The Pitch: I don't know. Make it a road trip movie this time. People don't seem to care.
I don't get the sense that Fox knows what it's doing with its franchises. They haven't for a long time. The most successful ones look like accidents. Ice Age always over-performed the amount of effort they put into the movies. They retool the X-Men and Planet of the Apes franchises with each movie. They had no idea what to do with Taken when it became a surprise hit in 2008. The Maze Runner always struck me more as them trying to get in on a trend than finding a property they believed in. I'm a little worried about how much they are putting into hoping these Avatar sequels will be equally massive hits. Alvin and the Chipmunks is another one that they appear to have now idea how to manage. After all, Alvin and the Chipmunks with $1.3 billion worldwide over 4 films is the highest grossing franchise to never have a movie lead the box office in the U.S. for a single weekend. In fact, the first two movies are the 3rd and 4th highest grossing movies to never hit #1 (at $219 and $217 million). Now, part of this has to do with always being Christmas releases in a competitive market. Still, that's weird. I can't find another franchise anywhere close to that box office return with that many films that never led the box office.
The Road Chip isn't memorable in any way. I've always hated the punny titles, although this is better than the Squeakquel. I had a lot of trouble with the internal logic of the movie. In previous installments, the Chipmunks were international pop stars. Now, they live in obscurity, at least, until it's more convent for the story for them not to. How can their New Orleans partying get national news coverage but causing an emergency plane landing on a cross-country flight doesn't? No one ever seems to recognize them* except the air Marshall who is after them thanks to a vendetta that goes back to him owning one of their albums. I just can't deal with that inconsistency.
*Although the Chippettes are famous enough to be American Idol judges? Please explain. Btw, nice product synergy with that plug, Fox.
This is not a cast that has ever been particularly comfortable interacting onscreen with the CG chipmunks. I don't know where in the production line that failing occurred, but it was painfully obvious that Josh Green in particular was talking to characters who weren't really there.
It's a harmless enough movie. It didn't anger me the way some children's movies can. There's just a general apathy to it that made it hard to care about at all.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
The Pitch: A journalist tries to learn more about the woman whose immortalized cell line has been key to medical research ever since her death by interviewing her family decades later...starring Oprah.
I'm not the first person to bemoan the state of HBO Films. That's been a long-running complaint people have had. For a network that is so good at series, it's surprising how uninspired their movies have been. Even the ones that get Emmy love like Bessie, The Normal Heart, Game Change, or Too Big to Fail are mostly a collection of strong performances by great actors, rather than great films*. Then again, as I look back, I wonder how much of these complaints are similar to people complaining about Superbowl Commercials or SNL not being as good as they used to be. I think some of it is truth and some is perception. Granted, I don't remember many of the '90s films (mainly Cheaters which I really love), but I can say HBO has been following the same formula for at least a decade: cast as many big names as possible and hope there's a story. Even looking to something I've watched probably a dozen times, Something the Lord Made, isn't great filmmaking. Alan Rickman and Mos Def are just so engaging that I kept watching.
*For the record, Behind the Candelabra was a special case where it premiered at Cannes, played in theaters outside the U.S. and aired only on HBO in the U.S.
What I'm trying to say is that The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the same formula that HBO has used for its films for a long time and delivers exactly the results you'd expect. Oprah is terrific. Like, it's shocking how good of an actress she is. Despite being so famous as Oprah - as a host - as a brand - she loses herself in her few acting performances. I stopped being aware that she was Oprah. In other words, she's a great actress. As much as I love Rose Byrne, she didn't have enough of a character to play for me to laud her work.
The structure of the film was odd. Most of it is in the film's present, with Rebecca Skloot (Byrne) researching a for a book on Henrietta Lacks with the help of Henrietta's daughter (Oprah). There are a number of flashbacks, but they are very scattered. Despite the title of the film, there's very little Henrietta Lacks in this. The film never decides what the focus is. Is this a story about Henrietta's life, the fallout from her death, or how Johns Hopkins screwed everyone in Henrietta's family over? As a result, the last act drums up some drama and makes up an end point.
At this point, HBO seems to have accepted that "TV Movie" is a genre and style as much 'blockbuster' or 'indie movie' is. They don't make movies that look like theatrical features. They make TV movies and accept all the trappings that go with the moniker. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is pretty good for what it is.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
The Pitch: John Slattery directs a listless movie about the people of a working class Philadelphia community.
A few things make this film notable. It's so far the only film directed by John Slattery, better known as Roger Sterling from Mad Men. He directed some great episodes of Mad Men and some good episodes of Love too. This is also one of Phillp Seymour Hoffman's final performances. I believe the film premiered at Sundance shortly before his death. It's not a defining Hoffman performance, but like most of his later work, he's solid at the very least in it. If nothing else, this is one less Hoffman performance that I can save for a rainy day if I want to see something I haven't seen before. One day I'm going to run out of "new" PSH movies and that will be a sad day.
This is a slice of life movie. It jumps around a very good cast of actors you would expect to be available for this. Slattery got his Mad Men co-star Christina Hendricks to join. Hoffman is the biggest name he pulled in. People like Richard Jenkins and John Turturro also seem to be available to lend their services for a few days in a small film. The story doesn't go anywhere, really. It's more of a meditation of life in the town of God's Pocket. The problem is, for that to work as a movie, I need to want to hang out with these characters. In God's Pocket, I didn't. I figured most of the characters out in a scene or two. After that, it went through a lot of familiar beats. I always talk about Sundance movies feeling like short stories and God's Pocket is a great example of this. It's like it's missing a final act, like there's too much build and not enough payoff.
Slattery has a good sense of place for the film. The characters would've been interesting with more to do. I think the film is close to being pretty engaging. It's just missing that "secret sauce" that would pull it together. Like, if this was a Coen Brothers movie, I could see these pieces coming together to make something interesting. I'll definitely look for anything Slattery directs in the future.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
Formula: Transformers - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Transformers: Age of Extinction
Directors don't normally stay with a franchise this long. In most cases, a director maybe returns for a sequel or plans a trilogy. After a while, he'/she wants out. It only took two Avengers movies to wear Joss Whedon out. Three Pirates movies almost broke Gore Verbinski. Peter Jackson made Lord of the Rings like one giant movie, then he was backed into doing the Hobbit movies when no other proven director wanted the job. Same with George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels. With the possible exception of Peter Jackson, no one I could think of has made five consecutive installments of a movie franchise, and in most of the cases that come close, there's a noticeable drop off in the quality of each film. It makes sense why. Being a director is a tough job. Almost no one works on a film as long as a director, who sees the project through from start to finish. On a $100+ million production, there's a crazy amount of managing of resources. To make even one film on the scale of Transformers, it's easy to understand why anyone would've had enough. Michael Bay has made 5 films with an average cost of almost $200 million. That is insane.
I'm not going to pretend that Michael Bay is some sort of auteur. He's not, nor do I think he aims to be. However, I am a Michael Bay apologist. Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon are all very entertaining, stupid action movies that audiences enjoy. Pearl Harbor aimed a little higher than Bay could pull off. Still, it's entertaining. Pain & Gain was little seen, but I liked it. The first Transformers is a good movie and I will die on that hill if I must. Transformers balanced everything Bay does just right. Good lead character, strong supporting cast, plenty of big action sequences with enough humor to relieve it, and the right amount of cheesiness to know no one was taking it too seriously. The series took a steep, WGA strike-impacted decline with Revenge of the Fallen, but bounced back OK with Dark of the Moon. By Age of Extinction though, there was no denying that the franchise had no idea what it was. The Last Knight compounds that and confirms that there is no reason for these movies to continue unless something major changes.
I want to explain the story of The Last Knight, but I can't. It's not that the story doesn't matter, I just couldn't follow it. It's something about the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron coming to overtake Earth. Before that, more Transformers keep arriving on Earth, creating a District 9 situation now that humans have learned how to fight back. Oh, and apparently the Transformers were responsible for the King Arthur legends. There's a dragon Transformer and a bunch of round table Transformer knights that defend this all-powerful staff, but there's also a knight that Mark Wahlberg discovers who makes Wahlberg "the chosen one". Hold on, there's two chosen ones: Wahlberg and this smokin' hot Oxford professor (Laura Haddock) who has an impressive lineage. I'm forgetting some things. Sorry, this movie is really long, or it felt really long. A team of writers was assembled to plan out this and the next few Transformers movies, much like a TV writers room. I actually like that idea. It's a more transparent way of doing what studios already do with scripts, and it's worth a try. So, they tried it, and they failed. The Transformers movies have always had a touch of National Treasure or The Da Vinci Code, but this is too much. Too complex and convoluted.
I get the feeling that the casting of the Transformers movies at this point involves sending out a bunch of offers to a large group of actors and anyone who accepts is written into the movie, regardless of the fit. Mark Wahlberg returns as the hero. Nicola Peltz must've declined to play his daughter again, so she's replaced with a scrappy orphan engineering prodigy played by Isabela Moner. Since TJ Miller was killed in the last movie, Jerrod Carmichael gets the wacky sidekick role. Josh Duhamel is still lurking around. I'm never really sure what side he's on. Anthony Hopkins is the British lord who happens to know whatever long-hidden secrets need to be revealed to move the story forward. John Tuturro and Stanley Tucci return for a couple unneeded scenes. Tony Hale has a bafflingly pointless role as a NASA scientist with no connection to any major character, who just shows up in TV interviews and NSA meetings to say that science, not magic should be used to stop the Decepticon threat. A bunch of Transformers are there too. I remember Optimus Prime (suspiciously absent for most of the film), Bumblebee, and Megatron. I couldn't tell you if the rest of the Transformers were new or introduced previously. Perhaps Transformers super-fans would know. No one in the cast was used well. I know I blame bad material rather than the actors a lot for poor performances (i.e. No actor could make this script work). It's especially true in this. The characters are thin. The development is minimal or unearned. The witty banter isn't witty. The serious moments are the bad kind of laughable. I realize that almost all of this could be said about every Transformers movie. Think of it like this: If it gets 30% worse with each movie, by part 5, that makes The Last Knight 24% the movie that the 2007 movie was*.
*Btw, I just made that number up, but if you compare the 57% to 15% RottenTomatoes scores (when I looked it up), that checks out.
What most bothered me is the lack of action sequences and the poor quality of the few that there are. The movie begins with a Medieval battle that is missing any context for the audience to care about it. The middle 2 hours have a couple quick, close calls: a car chase, a couple skirmishes, and some business with submarines. Then, the end has a huge battle involving an airbourne assault that's a cross between the climactic fights in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I legitimately couldn't follow what was happening during that. They were jumping from different platforms in the sky. The moon was destroyed. A few world monuments and surely millions of lives were lost. A character has to hold onto a staff in the ground while the Transformers fight their God (?). Mark Wahlberg gets a sword that let's him fight a Transformer. Perhaps it wasn't hard to follow, and I simply didn't care anymore. Is one really any better than the other?
I don't know if putting someone new in the director's chair for the franchise would make Transformers any better. I do know that it's clear that it's gone as far as it can with Michael Bay. Paramount has almost nothing else going for it*, so they are going to run the series into the ground to make every last dollar they can. This is the last of these movies I'll be seeing in theaters barring a Fast and Furious-level turnaround. Even the 8th graders in the row in front of me didn't seem impressed by the movie. This is the most dire installment yet and I cannot find a single positive thing to say about it.
*Transformers, Star Trek, and Mission Impossible are their only bankable brands right now. They lost Iron Man after the second film and Dreamworks distribution moved to Fox in 2013. They have a couple Viacom tie-in brands in Spongebob Squarepants and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that can make some money. The Paranormal Activity and Terminator franchises are effectively dead after their latest flops. Jack Reacher and John Ryan have limited ceilings. One of these days, I want to do a studio check in. I can say now that it's a race to the bottom between Paramount and Sony.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
The Pitch: A teenage girl's mother goes missing. She reflects on the events leading up to it.
