Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Max": As American A Picture As There Ever Was (PG - Warner Bros. - 1 hr, 51 mins)

Directed by Boaz Yakin
Written by Boaz Yakin and Sheldon Lettich

Alo Party Peoples.

In the current mass entertainment film making landscape, Max feels like an anachronism. Here's a premise that feels like it could have come straight from Amblin Entertainment in the 80s or from Disney in the 90s, (or from the Disney Channel in the '00s) presented completely straight with total sincerity. You normally don't get away with this level of earnest emotional enthusiasm unless your name is Spielberg and your'e making a a movie about a British army horse during the Great War.

This animal war story comes to us courtesy of Remember The Titans helmer Boaz Yakin, and if Max were in the hands of anyone less skilled at wringing emotional responses out of an audience, it would have fallen apart into self-parody, but Max is a completely "irony" free zone, and as a result it's both a phenomenal family film, and a far better story about veterans adjusting to civilian life than American Sniper could ever hope to be.

To wit, Max is about an all-American military family in suburban Texas. Pamela, a God-fearing compassionate housewife, Ray, a small business owning veteran of the first Iraq War, and their son Justin, a moody teenager that spends his days glued to his computer playing and selling pirated video games. When Justin's brother Kyle dies serving in Afghanistan, the family adopts the titular dog, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and Justin is the only one that Max feels comfortable being around. As they spend more time together, Max gets Justin to spend more time outside with his peers, and Justin helps Max recover from the horrors of war.

The actors fill their family film archetypes very, very well. The wise old father figure, the matron-saint of a mom, the wisecracking best friends, but the best actor in this film is easily the dog. The reason so many family films are built around dogs, they're an animal that humans, and especially children, tend to immediately empathize with, so having a dog involved in the Afghanistan war both doubles down on that and adds an element that adults will empathize with as well. It's so cannily assembled and well executed that it's enough to make one suspect that Boaz Yakin sacrificed a bald eagle to the Founding Fathers in order to bless the set and make Max the most American motion picture that ever was.

If there's one place where Max does trip up, it's in including a subplot involving Tyler, a man that served with Kyle in Afghanistan that has been selling weapons to a Mexican drug cartel, and is hell bent on having Max put down because... he growled at him when he got home from the service, I guess? Anyways, I don't think this story needed to have a villain, Justin helping Max recover from the horrors of war was more than compelling enough to hang a film on, but it's not like it breaks the movie or anything, it's just one okay element of what is overall a very well executed production.

Max is broad, arch, and it yanks on the heartstrings harder than anything else in recent memory. There's plenty that the Press Irreverent will mock, such as Justin and Max riding a bike together and leaping right into a deliberate homage to E.T, or juxtaposing Kyle fighting off the Taliban with Justin playing a military shooter. But Boaz Yakin really is just that good at this stuff, and everyone from the most God-fearing, red-white-and-blue-blooded patriot, to the most cynical, snarky Rifftrax wannabe in the audience will find themselves tearing up.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4.5/5

Let's Talk About Movies: "Jurassic World" And The Nostalgia-Industrial Complex

Alo Party Peoples.

Jurassic World is dominating the box office. It has trampled and devoured the competition to become one of the highest grossing movies of all time. As I write this, it has passed the billion dollar mark worldwide and become the eighth highest grossing film ever, according to Box Office Mojo. It is, to overuse a pun, a monster hit.

This isn't a discussion of Jurassic World's artistic merit, not by a long shot. Box office has never been an indicator of quality, for example, Transformers: Dark of the Moon is also on that list, and Avatar is the all time champ. I'm not interested in whether Jurassic World deserves to be doing so well, I'm interested in why. Why this film? Why is what amounts to a multi-million dollar B-movie so massively, utterly dominating movie screens?

This isn't like the original Jurassic Park where the CGI creatures were a novelty by virtue of being CGI, today practically everything remotely difficult to film is done via CGI, and Jurassic World's CGI isn't even that impressive, the dinosaurs never feel real, they feel like ethereal forms floating about among the actors. Nor does it have the natural talent of Spielberg backing up the spectacle, this has a no-name indie brat brought on-board by Universal since new talent is easier to control. Even if he did get some cheeky gags in about the bloated nature of blockbuster sequels (see the screenshot of a CGI monstrosity devouring a shark, i.e. the natural results of forty years of post-Jaws stakes escalation in blockbusters) they're clearly not the primary intent of Jurassic World.


