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Movie Curiosities: Zootopia
March 5, 2016 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Late last year, Pixar gave us a movie called The Good Dinosaur. It was supposedly set in a parallel timeline, in which the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event never happened and dinosaurs were free to keep on evolving for another 65 million years. The movie failed. In fact, it quite famously became the first indisputable commercial and critical failure in Pixar’s history, quickly swept under the rug in light of Pixar’s previous triumph with Inside Out and the pop culture tsunami that was Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
But why did The Good Dinosaur fail? It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying — nobody could possibly doubt that the animation was sterling and the movie was overflowing with passion. No, probably the most crucial factor is that Pixar had this wonderful premise to build from and they couldn’t do a damn thing with it. The story was pathetically rote, predictable down to the second. What’s worse, scarcely anything would have changed if the film had ostensibly taken place before that extinction event 65 million years ago (though perhaps a bit more suspension of disbelief would’ve been necessary).
So here’s Zootopia, from Pixar’s rival siblings over at Disney Animation. And it succeeds where Good Dinosaur failed by starting with a similar premise, only to take it so much further in a completely new direction.
Our scene is set in a parallel timeline in which mammals of all different species have somehow learned to live in harmony. It turns out that animals can do quite a lot when they’ve agreed to stop eating each other. Sure enough, it’s so many thousands of years later and animals have evolved to the point where they walk on two legs, they speak with each other, they use technology, and they’ve built the massive city of Zootopia where they can all live together peacefully (in theory, at least, but we’ll get back to that).
Incidentally, all of this is initially conveyed at the opening by way of a grade school pageant. Is it contrived? Sure. Long-winded? Definitely. But the whole sequence is so creative and funny and adorable that it’s easy to let all of that slide and accept the exposition on its own terms. Which is emblematic of how this movie works.
The pacing leaves a lot to be desired, as the central mystery is advanced by oddly convenient discoveries and info-dumps, and certain events are clearly made to happen just so the filmmakers can check off the necessary boxes. It’s plainly obvious that the filmmakers were stuck trying to cram two or three hours’ worth of story into 108 minutes. But the good news is that the movie is so incredibly clever and funny — especially in the more contrived moments — that it makes the pill easier to swallow.
Seriously, I want to stress just how funny and smart this movie is. To wit: Did you see the trailer about the DMV run by sloths? No joke, that scene was every bit as funny in the full movie. This movie tells jokes about goddamn sloths in a way that is consistently and repeatedly funny. If that’s not evidence of crazy-talented split-second comedic timing, tell me what is.
In terms of content, the jokes are all over the map. We’ve got crude bodily humor jokes, we’ve got animal puns to the rafters, we’ve got sight gags, we’ve got witty comebacks, there’s situational humor, pop culture references, the list goes on and on. And yet it all feels cohesive because the premise allows for so many different styles and tastes to coexist. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, this film tells the story of Judy Hopps, a rabbit voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin. Through sheer force of will, Judy has put herself through police academy to be the very first rabbit in the Zootopia Police Department. In fact, all of the mammal residents of Zootopia are sharply divided between predator and prey, and Judy is the very first prey animal to ever serve in Zootopia Police. So naturally, Judy doesn’t just start out at the bottom of the totem pole, she’s beneath the totem pole.
(CORRECTION: A correspondent has since pointed out that there were other prey animals in the ZPD before Judy came along. The distinction is that the other prey animals are all large enough and strong enough to take care of themselves, while Judy is by far the smallest and physically weakest one on the force. In fact, I completely forgot to mention the special city initiative aimed at making the ZPD more diverse, which is implicitly regarded by the other characters as the only reason she graduated from the academy in the first place. It’s a neat little commentary on affirmative action.)
But again, Judy just doesn’t know when to quit and she’s so determined to make a difference in the world. That and of course she’s too damn proud to go crawling back to her parents’ carrot farm with her cottontail between her legs. So Judy wheedles her way onto a missing persons case. In fact, this is the same missing persons case that’s been exhausting the ZPD’s resources as more and more strange disappearances keep happening. So of course Judy quickly finds that the case is part of something massive, with ramifications that quickly engulf the entire city.
Because Judy can’t find help with any of her fellow officers, she instead ropes in Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a fox who’s been running scams on Zootopia streets for over a decade. I won’t go into details on how they meet, because that’s frankly a very long story. Suffice to say that Nick is the self-centered cynic while Judy is the optimist who’s out to make the world a better place. Judy is very straightforward, with such an encyclopedic knowledge of the system that she knows how to make it work to her advantage, while Nick is more slippery in the way he manipulates people and dances through loopholes. But what’s most important is that while Judy is out to defy stereotypes and be whatever she wants to be regardless of who says no, Nick has allowed himself to be so thoroughly beaten by social pressure that he has no aspirations to be anything other than a stereotypical fox.
This brings me to the predator/prey divide within Zootopia. Even though all mammals in the city theoretically live in harmony and it’s been many thousands of years since everyone agreed to stop eating each other, there’s still a lot of animosity between the two sets of species. Predators often look down upon the soft and supposedly weaker herbivores, while the prey animals are mistrustful of those with sharp claws and long fangs. Especially when there’s mounting evidence of predators — and only predators — going savage and lashing out in uncontrollable violent rages.
It becomes especially prominent in the third act, but characters all throughout the movie are divided very sharply along “predator/prey” lines. We see so many forms of discrimination and prejudice, from openly hostile riots (PG-friendly, of course) to casual sidelong glances, and it’s all done in such a way that it painfully reflects our own diverse, contentious, politically correct times. The obvious parallel is race, but religion, party affiliation, sexuality, or anything else expressed in terms of “us vs. them” will work just as well.
Kids will get the message that it’s okay to embrace diversity, to treasure what makes us unique as we accept and celebrate what makes others unique as well. Meanwhile, adults will hear the message about fear and paranoia driving us apart for someone else’s gain and wince at how relevant that statement is. In fact, there’s one character who turns the tables on the audience in a neatly meta way, stating that deep down, we’re all animals.
Then there’s the matter of Judy and her career ambitions. Obviously, the message here is to reach for the stars and chase your dreams, but there’s actually a lot more nuance going on here. The film goes a step further by stating that because we’re all different, we all have unique strengths and weaknesses. This means that we all have something to contribute to any given environment, but it also means that there will be goals we are simply not cut out for. I almost wish the film had spent a bit more time on that latter point — learning when to give up is one of the hardest things that any adult will ever have to learn. Especially after a lifetime of hearing the message that anyone can be anything if we just power through failure and never give up. But I digress.
The point is that the film very eagerly sets forth the message that by embracing what makes us special and fighting like hell to carve out some kind of niche, we can all contribute our own unique gifts to help make the world a better place. To put it another way, the movie simultaneously pushes a message of diversity and a message of persistence, blending the two together in such a way that it results in something more enlightening and uplifting than the sum of its parts. Masterfully done.
Let’s move on to the voice cast. It was occasionally tough to forget that I was listening to Jason Bateman’s voice, but he was still uniquely suited to play the character. Ginnifer Goodwin is such a huge part of why this movie works so well that I can’t praise her lead performance enough. Jenny Slate and Bonnie Hunt were both perfectly cast. Idris Elba and J.K. Simmons made me wish that they had more screen time. Octavia Spencer’s talent is pretty much wasted. Alan Tudyk (who’s quickly becoming Disney Animation’s equivalent of John Ratzenberger over at Pixar) is borderline unrecognizable as a character named “Duke Weaselton,” in a clever if forced nod to Tudyk’s character in Frozen. Nate Torrence’s voice grated on my nerves to the point where I wondered if he was voiced by Josh Gad.
(Side note: Speaking of Frozen alumni, keep an ear out for Kristen Bell. Apparently, she cameos as one of the DMV sloths.)
Last but not least is Shakira, here poking her head in to play pop superstar Gazelle. She also sings “Try Everything,” which is this movie’s presumed candidate for Best Original Song. And it’s… okay, I guess? I mean, it’s miles better than the dreadful list of Best Song nominees we got last year. Even so, I was sick and tired of this one by the time the end credits were done rolling, and I’d completely forgotten how it goes by the time I got home. Though the Michael Giacchino score… really, what else do I have to say? It’s a Michael Giacchino score.
And then we have the visuals. I should really hope it goes without saying that the visuals are flat-out incredible. Zootopia is split up into several different habitats, which means that we get to go exploring through many different landscapes and environments. What’s even better is that every space feels lived-in, and the film often goes out of its way to show various minutiae about how the city functions. All of this leads to a vibrant setting and a movie that’s overwhelming in scope.
What’s even better is that the filmmakers successfully convey a sense of wonder, even as the city does its best to chew up our protagonist and swallow her dreams whole. It maintains that sense of optimism about the world, showing what wonders we can build when we work together, even while acknowledging that no worthwhile achievement ever came easy. And of course, it adds to the central conflict of our main character — it’s so easy to get invested in this setting and our main character that we want to see her earn a place in this city, and every time she’s rejected, it’s delivered in such a way that we feel the pain right along with her.
Disney Animation is indisputably a force to be reckoned with, and Zootopia is further proof. It’s creative, it’s vibrant, it’s funny, it’s smart, and it’s very effectively used to convey themes that will resonate with moviegoers of all ages. The film was impressive enough in 2D, but I’m sure the 3D upgrade will be worth the cost. I can’t begin to imagine what the IMAX treatment would be like — personally, I’d rather wait for the Blu-Ray release so I could freeze-frame at will and try to find all the jokes tucked into every corner.
Looking ahead, it looks like this movie will be a great start to another impossibly good year in animation. And no, I’m not counting Norm of the North, why would I?
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Movie Curiosities: Deadpool
February 11, 2016 in Curiosity Inc.
Let’s start with the obvious question, for those who aren’t in the know: Who is Deadpool? It’s a very reasonable question, given that Deadpool doesn’t have as many decades of name recognition as Superman, Captain America, or even most of the more famous X-Men. In fact, Deadpool didn’t even exist until 1991.
To put this in context, this was the era in which the whole comics industry was trying to make itself “edgy” and “gritty” in a pitifully misguided attempt at imitating the successes of “Watchmen” and “The Dark Knight Returns”. In this wretched period of excess, few comic talents found more fame or success than the notorious artist Rob Liefeld, who co-created Deadpool in “New Mutants #98,” alongside writer Fabian Nicieza. Deadpool’s appearance in that debut issue was brief, but it was enough to establish Deadpool as a mysterious badass mercenary with wit and arrogance in abundance. Allegedly because Liefeld really really wanted to draw Deathstroke and had to settle for making his own thinly-veiled ripoff of the DC character instead.
Cut to a few years later, when the speculator bubble was about to burst, the X-Men brand was slowly collapsing under its own catalog of series and spinoffs in publication, and Marvel was facing bankruptcy. In this context, Deadpool got a 1993 miniseries written by Mark Waid, and an ongoing series in 1997 written by Joe Kelly. In both cases — but especially under Kelly’s tenure — the creators went hog wild and threw everything they could at the wall, figuring that the series was doomed to be cancelled anyway.
