Fast & Furious 7

Alternate Title:  Art!

One sentence synopsis:    The Fast & Furious crew must try to stop an SAS-mercenary from taking revenge for the crippling of his brother in a previous heist.


Things Havoc liked:  In this movie, there is a moment where The Rock drives an ambulance off of an overpass and onto a flying predator drone, from which he then salvages a Gatling gun, with which he engages an attack helicopter in a battle through downtown Los Angeles.

Do I really need to say anything else?

The Fast and The Furious was a terrible movie, many many years ago, and since its inception it has spawned a whole series of seven films, completely unseen by me, all of which I had rather assumed were also terrible. And while I didn't see these films and consequently can't speak with authority about them, those who can have more or less echoed my expectations. At least until somewhere around the fifth movie, when people began reporting to me that, contrary to all the laws of fiction, filmmaking, and frankly physics, the series had begun to become good. Or perhaps not good, but awesome in the way that a movie that is not good can sometimes be. I generally regarded these reports as being the natural result of lengthy experiments with fantastically dangerous mind-altering chemicals, but in the aftermath of last fucking month, as I cast about for something to see that did not fill me with a desire to instead jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, a good friend of mine "suggested" (read: "insisted") that indie dreck about Russian mechanics and Depression-era lumber barons was out, and that this week, we were going to go watch shit explode, come hell or high water. So that's just what we did. And thank god we did it, because Fast & Furious 7 is awesome.

No, not good, awesome, and bear in mind the difference. This is a movie that knows precisely what it is, a vehicle for insane, over-the-top action in a world pre-established by many, many previous films as being designed precisely for this. Comparisons to The Expendables series invite themselves, and yet unlike The Expendables, the result is not a tired aping of obsolete mentalities, but a riotous festival of more modern ones. Consider the murderer's row of modern-day cheesy action stars on offer here, from Vin Diesel to The Rock to Michelle Rodriguez to Jason Statham to the late Paul Walker, with Kurt Russell of all people thrown in just for a little old-school cred (and because the sight of Kurt Russell donning night-vision sunglasses and whipping out a pair of handguns to fight a mercenary army is badass regardless of era). All of these people are experts in the field of badassery, and if their resumes are not as storied as those of Arnold or Sylvester or Bruce, it's only because they did not invent the genre out of whole cloth the way the previous generation did. And given the casual disregard that this film has for anything approximating realism, the result is a relaxed, eye-pleasing, fun affair, buttressed by an understandable need to pay homage to Paul Walker, whose death midway through the film's creation is more or less explicitly memorialized within the movie. Other than that though, it's all business, whether it be an excellent opening sequence which establishes Jason Statham's invincible-badass credentials without a shot being fired, to ludicrous car stunts through Abu Dhabi, Georgia (the Asian one), or Los Angeles, to a moment where, for no reason anyone can properly establish, both Vin Diesel and Jason Statham break out akimbo lug wrenches for the purposes of a martial arts fight. It's a movie where Rhonda Rousy, who is still the worst actress I have ever seen (though I'm not sure I can claim that in a world that includes Denise Richards), but who is also a bonafide UFC killing machine, gets into a martial arts fight with Michelle Rodriguez in eveningwear and heels. Lest this sound catty, unlike most movies where the token women get into fights that are more acrobatic than combative, this fight involves smashing each other facefirst into blocks of marble and delivering blows that would lay any man, woman, or for that matter, elephant, dead on the floor were they to be employed in our reality.

But this isn't our reality, and the movie knows it, knows that this is the reality of action films, and that different rules apply. Rules like practical effects, the rule in question being "yes, please". Some three hundred cars apparently gave their lives for this movie, quite a few of them through being thrown out of a cargo plane at 16,000 feet strapped to parachutes. Rules like badasses, the rule in question being "as many as you can get". Mui-Thai Tony Jaa, who the martial arts fans among you will recognize as the star of the sterling Ong Bak series joins the cast more or less to be a badass, and the cast is overall simply dripping with them, such that even basic characters established explicitly as non-badasses are given their moments to shine. Rules like drama, the rule in question being "only when it won't get in the way". This movie relegates the absurd "plot" and "character development" to the side, allowing for the proper elements to take center screen. These aren't characters, but archetypes, and archetypes are allowed to do things differently. Nobody complains that Achilles doesn't evidence enough character development in the Illiad after all. Given the almost congenital overuse of CGI in movies like this, their tendency to oversell a single badass who effortlessly slaughters mooks until we're bored, or the aggravating overreach wherein an action film about brooding badasses with enormous guns suddenly confuses itself with The Grapes of Wrath, stats like these give me hope for the genre overall.

Things Havoc disliked:  That's not to say there aren't some bad habits in play here though, and one of the foremost is a blight I had thought (and hoped) we had already banished, a cancerous relic of the age that this generation of action stars grew up in, shakeycam. A great many fights, particularly the hand-to-hand ones, employ what we used to call "MTV editing", meaning they look like they were filmed by someone suffering an epileptic fit. It's not merely that the camera gyrates wildly, ruining our ability to actually see what the hell is going on, but the movie compounds this by making the average shot length of the fight sequences somewhere between 0.1 seconds and the lifespan of a higgs boson. In consequence, all of the hard work that went into these fight sequences, the do-your-own-stunts and practical-SFX and expert choreography that I have every faith the filmmakers employed is rendered entirely useless, as even basic blocking is impossible to follow. Why Shakeycam became such a big deal in filmmaking, I have no idea (my suspicion is that it's the fault of Saving Private Ryan's famous Normandy sequence), but it has been an abject disaster since its inception, and remains one here. Not everything that was done in the 90s is worth preserving.

There's also, of course, the question of acting, or perhaps the lack thereof. Michelle Rodriguez can't act, ever, and Vin Diesel, for all his awesomeness and sterling credibility as a badass, isn't exactly Olivier himself. Having not seen the original six Fast and Furious movies, I have no idea what is supposed to be going on here, but the moments where the movie stops the action and cuts to the character drama!!!! between these two are moments where the movie comes to less of a halt and more of a collision with a retaining wall. The plot circulates around amnesia, or so I assume, as again I don't know what happened last time, but plots about amnesia, whatever their sources, tend to suck horribly, and exist more as cheap writer tropes than actual plot points, exceptions like Memento notwithstanding. Similarly pace-shattering is Paul Walker's wife (Jordana Brewster) and son, who are established rather explicitly at the beginning of the film, no doubt for the benefit of the fans, and then summarily shunted off to a compound in Panama to wait for the credits to arrive. I know that the family drama and "compelling" moments are afterthoughts in a film like this, I remember Men of Valor as well as anyone, but the problem is that the movie treats these as obligations to the fans, which deaden the film every time they arise.

Final thoughts:   It's tempting to be hipsterish about a series like Fast and Furious, either by condemning it as plebeian trash or by perverse praising it as some dynamo of modern filmmaking. But if the truth be known, this film was exactly what I needed to see at the tail end of a long, punishing slog through indie films that varied from mediocre to awful. Call it what you will, this series has managed to capture an audience, and unlike other vulgate series for which that could be said (Transformers comes to mind), it seems to have done so by getting the basics right, good action, fun stunts, practical effects, snappy one-liners, and ludicrous, over-the-top sequences that would not be out of place in one of Arnold's sillier jaunts. No, it's not some undeservedly maligned classic of the silver screen, ignored by serious critics because of snobbery, and no, I do not place it in the pantheon of great action movies of the last couple of years. But it is an irreverent, silly, over-the-top explosion-fest that knows what tone to take and what type of movie it is making. Good movie nights have been made from worse materials than this.

But if you absolutely must have a more intellectual gloss on your film selections, and who am I to argue with you, consider that this is an action movie where, without drawing the slightest attention to the fact, six out of the seven main characters, including both of the leads, are persons of color, representing practically every major ethnicity in America (including mixed), where the women in the film are permitted to be just as bone-shatteringly violent (and just as preternaturally indestructible) as the men, and where, despite being set rather prominently in the Middle East, the only terrorist in the entire film is a Brit.

We could do a lot worse indeed.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Next Time: Lassie meets The Birds in Hungary

Serena

Alternate Title:  Silver Linings Playbook, Episode 1

One sentence synopsis:    A pair of newlywed timber magnates try to protect their business against government intrusion and auditors in 1930s West Virginia.


Things Havoc liked:  Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper are two of the hottest things in Hollywood now, and wouldn't you know it, they have made something of a habit of playing opposite one another, usually to good effect. Following Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Serena is the third time these two have shown up on screen together in as many years, something I generally don't mind, given the quality of those two films and the talent of these two actors. And so in a fallow period, coming off one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life, I decided it couldn't be too terrible an idea to go with the safe choice this week.

It is the Great Depression, and George Pemberton (Cooper) has a concession for timber in the Smoky Mountains of West Virginia, with a profitable logging camp which he rules over in the manner of a logging boss in a poor state in the thirties. On a trip to New York to take out a loan to see his camp through the economic downturn, he encounters a mysterious woman named Serena, which he proceeds to marry. Both of them are veterans of the logging industry, and on returning to the mountains, both of them take an active role in managing the logging process, Serena doing so in defiance of the societal roles of the time, in daring to be a woman involved in such traditionally male activities as...

... yeah, okay, so the movie isn't exactly revolutionary in this sense, no, but in fairness it's not really about Serena's daring challenge to gender roles of West Virginia in the thirties, but about her and her husband and the lengths to which they wind up going to defend their claim from those who wish to take it away from them. Who are these evil malefactors? Well the National Park Service is one of them, in the form of Toby Jones, of Captain America, the man you hire when you want audiences to instantaneously dislike someone for being an officious nerd. It's an odd circumstance to find the National Park Service cast as the villain for trying to stop clear-cutting, but this is a historical film, and our heroes aren't all that heroic, frankly. Cooper and Lawrence do the best job they can with the material they're given, and turn in decent performances, if nothing better, as we settle in to watch them deal with the crises that afflict their business and the lengths they go to to make everything turn out the way they want.

Things Havoc disliked:  I'm... pretty sure by now you're all asleep, as the above was the most boring "things Havoc liked" section I've ever written. And the reason for that is that this movie has nothing to like whatsoever.

Oh don't get me wrong, there's not all that much to dislike either. This movie is perfectly... serviceable would perhaps be the right word. Serviceable acting, serviceable plot points, serviceable pacing, and serviceable sound design. The movie clearly wants to be something like The Piano crossed with a rural version of the Great Gatsby, but the process of watching Serena lose her damn mind as she becomes more and more obsessed with keeping what she has is not shocking or psychological or frankly even that interesting, thanks to a plot which chooses to telegraph itself fantastically at every moment. If you were, for instance, the business partner of a lumber magnate, who had just betrayed him to his enemies and informed him that you were going to destroy his company, would you then, the very next day, agree to go out on a hunting expedition with this same magnate, wherein you and he will head out into the woods of West Virginia, armed and beyond all aid from others? And having decided to do that, in a movie like this, what do you think will come about as a result? A rousing game of Parcheesi?

There's all the usual routines here, with Serena getting jealous of the bastard child that George fathered out of wedlock before meeting her, saving the life of a strange trapper and field-hand who becomes obsessed with her (Rhys Ifans, who is better here than he was in The Amazing Spiderman, but only just), and scheming to keep everything running through a series of perfectly rote "threats" that unfold one after the next. Lawrence is good at playing crazy characters, as is Cooper at dealing with them. Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle proved that much at least. But those movies surrounded the characters in question with an interesting story or setting or merely character traits that this film lacks entirely. Nothing is particularly badly done (a cameo by an almost unrecognizeable Conleth Hill is a nice touch), but there's really no actual sense of interest to the film. A story is mechanically presented to us and events transpire until they are transpiring no longer. Everything works out the way we expect it to. The end.

Final thoughts:   A couple weeks ago, I described The Gunman as one of the most routine films I'd ever seen, and yet here we are less than a month later, and the same damn verdict presents itself. Serena is a movie that was made and released on concept alone, and while the concept (putting Cooper and Lawrence together again) means that it's executed with a decent level of skill, that's all that really recommends this film. Doldrums releases sometimes conceal diamonds in the rough, or epochal disasters destined to be remembered for all time, but most of the time they produce films like this, movies that weren't strong enough to release opposite anything compelling, but not weak enough to be shelved entirely. Last year it gave us 300: Rise of an Empire and Robocop, the year before The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and Oz the Great and Powerful, and the year before that one Footnote and Mission Impossible 4. Serena unquestionably belongs in this not-so-lofty company, which means that, having now completed this review, I don't expect to ever think about it again.  Nor, I suspect, will anyone else.

Final Score:  5/10

Next Time:  I just... I can't do this indie crap anymore.  I need something with explosions...

Leviathan

Alternate Title:  Misery

One sentence synopsis:    A Russian handiman confronts a corrupt small town mayor and the legal and religious systems around him intent on forcing him off his land and ruining his life.


Things Havoc liked:  ...

...

...

Ahem?! Things Havoc liked:

Go away.

What?

Go away. I don't wanna.

What the hell do you mean you don't wanna?

I don't wanna review Leviathan! I won't do it!

Oh come on now, it can't have been that -

It was that bad! It was awful! I don't wanna relive it! I'm not doing it!

Don't be such a baby.

TWO AND A HALF HOURS! I sat through this fucking thing for two and a half goddamn hours and you wanna call me a baby?!

But every critic on Earth called this a great film. Hell it was a nominee for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars!

SO WAS UNDER THE SKIN!

And this was -

- WORSE!!!

I don't believe that. Under the Skin was a hole in the space-time continuum. This thing at least had nice cinematography, didn't it?

*Sniff* Yeah...

And the actors weren't bad, were they?

I... I guess not...

So how bad could it possibly have been?

You don't understand... this movie is just... contrived misery. For hours on end. Everything sucks and we have to make sure it keeps sucking artificially, even when it makes no sense for it to suck. We've gotta drop plotlines midway through and arrange macguffins and use every contrivance in the book so that everything can suck as much as humanly possible BECAUSE ART.

I get all that, but -

YOU DON'T GET SHIT! You can't understand how horrible an experience it is to sit through something this goddamn vacuous for that long with no actual purpose to it beyond some pathological need to display arbitrary suffering.

Well it's trying to be a daring indictment of Russia's corruption and culture of alcoholism

BULLSHIT. It takes more to indict something than just splashing it on the screen. Russia isn't corrupt because God and the impersonal forces of the universe are in collusion to ruin some drunken idiot's life. That's like saying Commando was a daring indictment of South American kidnapping rings.

But... you liked Commando.

I liked Commando because it's entertaining. This movie's as boring as wallpaper paste. I started trying to identify the make and model of the shuttle busses just so I wouldn't go completely mad. It's not like the plot was occupying my attention.

Did it even hold together?

Hell no! That would have required straying away from the daring thematic elements. Think about this one. Let's say you've got a corrupt mayor, who is being threatened by a hotshot lawyer from Moscow who has dirt on him so explosive that he nearly has a heart attack to see it. The lawyer is established as having high level connections in Moscow, and yet the mayor decides to drag him out to a rock quarry and beat him up with goons before throwing him on a train out of town. What do you think happens next?

The... lawyer goes to his connections and gets the government to -

NOTHING HAPPENS WHATSOEVER. We never hear from the lawyer again. Why not? Because Evil Must Triumph Or It Isn't Art!

Surely you're being a little overdramatic...

There is a scene in this movie where the main character sits down on a beach littered with whale bones, drinks an entire bottle of vodka in one swig, then looks out at the camera and says, in perfect dramatic seriousness, "Why?!"

... really?

I swear to God.

Okay so... not very good then.

Not something I'm gonna be running out to buy the Blue-ray of, no.

But you've reviewed bad movies before. What's the problem with this one?

I... I just hated it SO MUCH. Every time I sit down to write the review I degenerate into incoherent screaming. It was an atrocity. And everyone loved it because it was "daring" enough to claim there's corruption in Russia!

Sounds kinda like Under the Skin.

Don't remind me. Still... you're right, I do kinda have to do something.

See, that's the spirit! You'll think of something, don't worry about -

Wait, I know!

You do? Great! What's the plan?

I'll review it IN SONG!!!

Wait, WHAT? NO! NO DON'T YOU DARE! WE ARE NOT HAVING ANOTHER MUSICAL NUMBER IN THIS GODDAMN BLOG! DAMMIT, YOU GET BACK HERE AND REVIEW THIS MOVIE NORMALLY!!!

*Skips away in psychotic glee*

GODDAMMIT, WHO FORGOT HIS MEDS THIS TIME?!

  
The Russian Film 'Leviathan'(Sung to "The Yellow Rose of Texas")  There's an indie film from Russia
The worst I've ever seen
With characters so wretched
They drink like Charlie Sheen
Two hours or more I sat there
It damn near stopped my heart
And if I find the filmmakers
I'll tear their lungs apart.

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can talk about your Requiems
Or the Choices of Sophie
But the Russian film Leviathan's
The one that finished me.


When the Fireflies are buried
No longer shining bright
And the lists of Oskar Schindler
Have vanished in the night
I will lie awake regardless
For how was I to foresee?
That Leviathan will stick with you
And never leave you be.

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can send me to Elysium
Or the Life of Timmy Green
But among them all this film's the one
I wish I'd never seen.


And now I've seen this movie
And my heart is full of woe
It's like the Last Airbender
Crossed with The fucking Road
Under the Skin was awful
Worse than any film before
But the film that I most hated
I shall call it nevermore

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can talk about the second Tron
Or sing of Matrix 3
But I would not give Leviathan
To my worst enemy. 

Final Score:  2/10

Next Time:  Do I really have to?

... fine.. how about Silver Linings Playbook 2: This Time It's Personal?  It seriously cannot be worse than this.

The Gunman

Alternate Title:  The Bourne Encephalopathy

One sentence synopsis:    An ex-PMC contractor for a mining consortium must go on the run when the company decides to clean up loose ends regarding an assassination in Kinshasa.


Things Havoc liked:  Sean Penn is a raving asshole. We all know this. But he's also a multi-academy-award-winning actor and filmmaker, and consequently when a movie of his comes out, it's only polite to pay attention. That holds true even when the movie in question looks like a completely generic MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW movie (once again everyone, that stands for Middle-Aged-Everyman-Who-Is-Secretly-A-Massive-Badass-And-Kills-Everyone-Who-Threatens-His-Women). This isn't exactly the genre that I normally associate with someone like Sean Penn, but then we are talking about the man who made both Shanghai Surprise and I Am Sam, so perhaps I shouldn't be so shocked. But what really attracted me to this film was the supporting cast, a murderer's row of favorite actors of mine including Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, and Ray Winstone. I would watch those three (plus Sean Penn) starring in a laundry commercial, and was reasonably confident I could stomach their take on the Taken/Equalizer/John Wick genre.

And yet, to my surprise, that's not what I was given. The trailers all pointed to another MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW entry (my third in six months), but instead, The Gunman takes its cue not from Taken but from international super-spy thrillers in the vein of movies much better than Taken such as The Bourne Identity or Hannah or the Daniel Craig-helmed 007 movies, movies in which elite special forces-trained agents comprised entirely of vivified asskickium travel the globe to strange and exotic locales to investigate secret goings on, evade the surveillance of hundreds of cameras, drones and satellites controlled by stern-looking headset-wearing men in dark, monitor-filled rooms, and occasionally stop in abandoned factories, old-world apartment buildings, or infrastructure tunnels beneath major landmarks so that they may beat the ever-loving piss out of one another using some cinematic combination of krav maga and ninjitsu. Of course at 54, Penn is older than the actors one typically sees in these sorts of movies, but has been aggressively working out to prepare for it, and plainly wants you to know about it. The upshot is that despite being atypical for the role in question, this is Sean Penn, and he does a fine job by twisting the role away from a fresh super-spy and into a retired one. Indeed, far from shying away from Penn's age, the filmmakers make it a central point of the movie, having him diagnosed with various sorts of chronic concussion-related syndromes that should be familiar to anyone who follows the NFL, the consequences of a life spent doing the sorts of things that heroes in these kinds of movies customarily do.

