Goodbye, For Now

We will be with you/When you're leaving
We will be with you/When you go
We will be with you/And hold you til you're quiet
It hurts, to let, you go
                    - Gotye, Making Mirrors

Alo Party Peopl-

OMFG where the f*** have you been!?

Short version, adulting.

Long version, I'm going to college to pursue a journalism degree. Classes start tomorrow, and I simply won't have the time to keep up a weekly blog. This site has been a real boon to me, and having a body of published work out there is probably what got me into a university to begin with, but it has always been a labor of love. It's never brought in any money, and while the long-form writing experience has been invaluable to me, I simply have more important things to do with my time.

Maybe someday I'll be able to return to this site. Maybe I'll move on and do other kinds of writing elsewhere. (I'm considering political science as a minor) But either way, it'll have to wait. I need to see how well I do living independently, taking harder classes, etc. before I even try to find where the screenings happen in Denton, let alone setting up a new network after uprooting the one I had in Dallas.

I have loved writing for this site, it's been one of the highlights of my life for years. I loved finding a niche, I loved meeting new people, and I loved being able to do something I enjoyed to entertain people. But it's time for me to move on with my life. At least, for now.

It's been a great day,

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Suicide Squad": One, Two, Three Strikes They're Out

Directed and Written
by David Ayer 

(PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 10 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

It's an improvment over Batman v Superman, but that doesn't make it good.

I need to get that out there right off the bat because, like most of DC Films' output, Suicide Squad is the kind of bad movie where what went wrong is kind of fascinating in its own right and it can't help but attract an audience based off of that. And when you add in the rabid fanboyism that surrounds comic book superheroes, saying anything remotely critical will rouse the usual suspects to start shouting it down. So let me be clear, Suicide Squad is a mess; the tone is all over the map, the script is consistently overstuffed yet underwritten, a great cast has absolutely nothing to work with - the only reason that this is better than the train wreck that was Batman v Superman is because it simply isn't trying as hard.

Yet it's more disappointing because, while Batman v Superman proudly telegraphed "This is going to suck, get ready for it." from its inception, Suicide Squad was actually shaping up to be a good time. David Ayer knows his way around an ensemble cast, and the base premise of "Hey, let's take a bunch of C-list supervillains and use them as a government black-ops team." is a clever one. I'm surprised no one's used in the movies before. And when that first trailer hit, looking like a lean, tight palate cleanser. Like it would be perfect after the bloat and posturing of the last film, striking the same groove as Guardians of the Galaxy, I thought to myself "Hallelujah! I can finally get behind one of these things!" I was looking forward to this, and most of the people that trashed Batman v Superman were too. But, even if you managed to avoid the gossip surrounding the production, you can clearly tell that the studio stepped in and mandated a drastic shift in tone once critical reception of Batman v Superman hit. You can picture the post-it notes pasted up around the editing bay's monitors, most of which say "Make it more like a Marvel movie!" from the constant on-the-nose needle drops to the forced pandering to hardcore comics fans.

Case in point, Jared Leto's Joker has no reason to be in the movie. Granted, any actor following Heath Ledger in this role was going to have their work cut out for them, and the idea behind him isn't that bad; taking him from being just a serial killer in clown makeup back to being a gangster... but a decidedly modern skeevy, drugged out, blinged up archetype of "gangster" that rides around in a custom purple sports car. It at least differentiates him from prior incarnations of the character... but he just can't pull it off. He's trying so hard to be edgy and different that he just comes across as lame, and half the time he's onscreen I expected him to get into a rap battle with Die Antwoord and the Insane Clown Posse. And for all the focus that the marketing has put on him, he's barely even in the movie; his screentime tops out at nine minutes, and he easily could have been cut out with little to no impact on the rest of the film.

The only thing keeping Suicide Squad from being totally disposable is the rest of the cast being pretty damn good when they get to perform, and with a better script to work with it could have been something special. Will Smith brings his signature charisma to Deadshot, a hitman trying to convince his daughter that he isn't a horrible person. Margo Robbie as Harley Quinn is just as amazing as she looked in those trailers. Jay Hernandez as Diablo, former gangbanger with fire powers who's sworn off using them after accidentally killing his wife lends much needed humanity to the piece. And Viola Davis as Squad architect Amanda Waller is the kind of antihero that would feel right at home in a better version of this movie. I'd gladly watch a movie about Deadshot, or Harley Quinn, or Diablo or Amanda Waller, but this movie about all of them is just too overstuffed to function.

I really wanted to like Suicide Squad. I wanted to see Will Smith, Jay Hernandez, Margo Robbie, Jared Leto and Viola Davis click the same way that Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista and Vin Disel did. I wanted to see what the gleeful anarchy side of the "X-TREEEME" Ninties aesthetic that DC's cinematic universe looked like in constrast with the self-serious brooding of Man of Steel. I wanted there to be a good installment in this universe to finally shut up the people lobbing Disney/Marvel conspiracy theories at Rotten Tomatoes. (Don't think that I'm thrilled that the only outfit consistently good at making superhero films is a Disney subsidiary) But they've swung and missed yet again. One. Two. Three strikes, they're out.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Purge: Election Year": Just A Bit Smarter Than You'd Expect

Directed and Written
by James DeMonaco

(R - Universal - 1 hr, 45 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

These movies have the best damn pitch behind them I've heard in years. It's the near-ish future, and the United States has been taken over by a vaguely defined political block called the New Founding Fathers, and their signature legislation is The Purge. For one night a year, all crime becomes legal; you can do anything you want, steal anything you want, kill anyone you want, and not only will you not be held accountable afterwards, there will be no emergency services or police to stop you in the act. While it's presented to the populace as a release valve for pent up dark desires to ensure a safe, stable society otherwise, it's heavily implied that the real purpose of the Purge is population control, i.e. encouraging the poor to slaughter each other to ease strain on the social safety net.

The Purge took that twisted, ripe for satire premise... and used it for little more than a slasher movie where they don't need a reason why nobody calls the cops. Fortunately, they stopped trying to be horror films after the first one. The Purge: Anarchy is a melodramatic bloodily blunt action movie with a message in the tradition of The Toxic Avenger or They Live that just happens to take place during the 2023 Purge, taking a walking tour through things that might happen on that night. And it asks the thuddingly obvious question "If the purpose of the Purge is to clear out inner city slums, wouldn't the government start doing some of it themselves?"

The Purge: Election Year follows up on that revelation with Elizabeth Mitchell as Sen. Charlie Roan, who went into politics after losing her family to the Purge fifteen years ago and is now running an independent campaign for President on a platform of abolishing it. By hammering on the point that the Purge encourages regular people to kill each-other to survive while the wealthy and powerful get rich off it, she's been leading the New Founding Fathers' candidate in the polls, so they respond by revoking the rules that protect government officials during the Purge and holing up in a bunker to wait out the night. Sen. Roan tries to do so as well, but the New Founding Fathers' have an inside man on her security force, meaning that she and Frank Grillo as the retired police sergeant from the last film have to flee through the streets of Washington DC and make contact with anti-Purge rebels to survive the night.

Much like the premise, the whole film is an excuse to engage in sin and debauchery with the semblance of a message, but I'll be damned if they don't do it well. It isn't the best execution of this premise, I still think that would be an anthology of stuff people might do on Purge Night, but they know how to have fun with the idea. It strikes me that, besides that cringe-worthy tagline of "Keep America Great", Election Year is surprisingly lacking in digs at this particular election year, but it's better off for it. It would have been easy to put one of the Purgers in a Trump hat or stick an old fraying Bernie bumper sticker on one of the victims' cars, but it would have dated the film almost immediately. Instead, it's willing to go a bit more general and focus on more of the little details of Purge Night. Besides resolving the previously unanswered question of why no one was using the Purge as an opportunity to off government officials they didn't like, we get details like foreigners coming to the United States on Purge Night to engage in "murder tourism". They feel that this may be their last chance to engage in this twisted American Dream, so they're going all out by doing it dressed up in caricatured Americana.

Having a point behind them doesn't turn The Purge series into The Big Short, though they're both just as cynical about most of the same stuff. They're cheesy, melodramatic action films, but they're a really good version thereof that's just a bit smarter than you'd expect such fare to be.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Independence Day: Resurgence": A Pale Imitation

Directed by Roland Emmerich
Written by Roland Emmerich,
 Nicholas Wright, James. A Woods,
Dean Devlin, and James Vanderbilt

(PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 0 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

"Sparky sparky boom, man."

That is the experience of watching Independence Day: Resurgence. It's not exciting, it's not even interesting in its failure, it just happens, and then it's over. The story that exists is little more than a retread of the already intentionally arch original, all the easier for whoever has to dub it into Mandarin. It's all the glossy explosions for glossy explosions' sake that director Roland Emmerich's detractors go after him for. Granted, they're really good looking, well shot glossy explosions, Roland Emmerich is a flat out better technical filmmaker than most other blockbuster specialists. But it's glossy explosions all the same, and without the sense of earnest effort or heart that make his good films work and his bad films uniquely memorable.

And it's not like I was expecting high art from Resurgence either; despite what some of y'all might think, I've got nothing against glossy explosions. Fury Road got onto my best list last year, and pretty damn high, too. The Marvel films are one of the few things that I'll go out of my way to see regardless of whether they've been screened for critics. Hell, I even kind of liked Hardcore Henry, and it's about as glossy as glossy gets. But in those cases, the glossy explosions are complimented by something more; Fury Road is packed to the gills with crazy car stunts, but it's also a serious epic with actual observations about social dynamics and personal autonomy and an introduction to feminist theory, while still being packed to the gills with crazy car stunts. The Marvel movies get cited for "superhero fatigue" all the time by "serious" critics, but they do their antics in service of dynamic characters. Even Hardcore Henry occasionally struck a thematic line of feeling that someone else is pulling your strings.

And Independence Day is sort of like that too. The glossy explosions are definitely a focus, but even though we can be assured that billions of people are dying, human carnage isn't what Emmerich chooses to turn the camera too. Instead, it focuses on the destruction of buildings, landmarks and iconography. Those iconic shots of the Empire State Building and the White House being blown up aren't just eye candy for the trailers; by showing the destruction of all the symbols and borders we put up between eachother, and then showing mankind rising from the ashes to defeat the invaders, it establishes a theme. That at the core of the film, Independence Day believes that our differences hold us back, and the aliens almost did us a favor by blowing apart the divides we'd put between us, because it allows us to harness the strength that comes from unifying. It's that kind of optimism in the face of the literal end of the world that's turned Independence Day into a generational touchstone for Millennials. An accidental time capsule of how optimistic and forward looking the Nineties look in retrospect, especially compared to today's blockbuster landscape where even Superman has to be grim and morose all the time.

Roland Emmerich is not a subtle filmmaker, anyone that saw The Day After Tomorrow or White House Down can tell you that, so with the context of Independence Day's place in the popular culture in mind, making a sequel in a post-9/11 zeitgeist should allow it to burst with meaning, intentional or not. That first trailer, with its super serious title card intoning "We always knew they would come back." seemed to hint at something. Maybe the feeling here would be "paranoia after a devastating attack leading to constant military buildup in preparation for a second assault that may never come", that'd fit as a thematic followup to the original. If there's one reason that a sequel to Independence Day could be even remotely interesting, it's seeing what the post-invasion world eventually became. But Resurgence can't be bothered to wait more than ten minutes before the aliens show up again. Rather than letting us get to know about the setting it's created, and I'll give them credit for not trying to recreate the present, our minds are left to wander amid the fireworks. And I couldn't help but wonder how, despite twenty years passing and civilization being remade with their technology, we never bothered to give the aliens a proper name.

And if the fireworks were good, I might give them some slack for it, but Independence Day: Resurgence is one of the most underwhelming blockbusters in recent memory. The cinematography and effects are all fine, but the editing is horrible, never letting us hold on a shot long enough for it to stick, it's clear that they needed to trim it down for time, because nobody gets an arc or a personality that would let us care about who's doing the shooting. Fireworks are always better when they're actually celebrating something.

If Independence Day is the urtext of the modern blockbuster, then Resurgence is a pale imitation of the same. Where the former can thrill and entertain and inspire, the latter can only waste time. Part of the reason this review took so long is because of how surprisingly hollow this film is. Roland Emmerich at least usually leaves an impression, and it's sad to see him apparently stop trying.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Finding Dory": A Great Family Film, But Not A Great Pixar Film

Directed by Andrew Stanton
and Angus Maclane
Written by Andrew Stanton, Victoria Strouse,
and Bob Peterson

(PG - Disney, 1 hr, 54 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Finding Dory is unique in Pixar's catalog in that it has the chance to get really, incredibly bleak towards the end... and then it just doesn't. The studio is already well known for baking heavy emotional gut-punches into material that looks light and gentle on the surface; like a fantasy about toys coming to life that's also about coming to terms with mortality, or a superhero adventure that's also about midlife crises, or a rehash of Herman's Head that's explicitly about how bottling up difficult emotions will only cause them to boil over in the end.

Finding Nemo followed that template in that it's a movie about talking fish, but it's also at least partially about living with a disability, i.e. Nemo's little fin and Marlin's overprotective nature in regards to it being the thing that kicks off the plot and what lends the story most of it's emotional weight. Finding Dory makes it more explicit by revealing that the title character's forgetfulness is actually the result of chronic short-term memory loss, a childhood disability of her very own. The film opens with her parents teaching her coping mechanisms so she can lead a fuller life when she gets separated from them, and wanders the ocean for years, sometimes even forgetting what she's searching for, until the runs into Marlin and Finding Nemo happens. A year later, Dory has an encounter with a stingray triggers a dormant memory, which leads her to drag Marlin and Nemo along on another journey across the ocean to find her parents, which leads them to the Marine Life Institute of California where they get separated again.

"Hey kids/older teenagers that were in grade school when Finding Nemo came out! Remember the funny comic relief sidekick from last time? Well, the forgetfulness you spent the last film laughing at is actually a crippling disability she's been dealing with her entire life!" should come across as self-parody - just writing it out makes it sound like someone's screwed-up fanfiction. But I'll be damned if it doesn't work, because Pixar is that good at this material and because of Ellen DeGeneres' performance as Dory. Making her the main character means she doesn't get to be as funny, but she gets to go deeper and more poignant than Finding Nemo could ever let her be. By the end, it gets damn close to one of the most effecting endings Pixar has ever achieved...

...but then it sort of doesn't. I understand why, if the film ever slowed down enough for the weight of the scenario to really sink in, it'd come across as existentially horrifying instead of just exciting. The characters find themselves literally flung from one life-or-death situation to the next in a mostly dry, human-built space that's far more difficult to navigate than the open ocean. It's the kind of tossing around that usually gets reserved for Woody and company in the Toy Story movies, except that a fish is far less durable than an action figure. Aside from one scene in an interactive tidal pool, it never quite gets to the kind of intensity that Pixar is known for. At the end of the day, it's a kids movie, and you're not supposed to leave deep psychological scars in a kids movie; regardless of how well it would have fit thematically, Woody and company were never going to die at the end of Toy Story 3. Instead it keeps things going along at a good clip, introducing lots of new characters, Ed O'Niell as a curmudgeonly octopus is a real stand-out, and keeping from getting in too deep.

Finding Dory is a great family film, and one I imagine that parents of disabled children will have been waiting for for a long time, but it's not a great Pixar film. All the pieces are there, and if better assembled they could have achieved greatness, but for as long as it took to get a sequel off the ground, Finding Dory simply doesn't clear the bar that Pixar has set for itself.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Warcraft": Skip It Like A Cutscene

Directed by Duncan Jones
Written by Duncan Jones, Charles Leavitt,
and Chris Metzen

(PG-13 - Universal - 2 hrs, 3 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

It can be an enjoyable thing to watch a bad movie fail. To use the most recent example, seeing every short-sighted overly serious grim-n'-gritty decision made with comic book superheroes since the Nineties come home to roost in Batman v Superman was nothing short of cathartic. And there are entire communities built around cult failures like The Room or Birdemic - hell, even Howard the Duck has it's defenders. And there are people that built entire careers around mocking these sorts of failures like Mystery Science Theater 3000 or the folks at Channel Awesome and its ilk.

But no such joys are to be found in Warcraft; too ambitious to be written off as fluff and too serious to be called a farce, it is a tragedy. It's like driving past a car crash caused by drunk newlyweds, it's sad because you can tell that the reason it went wrong was because the people involved were giving it their all in hopes of a brighter future. The devotion from director Duncan Jones that lets all the sets and the armor and the weapons and the magic and the creatures feel cinematically real and aesthetically interesting is the same devotion that smothers the rest of the production and renders it an unwatchable slog. He's clearly a big fan of the Warcraft games, big enough that he thinks that the audience needs to know all of the lore and backstory and proper nouns before they can get to any actual plot. He's made an entire movie out of the stuff that the Lord of the Rings movies wisely confined to the first two minutes so they could get to an actual story - even Tolkien kept most of the more trivial worldbuilding details in the appendix.

The result is a masturbatory deluge of the same pop-fantasy milange that film and television and literature and, yes, games drew from Dungeons and Dragons until the "Hey, this could all almost exist" naturalism of Lord of the Rings took over, played so relentlessly serious that it sucks any and all joy out of the gloriously goofy art design. Sure, that's all World of Warcraft ever was on a story level, but without the ability to interact with it there isn't enough of a story or characters there to engage the audience. Great stories tend to have defined characters at their core, a Gilgamesh or a Hercules or a Sun Wu Kong or a Jesus of Nazareth or a King Arthur or a Hamlet or a Sherlock Holmes or a Huck Finn or a Jay Gatsby or a Holden Caulfield or a Clark Kent or a Frodo Baggins or a Luke Skywalker or a Forrest Gump... you get the idea. They all have defined personalities and motivations and arcs, and that's what let them get ingrained in the popular consciousness. A blank homunculus waiting for the character creation engine to decide their entire being is the exact opposite of that. No school will ever assign even the best Choose Your Own Adventure book to be read by its students. I was bored after two minutes, getting antsy after ten, and by the hour and a half mark I wanted nothing more than to be able to push the Y-button in order to make someone do something interesting.

That kind of dissonance is what's really sad about Warcraft, a movie that walks and talks and acts like it sprung fully formed from the collective dreams of a generation of fantasy fandom shouldn't be able to be this dull. There's surprsingly little warcraft in Warcraft, and even when it does happen it looks like a really expensive Scandinavian heavy metal music video, it's flatly directed and the editing is stale and it rarely gets to happen because the filmmakers were more concerned that we might not get that the magic green vapor that comes from stealing souls from prisoners of war and turns anyone that uses it into a horrific wraith is bad.

The experience of watching Warcraft is like listening to that one friend of yours drone on about the Dungeons and Dragons campaign they hosted last week, you can tell that they're really enthusiastic about it, and you feel compelled to keep listening to be polite, but you have no idea what they're talking about and you wish you could just walk away and join the more interesting conversation about that new song on the radio going on across the room. After decades of video game movies sucking because studios chose stuff that was the interactive version of a movie, or because they stripped away all the offbeat, uniquely video-gamey stuff that made it worth translating to film to begin with, or because they just didn't care, now we have one that sucks because the people involved tried way, way too hard to translate everything to the screen, regardless of whether it made an interesting film. It's a cutscene, and the reason you're able to skip cutscenes in games is so that if you just beat the big boss and you're in the zone and you can't wait to keep going, you can get past the boring short film quickly and get back to the action. Warcraft is that, and I suggest you skip it as such.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "X-Men: Apocalypse": It's Time To Let Go

Directed by Bryan Singer
Written by Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg,
Michael Dougherty, and Dan Harris

(PG-`13 - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 24 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Once upon a time, there were no superhero movies. That's not entirely true; once in a while you got movies based on larger-than-comics pop icons like Superman or Batman, but for the most part it was rare that any character created after the 1940s would get consideration from Hollywood, and even when they did, it was still up in the air whether you'd get a pretty good The Crow, or an abject failure like Howard The Duck or Steel. So when the first X-Men movie came out, and it wasn't terrible, it felt like a revelation, and alongside Peter Jackson pulling off Lord of the Rings and Sam Rami pulling off Spider-Man it was part of the rise of the modern "geek culture" dominated blockbuster landscape.

Then the second one came out and it was quite a bit better, so it got to be called great, but with hindsight they just aren't that good. Parts of them hold up; it was awesome to get two really classy respected British actors to play Professor X and Magneto, Hugh Jackman was such a perfect fit for Wolverine that people still don't want to see him in any other kind of movie, focusing on the gay youth metaphor was a timely update of the material - the first two X-Men films have a deserved place in pop history, is what I'm saying. But nearly everything else to come out of this series* has been either mediocre or flat-out terrible. The Last Stand managed to be interchangeable even by the standards of a Brett Rattner film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine was so terrible that they pretend it didn't happen, Days of Future Past  is a slog that takes a hatchet job to the already fragile semblance of continuity. I get that nostalgia is a powerful thing, I know I've felt an irrational desire to rewind the world and freeze it around 2005 more than once, but I'm not forcing my bubble onto everyone else. I understand why we hold onto this series, but it's time to let go.

But thanks to Deadpool, which not incidentally builds much of its comedy around mocking the anachronistic nature of this franchise, we're going to keep getting more of these and Fox is going to keep jogging in place until Disney offers them a shared custody deal like Sony got with Spider-Man. So it's fitting that Apocalypse is trying to emulate the superficial trappings of a Marvel movie (loads and loads of characters and banter, fanservice-y cameos, jokey references to the comics and other movies, a technicolor palleted CGI apocalyptic finale), but without any of the character work or genuine heart that makes it work. The best example of that is when, in the middle of the inciting incident for Act Two, when all the world's nuclear weapons are being launched, and it looks like the world is ending, they cut to Stan Lee looking up at the rockets. If there's one thing that it should be easy to not screw up, it's putting the funny celebrity cameo in the middle of the end of the world.

Not that the story they came up is that great to begin with. An ancient Mutant named Apocalypse that used to rule Ancient Egypt gets brought back from the dead in 1983 by the time-travel shenanigans in Days of Future Past and decides that he doesn't like what humans have done with the world in his absence. So he decides that he needs to take over the world and the X-Men unite to stop him. That's it. Nobody has an arc, nobody learns anything, the only meaningful change to the status quo of the series is that it provides an explanation of why Professor X went bald early. None of the cast appears to care about anything happening onscreen, Jennifer Lawrence is somehow more disinterested than she was in Days of Future Past, when she started to regret having signed onto this series before she had The Hunger Games clout to bargain with, and she's sadly resigned to being here now that that ship has sailed. Oscar Issac as Apocalypse - good Lord Oscar Issac as Apocalypse; this man is one of the best actors of his generation, and they've put him in six layers of heavy latex makeup and having him stomp around like he got lost on the way to the set of the Power Rangers reboot.

I might have excused that if it could at least be an enjoyable action film, but it's really not. Bryan Singer was never great at large-scale action to begin with, and it's really kind of amazing just how bad all the "big" moments in Apocalypse look. Limp lifeless effects and flat cinematography make the entire production look like a bunch of Abercrombie models in decade-old cosplay screwing around in front of a green-screen. The makeup is atrocious, and the costume design is worse, dressing everyone up like an emo rock album cover might have flown in 2000, but it doesn't fly sixteen years later. You'd think that being a period piece might force it to be somewhat visually interesting, or maybe they'd make narrative use of it being the Eighties, maybe tying the story into the Cold War like First Class did, but they don't do anything with the time period at all besides a needle-drop for retread of the Quicksilver super speed gag from Days of Future Past. One that makes him look so overpowered that I can't help but wonder why they need anyone else to defeat Apocalypse.

X-Men: Apocalypse isn't quite an apocalyptic failure, but that's only because you need to try to come up with a disaster, and it's clear that nobody involved in the production gave a shit about what they were doing beyond "We need to make one of these every few years or Marvel gets the rights back." When I told one of my teachers just how bad this movie was, he told me that it doesn't matter because it's a superhero movie and nobody expects high art from them. Setting aside that the Richard Donner Superman, The Dark Knight, and Spider-Man 2 would beg to differ, I don't buy that argument. Coming from source material of dubious merit is not an excuse to suck, I've seen terrible movies made out of the life of Christ, and I've seen excellent films made out of cheap airport novels and cheap Sixties sci-fi TV and print cartoons about a man that puts on a bat costume every night because he misses his mother. If The Lego Movie can become a postmodern masterpiece, then X-Men has no excuse for not trying.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 1/5

*First Class is the only one of these that's genuinely awesome, and it's the one that Bryan Singer had nothing to do with. That's not a coincidence.

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Alice Through The Looking Glass": Still A Piece of Nonsense

Directed by James Bobin
Written by Linda Woolverton

(PG-13 - Disney - 1 hr, 42 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

The main problem with making Alice in Wonderland into a movie is that it has no real plot. It's a series of loosely connected scenes barely tied together by dream logic, the kind of hallucinatory weirdness that's always worked better in literature than in any other medium. The original Disney film understood that, so instead of trying to cobble together a plot, they just made a bunch of shorts and strung them together. It's a nonsense story at its core, so when you try to force order and logic and structure onto it like the live-action films have done, you can only end up with a convoluted mess.

It's annoying, because we've seen that Disney is more than capable of doing good work when they remake their animated canon. If you could get someone with the same reverence and grace that Kenneth Branagh brought to Cinderella, or the sense of majesty and awe that Jon Faverau brought to The Jungle Book, then you could have gotten something great out of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Those names should go together like a match made in heaven, but Burton's lack of restraint and Disney's lack of willingness to reign in an A-list name like his resulted in an enthusiastic teenager's incredibly simplistic fanfiction about Alice returning to Wonderland years later to fulfill a prophecy that she overthrow the Queen of Hearts and also get past the shadow of her dead father who was a great merchant in China, I think? It's the same kind of dream logic as the original, but with a semblance of structure stretched over it like a hyperactive child playing dress-up with their father's Sunday best.

See if you can make sense of what they cooked up for the sequel; Alice has become a successful merchant in the South China sea, and she's just gotten back to London from a three year voyage, where she finds that her mother has sold her house to the guy who she refused to marry in the first movie, and she can only get it back by giving up her father's ship. Understandably frustrated with this, Alice runs off and falls through a magic mirror back into Wonderland where she discovers that the Mad Hatter is dying of grief because he's convinced himself that his tragic backstory dead family isn't dead, so Alice steals a magic ball from Time Himself in order to save his family, but doing so is likely to unravel the past so Time chases her down and also the Queen of Hearts wants to steal the magic ball herself in order to undo an incident in her past that led to her becoming mad...

That... is actually the kind of half-formed strangeness one would expect from an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, the first one had just enough structure to keep it from becoming a so-bad-it's-good "ironic" thing, but Through The Looking Glass doesn't even pretend to be an adaptation of either Alice book, which allows it to get straight up bonkers a lot of the time. Brightening up the color palette is a really smart move that makes it more pleasing to gawk at and much better suited for IMAX. It also means that the production design and costumes get to be genuinely creative instead of relying on Tim Burton's fetish for cartoonishly exaggerated Gothic grimness. The performances are similarly fresh, Sasha Baron Cohen as Time is a campy caricature, but it's fun campy caricature which fits with the tone, Helena Bonham Carter's Queen of Hearts gets to fully embrace the pettiness that was only glimpsed in the first film, and if nothing else, Mia Wasikowska continues to look stunning in Victorian period dress.

Through The Looking Glass is a better film, but that really isn't saying much. It occasionally gets the dream-like tone right, and if you can bring yourself to surrender and fall into the screen and get lost in it's over-designed digital madness, then you might enjoy it - I imagine it'd be a great drug trip movie. But if you actually want some substance to go with the spectacle, then I'm afraid you're out of luck, since, like the first one, Through The Looking Glass is still a work of nonsense; one more in keeping with the whimsical spirit of the books, granted, but still a piece of nonsense.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Money Monster": It Just Doesn't Work

Directed by Jodie Foster
Written by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore
and Jim Koufe

(R - Sony - 1 hr, 38 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

We're in one of those periods where there's this huge juggernaut that everyone knows is just going to crush the box office and destroy anything in its path, so everyone else gets out of the way and lets the juggernaut run its course. So, here's a review of the only notable thing that anyone bothered to release this week.

Money Monster is a feature length adaptation of that Facebook meme about Wall Street shared by your nephew that won't shut up about Bernie Sanders, it's got passion behind it, it has an idea that it scratches at, and you might even find yourself agreeing with it, but it's not willing to engage that idea on anything more than a surface level and it's too self satisfied to take seriously.

George Clooney is Lee Gates, host of "Money Monster", which tries to be a thinly veiled facsimile of Mad Money, but with how Clooney acts, introducing the show with choreographed background dancers, it comes across more like a half-rent knockoff of The Daily Show parodying Mad Money (if anyone ever tries to film "The Jon Stewart Story", they should cast Clooney). When a stock that Lee said was a safe investment crashes due to a computer glitch, Jack O'Donnel as a deranged viewer that had invested all his savings into that stock breaks into the set and holds him and the production team hostage while the show is being broadcast. He forces Clooney to wear a suicide vest and demands that the host renounce the lies he's been spewing lest he take his thumb off of the detonator, all while law enforcement is trying to get into the building and Julia Roberts as the show's director desperately tries to get in contact the company's CEO, who just so happened to be on a transatlantic flight when the stock went bust.

Director Jodie Foster knows how to build tension, it helps that the first two thirds of the film confine the action more-or-less entirely to the studio, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that lends itself to something passing for realism, but when the third act rolls around, for no real reason, they decide to move the broadcast out into the streets, deflating the tension at the moment where it should be building to a climax. The actors are similarly hit and miss, Clooney's natural charisma is a perfect fit for the TV host, and he has good chemistry with Julia Roberts, but Jack O'Connel's crazed fan is just all over the place, sometimes he's believably deranged, other times his exaggerated Brooklyn accent detracts from the tension at the worst possible moment, like when the police and the studio get his pregnant girlfriend on air to talk him down, and instead she snaps at him, making the situation worse. This should be a tense moment, we should care, but we can't because of the caricature onscreen.

That's the problem with the entire film, the screenplay is a caricature of it's own worldview and message, and whenever Money Monster approaches having a point, it gets watered down in the half-formed philosophizing of a fourteen year old that just discovered that the world isn't perfect, and decided that this must mean that everything is the worst. If The Big Short is what a Michael Moore film would be if he knew how to talk to an audience instead of talking at them, then Money Monster is what would happen if he were to drop the pretense of documentary and outright film his manifesto, it's definitely trying, but it just doesn't work, and by the end it's just kind of insufferable. The cast puts in an admirable effort, the cinematographer and the editor know what they're doing, but the screenplay and the direction are plagued by a constant inability to maintain a consistent tone, swinging between a dark comedy and a claustrophobic thriller. The result feels like either a below average episode of Black Mirror or an average episode of CSI depending on how heavily it beats you over the head with it's half-hearted moralizing.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Captain America: Civil War": It's "Avengers 2.5", And That's A Good Thing

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo
Written by Christopher Markus
and Stephen McFeely

(PG-13 - Disney - 2 hrs, 27 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

I want to know what happens when Marvel releases a bad movie, and I'm not counting lackluster but serviceable entries like The Incredible Hulk or Iron Man 2, or the eternal redheaded stepchild that is Agents of SHIELD, I mean something that really, genuinely sucks. It has to happen sooner or later, the law of averages demands it, but Marvel Studios is such a well oiled machine at this point that they might be able to just absorb the loss and keep on rolling like nothing happened. They've created their own almost natural cycle, turning hype into investment into stories back into hype so efficiently that even if Doctor Strange turns out to be a total dud, all the worldbuilding and fanservice and such that was put into it would just be absorbed back into the system and any remaining ill will would be swept away by Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming less than a year later.

It's entirely possible that Marvel Studios achieved that Rocky/Star Wars/James Bond point where what they do occupies such a specific niche in the popular culture that it's impossible to apply the same metrics of criticism that you use for everything else, but with the added bonus that the Internet has sped up the cultural cycle of engagement that the gap between "I'm getting kind of sick of this." and Oh, hey. This is back and I remember why I liked it to begin with." that used to take years for genre works like those mentioned above, the gap between Die Another Day and Casino Royale, between Attack of the Clones and The Force Awakens, between Rocky IV and Creed, can now happen within the few months between Age of Ultron and Ant-Man. We've lost the ability to forget; anything that becomes even remotely popular now is just going to stick around, forever, and the interlinking continuity and endless self-perpetuating storytelling of comic book superheroes could not be better suited to that new reality.

Captain America: Civil War is the clearest possible signal that Marvel not only realizes their dominance, they've embraced it wholeheartedly; there's no point in pretending that the story could end here, so instead they'll remind the audience why they've become attached to these characters and this iconography and this setting over the past dozen films and entice them with the promise of a dozen more to come. It's not a great film despite being a comics adaptation or despite being the third Captain America film or despite being part of an established vassal state of the Disney Empire, it's great because of having all those things to draw from and build upon.

You already know the outline of the story from the trailers, the Avengers inadvertently cause massive civilian casualties during a routine peacekeeping mission, and by now the novelty of having superheroes running around unchecked has worn off with enough of the public that the United Nations drafts the Sokovia Accords, meant to reign in the actions of "enhanced individuals". Some of them are for it, others are against it, and Captain America becomes even more against it when a terrorist attack during the signing of the Sokovia Accords is blamed on the Winter Soldier, aka Cap's old friend from the war who'd been brainwashed into becoming a cyborg assassin for HYDRA, he thinks he's innocent so he goes rouge to find the real culprit, and the prince of the reclusive African nation of Wakanda dons the ceremonial armor of the Black Panther to hunt down and kill the Winter Soldier to avenge his father.

I was hesitant to embrace that, the trailers were making it out to be "Avengers 2.5: Civil War" and I worried that this would be the point where Marvel Studios finally fell into the same trap that Marvel Comics did, where the demands of maintaining the continuity of the broader meta-narrative overrode and overwrote the individual storylines. Sure, it's nice to not have to wonder where the rest of the team is during a solo adventure for once, but were we going to get the lite-version of an Avengers movie at the expense of a good Captain America movie? And while Civil War is definitely a follow-up to The Avengers, and for that matter a more fitting thematic successor to that film than it's own sequel was, this is definitely still a Captain America film. Civil War is about tension between doing what your emotions tell you is right and just in the moment, and doing what does the most good in the long run, and no Avenger better embodies that dilemma, "freedom of" versus "freedom from", than the embodiment of America's self-image that is Captain America.

Except, perhaps, for Tony Stark, who's personal failings and not having any Avenging to fall back on is letting his personal demons consume him all over again. He knows all too well that letting powerful weapons out into the world unchecked leads to disaster, and he won't let it happen again, even comparing unrestrained superhumans to nuclear warheads. The two make perfect foils for each-other, and the conflict between the two drives the entire film. Even when all the cards are on the table and there's no logical reason for them to keep fighting, the fighting doesn't stop because the emotions are still running hot and all the hidden secrets and crippling flaws that came to the surface have risen above the mechanics that brought them out, and that kind of stuff doesn't just go away once the inciting incident has receded. That's heavy material even for a "serious" film, let alone one where the return of Spider-Man* is a huge selling point.

And while it's a given that most "serious" critics will give Civil War the backhanded passive-aggressive dig that it's "great for a comic-book movie", having the pre-existing cultural zeitgeist and past dozen films worth of lore and backstory to draw on is what lets Civil War exist as it does, something that certain other studios could stand to learn. It's a serious meditation on civics and interventions and human nature, but it's also a great follow up to The Avengers and a gloriously gonzo action film that contains some of the most ridiculous but most engaging action sequences ever put to film as an emergency "pump up the audience" button. It is Marvel Studios at their most crowd-pleasing, most refined, and most powerful, and while I'm not entirely sure if it's their best work, it's the best example so far of why the whole experiment was worth setting up in the first place.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 5/5

*Tobey Maguire is always going to be my Spider-Man, but Tom Holland is fantastic in his own right.

Let's Talk About Movies: Sit Down, Sit Still, And Shut Up

Alo Party Peoples.

You may have heard that last week, AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron told Variety that he was considering allowing texting in some theaters to attract Millennials, saying "when you tell a 22 year old to turn off their phone... they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow... that's not how they live their life.". Nearly everyone's reaction was that it was a terrible idea. There was talk about boycotting AMC, and he of course rolled it back the next day, this was probably a case of someone's public relations agent mistakenly thinking that all press is good press, and hastily backtracking once they realized that they had screwed up.

Setting aside that it's likely that AMC didn't have any serious plans to move forward with some version of "you can use your cellphone here now" any time soon - this was probably an attempt to gauge public opinion before getting serious about it later - as for me,  a Millennial who turns off their tiny piece of transhumanism when the lights go down, I'm irritated every time some executive or marketer says "Millennial" when they mean "twenty something prick that works in New York or LA media that never had to grow up", and as a cinephile, I am infuriated at the very notion of texting-friendly theaters. That most theater chains, AMC included, are too terrified of declining ticket sales to actually enforce their cellphone bans is one thing, but actively encouraging cellphone use in a theater by saying it's okay as long as it's in a specific room, or if they have a special seat, or if it's part of a "second screen experience" is a step too far if you ask me. When the news broke, I half-expected AMC to announce that texting-friendly theaters would be the norm, and audiences would now be required to pay extra for the privilege of not having a dozen glowing rectangles constantly dinging throughout the movie...

...but I'll admit that Aron has a point. The fact is that ticket sales have been slowly declining for the last decade, and younger audiences declining to go through the hassle of driving to a specific location to pay upwards of ten dollars to see a movie once, and telling them that they can't text on top of it, when they can just stream something instead is a big part of that. The theatrical moviegoing experience simply does not sit on the same pedestal to Millennials that it did for Boomers, and as such, when they decide to go to a theater, they have less of an incentive to care about proper etiquette; why learn the rules when you'll almost never need to follow them?

Once upon a time, going to the movies was a pretty good way to teach your kids how to behave themselves in public; "sit down, sit still, and shut up because there's a movie up there to watch" was good practice for "sit down, sit still, and shut up because we're at church, or we're in a nice restaurant, or we're at your sister's ballet recital", but now, with schools and parents more concerned with preparing kids to pass the SATs than teaching basic human interaction, it's entirely possible that nobody ever taught that 22 year old how to behave in a movie theater.

However, the solution to that is not to degrade everyone else's movie-going experience, that's akin to burning the house down while your family is inside because you really hate the dog. The solution is to actually teach that etiquette. A movie theater is designed to be an escape from reality, you walk through the doors into the dark room with that massive screen looming above you, it's meant to be larger than life, to instill a sense of awe at the titanic figures onscreen. When there are a few dozen tiny pinpricks of light dancing about all around you that you can focus on instead, the immersion is broken. You're paying to be here to watch a movie, why would you ignore it? When the lights go down, turn it off, and leave it off. You, and the actual adults around you, will be grateful that you did.

But, if your schedule genuinely doesn't let you be out of phone contact for two hours, maybe you shouldn't be going to a movie to begin with.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Jungle Book": This Is Why We Have Movie Theaters

Directed by Jon Favreau
Written by Justin Marks

(PG - Disney - 1 hr, 45 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

The Jungle Book is the kind of movie that has to be seen in a theater. Normally it isn't worth it to go into detail about the 3D of a 3D movie, not everyone is going to see the movie in 3D, and audiences have mostly caught onto the fact that only movies made in 3D tend to look good in 3D, but the effects work is essesntial to The Jungle Book's success. Despite being shot entirely at a studio backlot in downtown Los Angeles, The Jungle Book will still transport the audience to the jungles of India, where they'll find a boy raised by a pack of wolves under the watchful eye of a panther that must leave the pack on a journey to manhood after a tiger decides that he will become a threat.

The Jungle Book is Disney at its best, taking an old beloved story, and lovingly retelling it with all the style and majesty of Golden Age Hollywood and the technical prowess of the modern film industry. It's fitting that Disney has started to do so with their own backlog, recreating their 90s Renaissance with Frozen, creating the embodiment of the Disney fairy tale with Cinderella, and now doing an old-school family adventure movie that has enough nods to the original and Disney's history to satisfy nostalgia buffs without feeling like a rehash, and also is just this big, sweeping spectacle that just works wonders in the moment.

It's the kind of use of IMAX that Avatar promised and Gravity started to flesh out, and The Jungle Book has finally realized the dream of fully transporting the audience to a completely artificial environment without them realizing it's artificial, and not caring if they do. You aren't watching the animals, you're with them. Director Jon Favreau has enough restraint to realize that 3D is generally more immersive when it's drawing the audience in then when it's projecting out towards the audience. So the jungle is a majestic, lush, breathing creation that draws the audience in, the animals move with a real sense of weight, the kid is the only live-action actor in the entire film, and he doesn't stick out at all. It's a near perfect visual marvel, movies like this are why we have movie theaters...

...which is why, if you're going to see The Jungle Book, then you have to see it in a theater, and why it's worth it to shell out the extra cash for 3D. In two years, if you're watching it on a television, it isn't going to be as effective at drawing you in, and you'll start to notice the kind of stiff, episodic structure and the occasional tonal whiplash as it tries to strike a balance between the semi-seriousness of the Ruyard Kipling stories and the whimsy of the Disney film, best exemplified when they try to shoehorn the songs in to middling results. Having Bill Murray as Baloo hum the melody to "The Bare Neccessities" is a cute reference, having him then head into a full rendition of it when none of the rest of the movie has been a musical is pushing it, and having Christopher Walken sing "I Wan'na Be Like You" in the middle of what's supposed to be a serious moment leading up to the climax is just kind of awkward.

But those are all things you only think of once the movie's ended and you're driving home, as it's happening The Jungle Book comes damn near close to being perfect. Go see it.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4.5/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Hardcore Henry": Game On

Directed by Ilya Naishuller
Written by Ilya Naishuller and Will Stewart

(R - STX Entertainment - 1 hr, 36 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

You wake up in a mysterious laboratory with a woman that says she's your wife. As she screws on your cybernetic limbs, she tells you that your name is Henry, and that you're a prototype super-soldier that she's stolen from Akan, a Russian mad scientist bent on taking over the world; before she can install your speech module, said mad scientist breaks into her lab with his telekinetic superpowers and you grab your wife to jump into an escape pod and crash over Moscow. When you land, Akan's hired goons kidnap your wife, but you run for it, and you run into a man that looks at lot like Sharlto Copley. He says his name is Jimmy and he's here to help, he gives you a gun and directions to Akan's fortress so you can rescue your wife and take revenge. And you do...

As the first generation of filmmakers to grow up with video games as a constant presence in their lives since early childhood comes of age, visual language from games bleeding into cinema is becoming more and more common. Using popups to depict text messages instead of holding on an awkward static shot of a cellphone? That's an innovative solution to a relatively new problem. Using long elaborate tracking shots to make a heavily scripted action scene look more impressive? That gets annoying if you've seen it enough times, but it's an impressive translation of the cut-scene to a non-interactive medium. And eventually -- inevitably -- as the generation of gamers that grew up on Xbox Live starts entering film school, someone shot an entire film in first-person.

And if you just audibly groaned at the mere idea of a first-person shooter movie, I get where you're coming from; I'm not a fan of shaky-cam to begin with, and I've never been much of a gamer, so the prospect of "It's a Call of Duty death match, but you don't get to play it." was never going to do much for me, it sounded like a gimmick to save time on cinematography. "Where do we put the camera!? Put it on that guy's head!" but I have to admit that Hardcore Henry kind of rules. First-time director Ilya Naishuller has perfectly captured the mindset of a Twitch-addicted teenager who was given millions of dollars and a GoPro and told "Go nuts!". The plot is about what you'd expect from that, but the storylines of most first-person shooters - especially the ones that Hardcore Henry is directly influence by - are already trying to imitate a blockbuster action movies to some extent, so embracing that inspiration by taking a stock action script and shooting it in first person is just short of inspired...

...but it still falls short of inspired. Being able to shoot an entire film in first-person is impressive, but so was making a film look like it was all done in one shot, and so was painstakingly recreating silent film making; technical style is all fine and good, but it works better when you have something to say using it, and Hardcore Henry doesn't have much substance to back up the spectacle. It feels like a demo for the idea of a first-person action film, it's a promising technique, but this is unlikely to be the best use of it. It leans too heavily on shaky-cam and it's limited perspective as a crutch to hide lackluster choreography and middling effects work, and the novelty of that perspective does get old after a while, and the film tries to make up for that by being of the nastiest, bloodiest action movies to hit mainstream theaters in a long time. It's a full-on gore fest that makes Kingsman look like it belongs at the kids table. But there's a certain enthusiastic flippant, adolescent screaming charm to it that makes it work in the moment.

Hardcore Henry is the best example of me really appreciating something I theoretically should have hated in a long time, it's an exceptionally well done version of exactly what it wants to be... which is an angry teenager movie, granted - but it's a damn good angry teenager movie, and like the similarly adolescent-minded Deadpool, it's one that's self-aware enough to deliver gleefully flippant catharsis instead of sulking in it's own self-satisfied seriousness like Dawn of Justice. I don't know whether the director has a vision, or anything to say, or even if he has a second film in him, but his brief burst into boorish brilliance is a badly needed breath of fresh air, destined to become a sleeper-hit cult-classic.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice": Meet The Bizarro World Avengers

Directed by Zack Snyder
Written by Chris Terrio and David Goyer

(PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 33 mins) 

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING

Alo Party Peoples.

If I were an executive at Warner Bros that had any hand in signing off on building the studio's next decade of summer tent poles around this movie, I would be on the roof demanding that heads start rolling by Monday.

Yeah, this movie sucks. The direction sucks, the cast mostly sucks, the screenplay really sucks, the art direction and cinematography... actually isn't half-bad for what it is, but it's so grim and morose and lacking in form or function that it's impossible to care about or even make sense of the action onscreen, which really sucks. It is increasingly evident not only that Zack Snyder simply does not understand the pop-iconography he's been assigned to work with, he may actively despise parts of it and Warner Bros simply doesn't give a shit so long as what he turns in is technically recognizable as a DC Comics adaptation. 

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is one of the worst blockbusters in recent memory, and I'm getting all of that out of the way now because going into exactly why requires massive spoilers, and I have no intention to write a piece that ceases to be relevant a week after the movie opens. Do I sound pissed off? Because I'm pissed off, I just had to watch two and a half hours of DC fan service world building that exists not to retell a beloved old story, not to tell an exciting new story, not even just for fun, but for the soulless task of franchise management. It's bad in a way that blockbusters generally haven't been since the late-90s when Batman and Robin nearly killed the entire genre for a while, and it only spares itself being that terrible because expectations were so low after Man of Steel. It's the kind of bad that can only be faithfully expressed by just describing the movie and letting the sheer stench of its stupidity permeate through the room.

To wit, "Lex Luthor hates the idea of Superman, so he's delighted when he finds out about Batman, who also hates Superman because some people that worked for Wayne Enterprises died during the ending of Man of Steel, so he tries to bait Batman into killing Superman by egging Superman into engaging in reckless escapades in North Africa and setting off a suicide bomb during his Congressional hearing with a jar of piss (seriously), but none of that was necessary at all because Batman was already trying to kill Superman because he's been having psychic dreams about a dark dystopian future and also because The Flash popped out of a time hole to warn him about Darkseid (I think?), so Lex lures him into building Kryptonite weapons and a suit of battle armor so he can maybe actually have a chance of killing Superman, but Lex didn't need to do that either because he used Kryptonian science magic to turn General Zod's body into Doomsday, essentially a giant orc that's more powerful than both of them put together, but fortunately this woman that Bruce Wayne has been seeing on and off thought the movie is actually Wonder Woman, who shows up at the last minute to help them punch Doomsday to death, which they succeed in but Superman dies in the process so Wonder Woman and Batman think about maybe trying to put together the Justice League just in case anything like Doomsday ever happens again."

It makes even less sense when I'm writing it out than it did when it had two and a half hours to happen. The script is built out of a ham-fisted attempt to smash The Dark Knight Returns and The Death of Superman together into one story, and I almost want to see that reported R-rated three hour Blu-Ray cut, because in order to fit all of that stuff into a feature-length running time, Dawn of Justice had to be hacked to pieces and so haphazardly reassembled that it feels less like a movie and more like one of those YouTube fan tribute videos with the whiny emo rock soundtrack stripped out. The plot is so overly complicated yet insultingly simplistic that it wouldn't pass muster for a fourth grader's creative writing assignment; you'd find better material scrawled in the margins of a bored fourteen year old's textbooks in between whiny amateur poetry and Fall Out Boy lyrics. Not even Zack Snyder's visual styling works; he remains a top tier technical talent, but it's clear that when left to his own devices he simply can't tell a story. He's trying for big epic grandeur, with the intense color saturation and hyper-stylized feel of a Romantic painting or an Alex Ross splash page but it comes across more like something you'd see airbrushed on the side of a van outside a tattoo parlor. All accompanied by the crushing sonic weight of an even more oppressive than usual Hans Zimmer score.

The cast doesn't get off much better, Henry Cavill is somehow even more of an unbelievable stiff than he was in Man of Steel, this Superman is supposed to be one that's conflicted about being a hero and a savior figure (in case the Jesus and/or Moses parallels weren't subtle enough), but we never get to see this theme elaborated upon outside of general brooding. Ben Affleck is actually a pretty convincing Bruce Wayne, he plays him as a charming old money scoundrel with hints of James Bond, but he's a terrible choice to play Batman, or he at least can't pull off the gruff, scowling Frank Miller Lite version he's been cast as; if that solo Batman movie can still happen, something good might come out of this mess, but that's a big if. Gal Gadot gets nothing to work with as Wonder Woman, it feels like she was only cast because Warner Bros told Zack Snyder that he had to include Wonder Woman, but she at least gets off better than Amy Adams as Lois Lane, who the screenplay tries and fails to find a place for. During the climax she nearly drowns retrieving a Kryptonite spear from a caved in pool, which sounds interesting and heroic until you remember that she threw the damn thing into the pool herself ten minutes ago for seemingly no other reason than because the script says for her to do that.

Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor... is one of the worst comic book movie villains ever. He's instantly obnoxious and not in an off-putting way, his face is made entirely out of awkward ticks, his cadence is too off and idiosyncratic to deliver the theatrical lines he's been given, and he's hamming it up like he thought the villains on the Adam West Batman show were too subtle. We never get a sense of who he is, what his motivations are, or even what LexCorp is supposed to be or do when he isn't being a supervillian. Even his reason for hating superheroes changes from scene to scene, one moment he just does, then it's because he has hangups about religion, then it's because of his abusive father, then he's screaming about some offscreen future horrors that must be prepared for at all costs.

Speaking of which, if you were wondering about tie-ins to Justice League, we get them. Oh dear god do we get them. There's a reason that Marvel tends to relegate their more fanservice-y bits of world-building to after the credits, that way they don't get in the way of the actual movie. But Zack Snyder looked at that and decided "I can top this!"; so halfway through the movie, Bruce Wayne sends Wonder Woman stolen files from Lex Luthor's servers that document not only her existence, but also The Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman, who he's not only documented but named and given individual logos to. Really, that's how they do it, they stop the movie halfway through so they can open up a press kit and show off teasers for the next four movies. But where Marvel's teasers feel like a promise, this feels like a threat; "How dare you think that superheroes dominating popular cinema for over a decade wouldn't have any downsides! Look upon me and despair!"

Dawn of Justice is like the Bizarro World inverse mirror of The Avengers, where that was a triumphant finale to years of buildup of an unprecedented experiment in faithfully translating the shared-universe shenanigans of comic book superheroes to the silver screen made by people that clearly understood and cared about the characters they were working with, Dawn of Justice is a cynical attempt to set up a shared universe that was slapped together on the fly and handed to a creative team that couldn't care less even if Disney had secretly paid them to cripple any potential Justice League project before it could even get off the ground. And if news breaks tomorrow that that's exactly what happened, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 1/5

Let's Talk About Movies: "10 Cloverfield Lane" and Mystery Box Marketing

Alo Party Peoples.

I am not opposed to film makers naming their films after unrelated existing things inting  order to get their vision off the ground. So if you want to make a nasty little thriller like an extended Twilight Zone episode, and you have to name it after a found footage kaiju movie from eight years ago to get it made, I'm fine with it; you do what you have to in service of your art, but that is not the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane. 

10 Cloverfield Lane started production as an under the radar indie script called The Cellar, and it was picked up by Paramount and placed  under lock and key for months before getting a surprise trailer a couple months before release along with a viral marketing campaign hinting at possible connections to Cloverfield, so instead of thinking "Oh, this looks like a nasty little thriller, I might buy it on demand one day", you think "Oh, this reminds me of that found footage Godzilla movie that I sort of remember,  I might go see that." in service of the Mystery Box marketing shenanigans of producer J.J. Abrams.

If you don't have to know what the Mystery Box is - then I envy your superior life choices - but it's J.J. Abrams' twee little Ted Talk name for the way he makes/markets his movies, it boils down to "audiences like to be surprised", so he hides as much about his films as possible, in hopes of recapturing the pre-Internet experience of seeing films sight-unseen, remember the trailers for The Force Awakens? We saw almost every big moment of the film, but we had almost no narrative context for any of it, so we were free to speculate, which created terabyte after terabyte of free advertising.

This is Abrams' specialty, he's probably one of the best marketers ever, and it's a technique that was pioneered with Cloverfield itself, a campaign that was so low key that for months the film didn't even have a title, and it worked there because it was an original property that wasn't tied to anything else, so when people thought "A found footage Godzilla movie? I haven't seen that before, I'll check it out.", there was enough there to satisfy them. Now, however, Abrams appears to be trying to take that kind of marketing and turn it into branding for a loosely connected anthology

If that's the game, getting funding for rising indie filmmakers to make low-budget but high-polish genre pieces with relative artistic freedom so long as they have some mention of the word "cloverfield", I'm fine with that, that sounds awesome, but it would have been a better idea to use something a bit more general like "J.J. Abrams Presents...", because between the name and the marketing, anyone going to see 10 Cloverfield Lane that doesn't follow entertainment news isn't expecting an extended Twilight Zone episode with a larger than usual budget for the finale, they're expecting a kaiju at the end, so when they don't get one it's going to feel like a letdown.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a good movie, if allowed to stand on it's own merits it might even have been a sleeper hit that got director Dan Tractenberg a dedicated following, but now that it's been absorbed into Abrams' sphere, it can only be remembered as another example of the Mystery Box.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Zootopia" A Muddled Mess of Mixed Metaphors

Directed by Bryon Howard, Rich Moore,
and Jared Bush
Written by Jared Bush and Phil Johnsoton

(PG - Disney - 1 hr, 48 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Disney Animation's recent resurgence has been marked with stark shifts in approach and subject matter with each subsequent film. Frozen was a big flashy musical in the style of their 90s' Renaissance... that was also careful deconstruction of the Disney fairy tale and it's warped perception of romance and family dynamics. Big Hero 6 is a superhero adventure... but it's also a study of grief and how people deal with the loss of a loved one. Zootopia follows in this path in that it's a silly cartoon about talking animals, that's also a fable about diversity and acceptance.

Thousands of years ago animals (or at least mammals) became sentient and abandoned their predator-prey relationships in aims of creating a place where "anyone can become what they want to be", and through the Mayor's new "mammal inclusion initiative", Judi Hopps has achieved her dream to become the city's first rabbit police officer, but she soon discovers that the promise of opportunity is rather limited when she's assigned to be a meter maid, until she gets the chance to prove herself by investigating several disparate cases of animals "going savage", losing their intelligence, walking on all fours, and attacking anyone around them, for which she teams up with a sly streetwise fox, and they discover that only predators are going savage, which leads to increased targeting of predators by the police department and suspicion and fear by the general population.

All the pieces for another Frozen are there; a great voice cast, fantastic animation and character design, symbolic use of cartoon staples to make a point about the real world that created them, but they don't quite click in the same way that they did before, if anything it's because Zootopia is trying to do more. It's less focused on character dynamics and emotional payoffs than it is on allegory, and not particularly subtle metaphor, something that a cast of anthropomorphized animals is particularly well suited for. Problem is, Zootopia doesn't seem to have put that much thought into it's central metaphor, they're trying their hardest to make a serious statement about racial profiling, that it results from fear and ignorance at its core, that once it gets ingrained in a culture it's increasingly difficult to get out, and other things that would involve spoilers to go into, but their visual coding for "persecuted minority" is literal lions and tigers and bears, which more than undermines their point.

That's the thing about using animals as symbolic figures, the more complex an idea you're trying to convey, the less it works because we get the idea of a sly fox or a timid sheep or a powerful lion, almost on an intrinsic level. They go out of their way to include a little beat of a tiger sitting next to a rabbit family on the subway, and the mother quietly pulling her child away. We get the fear in the mother, the heightened alertness of the tiger, and the increasing tension on both sides, but it's a tiger, so of course the audience is going to want her to pull her child away. I'm not accusing Disney of doing anything nefarious, this is probably just the result of thinking "Okay, city full of animals! How does that actually work?" I'm accusing them of not thinking their visual language before they committed to it.

It's not all bad, the cast is a lot of fun, I'm sure the animation sets new records for rendering whiskers and fur, when they try for visual humor it mostly works; Zootopia is a good movie, but the Mouse House is definitely coasting off the success of Frozen at this point, it's a serviceable family film on its own terms, if the script had been put through the wringer a few more times it probably could have been great, but the muddled mess of mixed metaphors at its core keep distracting from the things that work.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5