At the Movies with General Havoc

[Steve]

Let's face it, half the reason they made this movie was to keep the IP, because letting it go back to what is now a competitor and watching them make massive amounts of money on it would be humiliating.

Sony's far smarter about it IMHO in their deal with Disney-Marvel for Spider-Man.

[General Havoc]

Let's face it, half the reason they made this movie was to keep the IP, because letting it go back to what is now a competitor and watching them make massive amounts of money on it would be humiliating.

Sony's far smarter about it IMHO in their deal with Disney-Marvel for Spider-Man.

Given what they did to Spiderman first, I'm not sure "smarter" is the term I'd use.

They did however see the light eventually.

[Steve]

Let's face it, half the reason they made this movie was to keep the IP, because letting it go back to what is now a competitor and watching them make massive amounts of money on it would be humiliating.

Sony's far smarter about it IMHO in their deal with Disney-Marvel for Spider-Man.

Given what they did to Spiderman first, I'm not sure "smarter" is the term I'd use.

They did however see the light eventually.

Yeah, they did. The question is if Fox ever will. For the moment the X-Men movies are doing well enough that I don't see them dropping them any time soon, but I do wonder if the flop of FF will lead to them seeking a similar deal with Marvel Studios.

Though they might wait until the first Spider-Man under the new deal gets released. Who knows.

[General Havoc]

Straight Outta Compton

Alternate Title: The Most Dangerous Men in America

One sentence synopsis: Young rapper Ice Cube, DJ Dr. Dre, and drug runner Eazy-E get together to produce NWA, and change the world of Hip Hop.


Things Havoc liked: By now, dear readers, you all have learned, I hope, to trust my judgment on all matters cinematic, in deference to my many years of dearly-bought experience on the subject. But as a renaissance man of sober judgment and cultured taste, it would be depriving you all of a profound gift if I forebore to mention my expertise in all matters musical as well. I'm no Rolling Stone writer, of course, but I have made popular music between now and the far-flung days of 1958 my subject for a detailed musical analysis that generally serves to bore my friends when they're not mocking my awful taste (yes, I like Elton John. Shut up.) In the course of this musical project, one which I devised so that I could better understand the history of pop music in the context of its proper times and contemporaries, I have encountered, despite all the musical madness of the last sixty years, only three occasions when a musical group managed to produce something that instantly and irrevocably changed the musical landscape around them forever. One such occasion was in early 1964, when the Beatles arrived in the United States and more or less instantly banished everything that did not sound like the Beatles to the black hole of irrelevancy, kick-starting the 60s as a cultural thing in one fell swoop. The second, was in the winter of 1991-1992, when Nirvanna's second album, Nevermind, dragged the 80s out behind a woodshed and shot them in the back of the head, ushering in the age of Indie and Alternative rock for better or for worse.

The third was NWA.

Straight Outta Compton is the tale of the meteoric rise and fall of 'Niggaz Wit Attitude' (Or Attitudes. I've heard both), better known by their radio-friendly acronym, NWA, centered around three young black men in late 1980s Compton, lyricist and rapper Ice Cube, DJ and producer Dr. Dre, and flat out drug dealer and gangster (and frontman) Eazy-E. Over the course of less than a decade, these three, and a coterie of other, secondary rappers and artists, create a firestorm, producing a series of albums that blew the top off of gangsta-style rap in the US, and helped create, promote, or inspire the careers of more or less every rapper you've ever heard of, a great many of whom appear in this film. They struggle against bitter, violent oppression on the part of the out-of-control LAPD in the leadup to and the aftermath of the famous Rodney King riots. They party and celebrate in the sudden explosion of wealth that they have access to for the first time in their lives, and fall out bitterly among one another over the proceeds of their works, culminating in violent beatings, dis tracks, and assorted bad blood. All along, other major figures of the Hip Hop world, from Suge Knight and Warren G to Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg float in and out of the picture, to say nothing of the other members of NWA, but the focus all along is on the three men at the core of it all, and all three of them, without exception, are absolutely fantastic. Corey Hawkins, a Shakespearian actor of no particular film pedigree, brings a sharp intelligence to Dr. Dre that is only appropriate for one of the smartest producers in music, a man who would go on to sell a headphones company to Apple for three billion dollars and discover most of the hip hop talent that any of you have ever heard of. Hawkins' Dre isn't a gangster or a thug, but a man with at least a semi-stable family locked in the violent ghetto of Compton, who escapes through DJing, and whose biggest goal simply seems to be working on his music, irrespective of the tempests around him. His counterpart Cube meanwhile, is played by O'Shea Jackson, Jr in an absolute dead ringer for the lyricist and rapper-turned-actor, something explainable perhaps by the fact that Jackson is the real Ice Cube's son. If anyone is the angry one in the group, it's Cube, whose bitterness at his life circumstances, his setting, his deprivation, and the way he is treated by everyone from the police to the rest of the group, is what fuels NWA's catalog, and the best praise for Jackson's portrayal might be the fact that he manages, through his acting, to make a song as incendiary as "Fuck the Police" sound totally normal just due to the fact that he's the one rapping it.

But the standout star of this film is Jason Mitchell, a total unknown with only bit parts to his name, who plays the third member of the NWA triumvirate, the late Eazy-E, the drug-dealing bankroller and frontman of the operation. Mitchell is flat out fantastic in this role, a hard-banging dealer and loanshark who turns his eye towards producing with the same ruthlessness that he brought to his previous life, plainly sharper than a razor, but equally plainly struggling to mentally escape the hell he came from. An absolutely standout scene midway through the film has him confront his alternately supportive and shady manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti, in another great role) with the fact that following a savage beating at the hands of another producer (R. Marcus Taylor as a menacing Suge Knight), he does not have any option but to outright murder his rival. The sequence is brilliant, with Heller desperately trying to talk the basic sense into Eazy that he is no longer in Compton, and rivalries like this are handled with lawyers and lawsuits, not bullets, while Eazy tries to talk to the basic sense into Heller that the world of Rap still is in Compton, and that handling matters like that would annihilate the credibility he holds so dearly. Both men understand what the other is saying and why he is saying it, but cannot get the other to see that it's their version of reality that must prevail for the thing they are doing to go on.

Up and down and through the lives of our three protagonists, the movie winds, through awful tragedies and bacchanalian celebrations, breakups and bad contracts, as the wider world of music and police brutality unfolds around them. Director F. Gary Gray has little to recommend him for a project like this (his last feature film was 2009's execrable Law Abiding Citizen) save for his personal association with the subject matter, being an old friend of Ice Cube and other figures in Hip Hop, who got his start as a director with Ice Cube's own Friday. As such, he is the perfect choice, deftly introducing legions of characters, many of whom the average moviegoer may have never heard of, being too young or too non-hip-hop-minded to know who these people are without the helpful, non-obtrusive introductions that the film supplies in the form of John Wick-style floating nametags. Gray's sure hand is evident as the movie manages to deftly handle the unavoidable topics of police brutality, violence, and censorship as NWA becomes, for a time at least, the most dangerous group in America, and their home town of Compton becomes, for a time at least, an open war zone. Though the temptation to do so must have been tremendous, never once does Gray let his film become an after-school special on why racism is bad, nor some sledgehammered lesson point on why "everything is still exactly the same". Instead, he simply shows LAPD's racism in the late 80s and early 90s in its full, blunt, oppressive, awful glory, through a series of standout, ultra-tense sequences and confrontations. Young black men are beaten, abused, harassed, threatened, and most of all constantly humiliated by a police force that despite all this remains entirely believable throughout. Rather than point fingers at the audience and shriek or exchange platitudes about everyone getting along, the movie gives the context of what happened in the years leading up to 1992, and lets everyone draw what conclusions they will, particularly from an evocative sequence from the King riots themselves, displaying the most famous shots of the period, while retaining the understanding that Fergusson and the BLM movement are both like and unlike what happened back then. While stupid people may (and will continue to) scream all manner of stupid things at Gray and the film's producers for alternately watering down or playing up the riots for political purposes, the effect within the film is near-miraculous. I'm about as far from the founding members of NWA as you can get in this country, in terms of race, background, musical tastes (and skill), and general attitude towards law enforcement, and yet I had strictly no difficulty understanding intrinsically why nobody in this movie would trust the cops for a red second, nor what would lead them to produce, distribute, and perform songs like Fuck The Police in the face of angry, violent protest from everyone from Tipper Gore to the FBI. Maybe that's more of a comment on me than the movie, but it is to date the only one of the literal hundreds of lectures, sermons, interviews, dramatizations, and angry Facebook denunciations that I've sat through to ever fully bridge that gap of understanding on a root, emotional level.


Things Havoc disliked: This is ostensibly a truthful movie, not just in the sense of its subject matter but in the sense of a biopic in general, and so it's only fair for me to point out a few elements that are less than truthful. No, I'm not talking about MC Ren's sour grapes, nor the people who are inexplicably using this film as additional "proof" that Tupac is somehow still alive. I'm talking, rather, about the rather large number of women that Doctor Dre beat the hell out of over the course of his career, including one journalist about whom he once said that he could not understand what the big deal was, as all he did was throw her through a door (that's not all he did, but is indicative perhaps of something). Normally I don't have much use for arguments about how a movie is wrong for not being about a different subject, but the subject this time IS the three founders of NWA, and if the movie has time to present Dre as a genius producer and businessman (which he is), then it has the time to include something this important, unsavory though it might be to his reputation. It's not like the rest of the film is especially reverent when it comes to Compton's drug and gang problem, Eazy-E's previous drug dealings, Suge Knight's thuggishness, or Jerry Heller's contract chicanery. It leads one to wonder if the fact that Dr. Dre is a producer on this film has anything to do with the missing elements...

Other than omissions however, the only serious criticism one can throw at this movie is its structure and length. The film has no real end point or narrative arc. The three main characters simply go through their lives, rapping, writing, being abused and abusing one another, signing and breaking contracts, dissing and reconciling, until finally we are somewhere around 1996 and it's time to stop. A lot of biopics have this sort of problem, as real life isn't necessarily the sort of thing that fits easily into Three-Act structures, but one imagines, given the overall quality of this film, that something a bit tighter could have been put in place. The first half of the film is simply so well structured that it makes a meandering ending harder to understand.


Final Thoughts: Straight Outta Compton is one of, if not the finest musical biopic I've ever seen, a tour-de-force triumph that should by rights become the model of such films in the future. Eliminating the controversy and the topical nature of the themes at work, the film is simply a magnificent biography of three men and how they changed the world of music together and separately, crafted by a director who has clearly just produced his magnum opus. And yet to remove the controversy is in some way to miss the point, for without the need to have his characters sit around reciting homilies on how bad racism is to one another (I'm looking at you, Selma), Gray has made not only one of the best biopics ever, but also one of the more enlightening films on the nature of race relations in America, both in 1992, and, yes, perhaps today as well. In its aftermath we are left to draw our own lessons from what transpired and who these men were and what became of them, whether dead at 31 from AIDS or the richest and most successful music producer on Earth.

I've had it said to me that movies like Straight Outta Compton are what we need nowadays, in the aftermath of Fergusson and other high profile cop-on-black-men shootings. I'm not entirely sure that culture can or should be directed by perceived "needs" such as these, but by and large, having seen the film for myself, I have to agree. Not simply because of what Straight Outta Compton is about. But also because of how it goes about the business of being it.

Final Score: 8.5/10

[General Havoc]

A Walk in the Woods

Alternate Title: The Carolina Death March

One sentence synopsis: Bill Bryson and an old friend of his from long-past adventures decide to hike the entire Appalachian Trail.


Things Havoc liked: Though my compulsive need to warn you all about bad films may seem like it would leave me with no time at all to spare, I do manage to get in a bit of reading here and there, and one of my favorite authors is travel and science writer Bill Bryson, author of all sorts of books from A Short History of Nearly Everything to Mother Tongue to a series of travelogues throughout Australia, Britain, Europe, and America. Bryson's writing style is a distinctive, newspaper-column sort of thing, not precisely the type of writing I would normally expect to see converted into a movie, but here we sit, and I wanted to see if Bryson's caricatures and sense of humor would carry through intact to a movie that included, among other luminaries, Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. With the September Slump upon is, the yearly pause before the storm that is Oscar Season, it seemed a reasonable thing to go and see. How bad could it really be?



Things Havoc disliked: *Sigh*

Robert Redford sucks. I've always believed that Robert Redford sucks. He sucked when he was younger, he sucked when he was middle-aged, and he sucks as an old man, all for the exact same reasons. The man does not know how to act. Any glance at any film of his, from Jeremiah Johnson and Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, to Out of Africa or The Sting (where he inexplicably won an Oscar nod), to more recent fare such as The Last Castle or The Horse Whisperer, Robert Redford has persisted in acting like nothing but a "charming," smarmy, useless, depth-free non-actor who thinks that a winning smile can somehow cover for all faults. Yes, he occasionally manages to elevate his game to merely "acceptable", such as in Spy Game, or last year's Winter Soldier. Woop-de-freaking-do. Most of the time he puts out crap like this, standing about in the middle of a movie set like he has only the vaguest notion of what's going on around him, reciting his dialogue as though it's being fed to him via an earpiece, delivering "jokes" (I cannot put enough quotation marks around that word) with the flattest, most timing-free delivery imaginable. Playing Bill Bryson himself, he fails to get across even the reasons why he has decided to undertake a 2,000+ mile hike through the forest, muttering incoherently about unrelated inanities in the hopes that someone, the director or editor or some extra, will rush in to save him from the need to convey emotions to the audience. He shares no chemistry with any other actor, not with his "best friend", Nick Nolte (who at least salvages some dignity by actually acting), not with his "wife" Emma Thompson (totally wasted in a role that could have been played by an extra), not with his son or his son's friends (one of whom is played by Nick Offermann, for no reason I could determine), not with the other people on the trail, not with Back To The Future III's Mary Steenburgen (whose presence here cannot be explained by the wisest of men), not with anybody. He looks like someone's confused great-uncle, the one you don't really know but know you're supposed to be polite to, awkwardly reciting "jokes" in the style of Rainier Wolfcastle, ones that he plainly doesn't understand, be they the simplest of sarcastic remarks. His hair looks like someone shaved a Golden Retriever to make a wig. He is useless.

But then this entire movie is useless, really, and the fault for that goes beyond Redford and to the director of this unfunny, leaden weight of a movie, Ken Kwapis, who had his debut in 1985 making the pristine Sesame Street movie Follow That Bird, and has been paying for it ever since with crap like Dunston Checks in, The Beautician and the Beast, and He's Just Not That Into You. Perhaps his true calling is children's films, I don't know, but were it not for obligatory F-bombs to remind us that we're all supposed to be adults here, I would have pegged the target age of this movie as being roughly 5. The jokes mostly consist of someone making a comment ("We must have covered a long distance!" "I hope it doesn't rain!") followed immediately by the most obvious "ironic" result one would instantly imagine (They encounter a map showing that they have not covered a long distance, It begins to rain, etc...). Several times, the characters even look at the camera following the "joke", as though expecting a sitcom sound effect (Wah, wah, waaaaaahh...) to play. Repeat this about a hundred and thirty times throughout the film, and you have the entire thing. All of the obligatory buddy-travelogue movie touchpoints, the wacky hijinx involving colorful locals, the bitter outpouring of long-repressed anger, the tearjerking reconciliation and regrets over having lost touch, all of it is entirely pro-forma, unconnected from one scene to the next, with Redford reciting his dialogue like he's reading a menu and Nolte shifting phlegm up and down his throat with every wheezing breath. Even plot points plainly established for later payoff, like the fact that Nolte's character needs to eat every hour due to some syndrome he picked up from contaminated tap water years earlier (how exactly does this man propose to hike two thousand miles again?) is brought up once for a cold, laughless joke, and then never again mentioned.



Final Thoughts: A Walk in the Woods is a complete waste of time, a wretched, joyless enterprise that fails to entertain or elicit any emotion whatsoever from its audience. Familiar as I am with the source material, I can see where the filmmakers tried to include touchpoints from the books, the woman our heroes encounter too annoying to believe, or Redford's solemn prognostications concerning the death of the American Chestnut tree, but none of it feels genuine, spontaneous, or even worth listening to. Nick Nolte, who is a proper actor, manages to salvage some dignity from the affair, but everyone else (particularly Thompson) is left to meander without direction, or as usual shows himself unfamiliar with the concept of direction or acting in general (Redford). Perhaps this just goes to show how good the original book actually was, as the story is essentially the same, as are many of the anecdotes, or perhaps simply it illustrates a more general division between a good storyteller and a bad one, regardless of medium.

Honestly, whatever the purposes you set it to as an example, A Walk in the Woods is simply a bad movie. And even in the September Slump, there's never an excuse for that.

Final Score: 3.5/10

[General Havoc]

The End of the Tour

Alternate Title: My Weekend With David

One sentence synopsis: A Rolling Stone reporter travels to North Dakota to interview David Foster Wallace during his book tour to promote Infinite Jest.


Things Havoc liked: I did not know David Foster Wallace. I did meet him a couple of times. He was an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Pomona College while I was studying there for my undergraduate degree. I was not able to take his course, though friends of mine were, and spoke well and highly of it and him. Wallace,of course, became famous for writing a novel called Infinite Jest, a thousand page tome brimming with supposed genius unread by me, as I have little interest in highbrow literary fiction. But I knew, then and now, of his importance to the world of literature, a man compared unironically to Proust and Hemmingway, and wish I had had a chance to take one of his courses. Failing that, however, I have this film, depicting a lengthy set of conversations between Wallace and Rolling Stone reporter (and novelist in his own right) Dave Lipsky during the final days of Wallace's publicity tour for Infinite Jest in the winter of 1996.

I'm well aware that everyone I know has already closed the review, surmising that this is another self-indulgent writers-on-writing sort of movie. And it is. But bear with me a moment, I beg you.

The End of the Tour is the sort of movie Richard Linklatter would make if he were trying to remake My Dinner with Andre, the infamously impenetrable Louis Malle film from 1981 which featured Wallace Shawn and Angre Gregory literally having dinner and talking about philosophy and experimental theater. It is an earthy, pretenseless film about two intelligent men trying to have an intelligent conversation about a number of matters that seem great to them, conscious as they do so that these matters may not be so great in the grand scheme of things. It is a movie whose subject matter should interest about a third of one percent of the population, but manages nonetheless to be spellbinding, not through artifice nor revelations of grand and universal truths, but via the more simple method of portraying interesting characters on the screen and following them around a while. The centerpiece of it is Wallace himself played to a pitch of perfection I have not seen in some time by Jason Segel, a man I had so little use for previous to this occasion that I don't believe I've ever seen him before. And perhaps I still have not, for Segel transforms himself into... if not David Foster Wallace himself, then a perfectly credible facsimile of the man that might have been. Bearing Wallace's trademark bandana, expounding at length his vague, unclear theories on writing, his insecurities about being seen as faking normalcy through his quotidian habits, and indulging in those habits themselves, from junk food to a profound appreciation for movies like Die Hard and Broken Arrow (ah, the 90s...), Segel is absolutely spot perfect in a role that could not possibly have been anything but torturous for an actor better known for sitcoms and romantic comedies. I don't know how faithful the representation is. My friend who took courses from Wallace was convinced and so was I, though Wallace's estate disowned the picture and his dearer friends have all claimed it is a travesty, mostly sight-unseen. But I do know that Segel is almost impossible to not watch, displaying Wallace's vulnerabilities, his meandering prolixity, his desperate desire to remain in some way genuine to himself in the face of nagging fear that he has never been so. His Wallace is a man who is not a regular guy, but desperately wants to believe that he is, who opines a preference for dogs over a girlfriend because he wouldn't know what to say on a date, and then goes home to write thousand page epochal novels, who analyzes his own television addiction even as he indulges in it, all without ever appearing, as biopics of this sort can often appear, to be nothing more than a screenwriter's conceited attempt at inventing some "brilliant, conflicted" parody, the sorts of which we find on dramatic network TV all the time nowadays. Segel makes Wallace look deeply human, and it is an achievement I have seen very few actors attain.

The End of the Tour was directed by Indie darling James Ponsoldt, whose last film, The Spectacular Now, made the usual circuit of film festival awards two years ago. My tolerance for such fare is limited, but Ponsoldt's directorial style and production is very deliberately low-key in this one, filming the subjects in an intimate, low-budget style to accent the focus on what they're actually talking about. To this end, he has employed Jessie Eisenberg, an actor I've never had much use for, to portray David Lipsky, whose task in the film is less to portray a character and more to assist Segel in portraying his. Younger than Wallace and infinitely less successful as an author, Eisenberg uses all of his awkward slightly-superficial charm to play a character who must ultimately force Wallace's character open for his interview, with the helpful side effect of letting us see what lies within the main subject. He gets a lot across with small gestures, fumbling with a tape recorder or using a moment's privacy to surreptitiously itemize Wallace's entire house, the better to recollect the details of the article he will one day write. Eisenberg allows just a hint of the wormy, anti-socialness he brought to The Social Network to infuse this character as he challenges Wallace not just on subjects such as drug use and institutionalization, but also the way in which Wallace affects at normalcy while consciously dumbing himself down to appeal to "normal" people around him. He does this because he must, as an interviewer and a journalist, and because Wallace is a man who wants to explain himself to himself if not to others. They clash, fight even, sit in awkward silence, mutually decide to proceed as though nothing happened, and press one another on the answers to mysteries as varied as existential meaning and Alanis Morisette. One does not, in the aftermath, get the sense that it's an experience Wallace would be interested in repeating, nor one that propelled Lipsky to new profound heights with his own writing. But the interplay between the characters offers so much richness of character and depth, that the plain intention is to offer us, the audience the catharsis that neither of them are capable of generating. And it is a strange movie indeed that causes me to write sentences like that.


Things Havoc disliked: The End of the Tour is a film with very narrow horizons, by requirement, certainly, and that's no bad thing, but given how enrapturing the lead performance is, one wonders at the inclusion of everything else. An extended introduction to Lipsky, his work as a novelist and reporter, his budding interest in conducting the interview and the process whereby he convinces his boss to let him eats up a lot of runtime, and I'm not convinced it pays off in any way in revealing more about the subject of the film. As I mentioned above, the movie isn't really about Lipsky, but uses Lipsky to reveal more about Wallace, and while that's the right call manifestly, this much focus on the other character makes me wonder if that was not something of an accidental design choice.

There's also a good deal of stunt casting going on, from Ron Livingston as Lipsky's Rolling Stone boss to Joan Cusack as Wallace's hapless driver and escort around Minneapolis. Neither of them are bad at their roles, particularly not Livingston, whom I always love to watch. But Segel is so good at becoming Wallace, and Eisenberg so good at deflecting the spotlight back at him, that one forgets that one is looking at actors at all, until one is violently reminded of such by Cusack or Livingston. It's an unfair criticism, I acknowledge as much, but a filmmaker's job is to artfully craft a reaction from an audience, and my reaction was that I'd almost have preferred a more stripped-down version of this story to one that felt the need to dip back into more conventional cinema every half hour or so.



Final Thoughts: In 2008, David Foster Wallace hanged himself at his home outside Pomona College after a lifelong battle with depression and anxiety. He was 46. His longtime editor described him as "a comet flying by at ground level", while fellow author Bret Easton Ellis, writer of American Psycho, called him the biggest literary fraud of his lifetime (it should be mentioned that Ellis went on to claim that women were incapable of directing movies because they lacked the necessary 'male gaze', so take that for what you will). The End of the Tour does not seek to explain what David Foster Wallace's place was in American literature, nor to understand his depression and suicide holistically, though both subjects are touched upon, with some care, by the characters themselves. Instead, it seeks, as best it can with a subject who has been dead for seven years and who would likely not have wished to have biographical films made about him were he not, to portray a version of the man as he either was or might have been. In this, it is an unqualified success, a movie that rivets the attention as it digresses whimsically through perspectives on writing, Americana, angst, ego, and the need to be accepted or recognized. I will not pretend that these subjects aren't personally of interested to me, but my tolerance, as all of you have learned, for pretentious tripe done up in indie trappings, is very limited, and I have not hesitated to pillory critically-acclaimed films of this sort in the past, should they transgress my limits. Yet I keep returning, despite films like Under The Skin or Boyhood, precisely in the hopes that a thoughtful, hungry young indie director will make a movie like this one, a movie I simply wished to continue, that I might hear more of what this version, real or fictional, of David Foster Wallace had to say.

I did not know David Foster Wallace. I did meet him a couple of times. Perhaps the person I met in the theater last week was very much like him and perhaps he was not, and perhaps, as Wallace himself believed, all biographies are suspect, because the life of an author is incidental to his work. But whoever he was, making his acquaintance again was one of the best times I've had in a theater this year.


Final Score: 8/10

[General Havoc]

Black Mass

Alternate Title: The Adventures of Jimmy B and his Bestest Pals

One sentence synopsis: James "Whitey" Bulger and his gang form an alliance with the FBI to extend their power over Boston.


Things Havoc liked: Ever since the details of his case came out back in 1997, the story of Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger and his illicit relationship with a network of corrupt FBI agents has tantalized a Hollywood still obsessed, in the main, with gangster flicks. Scorsese's "The Departed" was more or less openly based on Bulger's story, with Jack Nicholson taking on the starring role to effect that varied depending on who you asked. I quite liked The Departed, but it was pastiche, a thin retelling of a completely new story using characters inspired by real gangsters, something Scorsese has done many times before. The actual truth of the matter, of who Bulger was and what he did to earn himself a place on the notorious FBI Most Wanted list, remained untold, waiting for another director, in this case Scott Cooper, of Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace (two excellent films), to come along and take a crack at it with the assistance of an actor who desperately, desperately needed to be in a good movie for a change.

What a decade it has been for Johnny Depp, a man I once respected immensely, who has systematically squandered all of the goodwill he earned from me with every appearance of intent. He was one of my favorite actors once, in movies like Finding Neverland, Ed Wood, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Blow, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and of course Donnie Brasco, a gangster movie in which Depp played an undercover cop opposite Al Pacino during one of his brief periods of lucidity. All of this wonderful work, and yet what has Depp done for the last fifteen years but throw all of it away playing cartoon characters, literal or figurative, in appalling dreck such as the later Pirates movies, The Lone Ranger, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows, and last year's execrable luddite homily, Transcendence. So bad has his career become that the best thing I can say for it is that his three minute cameo as a pedophilic Big Bad Wolf in last Christmas's Into the Woods didn't ruin the movie for me. Formerly regarded as one of the great actors f his generation, Depp has become a joke, through enough collective memory remains of his great early work that we keep hoping he will, against all expectations, pull a Matthew McConaughey, and suddenly transition back into good movies once again. Black Mass, in fact, was sold almost entirely on the notion that it was just that, Depp returning to serious roles as a serious actor. He's the reason I went to see the thing in the first place.

And you know what? He's awesome. Depp's films have been so bad, so cartoonish recently, that we forget just how great his acting range really is, and here, in this movie, we finally get to see something of the old magic again. Almost unrecognizeable behind makeup that ironically makes him look more like a Vampire than Tim Burton's films ever did, Depp is a sinister, menacing, violent figure looming over this film, with none of the self-referential winks or crotchety old-man vibes that Nicholson brought to the role. An evil, manipulative gang lord with no conscience or sense of redeeming qualities beyond the ferocious loyalty he half-inspires, half-enforces on the rest of his cronies, Depp blows everyone else off the screen, his voice a low, cavernous Boston drawl, dripping with semi-sarcastic hate. He seems to feed on his own persona as a local Irish townie who was tougher than everyone else, murdering men in broad daylight with a carbine or beating them into a bloody pulp with a sudden explosion of frothing rage. Even his own allies within the FBI are afraid of him, and so are we. It's Depp's best role in decades, one of his best ever, and an anchor point to the tie the movie to, the core element of what should have been a gob-smacking tale of corruption, violence, crime, and punishment.


Things Havoc disliked: And yet...

