Popcorn Kernels: Best Picture Contenders, Vol. 1

In which I once again attempt to sit through all the nominees for Best Picture, knowing full well that the presence of Darkest Hour shall surely prevent me from accomplishing this goal. Here are two of those efforts.

The Post

Year: 2017
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk
Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When the Washington Post gets ahold of the Pentagon Papers, which expose a decade of government secrets, they must decide whether or not to publish them, which could potentially shut down the paper and send them to jail.

Look, I admitted that Spotlight was good, even though it's preposterous that it won Best Picture. And I dislike the state of the country as much as any reasonable American. But as timely as The Post is, it will never feel like anything other than Spotlight 2 (and in fact, it was co-written by one of the co-writers of Spotlight, if it wasn't already watered down enough for you). And as much as director Steven Spielberg has proven time and again he's a genius, we all have our bad days. The Post is such a huge waste of everyone's time and effort that it's not even funny.

Not that it was meant to be funny. The film finds Spielberg in intensely sober-minded Oscarbait mode, with only one scene (the best scene in the movie, involving a little girl selling lemonade) providing a moment of levity in this grandiose, self-important, completely arid awards season trifle.

The Post has a cruelly inflated sense of its own relevance, tying the problems of the past to current affairs in the most blunt, obvious way possible. Look, I'm all for arguments in favor of the free press, but they don't have to be couched in a series of artless, implacable zooms while characters monologue about how important the themes of the movie are. It hardly pretends to be dialogue, it's just one long essay mummifying an admittedly important historical event.

It's honestly rather clumsy, constantly framing Meryl Streep in drifts of men to pointedly remind you that she's not in a woman's space, all while the dialogue revolves around her being a woman in a man's space. It's very pointedly a message movie, and while shots like that can work - I'm thinking of Clarice Starling in the elevator at Quantico in Silence of the Lambs - it's forced down your throat so hard you start gagging before the fifteen minute mark.

It's just kind of a generally lousy movie, bookended by its worst scenes (a shoehorned-in Saving Private Ryan moment in Vietnam and a hilariously terrible Marvel-esque coda involving the world's worst Richard Nixon impersonator frantically waving his arms like a caffeinated mime and not even attempting to time his movements to the actual Nixon recording posing as dialogue) and endlessly unspooling trite, uninspired dialogue in between ("That picture makes me sad," exclaims Sarah Paulson, hopelessly drowning in a nothing role).

There's just no feeling involved here, it's all lecturing. And considering that The Post contains two of the world's most charismatic movie stars, it's astonishing how this could have even been accomplished. Meryl Streep is fine, as always, but she's snoozing through a role she could play with both hands and feet tied behind her back. And Tom Hanks is acting SO. HARD. But no matter how much he rakishly props his leg up on desks or undoes his sleeves, he's straining through an inexplicable old timey radio host accent that just drips with insincerity.

The Post was never going to be a great movie. It could only have ever been a acceptably Important prestige picture. But the way it fails its actors and the audience so substantially is frankly shocking. The music (John Williams, again visibly bored) seems to actively rebel against the tone of the film, the script is begging for attention yet barely there, and the coterie of strong performers (including, randomly, a handful of comic actors like Zach Woods and David Cross) is given nothing to do but be conduits for a firehose stream of flop sweat. One to miss.

Rating: 4/10

Dunkirk

Year: 2017

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We follow a fighter pilot, a civilian ship, and some ground troops through the effort to rescue the British military from the beach at Dunkirk during World War II.

Dunkirk is about as boldly experimental as a big budget blockbuster can get. But the thing is, experimentation leads to failure about half the time. Not that Dunkirk is a failure; what it gets right outweighs what it gets wrong, but its open risk-taking comes with some very odd choices that don't quite work.

For one thing, take the peculiar dilation of time that occurs over the course of the film. One story elapses over a week, one over a day, and one over an hour. The film cuts between these stories simultaneously, and they overlap at certain key moments. But the way they are presented doesn't really allow for any more insight or intrigue than if they had just been shown chronologically. And the landing of a fighter plane is dragged out over the course of what feels like half an hour of excruciatingly long screen time, milked for all it's worth in the film's biggest patch of jingoistic militarism.

Luckily, that doesn't seem to be the prevailing sentiment over the rest of the film. Dunkirk is a film that is above all else about the terror and constant, oppressive violence of war (despite the conspicuously pulled punches of its PG-13 rating), doled out by an omnipresent enemy that is literally never shown, except in the form of bomber planes that whistle by periodically. It eschews character arcs and even dialogue at times (especially in the sequences on the beach, it plays out more like a silent film, which fortunately prevents Harry Styles from screwing anything up) in favor of this all-important, nerve-rattling atmosphere.

And there is absolutely no denying that this is an utterly gorgeous motion picture. Between what are probably some of the best airplane action sequences ever filmed, Nolan provides us bleakly stunning, expansive vistas that blast your corneas with the sheer wideness of devastation and desolation on this beach. The single distracting thing about the visuals is that - at least on the home video release, I can't speak to the theatrical - it has been decided that the aspect ratios switch between the footage shot on 70mm and 65mm. The black bars constantly blotting out the huge screen-filling vistas are hugely distracting and an entirely odd choice.

Much more thoroughly satisfying is the soundscape, which is as harsh and alarming as you would expect any good war picture to be, slashed through with Hans Zimmer's droning, atonal, staccato score that ratchets up the tension to an unbearable degree.

It's a good thing that Dunkirk is so visually and aurally stunning and goes all in on those elements, because most of the dialogue sequences are the worst parts of the movie. Whether its generals dumping piles of exposition on the top of your head or Mark Rylance spouting nothing but affectless patriotic quotes for the better part of an hour, these scenes are generally worth much less of your time than the tense beach sequences - especially a scene where bullets begin to blast through the hull of a ship where stowaway soldiers are waiting for high tide.

I'm not usually a fan of war movies, and I wouldn't say I'd ever want to watch this again, but I'm glad I saw it in the first place. If you've already seen Lady Bird, Get Out, and The Shape of Water, this should certainly be next on your Oscars checklist.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1306

Popcorn Kernels: La Vie En Rage

In this set of mini reviews, we explore the modern incarnation of the zombie genre that pumped adrenaline into a decade of horror.

28 Days Later (For our podcast episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 2002

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A bicycle courier wakes up from a coma, only to discover that London is completely deserted, devastated by a Rage Virus that turns humans into ravenous, bloodthirsty monsters.

Zombies as we know them have been around since Night of the Living Dead in 1968. They’ve been devouring humanity on the regular since that fateful day, but our current zombie boom (spearheaded by the ratings juggernaut The Walking Dead) can be traced back to one vicious epicenter: 28 Days Later. This massively influential flick changed the landscape of 2000’s filmmaking in an astonishing myriad of ways, introducing the world to Cillian Murphy, proving that theatrical films can be successful even when shot on digital video, and ushering in the slightly smaller but nerve-jangling subgenre of “fast zombie” movies that eventually spawned my favorite film, [REC].

We owe a lot to 28 Days Later, but the fervor it spawned shot off in a totally different direction, so it still stands alone as an idiosyncratic littler indie without too many copycats dragging it down. That’s something very unique, but then again 28 Days Later is a particularly special movie. With a budget approximately the allure of the Avengers 2 snack table, it crafts an elegantly simple, paralyzingly terrifying premise, which is a testament to the fact that it was shot by an actual film director (Danny Boyle would later helm Slumdog Millionaire and Steve Jobs, but even before 28 Days Later he had Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary) rather than an amateur thinking they can strike gold with a cheapo shocker.

Danny Boyle crafts his scares with great patience, allowing his audience time to breathe, giving the scope of the devastation time to sink in before he pounces, plunging his characters into hot water without a moment’s warning. In his world, you are never safe, and this structure invokes a constant paranoia, even (perhaps especially) during the film’s surprisingly frequent comic relief interludes. The fact that 28 Days Later’s fear is so fiercely politicized (included among the angry grab bag of subtext is an indictment of animal testing, blind activism, sexual aggression, human pettiness, and the military industrial complex – no wonder this flick is nearly two hours long) just makes its undercurrent of rage – the source of every danger in this film – that much more potent.

There’s just one thing that bothers me about 28 Days Later… The film is powerful ugly. It was shot on digital video, which opened up all sorts of avenues for easily obtaining iconic images, especially in the scenes taking place on deserted city streets. This is all fine and dandy, but the unfortunate side effect of the format is that everything looks like a 90’s grunge music video, all overblown colors and Vaseline-smeared lenses. A lot of the handheld, vérité aesthetic is intentional, but when compounded with the low quality camera (which is usually something I never mind much), it’s an immensely frustrating visual schema. However, I suppose that being brutalized by the aesthetic pitches you even further into the film’s deranged terror. Well played, 28 Days Later.

Rating: 8/10

28 Weeks Later

Year: 2007

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Virus-devastated England is being rebuilt by the American military, but when the rage virus outbreak begins once more, a defected doctor and sniper must protect two children who potentially hold the key to finding a cure.

28 Weeks Later is the Aliens to 28 Days Later’s Alien. Where the original was a methodical, chilling nightmare, the sequel gnaws the cap off a syringe of pure adrenaline and jams it right the hell into your eyes. And just like with Aliens, it’s a Sisyphean task to even attempt to decide which film is better, because they’re both great in almost totally opposite ways.

While there’s still an angry political element to the film, rotating the vices of the military system front and center, 28 Weeks Later is more of a rapid-fire family drama about a Bad Dad hall of famer who abandons his wife to the rage zombies, destroying his family from the inside out, and then pretty literally destroying them from the outside when he becomes the next Patient Zero. The last vestige of humanity within him converts his guilt into pure rage, sending him after his own children like a bloodhound. As if you couldn’t extrapolate from that, this is a remarkably dangerous movie, a wicked, brutal extravaganza of blood and pain.

This is elegantly reflected in a seemingly innocuous Act One scene where a group of snipers spy on the citizens of the safe zone through their scopes. They may be laughing and joking about what they see, but the message is disturbingly clear: Every single living person is in the crosshairs of 28 Weeks Later. Violence is coming and it has no mercy. This atmosphere makes it a spectacularly effective action-horror film, if not a universally palatable one.

The one area where 28 Weeks Later is a marked improvement on the original is its aesthetic, which isn’t so bodaciously ugly. The quick-cutting handheld aesthetic is resurrected for the zombie scenes, but when it has a confident, appealing aesthetic to juxtapose against, it makes it so much more effective. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo crafts his film impeccably, making moments like the stunning visual metaphor in the aforementioned sniper scene possible, and capturing the forlorn emptiness of London with a keen attention to detail that grinds the dreary mood into every fold and crevasse of your mind.

It helps that 28 Weeks Later had a significantly higher budget and more developed CGI technology to fill in the cracks, but a well-shot movie is a well-shot movie. Let’s not blame the dollar bills. Now to even things out, let’s broach 28 Weeks Later’s biggest flaw. The film spends much more time world building than its predecessor, allowing us to explore a zombie-free London for quite some time, all this occurring after a significantly long opening scene (a terrifying affair, to be certain, but one that also eats up a good chunk of the run time). As much as I appreciate both these sequences, 28 Weeks Later is already a full ten minutes shorter than Days, so when the main plot finally kicks in, it’s a rather truncated affair that feels like it ends before it can even begin.

It’s not often that you’ll hear me begging for a longer movie, but it’s not often that a horror sequel assembles a stellar cast (including future stars Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Imogen Poots, and even Idris Elba) for a bloodthirsty, challenging, incredibly sharp horror affair. 28 Weeks Later earned those extra ten minutes, but even dismayingly abrupt as it is, it’s an indelible film and an eternal beacon to the cause of proving that sequels can be genuinely terrific.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1198

Popcorn Kernels: Aw, Screw It

Hello, hello, hello, faithful readers! Normally I do my best to bestow full length reviews on current films, but I am so damn close to clearing my backlog that I can’t resist knocking out some of the less important, less current selections from last year with another slate of mini reviews. There’s got to be a statute of limitations on this kind of thing, right?

In the Heart of the Sea

Year: 2015
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

In the story that inspired Moby Dick, the captain and first mate of a whaling ship pursue a massive white whale that destroys the vessel, leaving the crew stranded.

As helpfully pointed out by Hunter Allen (of Kinemalogue) in the comments on my Muppet Treasure Island review, I’m a hard sell on ship movies. So right off the bat, I was disinclined to adore Ron Howard’s massively ill-advised seafaring epic In the Heart of the Sea.

But you know what I dislike even more than schooners? Movies that use the lazy framing device of an author coaxing a story out of somebody for the express purpose of reminding people that hey, they read this book in middle school, isn’t that neat? This technique can be used well, but here it’s just an excuse to slice the film’s pacing into ribbons in order to bridge plot gaps by using the “storyteller” to handily provide us with an airdrop of exposition and convenient analysis. There is literally zero reason why the Chris Hemsworth storyline couldn’t have stood alone, and the film takes on a lot of water thanks to this decision.

You know what I dislike even more than flimsy framing devices? The fact that Chris Hemsworth can apparently only get roles if they take place either centuries ago or in ultramodern yet inexplicably Medieval cultures. The man has talent, but he’s constantly shunted into stuffy roles with awful hair that clamp down on his range like an iron vise and surround him with such illustrious (read: pale) performers as… That guy from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And maybe wait until his Marvel contract is finished before you strand him on a desert island. With his scraggly beard and perfectly waxed chest, he looks more like a hipster barista than a marooned sailor.

But you know what I dislike even more than Hemsworth’s Buff, Waxed, and Stranded photo shoot? The whale! The CGI technicians do not commit to making this khaki monstrosity seem huge or white or menacing in any way, shape, or form. I’m all for cinematic realism, but would anybody be mad if the whale was a couple yards longer and bone white? If I had to hazard a guess, marine biologists are not in the primary demographic for this flick. Plus, it really doesn’t do anything impeccably beastly other than trawling around after our heroes like it’s Jaws: The Revenge and providing really obvious metaphors to conclude Our Hemsworth’s character arc.

If you don’t particularly mind any of these things, we are not on the same page and you can feel free to check out In the Heart of the Sea. But even putting those gripes aside, it’s still only a blandly functional adventure picture populated with stock characters and depicting oddly brutal animal violence. So have fun with that.

Rating: 5/10

Goosebumps

Year: 2015
Director: Rob Letterman
Cast: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

A teen boy moves in next door to R. L. Stine. He befriends the author’s teen daughter, then must team up with the two of them when he accidentally unleashes Stine’s creations upon the town.

Because I am nothing if not a consummate academic, I am much more familiar with the Goosebumps books than the TV show. As such, I had absolutely no nostalgia for any visual R. L. Stine property and came to the Goosebumps film unclouded by expectation. This is the best way to approach it, though I feel that all but the grumpiest among us would be hard-pressed not to have a good time.

Goosebumps might be fashionably generic (new kid in town, single mom, struggling to find place amid wacky mayhem, it’s not exactly Proust), but it enacts those typical plot beats with an energy that at least makes them feel fresh. Dylan Minnette and Amy Ryan forge an excellent mother-son relationship, and the movie’s humor and heart branches out from there. This is primarily a comedy film of course, especially when Jillain Bell (as an eccentric aunt) or Timothy Simons and Amanda Lund (as two inept cops) are on the scene, but there actually is a decent amount of juice in the horror side of things.

The monsters are all rendered with a cartoonish CGI, which in a family film isn’t actually a liability (Mama, eat your heart out), but the effects spring into high gear when they get sucked back into the books from whence they came. Their bodies begin to unravel in a tornado of ink that’s both beautifully rendered and quite gruesome. It’s Goosebumps, so it won’t turn your stomach, but it’s just raw enough to remind you that kids movies can be scary too. Anybody who has seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory can attest to that.

Funny, scary, campy… Sounds like Goosebumps to me! The movie plays with a lot of classic monsters and scenarios, even conjuring up its own wicked twists. It might not be a perfect iteration of the Goosebumps mythos (sometimes the structure of a feature inhibits its ability to evoke some traditional Goosebumps storylines), but it captures the gleefully macabre atmosphere with no shortage of charm.

Oddly enough or perhaps no quite so unexpectedly, even taking into consideration the green teen talent, the weakest link is most obviously Jack Black. He hams it up like he works at a deli, and the taste of flop sweat curdles the tonal mixture a little bit. Goosebumps does exist in a heightened reality, so it makes a game attempt at assimilating his boisterous performance, but there are many moments that he tramples over by pulling faces and generally clowning around. It’s immensely frustrating, but this isn’t a movie about him. It’s about the young generation that loves Goosebumps, and for them the film is mostly a blast.

Rating: 7/10

We Are Your Friends

Year: 2015
Director: Max Joseph
Cast: Zac Efron, Wes Bentley, Emily Ratajkowski
Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A young DJ meets an older producer, igniting a friendship that will lead to love, loss, success, failure, and eventually growing up.

We Are your Friends is not a lucky movie. If no for the box office cavalry of Jem and the Holograms, WAYF would have scored the lowest opening weekend of the entire year. Seeing how I’m obsessed with cinematic failure and Zac Efron is on my celebrity freebie list, I couldn’t rest giving the film a looksie. Boy, am I glad I did.

We Are Your Friends isn’t ever going to be unearthed as a true buried gem, but taken as the generic coming-of-age story in the modern world that it is, it couldn’t be better. It’s a mini prestige picture, hitting all the beats of larger, more successful films with just enough twists to keep it lively. My single favorite element is the editing, which a voids the temptation to turn the whole thing into an EDM music video, rather creating a slick visual rhythm that jumps off the screen with graphic and text overlaps. It’s an edgy, modern style that has certainly been seen before, most recently in The Big Short, but it’s an exciting cinematic presentation that works wonders for the film. These flashy technical moments unfortunately decrease as the movie foes on, but their presence gives WAYF a spark that never fades.

Also, honestly, the cast is pretty incredible. Wes Bentley is magnetic as a self-destructive mentor, Walking Dead alum Jon Bernthal gets his Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wall Street moment in the sun, and Zac Efron turns in what is unequivocally the best performance of his career, one that’s tempered, at least slightly layered, and miles away form his standard dreamboat duties.

Please don’t leave this blog thinking We Are Your Friends is a life-changing motion picture, but aside from a bit of an unfocused narrative drive and a deeply generic plot structure, it really ain’t half bad. It’s messy, it’s foolhardy, occasionally deep, and plugged into some great beats; an imperfect love letter to modern youth that doesn’t talk down to them. I genuinely enjoyed this movie. That may or may not be a socially suicidal admission, but it’s the truth. Check it out!

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1468

This Is Your Captive Speaking

Year: 2005

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Again, let’s revel in our newfound post-Halloween freedom by continuing our post-mortem exploration of he late, great horror maven Wes Craven. As I set out to watch my way through the portions of his filmography that I hadn’t seen or reviewed before, I realized that most of the ones I missed, I’d missed for good reason. Part of why I admire Craven is the fact that he pushes himself to new horizons, even if he is trapped into the horror genre thanks to Hollywood’s compulsive pigeonholing. That experimentation resulted in some gems and some duds, but I always say you’re not growing as an artist if you don’t produce a few clunkers.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I particularly want to be exposed to the clunkers, however philosophically stimulating they may be. But even if I’d already cleared the shelf of out-and-out classics before Craven’s passing, he still left some nuggets of inimitable genre filmmaking behind to refresh the intrepid completist. One such nugget is Red Eye, a star-studded thriller from 2005 and his last feature film of the 2000’s, to be followed by just two final efforts in 2010 and 2011: Scream 4 (a shallow but underrated franchise film) and My Soul to Take (uh… I’ll get back to you on that one).

I try to focus on the positive things in life.

Lisa Reiser (Rachel McAdams) is the manager of a prominent Florida hotel. When a high-ranking government official comes to stay with his family, she rushes from her hometown (where she was attending a funeral) on a late night flight so she can properly accommodate him and his security contingent. Unfortunately her plane is delayed and that duty falls to her anxious coworker Cynthia (Jayma Mays, who is the adorable love child of a puppy and a field of daisies). Lisa meets follow passenger Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), who strikes up a hesitant flirtation.

She quickly learns that y0ou should never trust anyone with the cheekbones of a cadaver, because when the plane takes off, Jack reveals his true intentions. He tells Lisa that, if she doesn’t pulls strings and get the politician to transfer to a specifically targeted room, his agent will murder her father (Brian Cox, the original Hannibal Lecter from Manhunter, who loads around even more than the cellbound cannibal). Thus begins an epic cat and mouse game played on the smallest of scales –a  cramped airplane cabin.

Murder threats are still preferable to screaming babies though, to be honest.

If Music of the Heart hadn’t bowed its way into theaters in 1999, I’d say Red Eye was the most atypical Craven flick yet. A thriller without a whiff of the supernatural (or Craven’s dietary staple of dream sequences) and largely free from gonzo gore, it might still technically be a genre flick, but it’s about as similar to The Hills Have Eyes as Lady and the Tramp. As we’ve learned, Craven would have given his left foot to do another movie that wasn’t horror, and he knew this was one of the last life preservers floating toward non-genre shores. With that in mind, he really put his all into creating the best thriller procedural he could, and it shows.

Without a Craven-penned script, his personality is a little less evident in the film itself, but Red Eye is nothing less than a perfectly functional nail-biting thriller. It’s a well-oiled B-movie machine, performing its job to a T and bleaching every last shred of color from your knuckles in the process. From its unassuming opening credits to its bloody finale, all Red Eye wants to do is get in, jangle some nerves, then jet the hell outta there, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

But there is something wrong with people who don’t think twice when a Cillian Murphy character comes on to them.

Red Eye is all about setups and payoffs, with nearly every element in the first act coming into play by the closing credits. This Rube Goldbergian plotting keeps the audience engaged, constantly guessing the next way Rachel Madams will attempt to MacGyver her way out of the situation. It’s clever, satisfying, and frequently intense.

These are perhaps two of the most accomplished actors Craven has ever been afforded the chance to work with (well, them and Meryl. And Johnny Depp’s midriff), and he takes full advantage of their range, maintaining a seething emotional undercurrent beneath the crackerjack thrills. The characters might not be totally three-dimensional, but at the very least they’re two-and-a-half-dimensional, and they sell every twist and turn, even in the strangely distended final twenty minutes. 

The film’s pace never flags, even during the Birds-esque opening sequence that reties to trick you into thinking you’re watching a romantic comedy, or perhaps The Notebook Part 2: We Couldn’t Get Ryan Gosling, and though it’s hardly Oscar-worthy cinema, that is an unequivocally good thing. Red Eye is a taut, tense, no fuss no muss thriller. It’s so efficient, it could have a slot on the infomercial channel. If you want a simple, rip-roaring good time with a sprinkle of heart and a dash of political drama, look no further. Just make sure you buckle your seatbelt before you take off.

TL;DR: Red Eye is a taut, streamlined, nail biting thriller.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 905