So Long: A Star Wars Mistake.

Original Poster

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Directed by Ron Howard
Written by Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan
Cinematography by Bradford Young
Music by John Powell, featuring themes written by John Williams
Edited by Pietro Scalia
Staring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Joonas Suotamo and Paul Bettany


Originally released May 25th, 2018.


     Alright so first thing's first. I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor do I think I will ever be a huge fan of the Star Wars franchise. In fact, while I don't think it's totally void of merit and value, I think the franchise as a whole doesn't really offer much to our collective cinematic landscape (wow do you ever write a sentence and realize what a longwinded piece of shit you are? Happens to me all the time). My father actively disliked the original trilogy from the first time he saw it. In 1977, he was a 12 year old boy who loved space, and even he was not taken in by A New Hope's impressive special effects and unimpressive main character (I'm gonna say it right now, and I want it on the record, Luke Skywalker is an annoying little bitch). So I have no nostalgic connection to these movies. I can only judge them as I judge all other movies. On technical merit, ethical implications and cultural impact. If you want to hear about how this fits into the franchise, I am not your gal. I really enjoyed Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). It was a compelling story, concisely written and very competently put together. The result is a fun, and at times genuinely moving 2 hours where I never felt like taking a nap or rolling my eyes so hard I lose them in the back of my head forever. I was hoping that the movies Disney had announced that narratively fell outside of the original trilogy, like Rogue One, would follow that example. With Solo, I have been promptly let down.

Am I the only one who finds Chewbacca distractingly ridiculous looking?

     I'll give you the broad strokes of this erratic, overly complex plot now so we can get that out of the way. I will reiterate that I do not care for the story at large, so forgive me if I don't lavish in all the minute connections this movie makes to the episodic storyline. So Han (Ehrenreich) is an orphan living on the planet Corellia, that appears to be populated exclusively by youthful street urchins who are constantly stealing from one another (I found out it's a ship building planet with a large population of poor orphans, but only after I googled the plot for this review). He and his lover, Qi'ra (Clarke), attempt to escape the giant, angry, light sensitive worm creature they owe money to by stealing valuable refined fuel that they stole for her in order to flee the planet and sell it. Han gets out, Qi'ra does not. Han joins the Imperial Navy in order to become a pilot and one day return to rescue his lady love. We pick up with him again 3 years later, and now he's a foot soldier in the army. He got kicked out of the flight academy for being too disobedient or sexy or something. He's now stationed on a mud planet? where he meets Chewbacca, who has been chained in a pit eating people for at least as long as it takes a skeleton to rot clean. Which is horrifying. While there he also encounters Tobias and Val Beckett (Harrelson and Newton, respectively), a couple of high profile thieves there to steal weapons or something for Dryden Vos (Bettany). Vos is a high ranking member of the crime syndicate Crimson Dawn (why a group that is supposedly trying to keep a low profile would give it self such a flashy name that is very reminiscent of menstruation is beyond me). Han discovers that Qi'ra is working for/schtuping Vos (what the FUCK are the odds) and becomes invested in whatever needlessly cryptic bullshit is going on with them. So that's roughly the first 45 minutes. There's another entire hour and 15 minutes of shit I don't care to rehash here. Christ, what a long fucking movie.

A man and his giant dog thing. Classic.

     One of the very first lines uttered in Solo made me want to stand up, scream into the dark theater full of innocent moviegoers and rip out my cerebral cortex, showering those moviegoers with my hot, angry disappointed blood. Screenwriting. Is. So. Important. And I generally like Lawrence Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Big Chill (1983), Grand Canyon (1991) and Dreamcatcher (2003), just to name a few), so I don't know what the heck happened here. Maybe it was the addition of his son Jonathan (whose IMDB page is only slightly longer than mine). I take with issue with both the structure of this screenplay and the dialogue in that structure. For one thing, this damn movie is 2 hours long, and it very much doesn't need to be. I wish I could say it would be easy to cut that run time down! It would not be! The important stuff is so inseparably woven into boring garbage that I can't really figure out what I would remove. So in order to understand it's asinine plot you have to deal with a bunch of technical jargon that gets the audience and the story nowhere. There are so many 'hero in peril' scenes that none of them really carry any weight, because by the third one you know instinctively that there will be another, so the peril is never real. This movie is essentially just a bunch of cool space vehicle chance scenes strung together with utterly forgettable moments of weak dialogue and forced character connections. I didn't give one shit about any of these characters. Probably because everything they say is a very thinly veiled effort to either advance the plot or give us information they already have that we need. There's nothing I hate more than characters exchanging information to each other that they both already know so that audience can hear it. No one in real life talks like that. It feels like the screenwriter has reached into the audience, grabbed you by your shirt collar and yelled "YOU'RE WATCHING A MOVIE". This was just an ungraceful, clunky, and at times cringy, attempt at writing a movie. I blame the younger Kasdan. Nice going, Jonathan.

We're on a real life green screen! Oh Boy!

     While I grew up not giving a shit about Star Wars, I am a human with eyes, so of course I thought Han was sexy. Harrison Ford, at any age, can fucking get it. In this movie, I was looking forward to seeing him be all young and reckless and cool. But, as contrary as it may sound, he wasn't the main character of Solo. The bonkers plot drowns out any opportunity to get to know this character better. I still don't really feel like I know anything about Han's youth or formative experiences. This film does the same thing that first trilogy did, in the sense that it alludes to much more compelling stories than the one it's telling. Han got kicked out of flight school? Well shit that sounds cool lets hear about that! Anyway, because it has so many characters all vying for the top spot in this narrative (like, look at the size of that freaking cast), it relies waaaayyyy too heavily on audience nostalgia to help centre it. I'm totally fine with an acknowledgement of why we all showed up. But if you're relying solely on peoples previous experiences to connect your movie to it's audience, it will surely fade into obscurity (much the same way George Lucas's chin faded into his neck years ago). The first time Han and Chewie sit down together behind the wheel of the Millennium Falcon, there's a big musical flourish and they give each other this little knowing glance. Like hell they'd know this was some important moment! In the context of the story, it's out of necessity that they end up flying together. Because no one else is able to in that moment. Give me a fucking break. This is another choice that removes the viewer from the experience of the film. It says, "Hey, remember that thing you already love? Well here's a less impressive, secondhand version of that!". Like, we get it, you're the most financially successful franchise ever. Stop jerking yourself off and show us something new and special.

That god damn smile. Jesus.

