Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Say U.N.C.L.E.

Yesterday I saw Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Today I shall give my impressions:

See Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation instead.

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The Man from U.N.C.L.E. belongs to Ritchie/Wigram Productions, Davis Entertainment, Warner Bros. Pictures and whoever else.

If you’ve been keeping up with my jaunts to the theatre, you’ll know that I was rather lukewarm towards Rogue Nation. The story was loosely hamstrung together. The first half was incredibly weak. Character motivations were sorely lacking and the best part of the film was hopelessly spoiled by the studio’s own marketing.

For some bizarre reason, I had high hopes that The Man from UNCLE would be different. I’m not certain why. Perhaps it’s a plaguing persistence of optimism. Maybe I’m just that desperate for some decent action/spy-thriller release. I mean, the name isn’t the most elegant for a movie/series/franchise. What is UNCLE? Why is there only one man from it when clearly there are two main characters working together? Could they have possibly shoehorned in a female role more awkwardly than Alicia Vikander’s Gaby?

Actually, scratch that. If you’re bored, I’d suggest you watch both films as on reflection they’re basically the same thing but you can see where one woefully fails whereas the other… well Rogue Nation is still a middling production but still you can note the stark difference between them.

Anyway, as a succinct summation of my feelings towards The Man from UNCLE, I felt it was a rather poor movie that struggled to find any sort of interest or engagement with its audience through boring and two-dimensional characterization, dull plotting, rote action beats made confusing by a film maker’s signature style applied haphazardly and without any sort of integration with the greater piece. If Rogue Nation was riddled with missed opportunities for jokes and levity then UNCLE is so far from the mark that it might as well be a needle jettisoned amongst the stars.

Eh, that metaphor sucks but not quite as much as the movie.

Can I just say that Napoleon Solo is one of the most tragic names for a person let alone someone trying to be a suave thief?

So, where did things go so wrong?

First, I’m not certain Guy Ritchie is the best director for established franchises. I don’t know if he has studio executives breathing down his neck or what but I find that when he’s playing with someone else’s material, its flaws always glare brighter than its strengths. His Sherlock movies were troublesome. While I can appreciate the different direction and tone he used, as a fan of Doyle’s original work I couldn’t get how very little of the elements of what the made the original character and stories great in them. I would have probably appreciated the effort more if he had just made up some new characters and could have explored them without any concern for making enough references that those characters retained some amount of recognizability. His best movies that I’ve seen–Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels–were successful because Ritchie was able to mix in the crassness that seems so tied to the sole of his endeavours. Those characters aren’t “clean” by any Hollywood definition and the fact he can have a villain beat someone with a rubber dildo makes the strange and surreal choreography add to this strangely artistic nightmare that Ritchie films invoke. When you remove these bizarre elements from the characters and world, however, it simply makes his filming technique feel like a gimmick and one that’s more distracting than not. The best example of this is whenever an action beat started in UNCLE, we got multiple frames over-layed at once in a format that looks like a comic book spread. There’s very little to organize this mess but there’s also no benefit from creating confusion in the audience either. It lacks a thematic or character driven reason and so it mostly comes across as obnoxious.

And that’s probably the biggest issue with UNCLE. Unlike Rogue Nation, Guy Ritchie doesn’t really do the big spectacle, set-piece kind of film. Outside of his distinctive filming technique, there isn’t a lot of visual marvel to enjoy. So when there’s an incredibly weak plot, the last pillar you can balance your movie on is character. And this ties back to Ritchie clean characters are really boring.

I can tell that Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill are trying to work their lines. It’s just that there’s absolutely nothing to work here. Cavill is playing a personality-less womanizer. He’s James Bond without anything British to his name. Perhaps if this were played as a satire of how shallow James Bond is, it could work. When it’s played straight and even less engaging than the real deal, however, we’ve got a major problem. Hammer is an angry Russian. Their interplay is about as boring as their character description. The romantic subplot between the Russian and the German mechanic is also painfully cliched that even if they pulled it off it with any sort of skill it would have still remained a weak point of the film. At least, once again, Rogue Nation had the decency to not shove a romance between old man Cruise and Ferguson–tease it as they might.

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I can’t be the only one amused that the British actor is playing an American, the American actor is playing a Russian and a Swede is a German. It’s just a wonderful nationality blend.

The banter between the leading men is so painfully devoid of anything, however. The major arc of development–two rivals coming to rely on each other to succeed–is so poorly executed even ignoring how tired of a plot it is. What I found most surprising was the chemistry between them was inert. In the Sherlock Holmes films, there’s at least a charming tension between Downing and Law. It was really… awkward for that pair given the source material of the story but had they basically lifted it wholesale into this film it would have fit like a glove. Instead, we have Cavill playing an American Robot and Hammer spending most of his time trying to not drop his Russian accent whenever he’s doing his best cocaine addict hand waver.

If ever there was a perfect example for the importance of good writing, I think UNCLE would be a prime candidate. It’s clear that no matter how hard the actors try, they can’t save a script so lacking in story or heart. Ritchie’s direction is woefully in-adequate in hiding the boring writing beneath his heavy style and flair. It’s only a pity that writing quality is so unnoticed and undervalued that this major issue will either be misdiagnosed or simply swept under the rug. Then we can enjoy the same cycle when a studio executive attempts to revive another long past intellectual property in the hopes of snagging some quick bucks.

Mission Improbable: Middling Production

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The worst thing about movies that are middle of the road is how very little there is to comment on them. I’ve just seen the new Mission Impossible and it’s neither good nor bad. It’s the Schroedinger’s Cat of action-spy movies. It’s basically the white noise of day-to-day living. I was not offended or irate with squandered potential while watching it nor was I so enraptured that a gorilla could have broken into the theatre and danced before the screen without me noticing.

It’s standard. It’s banal. It’s safe. It is a movie which exists and one that I had watched. It’s one that within a few weeks time I’ll have wholly forgotten and it makes writing about it even now an ever increasingly difficult task as its nuances and pieces disappear like a humdrum dream before waking.

So what can I say of it? Well, let’s start with the good. I love spy movies and I enjoy action. I have no qualms about a mixture of science fiction into these genres as I’m an avid James Bond fan despite recognizing that most of them are pretty rubbish. Mission Impossible has never really gone through the tonal shifts that the Bond franchise has faced and thus it’s campiness is somewhat expected at this point. I’m prepared for that and it doesn’t phase me one bit.

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Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation has silly punctuation in its title that I don’t adhere to and belongs to Paramount Pictures, Bad Robot Productions, Christopher McQuarrie and a bunch of others.

Perhaps the most surprising element of Rogue Nation is just how good Rebecca Ferguson is. More to the point, the handling of her character–Ilsa Faust–is surprisingly well handled. We’re in 2015, so it really shouldn’t be necessary to applaud a female representation in a movie that is both as capable and complex as the leading male. In many ways, Ilsa is a more interesting character than Ethan Hunt who, after four prior Mission Impossible movies has about as much character development left in him as Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again. In fact, I would have placed Ilsa as the most compelling element of the movie if her role hadn’t been so blatantly spoiled in the pre-showing marketing blitz that ruins and sort of ambiguity which the script writer and direct strove agonizingly to achieve. However, she doesn’t really get into any situations that necessitate Tom Cruise to come swinging in to her rescue nor does she fall head over heels in love with him either by the end credit crawl. We’re in Mad Max: Fury Road territory with this type of character and not only is it refreshing but it’s also surprisingly comfortable as well. It never once comes across as weird or contrived that a woman can be just as effective as a spy or a character. There isn’t any fanfare or grand standing over it. Ilsa is just a woman that happens to be damn good at her job and nothing more.

Funny that.

Outside of Ferguson’s portrayal, what else was there good about the movie? It had a number of excellent set pieces that, as contained events, were well executed. The primary beat is the opera scene. There’s a wonderful balance between executing a covert operation while juggling between the action between two characters while still building tension through the masterful weaving of the increasing drama on the stage. I’d say this scene was really stand-out if it didn’t join a oddly long list of good opera scenes in otherwise unremarkable to bad movies.

Seriously, what is it about the opera? Quantum of Solace’s only really interesting scene was at the opera. Downing Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes had a good opera scene as well in that otherwise atrocious sequel. Hell, even video games have really well crafted opera moments as in Final Fantasy VI. I can’t help but feel that this conceit is the film version of photographing flowers: impossible to screw up.

The opera aside, however, there was a good Morocco chase scene and heist beat that worked quite well. Oddly enough, Rogue Nation has the opposite issue as the preceding Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Whereas the previous film had an incredibly engaging beginning and utterly dreadful second half, Rogue Nation starts off as a snore and gradually picks up into being half decent by the end.

So that about sums up the good. What about the bad?

Well, it’s kind of boring.

