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Saturday, March 21, 2015

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Divergent Series: Insurgent" (PG-13-Lionsgate - 1 hr, 59 mins)

Directed by Robert Schwentke
Written by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman,
and Mark Bomback
Alo Party Peoples.

Here we go again. Willed into existence in the wake of The Hunger Games becoming a worldwide phenomenon, Divergent was one of the most frustrating films of 2014. It starred Shailine Woodley as an outspoken teenage heroine in a vaguely dystopian future society, who discovers that she is the one special snowflake that can save them all from an allegorical caste system that holds them in bondage. (If you've heard that enough times to be bored, I could not agree more.)

The thing that set Divergent apart, sort of, was that while other YA fare such as The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Harry Potter to some extent - or even the genre's great-granddaddy The Catcher In The Rye - appealed to socially awkward teenagers through having protagonists that felt trapped in a long-standing societal order that didn't quite understand them, Divergent took it a step further by arranging its dystopian hellscape according to the pecking order of a high-school cafeteria. To wit, after a vague but incredibly destructive war, society has holed up in what's supposed to be Chicago, and divides itself into 'Factions' roughly aligned with virtues and occupations deemed essential to a functioning society. You've got the Jock Tribe (Dauntless/soldiers), the Nerd Tribe (Erudite/engineers, I think), the Hippie Tribe (Amity/farmers), the Teacher's Pet Tribe (Candor/administrators), the Dropout Tribe (Faction/home-less), and the Home Ec. Tribe (Abnegation/lawmakers).

That last one is the birth-faction of our heroine Tris, but she's never quite fit in with them. Once she goes up to the not-Sorting Hat on her sixteenth birthday, she discovers for a fact that (gasp!) she doesn't fit neatly into any of the Factions, and is instead a Divergent, and possesses all five virtues at once. (Wouldn't 'Convergent' make more sense as a name for all five traits existing in one person?) Because the state considers a varied skill set to be a threat to the social order, she chooses the Jock Tribe, they get used as henchmen in a conspiracy by the Nerd Tribe to take power, she thwarts that plan and escapes on a train headed far, far away from Future Dystopia No. 437.

The thing that made Divergent more than just a bad movie, and in retrospect probably what got it so high on my Worst of the Year list, isn't just that it's insulting how blatantly it panders to my particular age range. (Seriously, I'd like to think that teenagers are smart enough to demand better than this) Nor is it just that it's badly acted and looks worse, but that it's actual conception of social cliques among youth is dying fast in the Information Age.

In the Information Age, nerds have become jocks that happen to root for a fandom instead of a football team, and they can be just as toxic, exclusionary and intolerant if not more so. (Look up GamerGate if you want proof of that) In the Information Age, things that used to be staples of geek-dom; comic book superheroes, video games, high fantasy epics, etc., are now so close to being mainstream in the form of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, smartphone games and Game of Thrones respectively, that the distinction is practically archaic. In the Information Age, even the once ironclad division of musical tastes has gone away. Thanks to the MP3 and the Internet, everyone listens to everything and it's become normal.

The once clear boundaries separating social-cliques of the late 20th' Century are fast becoming obsolete in the 21st' Century, and it would be amazing if one of the authors of the dominant literary trend of that century recognized this by trying to create a different sort of dystopia. Especially since "Social structures are an arbitrary construct of human authorities that don't really exist" is more often than not the point of their multi-volume adolescent angst-fests...

...Two Hours Later...

... Insurgent picks up a few months later with Tris and company living among the Hippie Tribe to hide from the system, which has been fully taken over by the Nerd Tribe in between movies. (Didn't they stop the coup in the first one?) The Nerd Tribe's leader has found a MacGuffin Box from before the war that supposedly contains a way to solve the Divergent problem for good, but it requires one in order to open it, so the city has been placed under martial law as an excuse to hunt down any and all Divergents. When the system catches up with them, they realize that the only way to escape it is to tear it down, and form an alliance with the Dropout Tribe to take down the kinda-sorta Objectivist Nerd Tribe.

(Sidenote- There was a minor thematic line of "Smartness Leads To Arrogant Dickery" in the first one, but it's more apparent here. Our heroes are as dumb as a sack of hammers, and the villains are explicitly stated to be society's brightest minds. - End Sidenote)

While Divergent was a fusion of Hunger Games and Twilight, i.e. it's a dystopian future but with a romance story as it's primary focus, Insurgent is much more of a straight-forward action film, and it shows. They clearly got clearance for a bigger budget, and they're ridiculously eager to show it off with big detailed sets, and big elaborate FX sequences, and big sweeping shots, and a marketing campaign focusing on IMAX presentation meant to show off all that awesome big-ness. Unfortunately, the sets are empty and blandly designed, the effects would have been state-of-the-art in 2002 maybe, on television, and the camerawork- has actually improved from the first one since IMAX cameras are incompatible with shaky-cam.

The acting, which may have salvaged some of this, is almost uniformly terrible. Theo James is seemingly incapable of emoting, Ansel Elgort has left his Manic-Pixie-Dream-Boy charm on the set of The Fault In Our Stars, Miles Teller comes closest to a good performance, bringing some of his flippancy from Whiplash to the show, Kate Winslet gets nothing to do as the villain other than look menacingly upon efforts to open the MacGuffin Box, but the worst performance by far comes from Shailine Woodley. I like her as an actress, she's been good elsewhere, but she's at her best when she's can crack some jokes, which Insurgent's heavy-handed melodramatic screenplay sadly never lets her do.

The screenplay is atrocious. The characters make no sense, they either get one personality trait or no personality traits, our lead is practically a Mary-Sue, the plot is shoddy logic stacked on coincidence stacked on deus ex machina, and the world-building is shoddy at best and nonsensical at worst. For example, the factions are supposedly based around personality traits, but anyone can choose to enter any faction. How is the varied skillset of a Divergent supposed to be out of the ordinary if there's frequent unregulated inter-faction mixing going on? (Is it just a crime to have more than one personality trait?) Why is a society built to achieve maximum efficiency leaving all these ruins filled with useful building material lying around? Why is that society using 17th' Century farming equipment for food production to sustain a population at modern levels? If you poke around at the seams even the tiniest bit, the whole illusion just falls apart.

From terrible writing to wooden acting, horrid production design taken from a Build-Your-Own-Fascist-State Kit, and terrible direction marinating all of it, the Divergent Series' second verse is the same as the first. The song goes on and on, my friends, and it never, never ends....

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'Cinderella' (PG - Disney - 1 hr, 52 mins.)

Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Written by Chris Weitz
Alo Party Peoples.

Ever since around the start of the New Tens, the Disney Empire has been back on top of the world. (Not that they ever really left on a financial level, but they've got their pride back now.) The ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe project prints money hand-over-fist and has become the envy of... every other entity involved in blockbuster film making.. Their animation department has come out of its post-Renaissance 2000s dark age with a vengeance, and is slowly taking the once mighty Pixar's place as America's gold standard for the medium. (At least on film, they're a bit less prevalent on television.)

The big trend of their most recent golden age seems to be taking a sledgehammer to the post-war golden-age before Walt's death and to the money-printing princesses of the Disney Renaissance. From Frozen assaulting the idea of love at first sight while stating that true love need not be romantic, to Maleficent also doing that while being a shockingly dark allegorical rape-revenge film. After seeing that I was intrigued by the idea of a live-action version of Cinderella, which is the archetypal Disney princess movie.

Two Hours Later...

I probably should not be surprised that this turns out to be a rather straight-forward retelling of Cinderella, it's a family movie from Disney, of course it's going to stay in a land far, far away from anything controversial. But if they turned Sleeping Beauty into a story of recovering from sexual assault, then surely Cinderella becomes about domestic abuse and/or dysfunctional families, right? But no, this new version from Kenneth Branagh is more interested in reconstructing the Disney fairy tale after Frozen and Maleficent had a wonderful time tearing it down. Telling the story of Lily James as a young peasant woman that is horribly abused by Cate Blanchett as her stepmother and stepsisters Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger after her father's untimely death. One day the local king holds a ball and invites all the maidens of the kingdom, only for her overseer to forbid her from going, prompting Helena Bonom Carter as her fairy godmother to dress her up for the ball.

In keeping with the arch, dream like beats of the fairy tales that inspired it, the film looks and feels in tone and texture like a live-action cartoon. From the lavishly designed and decorated sets, to the just exaggerated enough costumes (the dress is actually one of the less impressive outfits on display) and even more exaggerated makeup, to every member of the cast giving professionally embarrassing but compulsively watchable performances. Cinderella is probably the best looking film of 2015 so far. The sets are wonderful, the camerawork is outstanding, the costume design is Oscar caliber, I just wish as much attention to detail went into the script. It isn't bad, far from it. In fact, for exactly what it is Cinderella is a really damn good film. It foregoes the dark revisionism of Maleficent or the pumped-up epic fantasy of the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland in favor of getting back to basics, and comes off as utterly charming as a result.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B




Saturday, March 7, 2015

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'CHAPPiE' (R - Sony Pictures - 2 hrs, 0mins.)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Written by Neill Blomkamp and
Terri Tatchell
Way back in 2007, Peter Jackson and then newcomer Neil Blomkamp were set to make a movie out of the Halo video game franchise that never came to fruition. Left with some time and cash on their hands, they decided to turn Blomkamp's independent short film Alive in Joburg into a full length feature. The result was District 9, which took off with both audiences and critics alike, and even got a Best Picture nomination from the Academy. (Which almost never happens for genre films.) Everybody wanted to see what this fresh-faced new auteur talent would do next.

What Blomkamp did next was piss away most of that good will on Elysium, an awkward hard-left polemic on American immigration policy and wealth disparity dressed up as allegorical sci-fi that highlights his biggest problem as a film maker. Even if he's one of the better directors working today, at least from a technical standpoint, as a writer Neill Blomkamp has yet to grasp that subtlety does not involve sledgehammers.

(I mean, just look at that poster! It's hilariously on-the-nose, and I doubt that was intentional.)

Neill Blomkamp is like a hybrid of Andrew Niccol and the Wachowskis, but if you sucked out any and all skill with words. He has Niccol's detailed world building and desire to use the fantastic as a lense to explore real-world issues, and the Wachowskis' big out there sci-fi concepts realized through millions of dollars in CGI. But he can never make the two mix in a satisfying way, and his constant bludgeoning of the audience with heavy-handed political points keeps his films from working either as serious drama or as crowd pleasing spectacle. Which is a shame since he really knows how to tell a story with pictures, he just doesn't know how to come up with a story to tell...

Two Hours Later

...until now. I'm pretty sure I just watched a hard-R Pixar movie, but I mean that in the best possible way. I can't believe I'm saying this, but CHAPPiE is actually pretty good. It's certainly Neill Blomkamp's best film, and that's because he's dropped almost any pretense. Despite being set in a near-future Johannesburg where the police force has been almost entirely replaced with emotionless robots to control high crime rates, there's no sociopolitical messages to monger this time. That lets Blomkamp focus on doing what he's always done best, wringing pathos out of each and every expertly arranged shot.

It's near-future Johannesburg, the police use robots called 'scouts' as field agents, and our focus is on Dave Patel as Deon Wilson, a programmer for Tetravaal, the company responsible for manufacturing the scouts. He's managed to make true artificial intelligence, but Sigourney Weaver's CEO won't let him test it on a company dime, so he steals a damaged scout to use as a test subject. Unfortunately, he's kidnapped by South African gangsta' rap act Die Antwoord playing gangsters Ninja and Yolandi to pay off a debt, and is forced to hand over the robot to them. Once they find out he's the scout's creator, they force him to upload the AI into it, dubbing him Chappie and using him for their heists.

CHAPPiE's central conceit seems to be positing Deon and the gang as two different kinds of adoptive parents. Chappie is a child, and incredibly eager to please, and he's torn between Deon teaching him to embrace creativity, and the forbidden fruit allure of Die Antwoord's dangerous gangsta' antics. As played by Sharlto Copley via some top notch motion capture, Chappie also questions why Deon, who he calls his 'maker' put him in a body with a damaged battery that's doomed to run out of power in a few days, at one point asking him "Why did you make me so I could die?" Blomkamp is just as unsubtle as ever, but this time it comes off as endearing instead of pretentious since he's just trying to make you feel emotions for Chappie, who is essentially Baymax mixed with ET in terms of onscreen presence.

(Incidentally, any kids that sneak into the theater are going to fall in love with this movie.)

If CHAPPiE has one very serious problem, it's that Blomkamp may be trying to do too many things at once. You could work an entire movie out of Ninja and Yolandi trying to raise the robot, or Deon's blossoming god complex, or an entirely different big sci-fi idea that comes up at the very end which probably should have been saved for a sequel or a different film, but that's mostly nitpicking since the parts that work, Chappie's slow discovery of his own humanity, work like gangbusters.

CHAPPiE is actually pretty awesome. It will be better a year from now once some random kid puts a bunch of money shots set to an inspirational pop ballad on YouTube, but for now it's a pleasant surprise and worth seeing, but I'd wait for DVD instead of seeing it in a theater.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B