While the Oscars are certainly not what I'd say determines how good a movie is (the very idea that there's an objectively "best" picture is kind of anathema to how art is supposed to work,) I've been taking their nominations as a jump-start to see some movies I hadn't yet. I just got back from watching The Revenant, so let's start there.
The Revenant is a brutal movie, but beautiful. I'd be perfectly happy to see it win for Cinematography. Frankly, this seems likely to win the best picture category, and while I would not be disappointed if it won, I'm undecided on it. The biggest expectation is that this is going to be the film that finally gets Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar. In all honesty, though, he isn't really given much to do other than bear an absurd amount of pain (my alternate title for the movie is "How the Fuck is Hugh Glass Still Alive?") However, the other acting nomination, for Tom Hardy's supporting role, is one that I think would be well deserved, as Hardy gets a character with a lot of depth and contradictions that he plays expertly.
Last night, I saw Room, which was far more watchable than I expected it to be. I was worried it was going to be a movie of wall-to-wall despair before a happy ending, but it kind of deconstructs it by having what a lesser film would use as a climax as something more like a mid-point shift (though it comes earlier than that.) It's still a pretty upsetting movie on a conceptual level (in case you don't know, it's about a woman who had been kidnapped seven years ago and is being held in a shed all that time, and her son, who was born in that shed and has never in his five years of life left it, and thus has a strange worldview in which "Room" (with no article, as if he were describing "Earth") is his entire universe. The movie is about trauma but also moving past that trauma, and is fantastically well-acted (always tricky when the main character is a little kid.)
The Big Short and Spotlight are kind of paired up, though I don't mean to de-emphasize them. Both are about horrific crises that should have been avoided if it weren't for complacency and impunity. Stylistically, though, the films could hardly be more different.
Spotlight is stripped down. We're not looking for opportunities to create false interpersonal drama. Instead, it's a story about a group of reporters (reinforcing the realism is that there's no one clear protagonist) who start putting the Boston Globe's resources into uncovering the massive sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. The movie is not sensationalist - it merely lays out the facts and shows the process by which people searching for the truth work to get it, despite a culture built around looking the other way. As a Boston-Area native (though only half culturally-Catholic) it's a remarkable look at the culture of the city (and refreshingly not about gangsters with thick Southie accents.)
The Big Short, on the other hand, feels like a call to arms. Adam McKay, mostly known for over-the-top improvisational Will Ferrel comedies, plays post-modern DJ to the culture of the financial world leading up to the 2008 Real Estate bubble bursting. Our heroes are only barely heroes (Steve Carrel and Brad Pitt's characters are the only ones who seem to really feel pain for the millions who are getting screwed) but there's still something kind of satisfying to seeing them win out against an incredibly corrupt, smug, counter-intuitively naive and ultimately sociopathic system. The movie attempts to "edutain," with some extreme fourth-wall breaking, including a few instances of celebrities playing themselves and explaining things directly to the camera. If Spotlight left you feeling sad at the way that so many people were abused and their abusers were the ones that the Church decided to protect, The Big Short will make you furious that so many smirking assholes who control America's finances were willing to bet innocent peoples' money on bad deals knowing that they would never be the ones who had to foot the bill, and that those people are still doing what they were doing before.
Bridge of Spies is another example, like Lincoln, of Spielberg doing the prestige pic right. It might be "middlebrow" or even accused of being "Oscar Bait," but the fact remains that Spielberg is a damn good filmmakers, and Tom Hanks is a damn good actor. Bridge of Spies does feel slightly bifurcated - Hanks' James Donovan is an insurance lawyer who is chosen to represent a suspected (and yeah, guilty) Soviet Agent named Rudolf Abel. This first quarter or third of the movie raises some interesting questions about the way that we conduct ourselves as a country. Donovan's family is threatened because he seems to be "working for the enemy" when, as Donovan (and clearly Spielberg and screenwriters the Coen Brothers) believes that only by giving the man a fair trial do they represent what makes the US better than the Soviets. The film shifts gears significantly after Francis Gary Powers is shot down in a spyplane over the USSR. With Abel convicted, the government wants to use him a bargaining chip to get Powers back before the Soviets can interrogate the secret information about his plane and mission out of him. In the midst of this, an american graduate student finds himself on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall just as it is going up. We then see Donovan - as the pinnacle of the American ideal as a plain-talking, principled man forced to try to work the geopolitics of American interests and a pissing contest between the Democratic Republic of Germany and the USSR in order to secure the release of both Americans. In a way, I think this film is undercut simply by the fact that we already know how good Spielberg and Hanks are - giving it any awards would feel redundant (though Mark Rylance stands a chance for Supporting Actor. I'd still go with Tom Hardy.) The Coens' nihilism is undercut by Spielberg's upbeat faith in good men of principle. I might be curious to see a bleaker, more Le Carré-style spy story directed by them
I also re-watched Mad Max: Fury Road (third time seeing it,) and it's really just unlike anything else out there. It has the simplicity of the original Star Wars, and could be a textbook on how to shoot compelling and coherent action. Also, the production design is utterly astounding. But I've already written about that one.
Another re-watch, I saw the Martian. Obviously, I have a soft spot for anything science fiction (or fantasy) that is actually good. I don't tend to care too much about the "hardness" of science fiction, but I remain impressed that this story feels so plausible that it almost feels like it's not even science fiction at all, but instead something like a real-world space disaster like Apollo 13.
Finally, a movie that I literally watched right after writing the previous paragraph, there's Brooklyn. After the dour gloom or ultraviolence (or both, in the case of The Revenant,) Brooklyn is a bit of a relief. It tells the simple story of a Irishwoman played by Saoirse Ronan who goes to America in the 1950s. It's not terribly plot-heavy - there's not even really much of a conflict until about halfway through the movie - but it's an effective kind of slice-of-life about the making of an American and the difficulty of forging a new life and identity when you still have people who you love in a world you've left behind.
So there you have it. If I had to guess, I'd say the Revenant is likely to win best picture, but it's by no means a lock. I could easily see Spotlight doing so as well. Mad Max is too out there (and it's a genre film, which the Academy generally tries to avoid giving the top honor to.) Brooklyn is a fine movie, but not terribly innovative. The Big Short is fun and messy, but that messiness might undermine it. The Martian has the same issue as Mad Max, though less so (given how, as I mentioned, it's hard enough sci fi to almost feel like it's not.) Bridge of Spies has the problem that unless it's Spielberg's best film yet, it's not going to have a chance to win best picture. Room's a remarkable film, but I wonder if something so relatively small scale is likely to get people to vote for it.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Monday, February 22, 2016
John Dies at the End
I just finished reading David Wong's (aka Jason Pargin's) John Dies at the End, a novel of Lovecraftian horror, suburban malaise, and utter silliness.
Actually somewhat like my own Dispatches from Otherworld, "JDATE" originally took the form of online media written over time. As such, the story does have a somewhat episodic nature.
The book has a frame narrative after a brief prologue in which David Wong - the pseudonym serving also as protagonist - meeting with a journalist in a ridiculous Chinese restaurant to discuss his work as a paranormal investigator. A few years back, David and his friend John Cheese (a fellow Cracked.com writer) took a strange drug referred to as "Soy Sauce" (John intentionally, David accidentally,) which allowed them to see the horrific supernatural threats that apparently surround us all the time.
David and John, along with the occasional (sometimes short-lived) ally then attempt to fight off - or at least make something of a dignified stand - against the immense powers arrayed against our fragile world. They do all of this while never losing their personalities as bored, shiftless suburban 20-somethings in a dull minor midwestern city (referred to as "Undisclosed.")
The eponymous John is a creature of pure Id, and unsurprisingly pushes the more wary and weary David into these lethal shenanigans. I don't want to go into too much detail about the story itself, as a great deal of the fun of the novel is seeing what batshit crazy thing is going to come next. Just as a quick example - at one point David is forced to use a McDonald's Bratwurst (which is apparently a thing in the midwest) as a cell phone to talk with John across time.
What I find particularly resonant in the story is the way that it gets the feel of being an aimless young man in a suburban environment. In between years of college, I'd spend the months with my friends back in Newton, Massachusetts typically driving around at two in the morning, goofing off for lack of anything better to do. It would not have been too out of place for us to go into weird houses with ghosts and otherworldly monsters at the time. In fact, I have a friend back home who reminds me a lot of John.
There's a movie that came out in 2012 based on the novel, and despite a couple of big names (Paul Giamatti, Clancy Brown,) I didn't hear much about it or see it coming to theaters. While I believe it's on Netflix now, I'm slightly hesitant to watch it, given that if it's anywhere as gory as the book, I might have trouble sleeping, like, ever again.
John Dies at the End could certainly be considered a parody of Cosmic Horror, but it's a solid enough parody that you might find yourself fairly unnerved reading it.
Actually somewhat like my own Dispatches from Otherworld, "JDATE" originally took the form of online media written over time. As such, the story does have a somewhat episodic nature.
The book has a frame narrative after a brief prologue in which David Wong - the pseudonym serving also as protagonist - meeting with a journalist in a ridiculous Chinese restaurant to discuss his work as a paranormal investigator. A few years back, David and his friend John Cheese (a fellow Cracked.com writer) took a strange drug referred to as "Soy Sauce" (John intentionally, David accidentally,) which allowed them to see the horrific supernatural threats that apparently surround us all the time.
David and John, along with the occasional (sometimes short-lived) ally then attempt to fight off - or at least make something of a dignified stand - against the immense powers arrayed against our fragile world. They do all of this while never losing their personalities as bored, shiftless suburban 20-somethings in a dull minor midwestern city (referred to as "Undisclosed.")
The eponymous John is a creature of pure Id, and unsurprisingly pushes the more wary and weary David into these lethal shenanigans. I don't want to go into too much detail about the story itself, as a great deal of the fun of the novel is seeing what batshit crazy thing is going to come next. Just as a quick example - at one point David is forced to use a McDonald's Bratwurst (which is apparently a thing in the midwest) as a cell phone to talk with John across time.
What I find particularly resonant in the story is the way that it gets the feel of being an aimless young man in a suburban environment. In between years of college, I'd spend the months with my friends back in Newton, Massachusetts typically driving around at two in the morning, goofing off for lack of anything better to do. It would not have been too out of place for us to go into weird houses with ghosts and otherworldly monsters at the time. In fact, I have a friend back home who reminds me a lot of John.
There's a movie that came out in 2012 based on the novel, and despite a couple of big names (Paul Giamatti, Clancy Brown,) I didn't hear much about it or see it coming to theaters. While I believe it's on Netflix now, I'm slightly hesitant to watch it, given that if it's anywhere as gory as the book, I might have trouble sleeping, like, ever again.
John Dies at the End could certainly be considered a parody of Cosmic Horror, but it's a solid enough parody that you might find yourself fairly unnerved reading it.
Saturday, February 20, 2016
11.22.63
First off, I should say that I haven't read Stephen King's 11/22/63, the book upon which this new Hulu series is based, so I'm coming at this as a fresh newbie.
James Franco plays Jake Epping, a Maine high school teacher (shocker, right, for a Stephen King protagonist coming from Maine? Did I mention he's a writing teacher?) who is passionate about his job but is going through a divorce. We don't really learn too much about him at this point, as he's, at least at this stage, your basic everyman.
Jake frequents a funky little diner where there are $1.50 hamburgers that are shockingly good for their price. The diner is run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper, who I think the AV Club review says, accurately, would be compelling to watch even if he were just taking out the garbage for the whole episode,) who has one hell of a crazy secret.
When Jake's wife tracks him down at the diner to sign their divorce papers, Al ducks back into the back of the diner. Precisely two minutes later, he comes out looking like absolute hell, having grown a scruffy stubble-beard and coughing up blood. In those two minutes, he's gone from happy and healthy to suffering from the late stages of terminal lung cancer.
When Jake asks him to explain what happened, Al takes him into the back of the restaurant and decides to show before telling. There's a door that leads into a dark corridor that then spits Jake out into 1960. When Jake returns (presumably walking into the air-space where the doorway will one day go,) Al tells him the whole story: The portal lets him go back to the exact same day in 1960. He's been able to go there and buy cheap ground beef for his burgers (probably the same cow, actually.) While he's been using it in this oddly mundane and practical way, he's got a much larger project in mind: to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
As a child of the 80s, Kennedy's assassination is a pretty settled fact in my mind - 9/11 was the huge, world-changing event of my youth. But a long-lived JFK is one of the great "What Ifs" of American History. While I have my doubts that everything would have been smooth sailing (JFK is technically the president who got us into Vietnam,) there's a kind of dream of an idealized, confidently liberal America that might have had a more thorough and painless Civil Rights Movement and one in which the middle class was not allowed to shrivel, and that dream is often tied into the idea of Kennedy surviving his Presidency.
Al certainly feels that the world would have to be better off if Kennedy had lived, and so he has gone to great pains to try to find out how to prevent the killing.
To be clear, the portal on the "modern side" moves with us at a rate of one second per second, but the "past side" is always 1960, on the exact same day. Going in resets anything you accomplished in the previous round, but that means that Al has been able to gather a hefty amount of intelligence about the events of the three years between the portal opening and the day of the assassination.
But Al is dying, and he needs Jake to finish what he started.
Thus, after some brief call-refusing, Jake arrives at Al's home to tell him he'll do it, only to find that his friend has died. Taking up his collected research, he goes into the portal, and the adventure begins.
As usual in a King story, this is far more on the fantasy side of things than science fiction, and as a result, the past - the familiar flow of history - seems to strongly want to straighten back into the way it was. As Al tells Jakes, "if you try to fuck with the past, the past will try to fuck with you." We see a few examples of this, and they're all pretty creepy.
Probably the biggest enigma right now is a man who is standing just by the portal in 1960. While every other person there goes through the same motions - some girls drive by with the same song "Just a Little Bit Longer" playing on their car, and a milkman drops a bottle, exclaiming "Oh for the love of Mike!" But there's one figure who seems to notice the differences, and he's the one who is saying "You're not supposed to be here."
Who or what that guy is has got to be one of the biggest mysteries going forward.
If you read the inaugural post on this website, you'll know that I love time travel stories. There's a moment in this episode where Jake uses his iPhone to distract a thug with an silly facebook-ready video of a bird, and I decided that yes, this show is my shit.
Despite being released through Hulu, they're sticking with a weekly release schedule, so we've only got the first episode so far of what will be, I believe, an 8-part miniseries. Stephen King adaptations can be some serious hits or serious misses, and television has often had more of the latter, but at least from the pilot, this looks like a solid hit.
James Franco plays Jake Epping, a Maine high school teacher (shocker, right, for a Stephen King protagonist coming from Maine? Did I mention he's a writing teacher?) who is passionate about his job but is going through a divorce. We don't really learn too much about him at this point, as he's, at least at this stage, your basic everyman.
Jake frequents a funky little diner where there are $1.50 hamburgers that are shockingly good for their price. The diner is run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper, who I think the AV Club review says, accurately, would be compelling to watch even if he were just taking out the garbage for the whole episode,) who has one hell of a crazy secret.
When Jake's wife tracks him down at the diner to sign their divorce papers, Al ducks back into the back of the diner. Precisely two minutes later, he comes out looking like absolute hell, having grown a scruffy stubble-beard and coughing up blood. In those two minutes, he's gone from happy and healthy to suffering from the late stages of terminal lung cancer.
When Jake asks him to explain what happened, Al takes him into the back of the restaurant and decides to show before telling. There's a door that leads into a dark corridor that then spits Jake out into 1960. When Jake returns (presumably walking into the air-space where the doorway will one day go,) Al tells him the whole story: The portal lets him go back to the exact same day in 1960. He's been able to go there and buy cheap ground beef for his burgers (probably the same cow, actually.) While he's been using it in this oddly mundane and practical way, he's got a much larger project in mind: to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
As a child of the 80s, Kennedy's assassination is a pretty settled fact in my mind - 9/11 was the huge, world-changing event of my youth. But a long-lived JFK is one of the great "What Ifs" of American History. While I have my doubts that everything would have been smooth sailing (JFK is technically the president who got us into Vietnam,) there's a kind of dream of an idealized, confidently liberal America that might have had a more thorough and painless Civil Rights Movement and one in which the middle class was not allowed to shrivel, and that dream is often tied into the idea of Kennedy surviving his Presidency.
Al certainly feels that the world would have to be better off if Kennedy had lived, and so he has gone to great pains to try to find out how to prevent the killing.
To be clear, the portal on the "modern side" moves with us at a rate of one second per second, but the "past side" is always 1960, on the exact same day. Going in resets anything you accomplished in the previous round, but that means that Al has been able to gather a hefty amount of intelligence about the events of the three years between the portal opening and the day of the assassination.
But Al is dying, and he needs Jake to finish what he started.
Thus, after some brief call-refusing, Jake arrives at Al's home to tell him he'll do it, only to find that his friend has died. Taking up his collected research, he goes into the portal, and the adventure begins.
As usual in a King story, this is far more on the fantasy side of things than science fiction, and as a result, the past - the familiar flow of history - seems to strongly want to straighten back into the way it was. As Al tells Jakes, "if you try to fuck with the past, the past will try to fuck with you." We see a few examples of this, and they're all pretty creepy.
Probably the biggest enigma right now is a man who is standing just by the portal in 1960. While every other person there goes through the same motions - some girls drive by with the same song "Just a Little Bit Longer" playing on their car, and a milkman drops a bottle, exclaiming "Oh for the love of Mike!" But there's one figure who seems to notice the differences, and he's the one who is saying "You're not supposed to be here."
Who or what that guy is has got to be one of the biggest mysteries going forward.
If you read the inaugural post on this website, you'll know that I love time travel stories. There's a moment in this episode where Jake uses his iPhone to distract a thug with an silly facebook-ready video of a bird, and I decided that yes, this show is my shit.
Despite being released through Hulu, they're sticking with a weekly release schedule, so we've only got the first episode so far of what will be, I believe, an 8-part miniseries. Stephen King adaptations can be some serious hits or serious misses, and television has often had more of the latter, but at least from the pilot, this looks like a solid hit.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Deadpool
I think if you had asked a huge comics fan ten years ago - when comic book movies were becoming a big thing, but had not become quite the titanic force in Hollywood that they are now - if they thought a Deadpool movie would ever happen, they'd probably have said no. Yet here we are, with a hard-R Deadpool movie that has been doing tremendously.
Deadpool, the character, is kind of a satire of both superheroes in general and also the uber-dark comic antiheroes that became popular in the 90s (which I've sort of suspected is largely influenced by people misinterpreting Watchmen and idolizing Rorschach.) Mind you - Deadpool is, to a large degree, one of those uber-dark protagonists. While Marvel superheroes seem less concerned about using non-lethal methods than their DC counterparts, they still tend toward a kind of reluctance to use force - it's what makes them heroic. Deadpool kills a whole lot of people in pretty gruesome ways.
He's not really a superhero, and one part of the film that sort of qualifies as a running gag is how the more traditional superhero, X-Man Colossus, keeps trying to recruit Deadpool to their more traditional superhero team and keeps being shocked at A. the lengths to which Deadpool goes to avoid this and B. the methods he uses that really put him beyond the standard superhero pale.
Deadpool is probably most famous for being aware of his nature as a fictional character - something they absolutely do not shy away from in the film. Deadpool makes tons of fourth-wall-shattering jokes, including snarky opening titles and lots of jokes about Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, James McAvoy, and Ryan Reynolds himself (with tons of self-deprecating jokes about the abysmal failure of Green Lantern.)
It's way more meta than you typically expect a big-budget blockbuster to be, and the success of the movie speaks volumes about how primed the general public is to enjoy weird postmodernism. And of course, given how huge superhero movies have been for the past decade (or longer - while Iron Man launched it into overdrive, the first X-Men movie really started this new era,) it's about time we have a movie that deconstructs the genre.
