Girls, Interrupted

Year: 2018

Director: Sebastián Lelio

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola 

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As a gay person, you get pretty used to any major motion picture with gay protagonists being arty awards bait that shows you how Important and Tragic your life is. The straights of the world can see themselves in blockbusters ranging from Titanic to Indiana Jones to Bee Movie, but we're stuck with stuff like Milk (dead gay guy), Brokeback Mountain (dead gay guy featuring sad closeted gay guy), Moonlight (sad closeted gay guy). Sure you get your Priscilla, Queen of the Deserts and your To Wong Foos and whatnot, but let's just say gay movies with happy endings don't have a lot of crossover with worldwide audiences.

It's even worse for lesbians. Because women are so rarely protagonists in mainstream movies, the percentage of gay ones is even lower. But the truly crappy thing is that these movies rarely even commit. Because lesbianism is only important to mainstream culture as it relates to men's interest in it, almost every big lesbian movie has its main character sleep with a man, either primarily or sometimes even exclusively. This might be a shock to you, but this is not how lesbians work. (This is not to discount that there are bisexual people and characters out there - but I dare you to find a single known movie where a lesbian actually only sleeps with women)

Disobedience was always going to be about what it's like to be gay in a straight world. It was never going to be a fun romp about two Rachels cavorting through a field of flowers. But it's maybe the worst example of a straight person (in this case, director and co-writer Sebastián Lelio) making a queer story I've ever seen.

But more on that later, after we've finished spitting into each other's mouths. You know, like lesbians do.

Disobedience wants to have its cake and eat it too, so in addition to being a lesbian movie, it is also an orthodox Jewish movie. When her father, a beloved London rabbi, passes away, Ronit (Rachel Weisz) returns to her childhood home for the first time in over a decade. While she's there, she discovers that her two best friends got married without telling her: Esti (Rachel McAdams) is a schoolteacher and David (Alessandro Nivola, who we just saw in 1999's Mansfield Park) is a rabbi protege of her father's.

Over the course of her stay, the ladies ignite a physical passion that has lain dormant for many years, while Esti chafes against the rules and expectations of her culture. They make out sometimes, but mostly they walk together, heels clicking against the pavement in front of grey, dreary skies. Yadda yadda, Oscar stuff.

This screenshot and the previous one are like an hour apart.

So yes, both characters sleep with men (even the unmarried one, in a scene that has so little to do with the rest of the film that even the soundtrack is intrusively different) in this film, but that's just the tip of the faux-prestige lesbian iceberg. Of course, there's also the complete misunderstanding of lesbian sex that I alluded to earlier, compounded with completely inscrutable shooting and editing that obliterates any hope of eroticism. But let me ask you this: Do you think a lesbian filmmaker would give the film's most crucial narrative arc to Alessandro Nivola?

Look, I can admit the dude looks sexy serving orthodox bearded realness, and he is certainly allowed to have a fleshed-out, rounded character, but the movie almost exclusively traffics in how he's feeling about everything. Esti's role is too subdued and frequently offscreen to draw any real impact from, and Ronit is flat as a board, trapped playing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl part in her own film. She's somehow both the lead and the character who dips in to shake things up and learn nothing from experience. 

I'm honestly surprised THEY didn't sleep together at any point.

Disobedience fails as a lesbian movie, but it also fails as a movie in general, so I guess at least that's fair. Nearly every element competes for the title of Worst Thing in the Movie: The cinematography is drab and oppressively grey, an effect it was certainly going for, but one that in no way fits well with the intense tedium of the story (the Rachels don't have a moment alone together until maybe the hour mark). Then you have the production design, which presents us with interiors as varied and rich as a porno, and the score, which attempts to channel the orchestral grandeur of a John Williams with some supremely ill-timed flute trills that triumphantly clash with every scene they appear in.

Hmmm... This is usually the part in a negative review where I say something nice. I suppose I don't dislike any of the actors, but none of them have the strength to claw out from the deep well of milquetoast drudgery the film has tossed them into. And that spitting scene is certainly thrillingly bonkers, much like the peach sequence in last year's similarly dull prestige queer drama Call Me By Your Name. And there's a scene that uses my favorite Terrible Movie trope to predictably delightful effect (this being the fact that nobody in any movie ever gives the speech they were meant to give, and devolves into a monologue about the lessons they've learned that makes sense to the viewer but must be powerfully perplexing to anyone actually in the audience for the speech).

In short, Disobedience is a massive waste of a grossly extended amount of time. It doesn't breach the two hour mark thankfully, but it sure feels like it does. I'd call it boring as sin, but I wouldn't want to be respectful to Sin, which is something this movie should be full of and is sorely lacking.

TL;DR: Disobedience is a dreary, deeply unerotic slog.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1000

Brooks' Brother

Year: 2018

Director: John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

Cast: Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's not groundbreaking to point out that there has been a dearth of imagination when it comes to Hollywood comedies, but seriously. Can we quit it with these titles? Girls Trip. Rough Night. Bridesmaids. Spy. Sisters. Dirty Grandpa. Good or bad, we're not doing these movies any favors with these relentlessly descriptive, boring titles. And let's not forget that on the slate for 2018 are Book Club, Eigth Grade, and Night School. Game Night is saddled with another one of these blah, nothing monikers, and that's no way to treat the best comedy of the first quarter of 2018.

Not that there was much competition for that, but still!

In Game Night, a  group of adult friends have a regular game night every week. So far, so simple. These friends are led by a competitive couple - Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams) - who are having trouble conceiving due to Max's high stress levels. Filling out the ranks are high school sweethearts Kevin (Lamorne Morris) and Michelle (Kylie Bunbury) and empty-headed hunk Ryan (Billy Magnussen). Former game night attendee and monotonously enthusiastic Gary (Jesse Plemons) still lives next door, but he's not invited anymore since his wife left him and he has sunk into a life of solitude, weirdness, and creepy lurking. To complete the pairs, Ryan usually has a rotating coterie of identical bimbos, but this week he brought in a ringer: his intelligent and age-appropriate Irish coworker Sarah (Sharon Horgan).

And oh, what a week to decide to come! It turns out Game Night has a lot in common with that other boringly titled film: The Game. Max's show-off older brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) is in town and has arranged an interactive role-playing game where one of their number will be kidnapped and the others will have to follow the clues to find him. Unfortunately, Brooks is abducted by actual thugs and the line between game and reality swiftly blurs as they rush to rescue him from what may or may not be an elaborate ruse.

They don't take it as seriously as they maybe should, is the point.

Now, I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I did really like Game Night, but it's not quite the balm to save the bloated corpse that is modern comedy. That's a lot to ask of a movie anyway, but it's far from special enough to have any kind of lasting impact on the culture. It's just a funny movie that'll go in one ear and out the other, causing no harm as it passes through.

But, oh is it funny. This is partially thanks to a tight script that's not so reliant on improv and employs judicious use of callbacks to bring everything full circle into a satisfying whole. But it's mostly thanks to the freaking cast, which is a who's who of comic actors we love and comic actors we have done a disservice to by not having loved for many years already. 

Jason Bateman is the de facto lead here, and he does find a way to keep his normal schtick fresh by honing his timing to a stilleto-sharp point, but as the resident straight man he's easily upstaged by a collection of truly tremendous performances. Rachel McAdams (who has always been great, but who I never particularly recognized for comedy) is a particular standout, for her off-kilter line readings that allow even her most flatly written lines to leap off the screen with surprising energy. 

But honestly, it's impossible to look away from the people on the fringes of this cast. The first is Billy Magnussen, who has certainly learned how to use his impossibly sculpted body as a punchline in his previous roles in Into the Woods and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and somehow takes a one-note "dumb hot guy" role and twists it into something knowing and unique. He finds ways to give unexpected outlets to his dumbness, both physically and vocally. 

If someone could slip my number into the next script he reads, I'd appreciate it.

Lamorne Morris also accomplishes the elevation of what should be a grating stock character, giving his repetitive jokes a rhythm so impeccably tight it always catches you off guard. And then - finally! -there's Jesse Plemons, who should be waited on hand and foot by the Hollywood elite for how much talent he's given the world in his young life. The character he has created here is a work of art, an insurmountable force of gravity that sucks you into its awe-inspiring weirdness. It's so unique that it's very difficult to describe. I shan't exert myself, but suffice it to say that his strained monotone is both keenly disturbing and guffaw-inducing.

But enough about that. Any comedy can assemble a great cast, even if this one is especially, unexpectedly strong. Game Night actually shines as a piece of filmmaking, far more often than is common in this day and age. Although its commitment to its stylistic approach wavers toward the second act, this movie has an exciting aesthetic that mimics board games in a variety of satisfying visual ways, using kinetic editing and what I assume are CGI-altered aerial shots to provide an almost dreamlike atmosphere when transitioning from scene to scene.

And the more that's said about Cliff Martinez's darkly synth-fueled score, the better. I wouldn't have pegged the composer of Drive to be the perfect match for this goofy R-rated comedy, but that's why they don't pay me the big bucks. His music really highlights the surreality of the premise, providing the perfect airy counterpoint to this movie's blend of high concept comedy with jarring jolts of reality.

Game Night does exactly what it needs to do, and it does it with some sense of panache. That's all we really need, isn't it? It won't melt your face off with pure comedy, but it sure is an irresistibly affable film to spend 100 minutes with, and you won't catch me complaining about that for one second.

TL;DR: Game Night is a strong comedy, supported by excellent filmmaking.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1041

Healing Hands

Year: 2016

Director: Scott Derrickson

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We’re two films deep into Marvel’s Phase 3 and going strong. I mean, if Ant-Man didn’t derail the superhero powerhouse’s stranglehold over Hollywood, Doctor Strange certainly wasn’t going to. But still, the other shoe has to drop sometime.

Luckily, Doctor Strange mostly deserves its box office success. It’s probably the best film from director Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil), who has made a career out of mediocre horror projects. Although its implications for the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe are worrisome (Doctor Strange joins Scarlet Witch in their cadre of massively overpowered characters with the introduction of straight-up magic), it’s a fun enough kaleidoscope of a film.

Quite literally.

In Doctor Strange, a brain surgeon with the actual god-given name Dr. Stephen Strange is, to put it light, an asshole. He’s a cocky, flagrantly rich genius who cares more about his reputation for greatness than actually saving lives. He shuns the film’s Useless Female Character Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), who’s into him for some unfathomable reason, and treats his staff like crap. When he loses his surgery skills in a bizarrely hands-centric automobile accident, he desperately seeks increasingly experimental treatments, eventually finding himself at the Kamar-Taj compound in Kathmandu, run by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton).

Although he only wants to learn enough to heal his hands, The Ancient One and her disciples Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Wong (Benedict Wong) begin to teach Strange to channel ancient magic, in the hopes that the medical genius can help them save the world from Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), an ex-student who has turned to the Dark Side, and is now attempting to – yadda yadda, big floating evil lights in the sky.

I can’t wait for the inevitable Kaecilius make-up tutorials.

As far as I can tell, the only truly unique thing Doctor Strange has to offer the MCU is its bizarre visual schema. The mystical, otherworldly dimensions accessed by the warriors of Kamar-Taj are an infinitely recurring series of shapes and colors that fold into one another in legible but uncanny patterns.

Sometimes it looks like a back catalogue episode of Rainbow Brite. Sometimes it looks like Benedict Cumberbatch got trapped inside a blacklight poster. Mostly it looks like they saw Inception one too many times. But when this surreal imagery is good, it can be truly great, especially in the film’s most straight-up horrific image: Doctor Strange’s fingers sprouting an infinitum of hands that tear him apart. This imagery is frequently frustrating and generic, but it’s bold and colorful, offering something visually stimulating for once in is godforsaken franchise.

It’s a good thing too, because Doctor Strange is a pretty cookie cutter entry into the MCU for so many reasons. Let me count the ways.

1) The protagonist is a f**king asshole.

Iron Man he is not. Stephen Strange prances through life putting people down and calmly rebelling against the rules. Only, instead of serving an actual character arc, he is allowed to be a raging gaper the entire film and is mostly rewarded for it, even though he’s pretty explicitly following the same path at Kamar-Taj that the villain did. Maybe this doesn’t work because Cumberbatch isn’t as effortlessly charming as Robert Downey, Jr. Or maybe it’s because his performance is handicapped by a strangled American accent. But Doctor Strange is more abrasive than Doctor House and I’m really not excited to spend more time with him.

Also, Tilda, if you don’t want people to read the Super Secret Evil Magic Book, maybe don’t have it displayed right in the middle of the room.

2) The villain is a wet mop.

Marvel villains get a bad rap for being boring and undercharacterized, and Kaecilius fits that description like a glove. Mikkelsen nails a couple tossed-off quips, but he makes next to no impression with his geeky ponytail and Alice Cooper make-up. His motives are murky, he’s onscreen for what feels like ten minutes, and he’s quickly dispatched with the weakest deus to ever machina.

3) Female character? What female character?

Pepper Potts, Peggy Carter, and Jane Foster have all been given a chance to shine outside of being just love interests, but the MCU is also full of characters like Sharon Carter, who exist just to kiss Captain America in a pointless and really gross thirty-second scene. Rachel McAdams’ Christine Palmer falls squarely in the Sharon camp. She waits offscreen twiddling her thumbs until Doctor Strange has a use for her, after which he immediately ditches her again. They don’t even have a scene together during the last half hour, because the film completely forgets she exists. It’s a massive waste of a talented actress.

Speaking of…

Yeah, as much as I love me some Tilda Swinton, she’s not up to much here other than some exquisitely timed gags. She’s trapped in an Obi Wan Kenobi role, devoid of all personality other than “wise and mysterious,” and the way the movie plays the reveal that The Ancient One is a woman (eek!) is so painfully 90’s. And then the score sounds like it was ripped straight from an 8-bit Legend of Zelda game. I know that’s not related, but this review is winding down. I had to get it out there.

A lot of Doctor Strange is frustrating or mediocre, but since when has any Marvel movie been much different? The gags this time around are remarkably funny, even a bit of slapstick comedy that couldn’t have worked in any other context, and there are two genuinely terrific action setpieces: one an astral battle in a surgical suite, the other a fight through a city street as time races backwards.

Doctor Strange makes some very interesting choices in its presentation and its surrealist aesthetic, and these manage to redeem its severest flaws. It’s another fun popcorn superhero movie, and I guess I’m OK with that.

TL;DR: Doctor Strange is a forgettable superhero flick spruced up with some cool surreal imagery.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1015
Reviews In This Series
Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

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

Globe Theatre

Year: 2015
Director: Tom McCarthy
Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams
Run Time: 2 hours 8 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

For a while, the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar was a little film called Spotlight, directed by the guy who made the second most recent crappy Adam Sandler movie. (Whether or not you worked on a slasher, I will dig those skeletons out of your closet.) Seeing as how Oscarbait heavyhitters and Brennan Klein get along about as well as the Brody family and great white sharks, I didn’t immediately rush out to see it.

However, during a harebrained attempt to screen all the nominees before the Academy Awards, I found myself at a late night screening of Spotlight. Lo and behold, it wasn’t as tortuous as I imagined it might be.

Even taking into account my allergy to true stories.

Spotlight is a dramatization of the real life reporters who uncovered the molestation scandal in the Catholic church. Geez, when will Tom McCarthy stop making these light-hearted comedies? Spotlight is the name of the crack investigation team of the Boston Globe, which has just been bought out by the Times, bringing new editor Marty Baron (Live Schreiber) to the table. As a non-Bostonian and therefore non-Catholic, he pretty quickly sniffs out a rat in a recent hushed-up spot of drama in the local church. He decides to shine Spotlight on the case.

Thus three reporters, the work-obsessed Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), lapsed Catholic Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and guy who won’t get into the Oscar reel Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), as well as their editor Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton, who probably feels demoed, because he has the sidekickiest alter ego name ever written) get embroiled in the scandal and soon discover that there is corruption in the church that rises all the way to the top. They seek out victims of molestation and proof of the church’ negligence toward addressing the problem while facing enormous pressure from the church and the community to back off.

But if there’s one thing I learned from just Like Heaven, it’s that Mark Ruffalo doesn’t back off from ANYTHING.

Spotlight really is quite good. It’s a crisp, efficient film with a brisk pace and a quiet charm. I suppose that’s a counterintuitive way to describe a movie with such dark subject matter, but Spotlight goes very far out of its way to defang the material, honing in on the nitty gritty of journalistic investigation rather than the actual horrors behind closed doors. It wants to be a triumphant film rather than a bleak one, and the safe packaging of the scandal might make it a far less urgent and necessary piece, but it’s at least a palatable one.

Palatable is about all Spotlight is, but it does it very well. Other than effectively recreating the overlit hubbub of a newspaper office (you know this is a period piece because newspapers are still hiring), the cinematography only makes the leap into greatness once, during a shot of an interview dominated by a hulking church, which drives home the sense of creeping oppression the film strives to build. The rest is completely adequate, but it matches Spotlight’s true nature: a standard retelling of an important story rather than an essential work of cinema art.

Every element of Spotlight functions like this: bright, strong, and utterly typical. The music is jaunty, inviting, and appropriately somber when the time comes. The editing gets us from scene to scene at a steady clip. The characters are brutally functional, their lives outside of the office painted in brush strokes ten feet wide. It’s as precise and impersonal as clockwork.

Remember analog clocks? That really takes me back.

The most human aspect of Spotlight is, quelle surprise, the performers. Keaton, McAdams, and James perform roughly what is expected of them and Ruffalo gets his opportunity to shout his way into an Oscar nomination, but the real beating heart of Spotlight lies in its peripheral characters. Liev Schreiber manages to humanize a rather stifling archetypical role (the perfect, unflagging voice of reason/mentor) by exposing his nerves and flaws through vocal tics and precise control over his tone, and Stanley Tucci devours a rather meaty role even further on the sidelines. But the real driving force of Spotlight is the ensemble of relative unknowns portraying adult survivors of molestation. Without their commitment and talent, the emotional core of Spotlight would be null and void.

So, Spotlight has plenty of ups and plenty of downs, though the lower threshold of its downs is still pretty high. It’s a clean, safe presentation of a taboo topic and a showcase for performances just begging to be nominated. But does it deserve Best Picture? Oh, hell no.

TL;DR: Spotlight is an efficient and brisk film that never flags, but isn't exactly an artistic masterwork.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 816

This Is Your Captive Speaking

Year: 2005

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Again, let’s revel in our newfound post-Halloween freedom by continuing our post-mortem exploration of he late, great horror maven Wes Craven. As I set out to watch my way through the portions of his filmography that I hadn’t seen or reviewed before, I realized that most of the ones I missed, I’d missed for good reason. Part of why I admire Craven is the fact that he pushes himself to new horizons, even if he is trapped into the horror genre thanks to Hollywood’s compulsive pigeonholing. That experimentation resulted in some gems and some duds, but I always say you’re not growing as an artist if you don’t produce a few clunkers.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I particularly want to be exposed to the clunkers, however philosophically stimulating they may be. But even if I’d already cleared the shelf of out-and-out classics before Craven’s passing, he still left some nuggets of inimitable genre filmmaking behind to refresh the intrepid completist. One such nugget is Red Eye, a star-studded thriller from 2005 and his last feature film of the 2000’s, to be followed by just two final efforts in 2010 and 2011: Scream 4 (a shallow but underrated franchise film) and My Soul to Take (uh… I’ll get back to you on that one).

I try to focus on the positive things in life.

Lisa Reiser (Rachel McAdams) is the manager of a prominent Florida hotel. When a high-ranking government official comes to stay with his family, she rushes from her hometown (where she was attending a funeral) on a late night flight so she can properly accommodate him and his security contingent. Unfortunately her plane is delayed and that duty falls to her anxious coworker Cynthia (Jayma Mays, who is the adorable love child of a puppy and a field of daisies). Lisa meets follow passenger Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), who strikes up a hesitant flirtation.

She quickly learns that y0ou should never trust anyone with the cheekbones of a cadaver, because when the plane takes off, Jack reveals his true intentions. He tells Lisa that, if she doesn’t pulls strings and get the politician to transfer to a specifically targeted room, his agent will murder her father (Brian Cox, the original Hannibal Lecter from Manhunter, who loads around even more than the cellbound cannibal). Thus begins an epic cat and mouse game played on the smallest of scales –a  cramped airplane cabin.

Murder threats are still preferable to screaming babies though, to be honest.

If Music of the Heart hadn’t bowed its way into theaters in 1999, I’d say Red Eye was the most atypical Craven flick yet. A thriller without a whiff of the supernatural (or Craven’s dietary staple of dream sequences) and largely free from gonzo gore, it might still technically be a genre flick, but it’s about as similar to The Hills Have Eyes as Lady and the Tramp. As we’ve learned, Craven would have given his left foot to do another movie that wasn’t horror, and he knew this was one of the last life preservers floating toward non-genre shores. With that in mind, he really put his all into creating the best thriller procedural he could, and it shows.

Without a Craven-penned script, his personality is a little less evident in the film itself, but Red Eye is nothing less than a perfectly functional nail-biting thriller. It’s a well-oiled B-movie machine, performing its job to a T and bleaching every last shred of color from your knuckles in the process. From its unassuming opening credits to its bloody finale, all Red Eye wants to do is get in, jangle some nerves, then jet the hell outta there, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

But there is something wrong with people who don’t think twice when a Cillian Murphy character comes on to them.

Red Eye is all about setups and payoffs, with nearly every element in the first act coming into play by the closing credits. This Rube Goldbergian plotting keeps the audience engaged, constantly guessing the next way Rachel Madams will attempt to MacGyver her way out of the situation. It’s clever, satisfying, and frequently intense.

These are perhaps two of the most accomplished actors Craven has ever been afforded the chance to work with (well, them and Meryl. And Johnny Depp’s midriff), and he takes full advantage of their range, maintaining a seething emotional undercurrent beneath the crackerjack thrills. The characters might not be totally three-dimensional, but at the very least they’re two-and-a-half-dimensional, and they sell every twist and turn, even in the strangely distended final twenty minutes. 

The film’s pace never flags, even during the Birds-esque opening sequence that reties to trick you into thinking you’re watching a romantic comedy, or perhaps The Notebook Part 2: We Couldn’t Get Ryan Gosling, and though it’s hardly Oscar-worthy cinema, that is an unequivocally good thing. Red Eye is a taut, tense, no fuss no muss thriller. It’s so efficient, it could have a slot on the infomercial channel. If you want a simple, rip-roaring good time with a sprinkle of heart and a dash of political drama, look no further. Just make sure you buckle your seatbelt before you take off.

TL;DR: Red Eye is a taut, streamlined, nail biting thriller.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 905

The City Of Love

Year: 2011

Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

Sergio and I have a sort of deal worked out. Whenever I force him to watch one of my idiosyncratic movies (most recently, the superbly deranged American Gothic) he gets to pick one of his. Call it cinematic karma. It's also a great way for me to catch up on films that I missed that I never might have seen otherwise. This Fourth of July's pick was Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

Now I'll admit this film isn't catering to my tastes but Sergio, ironically being a better film student than Yours Truly despite studying Econ, does know how to pick 'em. Only the second Woody Allen film I've seen (See? I'm a terrible film student), Midnight in Paris does an excellent job of creating a mood of lush romanticism even if it isn't equally good at anything else it does.

It's hard not to make Paris look stunning. You could literally just point your camera at a trash can for 40 minutes.

Opening with a solid three minutes (About 3% of the total run time) of Parisian scenery, the film exposes its loyalties at the outset. Midnight in Paris is first and foremost a love letter to Paris, France, only reluctantly operating as a narrative out of a sense of duty, being a 90 minute feature film and all.

It tells the tale of one Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a successful Hollywood screenwriter who is visiting Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her bourgie parents. He falls in love with the city and wants to move to Paris while he works on his novel about a man who owns a nostalgia shop (a wafer-thin analogue for himself, a self-professed adorer of Paris in the 1920's).

Inez and her parents object, largely because they view Paris as a tourist destination where one can shop and lord their pseudo-intellectualism over one another, as embodied in the outrageously smarmy Paul (Michael Sheen), a friend who runs into them during their stay and acts as a sort of tour guide / permanent douche installation.

An unfulfilled Gil goes out walking one night and discovers an old fashioned car that comes by every night at midnight, transporting him to the city's heyday in the 1920's where he can cavort with such grand historical figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston - a strange choice but he does a good job of it), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll -all glowering menace), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates - terrific, but hardly reaching), and a rhinocerous-obsessed Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody - who absolutely delivers in what hardly even amounts to a cameo).

I know it's authentic, but is that hair really necessary?

Every night, Gil returns to the Roaring Twenties as he grows increasingly detached from the shrewish Inez, who is such a one-note harpy that it's ridiculously difficult to believe that their relationship could have even sustained itself this long. Don't shoot the messenger, blame the screenwriter. He begins to fall in love with a girlfriend of Picasso's, Adriana (Marion Cotillard) whom he meets when delivering his book to Gertrude Stein to be proofread.

Thus begins a cross-dimensional love triangle with the singular theme that, no matter where or when you are, it's easy to become fixated on the past and romanticize bygone eras out of proportion of their actual merits. This is certainly a valid theme, especially when applied to this narrative structure, but the meandering plot supports no structure but the creation of mood.

Now, a solid mood is a great thing for a film to have, but without much more to back it up, Midnight in Paris won't be ending up on my DVD shelf anytime soon. It's a tremendous accomplishment, but one that doesn't resonate with me personally as much as it would with others. Myself, I prefer a film to provoke more precise responses in the audience rather than a general romantic blanket, as visually represented by the copious yellow filtering thrown over the entire project - a quick peek through my Instagram indicates that the cinematographer was most likely using "Kelvin."

This is the kind of in-depth cinematic insight that keeps you coming back for more.

A brief glimmer of conflict flashes across the screen at the one hour mark, but flits away as quickly as it appears. Because this film isn't about conflict. It's about love. Love for a person, love for a city, love for a bygone age. And in this respect it is tremendously successful.

It is my personal opinion that the screenplay is a tad self-indulgent and messy (Including an excerpt from Gil's book that is supposed to impress us - always a risky move for a screenwriter, trying to come up with something profound and literary. Because Woody Allen is Woody Allen he thinks he can do whatever he wants. It falls short. Turns out, writing books is hard.) and falls apart a little when you stop to think about why Gil's car takes him 90 years in the past, but Adriana's only takes her 30, or how Gil professes to come from the 2000th millenium.

But those are all cruel nitpicks of a film that, overall, isn't about any of those things. It's not about the mechanics of the time travel or the intricacies of the story. It just wants to present gorgeous Paris in all its splendor over as many eras as it can, and at that it is an unparalleled work in this decade.

TL;DR: Midnight in Paris is a solid mood piece and an endearing love letter to Paris.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 947