Delayed Reaction: Witness

The Pitch: Can Harrison Ford pass as Amish?

After an Amish boy witnesses a murder that would expose corruption at the highest levels of the police department, a detective goes into hiding in the boy's Amish community to keep him safe.

Harrison Ford is a great example of why I need not get worked up every year when looking at Oscar snubs. In his early years, Ford had small parts in Best Picture nominees American Graffiti and The Conversation. His breakout role was in Star Wars (a Best Picture nominee). The movie that solidified him as a star was Raiders of the Lost Ark (another Best Picture nominee). He starred in the SciFi classic, Blade Runner. Then there's that supporting role in Working Girl (You guessed it: a Best Picture nominee). As direct penance for passing on Rain Man, he starred in the amnesia drama Regarding Henry. No award attention with that one; a bit too transparently Oscar-baity. The Fugitive managed to be an unlikely Best Picture nominee (and netted Tommy Lee Jones his lone Oscar). Things calmed down for the next decade, even though he made hits out of Jack Ryan movies and honorary Jack Ryan movie Air Force One. What Lies Beneath became the kind of thriller hit that would've surprised no one had it snuck in a few Oscar nominations (think: Gone Girl). Since 2010, he's collected the kind of "old man roles" that have netted contemporaries Supporting Actor Oscar nominations, be it in original movies like Extraordinary Measures and 42 or "Sylvester Stallone in Creed"-style returns like The Force Awakens and Blade Runner 2049. Ford's career is marked not only by iconic roles, but by being in films that he helped elevate to Oscar attention despite genre trappings. Despite all this, the man only has one Oscar nomination to his name. And that's for being in the crime movie, Witness.

In fact, Witness pulled in 8 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Lead Actor, Director, Original Screenplay, and Editing. I really liked Witness, but I there's not much in my mind separating it from the likes of The Client (1 Oscar nomination) or A Time To Kill (0 Oscar nominations). Really, the story is functionally the same as Kindergarten Cop. And it's not like the 80s were just a hot time for crime movies with the Oscar voters. Other than Witness, I could only find The Verdict (more of a courtroom drama), The Untouchables (no Best Picture nomination), and Mississippi Burning (more of a race drama) as other examples that got love from voters. And Witness still beat them all in nominations.

The Oscars make no sense when you really break them down. Rating someone's career only by Oscar attention is a fool's errand.

So sorry about that rant. If I get going about Oscar history inconsistency, I'm likely to go on for a while. Part of the reason I let that go on for so long is because there isn't much to say about Witness. It's a good movie. Harrison Ford movie-stars all over the movie. He has great chemistry with Kelly McGillis. Seeing Viggo Mortensen so young is vaguely unsettling. The Amish setting is well used. The movie works hard to treat the community with respect. This was undone by the fact that "Amish Paradise" was playing in my head the whole time. This is a good movie that was released in the 80s, not a good 80s movie.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Five Feet Apart

Formula: The Fault in Our Stars + Mucus
 

I sure feel old now. It's sort of a running joke that the easiest way to tell that you are getting old is that you start taking the side of the parents in movies about kids. In the past, I've laughed that off. I love coming of age stories. Find me a teen looking for a sense of self, and I'm happy to watch. Even when I do see the parents' point of view, I still relate to the young protagonists. That sure wasn't the case with Five Feet Apart though.

Five Feet Apart is another entry in the surprisingly popular "sick girl finds love" genre. Of course, this began with The Fault in Our Stars. Everything, Everything maked the metaphor painfully obvious with a girl literally confined to her house as the world passes her by. Me & Earl & the Dying Girl is a variation of this that I loved. Even The Space Between Us is a gender-reversed SciFi take on it. Teens love stories about some force trying to hold them back from living their full life*. In the case of Five Feet Apart, the protagonist, Stella (Haley Lu Richardson) has Cystic Fibrosis to keep her separated from the world. As the film explains, CF - as those "in the know" call it - is a degenerative lung disease that keeps those with it in hospitals a lot and for extended periods of time. Even getting a lung transplant only buys a few years. And those with CF have to keep their distance from each other. If they get each other's bacteria, that could mean death. The rule is that they must keep six feet apart from anyone else with CF at all times. You can guess most of what this movie is based on that rule and the title.

*My favorite movie is Stranger Than Fiction which literalizes this, so I don't have much room to be snarky about this.

