Q2 Review Purge

Howdy, folks! You may have noticed that Popcorn Culture hasn’t updated in over a week. I’m very sorry for that, but I also have a very good reason. I’ve been in a midsummer frenzy, packing up my apartment, job hunting, prepping season 2 of Scream 101 (big announcements are on their way), And I just spent all of last weekend working on the set of All the Creatures Were Stirring, the feature film debut of my friend Rebekah McKendry, which I’m absolutely thrilled about. And then this weekend was my birthday and volunteering for Blumhouse at the ScareLA haunted house convention. All of these things, you may notice, are not formally considered “writing this blog.”

Popcorn Culture isn’t going anywhere, but in this scheduling melee, I’ve decided to once more unclog my backlog by releasing atypically brief reviews of films I’ve watched in previous weeks (and months, ugh that I haven’t had time to give my full attention to. It was either that or call a plumber. Let’s get started!

Pinocchio

Year: 1940

Supervising Directors: Hamilton Luske & Ben Sharpsteen

Cast: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Mel Blanc

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

A lonely woodcarver builds a marionette named Pinocchio that he wishes was his son. His wish is granted, breathing life into the puppet, but Pinocchio must prove his integrity before he becomes a Real Boy.

I know, I know. I should never have made that grand statement that I’d be marathoning every movie in the Disney canon. That was an incredibly foolish thing to so, given my track record for successfully completing marathons. But I did get a step or two further down the trail from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Pinocchio is a massive improvement on Snow White’s sometimes spotty animation, the beautiful backgrounds and consistent character designs holding up much better under modern scrutiny.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t quite there. This is a film filled with incident, but there’s not really any rhyme or reason to its plot. Pinocchio is launched through a series of visually compelling and frequently terrifying vignettes with absolutely no connective tissue. The film completely forgets the bit about his nose rowing when he lies after one scene, and Monstro devours Gepetto entirely offscreen. When you need to have other characters explain to one another what’s happening in the plot, you know there’s some deep structural damage there.

But in a nascent medium like feature animation, story is only half the battle. Pinocchio’s ridiculously advanced sense of camera mechanics and framing in a hand-drawn medium is at the height of the craft, so Pinocchio’s a must-see for artists of all kinds. Like they haven’t already seen it. Plus, it’s weirdly obsessed with butts, so there’s that.

Rating: 6/10

Fantasia

Year: 1940

Supervising Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, & Ben Sharpsteen

Cast: Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Corey Burton 

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

A series of short form animation pieces set to classical music.

Talk about not having a plot! Fantasia takes Pinocchio’s slack script and completely demolishes it, replacing it with a flurry of pure visual mayhem. A mind-bending blend of animation live action, and symphonic music, Fantasia was like nothing that had ever been seen before or since, perhaps Walt Disney’s greatest artistic triumph. I, of course, am a heathen, so I’m bored silly by it.

I’m not well equipped to handle non-narrative film or non-lyrical music, though I do recognize that this is an excellent example of both. It’s a glorious burst of pure animation imagination, informing the look and feel of dozens of Disney features in the years to come with its vibrant colors, fantastical animal designs, and graceful sense of motion. The mythological sequences are a little too twee to hold my attention, though once again Disney doesn’t stray from full tilt horror, depicting ghastly creations like the Chernabog in “Night on Bald Mountain” or the surprisingly tense flood sequence facing poor Mickey in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

I definitely forgot there were dinosaur fights in Fantasia, so that part was cool, but by far my favorite segment is an early piece using abstract color and line work to depict the emotional movements of a composition. It’s a gloriously compelling segment that is the closest anyone has ever come to a visual depiction of sound. And then there’s fairies and hippos and crap for like two hours. Like any anthology, which is undoubtedly what this is, the sum is much less than certain parts of its whole.

Rating: 6/10

Not Another Teen Movie

Year: 2001

Director: Joel Gallen

Cast: Chyler Leigh, Jaime Pressly, Chris Evans 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In a parody of 80’s and 90’s high school rom-coms, a popular jock is dared to make the indie rebel girl into prom queen material and falls in love with her along the way.

Remember the massive run of “____ Movie” parody flicks made up of pop culture offal and shattered dreams that ran in bulk from the early to mid-2000’s? Yeah, I try to forget about them too. But now we live in a world where those movies have been diverted from theaters and are pumped directly into Netflix (Tooken, anyone?), so we can look back on America’s unhealthy obsession with some degree of clarity and moral high ground. Let’s just pretend we didn’t give A Haunted House enough money to earn a sequel.

This is a low bar here, but among the Scary Movies and Date Movies and Meet the Spartanses, one movie actually stands out as being not quire so terrible as all that: Not Another Teen Movie. Perhaps it’s due to the presence of latent superstar Chris Evans, who brings a delightful blend of steely overconfidence and goofy charisma to the role. Perhaps it’s the soundtrack, which cherry picks the most instantly likeable 80’s hits from Brennan’s Bin of Beloved Pop Classics. Or perhaps it’s because the film actually has a damns sense of focus, parodying the teen movie genre as a coherent whole rather than winging off in random directions in pursuit of hot topics and trends from the millisecond it was released.

The obvious pitfalls are still present (whole scenes are lifted from other movies almost untouched, ands some of the humor is just too random to make heads or tails of) but Not Another Teen Movie is striving to be an actual parody, using elements of its genre, and it’s intermittently successful. That makes it infinitely better than even its closest competition. The fact that there are a few laugh-out-loud jokes that don’t cop from other movies and a handful of trenchant, actually analytical observations on the genre means that this movie is the Citizen Kane of its cycle. Even if it sports a totally random, ill-conceived musical number and a deeply boring football scene. Although, to be fair, pretty much every high school movie has a boring football scene, so they got that right too.

Rating: 6/10

Mean Girls

Year: 2004

Director: Mark Waters

Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Jonathan Bennett, Rachel McAdams

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A new girl at school is coerced into infiltrating the evil popular clique to take them down, but she unwittingly becomes one herself.

Reviewing Mean Girls is a challenging undertaking as a millennial. The film is such a zeitgeisty hit that it barely reads as a movie anymore. It’s just a carousel of Tumblr gifs, Twitter bios, and whispered quotes in the back of classrooms. But it has gotten that way for a reason. It’s a damn good movie. Well, it’s a damn good comedy.

The script is witty and sharp, with a plot loose enough to allow the characters to flourish yet still keep track of the throughline. The punchlines show off that then-undiscovered Tina Fey pop, and the characters watch Friday the 13th Part 2 on Halloween, so they clearly have their heads screwed on straight. With a gratuitously fantastic ensemble and a Lindsay Lohan in her prime to give voice to the sharp screenplay, Mean Girls can’t help but be a winner.

The actual filmmaking is totally cardboard and anonymous, but who the hell cares? Mean Girls is the last great teen movie (well, Easy A gives it a run for its money, but still), and its clever premise is both a generation-defining clash of the high school classes and a sweetly powerful movie about the damage teen girls can cause to one another and why.

Rating: 9/10

The Last Five Years

Year: 2014

Director: Richard LaGravenese

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan, Tamara Mintz 

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A relationship is shown out of order in a series of musical numbers depicting its inception, triumphs, pitfalls, and eventual destruction.

Sometimes a movie is all about performances. It’s a good thing, too, because without Jeremy Jordan and out-of-left-field musical prodigy Anna Kendrick, The Last Five Years would crumple like a bouncy castle in a power outage. The movie is essentially (500) Days of Summer cross-pollinated with an opera, and though its tone management is ferociously askew (Kendrick is saddled with an Adele album’s worth of ballads, with Jordan receiving all the poppy, high energy stuff), it’s a small-scale love story that lives and dies on the actors’ ability to apply human emotion to a battery of arbitrary musical numbers, which they do with aplomb.

There are some intensely memorable longform musical sequences at play here, but The Last Five Years is crippled by a devastating problem: It’s pointless. The out-of-order gimmick is but a lark, and we leave this couple having gained no particular insight into why their story is worth telling. The only reason it’s not told in chronological order is that no musical could have been so mismanaged as to backload so many weepers. This is a vehicle for two delightful young performers, not a necessary entry into the cinematic canon of doomed relationships.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1684

Deck The Halls With Pills Of Molly

Year: 2015

Director: Jonathan Levine

Cast: Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anthony Mackie

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! OK, if you’ve been in a Target any time since October, it might feel like it’s been Christmas for millennia. But December is finally here and the holiday season is once again upon us. And this time the present we’re receiving is much sweeter than the unwarranted ire of North Korea. From director Jonathan Levine (of 50/50, Warm Bodies, and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, because rest assured if there’s a slasher hidden in your closet, I will dig it out) comes The Night Before, the movie Judd Apatow would make if his heart grew three sizes.

Health warning: The Grinch is not scientifically accurate. If your heart should swell this holiday season, seek medical attention immediately.

The Night Before is your standard Apatow stable tale of a manboy learning to grow up. This time it’s Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a 30-something with no direction in life. In a tradition that began the Christmas Eve 14 years ago when his parents died, he and his friends gather together on December 24th to celebrate and attempt to find a mythical party known as the Nutcracker Ball. However, this particular celebration will be their last, because Isaac (Seth Rogen) is expecting a child with his wife Betsy (Jillian Bell) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) is a rising football star with a lot on his plate. And a lot of syringe marks on his ass, if you catch my drift.

As the night progresses, Ethan must learn that friendships change, and that’s not always a bad thing. When the friends’ three different goals for the night inevitably clash, Chris and Isaac must also face harsh truths about themselves. Also, Ethan pursues his ex, Diana (Lizzy Caplan), who is a woman in a bro comedy and as such doesn’t get very much to do.

Although there’s at least a solid reason she might consider forgiving Ethan. Have you SEEN his face?

Obviously, question number one when reviewing a comedy is “Is it funny?” For my rule of thumb, I propose a secondary question: “Is Randall Park in it?” I’ve written about Randall Park until the cows came home and then left again because I wouldn’t stop, so I won’t belabor the point here. But! If Mr. Park blesses a movie with one of his mystical 30-second nuggets of screen time, it’s pretty much worth watching. Here, he gradates from Thankless Role to Hyperbolically Earnest Bit Part. Progress!

Yes, The Night Before is funny. It isn’t funny in quite as explosive a way as last year’s Neighbors, but it isn’t trying to be. Jonathan Levine has confirmed that the script largely concerned the film’s dramatic beats, leaving the comedy to the improvisational whimsy of its actors. This leaves the film with a laid back, hang-out quality that’s consistently pleasant but each scene lives and dies on the strength of its various performers.

For example, whenever Seth Rogen, Jillian Bell, Mindy Kaling, or Broad City’s Ilana Glazer are onscreen, they spin even their most tripped out, dubiously conceived moments into comic gold. Gordon-Levitt on the other hand, really nails the dramatic beats despite being a bit slow on the uptake humor-wise. And then there’s Anthony Mackie. He doesn’t give a poor performance by any stretch of the imagination, but he is woefully underserved by a character that leaves him physically stymied.

Take a look. Does any part of him scream “roided up footballer?” Because at best I see “investment banker with a lacrosse habit.”

The Night Before is a wholly modern comedy that actually integrates current slang, technology, and social issues in a way that doesn’t feel like a Cool Dad giving Tumblr a whirl. But it’s also a loving look back at Christmas traditions past that covers cultural touchstones as far flung as Run DMC, Die Hard, and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Or maybe it was the Muppet Christmas Carol. Or Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Or Scrooged. Wow, we as a culture really can’t let that one go, can we?

Regardless, we’re dealing with a fun, nostalgic, but forward-looking movie. There ain’t nothing wrong with that. The movie has its share of icy patches, like some obvious foreshadowing, a scatterbrained plot, and an absurd level of focus on a minor character that hardly works at all, but you know what you’re getting when you sit down to one of these movies and it certainly delivers.

Its comedy is low key, but it still packs two of the best cameos of the year and a genuinely side-splitting dinner table scene that I’ll be quoting non-stop for the next, oh, several dozen years. Likewise, its drama is routine and predictable but can wring your tear ducts dry if you’re not too careful.

In other words, The Night Before is a nice movie. It’s a none-too-challenging, safely R-rated holiday treat that just wants you to have a good time. It knows it can’t compete with the classics like A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, or Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (you know… for some people), so it doesn’t try. It won’t be in my annual holiday rotation, but I sure am glad I watched it.

TL:DR: The Night Before is a pleasant, predictable, but funny bro comedy.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 906

Kim Jong Oops

Year: 2014

Director: Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen

Cast: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Randall Park

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It is at this point obligatory to point out that it's obligatory to point out the controversy surrounding Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's new film The Interview. But all this hand-wringing will get us nowhere, so let's get right to it. Sony was hacked and theaters that premiered The Interview on Christmas day were threatened. You can read all about it in my article here. 

But after a swift backtrack (possibly having realized that thanks to the media coverage and first amendment-touting American audiences, they would make approximately a kerjillion percent more in box office than if the release were uneventful), Sony gave the film a limited release in a couple hundred indie theaters nationwide and allowed flag-hungry viewers to do their patriotic duty and purchase it via online streaming one day early. Everyone in the media and across the globe seems a little muddled about the ramifications of this decision, especially now that there's considerable evidence that North Korea might not have actually been directly involved. But let's just agree not to take anybody on the entire planet at their word at this point and look at the facts.

The Interview has been released. So far, nothing terrible has happened. And, from the physical evidence of the film itself I can conclusively say that if nuclear tensions arise from this decent but underwhelming comedy, then the world is in even worse shape than I thought. It was not wise of Sony to greenlight a film about the assassination of a currently standing leader, especially one as notoriously three-crayons-short as Kim Jong-un. Nor was it wise to release it on Christmas because seriously, who is programming these Christmas releases this year? American Sniper? Unbroken? I'm gagging on the gritty bioptastic jingoism.

But The Interview is a lark. It's just another frat comedy, using the background of a derelict regime to lend gravitas and irony to the parade of dick jokes.

In the measuring contest, the tank wins by a landslide.

As just about everyone in the solar system knows at this point, The Interview is about entertainment "journalist" Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen), who are asked to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) when they score an exclusive interview with him. The two best buds see this as a way of pushing their careers forward, but when Kim and Dave form a fast friendship and Aaron falls head-over-heels for Sook (Diana Bang), a sexy propagandist, things get complicated.

And by "complicated," I mean "North Korean boner jokes." But I don't mean to devalue the film in its entirety. There are some genuinely decent moments of comedy and - it must be said - the dick jokes can be pretty great. As is to be expected by anyone who has been awake in the Anglosphere for more than five minutes, there are moments that tip into the less sensitive end of the spectrum, but the whiffs of misogyny, racism, and homophobia are not strong enough to be truly poisonous.

This is literally all we can ask in a movie where every female character (of which there are a mere two) is immediately treated as a source of erotic pleasure, even if they're in a position of power - say, a CIA agent or a high-ranking official of a militaristic dictatorship. Here's a little experiment - next time you have a female judge at a hearing (although - since you are reading this blog - I am certain that you are a peace-loving, law-abiding, respectable individual and won't find yourself in this situation), wolf whistle as loud as you can and follow that up with a nice "va-va-voom" or two. See where that gets you and send me a note in the comments.

Science is fun!

There are plenty of fun, non-execrable comic moments, especially in the first half hour (in which the film focuses more or less exclusively on incisive pop culture riffs rather than uneven political satire), but none will have you carted off to the E. R. for a busted gut. And they begin to peter out once the duo actually arrives in North Korea, which isn't as thoroughly represented as it could have been, either through shyness or lack of current information. Although the destitution of the country is mentioned many times, it is almost never seen. In a way it makes sense - it's easier to understand why Skylark would have trouble seeing the problem, and this is a comedy - not a documentary. But if we're going the political route, which a movie like this inevitably can't avoid, why not go all in?

This sort of gradual wearing out as the film goes along is present in the aesthetics as well as the comedy. In fact, the very first moments of the film are its absolute best, using color theory, framing, composition, and juxtaposition to establish the bleak atmosphere of North Korea as well as the fact that Dave Skylark is an ill-informed man-child whose program can't hold up to the likes of hard news. This is all accomplished swiftly and efficiently in the opening minute and a half, a level of cinematic prowess that swiftly vanishes, like the very last of our Christmas cookies before I woke up this morning, damn it!

But despite its drawn-out decline, The Interview is never less than pleasant, though it evaporates from the tongue as soon as it's tasted. Riding as it does on the backs of a gaggle of strong performances, it may be wobbly but it never falls down. James Franco isn't far from his usual schtick, but his act of character creation is more than meets the eye, with subtle, ingrained tackiness that draws some big laughs. Seth Rogen is consistent as always, but Randall Park and Lizzy Caplan (as the sexy Agent Lacey) are the real standouts in this parade of malfeasance.

That's right, smoke that victory cigar.

I have sung Park's praises again and again, but he outdoes himself as the little-seen despot, finding outrageous humor in Kim Jong-un's stunted personality, but simultaneously harnessing a raw power that breaks through his cuddly teddy bear persona and makes him a character to truly fear. Any actor could have coasted on the realities of the dictator's presence in the audience's subconscious, but Park goes above and beyond to menace and create a subtle, cunning villain that elevates the cheery comedy into something even remotely meaningful.

And although Lizzy Caplan's character is nothing but a flesh shell with a great rack, she brings a warmth and humanity to the role, grounding even the most ridiculous one-liners into a realistically human character despite her remarkably minuscule screen time. Without these four performers, The Interview would collapse like a despotic regime after the removal of its leader.

All in all, The Interview is a decent way to kill an hour and a half, but it's nothing to write home about. It's especially nothing to write to North Korea about. Its ill-handled release is a source of great turmoil in the industry at the moment, but as the waters settle, let's allow this film to become a footnote rather than define the moviegoing experience of 2014. It's really not memorable enough to deserve much more than that.

If you take one thing away from this movie, please let it be that Randall Park deserves more starring roles. Make it happen, America.

TL;DR: The Interview is a forgettable bro comedy driven by several terrific performances.
Rating: 6/10
Should I Spend Money On This? That's your call. If you want to do your part for 'Murca, you can rest assured that you'll be pretty safe in doing so. If you want to skip it, you won't miss much.
Word Count: 1312