And this is why I struggle with Rogue Nation. Sitting and analysing it is a rather difficult task. Not because I can’t pinpoint its flaws. Outside of Ilsa Faust, there’s woefully little interesting characterization amongst the primary IMF squad and its supporting characters. Simon Pegg and the others feel too much like they’re going through the motions and Alec Baldwin and the whole “going rogue” story arc adds nothing to the story. Even the quips are rather feeble and few as though the writers simply could not think of anything good to set up. The antagonist’s plot makes very little sense with Solomon Lane receiving inadequate attention until the last act of the movie and by then there’s been far too much contradictory behaviour to really pull together the muddied justifications for all the scenes leading up to it. Generally speaking, criticism of why something doesn’t work takes far longer than praising things that do, so I’m not going to quibble over all the little details for why Rogue Nation falls apart.

No, more than anything I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of deja vu while watching the film. Rogue Nation felt very much like Skyfall, both in its successes and failures. In noticing the similar issues, I couldn’t help but reflect on the genre as a whole. And I’ve mentioned before how the spy genre has been sort of teetering on irrelevancy for awhile but its only with Rogue Nation that I feel we begin to see why.

The face of the world has changed. The spy genre essentially was born as artistic propaganda during the Cold War when a battle was fought without tanks and soldiers. All that espionage and covert missions made sense in a world where enemies were smuggling missiles into ideologically antagonistic neighbouring nations and threatening things like a mutually assured destruction with nuclear warheads. We had an atmosphere were two super powers were butting heads in as roundabout a method as possible. They were akin to fencers, poking and prodding for a weakness in their opponent’s defence but too worried that full committal to a forward assault would leave both of them eliminated upon the other’s sword.

And then the Cold War ended but not through sabotage or heroic warfare that could be milked for untold number of war stories. No, the Cold War ended with the incredibly boring and film unfriendly collapse of an economy.

This has left a rather large void in the espionage genre. That ideological battle between America and the Soviet Union was far too easy to distil down into distinct sides. You had the “Good” and “Democratic” versus the “Evil” and “Communistic.” Very little nuance was afforded in these situations. Look at James Bond. All the opponents he face are irrevocably evil. More than that, their aims are always the same–to take over the world. This encapsulates the fear of the Cold War: of the ideology of socialism and communism defeating capitalism and democracy. As one side, it was so much easier to paint the other in shallow, broad strokes. The Russians became synonymous with evil. Western powers and America were inherently good.

But politics have changed and things aren’t so easy now. The troubles we face are harder to so easily dismiss with a wave of our hand. Our enemies aren’t great, unified super powers. They’re underground cells. They’re rebel forces. They’re misguided or brainwashed individuals from poor nations lashing out in all directions. Suddenly, this isn’t two opponents of equal skill. It’s more like a trouble child getting beat up by an adult. Not to mention, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the potential exploitative motivations of said adult in their meddling of others affairs. Those simple black and whites have become incredibly tangles shades of grey.

You would think this atmosphere would be perfect for spy movies, though. This is the perfect environment for when intelligence networks would be the most useful. You can’t tell clearly who is your enemy and who is not. An ally today could be a rival tomorrow and sometimes you’d have to accumulate debts with historical antagonists in order to accomplish the goals of the present. There’s a wonderful world of nuance and ambiguity that those who “work amongst the shadows” would need to thrive.

And yet, these movies don’t work. Skyfall had this problem. Rogue Nation has this problem. I speak specifically of the “going rogue” issue and the question of what the old vanguard divisions serve in a world that has completely flipped the script. Skyfall and Rogue Nation both put their respective main branches up towards a bureaucratic committee sceptical of their need. And both struggle to explore this conceit to any adequate degree.

It isn’t a concept that is undoable, however. I think the issue arises that it’s more a concept that is incompatible with what worked before. Just as the nature of our world has changed, the way we explore espionage in our media has to change with it. Instead, we have these studios trying to cram these old pegs into rusted and warped holes that no longer accommodate them. And I’m not certain that a film can adequately explore this thought. It might be too long for the cinema. It might be too complex.

Because, let’s face it, if you have to chop up half your movie into required chases, explosions and gun fights, you’re not going to be able to do a modern spy story any justice. The action portion of the spy-action genre is really sucking whatever value we could get out. We need simple plots and short hands to communicate how bad the bad guys are so that Ethan Hunt can spend all his time shooting them in the face without there being any messy morality brought in. It’s no wonder that all the villains for the last while have been amorphous, faceless “terrorists” often of an inoffensive variety. The Bourne Trilogy was lucky that it could frame its nemesis as the American CIA itself. But Bond and Hunt haven’t been so blessed and we keep getting more contrived enemies by the day for them to tackle.

At its heart, this genre is a narrative driven one so we need compelling enemies for our heroes to face otherwise the whole package starts to fall apart. Solomon Lane and Raoul Silva tried a similar tactic as Bourne with rogue elements that are the foil to our heroes but ones that have gone bad. Neither ever really get the attention they require to pull off their role, however. As I mentioned Sean Harris doesn’t get any real motivation to his character until the last final scenes and even then it’s never really made clear why he’s doing what he’s doing. Has he decided to go rogue just to be an independent dick? Is he trying to steer the world to a better place but being the decider of where that should be without bureaucratic senators who only care about their tribalistic agendas? Does he just want to make loads of money?

In some regards, Silva in Skyfall worked better because at least it was made abundantly clear that he was in it solely to ruin M. The failings of that movie was not making the whole story built around that motivation and instead wandering amongst a bunch of random set pieces that spent way too much time on Bond without saying anything. And here we are again, in Rogue Nation, watching motorcycles explode and assassinations in theatres without there being any reason, motive or message.

It’s hard to not see these products as the flounderings of ageing executives desperate to strike a relevant cord with its audience and world but being so out of touch that they don’t know what to strike. In a way, they reflect the same general unease and uncertainty that the world faces. They’re looking around desperate for villains but finding only people like them staring back.

There’s an identity crisis here and I feel it’s more telling that the story around the shortcomings of these films is more interesting than the films themselves.

I, Spy

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I saw the new Spy.

It’s a Melissa McCarthy movie.

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Spy is a Chernin Entertainment, 20th Century Fox and Feigco Entertainment movie directed by Paul Feig. They own it, not I.

Actually, that’s not accurate. As Derek described it, it’s someone trying to do a two hour Archer episode focused solely on Pam and Cheryl. Which, on one hand I really like Archer but it’s a bit much for two straight hours.

I make reference to it being a Melissa McCarthy movie since the only point of comparison I have is Bridesmaids. I liked Bridesmaids but there’s a tendency for that type of humour to devolve into the lowest common denominator kind of jokes. Which is to say there’s a fair bit of toilet humour or people falling down shticks. The toilet humour was definitely prevalent in Bridesmaids and the people falling down rode strong in Spy.

It’s also a movie that is quite fond of swearing. I’m not a Victorian prude but that gag certainly wore itself out much faster than the movie thought it did. Jason Stathom’s character nearly hinges on basically being loud and obscene for most of his moments and there’s a second act turn when Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy) relies on some quick improvisation to rescue her rather flimsy cover and goes with a foul mouthed body-guard explanation which overstays its welcome.

Overall, it’s an okay movie. I had some laughs with it, at it and then at the audience.

What it is not, however, is a good satire of the spy movie genre.

I think that’s the biggest disappointment for me. Granted, I knew little about the film and it wouldn’t have registered at all on my radar had I not heard that it was scoring so well on critic reviews. It’s hardly the first to take jabs at the genre which holds James Bond as one of the defining movie franchises. Even Kingsman takes many a potshot at international espionage and men of mystery.

Generally speaking, I find that spoofs of the spy genre end up falling a bit flat. The best of the bunch–in my opinion–is Archer and it keeps itself going by leaving a lot of the spy elements as dressing and dipping in and out of a half-serious, half-joking action motif. The few other success stories follow a similar pattern: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Red or even Burn After Reading. They certainly have a lot of tongue-in-cheek moments but they still treat their narrative with just the right amount of gravitas that it doesn’t devolve entirely into a Three Stooges type slapstick farce.

And I think that’s the tricky part of doing spoofs of spy movies. As I’ve mentioned, James Bond is really the big flagship for the genre but–and I say this as a massive James Bond fan–the series is half a joke. It’s filled with its own cliches and tropes that it pokes fun at enough times that it’s often times a parody of itself. It’s hard to satire something that’s already making fun of itself and certainly hard to keep it up for an entire original piece.

The best satires usually work by pointing out the flaws of genres or trends which are popular and unaware of their own weaknesses. Murder by Death and Clue work as great spoofs of the mystery detective genre because it takes all the dowdy seriousness and spins it on its head. It can stick its tongue out at the irritating habits that crop up in those genres. like detectives taking incredible leaps of logic, confusing final reveals designed solely to bedazzle its readership or the oft times mindless pile of bodies that accrue in an investigation because the original works pull those tricks again and again without even being aware of stereotypes they’re fulfilling.

The spy genre, unfortunately, doesn’t have these ubiquitous elements to lampoon because they, themselves, are not ubiquitous. Sure, we can make fun of James Bond tropes but those tropes aren’t universal amongst the handful of spy movies that get released. For example, a common scene to parody in these types of movies is the James Bond gets new equipment from Q moments. And while there’s plenty of standard elements amongst the Bond series for how these scenes play out, you’re not going to find them anywhere in things like the Bourne Identity, Cambridge Spies or Argo. But sure enough, the scene crops up in Spy like clockwork, focusing its time on pointing out how ludicrous a meeting with some technowizard like division would be in a spy agency despite the fact that it’s almost always played for cheese laughs in the Bonds in the first place.

Thus what ends up happening is that the laughs feel rather cheap. It’s a lot of going through the motions in Spy without really bringing anything to the table. A number of the jokes also hinge on the fact that Melissa McCarthy is a large woman and puts emphasis on how “gross” that is, either through constantly giving her undesirable and socially outcast cover identities or filling her gadget gear with things like haemorrhoid wipe pads.

It’s very American in its comedy, so if we’re not talking about stool solvents or rodent scat, we’re dropping vulgarity for the sake of padding out dialogue or flashing photographs of a person’s genitalia. And when you’re right out of ideas about what to do next, have an incredibly awkward and incongruous celebrity guest appearance and milk that for a few empty laughs more.

Which is a shame, because there is a workable concept in there. There’s a couple of times when Melissa McCarthy does do some decent action-spy elements that, had it been a greater focus, would have worked better. There’s a scene where she gets her handler to cut the power to a casino so that she can take out a squad of armed thugs in the dark without blowing her cover which, had the movie decided to lean on that trope more, I feel could have been a stronger narrative.

On the other hand, this could simply be me just wanting there to be more spy movies because it’s a genre that’s basically died out. This movie certainly found its audience and is pleasing someone despite how cheap it is most of the time. It could very well be a case of “not for me” with a side dash of “wanting what’s not around any more.”

But I don’t think I’m alone. Sure, Archer is hardly the definition of high-brow comedy but it still works. I think there’s interest in the spy genre outside of slapstick American comedy.

We’ll probably have to wait for the superhero craze to die out before that sees a resurgence though. The action genre is pretty dominated by that subculture for the moment and they’re unrelenting in their stranglehold on the comedy-action scene. One day, though… one day.

Hell Hath No Fury

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Confession time: I have not seen a Mad Max film before.

Shocking, I know. Somehow, through my formative youth, I managed to not once have any installment of this series grace the screens of the collective households in which I was raised. Granted, it is an Australian series, so maybe my family was simply holding fast to a “No Foreign Film” policy. Or–more likely–they were simply not popular enough to pierce the isolating cultural bubble of small town Canada. We only had one movie theatre at the time and–from all reports–said theatre has long since closed after I had moved from those alpine heights.

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Mad Max: Fury Road and all rights and images belong to Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, George Miller and all the rest.

Well, I have rectified this injustice over the weekend by seeing the much lauded Fury Road. I was quite excited to see this film after watching a trailer before a movie I’ve long since forgotten. An action movie, that takes place on a single road, in post apocalyptic setting and simple, unabashed back-to-back action? I could not sign up any faster. Alas, I hit a snag when the only friend I had that held any interest wandered off on opening night and saw it without me. My family were all less than enthused to see this film and so I had to search through my achingly meagre list of friends to find someone willing to indulge me and my lust for violence and carnage. Thankfully, I found someone. I can summarize the good and parts of Fury Road as thus:

Bad: It was in 3D.

Good: Everything else.

Alright, that is not true. However, I feel it adequately sums up my feelings about the movie. I can’t help but be reminded of Dredd (the 2012 release) while watching Fury Road. Similar to the Judge Dredd reboot, it wasn’t some over-the-top narrative mess that tried to be more than what it really was: that is an over-the-top action movie. Action movies have a tendency for injecting too much gravitas into their hearts. Movies like the Mission Impossibles and Die Hards kind of get lost in their own convoluted narratives as they attempt to keep the audience guessing about what the hell is going on in the story while jumping from set piece to set piece. Dredd stripped all of that away, keeping its story focus square on the single day in the life of the Judge as he went about breaking up an opportunistic drug cartel that had overtaken one of the megalithic apartment complexes in the Dredd universe. There wasn’t grandiose flashbacks of Dredd’s past, there wasn’t overly dramatic explanations for how the villain was going to change the face of the world, there wasn’t deep and evolving character arcs for the characters. And it all simply worked. You know almost as much about Karl Urban’s gruff Dredd by the end as you do at the start. Which is fine. This is an action movie, not a character drama. All we need to know of the character is expressed through, appropriately, his actions.

Fury Road follows the same formula. As I said, I’ve never seen a Mad Max film so I knew nothing about the character. At the end of the day, I can boldly say I still know next to nothing about the character. The basics are explained as quickly as possible (world went to shit, Max lost his family and is haunted by that loss) and then the action just starts. Within five minutes of the film, we’ve been introduced to a character and then a car chase followed up with a failed escape attempt. Within fifteen minutes, we’ve been introduced to all the main characters before yet another car chase begins (Note: I didn’t actually time this, all these are estimates). There’s no plodding about before we kick of the action. There’s no long narrative overlays to explain this strange and violent world. There’s no rehashing of whatever the hell was covered in the prior three movies of the series. This is it. Here we go. Welcome to Fury Road.

It may be strange for someone like me–someone who loves narrative and character–to adore this approach. And that’s one thing I do want to cover explicitly. While the action is centre stage to the performance, it doesn’t come at the expense of either these two elements. Simply put, Fury Road shows its characters and story instead of telling it. I learn quite a lot about Furiosa, Nux and Angharad without requiring long soliloquies or lengthy pauses to communicate clumsily their personalities. Often you’ll get the advice when writing that one should “show and not tell” without any real indication of what that means. I would point to Fury Road as an example. George Miller lets us know quite a lot about Furiosa and Max without saying any words. There’s a scene where Max is holding the Imperator at gunpoint, along with her entourage, while he systematically searches through the entire cabin of the giant warmachine for every hidden firearm. That Max keeps his weapon trained on unarmed civilians tells us a lot of his practicality over morality. That Furiosa keeps way more weapons around her than necessary tells us a lot of her preparation and fear of being disarmed. That Max fails to find the knife kept in the gear shift and Furiosa checks it the moment he leaves gives us indications for the faults of either character.

The movie is full of all these moments. Perhaps the most interesting and best use of this is with Nux, the fanatical lackey of Immortan Joe who has perhaps the most complex character development throughout the entire piece. When we were first introduced to him, his interactions with Max and his fellow outriders was so well done that I hoped he wouldn’t be some nameless mook to just fill up a few minutes of screen time before being murdered in spectacular fashion. I was more than pleased to see that wasn’t the case. Typically, important characters have grandiose introductions and that this one character could be introduced in such a fashion that you’re left unsure whether he is important or not was–simply put–quite elegant.

So, yeah, Fury Road isn’t just some “stupid action movie” though it’s got lots of wonderful stupid action in it. The set design–if one can really call it that–continues this subtle but extremely effective means of conveying character through subtle indicators. Near every vehicle that rides onto the screen is personalized for its driver. This is important when we start into several of the three faction skirmishes in the movie, giving the audience an immediate shorthand for who is who while explosions and car parts fill the air. The different gangs are given their own aesthetic that helps differentiate while the main bosses of the three pivotal cities (Gas Town, Bullet Town and I can only assume Water Town) ride in on their own unique chariots that convey their personal philosophies. The boss of Gun Town drives a converted muscle car with tank treads, trading efficiency and speed for military bulk. Gas Town, on the other hand, is more concerned with appearances and driving a large and impressive vehicle than something that’s truly combat ready.

And that stereo/war-drum contraption was utterly fantastic! Of course, the main warmachine is designed with various hidden compartment and entrances–another quick shorthand for the unexpected and surprising routes its drivers develop across the feature–while maintaining enough complexity to be the main set for the majority of the movie.

Of course, I feel that I can’t properly comment on Fury Road without making some comment about all that feminism hoopla prior to its release. There was clearly much attention given to the fact that a prominent feminist author was involved with the script or worked on set. Honestly, you wouldn’t really notice and I feel that’s kind of the point. Furiosa does not really stand out as some sort of highly crafted piece of philosophical propaganda. Amongst the likes of Ridley Scott or The Bride of Kill Bill fame, there’s nothing really different about Furiosa. She’s isn’t some sort of bra-burning femi-nazi who constantly shouts for equality or women’s rights. She’s just a woman trying to do what she feels is right in a world that’s gone utterly mad. She’s a product of her upbringing and heritage which has turned her into a capable fighter despite the loss of a limb. And while it makes her rather cold and stand-offish, this is hardly surprising given how long Max holds people at gun-length. Had there been no mention of feminist involvement, I suspect no one would really think anything of Furiosa other than her being a damn good action hero.

And she is a great action hero. She is essentially the central figure of the movie (it is called Fury Road after all), as Max has presumably gone through his character growth in his first movie. Some of the most annoying clichés of serialized fiction is this pressing need to constantly put the main character through the standard “hero’s journey” of character development. There’s only so much that someone like Max can learn in a world as crazed as the one he occupies. After awhile, him constantly getting some sort of moral lesson from all his gallivanting becomes very eye-rolling. I’m always a fan of shifting these sort of character developments to new faces who have the opportunity to learn the lessons the main character simply can not.

So, while Fury Road wasn’t two and half hours of pure car chase shenanigans, it simply and effective delivers on every other expectation and hope that it’s all the better for it. It’s a fantastic movie and I can see immediately where all the inspiration for Wasteland and Fallout derived. It’s so good that I’m going to try and get a hold of its prior installments… just as soon as I find someone to watch them with me.

Big City Heart

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So, continuing on our tour of late 2014 reviews, I have recently seen Big Hero 6 by Disney Studios. I hadn’t any intention of watching the movie, especially after feeling rather chilly towards the children’s entertainment giant and their lacklustre Frozen mega-hit which served to demonstrate just how out-of-touch I am with the rest of the world. It also didn’t help that whatever fledgling interest I may have had for the flick evaporated after having to sit through Guardians of the Galaxy.

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Big Hero 6 belongs to Marvel, Disney and a bunch of other people and stuff.

Yes, yes, I hate super hero movies–or as I like to call them “Stupid Hero Movies”–and was quite frankly ready to give popular blockbusters a skip since it seems the public is going through a really weird phase and I feel it’s safer to hunker down and wait it out. Of course, avoiding the megalithic reach of Disney and his cold, dead fingers is a near impossible task, especially as I have a habit of speaking to a number of women in my life. I was assured–quite voraciously I might add–that both Wreck-it-Ralph and Big Hero 6 were great movies. People even dared to go so far as to recommend I watch them even after I expressed my disdain for the unanimously adored flick about the Swedish girls and their boring life.

You’ll notice I didn’t write anything on Wreck-it-Ralph and that’s probably for the best.

Big Hero 6, however, is the more noteworthy of the two. I’ll jump right to the point: I think it’s “okay.” The biggest failings of Big Hero 6 is that it’s a Stupid Hero Movie released in a climate where movie-goers are tripping over costumed weirdos every other weekend. Narratively, it does nothing truly new or extraordinary. If you try and tease it’s characters and plot apart, it unravels rather easily. It’s competent, which is perhaps the best thing I can say. But it’s competency arises from it re-treading quite beaten ground at this point.

There is one thing, however, that Big Hero 6 does fantastically. Perhaps more than any other movie I’ve seen recently, and truly the only reason I kept at it and look at it fondly, is that the world of Big Hero 6 is just so damn interesting.

For those not in the know, Big Hero 6 was a comic at one point in time–thus explaining it’s unfortunate plotline. However, it takes place not on Earth. Well, more accurately, it does not take place on any reasonable facsimile of Earth. One thing that stupid hero movies do–and must do in order for the picture to work–is spend a gross amount of time grounding their comic book worlds in a very recognizable and verisimilitude world. We’ve long passed the days of George Clooney’s Batman nipple suits and a Gotham City that looks like it was ripped straight from Lovecraft’s most hideous cyclopean nightmares. The X-Men movies set the stage for comic book adaptations that are filmed with an intense grounding in our day-to-day familiarity and it has apparently produced a “gritty and realistic” aesthetic that has resonated with movie-goers. Thus, Nolan’s Gotham is very clearly New York. Iron Man unabashedly lives in Malibu.

Big Hero 6, however, is not. It’s location is San Fransokyo–some curious and compelling hybrid of San Francisco and Tokyo. It’s a world that’s strange and captivating. I found it hard not to get sucked in as we’re pulled over the Golden Torii Gate Bridge, the once familiar landmark carved into the iconic images of a Shinto shrine’s entrance. Great wind turbines bob in the air, tethered like enormous balloons and painted to inspire the recollections of the flying Koi during the Children’s Festival. Red lanterns hang from street cars while enormous neon signs in bright katakana fixate to the sides of downtown skyscrapers. The movie is very indulgent in its wide spanning shots of this inventive skyline where the old and the exotic are mixed into something almost familiar.

It’s really a brilliant mix of cultures done in such painstaking way to make the seams tying the two together indistinguishable. This extends to the main characters and their obvious Japanese heritage despite the movie’s stylistic renderings. Tanaka and Hiro are undeniably American for all intents and purposes, even as the engage in robotic sumo competitions or advanced robotics.

The best character of the show is the city itself and it’s a shame that something more couldn’t be done with it. Ultimately, the backdrop isn’t used for any clever thematic or even stylistic blending. The main villain runs around in a kabuki mask without drawing on traditional kabuki elements or traditions. There’s a heavy use of robotics throughout the film–echoing Japan’s leading edge in the field–without actually exploring any themes of robotics (displaced human workforces, moralistic questions of advanced artificial intelligences). There could have even been some exploration of the universality of the human condition by pulling on the shared elements of American and Japanese mythology and history but all of these things were missed.

At the end of the day, Big Hero 6 is a bunch of stupid action with some shoehorned morality shoved in at the last second that makes no sense. But it’s world creation is very intricate with painstaking detail done to even the smallest references. It’s a visual feast just as much as it’s a cognitive snore. I think it showcases just how samey and unremarkable this super hero phase really is. At any other release, at any other time, this movie would have been fantastic. As it stands, it’s kind of forgettable in a vast sea of similar faces. It’s a shame they couldn’t take this setting and do something really fascinating.

As is, it’s a really brilliant example of some clever world-building. Check it out for that.

Murphy’s Law

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The great outdoors are anything but great. I do not understand the appeal. It’s hot. It’s bright. And at any moment a tree will just shower you in its reproductive bits.

It also smells.

At any rate, what better way is there to discuss Christopher Nolan’s recent movie Interstellar than making a post on it nearly six months late. There’s a certain poetic irony about covering a film about time dilation and relativity and dredging up its existence long after people cared about it.

But I only saw it recently so, whatever. This is happening. Get used to it.

As some a priori information, I’m a big fan of Nolan’s work. Even before the Batmans launched him into the public sphere so astronomically, he had been creating films that entertained and intrigued. Even when I wasn’t fully on board with the final product (Insomnia), I could still appreciate what he was trying to do. And, generally, speaking, he was doing things no one else was.

For that, I love his output. He’s a director that focuses on themes and ideas more than gaudy explosions and cheap thrills. Not to say that he doesn’t have them at all. Memento has plenty of exciting scenes interwoven around it’s basic premise of a man with anterograde amnesia, what with his involvement in crime and murder. Insomnia still follows a detective and his hunt for a despicable serial killer. It’s just that he flavours these clichés and tired conventions with a fresh perspective or novel idea.

For this reason, I’m a big fan of The Prestige and Inception which I think are both examples of Nolan at his best. That they were some of his most recent work, and occurring while he was still making blockbuster comic book hero movies was all the more intriguing.

Thus, I was excited to see Interstellar when it was announced. Unfortunately, it had fallen victim to Hollywood’s recent attempts at starting a hype train and I “learned” about the movie a year before it was even releasing. My issue with such advance marketing is, by the time the movie actually comes out, I’ve already forgotten about my initial interest and almost never see it in theatres. I’m not that invested into the movie industry to plan my entertainment around release schedules and whatnot.

So, here we are. Me having just finally seen the film which everyone has already discussed and reached their own conclusions about with nary a helpful voice to raise to the topic. Well, I have my thoughts and I’m going to share them regardless of whether these points were mentioned before or not.

Let’s start with the big picture.

I’m pretty luke-warm to Interstellar. It’s not Nolan’s worse (which I still maintain is a distinction which belongs to Insomnia) but it isn’t his best either. There were a number of elements that I enjoyed and about an equal number which I did not. That’s perhaps the most vague description one could possibly give for a film.

But before I go on my huge whinge fest, let’s discuss those elements that I enjoyed. There’s something really interesting about the opening of the movie. The way it’s present and the slow reveal of information I found to be a compelling way to introduce a world set far into the future and very different from our own. The documentary talking heads ground us in a video framework of which is all too familiar to anyone that has stepped into a museum. We’re simultaneously greeted with a recording format that immediately conveys a sense of “past” and familiarity while the subject matter is weird and captures our attention. What is this dust that seems to settle everywhere? What is this blight that’s affecting the neighbour’s crops?

The basic premise for the setting is initially shown as so mundane that we are almost slow to realize how science fiction the work really is. You don’t realize that this story is taking place in the far future, after some inexplicable war/population collapse and a possible post-apocalyptic time. However, the tragedy of whatever has occurred (and thankfully the disaster is kept hidden to allow our imagination to fill the blanks) is conveyed in understandable imagery that evokes memories and studies of the Great Depression. We know things are bad without needing characters to list generically how bad things really are compared to the world in which we actual live.

There’s a real elegance to how the audience begins to learn of the troubles facing the planet yet also realizes this takes place in a time far removed from our own so when we do reach the titular interstellar portions, it doesn’t seem to come out of nowhere. What’s more, I absolutely love the way that artificial intelligence and advance robotics are integrated into this future. They’re relics of that same indescribable past, with many of them slowly falling apart and descending from the skies as their computational innards decay and bring them down to earth. Then, the survivors scoop these old relics up and re-purpose them as automated farming tractors.

Oh, and this information is revealed while the main character and his offspring are heading to parent/teacher interviews.

It’s unfortunate, then, that all this time slowly introducing the world truly feels like a waste later. It’s so well crafted that I found it really frustrating how little of it is important for the narrative. In fact, the elements that are key to the rest of the story–Murph’s mysterious ghost and her father’s interaction with the “paranormal activity” happening in her room–is probably the least interesting and most shoehorned part. The magic bookcase serves blatantly as a story deus ex machina, required solely to move the plot forward because there was no elegant solution present.

Even more maddening is, in the later acts, when the Nolans attempt to bring the story back to these humble beginnings as part of an overarching plot. It really exposes how the whole backstory for Matthew McConnaughey’s NASA astronaut is made really flimsy in order to give the character wide-spread appeal and make him “relatable.”

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Interstellar belongs to Paramount Pictures, Christopher Nolan, Legendary Pictures and a whole slew of other people that aren’t me.

Truly, the story doesn’t really begin until Farmer Cooper and his precocious daughter are sent on some wild geo-cache trip given by co-ordinates provided by the magic bookcase in Morse code. There, we discover that the fabled NASA research institute wasn’t abandoned but went underground (for reasons) and Agent Cooper is press-ganged into joining a rather rag-tag and dubious mission through a recently discovered wormhole to find a world on which humanity could relocate.

It’s at this time that we’re presented with the weakest explanation for how the planet is going to shit. Some mysterious disease is killing off all the delicious vegetables and possibly eating the nitrogen in the atmosphere and/or the oxygen and pooping out nitrogen? Michael Cain doesn’t spend a lot of time making the excuse clear and it’s hard not to think–as he waxes to great lengths about the difficulty of space travel and the effects on time by relativity–that it wouldn’t be easier to… you know… cure the blight. Maybe in this unmentionable disaster all the biologists were killed or something.

Anyway, after delivering the first of many repeated quotes of Dylan Thomas’ pretty forgettable poem, Cosmonaut Cooper is convinced to pilot the last remaining spacecraft on earth since he’s the only one alive to have done so (even though his last mission barely left the atmosphere). Course, we learn later that he isn’t really necessary, since twelve other shmucks flew ahead of him, and it’s hard not to wonder why all the fuss is made about him joining a mission that has been years in planning and quite happy to execute without anyone even being aware that he existed.

This ends up being a troubling trend of really poorly conceived or explained character motivations that pop up continuously for the rest of the movie. With great reluctance, Cooper agrees to this mission even though he knows it will take a lot of time and he’ll likely not see his soon to be orphaned children grow up and become adults. He hops on board with Catwoman and a pair of disposable extras and rattles his way into space and the great beyond, all the while maintaining some ineffectual stoicism that’s meant to make the audience feel pride over the fact that the world is going to shit and only those unrelenting Americans can ever truly keep it alive. Or something. There’s a few moments where it feels like I missed having my accompanying flag to wave throughout the film.

Once we get to space, we hit Interstellar’s second strength and that’s in creating absolutely gorgeous visuals. Nolan really hits the cgi cinematography as we’re transported through wormholes and explore some really alien planets. In fact, it feels a lot of the time like I’m watching some futuristic Blue Planet series and the only thing I’m lacking is Attenborough’s soothing voice-over. We learn… things while the spaceship meanders on its ten year journey with the crew kept in cryogenic storage so we don’t have to hire another actor that looks like old Matthew McConnaughey. Presiding over this delegation are two robot companions who are perhaps the best members of the crew and certainly my favourite characters.

Once we’re through the blackhole, the band of adventurers have to decide on three returned signals over prospective planets that they want to visit which will become humanity’s new home. Since Nolan wants to play with time as a theme, they hit up the closest one first–and the one where even if the mission were to progress according to plan would also take upwards of seven years, relatively speaking to Earth. And while the planet is pretty cool, the action on it is pretty dumb and the explorers find that after their little foibles have been resolved, nearly twenty four years have elapsed. That’s twenty four years of aimless puttering around space “learning all we can about blackholes” and still struggling to come up with a half-decent pesticide at home.

Grumpy and forlorn, the crew then hit up the second planet on the list because they’re reluctant to indulge reason because the characters would rather quibble over nonsense like “the power of love” than actually doing their mission. Here is the movie’s most egregious offence. Since there hasn’t been any truly villainous entity for us to hate, we’re introduced to Matt Damon that decides to spend the next twenty minutes needlessly twirling his moustache than actually following a compelling plot.

Interstellar’s best strengths are when it’s not following traditional movie structure. It’s weakest moments are whenever it falls back on “established wisdom.” A lot of the action beats and “raising the stakes” moments are forced and illogical. The cheap emotional manipulation is some of the laziest I’ve ever seen. There’s lots of arguing and misdirection that’s entirely unnecessary all so we can have a “third act twist.” It’s the farm opening all over again, where the film structure motivates the plot instead of the internal character designs and desires.

By the end of the film, it’s hard to shake the ever growing pile of “Whys” accumulating as you watch. Why did the random third guy on the water world stand outside the ship even though he was the first to return to it before the water mountain descended? Why did their fourth member of the crew spend twenty four years bombing around on a ship when he knew even a five minute delay–certainly a reasonable amount of time considering the away team is searching an entire planet for a single individual–would cost him a few years? Why did Michael Cain spend his entire life “working” on an equation that he’d already solved when he could have just plainly told everyone the situation and still got enough people to volunteer (he did get twelve for the original mission so he only needed three more). Why did Matt Damon program a bomb in his robot co-pilot and why didn’t he just outright tell them he lied about his data when they showed up to thaw him? Did he think they would shoot him with their non-existent guns? Did he think they’d leave him behind even though their mission is to desperately save humanity and they already wasted all their fuel getting to him? Like… what was the plan?

Also, the tesseract was stupid. I’m certain plenty of people have argued over it when the movie first came out. I can’t help but feel that this was the weakest “interesting” element of a Nolan movie. Future humans built a time machine but only for Cooper to radio his daughter random zeroes and ones recorded by the robot TARS. And they did it in such a manner that Cooper would be the instrument behind all the random messages delivered from Murph’s Magic Bookcase trusting that “love will lead the way” was a good enough lampshade to explain away all these lingering questions and arbitrariness.

It’s a shame, too, since the movie is strongest when it’s following a hard science fiction route and eschewing traditional story elements. The most powerful “human” scene is after a few minutes on the water planet, Cooper and Catwoman return to their ship to discover that their loved ones back home have lived their lives in the intervening minutes. We didn’t need pointless deaths to feel sad when you have your secondary characters literally ageing before your eyes. We don’t need Matt Damon to try and kill everyone in some weird mad struggle to open an airlock (speaking of which, how does an astronaut know how to make a bomb but not open an airlock?) when we could have easily had more powerful and interesting conflict by the team bickering his selfishness and the cost it accrued to them and their mission.

There was plenty of ideological debate to be had without Michael Cain having to intentionally lie about his plan to rescue the people of Earth on a magic spacecraft. It seemed like there were a lot of missed opportunities in Interstellar as the story shot for the lowest hanging fruit. What we ended up with was morsels that were rotting on the vine instead of the delicious treats that were just within reach if only we had dared to go just a bit further.

It was pretty though.

All the King’s Horses

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Let’s discuss Samuel L Jackson.

I’m a big fan of his work. He’s entertaining, affable and features in movies that are generally interesting if not wholly within genres which I adore. And, really, all it takes is for one to watch Snakes on a Plane to just realize how amazing he is. However, he’s highly prolific with a resume which includes such diversity as Patriot Games, Pulp Fiction, The Star Wars Prequels, Unbreakable, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Jurassic Park and Jackie Brown.

I mean, that’s an impressive list of a handful from the 100 films in which he’s credited. And, of course, do people even remember that he was also in Jumper or Inglorious Basterds? And yet, despite his proclivity, you never really hear him considered one of the greatest actors. Has he even achieved an Academy Award? I can’t think of him being nominated but perhaps he got some recognition for Pulp Fiction? That movie got a lot of recognition, I think. But while he’s not considered a truly talented actor, he’s neither considered terrible either. He’s no Nicky Cage (and really, who is?). So what happened? How does this man–who delivers pretty solid performances near in and out whenever he’s cast and is clearly held in high regard both by fans and producers given how much work he gets–get so little accolades?

Who knew Colin Firth would make such a charming action hero?

Well, looking over the large number of roles he does, Samuel L Jackson appears to have a tendency for being typecasted. I know I had this conversation with Derek after watching a movie–I can’t remember which but choose one of his many 100 appearances–where we felt that Samuel L Jackson was just not utilized as best he could. Looking at the Star Wars prequels and you can see perhaps his blandest performance (which isn’t a knock against the guy, no one comes out looking good from the Prequels). I remember Derek commenting that Samuel L Jackson just isn’t achieving his greatest potential if he isn’t being angry and swearing. And there really isn’t any reason for you to watch Snakes on a Plane than that reason alone.

Kingsman: The Secret Service belongs to Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar while the movie is credited to Matthew Vaughn, Marv Films and 20th Century Fox.

So where is this ramble leading? Well, I recently watched Kingsman: The Secret Service.

If you haven’t seen the advertisements, then you would not be aware that Jackson is casted as the titular villain Richmond Valentine. And here we see a side of Samuel L Jackson that has never been known: a haemophobic, eccentric, lispy cellular phone billionaire with a strong gag reflex whenever faced with excessive violence. It’s so not Samuel L Jackson and perhaps that’s what makes it so damn fun when you’re watching it. It’s hard not to like the stupidity of his character, especially during perhaps the best use of product placement in the last couple of years when villainous Valentine welcomes undercover Colin Firth to his opulent mansion in order to wheel out a smörgåsbord of McDonald’s happy meals resplendent in their fine silver accoutrements. His character is flippant and irrelevant which, perhaps, is the best way to describe the film over all.

Kingsman is fun but it is not without its flaws. What you may think is a spoof on the spy genre flirts too much with taking itself too seriously to be simple parody. It also dwells far too long on the personal development of young Eggsy Unwin as he’s recruited to the fantastically silly tailors turned independent spy agency. As much as young Taron Egerton tries to sell the part, no one is watching the film for him or his clichéd character arc. We are warming seats with our bums to see Colin Firth, Samuel L Jackson and Michael Caine chew the scenery as they play atypical roles that we’re used to the old timers adopt like a comfy pair of clothes. The fun of Kingsman is in the tongue-in-cheek use of these highly acclaimed performers living up the ludicrousness of the comic book world and clearly having a party while doing it.

And it’s this tonal inconsistency that really pulls people from it. There’s one word of warning I have for the film and that it is excessively violent. Part of the interest in the film is its Guy Ritchie-esque fight scenes that, while filmed in an interesting manner, are incredibly violent. Unfortunately, this hyper-violence isn’t used to any powerful end. It’s much like it’s headlining actors and there for simple amusement and nothing else. Which isn’t to say that movies can’t be stupid fun but then why detract from that with the overdrawn training plot for Egerton?

Ultimately, I think the greatest issues of the movie derive from its comic book origins. I haven’t read the comic but there’s no argument that the medium struggles with its high fantasy elements trying desperately to be grounded in a bizarre pseudo-reality that always comes across as disingenuous and jarring when adopted to anything that isn’t inked and coloured panels. We also have fairly flimsy characters espousing silly nonsense about knights of the round table all the while discussing the merits of free cellphone coverage that invariably leads to mustachio-twirling attempts to take over the world. You can’t take the story seriously, ever, even when its try its darnedest for you to feel concern over bug-eyed pugs.

And who knew that this image would be so common when looking up the film?

Furthermore, instead of ending the show on a happy note, I couldn’t help but worry that this was just the beginning in yet the unrelenting deluge of vapid comic book culture which has gripped our society. Kingsman is best as a one off–a sugary side dish that was silly and fun but not something you pull out every Friday when you’re desperate for a meal. However, it is almost a looming inevitability that there will be a sequel and, given the development of the movie’s plot, I can see no reason why I would want a Kingsman II or III. There’s very little direction I can see it going and all its best parts will be absent. For all the enjoyment I had for it, the movie is still shallow and fleeting. It’s a good pun which you grin at when your friend first makes it but as you do so you just know it’s going to be driven into the ground as your friend repeats it constantly for the next few weeks until he gets distracted by some other new meme.

Went Woman

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Yes, I know, everyone worth listening to has already seen this and commented on it. A little background story: I wanted to see this movie while it was in theatres. I proposed that my family watch it instead of seeing Guardians of the Galaxy which would no doubt be another standard Marvel movie release with all the pew-pews and little else. My sister, of course, had no interest but then it wasn’t really up her alley. My mother, on the other hand, loves going to films and loves seeing thriller and action movies. This would be the perfect situation for a child-parent quality time sort of experience. Of course, that didn’t happen because Gone Girl’s release came and went and my mother expressed no further interest in seeing it and rather bemoaned that we never watched Guardians of the Galaxy. And thus, our movie watching window closed. I had to content myself with hearing other people’s impressions as by the time it was clear I would not be seeing it with my kin, my friends already had.

Alas.

Anyway, Gone Girl came to video–as movies are want to do–and thus it was possible for us to schedule some time when neither of us were busy so we could sit down and watch the highly contentious movie (contentious only in whose fault it was that we never saw it in theatres). We were both eager for a decent thriller and suspense movie and came in with high hopes especially after all the positive word of mouth surrounding the picture. Aaaaand that was a mistake.

I didn’t like it. Neither did my mom. For her, there was just something off about the movie. For me, I simply didn’t get it.

And this isn’t some sort of confession that the movie was too “intelligent” or complicated to follow. The plot is not, by any stretch, difficult. Everything is explicitly detailed for the viewer. There isn’t any sort of Nolan ambiguity that may create some confusion in the audience. Knowing the truth of the situation is simple because the movie shows you it with any potential contradicting information clearly framed as being unreliable. Yes, the story uses an unreliable narrator but it becomes really evident when things aren’t being present to the audience at face value.

So what was there not to get? This was essentially my conversation with my mother afterwards. It is, to be fair, a perspective that I’m learning most people don’t possess. Most consumers of our media seem to focus on the act of consumption itself. They read the story, the follow the action and they smile or frown at whatever tone the author ties it up with at the end. Few people seem to take the approach which everyone was taught in their (competent) English classes. It seems like there’s a natural aversion to dissecting work and trying to peel the layers back and view the muscles and tissues beneath which make it all work. Perhaps most people are scarred from the English classes. I know I’ve had discussions with Kait about teasing themes and motifs from fiction and at first she always threw up her hands and declared she never saw it. The process is not onerous, however. It is basically taking the mind of a four year old; you simply always ask ‘why?’

As a creative person myself, my major question generally revolves around “Why was this made in the first place.” On first blush, the answer seems obvious: to entertain. But that’s not what I’m looking at. As an entertainer myself, there’s lots of ideas in my head that float around crying out for attention and form. I’m not looking for the reductionist answer for entertainment media, I’m looking for why this specific work had reason to come into being.

I am aware of no writer who sits down to a blank screen, puts their fingers to the keyboard and out pops a novel of its own accord. We are not the proverbial thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. In fact, a lot of new writers struggle with that intimidating empty page. Looking upon that vast white emptiness full of potentials and possibilities can actually stifle creativity and progress. You can get wrapped up in all the ‘what ifs’ and ‘how what about that’ to actually get anywhere. No, writers have some idea when they sit down of the form they wish to create. No sculptor mindlessly chisels at rock and thus no writer mindlessly drools on paper. Thus, there is some core that a story is written around. There is some central idea, theme or metaphor that serves as the foundation for everything that branches outward. This isn’t always something profound. I mean, Star Wars was created because George Lucas wanted to create a movie of his favourite pulp sci-fi action hero Flash Gordon but could not get the rights to the intellectual property. Thus, he made his own. You can see that primary motivation glimmer throughout the first movie before all the elements are brought in to flesh the piece out. He wanted a space opera and thus he created a space opera.

Now, I understand people’s disdain for this analytic approach. I know when I was younger it always felt a little like “reading too much into it” and trying to impose your own motifs and feelings on a piece that were never the author’s intention. I mean, you can look at my prior discussion of sexism in Name of the Wind for something that was not consciously part of this initial creation. These accidental themes are, in my opinion, just as important as the intentional ones for a strong writer will have much better control over their central concept and can keep out unwanted messages that would dilute or distract from their original intent.

So, my question to everyone who saw Gone Girl would be “what was the point of this movie?” I can not answer this question with any degree of confidence and that is what I don’t get about it. I don’t know why it was made (well, I do now because I read interviews of the author afterward) and ultimately that’s because the story is a bit of a mess. At its core Gone Girl is a confused jumble of raw ideas rather haphazardly forged together into a meandering tale. All these little pieces and ideas, on their own, could probably work as a piece but together it becomes too much for me to ignore the ends as they fray and come undone beneath the slightest scrutiny.

But let’s begin with the start since that’s what everyone knows. Gone Girl is at its strongest in its first act. It opens with a rather morose Ben Affleck visiting a woman whose relationship is not made clear immediately preparing the audience for a sense of vague uncertainty. We don’t know anything about these individuals and the tease of a mysterious treasure hunt devised by the hauntingly absent Rosamund Pike is certainly powerful enough to grab attention. It’s not long before Ben Affleck receives a call from a concerned neighbour and he returns home to find an empty house with a smashed table and immediately calls the police. The detectives trouncing about the house is segregated by a narrated backstory by the missing Amy Dunne explaining the happy life her and Nick led before she was dragged out into the Midwest America Suburbia and, for all intents and purposes, died.

As an aside, I find Ben Affleck really distracting in movies. It’s too hard for me to not shake that I’m watching Ben Affleck training to be Batman pretending to be some down on his luck average American whenever he does these kinds of features. It was the same issue in Argo (though made even more apparent in Argo because there was a deliberate attempt to not make everyone else look like a Hollywood Superstar). He’s got the same sort of goofy, Ben Affleck personality as he mopes about the screen kind of being sad about his wife’s disappearance and kind of not. On the one hand, he does a good job of communicating Nick’s detachment from his wife. On the other hand, I feel he would have got that across even if he weren’t trying to do it.

Anyway, digression over, I really liked the set-up and exploration of the two character’s lives as it followed the police’s investigation trying to find this woman and piece together what happened that morning. Nick’s testimony is always held with a bit of skepticism because of his laissez-faire attitude towards the whole affair. As the investigation continues, incongruities in Nick’s personal life and actions rise to the surface. However, there’s always some lingering doubt hanging over his suspicion. Despite Amy’s overtures, the fact that Nick’s sister Margo is so adamant against the woman (and something which is never clarified by either of the main characters thus by structure indicates that her feelings are genuine) and her rather cold demeanor towards her family and the strained relationship she had with them in her recollections make it clear that Amy isn’t some innocent, bumbling homebody that was apt to fall to some nefarious scheme. It’s in these slow moments of revelation while the life of Amy Dunne exists in existential uncertainty that the movie really shines. However, as the pieces begin to surface, it all felt too exact for it to be right. I was glad that the detective was self-aware enough to express the same cynicism over the case and continued to push the question of Amy’s fate away from the meticulously laid explanation that Nick had killed her and back into a more ambiguous “nothing seems right.”

And then the truth is revealed rather abruptly and far too early. Unsurprisingly, Amy is alive and driving off with a giant wad of cash. It’s explained that she discovered Nick’s affair and, so infuriated, decided to absolutely ruin her husband in as self destructive a manner as was possible. This… could have worked and I wouldn’t mind a story looking at how invested a marriage can create between two individuals that when that union becomes inextricably broken, there is no healing the wounds it leaves behind. I can get behind the idea that Amy was so distraught, so shut-off and so isolated that her only way out she could see was to fabricate this highly exacting set-up, manipulate the media towards a favourable bias and have Nick executed for her murder which would be cinched with her own suicide.

But then the movie keeps going. Suddenly, it’s not even about some desperate housewife but tries to reveal that Amy has all along been some incredibly twisted sociopath who has always manipulated the law in her favour against her jilted lovers. She has a habit of rather extreme self-harm in order to present an image of her living a life of constant harassment, abuse and sexual assault. It’s the sort of accumulating nonsense that arises from an need to easily explain a mountain of contradictory behaviour driven less by theme or character and more by a need to raise the ante to see how far one can go. It’s the modern equivalent of ‘the devil made me do it’ and this sort of lazy way out is expected in the incredibly silly modern slasher horror flicks. Somewhere along the way, Gone Girl lost its way and seemed to forget what it was trying to discuss. It devolves into this weird, Silence of the Lambs-esque lens on a bizarrely fictitious psychopath that had tried to elicit sympathy and humanity from its start. It would be like trying to watch Hannibal Lector be a caring if absent minded father in a Modern Family episode before having some inexplicable breakdown and just start eating people while trying to convince you that all that time you were watching him be a sitcom dad he was really also eating people… at some point. Don’t think about it, they didn’t.

It’s this shift from being a character piece to a narrative piece that also leaves Gone Girl in its weakest state by the end. When Amy returns covered in Neil Patrick Harris’ blood after coldly killing him (and not reacting at all to it because… I suppose having your life savings stolen from you is as good enough an excuse to send someone into the extreme depths of antisocial behaviour) the police question her over her story. The contradictions in her desperate attempts to keep her original plan to frame her husband accurate while also pretending she had been kidnapped the entire time are far too obvious and far too easy to prosecute. I mean, she tries to argue that there’s video footage of her imprisonment with the movie conveniently forgetting that there’s only footage for her at the house over two days since she spent the vast majority of the time in a Louisiana motel. Not to mention her arrival at Neil Patrick Harris’ house would look really bizarre seeing that she appeared in disguise and had to be provided with new clothes, hair dye and a diet in order to be returned to her normal look after a month of binge eating snacks.

But no, I’m sure that ten second footage of her crying over spilt brandy on her nightie would certainly trump the fact that nothing else makes a god damn lick of sense.

Accessed from https://killingfloorfilm.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/gone-poster-080114sp.jpg

Gone Girl belongs to Gillian Flynn and 20th Century Fox.

Gone Girl basically undid itself because it either didn’t have a clear goal of what it wanted to say or it simply didn’t keep to it. It lost its best elements by getting more and more ludicrous in an attempt to keep the “audience on is toes.” By the end of it, I couldn’t help but feel that the story itself is too self indulgent. It feels like it was mainly written as a form of wish fulfillment. The author wanted to explore two characters that were actually one: herself. In Nick, she had a picture of herself: an individual who tries their best but is often foiled by their own petty indulgences and desires. In Amy is the person she wants to be: an individual so in control of herself that she can manipulate even the behemoth media giants to dance to her whim–a woman that is both dangerous and desirable like an addiction that no person can quit.

And at its end, Gone Girl feels like that ludicrous fantasy. All that effort and work spent trying to sustain the suspension of disbelief and to flesh-out and round characters reduced to so many cliches and shallow explanations. It’s about as unsatisfying as Nick’s marriage.

Never Mess Around With My Greens

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Alright, Friday’s review is probably not going to cut it. So, today I’m going to do an actual review of Disney’s Into the Woods. I have a sneaky suspicion my sister is doing her own look at it later this week. Yes, we’re really milking this for all it’s worth but unfortunately we haven’t done anything exciting in our lives recently so you’ll just have to deal with it, I suppose. If you want some personal update, I’ve completed work on one short story and am doing the initial drafting of a second.

Into the Woods belongs to Disney and Sondheim and people.

But who wants to hear that. Presumably if you’re still with me you want more details on this damn Disney musical.

And it is a musical by the way. I feel every review is going to make note of that. I can’t possibly fathom why Disney decided to market it as something else but I have my suspicions about Disney’s view of the product before its release. But on with the show!

Yes, I enjoyed Into the Woods. Thankfully, Derek had braced me before I went about its Broadway roots. Course, what he didn’t tell me, was it that was an adaptation of a Stephen Sondheim production. I wouldn’t exactly expect that name to ring many bells–it certainly didn’t for me–but when perusing his past work, the old man was behind Sweeny Todd which I really enjoyed. Oh, and he did a little thing called West Side Story as well which you may have heard before. I haven’t seen that, much to the chagrin of my older generation, but I put up with Grease so I feel my responsibilities to their sensibilities has been served.

Where was I? Right. Sweeny Todd. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you do. Yes, it’s a musical but it’s closer in vein to my favourite: The Evil Dead: The Musical. It’s a near perfect fit for Tim Burton who has pretty much covered the quality spectrum. It’s a rather impressive accomplishment that this man’s products include such varied titles as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I won’t share which of these I think are utter trash and which are actually good but I think it prudent to take a moment and just marvel at his filmography nevertheless.

Sweeny Todd finds that right mix of weird and melancholic on which Tim Burton thrives. We get a non-goofy performance from Johnny Depp, a standard but still great performance from Helena Bonham Carter and a musical that isn’t afraid of dowsing the screen in gallons of blood. Like I said, what’s not to love? Course, it’s the blood that makes Sweeny Todd relevant to the discussion at hand. At it’s heart, Sweeny Todd is dark–there is no deny that. It’s a story of a man so hellbent on revenge that he loses sight of the things he’s actually avenging. If there’s any suspicion that there is redemption awaiting the titular anti-hero, Sweeny Todd does a very good job of making clear that those suspicions are wholly unfounded. From the moment Todd steps into London, you know he’s a rather unredeemable rogue when he contradicts the young star-crossed lover on how London is the world’s largest asshole. The rest of the production supports Todd’s claim when pretty much every character we meet is a disgusting wretch of a person. Burton does the very obvious play of filming the movie incredibly dark to make really obvious the dark themes but, whatever, it’s Burton and what do you expect?

The thing is, those dark themes were there in the original work and Burton’s job was essentially seeing them transfered to the screen.

And now we have Into the Woods by Disney.

Whereas Burton is known for being dark, broody and melancholic, Disney couldn’t be further from those motives even if it tried. In Disney’s eyes, life is a wonderful candy-floss filled world choked to the brim with charming, smiling rodents and helpful secondary characters who exist solely to fulfill every young girl’s desire for true love’s kiss. Disney trawls old fairy tales like Japanese fishermen tearing apart the Pacific for every last edible scrap of tuna. They rip their cargo up, gut it of all that nasty bile and organs, fillet the nicest flesh and throw it on a cute little bed of rice with some radishes shaped like eyes and a broad mouth so you forget that you’re devouring a mutilated corpse and fall for the idea of dining on some abstract concept of happiness and contentment. Disney de-scales its subject matter more than any fishmonger, making sure that there is no trace of the rough edges of the original tales which they plunder and copyright. Into the Woods is set-up along Disney’s modus operandi; it’s a conglomeration of a bunch of old, familiar stories slapped together. We have a tiny village filled to the brim with the iconic Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Jack Giantkiller and Cinderella characters. The interest comes from the interweaving of these different stories into one.

Into the Woods wears its Broadway origins plainly on its sleeve. The opening is a fourteen minute song setting up the principal conflicts for the ensemble cast. The biggest issue of the movie is shown immediately: you can’t help but see that this production is awkwardly shoved into the wrong medium. I couldn’t help but wonder how the work plays on the stage and that a lot of the spectacle would be quite impressive when working beneath the constraints of a theatre. And musicals are all about the spectacle. But not all of us can get into Broadway so here we are. Thankfully, unlike Sweeny Todd, the cast of Into the Woods are near universally equipped with some damn decent pair of lungs. The singing is top notch and the performances are incredibly engaging–with the sole exception of Johnny Depp but it’s clear he’s not a singer so thankfully he was reserved for a bit part. Meryl Streep stands out but it’s Meryl Streep and that’s what she does.

Anyway, the other thing about Into the Wood’s intro is that you start getting an indication that this isn’t going to be your standard Disney fare. I started noticing it when Cinderella sang her swarm of birds to pick up lentils to fill a pot so she can go to the king’s festival. The original fairy tales are far more intact here and the little details really make it stand out. There’s a charming dark lining trimming the production with sly comments from Red Riding Hood wondering if her grandma is already dead, the baker arguing with his wife about how Red is a thief, Cinderella getting domestically abused by her sisters and so forth. Then Meryl Streep breaks in and comments immediately on the Baker’s Wife’s infertility.

Quick question: when was the last time Disney showed a pregnancy yet alone talked about its complications? Sure, the Baker’s Wife suffers beneath a magical curse but I’m hard pressed to think when even something innocuous as pregnancy was deemed appropriate by Disney’s overbearing board. Granted, this is mostly used as motivation for the primary characters to head into the woods as all the cast are sent with some grand personal issue to solve. However, the audience is set up pretty early that no topic is truly off bounds. Red Riding Hood’s encounter with the wolf is a thinly veiled discussion about a young woman’s sexual awakening with a very obviously older and predatory male partner. The Baker and his Wife are tormented with trying to accrue the Witch’s required ingredients through noble means with varying success: both attempt bold face robbery of either a defenseless girl or lost maiden and conspire against an obviously naive boy to purchase his only cow with worthless beans despite the boy needing to sell it so his family can have food to eat.

Intermission

It appears the website ate half my review. That’s wonderful. Now let me try and see if I can’t recapture lightning in a bottle.

End Intermission

There’s Sondheim’s wonderful black line again. Though, I’m not entirely certain I can ascribe all the credit to him alone. Old fairy tales are ripe with rather bleak justice or unforgiving individuals. Into the Woods is subtle in bringing these elements forward. The first is characterized by Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Though they only speak it and keep all the details behind a curtain, there’s no misunderstanding that after her encounter with the Wolf, the Baker is required to cut and gut the monster in order to rescue Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. Perhaps even more macabre is that Red wears the Wolf’s skin for the rest of the story, trading in her red hood to the Baker as thanks for rescuing her.

Into the Woods dances around the old morals and the heartwarming lessons which Disney loves. But there’s a sardonic undercurrent to them. The two youngest characters are the quickest to learn their “lessons” in the woods. After being rescued, Red admits that she should have been more obedient and she’s learned to not trust strangers even if she wants to and what they offer is strange and enticing. Jack, after discovering giants at the top of his beanstalk, regales the Baker with his experiences and says that he’s learned the value of home and the homestead. And yet, through the course of the story, these morals don’t end up serving the characters at all. Jack gets convinced to go up the beanstalk again and again after failing to purchase back his prized Milky White and is encouraged on by a skeptical Red. Red finds later that listening to others doesn’t actually resolve anything and decries how, though she’s decided to be more assertive and defensive, it doesn’t contribute when faced with larger problems.

This is repeated with all the characters. Throughout the second act, everyone one of them achieves their heart’s desire: the Witch gets her cursed reversed and turns beautiful after the Baker and his Wife concoct her potion, Jack gets Milky White back after plundering the giant’s household and stealing all of his fabulous treasure, Cinderella gets her Prince Charming and is rushed off to the castle for the grand wedding. Had the story ended here, it would be indistinguishable from a Disney tale, and it would be all the worse for it. For it is at the height of Cinderella’s crowning ceremony that the kingdom is shaken by the arrival of the giantess.

And here Into the Woods strays well into its darkened boughs. For, in obtaining all their wishes, the characters have created a perfect storm of circumstances that swings around upon them. In their sale of Milky White, the Baker’s Wife keeps one of the beans as part of their ruse over the value of the items (and, perhaps, a touch of avarice). Jack, of course, angers the giants by stealing from them in the hopes of getting Milky White back and ultimately kills the giant husband when he seeks to catch the little thief and the latest of his plunder. The Witch discovers that her beauty charms no one and she has lost her ability to curse. The Baker’s Wife ends up trading the last bean with Cinderella in order to obtain her shoe and Cinderella, in her inattentiveness to the world and people around her, casually tosses the final bean aside thinking it worthless.

Of course, the giantess is furious with the murder of her husband and demands Jack be given to her so she can get her revenge. No one is willing to hand him over, and thus the giantess vows to tear the kingdom apart. No one knows how to deal with the problem, the two princes least of all. Cinderella’s Prince Charming reveals himself as the unapologetic rake that he is as he seduces the Baker’s Wife while everyone is searching the woods for Jack. Rapunzel’s Prince simply rides away from the problem, wanting nothing to do with it. Suddenly, everything everyone wanted is revealed to not be anything they needed. Instead of solving all their problems, fulfilling their wishes created only more. In the meantime, people die and ruin falls upon everyone’s house. Here, the character’s real issues surface. The Baker is forced to confront his abandonment by his father and the uncertainty of following in his footsteps. Jack must realize that things are out of his control and he can’t solve all his problems. Cinderella has to face the problems of her meekness and indecision, taking a stand where others will not. Ultimately, the real lesson is that hardships arise not from wicked people but mistakes and the consequences of actions. The giantess and witch aren’t really evil but people reacting to troubles visited upon them. There’s no grander force at work which insures justice.

As the story comes to a close, we’re well away from the happily-ever-after promised at the end of these tales. A great price was paid for the hard lessons taught and the wishes brought to life. In the end, no one could know what would happen in the woods. Even Witches and Princes are powerless against the unknown amongst the trees. Truly, the greatest lesson the characters learn is that nothing needs to be done alone. Their only real gift, their only real reward, is to see the value of what they had–community and family. And while they’re no safeguards against troubles which arise, they are all that are left when everything else gets ruined.

It’s not truly grim but nor is it singing into the sunset either. It’s bittersweet and it’s the very thing which Disney tries its hardest to hide. You can feel the executives’ fingers all about Into the Woods but I can’t help but wonder if Disney didn’t sign on to this without really knowing what they were backing. And there’s only so much they can sweep under the rug. I can’t help but see the parable between them and the Witch. Disney’s goal has always been to shelter and coddle from the hardships of life, confusing people’s desires for something pretty and fanciful while failing to understand that uglies and blemishes can’t be compelled to disappear. Unlike the Witch, however, I doubt Disney’s willingness to become a pariah for the good of everyone else. If there was one lesson which Into the Woods seems eager to tell, it is one of caution. We can’t know the outcome of our actions, so we should be mindful of the effects they may carry whether that be in the wishes we seek or the stories we tell to our children.

So, yes. I liked Into the Woods.

Into the Woods Review

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Into the Woods belongs to Disney and Sondheim and people.

I liked it.