Delayed Reaction: The Last Summer

The Pitch: What if American Pie 2 was more melodramatic?

Several teens figure out the next step in their lives over the summer after graduation.

We all have types of movies that we'll happily watch even if they are bad. I know I have several. Movies that are all practically the same but the minute differences are enough to satisfy us. We also tend to be a little blind to this fact, thinking other people are crazy for not seeing the diversity of these stories. To me, all anime is the same damn thing every time. But, the people with a higher tolerance for anime see all the different shades and variations in the different stories. I'm sure someone could school me on the intricacies of Steven Segal or Jean Claude Van Damme action movies of the 90s or raunchy 80s comedies even though they are indistinguishable to my eye. I'm most susceptible to the high school coming of age story. I'm not sure why, but I could watch them all and never get tired of them. Maybe I just like watching pretty, young people. Maybe I'm an easy victim of nostalgia. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that they are easy. I know all the plots and twists. They characters all fit types, even when they are trying not to. I enjoy these movies for the same reason I keep playing the same real-time-strategy video games I've beat a dozen times rather than pickung up new games. My ideal power-down activity is about 95% muscle-memory and 5% actively thinking. Watching The Last Summer requires little processing power from my brain, and the tropes that bother other people don't even register with me.

The Last Summer is nothing special. In a year, I won't be able to tell is apart from, say, Good Kids. That's the one with Zoey Deutch, I think. It's your typical high school ensemble movie though. There isn't really an A-plot. There's just a bunch of B-stories that occasionally intersect. There's the couple who break up and both start dating other people only to realize the error of their ways. One teen becomes a nanny. There's the nerds who somehow become regulars at a bar. And, of course, the artistic girl who's also gorgeous who tells herself she's not going to date anyone this summer (Spoiler alert: she does!). I like that I could write most of this movie before watching a second of it.

I only recognized a few people from the cast. Maia Mitchell was excellent in Never Goin' Back last year and brings that same charm to a much less interesting role in this. I guess I've seen Halston Sage in a bunch of things, but I couldn't tell you what without her IMDB page pulled up. She's also charming. I liked the nerd characters - one is also in A.P. Bio and the other is the brother of the kid from The Grand Budapest Hotel and the new Spider-Man movies, which I didn't need IMDB to figure out). Mostly, it's a cast of people I expect to see in CW and Freeform shows for the next decade, and maybe one will graduate to an impressive movie career.

With a softer touch, I would've liked this movie a lot more. For example, there's a scene where a guy is asking Maia Mitchell on a date via a text conversation. It starts as a wordless scene in which we only see the guy on a train and the text of the chat. It's a great little scene, capturing the excitement of seeing the "..." and the dismay when the other person takes too long to respond. Then, at the end, when he secures the date, the guy announces to the train that she said yes (Note: He hasn't been talking to anyone on the train before then). There's no need for that. The actor's face made his excitement clear enough. Having him announce it to strangers on a train serves as a blunt and unnecessary reminder that this is a movie world. This movie does stuff like that a lot, and it's disappointing. With a little more trust in the audience and the performances, this could've been a much better forgettable high school movie.

The Last Summer is nowhere near the pantheon-level movies of its ilk - Fast Times, Dazed and Confused, Clueless. It's far from my personal top tier - Me & Earl & The Dying Girl, The Edge of Seventeen. It has no hope of being considered with the modern classics - Lady Bird, Mean Girls, Easy A. But, being somewhere on the list around Can't Hardly Wait and Dope isn't so bad. OK, maybe it's below those too...Shut up. I still liked it for what it is.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Fuck it!

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: The Nightingale

Formula: The Revenant ^ Tasmania

At what point does a movie going from hard to watch to reveling in misery? The answer is different for each of us. We all have our own triggers and tolerance. For me, I can only deal with a certain level of violence and blood. I don't deal with wrist cutting or needles at all well. The only time I'm ever left a movie was when I nearly passed out watching The Evil Dead remake*. The Nightingale is the second closest I've come to walking out of a movie. It pushed right up against my tolerance.

*I legit went to the restroom and laid on the floor for a minute to regain myself. Thank god no one walked in at that point. That would've been awkward.

The Nightingale tells the story of Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish woman in the early 1800s sent to Tasmania for committing a crime. She's married with a newborn baby but needs to get her papers of freedom from the officer (Sam Claflin) in charge where she is.

I don't really understand the debtor system there. What's important is that she's done her time and should be free, but Lt. Haskins (Claflin) won't let her go. Then, one night, Haskins and some other officers do some really repugnant things to Clare before setting out for another town on the other end of the island. Clare hires a local tracker (Baykali Ganambarr) to catch up to them and get revenge.

Everything about the historical context of the movie I thought was tremendous. This is a period and place I know almost nothing about. It was fascinating to see what British Colonialism looked like there. I knew abstractly about the racial issues in other areas under British rule, but this movie makes it real and specific. The British treated the natives there just as inhumanely as they did in the U.S. Maybe even worse. This movie is rich with period detail. Everything feels lived-in and real. After watching this, I'm amazed that anyone managed to make it out of that time period alive. The movie doesn't shy away from the ugliness of the time. It's been a while since I heard dark-skinned people called "boy" this many times. The central relationship of the movie is Clare and her guide, Billy's, friendship, but it develops slowly and with a lot of resistance. It's not particularly wordy either, often letting the physical performances say the most.

