Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Race"

Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Written by Joe Shrapnel
and Anna Waterhouse

(PG-13 - Focus Features - 2 hrs, 14 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Race feels like a movie that could have been plotted by a machine, that's not a criticism as much as it's an observation. If you've seen one other inspirational sports movie in your life and you have any familiarity with the story of Jesse Owens, then you know what to expect from Race; it has the tone you'd expect, the look you'd expect, all the beats and scenes and big moments you'd expect. It only really exists so that the population of perpetually overworked grade school teachers can have one more movie to pop in the DVD player during Black History Month, but as far as these things go it's near the top end of such fare.

Jesse Owens led a long and interesting life, but Race focuses on the thing he's most famous for, running for the US Olympic Track and Field Team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, winning four gold medals and shattering ideas of white supremacy in the process. Even if you've never heard of Jesse Owens before, just from that you should have an idea of what to expect; racial hardship, uneasy teammates becoming friends and allies, unsure crowds slowly coming over to his side, it doesn't do any of these things badly, it does them quite well, but aside from being the only high profile retelling of Jesse Owen's life story, it doesn't really do much to set itself apart from the glut of inspirational sports movies.

I can't think of any reason that someone needs to run out and see Race unless you're the kind of person that goes to see every inspirational sports movie, and if you are then you've already made up your mind and you don't care what I or anyone else has to say about it. But for everyone else, let's call it a competent achievement and a noble effort that succeeds on it's own terms without any major problems.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Deadpool" Your Father's Superhero Movie

Directed by Tim Miller
Written by Rhett Resse and Paul Wernick

(R - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 48 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Deadpool shouldn't work as the main character of anything. Pretty much his only distinguishing trait is that he's a snarky jackass that can't die no matter what you do to him; he's a Looney Tune, and there's a reason that those generally don't last more than a few minutes. He's a comic relief distraction with a very specific shtick, and that shtick gets old fast.

Fortunately, Deadpool realizes that it can only really be a comic distraction, and thus it embraces that and becomes one of the most comic-booky films in recent memory, the entire story is that the Merc' with a Mouth is chasing down a bad guy, and he teams up with a couple of X-Men guest stars to find him. Really, that's it. All that stuff in the trailers with a red suited human cartoon spouting off really corny one-liners while slaughtering people is confined to two big action scenes at the very beginning and the very end, and they've been expanded out to a two hour movie via flashbacks explaining how Wade Wilson became Deadpool, and why he's trying to kill these specific people. The result is that we can feel like Deadpool is our focus the whole time, while also making sure that he doesn't stick around long enough for the shtick to get old.

It's all so much really crude, really cheesy Gen-X sarcastic snark, which makes a lot of sense for a movie that's been in development hell since just after the first X-Men movie that was only recently revived by positive reception on the part of thirty-something comic fans to leaked test footage, but the comic energy is infectious, and I can't help but respect how completely it embraces it's weird little niche. It all comes down to Ryan Reyonld's performance, he is perfect for the title character both in personality and on the meta level that he's doing a dirty sendup of the now standard superhero film; a form he tried once before to disastrous results that Deadpool is more than happy to make fun of "Just don't make the supersuit green, or all -and vein-y." If you're wondering what Colossus is doing here, the idea is that he's a stand-in for the morally upright superhero who has become fond of Deadpool for some reason and keeps encouraging him to drop the profanity and bloodshed to become more conventionally heroic, but the real standout in the cast is Brianna Hildebrand as X-Men trainee Negasonic Teenage Warhead. It's just short of inspired to include someone that "gets" Deadpool's thing... but doesn't find it particularly amusing, and Reynolds plays off her spectacularly as Deadpool is both frustrated and invigorated by a "kid" that's already too old for his shtick.

Deadpool is a "mature" superhero movie, and it's funny enough for long enough that you almost don't realize that it isn't really that bloody or perverse when you get right down to it. Sure, if you're one of the teenage boys sneaking into the theater with tickets to The 5th Wave that Deadpool was clearly made for, it'll blow your mind, but anyone old enough to see this alone will have seen genre material that is way more intense. It's difficult to tell which parts are aping the aesthetics of a 90s action movie for a laugh, and which ones are genuine flaws because this essentially is a cheap 90s action movie. Is the bad guy one-dimensionally evil as a joke, or did they just not try very hard with the villain? Does most of the action happen in stock locations like a highway, a back alley or a shipyard to call attention to its own cheapness, or were they just trying to save money on sets? Is Deadpool's weirdly dated reference pool and sitcom dad sense of humor supposed to be a joke, or are we supposed to find it genuinely funny?

Deadpool is a good movie; but it's not the revelation that many online have already begun to declare it. It's a disposable lark that succeeds on its own terms, and if you're looking for a slightly grittier alternative to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that isn't overly self-serious like DC's recent output, then you're probably going to have a good time. There are moments when it approaches greatness, but it's intent on undermining anything that approaches sincerity because it doesn't want to be great, and for once that approach works because it fits with the spirit of the character.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Hail, Caesar!": Oh, Hell Yes!

Directed and Written by
Ethan and Joel Coen

(PG-13 - Universal - 1 hr, 40 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

The strange thing about Hail Caesar is how surprisingly unassuming and laid back it is. It has a wandering, improvised dialouge-heavy comic tone, most scenes feel less like scenes and more like a lavishly funded lampoon, and it's less interested in having overarching themes or character arcs than it is in providing an excuse for comic moments built around weird dialouge. But unlike certain other film makers that practice their craft solely to get a studio funded vacation for themselves and their friends, the Coen Brothers want the audience to have a good time as well, and for the most part they've succeeded, and even if Hail Caesar is an underwhelming film by their standard, for anyone else it would be a crowning achievement.

Hail Caesar is a day in the life of Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix. It's 1950s Hollywood, and he's a fixer for Capitol Pictures. That day, implied to be no more bizarre than normal, involves arranging a publicity marriage for a pregnant starlet to preserve her family-friendly image, considering the prospect of a steady job with Lockheed over the chaotic world of show biz, fending off two competing gossip columnists (twins!) threatening to publish a scandal involving the studio's biggest star, and tracking down that star after he mysteriously goes missing just as their biggest production of the year "Hail Caesar: A Tale of the Christ" is set to finish shooting. That star, George Clooney as Baird Whitlock, has been kidnapped by a communist writers' union that demands a ransom of a hundred thousand dollars, and the clock is ticking because they're slowly indoctrinating him with a surface level understanding of their creed.

The entire film feels like everyone involved was doing it in between bigger projects, most of the top billed stars only have maybe one or two scenes total, and it feels like they spent less than a month on set, and most of their dialogue feels like it was made up on the spot; but they were months well spent, because every moment connects. Josh Brolin's "Wait, what? Are you serious?" reaction to virtually everything that happens is immediately relatable, Scarlet Johannson's sarcastic "I'm way too good to be here, everyone get out of my way." performance as the studio's sacred starlet is instantly compelling, Channing Tatum as a pretty face in a vaguely homoerotic big bombastic musical like a period version of Magic Mike is instantly hilarious, Jonah Hill's one scene as a mob accountant got big laughs out of the entire theater, newcomer Alden Ehrenreich as a Southern born cowboy heartthrob thrust into a classy period drama directed by Ralph Finnes is a hilarious moment and the two have great chemistry, and George Clooney as Baird is... essentially a caricature of George Clooney, but it's amazing.

Something this casual and seemingly effortless just shouldn't work, but the Coens' signature meticulous yet laid back direction ties it all together; it's less of a feature film and more of a collection of loosely inter-connected vignettes, like a collection of old shorts or a really good episode of Saturday Night Live, it takes its sweet time getting to its real gut busters, but once they land they land hard. Hail Caesar has some of the funniest moments I've seen in theaters in a long time...but the Coen Brothers are definitely an acquired taste. I can't imagine seeing the audiences that are genuinely excited for say, Zoolander 2 packing theaters to see a period comedy with a bunch of character actors riffing on the tail end of Golden Age Hollywood under the direction of the people that made Fargo, but this movie wasn't made with such audiences in mind.

Hail Caesar is a passion project in the purest sense of the term; a film made by people that really, really love movies for people that really, really love movies. It proudly displays it's starry eyed earnestness to the world and says "In spite of all the nonsense, I just really love the movies!" Perfectly encapsulated in the final words of the film, that the story has been "recorded in light everlasting", drawing a direct parallel between a spiritual experience and an incredible film. Hail, Casear! And All Hail Ethan and Joel!

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Pride and Prejudice And Zombies": Just Skin And Bones

Directed and Written
by Burr Steers

(R - Lionsgate - 1 hr, 48 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Let me tell y'all a little something about how I do what I do. If you've ever wondered how I or other critics are able to get out big comprehensive reviews before the movie comes out (or at least that's always the plan), that's because the studios usually hold special invite only screenings for critics a few days before wide release. It's a mutually beneficial process, we need the time to put together our columns and shows in time for release day, and the studios want those reviews running on release day for publicity. This process, called "press screening", happens in most cities of sufficient size, and in Dallas a lot of them happen at the Angelika Film Center at Mockingbird Station. Now, the studios want a full house to get as many people's reaction to the movie as possible, so these screenings are often intentionally overbooked, which means you have to get there early to get a seat, especially at the Angelika because it's a nice theater but not an especially big one. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the only screening for a big studio release I've been to where they failed to get a full house. They couldn't get people to see it even when they were giving it away for free.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a great period piece in that it perfectly captures that one moment about a decade ago when we all suddenly couldn't get enough of zombies, when fanfiction and mashup culture were still mysterious new things as far as most people were concerned, and thus this kind of post-post-post-modern meta "ironic" genre fusion was still considered a novel concept. It's based off of a book of the same name that literally came about after the author drew a monster and a public domain novel out of a hat. It's not like I don't get the appeal of this kind of deadpan humor, take Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter as an example. At first, the joke is "Heh. President Lincoln didn't actually fight vampires.", but then you watch it and the joke becomes "Huh. President Lincoln didn't actually fight vampires, but this is presented as a semi-serious work of historical fiction as though he had.". The joke is that the joke doesn't know that it's a joke, and it can work really well in literature, where you can suggest the image of absurd things like Mr. Darcy using carrion flies to detect the undead or Abraham Lincoln breaking down the door of a slave owning vampire family and personally beheading them with a silver axe, and the reader can imagine the details however they want.

The problem with adapting that is, film can't rely on suggestion. By its very nature, film is built on depiction, which means that the dissonance is harder to hide or make light of unless you go for pure comedy, and successful versions of this dance do. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, another film that feels like a 2000s nostalgia throwback released a decade early, pulls that off. But Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes itself just seriously enough that you can't think of it as a mindless popcorn flick but are just stylized enough that you can't take it too seriously. The result is a film that has no idea who it's trying to appeal to and thus ends up being a semi-serious adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that keeps interrupting itself with an ongoing period zombie outbreak in the English countryside.

Sure, that's essentially what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the book was, but like I said before, in a book it's easier to do this kind of genre fusion mashup stuff because in a book suspension of disbelief is easier to maintain. In a movie the tonal whiplash just feels awkward unless it's super stylized, but this isn't. It feels like they wanted to make a Matthew Vaughn film (think Kingsman or Kick-Ass), but Matthew Vaughn... is a better technical director, for starters - but he also knows how to blend sincere starry eyed enthusiasm with cartoon hard-R ultra violence and make it look like it's easy to do. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fails at both, it's like a bored fourteen year old in English class doodling amateur graphic novels in the margins of their notebook, they clearly worked very hard on it, but it takes itself too seriously to be genuinely fun, and trying to hold back the violence to avoid having any trouble for what they've drawn was the wrong creative decision. Especially when there really isn't anything else for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to prop itself up on. The cast ranges from forgettable to terrible, and it rarely embraces the kind of absurdity inherent to its own premise. Normally this would be the kind of thing I'd tear into, but there's so little meat on the bones that doing so is like trying to tackle a cloud of smoke.

For any reason someone might want to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies there is something I can recommend instead. If you want a mid-2000s zombie throwback, just rent Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. If you want a hyper stylized period horror film, rent Crimson Peak in a few weeks, or see The Revenant if you're more in the mood for an art film. If you want Pride and Prejudice... then just read Pride and Prejudice, why did you even consider this? In short, it's not worth your time, and it's definitely not worth mine.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The 5th Wave": Just Another Drop In The Storm

Directed by J. Blakeson
Written by Akiva Goldsman, Susannah Grant,
and Jeff Pinker

(PG-13 - Sony - 1 hr, 52 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

The jokes come too easily. It should have pleaded the Fifth instead of diluting the value of the First. It tries and fails to be the Fifth Coming of Katniss Everdeen. Everyone onstage was possessed by body snatchers themselves just before the director shouted action. The entire genre lazily follows the trends set by The Hunger Games and thus undermines its own point. They're all so terrible for mostly the same reasons that it's hard not to start grading these movies on a curve like some sort of market niche based affirmative action.

I get that I'm not the audience for these movies, I had no patience for lazy power fantasies aimed at insecure teenagers when I was one, and I certainly don't now. Hell, if it weren't for my little sister still being really into the genre, I probably wouldn't have bothered going to the advance screening for this, I'd have saved it for bad movie night with friends. I try not to hate a film based solely on genre, they all have their own scales ranging from terrible to transcendent, and there are some diamonds in the rough that is the nebulously defined genre of "young adult fiction".

The Hunger Games itself is no masterpiece, but it at least tries to tell an engaging story with fleshed out characters and a compelling point, and the backlog of John Green remains the best contemporary example of the form - but comparing that to Divergent or The Maze Runner is like comparing homemade pecan crusted tilapia to a Big Mac, they're both food, but one clearly had more thought put into it, and it's at least partially a matter of personal taste.

The 5th Wave is okay as these things go.... which is to say that it's slightly above the first Divergent but can't reach the mediocrity of Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. It has a couple of interesting ideas to play around with, but the director and the assembled cast aren't ambitious enough to do anything with them, and as a result they have created arguably the most pandering YA film to date; The 5th Wave is literally the story of an average high school student turned regime toppling one-woman army. To wit; Chloe Grace Moretz is Cassie, an average teenager in Ohio who is witness to the arrival of the Others, which is said with such reverent tones that you can practically hear the unnecessary capital letter. For ten days they hover over the world's major cities, waiting, then they start launching several distinct Waves of attacks.

The First Wave is an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out the world's electricity (which is a genuinely gripping moment up until Cassie's internal monolouge breaks the atmosphere by spelling it out), the Second Wave is an earthquake and resulting tsunamis that destroys the world's coastlines ("in Ohio, we only have to worry about the lake, I can't imagine how bad the coasts are", Cassie's monologue gravely intones, and immediately afterwards we are shown the destruction of Boston, London and Bangkok, the show don't tell here is all over the place). The Third Wave is a plague of modified avian flu that wipes out most of the survivors, including Cassie's mother, which means that she, her father, and her kid brother Sam head to a refugee camp, where a US Army officer informs them that the Fourth Wave consists of the Others taking human form and hunting down stragglers one by one. After a confrontation with the adults results in a firefight that kills Cassie's father, the Army takes the children including Sammie to an Air Force base leading Cassie to suspect that they may not be what they seem (no prize for guessing what The Twist is), so she grabs an assault rifle and sets off in search of her brother.

So it's Invasion of the Body Snatchers mixed with Independence Day by way of an extended Twilight Zone episode. Alright, I'm down with that, there are worse starting points for a budget sci-fi movie, and there are moments when The 5th Wave sort of works. The first twenty minutes, as the Waves arrive in the fashion of Biblical plagues, would be something truly gripping if Cassie's interior monologue didn't keep interrupting them by explaining to the audience what it just saw. This is another one of those movies where if the first act was released on its own as a short film, it'd be something great. And I can respect it for almost having a point beyond "You are special because you don't fit in" with a central conceit of a world where people are unable to trust each other after a devastating attack from out of the blue leads everyone to believe that the attackers are hiding among them and could strike again at any moment.

My god, using the uneasy framework of a YA dystopia as a broad allusion to post-9/11 terrorism fears? Yes! I can totally get behind that. Sure, it's not particularly inspired as far as a Body Snatchers update goes, but when you're aiming for the same audience as Divergent this may as well be 1984! Unfortunately, the rest of the script is so uninspired and the cast so ill equipped to convey the gravity of the situation that that little nugget of brilliance makes The 5th Wave even more insulting by reminding us of what it could have been.

And that cast really is terrible; I don't know whether to call Chloe Grace Moretz a bad actress, it's probably too soon to tell just yet, and I actually kind of liked that other YA movie she did (I think it was called If I Stay), but, she's really bad in this, showing a complete inability to capture the gravity of the literal end of the world. TV actor Alex Roe shows up as one of the aliens that has decided to rebel against his upbringing by saving Cassie's life and helping her find her brother, and it's supposed to be a twist, but pretty much everyone in the audience could immediately tell that he's an alien because of how forcefully wooden his performance is. Everyone else is similarly out of their league, ranging from forgettable to mildly amusing; my little sister has class with kids that could give a better performance than the American Eagle models onstage, and she's a high school sophomore.

So it doesn't do much with its premise, and the cast kind of sucks, but maybe it at least works as a dumb action movie, right? Nope. It's surprisingly self-serious for such films, so it barely allows the action to happen, and when it does it's consistently under lit and badly choreographed, at one point the kids at the Air Force base are sent to do battle with survivors in the ruins of a non description city, and it looks like it's a recording of a Call of Duty multiplayer digital paintball match, I'm still not sure whether that's intentional or if it's the result of having no real effects budget.

Occasional flashes of inspiration keep The 5th Wave from being completely pointless, but they can't keep it from falling into the same pointless malaise of other YA films. Maybe in about seven years or so, if YA can grow up with its audience the way that Harry Potter did, maybe then we'll get something worthwhile out of it, but for now this is another one to skip.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Talk About Movies: Why Has "Bay-ghazi" Gone Bust?

Alo Party Peoples.

I haven't seen Michael Bay's Benghazi movie, and unless I have to for some reason I don't plan on seeing Michael Bay's Benghazi movie. I took one look at the phrase "Michael Bay's Benghazi movie" and immediately thought "Was a Call of Duty movie deemed too risky?". Everyone was expecting it to be "American Sniper: Election Year Edition", and my only real question about it was who would be more obnoxious about its existence; angry irrational Trump boosting family on Facebook or angry irrational Sanders boosting friends on Twitter.

But now it looks like the question is if anyone will talk about it at all. Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is a massive flop. Critics savaged it, and audiences have largely stayed away. This is the first time in Bay's career that he's had an unqualified failure on his hands, one that looks doubly bad after American Sniper was aimed at the same audience at the same time last year and became the highest grossing film of 2014. Again, I haven't seen the movie, but that doesn't mean I can't weigh in on why 13 Hours is tanking so hard. If you ask me, it comes down to pre-release buildup and perception of the subject matter.

American Sniper had time to build up hype on the twin conservative media juggernauts of talk radio and Fox News during it's Oscar Season qualifying run - and for good measure it was about a subject that they had already thought of as an impossibly noble hero; Chris Kyle had been posthumously cast as an unambiguous good guy in the increasingly murky War on Terror. Not only that, but coming out in time for that Oscar qualifying run meant that the Academy could fulfill its obligation to nominate anything Clint Eastwood is attached to before he dies and put it up for 6 Oscars including Best Picture, meaning that it had even more steam behind it. Combine that with the residual high of sweeping Republican victories in midterm elections a few months before and you have a perfect pep rally for the right wing.

13 Hours, on the other hand, failed to come out in time for consideration by the Academy, and it wasn't heavily screened for critics, meaning that it had nowhere near as much time to build up momentum. Even if it had qualified for the Oscars, Michael Bay simply does not have anywhere near as much clout within Hollywood as Clint Eastwood does. If anything they tried to top American Sniper; there was a big publicized world premiere at AT&T Stadium in Dallas with Bay himself and two of the survivors of Benghazi present, Donald Trump rented out a theater in Iowa to show the movie to supporters, but it just couldn't reach critical mass. American Sniper's ascendancy was lightning in a bottle, it came out at just the right time under just the right circumstances to be a hit, and those circumstances are nearly impossible to recreate.

Especially without the distance neccesary to make a story out of its subject matter. People have compared 13 Hours to Bay's Pearl Harbor, the last time he tried for an Oscar by making a CGI spectacular action film out of a real-life tragedy, but Pearl Harbor at least came out decades after the events it depicts, there was time to grieve. But with 13 Hours, the survivors of Benghazi are still here and still telling their story, and Libya is still a war torn mess to this day. This is like making a disaster movie about 9/11 in 2003; it simply isn't viable because of how insultingly tone deaf it is.

That, at the bottom of it all, is why American Sniper was a massive hit, and why 13 Hours is a flop. Chris Kyle's story happened long enough ago that it's "okay" to make a sweeping generalization of it, while Benghazi is still too recent and too real for too many. As I understand it, the right wing's image of Chris Kyle is "common man becomes a hero after being caught up in the sweep of history", but their image of Benghazi is "incompetent bureaucratic clusterf***" and/or "deliberate sabotage and cover-up in service of the Obama-Clinton Doctrine". Which of those sounds like a more compelling narrative around which to build an event movie that people will want to see?

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Anomalisa": A Melancholic Meandering Masterpiece

Directed by Duke Johnson
and Charlie Kaufman
Written by Charlie Kaufman

(R - Paramount - 1 hr, 30 mins) 

SPOILER WARNING

Alo Party Peoples.

Animation is film making unrestrained by reality. It is the magic of moving pictures in its purest possible form. It is every outlandish or offbeat idea that you can imagine perfectly realized onscreen, offering the artist complete creative control. Which is why it's so popular with the art house set, the best way to make an indie brat even more pretentious is to remove the need to interact with other humans, and the complete creative control animations offers means that to a certain stripe of critic - say, the kind that attend the film festivals where Anomalisa has been building up hype and acclaim for months - the medium automatically makes what's being depicted seem more meaningful regardless of whether it actually is. Fortunately, Charlie Kaufman is no mere indie brat, and Anomalisa is the real deal.

It's 2005, and David Thewlis is the voice of Michael Stone, author of "How May I Help You Help Them?", a very successful self-help guide for sales representatives, and working in that field for years has made him emotionally distant from everyone around him, to the point that literally everyone else looks and sounds like Tom Noonan. He's speaking about his book at a convention at a hotel in Cincinnati, where he runs into his old flame at the bar, and promptly kills any chance of hooking back up. As he storms off back to his suite, he hears something amazing, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa, an insecure young woman and the only person in the world that looks different to Michael. She's an anomaly in his life, hence the title, and thus he must use his one night in Cincinnati to court her.

Anomalisa is a film about detachment, and every detail of the production is built around that theme; the painstakingly detailed environments are realistically drab and banal, the characters constantly teeter on the edge of the uncanny valley, it sets itself in a Middle American city that has virtually no identity as far as cinema is concerned, the "camera" takes long, slow tracking shots through the hotel's washed out red and beige interiors, it's all meant to get us into the same melancholic meandering mindset as Michael. For a while you wonder why this story is being told in animation to begin with, that it would have been a lot easier and a lot cheaper to shoot real actors in a real hotel, but eventually you forget that, and Anomalisa reveals itself to be such an intimate, low-key thing, that shooting it with real actors with recognizable faces would take away from its universality.

But the cast they do have is terrific, David Thewlis infuses Michael with real vulnerability and inner life as someone that's bored with the banality of their existence but can't quite conceive of anything else, Tom Noonan as nearly everyone is believably average, and if the Academy took voice acting seriously as a discipline I garuntee you Jennifer Jason Leigh would be nominated for her performance here over The Hateful Eight. At first Lisa and her relationship with Michael look like the most insufferable version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl imaginable, to the point that she is literally the only person in the world that registers as different to him. But then, as their night together wears on, Michael starts to get a little more demanding. Telling Lisa to keep talking because he can't be without the sound of her voice, getting her to give him her life story, eventually convincing her to have sex with him, exploiting her own vulnerabilities to his advantage.

This is not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, this is a somber deconstruction of one. Not one that's angry about it that violently tears it apart, but one that simply lets the trope play out as it understands it in such a way that it tells the audience "Look at this. Isn't it pathetic?" The morning after Michael and Lisa have their affair, when they're eating breakfast a few hours before Michael has to give his speech, they're discussing maybe running off with each other, but just as Michael is getting Lisa onboard, tinges of Tom Noonan's voice infringe on Lisa's, soon they sound one and the same. Michael has tired of the fantasy, and he's so horrified by this that when he finally goes onstage, he has a mental breakdown and totally bombs it.

Anomalisa is very avant garde, incredibly strange, and not for the faint of heart, but if you consider yourself a lover of animation, or even just a lover of film, you owe yourself a viewing. This is a masterpiece, and that is not a term I use lightly.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 5/5