Stella is the pretty, smart, charming lead that you find in any romantic movie. Even when she's sweaty, scarred, coughing up mucus, and using an oxygen tank, she still looks like Haley Lu Richardson. She's very up-tight and organized, trying to make the best of her very bad situation. During one of her long stays in the hospital, Stella meets Will (Cole Sprouse): a CF rebel who sits on the ledges of roofs, doodles on his treatment schedule, and flirts a lot. Understandably, she falls for him. She teaches him to be anal-neurotic about sticking to his CF regiment. He teaches her how to loosen up and live life. He's very much the "manic pixie dream boy". Throughout the movie, I kept thinking back to Riley's imaginary boyfriend in Inside Out. Since Stella and Will can't ever touch or get close, the drama basically writes itself.

The movie has the very best of intentions. It works hard to educate the audience about CF. It shows the ugliness of the disease while also not letting the characters be solely defined by it. The movie tries to make CF more than just an impediment for the sake of plot even though that's exactly what it is. As often as it can, it tries to remember the seriousness of the condition and the risks the CF kids take by ignoring them. Still, it is a teen drama. It's not perfect about the handling of the disease, and that's what frustrated me the most. Specifically, the last half hour had me rolling my eyes and mumbling "stupid kids" like an old man the whole time. Despite some decent chemistry between Richardson and Sprouse, I never lost sight of how dumb it was for them to fall for each other and be so irresponsible. Especially Stella, who is defined by how sensible she is. The shift in her personality is too drastic for me to buy. Also, from my understanding, people with CF are safe to touch and be romantic with people who don't have CF. That isn't all that dangerous. I know I'm missing the point, and it doesn't take into account her isolation in the hospital, but why does she have to fall for the one other age-appropriate straight CF boy in the hospital? Isn't there some handsome cancer teen there too? I guess what I'm trying to say is the story is more than a little contrived.

I only saw this because Haley Lu Richardson has yet to disappoint me. I liked her in The Edge of Seventeen, Columbus, and Support the Girls. She's also very good in this and makes a lot of the movie work that otherwise wouldn't. She is playing a type though. So is Cole Sprouse. And Moises Arias (the gay best friend). And Kimberly Herbert Gregory (the stern but deeply caring black nurse). And the parents. I don't remember who plays the parents, which I think is fitting. All parents in a movie like this are pretty anonymous and aren't around enough to matter. Most of the actors are good at playing their roles, but you can easily recognize their description in a Screenwriting 101 book.

Five Feet Apart is a flawed movie with a big heart. It loves grand gestures and long pauses. It has a "love conquers all" ethos that some people will completely fall for. Sadly, if you don't fall for the romance of the movie*, there's not enough else about the movie to connect with. Haley Lu Richardson is great though. That's all I hoped for.

*Note: I don't mean "fall for" like it's a cheap trick. Some people are hopeless romantics. Some aren't. I don't judge either way.
One Final Thought: I'm going to need Hollywood to cool it with the casting of these movies. I feel like every actress I think is cute then gets casts as a sick dying girl (Shailene Woodley in The Fault in Our Stars, Olivia Cooke in Me & Earl & The Dying Girl, Haley Lu Richardson in Five Feet Apart). It's starting to make me feel like I have a type that doesn't speak well for me.

One [Other] Final Thought: Is the One "Fuck" Rule dead? My understanding is that the MPAA allows one utterance of "Fuck" in a movie before it's bumped up to an R rating. It's a dumb rule, but it makes a fun game out of tracking how a PG-13 movie uses its one "fuck". Well, Five Feet Apart is PG-13 and has two "fucks". One is a "fuck" and the other is a "fucking". Maybe that makes a difference. Or is the MPAA finally letting up on that? I'm not sure, but this ended up being the most exciting thing to me in the movie.


Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Rings

The Pitch: I bet The Ring would be even scarier now with all the screens and phones in our lives now.

A young woman tries to stop herself from being Samara's next victim.

The Ring is one of my favorite horror movies. I understand that the Japanese movie it's based on is probably better if not on a technical level then simply because it's the original. I've rewatched The Ring fairly recently, and I know that it's a little cheesy at times and doesn't have perfectly sound logic behind it. I love the movie though. Naomi Watts is a great lead. They cast some great creepy kids for the movie. The haunting imagery is effectively unsettling. The rules of it are simple and the monster (Samara) is sufficiently scary. It helps that when I first saw the movie, I was 16, by myself, at night, watching it on VHS. It may not be a horror classic, but it's everything it needed to be for me.

I admire the attempt to modernize The Ring. There's a lot of fun to be had with the move to digital. There are screens everywhere now. The idea that the curse is passed down through a VHS is nonsense to begin with, so why not digital copies too?

I also like the idea that there would be people trying to scientifically understand the tape. It makes me think back to Oculus. I love when people in a horror movie try to meet the dark force on an intellectual level. If a person in a scary movie is smart, does everything right, and still can't win, isn't that even scarier than "Let's split up"? However, the way Rings tries to intellectualize it is just silly. The level of the operation that Johnny Galecki's professor is running is way too big. Too many people know and too many potential people end up dead. Samara can't be mainstream. The tapes can't move past the point of urban legend or they stop being scary.

The Ring movies have always had the problem of over-explaining. Horror works better when less is known. The first movie is about a reporter getting the curse, so it makes sense that she would be able to find some things out, and even she probably learns too much. The Ring Two is a pointless continuation that muddles the story. Rings tries to plus it up, which just feels like putting a hat on a hat. I balked at the idea of adding to the infamous video. If the filmmakers can't find more to unpack in what's in the video to begin with, then give up. Adding to it is such a cheat. It's like in Halloween IV deciding that Michael Myers can fly too. It's too much. Play by the rules of the game.

Then there's my more general criticism of the movie. The lead girl and her boyfriend are idiots. Most of the plot is driven by one of them doing something inexplicably stupid. Also, I'm deeply disappointed that I didn't get to see Samara crawl out of closed laptop. How was there no shot of a laptop getting force open as a hand emerges from it, followed by the rest of Samara, wriggling out of the screen like she's one of those people trying to shimmy their way through a clothes hanger? In fact, I want to know the rules on mobile devices. Can Samara pop out of an Apple Watch or is that one of the benefits of a closed system: no 3rd party software can hack the system? Is there a minimum screen size required? Do the rules change on an HD screen? Like, I want a 4K TV, but not if it makes it easier for Samara to get me. I've changed enough of my life as it is because of these movies. I already don't answer calls from unknown numbers and refuse to watch videos without thumbnail previews.

Rings had the option to either play it as straight as possible or go completely nuts with the idea. It managed to do neither of those things.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Capturing the Friedmans

The Pitch: A story about a clown turns into a story about child molester but not in the way you think.

A documentary about a father and son arrested for child molestation despite a lack of concrete evidence.

Andrew Jarecki has an odd career. He's most famous as the filmmaker behind HBO's The Jinx. That series was the result of years of extensive investigation on Robert Durst. He even made a movie about Durst called All Good Things five years before the HBO series. He's also tied to the documentary and series Catfish as a producer. He first made his name well before any of that with an equally buzz-worthy documentary that started pretty tamely. He was collecting footage for a documentary about clowns. When profiling one of the clowns in New York, he found out that his brother and father had been arrested for child molestation over a decade earlier. The family happened to have an extensive video archive from that time. Jarecki took that footage and some current interviews to make Capturing the Friedmans, which was praised and derided for not taking a firming stance on the guilt of the subjects.

It's clear that Jarecki is interested in half truths. He's built his career on people telling stories that can't be proven and actions that are difficult to interpret.

Documentaries often come down to the right person chancing upon the right story. So much of it has to do with opportunity. For example, Icarus wasn't as good as it could've been, because the size of the story exceeded the ability of the filmmaker. Often, the greats like Errol Morris are stuck making more mundane topics sound more interesting than they really are.

Capturing the Friedmans is a bit of a perfect storm. Jarecki happens upon a story that he's well-suited for, with a family who is mostly willing to open up about it, and has the kind of extensive film archive that documentarians dream of. The end result is a movie about people with despicable impulses who I came away feeling genuinely torn about.

There's more than a little deceptive storytelling going on in the movie. I suspected as I was watching this that I wasn't getting the full story. It didn't take much digging afterwards to discover that there was some additional evidence that was left out of the movie that make the father and son look a lot more guilty. 

I'm less bothered by that in this than in something like Making a Murderer though for a couple reasons. For one, MaM had a lot more hours to play with in which it could've given some dissenting points. More importantly, the counter evidence left out of MaM makes that subject look really guilty when the show is really pushing for him to look innocent. The point of Capturing the Friedmans isn't innocence or guilt. It's about what we do in the grey area. The accusations are pretty horrific. The stories never quite add up though. The father talks about past trauma growing up that his sibling doesn't remember. The sons and numerous boys who would've been present during the computer classes when this molestation would've occurred are clueless about much of this. The father is initially discovered because of his collection of child pornography. Does that immediately make him guilty of other accusations? Impulses aren't the same as actions. I'm don't want to be taking the side of a pedophile though. The thought exercise this movie puts you through is disturbingly effective.

And there't the unnerving response the family has to it all. I get the idea of laughing through the pain, but geez. If I was about to go to jail for these crimes, especially if I wasn't guilty, I'd be inconsolable. Good things don't happen to people who go to jail for that: guilty or innocent.

Sorry. I'm processing this all in real time.
It's hard to recommend Capturing the Friedmans. Like The Act of Killing, it's an very effective documentary that, ideally, no one would ever have to see. It's thought provoking and challenging. It's left me cold and unsatisfied. It is exactly what it intends to be though and attacks challenging topics. 

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend