At the Movies with General Havoc

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Sun Dec 06, 2015 6:51 pm

The Night Before

Alternate Title: The Stoner, the Flaker, the PED-taker...

One sentence synopsis: Three adult friends celebrate Christmas together for the last time.

Things Havoc liked: I've not had the best luck with comedies on this little project, but one of the big exceptions was 2013's This is the End, a Seth Rogan movie which spawned, among other things, my... ahem... review... of the unreleased Interview. I effectively went into This is the End on a dare, but it turned out to be a bloody, disgusting, sick black comedy of the sort that I can really appreciate, and so when Rogan showed up again with a new R-rated comedy featuring significantly upgraded characters, I was down. So, surprisingly perhaps, were others. This time, rather than the apocalypse,, Rogan's target is the Christmas spirit, and since I'm the sort of sick bastard who likes a good awful Christmas movie in the company of some good actors, it sounded like just the dish after the twin disappointments of Hunger Games and Bond.

The Night Before is the story of three high school friends, now adults of varying levels of success. Ethan Miller (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a thirty-something slacker coasting through his life, whose parents' deaths in a car wreck at age 19 triggered the establishment of a Christmas tradition whereby the three of them hang out together, partying throughout New York while attempting to gain access to the near-mythical Nutcracker Ball, a legendarily exclusive super-party run by god-knows-who, put on in a secret location on Christmas Eve, where all manner of debauched fun is supposed to be taking place. Ethan is the center of the film, which is fine by me, given Gordon-Levitt's pedigree, and is also the one with the deepest issues being masked by the forced cheer, to the point where the prospect of the tradition ending and leaving him alone upsets him enough that he gets into drunken fights with Santa-dressed pub crawlers (including Jason Manzoukas, one of my favorite podcasters) for disrespecting the meaning of Christmas. The tradition in question is ending because, unlike Ethan, his friends, Isaac Greenberg (Seth Rogan) and Chris Roberts (Anthony Mackie), have moved on with their lives. The former is a Jewish husband and expectant father, whose wife provides him with a cavalcade of hard drugs to enjoy the night with, and who spends the night getting so deliriously high that he winds up talking to a nativity scene in front of a Church and vomiting in the middle of a Midnight Mass while screaming that he didn't crucify the Messiah (before, later, crucifying the Messiah). The latter is a professional football player (what position and team are unrecorded, but I must assume the Giants), who is experiencing a career renaissance thanks to a new diet and workout regimen, a strong presence on Social Media, and approximately all of the steroids ever. As a side note, this is now the second movie in which I've seen Anthony Mackie indulge in massive steroid abuse for laughs. Statistics like these really keep me going during the darker times of the film calendar.

And really, that's all there is to The Night Before, the story of these three bros and the night they have on their last Christmas party. Along the way, wacky hijinx ensue, as Chris keeps getting his weed stolen by a grinchy hipster douche-girl named Rebecca (Ilana Glazer), whom he alternately chases across New York and has sex with in nightclub bathrooms, Isaac gets more and more transcendently fucked up on a series of hard drugs until he starts recording coked-out rants about the mortal terror of his impending fatherhood, all while receiving pictures of some random guy's penis on his phone, and Ethan tries, through a series of contrivances and bad ideas, to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend Diana (Lizzy Caplan). Along the way, they meet a cavalcade of strange characters played by strange character actors, including James Franco, playing... well... playing James Franco, best I can tell, as well as stable Seth Rogan actors Mindy Kaling and Randal Park (who played Kim Jong Un in last year's semi-unwatched The Interview), and, of all people, the increasingly ubiquitous Michael Shannon, who plays a chronically-stoned-to-hell Pot dealer/philosopher named Mr. Green, who operates out of his hotboxed Oldsmobile and dispenses the sort of creepy batshit wisdom that only makes sense to those who have just smoked gargantuan amounts of nuclear-grade weed. I love Michael Shannon, and he is the best thing in this movie by far, using that intense stare of his to radiate possible menace while offering pot and advice in equal measure.

Things Havoc disliked: There's a certain moral sensibility to this movie, despite all the violence, drugs, humiliation, and R-rated humor, which is par for the course as far as Seth Rogan movies are concerned. His last colaboration with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the underrated 50/50 had something similar, as did This is the End, despite the cannibalism, bestiality, and devil-rape (fun for the whole family!). This movie has it too, with the characters being taught life lessons about the meaning of Christmas and so on, but the result this time around is a little less well-made than the previous films were. I don't object to having a gooey moral center in the middle of a drugs-and-bodily-fluids comedy, not at all, but the lessons here are a bit forced, particularly for Mackie's Chris, who I think is supposed to learn that steroids are bad and that the rest of the team he's trying to impress are douchebags, but the sequences in which he's supposed to learn this are glossed over so quickly that I wasn't sure why, or even if he decided at the end to turn back towards Jesus or whatever the point of all that was. His mother, played by the wonderful Lorraine Toussaint, gets a few good lines, but really has no purpose in the movie other than to shame Ethan and Isaac for respectively letting his girlfriend go, and for being a drug-addled wretch (which at the moment, he is). Everyone else's plots resolve themselves in a reasonably perfunctory fashion, despite a standout cameo by Miley Cyrus of all people. Lessons are learned, friendships restored, Deus Ex Machinas are relied on (in one case quite explicitly), and everyone goes home for Christmas dinner.

And really, what keeps The Night Before from being a great film is not anything the characters do, but what they don't do. The movie's "message" is woven into the film a little tighter than before, as the characters openly discuss their problems rather than letting the sequences showcase them. This isn't a terrible thing, but it means that the film feels like it's tacking the low-brow sequences onto a Christmas movie, rather than tacking Christmas spirit onto a low-brow comedy. Bear in mind, This is the End involved douchebags being ripped apart by cannibals and demons, while those who exhibited righteousness in any form were raptured up to Heaven by direct act of God to party for all eternity with weed and the Backstreet Boys. Subtlety isn't a requirement here. But it feels like the movie spends a little too much time making sure you understand that it's really a wholesome family film at heart, before getting back to people bleeding into one another's drinks, cussing out their unborn children, and stapling people to trees.

Final Thoughts: The Night Before is a well made movie, funny in certain parts, with one or two really memorable lines and scenes, but it is not a classic comedy for the ages, not the way Pineapple Express or This is the End or The 40-Year-Old Virgin were. It tells its jokes, preaches its lesson, bows to a round of applause, and departs the stage with some grace, and while that's a lot more than many films manage to do, it's not exactly the stuff of legend. Still, this year has produced its share of both middling movies and middling comedy, and The Night Before is superior to both, a movie that is funny for its entire run time and leaves enough of a memory to merit a watch. Don't look to find it on a list of the best movies of the year. But if you're interested in seeing something you can just relax to and have some laughs, then you could do a whole lot worse than watch three not so wise men try to survive a single crazy night.

Final Score: 6.5/10

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Sun Dec 13, 2015 1:37 pm

Spotlight

Alternate Title: The Priests and the Pedophiles

One sentence synopsis: Reporters from the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" investigation team unearth the truth of a massive conspiracy by the Catholic Church of Boston to cover up the sexual abuse of children by hundreds of Catholic priests.

Things Havoc liked: In 2002, just after 9/11's coverage was finally fading from the news cycles, the Boston Globe published the first of over six hundred articles about the sexual abuse of children by priests within the Boston Archdiocese, and about the widespread and concerted effort to cover it all up on the part of the Catholic Church. The driving force behind these articles was the Globe's "Spotlight" team, an investigative-journalism unit who wound up winning a Pulitzer for their work in exposing the crimes and the coverups. And now along comes Tom McCarthy, an actor/writer/director best known for comedies and warmhearted fluff pieces like Up and The Station Agent, to try and bring this story to the big screen, with the help of a solid cast and a writing staff cribbed from Law & Order and Aaron Sorkin vehicles. I've certainly heard of worse ideas.

Spotlight is a procedural film at its core, a type of movie that has, ironically, more in common with heist films than it does with other news-based movies such as The Paper or Network. The assembled cast of characters has a job to do, and the movie is about how they go about doing it. These kinds of movies can work if the process of performing the job is sufficiently interesting, which is why most procedurals revolve around crime, either as mysteries, cop dramas, or criminal capers, and if the cast assembled to perform the job is good enough, then it will keep us interested. Fortunately enough, Spotlight succeeds on both counts. The entire Spotlight team is a murderer's row of good actors that I enjoy watching, from Michael Keaton to Mark Ruffalo to John Slattery to Rachael McAdams, all of whom play real reporters, current or former, of the real Boston Globe. McAdams in particular shines, as she always does, bringing the same sensibility she had in A Most Wanted Man to a movie whose intentions are considerably less axe-grindy, while Slattery (playing actual Globe editor Ben Bradlee Jr.) gets to do what he's always done best, which is to stand around and look shocked at the information other people are bringing to him. The entire affair is overseen by Keaton, playing Editor-at-Large Walter Robinson, a local Bostonian who schmoozes with the great and the good of Boston's elite, politely fending off "requests" to turn his attention to other matters by the powers that be. This gives Keaton a chance to do what he does best, which is to mug for the camera while taking a principled stand, rightly or wrongly, and he confirms that Keaton's disappearance from film between the mid-90s and the mid-10s (the occasional appearance in Jackie Brown notwithstanding) was a terrible mistake, and I need to see him more often to compensate.

But the best performance in the movie by far is Liev Schrieber's (shout out to another native San Franciscan!), which consists of him doing the exact opposite of what he usually does best, which in most movies is to shout and look menacing (and occasionally to narrate documentaries about finance, football, and the greater cosmos). Schreiber plays Marty Baron, the newly-inaugurated Chief Editor of the Boston Globe, summoned from Miami by the paper's New York-based ownership under the assumption (universal among the paper's staff) that he is here to oversee staff cuts and the shuttering of the venerable institution as part of the ongoing century-long trauma that has been the "death of print". And yet no sooner does Baron arrive than he kick-starts the entire investigation by more or less forcing the Spotlight team to begin paying attention to an issue regarded as too small and too local for their purposes, at least until it becomes clear that the story is anything but. Baron's motives are never explained, not overtly, but the movie characterizes him via everyone else brilliantly, as everywhere he goes, everyone treats him with formal politeness, all while making absolutely certain that everyone else remembers at all times that he's That Jew From Miami, an outsider come to ruin the paper, Boston, and Catholicism itself. An early meeting with Cardinal Law, head of the Boston Archdiocese, ends with Law giving him a welcoming gift of a Catechism manual. But even with this treatment, Scheiber plays Baron at a level of quiet professionalism, never raising his voice or responding to the alternating flattery and threats of the established forces of Boston's Catholic organizations, but quietly encouraging his team to do their jobs, safe in the knowledge that his very boring nature is his secret weapon.