So it was that Deadpool became the regeneratin’ degenerate so beloved by comics readers that he’s been known to consistently outsell Superman in the bookstores. Details about his past are unclear, but it’s known that Wade Wilson is a mutate (as opposed to a mutant, it’s a subtle difference) who was given a healing factor by the same Weapon X program that created Wolverine. However, Deadpool’s healing factor is so ridiculously advanced that he’s effectively unkillable. He can be hurt really badly, and some injuries take longer than others to heal, but Deadpool simply cannot be killed.
Because of Deadpool’s proclitivity toward violence and his ability to absorb unbelievably gruesome injuries, he works as a slapstick cartoon character in the vein of Tom and Jerry — or more accurately, Itchy and Scratchy. It also helps that Deadpool isn’t meant to be a sympathetic character. He’s very much an antihero, out for nothing except his own self-interest, though he can sometimes be hired or tricked into following someone else’s agenda. And the cherry on top is that somehow, Deadpool is actually aware that he’s in a comic. Talking directly to the audience and commenting on superhero cliches is a beloved staple of any Deadpool story.
Put simply, Deadpool is unique in that he can be anything, he can do anything, and he can say anything. And I do mean ANYTHING. He’s wooed the physical personification of Death. He’s killed every single U.S. president brought back from the dead. In one notable miniseries, Deadpool killed the entire fucking Marvel universe — every superhero, every villain, every deity and demon, EVERYONE — before killing the comics’ writers on the way to killing the audience. In all the massive multiverses of Marvel and DC, no one could do that but Deadpool.
So here we have a character who’s massively successful among comics fans, but virtually unknown in the mainstream. This explains Deadpool’s appearance in the famously godawful X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which Ryan Reynolds — an avowed fan who actively campaigned for the role — played a version of Deadpool with a radically different origin and power set. Worst of all, the Merc with a Mouth had his mouth sewn shut in the climax for absolutely no reason. Ryan Reynolds and all of his fellow Deadpool fans were so outraged that they spent eleven goddamn years campaigning to get a Deadpool movie done right. That meant a decent budget, a hard R rating, plenty of irreverent quips and wisecracks to the audience, a full-body costume, and Reynolds in the title role.
This was not an easy sell to the studios. But then Guardians of the Galaxy proved that a faithful adaptation of an irreverent and obscure comics property could make crazy box office bank. Folks, it’s really hard to overstate how much of a game-changer that movie was.
So against all odds, here we are with Deadpool, an origin story that makes it clear from the opening credits that these filmmakers are not fucking around. We all wanted a creative, juvenile, self-aware, rapid-fire, and completely fearless spirit toward action and comedy, and that’s exactly what we get from the first frame of the opening shot to the last frame of the post-credits stinger. The first scene alone is full of so many sight gags and one-liners that are so much fun to discover that I won’t even dare to try and list any of them here.
Naturally, the X-Men franchise as a whole proves to be a very popular punching bag, especially since X-Men: First Class fucked up the timeline. Hugh Jackman is brought up in so many jokes that he should’ve gotten a supporting actor credit. Deadpool’s botched appearance in X-Men Origins is naturally brought up once or twice, ditto for Reynolds’ ill-fated turn as the Green Lantern. But strangely enough, though Marvel’s cinematic output is alluded to a few times, no mention is made about the schism in the Marvel universe between the characters owned by Marvel/Disney and the characters on lease to Fox. That seems to me like a prime target for some meta humor. I wonder if someone at legal quashed that.
Oh, and of course it goes without saying that Stan Lee gets a cameo. I love it when filmmakers try to one-up each others’ Stan Lee cameos, and this one is a strong contender for the greatest yet.
Then we have Colossus (Stefan Kapicic), here serving as a voice of responsibility, heroism, doing the right thing, and so on and so forth. He’s basically the straight-laced goody-two-shoes to serve as a contrast with Deadpool’s self-serving immorality. And in the process, it hammers home the point that Deadpool is quite decidedly not your average cinematic superhero.
(Side note: Given how many inside jokes there are in this picture, I consider it a huge missed opportunity that the filmmakers couldn’t spare three seconds for the Colossus Yell.)
Colossus is joined by X-Men trainee Negasonic Teenage Warhead (quoth Kitty Pryde in the comics, “Wow, we really have run out of names.”), played by newcomer Brianna Hildebrand. As your typical moody and withdrawn teenage girl, she plays a detached and disinterested kind of irreverence to contrast with Deadpool’s hyperactive motormouth.
(Side note: In the comics, NsTW was a telepath who could see the future. Here, she’s basically a walking bomb.)
As for the villains, Ed Skrein is on hand to play Ajax, little more than a sneering Brit with super strength an an unlimited pain threshold. Gina Carano plays Angel Dust, who pretty much serves as Ajax’s muscle. Deadpool has a couple of sidekicks as well: TJ Miller (no relation to director Tim Miller, so far as I can tell) plays Weasel, Deadpool’s confidante and favorite bartender; while Leslie Uggams plays Blind Al, a mouthy old blind woman who agrees to give Deadpool a place to stay. Their conversations about Ikea furniture are an especially random highlight — a blind woman trying to put together Ikea furniture is exactly as funny as it sounds.
Last but not least is Vanessa, played here by Morena Baccarin. I was very disappointed to find that Vanessa’s mutant abilities (she’s a shapeshifter in the comics) don’t manifest in this movie, but maybe they’re saving that for later films. That aside, it’s a great thing that Baccarin throws herself into this role with abandon and her chemistry with Reynolds is on point. Because the plot affords Vanessa precious little agency, and her all-important romance arc with Wade is more or less rushed through in the space of a single montage.
Which brings me to a very crucial point: The budget. This film was reportedly made on a budget of $58 million, and it shows. For one thing, the stakes are quite distinctly small and personal, instead of the huge global stakes we usually get in superhero cinema. For another thing, the screen time is very limited. Because the film has to breeze through 108 minutes, nobody in the supporting cast gets much in the way of development and so they’re all painted in very broad strokes. Granted, the actors make it work and the exaggerated characterizations fit with the goofy tone of the comedy. Even so, there’s the distinct possibility that Deadpool’s brand of humor might have been more effective if everyone else was playing the straight man and Deadpool was the only goofball. You know, like it is in the comics.
Another crucial drawback of the smaller budget (relative to other mainstream comic book movies, let’s make that clear) is that the action is extremely limited. Luckily, the filmmakers were clever enough to find ways of making it count. By far the most prominent concerns the opening brawl, which is split into sections as the plot switches between time periods to show Deadpool’s origin. This effectively means that the filmmakers get half a dozen smaller action sequences for the price of a single huge one. Quite ingenious, really.
Aside from two huge fight sequences bookending the film, we’ve got a couple of smaller and generally unremarkable fights here and there. Director Tim Miller proves himself to be unusually adept at action scenes for a first-time director — aside from the occasional wonky camerawork, the fight scenes all look great. It certainly helps that Miller stretches his budget by making the fight scenes funny and loaded with humor, rather than going for the biggest stunts and the most awe-inspiring CGI spectacles.
And really, that’s what it all comes down to. Though the action was always going to be important, it’s the sense of humor that was really going to make or break this movie.
Deadpool is pretty much exactly the movie that fans of the character have been clamoring for. It’s a tremendously faithful adaptation of the character, brought to the screen by talented filmmakers who wanted to portray his bloodlust and his crude humor no matter who they offended along the way. It also helps that the movie pokes fun of itself and other superhero films in a loving and geek-friendly — though no less incisive — way.
If you’re not a fan of the character and you have no interest in seeing a loudmouthed antihero make crude sexual double entendres, this was never going to be your movie. But even so, with superhero tentpole films racing to be bigger and louder and more expensive, there’s something to be said for a smaller and more streamlined movie that approaches the genre from a different angle and doesn’t cost nine figures to produce.
Chances are good that anyone who’s been expecting this will not come away disappointed. Even for those who haven’t been expecting it, I’d at least recommend a second-run or a DVD viewing just to give it a try. Also, I don’t know how much they’ll be charging for the unrated director’s cut, but I’m sure it’ll be worth every cent.
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Movie Curiosities: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
February 6, 2016 in Curiosity Inc.
A while back, there was a book — and later on, a Timur Bekmambetov picture based on the book — called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And everyone laughed. How could we not? But look a little bit deeper, and we see that the real-life Lincoln was indeed a bona fide badass who saw a lot of illness and death in his lifetime, and he eventually fought against a power that sought to enslave, rape, and kill those they thought were inferior. So in a twisted kind of way, the premise almost makes a demented kind of sense.
Now let’s look at Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a film based on a book from the same author. Again, the first sensible reaction is to laugh. How could anyone come up with something so impossibly stupid, and who would be dumb enough to buy it?
Those were pretty much my exact thoughts as well, until I chanced upon the trailer.
It bears remembering that Lizzie Bennet is (with the debatable exception of Jane Eyre) the earliest, strongest, most beloved, most iconic proto-feminist character in the history of western literature. But times have changed and we’ve come such a long way from early 19th-century courting rituals that railing against them isn’t enough anymore. Here in the 21st century, we want our feminist icons to be even more proactive. We want them to be every bit as strong and smart as their male peers, capable of taking charge and kicking ass all by themselves.
So here we have a Lizzie Bennet (played here by the erstwhile Cinderella, Lily James, stepping in for producer Natalie Portman) who’s been trained with her sisters from a young age to kill zombies. She’s sexually empowered, physically fit, and more than capable of dispatching any threat in any number of ways. Yet her place on the social ladder hasn’t changed and she still has to deal with all the various peer pressures and unwelcome romantic advances that were present in the original book (by which I of course mean Jane Austen, not Seth Grahame-Smith). Granted, those scenarios have now been filtered through the lens of a zombie apocalypse, but still.
The bottom line is that here we have an early feminist character who’s been reinterpreted with modern feminist standards. Again, in a twisted sort of way, it kinda makes sense.
As for Darcy (here played by Sam Riley), he’s now a colonel and a career zombie hunter. Which means that not only is he another expert in self-defense, but it also means that he’s killed far more than his fair share of people in various states of undead. Furthermore, he’s grown quite used to people lying to his face about whether they or their loved ones have been bitten. This makes his aloof nature much more compelling and sympathetic, as opposed to the book Darcy, who was pretty much an asshole just because.
The shared focus on slaying the undead greatly enhances the interplay between Lizzie and Darcy. They save each other on multiple occasions, which engenders trust and respect. And Darcy is suspicious to the point of prematurely dispatching anyone he thinks could potentially be a zombie, which strains their relationship. And of course, the mere fact that they have something in common is always a big help in advancing any kind of romance.
The other characters are kinda hit-and-miss. Charles Dance appears as Mr. Bennet, and it was such a relief to see Dance have fun with a role for once. By contrast, Douglas Booth appears as Mr. Bingley, and I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive him for Romeo and Juliet (2013). God knows that Noah and Jupiter Ascending didn’t exactly help, but there’s something about this guy’s face and his screen presence that makes me want to punch him.
Moving on, Bella Heathcote did a passable job of playing Jane, though the character has always been a rather weak one without much of any agency in the story. Similarly, Ellie Bamber was stuck playing Lydia, who’s somehow even more useless here than she is in the source material. That of course heavily impacts Kitty (Suki Waterhouse), who never had much of any function other than Lydia’s partner in crime. As for Mary (Millie Brady), she’s… um… well, she’s just kinda there. No surprise, really.
Then we have Mrs. Bennet, traditionally a reliable comic relief character who sadly fails as comic relief because of how Sally Phillips doesn’t overplay her enough. The mantle of comic relief instead falls to Matt Smith, who gets a laugh out of every second playing the pathetically ineffectual toady, Parson Collins. Lena Headey also gets some great moments, perfectly cast as a wickedly badass interpretation of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Last but not least is Jack Huston, here playing this film’s interpretation of Wickham. I don’t want to go into detail about how this film reinterprets the character, but Huston does a fantastic job of selling us this effortlessly handsome and charming snake.
To be perfectly blunt, this cast would never have worked in a straight adaptation of the original book. Luckily, they were cast in a parody of the original book, and their performances have been accordingly adjusted. It works well enough, overall.
That said, it probably comes as little surprise that the best lines of dialogue were either lifted wholesale or at least partially derived from the original text. After all, Jane Austen’s dialogue is a huge reason (quite possibly the ONLY reason) why the book has endured for so long. Even better, the movie takes several of the story’s protracted arguments and enhances them by way of fights. The characters are trading blows while also trading insults. A predictable move, perhaps, but nonetheless effective.
Alas, the new dialogue is poorly written in spots and quite a few line deliveries fall flat on the floor. As for the action scenes… eesh. Writer/director Burr Steers rose through the ranks by way of Igby Goes Down, a couple of Zac Efron movies (at the height of Efron’s “teen heartthrob” days), and a few assorted TV episodes. Steers is no action director, and this movie is proof. While the fight scenes may have been ingeniously conceived, they’re robbed of all momentum by the hack job editing.
But let’s get back to the basic mash-up conceit. It goes without saying that the original story was hardly written with post-apocalyptic zombie warfare in mind, so of course the filmmakers are going to chafe against the source material in some prominent ways. The big one concerns societal expectations of women, as the polite and submissive female standard was an indispensable part of the story. And it flat-out does not work in this picture. The Lady Catherine de Bourgh has gained a massive reputation as the most wealthy and feared badass in the whole country, and any other woman who studies martial arts and warfare is a pariah? In a time when every living soul is at war with the undead? What kind of sense does that make?!
To be fair, I could almost understand the emphasis on marriage and childbirth if it was part of the effort to repopulate the world and birth more soldiers against the undead. But the film stops just short of making that connection. And even if it did, that still wouldn’t explain the arranged marriages between cousins or the obsession with marrying into a higher class (both inescapable holdovers from Jane Austen, sadly).
Worst of all, there’s the matter of pacing. Even if this is only an adaptation of an adaptation, the filmmakers still had to tell the story of “Pride and Prejudice” in 110 minutes. Given all the convoluted interpersonal maneuverings and antiquated social norms of the source text, compressing it into so short a time is no easy feat (just look at the 2005 attempt). You’d think things might be easier in the mash-up, since the proceedings could be sped up by way of zombie attacks or character deaths. Instead, it adds another layer of complications as the movie now has to establish its own rules for the zombie plague and how this world came to be.
The end result is a film overcrowded with exposition, with sequences weighed down by explanations of who’s who and what’s going on. What makes it even worse is that the movie has been inexplicably padded with recurring plotlines that go absolutely nowhere. The “four horsemen” are a prominent example, ditto for the annoying and useless feud between the Chinese and Japanese schools of martial arts.
But any points I take away for the pacing, I have to give right back for the tone. This movie had a tremendously difficult line to walk, and this movie skillfully avoids the mistake that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter made in taking itself too seriously. We get just enough exposition to flesh out the world and suspend disbelief, yet these details are absurd in just such a way that it enhances the overall sense of fun. And if anything seems ridiculous, the film makes no apology for it.
The movie nails the tone right out of the gate, as the Bennet sisters sit in a circle and clean their guns. They act with cool proficiency in an atmosphere more akin to a tea party, and the contrast is nothing short of sublime. And then they prepare for a ball by helping each other into their dresses and putting their concealed knives in place. It’s the perfect blend of awesome and sexy and freaking hilarious in all the right ways. And the same goes for the rest of the film.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was never going to be a perfect movie. And it was never going to be a faithful or even respectful adaptation of the Jane Austen novel (I seriously doubt that any attempt will ever be able to top the 1995 BBC rendition). The question was always going to be whether this movie justified its own existence. Whether it could play into its bizarre premise in such a way that it might be fun to watch, and maybe give us some kick-ass female lead characters in the bargain. Despite some uneven moments and a runtime that’s still padded at 110 minutes, I’d say it absolutely clears that bar. It’s a pretty low bar, but still.
It’s not worth paying full price for, but I’d heartily recommend a viewing on second-run or DVD.
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Movie Curiosities: Hail, Caesar!
February 5, 2016 in Curiosity Inc.
Where do I even begin with this one?
Hail, Caesar! — rather like its cinematic sibling, The Big Lebowski — is a Coen Brothers picture that’s virtually impossible to adequately summarize because its plot goes sprawling in so many different directions and storylines. There is a de facto protagonist (Eddie Mannix, played by Josh Brolin) who works as the head of the fictional Capitol Pictures studio. And there is something of a central crisis, as world-renowned superstar Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped off the set of a Biblical epic that the whole studio is banking on. (That would be the eponymous Hail, Caesar!, which is more or less a stand-in for Ben-Hur).
(Side note: Apparently, this protagonist is loosely based on the real Eddie Mannix, who played a crucial management role in MGM during the ’40s and ’50s.)
Yet the whole ransom storyline is weighed down by the studio politics and nosy reporters (in this case, a pair of feuding twin sisters played by Tilda Swinton) that naturally start to circle around the disappearance of an A-list actor. And that’s even before a weird group of closeted Hollywood communists gets involved. (Did I mention that the film is set in the 1950s?)
And completely independent of all that, we’ve got a hick cowboy action star (Hobie Doyle, played by Alden Ehrenreich) struggling to work through his first major speaking role. This on top of yet another independent storyline in which DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) has to deal with a sudden out-of-wedlock pregnancy in a way that doesn’t affect her current production or her career.
(Side note: It’s interesting to note how art imitates life here. Aside from Beautiful Creatures — and really, why would anyone count that? — Ehrenreich is himself an actor who had only a mere handful of quaternary roles before proving himself as a leading man with this picture. As for Johansson, she was quite famously pregnant through production on Avengers: Age of Ultron before she and her fiance had been married. Her presence here highlights the fact that only a few short decades ago, that would have been enough to send her out of show business in disgrace. How far we’ve come.)
And while all of that is going on, we’ve got actors like Jonah Hill, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes, Channing Tatum, Clancy Brown, Frances McDormand, Allison Pill, Christopher Lambert, Wayne Knight, and God knows who else showing up just long enough to spout a few great lines, pick up a paycheck, and skedaddle. All of this in addition to the religious debates, comedy bits, musical numbers, and other digressions that stop the movie dead in its tracks for several minutes at a time.
Look, there’s no denying that the movie is entertaining. Every single actor in this piece gets their chance to shine because they’re all insanely talented, and also because there’s nobody else in the business who can present memorable one-off side characters like the Coen Brothers. Even if it’s just a scene of two or more characters bickering, the writing and directing make it hilarious to watch. Even better, the musical numbers are all positively delightful. Johansson (who’s never looked more amazing, by the way) has a dazzling Busby Berkely tribute, and Channing Tatum gets a number that deserves its own damn movie. Seriously, that’s the role Tatum was born to play.
The movie works as a heartfelt and whip-smart tribute to the Golden Age of the 1950s, back when Hollywood was coming into its own as the once and future Tinseltown. The colors, shadows, and camera angles are all done in a way that clearly evoke nostalgia for that era, and the production design is mind-blowing in its scope.
More importantly, the Coens use this setting as a means of examining Hollywood from every conceivable angle, to show what it was like back then and how things have either changed or stayed the same. The relationship between actors and studios, the role of the press, who gets how much of the profit for their part in making the movies, whether movies are made for money or artistic merit, and all the various minutiae of what goes on behind the scenes are all discussed in depth. And if the Coen Brothers want to talk about what makes Hollywood tick, you’d be a fool not to listen.
My favorite example concerns yet another subplot in which Eddie Mannix is being courted for a high-level management position over at Lockheed. In the process, there’s the question of why anyone would ever go to the movies when every household will have a TV. What’s more, Mannix is shown a picture of Bikini Atoll getting blown to bits by an H-bomb, with the message that warplanes and weapons of mass destruction will be the future.
Of course, we in the 21st century know that even after television and videotapes and technologies that no one in the ’50s could possibly have dreamed of, movies still haven’t gone anywhere. But why is that? What is it that keeps us coming back to the movies? Moreover, we know that the nuclear doomsday scenario prophesied in the Cold War days never came to pass. But it’s worth asking what pulled us back from that ledge.
Alas, getting back to the problem I was talking about earlier, there’s a downside to approaching Hollywood from so many angles in so much detail, often through putting in so many different clips of fictional movies from several different genres. This movie is all over the place, with so many distractions that it makes for an incohesive and badly paced final product. It’s fascinating to watch, and the Coens leave a lot for the audience to think about on the way home, but there’s virtually nothing in terms of story or character to hang onto.
Hail, Caesar! is the kind of movie that could only have been made by the Coens. All of their strengths in casting, writing, editing, and directing are in full effect here, and that incredible presentation is the only thing holding this piecemeal film together. It’s undeniably a good movie — more than smart and funny enough to stay watchable from start to finish — but the proceedings are so erratic and the tone is so inconsistent that it falls well short of the greatness that we know the Coens are capable of.
It’s absolutely worth watching, especially at this otherwise dull time of year (Another Nicholas Sparks snoozefest, anyone?), but the filmmakers were very wise not to position this as an awards contender.
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Movie Curiosities: Kung Fu Panda 3
February 2, 2016 in Curiosity Inc.
Let’s talk for a moment about Hotel Transylvania. The first movie may have had a rote and boring story, but it was redeemed by fantastic animation and overwhelming passion. There was so much potential for the world to be opened up, which Hotel Transylvania 2 squandered by sapping out the passion, making the story even more dull, and actively undoing all the character development that had happened over the first movie.
Kung Fu Panda and its sequel were like the inverse of that.
The first movie also had a dull and predictable story, made watchable by way of first-class animation and tremendous effort from the filmmakers. Then the sequel capitalized on that not only by making the animation even better, but by advancing the themes, ideas, and character arcs in a way that built on what had come before and opened up the franchise’s scope.
So here we are with Kung Fu Panda 3, which delivers on the second movie’s promise of showing us Po’s origins and his reclusive family of fellow pandas. But first, the movie has another surprise for us: Oogway, voiced once again by Randall Duk Kim!
Yes, it seems that wise old mentor Oogway is still alive after he spontaneously burst into peach blossoms midway through the first movie. In the time since, he’s been hanging out in a kind of spirit world so he can meditate and focus more on his inner peace. Unfortunately, it seems that Oogway either forgot or ceased to care that he had banished his old rival (General Kai, voiced by J.K. Simmons) to that same spirit world 500 years prior. Whoops!
What makes things worse is that Kai has figured out how to capture the chi (which is basically life force, for those who’ve never heard of it) of every other kung fu master in the spirit world. What’s more, he can use chi to summon and telepathically control jade statues of the captured kung fu masters, all with the skills of the original fighters.
So let’s pause for a moment here. In the first movie, the villain was just a kung fu expert who was supremely skilled and evil to the core. In the sequel, the villain was a kung fu expert with vast armies and top-of-the-line weaponry at his disposal. And in this movie, our villain is a kung fu expert with an army of other kung fu experts, and he grows stronger with every martial artist he encounters. Interesting progression.
Anyway, after Kai has captured Oogway’s chi and gained enough strength to escape the spirit world, he attacks Oogway’s old dojo and students. Which of course means Po (Jack Black, natch) and his friends. One thing leads to another and it turns out that Oogway first learned about chi from a hidden colony of pandas. Which means that finally — FINALLY — we’re given a reason for why Oogway inexplicably chose Po to be the Dragon Warrior, and an explanation for just what the hell the “Dragon Warrior” title is supposed to mean.
The downside? This means that Po has been prophesied to learn a new kung fu ability so he can go and defeat the bad guy. Because that’s only the third fucking time in three movies we’ve seen the exact same plot.
As fate would have it (or not, but I won’t get into that here), this is exactly the same time when Po’s birth father (Li, voiced by Bryan Cranston) has surfaced to find and retrieve his son. So now Po gets to visit his long-lost relatives, learn the ways of his native people, and learn their secrets of chi so he can face off against Kai.
On the one hand, this means that Po gets the chance to embrace who he is in a new and emotionally compelling way. He can learn all the things that pandas do out of laziness and lethargy, incorporate that knowledge in ways that are compatible with kung fu, and then teach his fellow pandas how to do the same. It’s a wonderful twist on the first movie, when Shifu (Dustin Hoffman again) had to modify his teaching style in a way that was compatible with Po’s inherent nature. Except that now, Po has gone from student to teacher in a way that shows how far he’s come over three movies. It’s also a delightful new angle on the theme of individualism, which has always been a cornerstone of the franchise.
On the other hand, there’s the fact that Po is now surrounded by pandas who are just like him. Which means everything that makes Po annoying and useless — his awkward rambling dialogue, his clumsiness, his cluelessness, the never-ending fat jokes, etc. — are all multiplied by a factor of each and every panda that Po shares the screen with. So if you liked Po enough to sit through the first two movies, but an entire village full of Po clones is a bridge too far, here’s your chance to get off the ride.
What makes it even worse is that with only a couple of exceptions, none of the pandas are developed beyond a single cheap joke apiece. Kate freaking Hudson (stepping in for Rebel Wilson, who reportedly bowed out due to a scheduling conflict) was brought in to voice a ribbon dancer named Mei Mei, and her character went absolutely nowhere. As for Li, I’m sorry to say that his arc in this movie is woefully predictable from start to finish. Speaking of which, Po’s adoptive dad (voiced once again by the great James Hong) has grown overbearingly jealous now that Po’s found his birth dad, which means that Mr. Ping’s arc is both predictable and obnoxious.
Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, David Cross, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, and Lucy Liu all get about as much screen time and plot relevance as they’ve had in the last two movies, and it continues to baffle me why the filmmakers secured such top-notch talents for characters who’ve barely gotten any development over three goddamn movies (Shifu and possibly Tigress excluded). And Jack Black… well, the man practically is Po, but I’m sure you knew that already.
With all of that said, the voice acting is wonderful across the board. Even if I don’t understand why such talented actors would be wasted on such worthless roles, the fact remains that they are tremendously talented actors playing characters they already know from the past two movies. As for the newcomers, Kate Hudson does a pretty good job of goofing around, even if it is abundantly obvious that the part was written for Rebel Wilson. And Bryan Cranston… really, what more do I have to say? Is there seriously anything the man can’t do?
Last but not least is the villain. Kai is presented as a character who’s a terrifying and legitimate danger, but he’s just enough of an egomaniacal blowhard to present a bit of comedy without completely undercutting the threat. Basically put, the role is so far into J.K. Simmons’ wheelhouse that of course he nails it hard.
But what really makes this movie work is also what made the last two movies work: The animation and the Hans Zimmer score. The designs are wonderful, the animation is pulsing with energy, and the whole production is overflowing with a sincere passion that meshes perfectly with Zimmer’s beautiful score. I don’t know how the filmmakers keep doing it, but this movie knows how to hit the heart strings and the funny bone in just the right way, as the last two movies did.
For better or worse, Kung Fu Panda 3 both succeeds and fails in the same way that its predecessors did. It’s every bit as fun as its predecessors, energetic and heartfelt in a way that will appeal to moviegoers of all ages. Which is why the series has to end now.
The trilogy is done, the franchise has come full circle, the formula is quickly growing stale, and Po — as explicitly stated numerous times by various characters — has reached the pinnacle of his development. It was a pleasure to see that unfold over three movies and I wouldn’t want to see it ruined by a fourth movie that continues the franchise just for the sake of it. These movies may hardly be perfect (the over-reliance on vague prophecies, the failure to balance Po’s screen time with Shifu and the Furious Five, etc.), but none of these are flaws that could be fixed by moving the franchise further.
I sincerely hope (but nevertheless doubt) that Dreamworks Animation and 20th Century Fox have the wisdom to leave well enough alone. Especially when we already have three movies that were far better than they had any right to be.
Movie Curiosities: Victor Frankenstein
December 1, 2015 in Curiosity Inc.
I’m going to pose you a funny question here: When did the character Igor the Hunchbacked Assistant first appear in the Frankenstein Mythos?
He certainly wasn’t in Mary Shelley’s revolutionary, but extremely dry novel. That novel was about a college dropout on a boat in the arctic being hunted by a monster that he’d made in some unspecified way. And the monster was SMARTER than him, get that.
Nor was Igor in the iconic Universal Karloff movies. Those were at first about an insane Doctor obsessed with defying God and creating life for himself, and then, after the doctor died, became about the wanderings of his creation, a barely-intelligent simpleton neanderthal.
And in that one, Frankenstein had a hunchbacked assistant, a real creepy bastard…named Fritz. And then in the sequels, Bela Lugosi showed up as “Ygor, a broke-necked asshole blacksmith who’d manipulate the Monster into doing shit.
I realized we were missing Igor, the Igor everyone seemed to know, and I was like, “Wait, what?” So I started watching ALL of the Frankenstein movies, from Mel Brooks to Peter Cushing to Robert Deniro, and realized that the only time Igor’s actually been (Doctor?) Victor (Henry?) Frankenstein’s assistant was in the fucking Monster Mash.
I was like, “Wait, what?”
That’s when the idea came to me: instead of trying to do some high minded “revisionist” Frankenstein, why not try to stay true to a version that only lives in the zeitgeist, and has NEVER REALLY EXISTED.
And why not do it in an intelligent, hopefully, thoughtful way, about friendship and science, genius and madness, love and ambition, life and death?
Why not use that imaginary, fairy dust framework of “guy with hunchbacked assistant makes monster” and make it fun, sad, scary and hopefully, I really hope this, moving.
Let’s just hope it comes together, you know? I think it’s really cool.
That quotation comes from Max Landis, the screenwriter of Victor Frankenstein. More specifically, it comes from a message he wrote that was published on Ain’t it Cool News back in March of 2013, when the movie was still in pre-production. I read that when it was first published, and I was intrigued. It sounded like a potentially fascinating deconstruction of Frankenstein, especially coming from such a savvy young writer as Landis.
But in hindsight, after seeing the movie, it becomes obvious that there is a problem with staying “true to a version that only lives in the zeitgeist.” Specifically, the problem is that by definition, a zeitgeist is a loosely defined concept made of several disparate parts. Which means that without a strong guiding vision or a lot of luck, such a project would crumble into a soggy incoherent mess.
Alas, this is indeed a movie that doesn’t have enough scares to qualify as a horror film, nor does it have enough action to qualify as an adventure movie. As for the science fiction angle, there are so many reasons why it doesn’t work here.
To start with, the characters are all entirely void of nuance. We’ve got an entire circus full of one-dimensionally evil bullies. We’ve got Andrew Scott playing a religious nutcase. We’ve got Jessica Brown Findlay playing a love interest as bland and useless as a squashed banana. We’ve got Freddie Fox playing a rich douchebag who finances Frankenstein’s research for immortality and world domination. Charles Dance appears for all of one scene, and I’m seriously beginning to doubt that he can play a character who’s remotely sympathetic.
(Side note: The film was directed by Paul McGuigan, perhaps best known for helping to direct BBC’s ongoing adaptation of “Sherlock”. And Andrew “Moriarty” Scott wasn’t the only “Sherlock” alum that McGuigan brought along. Fans of the show can look for a cameo appearance by Louise “Molly” Brealey. Mark Gatiss, the “Sherlock” showrunner who also plays Mycroft, pokes his head in there somewhere as well.)
The only character who’s given the least bit of dimension is Igor (Daniel Radcliffe), here a hunchback who was rescued from the circus by Frankenstein. Who then goes on to straighten Igor’s back, which would have been nice if he hadn’t skipped over the whole “informed consent” formality. The problem with Igor is that he’s supposed to act as Frankenstein’s conscience, but that falls apart when Igor’s interest in the experiment waxes and wanes according to the needs of the plot. Daniel Radcliffe is trying so hard to make the character work, and he deserves a lot of credit for making Igor the only sympathetic character in the whole damn film, but it’s hard to root for a protagonist who’s this ineffectual.
As for Frankenstein himself, played by James McAvoy, this guy is nothing but pure energy. I absolutely believed that he was a genius with an intelligence far above everyone else, but McAvoy went way, WAY too far with the “mad scientist” schtick. This version of Frankenstein is so far removed from humanity that there’s no way to believe he was ever doing this out of a sincere interest to help those who were dead or dying. He is so completely void of compassion that it’s impossible to sympathize with him, and he’s constantly moving so quickly that we’re never even given the chance to try and follow his logic. I can understand the appeal of a mad scientist who’s fun to hate, but that’s a significant problem in an adaptation of “Frankenstein”.
This brings me to the central problem with the movie: Dr. Frankenstein doesn’t come to regret his experiments until the climax. When the movie is almost over.
That’s a huge dealbreaker because at its heart and core, the story is about a scientist who learns too late that he’s crossed a line by creating a living thing in his own image, and he has to deal with the consequences of his own hubris. That’s pretty much the only thing that’s stayed constant in the 200 fucking years since Mary Shelley first published the source text. And this movie doesn’t get around to that until the climax, when there’s no time left to do anything but defeat the monster in a huge action sequence. Also, because we know full goddamn well that Frankenstein eventually has to wise up, we’re stuck waiting through pretty much the entire movie for the title character to catch up with the audience.
So much of “Frankenstein” is tied with themes of paranoia, insanity, sin, redemption, mortality, loneliness, and other such concepts. Those are all a huge factor in what made the book such a classic to begin with. Yet they’re all either wholly absent or glossed over in the film. And the monster himself never has to deal with his unique status as something new and alone in the universe. The monster is the only living thing in all the cosmos who knows exactly how and why he was created, with the unique ability to threaten and even destroy his own creator.
Absolutely none of that is ever dealt with in this film. Precisely because the monster never comes to life until the last fifteen minutes. Until that point, the best we’ve got is a chimpanzee that’s been heavily modified with different dead animal parts, brought to life and then killed as part of a test run. That’s nowhere near good enough, especially because for whatever stupid reason, it does nothing to dissuade Frankenstein.
To sum up: Until the climax, we’re stuck watching one-dimensional characters we don’t care about as they go about their plot-motivated actions, occasionally stopping for discussions about science, morality, and religion in heavy-handed terms that are void of any intelligence or novelty. There is one brief moment in which Frankenstein asserts that life is merely applied biochemistry instead of some holy gift, but that’s about it.
And it’s not like the film was unsalvageable. I know I’ve been harping on about how awful the characters are, but there’s no denying that the cast is giving it their all. The production design looks amazing from start to finish, and the monster designs are particularly cool. We also get some neat anatomical overlays to show what Frankenstein and Igor are seeing (which, again, will look familiar to anyone who’s seen “Sherlock”).
I just don’t get Victor Frankenstein. It’s clear that a lot of people behind the scenes put a ton of effort into this film, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why. The scares and action scenes feel perfunctory, so it doesn’t work as a horror film or as an action film. It’s not smart enough or creative enough to work as intelligent science fiction. It’s obvious that no one was the least bit interested in adapting the source material, but the characters and story are too thin to stand on their own as original creations.
This film is the epitome of mediocrity. It’s a half-baked mess that isn’t good enough or even bad enough to take any note of.
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Movie Curiosities: Pan
October 9, 2015 in Curiosity Inc.
With every trailer that I saw for Pan, I knew that this movie would turn out to be awful. There was absolutely zero chance that this could be a good movie. And yet the trailers evoked such a passionate reaction from me that I knew I’d have to review the film.
First of all, this is a movie that comes to us from director Joe Wright, perhaps best known for the good-but-still-overrated Hanna. That movie solidified Wright as a filmmaker more concerned with style than substance, which was further proven with his baffling 2012 adaptation of Anna Karenina and his painfully mishandled 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Everything I’ve seen from Joe Wright shows a filmmaker who’s fantastic with visuals and incompetent at storytelling. And the trailers suggested that Pan would be more of the same.
The trailers clearly showed Peter getting dropped off at an orphanage by his mother, who leaves him a note that serves as a crucial plot point. Excuse me while I check my copy of “Peter Pan”, the classic book by J.M. Barrie that this movie is supposedly based on…
“Wendy,” [said Peter,] “I ran away the day I was born.” […] “It was because I heard father and mother,” he explained in a low voice, “talking about what I was to be when I became a man.”
So here we have a movie supposedly based on “Peter Pan”, supposedly acting as a prequel to show how Peter Pan became the leader of the Lost Boys of Neverland, and it flagrantly contradicts one of the precious few things from the source text that we actually know about Peter’s early days. Let’s call that Strike One.
Then we see Blackbeard, the pirate captain who serves as our antagonist. To be fair, Captain James Hook was clearly said to be Blackbeard’s bo’sun, but based on Strike One, we can safely assume that any resemblance to the source text is coincidental. I should also point out that to my knowledge, there’s nothing in Barrie’s texts to suggest that Blackbeard ever actually visited Neverland.
More importantly, I hate it when Blackbeard is treated as a fairy tale villain because anyone with access to Wikipedia could tell you that Blackbeard (nee Edward Teach) was an actual historical figure. Even better, he was killed by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard, who publicly hung Blackbeard’s decapitated head from the bowsprit of his ship on his way to collecting the reward money. Last but not least, Blackbeard died in 1718. And the film takes place over two centuries later. Even if the movie finds some contrived way around all of that completely unnecessary bullshit, I’m calling it Strike Two.
And then the trailers bring up The Prophecy. Yes, the trailers make it abundantly clear that Peter Pan’s coming was foretold by some unknown, infallible source whose words and powers are not subject to any kind of rules or logic. Let’s set aside that this is a trope of pathetically lazy writing that keeps infecting Hollywood blockbusters (Alice in Underland is still my favorite recent example). Let’s set aside that because we have a Prophecy, we already know that this story will follow the tired Hero’s Journey template beat for beat without any variation. All of that aside, this is supposed to be a prequel to “Peter Pan”!
The whole point of a prequel is to show how established characters got to where we know they will be. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. In this case, it’s about how a boy came to be Peter Pan. And we already know right from the outset that he didn’t get to be Peter Pan through any kind of hard work or clever planning or charisma of any kind. No, he got to be Peter Pan because someone or other said he would be. That’s it. The mantle just fell into his lap at the outset for absolutely no reason, through no effort of his own, and we get to spend two hours watching him decide that he’s going to pick it up. Even from Jason Fuchs, whose sole other screenwriting credit is Ice Age: Continental Drift, I might have expected more. And that makes Strike Three.
Put it all together and we’ve got a predictable, lazy movie made for the sole purpose of cashing in on a globally recognized property (that’s public domain, which makes it more convenient), even though it’s clear that no one involved gave the slightest of fucks about the source material. From Peter Pan to Blackbeard, it’s a movie all about picking up recognizable names and throwing them at the audience without the tiniest idea of what they are or why they mean so much to the world at large.
But shit, if I had gotten this far into my blog entry without having even seen the film, I figured that I may as well see how much worse things could get and finish both. But oh, gentle reader, I had no idea how bad things could get. This movie turned out to be so much more awful than any sane person could possibly have imagined.
To start with, the movie does indeed take place primarily during World War II. And our first big action set piece involves pirates kidnapping young boys orphaned by the war, sailing into the sky while engaging in a great big dogfight with British fighter planes. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, since the movie has so many bigger problems to address, but suffice to say that this is comparable to staging an adaptation of Harry Potter in which Death Eaters were shown to be responsible for 9/11. There’s a right way and a wrong way to use real-life catastrophes as a backdrop for lighthearted fantasy. The sight of London getting torn to shreds by fighter pilots and cannonballs at a time when London really was getting bombed by Nazis on a regular basis is not the right way.
But then we actually get to Neverland, and this is the point when I honestly thought I was going to have a goddamn stroke. Because Peter and his fellow kidnapped orphans are greeted by hundreds of pirates and the slave miners in their employ (we’ll get to that in a minute). They’re all singing in unison. They’re not singing the melody, they’re singing the lyrics. Clearly audible for us to hear. Then Blackbeard shows up and sings right along with them.
And what’s the song? “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Let me repeat that: A pirate who died in 1718 is now in the 1940s, and he’s leading his army as they sing a grunge rock song from 1991. Oh, and later on, as they’re sending kids to walk the plank, they sing “Blitzkrieg Bop”. Again, there’s no context and no explanation. It’s just there.
What the high holy fuck is this supposed to be? Are we still watching a Peter Pan adaptation? Did either of those bands’ estates sign off on this? If so, why?! This is raw stupidity on a level that I didn’t even know existed. I can’t possibly break down all these levels of bullshit. I can’t begin to imagine how much methamphetamine it would take for so many people from conception to screen to think that this was a good idea… and then double down on it. I wish I could adequately describe just how incredibly painful this is, but there’s a blood vessel in my brain that’s about to burst and it’s kinda hard to think through that. So let’s move on.
Anyway. Why do the pirates need slave miners? Well, it seems that Blackbeard is mining fairy dust so that he can stay forever young. No explanation is made about how Blackbeard got to Neverland and apparently faked his death back on Earth. So I guess he really is just a pirate called Blackbeard because fuck you.
Oh, and I hasten to add that fairies themselves are quite scarce in Neverland. Why? “Because Blackbeard hunted them all to near-extinction” is the reason we’re given.
I… just… heavy sigh Hey, Lex? Can you take this for me, please? Thank you.
“You see children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies, and every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”
I’m just going to let that quotation stand as solid evidence that nobody in the cast and crew ever bothered to read the book or even see the stage musical. At this point, I seriously doubt that “screenwriter” Jason Fuchs even knows how to read.
To summarize, the fairies are all in hiding, the pirates are all militaristic and evil, the mermaids are nothing more than a gorgeous deus ex machina, and the Indians… yeah, let’s get to the Indians.
There’s absolutely no denying that Barrie’s portrayal of Native Americans was terribly racist to begin with, and that portrayal will only get more awkward with time. There’s no way around that, though there are ways to soften the blow. On one extreme, the filmmakers could try to cast actual Native American actors and be as rigidly respectful as possible (see: The 2003 Peter Pan), which sacrifices a bit of the gorgeous imagery and pioneering spirit that made the story a classic to begin with. On the other extreme, the filmmakers could remove the Indians altogether (see: Hook) and sacrifice a huge part of Neverland. Or maybe the filmmakers could go full steam ahead and embrace the content as it is, cultural sensitivity be damned (see: The Disney animated film).
(Side note: I very strongly recommend Elaine Tipping’s excellent ongoing webcomic adaptation, which depicts the Indians as a tribe of badass Pacific Islanders.)
So what do Wright and company do? Well… it’s ambiguous. They’re only mentioned as a vague sort of “tribal people” who act as a noble, secretive, spiritual people in contrast with the loud, mechanized barbarians in the pirate horde. So they pretty much sit on their asses all day and act in accordance with The Prophecy, which means that they only do whatever the plot tells them to in the moment.
Oh, and they explode into colorful clouds of dust when they die. Because why the hell not?
But this brings me to the main reason why I didn’t really mind the Indians in this movie: At least they brought some color to the film. Seriously, aside from the Indians (and the fairies, who don’t show up until the climax), there is practically zero color in this movie. Wartime London is of course bleached out, ditto for the pirate ships and the mines, the forests and caves are all dark, and that’s pretty much everywhere else in the film. Couple that with native animals that look like they were rendered with CGI software from the mid-90s, not to mention some laughably bad effects on the flying sequences, and you’ve got a Neverland that looks pathetically ugly.
Neverland shouldn’t be ugly. It’s a fairy tale paradise. It should never look ugly. How do you fuck that up? Hell, this movie was supposed to be directed by the guy who brought fairy tale imagery to a story about a teenaged assassin, and adapted Anna Karenina with a kind of Moulin Rouge! motif. Where on God’s forsaken Earth was that Joe Wright when we needed him?!
Just in case I haven’t made this abundantly clear, the screenplay is a terrible joke. Every exposition dump and every “plot twist” comes perfectly on time, whether the circumstances make any lick of sense or not. The dialogue is hackneyed and the character development is nonexistent, usually because the characters simply do whatever the plot needs them to in the moment. And once again, there’s the simple fact that the only reason why Peter is our main character is because everybody says he is. Because of that damned stupid lazy fucking Prophecy. I wish I could spoil the whole movie and go into detail about all the various ways that the filmmakers wantonly abuse the imagery of the source material, but we’d be here all night and that blood vessel is acting up again.
