Hostiles

Alternate Title:  A Million Ways to Die in the West

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A veteran of the Indian Wars is assigned to escort a dying Indian chief back to his tribal homelands in Montana.

Things Havoc liked:  I love Westerns. I love the iconography, the setting, the themes, the action, everything about Westerns. Not to say that there aren't incomprehensibly awful movies made with that setting, but in January, when there's nothing to see but a bunch of dump-off films that no studio has faith in, and a screaming horde of oscar-bait movies that all came out on New Year's Eve, one kind of has to take movies by genre and concept more than by anything else, and a Western suited me just fine. The entire genre still lives in the shadow of the titans of the early 90s, especially Unforgiven and Tombstone, both masterpieces of the genre (the former won the Best Picture award that year), which stamped their form indelibly upon the genre and all films within it thereafter. At the time, many critics thought that Unforgiven in particular had closed the books on all there was to be said for the Western, but Hollywood doesn't work that way, and we've had a number of Westerns since then, some good (True Grit), some bad (Cowboys and Aliens), some modern (Hell or High Water) or otherwise setting-crossing (Serenity), but all ineffably Westerns, and most, on the whole, a credit to their forebears. The genre may not have the prominence that it once had back in the 50s or 60s, when the Western was regarded as one of the surest moneymaking prospects in Hollywood, but Westerns still get made, and the good ones, at least still try to say something about the world when they are. So it was that, still in recovery from the flu and looking for something with which to start the calendar year of 2018 (even if 2017's film calendar still has a film or two to run), I spotted a Christian Bale, Wes Studi, Rosamund Pike vehicle promising six-shooters and mustaches and long tracking shots across desolate plains, and settled in on a Friday night to watch something good.

Things Havoc disliked:That is not what happened.

2017 has been a banner year for film, without question, and one of the many consequences of its stellar slate of films has been that we haven't seen a lot of films like this one in a while, but they are still out there, waiting to strike as soon as your guard is down. Hostiles is just such a hidden trap, a movie that looks very good from the trailers, cast, and concept level, but completely implodes once it gets around to actually trying to tell its story. It is not a good film in general, nor a good western in specific. In fact, it downright sucks, in a way that we have not seen in quite some time. So let's analyze for a moment who could possibly be the one responsible for this dreadful state of -

... what's that? It's directed by Scott Cooper? Oh... well there we have it then.

Yes, Scott Cooper, a man who never met a screenplay he did not feel needed to be more on-the-nose, more anvilicious, more filled with trepidatious pauses and forlorn looks at the camera, a director whose entire filmography is full of sound and fury and signifies very very little. I know that many people liked Crazy Heart, the 2009 Jeff Bridges vehicle, and I even know some who liked Out of the Furnace, but I remember him from 2015's Black Mass, a movie in which Johnny Depp played a vampire and called himself Whitey Bulger, and Cooper did everything he could to disguise whatever else the film might have been about, beyond a handful of disconnected events that may or may not have had anything to do with Whitey Bulger. I didn't hate Black Mass, but it was not a good movie, and Hostiles, for all the differences in tone and theme and genre, is honestly even more of the same, a plodding, placid film directly from the Terrence Mallick school of filmmaking. But where Mallick is at least an interesting visual filmmaker, Cooper has simply learned that some directors place long, empty spaces between every line that every actor intones, but has not learned why. The result is a movie that is stuck in the tonal sensibilities of the worst parts of recent years, but the genre sensibilities of the early 1990s. Not a good combination.

The year is 1898, and life is hard in the West. Commanches raid farmsteads in New Mexico, while reservation jumpers are hunted down by the US Army with extreme prejudice. Captain Blocker (Christian Bale), a veteran US Army Captain, is assigned a mission by his commanding officer (Stephen Lang, in a rare moment of life within the otherwise dead film) to escort a dying Indian chief and his family (Wes Studi) back to their homelands in Montana, so that he can die in peace. Why is this mission so vital that the President of the United States issues a personal and direct order that it be accomplished? I have no idea, for the film is not interested in that question. It is interested instead in the fact that Captain Blocker, who seemingly fought in every single war between the US Army and an Indian tribe in the thirty years prior to this film, is a very bad man, a murderer of men, women, and children, and consumed by all-powerful hate for the Natives he has spent a lifetime battling. Thus far, we are on good thematic ground, with the hero revealed as a broken-down killer, much like in this film's most obvious ancestor, Unforgiven itself, which this movie is so endebted to that it steals quite a few major lines from the aforementioned Clint Eastwood piece, wholesale. Still, this would all serve well enough were the rest of the film, say, a character study of this broken and hate-ravaged soldier, or perhaps a slow exploration of the means by which he discovers a route to becoming something else. Unfortunately, the movie is neither of these things, preferring instead to be about nothing at all besides its own portentous, over-weighty dialogue, and its cynical marginalization of the very people it purports to be exposing the cruelties towards.

What do I mean? Well consider the setup above. A man who hates Natives is now forced to escort a Native chief halfway across the country through territories filled with hostile bandits and Commanche raiders. And yet of all the many and varied paths that the film could potentially take from here, the film chooses none of them, preferring instead to simply have Bale sit stone-facedly in the grass or in his saddle and stare off across the plains as though reviewing internally the emptiness of his life. I don't mean the life of the character, I mean the emptiness of Bale's life having been forced to make this movie. Bale spends the entire film in an unplaceable monotone that sounds like a Ron Swanson impression, staring into space blankly as the various other characters he meets recite ridiculously overwrought lines at him about how dark his soul is or how dark their own souls are or how dark everyone's soul has become or how much they wish they understood the meaning of the darkness that lies within their souls or how they wish their souls were not so dark but unfortunately they are, or or or or or. I get the desire to tell a revisionist Western (though the notion is not as revolutionary as Cooper thinks it is), but you actually do have to tell the Western, not just gesture at the self-evident notion that everyone who dared set foot in The West was a soul-destroyed PTSD-riddled hollow wreck of a person, whispering dialogue concerning the darkness that was their souls at ten second intervals before riding over the next ridge to do it all over again. The entire film is comprised of nothing but dead-eyed stares and monotone line delivery, until we as the audience start to wonder if the problem isn't something more medical than "the sickness of man". At least when The Homesman acted like this, it had the excuse of portraying characters that had literally gone insane.

