Teen Homicide (Don't Do It)

Year: 2018

Director: Cory Finley

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Olivia Cooke, Anton Yelchin

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When you bill a film as the second coming of Heathers, you know I'll be first in line. Unfortunately, you can bill a film as whatever the hell you want. The advertisers weren't lying. Thoroughbreds is a pitch black high school comedy about murder, after all. But we should all know by now not to violate the cardinal rule of reminding audiences of a movie much better than your own.

Come to think of it, you're reminding me of The Witch too. Stop it!

In Thoroughbreds, well-to-do teenager Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) is paid off by the mother of the only slightly less well-to-do Amanda (Olivia Cooke, who also held a starring role in Ready Player One, so this is a pretty big month for her) to host a tutoring session in the hopes that they'll become friends. This actually works, but probably not in the way mom was planning. It turns out that Amanda is an emotion-free sociopath, and Lily takes advantage of her total lack of conscience to plan a murder. 

She wants to take out a hit on her evil stepdad (evil is a malleable term here: we see him being generally disagreeable, but her perception of him is certainly skewed) Mark (Paul Sparks). They eventually draw in strung-out drug dealer Tim (Anton Yelchin, in what would seem to be his final role) to help with the plan.

He's the only one in the movie whose income is below like 10 figures.

Thoroughbreds is the writing and directorial debut of playwright Cory Finley, and it shows. It has all the limitations of setting and cast that a low budget debut would traditionally display, but it's also restricted to an absurdly small range of motion per scene, a pretty obvious holdover from the fact that this movie was originally written as a stage play. It's a static motion picture, and it never throws off the shackles of its theatrical origins. There's nothing wrong with a lot of scenes that are just two or three people talking to each other, but it's not presented with any particular cinematic flair. It's like eating a Pop Tart without any frosting. It's still a Pop Tart, but there's something so fundamental missing that it's not the same experience at all.

Now the script is pretty solid, of course. It's not as richly comedic as I was hoping, but there are certain dark situations and dialogue beats that raise a worthy chuckle. And the ideas it raises about emotion/the lack thereof in the teenage population, or how easy it is for wealthy people to toy with the poor are fun to chew on. 

It does tend to slip a bit too often into an over-literary mindset (this film is divided into chapters for absolutely no reason, other than to seem impressive and Smart), and the closing monologue leaves a lot to be desired - its attack on social media and technological advancements seems ripped from a completely different movie, because it has absolutely zero foundation in the story we've been watching. I don't think there's more than 90 seconds of actually even seeing a iPhone onscreen in the entire movie.

Look at these teens, so absorbed in their Chapsnats, not engaging with the real world, not going to Applebee's...

Everything in Thoroughbreds is kind of uneven in this way. Take the sound design, which sometimes creates incredible feats of audio, like the scene where the whirring of Mark's exercise machine keeps his stepdaughter awake. The noise builds and builds until she finally snaps, and you believe it. But most of the rest of the soundtrack is occupied with a truly unhinged score that sounds like composer Erik Friedlander is snapping rubber bands underwater. It's manic as hell, and while I secretly kind of like it, it's deeply distracting from the quiet dialogue-based story we're meant to be watching.

And then there are the two teen girls who lead the film. They're unequivocally great, and the fact that there are two teen girls bearing the entire weight of this movie on their backs is something tremendously fun and inspiring. Unfortunately, Anton Yelchin, who I like very much, seems to be acting in a completely different movie. He's being pushed into a cartoon character that would have worked in a film like Fright Night or even the bizarre Only Lovers Left Alive (he sure did make his share of vampire movies, didn't he?), but glances right off the grounded, intentionally flat performances of his co-stars.

Altogether I'm pretty sure I liked Thoroughbreds, but I'm absolutely certain that it takes someone of a very particular bent to love it, and I'm definitely not there. This movie makes me continue to be excited to follow the careers of Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, who I have seen and enjoyed in many previous genre efforts, but Cory Finley really needs to knock it out of the park next time to earn my trust.

TL;DR: Thoroughbreds has a solid dark comedy nugget at its center, but it's too stagebound to really do anything exciting with it.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 871

(Don't You) Forget About The 80's

Year: 2018

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn

Run Time: 2 hours 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Of all the properties that exist out there in this wide world of ours, Ready Player One was probably the one most begging for the Steven Spielberg treatment. A parade of nostalgia triggers for people who grew up in the 80's, who could be a better match than the man who shepherded so many of those childhoods with his visionary blockbusters? Unfortunately, that man doesn't exist anymore. Who we got is the guy who made The Post and Lincoln and The BFG. And I didn't want to do this to you, but let me remind you that Bridge of Spies is a thing that happened.

Now can you relate to people who want to escape their own reality?

In Ready Player One, we meet our hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) in a futuristic Columbus, Ohio trailer park in the gently dystopian future of 2045. Famines and poverty have caused many people to want to shrink back from the real world, so they've become obsessed with the virtual reality open-world game of the OASIS. When the game's creator Jim Halliday (Mark Rylance) dies, he reveals that has he created an Easter Egg hunt, where the first person to find all three of the keys he has hidden throughout the OASIS will become the sole proprietor of the entire game.

This business model clearly has some glaring flaws, the biggest being the fact that the wicked company IOI has hired expert drones, led by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), to crack the codes as quickly and efficiently as possible and thus own the biggest tech resource on the planet. But only the true fanboys and girls know enough about Halliday's past and his favorite old movies and video games to be able to get to the heart of the hunt. As the two factions get closer and closer to the finish line, Wade, under his online alias Parzival, must team up with other players, including his crush Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe, a casting decision the movie doesn't want you to know at first, but the marketing has already blown to ribbons), and the prominent Japanese players Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao).

And the true key to the heart of America, pop culture references. 

It's no use beating around the bush. The novel Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (the screenwriter behind the execrable Star Wars-fellating road comedy Fanboys), is hot garbage. It's an incoherent, blithering mass of pop culture references that is mostly just a list of obscure anime and John Hughes movies masquerading as an adventure plot. It's an insufferable piece that beats the drum of nostalgia so fiercely that it rips right through the very fabric of art.

Ready Player One the movie is a massive improvement, because it almost completely throws away everything the book was working with. Some of this is due to necessity: you can't turn this crap into a movie. And you can't keep a plot moving when every challenge involves sitting down and playing an Atari game for hours. Other improvements are the invention of the filmmakers, like the fact that the egg hunt relies on the players being able to dig into Halliday's past and uncover more about his character, rather than random 80's detritus like his top 10 favorite music cues from Tron or whatever.

I can't say there were a lot of decisions in the making of either the book or the movie that were truly great, but that character exploration is certainly one of them. I'm not sure I'm loving what Mark Rylance is putting down with his performance here (it's very nebbish and Mark Zuckerberg-y, with a certain scatterbrained, naïve charm, but it slips into feeling like a monologue from Dexter's Laboratory a little too often for my liking - although the way this illustrates the difference between the real life version of him and his in-game avatar is truly special), but converting Halliday into an actual character - rather than a Willy Wonka who makes Monty Python references instead of chocolate bars - was a genius move.

That hairpiece not so much, but you can't have everything.

One area however where the film truly fails is the character of Art3mis. It shouldn't have been hard to make her not a Manic Pixie Virtual Reality Girl, but they actually made her role even more reductive and pointless. More reductive and pointless than something in an Ernest Cline novel. Let that sink in. Whereas in the book she was just as knowledgable about 80's trivia as the rest of the egg hunters, to the point that she was incredibly famous in the OASIS (a girl who knows pop culture? I'm quivering already), here she only exists to gasp with delight whenever Wade explains things to her, then reward herself to him as the ultimate prize.

Her position as ego-booster to this nerdy dweeb is demonstrated in this unwatchable scene where he throws on a Bee Gee's track and she grins, complimenting him on being "old school." Girl, this is the OASIS! People give lectures on the biographies of Atari programmers and treat Buckaroo Banzai like it's a cornerstone of world cinema. Everything is old school!

If only any of the people making this movie had an actual woman to consult with.

But enough about characters. This movie is meant to be a visual spectacle, and I guess that's what it is. The unreality of the OASIS prevents the CGI technicians from having to go out of their way to make things seem realistic, which is both a blessing and a curse. It allows things to become stylized in an interesting way (the OASIS' interface and item screens are actually pretty intuitive and fun extrapolations from modern gameplay), but it too frequently becomes a maelstrom of unintelligible pixels flying around in muddy clumps of mottled color. Also, I'm not really even sure what Steven Spielberg had to do on set, because a good 75% of the movie is literally just a cartoon. This explains why he was able to make an entire The Post while this film was still in production.

The only time where the visuals truly come alive and work within the story's pop culture milieu to create something unique and spectacular is a scene that turns The Shining into an interactive minigame, delightfully combining old film stock with 3D CGI in an impressive feat of creativity that easily trumps the analogous moment in the book.

Unfortunately, aside from that scene, not a lot in Ready Player One is anything more than basically watchable. The run time never feels punishing thankfully, but you don't feel fully swept up into the world of the film. Maybe it's the endless, frustrating expository dialogue. Maybe it's the lame plot points involving Post-It notes. Maybe it's the odious cameo from an autopilot T. J. Miller. Maybe its Alan Silvestri's shallow John Williams impression on the soundtrack. But there's a lot here that just doesn't click.

Ready Player One might be a massive improvement on the source material, but that novel was so dire that even taking leaps and bounds above it leaves you in a very average, unimpressive place. That said, it's still the best movie Spielberg has turned out in years, unless The BFG was a secret masterpiece, because I surely haven't gotten around to seeing that one.

TL;DR: Ready Player One is a gleaming popcorn movie, but it can't escape the deep, deadly flaws of its source material.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1275

Board To Death

Year: 2014

Director: Stiles White

Cast: Olivia Cooke, Ana Coto, Daren Kagasoff

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Happy Halloween, everybody! I can hardly think of a better way to celebrate with you all than by reviewing the latest dumbass teen horror flick laboriously shoved into theaters to fill the recently-vacated Paranormal Activity slot. Last year we got the remake of Carrie, which was better than it had any right to be. This year we get Ouija - a film adaptation of a board game adaptation of an ancient spiritual device because Hollywood has devoured every last morsel of the horror pie and is now licking the tin.

Truth be told, it's not as bad as it could have been. But seeing as how its Bad potential was a bottomless pit of existential despair and its Good potential was - at maximum - a noncommittal shrug, this doesn't say much about Ouija. And by scraping its way to being halfway watchable, it ruins any potential camp value with its aggressive mediocrity. Oh well. Let's not pretend that modern teen horror was going to get any better than this.

And nowadays we just communicate with the undead through Twitter, so this is sorely outdated.

Ouija's story is as old as the wise oak tree, but we'll run through it briefly anyway. Debbie (Shelly Hennig) and her friend Laine (The Quiet Ones' Olivia Cooke) used to play with the Ouija board when they were kids, but while their friendship has persevered, the tradition has not. But when Debbie is found hanging from her rafters on a string of Christmas lights like a macabre department store display, Laine suspects that a Ouija board in her room has something to do with it.

She gathers her smarmily hot friends to use the Ouija one last time in an attempt to contact her dead friend's spirit and find out what really happens. These friends include Pete (Douglas Smith of Stage Fright), Debbie's now ex-boyfriend; Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), Laine's unctuous beau who says totally rational things like "Don't worry about the noise. It's just an old house." and does totally normal human teen things like walk his bike through dark runoff tunnels after trying to contact the spirit of his dead friend; Isabelle (Bianca A. Santos), the requisite friend who doesn't want anything to do with this, you guys; and Sarah (Ana Coto), Laine's little punk rocker of a sister who she drags along in order to prevent her from hanging out with her much older (and presumably much hotter, though he unfortunately never appears onscreen) boyfriend. This character dynamic seems promising until it doesn't.

And let me tell you, spelling words one letter at a time just isn't as scary as they want it to be.

Obviously the spirit they end up contacting is something much less banal than Debbie's bland teenage ghost complaining about how bad the Wifi service is in the void. Rather, the entity they do come into contact with is the restless spirit of James Wan's The Conjuring, available now on DVD and Blu-Ray. With an evil old woman who opens her mouth wide and points at things and a supporting performance by Insidious' Lin Shaye, Ouija plumbs Wan and Whannell's playbook, mangling their favorite tropes for a healthy dose of paranormal insipidity.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Horror has always been recursive, bringing old elements into new stories to remix and refashion them. James Wan's films themselves are absolutely not free of borrowed elements. If cinematic influences were patches on a film's sleeve, The Conjuring would be that punk rock kid with the denim jacket that hated everyone in high school. But in Ouija its numerous borrowed tropes (including the morally dubious Magical Latina who teaches the teens about how not to screw around with spirits) are displayed with no aplomb, simply recycling what's easy and so shopworn it can't not be successful in some cases - at least in providing momentary, unexemplary thrills.

But the result of all this pilfering is that Ouija turns into a mixed bag of paranormal tropes and jump scares (a whole bunch of investigating strange noises and villains that you see too much of to be scary, with a little bit of found footage thrown in, cuz that's been popular lately), neither creating an effective atmosphere nor putting its own personal stamp on the genre. It's just the same old milquetoast genre fare that audiences are (hopefully) really starting to get tired of Hollywood spoon-feeding to them.

Wanna know another thing that's not scary? The word "planchette."

Everything in the film is half-hearted from the PG-13 gore on down. Once we reach the level of character, forget about it. Emotional beats are skated over at Olympic aptitude levels. Everyone is super sad Debbie died because that's in the exposition, but once Isabelle kicks it, her friends are all "Isabelle who?" And when Pete is inexplicably stricken with a case of floss-mouth - watch the trailer, it's nonsense - he's spirited away from the film with a single cryptic text message (the film makes an argument for the increased integration of modern technology in cinema but not enough to give it more than a passing nod, let alone a paragraph).

I can think of worse ways to spend 90 minutes than watching attractive characters make bad decisions for 90 minutes, but Ouija is so entirely toothless. It attempts to hide its deficiencies behind a couple decent shock scares, but there's no reason to seek out this film unless you are stricken - like Yours Truly - with Genre Completist Syndrome.

TL;DR: Ouija is nothing more nothing less than average teen popcorn horror.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? No, especially not while the delightfully macabre The Book of Life is still in theaters. Or check out Daniel Radcliffe in Horns, out today!

Word Count: 977

Reviews In This Series

Ouija (White, 2014)

Ouija: Origin of Evil (Flanagan, 2016)

The Oxford Files

Year: 2014

Director: John Pogue

Cast: Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Olivia Cooke

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

As my friend Hunter Allen commented on my Xanadu review, I've been having a pretty dreary September. Disappointment after disappointment have abounded, whether it be the squandered potential of As Above, So Below, the meandering non-plot of Love Is Strange, or the repugnantly dull chintziness of the aforementioned experiment in psychological warfare starring Olivia Newton-John.

Now, I wasn't expecting Hammer's revival film after The Woman in Black to be a stellar piece of genre-defining genius, but the fact that it fails to be even halfway decent, barely even stretching itself to a quarter-way decent, boggles the mind. Some would ask why I expected any good output from the man who directed Quarantine 2: Terminal, but I maintain that I like that movie considerably more than its predecessor, a queasy shot-for-shot (except where it counts) remake of my favorite film of all time.

Toss in the fact that The Quiet Ones was kept on the shelf for two full years before its release and I suppose it's easy to see why the film couldn't technically be considered a disappointment - it was destined to be putrid from the very start.

"But movies with gratuitous bathtub scenes always end up so good!" says nobody.

Professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) has several problems, the most damaging of which is that he is a character in The Quiet Ones. But he's also hitting several bumps on the road to disproving ESP and paranormal activity once and for all. His experiment on Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke) - a young woman who is being haunted by a ghostly entity from within - has had its funding pulled by the board at Oxford University. However, he is adamant that he can prove that her haunting is merely a telekinetic expression of mental illness that can be expunged. He insists he will succeed despite his disastrously erroneous assertion that "if you cure one patient, you cure them all."

In addition to spitting on the grave of Sir Francis Bacon, his hobbies include having students do all his work for him and appearing in doorways whenever anybody says something even remotely dramatic. Although he has been forced out of his Oxford location, he brings Jane and a team of student researchers: Harry (Rory Fleck-Byrne) - a handsome Irish lad, Krissi (Erin Richards) - a horny blonde who's aiding the experiment on a lark, and Brian (Sam Claflin) - a shy camera operator, to a remote mansion for further assessment.

What ensues is a blisteringly odd mishmash of too-shaky found footage, too-slick 1974 period piece, and the most jaw-droppingly tedious and generic "possession" story ever inflicted upon the public. 

One clichéd example before we move on. In an early sequence - in which footage from a previous case file is played for the students - a young boy (who deserves an Oscar) somehow manages to not burst into hysterical laughter when uttering the most hyperbolically inane moniker for a ghost in recorded history - "The Man That Makes Things Happen."

Ah yes, my old nemesis, The Man Who Teaches Knowledge to Others.

I suppose being generic isn't the worst thing for a movie to be. When two roads diverge in a yellow wood, it's not a sin to take the road more traveled. But when the yellow is as washed out and drab as The Quiet Ones and punctuated by nauseatingly oversaturated swaths of green (we're talking about color palette now, by the way. Don't get lost in the confusing and twisty forest of my metaphor.), it really doesn't seem like a journey worth taking.

The grubby yet tactile colors jar with the slickness of the cinematography itself (every cut and angle and composition is a little too stagey and high definition), occupying a strange, interminably ugly middle ground that pushes you out of the movie with the force of a kangaroo kick.

Some visual examples:

Gross.

Gross.

Gross.

Conflicted.

Characters wander in and out of this repellent world repeating the same conversation over and over until some of them die. It's staunchly unscary, yet overwrought - especially in a too-early shock scene that overextends itself in an attempt to frighten, trips over a snag of internal logic, and tumbles into the rest of the plot, jumbling it into an incoherent mess.

My easiest comparison is the controversial "spider walk" scene in The Exorcist. Those who don't know about it can read about it here if they wish, but let's leave it at this. It's a tremendously creepy scene but it comes too soon in a slow burn narrative and displays powers the demon never uses again, even in the climactic moments. So it was cut out of the theatrical release to ensure the sanctity of the story.

The Quiet Ones leaves all that mess in with relish. To be fair, it's the only even mildly unsettling part of the entire affair, but the damage it does to the third act (which is already busy picking at its own logic with sado-masochistic glee) is irreparable. The whole thing is irritating nonsense, beginning with Sam Claflin living in a barn outside a mansion with presumably dozens of empty rooms, continuing with a doctor carting around incriminating video tapes and a film student suddenly gaining detailed medical knowledge, finally culminating in an explosion of twists that coil onto one another like an out-of-control frozen yogurt machine.

No matter how hard they pretend, there is no meaning to be found in all of this. Just pure agony, boredom, and disappointment. It's a shame to see the legendary Hammer Studios fall on such hard times, but if this is the output we can continue to expect from them, maybe they should return to dormancy.

TL;DR: The Quiet Ones is a pitiable wisp of a horror film - woefully tedious and not scary in the slightest.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 985