This Honky Grandma Be Trippin'

Year: 2015

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

M. Night Shyamalan. A once proud director whose name has since become a punchline not even Fozzie Bear could screw up. After helming one of my favorite horror flicks of all time, The Sixth Sense, he took a break from filmmaking. Though, that isn’t to say he quit directing. After a string of increasingly mediocre twist pictures, he began one of history’s longest sustained barrages of box office duds, smashing his credibility to smithereens with high profile dreck like The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth.

So here we sit, a good decade between us and his last remotely appealing film. Enter Jason Blum. Given free reign and an appropriately miniscule budget, our M. Night is afforded one last chance to get his groove back: the found footage thriller The Visit. So, did it work? Let’s journey over the river and through the woods to find out.

To grandmother’s Blumhouse we go.

In The Visit, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) is making a documentary. A young film buff, she has decided to record herself and her younger brother Tim (Ed Oxenbould) while they spend a week at their grandparents’ isolated farmhouse. Their mother (Kathryn Hahn) has been estranged from her parents for 15 years, so Becca is hoping that this trip  - which also allows mom to spend some quality time with her new boyfriend – will be an opportunity to both meet her grandparents and attempt to rebuild a long-burned bridge.

Almost immediately, things take a turn for the wacked-out. Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) are outwardly kind and charming. But after 9:30 PM, Nana takes after her famous cookies and goes a little nuts, rattling ferociously around the house in the nude. Becca’s borderline compulsive instinct to chalk things up to “old people, am I right?” quickly wears thin as the serene winter visit quickly descends into nightmare.

Don’t mind the creaking. It’s just an old house.

If you take only one thing from this review, make it this: In spite of obvious deficiencies, The Visit is Shyamalan’s best work in a decade and change. It also leaves the distinct impression of a writer-director endeavoring to regain his instincts, not always succeeding but slowly earning back his goodwill. The seasoned Shyamalan watcher (I’m sorry, by the way) will notice DNA of his favorite themes lodged within The Visit like pineapples in an upside–down cake. There’s the obligatory twist, of course, though he knows by now that he needs to pull back from the showboating endings that defined and capsized his middling works.

We also get a return to his Signs standby of child characters with ludicrously specific quirks that – of course – come into play in the finale (“I’ve compulsively memorized every song in the Taylor Swift discography! Gee, I sure hope those junior high girls outside stop trying to murder us.”). This trope, she does not work too well. It’s blatantly telegraphed and it makes less than no sense, but just like the wan family drama laced through the whole thing, you can tell he’s trying and it’s hard to begrudge him of that. Plus, after the hot dog speech in The Happening, I’m not exactly fazed by a couple dud payoffs. At least what I’m watching physically resembles a motion picture.

There’s some scattered slick patches of ineptitude spread throughout The Visit: exposition that’s indicated with huge neon lettering, idiotic character decisions at every turn, intentionally inaccurate language used to obfuscate a twist, and a strong sense that the script dearly wished it took place in the 90’s. But these are flaws The Visit comes by naturally and genuinely. It might be far from perfection, but it’s a totally serviceable found footage feature with a delightful mixture of spooky and kooky.

And just a little ooky.

I’m legitimately astonished at how much fun I had watching The Visit. In fact, it might be the perfect coda to the found footage fad, which hit a resurgence with Paranormal Activity and died a lonely death with Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. It doesn’t reinvent the genre, nor could it, but it utilizes its perspective in a satisfying manner, even physically incorporating the camera into the action, a trick I haven’t seen since the only good moment in the abysmal 2008 remake Quarantine.

The slightly misaligned shots offer the merest whiff of realism, allowing the scare gags (which follow Paranormal Activity’s recurring nightly pattern) to creep under your skin a little at a time. The slow boil shocks are generally effective, utilizing offscreen space well and offering a glimpse into a world just slightly to the left of normal. For a while, the “it’s just a creaky old grandma” excuses are even believable. The tension builds and builds, deftly playing with the audience. In one of my favorite scenes, a scare is revealed to be something mundane until a subtle last minute reversal clues you into the fact that something is terribly wrong here. You’ll know it when you see it, and that kind of moment proves that Shyamalan might just be back on track to give us nightmares again.