     So as much as I had a hard time sifting through all the narrative tripe in Solo, I at least enjoyed what I was looking at while I was doing so. The production design is absolutely outstanding. There's a definite 70's influence, which is an interesting choice. Because the original visual content was all designed in the 70's, but to look futuristic. So they sort of take that 70's space vibe and walk it back into a 70's earth vibe...in space. It works really well. Han's hair cut is super 70's, right down to the side burns. Most of the elegant dresses in one specific party scene are long, loose and low cut. The colour scheme for a lot of the movie is very heavily based in reds and yellows and browns. And I've always appreciated the design of the tech in these movies. From the swooshy space doors to Han's quintessential blaster (again a heck of a lot of reverence for a weapon that, in the context of the movie, is not important), everything is designed, ya know? There was thought and care taken with every prop, every set piece, every prosthetic alien scalp. I have a lot of respect for a movie that is visually so thoroughly realized. And one that so seamlessly connects a decade of style we're all familiar with to a new galactic setting. Even the poster is very 70's in it's design. There's lots of clean, symmetrical lines and a definite circle motif. Maybe I'm giving it too much credit, but a circle is an appropriate choice for a movie that's trying to bring our experience of a preexisting character, well, full circle. I have one more nice thing to say about this movie. Donald Glover is a damn masterpiece of a human artist generally, but he particularly crushes the game as a young Lando Calrissian. He looks perfect in the togs, he's got a legendary haircut, and he carries himself with just the right amount of friendly confidence with a 'fuck you\ attitude. He comes off exceptionally appealing, and I really hope they don't fuck up his dedicated bio pic the way they did this one.



     I don't recommend spending your hard earned cash on Solo. Watch it on Netflix in two months when you're trying to avoid doing your laundry. While there are some beautiful looking scenes, and Donald Glover's performance is not to be missed, it's ultimately underwhelming; A frantically written, hard to follow snooze fest with not nearly enough pew pew noises. Oh, did I say not enough? I'm sorry I meant too much. Absolutely too many pew pew noises. Cut those down by half and maybe you've got something here, Mr. Howard.



***


So that's another installment of me spending money on movies I know I won't like just to get the page views on here. This better work. All you opinionated nerds out there better be scraping the bottom of the internet and find this shit. I want enough page views to monetize this sucker so I don't keep wasting money on crappy movies like this one.

Ciao for now. See you next week!

"...wonderful in a loathsome sort of way..."

Original Poster

His Girl Friday (1940)

Directed and Produced by Howard Hawks
Cinematography by Joseph Walker
Edited by Gene Havlick
Screenplay by Charles Lederer
Based on the 1928 play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
Starring Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy and Gene Lockhart


Originally released January 11th, 1940.


     I was in a first year high school film class the first time I realized people don't all absorb movies the same way. "What did you think of it, Timmy (I don't remember his real name, so let's just call him Timmy)?", our teacher asked after we'd finished a movie. "I didn't like it.", replied Timmy with a I'm-14-and-have-just-discovered-the-wonders-of-apathy shrug. "And why not?", my naive and ever encouraging film teacher queried. A brief pause returned from Timmy, his hormone addled brain sifting through his ever growing mental catalog of Internet porn to find an answer he deemed suitable. "It was black and white." Being the academic, sheltered film nerd I was (and obviously still am), I was completely taken aback. My mental mouth hung agape in indignant shock. What the fUCK!? What a dumb fucking reason to dismiss something! I'll speak more on Timmy in the post script, but the point he serves in this review is that I think about that moment every time I watch an older film, shot in black and white. I picture his dumb face giggling to his equally dumb friends like he made a real funny joke or some shit. Needless to say, as I am still that aforementioned film nerd, I think about Timmy and his dumb face often. I thought of it when I sat down to revisit an old favourite this week. His Girl Friday is a witty, fast paced dramedy that treats a professional woman with surprising respect for it's era and shows us a young Cary Grant unbuttoning his shirt. An embarrassment of riches, really. It's an hour and a half of fun, satisfying banter between two gorgeous white people in beautiful cloths that eventually (and unsurprisingly) disappear into Cary Grants chin cleft, as we all will some day.

From top to bottom; Ralph Bellamy,
Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant.

     Hildy Johnson (Russell) is a sharp, quick witted and charming ex reporter. She left the game when she divorced her husband and coworker, editor Walter Burns (Grant). Our film opens with her first visit to the office since she left. She's there to tell Burns she's getting remarried, to an insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Bellamy). This is news he's not happy to hear, but he loves Hildy, and initially gives her his blessing (not that she needed it, but this is a genuinely complicated relationship, so I won't judge too harshly). Over the course of having lunch with her and her new fiance before they leave town, however, he realizes what fool he was to let her go so easy and formulates a plan to make her stay on at the paper, and ultimately, with him. He presents her with a story he knows she won't be able to pass up covering, thinking writing again will remind her how much she loves it. The story; an innocent man will be hung early the next day, and he convinces her that she could save his life by writing a profile and publishing it in the evening edition. She agrees to to do it, but is at the same time plotting to defraud her scheming ex husband and trick him out of his life savings. Hilarity ensues when they both try to enact their respective plans on each other at the same time. That's pretty much the gist of it.

*Cary Grant voice* "That looks infected, my dear..."

     So because this was based on a play, it feels very much like a play. In addition to feeling very structurally like a play, it kinda looks like one too. The common shooting style of early Hollywood movies was super simple. Most scenes were made up of almost exclusively long running medium shots. Obviously there were exceptions to this, usually films made by grandiose auteurs (Orson, I'm looking at you) or people with more money than they knew what to do with (Gone With the Wind (1939) can shove it's massive budget up it's own racist ass). Those who pushed the technical envelope often ended up changing the game. Right after Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Wells made The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). In it, there's a scene where Wells insisted on moving the heavy, loud camera through the ballroom of a real old house. They ended up just foleying the whole scene because the camera rolling over the wooden floorboards was so loud, but the result is pretty seamless. In fact, there's nothing else of that era like that long shot. It's akin to watching Marilyn Monroe use an iphone. Anyway, His Girl Friday is not like that. It's very very static. I can recall seeing only two dynamic shots. One shot in the beginning has some layered action and couple of focus pulls. One at the end uses fast pans back and forth to emphasize a humorously frantic tone in the scene. Almost everything else is a loosely framed two shot (occupied primarily by Cary Grant's chin) that pans slowly back and forth with the actors across the set (and that aforementioned chin).

Sadly, this is not a shot in the movie. Just a production still :(

      I believe that good banter in movies and television is basically a 50/50 equation. If a good script doesn't have the performances to hold it up and vice versa, they'll both ultimately fall fail. This is of course a simplified explanation of a very nuanced relationship. Essentially, the screenwriter entrusts the overall result of their work to the people delivering it, and even the best actor can't shine through garbage material. We'll talk about the chemistry between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell later on, but for now, lets focus on this unbelievable screenplay. Structurally, it's nothing special. Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy tries to win girl back, girl tries to commit insurance fraud. Pretty standard stuff. But the dialogue is the real attraction here. I think most of the story points are true to the play. The Hildy character in the play is a man, so most of the dialogue was rewritten for the movie. But regardless of who's primarily responsible for it, its a masterful example of writing chemistry. There's of course that element of chemistry that can't be written, and that's up to the actors. The dialogue here gives you everything you need to know about the characters and their dynamic while the specifics of their conversation often only hint at personality traits. It's conveyed in what they say and how they say it. That may seem like an obvious goal that most screenwriters would easily achieve, but too often they miss it. They worry so much about the audience understanding their characters that they find a way to build in really blunt and uninspired character development that often manifests as characters just saying things about one another. "John is smart." "Helen is brave." "Del is punctual." His Girl Friday is full of examples of character development that's slipped into normal conversations, giving the audience an impression of sincerity. In this exchange, the main characters reminisce about their honeymoon:

Hildy: All I know is that instead of two weeks in Atlantic City with my bridegroom, I spent two weeks in a coal mine with John Krupsky. You don't deny that, do you Walter?
Walter: Deny it? I'm proud of it. We beat the whole country on that story.
Hildy: Well, I suppose we did. That isn't what I got married for!

     From this short exchange, we better understand each of their priorities in general and the history of their relationship with each other. It's lines like this that make their future behaviour unsurprising. Big hand for Charles Lederer, everyone!

Look at this freaking lobby card :')

     Remember when I said we'd talk about Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell later? Well later is now.  These two as Hildy and Walter have Sam and Diane level chemistry. He's pants-shreddingly handsome. She's got a big sexy brain. They shamelessly flirt their way through the movie (and our hearts). They aren't just very compatible pieces of meat though. The characters also have a remarkably complex relationship for a movie from 1940. They have that conflict friction that audiences love. While they fight bitterly and throw nuclear grade barbs back and forth, they have a mutual love and respect that stops them from ever really crossing a line. It's that mutual respect that's specifically so surprising. The fact that Hildy is able to walk through this movie as a professional divorcee and is still every one's favourite person is truly remarkable. I'm not exaggerating, either. Every person that Hildy runs into is overjoyed to see her. You'd think she shat money or cigarettes or something. The reassuring feature of this enthusiasm for her is that most of it is related to her talent. People acknowledge and respect her for journalistic ability. She's not lauded for her body or her relationship to her ex-husband, but for her big sexy brain. Hey 40's? The future called. They want their female character back. Anyway. The relationship between Hildy and Walter is beautifully crafted and executed, and honestly, it's a joy to watch unfold. Plus, both Grant and Russell have outrageous Mid-Atlantic accents, so they sound bonkers.



     His Girl Friday is a very nice intro to classic cinema if you aren't already familiar and a nice edition to your repertoire if you are. It's light, funny and only mildly sexist. Also, part of the reason Hildy Johnson is such a cool cat is that she's based on a real fucking person!! Her name was Adela Rogers St. Johns and she was hailed as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 20's and 30's. Hildy's costumes are a widely acknowledged highlight of this film, and they are based on this woman's actual outfits. That's how compelling she was. Please do yourself a great service and read that wiki page. Ms. Rogers St. Johns was a god damn treasure and a fascinating woman. But yeah great movie also. Check em' both out!


***


Well. That's that. I've been meaning to mention that I'll take requests! If there's something you'd love to know my thoughts on, please let me know! I'll probably do it! Anyway, let's talk more about that jackass in my high school film class. If memory serves, the kid was making his outrageous qualification in reference to Modern Times, the 1936 Charlie Chaplin classic that is arguably one of his best and most iconic works. As a mixture of confusion and offence settled into my still processing brain, I realized that it had never even occurred to me that someone might not like a movie because of the colour it was shot in. It brought me out of the safe bubble I'd spent the majority of my childhood consuming art in, with a father and mother that not only encouraged critical examination of said art, but often required it. This statement helped me realize that not everyone was encouraged like I was. This kid, like so many others, was reacting negatively to something unfamiliar in the film. It probably wasn't the fact of the black and white colour scheme that offended him, but rather that he'd never been empowered to embrace art that looked different from what he was used to. If Modern Times had been in colour, I bet he would have liked it. Heck, if he'd been 14 in 1936, he probably would have liked it! His lizard brain, designed to keep him physically and emotionally safe, would have said "My guy, this is fine! We've seen this before. Just enjoy it." This kid, through no fault or intention of his own, set me on my path to not only trying to understand why individual artists make the choices they do, but why the public makes the choices they do when they consume and judge that art. I find the psychology behind film making and film reception fascinating. Thanks, Timmy.

See you next week!

Shake It.

Hey folks.

I'm super burnt out this week, so I'm not going to post a review. I'll be back next week though! In the mean time, please enjoy this limerick I wrote in high school about David Bowie.

***

Shake It.

His moonlight was ever so serious.
The real man was ever mysterious.
When he told us "Let's Dance", we jumped at the chance,
Because his music, it made us delirious.

What a fucking Angel.

Game Over.

Original Poster

Ready Player One (2018)

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Zach Penn and Ernest Cline
Music by Alan Silverstri
Edited by Sarah Broshar and Micheal Khan
Cinematography by Janusz Kaminski
Starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendolsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance


Originally released March 29th, 2018.


      As many of you already know, or may have guessed, I am a profoundly big fan of the 80's. Not just one specific feature of the decade, but the whole damn thing. This love covers all of my interests. I collect Life magazines from the decade. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of 80's film and television. My favourite genre of music is a small sub section of the English side of 80's new wave called Sophisti-pop. Hell, I often dress like it's 1988 and I've just dropped the kids off at soccer practice and am heading to the A&P for groceries. In other words, I am a massive nerd. Just a big raging ball of dork. I'm not trying to brag. I'm the first to admit that my obsessive interest in a fucking decade is extremely uncool and nothing to brag about. I almost never have an opportunity to apply this knowledge anywhere. Most of the people I interact with on a regular basis couldn't give two shits about Shermer, Illinois, or the evolution of Ted Danson's haircut over the course of Cheers' syndication. For me, it's generally wasted brain space. Ready Player One is rare, in the sense that it's new content that gave me the opportunity to nerd the fuck out all over it. It's a computer generated orgy of 80's references intertwined with a future geopolitical collapse fantasy and, just for good measure, video game culture. It jams everybody's least favorite parts of what makes up the Modern American Nerd TM into a periodically entertaining, generally confusing, mostly ok movie that uses stuff you already know and love to draw you in.


 

Everyone looks pretty funny in this when you can't see what they're seeing...

     It's 2045, and the world very different from the one we're in now. A few years back, a guy named James Halliday created an expansive Virtual Reality universe called the OASIS. Due to over population (and Trump probably), people in Columbus, Ohio live in slumy stacked motor homes called, fittingly, The Stacks. Our hero is Wade Watts, who, like everyone else on the planet, spends all of his time in the OASIS. When the creator died, he left three keys, or easter eggs, in the universe. The person who finds them all will control the entire OASIS. We come in five years after this contest starts. The keys have yet to be found. Wade has dedicated his time to learning as much about Halliday as possible to gain an advantage in his search for the keys, but he's not the only one. There's also a big evil corporation with unlimited resources and a bunch of faceless drones whose sole purpose is to look for the keys. Wade and his rag tag band of digital pals fight the forces of evil to protect their precious OASIS from certain doom. You know, pretty standard hero based quest stuff.

Like, it's odd for a man who helped define a pop
culture era to then make a movie in homage to that era, right?

     While I was watching, I had to keep having to remind myself that this was a Spielberg movie. Now, he's always been a little hit or miss (*cough**cough* 1941 (1979) *cough*), but ever since The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), the quality of his work has been steadily declining. I grew up on the cream of the crop (Jaws (1975), Close Encounters (1977), Raiders (1981), Empire of the Sun (1987), Jurassic Park (1993), just to name a few, obviously). My Dad made sure that the Spielberg I got to know first was the best one. And as a result, he remains one of my favorite Hollywood directors. It's hard not to love his work. His first major motion picture was also the very first film to be described as a block buster! There were literal lines around the block to see this thing! It made adults and children alike irrationally afraid of sharks! Yellow! Anyway. He's a genius who's rightfully revered is my point. But even geniuses can misstep. And boy does he have a few (re: 1941). I wasn't really surprised that RPO wasn't up to his best standards, but I was still disappointed.

The guy in the background (Mark Rylance) is real.
The guy in the foreground is fully CG. Fuck, that's cool.

     As I was saying, I was hoping to be more impressed with this movie than I was. For the most part, it was unremarkable. The cinematography was largely unimpressive. Nothing special about that script (if anything it felt a little off; very forced in places). The performances are fine. I was searching the whole time a Spielbergian use of color or restricted visual access motif. Sadly, I found neither. I don't even think there was a oner. The complex, dynamic, usually lasting 15 seconds or more single shot that he features in almost all of his movies, regardless of tone. It's perhaps his most quintessential technique. I was watching for it, and as far as I could tell, there was no Spielberg oner. Get the Hell outta here! This could have been directed by anyone else. That being said, there were one or two examples of the result of a symbiosis I first noticed in The Adventures of Tin Tin (2011). The best thing to happen professionally to Steven Spielberg was a realistic looking fully CG world and vice versa. Giving a filmmaker of that caliber the ability to put the camera anywhere, at any time, in any scenario is a gift from some higher being. The first action sequence that takes place in RPO, in the OASIS, is like mega Mario Kart. It's a massive car race through the VR streets of New York, and it's visually fantastic. I held my breath a few times. The fast pace of the cars is echoed in the way the scene is shot, with lost of sudden zooms or pans to cover all the action. The sound design is also very tight. It's easy to get lost in all those roaring motors, but they manage to hold the focus of the scene really well. Maybe it's because it's based on a book; maybe it's the complexity of the universe, but the exposition in RPO is some wacky shit. Especially considering who directed it. Spielberg is the master of visual, non-verbal expository story info. But the first five minutes of this movie are just narrated. And not even that well. It's just our boring, nerdy hero telling us point blank about the intervening years between our world and his. As if he knows his audience is coming to the story from 25 years in the past. It seems strange for a movie about an immersive virtual world to keep the audience outside the realm of the movie like that. I understand, from a screenwriting standpoint, how hard it can be to give the audience all the info they need to understand the narrative, but there are more artful ways to do it than the techniques used here. Come on Stevie. You know better.

Yes, The Iron Giant plays a fairly big role (pun intended)...

     The corner stone of the nerd community, like most communities, is knowledge. Nerds love to know stuff! Even the really unimportant, minute and frequently boring details about whatever they're into. Whether it's music, movies, sports, professional knitting; there are nerds of all shapes and sizes, and our defining characteristic is to know all the things pertaining to our thing. Ready Player One is like an ode to the nerd. There are so many opportunities to identify a wide range of references. It's a veritable feast for those of us familiar with 80's pop culture and video games. Those are the primary sources, but there are other content references that pop up. I spent most of the movie searching the crowded scenes, looking for familiar characters or outfits or soft drinks (as much as every 80's themed thing wants Tab to be like the drink, I don't think it was as popular as we think it was, because it was gross). The references come at you hard and fast. There's a scene where the main character is going through his digital closet, looking for an outfit for a date. He starts with Prince's Purple Rain suit, next is Michael Jackson's red leather Thriller outfit, then there's the quintessential Duran Duran Girls On Film era off-white slouchy jumpsuit. He settles finally on an outfit from his favorite movie. What is his favorite movie, you ask? Well, hold onto your butts, because this is a nerdy doozy. Fucking The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). Whose favorite movie is Buckaroo fucking Banzai? I mean, it's a magical intergalactic romp through 1980's camp, and Perfect Tommy is a perfect babe, but good god damn its a very specific choice. Sorry, I know this maybe seems inconsequential, but this got me real fired up. Because I'm a nerd. And the details matter to me.

They cast some normal looking people, which is nice.
They don't get all that much screen time, but it's still nice.

     This was a pretty critical review, but I did enjoy Ready Player One. It was a very fun watch. The action sequences are genuinely entertaining, the soundtrack is absolutely beautiful (shockingly, it's not John Williams), and the CG is truly baffling. I know it makes me sound out of touch, but holy motherfucking shit I am blown away by modern CG. We are now at the point that, for most things, if you didn't know it wasn't real, you wouldn't know. And I was extremely impressed with that component of this movie. I was just disappointed to not find more of the director in it. Also, the story was so predictable that none of the peril felt genuine. Kind of ruins the suspense to know the heroes will win no matter how many times the villains jump on the back of their van. Anyway. It's worth a watch, but don't pay for it. Maybe wait for the *cough* torrents *cough* to pop up.



***


Hey folks I'm sorry this one was late. I had a busy week. If I was being paid for this, I'd probably be more punctual. But I'm not. I gotta live, ya know? And I had to work pretty hard to separate all my feelings about this to write a fair review. Spielberg and I have a torrid love affair that at it's peak is the first 8 minutes of Raiders and at it's lowest point is, you guessed it, 1941. Also, I couldn't figure out where to talk about it, but the digital recreation of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining is absolutely mind blowing and I don't even mind the blatant rip off. It's just super cool.


See you Tuesday! Go see Deadpool 2 and tell me what you think!

Byyyyyeeeeee :)

Roll Over. Play Dead.

Original Poster

Benji (1974)

Directed, written and produced by Joe Camp
Music by Euel Box
Distributed by Mulberry Square Releasing
Starring Higgins (dog), Patsy Garrett, Cynthia Smith, Alan Fiuzat and Peter Breck


Originally released October 17th, 1974.


     Growing up, I often heard mention of a dog my family had when my brothers were young. There's a 16 year age difference between me and my eldest brother, so as much as I would have liked it, this dog and I never crossed paths. He was small, white, fluffy and, by all accounts, an annoying little shit. Just as the family was about to settle in for dinner, he would bolt from their picturesque 80's suburban home and into the large park the neighborhood surrounded. And he never even had a purpose. He just wanted to be in that park. He did this regularly. Once or twice a week. He really committed to the bit. I respect the hell out of him for that. What a little rebel! He was also very sweet and my mother loved him dearly, but his most prominent feature was, far and away, his escaping antics. This dog's name was Benji, and he, like many dogs born or adopted after October 17th, 1974, was named for a very popular fictional dog. A stray who did what he wanted, when he wanted and with whom he wanted was the subject of the third highest grossing film of 1974. Benji essentially redefined the family friendly G rated genre at a time when that rating was an effective box office kiss of death. It is not great. It's not even all that good. I fell asleep for 3 hours about halfway through and was not excited to continue watching when I woke up. But it represents an important moment in the 70's, and it's a checkpoint for examining the evolution of movies aimed at children in the late part of the 20th century (I know that doesn't sound all that exciting, but I'm going to talk about Air Bud later, so sit tight).

Out of context, what the fuck is going on here?

     I know I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised by how much of this movie is actually just a dog running from point A to point B at different speeds and angles. Like, it's 98% a dog running (sometimes two dogs running). The movie follows the story of a little stray mutt who lives in an abandoned house on the outskirts of a mid sized town. Everyday, he takes the same route around the town receiving food and unsolicited advice he can't possibly understand from the locals. Some call him Sam, some call him Buddy, but his favorite family calls him Benji. Every morning, he shows up to a big, white antebellum southern home and is fed by a kindly but no nonsense house keeper as she sends two aggressively white children off to school. The three of them successfully hide this dog-centered ritual from the children's stern, dog hating doctor father (Stern Dad, MD, as I referred to him in my notes). When the kids are abducted and held for ransom by a discount John Lithgow and his cronies, a ridiculously convenient confluence of events enable this wonder dog to save the day.

I can only see three colors!

   
     Benji plays almost like an after school special. With less art. It's barely a movie, really. Visually, it's so utilitarian that it's almost invisible. The script is virtually translucent. It's like having 85 minutes of family friendly dog content liquefied and hooked right to your veins. As much as I love dogs (and I do very very much love dogs), watching them do normal dog things is objectively not that exciting. They must have known how boring the content could be to begin with, so I find it puzzling that the filmmakers didn't do more to spice it up. Specifically with the use of music. Considering how little of the $500,000 budget is evident on screen, they must have spent most of that money getting Charlie Rich to sing the theme song. Which was received fairly well. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. The hot track in question, entitled "I Feel Love", won the Golden Globe in the same category. So it's not like they didn't have decent music to work with. And while many of the dog/dogs frolicking in the glowy 70's sunlight scenes have soundtrack in them, a surprising number of them do not. There is a very long (too long) sequence where Benji is running around a police station trying to get someones attention that uses no music what so ever. In this way, it can be hard to gauge exactly how the movie wants you to feel about things. A lot of it ends up feeling like an after thought. No wonder every distributor in Hollywood turned this movie down.

Here, Benji appears with lady Benji,
because of course this dog has a love interest.

     When people saw the moving image of a train pulling into a station for the first time, they dove out of their chairs for fear of injury. They hadn't been trained to understand moving pictures yet. We as movie audiences have learned to react to a pretty specific set of techniques and ques in film. These have grown and changed with time, just as we have. So it stands to reason that modern audiences might react to older films differently than the audiences those films were originally aimed at. We no longer culturally resemble the target audience of films from the 10's and 20's, for instance, so it's not surprising that very few films of that era endure in current popular culture. Obviously there are exceptions to that rule. It's those exceptions that, with the aid of true artistic vision, helped set the tone for the future. Benji is not one of those exceptions, and it has not aged well. Particularly in the area of pacing. This movie moves a glacial speed. Well, realistically, that's an insult to glaciers. They more or less got where they were going in only 15 thousand years, a jaunty sprint in comparison to the passage of time in Benji. I'm not exaggerating when I say that nothing happens for the first 30 minutes. The most exciting thing to then happen is our boy dog hero meeting a cute girl dog. He then does the same things he did in the first 30 minutes, just with another dog around. This thing takes it's damn sweet time going nowhere. It is infuriating. Or it would be, if it didn't also suck out one's will to live. I'd have been angry with it if I wasn't so fucking bored. I think this, in addition to lazy film making, is indicative of how audiences and their expectations have changed. We don't have the same patience we used to. Thanks Michael Bay.

The kids are actually pretty good in this.

     I don't know who the first person to say "Hey, what if the protagonist in this story was a dog?" was, but I think they deserve a fucking medal. Sure, Benji isn't a great example of what this four-legged trope has to offer, but it is credited with reinvigorating the genre. We previously had stories, and later movies, like Old Yeller and Lassie (a personal favorite), but even those centered around human relationships with each other. The dog character acted as more of a mirror or catalyst for human feelings. But it was with movies like Benji that we got used to the idea of a more anthropomorphous live action dog character. One that has human-like thoughts and feelings that it expresses in a, um, doggy style...sorry. After the massive success of this movie (made on a budget of $500,000, it made close to $45 million, a nearly eight fold return), it became an even more successful franchise. There are 9 movies in total, not including the 2018 remake. It helped make way for classics like The Adventures of Milo & Otis (1986), the Beethoven franchise, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), and perhaps most famously, the Air Bud franchise. There are other movies that are better technically or more iconic in the realm of "dogs in movies" (like Marley & Me (2008), or The First Time A Movie Made Me Cry Into The Family Pet). But these are prime examples of an animal being the principal protagonist in a movie where the human characters occupy only supporting roles. It's kind of nuts to think that this formula worked, and worked so well. But I suppose that these emotionally sophisticated dog characters' interpretation of the world resemble that of the children the movies are aimed at. Also, dogs were the first animals we successfully domesticated (about 15,000 years ago), so no wonder we feel so connected to them. They're magic.



     Benji isn't a classic worth revisiting in full. I don't recommend you go out of your way to watch it. Unless you're having trouble sleeping. Then definitely check it out. I even think most kids would be bored by it now. That being said, it is a bench mark for a very financially successful chunk of Hollywood movies. What can I say? People love a good dog. After all, we're only human.



***


I didn't have anywhere to put this in the article, but please do yourself a favor and read this short Wiki page about the original dog who played Benji. It's really sweet and nice. Also, if you're wondering where the animated dogs movies are, I felt that part of the genre deserves it's own article. So don't worry. We'll get there eventually. Thanks for reading, ya filthy animals! See you next week.

*yawns* *sighs*

Original Poster

The Week Of (2018)

Directed by Robert Smigel
Written by Robert Smigel and Adam Sandler
Produced by Allen Covert and Adam Sandler
Starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Rachel Dratch, Steve Buscemi, Alison Strong and Noah Robbins


Originally Released April 27th, 2018.


     You know that feeling you get when you realize that you've only been doing something for 20 minutes but it feels like it's been hours? Well that's more or less how it felt to watch this. 20 minutes in, I was ready for a nap and/or a good slap in the face. Really anything other than continuing with what I can only assume is the work of a computer program instructed to write a screenplay based on what it thinks movies are. But guys, I couldn't get to the theatre this week, so I took one for the team. Now you don't have to watch The Week Of, because I sat through all 116 minutes of it for you and only fell asleep twice (an achievement, I promise). So now, let me lay on you a review more entertaining than it's subject. The bar was low this week, gang. Let's do this.

Hahaha we're so rich!

   
     With a plot so thin you could spit through it, it feels a little wrong to even dignify it with a synopsis, but I have a format to stick to. A working class family from Long Island hosts their daughter's fiance's well off extended family the week before her wedding, for some reason. The families get along well, except for their respective patriarchs, played by Chris Rock and Adam Sandler. Sandler's character, the less affluent of the two, insists on paying for everything and continues to refuse financial Rock's help, even as everything that could go wrong does. In the end, they learn some valuable lessons from each other. How to lighten up for Rock's character and how to accept help when it's offered for Sandler's. This is surrounded by roughly 100 minutes of poop jokes and strippers on trampolines. We're working with some pretty basic stuff. It's not War and Peace.



