The Ghost And Ms. Moretz

Year: 2014
Director: R. J. Cutler
Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Mireille Enos, Jamie Blackley
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

If you, like me, have existed inside a movie theater during the year of 2014, you have almost assuredly seen the trailer for If I Stay a minimum of three times per visit and been equally perplexed about the plot of the film each time you gazed upon its choppily-edited facade. Fear no more, gentle readers! For I have ventured into the dark and dangerous chasm of YA cinema to extract that very knowledge for you today.

The things I do for you people.

As (bad) luck would have it, If I Stay is based on the novel of the same name by Gayle Forman. Though I suppose part of the blame should fall on screenwriter Shauna Cross, Forman's experience writing for magazines like Seventeen and Cosmopolitan in no way prepares her to pen anything other than the insipid teenage wish-fulfillment turkey that the film turns out to be.

The plot goes like this. Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a Portland teen with the world at her feet. She's a talented cello player awaiting a letter from Juilliard, her parents - Kat (Mireille Enos) and Denny (Joshua Leonard, recognizable to three cool people as the freaking guy from Blair Witch, how did that happen) - are absurdly lax and supportive, and she had a cool rocker boyfriend named Adam (Jamie Blackley). Although things have been tough with him since he graduated a year ahead of her, she still has a lot to live for.

Until, suddenly, she doesn't. While driving on an icy road, a car accident wrenches her family away from her and she becomes trapped in limbo, watching as hospital workers, relatives, and friends gather around her comatose body, unable to interact with the world or the people that love her. Thus begins a struggle to decide whether or not she should continue living in a world so scarily new to her, mostly told through useless flashbacks.

Absolutely, 100% the key moment you want to be mulling over when deciding to live or die.

The biggest problem with the film is that the storytelling is absolutely, functionally useless. The hospital scenes and random flashbacks (which, I might add, never add information to the story, only fleshing out things we already know from the first scene) are carelessly lumped together like the contents of a toy box. Although for pacing reasons I'm glad that the car crash happens early in the film, there is no narrative drive for any of the flashbacks to occur. They just sort of fart across the screen at random while Mia wanders around the hospital in varying states of ennui, never actively attending to her survival or even wondering just how she got in this position and how she might get out.

There is never a sense that, if she made the conscious decision to keep living, she could actually figure out how the hell to make that happen. The flashbacks that fail to comment on her current situation are just another nail in the vacuous coffin. Also the movie was very clearly not filmed in Portland, but that's a pointless thing to be enraged about in the face of such a gargantuan wall of film-breaking flaws.

Yet watch me continue to be mad. I'm a rebel like that. 

Where do I even begin? How about the arch, self-consciously cool dialogue that slams the audience with purportedly meaningful voiceover (because however could anyone possibly display such heaving literary emotion through a visual medium?!) and dire metaphors about sex and classical music? Yeah, that's a good starting point. There's nothing better than a bland teenage protagonist practically getting down on her knees and tearing out her hair, begging with us, pleading with us to please just notice how damn cool she is.

I get it. You're a loner. Your taste for classical music makes you an outsider in your rock-loving family. But that doesn't mean I have to be subjected to dialogue so terrible it sees the need to explain in excruciating detail what exactly a Juilliard is, or how you always thought of a cello as a solo instrument until some speckly boy showed up in your life. I hate to break it to you, but there's such a thing as an orchestra. You'd think you'd have heard of one what with owning all that super cool classical music which you love to complain that nobody else listens to.

And this may just be the writing, but the central romance is like my post-high school education: no chemistry. Moretz does a fine job in her performance overall, but she can't find a foothold with Blackley, who sighs out his lines like he's in the midst of a deep sleep.

What more can I say? If I Stay is entertaining enough as a trashy teen soap, but the plot structure actively mutinies against itself, the writing is ear-gougingly annoying, and there is nothing at the center holding it all together. It's not even worthy of being forgotten. It's just an utter nothing of a film, not offensive enough to make a fuss but not remotely good enough to waste your time on.

TL;DR: If I Stay is not worth the salt in all the tears you won't cry over it.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 901

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Year: 2014

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Julianne Moore

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Well, that was unexpected.

No, not that Suzanne Collins' third Hunger Games book, Mockingjay was adapted into a film. That was inevitable, especially after The Hunger Games and Catching Fire nabbed the 7th and 6th highest opening weekends in box office history. Nor was it unexpected that they would split that film into two parts. Twilight and Harry Potter proved beyond all doubt that, despite the format's limitations, it's a surefire box office bonanza. What's unexpected is that Mockingjay - Part 1, an adaptation of the worst half of the worst of the three books, is kind of awesome.

And not just because of the Sexy Lumberjack District.

While the book itself was a bit of a snooze, Mockingjay - Part 1 brings its best elements (namely, the scenes of rebellion) to the forefront and reduces its worst (Katniss's endless emotional outbursts which ring true to a teen girl's responses to a traumatic situation, but murder the pacing in cold blood), both by nature of being a visual, rather than written medium. 

While this is done without any real technical distinction save for a few moments, this turns Mockingjay into an emotional barrage, perfect for capturing the tone of this film's shift in genre from its predecessors. Where The Hunger Games and Catching Fire were bleak and dystopian and child-murdery, they couldn't even hold a birthday candle to Mockingjay, which is nothing more and nothing less than a brutal war film.

So, yeah. This film picks up where the last left off. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) was busy hungry gaming for the second time when she broke the game's force field and was whisked away to District 13 - a rebel safe haven long thought to have been abandoned. Ousted gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman in his final film role) has teamed up with District 13 President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) to rebrand Katniss as the Mockingjay, a symbol behind which the disparate districts can unite in opposition to the tyrannical Capitol, led by the despotic President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland).

As Katniss explores the damaged districts with Gale (Liam Hemsworth), she battles her PTSD and harnesses her anger against the Capitol to inspire all of Panem. Although her goals are more singularly focused on the rescue of Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the Capitol's clutches, her words ignite the flames of war.

And the fervor of a thousand fanfictions.

As the skirmishes increase and the districts band together against the Capitol Peacekeepers, the film becomes a slamming gauntlet of war and civil unrest. Although it retains the violence-obscuring shaky cam of the earlier films, Mockingjay largely casts away the YA trappings of the franchise to depict a grown-up, mature vision of a reluctant teen crossing into adulthood and finally realizing her responsibility to do all she can to fight the injustices that she has grown up with.

Looking at the news this week, the increased sense of social responsibility present in Mockingjay hits hard. That's all I'm gonna say about that, but this film came at the right time to (albeit slightly accidentally) be bold and shatter political boundaries, much more than it could have even a couple months earlier.

Every element of the film emphasizes the hard facts of war and injustice. Especially notable is the costume design, which actively denies the actresses of their typical level of makeup, stripping away the cinematic facade of normalcy and highlighting the bleak, unpolished reality of the situation. Although Capitol fashionista Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) finds a way to make a military jumpsuit her own, her costume is perhaps the most affecting, transforming a gaudy glamor queen into a pale shadow of her former self.

Though Lord help me, she makes it work.

Behind those simple costumes lies the powerhouse of Mockingjay. Elizabeth Banks outdoes herself as the garish spokeswoman stripped down to her essentials and Jennifer Lawrence gives the single best performance of her career as a shattered teen girl scrabbling for a kernel of hope in a colorless world. The rest of the acting is competent all around (although Natalie Dormer as Cressida the propo director is perhaps a little showy), but these two women really bring the house down, quite literally in some cases.

This visual bleakness is accented in the score with a dazzlingly simple composition by James Newton Howard with lyrics pulled from the book itself - "The Hanging Tree." This song of rebellion spreads like wildfire from district to district, eventually being pulled into the underscore itself in one of the most well-composed sequences in the film.

Luckily, side characters like Banks and Woody Harrelson as Haymitch provide brief moments of levity to protect Mockingjay from becoming a grand tour of humanity's most awful tendencies. I mean, this is a film in which the opening title is led in with the line "I wish we were dead." It's tough to watch - whether it's the bombing or the shooting or the sneak attacks or the ruthless propaganda, there's something to hit everyone's disturbed sweet spot.

I spent a great deal of time dithering over my numerical rating for the film because it's so much better than Catching Fire, but it lacks the intangibles necessary for me to rate it a 9. The visuals just aren't spunky enough for me to look at it as an astounding piece of cinema - although as a series of emotional beatings, it's top notch. So take that 8 with a grain of salt, knowing that I'd give it a half if I could.

See you next year when we can finally lay this franchise to rest with maybe the best entry yet? Until then, may the odds be ever in your favor.

TL;DR: Mockingjay - Part 1 is the best film in the franchise so far - and a harrowing emotional journey.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 989

Reviews In This Series

Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013)

Mockingjay - Part 1 (Lawrence, 2014)

Mockingjay - Part 2 (Lawrence, 2015)

Don't Wanna Be A Dystopian Idiot

Year: 2014

Director: Wes Ball

Cast: Dylan O'Brien, Aml Ameen, Will Poulter

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The room is cold and dark. You can hear others around you, murmuring in confusion. Through the gloom all you can see is slate gray walls, oppressive in their austerity. All hope is lost. Have you woken up in a dismal dystopia? A grim reminder of the path our society is implacably heading down?

Nope, you're in a movie theater in 2014. Every couple of months, Hollywood brings us some fresh hell conjured up from the seemingly inexhaustible pool of dystopian young adult literature, whether it be the relatively stately The Giver, the insipid and quickly forgotten Divergent, or this week's inevitable blockbuster Mockingjay - Part One (based on the most irritating portion of the most irritating Hunger Games book - a real recipe for success).

Our topic for the day is yet another of those films - September's The Maze Runner, which evens the scales by being almost confrontationally typical.

Each stone block represents another YA adaptation's corpse that this film pilfers from.

Typically, this is the part of the review where we complain about the liberties that the film takes with the book and how it bastardizes the original property's legacy. Take a deep breath. Find your center. Get ready for this fresh air. The Maze Runner is miles better than the book, actively improving upon its dreadful, leaden prose. 

Though it suffers from being stuck with the broad strokes of the source material (this being an adaptation and all), The Maze Runner largely reduces the book's infuriating Diablo Cody-lite slang and many of its conspicuously imbecilic plot beats. Also gone is its grating tendency to capitalize just about every noun with any shred of importance to the story ("Thomas walked down The Path toward The Tree to complete The Bathroomening."), though by nature of being a visual medium it would have done so regardless.

That said, The Maze Runner's still not a terrific story, weighed down as it is with paper-thin characters and a heaping helping of ass-stupid dialogue. But the ways in which it is monumentally better than the outrageously dire book are worth noting until the cows come home. And, this being a dystopia and all, the cow species has probably been wiped out so we have plenty of time.

Olly olly oxen free!

So. Thomas (Teen Wolf's Dylan O'Brien) wakes up in an elevator as it lifts him into a walled-off Glade. He has no memory of his life, nor idea of where he might be. He soon discovers that he has arrived at a Camp filled with boys led by the altruistic Alby (Aml Ameen). After an interminably lengthy time, the boys finally decide to explain what's actually going on, as far as they know.

Basically, every month one boy is lifted into the Glade along with supplies. They are surrounded by walls on all sides. Every day, a door opens up that leads into a Maze. There are people known as Runners who try to map the maze. Every night the doors close and the Maze is patrolled by Grievers, strange biomechanial flea-slug-scorpion monsters that are surprisingly not the worst-rendered CGI I've ever seen. Yadda yadda yadda, nobody survives the Maze. Because Thomas is a Special Flower, he is convinced he will be able to help the boys find a way out.

I really don't care to discuss Maze Mythology in detail with you all, especially because of how little gravity the Maze actually invokes upon the plot. What with it being in the Title and all, you might assume it would be a little more important than it eventually ends up being, but you would be woefully mistaken. So - the boys are trapped, Thomas only wants to help although he tends to muck things up even more, and we don't even get to see them explore the Maze all that much.

And there's not a David Bowie codpiece in sight.

The remainder of the plot tumbles through a variety of hoary Tropes including, but not limited to Give It To Them Yourself, a preponderance of Dream Sequences, a half-hearted Love Interest that is (exquisitely) tossed to the side almost immediately, and a "massacre" in which every boy with a name or a line of dialogue gets off scot-free. If I had a mind to pick at Holes, The Maze Runner would be more tattered than my favorite childhood blankie.

The writing is likewise quite nefarious, challenging audience patience as the characters try to decipher such arcane and mysterious Clues as "What does the note 'She's the last one' mean?" or "What could this metal device marked '7' possibly have to do with the eight zones labelled '1' through '8'?!?" Never mind the fact that the villainous Organization in charge of this whole affair is called - and I'm not kidding - "W.C.K.D." - affording us all the exclusive opportunity to hear the phrase "Wicked is good" repeated ad infinitum.

Although, again, Context is everything. Things don't seem so bad when you realize that in the book, the company was literally just called "W.I.C.K.E.D." with its own aggrieved Acronym to match.

Honestly, I'm pushing the screenwriters for an Oscar nod solely because they somehow made this trite garbage even a little bit more subtle.

At least The Maze Runner is shot competently enough, despite its obligatory YA reliance on Handheld Camerawork, even in long pans or insert shots where it really has no business being. There is a nice reliance on blackness in the editing, mirroring the opening and closing of the mysterious walls surrounding the boys. The production design is expressive and expansive, effectively evoking what a lived-in community run by teen boys might theoretically look like. And the mostly-CGI Maze doesn't show a crack, allowing the viewer to be immersed in the world onscreen.

Perhaps the most consistently terrific element of the film is its Sound Design, which evokes the silent mystery of things that go bump in the night far better than the plot properly deserves. This keeps the tone in check, especially in the moments where it tilts into horror territory. And there are a lot of these moments, whether it be a nod at zombieism (don't ask), a Teen Graveyard, or a monster attack. It's actually rather Cabin in the Woods-y, an eclectic mix of tropes compressed together in a closed-off environment controlled by unseen forces.

So despite some flaws in the Acting (Kaya Scodelario - as the useless love interest - chomps around in a poor attempt to disguise the British accent clawing its way out of her tortured throat and Dylan O'Brien provides far too little motivation to augment the thinness of his character), at least The Maze Runner looks and sounds decent, which allows the other manifold Grievances to slide down much more smoothly. 

It also really doesn't hurt to have a couple attractive actors lying around.

The Ending - which ladles out a Tolkienian level of unrelated Exposition setting up the second film - is wildly unsatisfying, preventing the film from operating as an individual story with a contained conclusion. And the Reveal is bonkers, providing perhaps the most arbitrary and thoughtless villainous plan in cinema history including all the James Bond films.

Whatever happened to just a knife, some teens, and a little stage blood being enough?

It is typical of dystopian fiction to reveal a Flaw in our Society, one that could lead us into the world we see now. The Hunger Games has its stabs at class disparity. Most of the others (like Divergent and The Giver, from what I've read) espouse standing up for individuality in a sea of conformity. But The Maze Runner is as shallow as the Grave it dug for itself by allowing a second film to be greenlit.

It occupies the time well enough, preventing the two Hours it takes out of your life from dragging. And it's decent enough as a mechanical teenybopper thriller, setting up all the pieces and knocking them down in unsurprising but generically satisfying ways. But by stripping the bedraggled Genre of the one vital thematic piece that keeps it thriving, The Maze Runner prevents itself from rising above the muck.

All in all, The Maze Runner is not a Bad Film, though it's a supremely unnecessary one. Fans will certainly get a kick out of it (if they can manage choke down that prose and smile, this film will be like Citizen Kane to them), but the casual YA enthusiast might want to steer clear.

TL;DR: The Maze Runner is perfectly average low-grade entertainment that is at least better than the book it's based on.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1459

OK, OK, OK

Year: 2014

Director: Josh Boone

Cast: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Nat Wolff

Run Time: 2 hours 6 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Let me attempt to deflect some of the immediate criticism by positing that no, I in fact have not read the massively successful John Green novel upon which The Fault in Our Stars is based. Many would say that this fact might invalidate any negative opinions I have about the film to which I respond: bully. It's a movie. It should tell a story in its own right without the crutch of a couple hundred pages of YA Lit propping it up. 

This is a film with a built-in audience. Those who were fans of the book are almost invariably going to love the movie because it brings to life the things that have been floating around in their heads for years. This kind of wish fulfillment allows them to draw all sorts of entertainment value out of merely watching the characters they have spent so much time with come to life. There is nothing wrong with this. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a movie. That's what it's there for. But if you're a fan you're good to go, so why not skip this review?

Because things are about to get real ugly.

OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. At the very least, The Fault in Our Stars is an unerringly competent movie. It's never so bad as to stop being a decent diversion, but it hardly ever seeks to be more than that. The director exists only to bring the plot from point A to point B, not getting in the way of things with stuff like "style" or "flair." Perhaps the greatest indicator of this films lack of commitment to visual creativity is the default generic color scheme it adopts, all Teal and Orange and no Joy.

She provides the orange.

Although every beat of the plot feels well-worn and familiar, why don't we go through the motions anyway and synopsize a bit? Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) is a young woman suffering from cancer. She spends her days unfulfilled and waiting for death until she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) in a support group. Their full names are wildly important. I know this because they see fit to repeat them to each other at every opportunity like they get a nickel every time they sneak a surname into the dialogue.

Anyway, Augustus Waters changes Hazel Grace Lancaster's life and perspective with his gung ho worldview and optimistic confidence. She resists at first, but is inevitably drawn into his charm, thus beginning an epic and brief love affair in which they get as much as they can from the world before it takes them away for good. Although the details are different, this is a dyed-in-the-wool teen romance with only a singular plot point that can't be detected from miles away.

And there's a certain comfort in this. There's a reason people keep coming back to these types of movies. But the filmmakers use it as an excuse to truncate certain emotional developments with the assumption that genre fans will already be able to intuit what's going on. This is a big flaw. Sure I can understand  at an intellectual level why Hazel Grace Lancaster is yelling in one scene, but I'd rather have it build naturally from the storyline and characters instead of ramping from Zero to Bad Girls Club in the blink of an eye.

Don't be misled by the smiles. They'll be screaming at each other in a few seconds.

One of the most intriguing (and the most damaging) elements of the film is that Augustus Waters must be one of the first ever examples of a Manic Pixie Dream Guy. For those of you unfamiliar with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl cliché, check out this TV Tropes article. Augustus Waters only exists to provide an emotional turning point for Hazel. He is cheery, relentless, and... kind of a dick.

Perhaps I'm the only person in the world to see things this way but I'm OK with that. And let's be clear I am speaking from an utterly personal level, but at every turn in the first half of the film, Augustus Waters seems to be nothing other than condescending ("It's a metaphor"), pushy, and overwritten. The movie in general can't escape the overwhelmingly booky feeling that suffocates the dialogue, but he shoulders the worst of the burden. The only thing I have to ask is: Is this what people want?

His overly wordy diatribes and his dogged persistence in pursuing Hazel Grace Lancaster (whom he insists on calling Hazel Grace instead of Hazel in a move which I assume is supposed to seem puckish but comes out rather douchey) does nothing for me and in fact actively hurts the later moments in which he has softened and I am supposed to care about his feelings.

At least as written in this film, he is a colossally empty character filled with just enough generic "guy" traits to seem like an active personality. 

Also, who even wears leather anymore? #grumpybrennan

Elgort does what he can with the character and manages to slightly bring him around by the finale, but Woodley delivers by far the superior performance here. She's perhaps a little too sweet to deliver all the hard edges concealed within her dialogue, and both of them are far too hale and hearty to realistically portray disease-stricken teens, but she handles the copious lifted-directly-from-the-book narration with a grace and ease that it certainly doesn't deserve.

Now, let me make this clear. I am not saying the book is poorly written. In fact most of the symbolism and structure contained in these passages is quite lovely. But falling back on direct book quotation is the absolute laziest form of literary adaptation. I'm sure many of you have heard of the filmmaking aphorism "Show, don't tell." The Fault in Our Stars is all about telling us what it means rather than depicting it onscreen in any meaningful way. Frankly, it's too much fault and not enough stars.

And I'm used to my screencaps having way more blood and knives than these. All I'm finding is just PEOPLE. How boring.

One last thing before we go. Movies have been struggling to find a way of assimilating modern technology into their structure. This film uses the method also at use in Neighbors of superimposing emails and texts directly onto the screen. While it's absolutely important to incorporate the prevalence of screens into any depiction of modern society, we're not quite there yet. These texts are intrusive artifice that serve only to bring one out of the movie.

Also, it's really just not as emotional to watch someone text their boyfriend good news rather than say it in person. Or even over the phone. But hey, at least they're trying something new. We'll get there eventually.

All in all, The Fault in Our Stars is an adequate teen movie. It doesn't quite earn the tears it wrings simply by being about what it's about, but it is a fleet-footed and mildly entertaining film despite its lack of aspiration to transcend its genre limitations. Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters aren't the most interesting teens and their love story isn't the most resplendent in all the vale, but at the very least it does good on its promise to deliver soapy tragic romance.

TL;DR: The Fault in Our Stars is a middling romance but it's hard to hate.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I'd say pass on this one. If you really do desperately want to make yourself cry, steal a friend's HBO Go password and watch A Normal Heart instead.

Word Count: 1295