Material like this is hard to stay above board with, as the temptation is so great to start sermonizing on the failings of wicked men or corrupt institutions, but Spotlight keeps its focus relentlessly upon the reporters and the objects of their reporting, the minutiae of how one goes about getting information from a less than willing subject, or deals with bureaucratic obstacles while trying to obtain public records. The tale of horror that the reporters uncover grows and grows and grows, from 1 sick priest to four to thirteen to ninety, and at each step the characters are left to wonder just how far it will lead. Along the way they deal with other parties, such as the irreplaceable Stanley Tucci, playing a lawyer for a number of abuse victims, as well as support groups, other victims, and even the perpetrators themselves. A standout scene midway through the film has Rachel McAdams approach a house, looking for a source, only to meet one of the accused priests directly, who amazingly consents to being interviewed, beatifically admitting to her that he molested a number of boys, but that everything's all right, because he never took pleasure in it, and since the church has declared that his sins are now forgiven, there is no harm done. This sort of alien moon-logic juts into the film's reasonably placid world like a knife every so often, reminding everyone of just how it was that a conspiracy of abuse such as this could possibly happen, and bringing the consequences home, as one reporter discovers that a classmate of his was abused by their football coach/priest, and that he was only spared because he was lucky enough to play hockey, and another realizes that one of the various "treatment centers" that the Church uses to hide the pedophile priests is just around the corner from his house. These sorts of terrible discoveries serve as their own motivation, as the staff of the Globe continue their work through to the final breaking of the story, and the conflicts and agonies they suffer as a result seem entirely real.

Things Havoc disliked: I realize that these actors are playing real people, and that real people have real traits that need to be kept in mind, but boy are the accents in this movie pretty bad. Mark Ruffalo sounds like he has cotton balls stuffed in his mouth, as if material like this meant that he had to commune with his inner Marlon Brando. His character is mentioned at one point as being Portuguese, but no accent or point of origin could possibly explain the resulting full-mouthed blubbering that Ruffalo gets up to during most of the film. The quest for an authentic sound also bedevils Michael Keeton, whose character speaks in a loose slur the entire film, sliding from one word to the next such that I, at least, found it almost impossible to hear what the hell he was saying. His character, while a local boy done good who boozes it up with the high society folks of Boston's elite, is nowhere established as being a drunkard or even ever drinking to excess, so why he decided to put on a pastiche of an Irish drunk is beyond me. Maybe the original character did sound like that, but I'd prefer to dial back the verisimilitude a bit in favor of understanding what the hell people are saying.

There's also, more directly, the flip side to a movie this careful and procedural. The film starts slowly and never really accelerates from there, as characters look into what they regard as a nothing case buried in the back-archives before slowly coming to realize what is actually going on. I have no problem with a slow burn, but Spotlight seems to tread on the notion that you already know these characters and the environs that surround them, rendering the first half hour or so of the film... I won't say boring, but definitely slow. It picks up, as the investigation gathers steam and the consequences for the reporters, the city, and the church become more and more clear, but it's the sort of film one does have to stick with.

Final Thoughts: Spotlight is the exact sort of film that Hollywood and the Awards organizations love, a movie about old-school journalists doing their jobs to solve some terrible societal crime that permits everyone to get misty-eyed over how wonderfully noble journalism used to be, and what terrible fallen times we live in. I thereby predict that when the Oscar nods are announced next year, we will be hearing more about it. Lest I sound too cynical however, Spotlight is also an extremely well-made film, starring a number of superb actors performing meaty material with a script that does not lead them off a cliff. The land of Oscar Season is strewn with the broken remains of films that tried to be as quiet-burn, as respectful, and as focused on their subject matters as this one was, and a film that clears the hurdles that lie in wait for would-be awards fodder is worth recognizing when it lands.

Spotlight does not indulge, by and large, in lengthy invective against the Catholic Church, who knew of this pattern of horrid abuse for decades if not longer, and took every step imaginable to cover it up and allow it to perpetuate. Not, at least, until the very end, when in a final title card, it lists the cities in which the church was also found to have participated in a conspiracy to abuse children and pervert justice. The list is hundreds of cities long, in every state, every country around the world, and each one represents a pattern of child abuse abetted by and all-but sanctioned by the Church authorities. Nearly 300 priests abused kids in Boston for decades and were allowed to get away with it, and Boston was but one city on the list. Spotlight and its director/writer Thomas McCarthy are not to be commended for casting light on this pattern of abuse, for that was done by the Globe investigators, and they already shared their deserved Pulitzer for it. Instead, Spotlight is to be commended for realizing, as so few films do, that when you can deploy statistics and lists this damning, there's no need to say anything else.

Final Score: 7.5/10

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Sat Dec 26, 2015 7:45 pm

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

Alternate Title: Proof of Concept

One sentence synopsis: A scavenger from a desert world and a renegade Stormtrooper try to make their escape from an Imperial remnant group called The First Order and their shadowy Sith leader.

A Note from the General: I customarily like to start these reviews out with a bit of background material, explaining why I went to see particular movie, or what the context of the previous films in the series are, but somehow that seems unnecessary here. Literally everyone on Earth knows what Star Wars is, from Bushmen in central Africa to Samoyed reindeer herders in northern Siberia, and if all of those people don't know that a new movie, the most hotly-anticipated film in twenty years, is finally upon us, it can only be due to a combination of willful deafness and dumb luck that they've avoided finding out. In a way, even reviewing the new film at all seems almost superfluous, given that it is currently in the process of making approximately all of the money, and is projected to be seen, in the next 18-24 months, by more than 50% of the population of the Earth. And yet, for me, I never started this project with the intention of somehow affecting the global box office of films this size, but merely recording my thoughts for such purposes as anyone may find in them. And in the nearly two hundred and fifty films that I have reviewed to date, not one of them, not Avengers, not Iron Man, not the myriad offerings of Pixar or Disney or the output of my favorite indie directors, no film to date has generated the expectations... the hope that this one has. To have a Star Wars movie worthy of the name after so many years, and such tremendous disappointments as the prequels were, was something I scarcely believed might ever happen. Star Wars is not other film franchises, not to me and mine, not even in this age of Marvel and its imitators. Star Wars is something different, something sacred, something pure, and consequently something guarded most jealously our memories, an epic, operatic space adventure whose importance shines through all the merchandizing, "special" editions, prequels, and hype. Star Wars is a special case, it has always been a special case. How then to evaluate a new film offered up at its altar? This is the question I've struggled with ever since seeing the film, and one that I've still not satisfactorily answered. And yet, faced with the fact of the new movie and the need to say something about it, I fall back, as I often do, on the process itself, which I invented in the first place specifically to allow me to clarify my thoughts on works of art that are, after all, entirely subjective. Whatever the tricks or the complexities or the ambivalence of my feelings for one thing or another, I am, at the end, faced with the same two questions as always. What were the things I liked about this film? And what were the ones that I did not?

Things Havoc liked: The original Star Wars was a great gamble in many ways, and one of those ways was the casting. Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher might all be household names to nerds of my generation now, but they were all total unknowns in the world of film when George Lucas decided to cast them in his insane, impossible, fever-dream of a space epic. Lucas wanted fresh faces who could nonetheless pull off the classically-epic material that he had created for them, and he got them, and before we talk about anything else in this movie, we need to acknowledge that JJ Abrams, a man who knows a thing or two about adapting old space operas to the silver screen, did the same damn thing, and got the same damn results.

Whatever the billing, whatever the surroundings, The Force Awakens is a movie about two young characters, Rey, a mechanical prodigy and indentured smuggler eking out a subsistence living on a desert planet, and Finn, a Stormtrooper slave-soldier desperate to escape his circumstances and find a way to live his own life, and before we go any further, these two characters are both the core of the movie and the best goddamn things in it. Rey, played by English unknown Daisy Ridley, is a self-sufficient engineer and scrounger with no future or hope for one, whose grubby circumstances amidst the ruins of the former galactic Empire is the perfect starting point for a Campbellian hero's journey like this one (a favorite note of mine is Rey's makeshift home built out of the wreck of an AT-AT Walker). Ridley plays the character just right, enough of a hard edge to reveal her capabilities and the harshness of her background, without (as the temptation always is) going overboard into "strong independent woman who don't need no man"-syndrome (go watch Catwoman if you want to see what that looks like). Finn meanwhile, played by another young English unknown (John Boyega), whose role is that of the audience surrogate, a young man whose circumstances are highly dangerous and who simply wants to get away with his life, and his soul, intact, and who benefits from getting most of the best lines in the movie. How long has it been since we saw a character within a Star Wars movie who is allowed to get as excited as the audience at the epic things going on, or who, like Rae, is empowered to evidence sheer pants-wetting terror at some of the horrors that exist in this universe, without sacrificing her essential intelligence, resourcefulness, or grit? As to which of these characters is the main one, there may be a technical answer, but the film doesn't force us to uncover it, allowing the both of them to combine forces and go on an adventure, which is manifestly the right move. Bodega and Ridley share an effortless chemistry on screen, without the need for forced hackneyed romance plots or other distractions. 'Two, young, interesting characters go on a space adventure' is how this movie seems to want to frame itself, and after the awful drudgery of the prequels, that's exactly what I wanted to see.

But of course, Ridley and Boyega aren't alone out there. The rest of the cast is a mix of excellent character actors and returning fan favorites, which (almost) uniformly do the script justice. Oscar Isaac, my favorite Guatemalan actor of all time, of Suckerpunch and Ex Machina and A Most Violent Year, plays Poe Dameron, an expert fighter pilot straight out of the Wedge Antilles handbook of Star Wars aces, and while his character isn't given a whole hell of a lot of weighty material, Isaac has the right kind of dashing swagger that a movie like this thrives on. Adam Driver meanwhile, a theater actor of no particular film pedigree, plays Kylo Ren, the obligatory dark lord for a film like this. Interestingly, Driver goes a different direction than the classic Vader-style implacably menacing Sith Lord, giving us an antagonist who, like the main characters themselves, is not yet fully formed, a raw force talent who struggles with his own conflicts and throws elaborate, rage-quelled tantrums when he doesn't get his way. Some of the best scenes in the entire film involve Ren and Rey in wordless contests of will, as Ren discovers that his freshly-formed powers have their limits, and Rey that hers may exist. Driver's performance is bound to be somewhat controversial among the die-hard fans, as he comes across fairly... wimpy... relative to figures like Darth Vader at least, but that's plainly the point. The intention here seems to be to provide a villain that will grow alongside the heroes as they make their way through the new trilogy, which is an idea full of promise for a series still unformed. As to the original cast, Harrison Ford's return as Han Solo is the evident highlight, still a scoundrel and a rogue after all these years, reluctantly dragged back into all of the force-related madness that he now, at long last, has to acknowledge was true all along. Han's appearance in the movie is a gem, replete with wonderful callbacks to the originals, including the minor (and glorious) point that in every gunfight Han gets into (and there are many), he always fires the first shot.

And speaking of gunfights, The Force Awakens is fittingly awash in action, action in space and in the atmosphere, action on the ground, action with blasters, turbolasers, and lightsabers, action of supremely high quality across the board. The starfighters seem to be front and center here, with revised renditions of X-wings and TIE-Fighters dogfighting over half a dozen planets or pursuing other chips through madcap obstacle courses designed as intentional throwbacks to the original series. A standout sequence early in the film involves the Millennium Falcon being chased through a starship graveyard by a pair of TIE fighters, a sequence that is not satisfied with ripping off a particular action sequence from the original films and prefers to steal simultaneously from half a dozen. Ground combat is exciting and well-paced, with blaster fights punctuated by standout "boss" character engagements, with a particular high point coming halfway through the film, as a completely untrained Finn grabs a handy lightsaber to take on a "riot trooper", armed with some kind of high-grade cattle prod. The inevitable lightsaber-on-lightsaber combat (which we all knew was coming), feels very different this time around, with no trace of the hyper-choreographed acrobatic flail-bouts that the prequels were full of. The lightsabers this time around have weight and heft and force being their strikes, and feel far more like weapons in the hands of men or women who want to violently kill one another, not show off their athleticism. I loved the fight scene at the end of Phantom Menace as much as anyone, but the style this time is completely on-point, allowing us (as any good melee fight will) to trace the temper and mentality of the combatants by the style and progression of their fight. A moment, for instance, where Kylo Ren goes from playing with his opponent to trying to murder him with extreme prejudice comes across as clear as a ringing bell, despite not one line of dialogue and minimal musical cues to underly the change.

And finally there's the design of the films, which is so important for Star Wars, one of the only space or sci-fi settings that allows things to look grimy, well-used, and worn. One of the many criticisms leveled at the Prequels was that everything looked far too shiny, too picturesque, too factory-fresh to mesh with the original series' style, and whether or not that criticism was valid, the filmmakers this time took the issue to heart. The first half of the film takes place on the not-Tatooine desert world of Jakku, which appears to be a giant interstellar graveyard for the remnants of imperial war machines of decades past, from crashed Star Destroyers providing an endless source of mechanical parts, to hollowed-out tanks or starfighters used as crude dwellings. The other settings, which vary from a forested smuggler-haven built into what appears to be a repurposed set from Game of Thones, to a frozen taiga-planet with an Imperial-grade Superweapon built into the center of it, all feel lived-in and properly dirty, as do the weapons, tools, ships, and costumes of the various soldiers, bounty hunters, smugglers, scavengers, scoundrels and mercenaries that any good Star Wars film has to be filled with. Top everything off with a John Williams score, freshly-written for the new movie, and we have at long last, a film that earns the name it arrives under, a film that is recognizably, visibly, truly Star Wars.

Things Havoc disliked: And... perhaps ironically, that is something of the problem.

The Force Awakens is a movie that was clearly designed with the idea in mind of not repeating the mistakes of prequels past, and yet so obsessively does it follow the "script" for a Star Wars movie, or more specifically for the original Star Wars itself, that it winds up being, for even a casual fan of the series, highly derivative. Yes, of course I know that the original Star Wars was also derivative, as Lucas more or less added Samurais and WWII fighter pilots to Joseph Campbell, but this film is even more derivative than that, to the extent of point-by-point retreads of previous moments in the series, including X-wings on a trench run against an evil, planet-sized superweapon with a single weak point, a hero attempting to refuse the call after finally figuring out what is actually going on, dark lords in breathing masks, a search for a wise, old, reclusive Jedi master on a remote planet, and dramatic family revelations taking place on catwalks that have clearly never been approved by OSHA. This is all in addition to the various callbacks, in-jokes, and references that the film is constantly making back to the original trilogy in a desperate effort to convince you that yes, this is actually a Star Wars film, because the Prequels ruined everything and we need to make sure you understand that this is just like the original, okay?! I understand the desire to reassure the fanboys (of which I am one) that things will be different this time, but the constant winking and pointing at the audience gets tiresome, and the movie's slavish fidelity to the decisions of its predecessor prevents it from actually becoming its own story, hoping instead to hint at a different story (or possibly the same story as Empire Strikes Back, who's to tell?)

And in its desperate attempt to rekindle the flames of the first Star Wars, this movie winds up making damn close to no sense at all. We are given more or less the same situation as the last movie, with a giant, evil empire full of Stormtroopers and Star Destroyers (The First Order), and a small, plucky rebellion fighting for freedom (The Resistance), with no sense of where the hell either of these organizations came from or what they're really trying to do. Of course in the original Star Wars, we got the same amount of information, but there it was world-building and it made perfect sense. An Evil Empire exists, a small rebellion exists, have fun. We destroyed the Evil Empire in Return of the Jedi, at least per my recollection, so where the hell did the First Order come from? Are they a remnant force of the Empire? An attempt to re-construct it? A group of particularly dedicated historical re-enactors? I have no idea, nor have I any idea where the "Resistance" came from or why. And all of this lack of basic world information following a thirty-year hiatus from the Galaxy Far Far Away means that very little of what's actually going on makes any sense. A great deal of the plot of this movie has to do with a map leading to SPOILERS REDACTED, of provenance unknown, and a simultaneous attempt to stop the First Order from using a horrifying super-weapon, of provenance unknown, to destroy the New Republic's capital, of provenance (and even name) unknown. Star Wars is a simple, timeless space epic, I grant, and I fully understand that among the Prequels' many, many sins, was an over-focus upon bullshit political minutiae as written by an teenager angry at the Bush Administration. But there is a happy medium between the goddamn Prequels and telling us nothing whatsoever, and this film fails to find it, the filmmakers preferring to assume that the audience doesn't care about things as minor as the plot of the movie they are watching, so long as they get to see some Star Wars staples.

Final Thoughts: And the worst part is, they're right.

I hate to give in to my inner fanboy to this degree, but JJ Abrams and his band of miscreants are absolutely right. I didn't care what the plot of The Force Awakens was, not really, so long as it wasn't something so unforgivably stupid that I was forced to care about it (I'm looking at you, Attack of the Clones). What I wanted was Star Wars, in every sense of the word, the pageantry, the timelessness, the epic scope and feel, the broad, appealing character archetypes, the heroism and action and daring-do, the humor and the drama and the characters and the orchestral grandeur of it all. I wanted Star Wars, peopled with characters I liked, replete with action that was exciting and bombastic, with stakes so high as to be ludicrous and a philosophy so timeless as to be instantly familiar. Next week, and the week after, I will go to the movies to get myself an interesting plot, but all I really wanted from Star Wars was for it to be good, and fun, and entertaining again.

And was it?

Yeah... yeah it was. Despite a plot dredged up from the bottom of George Lucas' boots and a storyboard that has "A New Hope" written on the cover and hastily scratched out, despite all the nitpicks about ex machinas and convenient plot points, despite a handful of lines I wouldn't have written and seams in the writing between Abrams' snark and Star Wars' earnestness, despite everything, yeah... it was what I wanted it to be, even if I didn't want to admit to myself that this was what I actually wanted. Maybe the next movies will continue to be entirely derivative, and I will turn on this new series the way I turned on Hobbit and Hunger Games. Maybe the plot won't get any clearer and the motivations won't get any more nuanced, and the films will implode under the tremendous gravity of their own predecessors. Maybe I will hate the next Star Wars movie because it does those things, or maybe it will do those things and I will love it anyway, because Star Wars is a blind spot for me and I am incapable of objectivity. Maybe I will be sitting here in a couple of years like a trauma victim, trying to assure you all that a series that has done nothing new whatsoever is actually good, despite all markers of objective quality.

Maybe so. But for right now, JJ Abrams clearly wanted to prove to me that he, and others like him, are capable of making good Star Wars films, and that the future films that they are offering are something worth sticking around for. The result isn't perfect, nor, I predict, will it be remembered anywhere near as well as the originals were. But in terms of a fun, exciting, gorgeous film that is recognizably Star Wars in all of its tattered glory? Here it is. Take it or leave it as you will, but we have not seen its like in forty years. And if there is anything at all that the Prequels taught me, it's that a good Star Wars movie is not so simple a thing after all.

Final Score: 7.5/10

Steve · Post by **Steve** » Sun Dec 27, 2015 12:48 am

Looking at your blog post of this, I have a question.

"Next Time: With Star Wars finally behind us, let us now consider a modern sequel to a classic series of beloved films, whose last couple sequels were regarded terribly, starring new young actors alongside the older, now-wizened original cast.

Wait a minute... "

What does this refer to? I almost thought Star Trek but there are none of the original cast in it...

LadyTevar · Post by **LadyTevar** » Sun Dec 27, 2015 5:18 pm

Steve wrote:Looking at your blog post of this, I have a question.

"Next Time: With Star Wars finally behind us, let us now consider a modern sequel to a classic series of beloved films, whose last couple sequels were regarded terribly, starring new young actors alongside the older, now-wizened original cast.

Wait a minute... "
What does this refer to? I almost thought Star Trek but there are none of the original cast in it...

You mean you forgot SPOCK?

Steve · Post by **Steve** » Sun Dec 27, 2015 6:24 pm

He's not in the new one though? I thought he was referencing the upcoming third movie, which as far as I know doesn't have OTL Spock in it for sadly obvious reasons.

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Mon Dec 28, 2015 1:06 am

Steve wrote:What does this refer to? I almost thought Star Trek but there are none of the original cast in it...

Wait and see, Steve, wait and see...

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Mon Dec 28, 2015 9:33 pm

I enjoyed Star Wars but I am forced to admit that it was pretty derivative. Honestly I would say in alot of respects, Abrams played it safe, which was likely the wise thing to do, as I don't think the fandom had alot of charity left.

Steve · Post by **Steve** » Mon Dec 28, 2015 11:55 pm

I honestly saw it as using the iconography of the OT to tell the story. Given the reputation of the prequels, I can see why they made that creative choice. What concerns me isn't that they did it this time, but whether or not they'll start doing new things in following episodes. Was that OT iconography just used as a statement of intent for the first movie, or is it going to be the crutch for the entire trilogy?

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Tue Dec 29, 2015 1:04 pm

Creed

Alternate Title: The 7th Round

One sentence synopsis: The son of Apollo Creed goes to Philadelphia to find his father's long-time rival, Rocky Balboa, and enlist his help in becoming a professional boxer.

Things Havoc liked: Some movie series aren't just movies, but culture-defining institutions. You can hate a particular Star Wars movie all you want, and I certainly have in my day, but objecting that you dislike all of Star Wars is tantamount to rejecting the space opera as a genre, or maybe even the entire popular side of the sci-fi spectrum. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but while a given movie from a series that influential can be bad or good, criticism of the series as a series is more or less irrelevant. If one does not like Westerns, then one simply does not like them, and wishing they included less dust, six-shooters, and horseriding is missing the point. So it is with the Rocky movies, which came to define the entire genre of sports films in general and boxing films in specific. Rocky has had movies of better or worse quality over the years, to put it mildly, but the last film in the series, the simply-titled Rocky Balboa, was a surprisingly decent film overall, particularly considering the context and the depths to which the series had slipped with movies 4 and 5. But here we are, a decade later, with a new film and a new boxer, wherein everything can come full circle.

I have heard a lot about Michael B. Jordan, but up until this film, with the exception of a small role on HBO's The Wire, I don't believe that he and I had crossed paths (at least until I discovered that he'd also had a small role in fucking Red Tails, of all things). Still, I've heard good things about his work in Chronicle and Fruitvale Station, and this seemed like a good opportunity to see what he was all about. And the answer is a great deal, because Jordan is on fire in this movie. His character, Adonis, the illegitimate son of the legendary Apollo Creed, is a well-to-do young man, with a secure, white collar job, who nonetheless moonlights (almost literally) as a boxer in dive undercards in Tijuana. Early on in the film he makes the decision to leave everything behind, his job, his family, and move to Philadelphia in the hopes of finding his father's old nemesis/friend and receiving his training as a professional boxer. The question of why he does all this, when unlike Rocky or other typical sports movie underdogs, he has all manner of other choices he could make, is never really answered (except in one line at the very end of the film), and frankly, never really has to be, as Jordan conveys everything wordlessly, a drive that has nothing to do with the working class and everything to do with self-respect. The physicality demanded of anyone starring in a boxing movie is there as well, as Jordan looks lean and lethal, and the scenes in which he obsessively trains for a boxing career that may never ever happen are as convincing as any movie-boxing sequences I've ever seen. It's one of the best all-round boxer performances I've ever seen, frankly, and while that might not sound like much praise, bear in mind that that list includes Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, Real Steel (shut up!), and the other Rocky films themselves.

Ah but this is a Rocky film, isn't it? So what of Rocky himself, played as always by the immortal Sylvester Stallone. Stallone might not have the greatest range as an actor, nor the finest reputation in these reviews of mine (the less said about Escape Plan and Expendables 3, the better), but lest anybody forget, Stallone is one of only three men (the others being Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin) to receive two Oscar nominations for the same film, nor should anyone forget that the movie in which he did this was the original Rocky. I've always counted myself a fan of Stallone's when he's in the right sort of role, Rocky or Rambo or some slurring badass fighting crime with both fists, but this is his original role, and frankly, at 69, he's every bit as convincing as he was at 30, maybe even more. Rocky in this movie is an old man, retired to his restaurant in his old working-class Philly neighborhood. Reluctant at first to even indulge some no-name youngster from California, a kid who is plainly not the first to seek the old war-horse out, Rocky has to be prodded and cajoled into the Burgess Meredith role from the original film. Yet when he finally takes it on, Stallone is, ironically, entirely in his element, even though that element entails nothing like his typical role. Moments such as a standout scene in a doctor's office, where the Italian Stallion is faced with a cancer diagnosis and quietly decides against seeking treatment, or a scene near the end where he has to be helped up the famous Philly steps that he once made famous sound melodramatic on paper, but Stallone plays them with a quiet dignity that I really didn't think he had in him. It's not the stuff of further Oscars, necessarily, but it's an excellent turn from an actor infamous for vanity projects showcasing him as an invulnerable badass irrespective of circumstance. Stallone and Jordan play off one another wonderfully, all without falling (too far at least) into the usual traps.

Creed was written and directed by up-and-comer Ryan Coogler, who made his debut in 2013 with Fruitvale Station, also starring Jordan. I had my issues with Fruitvale Station (to put it mildly), but most everyone else did not, and even I had to admit that the film was exceedingly well made on a mechanical level. Creed, on the other hand, is a step above, shot expertly and with great skill. An early standout sequence involves an entire light-heavyweight fight, including multiple rounds and corner breaks, all shot in a single, unbroken take. Granted, unbroken takes have become the auteur-du-jour calling card recently (thank you, Birdman), but a good one is still impressive, and Coogler supplements the camera tricks with other nice touches, such as the John Wick-style tale-of-the-tape stat-cards that appear around other boxers at key points in the film, and the judicious addition of the old-standby Rocky-training montages. As to the writing of the film, it leans heavily on elements that have always been strengths of the Rocky franchise. Rocky films have always had "villains" that weren't really villains, and this one is no different, as Creed's primary opponent is an English champion with serious anger management issues who, facing a seven-year sentence on a gun charge that is essentially going to end his career, is looking for one last high-profile fight so as to earn enough money to take care of his family, something he needs desperately enough to agree to a fight with an untested youngster with a famous name.

Things Havoc disliked: Unfortunately, not everything in the film is as well fleshed out as the villain. Tessa Thompson, from Selma and a number of other films, is the Creed's love interest in the film, a role that is in no way elevated above the previous statement. Clumsy attempts are made to give her character, a young singer and musician whom Creed meets in Philadelphia, something of interest, but these amount largely to the fact that she is suffering from congenital hearing loss and will eventually go deaf. What is done with this fact or this character in general? Nothing, save for the usual routine of three-act movies in which they must fight and break up only to reunite at the end when the main character needs her support the most. It's not that Thompson is particularly bad in the role, it's that the role is particularly useless, to the point where the Wikipedia summary of the film tellingly doesn't mention her character at all.

There's also the question of the boxing itself, which is a sore subject given that the problems this movie has are the same ones that Rocky effectively welded into the genre back in 1976. Simply put, boxing does not work this way, and it never has. Boxers in Creed, as in every Rocky movie, and by extension every boxing movie ever made, stand in the center of the ring trading blows to the head and body that would lay a man dead on the canvas were a real, professional boxer to ever deliver them in real life. Yet the movie seems to think it perfectly normal for its combatants to absorb dozens and hundreds of these blows before going down, even as their faces are pounded into hamburger meat and their bodies take shots that should liquify their organs with each punch. Boxing, at its most technical, can be a deceptively slow-looking sport, I grant, and nobody came to this movie hoping to see the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight all over again, but I do wish that boxing films would occasionally showcase something resembling boxing, rather than the Terminator-style bludgeonings that the Rocky films cemented in the genre to begin with.

Final Thoughts: Creed is not a terribly ambitious movie, but it is an extremely well-made one, a film that follows the old dictum that very little can go wrong when your movie calls for two good actors to stand in a room and act at one another. I'm not qualified, necessarily, to speak to it in terms of its position vis-a-vis the Rocky films of old, but as a sports film in the modern age, it stands as a testament to the notion, already highly popular this year, that new blood in an old franchise can pay great dividends if the material is treated with the respect it deserves. I don't know if this movie is the first of a new series, or if in 2018, we will see Jordan fighting steroid-enhanced Russians or acting alongside synthesized robots. But for now, all I've ever asked for was a movie that worked, and Creed is, if nothing else, unquestionably that.

Final Score: 7.5/10

rhoenix · Post by **rhoenix** » Tue Dec 29, 2015 9:44 pm

I'm still considering what I saw of the new Star Wars movie. Specifically, I'm still considering whether or not the huge winks and nudges the film gave to A New Hope and other aspects of the original trilogy were good storytelling or not.

Spoilers to be respectful for the few people who have not yet seen the movie:

Spoiler: show

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Sat Jan 02, 2016 5:56 pm

The Good Dinosaur

Alternate Title: Young Earth Creationism

One sentence synopsis: In a world where dinosaurs never went extinct, a young dinosaur, separated from his family, tries to find a way home with the assistance of a feral caveboy.

Things Havoc liked: Pixar, Pixar, Pixar, what am I supposed to do with Pixar? The great movies of Pixar's oeuvre stand out as some of the finest things ever animated, but the result for them has been that every Pixar movie is now judged in the context of Up or Wall-E or Finding Nemo, which has lead to complaints (with some justification), that if anyone besides Pixar had released Inside Out or Brave, it would have found considerably more acclaim. That may be so, but Pixar's the ones that set the bar this high, so they really have nobody but themselves to complain to when we get an unreasonable expectation upon seeing their name pop up in the opening credits. All of this, of course, is nothing but a clumsy attempt to explain why it was that in the midst of a Holiday season that gave us Star Wars, Tarantino westerns, a glut of Oscar bait, and the new David O. Russel movie, I decided it was time to sit down and watch an animated children's movie about dinosaurs.

Don't judge me.

The Good Dinosaur, Pixar's second (and far less-prominent) feature film of 2015, is a very old story told via a twist that leads to more speculation than a G-rated kids movie usually allows for. The premise is that the Chixulub Impactor, the 6-mile-wide asteroid that obliterated the Dinosaurs some 65,000,000 years ago, missed Earth rather than colliding with it, allowing dinosaurs to continue to evolve right alongside mammals and birds. Alternate History (Alternate Pre-History?) is one of my personal passions, and the hints of the society that the now-evolved, albeit still primitive intelligent dinosaurs are piecing together were enough to sell me. Saurians and other plant-eating dinosaurs seem to have developed into agricultural farmers, while meat-eating dinos such as the therapods and raptors have become herders and animal husbanders, a nice shift from the typical "meat-eaters = evil" that you see in films like The Land Before Time. Obviously this film isn't about the anthropological implications of pastoral-agricultural relations among stone-age reptiles (we hope to publish next year), but an excuse to allow for cavemen and dinosaurs to co-exist without having to ban Evolution from the schools.

So what is the movie about then, if not a mediation on social structures that never were? Well, strangely enough, the story that all this weird ahistorical trapping is draped around is a kid-alone-in-the-wilderness-style adventure movie, a genre of film that used to be very popular on the direct-to-video circuit, and may still be for all I know, and had titles like Into the Wild, Far From Home, or A Cry in the Wild, which made them very hard to distinguish one from the other. Pixar crosses this genre with a more straightforward adventure movie, in which audience-surrogate protagonists travel through exotic lands and meet strange and interesting people while learning and using life lessons (the examples are too many to cite). The audience-surrogate protagonist in question is Arlo, the youngest son of a family of little-house-on-the-prairie-style pioneer Apatosaurs (Jeffrey Wright and an unrecognizable Frances McDormand), whose problem to be overcome (there's always one in these sorts of films) is constant, overwhelming fear at his surroundings. What Saurians capable of plowing furrows with their faces and chopping down trees with a single tail-swipe have to be afraid of is never really stated, but then fear is not rational by definition, especially in kids. Separated from his family thanks to a flash flood and some contrived circumstances, Arlo meets a mute human cave-boy whose role, oddly enough, is, in this boy-and-his-dog-style genre, that of the dog (Arlo even names him "Spot"). Having a five or six year old kid take on the role of the fearless animal companion who challenges venomous pit vipers and pterodactyls eight times his size while the dinosaur protagonist cowers in fear behind him is... an interesting state of affairs, but then this is all kids' parable stuff anyway, and it's handled reasonably well, to be honest. The messages aren't too obvious and the two protagonists are well-animated, well-voice-acted, and done up in Pixar's trademark sentimental style.

So what else is there to say for this film? Well for one thing it's gorgeous. Pixar's films are always gorgeous, even the mediocre ones, and The Good Dinosaur has a lovely, nearly photorealistic style for its backgrounds and landscapes. The film takes place (I'm guessing) somewhere in the American West (fitting the pioneer theme, I suppose), and sports a John-Ford-style eye for the impressive, rugged landscapes that the area naturally affords (I swear, I thought I saw Monument Valley). The water effects in particular deserve praise, be they placid, still rivers rippling down their banks, or the surging, muddy tide of a landslide-induced flash flood. Beyond the visuals though, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the existence of the legendary Sam Elliot (the man, the legend, the mustache), playing a cowboy tyrannosaur driving a herd of buffalo across the open ranges of the American West. I try to respect the breadth of opinions that exist within the world of film criticism, but frankly, anyone who fails to get excited at the prospect of Sam Freaking Elliot playing a Tyrannosaurus Rex who is also a cowboy needs to either stop watching movies (because they have become far too cynical) or start (because they've clearly never seen one).

Things Havoc disliked: I said that The Good Dinosaur is gorgeous, and it really, really is, but for some reason Pixar chose a hyper-realistic animation style for the landscapes and backgrounds of the movie, and an extremely stylized, cartoony style for the characters themselves, which fits together kind of awkwardly. I recognize that a hell of a lot goes into animated character design, and realism is not necessarily one of the most important factors, but there's a visible clash this time between the characters themselves and the world they inhabit that simply wasn't there for most of Pixar's previous work. Finding Nemo for instance, managed to make its fish characters highly expressive and cartoony without making them stand out too eregiously from the underwater tropical world that existed around them. More to the point, Brave, whose software was refined to produce this movie, managed to use subtle shifts in how the characters were animated and how stylized they were to portray the changing mental and emotional states of their human or ursine cast. Maybe the more alien/up-to-date designs of some of the dinosaurs here (the filmmakers give us raptors which look a lot more like the semi-reptillian chickens they more or less were than Jurassic Park ever did) threw me off, or maybe it's a facet of the intended audience, but while neither the characters nor the background work is bad, the combination of the two is a bit... distracting.

Overall though, the issue with The Good Dinosaur isn't so much what it does wrong as what it doesn't do at all. Yes, this is a kids' film, and in consequence is going to have big, broad themes mixed with slapstick comedy, and a few winks to the audience for the adults, except that that's really not been true of Pixar's other work, or at least their best work. The Good Dinosaur is about a little dinosaur trying to find his way home with the help of strange people he meets along the way, and while that's fine, it's also... all that the movie is about. Compare that to Up or Wall-E or The Incredibles, which were about a great many things, some of them fairly subtle, or even to Inside Out, which was about some pretty heavy and abstract stuff (depression, epistemology, and even gender roles). There's nothing wrong with a simple film, certainly, but The Good Dinosaur feels like material that Disney might have put out in between one of their multiple golden ages, a time-filler movie that is designed to look nice and entertain the kids for a while, and then be over with.

Final Thoughts: Maybe I'm being too harsh, and maybe "just" making a good kids' film that isn't stupid is harder than it sounds (in fact I'm certain it is), but while it's always unfair to criticize a film for not being another film, it's almost impossible not to judge the Good Dinosaur in the context of what we've come to expect from Pixar. It's a fine, family movie overall, written well and animated gorgeously, with a number of strong elements that make it worth a watch if you happen to be looking for good kids' movies. But the previous entries in Pixar's oeuvre were masterpieces that transcended the label of "kids" film or any other genre for that matter, movies that had to be seen by everybody, regardless of their circumstances or background, speaking to people on a number of levels at once. The Good Dinosaur is not one such movie, but then that's not so terrible a sin either. After all, if every movie transcended the genre they were written into, then there'd be nothing special about Pixar's best work at all.

And hell, any movie that gives me Sam Elliot, Tyrannosaur-Cowboy, has to be doing something right.

Final Score: 6.5/10

LadyTevar · Post by **LadyTevar** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 1:54 pm

".... I drown'd him in my own blood....."

You can't get more Sam Elliot than that.

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Mon Jan 04, 2016 1:17 pm

The Hateful Eight

Alternate Title: No More Heroes

One sentence synopsis: Eight strangers find themselves stuck in a cabin together in 1870s Wyoming.

Things Havoc liked: I don't know if Quentin Tarantino has spent the last twenty-five years going increasingly insane, or if he was already raving mad and has simply been revealing that fact to us for a quarter-century. A lot of people look at him as screaming, indulgent egotist, who makes movies comprised entirely of style with no substance whatsoever. I understand that opinion, as the maddening unevenness of Tarantino's work can be frustrating as all hell given the generally high-level of cinemacraft he displays in producing it. The last half-hour of Django Unchained, for instance, came close to ruining the previous two hours, which were a veritable masterclass of restraint, pacing, and alternately rich and claustrophobic cinematography, while Inglorious Basterds was, in many ways, a highly-unfocused mess of a film elevated by a handful of standout scenes and actors. But for all of that, my view of Tarantino has always been a crazed, fanatical artiste filmmaker, whose obsessions are so prominent that they will not permit him to make anything but highly original movies, movies which sometimes overreach, but are always interesting to watch. All the paraphernalia he surrounded his latest film with, the touring pre-release roadshow, the intermission, the film brochure handed out to everyone on walking into the theater, from any other filmmaker, this would smack of unreasonable arrogance. But Tarantino has been operating at that precise level of arrogance since I was in High School, and alone among modern filmmakers I know of, he possesses both the willingness to engage in lunatic stunts like this, and the film pedigree to back it all up. Who else, after all, would I willingly sit through a three-hour, seventeen-minute film from after their last two movies had been underwhelming? With what other filmmaker's work could I convince someone else to come and do the same?

Maybe nobody. Maybe several. But all that matters is that I did these things, and boy am I ever glad I did.

The Hateful Eight is a masterpiece, of what I'm not entirely certain, but a staggering achievement in the realm of pacing, cinematography, and the firework potentials that can arise when you take a bunch of good actors and stick them in a room for a few hours. It is a relentless, bloody film about awful people doing terrible things to one another, delivered with all the grinning cocksureness that Tarantino is known for with far less of the over-indulgent twelve-year-old that we all know resides somewhere within his soul. It is a masterful work delivered by a masterful hand, whose flaws, of which there are quite a few, only serve to underlie just what surety guides Tarantino's directing, and what faith the actors who know him place within his ability to make anything, from subtle dialogues to quotidian acts like nailing a door shut, into tense, style-dripping setpieces. It is a very long film that doesn't feel very long, and one of the best movies that Tarantino has ever made, a movie where half of the moviegoing audience that exists out there will hate it, because they are intended to. Not being part of that half of the audience, I can only applaud the gall with which Tarantino has produced this awful, brutal, repellent thing, and praise it as is its due.

The Hateful Eight is in many ways a deceptively simple film. Eight people, two bounty hunters, a condemned murderess, a newly-minted sheriff, a confederate general, an English hangman, a cattle drover, and a Mexican hosteler are trapped by a blizzard at a large trail cabin in Wyoming. Many of these people know one another, often without admitting to it at first. Others have hidden secrets that they wish to divulge only at the proper time. All are armed, dangerous, and without exception, are terrible, awful, rancid human beings, bigots, murderers, sadists, killers of every stripe and every sort. If there's anything that his previous films have taught me, it's that Tarantino has a great affection for terrible people as characters, and indeed he spends much of the film getting to know them in their own words, finding out their idiosyncrasies, their self-justifications, the humanizing touches that enable us as an audience to empathize with this one or that one. Yet it is all a game, and Tarantino is the Game Master, as he plays with our modern conceptions of labels and the color-coded moralities that most films deal with to make the audience identify first this character as the hero, then that one as the villain, knowing all the time that there are no heroes in this film, no redeemed characters who can rise above their bitterly-regretted pasts for a cathartic third act, no sympathetic victims unjustly maligned by the designated bad guys. Only terrible people trapped in this cabin, and their allegiances and intentions shift and twist around one another like a nest of vipers.

And of course it's not just Tarantino playing us this way. The film boasts a wonderful cast full of excellent character actors who know just how to wring the right notes from Tarantino's ever-poetic dialogue. Front and center is Samuel L. Jackson, a man who needs no introduction from me, playing a Civil War cavalry officer-turned Bounty Hunter, who, if anyone, is the main character of this bloody drama. Jackson is, of course, a Tarantino regular from as far back as Pulp Fiction, and is in his element here, luxuriating in long, Poirot-style monologues in which he deduces the secrets of the rest of the cast or illustrates a lengthy, horrifying tale about his own past in terrible, graphic detail. Tarantino gets deserved flack for overindulging in his dialogue fetish, but Hateful Eight is set up specifically to permit such indulgences without interruption from plot elements or the requirements of taste. Jackson's character is as awful as everyone else's, but Tarantino has always known how to make Jackson look cool, regardless of the circumstances, and he takes full advantage of that, engaging in swift, horrific violence at the drop of a perfectly-phrased line. Not that everyone else suffers by comparison of course. Jennifer Jason Leigh, whom I've not seen in... well practically ever really, goes full Charlize Theron as a ignorant, murderous, monster of a woman being dragged off to hang. Her role involves getting punched in the face a lot and coming out spitting, something she is so good at you want to shower every time she's on the screen. Kurt Russell, who is awesome but manifestly not a great actor, manages to make his Jim Bridger-style Mountain Man into a raving pastiche of an invincible wilderness man, and Russell has always been better at pastiches than subtlety. Excellent turns by Demian Bechir (the best thing from Machete Kills), Tim Roth, and Bruce Dern all liven the film in their inimitable style, but the standout performance of the bunch comes from, of all people, character actor Walton Goggins, one of Robert Rodriguez' go-tos, playing a racist Confederate raider-turned-sheriff, who is both considerably smarter and considerably dumber than he passes himself off as being, and who winds up, over the course of the film, in some of the more surprising situations I've seen all year.

But then that fact itself shouldn't be much of a surprise, because Tarantino has stacked the deck with this one. Having eliminated all notions of conventional storytelling by ruthlessly exterminating any shred of heroism within our assembled cast (save for a few red herrings thrown in for fun), Tarantino is left free to do whatever he wants. His cinematography, shot on full, luscious 70mm celluloid, is rich and understated, drinking in the wide-open and yet claustrophobic confines of the cabin and lingering on evocative shots, such as that of snow swirling through the front door as the wind howls just beyond. The violence (and rest assured, there is violence) is equally luxurious, whether filmed in slow motion or with one sudden, gruesome shot. And what should underlie the entire affair, but a film score composed by the legendary Ennio Morricone, of spaghetti western fame and so much more, who just two years ago famously declared that he would never work with Tarantino ever again, and apparently was brought to change his mind. Morricone's score, his first western score since the 1970s, places the film precisely in the old-school context that Tarantino intends, and placing his work in a five-minute overture at the beginning of the movie probably did a lot to smooth over whatever feathers were ruffled after Django Unchained.

Things Havoc disliked: There's really no getting around the fact that a three-hour, seven-minute movie is a long goddamn movie, particularly when the movie in question features a bunch of actors trapped in a cabin together. The Lord of the Rings was long as well, but it, at least, spent its time on elaborate battle sequences and fantasy wars. I grant that I saw the "roadshow" version of the film, which is considerably longer than the theatrical cut, but most of that is due to the intermission that will presumably be cut out of the real film, and bear in mind that my version didn't come with the customary twenty minutes of ads and trailers. And for all the genius of Hateful Eight's framing, pace and writing, there are entire sequences I would have cut right out of the film. An elaborate flashback sequence detailing how several of the characters came to be at the cabin goes on roughly twice as long as it needs to, and most of the material relating to Michael Madsen (another Tarantino staple actor) and Eli Roth turns out to be artifice for the sake of artifice. There are also some questions that inevitably arise concerning why certain characters act as they do, given the ultimate goals that we discover them to have, which are natural when your movie is three hours of people lying to one another. To say more on that subject would be spoilery, so let's just say that plot has never been Tarantino's forte nor his area of interest, and this film is not the moment where he suddenly figured it out.

Final Thoughts: A great many people I know will despise the Hateful Eight as a ghoulish exercise in unremitting awfulness and bloodshed, and they will be right to do so. I, on the other hand, have chosen to praise the film for precisely these qualities, as it is one of the finest exercises in ghoulish bloodshed and general awfulness that I have seen in quite a long time, a movie worthy of being compared to Tarantino's great works of old such as Reservoir Dogs or Jackie Brown. It is a film that showcases a master of his craft executing precisely what he wishes to do, a movie that eschews our demands of Westerns or movies in general in favor of showcasing a concept that simply appealed to the deranged mind of one of the best filmmakers working. I'd be lying if I said I was in a hurry to see Hateful Eight again. A film that long needs to be prepared for. But in a year that had an awful lot of tentpole franchise-building and safe, pedestrian choices, it takes a movie like The Hateful Eight to remind us all just what the cinema is capable of being, once you have someone this good behind the camera.

Final Score: 8/10

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Tue Jan 05, 2016 1:08 am

Ironically while it sounds good... I think this review convinced me to skip it.

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 12:40 pm

Joy

Alternate Title: Joylessness

One sentence synopsis: A young woman caring for her extended, dysfunctional family, invents a new type of mop and struggles to build a business around it.

Things Havoc liked: Some things are as regular as the seasons themselves. Take wintertime, when we encounter short days and cold weather, the NFL playoffs, Christmas holidays, and of course, the most regular of all predictable events, the yearly David O. Russel movie starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, and Bradley Cooper.

Yes, for the third year in a row (unless you count last year, but who does?), Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell has returned to the well, bringing us another movie about weird, quirky people starring the same weird quirky actors as his last weird, quirky movie. In 2012, there was Silver Linings Playbook, a cute little romanitc comedy about two utterly broken, manipulative people, and their only-slightly-less-broken families trying to help them. In 2013, it was American Hustle, a madcap romp through the worst of 70s hairstyles featuring Christian Bale as a con-man with a combover of the gods. And now we have Joy, which is a movie about a whole panoply of insane, needy characters, and the one person who tries her best to take care of them all.

Joy stars Jennifer Lawrence, one of your and my favorite young actresses, and a veteran of both of the films I cited above, playing Joy Mangano, who is a woman in greater need of a week-long vacation to Hawaii than anyone else you or I will ever meet. A prodigy with mechanics and construction (or as the hipsters around here call it nowadays, a "maker"), Joy is inspired to invent a new type of self-wringing mop after one-too-many accidents while trying to clean up broken glass around her dysfunctional house (more on this later), and spends the rest of the movie trying to flog it to consumers any which way she can, eventually landing on QVC, the famous home shopping network, the meaning of whose initials I never knew before I watched this movie. Joy Mangano is a real woman, who really did these things in 1989, though how truthful the movie is to the reality of her story, I cannot tell. Lawrence is superb in this movie, as she is in everything I see her in, as a young woman stretched to the breaking point by the demanding needs of her extended family (more on this later), two kids, two parents, an ex-husband, a jealous half-sister, a job she hates, a desire to succeed, bills, arrests, and the thousand frustrations of life. The character never comes across as a martyr (very easy to do in cases like this), nor as some kind of needy twit (ditto), but an eminently watchable character just trying to keep all the plates spinning, in circumstances that occasionally had me wanting to run out of the room screaming (more on this later).

So what else does the movie boast? Well there's a reason Russell keeps coming back to this cast. Bradley Cooper this time plays a producer and acolyte for QVC, a salesman with a slightly messianic bent who proselytizes the gospel according to home shopping networks. His role isn't huge, but he's a strange, vaguely-orgasmic character, who seems to regard the production of a successful infomercial and the sales that it generates as a cross between conducting a symphony and performing stage magic. Robert De Niro and Virginia Madsen play Joy's father and mother respectively, the former a lonely, embittered car mechanic with good intentions and terrible habits, the latter a cloistered, dependent shut-in with no sense of perspective beyond the walls of her room. Both De Niro and Madsen are excellent in roles that have them screaming and breaking things and tearfully apologizing seconds later, be those things a water glass or their daughter's life and career. Edgar Ramirez, of Zero Dark Thirty (among other things) manages to be affable and appealing despite playing a deadbeat loser still living in his ex-wife's basement, while the eternally-glamorous Isabella Rossellini plays a wealthy widow whose business acumen is not quite the equal of the cold merciless demeanor she puts on when dealing with it. All of these are good actors, each of which have fun, meaty roles to play, which has always been the hallmark of Russell's success.

Things Havoc disliked: This time, however, the service all this talent is put to lets the whole movie down.

For a movie called Joy, this film is one of the hardest things I've had to watch since Leviathan mercifully ended, and the reason for that is because every one of these excellent actors, Lawrence excluded, has been instructed to put all their talent and skill towards portraying characters that I simply wanted to kill for almost all of the run-time of the film. The tone is set early on, when De Niro, fresh from another divorce, returns to Joy's house expecting to be given a place to stay, only to instantly confront and insult his first ex-wife and embark on a tirade against her that culminates in him violently smashing things while screaming invective. He apologizes, pro-forma of course, but treats the event as no big deal, expecting Joy to simply accept him acting in this way whenever he wants. So does Joy's mother, who watches soap operas all day and demands that Joy deal with every intrusion on her life from bills to repairs without even requiring her to lay eyes on other human beings. So does her sister, a thoroughly loathsome bitch seething with barely-suppressed jealousy, who sabotages her constantly in front of her children, business partners, and family. And Joy simply takes it, accepting the abuse and the negging and the jealousy and the dysfunction and the constant bickering fights that swirl around her. To Lawrence and Russell's credit, the film doesn't try to make her a stand-in for Jesus, but it does rob the audience of any sense of catharsis, as we are left sitting there waiting for Lawrence to do the sensible thing and throw everyone into an active volcano. Because she does not do this, we are left watching these awful, awful people for hours on end, and the skill with which the various actors blame Lawrence for every problem, denigrate and sabotage her constantly, and act like entitled dicks, only makes everything worse.

And on top of that, there's an issue with Russell's writing, normally as sharp as it comes, but this time so over-written, so impossibly on-the-nose, that it exacerbates all of the film's flaws. This isn't a movie where characters are allowed to simply emote or act, they must explain, in great and exacting detail, what they are feeling at this exact moment and how that relates to the arc of their lives. So it is that when Joy looks like she is faced with bankruptcy after her business is knocked onto the ropes by incompetence on the part of her family and outright theft on the part of her suppliers, her family gathers together to enact an elaborate after-action breakdown, in which they discuss, over and over again and in explicit detail, how this happened because Joy is a loser, who should not be in business, because she is weak, and will lose all her money, which she just did, because she is a loser, and has now lost her money, as losers do, and must now file for bankruptcy, the papers for which are right over here, which she should sign right now, signifying that she is a loser, who lost all her money, because she doesn't know anything about business, as the papers will attest to, which is why she should sign them, because then everyone will know she is a loser, who has lost all of her money in a risky business venture, which she should never have been in, because she should instead go home and be a loser, which is all she is, as attested to by the fact that she lost all her money, so she should sign the forms right now, and then everyone will forever know that she is a loser whose life ended on this day after she lost all her money, and that will be the abrupt end of her story, with no possible chance of redemption, ever.

Final Thoughts: Joy is not a badly-made movie, but it is a movie I flat out did not enjoy the act of watching, and had I been unable to make snarky comments about the awful people on screen, I would have enjoyed it even less. Plenty of movies are made about terrible people, including several films I have enjoyed tremendously, from Pain & Gain, to Russell's own American Hustle. This film, however, presents us terrible people not so that we may understand them or take pleasure in their sleaziness and greed, nor enjoy the act of watching them fail, but so that they can be inflicted on the main character, and thereby on us, for more than two hours without any compensating gain for our trouble. As such, despite the pedigree and the acting on offer, Joy is a film I simply wanted to end, and could not find much reason, in retrospect, to recommend to anyone. After all, even if you're a die-hard Jennifer Lawrence fan, and I have been accused of such in the past, surely you would prefer to see her in a role that serves some purpose beyond showering everyone with misery until the lights come up.

After all, if I wanted that, I'd go see an Alejandro Iñárritu movie...

Final Score: 5/10

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Sun Jan 17, 2016 6:25 pm

The Revenant

Alternate Title: The Montana Tourist Board Welcomes You...

One sentence synopsis: After being horribly mauled in a vicious bear attack, a frontier trapper is abandoned to die by his comrades, and must find a way to survive long enough to take revenge.

Things Havoc liked: Another year is gone (quite a ways gone by the time you're all reading this), but as always, January leaves me in something of a pickle. On the one hand, I want to close the books on 2015's movies as soon as possible, the better to get started on another sterling round of Doldrums-season offerings (A Michael Bay movie about the Benghazi attacks? It's like Christmas stayed an extra month!), and the better to produce my yearly lists of praise and pain that I know some of you are waiting for. But on the other hand, with the glut of movies released at Christmastime, I always feel bad about drawing the year closed before I've had a chance to see some of the major films within it. I can't wait for all of them of course, that would push my end-of-year lists to March, but with the proviso that there are still a handful of films I have not seen that I probably should have (The Danish Girl, Brooklyn, and The Big Short among them), there was one in particular that I felt I had to see before I could credibly start making claims about what the "best" or "worst" movies of the year was. And for that movie, it's time to turn our attention back to Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Those of you who have been reading my reviews for a while know that Iñárritu was one of the first directors I ever watched for this project, when a Spanish-language film called Biutiful starring Javier Bardem rolled through my multiplex. Biutiful was a well-made, well-acted, horrifyingly-depressing film that I would have liked more had it not engendered a desire in its audience to go home and drink bottles of Percocet. His more recent film, Birdman (Or, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), was a much better offering, a stylish, quirky actors' film showcasing a number of people I like and even a few I customarily don't. I liked Birdman, perhaps not as much as the Academy did, but it was a piece that grew in my mind as I thought about it more. And so when Iñárritu came back not a year later with a dense, atmospheric piece straight out of the Last of the Mohicans playbook, starring a couple of actors (Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy) that I love, and promising to place them in situations where they are allowed to "act" in the wider sense of the term, I was stoked. Also there's bears.

It is 1823, somewhere in the endless wilderness that will one day be called Montana, and Leonardo DiCaprio is a fur trapper and mountain man named Hugh Glass whose expedition is nearly massacred by a vengeful war party of Arikara indians. After a narrow escape by boat with a handful of men, DiCaprio tries to lead the remnants of the trapping party as well as his half-native son (newcomer Forrest Goodluck) back to the safety of a fort, only to accidentally stumble on a mother bear protecting her cubs, falling victim to one of the most gruesome and realistic animal attacks I've ever seen in a movie. Iñárritu is a nutcase, and this movie nearly turned into a Heaven's Gate-style disaster, when he insisted on not only filming on location but chronologically, weather and the tolerance of actors be damned. As a result, the bear attack in question featured a real, trained bear, proving once again that Leonardo DiCaprio is completely insane, and has been denied his recognition at the Oscars for long enough that he is willing to do literally anything to finally reach the mountaintop.

In fact, the whole movie could be subtitled "willing to do literally anything", as following the gruesome bear assault, Glass is left barely-alive (zing!), and entirely dependent on the rest of his party. With hostile tribesmen pursuing them, he winds up being abandoned in the woods by Tom Hardy, playing another mountain man, who callously leaves Leonardo to die of exposure and kills his son before his eyes when he tries to stop it. The movie then becomes a two-and-a-half hour festival of pain as DiCaprio painfully drags himself back to life and civilization, enduring one horrific necessity after another from cauterizing his own wounded throat with gunpowder, to ripping a horse carcass open to take shelter within it, to sudden ambushes by (and of) hostile natives or rival fur trappers, to a smorgasbord of all of the disgusting, raw, bleeding offal meat that one can encounter in the wilderness, with nothing but his own gritted teeth and matted beard and raving crazy-eyes to sustain him through. It's a transparent attempt at an Oscar grab by DiCaprio, who famously threw one of the great Hollywood tantrums of our time when the Academy (deservedly) snubbed him for Titanic, and has been trying to act his way back into their good graces ever since. But lest I sound too cynical, it's also one of the best performances of the year, if only for the evident misery that both character and actor went through to film it. Whatever else he might be, DiCaprio is a great actor, after all, and so is Tom Hardy, playing another veteran frontiersman desperate to get his money and get out of Montana in that order, and utterly unconcerned with who he might have to kill to do it. The character isn't evil so much as totally amoral, willing to kill to survive and get what he feels he needs, but never in a way that feels needless. Apart from an extended racist rant at the beginning of the film (something that would not make the character stand out at all in 1823), Hardy plays his character like someone who might well be a decent guy were he not stuck in wintertime Montana, trying to escape both a horde of righteously-angry natives, and Leonardo DiCaprio's inhuman rage-and-revenge-fueled survivalism.

