Thinking Out Loud

Category: 2 Stars

Pretty Bad, Really

  • The Future is a Tasteful Monochrome: Anon

    The Future is a Tasteful Monochrome: Anon

    Andrea Niccol’s Netflix exclusive Anon is a rather quaint throwback to the techno-paranoia cyberpunk genre, once common in the late nineties — remember Virtuosity, Johnny Mnemonic, and Paycheck? The ultimate modern incarnation of is of course the BBC series Black Mirror, which out-Philip-K.-Dicked Philip K. Dick., and set a newly high bar for cynical, pessimistic takes on the future.

    But reality has outpaced all of these cautionary tales, as we’ve since come to understand that of course governments surveil our movements and communications, while unchecked corporations build detailed consumer profiles on all of us. Logging off is little protection.

    Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried in Anon

    If Anon‘s future America without the Constitutional right to privacy were to come true, society’d have bigger problems than a sexy serial killer (Amanda Seyfried), exploiting the system to murder those who exploit the system. Ultra-grim detective Sal Frieland (Clive Owen) must fight the ambiguities of his digital record to entrap her. After, of course, bedding the much younger woman under false pretenses (for there are sleazy erotic thriller tropes and a female nudity quota to fulfill). Privacy is the foundation for many civil rights we enjoy today, a topic Anon only glancingly acknowledges.

    And if we ever start installing apps into our eyeballs, I somehow doubt the GUI will be a tastefully-designed monochrome. Everyone who’s ever touched a computer or smartphone knows we’ll be blinded by punch-the-monkey banner ads, free-to-play gem-matching games, and tweets from President Kid Rock.

  • Exhaustively exhausted: Ben Affleck’s Live by Night

    Exhaustively exhausted: Ben Affleck’s Live by Night

    Has any topic been more exhaustively dramatized than Prohibition-era gangsters?

    Live by Night seems especially redundant so soon after HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, which covers a lot of the same ground: the Florida/Cuba liquor pipeline, the Irish/Italian mob conflict, the pivot to legal gambling, etc.

    The explanation being pretty simple: original novelist Denis Lehane also contributed to Boardwalk Empire. The few elements not already done to death by the gangster genre, including additional conflicts with evangelicals and the Klan, are in this case simultaneously not enough and too much.

    Also, did Ben Affleck always play every role as a man in a deep depression, or is this a recent development?

  • A Dangerous Delusion: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

    A Dangerous Delusion: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

    Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is of course a remarkable achievement, a massive production with epic scope, a clever structure, and one of the best possible showcases for Technicolor. But I’m evidently so far out of step with the consensus on this one that I’m doubting my film snob bona fides. I simply hated it.

    I couldn’t look past my contempt for the delusional rich. Consider: American politics is dominated by wealthy families living in dangerous fantasylands: the Trumps, Kushners, Kochs, Mercers, DeVoses, et al. Terrifyingly, they are in positions of real power, including and especially that of war.

    Deborah Kerr in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

    As such, I have no time for the war-glorifying Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), playing soldier in his mansion, insulting his lifelong loyal manservant, and falling in love with three different Deborah Kerrs. It is simply beyond my suspension of belief to imagine a veteran of the Boer War and World War I that could preserve a lifelong delusion that there is such a thing as “good clean fighting”.

    His Good German man-crush Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) repeatedly fails to disabuse him of this fantasy. He’s the more relatable character here; his monologue describing his grief over the rise of Nazism in his home country is heartbreaking.

  • Famously chill dude Keanu Reeves goes on a killing spree in John Wick: Chapter 2

    Famously chill dude Keanu Reeves goes on a killing spree in John Wick: Chapter 2

    Rating: 2 out of 5.

    I’m kicking myself for wasting a rare Sunday movie theater outing on stunt choreographer-turned director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 2. I can’t deny the high craft and artistry that puts it near the top of its genre, but I’m just too sick and tired of gun culture as escapist entertainment.

    Give me a kung fu movie any day, where the fighting is beautiful and balletic. I just can’t turn off my brain and enjoy brutal MMA and/or firearm combat, where the aim is to maim or murder. Granted, maybe my mood was negatively influenced by the psychopaths in the theater that applauded every time somebody our hero Johnny W. put a bullet through a brain or stabbed some guy in the groin.

    OK, fine, I have to admit that Keanu Reeves does execute one incredible gun-related trick that impressed even this pacifist: he one-handedly flips his hand around the back of a pistol, opens & closes the chamber, and flips his hand back to the grip. That was awesome.

    Searching for other positive comments to make: Ian McShane is, as usual, delicious. He’s in Shakespeare while everyone else is just in some dumb movie. I also always like Common (see also Hell on Wheels and Selma), and the reunion of Keanu and with his Matrix costar Laurence Fishburne is entertainingly hammy.

  • Everything is… fine… in The Intern

    Everything is… fine… in The Intern

    Nancy Meyer’s 2015 trifle The Intern is a little outside the usual scope of this blog, but it sparked a couple thoughts I needed to get out:

    What a waste of a decent premise: a retiree reenters a transformed workforce, while the young founder of a startup grapples with success. But so little is at stake for either.

    Ben (Robert De Niro) enjoys a comfortable retirement, with a nice home, stable finances, and good health. While he’s a widower, he hardly seems overtaken with grief or loneliness. His urge to reenter the workforce stems from a vague, half-felt malaise, not out of any financial or emotional urgency. He’s… fine.

    Anne Hathaway in The Intern
    Just because she’s a boss doesn’t mean she can’t be quirky and adorkable.

    Jules’ (Anne Hathaway) primary dilemma is whether she should maintain her company’s status quo (which has been functioning… fine) or bring on a more experienced CEO as her business grows (which would also be… fine). She’s also… fine.

    The overall feel of this movie is like taking a warm milk bath, where every character was fine, is fine, and will be fine.

    But for all its gentle geniality, The Intern does briefly dally with melodrama, as Jules’ frustrated stay-at-home husband smooches another woman. Here, old-school Ben takes a more feminist stance than she. For once, she does not take his seasoned advice, and opts to avoid confrontation with her husband. Similarly, she decides to do nothing with her company. So… everything’s fine.

  • Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy make an odd couple in The Counselor

    Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy make an odd couple in The Counselor

    Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott were bound to be an odd couple in any case. All the richly composed and poetic dialogue in the world doesn’t disguise the fact The Counselor is basically a grimy, scuzzy, sleazy, feel-bad potboiler.

    There is an element of pulp to several of McCarthy’s novels, but here it’s brought to the forefront. As highly regarded as he is as a literary novelist, his subject matter is still mostly comprised of cowboys, bandits, whores, thieves, madmen, and murderers.

    This is Ridley Scott in full erotic thriller mode (see Black Rain and Someone to Watch Over Me). He has somewhat tamped down the extremely grainy stylization he used to employ (especially in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down), opting instead for a sun-blazed Miami Vice-like palette. Perhaps McCarthy should pitch his next screenplay to Michael Mann?

    Most impressive is the huge all-star cast. Even the smallest roles are populated by familiar faces (watch for Rosie Perez, Dean Norris, and John Leguizamo). I have never been one of those people who dislike Cameron Diaz (her most famous detractor being perhaps Sophia Coppola who lampooned her in Lost in Translation), but here she is perhaps the weakest link.

  • Riddick makes the most haphazard of movie franchises

    Riddick makes the most haphazard of movie franchises

    When even the humblest movies are planned to allow for multiple sequels if at all financially feasible, the Riddick trilogy (and counting?) must be one of the most haphazard of movie franchises.

    I doubt many would have expected any kind of sequel at all to 2000’s Pitch Black, and yet The Chronicles of Riddick appeared four years later to reinvent its surviving character as the hero of a grand sword & sandal epic in outer space. It’s not unlike the later John Carter of Mars, but less wasteful in terms of money spent, and with 100% more hovering Judi Dench.

    Even more improbable still, with David Twohy’s Riddick, Vin Diesel is now officially the headliner of a trilogy. Having achieved the holy number of installments, now three movies can be packaged together in budget multi-dvd box sets in time for Black Friday shopping. Or should that be that Pitch Black Friday? Oh, please yourself.

    Riddick has more in common with Pitch Black than Chronicles, but one thing they all share is surprisingly good art direction and set design. Chronicles, especially, went far above and beyond the call of duty. I’d argue that it draws more from Dune‘s visual imagination than the typically plundered art direction of Alien or Star Wars. Even Riddick has more believable alien landscapes than the volcano top conclusion to After Earth, which looked like it had been shot on the tiniest soundstage M. Night Shyamalan could book.

    Katie Sackoff and Dave Bautista in Riddick
    Katie Sackoff and Dave Bautista in Riddick

    Riddick‘s plot is admirably simple (man trapped alone on a hostile planet, struggles to simply survive, then gain a foothold to escape), and the first 30 minutes or so are crackerjack. But then additional characters show up and so there has to be… shudder… dialog.

    Sadly, everything falls apart at this point — and I mean everything, from the visuals to the script. What started out as an intriguing shipwreck story turned into something conventional and cheap. The bulk of what follows is set inside a single room, and not in a good way (like a good submarine movie, for instance), but in a bad way (like, they ran out of money and ideas).

