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