It's A Trap!

Year: 2016

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk

Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I liked The Force Awakens a lot, so I’m certainly not against Disney’s attempts to defibrillate the Star Wars universe. But I’m worried that they’re turning the franchise into a Marvel machine, churning out films at an unsustainable rate. They’re raking in billions right now so it doesn’t make business sense to stop, but one day a film is going to jam a wrench in the works and it will all come crumbling down. And if every spinoff is as careless as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (which errs on the side of good, but not for lack of trying), that will happen sooner rather than later for George Lucas’ beloved franchise.

But what the f**k do I know? The series survived The Clone Wars, after all.

In Rogue One, we zoom and enhance on a story implied by the plot of the original Star Wars: the acquisition of the plans to the Death Star by Rebel forces. If you don’t know what that means, 1) You don’t exist, and 2) good luck. There is no primer here for newbies. There’s not even an opening credits crawl, which I guess is a luxury reserved for the official Star Wars entries.

Anyway, here we have Jyn Erso (felicity Jones, who is having quite the year), the roguish daughter of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen, who is also having quite the year), who is instrumental in the Empire’s development of the Death Star. She is busted out of prison (she has committed the crime of… being sassy? Who knows. This is a universe where backstories haven’t been invented yet, apparently) by Rebel forces and taken by Cassian Andar (Diego Luna) and his sarcastic droid K2-SO (Alan Tudyk) on various missions to use her family connection and help the Rebels find the Death Star’s weaknesses (and cement over some of the original film’s biggest plot holes once and for all).

On the way, they meet friends who will come along on their journey: the defected imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), blind monk Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) , and his friend Baze Malbu (Wen Jiang), who’s a… soldier? Mercenary? Outlaw? Postal worker? Of all the paper-thin characters, he’s the one who most resembles a random plastic Star Wars action figure pulled from a bucket.

Batting for the Empire’s side, we have Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), the ambitious man in charge of Death Star development, Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry with a Getty Images still of Peter Cushing glued to his face), and some random imperial henchman called Darth… something.

There’s a lot of weird names in this movie, you can’t expect me to remember them all.

OK, guys. I’m about to rip into Rogue One quite a bit, but there are some things you should know before we dive in. First, this is an exciting popcorn action movie with stellar special effects (minus one horrifying rictus mask of Peter Cushing) so every complaint relative to its entry in the canon of Great Cinema is kind of pointless. And there’s one thing that I or anybody else can’t take away form it: Rogue One has an astoundingly diverse cast. The only white person on our ragtag crew is a woman, and the rest are Latino, Asian, Pakistani, and so on as we descend the cast list to its further reaches. And there’s not a dud in the bunch. This kind of representation is seamless, avoiding tokenism or calling itself out for how progressive it is. This is how all of Hollywood needs to start casting tentpole movies As Soon as F**king Possible.

I don’t have a punchline for this. The idea that non-white kids across the world have an entry point for dreaming of traveling the stars is just too sweet.

So, yeah, the script. It’s a rule of thumb of mine that a screenplay is terrible if it has a flashback to something that happened ten minutes before. ...Guess what Rogue One has. Yeah. 

This movie has no trust that the audience will understand its barbarically simple character arcs, so it chews the plot into mush and vomits bit back down your throat. It also strikes upon its themes with the grace and delicacy of a hippo on a pogo stick. You can practically see the highlighted-all-caps-italics on the page whenever they utter stilted lines about hope, geddit? This is a story that treats its thematic buzzwords like they’re holy writ, but doesn’t have the right kind of characters to get that over-earnest tone across.

Only Jyn has any kind of development or backstory, but her character arc conveniently avoids requiring her to actually make any real decisions about her values. Everyone else is drawn with an Etch-a-Sketch, given one character trait if they’re lucky. They’re well-acted repositories of action movie quips, but they’re not compelling in the slightest. And I’m sorry K2-SO, you have some solid line deliveries but you just don’t pass muster in a Droid Sidekick pantheon that incudes f**king R2-D2, C-3PO, and now BB-8. Your name isn’t even as catchy, man. Put some elbow grease into it.

The villains suffer much the same fate. Krennic’s one note characterization can’t survive the litany of cameos shoehorned into the film, creating an endless parade of my least favorite type of scene in movie history: two identical old white dudes yelling at each other. And while Vader gets a showstopping sequence in the third act, there’s no reason to have him appear before that, especially with Spencer Wilding’s garish pantomiming during the dialogue scenes.

Maybe he’s been taking ballet classes since Episode III.

It’s probably likely that I forgot how militaristic the rest of the franchise is. They do, after all, ask that we cheer while literally faceless evil masses are mown down, but wail in tragedy any time some random pilot in orange beefs it. But it’s a bit shocking what a jingoistic, patriotic hash Rogue One becomes. If you love noble sacrifices and people clutching corpses while screaming toward the heavens, this is the movie for you. But as a distinct anti-fan of war movies, I find its jaunts toward the tone of 300 troubling, especially considering what a Wacky thrill ride it so clearly yearns to be in most of the other scenes.

This is a movie that, within minutes of each other, has a blind monk deliver Jackie Chan-esque quips while kicking ass, and shows a crying girl shrieking in a dusty street as her city is laid to waste by laser fire. These two sides of Rogue One are distinctly incompatible, and their clash creates the biggest fissure in the surface of a film already spiderwebbed with cracks.

It doesn’t necessarily break (though, in its dull first act that hops from planet to planet in a grueling, pointless gauntlet, it frequently threatens to), but Rogue One is definitely a misstep. While it’s still a Star Wars film and thus worth a shut-your-brain-off, popcorn-munching watch, unless they really step it up with these side stories, the whole thing is gonna capsize before you know it.

TL;DR: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is decently amusing and boasts an incredible cast, but it can't overcome ghastly tonal shifts and a general sense of silliness.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1228
Reviews In This Series
Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Edwards, 2016)
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (Howard, 2018)

Popcorn Kernels: Smashing Pumpkins

In which we explore mini-reviews of movies I watched during the month of October, but weren’t quite important or horror-y enough to break their way into my scary movie-exclusive run of reviews.

Miss Bala

Year: 2011

Director: Gerardo Naranjo

Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Noé Hernández, Irene Azuela

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A beauty pageant contestant accidentally witnesses a raid on a club and becomes embroiled in a Tijuana drug war.

I was quite excited to see Miss Bala. A Mexican thriller from producers Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, from the description I was imagining an edgy, female-led action romp that’s part Miss Congeniality and part Sicario. Of course, that’s not how the Mexican drug wars work. Unfortunately in its pursuit of grim, arty authenticity, Miss Bala completely eradicates any reason for it to exist.

If there’s one thing I hate in movies, it’s a protagonist without an ounce of agency in her body, and our beauty queen Laura Guerrero is empty of almost everything else, too. We know nothing about her, save that she has a friend who pushes her to join a beauty contest. We can guess as to why she agrees, but one hypothetical trait does not a lead character make. Laura is an empty plastic bag drifting through this movie, doing what other people tell her and consistently making the single dumbest choice it’s possible to make in any given situation. This is a chick who would order the salmon at a Denny’s if given the opportunity.

I get what they’re doing here. Laura is meant to be an innocent who is randomly swept up in the pure evil of the drug wars just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s not allowed an arc or a happy ending, because that’s the reality of it. Frankly, it’s a Halloween-esque storyline. That pure simplicity could have worked, but we need to understand more about Laura in order to sympathize with her plight. Unfortunately Miss Bala is an arid thriller that doesn’t allow any humanity to leak out.

