Spring/Summer 2016 Movie Roundup, Part 3

And now, a final note from the General

And so we come at last to the final edition of our roundup, after which point I will finally, mercifully, be caught up, and we can get back to our regularly scheduled program of far-too-many-words-being-expended-on-individual-films. In the meanwhile however, let's catch up at last with the movies I saw as the spring transitioned to summer.

The General's Post Spring (and Summer) Roundup, Part 3

Finding Dory

Alternate Title:  The Octopus is In The Way

One sentence synopsis:    Amnesiac fish Dory experiences a memory revelation about her long-lost parents, and sets out on a cross-ocean journey alongside Marlin and Nemo to find them.


The Verdict: Pixar may be a gold standard company, but their sequels are not exactly the stuff of legends. For every Toy Story 2/3 we have a Planes or a Cars 2, which generally serve to remind us why Disney tends (with rare exceptions) to relegate their own sequels to the direct-to-video market. Still, 2003's Finding Nemo (God, has it been thirteen years?) was one of the great triumphs in Pixar's conquest of the 00s, and the hope was that they would find a way to not screw it up this time.

Finding Dory, as the title might indicate, focuses on Ellen DeGeneres' blue tang in a fresh adventure as she gets a fragmented image from the depths of her broken memory, and sets out to find her family, a journey which rather quickly deposits her, Nemo, and Marlin in an analogue for the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. Hijinx proceed to ensue, involving the usual slapstick routines and host of celebrity-voice-acted comic relief characters, particularly a seven-armed octopus named Hank (voiced by Ed O'Neil) who is both an ornery bastard and a chameleon/escape artist (which is true to life for both actor and species, I guess). Other new characters include a Beluga with concussion-induced echolocation problems played by Ty Burrell, a pair of Sea Lions played by Wire alums Idris Elba and Dominic West (goddamn those bribing bastards at Pixar), and a bird named Becky, who is... just off. All of this is done up in the typical Pixar cinematic style, with a rich vibrancy to the color palate and anatomic details of behavior, movement, and structure, for every fish, bird, mammal, and mollusk that crosses the screen. The tropical world, either of the Great Barrier Reef or of the Aquarium and its environs, look gorgeous, from forests of kelp stretching towards the heavens, to swirling constellations of fish within a towering biome-instalation, to the grimy interiors of ducts, sewers, and outflow ports. Action and animation are spectacular, particularly for the aforementioned octopus, who slithers and slides and crawls in a manner that clearly substantiates Pixar's claim that his animation is "the hardest thing we've ever done".

So does this mean that Finding Dory is as good as Finding Nemo was? Of course not. Finding Nemo was one of Pixar's finest movies, from the beginning of a decade they would go on to dominate as part of what we can safely call, with the benefit of hindsight, a golden age comparable to any other (including Disney's three). That age rather definitively ended with 2011's Cars 2, and while Finding Dory is certainly a decent-to-good animated movie, it is not the powerhouse its predecessor was. The problem isn't the writing or the plot, though both are somewhat less fantastic than the predecessor was, nor the lack of emotional resonance, for some sequences in this film veer almost into horrific trauma, as we see the full consequences of a condition such as the one Dory suffers from. The problem is that the intention here clearly isn't to make a revolutionary film, but simply to get the gang back together for another fun romp, interspersed with the occasional moment of existential horror that Pixar fans are accustomed to seeing driven into their guts, just to liven things up. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but the movie as a whole feels considerably more ephemeral than its predecessor, with many characters inserted because they let the animators include a sight gag, rather than because the character itself was intrinsically funny or interesting. Fun as the octopus is to look at, for instance, we get no real idea of who he is as a character, or why he wants so desperately to get to Cleveland, and while that may seem like not a big deal from a comic relief character who is also a cartoon cephalopod in a children's film, this is Pixar, who once reduced entire adult audiences to tears and ruin with heartfelt stories about toys, garbage disposals, and grumpy old men.

There's nothing really wrong with Finding Dory, ultimately. But it can't be said that there's all that much really right with it in that old Pixar style either. And in a year that gave us Zootopia, that's not enough to earn the abject praise this company once garnered as a matter of course.

Final Score:  6.5/10

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Free State of Jones

Alternate Title:  Occupy: Swampland

One sentence synopsis:   A confederate deserter forms a multi-ethnic militia to fight against requisition agents and the KKK.

The Verdict:  Big, sweeping historical war epic? I'm in! War epics are one of my favorite genres and always have been, and this one had the added benefit of actors I like (Matthew McConaughey for instance), and a story that does not get seen an awful lot. Oh there's plenty of Civil War epics out there, but this one seemed to be focused on a side unsung, the southerners who had no truck with betraying the Union, and who rose up against the Confederacy in a strange, second-order rebellion.

Well, it turns out I was wrong in that estimation, because once again, the trailers lied to me. Not about the fact that the movie was about Southern anti-confederate rebels, for it definitely is, but about the fact that the movie was a civil war epic, for it very much is not. Though advertised as some kind of great revolution-film ala The Patriot, Free State of Jones is really more of a study of the life and times of one Newton Knight, a farmer-turned-medic-turned-second order rebel against the confederate authorities in Jones County, Mississippi, and the biggest surprise, to me at least, is that a good half of the runtime of the film takes place not during but after the civil war, during the era of Reconstruction, a period not generally found upon movie screens, as it was an era where, unquestionably, evil triumphed and good men failed. From his origins as just a poor farmer trying to escape a war he wants nothing to do with, we watch Knight become a militant anti-Confederate crusader, as the requisitions of the local confederate authorities, carried out with brutality and callous disregard for the life of the poor locals, pushes him to open, armed rebellion. Meeting up early on with a group of runaway slaves, headed by Moses Washington (Hunger Games and Place Beyond the Pines' Mahershala Ali), he identifies quickly that blacks and poor whites in his neck of the woods have a common enemy in the confederate authorities, and yet the movie goes beyond that, as Knight (and this is all apparently true), follows this line of thinking to its logical end, becoming a John Brown-style evangelist against slavery, racism, and the suppression of civil rights by the KKK, until by the end of the film he has founded a mixed-race co-op of farms in a remote part of the county, married an ex-slave, in violation of the laws of the day, and helped organize voting registers of newly-freed slaves who would march, under arms, to the ballot boxes on election day to exercise their newly-won rights to vote. And just in case the point wasn't made clear enough, the film periodically cuts forward by eighty years to the trial of Knight's Great-Grandson, who was charged, in 1948, with marrying a white woman while being 1/8th black himself.

I try not to let preconceptions filter my experience when going to see a movie, but let me tell you all, it is rare that I encounter a movie that turns all possible expectations on their heads like this. And yet, I remain a historian at heart, and a cinephile, and I have to confess that I really liked Free State of Jones, almost certainly more than I would have liked the Patriot-style homily to the good warrior that I expected it to be. The structure of the film is really strange, what with constant cuts forward and backwards in time, and sections that seem drawn out for purposes unknown, and it's this reason, I assume, why the movie flopped overall and has a poor reputation among critics. Well I've never been one to follow the pack in this regard, and Free State of Jones is a very good film, bordering on an excellent one, thanks mostly to a trio of superb performances by McConaughey, Ali, and English actress and Dr. Who alum (of course in England, who isn't?) Gugu Mbatha-Raw, playing Knight's common law wife and ex-slave Rachel. It's one of the only movies I've ever seen since Birth of a Nation to dive into the Reconstruction period in the south, with all the wonderful historical atrocities that entails, from lynching and cross-burning, to voter-suppression, to the entirely historical scheme of "apprenticeship" that southern plantation owners came up with in the aftermath of Slavery's abolition that, at least for a little while, enabled them to continue to own and sell black people, particularly children. It is also one of the only movies out of the hundreds I've seen on the subject, that managed to make the KKK seem scary instead of ridiculous, something far more in keeping with the actual historical KKK than with the inbred Halloween rejects who don their sheets in modern times.