     I still maintain, as I have for years, that Rachel Dratch is one of the funniest people alive. Her presence will improve any project she takes part in, so naturally, she's a high point in this movie. She totally nails the socially clueless, well meaning mother who would die for her kids. A pretty funny recurring bit is hers and Sandler's characters having screaming fights that the rest of the family can hear word for word that ultimately end in exchanging angry sounding compliments to each other. It's her performance that really makes that joke work. I'll never forget the first time I saw the Debbie Downer sketch on SNL. Not even her cast mates can keep it together in that one. Obviously she's elevated by good material, but even without (like in this case), she's a fucking riot. I'd also like to mention that Adam Sandler is much better dramatic actor than a comedic one. If you're skeptical of this assertion, may I point you to Punch Drunk Love, Spanglish, and Reign Over Me. The few moments in this film where he gets to do some serious acting are some of the only good ones.


   

Funny, I was making the same face as Adam Sandler here
by the end of the movie too, but for different reasons I think.

     While the technical style of The Week Of is designed to be so subtle it's virtually non existent, the camera work is stylistically important. I might be giving this movie more credit than it deserves, but I cling to the belief that every movie has merit in some form (for the love of god, I need that to be true). The idea here is that the hosting family is very "normal". Honestly, they make that work.  They've cast some average looking people and achieved a more or less realistic family dynamic among the Long Islanders. The camera work emphasizes this. It's almost filmed like a Mocumentary, just with a film frame rate as opposed to video. Most shots are handheld mediums, intended to put you right there with the characters. The scenes that take place in cars are shot locked off and a little fished eyed, like they're filmed from mounted cameras on the inside of the car (much like reality TV). While it isn't a massive feat, and doesn't really do anything to improve the overall result, it's a nice little deliberate choice.


   
     So the two families coming together to witness this unnecessary, costly and stressful event are Jewish on the Bride's side and Black on the Groom's. Straying from what you'd generally expect from a Hollywood movie, the Black family is the more affluent and sophisticated of the two. Because these families represent two very different but similarly oppressed-by-white-christians minorities, there are plenty of opportunities to make a joke of their differences. It's easy, low hanging fruit. And whether it's the intention or not, the result is often racist. I was really surprised that crutch wasn't used more frequently. I can only think of one, maybe two instances where race or religion are used as the setup or punchline for a joke. For the most part, these two families accept each other with no caveats, no judgment. Both sides seem to genuinely appreciate the other and embrace them as new members of their respective families. That's a nice thing to see.


   
     I believe that it takes as much work to make a bad movie as it does to make a good one. Lots of good, talented, dignified people worked hard on this artistic representation of paint drying. They deserve our respect. I'd like to thank those people for what they did. You folks are the salt of the earth. Keep it up! Anyway, as I was saying, this was some underwhelming shit. I was expecting it to be bad, but I wasn't expecting it to be so dull. It had it's moments, as all films do (well, most), just not enough of them. 4/10, would not recommend.



***

Yeah I don't know. I'll have something cooler for you next week. Seriously though watch some of those other Adam Sandler movies I mentioned. Punch Drunk Love is wonderful. Fuck, you know a movie's bad when you end a review recommending other films. Well, thems the breaks.

See you pals next week. Try to avoid The Week Of!

Antonio Salieri: The Patron Saint of Mediocrity.

Original Poster

Amadeus (1984)

Directed by Milos Forman
Written by Paul Shaffer
Cinematography by Miroslav Ondricek
Edited by Nena Danevic and Michael Chandler
Music conducted and supervised by Neville Marriner
Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce and Elizabeth Berridge


Originally released September 19th, 1984.


     I remember being unenthused when my dad first pitched Amadeus to me as an option for an evening movie. I was around 8 or 9, so the prospect of sitting watching a bunch dudes in powdered wigs toss their arms around passionately in front of other dudes in powdered wigs for 3 hours was not particularly appealing. But I abandoned my reservations and my parents and the cats and I gathered around the soft glow of the flat screen to embark on this cinematic expedition. I of course had heard plenty of Mozart in my life. His work is some of most enduring and pervasive in the history of musical composition. But this film, from it's very first frame, invites the viewer to rethink what they originally assumed about the man and the music. It's a grand, sprawling story of love, betrayal, redemption and how to play a piano upside down at a party. It's important to mention that most of the story is fictional. And it's difficult to say with certainty what Mozart and his contemporaries were really like, but the key elements of truth are there. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an artistic visionary who partied mighty hardy and had not a single fuck to give about what the world thought of him. Hell yeah. This film shows us that Mozart, and does it in an exceptional way.

uoyevolitub! That's Elizabeth Berridge lookin' like a snack.

     The film opens with an old man proclaiming his guilt of the murder of W.A.M. as he attempts to commit suicide. Thirty years after Mozart's death, this character is institutionalized in the wake of this attempt and claim. When visited by a priest in the asylum, we learn that the old man is Antonio Salieri, a prominent classical composer who spent a portion of his career as the official court composer for the Emperor of Austria Joseph II (who reigned from 1764-1790). This period overlapped with Mozart's move to Vienna, where the Emperor met him and commissioned several works from him. When the visiting priest asks Salieri for his confession, Salieri begins to tell him of his experience with Mozart and the film primarily depicts flashbacks spurred by narration from this point on. The story examines Mozart's life and work through the lens of a bitter, envious, obsessive and none the less adoring contemporary composer in the form of Salieri. While many details are historically accurate, as I said before, a lot of the story is fictionalized. So if you're setting out to watch this for the first time, keep that in mind.

Tom Hulce as Mozart, making a face that
 sums up this character pretty perfectly.

      I'm a really, really big fan of Mozart (I'm listening to Symphony No. 18 right now!), and while I know it isn't true, I like to believe that he was as hot (and American) as Tom Hulce is playing him. The W.A.M. depicted in this film is irreverent, childish, impossibly outgoing, immature, irresponsible and self-absorbed. He's also one sexy fucking bad boy, baby! Maybe it's Hulce's boyish charm, maybe it's the 80's inspired powdered wigs, maybe it's the image of a man in tights. I don't know. Maybe it's a combination. It's a mystery left for the universe. What I do know is that Hulce delivers one hell of a performance. The Oscar nomination for best actor was well deserved. He strikes just the right tone throughout the film. He fully embraces the outrageous nature of the character publicly, but doesn't deny him the opportunity to be vulnerable in private. He also slays the shift in Mozart's character after the death of his father. For the fist time we see him conducting a performance (specifically Don Giovanni) showing the physical and emotional effort it takes. In most previous performance scenes, he looks like a dog with two very talented tails. We are also treated to the delightful and similarly complex performance that F. Murray Abraham delivers as Antonio Salieri. In a rare occurrence, both Hulce and Abraham were nominated for an Oscar in the same category for the same film. And Abraham won. For good reason. He spends about a third of the film in makeup (which is also exceptional) portraying Salieri as an old man. Seeing his performance jump back and forth through a 30 year period emphasizes his range and dexterity. While the two depictions of the character have the same key features, the perspective of that old Salieri brings to the story he's sharing is beautifully portrayed. It's that gained perspective that makes makes his young self easier to empathize with. Old Salieri is funny, honest and introspective. Young Salieri is a prick, but one we can understand. And that complexity of character would not be possible without an outstanding performance from Abraham. Also a quick shout out to Elizabeth Berridge, who plays Mozart's wife Constanze. As the most consistently tread on victim in this story (one of the only female characters is a victim?!?!?! HowWwwW?), she manages to still appear resilient and self-possessed. Oh fuck! A very young Cynthia Nixon (Miranda on Sex and the City) is also excellent in a bit part. Everyone in this is outstanding and I don't have time to talk about all of them, ok?! Just watch the damn movie.


   

Milos Forman (right) showing Tom Hulce (left) how to do The Hustle.

     There is so much technical merit in this film that I could write a hundred reviews and not cover it all, so I'll just choose one of the more obvious, and frankly, impressive film making devices on display here. This movie absolutely crushes the transition. It redefines both narration and flashback as story telling tropes by depicting both in such a beautifully functional way. It is a perfect marriage between editor and screenwriter. I usually find myself in the camp that believes narration is to screenwriting what the Segway is to walking. It's often just lazy; an opportunity for exposition without having to rely on the audience to do any work at all. But used correctly, it can be an artful addition to storytelling. For instance, it offers so many 'edit answers the question' moments to an editor. A narrator makes a vague or misleading statement and the audience, who've been trained by a lifetime of movie watching, asks a question of the film that can be answered visually of audibly in the edit. This is especially effective if you have two connected yet separate narratives going at the same time. Now you've involved the viewer in the process and given them the satisfaction of finding answers. There are so many examples of this in Amadeus. Every narrative jump between Salieri's story and the flashbacks to what he's discussing are seamless, smart and elegant. In some cases, they're funny. In others, they're jarring. There's one transition where the sound of crumpling paper at the end of one scene carries over into a shot of a heard of deer being startled and dashing off, bringing us so gracefully into the next scene. They also play beautifully with the idea of diegetic and non diegetic sound. Generally, this refers to music or sound that originates from the physical world the film is taking place in (that being diegetic) or music or sound that is happening outside that world of the benefit of the viewer (non diegetic). In Amadeus, there are scenes where you think music is non diegetic, but it's revealed that the music we've been hearing is happening in a characters head, so is in fact diegetic. There's a scene where Mozart is composing late at night and we're hearing what he's writing. We're meant to assume that's happening for our benefit alone, but when Constanze interrupts him and he looks up from the page, the music stops. The music in this scene is used to illustrate just how ingenious Mozart is. The music simply springs from his mind fully formed. And what a subtle and smart way to tell the audience this without having to say it. This film truly uses every inch of cinema it could get it's hands on. 

F. Murray Abraham (right) and Christine Ebersole (left).

As my 8 or 9 year old self first amused upon hearing Amadeus described, it doesn't sound like it would be all that compelling. How do make a movie about a big nerd who writes classical music for a living seem compelling (just so you can see how the film makers wanted to persuade you, here is the original trailer)? It may seem like a tall order, but here is a thing I try to remember about film when a plot or topic is being described to me. Film is ultimately, above everything else, storytelling. And a good storyteller can make anything compelling. Anything. That's the task. And boy does this film deliver on that task. It is as riveting as any action movie and as heartbreaking as any romance. And the reasons for this go beyond just good storytelling. There is a natural kinship between film and music generally, but even more so between film and classical music. For film to be effective as North American audiences (and increasingly, global ones too) have come it expect, it must operate in a ridged structure. There's plenty of variations on that structure, and many films that deviate from it become widely known and popular. But for the most part, in order to be widely understood and subsequently successful, a movie needs to follow a fairly strict set of structural guidelines. The necessity of following a structure is even more true for traditional classical music. For every format that a piece is written in, there are hundreds of rules that differ from all other formats. And of course sometimes those rules are broken, but then it becomes something else. And that's how traditional European music began to evolve. But for our purposes, we're talking about someone who never broke the rules. Mozart took existing structures and improved upon them by working magically within them. He bent the rules, but never broke them. And I think that's what makes a really great film maker. Building upon a form your audience is already familiar with and changing how they think about that form is a greater and more difficult to achieve triumph than just breaking the mold entirely and doing whatever the fuck you want. In the end, it makes sense that this film is compelling. The structure it's depicting mirrors the structure it's depicted in.

This looks cool for sure, but it's a
damn inconvenient way to write...

     Amadeus is an exceptionally written serious, fun and meaningful film experience that is amazing to look at. The costumes and set design are perfect. The performances are career defining. And the music is nothing short of magic (obviously). For a story about a bunch of old, white, probably racist, definitely smelly rich dudes, I can not sing it's praises thoroughly enough. If I was to criticize it at all, it's maybe a little too long. But I think any movie that I can't watch without having to make several trips to the bathroom during is too long, so that's not saying much. This is truly one for the god damn books, baby.

Ok, just one more pic:

Look at that cute baby! He's so good at his job!

***


     Oh my god. I'm so sorry this was so late everyone. Christ. I'm not exaggerating when I say I could write a hundred reviews and never say all I want to about this fucking masterpiece. I  honestly didn't realize I'd have so much to agonize over. I chose this one this week because of the directors passing last week. Milos Forman was 89 and had some astounding credits to his name. This was just my favorite of the bunch. If you're going to go watch it for the first time now, or re-watch it for the first time in a long time, keep an eye of Salieri's thing for food and how consistently that's woven into the narrative. It's amazing. Fuck. What a good fucking movie. Please watch it!

That's all for now folks. Until next week. Check out Capella Istropolitana's album 'The Very Best of Mozart'. You won't regret it. Auf Wiedersehen!

Emma wastes $25: The Story Of A Pretty Alright Movie.

Original Poster

A Quiet Place (2018)

Directed by John Krasinski
Produced by Micheal Bay, Brad Fuller and
Andrew Form
Cinematography by Charlotte Bruus Christensen
Edited by Christopher Tellefsen
Starring Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe



Originally released April 6th, 2018.



     Let me paint you a picture. It's a dark, chilly April day. The clouds hang low in the sky, heavy with impending rain. I roll out of bed determined to make it to the 12 pm screening of a movie I've heard only good things about. People are saying that it will redefine horror as a genre. As a frickin' GENRE. That's a lofty claim that I am skeptical of, but I'm very much looking forward to seeing for myself! I'm speeding down to the Cineplex at Young and Dundas as fast as my stinky little feet can carry me. As I motor onto Dundas, only a couple of blocks away from my destination, I am simultaneously confronted with a bird pooping on me and nearly running right in to a man shouting incoherently into the street wearing a jacket that can only be described as "crunchy". When I arrive at the theater, I discover that they're only showing the movie I'm there for in VIP. It's $25 a ticket. I sigh and figure, based on the reviews I've heard, it'll be worth it. Spoiler: it is not. It's Friday, April 13th, 2018.


**I'd like to take a quick moment here and warn you that there will be spoilers ahead. So if you've got $25 you were going to light on fire after reading this review, I suggest that you do neither of those things and instead head on down to your local Cineplex and give that cash to them. It'll have virtually the same result.**
 

Why is it that when the world goes to shit,
all the stop lights fall down? Is it a feature of their design?

     So it's the year 2020, and a plague of sightless aliens who hunt using exceptional hearing have ravaged the earth, killing almost everyone. The Abbott family - Lee and Evelyn Abbot and their children Regan, Marcus and Beau - live on a hobby farm in what looks like Maine? Vermont? I don't know. Anyway, their oldest child Regan is deaf, so the family is all accustomed to using ASL (American sign language). How lucky is that? They've become very accustomed to living in silence as to avoid detection from the creatures that lurk in the surrounding woods. Early on, we see their youngest child Beau killed by one of said creatures in a pretty intense scene, but the real horror gets going two years later. Evelyn is pregnant, and for reasons I can not fathom, everyone seems pretty pumped about it! When Evelyn goes into early labor while alone at the farm, all hell breaks loose. The features of  this set up make for some genuinely very scary moments in an otherwise unremarkable film.


   

Oh honey, I'm so glad you looted Pottery Barn
before everyone else got to it!

     If you watch this L.L. Bean commercial from this past holiday season without the sound on, you've pretty much watched the trailer for this movie. Obviously I'm exaggerating, but less than you may think. A Quiet Place looks like if the December 1991 issue of Country Living Magazine and a recent issue of Fangoria had a pretty unsettling, very quiet baby. I love it. I think it's beautiful. All these really attractive, clear-skinned, thin white people running around (or walking barefoot, slowly on trails of sawdust (?) if you want to be specific) in lovely wool knit sweaters and overalls. That's my shit. At one point, they eat a meal of fish cooked in the floor (for silence's sake I guess) that looks like fucking Antoni and Bobby from Queer Eye teamed up to make it. Their house, while definitely altered for the purpose of being less noisy (painted squares on the floor for where to walk, doors tethered open to prevent slamming, etc.) is very pretty. Lot's of wild flowers and lace curtains and nice quilts and shit. It's very Instagramable. It's also very much my vibe. But it seems a little unrealistic for a family that is living through the apocalypse to have such a keen sense of design. I know that the only thing they have to alter about their life is to be quiet, and that maybe leaves them with lots of time on their hands, but I found the picturesque beauty of their living spaces really distracting. Also John Krasinski's beard can fucking get it. Not the man, just the beard (like, someone have that facial hair give me a call). I feel like Krasinski was a quintessentially tall skinny nerd for the first two thirds of his life and he's just discovered that he's Kilmered (the effect of thickening, but not necessarily gaining weight as one ages. It often has a negative effect, but not in this case) and is all hot and "manly" now, so there's a lot of that in this movie. Which brings us to our next topic...

But DaaaAaAd, I don't wanna be in an L.L. Bean campaign!

     This film seemed oddly heteronormative. Like it seemed to go out of it's way to reinforce gendered stereotypes. For instance, as much as I loved (looooved) Emily Blunt's performance, it was a little disappointing that the horror her character experiences in the film was so deeply rooted in the only thing the patriarchy thinks women are good for: making babies. Would it be horrifying to have to give birth silently while a toothy alien with big ear holes stalks you through your house? Yeah totally. And giving birth is an experience a large portion of the population has had, so it's an effective way to connect the horror in your film to the audience. But based on the rigid stereotypes on display throughout the rest of the movie, the concept of the only adult woman in this film experiencing the bulk of her horror through childbirth feels pretty unimaginative. Also holy shit to her getting pregnant in the first place! I mean come the fuck on. No way. Just an objectively bad idea to bring a child into this specific world. Wrap it up, Lee! Jesus. Other examples of the oddly 1950's values in this film are the depiction of the patriarch and matriarch's respective daily tasks. Lee does things like chop wood, hammer fence posts, and take his son fishing, while Evelyn literally cooks and cleans and does laundry (and is pregnant). The scene where their daughter Regan expresses a desire to go on a fishing trip with Dad and is dismissed right away is both sexist and ableist. A case could be made for this just being the result of a father's concern for his child while living in an impossibly stressful environment, but as with everything in film, this was a deliberate choice. These people aren't real. They're conceived of by flawed human beings who clearly couldn't help but impose their own outdated feelings about gender politics on their characters.

There's a lot of this. The finger thing. Like, we get it. You've got to be quiet.
 Also that's Emily Blunt on the left and Millicent Simmonds on the right.

     For all it's glaring flaws, this film got casting spot on. Everyone in it was excellent, but there were two performances that really stood out. At one point, it registered with me that watching Emily Blunt's performance was making me literally nauseous. Not because it was bad, but because it was that good. I was feeling some semblance of what her character must have been feeling. Rarely is an actor able to pull an audience in and produce such a strong physical sensation. This character's physical pain and mental fear was palpable. And Blunt was 100% committed. She was all in. It was that commitment that made this performance one for the books. If you go to see this for no other reason than Emily Blunt, it'll be well worth your while. Also, big shout out to new comer Millicent Simmonds. What an exceptional start for a kid with only two acting credits to her name. Her performance in A Quiet Place was mature and nuanced. I'm really looking forward to seeing more from her in the future. Also really glad they cast an actual deaf person for the role of a deaf person in the film. What a novel idea (that's sarcasm, just in case that doesn't read). As much as women get the short end of the stick for the majority of this film naritively, the two and only performances by women are what make it watchable.


     So yeah. Overall, I wasn't super impressed with this movie. I liked it alright, and some of the scares really got me, but by the time the credits rolled I was left with a strange and oddly familiar bad taste in my mouth. As I sat and watched the names of the people involved flash up on the screen and the majority of the people in theater file out, I realized where this taste had come from. "Producer Micheal Bay". Ooooohhhhhhh. It was Bayhem. That weird turn the movie takes for the last quarter and that ill fitting ending was Bayhem. If you're not familiar with Bayhem, it's the insidious, chaotic and almost spiritual effect that Micheal Bay has on everything he touches. Here's a video by Tony Zhou that explains the phenomenon way better then I can. Anyway, I found A Quiet Place thoroughly O.K. and I wish I hadn't spent as much on it as I did, but here we are. I hope that pigeon that pooped on me is doing well!     



***


     Yikers. I'm sorry if ya'll found this one disappointing. I know lots of people who are really pumped to see this. Heck, I was one of those people before I saw it. And if you saw it and enjoyed it, well I don't blame you. I saw every penny of the $17 million they spent on it up on the screen, and it does achieve some pretty effective and moving moments. But gosh darn. When you've seen one movie about a pretty white family fighting aliens, you've seen em' all. Am I right?

Peace out. See you next week! Be nice to pigeons :)