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.