As for the actors, may God have mercy on their souls. There is no hint of nuance to be found anywhere, in any of the performances. Hugh Jackman is by far the worst offender, possibly as revenge for denying him that Oscar for Les Miserables and making him play Wolverine for 15 years straight. I have no idea what he was doing here, but it sure wasn’t acting. Ditto for Garrett Hedlund, who acts to the cheap seats in lieu of the charisma this role so badly needed. At least Rooney Mara is putting in some kind of effort, but it’s only enough to be bland. Newcomer Levi Miller might have made for a halfway-decent Peter, if only he had a consistent development arc that didn’t go this way and that to suit the needs of the plot. As for Amanda Seyfried and Cara Delevingne, I couldn’t even tell you why they were in this film to begin with.
Pan is aggressively bad. It’s outrageously bad. The action scenes are wretched, the visuals are atrocious, the acting and score have no clue of what subtlety is, and the script is one of the worst hack jobs I’ve seen in a very long time. This movie was put together with absolutely no effort of any kind, it shows no love for the source material, and it shows no respect for its audience. If you see this movie, you will get nothing but hate. From the very moment you see Peter’s mother slinking around London like a goddamn ninja to personally deliver her son to the orphanage, you know that you will get nothing for your time and money but 111 minutes of a middle finger pointed right toward your face.
FUCK. THIS. MOVIE.
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Movie Curiosities: Fantastic Four (2015)
August 7, 2015 in Curiosity Inc.
I did not want to see this movie. I’m not a fan of the Fantastic Four, I never held out any hope that the film would be good, and I can’t remember the last time I willingly sat through a film with a Tomatometer in the single digits. But then I sat down to put my thoughts on the Fantastic Four to keyboard. And before I knew it, I had already typed out a whole blog entry before I had even seen the movie. So I guess I don’t really have a choice.
For those who don’t have the time or inclination to read through my previous blog entry (probably the geekiest thing I’ve ever written, which is saying something), let me try and sum up. On the one hand, the Fantastic Four have such a crucial role in Marvel history that Marvel as we know it would not exist without them. Save only for Captain America and Namor, absolutely EVERYTHING that we know and love from Marvel came about as a direct result of the Fantastic Four’s success. On the other hand, a huge reason why the Fantastic Four were so successful is because the team was very specifically tailored to expectations of the time. By which I refer to the same conventions and stereotypes of the Silver Age that comic book fans and publishers have been trying to shake off for the past several decades.
Thus the Fantastic Four have been the source of a constant dilemma for so many years. How is it possible to make something relevant when it’s so hopelessly outdated? How could anyone use something so preposterous and goofy while still giving it all due respect as a cornerstone of comics history?
Marvel, 20th Century Fox, and Constantin Films (who still at least partially own the rights after the infamous 1994 unreleased film) have been trying and failing for years to make the Fantastic Four relevant again. Aside from the ill-received Tim Story films, perhaps the most notable case in point came with the Ultimates line. For those who aren’t familiar, Ultimate Marvel was a line of comic books that attempted to create a new Marvel continuity with updated and reimagined takes on their characters. The goal was to bring in new readers by modernizing the Marvel stable of heroes and villains, presenting a new continuity that wouldn’t require years of comic book history to catch up on. The experiment eventually failed for a variety of reasons, but that’s another story.
Getting back to the Fantastic Four, the Ultimates version of the Four debuted in 2004 and lasted for five years in print. The heroes (and this version of Dr. Doom as well) were now prodigies in their teens and twenties, and their powers now came from a teleportation experiment — rather than a mission to outer space — gone wrong.
From the moment the cast was first announced, it became obvious that this was the version the latest film reboot was going with. Even better, the cast was loaded with such exceptional young up-and-coming talents as Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell. We also have director Josh Trank, who previously made his debut with the dark horse superhero hit (not to be confused with a Dark Horse superhero hit), Chronicle.
Yet even with all of that talent, I was not expecting this film to be anything good. Hell, nobody was expecting this film to be any good. But then the movie opened, and imagine my surprise to find that Trank and company — for all their many, many failings in making this film — somehow managed to score one very small victory.
When we first meet Reed Richards (played as a grade schooler by Owen Judge and as a college student by Miles Teller), he’s already a mad scientist. Kid’s a prodigy driven to build technological wonders out of scrap metal because everyone says he can’t do it. He’s so far above everyone else’s level that nobody believes he can actually build a teleportation machine or a flying car. Nobody else understands him or wants anything to do with him, yet he refuses to be brought down to their level. So Reed has a chip on his shoulder and nonexistent social skills, which in turn means that no one will give him a chance no matter how brilliant he is.
Until someone finally does give him a chance.
It turns out that Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) has also been working on how to crack interdimensional travel, and Reed has somehow figured out a missing part of the equation. And so Reed is recruited into the Baxter Institute, a college of the most brilliant young minds, all given government funding to learn their trade and develop the next great innovations and breakthroughs. In the case of interdimensional travel, that could potentially mean anything from finding new sources of energy to discovering how life on this planet began.
Let’s pause for a moment and think about the source material. The Fantastic Four made their debut in 1961, mere months after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space. Everything about the Four — their origins, their personalities, their powers, their rogues gallery, pretty much everything — was borne of a certain fascination with science unique to those peak years of the Space Race. It was a time when we didn’t know what was waiting for us up there, and there was no telling what new wonders could be made possible with the next breakthrough of science and technology.
Latching onto that fascination with science was a brilliant move. The film shows an optimism for a better world and celebrates our compulsive need to keep inventing and exploring. All of that is very timely stuff that perfectly meshes with the source material. Trank and company actually found something about the Fantastic Four that can be made relevant in the 21st century, and that is to be applauded. Moreover, even if the science in this film is total bunk, it’s the principle of the thing. Anything that can get kids interested in science and eager to keep looking for that next great discovery is something that should be encouraged.
But then the first act ends. And the whole film starts to unravel.
Just after the accident happens and our four heroes (plus Doom) get their powers, all of that stuff I mentioned about science is completely forgotten. Which means that the most powerful and novel theme in this movie, the driving motivation behind the entire first act, is never once brought up again. And what is it replaced by? A whole lotta nothing.
See, because the interdimensional shuttle was built with government funding, Uncle Sam is eager to get a return on their investment by way of — what else? — military applications. Which means that The Thing (Jamie Bell) has been traveling all over the world wreaking havoc on behalf of our brave men and women in uniform, and Human Torch (Michael B. Jordan) won’t be far behind.
Where do I even begin with this?
- After the accident happens, there’s a one-year time jump. Which means that the heroes’ training, their whole process of learning about their powers and how to use them, happens pretty much entirely off-camera.
- We don’t want to see the Fantastic Four taking down terrorists in the Middle East. We want to see them taking down supervillains.
- We don’t even see that, either. Just some brief clips of The Thing in action, playing in the background of a scene, and that’s it.
- This whole military angle of course means that we get some Pentagon stooge (Dr. Allen, played by Tim Blake Nelson, because it’s not like Marvel is ever going to need him as The Leader at this point), who’s of course played as a two-dimensional weasel scumbag with no redeeming features whatsoever. We all know that character. Nobody likes that character. We don’t need him in an inspirational story about encouraging scientific progress, and we don’t need him in a superhero film.
- That military douchebag is the one driving the plot. Not the heroes, not the villain, that little sleazeball. Which means that for the entire second act, we don’t get to see our main characters develop into heroes, never mind a team of heroes. And Dr. Doom is absent through pretty much the entire second act, so he doesn’t get any development either.
The whole second act is just an exercise in lazy writing, cliched dialogue, predictable plotting, stupid decision-making, and virtually nonexistent character development, all with barely a single action scene in sight. It’s just a long, boring, plodding march to the third act.
Which naturally means that the third act sucks.
The climax of this film is the very first time that our heroes have ever fought a serious threat. It’s the first time they use their powers together. It’s the first time they meet Doom and learn what he’s about. And by the way, it’s our first time meeting Doom as well (after the accident, anyway), which means that we never learn exactly what his powers are or how they work.
By definition, a climax is the payoff for its story. In this case, there was virtually nothing in the story to set up the climax, so of course the payoff is going to be limp. It really sucks that the film tried to establish a plausible world-ending threat, explicitly showing us that the Fantastic Four was there to save the entire godforsaken planet, and the climax still felt so flat. Boredom should be the absolute last thing anyone feels in that scenario, and yet here we are.
I mean, sure, the third act spends a lot of time harping on themes of family and overcoming differences, both of which are of course key themes of the source material. But that’s not enough — they’ve been used so many times in so many other, better superhero films that their use here only registers as yet another batch of cliched tripe.
I wish I could say that the cast was good enough to keep things watchable, but no such luck. In fact, there are some cases when the casting actively works against the movie. Dr. Allen is such a driving force of the plot that the whole movie would have been improved if he had been played with some measure of charisma and/or morality. Instead of… well, Tim Blake Nelson. As for Reg E. Cathey, the guy might as well have been wearing a great big sign around his neck saying “I WILL DIE AND/OR TURN EVIL.” Such a waste of so much screen presence.
As for Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, and Toby Kebbell, this material defeats all of them. None of them are good enough to redeem these underdeveloped characters, this underwritten dialogue, or the cliched nature of the second and third acts.
It’s tempting to think that the sequel will be better now that all the heavy lifting of the origin is over and done with, but come on. I think we all know better by now. This is a movie made for the sole purpose of getting us good and hyped for the sequel. Which means that if the sequel gets made, it will be made for the sole purpose of getting us hyped for the third film. Same for the one after that and the one after that. That’s how it was with Star Trek (2009), that’s how it was with The Amazing Spider-Man, and that’s how it’s going to be here.
Fantastic Four (2015) starts out with such a promising first act that I was genuinely upset to see the movie fall apart. There’s absolutely no reason why we couldn’t have a superhero movie built on the message of inspiring creativity and scientific thought (see: Big Hero 6). Instead, the movie is content to throw all of that away in favor of a plodding second act and a third act loaded down with cliches. It’s upsetting to think that Fox had something genuinely good on their hands, a film that could have brought new energy and new ideas to this crowded genre, but someone behind the scenes just had to be lazy and let it slip away.
As it is, the film doesn’t have nearly enough action to work as a superhero popcorn flick, and it’s too stupid to work as an uplifting tribute to science. It’s very clearly a film made by committee, put together with so many conflicting intentions that the final product inevitably implodes. Though it isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, it’s still a bad movie.
The sole good news in all of this is that if a sequel comes, it won’t be for a very long time. For those who aren’t aware, this movie was first announced SIX FUCKING YEARS before its release this weekend. That’s longer than it took Sony to make their last two Spider-Man films, and longer than it took for Marvel to crank out their entire Phase II slate.
Fox is determined to keep hold of these characters for as long as possible. Let ’em. It won’t do them any good, and I doubt it would do any good for Marvel at this point, either.
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Movie Curiosities: Eden
July 6, 2015 in Curiosity Inc., Uncategorized
When I go to my local arthouse for something independent and obscure, I expect to find something new. A movie that isn’t like the CGI monotony of blockbuster cinema, especially during the summer season. But in recent years, it feels like I’ve merely been trading one kind of monotony for another.
I’ve long since grown tired of coming-of-age films and the way arthouse cinema has become overgrown with them. Just when it seemed like the tide was starting to turn, we got hit with the triple-whammy of Dope, Eden, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that all three are getting good reviews, but I already miss the variety we had when arthouse fans had Ex Machina, Maggie, and What We Do in the Shadows to choose from. Then again, it bears remembering that Dope (however flawed) was a very good movie that had its own refreshingly unique take on the “coming-of-age” formula.
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Movie Curiosities — Terminator: Genisys
July 3, 2015 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
I really had to debate with myself about whether or not to cover this one.
To start with, I had long since lumped the Terminator franchise with the Aliens franchise: They gave us two good movies apiece, everything after that has been crap, and there’s no point in trying to recapture that old magic. Aside from nostalgia, there’s no reason to bother going back to either well.
I did not have high hopes for this latest Terminator movie, and the advertising did nothing to assuage my worries. The first few trailers were unremarkable and the next few spoiled pretty much the whole damn movie, implying that there was nothing to sell aside from one major plot twist. Either that or the studio figured if we already knew what was going to happen, we wouldn’t go see the film.
Then the news came out that Paramount was releasing a mobile phone game for the audience to play while watching the film. So either 1) the movie is so awful that it needs a mobile game to be interesting, 2) Paramount is actively encouraging a breach of theater etiquette to keep courteous moviegoers away, or 3) these idiots actually think this is a good idea that will raise ticket sales.
At this rate, I genuinely can’t tell if this film and its studio are really so incompetent or if Paramount is somehow trying to sabotage its own box office receipts. Either way, I didn’t want to encourage such behavior by contributing to the opening weekend gross.
But then a couple of things occurred to me.
First, I remembered my own personal philosophy about promotions and hype: It all ceases to matter the moment the film gets released. When a film gets published, it has to stand on its own merit from that moment onward. There’s no way for a promo to hide the flaws of a movie that’s out in the open, and all the announcement teasers for viral Super Bowl sneak peeks won’t mean shit to audiences in twenty years or even two years.
Second, there’s Jurassic World. That movie and this one are both continuations of long-dormant franchises, and neither one of them are critic-proof. Think about how rare that’s getting to be. Movie franchises cater to a set audience by design, which usually means that everyone’s already made up their mind about whether or not they’re going to see it. It’s gotten to the point where there’s no reason to write about the next Marvel film, or the next Hunger Games film, or the next Transformers film, because you already know what you’re going to get.
But Jurassic World wasn’t like that. Nobody knew exactly what we were going to get with that one, and now that it’s out, some people really love it while others really hate it. Word of mouth was crucial with that film, which is probably why the box office receipts have dropped in half like clockwork every weekend since release. To this day, I still have friends and acquaintances who ask what I thought of Jurassic World and whether it’s worth seeing.
Terminator: Genisys was always going to be a similar case. From the time it was first announced, this film always had the potential to go either way. It might have been a good film with bad promotion, or it might have been a stinker that should never have been attempted. There wasn’t much room for a gray area in between, or so it seemed.
I ultimately felt that as a critic, I wanted to take part in the discussion that this movie will inevitably start, as Jurassic World did. More importantly, if there’s even the slightest chance that I can persuade my readers toward or away from the movie when they’re still on the fence, then how can I turn it down?
Ultimately, I’m glad that I saw the film (in a theater with a very strict cell phone policy). This way, if someone ever asks whether the film is worth seeing, I can reply with a firm “no.” I don’t agree that it’s the worst thing ever, but Terminator: Genisys is undoubtedly a misfire at the very least.
The thing about Genisys is that it starts out well enough. Excessive voice-over aside, the introduction does a fantastic job of showing us how John Connor (played here by Jason Clarke) is such a huge part of the resistance, how his upbringing prepared him for war against the machines, and why armies of people would rally around him. We also get to see the storied final battle between Cyberdyne and the resistance, seconds before that T-800 Model 101 is sent back to kill Sarah Connor (with Emilia Clarke –no relation — inheriting the role). And it is truly spectacular.
But then Kyle Reese (played here by Jai Courtney) goes back to Sarah’s rescue, and things keep slowly going downhill from there. Things may start out pretty much identical to The Terminator, complete with re-enacted scenes from the first movie, except that Sarah Connor as we know her is gone.
See, it appears that Reese went and got zapped into an alternate timeline that splintered off when someone sent a T-1000 to kill Sarah… when she was nine years old. To further complicate things, someone sent a reprogrammed T-800 (still being played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) to rescue Sarah, and she’s been living with a robot guardian ever since. Which means that not only is she the stone-cold badass we all know and love from Terminator 2, but she also has a full knowledge of how she fell in love with Kyle Reese, conceived a child with him, watched him die a few hours later, and then went on to raise the savior of mankind after humanity got nuked.
Except, remember, all of that stuff happened in an alternate timeline and this new sequence of events pretty much wiped it out. Confused yet? Just wait until we get started.
Anyway, Reese arrives in 1984 to find that the T-800 he was chasing has already been KIA by Sarah Connor and her “Pops.” But they still have to contend with a T-1000 that I guess was sent back as a failsafe measure or something, I don’t know. It’s never explained who’s sending these robots back in time to when they don’t belong. Hell, we don’t even know who sent Pops back in time — it’s hand-waved that the resistance doesn’t want anyone to know who’s sending robots back in time, lest Skynet figure it out and prevent that party from sending robots back in time and are you seeing a problem here yet?
Look, time travel brings about plot complications by its very nature, and that is not a new problem with this franchise. The very first movie established, by way of John Connor’s conception and his importance to the premise, that this whole franchise is built on at least one massive time paradox. But over the franchise’s thirty-year history, the films have had to use time travel, alternate realities, and paradoxes in increasingly convoluted ways. It was the only way to keep the franchise viable in light of the fact that it’s 2015 and Judgment Day isn’t here yet. But the franchise was generally smart enough to keep the time travel to a minimum up until now, and it helped to keep things at least simple enough for the audience to grasp.
But this movie goes whole hog with it. It’s not enough for the plot to have those time jumps I just mentioned. Oh, no. Now we have Cyberdyne robots jumping from after Judgment Day to 2017 so they can cause Judgment Day by bringing future technology to Cyberdyne. Go ahead and try to diagram that and see how it makes sense. I’ll wait.
On top of that, we also have the time machine that Sarah and Pops have been building out of scraps for the past few decades, waiting for the T-800 to come and try to kill her (they needed its CPU to run the machine, you see). Sarah wants to go to 1997, because that’s when she was told that Judgment Day was going to happen. Except that Kyle wants to go to 2017, because that’s when Judgment Day has been rescheduled for. It’s this huge, drawn-out argument between the two, and neither of them ever think to go to 1997 on the off chance that Kyle is right and they can spend twenty years preparing, or maybe they could try to stop Cyberdyne before it’s ever formed. As far as I can tell, they can do that. Because they have a goddamn time machine.
Oh, but how did Kyle know that Skynet was coming online in 2017? Well, he was flashing back to memories of his alternate-reality self after traveling through a time nexus and WHAT THE HIGH ROYAL HELL IS THIS BULLSHIT?!
It’s impossible to make heads or tails out of this plot because so much of it is tangled up in time travel nonsense. It also ruins the movie on a thematic level — every time the characters talk about fate or free will, it’s impossible to take seriously because nobody can sufficiently understand or explain how all of this is supposed to work. Though bless her heart, that doesn’t stop Emilia Clarke from trying. This is a version of the character who’s burdened not only with the trauma of watching her parents get killed, but with knowledge of traumas that are going to beset her before they’ve happened. She’s spent her entire life waiting to fall in love with Kyle Reese only to watch him die, and Emilia Clarke does a fine job of playing that. Though she does get a little whiny at times.
(Side note: I was rather amused to hear that Emilia Clarke was taking over the role from her “Game of Thrones” costar, Lena Headey. I’ve said it for years and I’ll gladly keep on saying it for the record: Lena Headey will always be my pick for the definitive Sarah Connor. Linda Hamilton may have done it first, but Headey did it best. Hands down.
(Likewise, Thomas Dekker was unquestionably the best actor so far to play John Connor. Not as much competition for that one, I grant you, but still.)
Speaking of which, Jai Courtney gets the job of playing a Kyle Reese who eventually learns about what was supposed to happen to him. Think about that. While he was alive in the first film, Kyle never learned that his mentor and hero was also his son, he never learned that he was going to die protecting Sarah Connor, and he never knew he would fall in love with her until shortly before he died. That is a lot of information to take in, especially all at once, and it’s very interesting to see how he copes with it.
But here’s the thing: Michael Biehn was so great in the part because he had some soft edges. It was easy to believe that he wasn’t born a soldier, but merely shaped into one by virtue of living and surviving in a post-apocalyptic war zone. He pulled off a very delicate balance that made him equally suitable as a romantic male lead and as an action hero, and so his fated pairing with Sarah was easy to believe.
Jai Courtney does not have that balance. From his name to his looks to his acting chops, the guy might have been genetically engineered to be a B-movie action star. He does not have the charisma to be a male lead, especially in a picture of this magnitude with so much else going on, and he sure as hell doesn’t have enough chemistry with Emilia Clarke to sell me on their romance.
Getting back to the themes at play, the movie naturally comments on our relationship with technology. This of course includes our obsession with mobile phones, our addiction to internet access, the importance of online activity as part of our identity, etc. So far, so boring. But the plot takes it a step further, using a new Cyberdyne OS (the eponymous Genisys) as a Trojan horse for Skynet. The film thus invokes our innate need to adopt the latest and greatest technological upgrade (see also: Lines around the block for the new iPhone, signing up for free and automatic updates to Windows 10, etc.). We’re practically inviting the machines to come and take over the world, which is a fascinating concept for this movie to play with.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. This is partly because we get virtually no information about what Genisys is or why everyone is in such a rush to get it. It’s some kind of cloud computing deal as best I can figure, but what makes it so much more special than the cloud services already offered by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others? Also, why would the military be so eager to switch all their systems over to a cloud-based server run by a private third party that also handles millions of civilian accounts? I’m no military man, but that sounds to me like a security risk.
Put simply, the angle doesn’t work because Genisys isn’t an OS or an app or really much of anything. As far as the plot is concerned, it’s a countdown timer to the end of the world. Even better, it’s a countdown timer that speeds up arbitrarily. Which brings us to the villains.
The damage has already been done (thanks a pantload, Paramount), so I don’t mind spoiling that John Connor is the big bad in this movie. In theory, this makes for a fascinating psychological threat: He was raised by Sarah and he raised Kyle in turn. He knows their every plan, every tactic, and every safe house. And of course, he’s also a nanobot-infused Terminator who can shapeshift and take damage like a T-1000 could only dream of. Which brings me to why the character doesn’t work.
For one thing, this isn’t like John Connor switched sides and it isn’t like this is a Terminator made to look like John. No, this is John Connor himself after every last one of his cells was transformed into a nanomachine. I couldn’t begin to tell you how this technology makes the slightest bit of sense or why the Terminators don’t do this to more people.