I mentioned before that Iñárritu is insane, and he is, but he's also a sharp, visually-inventive director addicted to long-takes (Birdman was done up entirely as one of these) and gorgeous cinematography. For this purpose, Iñárritu works here, as he has in previous films, with legendary cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Morgenstern, one of the most prolific art-cinematographers in the world, who regularly collaborates with Alfonso Cuarón, Terrence Malick, and the Coen Brothers. The result is a stark, beautiful film, bleak and evocative, with gorgeous, atmosphere-laden shots of the vastness of Montana's plains and mountains and forests and rivers, along with extended dream sequences showcasing tripy imagery, like the repeated motif of a bell still ringing defiantly within a ruined, abandoned church lost somewhere in the wilderness. Battle sequences, which are sparing but unreservedly brutal, are shot in close quarters, with the cameraman running through the proceedings as though trying not to get hit by the flying arrows and bullets (which may be true), while the hideous brutality of combat with knives, tomahawks, arrows, and muskets is showcased throughout, as blood stains the snow and gruesome injuries are lingered upon. A haunting, atonal score by experimental composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, with whom Iñárritu worked on Babel, completes the package, resulting in a film that has everything the Academy could ever want, except maybe a scene wherein an old white filmmaker saves the universe (those always help).

Things Havoc disliked: Back on the temporal plane though, Iñárritu has a habit of making movies that, whether or not they are actually too long, sure feel that way when you're watching them. Birdman, despite coming in at barely two hours in length, and despite the services of actors I love and material I respect, felt like it took half the night to finally end, and Iñárritu's earlier films, Babel and Biutiful in particular (does he have a thing for 'B' names?) felt even longer. The Revenant, meanwhile, actually is a long film, more than two and a half hours, and given the paucity of action (a couple of standout scenes) and lack of characters to follow or journeys for them to take (metaphorically-speaking), we spend a hell of a lot of time in this movie watching Leonardo DiCaprio suffer in the snow. I know that's the point of the movie, more or less, but the revenge element, played up so heavily in the marketing of the movie (the film's name is "Revenant" for God's sake), while present, really takes a back seat until the very end of the film. Granted, there's good reason for that, as merely surviving the Montana wilderness is a task and a half, but despite everything, the best actors of the cast and crew and a director who is legitimately insane in very interesting ways, the film is... inescapably boring, at least for long stretches.

And part of the reason for that is that DiCaprio's character, whom we are following through this awful ordeal, never gets the same opportunity to characterize himself the way Tom Hardy's does. Part of that is the unavoidable fact of being stuck alone in the wilderness for most of the runtime, but there's also the extended flashback and dream sequences I referenced earlier, which while pretty, really clarify nothing. This speaks to a larger problem with Iñárritu as a director, which is that he has no idea how to actually tell a story in ways that mortals are supposed to comprehend, leaving everything up to interpretation that requires the audience to do most of the work. So it was with Birdman, wherein the main character was occasionally insane, possibly hallucinating, or perhaps actually possessed of magical superpowers that nobody else knows anything about, or Biutiful, which had an extended Magical Realism sequence in the middle of the film that made no sense, alongside a weird conceit that the main character worked as a spirit-whisperer who talks to presumably-real-ghosts, all in the middle of a bitingly-real story of a man dying of cancer, illegal immigration, and the criminal world. Granted, both of those movies worked, despite or perhaps because of the lack of specificity, but Revenant, at least in part, represents a step too far. Instead of characterization of the man we are spending most of the movie watching suffer, we get disjointed scenes of moments from his past wherein he met a native woman, had a son, killed a man, and perhaps did other things I couldn't quite figure out. It's not that these scenes are totally abstract (though a recurring image of a pyramid of buffalo skulls feels like a Tarsem-style director jumping up and down begging for people to ask him what it means), but they reveal nothing about the character beyond what we already knew, that DiCaprio is mad because his son is dead, and because dying alone in the wilderness sucks, conceptions that I'm confident most audiences can figure out for themselves. Contrast this to The Grey, 2012's movie about Liam Neeson fighting wolves in Alaska, which was a movie that got a lot more out of similarly-stark imagery, surreal flashbacks, and limited characterization. It also had Liam Neeson punching wolves.

Final Thoughts: The Revenant is a movie that I expect will earn DiCaprio his long-awaited Oscar, which he deserves. I also expect it will earn Iñárritu another round of Academy accolades, including Best Director and Best Picture, which if I am being honest, neither of them do. It is a good, solid movie, by a talented, visionary director, but the stuff of best of the year it is not, though whether the old white men of the Academy see things that way is a question we shall have to postpone a little while. That all said, I enjoyed watching Revenant, though some of you with more squeamish tastes may not, and I can't complain overmuch if a bunch of good actors and a good director get together to try and make an Oscar-caliber film. Not even if they fail.

Besides, I've gotta have something to complain about during this year's awards.

Final Score: 7/10

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Mon Jan 18, 2016 4:27 am

The Best Films of 2015

Customarily, I like to indulge myself in a lengthy recitation at this time of year, on the abiding successes of yesteryear, and on the terrible flaws that ruined large sections of it. But this year, I thought it might be a good idea to be a bit more inclusive, as well as give you all some idea of the conversation that circulates around the movies that I go and see. And so, for 2015's Best and Worst lists, I decided to bring in some... help.

For the last two years, Corvidae, whom most of you will remember from a lengthy and in-depth review of Antman (produced while I was otherwise occupied being cooked to death in Southern France) has been accompanying me on the vast majority of my cinematic endeavors, a decision born no doubt from Catholic guilt, brain aneurysms, and a perverse enjoyment of pain, both hers and my own. This wonderful decision has led to her being present for some of the greatest films that this blog records, as well as some of the worst. And given the time she has put in and the fact that watching movies like Under the Skin alone might well have been fatal, I felt it was only fair that we both have a share in recording the highs and lows of the year that has just left us.

Normally, as you may recall, I like to record my thoughts in text, a paragraph or so for each movie to explain its place on the list, but given that there were two of us this time, and my consequent desire to generate a bit more of a dialogue than one usually finds in these sorts of reviews, the decision was made to record our thoughts live, the better to discuss our opinions on these wonderful films, and offer such criticisms as might be warranted, of our selections, of the films themselves, or of anything else that came to mind. For we are not here to bury these films, but to praise them. The burial will come later.

So dig in, ladies and gentlemen, as we praise the best films of the year that has passed. It's time for...

The Best Films of 2015!!!

(Click the mushroom cloud below...)

For those of you who are too lazy to sit through our edifying discussion of the finest cinema that 2015 had to offer, or who simply want to read along with our ramblings, I have thoughtfully provided links to the films below:

Corvidae's #10 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #9 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #8 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #7 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #6 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #5 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #4 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #3 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #2 Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #1 Movie of 2015

Havoc's #10 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #9 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #8 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #7 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #6 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #5 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #4 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #3 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #2 Movie of 2015
Havoc's #1 Movie of 2015

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Mon Jan 25, 2016 10:11 pm

The Worst Films of 2015

Big years mean big failures, and just as the best movies of 2015 were very, very good, the worst films of the year were all the worse for standing in their shadows, so much so that as with this year's best-of list, I felt that to recap them all in writing, even in song, would not do them proper justice. For it is not enough to simply state that a given movie is bad. In order to form an opinion worth having, it is necessary to analyze the reasons why the films in question failed. To that end, I have once more asked my faithful and esteemed colleague Corvidae to ruminate with me on the films we saw this year that made us cry, or laugh, in all the wrong ways. It was, after all, the least I could do after putting her through them all in the first place.

And so, at last, it's time for the show you have all (hopefully) been waiting for. Without further ado, I present...

The Worst Films of 2015!!!

(Click the mushroom cloud below...)

As before, I have thoughtfully provided the links below, so that you may all review what my opinion was on the movies in question:

Corvidae's #10 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #9 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #8 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #7 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #6 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #5 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #4 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #3 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #2 Worst Movie of 2015
Corvidae's #1 Worst Movie of 2015

Havoc's #10 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #9 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #8 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #7 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #6 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #5 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #4 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #3 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #2 Worst Movie of 2015
Havoc's #1 Worst Movie of 2015

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Thu Feb 11, 2016 12:16 am

A Little Chaos

Alternate Title: Indulgence

One sentence synopsis: A widow-turned-professional gardener is hired by the head landscaper of Louis XIV to build an outdoor ballroom within the gardens of the newly-constructed Versailles.

Things Havoc liked: As I've mentioned before, I'm entirely reliant upon trailers in order to determine what movies I should be watching, but then that's not always such a bad thing. Still, it has given rise to odd occurrences, particularly when a movie pops up in the trailer reels which never actually materializes as a released film. This happens every so often, usually when a foreign company finds itself with a tremendous bomb on its hands, and cuts its losses halfway through the marketing campaign, and before securing an American release. Generally these films are no loss, as they represent movies I was hardly about to go and see whether they were released or not, but once in a very long while, a movie I had circled as something potentially special disappears without a trace. So it was with a film I first heard of last year, mid-Doldrums, while slogging through the likes of White God, The Water Diviner, and Leviathan. It was a film set in 17th century France, an epoch of stockings and wigs, promising splendor, beauty, and the services of the incomparable Alan Rickman, one of my favorite actors working, taking on the dual role of the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, as well as the director's chair for the occasion. Though costume dramas are not really my particular cup of tea, I was excited for this one, and disappointed when the film failed to materialize in the US despite the promised release date. But it wasn't until earlier this year, with the news of Alan Rickman's passing at the age of 69, that I decided that while my rule has always been only to consider films in theaters, it was time to make an exception. And so, through methods I had best not admit to directly online, I was able to acquire a copy of Alan Rickman's final film, that I might give it the dubious honors I am capable of bestowing upon the capstone to a remarkable career.

It is the late 17th Century, and King Louis XIV (Rickman) is busy commissioning the construction of what will become his most enduring legacy, the magnificent royal palace of Versailles, a task that also involves the construction of the grandest gardens that have ever been produced. The task of playing the Sun King cannot have been a simple one, as Louis XIV was, both at the time and today, the effective model for absolute monarchs across Europe, a man of ambitions so towering that they consumed all of Europe in sanguinary wars, not once, but many times. It's therefore fitting perhaps that Rickman steals this show effortlessly, portraying a King whose every gesture, word, and glance is a calculated tool of rulership, and who has carefully constructed a heliocentric universe of courtiers, nobles, artists and officers around himself, whose task and mandate are to reflect glory upon him. Rickman's imperious, deadpan delivery and expression, honed over the course of many films (recall him from Dogma if you want an idea) is a perfect match here, whether instructing his grandchildren in mid-speech asides on how to be both loved and feared, cutting dead a mistress who has outlived her political usefulness with a single barbed word, or expressing his delight in such subtle terms that the object of such delight needs the services of a translator to determine if she has offended or pleased the King. Indeed, some of the weirdest sequences in the movie involve the King striking a pose of power and authority, and everyone nearby instantly and literally falling into orbit around him, forming a tableau of power and central authority for any who should choose to be watching.

But while Rickman is the main draw for me, he's not the main focus of the movie, which is ultimately a romance, featuring one actor I'm a fan of and one I'm generally not. The former is Matthias Schoenaerts, a Belgian actor I remember well from The Drop, Rust and Bone, and Death of a Shadow, the Dutch sci-fi film I encountered back in 2012 during my annual showcase of the Oscar-nominated Short Films. He plays the legendary gardener (these apparently exist) André Le Nôtre, the (real) head gardener of Versailles, a position which, back then, was roughly the equivalent of a Cabinet post today. Schoenaerts underplays the role considerably, which is the right call, as his character is both a nobleman of the Ancien Regime and in a position to both enjoy unlimited access to the King's Ear, and receive all the blame if anything goes wrong with Versailles' construction. An early scene, in between interviews with would-be subordinates, has him remark that despite being on such close terms with the King that he is allowed to dine with him, failure in his task will almost certainly mean execution. The other party is Kate Winslet, whom I first met in Titanic and needed a long, long time before I could forgive her for that fact (the same was true of DiCaprio). My grievances aside, Winslet is a fine actress, as roles from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Finding Neverland, or Little Children will all attest to. Here she plays Madame Sabine de Barra, another gardener selected to assist Le Nôtre in completing a particular feature of the gardens, a widow who supports herself through her work (not as rare in 17th-Century France as you might think), and who falls in love with her boss. Conventional though this all might be, Winslet and Schoenaerts have a nice chemistry on screen, butressed by the fact that these are both middle-aged veterans of the games of politics and gilded disappointment that has been their lives.

But if I wanted to watch a conventional romance, even one with Alan Rickman, I have quite a few to choose from, so what makes this movie special? The pageantry, for one. Rickman's directorial style is very lean on dialogue and long on landscape, using a Wes Anderson-style geometric shot construction to get the glory and the splendor of Versailles across, a world of wigs and gowns and stockings and poisonous politics, wherein everyone is quite happily sleeping with everyone else in "arrangements" that only the French could possibly keep track of. So it is with Stanley Tucci, who steals the show as the Phillipe, Duke of Orleans and brother of the King, whom he plays as an endlessly talkative, flamboyantly gay ornament of the court, whose wife, Princess Elizabeth of the Palatine (Paula Paul) has come to a perfectly happy arrangement with the above, aligning herself with Madame De Montespan, chief Mistress of the King (this was an official position in those days). Fortunately, the film doesn't expect us to remember who is who among the dizzying array of Madames and Seigneurs that we are presented with, but hints constantly at the byzantine complexities that surround the characters, getting everything across, as a rule, with inference and wordplay. Indeed, the dialogue in the film is almost relentlessly off-point, using metaphor and voice tones to say what is actually going on. It's a strange effect to someone used to more traditional Hollywood fare, but the resulting film feels a lot richer for it, as the characters circle around one another dispensing charm and venom in equal measure. A particular gem is Helen McCroy, playing Schoenaerts' cold-hearted courtesan of a wife, a woman who has elevated her husband through marriage and does not intend to ever let him forget it, even as she dallies with other men (as does largely everyone in the movie). The music, meanwhile, by cellist Peter Gregson, complements the effect with baroque splendor, a chamber orchestra to accompany a world that is consciously artificial.

Things Havoc disliked: The dialogue in this film is quite rarefied, and while I would hesitate, generally to cite that as a negative, it can actually be quite hard to figure out what the hell people are talking about (or doing) as a result. An extended sequence, midway through the film, where a promenade in the countryside stumbles upon what appears to be a pagan altar, seems to serve no purpose whatsoever except to allow a rider to announce that someone is dead, while the confusion of Winslet's character concerning the intrigues of the court translates to nothing more than confusion for the audience on the same subject. I could not tell, for instance, which mistress was and was not on the outs with the King at any given moment, which is a matter, as it turns out, of some importance, nor have I any idea why Winslet, approaching the most important job interview of her life, would decide for no apparent reason to begin messing around with the potted plants in her prospective employer's front yard.

And yet, strangely for a movie which turns in circles this lofty, so lofty that a critic as experienced as myself was lost several times, the actual plot of the film, as so often in romances, is relatively shallow, particularly in the second half, wherein Schoenaerts' wife spontaneously develops a Mean Girls' streak to her, and decides to sabotage a royal construction project for no reason other than spite and to no effect other than getting herself in a great deal of entirely predictable trouble. In a film where literally everyone has a mistress or a lover, where she suddenly develops a jealous streak sufficient to be willing to risk summary execution is beyond me, but we require a "crisis" of some sort to drive the formula plot forward, so there. All is forgotten, of course, by the end of the film, as is the "little chaos" of the film's title, a subject it took some pains to set up and then fails entirely to pay off. Much time is devoted to the fact that Winslet's gardener has shocking (one might even say British) ideas regarding landscape and horticulture, preferring the chaos of nature to the rigid order of French-style gardens (believe it or not, I know what I'm talking about). And yet having established Winslet as a Gardener who Doesn't Play By The Rules (imagine an 80s cop movie with this concept), she then spends the rest of the film playing by the rules. The final result, an outdoor ballroom with a cascading fountain (which I have seen in the real Versailles) is indeed very pretty, but has no element of Chaos within it, Little or otherwise.

Final Thoughts: A Little Chaos is the sort of movie that isn't commonly reviewed on this website, mostly because I don't care for formula romances enough to bother to see them. But to my surprise, despite the criticisms I leveled at it a moment ago, Alan Rickman's second (and sadly, final) directorial effort is an effortlessly-charming little film, one that speaks well above the intellectual level of its plot, and which imbues its admittedly formulaic structure with warmth and light and a soft-hearted cheer that is entirely fitting of the purpose it has unfortunately taken on. I am, of course, indisputably biased regarding this movie, being both a Francophile of long-standing, and an abject admirer of Alan Rickman's work. But given the jaundiced eye I generally cast upon romantic period pieces of this sort (the less I have to discuss Pride and Prejudice, the happier everyone will be), a movie that wins me over despite that is perhaps worth giving a shot to. And if nothing else, A Little Chaos serves as a fine tribute to a legendary actor, who will most certainly, by this critic at least, be missed.

Final Score: 7.5/10

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Thu Feb 11, 2016 12:59 am

Interesting, I had no idea that the gardens were that important.

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Thu Feb 11, 2016 5:28 pm

frigidmagi wrote:Interesting, I had no idea that the gardens were that important.

They existed by Royal Command. That made them of paramount importance.

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Thu Feb 11, 2016 5:28 pm

And now for something completely different (Again)

Once more we have a new year of films spread out before us, but with the Oscars coming up early this year, and January a wasteland of quality enlivened only by special projects like this, I decided to start things off with a few short films. Therefore, as is customary, The General's Post proudly presents:

The 2015 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films

World of Tomorrow What the hell was that? World of Tomorrow is a very strange film about a young girl being given a tour of a transhumanist future reality by a third-generation clone of herself. A bit rambly and extremely incoherent, the film has some really clever ideas in it (like a time travel device that isn't the most accurate thing in the universe, either temporally or physically, but the whole exercise seems to be a bit of weirdness for no real purpose. FUll disclosure: most of my viewing companions thought this one was the best of the bunch.
6.5/10

Bear Story: A silent, stop-motion animated film from Chile with a really clever visual style to it (more or less the entire film takes place inside a clockwork display mechanism), this film would have been instantly identifiable as a Chilean piece even if I hadn't known ahead of time where it came from, so tightly is it focused around the trauma of Pinochet. A decently-clever film, but nothing I'm going to remember.
6/10

We Can't Live Without Cosmos A Russian movie (LEVIATHAN FLASHBACK! AAAAAARGH!!!) about two best friends who are also astronauts, this one actually proves to be the funniest one of them all, relying on situational humor and slapstick. The film's ending feels a bit slow and tacked-on, but overall it's a much better piece than the last thing I saw from Russia...
7/10

Prologue: A six-minute, one-scene sketch cartoon plainly drawn from some sort of rotoscope-like software, Prologue is a single fight sequence between two teams of two ancient Britons, who fight to the death with spear, axe, sword, and bow. It's well-made, certainly, with vividly lifelike movement and well-paced action, but there's really nothing much to it beyond people killing one another briefly. Still, it's the first time I've ever seen the Short Film showcase warn the audience of graphic violence and nudity.
6.5/10

And the Havoc award for Best Animated Short Film goes to...

Sanjay's Super Team: An Autobigraphical piece directed by Pixar Animator Sanjay Patel, this short film debuted in front of last year's Good Dinosaur, and it's just as good now as it was then. A young Indian boy who wants to watch saturday morning cartoons about superheroes is instead forced by his father to participate in Hindu morning prayers, and daydreams the gods of the Hindu pantheon as members of a DC/Marvel-style superhero team. Wonderfully-animated (as is customary with Pixar), richly-produced and filled with warmth and emotion, this one ultimately won out in my mind. Call me a studio hack if you like, but Pixar knows how to do them right.
7.5/10

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Thu Feb 11, 2016 9:47 pm

The transhumanist one sounds pretty interesting as does the Pixar one honestly.

General Havoc · Post by **General Havoc** » Sun Feb 21, 2016 11:57 pm

The Live Action showcase this year was honestly a bit of a let down, mostly because of drama fatigue. Yes, these movies are usually about awful things happening to people in terrible situations (I still remember the Afghan movie about child-beggars from a few years back), but there is customarily a bit of levity to undercut the horror and heavy drama somewhere in the showcase (such as the Norwegian movie about the old man who massacres seagulls with machine guns and builds tubas to sound across the Atlantic). This year, it seemed like everything was a pile of pain and high drama, which just gets tiring after a while, as you watch awful climax after awful climax. Nevertheless, we have the films before us, and it's time to evaluate them!

The 2015 Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films

Ave Maria A Palestinian-French film that is, of all things, a comedy, this one concerns a hardcore orthodox Jewish family who gets into a traffic accident at a West Bank convent of catholic nuns on Shabbat. The Jews can't use any technology on Shabbat, while the sisters have all taken vows of silence. Hijinx ensue, albeit not as many as I was expecting, and the entire thing is resolved through a nun suddenly possessing the advanced skills and tools to do something she realistically could have done at any point prior to the movie's commencement. Still, not every film has to be Hamlet, and this one's at least all right.
6/10

Shok: Hey guys, did you know the war in Kosovo was horrible for children? Because it was! Shok is a movie about two Albanian boys in Kosovo dealing with efforts to alternately Serbify and eventually Ethnically Cleanse their village, and it is approximately as uplifting and warm-hearted as you would expect as a result. The film has a couple of quite good scenes, but overall it's nothing more than another "children in hell" flick, a sob-story archetype that the Oscars are not new to.
5.5/10

Everything Will Be Okay: Longest of the movies on offer, this German film features handheld cameras documenting a father picking his daughter up from his ex-wife's house for the weekend, buying her toys, taking her to the amusement park, and then embarking on a complicated scheme to abduct her out of the country using falsified documents. Filmed more or less from the perspective of the daughter, an eight-year-old girl who slowly comes to realize what is happening, the movie is intriguingly well-made, but has the unfortunate quality of spending most of its runtime waiting for the character in question (the little girl) to catch up to what the audience already knows. Still, the film ends strongly, and has a true-to-life feel throughout.
6.5/10

Day One: A complex, multifaceted story about how much Afghanistan sucks, Day One follows an Afghani-American translator on her first day in-country with a force of US military personnel, as they try to track down a bombmaker allied with the Taliban and accidentally stumble upon the bombmaker's wife, currently in labor, whose medical situation necessitates treatment. Instantly, a hundred complexities of local custom, religious scruple, guest-laws, and medical training pop up, forcing everyone to struggle to figure out what to do. The situation is highly contrived, but the movie gets a lot across in a little time, and has a cohesiveness to it that the others on the same theme lack.
7/10

And the Havoc award for Best Live Action Short Film goes to...

Stutterer: Admittedly, this is a close one, and in many ways the best of a mediocre lot, but Stutterer was at least entertaining in a way that most of the other films were not. A typographer with a terrible stutter who has been in an online relationship that is suddenly coming offline stresses out over what to do to avoid revealing his crippling inability to speak. The setup isn't revolutionary, and the film ends on a rather pat note, but the film has an interesting style to it, and is written well enough to push itself over the top. Not a great year for the short films, but one perseveres.
7/10

LibriumArcana.Games

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