Also the character motivations (both from the good guys and the bad guys) are incoherent, and the criminal plot is a sloppy mess, so Miss Bala is running on three flat tires. The opening act has a confused, frenzied energy, but as the story plays on and things don’t get any clearer, the film shows its hand: It really doesn’t know what it’s doing, and pretty much everything good is an accident. Then the pointlessly artsy lingering shots suffocate the film even more, as if it needed the help. It’s a damn shame that this movie utterly failed to meet its staggering potential, but they can’t all be winners I suppose.

Rating: 5/10

Death Proof

Year: 2007

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Kurt Russell, Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Two groups of girls are stalked y a psycho stuntman who commits murders with his tricked-out car.

I’ve seen the highlights of the oeuvre of one Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, what have you), but I’ve still seen far too few of his films, by some people’s accounts. I probably shouldn’t have rekindled that viewing with Death Proof, his contribution to the 70’s throwback double feature Grindhouse, which he created with Robert Rodriguez back in 2007. And no, I didn’t watch Planet Terror, but if you have a spare three hours handy, I would gladly borrow them.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a genre of film that Tarantino does not have mastery of, and that’s 70’s-style exploitation, which you think he’d fit into like a glove. But all his usual Tarantino-isms, which he applies liberally to Death Proof, are actively rejected by the genre like a bad transplant. First off, a key element he totally missed about grindhouse movies is that they’re short. The simplistic plot, which at certain points maps onto either the proto-slasher or rape-revenge genres is too elemental to be sustained for two f**king hours, especially when there are five minute swaths of film that so obviously could have been cut if he wasn’t so obscenely overconfident in his writing and his obnoxious cameo performance.

Speaking of writing… Tarantino is well-known for his dialogue, especially his long conversations laced with pop culture ephemera, during which he tosses all pretense of filmmaking to the floor and bathes in his own words for eight to ten minutes. This happens no fewer than four times in Death Proof, inflating the already punishing run time, and proving one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: Tarantino can’t write for women.

These conversational scenes have worked extremely well in his other films, but the dizzyingly high proportion of women in Death Proof mean that these scenes usually take place within a group of 3 to 5 females. When you’re a person who views that half of the population as giant pairs of feet with assess attached to them, it becomes difficult to craft compelling characters, which he fails to do ten times over, at one point literally forgetting about the existence of a girl who had – until that moment – held a major role.

Some of the dialogue itself is still fun taken on its own (although the single best line is beaten to within an inch of its life with ceaseless repetition), but these scenes drag the film’s already wonky pacing down like an anchor. And it’s not like the sole major male character, Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, fares much better. He’s given way too much to say, babbling like an infant in a way that completely undercuts his eventual menace. Russell does a great job of course, hamming it up to a pitch perfect degree in the gonzo grindhouse finale, but across the board this is probably the worst script Tarantino has ever written.

The feeling I’m left with after Death Proof is frustration, and I wish that wasn’t true. But after being pummeled with yet another of his overwritten black characters, endless conversation essentially using foot massages as a currency, and a scene with a cell phone that pointlessly derails its period authenticity for a subplot that never comes to fruition, who can blame me? There is good here, mainly in the kinetic sequences of violence that close out the film’s two distinct chapters, and a car chase that will have you biting your nails until your cuticles bleed, but just like everything else, they go on for waaaay too long.

Death Proof saps the energy out of itself at every turn, and as dearly as I want to like it, it’s its own fault that I can’t.

Rating: 6/10

Kristy

Year: 2014

Director: Oliver Blackburn

Cast: Haley Bennett, Ashley Greene, Lucas Till 

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A college student alone in the dorms over Thanksgiving break is targeted by a bloodthirsty cult.

Kristy is a Netflix horror movie if I’ve ever seen one. And I assure you, I most definitely have. Not quite a slasher, not quire a cultist film, not quite good, it is a film that clings to its own sorry existence by the skin of its teeth. But it’s reasonably entertaining and it’s free, so you might as well watch it.

By far the most interesting thing about Kristy is that it seems to genuinely still believe it’s the 90’s. There’s no winking throwback involved here, just a bunch of crop tops and an addiction to the wonders of modern gadgetry that seems to have missed the last decade or so of Apple press conferences. It’s odd that a movie that includes a crane shot clearly recorded by a drone (an exquisitely beautiful one, I might add, if a bit wobbly) should also insist that people still text like this: “U kil Kristy? ☺”

Its fabulously ill-conceived technobabble doesn’t stop there. Nor does it start there, as the entire opening is an exhausting slog through pixelated Darkweb nonsense that makes the webcam footage in Halloween: Resurrection look like 4K. Alright, after that brief detour to film nerd town, let’s get down to brass tacks. Kristy is a heaping helping of nonsense (apparently, by knowing Kristy’s phone number, the cult can hack 911?) but that has the unintended side effect of making it a pretty fun watch.

Kristy gets the job done in record time, never showing a full scene when a quick montage will do, and not overstaying its welcome by indulging in anything as ostentatious as a “theme” beyond the most superficial level. The crumpled tinfoil masks worn by the killers are pretty creepy, and although the film’s girl power finale is ruthlessly half-baked, it’s enough to have you rooting for her, even though her name isn’t even f**king Kristy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1469

Mexico Star Theater

Year: 2014

Director: Jorge R. Gutierrez

Cast: Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana, Channing Tatum

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Hollywood is making a change. Because it's Hollywood, it's not an enormous change and it's more than a little half-hearted. Because it's Hollywood, the change is driven by utterly mercenary motivations. But also because it's Hollywood, it has stumbled across a realization that, with a little polishing, could change the world of media as we know it.

That world-changing discovery seems like a simple one and it is: Latino people go to the movies. In fact, they go to the movies a lot. Not surprising, considering just how diverse the American population is, though Hollywood prefers to ignore this fact. But studios have finally begun to take notice of this heretofore unplumbed demographic, making movies that cater to - get this - audiences who aren't just white people.

One of the first truly high-profile movies with this demographic in mind was Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, the Latin-American spin-off of the decade's most popular horror franchise. But behind this film lie many others that have slowly been shifting the tides. Which now brings us to one of the first wide release Latino-themed kids' movies - The Book of Life.

Where was this guy when I was doing my Sexiest Animated Characters list?

Book of Life begins with a framework narrative that's essentially useless, but as it informs the aesthetic of the entire film - and oh, what an aesthetic it is - it's only fair to begin there. Mary Beth (Christina Applegate) is a puckish museum docent who takes a gaggle of detention kids on a field trip to a special secret room containing the Book of Life, which is full of stories and legends about Mexico. She uses a set of dolls to tell the kids one of the stories, so the bulk of the film is animated like wooden puppetry - more on that later.

SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST ACT - IF YOU SAW THE TRAILER YOU'RE FINE The chosen story centers around two mythical figures: La Muerte (Kate del Castillo) and Xibalba (Ron Perlman) - the rulers of the two underworlds, the Land of the Remembered and the Land of the Forgotten respectively. On el Día de los Muertos, they make a fateful wager. Xibalba is desperate to escape the realm of forgotten souls, so he proposes that each of them place a bet on Maria (Zoe Saldana), a young girl in the nearby town with two best friends/suitors. Xibalba bets on Joaquin (Channing Tatum), a cocky explorer who lives in the shadow of his valiant father, and La Muerte vouches for Manolo (Diego Luna), a sensitive musician whose father expects him to pick up his family's bullfighting legacy.

Although Maria is clearly smitten with Manolo's fumbling charm and put off by Joaquin's egocentric antics, she'd really rather hang out with her pet pig. But Manolo proves his worth, not quite soon enough after Joaquin proposes. After Xibalba pulls a devilish trick, Manolo is sent to the Land of the Remembered and must find his way back to the land of the living and reclaim his true love.

Although he did snag a great look just in time for Halloween so it's not all bad.

It's a children's film and a legend-based tale so once it settles in, it's quite simple to follow. Parents want their kids to be something other than their dreams, but individuality wins out and everyone learns the importance of being themselves. Boilerplate kid movie stuff, really. It's everywhere but the plot that Book of Life rises above the average family-friendly fare.

I've already mentioned the film's Latino themes, but the truly astonishing part is that it depicts a culture with customs, music, legends, values, and aesthetics much different from our own without being hideously offensive! There are some dubious elements that squeak by (including having only two actors of Mexican descent in the lead cast, a smattering white-culture signifiers for Mexico, and the fact that the entire story is framed by a puppet show put on for some dumb-ass white kids), but overall the film shines as a beacon of cinematic diversity with Mexican director Jorge Guiterrez and producer Guillermo del Toro preventing things from getting too out of hand. 

And even those rough patches are smoothed over with an ample supporting cast including Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, and Plácido Domingo, along with strong cultural musicality combining banda and mariachi styles with modern pop-musical lyrics and themes. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to see a film presented by somebody other than fussy old white dudes. Their contributions are numerous, it's true, but it's time to let somebody, anybody else take the stand.

And now for something completely different: Protagonists who don't have the delicate complexion of a glass of skim milk.

OK, now that we have the boring but vastly important stuff out of the way, let's focus on how utterly fun this movie is. Regular kiddy movie tropes (an animal sidekick; a Greek chorus) are turned on their heads (an adorable pig is the sidekick; the chorus is a group of hilarious nuns), boisterous characters burst with vividly colorful life, and the music doesn't suck! The great thing about the soundtrack is that it so easily could have drained the vigor from the film but instead injects it with energy. 

The Book of Life tends to parlay in anachronisms, a risky venture that works more often than it should. A mariachi Mumford & Sons cover? Strange but it works perfectly. Acoustic Elvis on a Mexican guitar? Lovely. A Radiohead song? Not so much, but it made sense at the time. The three original songs likewise manage to match this tone of marrying children's musical standards with Mexican instrumentation to blissful perfection. On top of it all, Diego Luna's voice - while a tad rough around the edges - provides the perfect DIY kick to these lovably offbeat arrangements.

All of this rolls into a film that's tirelessly heartfelt and kooky while at the same time buoyantly reveling in Mexican culture to its fullest extent. This is portrayed nowhere better than the animation itself, which depicts rickety wooden figures with grace and artistry, pumping them full of vibrant, colorful, joyous life. The film's portrayal of the endless fiestas of the Land of the Remembered is an explosion of brassy, rich, eye-popping technicolor dreamscapes as far as the eye can see.

And the attention to detail in unmatched in modern computer-animated film. Once you notice how Xibalba's pupils are little skulls or the way La Muerte's candles delicately float around the train of her dress, the film will have you in its thrall completely - assuming you have the capacity for childish wonder necessary to take it all in.

And compared to Reel FX Animation's last feature film - 2013's Free Birds, the step up here is about the height of the Tower of Babel.

And the acting is top notch, especially Diego Luna with a brave, limit-stretching vocal performance and Tatum in yet another pristine comic role and WHY AREN'T WE LETTING HIM DO MORE COMEDIES! Personally, I could do without Ice Cube in a comic relief part, but it's not as intrusive as you'd think.

All said, The Book of Life would be an utter masterpiece if it weren't for just a few minute stumbles. As I stated before, the story is a bit too wooden, overusing hoary thematic tropes. And the post-Frozen quasi-feminism doesn't ring as true as it could considering that Maria still tends to be a damsel in distress. But all in all, in the field of children's animation as well as that of 2014 cinema itself, you can hardly do better than this vivid multi-cultural extravaganza.

TL;DR: The Book of Life is an eye-popping experience of grandiose proportions that doesn't mistreat its cultural heritage.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Absolutely yes. Don't give Ouija the satisfaction.

Word Count: 1328