Free State of Jones is hardly a perfect movie. Even for a biopic I would have liked to see a bit more action, and many scenes or concepts simply seem to come out of nowhere, such as a sequence in the middle of the film, where Knight suddenly has an army with artillery at his disposal, and is engaging in pitched battles against the confederate troops of the area, things he appears to have conjured forth from thin air. But that's all more or less secondary. I know I have a reputation for being lenient towards historical films, and with good reason, but put another way, I have the expertise and experience to tell the difference between a good one and a bad. Free State of Jones is a very good historical film about a period in American history that isn't often seen or heard about. It may not be what I expected to see initially, but given what I generally expect every week, that's hardly a sin.

Final Score:  7.5/10

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The BFG

Alternate Title:  Big Flatulent Graphics

One sentence synopsis:    A young orphan named Sophie is abducted in the night by a friendly giant and taken to Giantland, the source of all dreams.


The Verdict:  Though my memory of such events is fragmented, I am assured by my mother that the BFG, by Roald Dahl, was one of the first real books I ever read, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. Roald Dalh was a huge element of my childhood, with books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and it's remarkably stranger sequel), Danny the Champion of the World, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, Henry Sugar, and a horde of other novels and short stories, child-themed or adult. Many films have been made from Dahl's books, some of them great (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), some of them execrable (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Now here comes Steven Spielberg, the master of whimsy himself, to put The BFG, one of Dahl's works onto the screen. Well at least it's not Tim Burton again...

The BFG stars Mark Rylance, of Bridge of Spies and The Gunman, as the titular BFG, though of course the character itself is a computer effect, and he's just great. There's a rumor out there that this role was supposed to go to Robin Williams before his death, but Rylance, a veteran actor of stage and screen, knows exactly how to embody the slightly bumbled-up, grandfatherly giant, and lets the animators take care of the rest. He's helped by eleven-year-old Ruby Barnhill, who plays the little girl Sophie whose role is to be abducted by the BFG and ultimately to drive a madcap plot involving flatulence-soda, man-eating giants, dreamforging, the Queen of England, and the British Army. Both Barnhill and Rylance are just excellent in the roles allotted to them, with Sophie the no-nonsense bookworm and the BFG the vocabulary-challenged old man who does his job because that's how he likes it. And in terms of supporting roles, one could do far worse than having the Queen of England (complete with Corgies) played by Dame Penelope Wilton (I know her from Dr. Who and Downton Abbey), or the evil man-eating giants Fleshlumpeater and Bloodbottler played by Jermaine Clement (What We Do In The Shadows) and Bill Hader (Trainwreck) respectively. Everybody does their job perfectly well, at least per my vague recollections of the story.

So... given that, you'd expect me to like the movie an awful lot, and yet... I mean I didn't hate it certainly, but there just feels like there's something missing here. Maybe it's my fault, my own childhood nostalgia fog denigrating the movie for not being some perfect representation of a half-remembered experience, but the movie just feels a little bit pro-forma. Some of the sequences I remember best from the book, the elaborate routine that the Queen's butler goes through when trying to work out how to accommodate and feed a giant in Buckingham Palace, or the crisp, military debates and operations of the Royal Army in devising a plan to capture the evil giants and then putting it into action, both of these sequences seem unduly rushed, in favor of more conventional "false crisis, false resolution" style storytelling that I don't remember being in the book at all. Maybe the slapstick of the evil giants undercuts their menace too much, maybe the BFG's world-weariness just feels a bit too world-weary, without any of the fun adventurous side that the character embodied back when I was five. Maybe I'm being totally unfair, and there's no version of this story that would have satisfied me, and this is just a subject about which I'm unlikely to find any shred of objectivity.

Final Score:  6/10

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Independence Day: Resurgence

Alternate Title:  Returning to the Well

One sentence synopsis:   20 years after their defeat in "The War of '96", the aliens return to conquer Earth once more.


The Verdict:  I don't give a shit who says otherwise, I maintain to this day that Independence Day was one of the great films of the 1990s, a spectacular action-disaster blockbuster that blew me and everyone else at the time completely away with things we had never seen before, a movie firmly in the America: Fuck Yeah pantheon of super-patriotic action movies coupled with all the things that would become touchstones of Rolland Emmerich's career. Casts of dozens, criss-crossing narratives, destruction porn, action showpieces to the accompaniment of stirring patriotic music, the scientist as a hero, the works. Emmerich of course would go on to spend the next twenty years making very dumb movies on similar themes, which varied from the bad (2012) to the really bad (The Day After Tomorrow), to the unwatchable (Godzilla). And yet, I can't hate Emmerich, partly because he gave us one (possibly two with Stargate) legitimately great films, and partly because he's just not a hateable guy. Unlike Michael Bay, Emmerich's failings are usually earnest failures, not filled with ugly stereotypes and bilious contempt for all men, but movies about true-blue heroes doing wholesomely heroic things in the midst of calamity. And so, while I'm certainly no fan of basically anything Emmerich has done this century, I had to go see what returning to the ID4 well would give us.

And... honestly, ID4:Resurgence is exactly what I was hoping for. Not in my wildest dreams, of course, it's no masterpiece to compare with the first, but my sincere hope was that while Emmerich was likely to make a stupid movie, that it would be the right kind of stupid, and it is. Resurgence is in fact a spectacularly stupid movie, but it's a fun movie first and foremost, one that understands exactly what it is and how to play with the conventions of the genre that its own predecessor created. It's a movie with cool action and heroic one-liners and fast pacing and actually funny comic relief (Brent Spiner steals the entire movie and runs away with it cackling), something Michael Bay couldn't generate if you gave him the GDP of Norway to play with. It stars actors I don't much like (Jessie Usher, Liam Hemsworth, honestly Judd Hirsch), but softens their presence by giving them formula plots to enact that never really get in the way, and instead focuses on actors I love (Jeff Goldblum, William Fichtner, Bill Pullman, Brent Spiner, and a crazy Deobia Oparei, playing a central African warlord who fights aliens with twin machetes and kung fu). The film's plot is ludicrous in the extreme (although nobody hacks the alien mothership with a macbook this time), and it certainly does suffer from the lack of a leading presence like Will Smith. But if ever there was a film aware of its own failings and willing to work to paper them over, it was this one, a movie that tries so earnestly to distract us from its flaws for the run-time before shrugging its shoulders and patting us on the back and hoping that we enjoyed ourselves. I did, and given that I did, I can't really muster outrage at the planetary-grade plot holes or the stupidity associated with some of the story beats. I was too busy watching the daughter of the President from the first movie make strafing runs against the giant alien queen battlesuit chasing our heroes across the deserts of Nevada.

ID4: Resurgence is not great cinema, and it is not the equal to its predecessor, not by a country mile. But it is, fundamentally, a fun, exciting, and very funny movie. And given how most of these modern remakes of a late 20th-century classic turn out, that's good enough for me.

Final Score:  7/10

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The Lobster

Alternate Title:  Artifice and Pogo Dancing

One sentence synopsis:   A newly-divorced man goes to a singles hotel where he must find a mate in 45 days or be transformed into an animal of his choice.


The Verdict: I am so sick of movies like The Lobster. I'm sorry if that spoils the review upfront, but half the reason I'm doing these catchups is to get to the point, and the point here is that I am tired of these arthouse dreck-fests that think confusing the audience means the film is highbrow and daring. Some directors can get away with this sort of thing, Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, but not Yorgos Lanthimos, who wrote, produced, and directed The Lobster with an eye towards making the tranche of critics that think anything the little people don't like must be amazing fawn all over him. He succeeded, winning BFAs and Cannes Jury Prizes and all the other awards that are fast becoming synonymous with "waste of time" in my book. Coming right after I got through praising a Rolland Emmerich movie of all things, I'm sure many art film fans will wash their hands of me as a plebeian bore who can't accept anything more intellectual than an explosion-fest laden with one-liners, but that argument is not only bullshit, but is the reason that crap like Under the Skin and Leviathan get made. These movies are not artistic, they are not clever, they are not interesting. They are boring intentionally-obfuscated garbage, and no amount of soliloquizing on the fact that people didn't "get it" changes that.

*Sigh*

The Lobster is a movie starring Colin Farrell, normally a turn-off for me, but who is honestly fine in this one. He plays David, a middle-aged sad-sack of a man whose wife has abandoned him and who, by the laws of his society, now has to find a new mate in 45 days or be turned into an animal. Over the course of his stay he meets various people, hooks up with them, leaves them, runs off to join a group of single rebels living solitary lives in the forest, etc. Yes, I know that this is all allegory, and yes, I even know what this is an allegory for. What I do not know is why the film has to be so intentionally stilted to make its point. Every actor, good (John C. Reilly, Rachel Weisz, Olivia Coleman), and bad (Farrell, Léa Seydoux) uses the same emotionless affect throughout the film, because society has deadened us to our true feelings or some damn thing, even when they are subjected to physical violence, atrocity, and the loss of loved ones. The rules of the dystopian society seem not merely arbitrary (which I could forgive), but mutable, particularly once the rebel group enters the scene, who have their own arbitrary rules which are violated periodically. The absurdist nature of the film does provide a few moments of hilarity, such as the deadpan line "We enforce solitary behavior, which is why we only play electronic music", or the man who attempts to attract a soulmate by periodically smashing his head against the wall, but the behavior of the characters is so alien across the board that we have no idea how anyone is going to react to anything, which de-anchors us entirely from the flow of the film. And while I understand what is being symbolized here (the arbitrary nature of social rules, and the ferocity with which we punish those who transgress them), did the film really have to bore us all for two and a half goddamn hours to make the point that social mores aren't always logical? Is this so revolutionary a concept that it could not be explained by actors acting like actual people? This is like putting together a discordant film consisting of three hours of interpretive mime dance over atonal music because if you do not, then how will the audience ever come to understand your revolutionary thesis that "love is a good thing"?!

The Lobster is nowhere as bad as some of the indie dreck I've reviewed on this project, but it is almost perfectly emblematic of what's wrong with a great deal of it. And I'd gladly take a Rolland Emmerich movie that's entertaining over one by a highbrow director who thinks I'm too dumb to be watching his movie.

Final Score:  4/10

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Swiss Army Man

Alternate Title:  Harry Potter and The Posthumously Delusional Psychotic

One sentence synopsis:   A shipwrecked man finds a washed-up corpse with various fantastical abilities that becomes his best friend.


The Verdict: I know I just got through bashing an Indie movie, but the fact is that the reason I stick to my one-a-week schedule is to force myself to see the films I normally wouldn't, and that generally includes a lot of quirky indie fare, especially as we get later into Blockbuster season and the weeks between said blockbusters begin to stretch out. And so it was that I went to see a movie that my sister described as "The Farting Corpse Movie"

She wasn't wrong.

Even by the standards of weird indie movies, Swiss Army Man is a weird indie movie, about a man named Hank (Paul Dano) who is marooned on an island in the Pacific somewhere, and is on the verge of suicide when he finds a washed-up corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) who begins displaying fantastic powers of flatulence, water retention, and muscle spasming, as well as the ability to talk and think (though not move). This is a concept that gets gross, though not as gross as it certainly could have (we do not get a medical treatise on decomposition, thank god), and the film more or less consists of Hank using Manny (the corpse) to help him escape the situations he is in, while re-introducing Manny to what it is to be alive. I'd explain more of what's going on here, but frankly, this movie is weird in a way that even Indie films typically are not, to the point where I have trouble even categorizing what the film is, be it coming of age, mediation on philosophy, broad slapstick comedy, gross-out humor, or (more likely) some depraved combination of the above. It's a movie that seems to expect you will take what you get from it, as many indie movies do, including quite a few terrible ones.

And yet... I gotta be honest folks, I loved Swiss Army Man, primarily because it is inventive where most indie dreck is formulaic, innovative where most are artificial, and intriguing where most are just boring. The film is weird enough to defy coherent description, but never feels random or incoherent, just a movie that takes its own premise seriously and derives weird rapport from it. Both performances from Dano and Radcliffe help, of course, as they are, the both of them, far better here than they have been in a lot of films I've seen, but the real stars of this one are the Directors (and writers) of the movie, unknowns Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, who exhibit great mastery in pacing, shot selection, dialogue and scripting. They are also buttressed by a superb soundtrack, by Indie Rock band Manchester Orchestra, all of which comes together to produce a movie that may not make a whole lot of objective sense, but feels wholesome and coherent while watching it, and which holds together in my memory astonishingly well. It's not really a movie "about" anything in particular, and the twists that the plot ties itself into are left quite understated, but that's not because of some intentional effort to confuse the audience or appeal to critics, but because the movie isn't about its plot. It's about the ways in which these characters, real or fictitious, can generate meaning from one another, and how the artificiality of modern life can be a strength as well as a weakness. Maybe I'm reaching for meaning that isn't there, as this isn't the most coherent film I've ever seen, but it's one where the experience of watching it is far more enjoyable, in an almost whimsical sense, than one could rightly expect from a movie wherein Daniel Radcliffe plays a dead guy who farts a lot.

Whatever it was meant to be, the fact is that Swiss Army Man is a wonderful movie in both the literal and figurative sense, an uncatagorizable mess that was somehow polished into art. If it serves to prove to some of my detractors that I do more than just praise brainless crap on this blog, then all the better, but the best resolution of all would be for those of you who have an appreciation for the weirder side of cinema to go see this one. I can't promise you what you'll get out of it, only that I got something very close to magic.

Final Score:  8/10



Next Time: Time to go where several people have gone before...

Spring 2016 Movie Roundup, Part 2

And now, another note from the General

The struggle continues, ladies and gentlemen, but we are finally approaching the point, halfway through this damnable year, where we will, at last, be all caught up. And so, for those who have been waiting patiently, let us present, in no particular order, the remaining movies of the spring of 2016, preparatory to making a clean, fresh start, for Blockbuster season. Without further ado, I present:

The General's Post Spring Roundup, Part 2

High-Rise

Alternate Title:  Brutalism: The Movie

One sentence synopsis:    A single doctor moves into a high-rise luxury apartment complex in the early 1970s, and watches as it disintegrates into lawless anarchy and class war.


The Verdict: The 70s have a lot to answer for. Not just in terms of architecture or politics, though there is that, but also in the sensibility of a time in which most people legitimately thought that the world was actively falling apart and that all was soon to be lost in a pestilent gyre of madness, violence and death. Not an uncommon sense, to be fair, indeed there's more than a few people who still think this today, but the 70s were the period when the appropriate response to the impending end of the world was to settle scores, real or imagined, with a host of one's own personal or class enemies, real or imagined. It was, here in America at least, the age of Nixon, of the Weather Underground, and of Jonestown, a period in which the impending end of civilization provided justification for any number of heinous atrocities, because decency itself was evil, and one's enemies undeserving of humanity. It scared the right so badly that they built a bunker among the religious establishment and never left it, and scarred the left so profoundly that they suffered through a decade-and-a-half of impotence before being dragged back to prominence by main force. It was, at least to a vocal minority, the age for fulfillment of the millennarian prophecies implied by the 60s, a decade of sound and fury, signifying little beyond arrogance, greed, and the baser instincts of a generation that imagined itself revolutionary.

Why do I bring up all of this in what is intended to be a movie review of a recent release? Because by the standards I have spoken of above, High-Rise is the most 70s movie I have ever seen.

Based on a 1975 novel by British sci-fi author J.G. Ballard (author of Empire of the Sun), the movie version of High-Rise is a baroque ode to the 70s in the same way Rock of Ages was to the music of the 1980s, save that the focus this time, rather than on music and culture and fun, is on the dystopian collapse of civilization within English society, something Ballard, as well as largely everyone else, thought was imminent in the mid-70s, whether because of the decadence of the upper classes, the degraded criminality of the lower ones, or the general misanthropy of the times, take your pick. High-Rise consequently posits that once people are encased within the titular building, a brutalist monstrosity of dark concrete and hard angles, everyone will immediately get their Lord of the Flies on and start butchering one another in the squalid ruins of their homes, because this is the natural state of man. The movie stars people I like, including Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Marcus Antonius (James Purefoy), and Scar (Jeremy Irons). I would explain to you who these people are actually playing, but I will be damned if I can figure out who anyone is in this movie, really, for it's the sort of indie film in which the characters are intended to represent not characters, but archetypical deformations of the human psyche or some damn thing. Suffice to say the movie has the services of quite a few fine actors to portray its story.

And it suuuuucks. Not because the politics are so antiquated, though to be sure there is that, but because having taken such a misanthropic view of mankind as a base premise, the only the way the movie can function is by making no fucking sense whatsoever. There is no reason given why everything goes to hell within the apartment building, it simply does, and having done so, nobody is allowed to react as though such a thing is in any way strange, because you see, it is the nature of man to butcher one another for no reason in a drunken orgy, as the steadily dropping crime rates since the late 70s in every society around the world clearly attest to. It's only fair to take a movie's premise at face value, but in a case like this, the premise is so alien, and treated as so self-evident by the filmmakers (headed by British advertising director Ben Wheatley, who has never done anything of note before this), that it's actually quite difficult to figure out what the hell is going on. Characters get in one another's faces, put on parties while dressed like Versailles fops, paint themselves grey and stalk dogs through the hallways, and windily discuss how overpopulation is soon going to reduce the world to a cinder, and so murdering children is only the right way to go, all without any sense of what the hell the director is trying to say with all this madness. A movie that used these kinds of strange behaviors in an artistic fashion might well have worked, but this film, beamed in from 1975 as it is, simply assumes that this is what all disaffected intellectuals actually think of the world, and so does not bother to justify itself in any way, to the point where the movie even fails to give us a reason why anyone stays within the high-rise, even as it turns into Ramadi crossed with The Last of Us. The reason the movie gives us no such reason, of course, is because in the movie's worldview, there is no difference between a blood-soaked abattoir wherein people cannibalistically devour one another and stash their bodies in a swimming pool, and the rest of the world.

High-Rise was, predictably, praised by all the same people who praised Under the Skin and Elysium, because if you want to impress indie film critics, nothing works like claiming they're the only ones that can see the impending downfall of civilization at the hands of vast hordes of people that are not like them, even if you have to dig up the mindset of forty years ago to do it. Being a critic who does not hold the 60s and 70s as some kind of sacred period of true freedom before "the youth" ruined everything, I have a lot less patience with the film. And even if you regard my viewpoint on history and politics as nothing but hot garbage, ask yourselves how much you enjoy the prospect of watching an indie movie in which nobody acts in a comprehensible manner for two and a half hours?

Final Score:  3.5/10

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X-Men: Apocalypse

Alternate Title:  The Same Old Shit

One sentence synopsis:   The awakening of the world's first mutant, who aspires to become a god, forces the X-Men and their enemies to unite to try and stop him.


The Verdict:   I was really hoping that this movie would be excellent, and can you blame me? The first movie of the rebooted series was the incomparable X-Men: First Class, one of the first films I saw for this project of mine, and one of the finest Superhero movies I've ever seen, period. The second film, 2014's Days of Future Past, while not the equal of its predecessor, was still a superb movie, one that merged both the old and the new canons together, and prepared the way for a future of infinite possibility. Combine that with the news that one of my favorite actors of recent years, Oscar Isaac, would be playing Apocalypse himself, and I was stoked for this one.

Of course I shouldn't have been, but I still haven't managed to train myself entirely to give up hope.

X-Men: Apocalypse is a great disappointment, not a disaster or the worst movie ever made or anything so dramatic, but a mediocre movie veering on a bad one that takes the infinite possibility afforded by its predecessors and cast and does exactly nothing with it. That Brian Singer, one of my favorite directors, and a man who directed not only Days of Future Past but also the original X-Men 1 and 2 (to say nothing of things like The Usual Suspects), created this thing only serves to deepen the disappointment for me, as X-Men: Apocalypse is the kind of movie that I assume all superhero movies look like to people who hate superhero movies. Though it retains the same raw materials as the previous films, particularly the services of James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence as the characters of Charles Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique respectively, it has no idea what to do with any of it, relegating Magneto to an one-note off-screen role that employs little of the character's fascinating depths, while giving Mystique nothing to do but exposition and the occasional punch. Only McAvoy gets some actual acting to do, and his part is shortchanged by being stuck on a rock on the outskirts of Cairo for half of the runtime, in the company of Isaac's Apocalypse, who looks like a Luchador, and who exhibits none of the amoral, sinister menace that the comic character evidenced back in the day. Returning roles by Rose Byrne and Nicholas Hoult as Moira McTaggert and Beast are equally useless, as the characters in question have been (in one case literally) prevented from moving forward in any interesting way from the previous movie. But the worst idea relates to Quicksilver, whose glorified cameo in the last movie was one of the greatest things ever committed to film, and for whom the filmmakers had so few ideas that they simply repeat it, almost shot for shot, in this one. The decision to upgrade this character to a supporting cast member could have been fine, if they had bothered to give him any sort of developmental arc. But this is not the movie for such things.

And why not? Because X-Men Apocalypse is simply bloated with too goddamn many characters, and I say that in full recollection of my praise for Avengers 2, which had nearly as many. In addition to all of the returning cast, we have Psylocke, Storm, Nightcrawler, Angel, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Jubilee, Colonel Stryker, to say nothing of the obligatory Wolverine cameo shoehorned into the movie in one of the most transparently crowbarred sequences of recent memory. Attempts are made to give some of these characters life, with mixed results. Former child-star Kodi Smit-McPhee actually does a very serviceable job as my favorite blue German teleporting mutant (Nightcrawler, for those plebeians who don't know), while Game of Thrones' Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) is just embarrassingly unable to embody Jean Grey at all. But ultimately it doesn't matter if any of these actors are able to portray their characters well, because the film gives us so little of substance with any of them. They could all be played by actors of the pedigrees of Lawrence Olivier and Peter O'Toole, and it would likely make very little difference.

Ultimately, I didn't hate X-Men Apocalypse, but it hardly represents what I had in mind when I saw the ending to Days of Future Past. And while I refuse to punish a film for not enacting my exact desires in front of me, I also refuse to have mercy for a film that fails to enact anything of substance whatsoever.

Final Score:  4.5/10

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Weiner

Alternate Title:  Art from Adversity

One sentence synopsis:   Disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner attempts to make a comeback by running for Mayor of New York when another scandal hits him.


The Verdict:  If I live to be a thousand years old, I will never forget Anthony Weiner, the man at the center of one of my favorite scandals of all time. Once a fiery congressman from New York, Weiner's promising career was destroyed in 2011 when it came out that he had been texting pictures of his penis to random women on the internet. The combination of transgression and name were too delicious for anyone to resist, and some of my favorite headlines of all time resulted from this hilarious debacle. So much for Weiner the man. Weiner the film, however, is a movie made two years later, in 2013, chronicling Anthony Weiner's efforts to stage a comeback through the 2013 election for Mayor of New York. And to document his attempt to do just that, Weiner invited documentarians Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg to chronicle his campaign, neither of whom probably knew what was about to happen.

Political campaign documentaries are a dime a dozen nowadays, as every campaign announces that there will be a "behind the scenes" documentary created as they run for office, generally as a way of appearing to be "hip, and with the youths". But the nice side effect of this barrage of documenting is that it means the cameras are on-hand for when everything falls completely to pieces, as happened here. Weiner, you see, was not done with his sex scandal behavior, and midway through the mayoral race, was hit with the revelation that he had continued to text pictures of his penis to anyone with an internet account, including a young woman named Sydney Leathers, who went explosively, wonderfully public with the allegations, a decision which ended with her and Howard Stern attempting to ambush Weiner at his own campaign headquarters on the night of the election, forcing him to take shelter by fleeing through the bathroom of a nearby McDonalds. It is rare, even in this day and age, to be able to watch a trainwreck like this transpire live before our eyes, but this is what Weiner, the film, consists of, the damage control and tearful press conferences, the meetings with shocked staffers and frenzied media sharks, all the glorious schadenfreude of something as stage managed as a modern political campaign misfiring dramatically before our very eyes, it's all here. And things get oh, so wonderfully ridiculous, until at the end, the shell-shocked documentarians are reduced to asking Weiner, in something of a sympathetic tone, "why did you let us film all of this?"

And honestly, it's hard to blame them, documentary ethics be damned, because the fact is that in bearing witness to Weiner and the disasters, all of his own creation, that overtake him in the course of this campaign, one actually begins to feel for the man, not as a punchline or a politician, but a person. A sharp, clearly principled political figure who just happens to also be opportunistic, ambitious, and as dumb as a bag of hammers, Weiner may be a sleazy figure, but over the course of the insanity that erupts in his wake, he starts to feel like a character from a Coen Brothers movie, a semi-coherent guy who fundamentally does not understand why he is where he is, but is attempting in his own way, to make the best of it. We also get to know his wife, Huma Abedin, one of the most powerful people in the Democratic Party, and currently the vice-chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Weiner and Abedin's relationship is... well strained probably doesn't do it enough credit, and feels rather like the arranged political marriage between two up-and-coming young Democrats that it originally was (Bill Clinton officiated their wedding). They speak frankly of having considered separating back when the first scandal hit, and both myself and all of my companions assumed (wrongly as it turns out) that they had divorced in the aftermath. Though they never scream at one another Jerry Springer-style on-camera, there is a palpable tension between husband and wife that feels entirely real, undercut only on rare occasions, such as when Weiner angrily confronts a man who takes him to task for having "married an Arab".

I don't see a lot of documentaries, mostly because I can't stand polemics, but even by the admittedly strange standards of the documentaries I do go and see, Weiner is one of the strangest documentaries I've ever seen, and it definitely profits from it. That it exists at all is a point in favor of the voyeuristic side of political life in this country, something I never thought I'd ever say for any reason. I would hardly call the film a must-see, but for those who have any interest in what it must be like at the center of a maelstrom like the one that Anthony Weiner conjured up for himself, there is no finer resource than this, other than running for office yourself while trying to conceal an addiction to barnyard animals.

Final Score:  7/10

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Popstar:  Never Stop Never Stopping

Alternate Title:  This is Bieberlake

One sentence synopsis:   Connor4Real, formerly of the Style Boyz, attempts to recover from the failure of his second solo album amidst fears of irrelevance.


The Verdict:  If you don't know who the Lonely Island are, then open up a new browser tab to Youtube and go find out. I'll wait.

Back? Good. So having sampled the Lonely Island's wares, what would you say if I told you that Popstar is a full on Spinal Tap-style mocumentary which changes out Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne for Justin Bieber and One Direction. Some of you might, no doubt, run screaming for the hills, but those who do not are in for a treat, because Popstar is goddamn glorious.

Andy Sandberg, SNL and Brooklyn Nine-Nine alum, stars as Connor4Real, a Justin Bieber/Justin Timberlake analogue who was once a member of a group called The Style Boyz, which resembles nothing if not the fake boy band that the protagonist of Rock of Ages was forced to be a part of by his unscrupulous manager. Now a solo act with a massive, MC-Hammer-style entourage (including a Unicorn Trainer), the story, such as it is, involves Connor's second album (Connquest) flopping, sparking a crisis of confidence and ever-more-desperate acts on Connor's part to recapture the limelight, of a sort that would be familiar to watchers of reality television or VH1 documentary shows. If this all sounds familiar, then there's a reason, for we're in solid mockumentary territory here, a cross between Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (typing that title makes me want to set my computer on fire), and a Christopher Guest movie. As such, the plot isn't the point. The point is to pillory everything and anything in the music industry, which means that the only question that matters is whether the movie is funny or not.

Well... yes. Yes it freaking is. Sandberg is accompanied here by Lonely Island veterans Akiva Shaffer (who doubles as the film's director), and Jorma Taccone, playing his former bandmates, the former of which has become an embittered farmer in Colorado (whose woodworking skills recall Billy Joel's "Classical" work), the latter of which has become Connor's DJ, hiding under a helmet that Daft Punk would reject for being gimmicky. All three men are credited as writers, and fill the movie with blink-and-you'll-miss-it in-jokes and gags, such as Connor one-upping Justin Bieber's infamous gaffe at the Anne Frank house (just watch it), or a quick-change act that ends just about as disastrously as such acts can possibly end. All along there are a horde of funny people in support, from Emma Stone, Bill Hader, Sarah Silverman, Mike Birbiglia (you'll live Sleepwalk With Me down someday, buddy), Joan Cusack and Will Arnett (who tries vainly to satirize something as stupid as TMZ), to an unpublishably huge list of cameos from basically every musician ever, including Ringo Starr, Usher, Pharell, Carrie Underwood, Adam Levine, Akon, Snoop Dogg... there's just no end. Highlights for me include Seal (back from palling around with West Asian dictators) getting eaten by wolves, and none other than Martin Sheen punching Sandberg in the face before running around the room chanting "ATTICA! ATTICA!" The songs are no less awesome, from a satire of pro Gay-Rights anthems like Born This Way or Same Love more interested in assuring the audience of the singer's heterosexuality than any message, to an Insane Clown Posse ripoff called "Incredible Thoughts".

Enough. Suffice to say that Popstar, while hardly a movie for everyone (you do kinda need to understand the modern state of Pop Music to get 90% of the jokes) is a hell of a thing, a short, sweet, rapid fire movie that doesn't overstay its welcome and is worth the price of admission. One can always do worse at the movies than that.

Final Score:  7.5/10

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The Man Who Knew Infinity

Alternate Title:  Show Your Work

One sentence synopsis:   Mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan works at Cambridge with English Professor G. H. Hardy during World War 1.


The Verdict:  I want to like Dev Patel. I want to like him because he tries so hard to be likeable, in Chappie, in The Newsroom, in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, he's just a... peppy figure for lack of a better word, and so I suppose it was only a matter of time before he played the brilliant and eager young student struggling to fit in at the prestigious institution of higher learning that has been seen in a thousand movies from Monsters' University to Harry Potter. Most of those movies have a wise old teacher who takes the student under his wing and helps him achieve his potential, and when it comes to wise old teachers, one could do a lot worse than Jeremy Irons, I suppose. And Cambridge is, after all, the ur-example of stodgy old learning institutions steeped in history. So why the hell not?

The Man Who Knew Infinity is based on the real life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an poorly-educated laborer and clerk who also happened to be an intuitive mathematician of staggering productivity and insight, author of thousands upon thousands of wholly self-made theorems, many of which continue to baffle the world today. The film focuses on his life in Cambridge, after having come to the attention of several Mathematics professors there, one of whom (Irons) sponsors him to come to Britain and revolutionize the world of numbers. In Britain, he must deal with all the usual suspects, racism, overt and shuttered, both by bitter draftees on the streets and sneering ponces in the classrooms, a climate and diet that is like nothing he is used to (if I had to eat nothing but British food from the 1910s for five years, I might try to dig back to India with a spoon), and, of course, the rigid codifications of a system that is not kind to intuitive geniuses, and seems to exist only to put young men in their places...

... yeah, so there's nothing really revolutionary here from a plot perspective, and yet I did like The Man Who Knew Infinity. Not as much perhaps as I've liked some other movies this year, but I liked it nonetheless, for the movie does do a few things differently from the typical "smart kid makes good" films you see every so often. I liked, for instance, that Ramanujan's insistence that proofs are a waste of time being forced upon him by a racist western establishment that doesn't "get" the numbers (maaaan), is rewarded in a very un-cinematic way when it turns out that his primary theorem, which he never bothered to mathematically prove, is completely wrong. Having seen roughly a billion movies where proper testing and academic rigor are treated as the last resort of dopey, smelly losers out to crimp the genius main character's style, I appreciate a film that is aware of the fact that Math does indeed have to add up in order to be correct. I liked Patel in the movie, liked his growth from naive student to seasoned Mathematician, liked the frustration and anger he let himself express (not always in the most productive ways) at the racism and the boorishness he was faced with. I liked Jeremy Irons (but then I always do), and I liked Toby Jones, who is finally given a chance to play something other than a weaselly villain.

There are things I didn't like of course, like the obligatory love interest shoehorned into the movie with a crowbar, or the fact that Steven Fry, who got third billing in the movie, has roughly eight seconds of screentime throughout the thing. But those are minor points. The Man Who Knew Infinity is a decent-to-good movie, and if sedate biopics about men who should probably be more famous are your thing, then I doubt you'll have much to complain about here.

Final Score:  7/10



Next Time: We finish off the first half of the year with Part 3 of our roundup.

Spring 2016 Movie Roundup

And now, a note from the General

So over the last few weeks, I've been struggling with competing priorities, an illness or two, and general chaos that circulates at any given moment around here. As many of you have consequently noticed, I have therefore fallen somewhat behind in my weekly reviews of the films that I subject myself to for your amusement. As such, rather than continue to struggle with catching up on the backlog that I have amassed for movies this spring, and consequently render all of Blockbuster season's releases late as well, I have decided that it is best to catch everything up in one fell swoop, by providing capsule reviews of the various films that I have seen over the last month and a half. With luck, these will still provide all of the information that you all require when making determinations about what movies are worth seeing, as well as the standard cathartic enjoyment you all get from my pain and anguish. And so, without further ado, I present to you all:

The General's Post Spring Roundup

The Lady in the Van

Alternate Title:  Downton Garage

One sentence synopsis:    A homeless lady living in a broken-down van parks it in the driveway of a writer's house and stays there for fifteen years.


The Verdict: Let's get things started with a movie none of you have heard of.

Between 1974 and 1989, a woman named Mary Shepherd lived in a dilapidated van on the property of British author Alan Bennett. That... effectively is the plot of the movie before us here, a quintessentially British film from acclaimed director Nicholas Hynter, previously of The Crucible and The Madness of King George. If this sounds like a boring time, I can understand why, but I went to see this one for one reason and one reason alone: Maggie Smith. I said before in my Quartet review that I regard Smith as a gem (this is not a controversial opinion), one of the few actors for whom I will go see a movie largely regardless of its subject matter, and she is, as always, excellent herein, playing a role that could not be more removed from the wizard professors and dowager countesses that she typically portrays on screens large and small. Her character is a dotty old lady of questionable sanity and togetherness, and considerable aggravation, remarked upon as smelling awfully and being utterly ungrateful to those she accepts the charity of or tremendously inconveniences. And yet she gets away with this because her erstwhile landlord (sort of), is Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings), a gay author and playwright who is also one of the most British men alive, and who avoids conflict like no man I've ever seen, either with his neighbors (who are horrified that he has permitted her to take up residence), or with Ms. Shepherd herself (who walks all over him). The film goes so far as to have Bennett spend much of the film talking to a Charlie Kaufman-esque vision of himself (his 'writer' self or some such) who berates him constantly for not taking a more active line with such people as annoy him.

As you can tell, we are dealing with a strange film here, but it all works... mostly, and the artifice is generally capable of disguising the fact that there isn't much to the plot of the story beyond the old woman continuing to exist despite the efforts of the entire neighborhood to will her out of existence. The film does break down at its margins, whether from a completely forgettable turn from Jim Broadbent, playing a crooked policeman who shakes down penniless old women for money (that can't be a terribly lucrative racket), to Cecilia Noble's role as a social worker whose job appears to consist of berating Bennett periodically for not sufficiently permitting the old woman on his property to ruin his life as opposed to performing social work. The film's navel-gazing gets a bit tiresome after a while, but Smith and Jennings are very good in it, separate or together, and as an excuse to watch one of the grand old dames of the cinema work, I've certainly seen worse. Not a film to run out for unless you're desperate or as thrilled with Indie British theater as I occasionally am, but hardly a bad time.

Final Score:  6/10

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Midnight Special

Alternate Title:  ET: The Branch Davidian Cut

One sentence synopsis:   The father of a boy with unexplained powers struggles to hide him from the government and the religious cult he grew up in.


The Verdict: Actors and directors sometimes just hit things off together. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, John Ford and John Wayne, Wes Anderson and a quarter of Hollywood, these pairings have existed since the dawn of movies, and have been responsible for some of the greatest films in existence. And while indie director Jeff Nichols has only made a handful of films in his career to date, he seems to have already found his counterpart in celluloid for the foreseeable future in the form of Michael Shannon, one of my favorite working actors, whom he has directed in most of the movies he has made to date, including 2012's Mud, and the strange, apocalyptic psycho-drama Take Shelter, which was just weird enough to be a work of near-genius. Nichols' trademark has always been of existential uncertainty and gritty violence in a hyper-realistic context, and this time he brings the same style to a genre film, which is a novel idea if nothing else.

Michael Shannon plays Roy, a former member of a religious cult in West Texas that has formed around the pronouncements of his son, Alton, a strange kid who has exhibited unexplained powers of precognition and telekinesis since birth, who spends the movie trying to safeguard his son from the dual threat of the FBI, which is searching for Aldon after he managed to psychically decrypt their satellite communications, and the rest of the cult, who believe that Aldon will herald the rapture in a few days and will stop at nothing to retrieve him. This is the sort of premise that could easily have turned into an action blockbuster, but Nichols keeps things relentlessly close-cropped and focused on Aldon, Roy, Roy's friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton, in one of the first good turns I've ever seen him make), and the people they cross as they try to figure out what is coming, and what role Aldon will play in it. Shot mostly at night, with a claustrophobic and paranoid feel that never crosses the line into thriller territory, the movie is extremely well-made, and Shannon is fantastic in it, as he is in everything I see him in.

Indeed everyone is fantastic in Midnight Special, whether I normally like them or not, from the immortal Sam Shepard as the quiet-spoken leader of the Waco-like cult, to Kirsten Dunst, who has retreated into indie fare for the last decade, playing Alton's estranged mother, to Adam Driver, of Star Wars and Girls, playing an FBI agent trying to put everything together in the wake of the increasingly disturbing events transpiring in Roy and Alton's wake. Unfortunately, the plot is not quite up to the same level, fraying around the edges before collapsing entirely near the end. Nichols' movies always seem to be more interested in the setup than the punchline, but this time he's working with a genre piece, and his inexperience with the conventions of sci-fi shows in an unfocused conclusion that wound up confusing the hell out of me in all the wrong ways. Still, the tone and feel of the film is spot on, and while I wouldn't call Midnight Special one of the best movies I've ever seen or anything, it's a solid enough piece to be worth a look if you have any interest in the indie side of scifi. Keep an eye on this Nichols kid. He's going places.

Final Score:  7/10

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Hardcore Henry

Alternate Title:  I Wanna Be The Guy, The Movie, The Game, The Movie

One sentence synopsis:   A man is revived from death as a cyborg super-soldier, and must save his girlfriend from an evil maniac and his army of killers.


The Verdict:  Experimental cinema is a dangerous place to hang around, but this movie was a concept that I basically had to see. Hardcore Henry, for those who've never heard of it, is a Russian-American action movie produced by semi-legendary Khazakh schlock-meister Timur Bekmambetov, purveyor of such fine films as Wanted (ugh) and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (which... if I'm being honest, has aged a lot better than it should have). The gimmick, this time, is that the entire movie is shot from a first-person perspective, thanks to a pair of GoPro cameras mounted on the heads of a whole series of stuntmen and parkour athletes used to portray the titular Harry. Add in a bunch of game actors and a bunch of action and blood, and we have a concept that could fail miserably, but one that had to be seen regardless.

So does this ludicrous excuse for video-game cinematography actually work? Well... kind of. If (like all right-thinking individuals) you have a problem with Shaky-cam, then this film is not going to please you overmuch, as the first-person camera is frenetic to the point of being honestly distracting for the first hour or so of runtime, and the schizophrenic editing style does the movie no favors in that department either. It's not quite nausea-inducing (though in fairness, I didn't see the movie in 3D), but it certainly made several of the earlier fight sections very, very hard to follow, something not helped by the movie's plot involving crazy, fantastical elements, such as a character (played by Neil Blomkampf's favorite actor Sharlto Copley) being killed and re-incarnated multiple times with no explanation given. As with any kind of shaky-cam-like style, the result is to effortlessly obscure the wonderful work that the director, stunt coordinators, actors, and stuntmen put into producing a visual wonder, wasting much of the enterprise.

And yet... weird as the core conceit and gimmick are, you do get used to it, and by the midway point of the movie, my eyes had adjusted to the frenetic pace and the strange perspective, and fortunately, the midpoint of the film is where first-time director Ilya Naishuller decides to A: Slow the movie down a bit so that we can get some sense of what the hell is going on, and B: Start introducing the real meat of the action in the film, cored around two particular extended sequences, one in an abandoned apartment complex, and another atop a Moscow skycraper. Both of these sequences rock, and are shot with a bit more restraint and maturity to them, resulting in truly orgiastic spectacles of artful violence and death (eventually to the accompaniment of a Queen soundtrack). The overall effect is still a bit video-game-cutscene-like, particularly the final confrontation with the big bad (an inexplicably telekinetic Danila Kozlovsky), but if you're used to the conventions of the genre (and if not, research is in order), then it won't be too distracting. Overall, while I can't call Hardcore Henry an unqualified success, and I certainly don't want its style to sweep through action movies and change everything (though in fairness, anything is better than actual shaky-cam), the movie does justify its existence with a showcase of excellent stuntwork and violent action. Would it have been better as a normal movie? Probably. But then would I have even heard of it?

Final Score:  6.5/10

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The Jungle Book

Alternate Title:  Now With Actual Indians!

One sentence synopsis:   Mowgli the Jungle Boy is menaced by the tiger Shere Khan, and taken to the nearby man-village by his friends Baghera and Baloo for his own safekeeping.


The Verdict:  Twice now, in less than six weeks, I have seen a film wherein Idris Elba voice-acts as a ferocious animal, first as a Cape Buffalo/Stern Police Chief in Zootopia, and now as Shere Khan, the famous man-killing tiger from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories. I have strictly no objection to this state of affairs, of course, as my mood at the cinema rises and falls in no small part based on the amount of Idris Elba I am able to acquire. Nor is Elba alone in this one, as director Jon Favreau (you really should not need me to tell you who that is) has assembled a hell of a voicecast, including Ben Kingsley as Baghera the panther, Bill Murray as Baloo the Bear, Christopher Freaking Walken as King Louis the Gigantopithecus (a gargantuan orangutan), Scarlett Johansson as Kaa the snake (whose role is quite truncated from the 1967 animated film), and a whole slew of cameos and smaller roles for everyone from Lupita Nyong'o and Giancarlo Esposito, to Russell Peters, Sam Raimi, and the late Gary Shandling. Granted, most of these additional voice-roles don't amount to much beyond stunt-casting (though a sight-gag involving Walken's character is to die for), but still.

There've been quite a few versions of the Jungle Book on screen, most of them animated, some not. But among them all, this one stays closer to Kipling's original stories than is typical, combining a couple of the Jungle Book anthology pieces together into a more or less coherent whole, and mixing it with elements from the Disney animated version. Mowgli himself is played by then-10-year-old Neel Sethi, an Indian-American kid who does a... passable job, let's say, if not an inspired one, particularly given that it could not have been easy having to act entirely on a green-screen with puppets and motion-capture icons for sightlines. Sethi is fine, honestly, and I don't like beating on kids for uninspired acting performances anyway, particularly in a children's film where the intended audience will likely not even notice.

What they might notice is the seams between the better-done aspects of the film that are mostly drawn from Kipling's stories, and the... other... sections of the film which are drawn from the animated movie. I love the 1967 film, of course, but the decision to transplant a couple of the songs from the original over into the live action film was not an inspired one, on several levels. For one thing, musicals work under their own logic, especially Disney animated ones, and while you can have a movie full of singing, or a movie that has no singing, it's really difficult to get away with a movie that is mostly non-musical except for a couple of songs awkwardly inserted. None of this is helped by the fact that neither Bill Murray nor Christopher Walken (who get the two songs in the film) can actually sing, something made worse by the fact that I, at least, remember the original songs (Man Like You, and Bear Necessities) quite well, and can compare them to these renditions, which sound like amateur hour at the Lake Woebegone talent contest by comparison. None of this "ruins" the movie or anything, but it does expose the entire procedure as a flawed one, that may not have been thought through sufficiently.

The Jungle Book is a perfectly decent movie, ultimately, but it's not one that I'm going to remember as fondly as its predecessor. But then again, it hardly has to clear that bar in order to be worthwhile.

Final Score:  6/10

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Criminal

Alternate Title:  Paycheck

One sentence synopsis:   A sociopathic criminal has his mind switched with a dead CIA agent so as to stop an anarchist from destroying the world.


The Verdict:  In 1991, Gary Oldman, Kevin Costner, and Tommy Lee Jones all got together with Oliver Stone to make JFK, a ludicrous but extremely well-made movie about the trauma and conspiracy wrangling that attended the JFK assassination. In 2016, all three actors got together with Israeli director Ariel Vromen and perpetual underachiever Ryan Reynolds to make a generic spy movie involving body switching technology. The world is sometimes a cruel place.

I can't pretend that I didn't know what Criminal was likely to be, but a cast like that is something I have a lot of trouble resisting, even if Tommy Lee Jones has made a habit of phoning it in recently, Gary Oldman doesn't seem to read his scripts before selecting them, and Costner... well... I mean I do like Costner more than I probably should, but let us not pretend that he is a great actor or has been in nothing but amazing movies here. Criminal supplements these three veterans with what is, honestly, an excellent turn by Ryan Reynolds, who lights up the screen for five or six minutes before being summarily killed off and removed from the movie for the rest of its run-time, and with respected Spanish actor Jordi Mollà, who plays a radical anarchist straight out of the Mission Impossible 4/5 school of villainy, an evil villain of evil who has no actual motivation beyond evil, despite the movie's almost-desperate efforts to hint at one. It features a lot of shooting and blowing up of things, occasionally with some degree of skill, such as a strange three-way gun battle between the terrorists, the CIA, and a Russian snatch-and-grab team sent in just to complicate things. It also features movie-hacking in all its glory, including the inevitable scene where a hacker causes a submarine to launch a nuclear missile despite the frantic and desperate efforts of the helpless crew to countermand their own computers. I do not understand why it never seems to occur to directors or screenwriters that nuclear submarines are not able to launch their missiles remotely for this very reason.

Ultimately, Criminal is one of those movies that would have been very difficult to write a full-sized review for. Not only is it a bad film, but it is bad in entirely generic, uninteresting ways. By no means is it the worst thing I've ever seen, but that almost serves to make it worse. Criminal is just a generic, boring movie, the likes of which nobody will ever think about ever again, another piece of flotsam to be tossed onto the rubbish heap and forgotten.

Final Score:  4/10

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The Huntsman: Winter's War

Alternate Title:  Upgrade Complete

One sentence synopsis:   The Huntsman must find the evil queen Ravenna's magic mirror before her sister, the Ice Queen of the north, locates and uses it to rule the world.


The Verdict:  Like everyone else in the world, seemingly, I thought that 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman was a film with some good ideas, weighted down by bad actors and bad decisions, resulting in a mediocre experience. And yet here we stand some four years later, with a sequel in-hand to a movie that probably did not deserve one, objectively-speaking. Like its predecessor, it is pretty damn stupid, with a plot that falls to pieces as soon as you look at it for too long, and characters that seem to have been assembled by random sortition. Like its predecessor, it is fairly badly written, passing off the simplest of concepts ("LOVE IS GOOD AND FASCISM IS BAD!") as revolutionary notions that nobody in the audience will have ever thought of (and don't give me the kids' movie excuse here. Not only is this a violent action movie, but even kids are bored of this stuff.) Like its predecessor, it a fair amount of dead weight, as well as some of the worst accents I have ever heard in film (Jessica Chastain's idea of a Scottish accent is staggeringly inept). Like its predecessor, it is consequently not a very good movie.

Unlike its predecessor, I actually really liked it.

So how did this come to pass? Well for one thing, the filmmakers managed to zero in on the elements that worked in the original film (Charlize Theron's madness, Chris Hemsworth's charisma, the scenery), and ruthlessly eliminated everything else, reducing Sam Claflin (whom I liked in The Hunger Games, but not in Snow White) to a cameo role and eliminating Kristen Stewart, the previously-titular Snow White, entirely. Given that Stewart is one of the worst actresses alive, that's an immediate improvement, but they doubled down on the matter by replacing her with Emily Blunt, a wonderful actress whom I adore, playing the role of the Ice Queen in a role half-derived from Frozen and half from Conan the Barbarian. Put simply, replacing Kristen Stewart with Emily Blunt is like replacing Adam Sandler with Lawrence Olivier, to say nothing of the fact that the movie supplements this addition with Jessica Chastain, an actress I have said many unkind things about, but who, I am beginning to realize, is not so much a bad actress as one of limited range. In movies like Interstellar and Zero Dark Thirty she is miscast, as she cannot convey serious business to any real effect. But when called upon to deliver campy, over-the-top snarling-and-fighting sorts of fantasy performances, she's actually much better than I was prepared to expect. Toss in a handful of legitimately funny comic relief supporting characters (Dwarves all) played by Nick Frost, Alexandra Roach, and Sheridan Smith, focus heavily on Theron and Blunt being crazy in all the right ways, and in some honestly pretty legit fantasy action, and the resulting movie, while probably not objectively "good", is actually a surprising amount of fun. I not only liked it, I liked it considerably more than its predecessor. And that, dear friends, is not something I ever expected to say about a sequel to a Kristen Stewart vehicle, but this is the world in which we live.

Final Score:  6.5/10

o-o-o-o-o

Batman v Superman:  Dawn of Justice


Alternate Title:  ...


One sentence synopsis:   ...


The Verdict:  ...

...

...

...

...

...

....... no.

No... you know what? This one... this one's gonna need a full review....



Next Time: We examine DC's most recent... offering.

The Interview

Alternate Title:  A Jolly Jaunt in the People's Paradise

One sentence synopsis:    A shallow television personality and his producer/best friend go to North Korea to interview Kim Jong Un.


A Note From Management:  We are currently attempting to determine what happened here and how this review came about. No offense is intended towards anyone with enough military hardware to make credible threats. We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused. Those responsible for sacking those previously responsible for incidents such as these have themselves been sacked.


Things Havoc liked:  I have never been a great fan of James Franco, nor of Seth Rogan, but in all fairness, last year's "This is the End" was riotously funny despite those two doing more or less exactly the things I have disliked them for in the past. As such, I had rather ambivalent feelings about The Interview, appearing as it did to contain everything I hated, yet required to take certain things on faith. It appeared for a while that my ambivalence on the part of this film was going to be rendered irrelevant, after North Korean hackers threatened Sony with assorted violent retributions if they did not pull the release of the film, but fortunately, since no major company would ever agree to a policy that cowardly, debased, and counter-productive, I was given the opportunity to witness what is surely, a part of history.

What can be said in the film's favor then? To begin with, like This is the End before it, The Interview is a film made with care. Scathing pillory is not something that rewards sloppiness, and as the previous film knew precisely what the sort of Hollywood excess they were skewering was. This film, similarly, has done its homework, down to details such as the composition of flower bundles handed out to foreign dignitaries on the tarmac of Pyongyang, the songs sung by the obligatory identically-dressed masses of schoolchildren drafted for such occasions, and the size and scale of the rawhide whips used to beat the political prisoners in North Korea's mountain prison camps (the lowland ones have a different climate, different barometric pressure, and consequently, different loyalty-enforcement instruments). Particular praise should go to Randall Park, whom I've not seen before, but who here has the unenviable task of portraying the Dear Leader Kim Jeong Un. Park's portrayal is masterful, particularly the first interview, where he smilingly and charmingly disarms our bumbling heroes with imported liquor and classical music as his staff hurriedly cover up the bodies of the young women he raped to death that morning (I'm told this actually happened during a meeting with the Chinese Ambassador last year, forcing the embarrassed diplomat to spend fifteen minutes appreciatively admiring the floral patterns on the carpet to avoid looking up). In the second interview, a more intentionally hurried affair wherein the journalists surprise Kim in the middle of one of his infamous (and CIA-attested) goat-orgies along with North Korea's senior military staff, Park manages to deliver a chillingly calm and rational defense of his regime's policies despite the ball-gag, and even contrives to order his harem girls to continue administering the electric shocks to his genitals, all without losing his temper or raising his voice. It's a performance that could not have been any easier to produce than anything Christian Bale has ever done, and credit must be paid to Park for his masterful display of the craft.

And yet the film, to my surprise, does not restrict itself to skewering the admittedly low-hanging fruit of North Korea's ludicrous regime. Rogan and Franco, Hollywood insiders though they are, simply cannot restrict themselves from dealing harshly with the materialistic world around them. Guy Pierce, playing Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman Michael Lynton, turns in a role I regard as his best (admittedly not a particularly high bar), having gained over two hundred pounds for the role and agreeing to have what is claimed to be pig feces (I hope, for his sake, it was merely chocolate) smeared over his face and mouth six or seven times throughout the runtime. Co-chairman Amy Pascal (played by Jennifer Garner, at last having found a role I like) is meanwhile depicted as pouring over the backlog of Sony's film library with a microscope looking for anything that might insult someone. The scene where she dances drunkenly around a bonfire consuming the master tapes of Casablanca is a standout bit of work from an actress I had long suspected had no actual talent within her. But the pick of the lot has got to be Vincent D'onofrio, who is a changed man playing Sony's President Doug Belgrad. Sweating grotesquely, D'onofrio here lets himself look far worse than anything that ever happened in Men in Black, fauning over everyone nearby with a sleazy, mincing mien that turns the stomach and the ear. And yet this is plainly the intended-for effect, as director Evan Goldberg combs the depths of depravity to portray this man in the most hideous, grotesque manner possible. I was not prepared for the graphic, hardcore snuff-and-sex scene which D'onofrio subjects himself to near the end of the film, and while I intellectually know that the flames of the butaine lighters used to torture the smuggled children were all CGI or other movie fakery, I have to report that the sequence is incredibly disturbing to watch, enough to put one off Sony films for a good long while.

Things Havoc disliked:  Not everything can be perfect of course, not with a subject matter like North Korea, the most secretive regime on the face of the planet. For example, I could not help but notice in the aforementioned goat orgy sequence that the goats in question were clearly Thuringians, something I can probably forgive given that the Dear Leader's absolute proclivity towards the similarly-appearing Black Zhongwei goats is known only to a few scholars of obscure zoophilias. Similarly, the rate of fire of the Chinese type-81 Squad Machine gun is approximately 700 rounds per minute, too slow for a trio of the guns to kill literally every one of the three or four thousand political prisoners we see lined up for the mass sacrifices intended to accompany Kim's birthday celebrations in less than a minute of work, even with pinpoint accuracy. As to the sequence wherein the Sony board of directors lines up to perform acts of hardcore felatio on Kim's senior ministers, I can only report that I am gratified that no crude gay jokes were hurled their way during the course of the scene, as such homophobic remarks have become truly passe in the modern culture of Hollywood.

Otherwise, the only criticism I can level at the film is really a simple lack of ambition. I know this seems a strange thing to throw at a movie produced by Seth Rogan of all people, someone known for thoughtless comedies like The Neighbors or Seth and Miri Make a Porno, but the base fact is that after the first half hour of the movie and its shameless expose of the regime and the film industry's sins, I did expect to see more. A nod towards the North Korean policy of generational guilt would have been nice. While the seven-year old girl we see Kim torture to death with barbed wire is hinted at having been the victim of such a policy, something a bit more explicitly called out would have not gone awry. Similarly, the all-too-brief sequences of mass starvation are undercut by the crude comedy surrounding it, leading to the uncomfortable feeling that we are intended to laugh at the victims of this regime instead of pity them.


Final Thoughts:  That said, I doubt seriously that was the intention, as nobody capable of making a movie this daring, this fearless, and this filled with scathing critique is capable of actually harboring such infantile and awful concepts. One might from there accuse the filmmakers of themselves becoming mouthpieces of one of the most evil regimes on the planet, chilling the expression of free speech for decades to come, and actively seeking to oppress and persecute anyone who dares rock the boat against a manifest evil such as North Korea. Such a claim would be laughable however, as Sony has proven themselves the stalwart champions of free speech and common decency, persisting in calling a spade a spade no matter who tries to intimidate them, letting all audiences see the movie that, while no masterpiece, is a fine reminder of the fact that in a free country, we have the right to be stupid when we wish to.

My hat is off to you, Sony. You have redeemed my faith in the medium of film.

Final ScoTHIS IS AN INTOLERABLE ATTACK ON DEAR LEADER!  WE DECLARE IMMEDIATE WAR!  ANYONE WHO READS THIS REVIEW WILL SUFFER TEN THOUSAND 9/11S AND HAVE THEIR CHILDREN ENSLAVED!  PRAISE TO DEAR LEADER!