But heavy-handed as this sort of thing is, I might have forgiven it (might) if the movie had had the balls to actually follow through with the premise that the story of the West is truly the story of the Natives, and that the disconnection the other characters feel has to do with the horrors they have perpetrated on such people. Unfortunately, for all its pretensions at telling a revisionist story of modern understandings of The West, the movie's interest in its Native characters, which as mentioned before include Wes Studi, the greatest Native American actor of all time (go watch Geronimo or Last of the Mohicans if you disagree with that), is practically non-existent. In addition to Studi's Chief Yellow Hawk, there is his son, Black Hawk, his daughter, his daughter-in-law, and grandson, and not a single one of these characters get a goddamn thing to do throughout the entire movie but sit in a circle and look enigmatically upon everyone else, without saying a word, and occasionally demurely giving gifts to the white characters and radiating angelicness. Yellow Hawk himself doesn't get much more to do. He and Blocker are established as being old enemies, both bad men who did bad things during the Indian Wars to one another's people, who have hated one another for years without halt. Yet Studi doesn't get more than a handful of lines across the entire movie, all of which are calm, dispassionate requests for Captain Blocker to listen to his wisdom in terms of how to deal with other Indian tribes, how to deal with his guilt, or (get this) thanks to the good Captain for having the common decency to treat him... better? It's not quite as obsequious as it sounds, but it's not far off, and this is the only Native character in the film with what amounts to a real part! Yellow Hawk and Blocker share barely a handful of scenes together, and then suddenly transform into best friends, with Blocker telling Yellow Hawk in his own language that he carries a piece of him in his heart. There is a way that this sort of admission between two old enemies could work, hell there is a way where it could be profoundly moving. But it would have to be in a movie that was about the relationship between these men, while this film is not interested in being about anyone, least of all the Natives, who are treated here like the Indian equivelant of Spike Lee's famous Magical Negro archetype, props for the movie to trigger the spiritual renewal of a sinful white character who is now redeemed. At least the majority of the Magical Negro movies out there (Legend of Bagger Vance for instance) actually involve the black character getting to do something, be it give wizened speeches or demonstrate his superior ways. This movie seems to posit that the mere presence of Native Americans will render you more spiritual and absolve you of your sins, like the symbols of some holy faith, bereft of the need to actually do anything.

Final thoughts:   I said before that I love Westerns, even though this sort of failing is not unheard of in the majority of them. Hell, I like Dances with Wolves, which a number of people have castigated for being nothing but another White Savior film. Maybe that's fair and maybe it isn't, but goddammit, in Dances with Wolves the Natives got to be real characters, with speaking parts and character arcs and everything, not mute props dragged along so that the "real" characters could react to their presence and be cleansed of their guilt. And when you combine all this with the fact that none of the characters actually do anything to cleanse said guilt beyond staring into space and occasionally getting in gunfights with the most thinly-characterized "bad people" imaginable, well let's just say that a film which starts to give me Under the Skin flashbacks is not precisely putting its best foot forward.

Westerns have come a long way in the last three decades, not always to great effect, but frequently so. Go watch Unforgiven or Tombstone, or Geronimo, or for that matter Wind River from earlier this year, as all of those movies are good movies first and foremost, with characters who take action and who deal with one another as people might do. Not all of them involve Native Americans, but the ones that do actually involve them, they don't play-act at involving them and then pretend that they somehow have something to say that the aforementioned movies did not say. Above all though, go watch movies that are actually about something, because Hostiles is about nothing besides its director's ego, and the highly out-of-date sensibility that the only thing you have to do to increase representation of Native Americans in movies is to physically include them within the frame occasionally.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Next Time:  We continue our trek through the Oscar Bait of 2017.  What gems shall we find therein?

Dunkirk

                                                                                                             
Alternate Title:  We Shall Bore Them on the Beaches...

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A soldier, a civilian sailor, and a fighter pilot, all participate in the Battle of Dunkirk.

Things Havoc liked:   Christopher Nolan is a bit of a polarizing figure. There are those who regard him as the visionary auteur of modern high-concept classics like Inception, Memento, and the Dark Knight, and believe him to be a genius of tremendous skill and craft. There are also those who regard him as the talentless hack director of incorrigible disasters like Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises, and believe him to be a useless waste of cinema-space, incapable of producing a human element to go with his admittedly-pretty pictures. Strangely enough though, I find that very few people regard Christopher Nolan as I do, a director of considerable talents within a narrow range of filmmaking, whose high-concept balancing acts are not always buttressed by sufficient skill to actually pull them off, but who must, at least in some regard, be admired for the attempt. Perhaps there's no room in people's lives for gradations any longer, but I do like Nolan's work so long as he stays within his comfort zone, and given that Nolan's best films tend towards the clinical (Inception being basically two hours of exposition punctuated with explosions and Edith Piaf), I was interested in seeing what he might do with a classical, lavish war film. The cast is certainly no blemish, comprising reliable British fixtures like Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branaugh, Cillian Murphy, and even Michael Caine, and while I've not seen Nolan attempt a war film, I have seen him attain great success through ensemble casts in an intricate plot before. This seemed right up his alley, all told, and given the year that 2017 has shaped up to be, I was very much looking forward to this one.

Things Havoc disliked: So... let's get a few things straight.

I am aware of my reputation, as both a film critic and a historian, for getting a trifle... dogmatic when it comes to "historical" films like The Eagle, or The Flowers of War, or even Dallas Buyer's Club, and of flying off the handle into epochal rants concerning how a bad film has mutilated history, or how the critics of a good one are attempting to do so. With Dunkirk being such a historical film, I can appreciate the expectation that some of my readers have that such a rant, one way or the other, is soon to forthcome, and wish to allay those fears. For while I do have certain quibbles with the history portrayed in Nolan's Dunkirk, they are, for the most part, reasonably minor, and unimportant to the overall question of the film's quality, nor do I intend to stand upon soapboxes and direct fire and thunder at those who have misinterpreted the historical context of the film in making their own criticisms, as I so famously did to Roger Ebert's bafflingly ignorant assertion that Zhang Yimou was in the habit of whitewashing his own films. Cognizant as I am of the fact that most of my audience are not as obsessive about historical questions, I wish to assure readers that I shall not be using this time we have together to rant deliriously about history, real or imagined, within the context of this film.

I shall instead be ranting deliriously about everything else, because Dunkirk fucking SUCKS.

Yes, you heard me correctly, Dunkirk sucks, in fact it sucks with tremendous vigor and velocity, an ugly, tone-deaf, ineptly-produced calamity of a film that stands up to neither logical thought nor emotional judgment. It is all of Christopher Nolan's worst habits rolled into one and combined with new, fresh, entirely unexpected bad habits which he has manifested solely for the purpose of rendering this film an unwatchable, boring mess. The problem here is not that Nolan is an untalented filmmaker, nor that, as a war film, it is highly unconventional (Nolan himself has insisted that it is not a war film, but a "suspense" film). The problem is that whatever you choose to call it, it is one of the most boring movies imaginable, an achievement of some note given that the subject of the film is, theoretically at least, a battle involving hundreds of aircraft, thousands of ships, and hundreds of thousands of men. Except of course that Dunkirk is not about this battle nor the masses of men and machines that fought in it, but about a small handful of characters who do nothing but stare into the middle distance for a minor eternity while the soundtrack attempts to convince you to engage in trepanation by means of your soda straw.

God, where do I even start...

Dunkirk is a film built around three intertwining narratives, that of a soldier attempting to escape France and return to England, an elderly yachtsman called forth to save the British sailors so-trapped, and a fighter pilot engaging in combat over the Channel. All three of these narratives take place on different time-scales, the soldier's ordeal lasts a full week, the sailor's a single dodgy day, and the pilot's an excitement-filled hour. The film interweaves the various threads together in a tangled web, along the lines of better films like Cloud Atlas, but unlike these, the material for each storyline is unevenly applied. The soldiers must escape death some dozen different times, generally through repetitions of the formula "get on boat, boat sinks, get on other boat", something the movie does so many times that it begins to resemble outtakes from Waterworld. The pilots, however, have nothing whatsoever to do for most of the runtime, resulting in entire scenes where a pilot, caught between a dwindling fuel tank and a German bomber attacking a defenseless ship, will resolve their dilemma by looking at the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, before the movie mercifully cuts away to another storyline for a few minutes. Don't worry though, when we return to the pilot after several days have passed for the rest of the cast, he will be looking at the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge...

Seriously, the above sequence repeats itself five times.

But it's not just the macro-editing of the film that's the problem, it's everything. The score, made by legendary film composer Hans Zimmer, who has worked with Nolan on most of his best films and scored everything from Gladiator to The Lion King, is one of the most incompetent pieces of music I've ever experienced in or out of a theater. Not only is it entirely comprised of the same sort of atonal electro-music that Under the Skin tried to use to make whatever its point was, but it does not vary, either in "intensity" or tone, from the beginning of the film to the end of it. Action scenes, danger scenes, quiet scenes of soldiers staring out to sea, heroic scenes where the cavalry finally arrives, all of them are set to the same formless mass of abstract electronica, with the result that the film has no emotional depth, and scenes that are intended to be scary, claustrophobic, or suspenseful, fall completely flat tonally. Not that they wouldn't even without the score, as the film manages to take the massive scope of the Battle of Dunkirk and turn it into a cross between a Vincent Gallo film and a Calvin Klein ad. Hundreds of thousands of men fought in the Battle of Dunkirk. Thousands of ships and aircraft participated. Yet the entire film comprises perhaps five aircraft, half a dozen ships, and maybe a couple hundred extras at the most. This isn't some stylistic attempt to humanize the battle by restricting the perspective to that of a few men, this is the High School play version of Dunkirk. Tiny knots of huddled men stand dwarfed by the enormous, empty beaches that surround them, all while a couple of officers sit on a pier and wonder out loud if a ship might come for them today, or perhaps tomorrow. Once in a long while, a single German bomber will appear out of a clear, empty sky, and drop a single bomb, whereupon the several dozen men trapped in France will fling themselves to the ground in terror, before rising anew and resuming their long, lonely wait. I knew that I said I wasn't going to complain about the historicity of the events in the film, but if the movie is attempting to convince us that these events are small pieces of a much greater whole, it utterly and completely fails to do so. At one point, one of our heroes traverses the distance between the front lines of the German assault force and the beaches where he will spend the next eight or ten days in less than thirty seconds. I have literally fought paintball matches that took place in larger canvasses than this film conjures up for one of the greatest battles of the 20th century.

I could speak here of the actors, but they truly do get lost in the mess, whether it's people I adore, like Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branaugh, Cillian Murphy, or Mark Rylance, or people I've never seen before, such as the bulk of the faceless, characterless soldiers who stare into the distance in this film in the hopes that someone will remember to give them something to do. Hardy, one of my favorite actors working, spends the entire movie hidden behind an oxygen mask, speaking in monotones and staring at fuel gauges (then bombers, then fuel gauges...), while Branaugh has literally nothing to do except exposit information to the audience about the tremendous scale and epic scope of the raging battle taking place off-screen, which we are expected to take his word on, I suppose. The other soldiers meanwhile, so nondescript that I absolutely lost track of which one was our main character, do nothing except board ships, jump off said ships, sit on the beaches staring at the waves, and act stupidly, such as a sterling moment late in the film where desperate soldiers demand that one of their number jump overboard, so as to lighten a ship's load enough to make it off the beach, heedless of the fact that they are currently standing in four feet of water within the ship's hold, water which outweighs the lot of them by a factor of twenty or so.

And this is a film that critics are calling one of the greatest war movies ever made?!

Final thoughts:   Even by the standards of the disaster that was Interstellar, Dunkirk is a gruesome misfire, a truly awful film that, among other things, manages to do what even Red Tails did not, and render dogfights boring. I am well aware of Nolan's stated intention of making a non-war war film, a movie that was more suspense than action and one relying entirely on practical effects, but whatever his intentions, the resulting film is terrible on every level you measure it by, a bad war film, a bad suspense film, a bad historical film, and a very bad film in general. I am well aware that this review stands in stark contrast to the universal acclaim with which Dunkirk has been greeted, acclaim which utterly mystifies me, even when I try and put on my professional critics' hat and see the movie through the lens of people paid to tell you about how their taste is superior to yours. The film's incredibly short run-time (106 minutes for a film that, despite what Nolan wants to claim, was plainly intended at least in part as a war epic), subdivided into three awkwardly-assembled plot threads of uneven length, does not stop the final product from feeling about nine hours long, and if there's any artistic, or god help us, political point to be made in the decision to make the least warlike war film ever, I have completely failed to discover it, either during the viewing or in my research since. It is, in short, a dismal failure of a movie, certainly one of the worst that the otherwise strong cinema calendar of 2017 has offered us.

I've defended Christopher Nolan many times in conversation and in these reviews, pardoning his flaws as a filmmaker, his weak characters and basic emotions, because of his evident strengths of concept and plot. It was for this reason that I forgave him for the unreserved mess that was Interstellar, and for this reason that I was excited to see what he would do with a war film like Dunkirk. Having now discovered the answer to that mystery, I have to confess that, despite all the love I bear Nolan's Dark Knight series and Inception, I will be taking a very long, hard look at any work he does in the future before deciding that it's worth a gamble, as, no matter how often I go see films, no schedule is generous enough to make tolerating crap like this acceptable.

Dunkirk, in short, should be thrown unceremoniously into the sea.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Next Time:  Let the inevitable ripoffs of John Wick begin!

A Walk in the Woods

Alternate Title:  The Carolina Death March

One sentence synopsis:     Bill Bryson and an old friend of his from long-past adventures decide to hike the entire Appalachian Trail.


Things Havoc liked:  Though my compulsive need to warn you all about bad films may seem like it would leave me with no time at all to spare, I do manage to get in a bit of reading here and there, and one of my favorite authors is travel and science writer Bill Bryson, author of all sorts of books from A Short History of Nearly Everything to Mother Tongue to a series of travelogues throughout Australia, Britain, Europe, and America. Bryson's writing style is a distinctive, newspaper-column sort of thing, not precisely the type of writing I would normally expect to see converted into a movie, but here we sit, and I wanted to see if Bryson's caricatures and sense of humor would carry through intact to a movie that included, among other luminaries, Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. With the September Slump upon is, the yearly pause before the storm that is Oscar Season, it seemed a reasonable thing to go and see. How bad could it really be?

Things Havoc disliked:  *Sigh*

Robert Redford sucks. I've always believed that Robert Redford sucks. He sucked when he was younger, he sucked when he was middle-aged, and he sucks as an old man, all for the exact same reasons. The man does not know how to act. Any glance at any film of his, from Jeremiah Johnson and Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, to Out of Africa or The Sting (where he inexplicably won an Oscar nod), to more recent fare such as The Last Castle or The Horse Whisperer, Robert Redford has persisted in acting like nothing but a "charming," smarmy, useless, depth-free non-actor who thinks that a winning smile can somehow cover for all faults. Yes, he occasionally manages to elevate his game to merely "acceptable", such as in Spy Game, or last year's Winter Soldier. Woop-de-freaking-do. Most of the time he puts out crap like this, standing about in the middle of a movie set like he has only the vaguest notion of what's going on around him, reciting his dialogue as though it's being fed to him via an earpiece, delivering "jokes" (I cannot put enough quotation marks around that word) with the flattest, most timing-free delivery imaginable. Playing Bill Bryson himself, he fails to get across even the reasons why he has decided to undertake a 2,000+ mile hike through the forest, muttering incoherently about unrelated inanities in the hopes that someone, the director or editor or some extra, will rush in to save him from the need to convey emotions to the audience. He shares no chemistry with any other actor, not with his "best friend", Nick Nolte (who at least salvages some dignity by actually acting), not with his "wife" Emma Thompson (totally wasted in a role that could have been played by an extra), not with his son or his son's friends (one of whom is played by Nick Offermann, for no reason I could determine), not with the other people on the trail, not with Back To The Future III's Mary Steenburgen (whose presence here cannot be explained by the wisest of men), not with anybody. He looks like someone's confused great-uncle, the one you don't really know but know you're supposed to be polite to, awkwardly reciting "jokes" in the style of Rainier Wolfcastle, ones that he plainly doesn't understand, be they the simplest of sarcastic remarks. His hair looks like someone shaved a Golden Retriever to make a wig. He is useless.

But then this entire movie is useless, really, and the fault for that goes beyond Redford and to the director of this unfunny, leaden weight of a movie, Ken Kwapis, who had his debut in 1985 making the pristine Sesame Street movie Follow That Bird, and has been paying for it ever since with crap like Dunston Checks in, The Beautician and the Beast, and He's Just Not That Into You. Perhaps his true calling is children's films, I don't know, but were it not for obligatory F-bombs to remind us that we're all supposed to be adults here, I would have pegged the target age of this movie as being roughly 5. The jokes mostly consist of someone making a comment ("We must have covered a long distance!" "I hope it doesn't rain!") followed immediately by the most obvious "ironic" result one would instantly imagine (They encounter a map showing that they have not covered a long distance, It begins to rain, etc...). Several times, the characters even look at the camera following the "joke", as though expecting a sitcom sound effect (Wah, wah, waaaaaahh...) to play. Repeat this about a hundred and thirty times throughout the film, and you have the entire thing. All of the obligatory buddy-travelogue movie touchpoints, the wacky hijinx involving colorful locals, the bitter outpouring of long-repressed anger, the tearjerking reconciliation and regrets over having lost touch, all of it is entirely pro-forma, unconnected from one scene to the next, with Redford reciting his dialogue like he's reading a menu and Nolte shifting phlegm up and down his throat with every wheezing breath. Even plot points plainly established for later payoff, like the fact that Nolte's character needs to eat every hour due to some syndrome he picked up from contaminated tap water years earlier (how exactly does this man propose to hike two thousand miles again?) is brought up once for a cold, laugh-less joke, and then never again mentioned.

Final thoughts:   A Walk in the Woods is a complete waste of time, a wretched, joyless enterprise that fails to entertain or elicit any emotion whatsoever from its audience. Familiar as I am with the source material, I can see where the filmmakers tried to include touchpoints from the books, the woman our heroes encounter too annoying to believe, or Redford's solemn prognostications concerning the death of the American Chestnut tree, but none of it feels genuine, spontaneous, or even worth listening to. Nick Nolte, who is a proper actor, manages to salvage some dignity from the affair, but everyone else (particularly Thompson) is left to meander without direction, or as usual shows himself unfamiliar with the concept of direction or acting in general (Redford). Perhaps this just goes to show how good the original book actually was, as the story is essentially the same, as are many of the anecdotes, or perhaps simply it illustrates a more general division between a good storyteller and a bad one, regardless of medium.

Honestly, whatever the purposes you set it to as an example, A Walk in the Woods is simply a bad movie. And even in the September Slump, there's never an excuse for that.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Next Time:  A return to indie cinema in the person of an old acquaintance...

Ballet 422

Alternate Title:  Watching the Watchers

One sentence synopsis:    A young ballet dancer at the New York City Ballet is given the opportunity to write, choreograph, and produce a new ballet in two months.


Things Havoc liked:  I do like catching the occasional documentary, even about subjects I care nothing about, and there are few subjects I care less about than ballet, a highly stylized art form whose artificiality has never appealed to me. Oh I have nothing against ballet, certainly, and I know plenty of people who speak highly of this or that troupe, show, or dancer. One thing I do know about ballet however is how exacting it is, how terribly hard everyone works, how cutthroat the competition is for every position at every level. I know this, of course, because I have seen movies such as Black Swan, and movies would never lie to me. And so it was that I decided to go see a documentary about this full contact sport and see what the process for making these things actually is.

Ballet 422 is about a young man named Justin Peck, one of the "choral" ballet dancers (the lowest rung on the totem pole) at the New York City Ballet company. Thanks to an in-house choreographer's course and a promotion put on by the company, Peck was given a chance to write and direct (to use the movie parlance) a new ballet, the four hundred and twenty second in the history of the company. The documentary is simply a record of the process of him doing so, working with the dancers, the costumers, the lighting technicians, the conductor and orchestra, all of the myriad people who must come together in order to produce any kind of live performance such as this. All of this seems like a huge opportunity for a fairly low-ranking member of the ballet's cast to be given, and I must assume that this is some sort of particular distinction that Mr. Peck was singled out for.

Things Havoc disliked:  Why must I assume this? Well there's a couple of reasons, but mostly it's because this documentary doesn't tell you anything at all about anything.

Ballet 422 is the least informative documentary in the history of documentaries, and if that's not literally true then I really don't want to know what ranks above it. It has nothing to say, not in any sense of the word, about Ballet, about the process of making it, about Justin Peck or his creative process, about anything whatsoever. It is a complete waste of time in the form of a 75 minute hole in your life. Not content with providing no narration to their supposed documentary, the filmmakers for Ballet 422 have decided in addition that there should be no interviews, no subtitles, no actual discussion with the subjects of their story, just silent observation, as the ballet dancers and crew go about the business of creating the ballet. You might think that even with all that, it would still manage to be an interesting viewpoint into a hidden world, but so averse are these filmmakers to elementary film-making conceits, to informing their audience at all, that we literally are given long stretches of the camera watching a person who is in turn watching a dancer offscreen perform a routine we do not know anything about. We literally stare into the eyes of someone watching something else for minutes at a time, and are somehow expected to derive meaning and importance from the subject thereby. This approach is so tremendously wrongheaded that it is almost farcical, a pastiche of overly-important arthouse-style "undocumentaries" that are fashionable among the stupid crowd.

Oh there's stuff in this film, certainly, dancers and costumers and musicians and the rest of it, but while we do see them rehearse, or plan, or block, or inscribe notes onto arcane pads and computers, we have no conception of what they are actually talking about. At best we're given a chance to see Peck himself critiquing the way one of the premier dancers performs, or having a conversation with the conductor of the orchestra as to whether he's allowed to address them before the premiere (the departments seem pretty protective of their turf in this company, though I suppose that's no surprise), but devoid of context or, all we're watching is what amounts to a home movie for insiders from the ballet company, a series of vignettes meant to stimulate people's memories of the process of putting the ballet together, not substitute for them for us uninitiated plebeians. We get no sense of the artistic intention behind this ballet, no idea why Peck wants things to be one way and not another, nor of what options he has thought of and discarded. The movie doesn't even manage to generate a sense of pressure or tension as he goes about trying to pull this ballet off. Isn't two months a bit short for creating a full on ballet? I have no idea, as the film treats the whole affair as a workaday event. As a result of all this, I left the theater without even any idea as to what the ballet is supposed to be about, what it was based on, or even what its title was. And as to the various people I saw over the course of the film, let's just say that I didn't realize that Peck was himself married to one of the lead ballerinas (something that drastically alters the dynamic going on here) until I happened upon the IMDB page for the film and noticed the names matched.

Final thoughts:   Ballet 422 is one of the worst documentaries I've ever seen, a film that fails not on an artistic level, but on the deeper, mechanistic level of actually getting across the subject matter to the audience. I can only assume this was intentional, as the film is so systematically devoid of contextual information that I can't envision this happening by accident. Someone decided, for whatever reason, to tell the audience nothing whatsoever, confident either in the thought that merely peering behind the curtain would be enough for us, or perhaps trying to make some artistic point about audiences being spoon-fed information. Either way, the result was a totally pointless exercise, a documentary that documents nothing but context-free footage of people doing things that we don't understand, for purposes we don't know, in the service of a vision we don't see, from a choreographer we never get to meet.

Hell, you want to know what kind of documentary this is? The poster for the film shows the main character on stage, staring off at the interior of the richly-furnished theater, no doubt dreaming of the world premiere he is about to stage before everyone at the New York City Ballet.

The theater he's "staring" at? It's the 180-year old Mikhailevsky Theater for Dance and Performing Arts. In St. Petersburg.  A place referenced by name, location, or even inference exactly zero times in the entire film.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Next Time:  Johnny Five alive?  And kicking ass?

Jupiter Ascending

Alternate Title:  What Goes Up...

One sentence synopsis:    A girl from Earth is kidnapped into a universe of dynastic politics after being identified as the re-incarnation of an interstellar queen.


Things Havoc liked:  Back in 2012, I saw one of the greatest films I have ever encountered, a sweeping, epic opus that went by the name of Cloud Atlas. I loved Cloud Atlas so much that I broke my own review structure when it came time to talk about it, gushing in barely-coherent ramblings about the tapestry of history and the connections between people, or some such. So much did I adore this film, in fact, that I swore then and there that whatever its creators, the Matrix-directing Wachowski siblings, created next, I would, without question, see it, for they had earned as much by presenting something that filled with amazement and wonder. And now here we are, two and a half years later, and what have they given me? Jupiter Ascending. And true to my word, I have seen it.

So what can be said in this movie's favor? Well for starters, the film is absolutely gorgeous. The term "visual director" is one that I've never had much use for (are there non-visual directors out there somewhere?) but if ever it applied to anyone, the Wachowskis would be a strong candidate (as would Wes Anderson). Space in this film is on display in its full Kubrickian majesty, with spaceships and space stations comprised not of the customary phallic or gun-encrusted fare from many modern space films, but spires and sails and organic-looking spindles that waft through the void like the fins of some enormous interstellar whale. The effect is so over-elaborate as to become almost hypnotic, a design archetype that seems to be drawn less from standard movie science fiction, and more from the mysterious and fantastical side of the genre, from sources like Dune or the Barsoom cycle or Warhammer 40,000, with cathedrals of light embossed and imbued with every conceivable enhancement and artistry. The effect is not restricted to outer space either, as scenery, costuming, and everything else positively drips with opulence, hinting at the power, the age, and the decadence of the immense world that the Wachowskis are trying to set before us.

Things Havoc disliked:  As such, it's a great pity that the movie sucks.

Do not mistake, this movie sucks. Hard. It sucks for reasons both familiar and alien, but it sucks all the same, a massive, bloated, festering pile of a movie that despite some interesting ideas, is nothing more than a waste of time. Why is it a waste of time, you ask? Well that answer is rather unfortunately complicated, but it's probably best to begin with Mila Kunis.

You see, Mila Kunis can't act. Irrespective of the circumstances, the project, the tone of the film or the quality of the actors you surround her with, Mila Kunis can't act at all. I can't claim this comes as much of a surprise to me, having watched Black Swan and Oz the Great and Powerful and Book of Eli and half a dozen other things, but I don't believe I appreciated until now just to what degree Mila Kunis' inability to act actually reaches prior to sitting down and watching this movie. Here, playing Jupiter Jones (the name is given a rather handwavey explanation, but still), a Russian immigrant who works with her family cleaning the houses of the wealthy in Chicago, Kunis is tasked with playing the standard fish-out-of-water archetype as she is swept up in events of galactic importance. I don't object to this archetype at all, of course, it's used as often as it is for a reason, but the entire point of the archetype is that the character must grow to master his/her surroundings and seize back control of their own destiny. Kunis plainly doesn't know what to do with this character, reciting her dialogue as though reading it off a cue card, and emoting to the astonishing sights and sounds around her with all the passion of a patent attorney preparing a deposition.  But the biggest problem is that her character remains completely useless throughout the entire movie, bubble-headedly wandering from planet to starship to cathedral to space station like an oblivious extra who got lost on their way to the casting call and stumbled into the middle of a Star Wars knockoff. I can abide many things in a movie, dear readers, if I couldn't I would have lost my mind long ago. But one thing I simply cannot abide is a useless protagonist, and Kunis' Jones is one of the most useless characters I've seen in this entire project, to the point where tertiary characters without names actually accomplish more in the course of the plot than she does.

But while Kunis can't act, and therefore has no idea what to do about this predicament she finds herself in, there are a number of actors here who can, and whose coping strategies at being dropped into a movie this stale are... interesting. Channing Tatum, who has been in his share of bad movies, plainly knows what kind of film he's in this time, and looks and sounds completely uninterested in his surroundings, mumbling his lines as though he's recovering from an all-night bender, and lapsing into half-understandable exposition at the drop of a hat. Given that we have no idea what he is actually talking about, as he throws out casual references to objects, people, and locations we've never heard of, Tatum's dead-eyed mumbling renders it actually quite difficult to understand what in the hell he's saying. Tatum is also tasked with the unenviable duty of trying to portray a romantic relationship with Kunis, with whom he shares absolutely no chemistry, save perhaps for soporific gas. Sean Bean meanwhile, he who always dies (spoiler alert?), does his best playing a character whose motives and relationship with everyone else I was entirely unable to understand, being as the film consists of him being introduced by throwaway comment and then engaging in a lengthy series of about-faces wherein he sheds what little motivation he has in favor of new, equally-confusing motivation. I suspect his hope was that if he confused the audience sufficiently, they might forget he was in the movie. But taking the opposite approach is Eddie Redmayne, a fine young actor who, according to this film, has taken leave of his senses. His character, Balem Abrasax, serves as the primary antagonist (sort of), and Redmayne plays him like a cross between Emperor Palpatine and Al Pacino as Lucifer, alternating between a strained, throaty whisper that sounds vaguely orgasmic, and screaming unbridled madness in the style of Sting-in-Dune. The effect is not precisely menacing, but perhaps Redmayne is taking the Lee Pace approach, reckoning that the only method to survive the movie is to overact to the point where anyone who criticizes you risks being devoured along with the scenery.

That said, Redmayne does at least liven the movie somewhat, something I appreciate when the rest of the film is such a leaden chore. Perhaps Tatum's lack of enthusiasm tainted the whole mix, but for an eye-watering spectacle film that is also a space opera, Jupiter Ascending drags for long stretches of its run-time, as the plot meanders from one meaningless confrontation with one of the evil, self-serving Abrasax nobles to the next. At one point in the middle of the film, Jupiter and her retinue must go to a bureaucratic planet to get her claim recognized officially, a sequence which consists of her visiting department after department (in a clear reference to Brazil) before finally stumbling upon a helpful bureaucrat (played by Terry Gilliam himself, see above) who manages at last to get her papers processed. What is the purpose of this 5-10 minute section? What lessons does the heroine learn or meaningful events transpire? Nothing. We get to watch her watch robots watch bureaucrats shuffle paper, until at length the movie allows us to watch something else for a while. Similarly, an entire wasted series of plotlines concerning the antics of Kunis' extended Russian family back home on Earth feels like nothing more than filler, in the vein of the parents' antics in the Transformers movies, a series of meaningless sequences in which people complain about not having enough money to pay for their video game equipment, which we are being shown in preference to the staggeringly vast galactic civilization that our "hero" is supposedly being enmeshed in. The main villain doesn't even get a moment's screentime for 2/3 of the film, as Jupiter slowly gets hoodwinked by other, lesser nobles, for plots that have nothing whatsoever to do with the main threat, and which afford her neither the skills nor the lessons, nor even the equipment she will need to finally confront the bad guy. And by confront, of course, I mean stand around and watch other people confront him, because Mila Kunis cannot be allowed to take any goddamn action in a movie in which she's supposedly the star!

Final thoughts:   I can't pretend that I didn't know Jupiter Ascending was going to suck. The trailers for this movie looked awful in that wonderfully YA/Twilight-in-Space sort of way that graces a lot of movies released around this time of year, and neither the announcement that it was being pushed back to February, nor the casting of Mila "Needs an Acting Coach" Kunis, filled me with hope as to its qualities. That said, even with that, I remain surprised at just how awful this movie was, a turgid slog of a film, albeit one with pretty pictures, that feels rather like the Wachowskis' dumping all of the characterization and plot details they weren't able to use in the third Matrix movie, due to the need to include seven hundred thousand references to Neo-as-Jesus. If nothing else then, this movie can teach me a lesson about the risks entailed in following directors blindly, even when their last project was as monumentally good as Cloud Atlas was. My policy with this project has been only to see movies that I believe honestly have a chance of being good, and I believe it should stay that way. Lord knows I see enough crap as it is.

And as to the Wachowskis? I would simply suggest next time that they let someone else write their film, as that seems to have worked for them in the past. Otherwise I'm worried their next project may literally include Space-Jesus, save that in this rendition, he will be forced to watch uselessly as other people sacrifice themselves on his behalf before returning to Jerusalem and becoming a carpenter again.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Next Time:  All the King's horses...

The Judge

Alternate Title:  Symbolism!!!

One sentence synopsis:  A hotshot lawyer returns to his hometown to defend his estranged father, a local judge accused of murdering an ex-defendant.


Things Havoc liked: I've always liked Robert Downey Jr, even back before he was Iron Man. I liked him in things like Air America and A Scanner Darkly and Tropic Thunder and Natural Born Killers, and one of the only negative things I can point to about the Rise of Marvel is that since the advent of this remarkable run of films, we've not gotten to see Downey in much besides the Avengers and the occasional Sherlock Holmes flick. I can't exactly complain, given the result, but when the opportunity arose to see Downey in a more "normal" film, alongside Robert Duvall and Billy Bob Thornton no less, I immediately jumped on it. For all I appreciate Marvel's output and other such blockbusters, there are times I simply want to watch good actors acting at one another, and Oscar season is as good a time as any.

And these are good actors. Robert Downey Jr. in particular is a phenomenal actor, whose role is not all that distinct from his turn in the Iron Man/Avengers films, but that's hardly a complaint. He plays Hank Palmer, an abrasive hotshot attorney from Chicago who fled his small hometown long ago and never looked back. Downey showcases here his patented sardonic wit, a little more abrasive than Tony Stark is ever allowed to be, showering contempt on those less intelligent than he is, convinced that he knows what’s best, for the simple reason that he often does. This kind of character can be hard to swallow, and easily turn into an entitled dick, but the film gets around this with another phenomenal actor, Robert Duvall, playing Hank’s father Joseph, a domineering, moralizing bastard, cantankerous and harsh to all three of his sons, particularly to the one that got away from him and left to form his own life. The dynamic between Downey and Duvall is effectively the movie, which is a fine decision, given the sparks these two are capable of.

Things Havoc disliked: *Groan*

The Judge has a good idea behind it. Duvall and Downey are two actors that could bounce off one another for days. But in order for them to do so, they would need either a script worth a damn, or license to invent their own dialogue. This film supplies them with precisely none of those things.

Oh there’s a script here, of a sort. A script laden with every family-bonding cliché known to man, but a script nonetheless, one that lets Downey and Duvall interact as little as possible in favor of the most ham-fisted symbolism I’ve seen in a while. I’m all in favor of showing rather than telling, but after a certain point of clunkyness, showing is telling, especially when you’re relying on such iron-handed devices as two people facing away from one another on a road in a wide-shot that emphasizes the distance between them, or that oldest of the pretentious old-time-writer’s tricks, a family argument to the backdrop of a raging storm, into which characters stalk angrily the better to frame their emotions. Symbolism works best when done subtly, something to analyze after the fact, a detail in lighting or tone. This has all the subtlety of an anvil dropped off a roof, crude analogies so bluntly framed as to be laughable in their attempt to preserve mystery. When someone is trying to decide whether they should take their father’s place or not, how subtle is it to have him spin his father’s desk chair around, which comes to a rest framed in soft, yellow sunlight, the seat facing the man in question, rocking back and forth invitingly?

But movies have survived thunderous symbolism before. 2011’s Real Steel was barely any more subtle than this, and it made my best-of-the-year list. Unfortunately for The Judge, Real Steel buttressed its anvilicious symbolism with a wonderful cast and a heartfelt, though derivative script. The Judge has several excellent actors as I mentioned before, but it also has Vera Farmiga (far and away the weakest link in Scorcese’s The Departed), a complete waste of a performance from Billy Bob Thornton (whose character is allowed to hint towards an interesting angle, as the prosecuting attorney who sees the opportunity to squash Downey’s frankly arrogant perversions of justice, before being dropped entirely), and worst of all, God’s gift to bad acting himself, Vincent Freaking D’Onofrio, a man who has made many movies, and was good in only two of them, one as a marine suffering a psychotic break, and one as an alien faccimile of a human being. As in all previous occasions in which I’ve had the misfortune to encounter D’Onofrio (Kill the Irishman, Escape Plan), he is more or less a waste of time here, playing Downey’s older brother, a former baseball star whose career was ruined in a car accident Downey caused. Once again, a potentially interesting idea with which nothing is ever done, though in fairness that's less his fault and more the script's. Neither he, nor their mentally challenged brother Dale (Lincoln's Jeremy Strong) has a character at all, being used instead for more goddamn symbolism, such as the home movies of the car wreck that destroyed D'Onofrio's career which Dale "accidentally" plays (why exactly are there home movies of the car wreck spliced into a movie about them as children?) during a storm, just so it can afford Duvall the opportunity to break things and rage at the heavens.

Ultimately that's the real problem. There are neither characters nor a real story in this film, there is just a concept, saccharine as it is, and nothing more, and the characters (along with everything else) exist solely to symbolize things within it. Farmiga, for instance, plays Downey's love interest, who has no character of her own, merely serving to "symbolize" the bucolic existence he has passed up. His daughter, played by the same little girl from Elysium (I remember a child performance that bad) serves to "symbolize" his innocence or some damn thing. Even the final confrontation with his father comes, for no reason other than to symbolize even more, at the pinnacle of the old man's murder trial, culminating in a schmaltzy "I love you son" series of epiphanies that I would wager most courtrooms probably would not allow on the witness stand.

But boy does it sure symbolize a lot.

Final thoughts:   The Judge is a sad waste of time, not merely for me, but for the actors who wrongly thought it was an opportunity to make a good film this Oscar season. I cannot say that director Jeremy Strong, formerly of Fred Claus, and co-writer of such masterpieces as Jack the Giant Slayer and R.I.P.D. really plays below par here, given the above resume, but this film does not elevate his name into one I will be looking for when it comes time to select something to watch. But as to this dreary, sappy, over-long piece of kludged-together gunk, my only hope is that it will soon be forgotten thanks to the flood of excellent films I have to assume are coming just around the corner. The alternative would be for the entirety of Oscar Season to be comprised of nothing but the kinds of terrible disappointments that have filled my last two weeks. And there's no way that can continue forever...

...

... right?

Final Score:  3/10

Gone Girl

Alternate Title:  Genesis  3:16

One sentence synopsis:  The wife of a philandering bar owner disappears without a trace, leading to suspicions that he may have murdered her.


Things Havoc liked: "I'm excited to see that new Ben Affleck movie," is one of those statements that I never expected to be saying in all earnestness ten years ago, not in the dog days of films like Gigli or Daredevil. But then we live in a strange world these days, where people speak of things like "Academy Award Winner Matthew McConaughey", and "this year's cinematic masterpiece from Marvel comics", so perhaps I should be less surprised. It is still perhaps saying something that my first thought on hearing about this film was grave concern that Affleck was merely acting in this movie, and not taking on the director's duties, but one takes what one can get when it comes to serious dramatic films with serious dramatic casts.

Gone Girl, based on the book by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the screenplay), and directed by the incomparable David Fincher, whose resume includes such films as Se7en, Zodiac, Fight Club, The Social Network, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is the first real sign I've seen that the September slump is behind us, and that we've finally entered Oscar Season. Oscar Season, for those who have not been keeping up with my barely-comprehensible ramblings concerning the yearly film calendar, is the third of the three major seasons into which the year is divided, a time between mid-October and the end of December, wherein the studios release their big-ticket Oscar-prospects, the movies they believe and hope will generate awards for them during the award ceremonies that recap the year between January and March. Not every film that comes out around this period qualifies as an Oscarbait film of course, but Gone Girl, with its accomplished cast, its all-star director, and its dramatic, "serious" subject matter, is almost a perfect example thereof. Lest I sound critical however, Oscar Season is a time I look forward to with great anticipation, as all of a sudden the studios disgorge a plethora of excellent prospects before me, and ask only that I, like the rest of the critics, find something in them that we like.

Well I'm always game for seeing the bright side of things. Let's start, as always, with the actors. Ben Affleck, like other former-pretty-boy actors before him, has made the transition from a critical joke to a critical darling mostly by putting his reading glasses on when reviewing scripts, taking on films that offer greater dramatic range while relying on his instinctive charisma to carry him through the role. McConaughey did the same thing when he made his right-turn into relevance, and Affleck, even when not directing, knows exactly how to deliver a performance like this. He plays Nick Dunne, a failed writer who has become something of a layabout in a small town in Missouri, to which he has moved himself and his wife to be closer to his family. Affleck plays the role distantly, like a playboy who is no longer young enough to get away with such antics, and does not seem to know what else he is supposed to transition into for the remainder of his life. His marriage with Amy, his wife who goes missing early in the film, is highly strained, believably in both of their cases, and Affleck does an excellent job of provoking suspicion from both the audience and the rest of the cast without ever transcending the bounds of reason or lacking for a plausible explanation. It's not easy to balance on the edge of a mystery like this, but Affleck is easily up to the challenge, and never once slips back into the bad habits he demonstrated for the first fifteen years or so of his career.

But Affleck is a rank amateur compared to the real revelation of the film, Rosamund Pike, an actress whose resume previously included such "wonderful" films as Die Another Day, Jack Reacher, and Wrath of the Titans, and who is on a completely different level in this film. Describing the various things that Pike does in the movie would be to spoil the entire thing, but her performance here is absolutely electrifying, an order of magnitude beyond anything I have seen of her before. Through all the tribulations that the movie involves her in, Pike manages to portray everything from quotidian concern to frustrated anger to horrific victimization to... well that would be telling. Her performance anchors the entire film, whether in flashbacks to her and Affleck meeting in New York, to more recent flashbacks to their troubles in Missouri, to the events that actually touch the plot off, and with it, she has instantly elevated herself in my mind to the A-list of Hollywood actresses. This is the sort of performance that Oscar nominations are made of, a riveting, twisting role that can make or break the actor or actress in question.

And the good times don't stop there, indeed this movie was a rather stunning revelation for me, not merely because of Pike, but because of a number of different actors for which I've had no use previously, and found one here. One of these actors is Kim Dickens, a main character on HBO's Deadwood (one of the best television shows of all time), who has previously been decidedly underwhelming in everything I've seen her in, but not here. She plays Detective Boney, the only member of the local police force unable to make her mind up instantly about Affleck's guilt or innocence, whose investigation parallels that of others, as the audience tries to piece the truth together. But the one that surprised me the most, unquestionably, was of all people, Tyler Freaking Perry, once described to me as the least-intimidating six-foot-four black man in America. Perry, a purveyor and star of absolutely terrible movies for the last decade or so, here plays the first serious role I've ever seen him attempt (I contrived to miss 2012's Alex Cross), as a high-priced, high-profile defense attorney specializing in media circuses, and to my abject shock, plays the role perfectly, a sober, collected expert who knows precisely how the currents of public opinion and media cycles function, and advises his client on the best way to avoid shipwreck. Perry is not a caricature, nor an exaggerated farce, and the realism with which he portrays the role actually cements the film's central narrative about the facetious gossip-mongering that the rest of the media and legal system is mired in.

Things Havoc disliked: Given the above, and the effusive praise I have lavished upon so many actors of this film at such length, you might expect that I would have little to complain about, and that this movie was one I was preparing to strongly recommend. And indeed I must admit that when I first emerged from the theater and analyzed my feelings on the film in general, that was precisely what I was preparing to do. Normally my first impression from a film proves to be pretty close to my final thoughts, but in this case, I decided to give the film a little time to percolate before making a final decision, so that I might come to terms with some of the more disquieting elements that the movie left within me.

My conclusion? I hated this film.

Everything I said above, praise for Affleck and Pike and Dickens and Perry, all these things I stand by, as the problem with the movie is not the acting. It is not, by and large, the direction, nor the cinematography, the former of which is at least serviceable, the latter of which is expertly-done by long-time Fincher-collaborator Jeff Cronenweth. No, the problem with the film is something much deeper, much more troublesome, something rooted in but not precisely equivalent to the writing. An accusation that all of you know, by now, that I do not make lightly, and in fact almost never make at all. The major problem with this film is, indeed, something I feel fairly uncomfortable even bringing up, knowing as I do how quick I am to reject such statements as issue-questing and axe-grinding when it is made of other films. But the fact remains that the problem with this film is that it is deeply, pervasively, stunningly misogynistic.

You all know me. You all know I do not press that button of all buttons casually. And yet I have no choice here but to hammer it home because this film is staggering in its contempt for women, all women (with a couple customary exceptions) over the course of its narrative. They are shrewish, empathy-less, judgmental harpies. They are evil, conniving, psychopathic murderers. They are twisted monsters disguising themselves effortlessly from the honest, simple, true-hearted men that surround them, whose virtuous, trusting natures prevent them from seeing the webs of iniquity and vitriol that are being spun around them. Not one woman is portrayed this way, but ALL of them, even when their characters must make right-angle turns in order to support this narrative, even when the plot groans under the weight of contrivances just to squeeze that much more evil out of the female species, even then the film is relentless in hammering home the fundamental decrepitude of women as a whole, to the point where my viewing companion suggested that the film was beginning to resemble an MRA propaganda piece, and I was getting flashbacks to St. Bernard's medieval panegyrics denouncing the race of Eve as sinful, duplicitous monsters.

The typical hypocrisies associated with bigotry of any stripe are front and center here. Some women are ditzy or brainless or simply stupid, such as the majority of the Stepford-analogues in the bedroom community that Affleck and Pike are living in, vapid people with shallow interests and a grotesque inability to empathize. A throwaway character early on in the film, a woman who approaches Affleck after he has lost his wife to a violent kidnapping for which he himself is suspected, presumptuously takes a Selfie with him for no reason whatsoever, and then reacts to his requests to delete or at least not share the picture as an inexplicable and creepy request from a selfish dick, informing him that she will share the picture with whoever she wishes and storming off as if wrongfully abused. Later that very image appears on a talk show run by an evil, shrewish Ann-Coulter analogue played by veteran actress Missi Pyle (who I'm sure is a very nice person, but whose misfortune has always been to have a face that naturally screams "bitch"). What benefit does this mystery woman draw from this act? Nothing. She's simply a stupid ditz who ruins Affleck's life for no reason and can't even realize she's done wrong. Similarly Affleck's mother-in-law, a bitter, sniping woman who publicly denounces Affleck any chance she gets, and his mistress (more on that later), a dumb college student who seduces Affleck with her bubble-headed sexiness only to turn around and put on a virgin's cowl when it's time to tearfully denounce him while being manipulated by other women. Yet on the other hand we have other women who are sublimely clever, twisted, masqued murderers and sociopaths, who delight in destroying men's lives for the fun of it, or for the crimes of having paid insufficient adoration to themselves. Women able to construct the most exquisite frame jobs, fake everything from rape to physical abuse, spend years establishing the pieces only to bring the unknowing men down just so that they can have the pleasure of watching them burn. It's not just Affleck this happens to of course, for these are man-eaters, misandrists of a sort that exist only in the depraved fantasies of men who feel themselves wronged. One man, late in the film, admits to having had his life destroyed by a woman who set him up as a rapist for the crime of not committing to her, while another (played by a surprisingly flat Neil Patrick Harris), showers a woman with money and attention, only to be the victim of a hideous crime largely out of convenience. I have literally known men who were falsely accused of sexual assault in real life, something which is vanishingly rare, and even I was unable to simply accept something like this wholeheartedly. In a film that employed ONE of these characters, such as Jennifer Lawrence's sollopsistic passive-aggressive maniac in American Hustle, I would have had no problem. But this film throws in every stereotype they can find, makes up a few more, and then afflicts them all on the thankless, aw-shucks simple man of virtue that is Ben Affleck, and expects us to accept that this is the stuff of real drama.

And maybe this all would have worked in a film that explored the deep-seated hypocrisies of seemingly-normal people, a Peyton Place-style unveiling of the hidden darkness within everyday people, but the movie refuses to play fair, because Affleck, the afflicted man at the center of this tempest, can do no wrong. Sure, he's a shiftless layabout who sponges off his wife's trust fund, but trying to be a writer is hard, guys, and he needs some time to himself. Sure, he throws his wife into a wall in anger, but she probably made that up as part of a Machiavellian plot to get back at him. Sure he, cheats on his wife with a student half his age, but she was just so goddamn sexy that he had no way to control himself! Just ask his twin sister Margo (played by Carrie Coon, whom I mistook until five minutes ago for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World's Aubrey Plaza), who almost alone among the women of the film is portrayed as neither stupid nor conniving, mostly because she has absolutely no reason to exist, either in the script or in the world of the film, save as an adjunct to Affleck's character. She has no life of her own, no family, no boyfriend, no hints of anything else going on except the ability to bear witness to Affleck's travails and fume against his tormentors. At one point late in the film, when asked if she is "with" Affleck, she responds that she was with him before they were born. She exists to complement him, which promotes her to 'honorary guy', something I don't usually mind with female characters, save when that promotion exists purely to distinguish the character in question from the dreaded curse of femininity that otherwise runs through the movie.

Final thoughts:   This review project of mine has been a weird exercise in many ways, but this, for me, is one of the weirdest. I never in my life thought I would wind up denouncing a movie with good acting, excellent cinematography, and at least decent directing (Fincher has a bad habit of stopping the film for ten-minute expo-dumps periodically, but that might be unavoidable considering the subject matter), let alone for reasons such as this, but there are occasions when one must, upon seeing a spade, call it a spade. I know this film has been praised to the skies by every critic known to man. I know it was written by a woman (Gillian Flynn, who also authored the book it was based on). I know David Fincher is a superb director who has done very little wrong in the last fifteen years, and made films of greatness and grandeur, something he will hopefully do again. I know this movie may even show up next March when it comes time to hand out Oscars. But this is my goddamn blog with my goddamn reviews on it and I cannot, and will not praise a movie this badly compromised by a deep-seated sense of misogyny as some kind of daring exploration of the nature of our modern world. I do not require that all men who philander be regarded as satanic and evil, or that all women be virtuous or kind or even sane. But I will not accept a movie that so blatantly gender-codes its roles in such a way and then turns around and tries to pretend to me that it is some sort of deep-rooted mediation on reality and its flaws. If a movie was made this way about men (and there have been some), I and others would be trumpeting outrage to the skies. It is only elementary consistency that leads me to do the same here.

A good movie can be made about any subject, but only if it is made with honesty. This movie is made with cruel and crude simplification and then gathers airs of depth and innovation because of its many virtues of acting and pedigree. I leave it to the other critics this time to praise its glories. For me it is a shallow, ugly thing, that in all honesty, I would simply sooner forget.

Final Score:  3.5/10