Popcorn Kernels: Q2 Review Purge, Vol. 2

OK, I'm trying my best here, but it's been super busy so here's a bunch more mini reviews to get us caught up on current releases.

Alex Strangelove

Year: 2018
Director: Craig Johnson
Cast: Michael Abela, Daniel Doheny, Brendan Archer
Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes
MPAA Rating: TV-MA

A young teen must struggle to figure out his sexuality when his girlfriend starts to want to have their First Time but he begins to develop feelings for an older guy he met at a party.

Netflix hasn't made a great name for themselves in the original movie realm lately, which is why they should make way more midbudget movies like Alex Strangelove. There's no stakes or expectations like the overindulgent Bright or The Cloverfield Paradox, and it's a pretty dang special movie to boot!

Alex Strangelove is the smaller, weirder little brother to this year's Love, Simon, and it's the movie the world needs even more. Where Simon was buffed and polished by Hollywood to within an inch of his life, Alex grabs the reigns with an American Pie sensibility and is off like a shot. The film doesn't shrink away from the realities of life as a teen, from the awkward sexual fumblings to the filthy language to the first, failed drug experiences (I usually hate the obligatory "drug trip" sequence in this kind of comedy, but that even works here!). For a gentle teen romance, it actually has a bit of an edge, which is exactly what was missing from the charming but saccharine Simon.

The one thing I will say about Alex Strangelove insofar as it's a gay film is that its male love interest takes a backseat for way too much of the run time. We don't get to explore his character much, or why he would be particularly interested in Alex, and Alex's internal struggle is amusing, but it largely takes place when he's separated from his object of affection.

But for the most part, this flick is a right gem, sprucing up that on-the-ground teen realism with some quietly delightful creative visual effects. Alex's struggle is presented in a way that's actually - dare I say it - stylish, actually engaging with the power of cinema to give us images and ideas that no other medium is capable of. Maybe I'm rhapsodizing too hard about cereal boxes labeled "heter-O's" or the animal biology metaphor ripped straight from Mean Girls, but it's been so long since we've gotten a teen comedy that's in any way actually interesting to look at in any respect other than the beefy 25-year-olds playing the teens. Alex Strangelove is incredibly pleasant, and I highly recommend it for that and so many other reasons.

Rating: 7/10


Set It Up

Year: 2018
Director: Claire Scanlon
Cast: Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell, Lucy Liu
Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes
MPAA Rating: TV-14

Two assistants set up their bosses so they'll be treated better, but maybe they just happen to fall in love along the way too.

OK, maybe my Sunday nights are just going to be owned by Netflix from now on, because Set It Up is the exact sort of forgettable romantic comedy I've been craving from the market for some time. Everyone in it is impossibly gorgeous and oozes charisma, nothing of much import happens to any of them, and we get a few standout comic cameos, most notably from Kimmy Schmidt's Titus Burgess.

Now, I know that poster looks ten kinds of awful, but I promise the movie is completely bearable and even, dare I say it, funny? My knees aren't exactly going to be sore from slapping, but there are definitely some solid jokes that crop up from time to time. It's just thoroughly charming, generously bestowing you with good cheer for its entire run time and not challenging you for anything more. The only even minor quibble I have with it is the fact that we've hired Pete Davidson to play the gay roommate in the now-stock role of "gay dude who is just a straight bro who likes ass." It's a massive overcorrection from the swishy queens that used to populate screens in the 90's, and it's become just as irritating. And now that he's engaged to Ariana Grande, Pete Davidson's smug face is beaming at me from all the ads for this movie on Netflix, and please, give me a break with that.

I really don't have much else to say about this film, because it's not designed for one to think about or analyze. It's designed to be a completely inoffensive soap bubble that blows in the wind, brings you joy, and then pops into thin air, never to be thought about again. As I'll probably mention with one of my later picks, it isn't a sin for a movie to be designed this way. It's just not especially rewarding to really dig into the meat of it with a full review.

Rating: 6/10

Ocean's 8

Year: 2018

Director: Gary Ross

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway 

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A group of eight ladies seek to fix the wage gap by running a jewel heist at the Met Gala, as if Rihanna needed help getting in.

The cast to Ocean's 8 is great. The concept to Ocean's 8 is great. The music and costuming of Ocean's 8 is great. The director of Ocean's 8 is unremarkable. Now, the blame for the movie falling short of greatness certainly shouldn't fall squarely on the shoulders of Gary Ross (let's give some credit to the screenwriters for also fumbling the ball), but the exercise in pure style and fun that this film should easily have been just isn't quite gelling.

Mind you, the movie is fun, but in a truly insubstantial popcorn movie way. Much like the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters, which was likewise... fine, the movie plays it way too safe, leaning back on a story about fast and easy female friendship that doesn't allow a lot of wiggle room for these people to actually become well-rounded characters. We get to watch a lot of shallow people be very good at stealing things, and that's not a bad time at the theater, but it's not a movie I'll be thinking about the second I type the last sentence of this review.

Really, the only thing to really dive into on this movie is the all-star cast, so let's go with that. Sandra Bullock is in top form here, prickly and unlikeable yet nevertheless charismatic in a way she hasn't been since The Proposal. The two runners-up for best in show would have to be Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter, who both are essentially playing cartoon characters toned down just enough to be palatable. But boy are they palatable, and it's an ebullient good time whenever they're onscreen together. 

Sarah Paulson and Cate Blanchett, on the other hand, are actresses I know to be terrific who are given absolute bupkis to do. They're good enough to avoid becoming wallpaper, but they are too handcuffed by the script to do anything remotely interesting. And then there's Awkwafina and Rihanna, two musicians turned actors who have pleasing personalities but aren't going to be winning any awards anytime soon.

It is nice to watch these people hang out, but that's pretty much all that happens in Ocean's 8. By the time you get to James Corden's noxious cameo as an insurance investigator, all the energy has long since been sucked out of the movie, and Gary Ross has forgotten every one of the stylish fillips with which he introduced the story and its characters. Oh well. It wasn't a waste of air conditioning, at least.

Rating: 7/10

Hereditary

Year: 2018

Director: Ari Aster

Cast: Toni Collette, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne

Run Time: 2 hours 7 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After the death of their grandmother, a family must cope with the emotional fallout of loss, guilt, betrayal, and demonic possession.

I really don't mean to be the guy who comes in to trash the A24 horror films, but at the very least I'm aware that they are horror. Movies aren't disqualified from the genre if they're slow-paced, nor if they reflect deeper themes. So at least I have that going for me before I say that I really didn't care for Hereditary.

Honestly, this movie has all the ingredients to be a movie I truly love (read: Toni Collette), and it succeeds heavily in the first act. Right at the end of the first act, there is a terrifying standout sequence (anybody who has seen the movie will know exactly what I'm talking about) that is perfectly, excruciatingly executed. This has a lot to do with the performance of Alex Wolff, who has graduated from being in the peanut gallery of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle to blowing the roof off in a single close-up of his face that takes you on a riveting roller coaster ride of emotion. It's a transcendent performance that goes toe to toe with the always superb Toni Collette, who is operating at 11 throughout this entire film (it's a bit exhausting, but it's what the movie asks her to do and she does it great).

Unfortunately, these stellar performances are given a script that, without spoilers, feels closer to Paranormal Activity 4 than The Witch. Hereditary really falls down a rabbit hole of overworn horror tropes that undermine any sort of specificity and power the story had created in the first act. And the title clearly indicates that we're meant to be really invested in whether or not Toni Collette has inherited a mental illness and everything that's happening is all in her head, but like most movies of this ilk, completely forgets what it's supposed to be doing in favor of shoving creepy imagery down your throat at every opportunity. I don't blame a horror film for wanting to be a horror film, but don't introduce that kind of doubt if you're not really going to do much with it.

It's a frustrating watch for someone who has received a steady drip of these kinds of movies for years, so the fresh and exciting bits are fully drowned out by the clunky, generic material that gums up the works. Maybe if I wasn't so familiar with these types of movies, it wouldn't feel so uninteresting, but this one just didn't do it for me at all.

Rating: 5/10

Ideal Home

Year: 2018
Director: Andrew Fleming
Cast: Paul Rudd, Steve Coogan, Jack Gore
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

A bickering gay couple find out that one of them has a long-lost grandson, who they must care for while his father is in jail.

Ideal Home is one of those indie comedies where you can predict every beat of the plot from the opening credits, but it's also one of those indie comedies that earns its right to be generic. It's comfort food cinema at its best, delivering well-worn tropes with a low key but effervescent sense of humor that is perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

And hey! The fact that we can make material this rote with a gay couple as the leads is a remarkable thing about the year 2018. Of course, Ideal Home ain't winning any Spirit Awards anytime soon, having cast two straight men in the roles and considering that literally nobody knows this film even came out, but their sexuality factors into the plot of the movie not one bit, and that actually turns its genericness into a political strength. It's just like every slightly edgy family comedy you've ever seen, and the fact that there's two men in charge doesn't impede the progress of the bland plot one bit.

Then there's the fact that Paul Rudd instantly makes any comedy at least one point better just through sheer charisma. He's rocking an incredibly sexy indie movie beard, but he's still our good ole Rudd, delivering his trademark brand of goofy yet naturalistic humor, this time through a sheen of everpresent supercilious disdain. Ah, and there's the real way this movie differentiates itself at all. The tone of Ideal Home is unusually bitter, refusing to cut its snide, posh characters any slack, as much as it loves them and wants them to love each other.

The film won't blow you away or anything, but at the end of the day, it's a nice way to spend 90 minutes. Also give money to gay movies that don't end in AIDS, tearful coming outs, and/or tragic death. Please, I'm begging you. I don't want to have to sit through The Normal Heart every time I want to feel represented in the culture. Look, if you even have a toe on the Kinsey scale, you're going to find Paul Rudd especially attractive in this movie, so that's a reason right there.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 2164
Reviews In This Series
Ocean's 8 (Ross, 2018)

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

Year: 2018

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña 

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

So this is how the Marvel movie year ends, not with a bang but with Michelle Pfeiffer. A scant two months and change after Avengers: Infinity War ravaged theaters worldwide, we're getting Ant-Man and the Wasp, a wispy summer treat before the MCU goes dormant until 2019, giving us some much needed rest. In which time we'll be getting Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Teen Titans GO to the Movies, Venom, Aquaman, Hellboy, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. 

Never say Hollywood doesn't try to capitalize on a trend.

So, we pick up nearly two years after the events of Captain America: Civil War (remember those? me neither). Ant-Man is on house arrest for violating the Sokovia Accords (yeah, I don't know), and he is three days away from being allowed to return to the world. Unfortunately, right about this time is when he discovers a quantum entanglement with Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), the long-thought-dead wife of original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). This reunites him with Hank and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, who for continuity's sake has to wear her original bowl cut wig in several scenes, causing me to giggle for about twenty minutes straight because I did not remember how stupid it looked and it really caught me by surprise), and they struggle to rebuild their relationship while figuring out how to rescue Janet from the quantum realm. I promise I reduced as much pseudo-science gobbledygook as I could from that paragraph. It was a Herculean effort.

While our heroes run through a video game-esque gauntlet of "Need Object A? Acquire Object B to gain access to Object C to get it," they must avoid the FBI officer Jimmy Woo (my boy Randall Park), the rogue tech black marketeer Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins), and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a girl whose particles keep expanding and contracting, allowing her to phase through objects, but keeping her in intense pain. She thinks she can cure her condition by sucking the science juice out of Michelle Pfeiffer, or something.

Though honestly, the pain seems like a fair trade for such a rad evil suit.

So far both Ant-Man movies have felt like a bit of a break from the MCU at large. The first one had a stronger separate core for its own story (namely, the heist element), whereas this one does have to deal largely with the implications left behind from a previous spinoff, but for the most part it's equally contained. The plot itself is a bit more sprawling, but it doesn't spill over into any other characters or plot lines, which is a welcome respite after the world-shattering character collisions of Infinity War  that required an MCU encyclopedia to get through.

And also much like the first one, there isn't a lot of meat on these bones. Anytime the story turns its focus to its feeble character drama, it becomes almost laughable. Lilly and Rudd's total lack of romantic chemistry exposes the mechanical artifice of the script. Whenever they exchange a glance or a kiss, you can hear the plot gears chunk into place. These things don't happen because they want them to, they happen because the narrative needs them to. The same goes for this film's wrinkle, the fact that Ant-Man's suit is a prototype and sometimes malfunctions, randomly changing his size at inopportune moments. But this happens only when its most convenient to the plot for a joke, and doesn't cause any major strife other than yet another one of the film's endless video game side missions.

"Alright, who ordered the plot contrivance?"

Honestly, I'd be more content if this was just a comedy about being on house arrest, because as usual the humor is by far the strongest element of the movie. The bulk of this is delivered by Michael Peña, who returns to once more prove that the entire movie lies in the palm of his hand, but we also, blissfully get an appearance by Randall Park. I've long been a proponent of Park, but this is the first side role he's gotten in a comedy where he really gets to shine, allowing his character's businesslike exterior and seriousness convert into awkward ineptitude and confusion at the drop of a hat. It's his best work in a long time, and he's always doing his best work.

Paul Rudd is of course on fire as well, but whenever he has to deal with Lilly and her bleating nothing of a character, he flounders a little bit. He flounders a lot bit during a scene where [SEMI-SPOILERS] he channels a woman's spirit into his body, which he plays like a high school freshman trying drag for the first time in drama class [SPOILERS OVER]. But come on. He's Paul Rudd. He acts his way back out of that paper bag over and over again. And then there's Michael Douglas, who at this point is just expensive window dressing. 

At least they fixed Hope's hair. This is an even bigger triumph than Jurassic World correcting Bryce Dallas Howard's footwear.

But even if the drama is firing on zero cylinders, the action is solid enough to provide a satisfying popcorn superhero romp. They really lean into our heroes' abilities to change size here, turning various small rooms and San Francisco cityscapes into wonderful Alice in Wonderland playsets, finding new, creative uses for everyday objects that is tremendously satisfying, even if it's not particularly groundbreaking.

Really, Ant-Man and the Wasp does what it needed to do. It provides us a (blissfully short, for one of these movies) two hours of distraction from the world outside (and, if you live near me, the blistering heat wave we got last Friday). It doesn't try your patience or test your brain in any way, it just lets you sink into a morass of fun, funny people doing spectacular things and not asking you to feel too much about it other than excitement. It won't go down in the pantheon of great summer movies, but it hits the spot, for sure.

TL;DR: Ant-Man and the Wasp is a forgettable popcorn movie, which is exactly what it needed to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1048
Reviews In This Series
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)
Ant-Man (Reed, 2015)
Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)
Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016)
Black Panther (Coogler, 2018)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

Reviewing Jane: If I Loved You Less, I Might Be Able To Talk About It More

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time. This review is a massive expansion of a frankly terrible mini-review I wrote back in November 2013.

Year: 1995

Director: Amy Heckerling

Cast: Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jane Austen's work as a whole is almost perfectly designed to be translated into a high school setting. The rigid class strata, overwhelming obsession with pairing off into romantic couples, and razor-sharp sarcasm of her novels is if anything more suited to the modern teen movie than the period piece. It's such an obvious thing to do that it took a genius to recognize it, and that genius was none other than Amy Heckerling, one of the only commercially successful female filmmakers to come out of the 80's (her debut Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a massively profitable, zeitgeist-defining hit).

When approached to write a high school movie, Heckerling reflected back on the novel Emma, which she remembered enjoying at that age. And thus, by combining a centuries-old plot structure with modern teen fashion and lingo, Clueless was born, jamming yet another massively profitable, zeitgeist-defining hit into that C.V. just for good measure.

It was a movie so iconic, it convinced Stacey Dash she could go ahead and keep on pretending that the world loves her and her every thought.

So, here we go. A decade before Mean Girls, Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) rules the campus with her matching plaid ensembles and boxy cell phone. Along with her friend Dionne (Stacey Dash), she matchmakes her way into better grades by keeping her depressed debate teacher happy, and she's more than willing to use her talents to mold crude new girl Tai (Brittany Murphy) into the perfect popular princess.

Together they navigate a tangled web of love involving the popular boy Elton (Jeremy Sisto), the loser stoner Travis (Breckin Meyer), the ostentatiously retro Christian (Justin Walker), Dionne's lusty boyfriend Murray (Donald Faison), and Cher's preachy, college-aged stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd). If Cher hadn't meddled, it would probably be a lot less complicated, but also a lot less fun!

And thanks to her, the rest of the world who HADN'T seen Halloween 6 got to meet Paul Rudd.

The ways that Emma's plot corresponds to the beats of Clueless are frankly remarkable. Sure, it's all slathered with a heaping helping of dated hairstyles, slang, pop tunes, and brown lipstick that only increase the film's hilarity as time goes by, but there are certain scenes that are practically verbatim (especially the scene where Cher is insulted she wasn't invited to a party she didn't particularly want to go to, or where Tai decides to burn her last remembrances of Elton).

This is why it absolutely works as a comedy, because that's the exact element it isolates from Jane Austen's romance of manners and manors. I have constantly been frustrated by the way that the straight Austen adaptations rub out her idiosyncratic sarcasm as if it were a dirty thing to be ignored in the face of literary merit. But Clueless is the exact opposite, removing everything but the humorous character dynamics much to its benefit.

Of course, it does also naturally inherit one of Emma's flaws: Tai (just like her character analogue Harriet Smith) holds a major role, but shrinks into the background come the third act and is given a tossed-off conclusion without really completing an arc of any kind. But that's a small price to pay for one of the purest adaptations of Austen's tone we've ever gotten.

Somehow, I think she would approve.

Clueless is hilarious at all times, but it's perhaps most hilarious if you've ever lived in Los Angeles. Regional humor always gets me, but Amy Heckerling manages to toe a very delicate line between referencing very specific places and feelings, yet still making it universal. The iconic learner's permit freeway scene and the followup line "Getting off the freeway makes you realize how important life is," are freaking hysterical if you grew up terrified of navigating the labyrinthine L.A. freeway system, but yet they also strike at a truth that will resonate with anyone who's lived through high school. The way teenage emotions are so vivid and bold that they can make mountains out of the tiniest, most mundane molehills is effortlessly encapsulated in this funny, relatable, endearingly earnest line.

Heckerling may have been the one to strike gold here, but Alicia Silverstone is an all-important piece of this puzzle. One of the toughest things about reading Emma is watching the main character make so many mistakes. She's a supremely flawed heroine: venal, self-impressed, and wearingly meddlesome. That is what makes her interesting as a protagonist, but you don't always want to spend time with her. Silverstone finds the perfect balance here, knowing full well that Cher is an airheaded twit but humanizing her just enough that you can see her potential to be an actual good person and are always willing to follow her into the depths of her comically terrible decisions.

The rest of the ensemble is generally strong too, of course (only Stacey Dash is a major miss; her one approach to line reading is "shrill and catty"), but Silverstone is obviously the Queen Bee. Clueless just wouldn't work without her, and Clueless works tremendously well. In the terrifyingly vast landscape of 90's teen movies, this is one that truly deserves its status on the A-list, and that's not nostalgia speaking. I was one year old when this movie came out, so the fact that it still strikes a chord speaks to its generous and loving approach to the teen human condition.

TL;DR: Clueless is a delectable teen comedy only made better by its literary source material.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 984

Other Films Based on Emma

Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
Emma (McGrath, 1996)
Emma (Lawrence, 1996)
Aisha (Ojha, 2010)
Emma. (de Wilde, 2020)

When Tony Comes Marching Home

Year: 2016

Director: Anthony & Joe Russo

Cast: Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson

Run Time: 2 hours 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Captain America: Civil War is one of those frustrating movies that renders film criticism even more useless than it already is. A negative review is but a fragile echo in the void while Marvel plows through their stacks of money with a bulldozer. And a positive review is extravagantly pointless, because you know you’ve seen the goddamn thing. But I watched it, and I’m morally obligated to give my two cents. Why not have some fun with this exuberantly pointless exercise?

I’m not a regular blog. I’m a cool blog.

So, Captain America. The Avenger that nobody would give a flying fart about if he weren’t played by the human mountain we call Chris Evans. Full disclosure, I haven’t seen the first two Cap movies, but I’ve been on my roommate’s Tumblr page enough to grasp the gist of things. The constant between the films (aside from a set of wholly bland villains) is Captain Steve Rogers and James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and the fact that the series is essentially a longform exploration of male friendship is by far the most interesting thing about it. Oh, also Cap’s friend Falcon (Anthony Mackie) is there, though he hardly finds a convincing reason for his presence. A third wheel is a third wheel, even if you’ve got a bird suit.

Bucky has been brainwashed by the Nazis Hydra to become the Winter Soldier, a mindless assassin who carries out their wickedest deeds when read a special passage from a Dr. Seuss-esque red book. Tensions have already been rising between the Avengers when, following a botched mission, the government decides to regulate the team, having them answer to the UN. Because nothing streamlines saving the world like handing the reins to international bureaucracy. This effort is spearheaded by Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), Iron Man himself.

When Bucky lands himself in the sights of the coalition, an already dubious Steve assembles a team of MCU cameos to help him save his friend and also the world (from the requisite milquetoast villain, Zemo – played by Daniel Brühl), defying the UN Accords. Iron Man assembles his own team, including an olive branch from Sony: Spider-Man (Tom Holland).

Meanwhile, Hulk and Thor are vacationing in the Poconos.

It’s intriguing that both of this year’s major superhero mash-ups (Civil War and Batman v Superman, and please allow me to extend my humblest apologies for bringing up that crapfest again) directly grapple with the collateral damage caused by superhero brawls. It’s an important conversation to be having, in terms of the depiction of onscreen violence, but I can hardly think of a less exciting tend for comic book movies. It’s just one step above that stultifying superhero standby of “I must resist using my powers because they’re bad (and we can’t afford the special effects).”

And do you want to know the worst thing? In terms of directly addressing the repercussions of their own violent content, Batman v Superman is actually the superior film. Only in that regard, mind you, but talk about a plot twist. That movie, while incomprehensible, actually had high stakes and some clear consequences. In Civil War, the Accords are pretty inconsequential, just a garnish for a massive action sequence between two sides chosen as arbitrarily as a game of dodgeball.

Civil War plays it way too safe, and the supposedly grand, operatic plot beats feel like they’re tiptoeing on eggshells, not wanting to throw a wrench in Phase 3 with anything as gauche as [SPOILERS a major character death or even a stubbed toe. They refuse to even allow ludicrously minor characters like War Machine (Don Cheadle) the dignity of being bumped off to raise the stakes, no matter how clearly he super duper died in the film. And so help me God, if I don’t get to see Thanos crack open Vision’s (Paul Bettany) stupid, didactic Klaatu forehead before the end of Phase 3, I’m going to rip myself in half.] All I’m asking for is that a storyline as grand and sweeping as Civil War be treated with a little more gravity than Thor’s latest bubble bath.

Well, maybe I’m overextending myself expecting gravity from this guy.

OK, I’m calming down. Though Civil War fails to reach the heights of the raging maelstrom promised by the comics, the trailers, and the advance reviews, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad film. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. But as a piece of popcorn superhero mayhem, the film largely delivers. Frankly, the one-on-one action sequences between Captain America and Iron Man pull so many punches that they end up smacking themselves in the face (and yes, a hardcore moment that is almost instantly retconned counts as a pulled punch), but when our other heroes get in on the fun, the movie gets a shot in the arm.

Where Civil War truly triumphs is its ensemble action, which is an astonishing feat of character juggling. The ubiquity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is helpful, precluding the film from having to reiterate backstories for returning characters like the spuriously-accented Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), the expert agent Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), or the sharpshooter Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner, and I am pleased as punch to report that his appearance got the biggest applause from my audience), but the script stays true to their personalities and longform arcs.

It manages this while also introducing two entirely new heroes to the pack: the vengeful Wakandan prince Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and the snotty teen Spider-Man in his third cinematic iteration. I’m deeply concerned to admit that I actually enjoyed Tom Holland in the role, because I sure as hell don’t want to shell out money for an umpteenth Spidey flick.

The guy has more regenerations than a Time Lord.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. The movie doesn’t get as distracted by its massive smorgasbord of superheroes as I do. In a jam-packed chase sequence as well as the inevitable showdown between both teams in a massive airfield, Civil War effortlessly weaves an infinitum of motivations, personalities, and character struggles into one seamless, breathtaking tapestry. The only hero who doesn’t get his fair share of the pie is Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), who’s just here to have fun. Although, considering the cotton candy froth that his film turned out to be, I guess that’s still staying true to Ant-Man’s mission statement.

Plus, despite the stakes being dismayingly low on the grand narrative scale, these fight scenes are filled with little moments that will sock you in the gut. One scene in particular with a helicopter stopped my heart for a second.

OK, TWO scenes in particular with a helicopter.

The relative intensity with Russo brothers bring to the action also serves to give the Whedon-tinged dialogue more comedic punch when it does arrive. This is a transitional film between two Marvel phases with two distinct personalities, and tonally it’s an excellent midpoint between the both of them. So while I found myself immensely frustrated by large portions of this overlong film (this is no empty complaint – I could slice half an hour off this behemoth and never miss it – including two, count ‘em, two romances so chaste they feel vacuum sealed), it’s still an excellent entry in the overall Marvel canon. Enough that I can confidently proclaim that, whatever happens, Doctor Strange will still be the worst MCU flick out this year.

TL;DR: Captain America: Civil War is a grand achievement in unwieldy ensemble filmmaking, but plays it too safe to be a superhero classic.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1286

Reviews In This Series
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)
Ant-Man (Reed, 2015)
Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)
Black Panther (Coogler, 2018)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

A Thorn In My Side

Year: 1995

Director: Joe Chappelle

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Paul Rudd, Marianne Hagan 

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Part sixes can be good. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is an excellent cross between gothic horror and winking humor, and Saw VI actually had a political agenda other than vacuuming people’s guts out. So forgive me for not adjusting the curve for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the first flat-out abysmal entry in the series. Sure, I also despised Halloween 5, but that film was too silly to provoke any hardcore ire.

Halloween 6 (which lacks the number in the official title, because producers already didn’t want audiences to catch on to how damn many of these films there were) does not have that luxury. No, it’s your run of the mill blood-boiling suckfest, and it’s all the worse for it. To be fair, the film was so extensively tampered with by overzealous studio heads that it’s lucky it even remotely resembles a coherent narrative and not a jumbled page from an asylum inmate’s scrapbook. However, my sympathy for an addled movie does not actually extend to enjoying it.

I’m not enough of a fanboy to be that magnanimous.

Halloween 6 goes like this: It has been six years since Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur returning from Halloween 4) and his niece Jamie Lloyd (played by the singularly unprepossessing J. C. Brandy, who looks about fifteen years too old for the part) disappeared in a police station explosion. We open on Jamie giving birth and escaping a cult compound, whereupon she hides her baby in a bus station bathroom before being gruesomely offed in an abandoned farmhouse.

Cut to nobody that matters. Relatives of the Strode family have taken up residence in the old Myers house, and they run through about 30 beats of twisted family drama (that never comes up again) over the course of one breakfast. Kara (Marianne Hagan) has recently returned to her family’s home after five years of estrangement, her six-year-old son Danny (Devin Gardner) in tow. Her dowdy mother Debra (Kim Darby) welcomes her with open arms, but her father John (Bradford English) is the undefeated gold medalist of the Dickhat Olympics and relentlessly berates her, calling her son a bastard, at which point Danny pulls a knife on him. Again, this never ever is addressed at any other point in the movie.

Meanwhile, Laurie Strode’s babysitee Tommy Doyle (introducing Paul Stephen Rudd) is all grown up and on the hunt for the Boogeyman. He uses clues in Jamie’s distress call to a radio station to find her baby at the bus depot, then hooks up with Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance in his final Halloween film). Their combined hysterical soliloquizing leads us to the knowledge that the druids bestowed Michael Myers with the Curse of Thorn as a baby, forcing him to try and kill his family on the night of Samhain whenever the stars align or the producers need some fast cash. And although the Strodes aren’t technically related to him, he goes after them as well, possibly because he hates the tacky forest green and burnt umber paint job they gave to his house.

Double meanwhile, an obligatory teen subplot is hammed into the film at a sideways angle. Kara’s brother Tim (Keith Bogart) and his girlfriend Beth (Mariah O’Brien) attend the live radio show of shock jock Barry Simms (Leo Geter of Silent Night, Deadly Night), because this film is a science fiction tale about an alternate universe where teenagers actually listen to the radio in 1995. They go home, share the least erotic pillow talk in the history of sex, and get stabbed a whole lot.

If there’s one thing Michael hates more than his own family, it’s inexplicable teen hookups.

This is one of those movies that I watch so you don’t have to. At every single level, Halloween 6 is a technically incompetent slog and an abrasive insult against John Carpenter’s original masterpiece. Filled with irritating flash cuts to supposedly creepy images, the movie has the attention span of a TeenNick sketch show. When you take that with the lighting that drowns everything in shadow (at one point obscuring all but Tim’s forehead in a “close-up”), it feels like a Capri-Sun commercial as directed by early David Fincher.

And the sound design! It’s so easy to take good sound design for granted, but when it’s improperly done, it can tear a movie apart from the floorboards up. Halloween 6 might just have the single worst audio job I’ve ever seen in a reportedly professional film. The baby’s cries could only have been recorded in a tin outhouse for all the reverb on the canned track, and the kills sound like Michael is stabbing victims with a small piece of Velcro. Which, incidentally, I would pay to see. Also, the foley artist must have had a hot date that night, because every single sound cue in the rushed, sloppy mix is exactly the same. Unless it’s an artistic choice that closing a book, opening a door, and beaning someone with a fire poker all make the same identical, slightly metallic noise.

Perhaps it was an attempt to tonally match the violently wretched, screeching industrial music masquerading as a John Carpenter score.

Narrative logic went out the window back in Halloween 5 when Michael was revealed to have a tattoo that we haven’t seen the previous three times, but there are some extremely basic needs that fail to be met by the story. Let me ask you this: Who is the main character of Halloween 6? The obsessed Tommy Doyle, the eye-popping Dr. Loomis, and the besieged Kara all lurk offscreen for a nearly equal amount of time. There’s two separate innocent children that need protection from at least three villains who are jockeying for position. I’d suggest this was an Eisensteinian approach, emphasizing the socialist ideal of the collective over the individual, but I can’t say for certain that the director of Phantoms is intimately familiar with Soviet film history.

The logical leaps required to make sense of Halloween 6 would make a kangaroo jealous. I haven’t the foggiest idea how Michael would know where Barry was, or even have the inclination to kill him while in the middle of a siege on a house on the opposite end of town. Likewise, I’m very worried for the continued employment of the janitorial staff at the Haddonfield bus depot, who neither noticed the trail of blood across the floor nor the baby stuffed into the bathroom cupboard. The entire film is cobbled together from this sort of mildly confusing, perpetually frustrating detritus.

Michael Myers himself suffers from the film’s powerful negative aura. Though no mask could beat the combined efforts of Halloween 4 and 5’s sheer neck-flapping dime store tackiness, the hair on this one is teased out into Johnny Rotten oblivion, giving Michael the silhouette of a birthday clown.

I guess that’s intimidating in its own right, but it’s not exactly Beacon of Pure Evil.

Given the mire they have to trudge through, it should come as no surprise that the cast can’t make heads or tails of this movie. Donald Pleasance, just months before his tragic death, can’t bring himself to care about the dreck he’s spouting, reducing his scenery chewing to a mere nibble.  Paul Rudd does an OK job, his kind face and adorable almond yes clashing with the off-putting single-mindedness of Tommy Doyle. He does indulge himself with a couple of his trademark goody grins, but for the most part he provides the film with an unnamable dissonant quality that helps it along. As for the rest? I can’t imagine that they had the budget to fill everyone's mouths with marbles, but they sure did pull off that effect with aplomb.

I’ll say one food thing before we wrap up, just to leave things in a pleasant frame of mind. The gore, when it arrives, is pretty well constructed. There are only three moments in particular that stand out, but one is gruesome, one is devastating, and the other is a campy treasure. I can’t really complain about that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a page from Tim’s book and put my face directly beneath the shower nozzle to blast sand my brain of the memory of this painful, painful film.

Killer: Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur)

Final Girl: Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd) feat. Kara Strode (Marianne Hagan)

Best Kill: “John is such a dick, he’d better die painfully,” I said. I got my wish when he was split up the abdomen, impaled on a fuse box, and electrocuted, at which point his head explodes. Rah rah, Michael!

Sign of the Times: Doting mother or Twin Peaks log lady? You decide.

Scariest Moment: Blood rains down on a child from a tree where Barry’s body is stashed.

Weirdest Moment: Tommy Doyle has a magnet of the drag queen Divine on his fridge.

Champion Dialogue: “Psycho lays nympho – best sex she can ever dismember.”

Body Count: 9; not including an entire operating room full of druids.

1. Nurse has her head impaled on a spike.
2. Truck Driver has his head twisted backward.
3. Jamie Lloyd is impaled on a farming machine.
4. Debra is chopped with an axe.
5. John is stabbed, electrocuted, and his head explodes.
6. Barry is stabbed in the gut.
7. Tim has his throat slit.
8. Beth is stabbed in the back.
9. Random-Ass Doctor has his face smashed into iron bars.

TL;DR: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is pure pabulum with scarcely any redeeming qualities.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1610

Reviews In This Series

Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)

Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed some of the movie posters schizophrenically flickering along the "Coming Soon" section of my blog's sidebar. Rest assured, everything truly is coming soon. "Soon" is an exquisitely relative term chosen for its very nebulousness. But over this summer, between work, the Scream 101 podcast (which I am very proud of), and the inordinate amount of movies that I have been watching, it's just been a struggle to prioritize which reviews to get out first according to the system of extremely complex algorithms I have set in place for myself.

My accountants are hard at work figuring things out and you can prepare for an onslaught of reviews like you've never witnessed before, but in the meantime, please enjoy these two mini-reviews for films that I watched recently, but about which I had only relatively minor thoughts to share.

Hustle & Flow

Year: 2005

Director: Craig Brewer

Cast: Terrence Howard, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes 

MPAA Rating: R

A small-town pimp thinks he has what it takes to make it in the hip hop business.

Some movies with that exact plot line are inspiring. Some are treacly and shrill. Most are painfully generic. But a very special few anchor themselves around a protagonist so vehemently, ho-slappingly unlikeable that you actively root against him. Perhaps this isn’t what Hustle & Flow was going for, but that’s at least what makes it interesting.

“Interesting” does not always mean “good,” but Hustle & Flow flirts with the combination when it’s not being nauseatingly misogynistic. Which is most of the time. You see, Mr. Pimp, played by the terrifyingly good Terrence Howard, lives with three of his hos, one of whom is pregnant, one of whom he kicks out on the street with her baby, and all of whom he menaces with precise regularity like the world’s most evil cuckoo clock. And then he turns around and records songs like “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” or “Whoop That Trick” about how these skanks need to understand that he’s actually a super sensitive guy who’s beating them for their own good. As he performs a job that they could easily do themselves. If they even wanted to. Which they don’t.

It’s tough to process the urge to strangle your protagonist with 8-track tape when you’re not watching a horror movie or some other genre actively meant to shock or horrify you. The really disheartening thing about Hustle & Flow is that it doesn’t seem to notice any of this. There’s an awe-inspiring level of cognitive dissonance going on between the Take the Lead/Freedom Writers story that it imagines it’s telling and the GTA XXI: Harlem Shake amorality that actually plays out onscreen. In the film’s most triumphant, romantic moment, a kiss between Howard and Taraji P. Henson, it’s hard not to think, “What, she suddenly forgot that the only reason he’s not forcing her to sleep with a stranger is that because she’s carrying another stranger’s baby so she’s damaged goods?” It’s not exactly Sleepless in Seattle.

As a character study, there is a mild degree of nuance, but the film is far more interested in exploring how the man’s ambitions and talent have led him to believe that he deserves instant success and the consequences of his realization that that’s not exactly how it works. The film’s acknowledgement of reality – that just being a good rapper is only a start to getting big, that there’s a lot of hard, thankless work involved, is its biggest strength.

Its second biggest strength is its setting, which effortlessly evokes the town’s poverty in simple, sad, beautiful details: a splash of garish neon in a rain puddle, water slowly dripping into buckets through the leaky roof of a strip club, and the ever-present, grotesquely un-Hollywood sheen of sweat that glistens on every performer, a la The Fighter or Do the Right Thing. And Howard is admittedly terrific, bolstered by strong, committed performances by his side-hos, Taryn Manning and Taraji P. Henson. But damn, is this film unpleasant to watch.

Rating: 6/10

Knocked Up

Year: 2007

Director: Judd Apatow

Cast: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd

Run Time: 2 hours, 9 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An entertainment news presenter accidentally finds herself impregnated by an unemployed pothead.

Speaking of movies by noted misogynist filmmakers starring a pregnant woman and a less than credible romantic lead…

OK, obviously I took a lot of creative license with that description, but surely it hasn’t escaped the notice that in Judd Apatow’s parables of schlubby man-children learning about the splendors of adulthood and heteronormative pair-bonding, the women are vehicles for this transition more often than they are thinking, breathing, flesh-and-blood human beings. That said, Knocked Up is one of his better efforts, thought I believe I can be forgiven for slightly preferring Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

First and foremost, Knocked Up is funny. That’s the important thing, I suppose. However, much like Trainwreck (review pending) and many other flicks in his filmography, he film is funniest when Apatow throws open the floodgates on his massive stable of comic actors, allowing thrilling fringe performances from Jason Segel, Kristen Wiig, Ken Jeong, Adam Scott, Bill Hader, Charlyne Yi, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk to wring laughs from the sidelines. In the midst of such a squall, Heigl and Rogen hardly make any impression at all, finding themselves likewise outshone by co-leads Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd, as the squabbling married couple providing a benchmark for how our unhappy pair shouldn’t strive to be.

In fact, the strongest scenes with any of the leads are when they buddy off into same-sex pairs: Mann with Heigl and Rudd with Rogen. It hobbles this romantic comedy somewhat that its romantic pair is by leaps and bounds its weakest link, also stunting the flow of several of its major story arcs, but there is enough genuinely good material at work here to buoy the movie past any obstacle.

At the end of the day, it’s quippy, poppy, and a lot of fun, and I can’t begrudge it of that. It doesn’t leave me with a strong sense that I truly understand the mechanics of this couple or the reason they decided to keep this baby and raise it together, but damn it, it’s a good enough time that it’s hard to care too much. Nothing a nice, even slicing of fifteen minutes couldn’t fix. Even in the early years, Apatow never knew how to edit himself.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1093

You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Tiny

Year: 2015

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Corey Stoll

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Ant-Man is a punchline. A superhero who can make himself really tiny? He’s the Aquaman of the Avengers. It’s like when you’re at a restaurant and ask for a Coke and they say, “I’m sorry, we only have Ant-Man.” At least, that’s been the online dialogue among non-comic book fans. But guess what? Guardians of the Galaxy took a property that literally two and a half people cared about and converted it into a media juggernaut, so why not Ant-Man?

Enter Edgar Wright. …Exit Edgar Wright. Leave the keys to the guy who made Bring It On and Yes Man (I’ve never ever heard of that superhero). Suffice it so say, Ant-Man isn’t quite the sterling success that Guardians was, though it packs some punch in a very similar, if slightly watered down manner: trump up an achingly generic storyline with a heavy dose of good-natured humor and hope for the best.

Also – exactly one disappointingly brief ab shot.

Ant-Man tells the story of Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), a cat burglar trying to turn his life around after his release from San Quentin. He’s working hard to be a good role model for his daughter, but it’s tough to find work as an ex-con. He’s sent on a job that turns out to be an elaborate set-up by Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas, looking just as confused to see himself here as I am), who has invented a suit that can shrink the size of the wearer while increasing their strength. This suit is controlled by the Pym particle. Only Hank knows the formula to this particle, which is also a liquid because science. Also he can mind control ants, because why not.

Hank enlists Scott to work with his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) to help him perform an elaborate heist and shut down the operation of Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who has taken over Pym’s company to develop a shrink suit called the Yellowjacket, which he plans to sell to HYDRA, which is basically the Marvel equivalent of Osama bin laden presents the Nazi Party. If this suit falls into the wrong hands, it’s somehow even worse than Iron Man’s suit, which can shoot nuclear warheads out of its ass. Because ants. Or something.

I’m so sorry, Hunter.

The biggest liability – and the biggest strength – of Ant-Man lies in just how inconsequential it really is. It knows it’s a story you’ve heard a quintillion times before and it knows it’s just a breadcrumb on the trail to Avengers XD: Montezuma’s Revenge or what have you, so when it takes the liberty of not taking itself so seriously, it soars. Ant-Man is a film with a tremendous sense of humor, both about itself (and its stature among its epic superhero peers) and within itself. It’s a genuinely funny movie, much like Guardians of the Galaxy before it, though admittedly most of its best lines are disproportionately handed to the terrific Michael Peña (as Scott’s best friend Luis).

But when Ant-Man isn’t laughing, it’s unrepentantly mechanical. Characters repeatedly show off their grotesquely inflated single behavioral traits like some kind of low rent freak show, trying not to trip over the hypnotically gargantuan foreshadowing scattered haphazardly at their feet. Character motives bend and snap in ways that put Elle Woods to shame, all in the service of ladling the audience with as much steamy, nutritious Marvel Cinematic Universe exposition as they can handle. The highest number of the most affordable cameos jockey for position among the actual storyline, which at this point is so overgrown and choked out that the establishing shots are practically subliminal and the entire second act has been converted into one incoherent montage,

Although, to be fair, I’m pretty sure that’s technically a genre now.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly serviceable. Those who love Marvel will get a kick out of connecting the dots. And those who just want Ant-Man only have to unfocus their eyes during a couple key moments to keep themselves pure. There’s a dash of political commentary, a surprising playfulness in the infrequent action sequences incorporating the balletic exchanging of sizes, and the questionable creature CGI is easily overlooked by the film’s jocular tone. No, the only truly, egregiously bad thing about Ant-Man is Evangeline Lilly’s hair, which she has clearly stolen from Bryce Dallas Howard’s sacrificial wig altar on the Jurassic World set.

It’s the only possible explanation.

But the fact remains that Ant-Man is a lark. It’s a fun, occasionally clever sugar rush, but it’s not Marvel filmmaking at its finest. It’s worth a watch for the humor, but absolutely do not go into it expecting anything other than a tinier version of everything you’ve already seen before. By every definition of that word.

TL;DR: Ant-Man is a funny, but inconsequentially generic entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Sure. Why not beat the heat? Just beat it at matinee prices.

Word Count: 850
Reviews In This Series
Ant-Man (Reed, 2015)
Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)