Category Archives: Film

Jurassic World

Things Jurassic World had going for it, right out the gate:

Dinosaur technology is better than ever
Chris Pratt is, also, better than ever
The John Williams anthem

Things Jurassic World had working against it:

“Let’s add some kids to run around in danger a lot. That makes it family friendly! I’m sure they’ll be great at acting.”
A music person who clearly had no clue how to appropriately use the John Williams bits
The lead female character’s primary role was to gradually devolve from manager of the world’s most lucrative entertainment enterprise to girlfriend, while gradually showing more skin as indicators of key moments along the progression

Seriously, though, if I was not so annoyed by that last thing, the rest of it made a pretty good movie overall. The music part was rough, but at least they got better at it over the course of the film, and the kids were dumb, but really not any dumber than the kids in Jurassic Park. If you like dinosaurs and chase scenes, that’s enough to go by, and as a bonus most of the characters and situations were pretty well developed. But man, Claire is just a terrible character that damages the rest of the movie so much.

I mean, it was still the best Jurassic sequel by a long shot. Of course it was, did you see those?!

Mad Max: Fury Road

A lot of people will tell you the new Mad Max movie is a feminist film. Those people are right, of course. There are many more women with dialogue than there are men, especially after you correct for one-line extras. It passes the Bechdel test again and again. Nobody’s role is “be rescued”, even the people who are in fact being rescued; and even if it were, they are being rescued by another woman. By any possible metric, Fury Road is a film that glories in being pro-woman.

But is it a Mad Max movie? Is it even an action movie? So, I’ll be honest. I’ve seen those movies, I’m pretty sure all of them. But not since the ’80s. All I remember is Mel Gibson driving around ~~Australia~~ a post-apocalyptic hellscape in weaponized cars, shooting at people he was chasing or who were chasing him. That said, there’s no doubt that this is a sequel to those flicks, both visually and via the clever use of flashbacks that were not intrusive to my lack of knowledge while clearly referencing real scenes that I just couldn’t remember. And as far as action: I’m pretty sure you will not find as much concentrated adrenaline at any point during this summer season. It’s one long chase movie, and you can tell where the act breaks are written into the script because that’s the only time someone isn’t chasing someone else. Aside from one silly action movie trope about the physical toughness of a main character, there was no point where I was confident about anyone’s safety once things started, um, rolling. I have nothing bad to say about this movie that I’m not willing to immediately handwave as an aspect of the genre.

But you know what? It’s important to acknowledge the feminist angle again. Here’s why. Post-apocalyptic fiction has a habit of relegating women to victimhood. That’s what I always praise so highly about the Deathlands series that I’ve been reading, is not only that it rarely falls into that trap, but that it was written starting in the late ’80s, when nobody really cared about that kind of thing yet.

The thing about the post-apocalypse is that women will frequently be victims. This is not a particularly controversial thing to say. Men will be victims too, they just won’t survive that initial step the way women will. Human nature indicates that once power is all that matters, a lot of men will be killed, fewer women will be killed because they can be enslaved for the purposes of the men doing all the killing, and the people who are left will be tough enough to survive on their own / in their own small groups, or they will glom onto the men doing all the killing and help them so as not to be killed themselves. Which is the point. In the post-apocalyptic world, as in all worlds, feminist problems are really just humanist problems with a different word attached to them. Yes, it’s terrible that all those women have been enslaved and someone should ought to do something about it. It’s also terrible that all those men were killed on the way to where the movie started, and it’s terrible that all the boys were brainwashed by the powerful into being cannon fodder for Max (or whoever) to shoot at. None of it is the least bit okay, but the women are the face of it.

What makes Fury Road a great feminist movie is simply that women were co-equally involved in doing something about the world’s humanist problems. Maybe someday we can get there in the regular world, too.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Last Friday, I made a joke about putting up the wrong review, secure in the knowledge that the correct review, about the blockbuster sequel that was kicking off the summer season, would be following that first review by only an hour or two. So, that was six days ago.