Pierre Morel, director of the original Taken and District 13, takes the helm here as director, and his intention is plainly to split the difference between Taken's MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW-ness and District 13's frenetic parkour-laden action. The result feels like an "adult" version of Taken's middle age power fantasies, with a nice helping of John leCarre-style real-world grit mixed in, thanks to a plot that centers around an assassination attempt on a member of the Congolese government at the behest of a PMC working for international mining cartels. Ray Winstone plays the same character Ray Winstone always plays (I say this with the utmost respect), a gravel-voiced looming indeterminate badass who does whatever he wishes despite the hero's (or villain's) opinions on the subject. Javier Bardem meanwhile, who has far more of a range, plays against the trailers by portraying a drunken asshole in the vein of his from Skyfall Bond Villain, a morose, bitter jackass who resents Penn for the mess they were all involved in in Central Africa and who is cognizant, moreso than most of the price to be paid. Great actors cover a great deal, as always, and it's a reasonable amount of fun just watching these guys gyrate around one another in a typical modern spy plot.

Things Havoc disliked:  Unfortunately, that's about all there is to be had in this movie, as beyond the idea of making a movie with Penn as Jason Bourne, the filmmakers did not seem to have any idea what they wanted to actually do here.

The Gunman is an extremely generic film. Not the one that was advertised in the trailer, mind you, but generic nonetheless, one that has little to say and no real idea of what they should actually do with what little they have. Only this level of bafflement could possibly explain why they would go through the trouble to hire Idris Elba, a bad man if ever there was one (I say this also with the utmost respect), feature him prominently in the promotional materials and the trailer, and then use him in a two-minute cameo role that effectively amounts to one scene in which a mysterious, unknown man sits down on a public bench next to our hero and tells him personal details about his own life as a way to hint that he may wish to take a certain course of action. How people keep misusing Idris Elba I will never understand, but if you are a fan, as I am, be forewarned that he is more or less not in this movie at all.

Nor is there anything to replace him with. Shakespearian veteran and reliable sleazeball (once more with utmost respect) Mark Rylance portrays the villain, such as it is, but the script is so poor of imagination that he cannot think of any plot to engage in other than the tired kidnap-the-woman-the-hero-loves routine, following which he meets with the hero in a cinematic location and dutifully sends his henchmen to kill him one by one in reverse order of previous screentime. His lengthy monologues on the rudiments of power and cynicism, however well delivered, are absolutely interminable, until we begin to wonder if he intends to bore the hero to death, as he is doing to us. The entire concussion angle, supposedly the very thing that separates the movie from its peers, is used for nothing but convenient weaknesses to apply to the hero at strategic moments, as Penn makes no visible effort to avoid getting hit in the head or blown through windows by concussion grenades, nor suffers any consequences from doing so save when the plot requires it. Meanwhile, the love interest, played by way-too-young-for-Sean-Penn Jasmine Trinca, has no purpose save the one I just mentioned. There is not even a tendentious effort to tie her into the plot, or to allow her to do anything but serve as a convenient hostage or prop during the obligatory action sequences. The entire process feels like a paint-by-numbers exercise, as if all of the actors involved just wanted an excuse to take a holiday in Spain for a while.

Final thoughts:   The Gunman is one of the most routine films I've ever seen, a movie that exists because it must, competently performing the required steps that movies like this involve before the lights come up and we can all go home. As an excuse to watch actors I like doing their thing alongside pretty cinematography and decent action, I suppose there are worse examples. But given Sean Penn, an actor whose obsession with good works and left-wing politics borders on the maniacal, I confess to complete confusion as to why it was made. This is the sort of movie that Liam Neeson has made a habit of making in recent years, a movie designed to showcase his ability to beat up and/or kill people as well as seduce women considerably younger than himself. Sean Penn's ego is planet-sized, but I cannot envision the same person who made Dead Man Walking and Mystic River feeling the need to show off like this. Perhaps I've managed to underestimate the man's ego, or perhaps he (and his co-stars) all needed paychecks, but the resulting film is almost aggressively ordinary, and contains nothing, however well done, that any moderate film fan hasn't seen a hundred times before.

Go see the Gunman if you're a hardcore Sean Penn addict, or if you absolutely have to see something this time of year (as I did). But if you're one of the many people free from either of these torments, then my suggestion would be to keep counting down the days before you can watch Avengers 2.

Final Score:  5.5/10

Next Time:  A decent into raving madness.  And a whole lot of vodka.

Chappie

Alternate Title:  Robocop: The Existentialist Cut

One sentence synopsis:    An engineer at a South African robotics company tries to train an experimental sentient robot alongside a group of local gangsters.


Things Havoc liked:  Though there are weeks when the choice is obvious, it's usually something of a gamble picking movies for this little project. As I've mentioned many-a-time, I don't consult reviews, critics, or word of mouth (where possible), relying instead only on the trailers I see from previous films, and on gut intuition. Given that I am a man of great probity and judgment, this has led to nothing but great success, as movies such as Under the Skin, To Rome with Love, Red Tails, and The Odd Life of Timothy Green can attest to. Nevertheless, despite all these manifest successes, there are still moments, particularly in Doldrums Season, that could shatter the calm of lesser men. One such occasion presented itself this week, as the big release of the weekend was a film I had more cause than most to fear, for it was a film from South African sci-fi director Neill Blomkamp, whose early success with District Nine led me right into a bear trap when it came to 2013's worst movie of the year, a putrid exercise in shameless, color-coded moralizing called Elysium. Generally a director who produced something that bad would never be permitted to darken my evenings again, and yet I was encouraged by the fact that among the very few critics who had the gall to savage Elysium was Blomkamp himself, who gave interviews in which he described it as a failure of writing and script, a movie that "got away from him". And so with that in mind, when the trailers for his latest film began to appear, I decided ultimately to give Blomkamp one more shot, if only because each subsequent trailer seemed to be from a completely different film, and I wanted eventually to see whether Blomkamp was, as each one indicated, making a modern version of Robocop, of Short Circuit, or of Elysium itself.

The answer? All of the above.

Chappie is one of the strangest movies I've ever seen, and a quick glance through my back catalog should suffice to illustrate just what a statement that is. Part coming of age story, part sci fi action extravaganza, part transhumanist science fiction piece, it is a mishmash of a thousand disparate elements strung together by a director who seems to have had five different ideas for movies and smashed all of them together until they fit. On paper this is the sort of thing that disasters are made of, and yet the pieces Blomkamp is playing with are so hypnotically strange on their own, that the result is unlike almost anything I can recall.

What do I mean? Well let's start with the cast, not the established actors like Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, or Sigourney Weaver, all of whom are very good at what they're doing here, but none of whom are the point. The point are guys like Ninja, yes Ninja, a South African rapper and experimental musician who plays... well... himself in this movie, except it's some kind of alternate version of himself in a world where he became a machine-gun-toting gangster engaged in teaching a robot how to be cool. I have no idea who this guy is in reality, but the film version of him is cracked out as though he decided to complement the old stock character of the borderline-crazy gangster by actually being crazy. Sequences in which he teaches the robot in question to throw ninja stars, shoot guns "straight" (gangster-standards apply), or strut about in a 'cool' fashion really kind of defy description in terms of how they set the scene. Given that he's sharing the screen during these sequences with, alternately, Dev Patel's earnest sincerity (Dev Patel's trademark, it's increasingly apparent), a fourteen-foot armored death machine, and an animatronic police robot covered in bling who calls him daddy, Ninja's absurd presence in the film actually doesn't feel that out of place, and he renders the movie, if nothing else, highly interesting to watch whenever he's on the screen.

Not that Blomkamp has much trouble on that front though. Even when making crap like Elysium, Blomkamp's eye for cinematography, design, and effect are top notch, and they remain so in this go-round. Blomkamp's trademark is "futurist underclass", a philosophy similar to that of Paul Verhoeven (before he lost his mind and made Showgirls that is), showcasing the intersection of ultra-high-technology with a gritty, duct-tape-and-baling-wire sensibility from criminals and social outcasts living in the crumbling ruins of immense, crime-ridden cities. It's a style that demands incredibly convincing VFX work, and Chappie is, fortunately, the recipient of some of the best I've ever seen, from the overall look and feel of the many robots, humanoid or otherwise, that grace the screen, each of which is filled with wondrous detail and a sense of real weight and force behind their movements, to Chappie himself, motion-captured by long-time Blomkamp collaborator, Sharlto Copley, who also provides the voice for the titular robot. Chappie's integration into the film is so complete it makes Golum look like the the CGI from Catwoman, with visual effects so absolutely convincing, so utterly devoid of "showcase" moments to drag you out of the film, that despite all rational evidence to the contrary, I actually thought the robot was done animatronicly with practical effects, and only realized how impossible that was in retrospect based on what they have the thing actually do. The titleholder for Best Effects rotates frequently in movies, I know, but Chappie's are so good, and fit so well into the grungy, lived-in design of the world, that even with all the superhero, fantasy, and sci fi extravaganzas with which I am regularly presented, it stood out almost effortlessly. I'd make a joke here about how Weta Digital, the effects company created by Peter Jackson for the Lord of the Rings has finally been upstaged, but it turns out they were the ones responsible for Chappie as well.

Oh but there's more to the look of a film than the digital effects, and Blomkamp, who has always been a visual director, is at the top of his game here. Chappie is not a film entirely full of action, but like Robocop before it, the movie is capable of staggering, bloody violence at the drop of a hat, filmed in gorgeous, lush long-takes amply supplied with slow motion sequences at just the right moment. Several of the best sequences come (as is only reasonable) near the end of the film, done in unbroken, quasi-handheld shots that never veer into shakycam, but showcase the rampages of characters allowed, at last, to cut loose. Buttressing everything is a glorious choral-electric score, featuring the music of the aforementioned Ninja and his collaborators alongside more traditional fare from Hans Zimmer himself.

Things Havoc disliked:  So far so good, a far-out concept, actors who vary from the well-established to the utterly weird, a design that stands out, and effects that back it up. So where exactly do we run into problems? Well... let's talk about the script.

Elysium fell apart because it was generally terrible, but diving into the precise reasons, the issue was the script, a sanctimonious, bloviating, ignorant take on immigration policies in general, and my abiding fear from the trailers was that Blomkamp was going to do to Ferguson and the associated police scandals what he did in Elysium to the immigration question. Fortunately, that fear proved entirely unfounded, but less fortunately, the reason it was unfounded was that Chappie is not really about any one thing in particular, but about eighteen things smashed together to form a movie, from transhumanism to police militarization, to pedagogic theory, machine sentience, and brain digitization, all in a movie that's clearly also supposed to have time to be funny and touching. It's a tall order for any script, and the result is basically a complete mess, as the movie gyrates wildly from one concept, tone, and feel to another, dragging whiplashed characters along in its wake, until by the end we have things happening that have never once been established through means that make no sense within the context of the film. Among the many, many plot contrivances that come to mind, one of the few that does not involve a spoiler is a helmet, designed to allow direct brain interface with computer systems, an extrapolation of technologies existent today that allow a computer to literally read someone's mind. All well and good, but by the end of the movie we have the sentient robot itself using this system in an attempt to upload its own consciousness, apparently unaware (as are the filmmakers) that this sort of thing uses brainwaves to interpret the thoughts of the wearer, something a robot is unlikely to be producing in any quantity.

But it's not so much a matter of this nitpick or that one, and just a general sense of confusion that reigns throughout the film. Ninja's counterpart, both in this movie and in reality, is Yolandi Visser, who like Ninja basically plays herself, but unlike him, does not seem to have much of a character in the film beyond what's absolutely necessary at any given moment. At one point a hard-bitten gangster who casually suggests shooting Dev Patel's feet off if he doesn't help them hack the police robots, at another point a motherly nurturer who reads picture books to the newly-awakened robot and who teaches him to address her as "mommy" (a shiruken-flinging combat robot ripping walls and armored cars apart while screaming angry invective about "mommy" is only one of the many surreal things we get to see in this film). I don't object to a complex character with disparate qualities, the best characters in film are usually exactly that. But Yolanda is mired in a movie that whirlwinds about from concept to concept, which doesn't let us get any sense of her holistically. She simply is whatever the filmmakers want her to be at a given moment, with no sense that all of these attributes are coming from the same person. Other characters, including Ninja himself, Hugh Jackman's military-industrial schemer, and a skeeving crime boss played by South African television star Brandon Auret, all undergo similar gyrations, as the plot convulses around them, changing its mind mid-stream about what the movie is actually about, until by the end, we've seemingly lost track of the fact that we were originally talking about the invention of a sentient robot, a character we are presumably intended to identify with at least somewhat, but who, like everyone else in the film, is not allowed to establish itself for more than five minutes before becoming something else entirely. In the case of the robot, that's probably a plot point. In the case of the humans, I have to blame the script.

Final thoughts:   My greatest fear regarding Chappie was that it would resemble Elysium, and on that score, Blomkamp manages to pass with flying colors, as Chappie not only fails to resemble Blomkamp's previous picture, but also doesn't resemble damn near anything I've ever seen before. Indeed, so strange, so left-fieldish is this deceptively-simple movie that the closest point of comparison I have is the work of Darren Aronofsky, whose life's mission seems to be to take as many simple ideas as he can and produce as much surreal insanity as possible with them. Chappie's weirdness is not openly Feliniesque (as Aronofsky's often is), but more a matter of a director pushing the envelope until it falls off the table, and yet I'll be damned if there isn't something almost hypnotic about the result. The film makes little-to-no sense when sat down and thought about, but the experience of watching it is not something I'm at risk of forgetting soon, and like Aronofsky's 2014 version of Noah, it manages, whatever its flaws, to avoid being boring, predictable, or even sane.

Chappie, as it turns out, is presently being torn to pieces by the same critics who praised Elysium for being bold and daring, and it would be uncharitable of me to ascribe that to the fact that Chappie isn't as sanctimoniously preachy as Blomkamp's last effort. Their objections to the film's confusion, lack of consistent motivations, and overloading with too many plots (to say nothing of glaring product placement from Sony and Redbull) are similar enough to my own that I'm not going to object, and yet... if I'm being honest, the overall effect of Chappie is less trainwreck, and more awe. Chappie doesn't really work, but in failing it produces something quite unique, as if Blomkamp reached for the stars and only caught a satellite. Technically this wasn't what he was going for (I think), but it's still a fairly impressive achievement nonetheless. And if I'm being completely honest with myself, I have to say that for all the confusion and madness (or perhaps because of it), I enjoyed watching this movie, What else matters, really, besides that?

Ultimately, Chappie almost defies criticism, as the movie is plainly the work of a man who only knew what he was doing about two thirds of the time. One can like the result, or dislike it, but to argue that mistakes were made in producing it is kind of missing the point. The entire effort was a grand, glorious mistake. Take from it what you will.

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  Action of some form, be it old or new.  Or maybe it's time to visit Bollywood...

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?

What We Do In The Shadows

Alternate Title:  Hobbiton by Night

One sentence synopsis:    Documentarians film a group of vampires around Wellington for several months, learning about their lives and habits.


Things Havoc liked:  With as many movies as I watch, I don't get around to seeing a lot of television. As such, while I've certainly heard of New Zealand-based comedy group Flight of the Conchords, mostly thanks to their musical stylings, I have not seen a great deal of their work on screen at any point. Still, reputation is reputation in this sort of thing, and with the Doldrums still upon us, a small indie offering from Kiwiland about Vampires seemed as good an option as any. Words cannot describe the horrors that otherwise awaited.

So... Wellington, New Zealand: Southernmost capital city in the world. Quaintly picturesque town nestled on the straights between the North and South islands. Headquarters for the production of the Lord of the Rings. Overrun by vampires. But fear not, would-be visitors, a collection of fearless cameramen and documentarians have ventured forth to draw back the curtain from the dark world of these dwellers of the night. Finally the truth can be known.

What We do in the Shadows is a mockumentary in the style of Christopher Guest, centered around a group of four flatmate vampires living in one of the more boring cities on Earth, and engaging in their nightly routine of hunting, bloodsucking, and performing dark rites. Sort of. Explaining what actually happens over the course of this movie would sort of defeat the point, I feel, as that's the point of the jokes in the first place, all of which work better in context than they would here. So let's turn to the vampires themselves. Taika Waititi, a filmmaker I've barely heard of, plays Viago, a German transplant vampire who moved to New Zealand in pursuit of his lost love but got waylaid when his coffin was rejected for insufficient postage. Fluttering about the shared flat, he clashes alternately with Deacon (Johnathan Brugh), a douchebag who seems to have gone on with his douchebaggery in the afterlife, circumstances be damned, and Vladislav (Jermaine Clement), a morose sex-obsessed technophobe (initially), who may or may not be Vlad the Impaler, and who spends most of the movie shivering in terror at the mention of his arch-nemesis, "The Beast". As the filmmakers follow these three around, we meet all manner of other denizens of the Wellington underworld, from Peter, an eight-thousand-year-old Nosferatu-knockoff, to a local pack of new-age Werewolves, to Nick and Stu, a fledgeling vampire brought into the coven early on, and his human associate who helps the Vampires discover the wonders of such modern marvels as Facebook and selfies.

This all sounds dry, I know, but the humor in this film is very dry, in a sort of spur-of-the-moment style with references and in-jokes worthy of any mockumentary I can recall. From Deacon's familiar Jackie, pissed off that she hasn't been turned into a Vampire yet while being forced to run his errands and clean up after his "feeding" efforts, to Vladislav's... "skills" at hypnosis, to Nick's conception of subtlety when it comes to disguising his nature as a vampire, to how the Werewolves deal with their... condition... the entire affair is a welter of circumstantial comedy, none of which, I'm afraid, will play well here. The film also uses its indie-documentary style to send up found footage films, periodically turning in satire far worthier than anything the Scary Movie series has put out.

Things Havoc disliked:  You kind of have to like films like this, films that sort of wander around without a point to them, in order to get much out of this. There is no plot to the film, no arc, no narrative progression. Characters do have things happen to them, yes, some of which have been established before, but there is no real unifying theme to the movie beyond the characters existing and being followed by the camera crews. I realize that documentaries and the films that ape them work differently than feature films, but even fake-true stories are supposed to be stories, and there's no real equivalent to Waiting for Guffman's theatrical performance, or Best in Show's dog show, the central unifying event around which the movies were made, and which served as a sort of climax. Attempts are made with the undead masquerade ball that the characters are looking forward to for much of the film, but the ball itself doesn't really pay anything off and the characters go on thereafter as though it were simply another incident. Even when aping real life, it's possible to be a bit too meandering.

Final thoughts:   The difficulty with a movie like this is that there really isn't a lot to say here. You really are going to like the concept of this film or you are not. I saw the thing based on a single trailer at an indie showcase some weeks ago, and thought it was hilarious and fun. Someone else might take one look at this review's description and think it was the most boring thing on Earth. They would probably not be wrong. But the fact that the jokes, in fact the film itself, works only in context, makes it rather proof against any attempt to review it. Flight of the Conchords made a fake-documentary-comedy about New Zealand vampires living in a flat in Wellington. Whether you think this sounds like the sort of thing you would like or whether you think it doesn't, you're probably right.

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  Goddamned if I know.  Doldrums season strikes again.  Maybe Will Smith remaking Matchstick Men?