Far more importantly, John has a nasty habit of rambling on and on about how Sarah and Kyle should just give up and help him usher in Judgment Day. This was a golden opportunity to try and justify Judgment Day, commenting on the relationship between man and machine from the machines’ point of view. But instead, it’s just so much mustache-twirling twaddle about how there’s no way they can win and come join the winning side and blah-de-blah-blah-blah. Jason Clarke is clearly doing the best he can with what he has, but that’s really not much.
Also — and yes, I realize that I’ve already commented on this a lot, but it needs to be emphatically repeated — whoever at Paramount was in charge of promoting this movie should never be allowed to work in entertainment again. The big reveal of John Connor as a Terminator is flat-out amazing in context, and it easily would have been one of the year’s most jaw-dropping sequences if the advertising hadn’t spoiled it so far and so thoroughly in advance. Such an incredible shame.
As for Schwarzenegger… well, he’s Schwarzenegger playing the T-800. Guy could play the role in his sleep at this point. In fact, given the nature of the role, he could easily sleepwalk through the role and who could tell? J.K. Simmons elevates a thankless comic relief role by virtue of being J.K. Simmons. Byung-Hun Lee is suitably threatening as the T-1000 who’s in 1984 for no adequately explained reason. Courtney B. Vance is grossly underutilized as Miles Dyson, such a pivotal character in Terminator lore that he deserved much better than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. Oh, and speaking of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, Matt Smith is barely in this movie. So yeah, the character’s fifteen seconds of screen time totally justified casting Matt Smith and keeping it a total mystery who he was playing.
Yet Paramount rubbed it in our faces that John Connor was the villain. Seriously, Paramount, fire someone. Fire everyone.
As for the visuals, they’re really not bad. The CGI looks good throughout, and the work of youth-enizing Schwarzenegger looks especially stunning. The action scenes aren’t exactly groundbreaking, but they’re certainly big and stylish enough for your average summer blockbuster. If this film was merely content with being a brainless action film, I could give it a pass. But no, this film just had to go ahead and try to take itself seriously as a work of intelligent science fiction. And therein lies the problem.
Getting back to my earlier comparison, this movie can’t get away with stupidity the way Jurassic World could. Both movies comment on the hubris of humanity, with science and technology that’s rapidly outgrowing our tenuous grip. But the Jurassic Park franchise comments on this using animals that have been extinct for millions of years. The notion of living, breathing dinosaurs is so over-the-top ridiculous that there’s no pressure to take the thematic material seriously. By contrast, the Terminator franchise is about our very real relationship with very real machines, and the very real possibility that artificial intelligence may outpace human intelligence, resulting in our subordination and destruction. That possible future may be far off, but it’s more than plausible enough that the scenario demands some degree of serious thought.
That said, there’s no denying that both franchises rely on junk science to an extent. The cloning technology of Jurassic Park and the time travel technology of Terminator are both pure bullshit powered entirely by suspension of disbelief. The difference is that when the scientists of Jurassic Park clone dinosaurs, we get awesome set pieces by way of giant thunder lizards. When Terminator sends characters across time and space, we get paradoxes and alternate timelines that we have to sort out before we can get even a basic understanding of the plot.
Terminator: Genisys has some good moments, some fun action scenes, and several good ideas, but the film has to bend over backwards in getting all of that to work. Between the plot contrivances, the forced callbacks to previous films, and the incomprehensible time travel nonsense, the movie is irreparably crushed under the weight of its own bullshit. But here’s the thing: That’s not the fault of the movie, that’s the fault of the franchise.
Every time our characters somehow manage to stop Judgment Day, it gets that much harder to justify the next sequel. Every year that passes in real time without the machine uprising, it means another time travel paradox to screw up the continuity and complicate the plot. That isn’t even getting started on Ah-nuld’s advancing age and all the hoops that the filmmakers have to jump through to keep him involved. This latest entry is the final proof that the franchise has grown too old to keep going. Another sequel at this point would be more trouble than it’s worth. Either reboot the franchise entirely or just let it go.
Luckily, this film ends in such a way that it looks like this may well be the final chapter. At least that’s what I thought, until the mid-credits stinger happened and you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!!!
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Movie Curiosities: A Little Chaos
July 1, 2015 in Curiosity Inc., Uncategorized
Alan Rickman is proof that you’re never too old to catch your big break. Though he had been working in some capacity on various stages and the occasional TV show, he didn’t get to be truly world-famous until making his film debut in a little film called Die Hard in 1988. At the age of 42.
It’s hard to believe that Rickman’s career is almost as old as I am, because it seems like he’s been around forever. Not only has he taken on so many iconic roles, but he has that kind of seasoned and world-weary screen presence. No matter what character he plays, he always seems to radiate such confidence and wisdom. It’s like he’s seen everything, done everything, and he doesn’t have a damn thing to prove to anyone else. And what’s better, he has the acting chops (and that voice!) to back it up.
So when Rickman set out to direct and co-write a period costume drama, I of course paid attention. Rickman naturally cast himself in a supporting role, alongside such well-established actors as Kate Winslet and Stanley Tucci, underrated character actors like Helen McCrory, and hot young up-and-comers like Matthias Schoenaerts.
(Side note: It perhaps bears mentioning that Rickman’s cowriters include Jeremy Brock, who previously wrote the Oscar-winning The Last King of Scotland and the “Was-that-really-a-thing?” The Eagle. Brock was also a writer on a BBC series called “Casualty,” which featured an actress named Alison Deegan, who makes her screenwriting debut here.)
Even when A Little Chaos came out to indifferent critical reception, I had to give it a look. How could this have gone wrong?
Well, let’s put it this way: For a director, Alan Rickman is one hell of an actor.
The film opens with a title card helpfully informing us that this was NOT based on a true story, and any moments of historical accuracy are purely incidental. With that out of the way, we open as King Louis XIV (Rickman) decrees that his palace at Versailles should be a place of exquisite beauty and divine perfection. Nothing short of paradise will suffice.
A landscape designer named Andre Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) is assigned to oversee this Herculean task. But of course, the grounds are so huge that he has to divide Versailles into different outdoor projects and delegate each of them to different designers. Enter Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet), who is not only a woman and a commoner but also a gardener with very little respect for classical design rudiments that have been in place since Ancient Rome.
Naturally, Sabine’s organic and disordered approach clashes at first with the more classical and disciplined style of Andre. That said, Andre was charged with the task of improving upon perfection, and he’s smart enough to realize that it takes some serious thinking outside the box to have any chance of doing that job. So he brings Sabine on board, puts her in charge of an unprecedented outdoor ballroom, and collaborates with her on the design.
Sabine and Andre of course begin crawling their way toward a love affair, but it wouldn’t be a movie if there weren’t complications. On Sabine’s end is a past tragedy involving her husband and daughter, both deceased. This is conveyed by way of hackneyed camera placements and slo-mo shots, along with visions of the daughter’s ghost that could scarcely be more cliche. We’ll come back to this in a minute.
On Andre’s side is his wife, played by Helen McCrory. The two of them are stuck together in marriage even though they quite plainly hate each other. Andre seems to treat her with a thinly-veiled disgust, while Madame Le Notre is so insanely jealous that she declares a blood feud against Sabine the very moment she first looks in Andre’s direction. And we can plainly see that she isn’t above cheating on him, either. It’s anyone’s guess what she does or why the two of them bother keeping each other around, which brings me to what may easily be the biggest problem in this movie.
At no point in any of the proceedings does it feel like anything’s at stake. The king has to be happy with the Versailles project, or else what? Sabine and Andre both have to knock this out of the park, or else what? If Andre’s marriage falls apart, well, it looks like they’d be better off, so who cares? There may be a little bit of character drama with regard to Sabine’s tragic past, especially when we finally learn the heartbreaking specifics of what happened, but that momentum is completely undone when the whole thing is resolved and swept under the rug without consequence only a few brief minutes later.
I think there’s one scene that puts it best: A royal messenger rides in to tell everyone that the queen is dead. This is followed by a group shot of the characters standing around like statues, none of whom show any reaction. And we’re right there with them, since we’ve never even met the queen.
It really, really doesn’t help that the characters are only as good as their actors. Rickman and Winslet both turn in spirited performances, and we get some nice bits of scenery-chewing from McCrory and Tucci, but all of these characters fall hopelessly flat on the page. On paper, there’s nothing to any of these characters. And what makes it even worse is that the male lead is by far the worst offender.
I get what Schoenaerts and Rickman were going for with the character, to show a good-looking romantic male lead who hides his true thoughts and emotions behind a stone-cold poker face. The problem is that Schoenaerts either couldn’t or wouldn’t bring the charisma to make that work. For whatever reason, there’s nothing going on behind the eyes and it looks like he’s sleepwalking through most of the film. This is naturally a huge problem when it comes to the central romance, since there’s never any hint of chemistry between him and Winslet. Oh, and it doesn’t help that when the two have a sex scene, they’re quite clearly having sex through the bedsheets. FAIL.
Aside from a few rare highlights — Tucci’s introductory scene, the king’s day with Sabine in the garden, and that resplendent finale all come to mind — there’s no charm or energy to be found anywhere in the proceedings. And that would be fine if there was something else to justify our attention and the film’s existence. I’ve already commented on the dull characters, so that rules out the possibility of character drama.
So maybe the film can entertain on an intellectual level, examining various themes in compelling new ways? Yeah, right. The filmmakers occasionally start to think about gender equality, class equality, art, order, chaos, marital infidelity, living with regret, and you can already begin to see the problem. The movie spreads itself too thin, trying to cover so many disparate subjects that none of them are taken in any interesting directions before they can even coalesce into something that resembles an idea.
I’ll grant that the visuals are very nicely crafted, even if the editing leaves a lot to be desired in places. Still, the outdoor shots are nothing short of sublime and the costume work is quite impressive.
Put simply, A Little Chaos had everything in place except a point. The cast, the premise, and the visuals were all on point, but the whole thing falls apart because there’s barely any passion or drive to be seen here. I have no idea what the filmmakers were trying to say or why they wanted to tell this story. The cast is clearly giving it their all, but if it wasn’t for the chance to work under Rickman’s direction, I’d have no idea why they’d want to play these characters.
I’ll say this about Alan Rickman: For a director, he’s a hell of an actor.
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Movie Curiosities: A Little Chaos
July 1, 2015 in Curiosity Inc., Uncategorized
Alan Rickman is proof that you’re never too old to catch your big break. Though he had been working in some capacity on various stages and the occasional TV show, he didn’t get to be truly world-famous until making his film debut in a little film called Die Hard in 1988. At the age of 42.
It’s hard to believe that Rickman’s career is almost as old as I am, because it seems like he’s been around forever. Not only has he taken on so many iconic roles, but he has that kind of seasoned and world-weary screen presence. No matter what character he plays, he always seems to radiate such confidence and wisdom. It’s like he’s seen everything, done everything, and he doesn’t have a damn thing to prove to anyone else. And what’s better, he has the acting chops (and that voice!) to back it up. Read the rest of this entry →