The most unexpected joy to be found in The Visit is that it’s funny. It’s not Sam Raimi slapstick hilarity, but a kind of down-home quiet humor permeates the film. I suppose this tone should have been expected from the casting of Kathryn Hahn, one of our generation’s most underrated comic actresses, but it melds so perfectly with the darker horror elements that you almost don’t even notice it’s there. It’s just a subtle undertone in the background that flavors the world of the film with another shade of reality. They do occasionally derail into nightmarishly goofy territory that would make Adam Sandler blush (no spoilers, but if you’re familiar with the Pokérap, you’ll get some disconcerting déjà vu), but for the most part, the balance is pitch perfect.

The Visit’s surprisingly quality can largely be attributed to the performers, who sell the hell out of a somewhat silly conceit. Oxenbould somehow inhabits an utterly smackable character and makes him into the film’s best comic asset, DeJonge shows some remarkable nuance, subtly altering her performance to shift between reality and when she’s vamping for the camera, and both the grandparents give remarkably unsettling physical performances that somehow evoke both kindly grandparents and looming birds of prey.

There’s really a lot to like about The Visit. It’s an impure jewel, to be certain, but a jewel just the same. With this enticing blend of found footage frights and childlike comic antics, Shyamalan has achieved the impossible: I’m actually excited for his next film.

TL;DR: The Visit is Shyamalan's best film in a decade.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1139

You're Only A Day Away

Year: 2015

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie

Run Time: 2 hours 10 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Brad Bird was offered a chance to direct the new Star Wars film.When he said no and decided to make a passion project of his own, the reverberations were felt all around the physical realm. Somebody turned down Star Wars? And all that money? They must really care about their art!

And while I'm certain that Bird is a genuinely decent human being to be able to turn down an offer like that, the fact remains that his passion project, which became Tomorrowland, is about as artistic and personal as a Bazooka Joe comic. It's certainly one of the more messily intriguing blockbusters of the summer, but it's about as drearily generic and painstakingly earnest as they come.

Kind of like how an E.R./House crossover would be.

Tomorrowland tells the story of Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a teen girl whose father used to be an engineer for NASA. She can't handle the fact that NASA is shutting down their space program, in the process rendering her father obsolete. She still has hope for the future, so she sabotages the construction site around a launch pad that NASA has been trying to dismantle. Her repeated criminal activities land her in jail for a night, and when she is released, a pin with an ornate "T" on it is among her stuff.

When she touches it, she is transported to the mystical land of Tomorrowland - an alternate dimension built by snobby aristocrats and intellectuals where they could develop futuristic technology in peace - but the pin runs out of battery before she can fully explore it. Her quest for another pin leads her to a faraway sci-fi shop run by the strange caretakers Hugo (Keegan-Michael Key) and Ursula (Kathryn Hahn), a run-in with young girl android Athena (Raffey Cassidy), and the secluded farmhouse of Frank Walker (George Clooney) a man who, as a young boy, was given the opportunity to visit Tomorrowland, but was kicked out after inventing a machine that predicted the end of the world.

They must reluctantly team together to prevent the apocalypse, using Casey's optimism, Frank's know-how, and Athena's technological prowess to undermine the current, embittered leader of the now defunct Tomorrowland, Governor Nix (Hugh Laurie).

You'd think guns would help too, but they forget to bring any along.

At its heart, Tomorrowland really wants to tell an interesting story about the way humanity has been receiving the portentous messages about global warming and the various other ways we're ruining our own planet. It succeeds intermittently at this, especially in the final ten minutes, but for the most part it's cloying and pedantic, feeling more like one of those smarmy vegans who brags about just how much quinoa they can shove up their nose instead of a genuine, earnest plea for change.

This effect is achieved through an extremely labored script that positively aches for us to feel the full force of the clunky metaphors and heavily Meaningful subtext it pummels us with over and over. On top of it all Casey Newton contracts a lethally severe case of Special Snowflake Syndrome. Common among teen protagonists, it means that even though she is but a simple Ordinary Teen, she and only she has the imagination or creativity or dreaming or whatever to Save The World.

Lo! She can fix her dad's machine by plugging in a super obvious wire! Behold! She can instantly figure out any technology, no matter how futuristic or alien, papered over with the incessant, infuriating line "I know how things work." Oh, and the year Frank was kicked out of Tomorrowland for predicting a dystopian future? 1984. The film is about as subtle as a hippo in a tutu.

Though, come to think of it, the film might be improved if the protagonist was an actual hippo ballerina.

The film gets itself so worked up over teaching its Lesson that it occasionally forgets what it's doing entirely. An emotional beat that is incessantly foreshadowed during the first act of the film collapses at the end of the second with absolutely zero fanfare, and the stakes are never high enough to take the threat (which is integral to understanding the theme and the desperation with which it calls upon humanity) seriously.

But a certain amount of heaving, didactic, distracted humanism is to be expected from a film so utterly, thoroughly in love with Disney its lore. Cheerful easter eggs pepper the film, from small subtle background details to integral plot points (ie. the entrance to Tomorrowland is first discovered on the It's a Small World ride). Your level of Disney admiration will largely influence your appreciation of the film, though its mythology around Tomorrowland itself is entirely original.

In its quasi-religious Disney fervor, the film fails to set out some truly strict rules for its universe, so it becomes difficult to nail down exactly how Tomorrowland and its technology function. The logic is so strung through with holes, you could drive a car through it, but the fact remains that many of the ideas at work in the film are dizzily creative, at least in the idyllic Tomorrowland of the past. And the CGI used in the creation of this world is decent enough, though any and all giant robots look a little too pasted onto the screen. They have no weight and appear to be sandwiched in between the film's dimension and our own. It's highly unsettling.

Even more than the fact that an entire extra dimension houses only one city.

Just like everything else in Tomorrowland, the acting is a smidge uneven. George Clooney does the best of the pack, of course, but even he succumbs to the pulpy influence of the material, playing more of a caricature than a genuine human being with inner life. Cassidy has a hard time at first, but settles into her role, providing one of the best characters of the film in the process. And Robertson does a consistent job all the way through, though the frequent, extremely false bark that she pretends is a laugh is shrilly alarming. The actors playing young George Clooney and Casey's father are weak beyond belief for a studio picture, but they're not in the film enough to harm it. And any ensemble that contains both Key and Hahn will always have a positive average, when it comes down to it.

All in all, Tomorrowland is a strange, tottering behemoth. It's funny enough, the action is decent, and the characters are mildly engaging, but its flaws hang over it like a black mark. The chinks in the CGI armor, the spotty acting, the pedantic dialogue, and the "happy" ending that remains sourly elitist render the film a bit of a tough hunk to swallow. But Brad Bird pours his heart out into this film and a messy, all-over-the-place personal picture is worth a hundred times more than a messy, all-over-the-place studio picture. It's just true. If you feel the need to check it out, don't get your hopes up and you'll manage to have a good time.

Happy travels!

TL;DR: Tomorrowland is a messy, emotional wreck of a movie, but it's decently entertaining through and through.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I'd say no, but I'd be remiss if I didn't give my good friend Matt a chance to speak his mind on why you should.

Word Count: 1253

Spellbound

Year: 2014

Director: Jason Bateman

Cast: Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn, Rohan Chand

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

M A V E R I C K. Maverick. (noun) Definition: an unorthodox or independent-minded person. Used in a Paragraph: I doubt Jason Bateman ever intended to be a maverick when he directed and starred in a movie simultaneously. He's not a Tommy Wiseau, a disillusioned and quietly insane auteur who was forced to fund The Room himself because nobody else would. And he's no Lake Bell, who gave herself a starring turn in In A World... because Hollywood was incapable of appreciating her ample talents. No, his is the classic story. An actor who longed to direct but couldn't find someone to do it on, so he filled the role himself.

P R O W E S S. Prowess. (noun) Definition: skill or expertise in a particular activity or field. Used in a Paragraph: It's difficult to say whether this was the best choice for Bad Words or not. We all know that Jason Bateman is a capable comic actor (If you disagree, please watch Arrested Development and don't come back until you've finished. I'll keep an eye on the clock.), but his directing prowess remains unproven. Though there are people in this world who have accomplished great feats directing themselves, Bad Words has the inescapable aura of one man spread too thin, halfheartedly tacked onto a relatively solid screenplay.

G, J-son. R U O K?

H E D O N I S T I C. Hedonistic. (adjective) Definition: engaged in the pursuit of pleasure; sensually self-indulgent. Used in a Paragraph: The film revolves around one Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman), a hedonistic 40-year-old loser who enters a spelling bee through a legal loophole in order to pursue a personal vendetta. Accompanying him is Jenny (Kathryn Hahn), an intrepid reporter who is supporting his scheme in order to eke a viable story out of him. But Guy delights in alternately tormenting and banging her rather than giving her answers.

L O G O R R H E A. Logorrhea. (noun) Definition: The tendency of talking a great deal. Used in a Paragraph: When Guy meets an extroverted young man named Chaitanya (Rohan Chand) with a severe case of logorrhea, an unlikely friendship begins as the kid slowly begins to crack his tough shell. It's all pretty standard indie film blather, really. Guy slowly begins to change except that he really doesn't. Secrets are revealed but they're not that exciting. And an annoyingly vague and unnecessary narration slobbers over the entire thing.

It's telling when somebody this chipper ISN'T the most annoying part of a movie.

A R C H E T Y P E. Archetype. (noun) Definition: a very typical example of a certain person or thing; a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology. Used in a Paragraph: Perhaps the biggest problem for Bad Words is its utter reliance on Bateman as a bitter "antihero." We're supposed to root for him even though he's doing awful things, which is an interesting enough idea to base a film on, but is sorely fumbled here. The antihero archetype lifted into the stratosphere by TV shows like Dexter or Breaking Bad has been highly popular in this decade, but films like this and its closest filmic analogue - 2011's Young Adult - are the first omens of its inevitable decline.

I N S O U C I A N T. Insouciant. (adjective) Definition: showing a casual lack of concern; indifferent. Used in a Paragraph: The bulk of the comedy is derived from this insouciant antihero being homophobic, racist, rapey, criminal, and just about every kind of terrible thing that could conceivably have a Tumblr blog written about it. This formula has worked before, but when you center it around Jason Bateman's competent but uninspiring performance and throw in a crop of spelling bee contestants as just about the only side characters (Allison Janney has a forgettable turn as an administrator and several parents are involved, but other than that there's not many additional bodies), Bad Words turns into naught but a one man show about terrorizing children for an hour and a half. As an audience member this is positively battering.

R A N C O R O U S. Rancorous. (adjective) Definition: characterized by bitterness or resentment. Used in a Paragraph: All in all, thanks to Bateman's being distracted by his directing duties, his failure to bring a spark of humanity to his rancorous character mires the entire film in unpleasantness. Luckily Kathryn Hahn picks up some of the slack, showing off her chops as what is by far the film's brightest comic light. She really seizes her role, giving her character edges but sanding them off in all the right places - reaching the exact tone the rest of the movie fails to access. I've never noticed her in anything before, but she's one to watch if this performance is any indication. But one great female role doesn't make up for the 90 minutes of baseline competence surrounding her.

Get ready for the best segue you've ever seen.

I M B R O G L I O. Imbroglio. (noun) Definition: an extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation. Used in a Paragraph: I want you to look up at that screenshot of Kathryn Hahn again. Please notice the beam of wood obscuring the far right portion of the frame. This is but a minor example of a major imbroglio within the film. Bateman has a tendency to frame his characters behind other objects, sometimes creating an entirely distinct frame within the film's natural frame. I'm going to stop saying frame now. The point is, this technique can be used to great effect in pursuit of a thematic goal, but here it merely distracts, drawing attention to how threadbare the plot is. One gets the sense that Bateman knew this was a thing that happened in movies, but hadn't quite pieced together why. Kind of like the truly mortifying amount of slow motion I lathered into my homemade films in high school.

S O P H O M O R I C. Sophomoric. (adjective) Definition: of, relating to, or characteristic of a sophomore; juvenile. Used in a Paragraph: The film isn't all flaws though. I've already mentioned Hahn's terrific supporting performance. And a brief scene with Marzipan the Prostitute (Kimleigh Smith) is hysterical - yet another woman killing it in a small role; if we gather enough of them, maybe we can join forces and beat Hollywood into submission to finally give them leads. And the third act finally reaches a blissful balance between saccharine charm and acrid humor in the movie's best sequence. It's quickly derailed by a moment of sophomoric humor, but hey. At least anything worked out in this lumpier-than-my-grandpa's-disgusting-quinoa-barley-wheat-blend-oatmeal movie.

P L A T I T U D I N O U S. Platitudinous. (adjective) Definition: used too often to be interesting or thoughtful; hackneyed. Used in a Paragraph: Also, the music and cinematography come alive for exactly one pristine moment. So it's not a total bust. But with such a great crop of talent behind it, Bad Words has no excuse to be as platitudinous, bland, and sour as it is.

TL;DR: Bad Words is a disappointment, but it has some lighter moments and a couple great female performances.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1235