    Riddick is also unfortunately sexist. Battlestar Galactica fan favorite Katee Sackoff gets the coveted only-girl-in-the-movie role, and she dutifully works what her momma gave her. She’s sadly stuck with a retrograde character who exists mostly to concede to Riddick’s brutish flirtations. It’s unclear if her character is actually gay or simply allows her male colleagues to assume she is, but either way, it’s stomach turning when she acquiesces to Riddick’s crude propositions. Her utility exhausted, she simply vanishes from the film.

  • Double Jeopardy was one rewrite away from being a thrilling thriller

    Double Jeopardy was one rewrite away from being a thrilling thriller

    Not to imply that screenwriting and revision are easy, but Bruce Beresford’s Double Jeopardy is only one rewrite away from being a decent action thriller. The elevator pitch is obvious enough (The Fugitive… but with a lady!), but it truly does have a killer hook: jilted woman – framed for a murder that not only did she not commit, it didn’t even happen – is legally free to actually commit the crime if she wishes. Give it a solid cast (Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones in roles they could both do in their sleep), and it should have been a home run.

    Ashley Judd in Double Jeopardy

    It does all start out rather well, surely better than its generally poor Letterboxd reviews would imply. But the plot holes and implausibilities quickly pile up and you find out why people hate it. There are lots of issues to point to, but I was frustrated by its two biggest problems:

    First, the failure to identify what should have been the core of the story: Tommy Lee Jones’ character coming around to believing his quarry may be innocent. Instead, he simply pursues her for a while, and suddenly offhandedly mentions near the end that he figures she didn’t do it. What should have been a key story beat was underplayed to the point of almost vanishing.

    Second, the final confrontation makes no logical sense. If Judd and Jones find the supposedly-dead murder victim alive and well, then problem solved, right? Simply drag him in front of a judge and all of Judd’s problems go away. But no, instead they propose some sort of insane double-wrap-around reverse/inverse blackmail scheme that makes no sense whatsoever, which produces a scuffle and then she just shoots him anyway.

    I suspect the filmmakers were working backwards from a premise they were too attached to.

  • The chemistry only goes one way in The Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty

    The chemistry only goes one way in The Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty

    Intolerable Cruelty is usually found at or near the bottom of Best-to-Worst films by the Coen Brothers:

    You get the idea. But Intolerable Cruelty is the movie for you if what you’ve always wanted is a modern-day Cary Grant-type romantic comedy in which two opposites fall reluctantly in love, seasoned with dashes of that unmistakable Coen flavor:

    • slapstick ultraviolence: A grotesque giant accidentally shoots himself in the mouth, and it’s played for laughs.
    • creepy weirdness: The nightmarish boss from hell is straight out of an old Sam Raimi movie.
    • basement humor: This screenplay’s idea of witty banter is to have everybody say “nail your ass” over and over. A lot.

    It’s biggest failing is that the chemistry between the leads only goes one way. Whether by design or Catherine Zeta-Jones’ blank performance, George Clooney plays smitten kitten to her ice queen. Clooney falls all over her, mugging like a madman (as if he were doing an impression of Jim Carrey, come to think of it), while she looks mildly bored at best.

  • Scream 4 makes a few half-hearted stabs… at relevance

    Scream 4 makes a few half-hearted stabs… at relevance

    By the time Scream 4 appeared, over a decade after the original trilogy began, the horror genre had moved on from the ironic, winking mode the series popularized. A character in Scream 4 complains that most horror movies traffic more in outright gore (“I hate that torture porn shit”). On television, The Walking Dead characters are so divorced from pop culture that they don’t even know the word “zombie”. How does the usual tone of the Scream movies play to today’s audiences?

    In this context, Scream 4 would seem old fashioned throwback to the ironic 90s, were it not significantly more cynical than its predecessors. Scream 2 overtly critiqued sequels, Scream 3 deconstructed trilogies, and now Scream 4 openly uses the word “franchise”. Movies are more the product of big business than ever before, and now that’s the subject of the movies themselves.

    Scream 4 does make a few half-hearted stabs (sorry) at relevance by roping in social media (one kid liveblogs the whole thing), and celebrity culture. The murderers’ motivation has moved on from sex and revenge to desire to the kind of instant celebrity enjoyed today by the likes of teenage murderers and socialite drunks.

    Amusingly, Scream 4 self-mythologizes itself with the movie-within-the-movie Stab, amusingly credited to Robert Rodriguez. Actually, I think I’d rather see that movie.