I had an idea of what I was getting into with this movie. It's from director Gregg Araki, who also made Mysterious Skin. White Bird in a Blizzard is a bit more polished looking, in the sense that it's ten years newer. It has a similar tone and relies a lot on its young star. Shailene Woodley carries the movie, often adding some shades to her performance that a replacement-level actress wouldn't. I think Eva Green is terrific in general, but she didn't fit in this movie (somewhat intentionally). Everyone else was underplaying, going more naturalistic. Meanwhile, she's going big. I assume that's intended to show how she doesn't belong in the life she's living. The contrast was too stark though. I like how the mystery of the movie is hiding in plain sight, and the twist of it [the real twist] is delightfully unexpected. So much of everything before the final act, like everything with Thomas Jane, felt like wheel spinning to kill time.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
The Pitch: What if there were more Pandas?
Dreamworks isn't my favorite animation studio. I've always looks at them as the anti-Disney or Pixar, more concerned with the voice cast and jokes than the story and animation. That's not always the case. How to Train Your Dragon is a top-tier franchise, for example. I still think of them as the Shrek/Madagascar studio, perhaps unfairly. Kung Fu Panda has been middle-tier Dreamworks by my rating. The movies are fine. The voice cast is stronger than I'd expect (Dustin Hoffman and Angelina Jolie. Kudos, Dreamworks casting). The setting makes for nice visuals. There's a decent amount of heart to it. The jokes are aimed mostly at the younger audience at the expense of the older, which is forgivable. Kung Fu Panda 3 is about par for the course. I got some Mr. Peabody & Sherman vibes from all the adopted vs. biological parent talk. Bryan Cranston is as good a voice as any to be Po's dad. JK Simmons is an easy pick for the main villain. This is one of those sequels that's good if you've watched the first and second movies and want the exact same thing but different slightly. I don't think the aim was much higher than that, so I can appreciate a movie that reaches its goals.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
The Pitch: A Wall Street firm tries to figure out what it should do when it has an early warning of the 2008 financial crisis.
I make it no secret that I find the "evil businessman" trope to be about the dullest thing in movies. All sorts of movies are interested in finding human shades to murderers, rapists, and all sorts of unsavory characters, but businessmen [or bankers] are normally one-dimensional and boring villains. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we need to shed a tear for the misrepresentation of the affluent businessman. I'm saying that a screenwriter shouldn't expect praise for going after an easy target (In other news: Nazis are bad). Even when a movie tries to examine Wall Street types a little closer, like The Big Short, it's in a "aren't these people the worst?" way, which again, gets repetitive.
That's what makes Margin Call such a refreshing change of pace. When it first came out in 2011, I heard "wall street" and "2008 financial crisis" and decided to skip it, assuming it was another lazy indictment on Wall Street power brokers, written by people who barely understand what was even going on*. When a friend who actually knows that kind of stuff said the movie was pretty good, I decided to give it a try and I'm glad I did.
*For the record, I barely understand what happened in 2008 either. It's complex stuff.
Margin Call is a movie about people trying to figure out what to do in an emergency. It's morality vs. survival. No one is a hero or villain. They are all people. I won't pretend that they are all lovable. They are hard drinking, greedy Machiavellians. Simon Baker is especially sleazy as one of the upper-level managers. Stanley Tucci is like any middle-management middle-aged man. Kevin Spacey is the closest thing to a moral center of the movie and even he's a survivalist. Jeremy Irons as the company's CEO is pragmatic and presents himself as likable enough, but it's easy to see how he can become a sonuvabitch when needed. In other words, the movie is filled with characters, not types.
As much as I liked the performances, the Oscar nominated screenplay is what shines. It's tense. It's tight. It's funny. The story escalates in a natural way. It does a great job both showing how and why these people got to the level of power they're at while not letting them off the hook for the mistakes they made that put them in this position. Some of them are cockroaches. Some are sacrificial lambs. All of them knew that going in. This is a smart script. Not in the way The Big Short is smart, in which it pats itself on the back for doing such a job explaining itself. Margin Call has a lot of really complex stuff that the audience needs to know in order to understand the stakes but it doesn't want to lecture about it. It's more important to understand the stakes than what caused the stakes. Most of the night scenes are handled like a low-boil horror movie, where this disaster is looming and the only decision left is whether to mitigate the damage by spreading it out or take the entire hit.
I liked this movie a lot.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
The Pitch: A documentary about rape on college campuses.
It's tough to say that I didn't care for The Hunting Ground that much. The topic is a good one. It's important to bring to light the rape culture on college campuses and to show the victims' side of things. My issue with The Hunting Ground is that most of it was a "greatest hits" of the topic: athletes, frats, apathetic college administrators. If I've seen every section of the movie covered in a dozen episodes each of Law & Order, I'm not sure how much it's adding to the conversation. I've said before that I have less interest in documentaries that know the point they are trying to make going in, even if I agree with the point. This was nowhere near as bad in that regard as something like Blackfish, which I couldn't even finish. What kept me watching and ultimately saved the movie was Andrea Pino and Annie Clark: the assault survivors from UNC. Following their efforts to increase awareness and fight back was engaging and informative. It's one thing to present a lot of scary statistics. It's another to show that people are doing something about it, that something can be done. The parts following them were the only times I didn't feel like I was being lectured at. I appreciate the topic being discussed. I just didn't feel like it was engaging me on a new level very often.
And Lady Gaga and Co. deserved that damn original song Oscar.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
The Pitch: Alice in Wonderland made so much money that we don't have a choice in the matter. There must be a sequel.
These days, crossing the $1 billion threshold doesn't mean much. All it says is that China really likes that Fast and Furious movie, people around the world aren't tired of Pirates movies, or Europe was really happy that James Bond has been around for 50 years. In 2010, it meant something. When Alice in Wonderland was released in the spring of 2010, here's a list of all the movies to break $1 billion in the worldwide box office:
- Avatar: 3-D movie sensation that the world ate up for some reason, still holding the all-time box office record by $600 million.
- Titanic: A global sensation, the likes of which we may never see again when you calculate in inflation.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: The culmination of one of the most impressive series runs in history.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: A testament to the overwhelming popularity of Johnny Depp and the first Pirates movie.
- The Dark Knight: A perfect mix of hype and domestic box office dominance that only made it to $1 billion thanks to a strategic IMAX re-release.
That's it. 5 movies. Then comes along Alice in Wonderland. Despite lackluster reviews, it uses the 3-D appetite created by Avatar and Johnny Depp appetite won by 3 Pirates movies to become the most improbable movie to earn $1 billion. Even now, it sticks out in list of the 30 movies to reach that amount as the one that makes the least amount of sense.
What I'm trying to say is that Disney should've known better. There was no reason to assume that Alice Through the Looking Glass would be a hit. As I discussed with Now You See Me 2 the other day, there's such a thing as an accidental hit. Alice in Wonderland had all the markings of one. When the film was release in March 2010, audiences were only 5 weeks removed from Avatar's record-breaking streak at #1 in the box office. They were starved for any kind of 3-D. Keep in mind, shortly after Alice in Wonderland, audiences made a hit out of Clash of the Titans' shoddy 3-D conversion. People hadn't grown tired of Johnny Depp's shtick yet either. The stars aligned for Alice. In the six years since that surprise success, Johnny Depp had a sting of flops (Mortdecai, Transcendence, The Lone Ranger), Mia Wasikowska hadn't managed to become a star, and no one cared about 3-D anymore. Tim Burton didn't even return as the director. Disney should've known better. The really incredible thing though, is that even despite releasing the fewest number of films in 2016 of any of the six major studios and having major disappointments like The BFG, Pete's Dragon, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, Disney managed to DESTROY the studio box office record that year.
I guess I could talk about the movie itself now. It's not very good though, so why would I want to? It looks like a poor imitation of a Tim Burton movie and makes the mistake of adding backstory to characters who didn't need them. It feels like Mia Wasikowska is trapped in this because neither Jane Eyre, Lawless, Stoker, Tracks, nor Crimson Peak caught on with audiences or awards circuits. Like the Pirates movies, this makes the mistake of thinking that Johnny Depp's character needs to have more focus simply because he's the biggest name attached to the movie. And, the story is convoluted nonsense. I'm being harder on the movie than it deserves because it's such an obvious example of studio hubris.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
Formula: (Very Bad Things / Weekend At Bernie's) * Bridesmaids
I've been doing formulas for a while. Since my second Reaction, back in 2011, in fact. That's a couple hundred so far. There's some variance to the quality of the formulas. Sometimes I'm just too lazy to look for a comparable film. Other times, the movie really is too singular to put into pseudo-math. However, there are some films that I can't stop formulizing. Rough Night is a movie that's lousy with comparisons. Looking at the premise, Very Bad Things immediately comes to mind. Considering the cast, Bridesmaids is obvious. Some of the hijinks call Weekend At Bernie's to mind. The most casual observer may call it a female Hangover. Emotionally, it got me thinking of The World's End more than I expected. In other words, Rough Night is working in some familiar territory, and that's not a bad thing. The reason I insist on the formulas (other than I have fun doing them) is to point out that there aren't that many original ideas out there. From major studios to the smallest of indie film companies, everyone is telling familiar stories. The key part is how well those stories are told.
Rough Night is the story of a bachelorette party gone wrong. Scarlett Johansson, Jillian Bell, Zoe Kravitz, Ilana Glazer, and Kate McKinnon play five college friends (Ok, four college friends and an Kiwi Australian) who meet up in Miami for a wild weekend. Jess (Johansson) is the one getting married. She's busy running for state Senate. Alice (Bell) is the mastermind of the weekend, refusing to let anyone take it easy. Blair and Frankie (Kravitz and Glazer) round out the college group. Pippa (McKinnon) is a friend of Jess' she met during her summer abroad in Australia and is meeting the group for the first time. It's clear that the group has become distant over the last few years. Alice is pushing hard to make this weekend as memorable as possible. She succeeds at that when they accidentally kill a stripper they order at their rental home. That's when the zany antics get really dialed up. The women have to figure out how to hide the body and handle some nosy and horny neighbors played Ty Burrell and Demi Moore. Jess' fiance (Paul Downs) gets the wrong idea after a cryptic phone call and has a side adventure in which he races down to Miami, thinking Jess is backing out of the wedding.
The story needs a lot of narrative heavy lifting to work. In the age of the internet, every story of miscommunication and escalation is a little bit more complicated in general and the screenplay works very hard to absolve the women of the stripper's death. If I was judging this by my One Big Leap standards, which even gives comedies a little more leeway, it wouldn't come close to passing. The story is built entirely on contrivance and coincidence. It makes a few misguided attempts at genuine emotion which fall flat. In a movie this over the top, there's no room for a person to honestly reflect on the fact that she just killed a man or to introduce sick parents into the mix. Those moments kill all momentum the movie has going for it and remind the audience how implausible this all is. Simply put, it's just not a good enough movie to fit some heart into it the way that, say, Bridesmaids or The World's End does.
That's not to say this is a bad movie. Clunky plot and poorly inserted emotion aside, this is a comedy movie with a strong ensemble and some good jokes. Jonhansson is probably the least funny person in the main cast, which isn't a knock on her. She's the straight woman and the glue for the ensemble. Bell dominates the scenes she's in. She's positioned with the Melissa McCarthy breakout role if you want to make the Bridesmaids comparison. Glazer and Kravitz get their moments. As the one with more of a comedy background, Glazer generates more of the laughs from their scenes. Kravitz is fine though. McKinnon's character isn't much more than a funny accent. It's impressive how much mileage she gets out of that though. Speaking of mileage, I don't know what to make of Downs' scenes, road-tripping to Miami and running into several obstacles along the way. He's in his own movie most of the time and those scenes are trying way too hard. His energy mostly makes them work.
Rough Night is by no means a perfect comedy, but it is a comedy. It knows that it needs to get a laugh every x seconds and accomplishes that. It would rather be silly than take itself seriously the vast majority of the time. It collects a bunch of funny people and lets them bounce off one another, which is a good formula. After notable disappointments like Baywatch and Snatched over the last couple months, it's nice to watch a comedy that knows what it's doing. The is a competent movie that gets the job done. What more do you need?
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
The Pitch: So there's this SNL sketch. I think it could be a full movie if we stop thinking long enough to write a script.
This is not going to be a substantive reaction. Sorry.
You see, I fucking loved this movie. I don't have much more to say than that. It is delightful in just about every way. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd are perfect. The music is great. The car chases are gloriously over the top. The cameos are constant and delightful. Really, I'm having trouble coming off the high of watching that movie long enough to write anything of substance about it.
...
Ok, maybe it's been long enough now.
When talking about SNL-based feature films, we're really talking about an 8-year period with two exceptions on either end. From 1992-2000, 9 movies were released based on SNL characters. The first was a hit. The rest were not. The two outliers are 2010's MacGruber, which no one expected to work, and 1980's The Blues Brothers. In hindsight, it's hard to believe that it took 12 years after The Blues Brothers for SNL to give another sketch the movie treatment. I mean, Blues Brothers was so good [and successful] that I would've expected to see something the next year. I'm sure there's a reason for that. Perhaps it was Belushi's death in 1982.
I'm a sucker for shaggy dog stories, and it doesn't get much shaggier than The Blues Brothers. I feel like everyone involved in the movie figured this was their one shot at this and threw everything they had at it. There can't just be a car chase at the beginning. They need to drive through a fucking mall. There can't just be cameos. There needs to be every big name possible. There can't just be a final chase at the end. There needs to be the most elaborate, escalated, multi-phase chase possible. God damn this movie was a treat.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
The Pitch: You think Now You See Me was improbably and barely held together? Just you wait.
A lot of people complain about franchising and I get it. All the studio money is going into a very few properties. No one ends up taking a chance on new ideas and the whole industry gets stale. That's the running theory. I don't agree with that. Not entirely. At the end of the day, my only concern is if it's a good product. If I had to pick between a bad original movie and a good sequel, I'm going to pick the sequel. Normally, I'm focused on the 2 hours while I'm watching a movie, not what those 2 hours mean. No, what I think we could all use less of is unintended franchises. You know what I'm talking about: hit movies that weren't designed with a sequel in mind but got one anyway. Just look at a list of worst sequels of all time. Son of the Mask, Jaws: The Revenge, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Caddyshack II, Exorcist II: The Heretic, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Basic Instinct 2 (and I could keep going). None of these movies were designed with a sequel in mind*. And it shows.
*Yes, there are plenty of intended sequels that were pretty bad too -
Batman & Robin, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Spider-Man 3 - but those almost
all have additional considerations for why they are bad beyond being
sequels.
Now You See Me 2 is a textbook example of why it's best to leave well enough alone. Technically, it's not an awful movie compared to the first. If you recall, I had plenty of issues with the first movie. It's just...nonsense. Utter nonsense. I refer to my One Big Leap often because I think it's a good principle. Literally, every single explanation of a trick/illusion in this movie uses up my big leap. Everything about this plot is a "go with me here" explanation and I have no patience for that. Either be clever enough to prepare for all contingencies or own up to the nonsense. If every "master plan" relies on chance, then that's just lazy screenwriting. You know what the crazy thing is? If they didn't spend so much time trying to explain how each illusion works, I would've been less bothered by them, but the movie invites me to question it. And, under the lightest of scrutiny, it doesn't hold up.
If I can find a way to get past the screenplay [which I can't], there's a lot about the movie which is pretty terrific. They bring back Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, and Mark Ruffalo, all playing to their strengths. While I'm sad to see Isla Fisher go**, Lizzy Caplan could not be more in her comfort zone. And I'll never complain about having Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman in a movie. Daniel Radcliffe didn't add much to the movie, but it's a net-plus convincing Harry Potter to play the villain in a movie about magicians. If I could find a way to turn my brain off at all, I'd enjoy this movie. That's a non-starter though. All my issues with the first movie were just amplified.
**Real talk for a minute. I was reminded a lot of The Karate Kid: Part 2 (another terrible sequel) with how they wrote around the casting changes by slipping in an early line of dialogue and never again acknowledging how Ilsa Fisher (and to a lesser extent Melanie Laurent) are missing.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
The Pitch: Pets have lives even when their owners are away.
This is an OK movie. The best animated movies tend to leave a little room for heart and the rest of the time is a showcase for all the jokes the writer(s) can come up with. In that respect, I have no complaints about The Secret Life of Pets. Like Zootopia, it's packed with in-jokes about different animals that mostly work. The voice cast is on-point. I would not have thought of Louis C.K. as the voice of Max yet it works surprisingly well. Kevin Hart , Eric Stonestreet, Jenny Slate, Ellie Kemper, Albert Brooks. It's hard to argue with that lineup.
I can't with this movie though. I just can't. I know it's silly and nonsensical, but I still spent the whole damn time figuring out the logistics of it. None of this world makes sense. Wouldn't the owner with the poodle get noise complaints from all the heavy metal music being played? What happens if the owners return before the pets are back in position? How does a bunny drive a car? Wouldn't hundreds of animals showing up on a bridge in New York City make national news or get the National Guard called? I know the point isn't to get caught up in that, but I couldn't help it. From a One Big Leap perspective, I couldn't process it all.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
Formula: The Mummy * The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
I think it's evident by now that I find the business end of movies nearly as interesting as the films themselves. While there's few things better than sitting down in a movie theater and discovering a new favorite film or seeing a filmmaker try something I've never seen before, I spend just as much time at home tracking studio strategies, box office results, and shifting audiences trends. In that respect, The Mummy is a very interesting movie. Of the studios, Universal is the one most suited to compete with Disney's market dominance. Between Jurassic World, the Fast and Furious franchise, and the massively successful animated films from Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me, The Secret Life of Pets), they have a lot of golden geese already. However, they want in on the extended universe business that has been printing money for other studios. Since Disney (Marvel) and WB (DC) already have the comic rights*, they have to come up with something else. That something else is the Dark Universe - their name for a shared universe with all the classic horror movie villains like the Mummy, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.
*Fox too, since they refuse to let those X-Men rights lapse despite have no clear plan for where to go with them.
The Mummy is the first film in and a less than encouraging start to the Dark Universe. The movie begins with Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and his put-upon partner, Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) in the Mesopotamian desert looking for priceless artifacts to loot. They are officers with the US Army but mostly play by their own rules. Nick is roguish and charming. Chris is nervous and exhausted by Nick's antics. Classic adventure movie duo. Despite being in Iraq, they stumble onto an ancient Egyptian tomb*. Then attractive female scientist, Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), who Nick of course had a fling with before the movie begins, shows up to investigate and explain what they find in the tomb. As you can imagine, they end up unleashing a mummy intent on destroying the world. Along the way, they meet up with a man (Russel Crowe) who leads a group investigating creatures like mummies and vampires - kind of a SHIELD for monsters. Nick also has a curse that ties him to the mummy for some reason. And, that's about it.
*For non-map whizzes out there, even though both are Middle-East-ish, that's a long distance away.
A Quick Warning: Before I get any further, I want to make a note of something. When I saw this movie, I was very tired and just about anything would've made me nod off a little. There's a chance that some of my appreciation of the film was impacted by this.
There's a few ways for a movie like this to work well. It could populate the world with interesting characters and a charismatic lead. It could create a memorable villain who threatens to take over the whole movie. It could string together a story that surprises you with each new development. Or, it could produce exciting sequences that drive the movie. The best movies do several or all of these things. The Mummy doesn't do any of these things.
The characters are duds. Tom Cruise takes all his movie star charm he's picked up from films like Mission Impossible and Knight & Day and uses it to animate a character that doesn't otherwise exist. His character is a generic Indiana Jones. By the end of the movie, I didn't know him any better than I did in his first minute. Wallis' character is a non-factor on her own and she also has little chemistry with Cruise. Johnson is there for comedic effect that never materializes. When looking back, his entire character feels like it was written in on the margins of the final draft of the screenplay right before shooting started. He exists to explain things that we could've intuited on our own. Crowe is pure exposition. Virtually every scene with him should've included a title card at the bottom of the screen reading "Look for the sequel in Summer 2019". And let me be clear, I like many of these actors in many other roles. They try to save these characters as much as they can, but there's not enough there to begin with.
The mummy was a bore. I haven't seen Sofia Boutella in much, just Kingsman and Star Trek Beyond. She's an OK actress, but if you cast her, it's because you want a character with some physicality. The woman can do some acrobatic moves. Mostly, Boutella is used in The Mummy to walk around menacingly or jump around in the shadows. The CGI effects do most of the work for her.
The story is too complex too be effective. It takes a little too much structurally from a Robert Langdon novel by tying everything to Crusade knights, missing jewels, and undiscovered tombs. I feel like a lot of this was done to move the action from Egypt to London so they could introduce the tie-ins to later Dark Universe installments.
As for the action sequences, they were uninspired. If you told me they were all designed so that Tom Cruise could do as many as possible, I'd believe that. There's one in which a plane is crashing and rolls Cruise around like he's in a giant clothes dryer. Another one is the classic "run out of a building as things keep exploding a half a pace behind you". It was all very manufactured. The horror side of things weren't much better, relying on a bunch of jump scares and weird body contortions.
One last thing, and this could be more about the specific audience for my showing than in general. The jokes bombed. Jake Johnson's character is there entirely to add some laughs and Tom Cruise is usually good for a couple as well. Not this time. Whenever the movie hit a beat that I could tell was supposed to get a laugh, there was silence. It was bizarre. Normally there's a least some polite laughter or people laughing because they are conditioned to. There's was almost none of that [that I could hear]. There is a reason for that. The jokes weren't very good. It's not like people were passing up killer material. I don't remember the last time they were this rejected by an audience.
The Mummy is by no means unwatchable. It's more like the inverse of Wonder Woman last week. Wonder Woman is a movie that does no one thing exceptionally. It just does everything well which elevates the film overall. The Mummy doesn't do anything unforgivably poorly. It does a lot of things not very well, which drags it down overall. This is looking more like another Sahara or Golden Compass*, than an Iron Man. If nothing else, this isn't an encouraging start for the Dark Universe.
*Sahara was a Matthew McConaughey bomb that was one of the most expensive movies ever made at the time . It only made back about half of its massive budget in the US and made even less internationally. It was intended to launch a series of adventure films and be the next Indiana Jones. No sequel was ever made. The Golden Compass is the is the 2007 film, intended to be New Line's next The Lord of the Rings, that was so expensive and did so underwhelmingly in the US that it crippled the studio beyond repair. Three month after its release, New Line stopped distributing films independently.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
The Pitch: A mother in the 1920s with a kidnapped son battles the LAPD when they refuse to admit that they brought back the wrong kidnapped boy and pretended he was her son.
Changeling is several movies. It's the story of a woman trying to find her missing son. It's the story of a woman trying to expose an LAPD cover-up when they bring back the wrong boy and pretend he's her son. It's also about the investigation of a serial killer. As a result, the movie is too long and doesn't know where to end. I'm not sure if that's a consequence of the script or if no one knows how to tell Clint Eastwood "No". The up and down pacing of the story plus the time period it's set in reminded me a lot of The Shawshank Redemption, but that movie is an outlier in almost every way. It shouldn't work but it does. Changeling is more of an example of how structuring a movie like this normally goes. By the end of the movie, I just wanted them to settle on a stopping point. The LAPD cover-up which is how the movie was sold had been over for a while. The cover-up was exposed. The trial had concluded. The son's probable murderer had been killed. They kept finding excuses to not end. That got fatiguing.
The movie is fine though. I needed an Angelina Jolie fix and got one. The production design looks good. I like the 1920s/30s aesthetic and always appreciate it being done well in a movie. In the earlier parts, Eastwood does a great job showing how helpless Jolie's character was to fight the LAPD, due to the nature of their position vs. her standing as a single mother in the 1920s. So, yeah. I like it. I just needed less of it.
Some other thoughts that have no value but I still wanted to bring up:
-The main note I made while watching this movie was "Man-splaining: The Movie" and I don't think that's inaccurate.
-I think I need a new section in all these PG-13 movie Reactions for spotting the "Fuck". As I like to point out often, one of the quirks of the MPAA rating system is that, traditionally, PG-13 movies are allowed to use "fuck" one time. So, the game within the movie become about seeing how each movie burns it off. In the case of Changeling, it was an excellent use. I forgot who she was talking to (probably Jeffrey Donovan), but at some point, Angelina Jolie tells some cop or detective "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on". That's a terrific line!
-This is the most minute of points, but I couldn't resist. Jolie's character makes a bet with a co-worker about who would win the Academy Award for best picture. They paint it as Cleopatra being the favorite and It Happened One Night (the eventual winner) as the underdog. So, I looked it up. Both films were tied for 2nd most nominations that year. Cleopatra's were for more technical awards. It Happened One Night was nominated for the "Big Five" awards (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay) and is one of only three films ever to win all five of those awards. Look, I wasn't there at the time, so I don't know what public sentiment was. However, I think this movie gave the wrong impression about the 1935 Oscar race.
-Finally, I'm not the only one who didn't remember what the son looked like at all by the time the fake son was found, right?
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
The Pitch: Woody Allen and friends re-dub a Japanese spy movie to make it about something else entirely.
Here's the idea: No filmmaker is as prolific over as long an amount of time at a major level as Woody Allen. Not that I know of, at least. So, I think it would be fun to work my way through as much of his filmography as I can to trace his evolution as a filmmaker and maybe see how that's reflected in the larger cinema landscape. In other words, how is a 1980s Woody Allen movie from a 2010 Woody Allen movie and are they different in similar ways to other movies from both of those periods? This isn't a formal project like Club 50 was/is and there's no timeline on it. In fact, I doubt there will ever be a formal examination of it where I explain my findings...That kind of makes this entire paragraph pointless. Oops.
That nebulous project is the only reason I bothered with What's Up, Tiger Lily? It's Allen's debut directorial feature and that's apparent. Before this, he was mainly known as a writer and performer. What's Up, Tiger Lily? is a clever way to break into directing, because he really didn't direct it in the traditional sense. He rewrote it and reedited it. There's a couple new scenes in there, specifically with The Lovin' Spoonful. However, he didn't do any of the directorial heavy lifting. That'll begin with Take the Money and Run a few years later.
What's Up, Tiger Lily? is reminiscent to what Will Ferrell and writer Andrew Steele like to do: movies in which the joke is the premise (Casa de Mi Padre, A Deadly Adoption). This winks a lot more though. It's fully addressed as one big joke. I wasn't surprised to learn that apparently Allen made this as a TV hour and the studio turned it into a theatrical release after the fact. The humor is thinner than I'd expect from Allen's work even a couple years later like Love & Death or Sleeper. The parts I most enjoyed were actually the cutaways to Woody Allen that explained the movie. Allen is a gifted comedic performer. He hasn't actually tried in years, so people have forgotten that. In 1966, he was still young and hungry and knew how to milk a laugh out of a line read as good as anyone.
This is a forgettable movie. It does help mark Allen's transition from writer to writer/director in a way that makes a lot of sense though. And, for that reason, it has value.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
The Pitch: Hepburn and Bogie on a boat for 105 minutes.
Katherine Hepburn. Humphrey Bogart.
That's all I needed to know. What I didn't realize is that it was a John Huston film and it won Bogart his only Oscar. In other words, this has all the credentials it needs. Following in the long tradition of the Oscars, this isn't the performance I'd've liked to see Bogart win the Oscar for (that would of course be Casablanca), but if it's the movie that finally made him "Oscar winner Humphrey Bogart", I'll take it. Hepburn was just as good but already had her first Oscar by then. It's interesting how she won three times in her last three at bats with the Academy, late in her career after a long cold streak. That's beside the point though.
I'm not sure that I agree with where AFI ranked the movie all-time in 1998 (#17) or even in 2007 (#65), but it was enjoyable. And, it had a scene with Bogart and Hepburn doing animal impressions/taunts. How can you hate that?
I feel like I need to see Romancing the Stone now.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
Formula: (Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice - Man of Steel - The Dark Knight) ^ All Quiet on the Western Front
I love tracing the studio battle between DC and Marvel. For decades, DC was the undisputed champ, starting with Superman in 1978 and continuing with Batman in 1989: Two mega-hits that solidified the age of the blockbuster. Then, DC came down with a bad case of Bat-nipples and left an opening for Marvel to give movies a try. Blade had been doing OK through the 90s. X-Men proved to be a hit in 2000 and Spider-Man broke box office records in 2002. DC quickly responded with the Dark Knight trilogy and a failed Superman reboot. It was Marvel who stumbled onto the winning formula with 2008's Iron Man by bringing all the properties they could into the same shared universe. However, DC was the one dominating the box office that year when The Dark Knight became (at the time) the third highest grossing film of all time in the US and only the fourth film to make $1 billion worldwide. After they couldn't convince Christopher Nolan and company to stick around after his trilogy was complete, DC was four years behind Marvel on the world-building. In 2012, it was Marvel's Avengers breaking records and DC's Dark Knight Rises lagging behind. Since then, DC has been working hard to "catch-up" to Marvel. Man of Steel was a perfectly fine introduction. Batman vs. Superman had a litany of problems though, that could be summed up as "too much, too fast". Suicide Squad had the problem of being too different too quickly. It's like the old writing adage [that I might be making up], "you need to prove that you've learned the rules before you can start breaking them". They were trying to break the formula by following villains turned heroes before they had mastered making a standard hero story in a share universe. Finally, that brings us to 2017 and the most encouraging DC film in almost a decade: Wonder Woman.
Why is it encouraging? Because it's DC going back to basics. Wonder Woman tells the story of Diana Prince (as she is known in the present day), played by Gal Godot. She's raised on island that was hidden from the rest of the world by the gods and run by the Amazons. She is trained to be a great warrior and taught that basically everything in Greek legend is true (and in this world, it mostly is). One day, a WWI pilot (Chris Pine) crashes near their island. He's pursued by some Germans who are held off by the Amazons. This pilot, Steve Trevor, leads Diana to England, then mainland Europe where she is determined to end the great war by defeating the war god Ares, who she believes is forcing men to go to war with one another. And the movie recognizes that this is all pretty zany. A lot of fun is had with how little Diana fits into WWI Europe. You can see a lot of previous superhero movies in this one. The wartime period setting calls Captain America: The First Avenger to mind. Diana's fish out of water response to the world reminded me of Thor. The focus of the movie wasn't on creating some huge spectacle or one-upping Marvel or previous DC films. The film isn't an extended universe delivery system either. The idea for this film is simple: let's introduce Wonder Woman. That's all it's wants to do and that's what makes it so good.
It's ironic that by taking a step back from playing the Marvel game, DC ends up beating Marvel to a lot of firsts. Wonder Woman is the first female lead protagonist in a film in either extended universe. Director Patty Jenkins is the first woman to direct a superhero film and broke all sorts of opening weekend and overall records in the process. However, none of this would matter to me if the film wasn't any good*. And, this is the best reviewed of DC films since Christopher Nolan was working with them. I wouldn't call this film exceptionally made in any specific way. Rather, it's a collection of things done well. Wonder Women has a better sense of fun than the previous DC movies without losing the stakes. It switches between lighter and serious moments comfortably. The WWI setting is a refreshing change of pace and handled as seriously as a superhero movie can handle a real war. Jenkins holds back during the action sequences when needed, which is a nice change from something like Dead Men Tell No Tales last week that was a mess when the bullets started flying. Jenkins is more in love with the slow motion shots than I was as an audience member. The film still struggles with some of the sillier comic book trappings in the same way all superhero movies do (i.e. the lasso of truth will always be a little silly, just like Dr. Strange's cape is). This is the thousandth iteration of the "men are capable of great evil but also great love" story I've seen, but they don't belabor the point too much.
*OK, yes, it does matter, big picture. It just doesn't matter for this Reaction. I'm all for more diversity of voices in film (or in anything). More voices means more variety which invariably means more quality. That just makes sense. Hopefully this success and other films that are already in production with female directors and leads will mark a lasting shift rather than a blip in the business.
The cast really shines throughout. Gal Gadot plays the titular heroine perfectly. I remember when her casting was first announced, I was worried. At the time, I only knew Gadot as the eye candy from Fast and Furious movies. I thought DC just cast the first 5'10 model who could pass a screen test. She made a believer out of me in only a few minutes of Batman vs. Superman last year and Wonder Woman only solidifies that belief. She pulls off the physicality. She has superpowers but also skills. Even if she wasn't a goddess, I'd believe she could kick some ass. She is good enough at getting a laugh, normally out of a physical gag, and she can sell a dramatic beat even if the dialogue she has to deliver is a little clunky. She has great chemistry with Chris Pine*, who is playing the "Chris Pine in an action movie" role. He's a little jaded. She's a little naive. There's a yin and yang to what they bring to the relationship. She's undeniably the hero of the story but he is also heroic. He takes away from her no more than Peggy Carter takes away from Captain America. The rest of the cast is enjoyable. Back on the island of Themyscira, Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen bring gravitas as the lead Amazons. I can't say any other characters matter. The other men on Diana and Steve's team are entertaining character-types who probably have names I'd recognize if you said them to me. The villains are thin, mostly by design. I doubt we are ever returning to WWI Europe, so it's fine if Diana is the only person with dimentionality by the end of the film.
I'm really not a music person. I like music, but I can't speak intelligently about it. That said, the theme music DC has developed for Wonder Woman is superb. Even going back to BvS, when that music starts playing as shit's about to go down, it's electric. Wonder Woman needs to show up in as many movies as possible just so we can get to that moment in any movie.
I really liked Wonder Woman. It's an efficient superhero movie that stands alone. It's familiar in all the right ways and different in enough ways that it doesn't feel like a rehash. It's not subtle thematically and the final battle feels a little tacked on, like some executive said, "She's a superhero, dammit, so make her have a 'super' fight." It's never boring though. I left this more excited by what's next in the DC universe than any of the previous films have. I'm perhaps a little higher on this than I should be, but that's what lowered expectations do.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
The Pitch: We [Disney] are on such a hot streak right now, we might as well.
Pete's Dragon is a pretty simple movie and that works. It's not flashy. It has the lowest profile of any of Disney's recent batch of live-action remakes, so the modest box office numbers are fitting. Pete's Dragon is tucked away in the Disney catalog, just like the logging community in the movie is in a quiet corner of the country. That's where Disney gets you though. People immediately think of the big movies when they think of Disney, but the reason the brand is what it is is the movies that are the next tier down: the Meet the Robinsons and Enchanteds. These are movies with heart that people forget about too often.
The original Pete's Dragon isn't very good, but it had a good idea behind it. That's the best kind of movie to remake, because there's room for improvement. This updated version looks great. It has a great cast, but no one is sucking up all the air (i.e. "It's a movie with Robert Redford. It's not a Robert Redford movie."). The end hits all the right notes. It's hard to find much bad to say about the movie, except that maybe it's a little too quiet. Looking back, I don't know how this managed to fill 102 minutes. However, while watching it, it didn't drag. It doesn't seem like it should be possible to be slow without dragging.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
