New Year's Resolutions: And Another Thing

Just when you thought it was over… My implacable backlog continues to grow, necessitating another slate of mini reviews.

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Year: 1999
Director: Trey Parker
Cast: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman
Run Time: 1 hour 21 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

The kids of South Park become obsessed with a vulgar Canadian movie, prompting a parental crusade against Canada that erupts into all-out war.

South Park: The Movie. It’s just like South Park the show, only bigger! If you like the show, you’ll love the movie! Otherwise, steer very clear. I could just end my review there, honestly, but I would like to take this time to commend Trey Parker and Matt Stone for being two of the leading musical theatre songwriters of our generation. That statement sounds less ironic following the success of The Book of Mormon, but the fact remains that the duo has been writing incredibly rewarding musical theatre essentially since their careers began.

In addition to ramping up the vulgarity and offensiveness of their show, the movie also expanded their fairly frequent lyrical moments into a full scale musical extravaganza that’s just as much Les Misérables as it is South Park. That is, if Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg had seen fit to include a truckload more F-bombs. With an endless array of catchy tunes including the Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada,” the über-catchy “What Would Bryan Boitano Do,” and the downright genius, reprise-laden “La Resistance (Medley),” SP:BLaU is legitimately one of the better original movie musicals of all time.

Fun music with a sharp political agenda is most certainly an ironclad reason to recommend South Park, although the plot sequences do lack a bit of the thrust required to render the film itself a true blue classic.

Rating: 7/10

My Soul to Take

Year: 2010
Director: Wes Craven
Cast: Max Thieriot, John Magaro, Denzel Whitaker
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Seven kids were born prematurely on the same night a notorious serial killer died. Now they’re being hunted down on their 16th birthday. Could one of them carry his reincarnated soul?

I love Wes Craven and end to appreciate his works, good or bad, but boy am I glad that My Soul to Take didn’t wind up being his final film. His first self-penned script in nearly a decade and a half, My Soul to Take certainly contains nuggets of his typically idiosyncratic ideas, but it flops in its execution. Craven is nothing if not a skilled storyteller, but as a 70-year-old man, it becomes understandably difficult to write teen dialogue and situations. His script is littered with sub-Diablo Cody slanginess and a nigh-on incomprehensible story flow. It’s like one of those arcade games where your quarter bounces randomly down the pegs, with every turn almost exclusively going somewhere unpredictable and frustrating.

There is a lot to dislike about My Soul to Take, all of which I heartily do. The killer is everything Craven’s villains never were: Vulgar, crude, and loudmouthed. The less hardcore mindset he acquired as he grew older is queasily unsuited to bring this character to life, and his direction leans a little too heavily on MTV-style quick flashes and arbitrary slomo. It’s a garbled mess with subtext that pretty clearly announces that he’d rather be out bird watching than working on this film. Every genius has their duds, and their willingness to try new things make my appreciation for them even stronger, but damn is this ever a flabby, sputtering dud if I ever saw one.

Body Count: 12

1. Sarah is killed offscreen.
2. Doctor is shot in the head.
3. Ambulance Driver explodes.
4. Kay is stabbed in the gut and tossed into the river.
5. Penelope has her throat slit.
6. Brandon is stabbed in the gut.
7. Brittany is stabbed to death.
8. Quinn has his neck broken offscreen.
9. May is killed offscreen.
10. Cop is stabbed in the back.
11. Jerome is stabbed in the chest.
12. Alex is stabbed in the gut.

Rating: 3/10

Jurassic Park III

Year: 2001
Director: Joe Johnston
Cast: Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Téa Leoni
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

Dr. Alan Grant is tricked into visiting Isla Sorna by a rich couple who want to save their stranded son.

So, the third Jurassic Park movie. This is the one that absolutely nobody talks about, so I was definitely apprehensive. Fortunately, no JP movie could be worse than The Lost World with its quiet bongo antics so I was in for a treat. I didn’t love it with quite the spittle of Friend Hunter over at Kinemalogue, but I certainly feel it doesn’t deserve its ignominy. It’s a popcorn flick through and through, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t worth a watch.

The stunning action setpieces that typically define these movies are back in full force, with a third act that leaps from stellar moment to stellar moment like stones across a stream. JPIII knocks its characters down, slits them up, drags them through the mud, attempts to drown them for good measure, and still comes back for seconds. It’s an exhilarating whirl, like being trapped in a washing machine. As an overall story it’s a little more generic, but it does the trick, bringing an estranged family together with the power of Amblin.

It’s got its action, a healthy sprinkling of comedy bits, a splash of theme about paleontology becoming defunct no that real life dinos are alive and stomping… There’s naught to complain about. It’s certainly tackier than the original masterpiece, and a talking raptor dream sequence is just about one of my worst movie watching moments of the whole year, but it’s a fun jaunt back into Crichton’s world, minus his heavy-handed political bleating.

Rating: 7/10

Getting Go: The Go Doc Project

Year: 2013
Director: Cory Krueckeberg
Cast: Tanner Cohen, Matthew Camp, Ramon O. Torres
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: UR

A college student pretends that he’s shooting a documentary to get close to a go-go boy he’s obsessed with.

I’ve always been a proponent of applying the found footage style to non-horror genres, so this low key vérite romance is right up my alley. Part Weekend, part Breathless, all pretentious, it’s an interesting look at modern romance without getting too obnoxiously hung up on that “modern” part. It’s not all treatises on social media and tech trends, but a human portrait of a relationship between two people who fundamentally don’t work together. One is obsessed with his perfect ideal, the other is confident enough to know not to change himself for a man.

Mostly just conversation-based, Getting Go could very easily have been a snoozefest, but a layered script and some colorfully innovative editing keep the pace brisk, save for a closing ten minutes that could really use a trim. The acting is a little rough, especially from the nonprofessional Matthew Camp, but the two leads have enough chemistry to smooth out most of the clunkier line readings. Getting Go lives in its silent moments, which let the dialogue-packed scenes settle into your brain with contemplative stillness. It’s no new classic, but it’s sexy, it’s stylish, and it has a great soundtrack. What more could you want?

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1207
Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)

Be As Thou Wast Wont To Be

Year: 2008

Director: Tom Gustafson

Cast: Tanner Cohen, Wendy Robie, Zelda Williams

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A

It is difficult for me to even begin discussing Were the World Mine without slipping into hyperbole. Despite its flaws - and any canny viewer may note that there are several - the film is the single non-horror movie most attuned to my preferences. In addition to being an aggressively stylish, gleefully campy, devilishy handsome, subtly meaningful film, Were the World Mine is above all most notable for two things:

1. It is a musical.
2. It is a gay retelling of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you are patently not myself. But although its core concept is immensely appealing to Yours Truly, the film has enough bulk to break through my bias and prove its wonderfulness in its own right. But I may not be as biased as it seems -Private Romeo, the gay version of Romeo and Juliet set at a military academy is conceptually perfect for me, but it's one of the only movies in existence that I turned off halfway through. And I've sat through all 82 soul-gouging minutes of The Outing. Hell, I've survived Bee Movie. I'm a veteran of this kind of thing.

I mean, scenes like this help, but the movie is legitimately good. Trust me on this.

The story revolves around Timothy (Tanner Cohen), a gay student who goes to an all-boys private school in a very conservative neck of the woods. He lives with his mother (Judy McClane) in a realistically worn-in house (I only note this because aren't we collectively getting tired of "poor" characters living in luxury in opulent palaces? We are the 99%! The part of the population who aren't fictive TV personalities.) as she struggles to find a job and pay his way through his education.

While the school's rugby team sees fit to bully him all day long, Timothy nurses a crush on their hunky captain Jonathon (Nathaniel David Becker) - his only classmate who actually seems to see him as a human being and not just a pincushion of relentless torment. Dibs on the band name. He is thrown into conflict with them more and more as they are forced to spend time together rehearsing the mandatory senior play. You win absolutely nothing for guessing what that play just so happens to be.

As is true of nearly all films on the LGBT spectrum, Were the World Mine has a disastrously low budget. The "living in a crackerjack box eating the shoes off your own feet" kind of low. But unlike just about every single glittering one of those other flicks, it turns that lack of means into an outright strength.

You see, when Timothy discovers a secret recipe hidden inside a magic script (did I mention camp?), he recreates the flower from the play. You know, the one with the juice that can make anybody fall in love with the first person they see? Put yourself in Timothy's position. What would you do with a flower like this if you discovered it in high school? He absolutely uses that sh*t to get Jonathon to fall in love with him and make all the rugby guys turn gay for each other.

The flower also gives them impeccable skill with a chrome makeup brush.

Rife with fantasy sequences and mystical forest dances numbers, the ambitious aesthetic of the film must have had the accountant tearing his hair out by the roots. But by using a trick harnessed in 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street of all things, these sequences gain their power from their homegrown design. Utilizing high school theater sets and costuming and reappropriating actors from the student body ensemble, the film at once saves money and unites the film under a singular theme.

Director Tom Gustafson's visual prowess is such that, even with these limitations, he manages to assemble dazzling compositions of color and light, utilizing the human form in his staging in a way that wouldn't be out of place in the most high-falutin', champagne reception, Sundance exclusive of art films.

Show me a gay movie at this budget with a frame even half as lovely as this eye-popping purple extravaganza and I will show you a lying charlatan.

But the best part about this quite literal high school fantasy is the message, taken from Midsummer itself. Though Timothy has his puckish fun with the young lovers, he learns that he is interfering with their true feelings, much in the way that they were with him. It is unusual that a gay film has a bifurcate message, but Were the World Mine pulls it off with aplomb, simultaneously depicting a "teach the town to be open minded" fable with a dash of "teach yourself the same thing." In this way, Were the World Mine is utterly human, embracing our flaws and pushing us all to change and be a little more forgiving in all regards.

It also doesn't hurt that the songs are hella rad.

With lyrics culled exclusively from Shakespeare-penned lines, Cohen's soaring falsetto, and an Eastern musical styling providing a tonal undercurrent, the music in the film is unutterably perfect, by far the most consistently satisfying and unimpeachable element of the movie as a whole. Whether it's perfectly capturing the feeling of "catching" in an audition after a wobbly start or the hellish sting of a broken heart, the music pumps the film with pure, unadulterated feeling.

And let us never forget that this aesthetic is SO.

DAMN.

PRETTY. 

(Also, that's Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda.)

Were the World Mine exists in a register halfway between camp and sincerity. But whether it's Ms. Tebbit (Wendy Robie), the zany English teacher appearing out of nowhere to spout hilariously stilted lines like "I'll note you in my book of memory" with the zeal of an older actress who has nothing to lose or a final moment that is reminiscent of The Great Train Robbery, the entire picture is utterly genuine. This renders the camp moments fun and the serious moments (especially the strain on the relationship between Timothy and his single mother) tender. Honestly, if I fully understood how Tom Gustafson managed this, I wouldn't be here writing about it. I'd be out there making the sequel.

And any doubts about the acting (Wendy Robie is an eternal gem, but Tanner Cohen has a little trouble shifting gears during the first act and the ensemble is occasionally dubious) are swept away with a tidal wave of style and pure musicality.

In spite of its strong style, there are a few intractable issues with the film, typically due to its low budget equipment. The sound in the exterior scenes is murky at best and the cinematography during the non-dazzling moments has a perplexing tendency to cut together a little roughly, like there wasn't enough coverage for certain particular moments.

But we takes what we gets with indie cinema and Were the World Mine is such an eminently euphoric fantasy film that its faults are occluded by pure joy. If you're not in the target audience for this dazzling film, you know who you are. But I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. Gay or straight, young or old, Simon or Garfunkel, this film has something for everyone and deserves to be appreciated far beyond its mild cult audience.

Also it's on Netflix, so you have no excuse. Go. Now. Let me know what you think. I hope you love it. And if you don't, well... If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended- that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.

Good night unto you all.

TL;DR: Were the World Mine is certainly beholden to some low budget indie movie flaws, but is next to perfect stylistically and musically.
Rating: 10/10
Word Count: 1323