Delayed Reaction: Mars Needs Moms

Premise: A boy stowaways on a spaceship after Martians stole his mom.

 

If you asked me to describe the biggest box office bombs, my first instinct would be to say they are attempts at franchises that studios overinvested in that fully fell apart. Disney alone has John Carter, The Long Ranger, and my beloved Tomorrowland toward the top of the list* that all fit the description. There are also movies that make you wonder why the star or director were ever given that much money like Cutthroat Island, Battleship, or The Adventures of Pluto Nash. A little further down the list, there are the last gasps of franchises like Terminator: Dark Fate and Dark Phoenix. The movies that aren't that discussed are the animated movies. Many of the biggest financial failures in cinema are animated films that tried technology (normally motion-capture) that ballooned the cost and audiences weren't ready for. Remember Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Sears, Titan A.E., Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and A Christmas Carol (the Zemeckis one)? Those are all among the very worst bombs ever. So is Mars Needs Moms.

 

*For all the talk of Disney dominating the box office these days, they still make a number of large and pricy gambles on movies.

 

I remember Mars Needs Moms almost like a fever dream. I saw exactly one trailer for it. It looked bad. I figured it was one of those cheap Disney Toon movies they were releasing to game the Oscars nominations*. In my mind, this was confirmed when I didn't hear about the movie again for a long time. There must've been some delays in its release that even the Wikipedia page doesn't care to mention. By the time it was released in 2011, it was dead on arrival and one of the biggest flops in history.

 

*The Oscars only give 5 nominations for Animated Feature if a certain number of animated movies are released that year, so Disney does what they can to inflate those numbers by releasing some straight-to-DVD movies to theaters for a couple weeks first to make them eligible.

 

Simply put, this movie is bad. The animation looks weird. Director Simon Wells is a disciple of producer Robert Zemeckis and is just as enamored with this motion capture technology. The uncanny valley is real in this movie. I'm not sure why Disney put so much money into this. It's not like Zemeckis' mo-cap movies had done well before this. The Polar Express only made profit through yearly re-releases that creeped out a new set of children each year. Everything else lost big though. Why would Disney expect differently without Zemeckis even directing it?

 

I doubt this movie would've succeeded even with traditional animation. The premise is really strained and insulting to basically everyone. So, the idea is that the men in Martian society are oafs who the women kick out to the slums of the planet. The female Martians that rule society though don't know how to take care of their children. So, they abduct mothers from Earth and suck out their parenting acumen to load into nannybots, killing the mother. Ignoring how incredibly grim that is, how did no one making this movie realize the myriad ways this movie would be misinterpreted? It suggests fathers are insignificant. It implies that mothers who work are the villains. It seems to be saying that the correct way to raise a child is full time care by a parent or nanny. Was this based on a book written in the '50s? That's smart. Make a movie attacking fathers, working parents, and anyone who can't afford full-time care for their kid. I don't think that was the intent of the movie, but that's certainly how it reads.

 

And, let's not forget that the movie just isn't very good. Like, it's not very funny. They mo-capped Seth Green for the lead performance then didn't even use his voice, despite using him in the blooper reel. I know I should've turned this part of my brain off, but none of the logic about Mars made sense. All humans need are helmets, I guess. No need to shield the rest of the body, and losing the helmet is just like being underwater for a little while. Once you get a helmet back on, you can breathe again. Sure, that makes sense.

 

This is rightfully a box office disaster that Disney should and does hide from.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Quick Reaction: The Addams Family

There are few things more disappointing than hearing that Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloe Grace-Moretz, and Allison Janney are going to be in a movie, only to realize that I read over the word "animated". I would've loved Isaac's take on Gomez, Theron donning jet black Morticia hair, and Moretz's older take on Wednesday. Alas, an animated movie is all I got, and it's a very meh movie. It's targeted at kids not families. There are a few good "over the kids' heads" jokes, but most of the jokes are just pop culture call outs. The movie gets the basic idea of The Addams Family right. It uses them for a good (albeit unsubtle) message about acceptance. It's hard to be too angry at anything this short, even if it still struggled to fill the 86 minutes. Overall, there's not much to say here. A very forgettable movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Delirium

Premise: A man on house arrest, alone, in his recently deceased father's mansion struggles with the ghosts of his past and weak grasp on reality.

 

Compared to the average person, I know a lot about how movies are made, but in actuality, I still barely know a thing. I don't really understand how a movie gets made. I'll hear about raising funds from investors, working out contracts with the actors, taking notes from producers, and securing shooting permits, and it's all abstract to me. I know that a movie comes together and I like or dislike it. At the end of the day, that is the part that matters, but I am aware that often, when I blame the director or writer, I'm really blaming the budget restraints or location scout. Poor casting is often about scheduling conflicts that forced someone to replace someone else at the last minute. I say it as often as I can. I'm amazed that any movie can get made and be good.

 

You can tell where I'm going with this.

 

I did not like Delirium. It didn't work for me at all. It's a movie that uses mental illness as an excuse for disjointed storytelling. The twists are both not earned and too excessive. I can see why they want to have them. I just don't think they knew how hard they would be to pull off. The brother in prison who Topher Grace keeps imagining turning out to be real is an awesome twist in theory. As soon as it's revealed though, all I could do was question the plausibility of the prison escape and wonder how Topher Grace could be so out of it that he couldn't decipher if the brother was real or not. If he was that far on the edge, how was he ever deemed well enough to leave the mental hospital? Then there's the mother being alive and chained up in the hidden basement. That's an awesome visual. The mom looks wicked, but that didn't feel at all earned or make sense. How perfectly contrived. Think about it. For this movie to work, Grace has to be released, the brother has to escape, and the father has to die all at the perfect time for any of this too work.

 

Part of the issue is that Topher Grace is not great for this role. I've liked him in many things, but this is not in his range. His mania plays as much funnier than it's supposed to. He's playing it earnest, but his delivery sounds like there should be quips or jokes in there. I don't think anyone could've pulled this off, but he was strikingly ill-fitting.

 

This was a Hollywood Blacklist script all the way back in 2005. The Blacklist is a yearly list of the top unproduced screenplays floating around Hollywood. Many of the screenplays go on to be some of the best movies of the next couple years. Others...don't. You can often point to how long it takes for them to get made as a quality indicator. Delirium was from the 2005 Blacklist and wasn't released until 2018. If that's all I knew about it, I'd assume this is a movie with problems. Some screenplays just don't transition to screen very well. Stuff looks great on page yet doesn't work on screen. What are some other late releases from that year's list? The Only Living Boy in New York. The Highwaymen. Several others I've never heard of. Maybe the rule should be that if a Blacklist movie isn't produced after a decade, it's retroactively removed from the Blacklist. Because, whatever was appealing about this movie in 2005 was lost by the 2018 release.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Things Heard & Seen

Premise: A family moves to a small New York town, into a house that's haunted by a spirit, and...well, you've seen What Lies Beneath, right?

 

I hate when the Netflix algorithm works on me. Not that it correctly suggested a movie I'd like. I'd like it if it did that. I generally know what movies have come out and are coming out. I often have a sense of how good they are or aren't going to be going in. Or, at the very least, I know what they are about or who is in them. Then Things Heard & Seen pops up on my Netflix page. Just released. Starring Amanda Seyfreid, who couldn't be hotter now after her Oscar nomination for excellent work in Mank (another Netflix release). It's even a horror movie, and I love horror movies. Yet I had no idea this movie existed until the Netflix algorithm brought it up. How did this movie sneak up on me so successfully? Anyway, it popped up and I watched it as blindly as anything I've seen lately.

 

Early on, I was pretty impressed with the movie. Amanda Seyfreid. Natalia Dyer. Rhea Seehorn. F. Murray Abraham. What a cast. I like the idea of moving into a haunted house where spirits have unfinished business. Pretty quickly though, the movie stalled and never got more interesting.

 

First of all, this is more of an eerie movie than a horror movie. A while ago, I determined that merely having zombies shouldn't make something a horror movie. Horror is more about the verbs than the nouns of the story. Just having zombies doesn't make World War Z a horror movie. I'm starting to think the same thing about ghosts. Just because a movie has a spirit with unfinished business doesn't mean it automatically has to be horror. In my book, Things Heard & Seen, What Lies Beneath, and Ghost are more supernatural thrillers than horror movies, so I did not get what I was looking for going into this movie. I didn't get the horror movie I thought I was signing up for. That's bad marketing.

 

Secondly, I was really bored by the toxic, deceptive male aspect of the story. Haven't we all seen enough movies about guys who lie, cheat, and kill to maintain the facade of their lives? James Norton as the husband in this is never really likable. The movie does a poor job convincing me why Amanda Seyfried would be with him in the first place. And he does a poor job even maintaining his lies. So, the more his deception revealed itself, and the more it looked like someone wrote a book* after watching What Lies Beneath, the less intrigued I was by it all.

 

*Things Heard & Seen is adapted from a novel, which I do hear is more successful than the film at what it's trying to do.

 

Amanda Seyfreid is OK in the movie. Everyone is allowed a paycheck movie on occasion, and I could see how she would sign onto this with the idea "If they do this right, this could be great for me." The truth is, there are only about 20 actors out there who can and want to wait until the great movies come to them. Everyone else gets a mixed bag of offers. Sometimes you get a great role in a Mank. Other times, you get a lead role in a thriller movie from some journeyman indie directors. It's a little harder to judge James Norton's performance. I don't know him from anything else, so it's easy to confuse my dislike of his character for a dislike of his performance. I don't think the character is compellingly written or performed, but I leave a little room for that to be the performance working as intended. In other words, I hate the character, so maybe that means he's doing it right. I wish Rhea Seehorn had more to do. That's a general comment applicable to any situation though. Natalia Dyer is really wasted. Even she is annoyed that her role is to be the college student the husband has an affair with. Literally, she rolls her eyes at the idea that she's going to have sex with him then does it anyway.

 

It's hard to say I was disappointed by the movie. I thought I was getting a slightly different movie, which wasn't the movie's fault. The supernatural parts of the story felt more like a narrative crutch than value added. Like, this movie could've been done nearly identically without any of it. The cast feels a bit wasted. Not in a depressing way. Just in a "you never know how a movie will come together when you sign on or are making it" way. The less said about this movie the better, so naturally, this Delayed Reaction is abnormally long. Oh well.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Quick Reaction: Scarface

Screen violence sure has changed some in the last 90 years. This film had to be edited for violent content when it was released originally. People pointed to it as an example of how films had gotten too violent. Yet, watching it now, there's no swearing, no nudity, no blood. Many of the killings are technically offscreen and the deaths are so theatric that they don't even register as real. Would this movie get a PG rating now?

 

I don't have a ton to say about the movie. I see its influence in the gangster films that followed, and I appreciate the boundaries it pushed up against at the time. Paul Muni is good in the lead role. This is a very sound-stagey movie though. It doesn't even seem that ambitious for 1931. Just violent. Considering it was in the same box office as Dracula and Cimarron, it doesn't even seem like that shocking of a movie. It's OK though.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Thunder Force

Premise: Estranged childhood best friends get super powers in order to stop the sociopathic supervillains in their city.

 

Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone are finally onto something with their movies. I've made no secret that I hated their first few movies. Tammy, The Boss, and Life of the Party all leaned into the worst of McCarthy's impulses and confirmed my long-held theory that if Melissa McCarthy is the lead creative voice in a movie, then it's going to be bad. That said, the films directed by her husband (Falcone) have gotten incrementally better. With Superintelligence last year, the first Falcone-directed, McCarthy-starring film not written by them, I came away for the first time not hating the movie. It was still a long way off from being good, but "not awful" is a good sign nonetheless.

 

Their new film, Thunder Force, continues the trend of their films getting just a little bit better. And this one is even written by Falcone. Maybe by their 10th film, I'll be actively enjoying them. Thunder Force seems to recognize what worked about Superintelligence and found a very similar premise. You see, if Melissa McCarthy plays an exceptional mess of a person in everyday life, her character is incredibly unlikeable. If she plays an exceptional mess of a person in an exceptional circumstance, then it's a much better fit. The worlds of Superintelligence and Thunder Force are both so heightened that McCarthy can go nuts without feeling out of place. I'm still not sure that I like it much, but at least it's of a piece.

 

McCarthy is fine in the movie. She gets a lot of chances to do physical comedy, which you can tell she enjoys doing. She's come to realize that she works well when there's a teen or young child around to match her arrested development with. Her fellow 2011 Supporting Actress nominee Octavia Spencer matches her well. I do wish Spencer's role allowed a little more room for her to have fun too. She's fine as "the responsible one", but she could also be great as part of a Dumb and Dumber pairing with McCarthy. I kind of hope they work together again on something where they aren't playing personality opposites.

 

It's a shame that I'm just not as tickled by the same things as McCarthy (and Falcone) are. I think McCarthy can be incredibly funny. Her work in Paul Feig's movies is almost uniformly great. Even in a more serious role like Can You Ever Forgive Me? she's often very funny. But, in the movies where she calls the shots, it's a lot of prat falls and gross out humor. Thunder Force tries to get so much mileage out of "McCarthy eating raw chicken is hilarious" and I can't say I agree.

 

The story of the movie is pretty dumb but intentionally so. I wish it had a little more satire of the superhero movie genre. Instead, it's just piggybacking the genre as a good excuse to make its narrative leaps. Like, how different would this movie really be if it was about Spencer as an undercover detective and McCarthy accidentally identified herself as the cover story character to the crime boss, making Spencer stuck with McCarthy for the rest of the movie? Same basic idea. Only the details of the jokes would be different.

 

So, not a great movie, but at least it's watchable. It's an encouraging step forward for the McCarthy and Falcone pairing. They are like a sports team that has finally dropped all the bad contracts from their books and needs to start looking for good players to sign. They've figured out how to make a movie with a lead character who I don't fully hate. Now they just need to add better jokes.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Stowaway

Premise: A three-person crew on a trip to Mars discovers a fourth person mistakenly on the vessel and realize they don't have the resources for all four to survive.

 

It gets hard to keep all these space movies straight. Quiz me on the casts of Life, Ad Astra, Interstellar, Gravity, The Martian, The Midnight Sky, and Stowaway, and I won't do well. These movies aren't all built the same. The Martian and Gravity are very distinct in my mind. Some of the others get hazy. I do appreciate that they all have their differences though. Ad Astra is more of a space voyage. Passengers is more about the isolation than the space. The Midnight Sky has the pull to go home. I'll happily watch all of these movies, because I like the genre well enough. I'm invested enough in this kind of movie to appreciate the small differences. That could be a barrier for entry for other people though for whom all space movies are the same.

 

Stowaway has to lay a lot of pipe to get to the core problem of the movie. It establishes the three-person space mission manned by Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, and Daniel Dae Kim. It has to explain how Shamier Anderson could end up on the ship by accident in a way that sounds plausible. Then it has to establish all the reasons why they can't produce enough oxygen to keep all four alive. Once it sets all that up, the movie is quite intriguing. I like space movies about how to fix a problem with only the resources available. The movie sets up the personalities and motivations of everyone well, so no one really seems like a villain. Collette's training makes her too valuable to sacrifice herself and her injury prevents her from taking the risks she otherwise would. Kim is afraid of everyone dying because they hesitated to make the hard decision. Kendrick knows she couldn't live with herself if everything possible wasn't tried. Anderson has to live with what started as a happy accident turning into a dangerous liability. Even if I could predict the basic beats of the movie, the premise has enough intrigue to keep me invested anyway.

 

This would've been a nice movie to see on the big screen. As a rule, any mission happening in open space has a grandeur and tension that few other scenarios can match. I knew something was going to go wrong, but I didn't know what or how wrong. I knew there was no chance all 4 would survive by the end. They did surprise me with who didn't last though.

 

The moral dilemma and some great late set pieces make up for some early issues getting everything set up interestingly, so I'm mostly favorable about the movie. Besides, what kind of monster would I have to be to not appreciate two hours with Toni Collette and Anna Kendrick? Daniel Dae Kim and Shamier Anderson are good too.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Quick Reaction: Morocco

North Africa post-WWI and into WWII seems like it was the place to be. I haven't seen that many movies from that time period, but among them are Morocco, Algiers, and Casablanca. So, either my sample size is wildly non-representative, or that was a popular setting back then. It's an exotic area that was also under European rule for long enough to look cosmopolitan. That creates a really cool dynamic. I wish Hollywood would go back to it a little more often. Allied took place there, but that's the only recent example I can think of. I'm probably forgetting about many. I do think the image of the region changed some after WWII and the revolts against the French. The first world impression changed from seeing it as a mysterious place to yet another region in discord due to weak government and assorted persecutions.

 

Really though, if you're watching this movie, it's for Marlene Dietrich dancing in a tuxedo. It's the most indelible image from the movie. It's sparked decades of discussions about what Hollywood could've been had the Hays Code not taken over and stomped down any bit of subversion.

 

Otherwise, the movie is pretty forgettable. Not bad. Gary Cooper and Dietrich are good and work well on screen together. It's well made, especially for that era. I certainly prefer it over the Best Picture winner that year, Cimarron. This movie certainly falls victim to the fact that I'm not well trained for the pacing and style of older films.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Spontaneous

Premise: The students of a high school class start spontaneously exploding for no apparent reason.

I mean...sure.

 

I'm on board for what this movie has to offer. It's a horror black comedy coming-of-age story. That fills up my movie taste Bingo board as well as any recent movie. If they could just throw in a few grade-schoolers swearing then this might be my favorite movie by force. It's got Katherine Langford and Charlie Plummer (who I've both liked in many things at this point) playing teenagers who are good at sarcasm and make movie references that were written by someone at least in their 30s. These are all things I like. So, unsurprisingly, I liked this movie.

 

It gets a little too self-serious toward the end, and it spells out its message a little too much at the very end. Otherwise, this delivers. The spontaneous combustion is delightfully random. The filmmakers really get into how disgusting the mess left behind would be. I enjoy how it never really explains the combustions. It hints at some science, but smartly remembers that it's just a loud metaphor for the fragility of life.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Queen of Versailles

Premise: A time share mogul and his wife are in the middle of building the largest single-residence house in the U.S. until the '08 market crash happens and makes them cash poor.

 

I'm not an "eat the rich" type, because I think it's a lazy way to look at things. That said, I'd be OK if we did eat some of the rich.

 

It's not that the Siegels, patriarch David and titular matriarch Jackie, are the worst people. Jackie is sort of nice in her own way. They are just out of touch. Director Lauren Greenfield smartly doesn't spend the movie trying to tear the Siegels down. The film isn't relishing in their abrupt financial struggles. It sort of feels like a release valve situation. Greenfield calmly captures the family's "plight" for long stretches, then takes an occasional dig at them to release the pressure, like a parent who yells at their kid after they've been annoying them about the same thing for 6 straight hours. You don't think the parent hates their child, but you just need to give them that moment on occasion.

 

What's interesting to see in The Queen of Versailles is something we all know but still have to remind ourselves of: rich people aren't any better than us. Jackie is completely unequipped to run a house without a full staff working for her. When the family has to cut back after the financial crash, the house is a mess. There's dog shit all over the floor. Pets are dying because no one feeds them. Every room is stacked with boxes and containers. There's nothing about how they are actually living their lives that I'm envious of. What's crazy is that they aren't even poor at that point. They still live in a mansion. They still have a full-time nanny and housekeeper. They throw extravagant parties. Jackie goes on spending sprees. Yet they still live like shit. This movie was oddly healing for me, because I was able to look around at my life and not feel so bad about it, even though I wasn't rich like them. Don't get me wrong, I'd happily trade bank accounts with them, but I don't feel like they are living a better life simply because of the fortune.

 

I love a right place, right time documentary. Something where the filmmaker came out to make one thing then finds herself in the middle of something bigger than she realized. Often it ends up like Icarus, in which the filmmaker isn't up to the challenge, and the movie mainly works because of the power of the story, not the effectiveness of the filmmaking. Occasionally, you get a Queen of Versailles, in which filmmaker Lauren Greenfield seems so ready that you'd think she predicted the '08 market crash. Her camera is at the center of everything going on with the family and she approaches it all with curiosity. The film realizes that regardless of what is happening, Jackie is the kind of person they want to profile. The adversity only makes it more interesting. This isn't an iron sharpens iron movie. It's more of an iron shatters glass movie. It began as a display of extravagant wealth and ended as a movie about the folly of extreme wealth.

 

My only regret is that I wanted them to add an 8 years later addendum to it. I've gathered that David Siegel is still worth half a billion. David hasn't traded Jackie in for two 20-year-olds yet. The oldest kid apparently died of a drug overdose at one point. That's all I could find out. Honestly though, I probably don't want to see how they are all doing now. They're probably back on their feet, having learned no lessons. The kids are all insufferable, entitled teens now. And who wants to see that? Greenfield did make a spiritual follow up in 2018, Generation Wealth, which I'm not as interested to see. That looks like it has much more direct "eat the rich" energy, and I'm not ready for more exhibitions of incredible wealth.

 

Side Note: I was howling every time they tried to blame the evil banks for trying to ruin them. Sorry, I'll cut the plumber making $50,000 a year some slack for not understanding finances enough to avoid ruin. The Siegel's are in trouble because they literally mortgaged their future for extra millions. Blaming the bankers is a move that's only allowed for people who are relying on 401ks. Nice try though.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend