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Sunday, November 29, 2015

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Big Short": Part Docudrama, Part History Lesson, All Amazing

The Big Short teaser poster.jpg
Directed by Adam McKay
Written by Adam McKay and
Charles Randolph
(R - Paramount - 2 hrs, 10 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

This is not a politics site. If you see me doing election coverage here, feel free to punch me in the face. It isn't like I don't have political opinions, anyone that follows me on Twitter knows that's not the case, but that's not the thing that determines how I rate a movie. Like the man said, "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it's about it." Normally this isn't that huge an issue here, but when you're reviewing a movie about the lead-up to the Great Recession, there is no way to avoid talking about politics.

My appraisal of The Big Short is not based on its agenda or my agenda. My appraisal of The Big Short is based on it being a well directed, extremely well acted, forcefully well made film that has a compelling point to make, presents the facts as it understands them to back it up, and does so in a consistently engaging way that makes something as byzantine and obtuse as the housing bubble seem like the greatest heist in history.

It's like a Michael Moore movie if he wasn't a borderline propogandist that made his entire side look either insuffrable or insane. Where Moore starts with a conclusion and makes shit up to justify it, The Big Short does the reasearch and then comes to the conclusion that the housing market collapsed because of systemic fraud. It's part docudrama and part economic history lesson, and it's all amazing.

But it's the kind of amazing that is very difficult to write about. You almost have to see it to know what I'm talking about, it takes a story about bankers and stocks and mortgages and stuff that's all very complicated and dull, and makes that very complicated dullness part of its point. When a system is so intricately dense and immensely important but at the same time so mindnumbigly uninteresting to the layman, it's not only prime for corruption, it's practically designed for it. 

So says Christian Bale as Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager that looks into the mortgage security industry and discovers that the supposedly sturdy housing market has beome a bottomless pit of fraudulent investment. That when people haven't paid anything to own their house, they don't feel particularly invested in it, so they don't pay their mortgage, so he decides to short the market, essentially betting that it will fail, something that eventually gets out to other stock investors, waiting for the market to go south.

The truly remarkable thing about The Big Short is that it makes something as intentionally convoluted as the housing bubble feel simple, shifting between docudrama and history lesson as it enthusiastically presents a matter of fact account of what a mortgage backed security is, how it was a sound idea when it started, and that it was slowly corrupted over the decades as the lenders became increasingly lax about who they were lending to. It effortlessly jumps from meetings in board rooms explaining the collapse in terms of Jenga blocks to ominous shots of McMansions looming like icebergs over the average home buyer to Selena Gomez and an economist explaining insurance on securities in a casino. 

I can already see people decrying The Big Short as a left-wing screed about regulations, when I told my father that it was about the housing market he immediately assumed that it was - and I can only imagine what happens once it starts screening for the general public around Christmas - but its ultimate point is strikingly non-partisan. That fraud is not only morally wrong, it's unsustainable in the long run. If that counts as a left wing screed, then call me a Marxist.

Bottom line, The Big Short is one of the best films of the year, and if nothing else you should go see it so you can have an informed opinion when someone immediately cries "liberal agenda" when it gets a slew of nominations at this year's Oscars.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 5/5

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2":Thank God It's Over

Directed by Francis Lawrence
Written by Peter Craig and Danny Collins
(PG-13 - Lionsgate - 2 hrs, 17 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Setting my thoughts about its legion of imitators aside for the moment, I get why people like The Hunger Games, or at least I think I do. Strong female heroine? Great. Encouraging young audiences to think about systemic inequality and the effects of perpetual war on society and the power of media narratives to reshape society? Great. Doing so as a big multimedia franchise with broad appeal that can reach as many people as possible? Indispensable. Those are all good things, all admirable goals, all things that I can respect Hunger Games for trying to do, but that doesn't mean that I like them as movies. Like the man said, "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it", and The Hunger Games has mostly failed in execution.

The first film is okay, but it's surprisingly cheap for a high profile release like this and it starts the baffling decision to strip Katnjss of her interior monologue from the books, meaning that huge chunks of it are just watching Jennifer Lawrence mope around the middle of the woods. Catching Fire is better by virtue of abandoning shaky cam for the most part, but it's mostly more of the same, and Mockingjay Part 1 stretches maybe thirty minutes of actual plot into two and a half hours of moping around a bunker for no reason other than splitting the final installment in half, a decision that has doomed Part 2 to die of thirst in a desert of mediocre anti-climax.

It's sort of ironic, the two Mockingjay films are easily the biggest of these movies, in terms of scope, in terms of themes, the studio even let them spend enough money to almost look like a theatrically released film instead of the direct-to-TV cheapness of the rest of the series. The games are over, and the war to free Panem has reached its peak. Katniss Everdeen has been made into the Mockingjay, the symbolic firebrand of the revolution, and as such she's chafing at leadership's insistence that she stay away from the actual fighting. They've almost taken the Capitol, and ever since finding out that they'd brainwashed her co-Games survivor Petta to hate her, she's been motivated to take up the "Girl on Fire" mantle for real and sneaks off to lead the siege of the Capitol herself. (just in case the allusions to Joan of Arc were too subtle for you)

Taken together, the two Mockingjay films are the best of the series, their action is harrowing, and unlike anyone else in the YA game, it actually has an effect on the people doing the shooting. (Seriously, this barely qualifies as a PG-13) Namely, that Katniss barely survived being a media puppet for one regime, and becoming one again but for her own side - as reflected by the Capitol gamemakers having turned their own city into an arena to hold back the invasion - nearly breaks her, and Jennifer Lawrence plays that spectacularly. But the same thing that turned Part 1 into a near unwatchable slog comes back to bite Part 2 in the ass. Since the final installment was split in half, this one feels less like an epic finale to four years of buildup and more like a feature-length cutscene from any number of indistinct military shoot-em-ups.

Then again, in some ways it doesn't matter. Like most franchises, you've either been a fan of Hunger Games from the beggining and you'll see this no matter what, or you've never cared and you're definitely not starting now. I could have spent this entire column ranting about the Republicans' response to the Syrian refugee crisis, and it would have exactly as much impact on the box office returns of this movie. I'm just glad that the dystopia craze it started is finally dying down, but if you love Hunger Games, then go see it, you'll probably get a lot more out of it than I did, but everyone else just shouldn't bother. 

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Spectre": The Wayward Ghost of a Franchise

Directed by Sam Mendes
Written by John Logan, Neal Purvis,
Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth
(R - Sony - 2 hrs, 30 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

I haven't loved the Craig-era James Bond movies. Don't get me wrong, Daniel Craig is great in the part, and Casino Royale is a genuinely great action film, but this incarnation of the British secret agent has been struck with an identity crisis since the beginning. The studio knew that they couldn't let the property end with Die Another Day, they knew that they could make huge amounts of money off of a reboot, but they didn't quite know what that reboot should look like, so it's changed every time.

Casino Royale is essentially a Nolan Batman-ized version of the property, Quantum of Solace is a half-rate Jason Bourne wannabe, and neither of them really feel like James Bond movies. They are movies that have a guy named James Bond in them, there's a difference. However, Skyfall is still the best one of these, managing to combine the more serious, grounded approach of the reboot with the pulp-action sensibilities of the franchise's Connery-era golden age, and promising much better things to come in the future.

Spectre, unfortunately, scuttles that promise in favor of a slow, lazy, unfocused slog of an action film that recalls the worst of the late 90s, already one of the worst periods in action movie history. Spectre is the wayward ghost of a franchise (just look at how miserable Daniel Craig is on that poster) shuffling along on its last breath, going through the motions and hoping that nobody notices the fact that this version of Bond is running out of steam.

After the events of the last film, and a pre-credits action scene that reeks with envy of Mission: Impossible, Bond is in deep shit because his antics are making the 00' program look increasingly anachronistic and dangerous, so it's being scrapped in favor of drones and a "digital ghost" to monitor the world's communications. But he decides to further endanger the program by heading off to Rome and discovers SPECTRE, a secret organization responsible for the villains of the last three movies that's using them as justification for the world's governments to sign onto sweeping surveillance measures they can tap into. (yes, exactly like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but Spectre isn't fit to shine its shoes)

Where films like, say, Crimson Peak or Pacific Rim embrace convention because they sincerely love their genre and want to be the purest expression the form that they can be, Spectre embraces convention because it's lazy and can't be bothered to do otherwise. It ticks off every spy movie trope and cliche in the book, soullessly moving through action scene, meeting, undercover work, action scene, action scene, bang the Bond girl, secret lair, action scene. It's "climactic" showdown hinges on not one, but two digital timers. I'd call it an Austin Powers script with all the jokes cut out, but it's so grim, joyless and self serious that it could never be mistaken for comedy.

It doesn't even have good or even memorable action scenes, the one thing that even the worst Bond films have managed to provide. The opening action scene takes a fistfight in a helicopter flying over a Day of the Dead festival and somehow makes it not exciting in the slightest. A car-chase with an airplane slowly falling apart in a mad dash down a mountain is watered down into tedium by terrible editing. A brawl on a train with Dave Bautista as a henchman (who, to be fair, is the one good thing in the movie), is wrecked by Bourne-esque shaky cam, and is immediately followed by a passionless sex scene with one of the least-interesting Bond girls ever.

Daniel Craig still has one more Bond movie on his contract, so unless Spectre absolutely tanks, which is unlikely, we're getting at least one more movie with this version of James Bond. Which is a problem, because at this point its become clear that this series just doesn't have any idea where it's going. Spectre just plain isn't a James Bond movie, it's a movie with a guy named James Bond in it.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5