Yep. I really am that busy, apparently.

Anyway, though, Avengers. Did you see it yet? No? I guess that’s not numerically surprising, it has not made the bank it was expecting. And there have been all kinds of complaints, from anti-feminist to muddled and confusing to unnecessary antagonists. Some of that is fair, and some of it is not. I come neither to defend Caesar nor to bury him, just to say that, you know, I still liked it?

Obviously I’m a total Marvel fanboy. But I don’t think that’s it. It got me in the door, sure, but the things that I liked were along the lines of, “It’s really awesome that Whedon managed to provide a character arc for every person onscreen, even though there were like ten of them.” I completely get why someone would turn that around and complain about how overstuffed the thing is, it just wasn’t my experience. Or, “I appreciate how Ultron’s[1] motivations are thumbnailed so quickly, so we can get on to the plot and character development that succeeds his existence.” Which was turned into a question by a person that I wouldn’t have expected to hear it from, about why nobody bothered to explain why Ultron is trying to <spoiler elided>.

And more things like that. Basically, it’s possible that even though I’m actively looking for details about these characters, my decade long immersion in the characters they’re based upon is giving me an unfair advantage over the uninitiated viewing audience. So, I cannot say if this movie is for you. (Well, I can, for three or four specific values of “you”, but mostly I cannot.) I can say that the director’s cut is probably a visibly better movie than this was, and that this movie, despite a couple of missteps, was still a really excellent chapter in what is probably the most ambitious long-form piece of storytelling Hollywood has ever attempted.

There are worse epitaphs.

[1] He’s the guy whose Age it is, right? Age of Ultron? Right? Also, while I’m here: Spader nailed that character. I’m not surprised, but I am pleased.

Unfriended

It Follows

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I’ve been looking forward to this movie for several weeks, and no lie, both because it seems like the only horror movies lately have been possession oriented and also because it doesn’t seem like any at all came out in February as is good and proper. And then lots of other people saw it before I did, and I’ve already been reading and internalizing reviews, which I hate it when that happens, but here we are nonetheless.

It Follows is a very succinct title, in that it gives you like 80% of the knowledge necessary to understand the movie. Because there’s this person-looking thing, right? Different people at different moments, but always there (and only you can see it!), walking toward you. Always. Which means you can drive away and escape, right? Yes, but you have to sleep or let your guard down sometime, and it doesn’t. It only, y’know, follows.

What’s great about this movie is the lessons in fear that we have all learned over the past thirty or forty years of film-making. Because, I think anyone reading this knows full well that Michael Myers, for example, has never run a yard in his life. But he’s still just a slasher in a mask, whereas this thing was a little bit terrifying. In the audience, without the slightest inkling of a stake, I could not stop myself from looking for every single person walking with purpose toward the camera (or the heroine), because until they identified who else could see the walker, it might have been… the follower, I guess.

So, that’s that, pretty much. If you like quiet, moody, atmospheric dread that does not hold your hand and lead you from plot point to plot point, where even the frequent nudity is more terrifying than titillating, this movie is for you. Not quite nightmare-inducing, but definitely nerve-wracking. I dug it. Also, a quick spoiler-filled social commentary paragraph in the first comment.

Project Almanac

Did you ever see The Butterfly Effect? The one with Kelso from the 70s Show, right before he turned into Ashton Kutcher? If not, definitely watch that instead. But if you have, it’s probably been quite a while, and you may be ready to walk that territory again. Project Almanac is an MTV movie about a bunch of high school students who find themselves via quirks of causality in possession of the ability to time travel.

Then, they use it to do the kinds of things high school students as envisioned by MTV would do (pass chemistry, go to Lollapalooza, you know), until, inevitably, things start to go wrong. Which is what the movie is really about.

I liked it well enough, probably because of how much I liked the other movie in the first place? I assume it was meant to be neither an indictment nor a non-judgmental representation of how high school popularity works, but instead accidentally represented and indicted that process. And from a time travel logistics perspective, well, I had issues. They used and tossed out causality pretty much at whim, which is annoying simply because time travel logic needs to be internally consistent. Pick your method, but then stay there. That’s all I ask.

Like I said, the only reason to watch this is if you can’t watch the Butterfly Effect for the first time instead. Not because Project Almanac was bad; it wasn’t. It just wasn’t nearly good enough.

Movie 43

What I actually wanted to watch last night was Project X, but it wasn’t on Netflix. But the reason I wanted to watch it was that I was watching Iron Man earlier in the evening and thought the Vanity Fair reporter looked familiar. Turns out she didn’t, but I saw Movie 43 in her credits, which reminded me of Project X. Because, you know, generic titles and all.

Movie 43 is a series of comedic shorts tied together by a movie pitch plot[1], and… well, let me offer you this quick guide. If you’ve ever wanted to see Anna Faris as a coprophiliac, or if you’ve ever wanted to see Halle Berry make guacamole with a breast prosthesis, or if you’ve ever wanted to see Hugh Jackman being a literal dickhead, you should watch this movie. If you actively want to avoid seeing those things, you should not.

This doesn’t feel like a “middle ground” type of situation, you know?

[1] No, seriously, it’s not a V/H/S sequel, and I’m pretty sure this is not the only kind of movie I watch anymore? Pretty sure.

V/H/S/2

I know what you’re thinking. Why am I reading a review about a crazy former hot werewolf when I was promised a review explaining how V/H/S maybe actually does make sense as a series?[1] Answer: I can’t[2] review things out of order, can I? And I watched that other movie in between because my girlfriend was over, and she had not even seen V/H/S, so I couldn’t very well throw her right into the middle of things, could I?

But then, a night or two later: here we are. The open question is, does V/H/S/2[3] make a damn lick of sense, and, even trickier, does it retroactively make its precedent make sense? That’s what we in the radio business call a tease[4]. First, I will say that all of the short films that tied the sequel together were as skin-crawly and engrossing as last time. (Well, one of them had a monster that should never have been shown closely and in slow movement, but that was like the last 15 seconds and did not ruin the Lovecraftian splatterfest that had gone before.) I don’t know if it’s that most horror movies are too long and the compactness packs a punch, or if it’s that the first person nature of all found footage movies makes me identify more closely with what’s going on, or what, but these stories, one and all, were genuinely disturbing.

Okay, I’m doing it for real this time. Yes, there is a small degree to which the cohesion stories about finding these houses full of screens and creepy tapes does make sense now that did not exist last time, and it even sort of works retroactively. It’s a pretty small degree, but still, if you were really here because you desperately wanted to understand the underground world of tapes of supernatural events, you would hate these movies I think for their inability to deliver. And since that’s the only way they don’t deliver, well then.

[1] Well, correction: I know what you were thinking.
[2] Well, correction: I don’t
[3] These movies are irritating as fuck to type out, b/t/w.
[4] Well, correction: they in the radio business.[5]
[5] I know what you’re thinking this time, too. And no, I really have no idea what I’m doing, much less why. You gets what you pays for.

88 (2014)

Remember Ginger Snaps? I do, very fondly, even if my viewing of the original movie barely predated my starting to review things. Remember Ginger? ….no, not from Gilligan’s Island, this Ginger, the one I was literally just talking about? My point is, Katharine Isabelle’s face was tugging at my recollection the whole time I was watching 88 on the strength of its Memento-like description on Netflix.

To be clear, this is no Memento. But it does have a cool fragmented parallel story structure where you can’t tell what’s real. The hot girl in the poster (Ginger, you guys, why is this not sinking in?) has obviously had a psychotic break[1], but still, something you’re seeing must be real, surely! And it’s pretty fun trying to figure out what. Long story short, I’ve made bigger Netflix mistakes than this.

[1] Sounds like a spoiler, possibly is a spoiler, but they say it in text at the front of the movie before you’ve even seen her come to herself, confused, in front of a stack of pancakes.

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight