Popcorn Kernels: Smashing Pumpkins

In which we explore mini-reviews of movies I watched during the month of October, but weren’t quite important or horror-y enough to break their way into my scary movie-exclusive run of reviews.

Miss Bala

Year: 2011

Director: Gerardo Naranjo

Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Noé Hernández, Irene Azuela

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A beauty pageant contestant accidentally witnesses a raid on a club and becomes embroiled in a Tijuana drug war.

I was quite excited to see Miss Bala. A Mexican thriller from producers Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, from the description I was imagining an edgy, female-led action romp that’s part Miss Congeniality and part Sicario. Of course, that’s not how the Mexican drug wars work. Unfortunately in its pursuit of grim, arty authenticity, Miss Bala completely eradicates any reason for it to exist.

If there’s one thing I hate in movies, it’s a protagonist without an ounce of agency in her body, and our beauty queen Laura Guerrero is empty of almost everything else, too. We know nothing about her, save that she has a friend who pushes her to join a beauty contest. We can guess as to why she agrees, but one hypothetical trait does not a lead character make. Laura is an empty plastic bag drifting through this movie, doing what other people tell her and consistently making the single dumbest choice it’s possible to make in any given situation. This is a chick who would order the salmon at a Denny’s if given the opportunity.

I get what they’re doing here. Laura is meant to be an innocent who is randomly swept up in the pure evil of the drug wars just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s not allowed an arc or a happy ending, because that’s the reality of it. Frankly, it’s a Halloween-esque storyline. That pure simplicity could have worked, but we need to understand more about Laura in order to sympathize with her plight. Unfortunately Miss Bala is an arid thriller that doesn’t allow any humanity to leak out.

Also the character motivations (both from the good guys and the bad guys) are incoherent, and the criminal plot is a sloppy mess, so Miss Bala is running on three flat tires. The opening act has a confused, frenzied energy, but as the story plays on and things don’t get any clearer, the film shows its hand: It really doesn’t know what it’s doing, and pretty much everything good is an accident. Then the pointlessly artsy lingering shots suffocate the film even more, as if it needed the help. It’s a damn shame that this movie utterly failed to meet its staggering potential, but they can’t all be winners I suppose.

Rating: 5/10

Death Proof

Year: 2007

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Kurt Russell, Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Two groups of girls are stalked y a psycho stuntman who commits murders with his tricked-out car.

I’ve seen the highlights of the oeuvre of one Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, what have you), but I’ve still seen far too few of his films, by some people’s accounts. I probably shouldn’t have rekindled that viewing with Death Proof, his contribution to the 70’s throwback double feature Grindhouse, which he created with Robert Rodriguez back in 2007. And no, I didn’t watch Planet Terror, but if you have a spare three hours handy, I would gladly borrow them.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a genre of film that Tarantino does not have mastery of, and that’s 70’s-style exploitation, which you think he’d fit into like a glove. But all his usual Tarantino-isms, which he applies liberally to Death Proof, are actively rejected by the genre like a bad transplant. First off, a key element he totally missed about grindhouse movies is that they’re short. The simplistic plot, which at certain points maps onto either the proto-slasher or rape-revenge genres is too elemental to be sustained for two f**king hours, especially when there are five minute swaths of film that so obviously could have been cut if he wasn’t so obscenely overconfident in his writing and his obnoxious cameo performance.

Speaking of writing… Tarantino is well-known for his dialogue, especially his long conversations laced with pop culture ephemera, during which he tosses all pretense of filmmaking to the floor and bathes in his own words for eight to ten minutes. This happens no fewer than four times in Death Proof, inflating the already punishing run time, and proving one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: Tarantino can’t write for women.

These conversational scenes have worked extremely well in his other films, but the dizzyingly high proportion of women in Death Proof mean that these scenes usually take place within a group of 3 to 5 females. When you’re a person who views that half of the population as giant pairs of feet with assess attached to them, it becomes difficult to craft compelling characters, which he fails to do ten times over, at one point literally forgetting about the existence of a girl who had – until that moment – held a major role.

Some of the dialogue itself is still fun taken on its own (although the single best line is beaten to within an inch of its life with ceaseless repetition), but these scenes drag the film’s already wonky pacing down like an anchor. And it’s not like the sole major male character, Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, fares much better. He’s given way too much to say, babbling like an infant in a way that completely undercuts his eventual menace. Russell does a great job of course, hamming it up to a pitch perfect degree in the gonzo grindhouse finale, but across the board this is probably the worst script Tarantino has ever written.

The feeling I’m left with after Death Proof is frustration, and I wish that wasn’t true. But after being pummeled with yet another of his overwritten black characters, endless conversation essentially using foot massages as a currency, and a scene with a cell phone that pointlessly derails its period authenticity for a subplot that never comes to fruition, who can blame me? There is good here, mainly in the kinetic sequences of violence that close out the film’s two distinct chapters, and a car chase that will have you biting your nails until your cuticles bleed, but just like everything else, they go on for waaaay too long.

Death Proof saps the energy out of itself at every turn, and as dearly as I want to like it, it’s its own fault that I can’t.

Rating: 6/10

Kristy

Year: 2014

Director: Oliver Blackburn

Cast: Haley Bennett, Ashley Greene, Lucas Till 

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A college student alone in the dorms over Thanksgiving break is targeted by a bloodthirsty cult.

Kristy is a Netflix horror movie if I’ve ever seen one. And I assure you, I most definitely have. Not quite a slasher, not quire a cultist film, not quite good, it is a film that clings to its own sorry existence by the skin of its teeth. But it’s reasonably entertaining and it’s free, so you might as well watch it.

By far the most interesting thing about Kristy is that it seems to genuinely still believe it’s the 90’s. There’s no winking throwback involved here, just a bunch of crop tops and an addiction to the wonders of modern gadgetry that seems to have missed the last decade or so of Apple press conferences. It’s odd that a movie that includes a crane shot clearly recorded by a drone (an exquisitely beautiful one, I might add, if a bit wobbly) should also insist that people still text like this: “U kil Kristy? ☺”

Its fabulously ill-conceived technobabble doesn’t stop there. Nor does it start there, as the entire opening is an exhausting slog through pixelated Darkweb nonsense that makes the webcam footage in Halloween: Resurrection look like 4K. Alright, after that brief detour to film nerd town, let’s get down to brass tacks. Kristy is a heaping helping of nonsense (apparently, by knowing Kristy’s phone number, the cult can hack 911?) but that has the unintended side effect of making it a pretty fun watch.

Kristy gets the job done in record time, never showing a full scene when a quick montage will do, and not overstaying its welcome by indulging in anything as ostentatious as a “theme” beyond the most superficial level. The crumpled tinfoil masks worn by the killers are pretty creepy, and although the film’s girl power finale is ruthlessly half-baked, it’s enough to have you rooting for her, even though her name isn’t even f**king Kristy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1469

A Real Stand-Up Guy

Year: 2014

Director: Chris Rock

Cast: Chris Rock, Rosario Dawson, Gabrielle Union

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

With the cinema of diversity, there's always a line being toed. Top Five is part of a massively important movement in fringe Hollywood, allowing non-white performers to take major positions in front of and behind the camera. Their continued success is vital in paving the way for change in a rigidly biased economic and artistic system. That said, anybody of any race can make a film with wan comedy, meandering storylines, and an unskilled aesthetic, and that is unfortunately exactly what has happened here.

When your film literally opens with outtake footage, it's hard to care a tremendous amount about the structure of the rest of it.

Chris Rock's third directorial feature stars himself as Andre Allen, a washed-up comedian and recovering alcoholic who is struggling to turn his wacky film career in a more serious direction. His impending wedding to reality star Erica Long (Gabrielle Union) is weighing on him, as an eternal commitment to a shallow materialist broadcast nationwide is wont to do. When he is paired up with Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), a reporter with a heart of gold, they stroll around the New York streets together experiencing a series of comic-lite vignettes while she interviews him about his his career hopes, dreams, and fears.

Throughout their day together, Chelsea and Andre learn a lot about each other and their relationship deepens as they visit a series of cameos who pop in and out for a scene or two. There is the constant looming threat of the wedding two days from now and the bachelor party that night, but other than that there is next to no narrative drive at all. It's the Once of ensemble comedies.

It's perfectly fine for movies to be in this more relaxed register (read: Once), but the largely improvisational structure of Top Five leads to some jarring continuity in the editing, and the film as a whole really isn't funny enough to sustain the format for longer than ten minutes at a time. There are some pristine moments to be sure, including a series of interviews, a couple fantastic stars playing themselves, and any moment where Rock is actually allowed near a comedy stage, but the rest is tepid, blah, or grossly prejudiced.

You mean a movie about vapid reality stars, hoes, and closeted gays who just crave a good fingerbang is misogynistic and homophobic? What?

When it's not being actively gross or offensive (J. B. Smoove plays a character whose entire personality is based around him aggressively catcalling overweight women), it's indulging in underwhelming chatter between actors who have admittedly solid chemistry, but nothing much of interest to say. Most of these guest players are other stand-up comedians taking day trips to the set, with varying degrees of success.

Sherri Shepherd and Leslie Jones shine in brief roles, but Tracy Morgan looks like he's so bored, he decided to astrally project his consciousness to a theme park while he recited his lines. The leads are similarly mismatched. Rosario Dawson keeps the reality of the film in check with a solid, down-to-earth performance, but Chris Rock turns in a piece of work that I can only assume stems from a family crest that reads "When in doubt, bug out your eyes and shriek."

He settles into his role by the halfway point, as does the cinematography (which up until this point, leans heavily on a quasi-documentary handheld aesthetic that looks more like reality TV by way of the SyFy network), and the movie is generally more enthusiastic about its characters from that point on, but it's a slog to get there.

At least we can gaze upon Dawson's rad as hell haircut during the slower moments.

Perhaps one of the most inhibiting elements of the film is the score. When it's not endlessly repeating co-producers Jay-Z and Kanye West's single "N*ggas in Paris" like a surly white teen with tattoos on his knuckles is in charge of the jukebox, it's bleating music that wouldn't be out of place in a hotel elevator. I'm pretty sure I was put on hold to one of the songs when I called Jamba Juice customer service (don't ask). It reduces the tone of the whole thing to that of a crackerjack commercial.

It's a pleasant enough film to watch, but it's utterly inconsequential. The narrative beats are relentlessly predictable, nothing of much import happens, nothing of much humor is said, and even the title is halfhearted. "Top five" refers to a game Andre and his friends play in which they list their five favorite rappers. I imagine this particular diversion gets old after the first round, and it's a lackluster choice for the film's namesake.

Although perhaps it's perfect, because the film as a whole is pretty lackluster too.

TL;DR: Top Five is underwhelming, dull, and occasionally offensive, though it's not grating to watch.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I'd think not.

Word Count: 843