Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Martian": Welcome Back, Ridley. We Missed You

Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Drew Goddard

(PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 21 mins.) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Go see it. Just, go see it. Why are you still here? Why aren't you driving or on a bus or walking or anything to get yourself in a theater to see this movie? The Martian is one of the best films of the year!

Have a ni-

-Seriosuly though, I wish I could end things right there. The Martian is such a lean, tight, deceptively simple film that it's actually pretty hard to talk about. The Martian is this year's Gravity, a big, gorgeous crowd pleasing thriller that gets to come out in awards season because it doubles as a high-concept character piece. That rarest of events where mainstream audiences and professional critics are 100% on the same page.

It's the near-ish future, and Matt Damon is Mark Watney, a botanist participating in a manned expedition to Mars when a sandstorm forces the crew to abandon the planet. During the evacuation, he gets hit by a piece of flying debris, and he is thought dead as the crew heads back to Earth. A few hours later, Mark wakes up, stumbles back to his habitat, and sets out figuring out how to contact NASA and survive long enough to hitch a ride home with the next Mars mission. Meanwhile, NASA mission control is dealing with the public relations fallout of leaving a man to die on a barren inhospitable rock when they find evidence of Watney's survival, and they scramble to put together a rescue mission and contact him with advice on how to survive the four years it would take for them to get there, all while the rest of the crew are constantly grieving over him as they rocket back towards Earth. It's Castaway in space with liberal doses of Gravity and Apollo 13 mixed in for good measure, and the results are simply electric.

Director Ridley Scott; the visionary behind Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down- you get the idea - has reclaimed his stature as one of the great American film makers after his last few films had failed to impress. If The Martian didn't work, I was completely ready to brush him off as a filmmaker of note; he still had technical skill to rival the best, but he had seemingly lost sight of how to use those skills to tell a compelling story, and he was simply lost in the details. The Martian fixes this by only covering the essentials of what it has to in order to get the plot across in simple, clear-cut punctual fashion. He's going to run out of food soon, he has to find a way to grow food from potatoes that were sent up with him, here's how he does that. He needs to contact NASA, he knows there's an old probe within driving distance of his rover that he can salvage, here's how he does that. A bunch of guys on Earth need to get him off Mars, they need to do lots of complicated math to get him off Mars, here's how they do it. There's a guy, he's stuck on Mars, he has to get off Mars, he doesn't have much time, here's how he does that.

If Ridley Scott was still in the mindset that spawned Exodus: Gods and Kings, this would have come across as cold, inhuman, and combined with the considerable amount of technical jargon, it would have fallen victim to the same affliction as Interstellar; where the film makers were clearly so concerned with showing their work on the science that you'd think they were worried that Stephen Hawking would bust into the editing room and demand to see their figures.

Scott gets past this by playing the visuals in the exact opposite direction. He frames the vast imposing Martian landscape, huge imposing sandstorms, and Mark's dark, claustrophobic, inhumanly grey habitat so well that you can't help but feel the emotions gushing hot and powerful through every expertly painted frame of Scott's Red Planet. You could teach a class on this movie- hell, you could teach a class with this movie, and not just because it is easily the most scientifically accurate major sci-fi production in recent memory.

The Martian is simply incredible. Every moment is gripping, every line lands with perfect precision, every scene incredible. It is one of the best films of the year, a great thriller, a great character study, and an instant classic of modern science fiction. It's one of those movies you just have to see so you can say you did, do not miss it.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 5/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" Finds Its Way Out of Its Genre's Limitations

Directed by Wes Ball
Written by T.S. Nowlin

(PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 12 mins.) 

Alo Party Peoples.

In 2012, the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games took the world by storm, and for good reason. It was an exciting action film with a welcome strong female lead that also had a brain, and was willing to use that brain to encourage its young fan base to think critically about issues as diverse as celebrity culture, systemic economic disparity, and manufactured media narratives. Even if the movie itself was kinda iffy in spots, it's cultural impact is more than welcome.

Over the next couple of years, the less inspired copycats - including Hunger Games' own sequels - were arriving in full force; culminating in 2014 with the Unholy Trinity of Divergent, The Maze Runner, and The Giver. All three of these films were either dull, lazy, or just plain terrible, because the nature of what would soon be named the YA movie is that they are cheap to produce and guaranteed to make a profit since they have a built-in audience of easily impressed teenagers. The Giver took a highly symbolic story that only works in the formless realms of the written word and turned it into an embarrassing action movie version of Pleasantville that hinges on self-parody, while Divergent was the laziest possible version of "Vaguely-Totalitarian-Society-As-Metaphor-For-High-School-Social-Cliques" imaginable, and worse yet it seemed to take pride in being so.

Of that Unholy Trinity, The Maze Runner earned the dubious distinction of being the least terrible. It wasn't good by any means, the sets were sparse and ugly, the director had no idea how to shoot action, the acting was amateur at best, but it at least tried to be its own thing, and in this genre that might as well be Citizen Kane.

The first one had the premise of a bunch of adolescent boys trapped in a secluded forest glade surrounded on all sides by a gigantic constantly shifting maze, and it focused on their struggle to escape once the monsters living in it started to abandon their nocturnal habits and attack the boys directly. It's kind of like The Village, and like that film it ends in a headslappingly stupid twist; namely that they were placed in that maze by the "World Catastrophe Killzone Department" (that is not a joke) in order to preserve humanity after a solar flare-induced zombie plague wiped out most of the planet.

The Scorch Trials picks up a week later after W.C.K.D. has moved the boys from the maze to a holding facility to harvest their blood in hopes of finding a cure for the plauge. After hearing rumors of a resistance group called the Right Hand attacking W.C.K.D. facilitites, they escape in dramatic fashion and set off on a trek across the zombie-ridden desert to find sanctuary in a rumored safe zone untouched by the plauge.

If the first Maze Runner was trying to be The Village, then The Scorch Trials is closer to Mad Max, and it works surprisingly well. Sure, it has almost nothing to do either story-wise or tone-wise eith the first movie, but considering that the first movie is... the first movie, that is a very good thing. Getting out of the maze allows for kinds of action scenes other than walking down a corridor while mysterious creatures stalk you in the darkness. And since franchise helmer Wes Ball has finally figured out how to shoot good action, now we get shootouts, huge brawls, chases, it's the greatest B-movie ever made...

...but it is still a B-movie, better than the first one, mind you, but neither film has much going on under the surface. The first film is also a glorified B-movie, but it was a slow, dull one, this one has things happen, which makes it far better as far as I'm concerned. Bottom line, it's a pretty decent pulp sci-fi action movie, and in the doldrums of September they could certainly have done worse.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Intern": A Charming Little Date Movie

Directed and Written
by Nancy Meyers

(PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 1 min.) 

Alo Party Peoples.

"Here's a really great pitch for a comedy; take an old school straight laced 20th Century businessman, and stick him in a decidedly 21st Century Internet startup. It feels topical, it gets work for a veteran actor, it's a setup for jokes about how 'quirky' and kinda childish Millennials are..." 

That's how I imagine the pitch for The Intern went. Its director, Nancy Meyers, is primarily a maker of family comedies and rom-coms, and The Intern feels somewhere between the two. It's the kind of movie where Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway share a touching scene together, followed immediately by a plan to break into her mother's house and steal her computer to delete an email. It's a strange combination, but through combination of good actors and a good director, The Intern becomes a charming little date movie.

Robert De Niro is Ben Whittaker, a widowed retired businessman that feels discontent with his quiet retirement. One day he sees a flyer for a senior intern program at an e-commerce startup and signs up. There he becomes the intern of Anne Hathaway as 20-something CEO Jules Ostin, who took a custom clothing sales site from not existing to over 200 employees and billions in less than 9 months. At first she's irritated since she didn't even know about the senior internship program, but as they get to know each other they grow closer, and...

No, it doesn't go there; this is a mainstream comedy coming out in September, it's not going to make a 72 year old man and a 32 year old woman an onscreen couple. Instead, The Intern is focused on solid character work from its two leads. Hathaway plays a manic hyper-focused professional, the kind of person that sleeps five hours a night, never works on only one thing at at time, and personally tracks individual transactions on her site in real time, and she is excellent at it. De Niro is also pretty great, playing against type as a jovial grandfatherly figure that serves as a perfect contrast to Hathaway, though it would have been great to see him go the extra mile and put some real passion into his performance.

Pretty much every part of The Intern is like that, it's very proficient, but there isn't much passion to it. Nancy Meyers is good at doing visual comedy without shoving it in the audience's face and going "Look at this! Isn't this impressive!?", and there are a couple of real zingers in there, but besides one strangely out of place gag involving an on site masseuse accidentally groping Ben, it never gets truly outrageous. There's a recurring theme of generational dissonance running throughout the film, from the cinematography emphasizing how out of place Ben's suit is among the totally casual attire of the other interns, to Julie's startup being based in what was once the factory that Ben worked at, to the fact that that factory printed phone books; a product that once served a vital purpose, but is totally obsolete in the Digital Age that made Julie's company possible, but the film never really addresses this theme outright, and it gets consigned to the details.

But review the movie you have, not the movie you want. The Intern is not - and it is not trying to be - a treatise on the Amazon era of corporate America. It wants to be a sweet little movie backed by good recognizable actors meant to send married couples on their night out home with a smile on their face and warm feelings in their hearts, and on that level it succeeds with flying colors.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Visit" The Saga of Shyamalan is Just Sad Now

Directed and Written
by M. Night Shyamalan

(PG-13 - Universal - 1 hr, 34 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Once upon a time, there was an aspiring indie film maker from Pennsylvania that made a little movie about ghosts. This guy wasn't untalented, he seemed to have a Sixth Sense for narrative diversion. His movie was essentially an overlong Twilight Zone episode, but he was good enough at distracting the audience from the details that he kept them from putting the pieces together and realizing that the obvious answer to what was really going on... was exactly what was really going on.

He knew he was good at it, and over the years his confidence in his craft would become Unbreakable, but the Signs of a descent from greatness started showing up almost immediately. Since nearly everyone that was talking about his movie was talking about the twist, he was convinced that every movie afterwards had to have a twist too. He made two more movies after that, and reception was a lot more mixed, but overall people still seemed to like him. Some people even thought we had found the next great American auteur...and then with his very next project, M. Night Shyamalan had pissed it all away, and would continue to do so for over a decade. Film after film of accidental anti-classics, each passing project destined to become a staple of "ironic" comedy. It soon became clear that rather than a true successor to the Master of Suspense, Shyamalan had become the Master of Pretense.

Shyamalan is a failure, but he is admittedly an interesting one. He makes terrible, terrible movies, but he at least does so while trying to grow as a film maker, which is more than can be said for certain other filmmakers that the Internet loves to hate. He tries different styles and a ton of different genres, bouncing from old-school monster movies to fairy tales to apocalyptic horror to epic fantasy to a Hitchcockian thriller to a survivor's tale all in a row. That's a good thing, sometimes a radical shift in genre and tone is exactly what you need to get the magic back...

..but The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, Devil, and After Earth were all terrible, and it's for a very specific reason. Regardless of what Shyamalan is trying to do, his massive, massive ego dooms it. In Lady, he fed a critic to a monster and cast himself as a misunderstood writer who's prose was going to save the world. The Happening took a premise as ridiculous and ripe for black comedy as pollen that makes you kill yourself and decides to play it completely straight. The Last Airbender is the best possible guide for what not to do when adapting a property to the silver screen, Devil takes a perfect nasty little thriller premise and negates all tension by awkwardly inserting the supernatural and putting it in the title, and After Earth casts Will Smith and decides to force him to hold back virtually all of his signature charisma.

And now we have The Visit, which sees Shyamalan, longing for the days when people took him seriously, limping back to the template of The Sixth Sense for another cheaply produced tale of wide eyed children navigating rejected Goosebumps pitches leading up to an obvious twist that is far too impressed with itself. Two siblings are sent to spend the weekend with their grandparents that they've never seen or even heard of before now after ambiguously ill circumstances surrounding their father's departure. The grandparents seem nice at first but soon begin exhibiting increasingly strange behavior that first seems like just the eccentricities of the old but ultimately turn out to be serious warning signs that something is afoot and they are stuck with two very dangerous people.

This is not a bad premise for a horror film. Taking the shared experience of being a child staying with an unfamiliar relative and being creeped out by their behavior and the environment and adding another layer of unease to the proceedings is the kind of old-school pulp fiction that has influenced the One-Twist Pony's work from the beginning. Hand this premise to Charlie Brooker or David Fincher, or even pre-Signs Shyamalan, and they probably could have hit it out of the park.

But the Shyamalan that made The Last Airbender is at this point so inept and convinced of his own greatness that he simply has no idea what he's doing. Any of the skill on display in Wayward Pines turns out to have been in spite of his involvement, because he really has left any genuine suspense chops he once possessed by the wayside. Case in point, The Visit is a found-footage movie, one of the kids is a wannabe film maker documenting their week, and rather than having any point to make with the motif, The Visit only uses it as an excuse to have characters monologue exposition, backstory, and character beats directly into the camera.

This isn't even getting into The Twist, which I won't spoil here, but I will say that it is so idiotic, and the entire screenplay bends over backwards to hide it for so long that you can't help but figure it out well in advance and negate all tension, though it does manage to avoid the awkward insertion of a completely different genre that doomed The Village and Devil.

The point that I completely gave up on The Visit is when, during an interview for the kid's documentary, the other child is questioned about his use of mise en scene and, after it turns out he has no idea what that means, he flips the bird directly to the camera. That, underneath the terrible screenplay, bad acting, and pointless faux-documentary camerawork, is The Visit's real reason for existing. As much as people have come to despise Shyamalan, it turns out that he hates them just as much if not more, and this entire movie is him flipping off all the critics that hate him, all the hipsters that watch him to laugh at him, and the film industry that may have (hopefully) finally had enough of him.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 1/5