That said, Deadpool (the movie) doesn't entirely escape the genre that it is parodying. While Morena Baccarin's Vanessa is a bit underwritten and suffers from damsel-syndrome, the movie does set aside the snark for a bit to deal with both the serious nature of their relationship and also the seriousness of Wade Wilson's cancer - the disease whose treatment winds up giving him his Wolverine-like regeneration ability (but with no adamantium-coated skeleton and a cartoonish disregard for his own pain, we see a lot more gruesome damage inflicted on Deadpool than we ever saw for Wolverine.)
Vanessa is an anchor that does give Deadpool just enough humanity to feel like something more than a hyper-violent Bugs Bunny, though it would have been nice to see her define a little more on her own.
That said, the movie really is all about Deadpool himself, and every other character is kind of defined in relation to him (most of them as "that guy that Deadpool just killed.")
It's not a perfect movie, but given how out-there a concept it is, it's remarkable that it A. got made and B. turned out so well. I'd say if you were intrigued by the marketing, you'll probably enjoy the movie.
One disclaimer though: This is an R-Rated movie for a reason. Yes, it has some X-Men in it. Yes, it's a comic book movie. Don't bring your freaking kids to it. (Probably fine for teenagers if you don't mind them seeing a bit of nudity and a pretty hefty number of severed limbs.)
Deadpool, the character, is kind of a satire of both superheroes in general and also the uber-dark comic antiheroes that became popular in the 90s (which I've sort of suspected is largely influenced by people misinterpreting Watchmen and idolizing Rorschach.) Mind you - Deadpool is, to a large degree, one of those uber-dark protagonists. While Marvel superheroes seem less concerned about using non-lethal methods than their DC counterparts, they still tend toward a kind of reluctance to use force - it's what makes them heroic. Deadpool kills a whole lot of people in pretty gruesome ways.
He's not really a superhero, and one part of the film that sort of qualifies as a running gag is how the more traditional superhero, X-Man Colossus, keeps trying to recruit Deadpool to their more traditional superhero team and keeps being shocked at A. the lengths to which Deadpool goes to avoid this and B. the methods he uses that really put him beyond the standard superhero pale.
Deadpool is probably most famous for being aware of his nature as a fictional character - something they absolutely do not shy away from in the film. Deadpool makes tons of fourth-wall-shattering jokes, including snarky opening titles and lots of jokes about Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, James McAvoy, and Ryan Reynolds himself (with tons of self-deprecating jokes about the abysmal failure of Green Lantern.)
It's way more meta than you typically expect a big-budget blockbuster to be, and the success of the movie speaks volumes about how primed the general public is to enjoy weird postmodernism. And of course, given how huge superhero movies have been for the past decade (or longer - while Iron Man launched it into overdrive, the first X-Men movie really started this new era,) it's about time we have a movie that deconstructs the genre.
That said, Deadpool (the movie) doesn't entirely escape the genre that it is parodying. While Morena Baccarin's Vanessa is a bit underwritten and suffers from damsel-syndrome, the movie does set aside the snark for a bit to deal with both the serious nature of their relationship and also the seriousness of Wade Wilson's cancer - the disease whose treatment winds up giving him his Wolverine-like regeneration ability (but with no adamantium-coated skeleton and a cartoonish disregard for his own pain, we see a lot more gruesome damage inflicted on Deadpool than we ever saw for Wolverine.)
Vanessa is an anchor that does give Deadpool just enough humanity to feel like something more than a hyper-violent Bugs Bunny, though it would have been nice to see her define a little more on her own.
That said, the movie really is all about Deadpool himself, and every other character is kind of defined in relation to him (most of them as "that guy that Deadpool just killed.")
It's not a perfect movie, but given how out-there a concept it is, it's remarkable that it A. got made and B. turned out so well. I'd say if you were intrigued by the marketing, you'll probably enjoy the movie.
One disclaimer though: This is an R-Rated movie for a reason. Yes, it has some X-Men in it. Yes, it's a comic book movie. Don't bring your freaking kids to it. (Probably fine for teenagers if you don't mind them seeing a bit of nudity and a pretty hefty number of severed limbs.)
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