In the absence of any other explanation, the reason Jurassic World is ruling the Earth right now is the same reason that Transformers dominated the box office, the same reason that Sony has fought tooth and nail to keep some aspect of Spider-Man under their control, and the same reason that a Jem and the Holograms movie is happening at all, let alone decades after it was supposedly popular. It is the nostalgia-industrial complex. The only thing that Jurassic World's box-office haul means or proves is that it is powerfully profitable to pander to an entire generation's desire to wrap themselves in warm memories of their late-20th Century childhoods.

The late 20th Century was in many ways a massive turning point for the way people consume media. The Digital Revolution made it easier and cheaper both to find and find out about all sorts of shows and songs and movies and everything else, the Blockbuster Age brought a standard release cycle to the film industry and brought it out of the Broadway model of touring films across the country, but there was also one other change. As part of the Reagan administration's aims of supercharging the American economy via deregulation, the FCC's rules against television shows being 30 minute advertisements were done away with.

While shows aimed at adults mostly resisted becoming more blatantly commercial, since adults tend to notice that, shows aimed at children almost immediately embraced the new reality and started turning out half-hour toy commercials by the truckload. The result is that Generations X and Y are the first generations for whom their pop-cultural touchstones came in commercial form. And when those children grew up and had disposable income, the entertainment business wasted no time in repackaging those properties to turn a tidy profit off of their happy childhood memories with the dawning of the Franchise Age.

You'll find no one more dismayed by the current status-quo of American film making more than I am. I am dismayed that the Adam Sandlers and Michael Bays of the world can put the least effort imaginable into their craft and still get the mobs of Middle America to turn over their money hand over fist. I am dismayed that studios hyper-focus on existing intellectual property to the extent that a movie about Peeps is happening, and that we're already on our third cinematic Spider-Man. I am especially dismayed that this also means that shallow vlogger after shallow vlogger are able to get films, while tens of thousands of people with talent and vision to burn slaving away in the commercial and music video salt mines would kill for that opportunity.

But I'll never say that that is the entire film industry. The indie scene has never done better for itself, Whiplash, Ex_Machina, and Birdman were all able to find dedicated audiences, and that last one even won Best Picture. For every Happy Madison there is also a Pixar. For every Last Airbender there is also a Lego Movie. For every Boyhood there is also a Grand Budapest Hotel. Is the bad stuff incredibly, omnipresently visible? Absolutely, but there is still a lot of good stuff if you go out and look for it.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

"Smosh: The Movie" Trailer: This Is The Closest We've Gotten To A Millennial Auteur

Alo Party Peoples.

If there's one thing I'll admit is a real downside to the Digital Age and the democratization of information, it's that it has greatly reduced the value of that information. The prime example is probably still books. The printing press made the written word accessible to the common man, rather than just the nobility and the clergy, and the worthy price paid was that once anyone can write a book, you eventually end up with Divergent.

The same thing happened with film-making and YouTube. Now pretty much anyone with a cellphone can try their hand at film making, but now doing so is far less special. "If everyone's super, no one is."

This trailer for Smosh: The Movie, based off of a long running online sketch comedy show of the same name, is exactly what you would expect from a broader, dumber version of something that was already pretty broad and dumb to begin with.

This is the digital age equivalent of Cool as Ice or Freddy Got Fingered, taking some inane fad that infatuates the youth and only works (relatively speaking) in its native medium (music, television, online video) and forcing it into a format that it just can't work in.

As for Smosh specifically, it looks pretty bad. Online video is already a medium dominated by people that never quite grew up, you could even say that it is the Millennial Medium in the worst possible way. So it's not a surprise that the plot of Smosh: The Movie, which seems to involve the titular comedy duo leaping into YouTube to pull a video down from the inside, feels like something thought up by a hyperactive fifth-grader, right down to the juvenile humor and amateur - even for an indie production - effects work. This hits theaters on July 23rd, and it's sad to think that this is as close as we've gotten to a Millennial auteur.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Inside Out": Pixar's Got The Magic Back (PG - Disney/Pixar - 1 hr, 42 mins)

Directed by Pete Docter and
Ronaldo Del Carmen
Written by Pete Docter,
 Meg LeFauve, and Josh Cooley

Dear Pixar,

Once upon a time, and not really that long ago, you were America's gold standard for theatrical animation. Disney was a fallen titan, DreamWorks was a pandering celebrity-cameo factory, and you were the actual artists in the field. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature - an award created during your initial heyday - used to be called the Pixar Award in the popular parlance, because you kept winning it by earning it.

There's an entire generation for whom your name conjures the same kinds of memories as the Disney Renaissance does for the Millenials, and I'm part of that generation. The Incredibles was the first time I thought I needed to see something in theaters. The first press screening I ever went to was Ratatouille, your name became a seal of quality, one that ensured that whatever it was attached to would be an inventive take on a subject - and probably something that people would enjoy.

But ever since Up, you've been letting yourself fall further and further behind, and the rest of the field has been catching up to your Golden Age. From the nostalgia exploitation of Toy Story 3, to the cynical cash grab of Cars 2, to the tragic misfire of Brave, you just seem to have lost the magic, and in the meantime everyone else has figured out how it works. DreamWorks gets lavished with praise by critics now, Warner Bros. brought their animation department back from the dead, and people are shocked that their movie about Lego didn't get an Oscar nomination. Disney embraced CG animation and, after some early stumbles, rediscovered how to make films with relatable characters in interesting twists on established genre-staples. (fairy tales, video games, superheroes, etc.) They've taken your job, and they're doing it well.

So Inside Out is the project that either proves you have a serious problem, or the project that brings you back from the brink. You didn't seem to have much confidence in it, the first teaser felt less like an ad for Inside Out and more like an ad for "The Pixar Collection: BluRay Edition", which combined with greenlighting sequels to Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, two of your most lauded successes, added yet more credence to the idea that you h ad finally lost your creative soul to the Disney Empire, and are now wholly dependent on nostalgia for the period when you were still relevant...

... until now. Old friend, I'm glad to see that you've gotten your act together. Not only has Inside Out brought you out of your downward spiral, but it may just be some of your best work since, well, probably since Up. It feels like you had some emotions to work out of moving in with Disney, and you decided to make a film about the emotional struggles of a young girl going through the major life change of moving to a new home.

To wit, Inside Out is about a girl named Riley, and the little voices in her head. Those voices are her emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. For eleven years, Joy has been the dominant emotion in Riley's life, dominating practically every new memory of her idyllic existence in Midwestern Rural Tranquility Land. Until one day, when her father gets a new job out in California, and moves the family out to San Francisco. Naturally, what with leaving her friends, staying in an unfamiliar environment, catching brief glimpses of her parents' financial troubles, Riley's emotions start to fall into chaotic discord, resulting in Sadness corrupting and releasing her "core memories", i.e. the experiences that define her personality, nay, her identity, and forcing her and Joy out of the brain's central command, leaving Riley's actions in this crucial point in her development to be governed by Disgust, Anger and Fear. The only way to stop that is for Joy and Sadness to make the trek back through her memories and keep her from having a complete mental breakdown.

It feels like you dealt with the emotional shock of living with Disney by getting incredibly drunk, and your last three movies have been a really bad hangover. But now, you've sobered up, you're ready to start the day new, and you're getting back into the field, having become stronger through that struggle and channeling it into your comeback. You've dealt with some real depressing thoughts running through your head, and you get something that most existential angst-ridden teenagers don't. You get that sadness isn't inherently negative, that it's more of a release valve for emotional tension, that sometimes you just need to let it all out in order to move on to something positive.

And you've just plain got the technical chops, man. You never really lost the ability to make things look pretty, and Inside Out is no exception. Your colors are still bright and vibrant and well chosen, your voice cast perfectly embodies the emotions they depict, you come up with imaginative ways to depict the inner workings of the brain (dream production studios, vast labyrinthine memory archives, literal trains of thought), and at the core of it all, you've rediscovered how to tap into the emotions of the audience. I never thought I'd see an audience close to tears at one of your films after Toy Story 3, but you pulled it off. Hell, you even managed to do 3D well, you didn't have to do that, it's beautiful just the way it is.

Inside Out is arguably the best Pixar movie to date, but besides that, it is a cracking good adventure story that has more to say about how people deal with complex emotions than most grown-up movies do. I'm impressed, old friend, keep up the good work.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Spy": Diet "Kingsman" (R - 20th CenturyFox - 2 hrs, 0 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed and Written by Paul Feig

Spy is another Melissa McCarthy vehicle written and directed by Paul Feig. The last time that happened was The Heat, which starred her and Sandra Bullock in a broad riff on 80s buddy cop movies. Spy goes back further to do a broad riff on 60s spy movies, and in particular Golden Age James Bond. If you saw Kingsman and thought "This is good, but I'd like it more if it were less witty and broader. Oh, and all this blood is just too much for my sensibilities.", then you will probably enjoy Spy, and if you didn't think that, you still might enjoy Spy, because it's still really funny.

Melissa McCarthy is a CIA mission controller who's field agent/boyfriend dies on the job trying to stop a Chechen nationalist terror cell from obtaining a nuclear bomb. Since the last thing she saw on her camera feed was one of their higher ups reading off a list of active CIA agents, they have no choice but to send McCarthy in to pursue the case. That's it, that's the whole setup. Oh, there are twists and double-crosses and plot complications, but any sharp eyed viewer will probably spot them coming a mile away, and they aren't what Spy is interested in.

The main focus of Spy is making a broad physical comedy in the confines of a spy movie, which it does with great success... and that's all I can really say without giving away the jokes. That's the hard thing about talking about any form of comedy. "Analyzing humour is like dissecting a frog. No one is interested, and the frog dies." (E.B. White) I could talk about how Paul Feig has figured out how to do visual comedy, or McCarthy's fantastic chemistry with Rose Byrne as a fellow supervisor turned super-sleuth, or how Jason Statham commits grand-theft-cinema in a supporting role, but then those things would be less funny to you when you saw them. Aside from a confused thematic line where traditionally attractive agents get to work in the field while someone that looks like Melissa McCarthy is kept out of sight at base (wow, subtle), there's not that much to talk about.

So, all I can really do here is say that Spy is hilarious and hope you trust me on that.

All in all

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Aloha": Notably Imperfect (PG-13 - Columbia Pictures - 1 hr, 45 mins)

Directed and Written by
Cameron Crowe

Alo Party Peoples.

One of the hardest parts of this gig is when something just isn't quite right. Transcendently terrific true art? That's easy to write about, the hard part is coming down from the contact high and looking for things that you can actually criticize. Mystifying, blaze-of-imagined glory, cinematic disaster-pieces? Those can be fun in a cathartic sort of way. But notably imperfect is not easy. Aloha is that kind of movie, the kind where there are a lot of parts that you like, and that you want to focus on, but it doesn't work in some nagging specific way that just won't let you ignore it. It's like a loose thread in the world's most luxurious coat, it ruins the whole thing and leaves you awkwardly itching for the entire day.

Bradley Cooper is a defense contractor for the Air Force sent to Hawaii to negotiate with a local nationalist group to set up a launch platform for a satellite owned by Bill Murray as an Elon Musk type billionaire looking to restart America's space program with some good old fashioned entrepreneurship. Along the way he reconnects with Rachel McAdams as his ex-wife - or old flame, it isn't entirely clear - and falls in love with Emma Stone as a local Air Force officer assigned to work with him on negotiations with the locals.

Although it isn't the primary focus of the plot, on a thematic level Aloha, like Interstellar and Tomorrowland is another movie about how we need to restart manned space travel if we want to remain a great power. Unlike those two however, it explicitly argues not only against militarizing space, but also against private sector involvement. The lynchpin of the Hawaiians' argument against allowing the launchpad is that it would involve moving the graves of their ancestors to make way for a wealthy Western businessman to make millions by launching weapons into the sky, which they hold sacred.

Unfortunately, again like Interstellar and Tomorrowland, Aloha has almost no subtlety or grace in how it conveys that message. Characters make exclamations like "You can't buy the sky" and "If we can't look up there with purity and purpose we're finished!" I get the sentiment, I'm all for pumping federal money into space travel, and I don't quite trust private entities motivated by profit to make mankind's message to the stars, but between these three movies, I also think NASA desperately needs better advocates.

There are some things I did like about Aloha, but mostly on a conceptual level and they fail in practice. Bill Murray and Bradley Cooper are great, but they feel like they're each playing a character written for the other, I could totally see Murray playing a down on his luck old pro Army guy and Cooper (still rocking that American Sniper body) playing a young hot shot executive convinced he can bring back American greatness by just throwing enough money at it. It's impressive that Crowe is willing to give the native nationalists and actual voice, and legitimate concerns that could get audiences thinking about issues of ethnic pride and colonial legacy and conflicting nationalisms, and all sorts of other stuff that you usually don't see explored in mainstream family movies... until they fade into the background for the entire rest of the movie.

I'm just going to say it, in 2015 there is no excuse for setting a film in Hawaii, arguably the most diverse cultural melting pot in the world, and still having the main cast be entirely white. The closest it comes to one of the main cast actually being Hawaiian is claiming that Emma Stone's character is 1/4 native on her mother's side. Then again, Emma Stone is great in this, it's like she's acting in an entirely different movie, one that I want to see since Aloha, with its ham handed message mongering, conflicted tone, and sad case of Return of the King's Endless Endings Syndrome, fizzles out like a rocket misfiring on the launchpad.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl": Meet Millennial Wes Anderson (PG-13-20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 44 mins.)

Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Written by Jesse Andrews

Alo Party Peoples.

I was not looking forward to Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, at all. I read that terribly twee title, took one look at this trailer for it, saw that the Sundance set were freaking out over it, and instantly thought "This is a film made by and exclusively for coastal dwelling, Europe envying, Pabst drinking, MSNBC watching, Al Jazerra reading, Steve Jobs worshiping, libertarian leaning, Democrat voting, skinny jean and "ironic" T-shirt clad, eternally irreverent art school attendee wannabe auteur hipsters."

I saw that they worshiped at the altar of Wes Anderson, already a filmmaker often accused by many of exclusively pandering to irreverent skinny jean clad wannabe auteurs, and that they were proving those people right by making a film about irreverent wannabe auteurs filtered through his lense of melancholic whimsy - with the only significant difference being that while Wes' usually evokes the mid-20th Century with his work, these film makers decided to use it to evoke the mid-90s.

That aesthetic choice, sort of makes sense. There's more than a little cultural nostalgia for the brief happy period between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, the same kind of cultural nostalgia that existed for the postwar period during Wes Anderson's formative years. They've both been seen as a bygone, almost mythic age when life was simpler, and all sorts of amazing things were possible, and also as something that can never really happen again since the crushing weight of reality long ago set in. The magic economy was unsustainable in the long run, the Land of the Free is not invincible, and the Tooth Fairy is a figment of your parent's imagination.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is about that sense of disillusionment... as seen through the eyes of a snarky teenage wannabe auteur with a serious case of senioritis. If that sounds like the most insufferable thing ever to you, like it did to me before I saw it in practice, then you probably won't enjoy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. But if you can get behind that, or identify with any of its main cast, or if you really want to see what an Andersonian take on a book that John Green never wrote looks like, then Me and Earl and the Dying Girl will probably be one of your favorite films of 2015.

Greg Gaines is a socially awkward teenager that just doesn't fit in with his peers, to the point that he's "afraid to call anybody his friend" and puts on a show of lightly interacting with everyone while never delving into any kind of relationship that requires real emotional investment. He's so averse to relationships, that he refers to Earl, the closest he's ever come to a best friend, as a "co-worker" since they spend their ample spare time making no-budget spoofs of classic films. (Said spoofs include Senior Citizen Kane, A Sockwork Orange, A-Box-o'-'Lips Wow!, etc.)

This wall of "carefully cultivated invisibility" comes crashing down when Greg's parents require him to spend time with Rachel, the neighbor's girl that has just been diagnosed with leukemia. They're both hesitant at first, but over time they start to fall for each other, she even starts watching their spoofs and they sort-of agree to make one for her. He gets so fixated on making it just right that he does "literally zero schoolwork" just to keep working on it.

I know that sounds like exactly the sort of pandering thing I railed against at the beginning of this article, let's go through the list. Limited color palates, check. Lutes and 60s Brit pop twinkling across the soundtrack, check. Plot involving amateur film making, check. A main character just self-absorbed enough to be funny but hopefully not enough for the audience to hate them, check. By any logic I should have hated this. But there are two reasons I didn't, the acting is good, and they aren't mimicking Wes Anderson just because they can.

If they had made even one bad casting decision among the film's main cast, the whole thing would have just fallen apart. As written, Greg Gaines is just the worst kind of person. He's convinced that everyone around him is a jerk (because he constantly blows everyone else off), that no one understands him (because he's intentionally isolated himself from his peers), constantly moping about his lack of prospects (while doing absolutely nothing about it himself). If they screwed this part up, everyone would want to reach through the screen and strangle this kid, but Thomas Mann brings real humanity to the role and makes him sympathetic and even relatable after a while, especially when you combine it with why the film-makers are making a tribute to Rushmore.

The film's Andersonian melancholic whimsy (somewhere between Rushmore, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom) is, sort of brilliantly, used to show us the world as seen through the eyes of two people that think they have no future (she's dying of cancer, his grades are nowhere near good enough for a scholarship) at a time when everyone around them is saying they have their whole lives ahead of them. The limited fading color palette and the weird dialogue and the ever-present miasma of 1996 adds a vaguely tragic element to this, because they, and by extension the audience, are hit with a longing for something that constantly surrounds them, but that they have no real experience of themselves, which will definitely strike a cord with the legions of socially awkward teenagers that will give this film a passionate following once it comes out.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is going to be a divisive film once it starts coming out on June 12th. Some people are guaranteed to love it, others are guaranteed to hate it, most won't be able to look past the surface-level self-aware quirk to see the raw adolescent wannabe auteur angst fueling the film, and a few will see that they themselves are fueled by that engine. I know I saw a bit of myself in Greg Gaines, and not just because of a shared name.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B