowabunga is uttered only twice in the entire movie, right at the end. First, with appropriate enthusiasm. Then again with the sort of “gritty grimdark I’m about to walk away from an explosion while putting on my sunglasses” tone that made me want to weep in despair.
But fear not. The turtles have a new catchphrase: Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!