I haven't seen Aisling Franciosi in anything but a small role in Game of Thrones before this, but you can add her to my list of British and Irish actresses who I'll see a movie with just to here them talk. She wears the brutality her character faces well. She plays the required hardening while still being vulnerable. Baykali Ganambarr is strikingly good for a screen debut. And, I have to give Sam Claflin credit for being so convincingly awful. His character is wholly irredeemable, and Claflin wears it confidently. He's not a cartoon villain. He's just a terrible human being.

If you can get past the first 20 minutes, this is a pretty good movie. Those first 20 minutes are rough though. Right around the second rape scene, I wanted to run out of the theater. I'm pretty done with filmmakers using rape as an inciting event*. Writing/Director Jennifer Kent really sits on those scenes and escalates them to unbearable levels. I don't think she does it in an exploitative way. She just really wants to make sure the audience connects with the horrors Clare faces and the reason she's hell-bent on revenge. It just goes on too long.

*At least it's better than if her rape was used as a male characters motivation.

The pacing of the movie can be a little sluggish, especially toward the end. It's kind of like the dog chasing the car who wouldn't know what to do if it ever caught the car. It's intentionally underwhelming. For anyone seeing this as Kent's follow up to The Babadook, prepare yourself for what kind of movie this is. It's a big pivot away from horror. A pivot that makes me more interested in her as a filmmaker but somewhat scared of the discomfort she's going to put me through next.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Ready or Not

Formula: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil / Free Fire

The half-life of a good horror premise is short. Pretty much as soon as an idea is effective in a movie, it's reverse-engineered, broken down to its component parts, and made into a trope. That's how the brain works. Something scares us, so we try to diffuse it so we aren't scared anymore. This need to pick the genre apart is why horror comedies are so common. As soon as something can be troped, it can be laughed at. Sadly, most horror comedies are sold with a pitch that is the inversion of a single trope and don't have a full story to back it up.

Ready or Not has an awesome premise. Grace (Samara Weaving) marries into a gaming empire family and finds out that they have an odd tradition. On the night of the wedding, a magic box gives them a game to play. Most games are innocuous, like backgammon or old maid. But, if the person marrying into the family pulls the "Hide and Seek" card, then the family has until dawn to hunt down and kill that person. And wouldn't you know it, Grace pulls the "Hide and seek" card. The rest of the movie is Grace running around the estate, trying to survive.

The movie makes a smart choice early on: It recognizes the absurdity of the premise. The Le Domas family members constantly question why they are doing this or express displeasure with the situation. It offers just enough explanation and proof to explain why the family believes in this superstition. When Grace puts together the wedding gown with a shotgun look in the movie poster, she rolls her eyes at it. The characters are aware of how ridiculous it is, but the movie doesn't move into being meta. This works especially well when everything comes to a head at the end.

I also appreciate that the movie tries to have the characters reckon with this barbaric tradition. Grace's new husband, Alex (Mark O'Brien) disowned his family, and only returns for this because of his belief in the curse attached. His brother, Daniel (Adam Brody), is an alcoholic, trying to drink away his memories of the last hunt. The children think of it as a game. The older generation (Henry Czerny, Andie MacDowell, Nicky Guadagni) looks at it as an honored tradition. The movie actually tries to build real people, which is more work than most movies like this would put in.

The actors are all game for anything. Samara Weaving is easy to root for and has the right mix of disbelief of and disdain for the situation. Mark O'Brien has one of those faces that allows him to either look handsome or like a creep depended on the situation. Adam Brody's sarcasm is well calibrated for the tone of the movie. Elyse Leveque, another Le Domas sibling, really goes after her role, overwhelmed immediately and throughout. Andie MacDowell even manages to make this all seem almost normal.

I just wish this was plotted a little tighter. This takes place in a large house on a large estate. It has secret doors and a maze of passages. Characters have a variety of weapons and varying levels of competence with them. Allegiances shift depending on guilt and belief in the curse. There's so much room for this to stage big set pieces and pay off setups from earlier in the movie. This movie has all the ingredients to be one of my favorite movies, but it plays like either the writers or directors ran out of time to maximize its potential. I kept thinking that what I was watching should be even more insane.

Overall, there are worse criticisms to have than "I liked what it was doing but I wanted it to do more". Killer premise. Willing cast. A decently thought out story. Several solid jokes. This is exactly what I hoped for when I heard about this movie. I guess I should caution people that it does get rather violent, but, I mean, duh.

One Last Thought: This is a Fox Searchlight movie. I don't have the time to explain why that's weird if you don't already know. It is though. This movie had no award potential at any phase of development. It doesn't even have an Oscar pedigree cast. I'm not sure what this movie is doing as a Fox Searchlight release, but I like that it is one.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend