I almost didn’t watch this movie. I never saw Cloverfield, and heard enough about it that I wasn’t really all that interested in it. So something that sounded like it might be a sequel wasn’t really on my radar. But then I heard from Sunil that this was a standalone thing, and more importantly, there weren’t any other movies I wanted to see that weekend. I decided to brave the potential scary and give it a whirl.
I’m so very glad I did. 10 Cloverfield Lane isn’t a horror movie, I don’t think. It’s more of a thriller, with the ordinary everyman Michelle trying to figure out what has happened to her and escape her captivity to gain freedom in a potentially deadly world. It’s unbearably, superbly tense at times, relieved occasionally by some delightfully black humor.
The basic plot is simple: Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has just broken up with her fiance and left their home. On the way through the countryside, something hits her car. She wakes up, injured and held captive in an underground bunker with survivalist conspiracy nut Howard (John Goodman) and hapless regular guy Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr). And it looks like they’re going to be trapped down there fore the long haul, because according to Howard and Emmett, there’s been some kind of chemical attack at the surface and everyone is dead.
It’s a pretty simple setup, three people attempting to live together while one of them–Howard–is absolutely unhinged in a very quiet way. John Goodman is absolutely terrifying in the quietest way possible, delivering a twitchy performance that leaves the audience as off balance as Emmett and Michelle, unable to tell which way he’ll turn. And the way Howard talks to Michelle while staring through her and past her gave me chills. The power of the film is ultimately the way the three characters interact, with Michelle and Emmett forming bouncing between deep suspicion of Howard as new facts are revealed, coupled with deeply weird, almost familial moments of these people just trying to get along–sometimes because they genuinely find something to like about each other, sometimes because they’re desperate to appease their mercurial captor.
Michelle makes for an amazing hero with a very satisfying character arc. Michelle is the sort of hyper-competent problem solver that we so rarely see female characters get to be. The most interesting thing about her is the fact that she’s a wannabe fashion designer, and obviously has been written by someone who gets that it’s a serious profession with a lot of skills involved. She addresses the problems presented to her by looking at the materials she has at hand and designing some kind of solution–there was so much make it work in her that I think she’d make Tim Gunn weep with pride.
Another thing I appreciated, in light of the stories we normally get where a female character is held captive, is that Michelle doesn’t ever get sexualized by the two men in the bunker, let alone sexually assaulted. (In fact, Howard polices very hard against it, for incredibly creepy reasons of a different sort.) It’s a sad statement that I have to point that out as a bonus, but I think it’s an important thing to note.
There are a lot of surprises to this movie and some very unexpected turns that I don’t want to spoil. It’s well worth watching, and seeing Michelle unravel the mysteries is incredibly rewarding. Perhaps my enjoyment was enhanced by the fact that I never watched Cloverfield, so I had no expectations coming from that name. Let this one be its own movie, and you won’t regret it.
Batman vs Superman is the story of an engineering genius named Alfred who has decided to dedicate his life in service to the Wayne family as a butler, much to his detriment. As not-so-young-any-more Master Bruce goes into an out-of-control spiral of obsession laced with extremely lucid an violent dreams that really ought to have him seeking out help from a mental health professionals, Alfred does the best he can to get him to reel it in, with such pointed remarks as, “…the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men cruel.” Alfred can only watch in growing dismay as Bruce becomes completely fixated on Superman as a symbol of all things wrong, presumably resentful because Superman is way better at murdering people than Bruce, and is also the most popular girl at prom. It’s the story of one man being slowly crushed under the weight of another man’s insurmountable ego, as Alfred laments, “Go upstairs and socialize. Some young lady will make you honest… in your dreams, Alfred.” Ultimately, Alfred’s soul becomes one more piece of collateral damage in the massive manpain dick-waving contest that occurs between Batman and Superman, thankfully cut short by the intervention of a badass woman wielding a sword and round shield, who is the only person capable of finding some sort of joy in this entire film. Maybe she will make the dark knight an honest man and answer Alfred’s dying hopes, but I wouldn’t want to inflict that on her, she deserves so much better, and it’s obvious from the way she’s willing to dive into battle and take her hits with a fierce grin, having at last found a worthy opponent.
In case you couldn’t tell, the only parts of this movie I liked were Alfred (Jeremy Irons) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who probably accounted for less than 5% of the film’s running time. (My driving away from the movie reaction here, since Didi asked for it.)
I’m not surprised I didn’t like this movie. I really didn’t care for Man of Steel, and in Batman vs Superman, Zack Snyder makes a film that’s even less coherent than the first. Even worse, the soundtrack for this one is bombastic, overblown, and oddly desperate, which is the cherry on the shit sundae, kind of like the soundtrack for Transformers 4 sucking. (The only good bit of the soundtrack was when Wonder Woman showed up, holy shit that guitar though.) You leave me with nothing, Snyder. But I decided that I would see BvS anyway because 1) Wonder Woman and 2) Alfred, and at least they didn’t disappoint. Also, it’s hard to justify saying mean things about a movie if you haven’t seen it (particularly egregious nonsense like Gods of Egypt excepted) no matter how much of a hot mess it looks in the trailers.
As usual, Zack Snyder makes a film that’s visually appealing (if so ridiculously color filtered that at times it looks almost black and white) and lacks any sort of sequential or narrative coherence as shots form scenes. It also feels like he jammed at least three movies together and the plot just bounces between them all like a frantic pingpong ball. We get the Batman origin story again. We get Lex Luthor coming out of left field (way the fuck out in left field, more on this in a minute) and doing some kind of six dimensional villain chess thing that’s so poorly developed it’s impossible to follow. We get Wonder Woman trying to set up the Justice League, squeezed into a few spare seconds. We get Bruce’s manpain, and more manpain, and even more manpain, and then some bizarre dream sequences that really don’t add a fucking thing. We get Superman getting called in front of Congress and constantly talked about as what a giant threat he is because everyone likes him, which seems very weird when in the movie literally no one but Lois Lane seems to like Superman until we’re midway through the second act and he finally rescues some people from a burning factory. (By the way, Lois Lane and Clark have a couple really cute scenes and kudos for that tiny sliver of character development.)
Henry Cavill tries with Superman, bless him, you can tell he’s trying so hard as someone who gets the character under a director who plainly doesn’t. But I honestly laughed out loud when Ma Kent reassures Clark that he’s not a killer. Actually, Ma, we have Zack Snyder and the previous movie to thank for that. Though I will note that Clark goes out of his way in this movie to try to not murder a lot of civilians, and that I appreciated. But it’s a bit ridiculous when his supposed reason for going after Batman is that Batman is brutal and causing people to die. Your body count is still way higher, kiddo. But it doesn’t help that even Superman doesn’t seem to know why the fuck Superman is doing anything, perhaps because Zack Snyder doesn’t get it either, and Ma Kent acts as reverse Uncle Ben, assuring her son that, “I never wanted the world to have you… you don’t owe this world a thing. You never did.” (Ma Kent’s an objectivist, who would have thought.)
Of course Ben Affleck’s Batman is another step in the descent of this character becoming the Punisher Lite. There’s only one fight in the entire goddamn movie where it really feels like he’s fighting like Batman, using hand to hand and ninja skills and gadgets instead of shooting things and blowing up cars and basically murdering people left and right, even if he doesn’t do it personally. This version of Batman, charmingly enough, brands people with the bat symbol so that when they get sent to prison, they get murdered by the inmates. This is a thing he plainly knows is happening. It’s as if Snyder took a look at the Bale/Nolan Batman and went, yeah, but this guy is way too likable and morally upright. Now, why he’s got a hate-on for Superman makes sense in a strictly hypocritical fashion–it’s okay to murder people when you’re Batman, but Superman is just way too good at it. Obviously this cannot be allowed to stand, and thus some kind of battle, blah blah blah manpain manpain angst angst posturing oh wait we need to unite to defeat a common enemy that gets airdropped in at the last minute. (Though I will note that I think Ben Affleck did a fine job with what precious little he had, and I’d actually really like to see more Batfleck if he’s in a movie that isn’t directed by Zack Snyder.)
Maybe if you liked Man of Steel, you’ll like this. Maybe Zack Snyder movies are for you. But if you’re like me, just wait for some perfect soul to make a super cut that’s nothing but Wonder Woman (or ideally, Wonder Woman and Alfred) and watch it on youtube. Don’t worry, there’s a much, much better Batman movie coming soon.
The worst part of all of this is I’m going to drag myself to whatever DC does next as long as Gal Gadot is in it, because I’m that fucking thirsty for a female superhero movie. So hell yeah, I will still show for a Wonder Woman movie, even if Zack Snyder ends up directing it, (bless Farli for pointing out that Patty Jenkins is directing Wonder Woman, I can feel hope again!) because I love Wonder Woman and still have hope in my heart that hasn’t been entirely crushed that maybe she will get the treatment she deserves. (Her five minutes in BvS was pretty good.) But I sure don’t have a reason to trust her movie won’t suck, not after the way this one ended.
SPOILERS for the end from this point, if you even care.
I’ve been avoiding writing about this movie. Not because it’s bad. Hell no. Exact opposite. But because there’s just so much meat there that I’m not even sure where to start.
Well, I’ll start by saying that I absolutely loved this movie, and that I almost didn’t see it. After my feeling of profound meh from Frozenand my increasing grumpiness at how damn oversaturated everything to do with that movie was, I was a bit done with Disney. Honestly, the only thing that convinced me to give Zootopia a chance was seeing an article where it got mentioned what a big deal it is that there isn’t a romance plot.
From a Disney movie. (Setting Pixar films aside, here, as their own thing.) No romance plot. Okay. You have my attention. That’s all I knew going in.
It’s a fun story. Small-town bunny Judy Hopps goes to the big city, Zootopia, to follow her dream of becoming a police officer. Zootopia is an amazing mix of technologically created biomes, where predator and prey animals live together in relative harmony via handwavium that’s never explained and really doesn’t need to be. Judy’s the first bunny to ever become a cop in a police force that’s really controlled by size more than anything else; she’s tiny compared to the big cats, water buffalo, bears, hippopotami, and other big mammals that dominate the force. She gets assigned to write parking tickets, where she runs across conman fox Nick Wilde and gets hustled by him. Not long after, in the right place at the right time and on the verge of being fired, she picks up an abduction case. With no resources and no help to be found within her department, she pulls her own hustle on Nick to force him to help her, and it all proceeds from there.
I’m a sucker for a good buddy cop comedy. I really didn’t expect this one to kick everything but Hot Fuzz out of its way, but Nick and Judy (how many cross-gender buddy cop duos have we had? Not bloody many) have firmly found a place in my heart right next to Nick and Danny. Just on the level of a buddy cop movie, Zootopia succeeds beautifully. It’s got a fun case with some twists in it that I didn’t expect. It’s got a lot of comedy, much of it based on the setting and mammal jokes. I’m going to end up buying a Disney animated film for the first time in years because I enjoyed it so much and I love these characters.
But what makes Zootopia special and incisive is that it acknowledges not just the existence of prejudice (racism, sexism, classism) but privilege as well, and the interplay between them. I’d caution against taking the allegory too literally. If nothing else, there’s an odd interaction along the predator/prey divide, where prey animals still haven’t forgotten the “savage” days when predators ate them and thus remember the fear and distrust, while in the modern city of Zootopia, the predators only make up about 10% of the population. It’s not something that has a direct analog to any part of the modern world that I’m aware of, and that’s okay.
I suppose technically what follows could be considered a spoiler, but I’m going to talk in generalities here.
Judy’s the underdog character for much of the movie. She’s a small town girl, viewed as a hick in a big city, fighting to find her place in a department that’s generally hostile toward her because of who she is. Yet we see her exercise her own privilege over the fox, Nick, in little ways and then big, awful ways. She calls him articulate. And in a scene midway through the film that I found incredibly difficult to watch, she vilifies predators as a whole and does incalculable harm to them by telling the truth as she sees it. She’s even initially puzzled why Nick is so hurt. Because she just told the truth, right, why is he so upset, he’s her friend and he’s different. Ow, ow, ow. As a reminder that just because you face oppression of your own (for being LGBT, say) doesn’t mean you don’t also have privilege you can wield to devastating effect, it’s razor sharp.
And of course, yes, let’s talk about vilifying a minority group as a means to gain and maintain political power. It’s definitely not the first time a movie’s made that point, but it’s worth making again and again until people fucking listen. It was a cringe-worthy irony that the theater I watched Zootopia in was right across from one playing London Has Fallen.
Zootopia is good. It punched my soul in the kidneys. But it’s funny. There are sloths in the DMV. And I’m going to dream of an ever so slightly different ending, in which Judy turns to Nick and says, “Little hand says it’s time to rock and roll.”
And by the way? The manager at my local Alamo Drafthouse, who now recognizes me on sight, initially assumed I was there to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Oh no, I told him. Gods of Egypt. His eyebrows went up and he said, “Wow, your job must suck.” (He knows I write reviews for pay sometimes.) No, I assured him, it’s because people donated money to charity to make me watch this. How much? $305. “They didn’t pay enough,” he said.
Alex Proyas must be some kind of culinary magician. No doubt with help from the studio and a terrible script, he managed to take $140 million worth of metaphorical cinematic vegetables and garnishes and POOF! turn it into a film salad that’s equal parts insulting, lazy, and boring, the kind of salad that strips the skin off your tongue and takes a sour dump in the back of your throat and there is not enough wine in the world to wash that taste away, you just have to wait for the cells to die and slough off naturally.
Here, let me illustrate where this film falls, via Venn diagram.
Hit the sweet spot, aww yissss
The inexplicably white pantheon of Egypt walks the Earth and rules the Nile valley. Super white Osiris (Bryan Brown) wants to retire and crown his party boy jerk son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), so all the other gods are throwing a party. Then Set (Gerard Butler), sporting an excellent spray tan, shows up and murders the shit out of Osiris while the other gods sort of stand around awkwardly and try not to make eye contact. He then calls upon the powers of computer generated graphics to become a shiny animalbird transformer and beat the shit out of Horus in the first of the movie’s many unarresting fight scenes, rips out Horus’s eyes, and only refrains from killing him because Hathor has a nice rack. Set immediately declares that the afterlife will now be a capitalist enterprise and the only way to get anything nice is to buy your way in with money. And by the way everyone who doesn’t have money right now will be a slave.
As this happens, we get white Aladdin knock-off Bek (Brenton Thwaites), who is a strong, independent man who don’t need no gods. His girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton) is Horus’s number one fangirl, and is enslaved by an architect guy whose main job in the film is to construct a towering black obelisk (with a gold vein on one side) for Set, which is basically the only appearance of wang in a film about Egyptian gods. Zaya gives Bek the plans for Set’s vault, which is basically Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool, and he goes there to steal Horus’s eyes back. He gets one eye, singular, and then tries to escape with Zaya. The architect guy shoots her through the boob with an arrow and she is tragically fridged, except there’s not even really any manpain about it.
Bek decides he’ll help Horus get his other eye back (so Horus can turn into a CGI birdman) if Horus will bring Zaya back to life. They go off on a buddy adventure through fantasy Egypt, during which Bek decides that gods are okay, he guesses, and Horus presumably undergoes some sort of character development. While they’re doing that, Set methodically goes about whacking all the other gods, except for Isis, she already killed herself in grief over Osiris, and yes you just read that sentence. Once he’s collected the whole set of god body parts, Set goes full Satanic Ritual and basically makes himself an Egyptian God Voltron. Bonus points for the part where he literally inserts the glowing brain of Thoth (Chadwick Boseman), the only one of the gods who is black, into his own skull.
Take a moment to let that one wash over you. I’ll wait.
Thus empowered, he goes up to Ra’s awesome skyboat, throws dad out into the void, and then invites the serpent Apophis to eat everything??? because???? it???? will give???? Set more power????
Deep breaths, Egyptian mythology nerds. Deep breaths.
CGI things happen, there’s fighting I guess, Set loses, whatever, I kind of mentally checked out at that point. I just mostly remember that prior to her resurrection by a newly humbled, nice-guy Horus, Zaya had absolutely perfect lip gloss for a corpse.
Entire books could be written about how wrong the mythology is in this film, beginning with the fact that Christian good vs evil framing ruins everything, please stop making chaos gods into the devil, thank you and goodbye. But that would be a waste of someone’s perfectly good time that they could use to pick their nose or scratch their butt crack or a million things more productive than giving this film a second or even first viewing. And by the way? When Set plays God Part Voltron, the piece of Osiris he has, the piece that poor Isis couldn’t find before she offed herself as a side note, is Osiris’s heart. His heart.
The really upsetting thing here though is that there is a lettuce cameo in this movie. (Aha, so that’s why ze started with an incredibly strained salad metaphor.) When Horus, Bek, and Hathor go to Thoth’s library to get his help, Thoth is examining the scientific merits of a head of lettuce. It’s like the screenwriters signaled to us, hey, we totally did this research and know about the jizz lettuce wraps and the wangs and all, but we decided to write this bland as shit movie instead.
I have never been simultaneously so pleased and so angry to see a goddamn head of lettuce. Here’s your lettuce, assholes, but there are no wangs. NO WANGS.
Apparently I talk a lot with my eyebrows when I’m drunk.
Well, no wangs other than Set’s giant black stone Wang of Evil (yes but can you make it taller), which considering the absolutely delightful racism exhibited in the casting, well. Those are some stygian depths perhaps best appreciated from a distance.
So with all that going against it already, the sheer badness of the directing and acting in Gods of Egypt is really just the oh-god-that’s-not-actually-dressing on the lettuce. This movie should make it into a screenwriting course as exhibit A for this is how we don’t do voice over. The dialog is forgettable at best, awful at worst. And I don’t know if it’s an artifact of the extensive CGI shit they had to do to make the actors playing the gods twice as big as the humans so maybe they were all just acting in isolation in green closets, but none of the dialog actually sounded like dialog. There was no flow. It was actors, many of whom we know can turn in a decent performance, barking out lines by rote without any kind of interplay or response. It was weird, disturbing, and really fucking annoying. We’re talking Plan Nine From Outer Space levels of woodenness, here, but without any of the bizarrely kitschy charm lent by tiny plywood tombstones and pie-plate UFOs. Instead we get overblown visuals that are occasionally breathtaking (Ra’s spaceship hauling the Sun up over the edge of a flat Earth springs to mind here) but probably squarely to blame for the fact that every actor appears to be shouting their lines from a green screen vacuum.
And it’s boring. This movie is so. Fucking. Boring. It’s 127 minutes (still shorter than Transformers 4‘s 109 hour running time, mercifully) that should have been maybe 90 minutes, padded out with boring as shit action sequences with random moments of bullet-time slomo so I guess we can appreciate how cool this is. This film is fucking genre salad all thrown together (buddy comedy, action, romance, family drama, etc) and dressed with cheap exploitation because they spent their god semen budget on birdman transformer effects. The only character whose motivations make any sense is Bek, who presumably loves Zaya because we’re informed of this fact, even if they have the emotional resonance of two slices of plastic-wrapped American cheeze being rubbed together. Set wanting to let Apophis consume the entire world only makes sense if you consider it’s his only way to escape this fucking movie and then okay, maybe he’s doing us all a favor.
In that thoroughly awful way, maybe there’s one tiny, very well-disguised blessing to the unforgivable whitewashing of Gods of Egypt: at least no cowardly studio exec will be able to point to this shit salad and bleat that it somehow “proves” no one wants to watch fantasy movies starring black (and other non-white) actors. If any real lessons stick, like oh maybe it’s past time to stop trying to make movies about ancient (fantasy or otherwise) Egypt that headline white people, that remains to be seen. I don’t do sucker bets.
And remember, kids, if someone wants to sell you a salad, take a good, long look at it first and see if that dressing is really what they’re advertising.
As promised, here are my handwritten notes I took in the movie! You can track my inebriation by how bad my handwriting gets. Not as bad as 50 SoG, I’d say: Gods of Egypt notes
Think this movie sounds awful? Feel bad for me? Donate money to a good cause, to prove my suffering was not in vain!
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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
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.
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.
I saw two movies this weekend: Zoolander 2, and Deadpool. Actually, I saw Deadpool twice because I liked it that much. I don’t know jack shit about Deadpool as a comic book character, but the movie is hella funny and I think Ryan Reynolds finally got the movie he’s been craving for years. It’s crass and profane and earns the R-rating without ever going the full Tarantino, which I appreciate immensely.
Zoolander 2 isn’t terrible; it’s got its funny moments, but it kind of feels like a collection of cameos held together with a thin veneer of plot. (The Neil Degrasse Tyson and Kiefer Sutherland cameos make it, by the way.) It’s not really as coherent or weird or funny as the original Zoolander, which I’m not ashamed to admit I loved in all its stupid glory and regularly rewatch. I’m not sad in a general sense that I watched the sequel, but I’m not feeling a burning need to own a copy, like I do for Deadpool.
Two things strike me after viewing the movies so close together. There’s a scene near the end of Zoolander 2 where Fashion Police agent Valentina and henchman Katinka have a fist fight, and it’s called out by Mugatu as “Look, they’re sexy fighting!” And they sure are rolling around and making porn faces in a way that’s not really that much exaggerated from the way such fights are in “serious” action films. I appreciated it as a moment of calling out how bullshit and ridiculous woman versus woman fights can be in action movies and making fun of it.
But in that vein, I liked what Deadpool did even more. There’s a scene about midway through when Deadpool is hunting down a bunch of bad people and he’s taking on two women. He hits one of them (just like he has with the male bad guys he’s taken on) and then when she screams he says in what sounds like sincere distress, “I’m so confused! Is it sexist if I hit you? Is it more sexist if I don’t?”
I think the reason that scene just stuck with me is it’s been a staple of so many superhero movies that when there’s a female hero on the team, there’s got to be a female villain, and those two fight. I think there’s a deep discomfort with seeing cross-gender violence in these kind of action movies just because female heroes and villains are universally sexualized. (Extra points here for the number of spandex-clad and au naturale ass shots we get of Deadpool, the most sexualized character in his own movie.)
And as weird as it sounds, I appreciate very much that Deadpool is an equal opportunity puncher/stabber/shooter in that sense. The female villain in Deadpool, Angel Dust, does eventually fight Negasonic Teenage Warhead, but her longest and most protracted action sequences is with Colossus, and there is nothing sexy about it.
Of course, the bothersome thing about Angel Dust is that when she first shows up and we learn her mutant power is super strength, pre-Deadpool Wade of course has to make one of those fucking “jokes.” You know, the you are strong therefore you must not actually be a womanhey I bet you have a dick jokes.
And before you crawl into my comments and tell me all about how Wade is crass and nothing is sacred and he’s supposed to be an obnoxious dickbag, please stop. Every line in this film was a choice, by the writer, by the actor (if adlibbed particularly), by the director, by the editor. Wade was a lot of things (obnoxious being number one) in the movie, but he was far less sexist compared to what he could have been and what I expected. He wasn’t disgustingly racist, just think about his interactions with the cringe-y stereotype of a cab driver (Dopinder) and with Al. The transmisogyny there, so reminiscent of the whinging bullshit you hear every time a female athlete excels, was unnecessary. (eg: going with the athlete vibe, how about sensing some steroids instead of wang?) Wade manages to be a dickbag to Angel Dust plenty of other times without playing to a harmful stereotype that resides entirely within the audience and makes even less sense in a world where the X-Men exist.
Of course, this pales in comparison to the “All” scene in Zoolander 2. If I have to pick my transmisogyny poison, I’ll take the throw away line versus whatever the fuck this scene was supposed to be. After seeing the entire thing in context (because it does go on way longer than in the trailer, unfortunately), I’m still not sure what the actual point was, though I am sure I didn’t like it.
The scene starts out with Derek and Hansel being nosy about what All’s got stashed in their trousers, which is bullshit way too many trans people have to deal with already in real life. Then on one hand, you have someone defending All and calling out the notion of the strict binary. On the other hand, it sure feels like mockery considering it’s coming from the hipster fashion designer who continues on about All being in a “monomarriage” with “hermself.” All in the movie is the hottest model in fashion because I guess nonbinary gender is supposedly “trendy” and thus deserves mockery. Somehow, I don’t think any fashion gender ambiguity trend outweighs the “trend” of trans people being murdered or committing suicide or being targeted by shitbag lawmakers who are more obsessed with genitalia than Derek and Hansel.
The only other time we see All, they’re dressed in a weird fashion angel outfit and diving down to lash Hansel and Derek with a whip on the runway. I got nothin’, other than the fact that I really wish this scene hadn’t even existed. And yeah, Derek and Hansel are dumb, that’s part of the joke. But I’d ask: is the real joke in this shit show of a scene supposed to be that Derek and Hansel are dumb for thinking they have any damn business asking about All’s genitals, or that All is a caricature played by a cis male actor and All brought it on themselves by being ambiguous and weird and is making Derek and Hansel uncomfortable?
To end on a positive note, yay Deadpool. It was a good Valentine’s day choice, believe it or not. The movie has an emotional core to go with all the quips and fourth wall breaking and Ryan Reynolds snarking about the Green Lantern movie. Vanessa and Wade are disturbingly cute and have a strong, emotionally healthy relationship. One of the big questions of the movie is if that relationship can survive how Wade has changed, and the answer is pretty satisfying. Not what I expected out of an R-rated superhero movie. The opening credits alone are worth the price of admission.
Hashtag fuck cancer.
BTW I’m raising money for Act For Change, an organization that helps and promotes diverse artists. You should check it out.
(PS: I am not perfect at writing about gender issues. If I have been an asshole unintentionally, I appreciate very much being told so I can stop being an asshole.)
This movie was pretty good. You should support Act For Change and make me watch a bad movie instead so you can feast upon my sarcastic rage.
I’ve been trying to catch up on as many best picture nominees as possible for special podcast-related reasons, so I jumped at the chance of seeing this one at the Alamo Drafthouse last weekend. (I am also trying to find a showing of Creed I can watch, for potential talking shit about the nominees purposes.) Like most of the other nominees, this Isn’t My Kind Of Movie, which means it’s the sort of movie I should still watch anyway in the interest of expanding my horizons out of the genre dungeon.
Brooklyn is about an Irish immigrant with a name that’s completely unspellable without referring to IMDB (Eilis, played by Saoirse Ronan) who comes to the titular city in the 1950s, looking to make a future for herself after she can’t find decent work in Ireland. She meets and falls in love with an Italian plumber who is regrettably not named Mario or Luigi (Emory Cohen) and eventually has to decide if her home will be in America or Ireland. There’s not that much plot to it; this is more a character study built on scenes of fairly ordinary days that add up to a life.
It’s a very pretty movie, with a softness to the way everything is shot that reminds me of old photographs. I think there’s a lot of that sort of nostalgia filtering going on throughout the film; everything looks exceedingly clean, society is startlingly polite. Maybe 1950s Brooklyn had a Leave-It-to-Beaver air to it, I don’t know my history granularly enough to say. On one hand, that gives room for Eilis’s conflict to be entirely a choice between old and new lives, without any outer social distraction. (And Time magazine seems to feel it was pretty accurate in some ways.) But I felt entirely unmoored, since I didn’t find any distinct sense of history beyond the costuming to really remind me where we were.
One thing I did love about the movie, which was highlighted in my mind perhaps because I’d seen Lazer Team less then twelve hours earlier, was just how many women there were in it. It was about mothers and daughters and women helping each other make it in a new place or occasionally trying to destroy each other. Men mostly exist in the film as arm candy for the supporting characters, and while one of Eilis’s conflicts is choosing between two equally nice men, it’s secondary to her choosing if she will go back to her life in America generally, or stay in Ireland with her mother. I also loved that some female characters I expected to be quite nasty thanks to common film tropes ended up being immensely supportive of each other.
Ultimately, it’s like eating cotton candy; it fades away almost immediately but for that lingering memory of sweetness. I didn’t find it to be terribly substantial, and while I can’t say I regret watching it, not by a long shot, I’m really not sure what it’s doing up against movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, or even The Martian.
(Still to go: Spotlight and Room. And Creed because I’ve heard it sure as hell deserved a nod.)
Like what I do? Want to see the notes? There’s a Patreon for that.
And lo, in the year of our Lord 2016, Hollywood is giving us an Egypt so white it almost looks like the Oscars. Just kidding. One of the Egyptian gods (Thoth) actually is played by an African-American actor, which makes this movie significantly more diverse than the 2016 Academy Awards and let’s just contemplate that for a minute.
I have been making fun of this movie from the first moment I saw the trailer, because even if you ignore Gerard Butler gnawing on the scenery, it just looks terrible. My Clash of the Titans senses are all a-tingle; I spent endless hours (at least twenty-seven) of my life trapped in a theater with that movie while my will to live withered away. You could not pay me enough to go watch this train wreck of white people with faintly British “fantasy” accents and CGI.
But guess what? You CAN pay a charity enough to make me watch it so you don’t have to, if you’re feeling simultaneously sadistic and giving. And considering the absolutely blinding whitewashing of this film, I feel a charity theme coming on.
MEET THE CHARITIES
Act For Change is a British charity devoted to promoting not just actors of colour, but LGBT, disabled, and female artists as well. I have created a fundraising page with them, please donate there for ease of tracking. Monetary amounts are in GBP, but I’ve done a test donation and they take American credit cards just fine. (Alternatively, if you’re still having problems, you can contact me via email and we’ll work something out.) Americans, right now 1 GBP is running around $1.50, calibrate your giving accordingly.
Classics in Color is a NYC-based theater company devoted to classics as well, focused on ethnic, gender, age, and physically challenged inclusivity.
So this is the deal:
Donate to Act For Change at my page, and I’ll get told how much and your work is done. If you donate to the other two charities (or don’t use the Act For Change page) I’ll need you to inform me via tweet, blog comment, email, or smoke signal that you gave and how much. We use the honor system here; if you tell me you gave someone money, I’ll believe you.
Either way you decide to go about it, if you, my tormenters blog readers and friends, donate $300 to the above charities by February 26, I will see this movie the next day, Saturday February 27, and then I will write about it once I’m sober enough to type. I will also scan my notes for you as soon as I’m able.
GOAL MET: £241.51/£220 ($336.45/~$305)
BUT KEEP DONATING!
Here’s the plan: I will be seeing Gods of Egypt on Sunday (28th) and will have review and notes for you on Monday the 29th!
Offer your gratitude to these monsters people who love both my suffering and diversity in the arts:
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.