To my surprise, given the pedigree of Scott Cooper, and the quality of the supporting cast, Depp isn't the problem with this movie. Indeed he's one of the only actors in the film that manages to pull anything out of it. The rest of the dozens of characters orbiting around Depp's performance are almost entirely useless for a variety of reasons, and it's this, not Depp, which ultimately sinks the film. Joel Edgerton, whom I'm beginning to realize is simply a bad actor, plays FBI Agent John Connoly, a childhood friend of the Bulger family, who proposes an alliance between Bulger's Winter Hill Gang and the FBI so as to bring down the Italian mob. Given that this alliance is the central drama of the film, and that the movie, truthfully or not, makes clear that the entire thing was Connoly's idea, foisted on a semi-reluctant Bulger after much persuading, it's really Connoly who should be the focal character of the film, at least structurally, but Edgerton is a boring actor, and his character, a slick, slimy, charlatan of an FBI agent who drags others down with him, is not as interesting to watch as Depp's Bulger is, nor does the film manage to convince us that he's the sort of person that could mastermind something like this. The movie makes Bulger look almost indifferent to the entire thing, blowing Connoly off when he brings up issues that might arise, and treating him with the grudging semi-contempt that a high school cool kid might treat a nerd who wormed his way into the cool kids' table at lunch. Indeed the film goes so far as to suggest that the entire reason Connoly maintained the alliance so long was because he was obsessed with being "in" with someone like Bulger, a obsession that was entirely unrequited. Maybe this is all true (though it smells a lot like someone trying to pin all the blame for a multi-decade conspiracy within the FBI on the one fall guy who got convicted for it all), but narratively, it's like watching the first half of an 80s High School movie over and over again, without any character movement or development, nor any rapport between our main characters, the sort of which is required for a good gangster movie like this to function. Michael Mann knew this much.

And the problem spreads from there. Because Edgerton looks hapless and frankly pathetic, it makes all of the other people engaged in trying to work around this unholy alliance look stupid or powerless. Kevin Bacon and David Harbour do their best with what they're given, but what they're given just isn't that much. They roil and scream or agonize over questions of what the right thing to do is, and then let themselves be walked all over by a man we have just watched being walked all over. When finally the noose starts to close around everyone, thanks to newly-arrived crusading DA Fred Wyshak (Corey Stoll, making up for a bad turn in Antman), the movie picks up somewhat, but only so that we can ask why nobody was able to put a stop to this earlier? Any hints of wider corruption are ruthlessly suppressed in the film, so we are left with the conclusion that the Boston office of the FBI was comprised entirely of shy, retiring gentlemen, who thought it would be too awkward to ask one of their agents to please stop assisting Whitey Bulger with his murder spree.

Meanwhile the rest of Bulger's friends and family are a just a mish-mash of poor execution and bad pacing. The movie opens with Friday Night Lights' Jesse Plemons playing a newcomer to the Bulger gang, his initiation, his meetings with Bulger, etc. The film clearly seems to be setting this character up as an audience viewpoint, along the lines of Goodfellas or Once Upon a Time in America, only to, ten minutes in, drop the character entirely and focus instead on someone else, then someone else again, seemingly at random. Benedict Cumberbatch, he of the most British name, is more or less wasted in the role of Bulger's brother Billy, popping up every twenty minutes or so to say hello before disappearing again without affecting the story. Other character actors, including ones I adore, such as Deadwood's W. Earl Brown, are so sparsely and ill-used in the movie that I actually mistook them for other characters when they finally made a reappearance. The plot, such as it is, just meanders along from point to point, with no cohesive narrative, no sense of the proper passage of time, or even of the rise of Bulger's criminal Empire. Contrast this to The Connection from earlier this year, which managed to show a convincing and utterly real crime syndicate building up and mutating as wars and pressure from the government continued to hammer on it. In Black Mass, nothing actually happens except for vignettes involving schemes to take over a Jai-Alai league (???), and the occasional comment about so-and-so's vending machines. I don't require that every gangster movie provide a primer on the commission of organized crimes, but some sense of what's actually going on here would be of help. As it stands, the movie simply expects us to take the existence of this massive crime syndicate on faith, while simultaneously floundering around in search of a subject.


Final Thoughts: Black Mass is not a bad movie, ultimately, but it is not by any means a great or even good one. That a director known for making legitimately great films like Scott Cooper could have floundered like this points to a serious breakdown in the production and writing process, and yet ultimately the result is that the movie isn't about anything at all, except some kid from South Boston who unrequitedly idolized a bad man so much that he did bad things himself. Ignoring the historical truth of that premise, if the film had just been honest about that being its subject matter, it still might have worked, but the strongest element of the movie, Depp's performance as Whitey Bulger, is never allowed to anchor the film, because of the need to wander this way and that through the screenplay in search of something that the movie can be about. On its own, Depp's return to form is good enough to warrant a look, but if this movie had ambitions of becoming another Scorsese-like exposition of the wacky, evil, violent, and sleazy worlds of organized crime, then all I can suggest is that it probably needs to familiarize itself with its subject matter some more, and come back when it has something to say.

And if not, then I'll be damned if I can figure out what the point of the whole exercise was. Because it sure as hell wasn't to tell the story of Whitey Bulger.


Final Score: 5.5/10

[General Havoc]

Everest

Alternate Title: Places You Will Not Find Me

One sentence synopsis: Legendary New Zealand Mountaineer Rob Hall guides a group of paying clients to the top of Mount Everest just as a raging storm descends on the mountain.


Things Havoc liked: I first read Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air", an account of the 1996 Everest Disaster, nearly twenty years ago, and have re-read it several times since. It's a fascinating work, detailing the lives and deaths of a group of people whose obsessions frankly puzzle me, mountaineers, willing to put up with agony in untold quantities and the constant risk of horrible death, simply to stand on top of a mountain in the middle of a part of the Earth designed seemingly to kill anyone who enters it. Though Everest is now climbed by hundreds of people a year, enough to produce traffic jams on the summit approach, the mountain still kills one in five climbers who ascend above base camp, and the list of highly-experienced, indeed world-famous climbers that have died on its slopes is long and august. In some ways, therefore, it is surprising that it took this long for someone, in this case Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur, to put a big Hollywood movie together based on the incident. And not just any movie, but a big, sweeping IMAX 3D movie. Normally I couldn't care less about either 3D or IMAX, but big landscape-movies like this are an exception in my mind, and I decided to splurge.

But forget the visuals, let's talk about the guy from Terminator Genesys!

Yes, Jason Clarke, who was good in Zero Dark Thirty, and has spent the intervening time between that movie and this one trying to convince me by any means he can that his performance there was a fluke and that he actually sucks. It's not that Clarke is a bad actor, it's that he has no sense for what movies he should be doing and what ones stink on ice. I asked Mr. Clarke in my Genesys review to fire his agent and start reading his own scripts, and... well maybe he did, because this is the best I've seen out of him in a couple of years. His character, Rob Hall, the leader of the main guided expedition to Everest, isn't especially nuanced, a dedicated family man and expert mountaineer who is there to do his job, and does it, but Clarke manages to at least bring a bit of humanity to a character that could only have been something of a cypher, given the production's lack of support from the survivors of the actual disaster. A better job (from a better actor) comes from Josh Brolin, playing Beck Weathers, a cardiologist from Texas who hires Hall to drag him up and down the mountain. There isn't a vast amount for Brolin to do with the character, but he's an entertaining presence with folksy Texan ribbing for his fellow climbers. Others present include other actors I enjoy the chance to see, such as John Hawkes (of Deadwood) as Doug Hansen, a mailman on his third attempt to climb a mountain that has come to rule his mind, and Emily Watson (of many things), as Helen Winton, the base camp controller, whose job is more or less to sit on a radio talking to people high on the mountain who are dying in the storm...

... okay, maybe I'm not making a great case for the good stuff here. Let's try something else.

Everest, for whatever faults it may have, is a beautiful film, shot by whatever means with lush, realistic photography, expansively photographing the mountain and its surroundings. In all conditions, calm, storm-laden, or anywhere in between, the mountain is shown off in all its terrible, lethal beauty, and the sequences wherein our heroes are waylaid by the storm of the century look frigid enough to freeze the audience in their seats. I particularly appreciated the little touches on the way to the mountain, the overview of the gorgeous trek that leads to base camp, the stops at local monasteries to receive blessings from the Nepalese lamas, the tent city of Base Camp, and the generally primitive conditions that prevail there and elsewhere. I've long imagined Everest and its approaches, thanks generally to Krakauer's book, and this film, if nothing else, cured all need to experience the mountain further. One can only watch people falling to their death or being horribly mauled with grotesque frostbite in the middle of a hurricane-force ice storm and be thankful that one does not share the obsession that led them to seek their deaths in a god-forsaken place such as that on the roof of the world.


Things Havoc disliked: If it feels like I haven't said much about Everest until this point, it's because this sort of movie is one of the hardest sorts to fit into my usual structure of likes and dislikes. And the reason for that is that this movie isn't really about anything.

I mean that's not fair, it's about the 1996 Everest disaster, and it quite faithfully shows that, but... at the same time that's really the problem here. The film is about a group of people who go up a mountain and do not come down it. We all know (at least if we've read the book or heard of the incident) that the movie is going to consist of this, which renders it quite difficult to wring any kind of actual narrative out of the film. People go up the mountain and die, as we know they are going to, as we expect that they will, and there's no real surprises to be had, or even question as to the direction the story will take along the way. I'm reminded, in a way, of the George Clooney/Mark Wahlberg film The Perfect Storm (a movie that also featured John Hawkes, now that I think about it), which was also about a group of men who went out into bad weather and all died, and also had the difficulty of trying to make that story interesting to an audience that knew they were all doomed. The Perfect Storm managed it by using the fact that nobody knew precisely what happened to the men in question to speculate on what their final hours might have been like, thus telling a story of courage and adventure and heroism in the face of terrible odds. Everest, meanwhile, has to stick directly to the known facts of the case, which are that many of the men in question died while narrating their own actions into satellite phones. As such, we really are just sitting there waiting for people to die, in a circumstance (freezing to death without oxygen) that prevents them from even making last-ditch heroic efforts to save themselves.

And even if you ignore the plot in favor of just watching actors act and filmmakers film, there's just a lot of bloat to this film. Consider Jake Gyllenhall, whom I've finally come around on, who here plays Scott Fisher, leader of the rival Mountain Madness guided ascent group. Fisher, who also died on the mountain, has no role in this film, other than to have Hall occasionally ask him if he's okay before getting sick and dying of hypothermia on the mountain. Having read the book, I know who Scott Fisher was, but had I not done so, I would have been utterly confused as to why he was even in the movie. He ascends the mountain and dies largely without having anything to do with anyone else, nor does his death or presence prior to it affect the ongoing tragedy around him save for adding another number to the casualty list. But if I can't figure out what Gyllenhall is doing there, I certainly can't account for the presence of Robin Wright or Keira Knightley, both serious actresses, whose roles as the wives of various dying climbers consist entirely of sitting at home and looking worried or tearful in proportion with the amount of information they have as to the status of their significant others.


Final Thoughts: I don't want to give the impression that I hated Everest, or was bored by it, for the teeth-chatteringly awful conditions that climbers are subjected to on Everest, even without unseasonably horrid storms brewing up from the bowels of Hell, certainly prevents that. But the base fact is that the story that Kormakur and his crew are attempting to tell here is simply not a very narratively interesting one, turning instead into one of my least favorite sorts of movies, the Death-Watch thriller. Made at a much higher quality than most Death Watch movies, Everest manages to retain its interest during its run time, but it manages nonetheless to be one of the more ephemeral movies I've seen in a good long while. Still, I can't say that I disliked the experience of watching Everest. I just don't think it's a movie I'm likely to spend any brainpower thinking about ever again.


Final Score: 6/10

[General Havoc]

The Martian

Alternate Title: Stand back! I'm going to try Science!

One sentence synopsis: An astrobiologist on one of the first manned missions to Mars is left behind during an evacuation and must figure out how to survive, contact NASA, and find a way home.


Things Havoc liked: Welcome back, Sir Ridley Scott. I've really missed you.

I know we haven't had the easiest time, this last decade or so. I know I said some things that were unkind, maybe even unfair. I know your original vision for Robin Hood was a much more interesting film than the one Universal finally let you make, and I know it wasn't entirely your fault that it turned into a boring slog so dull that even the historian in me couldn't be bothered to take an interest. I know that you went into projects like Exodus: Gods and Kings and... *shudder*... Prometheus, with the best of intentions, and I tried, I really tried, Sir Ridley, to praise the good parts of those movies, the visual style that you've always been a master of, and the interesting concepts that you... attempted... to bring to the screen. I know that I wasn't very complementary about Prometheus in particular, Sir Ridley, but in my defense, you hurt me with that film, you hurt me and you hurt everyone that loved the Alien mythos you created. And I do love that mythos, Sir Ridley, just as I have loved so many of your films, from The Duelists to Blade Runner to Thelma & Louise to Gladiator, to the stunning, glorious, historical triumph that was your Director's Cut (not that mutilated theatrical version) of Kingdom of Heaven. I love so many of your films, Sir Ridley, and I want very much to carry on loving your films, and so when I heard that you were making a movie about hard science and space exploration, based on a book that my scientist friends all rave about, and featuring an army of great actors and a screenplay by Drew Goddard, who wrote World War Z and Cabin in the Woods and most of Netflix' Daredevil series, I got really excited. For all the things I've said, Sir Ridley, all I've ever wanted was for your movies to be great.

So welcome back, Sir Ridley, from the bottom of my heart, welcome back. Let's never fight again.

The Martian, one of the most anticipated films this year among my coterie of friends at least, is everything that Interstellar was not. Bold, scientific, rigorously on-task, and possessed of the best performance I have ever seen Matt Damon (among others) give. His task is to play Mark Watney, a scientist trapped on Mars when a dust storm forces the evacuation of the NASA expedition sent thereto. For what amounts to the entire film, he is on-screen alone, narrating his actions to a series of video journals and logs, as he struggles to find a way to survive in a habitat designed for temporary occupation, on a planet devoid of life, and with the nearest help several hundred million miles (and multiple years) away. This is not an easy task to perform, a role that demands he not only act alone but for some props, but that he narrate his actions to the audience without histrionics or character development, effectively expositing to the audience for two hours. Tom Hanks tried something similar in Cast Away, in which he was ultimately reduced to talking to a volleyball in order to give the audience something to watch and listen to, but Damon does it better, much better, mostly by understating the role, letting his scientific credentials take front and center and only letting slip the panic, fear, and turmoil that must be pulsing through him at every waking moment in tiny bursts and occasional slips of the stoic mask. It's probably Damon's finest performance to-date, and I've loved almost everything he's ever done, from Good Will Hunting to The Adjustment Bureau.

But the really impressive performance in the film isn't Damon's, it's Ridley Scott's, who has made so many bad or editorially-mangled films in the last few years that we forget just how great a filmmaker he is, one of the best directors working, a master of every aspect of filmcraft beyond the ken of most of his peers. Knowing, as Scott does, that a movie entirely set on Mars watching a smart guy act smart would become insufferably boring, Scott splits the film between Mars and Earth, where NASA, in the person of a whole boatload of fine actors from Chiwetel Ejiofor to Jeff Daniels, slowly become aware of what has actually happened on Mars, and throw themselves, collectively, into trying to help Watney out from several dozen million miles' remove. Granted, these sequences also mostly consist of exposition, but the exposition is tinged with debate, frustration, and risk, as NASA and even other international space agencies throw themselves into the task at hand with all the fervor of any good space-love-letter movie. Everywhere the film goes, from NASA command in Houston to JPL in Pasadena to the red planet itself, the cinematography is gorgeous, the soundtrack suitably weighty and epic (in most cases), and sense of wonder and exploration palpable. And unlike last year's dismal Interstellar, a movie which also featured Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on another planet, there is no attempt to ruin things with digressions into the physics of love or transdimensional Morse Code. Everything is grounded in real science, something my scientist friends can attest to even if I cannot, which lends the entire proceeding an air of wonder it might not otherwise have. It's one thing to see phasers and transporters and lightsabers and warp drives and understand what those vehicles mean for the plot. It's quite another entirely to see Watney lighting hydrogen on fire to produce moisture for his potato garden, or cutting a hole in his spacesuit with wire cutters so as to fly through space like Iron Man, if only because in the back of your mind, you're trying to remember that this shit actually works.

The visuals are gorgeous, as they always are in even a weak Ridley Scott film, from the sweeping, Dune-like landscapes of Mars (properly red this time) to NASA, JPL, and international space agencies on Earth, their look burnished just enough with near-future extrapolations to keep the film believable. None of the actors are asked to do much more than look properly somber and excited while reciting their lines, but they are good enough sports and the lines are interesting enough reads to permit this. Jeff Daniels more or less reprises his role from The Newsroom as the perennial straight-man head of NASA, Ejiofor reprises his from 2012, only with a good script this time, as the mission director in Houston, while more minor roles go to Kristine Wiig, Sean Bean, Kate Mara, Michael Pena, and Benedict Wong as assorted media directors, mission planners, Astronauts, and JPL officials trying to figure out what to do to save Watney's life and get him home. There are no relationship triangles, no forced family drama, no stodgy, unbending administrator who gesticulates at the bottom line while sneering at the notion of trying anything "radical". Where disagreements happen, they happen among scientists and administrators dedicated to solving the problem in front of them. Given how many movies with strong premises I've seen destroyed by hack writers who felt that they had to add more made up "human interest" to avoid deviating from their "Screenwriting 101" syllabus, the effect is almost revolutionary.


Things Havoc disliked: I swear that I do not intend any puns when I say that the Martian is a very dry film, which is fine, and such humanizing touches that are there are clearly tertiary concerns on the part of the director. Recurring gags about the bad musical taste of the mission commander on Mars are fine, and we do need a break every once and a while from the raw "SCIENCE" of the film, but there are some decisions I don't quite understand. One of them involves Community's Donald Glover, who plays an astrodynamicist (this is a real thing) beamed straight in from the Big Bang Theory, the raw-talent-with-lots-of-smarts-but-no-social-sense archetype. This is just an archetype I don't care for, with exceptions, and Glover carries the thing way too far, as I refuse to believe that a titanic super-nerd such as him, however awkward, could walk into a room with the Director of NASA, and not only fail to recognize him, but apparently fail to recognize his title. The whole character screams comic relief, which is something the movie doesn't demand, at least not in strokes this broad.

A similar problem arises with... *sigh*... Jessica Chastain, an actress everyone else likes, and I just have no use for. Another veteran of Interstellar, Chastain is the only actor from that movie who manages a worse turn in this one, as she plays her character, the mission commander of the Mars landing, so woodenly as to render her entirely boring. I get that she's trying to be a tough, no-nonsense NASA commander, but the script calls for her to feel guilt at having left Watney behind to die, and to thereby project other emotions throughout the film. As with several other movies I've seen of hers, Chastain simply can't project the appropriate level of emotion for the scene. In Zero Dark Thirty she was a screaming lunatic who should have been thrown out the door of the high-pressure position she found herself in, while here she takes the opposite approach, reciting her lines monotonously and failing to elicit any sort of believable human reaction to the events before her. When Gillian Anderson's performances have more emotional heft to them, you may wish to re-think your approach.


Final Thoughts: The Martian is, in every way, a welcome return-to-form for Ridley Scott, a movie that is about precisely what it intends to be about, a love letter to NASA, science, engineering, and the power of human ingenuity to solve seemingly insoluble problems. It presents no villains except for Space itself, no drama except for that of the situation, and even manages to bypass the over-nationalism that sometimes accompanies NASA love letters by bringing other countries' space agencies (which ones may surprise you) into the mix to receive their share of the plaudits. The film it most closely resembles, inevitably, is Apollo 13, another procedural science-thriller about a disaster in space and the reactions to it by intelligent men, and like the Ron Howard film before it, it serves as a wonderful recruitment film for NASA and for engineering schools worldwide.

I know that my friends and readers of a scientific bent were anticipating the Martian, and I'm glad to report to them that Sir Ridley pulled it off. As for me, I've no more background in science than most laymen, can't tell a hydrogen block from a thrust pack, and don't particularly feel the need to learn to do so. If the film managed to make an effete, cinephilic liberal artist this happy, imagine what it might do for those of you for whom science is a passion or even a calling.

Final Score: 7.5/10

[General Havoc]

The Intern

Alternate Title: The Taxi Driver Wears Prada

One sentence synopsis: A retired widower joins a senior internship program at a startup fashion company, and becomes the personal assistant of the frazzled CEO.


Things Havoc liked: Let's be honest with ourselves here. Robert De Niro is a great actor, but he's been phoning it in for literal decades now. I mean, I watch a lot more movies than most people do, but even I struggle to recollect anything about his more recent projects, boring make-work fare like Killer Elite or godawful tripe like Freelancers. Yes, De Niro is an old man, whose reputation and stature in Hollywood is eternally secure, and he doesn't need to be running around proving himself to anyone anymore, but it's not like any of those factors have stopped Maggie Smith, Hellen Mirren, or Meryl Streep from continuing to produce high quality work in interesting films. And the nexus of a lot of the crap De Niro has been his comedies. If they're not garbage like What Just Happened or Grudge Match (and they usually are), then he quickly stars in a number of sequels to them (Meet the Fockers, Analyze That) which are guaranteed to hammer the quality level back down to what we have come to expect in recent years. I love De Niro, and will always love De Niro, for all the many, many great films he's done, but he trades on that love to get away with making throwaway crap, ground out in a week or two so that he can get back to Tribeca and his political work.

So, with all that in mind, I decided this week that it was best to go see a Robert De Niro comedy.

*Record scratch*

Now hold on, this movie's more than just a Robert De Niro vehicle, it's an Anne Hathaway vehicle, and that's a different prospect entirely. Anne Hathaway is a wonderful actress, and I've loved a great many roles of hers, from The Dark Knight Rises to Les Miserables, to The Devil Wears Prada, which is where we finally arrive at this film. Hathaway plays Jules Ostin, founder and CEO of an online fashion startup in Brooklyn, who resembles in no small part a number of people I know hanging around the tech industry, people who are pulled constantly in eighty-six different directions at once because, deep down, they sort of prefer it that way. Her character is not the Satanic fashion overlord that Meryl Streep played to such effect in Prada, but sort of a... natural evolution of the one that Hathaway played, someone who is intensely focused and highly self-driving, but who tries, at least, to moderate those tendencies when it comes to everyone around her lest she transform into the boss from Hell. Which is good, because the movie really isn't about Bosses From Hell, nor about the dangers of overwork, nor even (as the trailers seemed to indicate) about Robert De Niro being old and unacquainted with technology, and thereby setup for pratfalls when it turns out he doesn't have a Facebook account or doesn't know what the internet is for.

So what's the movie about then? Well, strangely enough, that's kind of a complex question, and even more strangely, the confusion that results is actually to the movie's credit. You see the film recognizes that, while having a seventy-year-old intern working at your company is... perhaps unusual, as well as a bit awkward at times (the interview question of "Where do you see yourself in ten years" is not the most appropriate one here), it's certainly not the most revolutionary gut-buster to ever cross the threshold. After all, De Niro is hired as part of a Senior Internship program, examples of which exist in the real world. And so after exhausting the veins of "old guy among young people" jokes for about twenty minutes, the film really finds itself with no choice but to pivot around and turn into something of a character study. We have Hathaway, who is sharp and committed, and possessed of a strong vision for her company, trying to juggle her family's requirements (her husband gave up his career to care for their daughter), with those of her company (which is reaching the point where a professional CEO may be required, a dangerous moment for any startup). Far more self-aware than most Captains of Industry, she recognizes that she may be attempting to do more than is humanly possible, with resulting strains in her life and in the company itself. And opposite that we have De Niro, who allows himself to play De Niro, a charming, smart, wizened man whose background in company work (he spent forty years as a phone book production manager/salesman before his retirement) fits better into the chaotic mess that is any startup, particularly an internet company with an average employee age of 26, than anyone anticipates. Smart though they may be in their fields, and the film makes that clear enough, nobody at this frazzled company has a sense of what it means to be a company, an institution designed to last for decades, not months, and while De Niro certainly doesn't take over, he brings a sense of stability and reliability to the proceedings that is self-evidently valuable.

Sure, there's comedy here, some of it pretty good, as De Niro's old-world charm begins to rub off on the fresh-from-college manchildren that inhabit the company's ranks. A standout sequence involves De Niro taking command of a squad of interns and technicians as they try to retrieve and delete a nasty Email that Hathaway's character has accidentally sent to her overbearing, critical mother. But mostly, the movie just sort of lets the characters work off one another, be they De Niro and the company masseuse, played by Rene Russo (in a nice turnabout from her last outing), Hathaway and her frustrated (to say the least) stay-at-home-husband (Comedy Central's Anders Holm), or mostly, Hathaway and De Niro themselves, who share an effortless platonic chemistry in the movie that's actually quite surprising, given the premise promised by the trailers. The movie leans on this chemistry a lot, which is a good decision, softening a lot of the more preachy elements in the film, while indulging in sequences where Hathaway seeks... perhaps not advice, but just a sounding from someone who's life experience and background is entirely alien to everyone else's in her world, while De Niro quietly and calmly dispenses what he thinks are the proper dollops of advice that bridge the gap between fatherly, friendly, and just wise, to those who seem to need them. A worse movie could have turned this into the retiree version of The Legend of Bagger Vance, where a magic old person miraculously solves the problems of everyone around them. De Niro does, and says, what he thinks is best, and if he's right, it's simply because he's been there before. He never presumes to step in further than is appropriate for someone who admits to not understanding everything that's going on with the fast-paced world of internet support, nor the realities of non-traditional-gender-role-households (there's a mouthful), and the resulting restrain pays off for the movie, by making it simply about two interesting people and the interesting conversations they have with one another.


Things Havoc disliked: And it's kind of surprising that it does so well at that, because frankly, this movie is pretty badly written. And that's unfortunate, considering it comes from Nancy Meyers, a writer and director of these sorts of sugary, women-centric movies whom I actually like a fair amount, at least when it comes to her earlier work like Father of the Bride or The Parent Trap (I can even find one or two good things to say about Private Benjamin if you twist my arm). But since taking on the Director's chair, while Meyers has achieved commercial success (she used to hold the record for most successful film directed by a woman), the writing quality of her movies has gone way downhill, starting from the aforementioned "success" What Women Want (*shudder*), and proceeding on through films like The Holiday or It's Complicated. Meyer's signature has always been to find a parcel of great actors and get them to act against one another in a relaxed setting, and that's what she does here, but the movie also delivers a lot of big, elaborate speeches, and those speeches are, inevitably, stiff, wooden exercises in bullet point recitation. Do not get me wrong, the problem isn't the themes in the movie, feminist or otherwise. The problem is the on-the-nose quality of the dialog, or more precisely the intersecting monologues that fill a lot of the run-time of the film. De Niro gets an opening narration, one I understand is intended to set the tone of the film from the get-go, but that comes across so leadenly-dull, like the bullet points of a character study being turned in at a community college literature class, that it really robs us of the chance (until later) to get to know the character at all. A speech midway through the film by Hathaway of how men have lost their sense of quiet charm and the societal sources thereof, would be unlistenable if the actress delivering it wasn't so good, or the setting established so well (she's drunk in a bar, rambling to a captive audience who looks as awkward as we feel). De Niro and Hathaway are so good in this movie, so effortlessly good, that a lot of the worst effects of this sort of stilted dialogue is mitigated, particularly when it's just the two of them talking to one another. But even the best actors can only cover for so much, and one is left with the sense that perhaps the reason the film concentrated so closely upon these two characters is because the film would have fallen instantly apart the moment the script was asked to bear any real weight.


Final Thoughts: The Intern is not a great movie, but it is a rather surprisingly good one, one that I liked when I left, and find I actually like a little more now that I've had a bit of time to sit back and think about it. It may be a personal matter for me, as my own father spent some time as the Old Man of an internet startup back in the first .com boom, and found that his job, in no small part, was to educate the kids around him, smart though they unquestionably were, about the actual mechanics of business in general. The film has, unfortunately, gotten dragged down into an internet mudslinging contest, as didactic feminist theorists have accused everyone who doesn't like the movie of being sexist shitheads who hate women (my favorite claim, published in The Guardian, being that Richard Roeper, who thought far more highly of the film than I did, "only" gave it 3.5/4 stars because he is engaged in a conspiracy to drive women out of the movie business). But taking the film as a film, particularly when comparing it to its trailers, the result is a much more charming little piece than I had anticipated seeing, and a welcome reminder that there is actually a reason why Robert De Niro (and, for that matter, Anne Hathaway) is as famous as he is.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[Josh]

Spoilers for The Martian:

Spoiler: show

Sean Bean only suffers career death in this one.

Anyway, we actually agreed in almost every particular on this one. I will say that I thought Watney's penchant for foul language in his communications was also a nice touch for humanizing the movie.

Definitely agree on Chastain. Her 'concern' had to be bludgeoned out tell-style in her dialogue, because she flat didn't show it in her acting.

[frigidmagi]

I really enjoyed the Martin. I liked the part where they references the Council of Elrond.

[General Havoc]

Spoilers for The Martian:

Spoiler: show

Sean Bean only suffers career death in this one.

Anyway, we actually agreed in almost every particular on this one. I will say that I thought Watney's penchant for foul language in his communications was also a nice touch for humanizing the movie.

Definitely agree on Chastain. Her 'concern' had to be bludgeoned out tell-style in her dialogue, because she flat didn't show it in her acting.

Honestly, I thought they went way way over the top in censoring Watney's language, which pulled me out of the film somewhat, as I realized this was happening so that the movie could be PG-13. As to Chastain, she's been all right in some parts recently (such as A Most Violent Year), but I just don't like her acting in general. Between this and Zero Dark Thirty, it feels like she always makes the wrong acting choices.

I really enjoyed the Martin. I liked the part where they references the Council of Elrond.

Everything about that scene was awesome.

[General Havoc]

The Walk

Alternate Title: Peak French

One sentence synopsis: A French tightrope walker conceives of and executes a daring plan to sneak onto the newly-constructed twin towers of the World Trade Center, and walk between them on a tightrope.


Things Havoc liked: Some years ago, I saw a documentary by the name of "Man on Wire" about a certifiable lunatic named Phillipe Petit who, in 1974, strung a high wire between the towers of the World Trade Center, and spent the following morning walking between them for all to see, with nothing but his own skills and a balancing pole between him and horrible death. The entire stunt was so... ludicrous, done not for any cause or political action, not because someone wanted to self promote, but because the acrobat in question simply felt a compulsion to do it, that it instantly captured everyone's imagination, and became the subject of books and documentaries and television specials the world over. In fact the director of the documentary, one James Marsh, when asked during the showing of his film at Tribeca why he had decided to make it the subject of his picture, responded that it was such perfect fodder for "a heist film", that he felt someone had to take it on. Well fast forward seven years, and what do you know, but someone has.

And not just someone, but legendary "visual storyteller" (his words) Robert Zemeckis, of Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forest Gump and a whole bunch of extremely creepy 3D animated films from the 00s that we shall not speak of again. Zemeckis, like Ridley Scott or James Cameron, is a staggeringly visual director, one of the few serious filmmakers who always wholeheartedly embraced the 3D craze that I'm still hoping dies an eventual death. Zemeckis, I have every faith, did not sign onto 3D just to aggravate me, but because, moreso than even most of his peers, Zemeckis relies on his visual style to sell the experience his movies offer, be it the half-animated world of Roger Rabbit or the motion-captured non-Euclidian nightmare realm of The Polar Express. This time his subject is less out there, a period and a place, well two places really, specifically Paris and New York in the early 1970s, a time when Paris was a romantic, charming, magical place, and New York was... well moving on... Zemeckis films his tale of two cities in soft, muted lighting, with sweeping spectacle shots to drape the film in warm panoply of romantic nostalgia, even before the actor steps out onto his indescribably high wire. From the rich, cozy confines of a basement Bistro in Paris to the lofty heights of Notre Dame, Zemeckis clearly loves and wants everyone to love the idea of Paris in the 70s as being the most magical place in the world. It reminds me of Hugo, Martin Scorsese's love letter to cinema and to the Paris of a bygone day, and carries over even when the film reaches New York, which is a cinematic city but not a very romantic one. Yet Zemeckis manages to make even the Twin Towers, which if I'm being honest were two of the ugliest buildings ever built, look good, emphasizing their simplistic styling and their sheer mass, humanizing the two lumps of undifferentiated concrete, letting us see the towers the way our frankly-deranged protagonist sees them.

And let us not be mistaken here, this protagonist is deranged, but in a very precise way that requires explanation. You see, my sister and I both attended French immersion schools from the age of four, speak the language fluently, know and love the country, the culture, the people, (the food), everything about France and all that is French, and we both agreed, when first we saw the Documentary, that Phillipe Petit is, without question, the Frenchest man to ever live upon the Earth. What we mean by that is in some way ineffable, a combination of illogical madness, artistic obsession, vivacious over-energized demeanor, and semi-crazed philosophical underpinnings that make no sense to anyone else and only some sense to him. And stepping into this demanding role as an insane French aerialist, we have Joseph Gordon-Levitt, of Inception and Dark Knight Rises and Looper and so many other things that I have overcome my antipathy towards his work and embraced him as an actor worth seeing in things. To satisfy me, a Francophile of considerable experience, was going to be a tough sell, but frankly, Gordon-Levitt does a marvelous job by portraying a character at the edge of a particularly French sort of insanity, with big, bold mannerisms and big bold obsessions that leave no room for self-doubt or distraction. His accent is attractions, one step removed from Monty Python's French Knights, but his mannerisms and enthusiasm are perfect, indeed they almost render the comic-bad accent more appropriate, as this is a character who is effectively a living pantomime. He must walk across the Twin Towers, you see. He must do it because it is a Great Thing and Great Things must be done for their own sake and for the sake of utterly incomprehensible notions of art and life and respect for the spirits of great buildings and the honor of a performance or some damn thing. You run into notions like this in movies about otherwise rational men who willingly do dangerous things for no reason, movies like Rush or Everest, but none of them got across the almost tautological nature of an obsession like this the way this movie does, not by explaining it, but by safely placing it outside the realm of explanation. Mountains must be climbed because they are there, and tightropes must be walked upon in dramatic locations because that is what must happen, and notions of safety and legality are consequently irrelevant to the task.

Of course those notions aren't so irrelevant to everyone else in the world, and so we return to the notion of a Heist movie, which this film really is, except that the only thing being stolen is gravity. Most of the film is taken up with the antics of Petit and his band of like-minded "conspirators" as they plan out, Oceans' 11-style, their grand "coup" (these are the terms the movie uses). Even before 9/11, sneaking a heavy-duty tightrope cable up to the top of a skyscraper, contriving to string it across to another skyscraper, and anchoring it to the building at several points, in pitch darkness, all without being caught, is no mean feat. When the film is finally done with the setup, the rest of the movie is the walk itself, an extended promenade straight into hardcore vertigo that is fantastically tense despite depicting a real event which actually occurred and which we know the end result of. Even in a 2D showing, which was what I engaged in, the film is positively gorgeous, lovingly capturing New York at a specific moment in time, from a vantage point only one man ever reached, and none ever will again.


Things Havoc disliked: All of this is supremely well-done, as befits Robert Zemeckis, but that's... really all there is to the film. Characters, other than the main one, are more or less nonexistent, props for the heist or for Phillipe to bounce off of. Canadian Actress Charlotte Le Bon, playing Phillipe's musician girlfriend, has more or less nothing to do in the film but to, almost literally, bear witness to how crazy he is, watching him as he sets up the heist, pulls it off, and then heading home, with only a couple obligatory scenes of "why are you doing this?" concern to give the audience the chance to listen to Phillipe being French and crazy again. Even Sir Ben Kingsley, who was also in Hugo and about six billion other movies, has little to do as Papa Rudy, a Czech circus-master who serves as Phillipe's mentor, save for appearing once every half hour or so to dole out a penny-packet of wisdom on the philosophy (oh yes, there is more philosophy) of performance and life. I don't mind wise old mentor figures, certainly not when they're played by actors as august as Ben Kingsley, but it's only polite to actually give them something to do in the film beyond lending their name to the marketing campaign.


Final Thoughts: The Walk is another one of those frustrating films whose only real flaws are that they have limited horizons, movies I like but always feel bad about not giving a higher score to, as they didn't really do anything wrong. But whatever the hangups inherent in my scoring system, the film itself is a wonderful, atmospheric, enjoyable little character piece, one which, if the stories told be true, heavily involved the real Phillipe Petit, who personally taught Gordon-Levitt both how to tightrope walk and, presumably, how to be sufficiently French. A great and lasting masterwork it is not, but as a film designed to capture a person, a place, a time, and a couple of buildings that are normally associated in most Americans' minds with an entirely different, considerably less whimsical event, The Walk is a film it's hard to find fault with.

Final Score: 7/10

[frigidmagi]

If nothing else it sounds like an interesting film willing to tackle different subject matter then the usual... And do it well.

[General Havoc]

If nothing else it sounds like an interesting film willing to tackle different subject matter then the usual... And do it well.

It's not as good as the documentary, but it's a pretty decent run through.

[General Havoc]

Crimson Peak

Alternate Title: Alice in Jotunheim

One sentence synopsis: An American writer who can see ghosts marries an impoverished British Baronet, and comes to live with him and his sister in their ancestral manor.


Things Havoc liked: I just don't know what to do with Guillermo del Toro anymore. Frankly, I don't think I ever did. He's a talented, truly original director who is also frustrating as hell to me as a moviegoer because I simply don't know what I'm going to get from him for any given film. Will I be seeing a movie from the visionary, fantastical, brilliant action-fantasy director who brought me Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy? Or will I be seeing a movie from the cheap, low-concept genre hack who brought me Mimic, Blade II, and Pacific Rim. Admittedly, a director who gives me great and bad movies in alternating sequence normally represents a worthwhile investment, but we exist in a movie landscape that suddenly seems to be replete with visionary Mexican directors such as Alfonso Cuarón or Alejandro González Iñárritu, and inconsistency like del Toro's really begins to mar the experience. I rely on trailers, history, and my own native good sense (pause for laughter), to make my weekly selections, and when the trailer promises a horror film livened only by the promise of a director who in his last picture failed to make giant robots awesome, well... you can see why I put this one off.

And yet del Toro is a talented director, a very talented director even, and while I'm beginning to tire of the old excuse for bad movies that "at least they have good visuals", the fact remains that there's good visuals, and then there's del Toro's visuals. Even in crap like Pacific Rim, del Toro has always had a masterful eye for dressing a camera shot, and that remains the case in Crimson Peak. We've all seen haunted old mansions before, but del Toro's version gives us a mansion that, rather paradoxically for a horror film, all big, open areas, be they the towering central atrium of the Mansion's ground floor, to the barren, snow-swept fields of the surrounding region, sparsely-studded with arcane machinery. Even when the film descends into haunted cellars and spooky corridors, the lighting is ample and the spaces large, ensuring that the area never feels claustrophobic. This is a particularly weird choice for what is ostensibly a horror film, but del Toro seems to want his imagery to provide the necessary thrills by itself, rather than through penning the audience in. Some of the more evocative shots involve the malformed ghosts standing or floating openly in broad daylight, with plenty of room around them to highlight their alien-ness. Forget letting your imagination do all the work, del Toro has created a visually rich panorama, and you are going to look at it dammit, drink in every last drop, and let those images scare or impress you.

Indeed, I'm not even sure that the intention is to be scary, as del Toro seems to go out of his way to replace fright with atmosphere. Elaborate explanations, often established in advance, greet every manifestation of strangeness, from a rich blood-red clay that stains the ground around the manor and bleeds from the very walls, to the arcane sounds and groans that permeate the house. The characters, inured to strangeness like this as they are, consequently pay the presence of such disquieting images very little mind, even when it comes to ghosts clawing their way out of the floorboards or dripping bloody clay down the atrium as they float and moan. In a strange way, this makes sense for a del Toro picture. Pan's Labyrinth had a similar sort of spooky-but-not-scary atmosphere to it, a dark fantasy/magical realism approach completely at odds with the state of most horror films (Evil Dead comes to mind). Indeed that was one of the reasons I loved Pan's Labyrinth as much as I did, for rather than forcing the audience to cringe for jump scares all the time, it let us drink up the world that was being presented, dark though it might be. There's a subtlety to Crimson Peak, for all the haunting and mystery, and it's something I can appreciate.

As with most of del Toro's movies (though not all), the cast is something of an afterthought, but that doesn't mean they're bad at what they do. I love Tom Hiddleston, for instance, even when he's not playing Loki, and this role (a tall, austere, elegantly-charming British aristocrat with a troubled dark past is the sort of thing that Hiddleston was born to play. As with his turn as Loki, we are never quite sure just what the hell his game is, is he a good guy, a bad guy, or merely troubled and dark (hint, hint). Jim Beaver, of Deadwood (a show you should be watching now), does a fine turn as the concerned father of our heroine, making an actual character out of something that could have been nothing more than a pastiche of an overbearing dolt. But the big surprise for me in the cast was Jessica Chastain, who continues to confound me by following up every boring, acting-free role of hers (Zero Dark Thirty, The Martian, Interstellar), with one that actually showcases some skill (A Most Violent Year, and now this). Nobody's going to confuse her with Meryl Streep or anything, but her role, as the disturbed sister of our favorite Trickster-god, is certainly animated, and involves a good bit of horror-trope acting before it's over.



Things Havoc disliked: So then with all those things, why didn't I like this movie more? Because this is a Guillermo del Toro film, perhaps one of the most del-Toroesque movies I've ever seen. And that means we don't just get visionary-del-Toro, we get the schlocky fanboy-del-Toro too. How else to explain the tone of this movie, which is the most fragmented thing I've seen since the last half hour of Django Unchained? The movie builds atmosphere relentlessly, stacking up visual images left and right, and then... all of a sudden at the drop of a hat, we're in Eli Roth territory, where horrific, violent shit is happening to characters nearby in a manner so over-the-top as to be grotesque.

I mean, I know what del Toro is going for here, and I'm not a prude. There's certainly a place for over-the-top gorey violence in film. I composed a pangyric to Mad Max for nastier stuff than this. And I understand that the intention here is to contrast the reserved, visual world with scenes of shocking horror, the way Pan's Labyrinth intercut all the magical realism and creativity with brutal sequences involving fascists and torture. Unfortunately, this time it doesn't work at all. Pan's Labyrinth maintained a stark division between the realistic scenes of awful horror and the mystical scenes of childlike fantasy, using the two of them as mirrors for one another. Crimson Peak is all visual magic and set-piece imagery, until all of a sudden we're hit with body horror and jump scares for a moment or two, and then back to the magical realism we go. This sort of tonal shift is a terrible mistake, as it drags the audience out of the world by shocking them into a completely different movie every time the film has built a bit of momentum. We simply can't let ourselves sit back and drink up the details of del Toro's world the way he wants us to, because he's already established that at the drop of a hat he's going to pull some hideous jump scare or gore-pile on us, and run off giggling about how he "got" us to let our guards down.

And none of this is helped by the fact that the camera is focused far, far too much on the weakest elements of the cast, among them Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, whom I last saw last year, pairing up with Tom Hiddleston in the far superior dark fantasy/horror film Only Lovers Left Alive. Wasikowska was perfectly good in that film, but this time she's gone full Tim Burton protagonist on us, playing a shrinking violet of a character who insists against all appearances that she's tough enough to deal with what's going on. Her acting is wooden and stilted, as it was in Alice in Wonderland and as I expect it will be in that film's misbegotten sequel, which we shall almost certainly not be considering when it comes out next year. Her character takes an agonizingly long time to recognize that there is anything even slightly odd about living in a house with no roof that bleeds from the walls, and reacts to truly worrisome events or mortal peril like she is being horribly inconvenienced and may have to actually raise her voice. Nor are things improved via the addition of Charlie Hunnam, last seen as the lead in Pacific Rim, where he played a character so boring that I remember nothing whatsoever about him. If nothing else, this film proves that Hunnam is consistent, for I continue to remember nothing whatsoever about him, which is a problem given the amount of time his character is afforded to prat around uselessly. Indeed that description can be thrown at most of the cast, who are so clueless that it takes the better part of a year and the consistent efforts of a concerned party to get anyone to realize that someone whose face was beaten in by multiple blunt force traumas may have experienced foul play.



Final Thoughts: Crimson Peak has some good shots in it, but a collection of good shots does not a good movie make. Bereft of a cohesive tone, and riven with jump scares or body horror shock moments as a substitute for a plot that would serve to amuse any moviegoer for more than a few minutes, the film is disjointed and lackluster. I have certainly seen far worse horror movies in my tenure as the Internet's foremost film expert (pause for laughter), but it does not serve as the return to form for Guillermo del Toro that I was hoping it might, and I doubt that after another couple of weeks, I will remember it at all.

Final Score: 5/10

[General Havoc]

Bridge of Spies

Alternate Title: Saving Captain Powers

One sentence synopsis: An insurance lawyer from Brooklyn is asked by his company to defend a Soviet Spy in his trial, and by the US government to negotiate his exchange for American pilot Gary Powers.


Things Havoc liked: I really should not have to introduce Steven Spielberg to anyone. If he's not the greatest filmmaker of the modern age (and he probably is), then he's at least on the short list, alongside names like Scorsese, Kubrick, Myazaki, and Scott. Yeah, it's fashionable to denigrate his films as sentimental schlock and no, I've not loved everything that Spielberg has ever made (let us never speak of War Horse again), but make no mistake, Spielberg invented modern Hollywood cinema and has defined it, with revisions, for three and a half decades. When I was a child, he was my favorite director in the world, and now that I am an experienced film connoisseur who can discourse authoritatively on the works of Werner Herzog and Lars von Trier, Spielberg is still (probably) my favorite director in the world, and no amount of twaddle about the "infantilization of American filmgoers" (Peter BIskind can kiss my ass) will ever change that. So far, five years into this project, we have been twice presented by one of Spielberg's films, The Adventures of Tintin (which while not great, was pretty fun), and Lincoln (which while not fun, was pretty great). Now we have another offering before us, a cold war historical thriller of the sort that Spielberg has become increasingly fond of in recent years (Munich comes to mind) starring one of his favorite actors, Tom Hanks, and one of mine, Mark Rylance.

You do know who Mark Rylance is, don't you? A big-time British theater actor who specializes in Shakespeare on stage and television, whom I've not, admittedly, seen a whole lot of in my film-watching career, but I do remember. He was the only good thing in Anonymous, Roland Emmerich's godawful attempt to posit a monarchical conspiracy theory, and also the only good thing in The Gunman, a film that would have to find some ambition before it could become shit. Rylance plays real-life Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, not as any form of movie spy, but as an old, unfailingly polite man, who neither admits his espionage nor explains it, but holds fast to his allegiance without any real explanation as to why. We don't know a lot about Abel, why he became a spy, what his background is, what he hopes to gain from refusing the offers the CIA (understandably) makes to him involving turning double-agent. What little we do get from him is via his interactions with James Donovan, played by Spielberg's favorite actor, Tom Hanks, an insurance lawyer and (*gasp*) everyman good guy assigned to the defense of the accused spy, and following his conviction (spoiler alert), to the task of trying to arrange his exchange for a shot down spy pilot in Berlin.

So far, all I have told you is the plot of the movie and that actors you have or have not heard of are in it, so let me try and actually speak to something good here. Spielberg is one of the great directors after all, and his specialty (or one of them) is this exact sort of Americana period piece. It's no surprise then that the movie's decoration and sense of place is so spot on. Be it 1950s Brooklyn, or 1950s Berlin, the set dressing for this film is absolutely fantastic, neither layered with nostalgia nor over the top in its depiction of the dismal, ruined state of Berlin at the foundation of the Berlin Wall. The smoldering ruins that are all that is left of East Berlin (and would remain all that was left of it until 1989) are beautifully realized, as is the smoldering resentment of the East Germans themselves towards this state of affairs and the hand they have been dealt by global geopolitics in general. Indeed, the film is in no small part about this fact, as Donovan does not engage in spy games, Bondesque or otherwise, but simply shuttles between one part of Berlin and another, making contacts and struggling to understand, however he may, the interests of the various organizations that he has to deal with, Soviet, East German, American, and whatnot. This gets hilarious at times, from the thunderous, bufoonish bombast of the East German minister of... nobody quite knows what, to the tearful overacting of the "family" of the confessed spy, none of whom seem able to keep straight what their relationship with him is, and whose purpose in being foisted on Donovan in advance of his meeting is entirely opaque to us and to him. The take is very much Marx-Brothers-do-The-Cold-War, which is appropriate, given the level of false ambition endemic to spy agencies then (and now).



Things Havoc disliked: If it doesn't sound like I'm making a great case for this film so far, well... there's a reason.

Bridge of Spies, like many movies I can think of made by many good directors, is a film defined by what it is not. It is a spy movie that is not James Bond or Jason Bourne, all action and adventure, nor for that matter is it a John leCarre film about how everyone is evil and posturing and spycraft is useless. It is not a movie about the relationship between Donovan and his charge, though it touches briefly on that point, nor about the life and times of Captain Powers himself, on whose behalf all of this is being done, nor is it a biography of James Donovan, who was a real man who engaged in real negotiations of this sort, serving as an envoy between governments that were not able to recognize one another's existence. It's fine to want to make a movie different from its fellows by not being similar to them, but at a certain point, a movie actually has to BE something, and Bridge of Spies... isn't.

Consider the first half of the movie, which is an extended setup for the second, in which Donovan defends Abel against the charges of espionage, unsuccessfully. We know he is going to be unsuccessful, as the film was advertised to us as being about the negotiations which took place after Abel was convicted, which makes the entire hour of screentime spent watching him be convicted pretty damn pointless, as far as I'm concerned. Spielberg tries to insert some interest, by having a massive public backlash against Donovan for having defended a spy (which never happened), culminating in someone shooting into his house with a machine gun (which also never happened), following which point the police accuse him of being a traitor who deserved to have his family massacred (which I'm willing to predict never freaking happened). The entire event is a hamfisted effort to ground the film in hysteria so as to wave neon signs to point to similar events from today, tendentious ones that don't fit the tone of the movie. Even if this sort of thing happened all the time in regards to terrorism suspects today (which it does not), Spielberg's inherent sentimentality turns the entire event into an after-school special on how condemning people without trial (which nobody ever considered doing) is a bad thing, because they might be innocent (which Abel isn't).

But lest this sound like another political axe of mine being ground at the expense of another movie, my objection isn't the politics of the film, but the pointlessness of it. More tension is brought to the fold later on, when it turns out the East Germans have seized some college student who strayed on the wrong side of the Wall, and now seek to scupper the impending spy trade by threatening to execute him. This did happen, and adds an interesting wrinkle into the situation before Donovan, but nothing is unfortunately helped by the fact that everyone else involved, CIA, GDR, KGB, or whatnot, are unspeakably stupid. The movie lets Donovan's CIA handler insist, over and over, that they should not exert themselves to save the kid without ever letting the CIA handler give a reason why (and there are reasons why). Unlike 2013's Most Wanted Man, I don't think this is because Spielberg actually thinks the CIA are too stupid and evil to have a reason, but it's a diminishing of the film's stakes when we're presented the question of "Do we approve of the execution of innocent college students" as though it's some kind of deep moral quandary. And lest the film sound biased, the movie manages to go so far over the top with the Eastern Bloc agencies that Donovan winds up having to explain to the East Germans that if they decide to blatantly scupper a deal between the USSR and USA, the Soviet Union, the country which occupies their own with the largest standing military force on the planet, might get angry.



Final Thoughts: I certainly didn't dislike Bridge of Spies, but the film is almost relentlessly ephemeral, a non-entity of a movie that is, as always, quite difficult as a result to actually talk about. On the scale of Spielberg films, it rates along the lines of things like 1941 or Always, movies that are neither good nor interestingly bad. I barely recall the act of seeing it, just a couple of weeks ago, and will likely remember it even less the next time this project forces me back to the subject. It's a pity, because there's a good movie to be made from the story of Captain Powers, James Donovan, and Rudolf Abel, but given this thing, I think we'll have to wait on that one for another time, and frankly, another director.

Final Score: 5.5/10

[Lys]

Spielberg tries to insert some interest, by having a massive public backlash against Donovan for having defended a spy (which never happened), culminating in someone shooting into his house with a machine gun (which also never happened), following which point the police accuse him of being a traitor who deserved to have his family massacred (which I'm willing to predict never freaking happened).

The American public is actually remarkably consistent about not throwing hate or scorn on defence lawyers for even the vilest of men. There are exceptions of course, there always are, but in general it seems that it's understood that a defence lawyer is a vital part of the process and that these men and women are just doing their jobs. It's not a job that likely to win them a lot of admiration, but like cleaning public bathrooms everyone seems to get that someone has to do it.

[frigidmagi]

but the film is almost relentlessly ephemeral,

Well that's a damn shame. Because if I was making a movie about this... Ephemeral is not a quality I would want.

The American public is actually remarkably consistent about not throwing hate or scorn on defence lawyers for even the vilest of men. There are exceptions of course, there always are, but in general it seems that it's understood that a defence lawyer is a vital part of the process and that these men and women are just doing their jobs. It's not a job that likely to win them a lot of admiration, but like cleaning public bathrooms everyone seems to get that someone has to do it.

There's never enough defence lawyers to hate them to much. Besides... Someday you might need one yourself.

[General Havoc]

The American public is actually remarkably consistent about not throwing hate or scorn on defence lawyers for even the vilest of men. There are exceptions of course, there always are, but in general it seems that it's understood that a defence lawyer is a vital part of the process and that these men and women are just doing their jobs. It's not a job that likely to win them a lot of admiration, but like cleaning public bathrooms everyone seems to get that someone has to do it.

Which is why this element makes so little sense to me. I suppose Spielberg was trying to draw parallels to modern day matters such as people criticizing those who defend terrorism suspects, except that never happens either. Every time a terrorist winds up in court, dozens of lawyers volunteer to defend them so as to make their reputations, and I've never heard of any of them getting any blowback from the government, let alone the general populace. From a lesser director, I would fear therefore that it's a hamfisted attempt to make US society in general look as degenerate as Soviet society in 1957, which is both tendentious and a bad way to go about it even if it wasn't. There are easier ways to show the Red Scare off than making shit up about it.

Well that's a damn shame. Because if I was making a movie about this... Ephemeral is not a quality I would want.

This movie was clearly made specifically to not be like certain other movies. I'm unconvinced they ever got to the point of making it about anything in particular.

[General Havoc]

Spectre

Alternate Title: Staggeringly Putrid Excrement Created by TRepanation Enthusisasts

One sentence synopsis: James Bond tracks down the mysterious architect of the events he has been investigating, as well as the shadowy criminal organization he heads.

A Note Before We Begin: Try as we might to avoid it, it became impossible to discuss this film rationally without resorting to SPOILERS. Do not read this review if you are desperate to avoid having a major plot-point spoiled for you.


Things Havoc liked: There are different rules for Bond films. We all know this. Bond is its own genre by now, with 24 movies spanning fifty years of spies, gadgets, seduction and daring-do. The most recent one of these was Skyfall, and I liked it a hell of a lot, a new beginning for a Bond series that has been many things over the course of its half-century lifespan, one that left the series open to any sort of followup the filmmakers wanted. Coming off a sterling performance by Javier Bardem as the previous installment's villain, and with the news that legendary German Tarantino-collaborator Christoph Waltz was to be taking his place as the evil criminal mastermind of Bond's most famous nemesis-organization, I was stoked to see this movie. Like with Skyfall, this seemed to promise the best combination of an excellent Bond (Daniel Craig is in the conversation for the best in the role, as far as I'm concerned), a brilliant villain (go see Inglorious Basterds if you want to know how well Waltz can play this sort of material), and a sleek, modern interpretation of the dynamic between Bond and his foes showcased through three previous movies, two of which were sort of brilliant and the last of which was merely okay. I have to see something every week, rain or shine, hell or high water, doldrums or Oscar season, but sometimes this blog writes itself. Bond was back. It was time to enjoy.



Things Havoc disliked: What the fuck was that?

Spectre is, without question in my mind, one of the most staggering, incomprehensible failures in moviemaking that I have ever seen. It is a disaster, a terrible film on both the level of a standalone action movie and the level of a Bond film, modern or otherwise. Comparing films to their predecessors may be gauche, but this is James Bond, a movie series with heft to it, and more importantly, one that had just finished a rousing triumph in the form of Skyfall, and for the filmmakers to follow Skyfall up with this, makes for perhaps the greatest collapse in quality between one film and another in the same series since Highlander 2: The Quickening. It is a terrible movie, no matter how you wish to slice it or what excuses you wish to give, and if you want to find out why, then we have to start with a little digging...

Bond films have always been silly, we know this. Sometimes, as in many of the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan films, they are more overtly so, and sometimes, as with Craig or Timothy Dalton's showcases, there is an attempt made to ground them in a grittier reality, but even when we're dealing with the former case, the silliness of Bond films comes from how over-the-top they are. Laser death traps, girls with ludicrous names, exotic henchmen with signature weapons, evil masterminds who could just kill Bond but prefer to monologue about their evil plan first, these things are staples of the series because they fit the series, or at least fit the movies they are in. Scaramanga works in Man with the Golden Gun because he's established as being an eccentric perfectionist who locks Bond in a dueling arena on his private island because his goal is to defeat Bond in a dueling arena on his private island. Jaws is a giant hitman with metal teeth because we are inhabiting a world with giant hitmen with metal teeth, same with Oddjob and Xenia Onnotop and Pussy Galore and all the rest. You don't drop villains like that into a movie like Casino Royale or License to Kill, at least not unless you intend to make terrible Bond films (Die Another Day comes to mind). So what do these filmmakers do? They get Christoph Waltz, a man who never found scenery he couldn't dine on, and tell him to play Ernst Blofeld (the reveal of which is treated like some grand dramatic thing, even though there is no context for who the hell that is within any of the previous films), zapping at Bond with some contraption of indeterminable purpose, or stashing him within elaborate death traps that he can easily escape, all while the other half of the movie is trying to be a Kathryn Bigelow-esque mediation on surveillance societies and privacy-infringing intelligence resources, material it plays so straight as to strangle all potential for any fun.

But I'm afraid blaming a tonal clash for this film's woes doesn't even scratch the surface. Plenty of movies have tried to be all things to all people, and some of them were even decent. This film however doesn't just fail on the level of ideas that clashed with one another, but because the ideas themselves that they are trying to fuse are BAD IDEAS. The movie goes all-out, trying to convince us that everything from the last three Bond films was leading up to this, all the events of the previous movies were orchestrated by some shadow-organization who is now being revealed, because hey, it's 2015, and we want every movie to be the Avengers now, right? Well the Avengers managed that because they were A: Dealing with comic book characters, with strongly-defined archetypical characters, traits, and stories, and B: Marvel spent a goddamn decade building the world they would inhabit up through a whole series of previous films explicitly geared towards this end. You can't short-cut your way through that process by taking the three previous, barely-connected films, waving your hands at any muddled aspects of them that didn't make sense, and claiming that the very lack of specificity to some of the plot details we barely remember was all part of your brilliant plan. The effect is so tendentious as to be laughable, as the movie vainly tries to pretend that this was the plan all along, and when it fails (and oh, does it fail), turning around and doing something you only see when a movie has suffered a tremendous failure at the most fundamental level:

WARNING! SPOILERS LIE BELOW! DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN UNSPOILED!

Making the villain a relative of the hero, about whom we have heard nothing previously, in a vain attempt to force some "emotional resonance" into the conflict between them without actually going through the trouble of establishing anything.

Yes, this is a film wherein it turns out that all of the events of the three previous Bond films happened because James Bond's step-brother, whom we have never heard of, became the literally greatest criminal in the world just so that he could torment James Bond and ruin his life through a series of hopelessly lame setpieces and death traps. And we are expected to swallow this despite there being no evidence in any of the previous movies (or frankly, in this one), that anything of the sort was being planned. The transparency of this ploy within the film is so stark as to stagger belief. It is like claiming that you did not kill that man moments after walking into the room with a machete, and, in front of seventeen witnesses, killing that man.

But fine, the plot is stupid beyond belief. Bond movies have survived that much before. What makes this movie fall totally to pieces? Everything else. The action, one staple of Bond films you can usually count on, is staggeringly inept, boring as all get out, with no energy, style, or interest to it. Remember Casino Royale? Its opening sequence, its fight in the bathroom or the parkour-heavy scene in the construction yard? Remember that silent, silhouetted fight scene from Skyfall, the one that took place against the backdrop of a ten-story neon sign? Well forget all that shit, we've got some of the most boring, pace-less, spectacle-free action you've ever seen here. Even Bond doesn't look interested as he lazily shoots down his targets. The fucking climax of the movie involves him firing a pistol at a helicopter while not being menaced even slightly. What is this, some attempt to drop Blofeld and Bond's wackiness into a John leCarre book? Even the henchman, usually a reliable source of fun in a Bond movie, is a hulking cypher of an irrelevancy played by Dave Bautista, who was awesome in Guardians of the Galaxy as Drax the Destroyer because that was a good movie made by skilled filmmakers with a brilliant script. This film, possessed of none of those qualities, makes him into Generic big tough guy number 18, to the point where it wasn't until after he had died that I realized his death sequence was supposed to be a major setpiece of the film.

And what of the Cast, the quality of the film I usually lead with? Useless. Léa Seydoux may be gorgeous, but she is simply a bad actress, something I've determined before from films as varied as The Grand Budapest Hotel and Farewell My Queen. Honestly, the problem here though isn't her, but the character written for her, a generic useless pretty person who has no actual point in either the story or the "grand plot" of the films, and yet whom we are supposed to believe Bond falls in love with to the point where he is willing to give up the life of an itinerant spy. The classic Bond girls of yesteryear were silly, yes, and there as eye candy, but they were also KGB spies and secret assassins and exotic heiresses looking for vengeance in their own right, and when Bond slept with them, you could see what it was that he found compelling. This one is a shrinking violet of no use to anyone, whose character arc is transparently used as an excuse to get her captured, again and again, so that Bond can have a dilemma. Monica Bellucci, meanwhile, about which so much was made prior to the film's release, that there would finally be an older Bond Girl, is basically not in the movie at all, and during the two minutes she does spend there, she accomplishes exactly zero, save of course for being seduced by Bond during her husband's funeral. We've discussed Waltz and Craig, both of whom look flat-out embarrassed to be there, but we also should bring up Ralph Fiennes, who has the unenviable task of basically playing Alec Baldwin's character from Mission Impossible 5 without the compensating quality of being Alec Baldwin. Andrew Scott, meanwhile, who played Morarty on the BBC's Sherlock, gets to play the evil government official who wants to activate a domestic spy program to rule the world, an idea that seems to come out of nowhere except the filmmaker's desire to pretend that this BOND FILM is actually a deep mediation on the questions of our times. Admittedly, this is the sort of shit that worked in Captain America 2, mostly because that movie starred Captain America, was written by someone who had seen a movie in the last thirty years, and was also entirely about the subject in question, rather than tacking it on as a B-plot to impress those who believe we can't have a spy movie that isn't also about how evil espionage is. This film meanwhile is so incompetently-made that we are treated to actual scenes in which Scott stands before his adversaries and sneers at them that they are clearly too naive weak for the modern world because they "are stupid enough to believe in... *scoff*... democracy!".



Final Thoughts: Spectre is not just a bad movie, but the worst kind of bad movie, a movie so bad that it makes me retroactively hate other movies related to it that I previously liked. I praised the hell out of Skyfall when it first came out, but reflecting on the thunderous mess that is Spectre makes me realize that the flaws that destroyed this film were present in its predecessor as well, waiting to strike once the filmmakers ran out of good ideas and threw their hands up in the air. That Sam Mendes, who made American Beauty, Jarhead, and Skyfall itself, was the director of this film, tells me that something went fantastically wrong early on in the process, to the point where nobody, not the cast, not the producers, not Mendes, and not the scriptwriters, were able to salvage anything from it. And yet to present this movie as some kind of Avengers-style capstone to a series that was plainly not aiming in this direction beforehand is a move so shameless that I can only describe it as contemptible. This is a film that tells you that the movies you watched before were other than what they were, and rather than try and figure out what made them popular, prefers to re-write them for the worse so as to peddle lazy swill before you, confident that an action movie in November is unlikely to have much competition.

I get a lot of flak every time I pan a stupid action movie, from people who claim that I am simply failing to get into the "spirit" of the thing by turning my brain off and enjoying the spectacle. While I would point out that you are speaking to the guy who liked both Kingsman and Fast & Furious 7, my counter is not so much that I don't have high expectations, but that a stupid action movie that wants to coast on its action and fun should probably include fun action. And when the film does not include fun action because fun is stupid and all movies have to rip off other successful movies regardless of whether their formulas are compatible, then they should not expect mercy from me when it comes time to review the quality of their work, particularly not when their only recourse is to try and convince me that movies I liked weren't all that good in the first place.

Final Score: 2.5/10

[General Havoc]

Guest Review: The Last Witchhunter

Alternate Title: Let Me Tell You About My Character...

One sentence synopsis: Vin Diesel plays an immortal badass in Modern Day New York who polices the hidden magical world when SUDDENLY THINGS GET SERIOUS.


A Note Before We Begin: Havoc and I will tend to disagree on movies, we tend to discuss them quite vigorously, so our tastes (and likely scores) will tend to be different depending on what it is we see, though they are rarely off by more than a few points. I offered to see this movie and do a guest review for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I am a LARPer and one of my characters is a Witch Hunter. This movie is literally about Vin Diesel playing a D&D character from back in the day that he really had fun with. I like Vin Diesel, I like gaming, I like movies, I pretty much had to see this one.


Things Havoc Hotfoot liked: I can’t ever really hate Vin Diesel. He played the greatest cinematic Superman, he’s a twenty-sided die hard nerd, and he genuinely seems like a terrific guy. That comes through in the movie, where the character he plays, Kaulder, is in many ways an extension of himself in more ways that other characters he has played in the past. He is not the unending pile of badassery that Riddick was, he is not the Iron Giant or Groot, he is in many ways himself, which means that we do get to see moments of honest kindness and charity expressed in his depiction of the Immortal Hunter of Witches. In the first scene of the film’s modern day section, we get a sense of what this character is about, and it’s something that could have been expanded on more, I think.

The premise for the film is also a decent one. It’s not one of unending war between the Hunters and the Witches, but one of a peace, if an uneasy one that has allowed the modern age to thrive while keeping magic away from the average person. Kaulder acts as the primary enforcer for the Axe and Cross organization.

By and large, everyone puts in a reasonable performance here. For what little time we see him, Michael Caine has a solid performance that is a bit more personable than his role as Alfred in the Nolan Batman movies. There’s some good chemistry between Diesel and Caine too. The others do their jobs well, for what time we have them on screen, and the movie doesn’t take huge amounts of time to do exposition about them or their pasts...



Things Havoc disliked: ...which is not the same as showing and not telling. Aliens remains one of the best movies for establishing a large cast and doing so with incredible economy of time, letting you get to know the characters through watching them instead of having them talk about their backstory. This movie allows characters to talk about their backstory, but does so only long enough to establish them and then quickly moves on to the next point. The movie feels fairly rushed, and not in the good way.

I usually go to see movies in theaters for the spectacle. Emotional or story-focused movies I reserve for the quiet of my own home. This movie barely cleared the bar for the spectacle. The special effects are serviceable, but the over-reliance on CGI, and not great CGI at that really hurt this movie for the value of the summer action movie. When you have to compete with what’s come out this year, it’s no small wonder this got released when it did, after the summer blockbusters but before the behemoths of winter.

The story was serviceable, but only that. The formula it uses has been used in a thousand other movies before, and save for a few deft turns, fails to bring anything new or interesting to bear. It also has a few moments where significant plot points seem to come from nowhere. The lore of the world is kept largely hidden from the audience so that things can be done as needed, and while there may be deeper in-universe explanations for some of it, it’s not presented to the audience ahead of time, so it still acts as ex machina style revelations.

The action sequences themselves are sadly brief and while not overly flawed seem somewhat unfulfilling. The perform their jobs adequately, but do little to engage the viewer. Part of this may be that Kaulder has Wolverine-like regeneration, and thus most physical threats are of little concern to him, but the other part is that I was expected a lot more supernatural stuff than what was presented. That isn’t to say they don’t bring trippy visuals and interesting predicaments, they do, but they are often easily overcome and ended quite quickly. The most interesting action sequence to me was the very first one in the film, and it quickly went from an Aliens styled Charlie Foxtrot to a scene that just allowed Kaulder to take center stage and set up the rest of the movie’s plot.

Perhaps the biggest failing of the movie is depicting Kaulder as an immortal. There have been several movies and stories of what it might be like to be immortal. Highlander, various Vampire movies, the list goes on. I understand not wanting to wallow in “oh man living forever sucks” and for once having a character who on some level enjoys it, but the sense I was getting was that Kaulder, while superficially enjoying his immortal life, at least on some level has to deal with a degree of inhumanity as a result. We get glimpses of that throughout the movie, but rarely do we see a full scene of it being played out.

One of the biggest flaws and oversights in this movie, however, has to deal with the fact that there is a massive global secret organization dedicated to keeping magic and witches under control, but Kaulder appears to be the only enforcer in existence. I get that you’d want the immortal, unkillable, experienced individual to handle particularly large problems, but given the supernatural community in New York alone, there should rightly be hundreds if not thousands of Witch Hunters worldwide. I get that since there is an accord of peace between the Axe and Cross and the Witch Council, they don’t need a full time army, but given how much havoc can be caused by children with magic, you’d think there would be some sort of emergency response team that isn’t Kaulder.

Another thing that is classic for Witch Hunter stories is having to make hard choices, to do things other people might call monstrous to protect others from even greater evils, and the line the hunter in question chooses to draw for themselves to keep from falling to said greater evils themselves. Again, we see hints of such elements popping up throughout, but we don’t really get to see the ramifications of it or the deeper character growth throughout. If anything, Kaulder is more of a Paladin than a Witch Hunter. Always trying to do the right thing, being merciful where he can be, he rarely does anything that would break his or anyone’s moral code. At one point he mentions how he could have wiped out Witches from existence, committed a mystical genocide of sorts, but he didn’t, because he wanted peace and knew it could be attained. In many ways he is sort of playing Superman here, and I think the movie calls for something a bit darker, though not quite Pitch Black.




Final Thoughts: For every good moment in this film, there seems to be a bad one along for the ride. That would have been forgivable had the action been better, as I can forgive quite a lot for good action. Sadly, The Last Witch Hunter did not quite live up to that expectation. Of course, this is a year spoiled by excellent action all around. In a year where the last movie I saw in theaters was Fury Road, something Humungous would have to come along to Lord over that. That said, with all the negative things I’ve had to say, I don’t think this movie was particularly bad. It’s a decent popcorn flick, just not great. As someone who plays a Witch Hunter in an RPG, and a live action one at that, I just can’t help but feel some kinship with this movie. It may also be why I’m more overly critical of it, if I’m being utterly honest. Vin Diesel made a movie about a character he played with dice and paper that he really loved, and as a nerd, that speaks to me. Had this come out the same year as, say, the Dungeons and Dragons movie (yes, that one), I’d probably sing the praises of this film until the end of time. That said, there’s enough promise here to potentially reach greater heights, and if this film ever gets the sequel it baited quite heavily, I’d certainly like to see it.


Score: I don’t usually do numbers the way Havoc does, but as this is his blog, I’ll relent and provide a conversion rating. I’d recommend seeing this movie at a Matinee showing if you want to see the action on the big screen where it will, at least, be more impressive than it would be otherwise. If not, wait for on-demand or some other form of rental. For Havoc’s Numbers, I give this movie a 5.5. Had the action or story been better, it might have been a 6 or even 6.5.

[General Havoc]

All Things Must Pass

Alternate Title: The Importance of Things Baby Boomers Liked

One sentence synopsis: Russell Solomon and the original employees of Tower Records, reflect on its creation, reign, and dissolution.


Things Havoc liked: I see an average of about one documentary per year, usually whenever I am coming off a rough stretch at the regular theaters, and with the worst Bond film in living memory directly in my rear-view mirror, this seemed like a good time. The difficulty with documentaries, like with anything really, is that a lot of them are poorly made, or thinly disguised polemical rants hurled at a paying audience with no attempt made at objectivity. So it was that, rather than see a movie about how the filmmaker is the only person in the world endowed with morals in a world comprised of sheeple, I thought that I would go and see one on a subject that nobody ever gets passionate or argumentative about: the music industry.

Tower Records, for those of you too young to remember it, was once a giant of the music industry, a chain that was not a chain, half music emporium, half shrine to the mystical glories of popular music, an empire that grossed a billion dollars in the last year of the 20th century before ceasing to exist five years into the 21st, and All Things Must Pass, taken from the metaphysical slogan that accompanied its final liquidation, is a chronicle of its lifespan, from its creation in 1960 by Russ Solomon, who sold records off of a jukebox in his father's drugstore, becoming more and more successful until he finally bought out his father and re-purposed the enterprise entirely around music. It walks through interviews with the major employees, in the main hired as young school-age dropouts in the throes of the sixties, who started working there because they loved music and because the store had no dress code or maximum hair length, and wound up executives and regional directors in their forties through sheer time commitment and the fact that promotion was all internal. There's a vibe here of the kids being given the candy store, as the major figures of the company are all either scene-sters who were looking for a cool place to work, and found one that would let them spin off a casual million or two to go build major stores in Japan, or party-crazed kids who fell into music accidentally when they discovered a job that didn't care how drunk you got or how many drugs you took as long as you showed up to work.

Tower was important to more than just the employees, however, and it's the music artists that stud the film with their memories of the store that really cement how important Tower Records was to the industry at large. Dave Grohl, of the Foo Fighters, first entered music by working in a Tower Records and experiencing the small world that existed around it. Bruce Springsteen describes knowing that he had made it when his records first appeared in Tower, and using the store's stock and displays as a barometer of not only how he was doing but how all of his contemporaries were as well. Meanwhile, Elton John, whose career spanned the lifetime of Tower, assures us with perfect certainty that he spent more money in Tower Records than any other human being, and we must believe him. He makes the place sound like a cross between Studio 54 and a shrine to music, and seems genuinely torn up by its demise, intoning that there was never any place like it before and never will be again.

Of course the title is indicative of where this all leads, and as documentaries on the rise and fall of companies go, All Things Must End is one of the more honest when it comes to the inevitable demise of its subject. Blame is spread fairly evenly all around, from Solomon himself, who lost his best friend/accountant and, without his advice, made business decisions that were less than ideal, to the general tenor of the financial times in the years before the first Dot.com crash, where businesses were encouraged to take fantastic-sized loans no matter the risk. The prevailing wisdom, of course, in regards to record stores in general, is that the internet, piracy, and worthless kids who didn't appreciate brick and mortar stores killed them all, but the film does not allow such facile reasoning to infect its narrative. Yes, Napster and the like did their damage to Tower's sales, but many of the former employees reflect on the fact that the record industry itself created Napster by doing away with Singles sales, preferring to force people to buy $19 CDs containing a single song worth listening to, confident that there was no other way for people to get their music. When Napster did show up, the industry refused to lower prices to match the new reality, instead concentrating on suing people away from piracy. Tower, and the industry in general, failed to adapt to the changing technology, and despite actually having the first online music store in the world, they fell into the trap of so many businesses I watched or was a part of in those years, businesses who were overtaken by bank-mandated "restructuring experts" of little talent and less intelligent, who through malice, incompetence, or greed, systematically destroyed what was left of the company in the pursuit of some sort of quixotic MBA-school mandate to "increase branding" or something similar. By the time they were done, there was only a carcass of a company left to pick over.



Things Havoc disliked: In describing the origins of Tower Records, All Things Must End does a fine job, as it does in describing its ultimate demise and what legacy it left behind. But unfortunately, the middle sections of the film lag significantly behind these two elements, as the film drags into a fairly slow repetition of new location selected - store opens - young aimless kid gets hired there - store does really well - young aimless kid becomes responsible adult thanks to Tower Records - repeat. I recognize we're here to chart the business, by and large, but the movie seriously repeats its "nobody thought we could put a store in Sacramento/San Francisco/Seattle/Manhattan/Tokyo/Buenos Aires/London, but we did!" shtick about a dozen times before it's finally time for the business to collapse and the movie to end. At a certain point, we're not here for a Business School case study, we're here to watch a documentary about one of the more culturally-influential institutions of our times, and while there's some effort made by the above-mentioned artists and the company executives to ground us in the epochal nature of what we're being shown, the film really seems to rely on the notion that you already know what Tower Records was, and how special it was to Baby Boomers everywhere. Not being a Boomer myself, I had certainly heard of Tower, but I don't believe I'd ever been in one, and I remarked on its passing as I would have any other large store that collapsed (who remembers Good Guys and Blockbuster?). Maybe I'm just not in tune with the world. Or maybe, conversely, we should re-think just how sacred everything that Baby Boomers liked in their youth really ought to be.



Final Thoughts: But now I'm just being unfair, and while All Things Must Pass is not a great documentary on the level of Searching for Sugar Man, it is a solid enough one to be worth a watch. The subject matter necessarily renders it somewhat restricted in its purview, and indeed, I had to contort my schedule quite a bit just to be able to see it. But if we judge a film's qualities based on whether it told us a story worth listening to and did so well, then there are far worse things one can do with two hours of your time than sitting back and getting a glimpse of a cultural world as it used to be, and hearing from the people for whom it was a special place, even if those people don't include yourself.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Alternate Title: Hunger Overtime

One sentence synopsis: Katniss Everdeen and her band of freedom fighters take the civil war to the Capitol itself in an attempt to bring down President Snow once and for all.


Things Havoc liked: Some of you may recall that I was not terribly complementary towards the first "part" of Hunger Games' Mockingjay, due entirely to the baffling creative decision (unless you consider the box office possibilities) to arbitrarily divide it in half. The track record for movies that have done this is very poor, even if you don't consider Twilight (and who does?), but I didn't chide the filmmakers because I hated Mockingjay, I chided them because Hunger Games is the only YA series of films that I like, and I wanted it to remain good as it approached its ordained end. In the time since then, we have experienced the pacing disaster that was the third Hobbit film, also due to badly-designed cuts between films that should never have been separated, but what's done is done, and no matter what my feelings on dividing movies up into halves or thirds or whatnot, I felt it was important to see the series out, and find out if anything could be salvaged from the mess.

The strength of Hunger Games has always been its cast and its characters, a collection of weird individuals in a larger-than-life world derived from the bastard child of Imperial Rome and Madison Avenue. Jennifer Lawrence has long-since ceased to require this series to prove that she is a good actress, but she inhabits the character as well as she ever did. Katniss by now is a weary, tired soldier, sick to death of war and the losses it forces on her circle of friends and loved ones, animated primarily by the abiding need to take revenge against President Snow, and protect whatever she has left. Snow himself is as delightfully sociopathic as ever, and Donald Sutherland's avuncular evil gets a full stage to work with here, as the rebels advance relentlessly on his glittering Capital, and he is permitted to chew a bit more scenery than the previous films afforded. Even in the face of impending defeat, his Coriolanus Snow (I love these names) is unrepentantly evil in the best tradition of theatrical Bond Villains everywhere, and I'm so glad the film finally saw fit to give him a stage to monologue upon. The role of Peeta remains the only thing I've ever been able to tolerate Josh Hutcherson in, and this time the film gives him more to do than simply stand around moping as part of one of the obligatory love triangles that all YA stories must be provided with. Following his capture and rescue from the hands of the Capital forces, Peeta is a badly-damaged individual, conditioned and re-conditioned to the point where he has admitted difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy. The film actually handles this concept reasonably well, particularly given the comedic or overwrought method that any sort of Mental Illness is usually portrayed on screen.

Indeed, there's a couple of pretty decent ideas at the core of this film, particularly in terms of the scale of the piece. The war between Snow and his rebellious districts is in full rage by now, with tens of thousands of troops engaging one another in battles so immense as to dwarf the protagonists. One gets a fine sense of them being more or less lost in the wider war, as Katniss' efforts to get to Snow seem almost incidental compared to the wider sweep of the conflict around them. Normally I'm not fond of movies that miss the forest for the trees (it was one of the big problems with Spielberg's War of the Worlds), but in this case the trees are more interesting than the forest anyway. Sam Claflin, Jena Malone, Woody Harrelson, and Jeffrey Wright all resume their roles from earlier films, necessarily small, but welcome, while the late great Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in his last theatrical appearance, reprises arch-manipulator and gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee. Given Hoffman's untimely death, the filmmakers plainly did the best they could with his remaining footage, contriving to put a role together for him that mostly doesn't feel pulled together artificially. Considering the circumstances, I'm forgiving of any seems that result.



Things Havoc disliked: I'm considerably less forgiving of everything else.

My original concern with Mockingjay being split in half was not simply that this sort of thing never works (which it doesn't), but that the first film in this pairing was entirely comprised of setup and character establishment, neither of which are bad things to have in a movie, but which meant that there was no actual payoff to anything. Nothing of consequence happened, no battles were fought or issues settled, there was not even any interesting action, resulting in a movie that was flat out boring at points. At the time, I assumed that, given everything, we were being set up for a second part that would be almost entirely paceless action, all of the "boring" setup parts having been gotten out of the way earlier, akin to what happened to Harry Potter 7 or The Hobbit. The good news is that it turns out I was entirely wrong. The bad news is that the reason I was wrong is that this movie is also nothing but setup and character establishment.

Mockingjay 2, or whatever we're calling it at this point, is a dreary, boring, leaden affair, a movie that has some of the worst pacing I've seen in quite some time, whether you consider it its own film or part of a unified whole with its predecessor. It is a film that consists almost entirely of the main cast sitting around in basements, bunkers, or other dark holes in the ground, talking in hushed, whispered tone to one another about how horrible things are, something I would normally be more forgiving of if the movie had focused on those horrible things and the ugly reality of war. That theme is in the film, don't get me wrong, but takes a second place to the love triangle built up between Peeta, Gale (Liam Helmsworth at his least memorable), and Katniss. This element, a staple of YA fiction, was in all of the previous movies I'm sad to say, but in the previous movies there were other elements to distract us with. Here there are not. The strange, decadent, world of Panem, both alien and familiar, is barely here, partly due to the understandable reason that the Capital is in the middle of a brutal street-to-street civil war, but that hardly excuses relegating characters such as Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman or Elizabeth Banks' Effie to barely a minute of screentime, characters which were the mainstay of my level of interest in the previous films. Here was an opportunity to watch the Capital's degenerate society collapse upon itself in the midst of violent, fiery upheval, to watch characters we've come to know get pressed to their breaking point, and all the filmmakers can think to do is show us mopey people walking through ruins and worrying about which interchangeable boring hearthrob will wind up with Jennifer Lawrence? Even the action scenes, which while not the draw of the previous films, were at least there, are muted and boring this time around. There is one, one action sequence worth remembering, a standout piece that starts in sewage tunnels inhabited by demons straight out of the later versions of Doom, and escalates from there. This one sequence however takes place hours before the end of the movie, and doesn't even serve as a climax to anything, being buttressed on both sides by yet further scenes of the characters sitting in basements engaging in long, pregnant gazes at one another.

But no, let's be fair, there's more than just moping and love triangles going on here. There's also some of the most ham-fisted "political" drama I've seen in a while. Juliette Lewis is not exactly my favorite actress in the world, and long-time readers may recall my identification of her character as being a designated bad guy designed to teach lessons about the abuse of power in the next movie. I don't want to give the game away, but let's just say that a character who shows up, apropos of nothing, and announces that all elections are suspended until further notice, and that the first thing that the rebels should do following the defeat of the capital is to put on a new set of Hunger Games, may not be quite as subtle as the filmmakers intend. What justification the filmmakers have in tearing all of the interesting parts of this setting out and replacing them with a Juliette Lewis performance that would not be out of place in Escape from LA, I have no idea, but it seems to be part and parcel with this film's utter lack of ambition, content, and elements of interest.



Final Thoughts: With Mockingjay Part 2, The Hunger Games, a series I once enjoyed enough that I gave its second installment a place on my yearly top-10 list of best films, ends not with a Bang, but with a Whimper. If nothing else, it proves, assuming anyone didn't already know, that arbitrarily hacking a book up into two components is, and will remain, a terrible idea, one done purely for the sake of squeezing more money out of a franchise that has proven popular enough to be squeezed. I can't say I didn't see this coming, but I do admit a sense of profound disappointment with the end of the series. Movie franchises often end this way, everything from Terminator to Alien to the terrifying collapse of the Matrix series showed me as much, but this film hurts more than most, if only because it didn't have to be like this. Hunger Games was a special franchise, one of the only series of its genre that I could stomach at all. If the filmmakers had only concentrated on making an actual movie instead of deadening all possible forward motion with a blatant cash grab, then we might well have had something special. Instead, all we have now is the lurching remains of a series I once admired, and the epitaph of a once-promising series to remind us that there exists no story in the world so simple or idiotproof that someone in Hollywood can't be found to fuck it all up.

Final Score: 4/10