Hanging By A Moment

Year: 2014

Director: Tom Gormican

Cast: Zac Efron, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Have you ever heard of the term in medias res? It's Latin for "in the middle of things" and it is a rhetorical device used to draw people into a story by revealing details from a later point in time at the beginning, then telling most of the story in flashback. This idea has been used far and wide in movies like The Hangover, which opens with a desperate trio wondering how they will make it to the wedding before going back to the beginning to explain "how we got here." There's a whole thing about it on TV Tropes. Check it out.

As you may have gathered, That Awkward Moment begins with an in medias res moment. Jason (Zac Efron) is sitting on a park bench in the freezing cold as his voiceover narration asks "I bet you're wondering how I got here." 

No, Zac Efron. We are not wondering why you're sitting on a freaking bench. It's a park bench, not the Iron Throne. The rest of the movie is no less stupid than this opening scene, although it is somewhat less exciting to mock, alternating from being bland and tasteless to relying on the worst kind of odious gender essentialism.

And a heaping helping of white nonsense.

Jason is one of a trio made up of him and his friends Daniel (Miles Teller) and Mikey (Miles B. Jordan), two other up and coming actors. Teller attempted to make a name for himself in the quickly forgotten YA adaptation Divergent and Michael B. Jordan recently lit up the indie scene in Fruitvale Station. It is clear that they agreed to do a movie together in order to hopefully lift each other's careers up and over the high wall of success. 

It is unclear why they chose to do this particular movie with its characters that are far too old for the actors portraying them (Mikey is a married surgeon; Daniel and Jason are successful book cover designers), a director fresh off of producing the steaming pile of rat dung that was Movie 43, and non-starter dialogue and scenarios that could only be an aborted script for a sitcom pilot.

And not a particularly good sitcom. Not the kind that pushing the envelope of storytelling like or creates a zeitgeist hit based on a solid ensemble of relatable characters. But rather the uninspired style filled with (two and a) half-baked zingers and lazy gender psychology. Did you know that the one thing every woman in the entire world wants more than anything is a pair of shoes? Zac Efron knows. And all the women in the film agree.

Sure, shoes are cool. But it makes you wonder if the screenwriters have ever met an actual woman who wasn't a 3mmx3mm jpeg at the corner of a chat bar. And the inclusion of the line "So, you're gonna go full girl with it?" spoken to an emotional man was enough to cement the movie entirely into my lack of esteem. The shock displayed when a girl expressed interest in video games sent me into a supernova of anger, from which my houseplants are only now starting to recover.

True story: Sometimes they were so aware of the direness of their dialogue, they tried to mask it with a jaunty pop tune.

The film is just as blasé and careless about every other aspect of its creation. The editor cuts abruptly away from scenes before they end, any of the human emotions that are more challenging to write (i. e. anything that isn't "horny" or "bland") are smoothed over by turning them into musical montages, taking all the contrivances out of the plot would render the movie twelve seconds long, and - perhaps most egregiously - there is a date scene in the coffee shop where the scone they are sharing lies on a plate untouched for a matter of hours.

So, the plot. I guess. Let's just get that out of the way real quick. Mikey and his wife (Jessica Lucas) are getting a divorce, so Daniel and Jason make a pact with him to stay single in solidarity with their fallen brother. They of course all immediately fall into intense, loving relationships. Jason meets a Word Vomit Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Ellie (Imogen Poots), Daniel falls in love with his sarcastic best friend (Mackenzie Davis), and Mikey gets back together with his wife after little deliberation. The pact doesn't seem to matter until the very end of the movie when it suddenly does, where it is used to create a frail snotrag of conflict.

For the first hour or so, though, we are stuck watching absurdly well-off white people date each other in New York while an absurdly well-off ethnic couple does their business in private on the other side of town. There is no sense of urgency, no plot direction to speak of, just endless minutes unspooling of Zac Efron romancing his nonsense maiden.

You rang?

The humor is like a low sodium cracker - it exists, but it doesn't make you smile. The title is irrelevant to the plot and immensely pandering. The ending is bonkers if you're a sane human being. And although the production values are nice enough and the people are pretty enough to not hate spending an hour and a half together with them, they certainly tried their hardest to make you feel otherwise.

TL;DR: That Awkward Moment is entertaining enough to make me not want to drive a knife through my eye, but is too terribly put together to be much more than that.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 955

How Am I Gonna Be An Optimist About This?

Year: 2014

Director: Paul W. S. Anderson

Cast: Kit Harington, Emily Browning, Kiefer Sutherland

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We're not even halfway through the year and 2014 has already been the stage for some rather unusual cinematic phenomena. One of the most astonishing is the resurgence of the Christian Values film, which has been cropping up almost monthly with titles like Heaven Is For Real, Son of God, and Noah. Not that there's anything wrong with Christian film, it's just we've never seen a slate so inundated with Jesus since the religious epics of the early sound period.

Perhaps even more inexplicable in its sheer abundance is the return of the swords and sandals gladiator flick. Already this year we've gotten The Legend of Hercules, 300: Rise of an Empire, and Pompeii, the subject of this review. And we're currently staring down the barrel of an even more abysmal Hercules, poised to come out in July and starring the rock as the titular warrior.

Why has this genre suddenly gained so much currency with the American public? Well, one look at the box office grosses would suggest that, in fact, it hasn't. 300 fared well enough thanks to its franchise attachments, but Hercules and Pompeii collectively made less in their entire runs than The Lego Movie made in one weekend.

Typically this kind of inundation in a certain niche genre comes about a year after a big success in a similar vein, but there is no evidence to suggest that gladiator movies had any cachet even as far back as 2012. I suppose it's just one of life's many mysteries, for which we will never have a satisfactory explanation. Like the Marie Celeste or Amelia Earhart. Or where the other half of your pair of socks ended up after doing your laundry.

Whatever the reason, we can rest assured that it's a terrible one because, if Pompeii is a reliable indicator, the filmmakers of 2014 don't have anything new to bring to the genre.

Except Jon Snow, that is.

The story is set in A.D. 79 as gladiator-slave Milo (Kit Harington) is brought from his home in the UK to the grand city of Pompeii for the amusement of the locals in the arena. The horseman training he received as a child earns him the attention of Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of the... Governor? Emperor? 

There's two different fancymen who seem to be in charge of the city and she is the daughter of one of them. Pompeii is full of little moments like this that slip through the cracks - I'm not sure the screenwriters bothered themselves with continuity, being too distracted diving into their swimming pools filled with gold coins.

Anyway, they have the strangest Meet Cute in cinematic history when he breaks her horse's neck to put it out of its misery. This apparently revs her engine something fierce, prompting anachronistic gossip with her handmaiden (Jessica Lucas) about how sexy his muscles are. I have it on good authority that the screenplay describes his character as "absolutely ripped," which just goes to show their devotion to being one hundred percent period-accurate.

"I'm, like, totally bummed about this whole volcano thing" - Actual Dialogue from Pompeii

Regardless, Milo is shoved into the slave barracks under the arena and befriends a fellow competitor, Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje - Lost's Mr. Eko). While they both struggle with the idea of having to kill each other in the tournament tomorrow night (and, thanks to some severe continuity deficiency, "tomorrow night" is about three nights from now) and Cassia struggles with the unwanted attentions of Roman Senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), things start to go wrong in the countryside as some major seismic shifts begin to take place.

Suddenly, during the climactic tournament, all those times the camera panned up to that funny looking mountain outside the city start to make sense as it explodes all over everything. I put that in italics because the shrieking score indicates that this matter is of grave importance despite the fact that our heroes manage to walk through storms of raining fireballs and burning clouds of ash unscathed.

Come on, you can figure out the rest. Volcano does its thing. Milo tries to save Cassia from evil clutches.

Pompeii's tourism department weeps softly in the corner.

In case you hadn't noticed before, the screenplay and the editing are messy as all hell. The prisoners switch rooms in the space of a single cut. The opening title cards intersperse location and action titles (i.e. "Londinium, 62 AD" and "The Battle of IDK Whatever") with the cast credits in the exact same font, confusing even the hardiest of filmgoers.

And the script is full of witty, unique, highly original and inspiring gems like "If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already" and people standing around giving monologues of grand significance when they should be running from the lava that's pouring out of the sky. My personal favorite moment is when grammatical structure breaks down completely to provide us with this avant-garde masterpiece of a line: "My family were murdered."

His backstory are tragic.

Unfortunately, for all of Pompeii's deficiencies, it's not quite as dumb as I was hoping. If it was a rip-roaring terrible gladiator picture, it could have been a lot of fun sitting around mocking it and making Bastille references. But as it stands, it is perfectly middle-of-the-road popcorn entertainment. It's too dumb to be actively good, but it's not dumb enough to attain "so bad it's good" status, leaving me up a creek without a paddle.

The action is bog-standard with an uncanny predilection for people fighting with two swords at the same time, which isn't as effective as it looks. There's one scene that's cool enough to be entertaining, cool enough that I won't spoil it here, but for the most part the film thuds back and forth between routine sword fights and characters with names just narrowly escaping the crumbling wreckage of the city, something which I call "2012 Syndrome."

The performances are all competent save Kiefer Sutherland, who was saddled with the most unfortunate of accents, rendering his villainy entirely toothless. And why is it that first century Roman officials all speak in clipped British tones? This phenomenon has yet to be explained by science.

The drab color palette (brown on brown on grey, with some brown-red thrown in for good measure) keeps things from getting too exciting and the emotional resonance is just plain absent. The central tragic romance is more Day After Tomorrow than Titanic, no matter how hard it tries to get us to care (by my calculations, approximately 15%).

Despite being a decently entertaining movie to sit through, it's just plain not worth seeing in any respect. Perhaps it might have been in the hands of somebody other than the director of Mortal Kombat, but as it stands, Pompeii crumbles before it has a chance to impress.

TL;DR: Pompeii is the worst kind of failure - a non-abysmal one.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1182

Archive: April 7, 2013

Dead Again

Year: 2013
Director: Fede Alvarez
Cast: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Jessica Lucas
Run Time: 1 hour, 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

All I can say is, thank (nondenominational) God for R-rated horror. Leave aside whatever baggage you may have about this film - your connection to the franchise, the absence of Bruce Campbell in front of and Sami Raimi behind the camera, or hatred of the Hollywood remake culture. This film is a no-holds-barred, unflinching, genuinely fun splatterfest and we really don’t get enough of that in this demure PG-13 horror economy.

I swear if you comment to argue against that statement and mention the Saw series, I will cut you in half.

It will not be pretty.

OK, so now that I’ve already stated my opinion of the movie taken alone, it’s time to put it in context of the original series. The remake retains some of the more inspired Raimi elements - the swooping Steadicam shots, the frenetic editing, copious vomit, and gallons and gallons of blood. And gallons. Gone, however, is the slapstick comedy of Evil Dead II and even the relatively toned down absurdity of the original.

Don’t get me wrong, this movie is absurd. Any film in which a character survives being shot repeatedly with a nail gun, stabbed in the chest, neck, and face, and just generally being further bandied about involves a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. However, the universe of the new Evil Dead takes itself much more seriously and treats its subject with a gritty realism.

The plot - like anyone needs a recap - revolves around 5 young adults spending a weekend in an old abandoned cabin in the woods. When they discover an old book in the basement, an incantation is read aloud and they unwittingly summon dormant demons who proceed to attack and possess them one by one.

Didn’t somebody mention zombies? No?

One of the few aspects of the film which is an outright improvement on its predecessor is in the characterization - while the original cabin is populated by one-dimensional characters on spring break, our gaggle is here to support Mia (Jane Levy), who is determined to kick her drug addiction and figures the cabin is isolated enough to avoid temptation. She is accompanied by her estranged brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez). There is some backstory with a dying mother, and it’s all pretty routine but - hey - it’s backstory. 

Mia’s two friends are likewise given enough character traits to resemble actual humans. The only weak link is David’s girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore), who might as well be a grocery bag filled with raw meat for all the importance she has to the story. She doesn’t even get a name until about five seconds before her gruesome demise - she’s actually introduced as “my girl.”

So what we are given is a grisly remake combining the madcap grosserie of Raimi’s magnum opus with some actual characters hung on the framework of a grittier, more modern premise, and there’s really nothing wrong with that.

Any movie with this shot can’t be all bad.

One might think that, since this is the third time we’ve heard this story in theEvil Dead franchise alone, the cabin in the woods thing would have grown stale by now. However, this film proves that it has more to say - even if it’s just new and clever ways of grossing us out.

I have thus far sung the praises of this film, but it is far from flawless. The lack of humor was a blow to the film, albeit not a fatal one. Without the manic glee of the original, the gore and pain is just a little more real, deadening a little of the enjoyment.

Without the slapstick and antics to draw a veil between our universe and the filmic space, it’s a little unsettling watching people getting sliced open and otherwise maimed. However, the sheer amount of gore and blood is elegantly over the top, which saves it from being too realistic to handle.

Groovy.

TL;DR  This remake of a classic is a worthy experiment - not totally successful, but also not completely unnecessary.

Rating: 7/10

Should I spend money on this? I may be somewhat biased, but hands down yes. Evil Dead without a doubt will be on my top 10 of 2013 list, flaws and all.

Word Count: 750

Reviews In This Series
The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)
Evil Dead 2 (Raimi, 1987)
Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013)