Q2 Review Purge: Volume 3

You saw this coming, didn’t you? Underestimate my backlog once, shame on me. Underestimate my backlog twice, shame on YOU. Here’s the third and final (?) set of mini-mini reviews as I reboot my system and get back on track.

All About My Mother

Year: 1999
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Candela Peña
Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

After her son dies, Manuela travels to Barcelona to tell his father, helping an aging actress, a transgender hooker, and a pregnant nun along the way.

You might not be able to tell from that synopsis, but All About My Mother is pure Oscarbait through and through. There was a period in Almodóvar’s career where he was on his hands and knees begging for the Academy to take him seriously, and this film is smack dab in the middle of it. Naturally, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Always the staunch Oscar contrarian, I must contest that All About My Mother is far from the director’s best work (winners are rarely as good as their competitors, as evidenced by the fact that his masterpiece Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown lost to Pelle the Conqueror). Although there is some delightful comic relief from the talented transgender actress Antonia San Juan, the movie takes itself way too seriously.

While Almodóvar admittedly crafts some stunning imagers and weaves in a tapestry of parallels between the film’s wide variety of mothers, trying to find the line between reality and fiction, All About My Mother is one of Almodóvar’s few films that feels typical. It might push the envelope with its depiction of gender and sexuality, but it’s just an Oscar tearjerker, yanking its characters through sad sad situations so they can spout elegant monologues at the drop of a hat. Obviously it’s far from a bad movie (I don’t think Almodóvar has made one of those), but it just doesn’t make an impression, which is usually what he’s best at.

Rating: 6/10


Talk to Her

Year: 2002
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Rosario Flores, Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti
Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Two men become friends at a hospital while caring for their loved ones, who are both in comas.

If you thought All About My Mother was Oscarbaity, wait till you get a load of Talk to Her! A movie so wildly overbearing that even the Oscars were a little put off, shuffling it into the Best Original Screenplay category, it’s by far the least funny Almodóvar movie I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot at this point. What I admire most about the director is his ability to draw comedy from even the most dire of situations, but here he sets all that aside and doubles down on the sincerity, to muted effect.

It lacks the serene beauty of All About My Mother, though if anything its intricate web of metaphor is even more complex. The film is about transition and metamorphosis, two disparate halves coming together to form a whole. It maybe goes without saying that this theme results in the most f**ked-up Almodóvar relationship yet: the friendship between the lover of a female bullfighter and the lonely stalker of a beautiful young dancer. The queer overtones prevalent in his filmography are almost entirely absent, stripping away all veneer to showcase a story about two people bonding.

Unfortunately, Talk to Her trips over itself in the third act, pointlessly extending the plot for some melodramatic waffling. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence in Almodóvar’s work, but when it lacks so much of his signature style, it also lacks the charm that allows you to cling to the bull’s back. Talk to Her bucks and you go flying, which is an extremely disappointing outcome.

Rating: 6/10


The Lives of Others

Year: 2006
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Cast: Ulrich Mühe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch
Run Time: 2 hour 17 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

An East Berlin secret police agent tasked to bug the apartment of a suspected dissident finds himself wrapped up in the man’s life as he listens from the attic.

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and those who make historical movies are almost always talking about the present. It’s no mistake that The Lives of Others came out during the time of the Patriot Act and America’s surveillance controversy. And it’s certainly no mistake that the film is set in 1984.

The Lives of Others is a thriller about sitting down, about the sociopolitical intrigue that can change lives and enact deaths without stepping out from behind a desk. It’s a terrifying snapshot of a bleak reality that has existed, does exist, and will exist. In essence, it’s a very German film.

However, despite its dour setting and even more dour production design, dripping with greys and mottled greens, The Lives of Others is a story of hope. About the flowers that can grow in the cracks of the concrete. This is thanks in large part to Ulrich Mühe, whose stony visage captures every last chink in his armor as he learns that the people he has been victimizing are actual human beings. The Lives of Others is a terrifying film about bureaucracy and a reassuring one about humankind. It’s not often that something like that comes from a film set in historic Germany (unless Spielberg is involved), and The Lives of Others is a powerful break from the mold.

Rating: 8/10


Star Trek

Year: 2009
Director: J. J. Abrams
Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg
Run Time: 2 hours 7 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

The Star Fleet rebel James T. Kirk finds himself on a stranded student vessel facing the alien threat that killed his father.

I know it’s a popular joke to make fun of J. J. Abrams’ use of lens flares, but I’d never until now experienced them for myself. The legends were true. Star Trek 2009 is an ocular freak show. People have counted, there’s literally a lens flare every 12 seconds on average. It’s like standing on the red carpet at the Oscars for two hours. Every single heroic shot is marred by these hideous distractions. They even go off in quiet, indoor scenes with no discernible light source. The lens flares will make your eyes water far more than any of the drama.

But there’s a movie beneath all that digital tampering, so let’s talk about it. As an origin story for a franchise I have not one shred of nostalgia for, it does a decent job of telling its own story. This could be a movie about James T. Bumblefart overcoming great odds as a cadet, and it would still be a coherent, engaging yarn. And there would be even less reason for Zoe Saldana to be there, because Uhura’s extremely discomfiting romance with Commander Spock happens entirely backstage.

As an exercise in J. J. Abrams crashing his CGI action figures into each other, Star Trek is a fun popcorn adventure, if a little beholden to the Star Wars standby of having important battles take place over yawning chasms. There’s only one scene that reaches the dizzy heights of summer fun I was hoping for (Bones follows Kirk, injecting him with a variety of wacky vaccinations to stabilize him as he attempts to deliver an important message) as the film tends toward the over-serious, but it’s never dull.

And Chris Pine is honestly a terrific choice, giving young Kirk a frat boy braggadocio that puts his flaws on his sleeve while retaining his natural charm. Star Trek’s a swing and a hit, even if it’s not a home run. Those lens flares can rot in Hell.

Rating: 6/10


Mamma Mia!

Year: 2008
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Cast: Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried
Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

A young woman wants to invite her dad to her wedding on a Greek Isle. Only she doesn’t know which of three men it is, so she invites them all. Then they sing a bunch of ABBA songs.

The Mamma Mia! title card appears as a young girl runs screaming through a cloud of sparkles. That should pretty much tell you all you need to know about it. Mamma Mia! is loud, stupid, deranged, and I love it from the bottom of my heart.

While Mamma Mia! attempts to harness the glittery camp of attending a Broadway musical or a disco show, it frequently swings over the top into wholly unintentional bad-good delight, then back around the horn again into genuine fun. It spins around and around again between these two registers like a gymnast on the horizontal bars, afraid to let go and stick the landing. And stick the landing Mamma Mia! doesn’t, backloading about 90 ballads that suck the energy out of the third act, leaving it so ravaged that not even “Take a Chance On Me” (the most perfect pop song of the 70’s) can resuscitate it.

But despite its sputtering denouement, I love both angles from which Mamma Mia! approaches its content. For all the too-bright lighting that makes every location look like a sitcom set and the herky jerky variance in quality between the celebrity singers (Meryl Streep is at the top with a shockingly good belt, and Pierce Brosnan flounders at the bottom, sounding like Fozzie Bear in the middle of getting his tonsils removed) there’s a genuinely good vin running through it all, like the Greek chorus that resurrects an ancient form of theater to great effect, the bubblegum disco magic of “Super Trouper,” or the beach party sizzle that underscores “Lay All Your Love On Me.”

At the end of the day, Mamma Mia! is a movie that makes me sublimely happy. It is great and it is terrible, frequently at the same time, but it never stops being tremendous fun to watch.

Rating: Please don't make me do this. 7/10? 9/10? 5/10? 9/10. Don't hold me to that.

Last Night

Year: 2010

Director: Massy Tadjedin

Cast: Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington, Eva Mendes

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A wife and husband both find themselves faced with the opportunity to cheat while he’s away on a business trip.

Last Night is one of those ponderous indie dramas that’s so excessively low key it would easily have been a TV movie. Or a commercial. With minimal sets, a tiny cast, and an abundance of agonizing close-ups, there’s nothing that screams “feature film.” To be frank there’s nothing to look at whatsoever.

Much like Looking: The Movie, Last Night is mostly composed of a string of conversations rather than any real incident. This is fine, especially when the conversation is as thought-provoking as it is. But the inhuman frankness and eloquence of these conversations make it screamingly apparent that the dialogue is Written. Luckily the actors that perform this series of treatises are well suited to the job.

Keira Knightley and Guillame Canet are a better match than Sam Worthington and Eva Mendes (though Mendes shades a surprising amount of depth onto a thankless sex symbol role), but for the most part Last Night is well-delivered, if coldly intellectual drama.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1882
Reviews In This Series
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Beyond (Lin, 2016)

Mamma Mia! (Lloyd, 2008)
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (Parker, 2018)

Q2 Review Purge: Volume 2

You thought I’d finished clearly out my backlog with just five measly reviews? Ha! You underestimate my movie-watching prowess. We’ve got another set of hot ‘n ready reviews coming atcha.

Night of the Comet (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here. For the Scream 101 interview with Kelli Maroney, click here.)

Year: 1984
Director: Thom Eberhardt
Cast: Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Robert Beltran
Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

After a deadly comet reduces the world’s population to ash, two valley girls must fight their way through a silent LA filled with radiation zombies, crooked scientists, and shopping montages.

Night of the Comet is one of those great 80’s movies that has not only a towering high concept, but an intimate, human story to tell within it. While the idea of “valley girls vs. the apocalypse” is like bread and butter for trashy horror fans, NotC is much more than meets the eye. Its valley girl veneer is certainly mined for comedy, but there’s something intensely thoughtful pulsing beneath the surface of the film. These are two girls with a severely narrow worldview (“This happened everywhere? Like, even in Burbank?”) that are stripped of everything they took for granted and forced to face a cold, dead world.

The shallow creature comforts they pursue pale in comparison to survival and connecting with the few humans that still remain. It’s hilarious because it’s so bleak, but the emotions that well up from time to time, especially in Kelli Maroney’s striking performance and Mary Woronov’s world-weary acceptance of destruction, are completely earned for that very same reason.

But Night of the Comet, despite its surprising heft, isn’t a tearjerker. It’s a cotton candy blast lit with bright, sci-fi comic slashes of neon color. While I do wish it had the budget to take its perfect concept even further, it’s an intelligent, fun movie with well-drawn characters, masterful production design, and a hellishly witty script jam packed with instantly memorable one-liners.

Rating: 8/10


The Changeling (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1980
Director: Peter Medak
Cast: George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A bereaved composer takes up residence in a historical house that turns out to be haunted.

The Changeling is a very classical ghost story almost to a fault. Although the drawn-out, methodical scares pack a punch, sometimes the story lingers a little too much on the past. As our hero investigates the history of the house, the third act slowly unravels until it’s a feeble drama about two old men screeching at one another. Until, of course, it isn’t. The finale is the best kind of grandiose, plunging its low-key atmosphere into a shrieking inferno of special effects and frenzied, unpredictable editing.

While the third act swings from dull to gonzo, the first two are firmly set in traditional haunted house mode á là The Haunting. Though modern viewers may be numb to the effects of these scenes after decades of rip-offs and copycats, they’re expertly executed, with lurking camerawork suggesting an uninvited presence, sharp editing linking the protagonist’s tragic past to the history of the house, and an echoing, sinister sound design that will drives spikes of fear directly into your spine.

The two most startling sequences are birthed from this atmosphere: one the best séance I’ve ever seen, using performance and rhythm to scare rather than special effects, the other a subtle, lingering reaction shot that milks every last heebie jeebie out of something appearing somewhere it patently shouldn’t be.

Without talented filmmakers at the helm, The Changeling would be dry and predictable, but its perfectly crafted scares make it an indelible classic of the genre, even if the plot is a little been-there, done-that.

Rating: 7/10


Brokeback Mountain

Year: 2005
Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams
Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Two gay cowboys fall in gay love with each other and it’s very gay but mostly sad.

As a gay gentleman myself, it’s basically sacrilege that I waited this long to watch Brokeback Mountain. But you know what I almost never want to watch on an average day? A tearjerker about how super duper hard and sad it is to be gay. At least nobody gets AIDS, like in every other gay movie ever made.

So no, Brokeback Mountain is not in my wheelhouse, though it’s a terrific film. A sweeping romance that spans decades (as evidenced by Anne Hathaway’s chain of increasingly preposterous wigs), it highlights two fantastic performers working at the peak of their abilities. Gyllenhaal and Ledger are so credible and grounded in real emotion that this “gay cowboy” movie becomes a universal love story about passion, loss, and disappointing your parents.

Opening with what’s essentially a silent film about two men thrown together slowly developing respect for one another and culminating in a violently lustful act, Brokeback Mountain uses its epic sprawl to detail the impact that one encounter can have on an entire life. Two entire lives. Its scope is set as wide as the Wyoming sky, covering topics of class disparity, marriage compromise, gender warfare, and dozens more without breaking a sweat. Do I ever want to watch it again? No. But I know I will.

Rating: 8/10


Lust, Caution

Year: 2007
Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Tony Chiu Wai Leung, Wei Tang, Joan Chen
Run Time: 2 hours 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: NC-17

A Chinese actress working for the rebellion poses as the mistress of a cruel government official to draw him into an assassination, but falls in love with him in the process.

Ang Lee needs to hire a better editor. After converting the short story Brokeback Mountain into a sprawling epic, he has taken Eileen Chang’s novella Sè Jiè and stretched it on the rack until it’s over two and a half hours long. It does not serve the material well.

Sure, the opening hour is great. While Lust, Caution is an espionage picture about rank amateurs playacting rebellion until it gets too real, it’s a piano wire thriller with a soaring sense of danger and fun. But then it turns into – gag me with a spoon – a love story, and things quickly spiral out of control. Despite the best efforts of its talented leads, Lust, Caution fails miserably to make a case for these two actually falling in love. Their cold, S&M style liaisons might be rendered romantic with a Pedro Almodóvar or, hell, even a Clive Barker at the helm, but Ang Lee suffocates the film. He draws out the relationship far longer than it can be sustained and his relentless formalism keeps us at a constant remove from his characters’ humanity.

What I do admire about Lee’s work here is that the man knows how to craft a visual metaphor. The endless rounds of mahjong underscore our heroine’s constant awareness that she’s playing a high stakes game, and the latter half is sprinkled with shots that indicate how she’s feeling, even if the movie is too chilly to actually explicitly express it. Lust, Caution isn’t a bad movie, it’s just needlessly prolonged. It’s well crafted but empty, like a Ming vase.

Rating: 6/10


X-Men: The Last Stand

Year: 2006
Director: Brett Ratner
Cast: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry
Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

The mutant community is dived over a cure for the mutant gene, leading to an all-out war with humanity caught in the middle.

X-Men: The Last Stand, the third and final movie in the original cinematic X-Men chronology, has somewhat of a reputation for sucking hard. While I wouldn’t argue against the fact that it’s a tremendously silly potboiler, it’s hardly the worst movie ever made. It’s not even close to the worst X-Men movie ever made.

Yes, it has deep, fundamental flaws. The final battle is a rickety, one-liner-ridden disaster, and its secondary villain, Jean Grey’s dark alter ego The Phoenix, is both a botched pull from the comics and an egregious anticlimax. But people forget that silly movies can be fun.

I love me an unpredictable piece of cinema, and The Last Stand’s almost psychotic willingness to kill off its own characters is captivating. And the CGI is unforgivably crummy, but it provides a flavor blast of summer movie fun by upping the number of effects sequences to a delirious degree. Little comic touches in the script actually work, and two performers pull the beast back from the brink of destruction: Hugh Jackman and Ian McKellen. Jackman is a charismatic badass that provides Wolverine with gruff sympathy so well that he spackles most of the holes in his mothbitten plot. And McKellen is once again a crackerjack villain with a wounded human soul, relishing in his own dastardly ego while drawing from his Holocaust background to provide an actually powerful, compelling turn as Magneto once again.

There’s not a ton to praise about X-Men: The Last Stand, but it’s a sugar rush that only hurt your stomach a teensy bit.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1528
Reviews In This Series
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)

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

Reviewing

Year: 2016

Director: Andrew Haigh

Cast: Jonathan Groff, Frankie J. Alvarez, Murray Bartlett

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

I have a love-hate relationship with Looking, HBO’s gay slice-of-life dramedy series. While the low key atmosphere of the show has provided some of the network’s best material (season 1’s episode-long date focusing on just two cast members and season 2’s funeral are two masterpiece-level half hours), the ensemble is plagued by obnoxious characters (Agustín passed the torch to Patrick after season 1, but he’s still such a Samantha) and long stretches of aimlessness. And then I actually got paid to recap the second season on The Backlot, which tipped the scales a little more toward love.

Anyway, Looking conked its head on its low ratings and swiftly perished, but here’s the thing. HBO actually made good on its promise to conclude the series with a movie, which was greenlit in record time. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that the show’s executive producer who signed on to direct was indie darling Andrew Haigh, of the iconic gay film Weekend and last year’s Oscar-nominated 45 Years. At any rate, we got our movie.

I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, and I’m still not convinced that it really exists.

In Looking: The Movie, our lead character Patrick Murray (Jonathan Groff) returns to San Francisco after nine months. He left abruptly because he decided he needed some space to grow up a little (read: a lot) following a disastrous romantic entanglement with his taken boss Kevin (Russell Tovey) that threw a wrench into his blossoming relationship with the long-suffering Richie (Raúl Castillo), a perfect angel cursed to walk this blasted Earth. He’s in town for his friend Agustín’s wedding to Eddie (Daniel Franzese of f**king Mean Girls), which reunites him with friends Dom (Murray Bartlett), now running a successful chicken window, and Doris (Lauren Weedman), the sassy token straight lady, as well as… Richie and his alcoholic Social Justice Boyfriend, Brady (Chris Perfetti).

Cue lots of contemplative staring as Patrick navigates the weekend, having conversations about life, love, and how not to end up like your parents with a revolving door of old friends and new people he meets along the way. He claims to have learned a lot during his time away, and that he’s no longer such a self-centered neurotic.

But, who are we kidding, we know this is what’s going through his head any time somebody else talks about themselves.

Let’s get one thing out of the way real quick. This is hardly a movie. It’s a triple length season finale, and it does nothing to hide that fact. It would be impossible for a new viewer to zap this onto their screen from HBO Go and understand a single shred of what’s happening. It would be like starting Lost in the middle of that season where the island started time traveling for some reason. But is it a solid series finale? Of course it is.

Appropriately sending off this show that shied away from hyperbole at every turn, Looking: The Movie is neither the best of what the series had to offer nor the worst, though it skews firmly toward the “best” side. Typically plot-lite, it makes the most of its brief resurrection in terms of once again depicting the human experience in all its messy, sexy, disgusting glory. This could easily have been just another drab mumblecore movie about finding oneself and celebrating Doing My Own Thing in a vague, self-satisfied way. I mean, it IS about that, but it finds the human characters trapped in the amber of that particular subgenre.

Like Jack Nicholson in The Bucket List, Looking does a lot of things before it passes on, hitting the wall with every strand of philosophical spaghetti in the pot. It covers such a vast array of thoughts and feelings from a thirtysomething gay man that it’s almost dizzying, but from its immense specificity is born a universal truth. Every single person watching it, be they gay, straight, bi, old, young, drunk, whatever, will find something to latch onto in Looking. It’s a film that holds up a mirror to a black part of life that we’d rather not think about, but treats it with immense warmth and tenderness.

And all this is tucked inside a story with a protagonist so unstable, the film could literally at any moment smash cut to him having sex with whatever man, woman, plant, etc. he’s sharing the frame with at the time.

This movie would be nothing without its cast, though the side characters make much more impression than our main three friends. Patrick is still a bland cypher, Dom is given next to nothing to work with, and Agustín pulls something good out of his wedding jitters, but he’s stuck with the unenviable task of being the focal point for his friends’ hang-ups about relationships. The show has always had problems balancing its leads, and while they’re played well, this plot belongs to whiny ol’ Patrick as he greedily guzzles up the run time.

The true MVP here is, as always, the massively undervalued Lauren Weedman. Typically ignored because her character is only there to flavor a stew with too many carrots, Weedman once again effortlessly delivers an irresistible prickly charm that’s almost Bill Murray-ish while letting her stunted emotions and deep fear of happiness peep through the cracks. She’s marvelous, and while I wish she was given more chance to explore the range I know she’s capable of, she’s a satisfying, grounding presence here. Newcomer Tyne Daly (of Hello, My Name is Doris) is also superb, transforming a stock character (a city hall wedding officiant who bestows some Old Person Relationship Wisdom) into a three-dimensional, thoroughly relatable presence.

This deep understanding of what makes people tick courses through the film in even the smallest characters (save Brady, who contorts into a leering, one-note villain so we can root for Patrick, who proved in season 2 that he’s far from a worthy choice for Richie). This is perhaps best exemplified by Russell Tovey. He returns for only one scene, but it’s a doozy. The most unequivocal “bad person” in the series, here he throws everything out of whack with a subtly emotional performance that’s by far his best Looking work, bar none.

It’s telling that this part of the review is only discussing character, because that’s pretty much all Looking: The Movie has to offer as a piece of cinema. It’s still shackled to the small scale of television, even with a feature length run time. That’s not to say it’s not well put together. Quite the opposite. A scene in a club set to Perfume Genius’ melancholy ode to doomed romance “Hood” is one of the most indelible images Andrew Haigh has ever crafted. But Looking’s low budget and lower expectations hobble it a bit, preventing it from being more than just a very good TV farewell.

TL;DR: Looking: The Movie is a decent, satisfying finale for a show that had its share of problems.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1187

Chew Toy Story

Year: 2016

Director: Yarrow Cheney & Chris Renaud

Cast: Louis C.K., Eric Stonestreet, Kevin Hart

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I have a tenuous relationship with Illumination Entertainment. While I’m down to clown with some Minion mayhem from time to time, I’ve only truly liked one of their movies so far: Despicable Me. Its sequel would have joined the list were it not for the blatant racism and obsessive heteronormativity. And you couldn’t have paid me to go see Hop or The Lorax. I want to like this studio, I really do. I’m ready to see it thrive.

You see, there’s a sea change coming, and this will put Illumination on a path either to greatness or to ruin. We’re living in a post-Minions world. After the Despicable Me spinoff raked in over one billion dollars (that’s far from an exaggeration), these little yellow ragamuffins have become a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Illumination recognizes that they are sitting on what could be this generation’s Mickey Mouse, so they’re lassoing that bronco and seeing how far they can ride it. The Minions now inform the look and feel of the company’s entire output (including their studio logo, which highlights the “MIN  ION” in the company name), even appearing in a comic short preceding Illumination’s latest box office bulldozer, The Secret Life of Pets.

That’s the movie we’re here to talk about, and we shall. In one minute. The commitment to Minion style comedy and animation will make Illumination’s output a more coherent whole, which is definitely a good thing. But there’s an extremely high chance of them flying too close to the sun. What I’m seeing with Pets makes me extremely nervous. But only time will tell.

They’re already used up five of their nine lives, so they’ve got to be careful.

In The Secret Life of Pets, something in your home can secretly speak when you’re not looking! How novel! Those things in particular are pets, and our lead pet is Max (kid favorite Louis C. K.), a dog owned by Katie (Ellie Kemper). When Katie gets a second dog, the enormous mutt Duke (Eric Stonestreet), Max’s jealousy leads them into a fight while on a walk, which gets them captured by animal control. They embark on a long, arduous journey to get home, meeting a tribe of abandoned pets led by the sadistic bunny Snowball (Kevin Hart, who I’m pretty sure is contractually obligated to be in every movie ever made). Meanwhile, a rescue attempt is led by Gidget (Jenny Slate), a neighbor dog with a massive crush on Max.

Will our unlikely pair make it home, having discovered a newfound friendship along the way?!

What the f**k do YOU think?

The Secret Life of Pets relies entirely on one major human personality trait that I lack entirely: an affinity for the animal kingdom. If you’re what is colloquially known as a “dog person,” this movie will magnetically draw your attention and admiration. But it’s the Dane Cook of pet-based movies, observing animal behavior without finding anything to say about it. There could be a very interesting comedy here about how pets operate in a world that wasn’t built for them, but the screenplay seems content to relax in the “dogs sure do love to walk in circles before they lie down, don’t they?” register. This is a movie that required four distinct people to write it, and Lord knows what they did all day. It doesn’t require a Jane Goodall level of research to reach the conclusion that cats like to chase laser dots.

Then again, this movie is lazy in every way, shape, and form, including some ways, shapes, and forms that haven’t even been invented yet. Combining the premise of Toy Story with the plot of Homeward Bound and the characters of Flushed Away, this is a movie that could only have been marketed to children, because anyone over the age of six has already seen it a thousand times before. I understand that I am not in the major demographic for this film, and that’s fine. But if you’re looking for an animated animal movie with a lazy premise, why not go straight to the source and watch Finding Dory again? Don’t waste you or your child’s time with this unbecoming nonentity.

Come to think of it, does anybody with a kid actually read my blog, besides my parents? Hello out there!

I think I laughed twice at The Secret Life of Pets, which is honestly more than I expected, so kudos to them. Kevin Hart’s presence is such a massive roadblock to my personal sense of humor that I’m genuinely delighted I had any fun at all. 

This flick is all over the place, frantically darting down every avenue of comedy it can. The roster includes poop jokes, a pratfall interlude that slams the brakes on the plot so abruptly that you’re tossed from your seat, and deeply weird cribs  from classic films as varied as Grease, The Lost World, and freaking Some Like It Hot. So I was bound to like something in this schizophrenic fantasia of comedy stylings. Pets also carries out the Minions manifesto of being inexplicably violent for a kids’ movie, trotting out some incredibly unkind slapstick and even literally killing off a character in pursuit of a gag.

There’s a surprising amount of death coursing around the edges of this film, but it’s not treated in the gloopy tragic mien of Pixar. In fact, it’s barely acknowledged at all, because Pets ignores the arcs of nearly every major character in its feverish race toward the finish line. It’s such a cursory, tossed-off product trafficking in only the hoariest cof lichés that it’s vaguely insulting.

So… Welcome back, Illumination! Maybe stick to Minion movies. The Secret Life of Pets is exactly what happens when the sugar rush sophomoric humor of the Minions is undiluted by other tones, then stripped of the retro, stylistic sheen that has always surrounded them. It ain’t pretty, it ain’t memorable, it ain’t anything. I hope and pray that another Despicable Me is right around the corner, because the new age of Illumination is looking unpromisingly like the old age.

TL;DR: The Secret Life of Pets is a boring, lazy movie without much drive.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1054

Christmas In July: Slay Bells Ring, Are You Listening?

Year: 2012

Director: Steven C. Miller

Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Jaime King, Donal Logue

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Yeah, they remade Silent Night, Deadly Night. It’s one that kind of slipped through the cracks, late to the remake party in 2012. Although the retitled Silent Night is a loose remake if there ever was one (and boy have there been a few), it shares enough elements with the original (like a Santa killer punishing the naughty, which some of the sequels couldn’t even manage, as well as an antler-based kill, a child gifted with a bloody weapon, etc.) that it at least proves that the original was on its mind, as opposed to the Sex Kitten romps of Prom Night and Sorority Row. That’s by far the best thing I can say about it, because – keeping in tone with the rest of the franchise – it kinda really sucks.

I’m so glad I’m finished with these garbage fires they called movies.

In Silent Night, Deputy Aubrey Bradimore (Jaime King) is forced to work on Christmas Eve when her coworker fails to show up. A line is dropped about this being her first Christmas without her husband, and by “dropped” I mean “hurled off a cliff” because this is literally never mentioned again. Together, she and Sheriff Cooper (Malcolm McDowell, essentially reprising his role as the scenery-masticating Dr. Loomis in Rob Zombie’s Halloween) discover that a killer dressed as Santa Claus has been rampaging through their little town of Cryer, Wisconsin punishing the naughty. This being a slasher movie (a subgenre we finally return to after two hyperbolically bizarre detours), Cooper elects not to call the FBI and handle the threat on his own.

Their search is hampered by a parade in which nearly every able-bodied adult man in town is asked to don a Santa suit, but they narrow down the suspects to a group of bad Santas that would make Fred Claus proud, including a wandering vagrant and a local coke dealer.

You’d think they’d find the killer with ease, considering he’s wearing giant steampunk goggles, but you would be wrong.

To be fair, Silent Night has a lot in common with SNDN1. It’s just as mean-spirited and poorly acted, but it lacks that veneer of 80’s charm that makes the original an enduring mainstay of the slasher genre. While SNDN featured a few too many rape scenes for my taste, it was a loopy, idiosyncratic film that told a strangely detailed, unwittingly compelling story about the societal ills that molded our apple-cheeked Santa killer. Silent Night just pulls a reverse Rob Zombie, stripping away the villain’s backstory and filling in that extra run time with an extra helping of nasty-minded sleaze.

There’s just something deeply depressing about watching a horde of wooden, amateur hour performers get chopped up in 2012 rather than 1984. It might just be the buffer of time making the legwarmered, permed 80’s seem a couple degrees askew from reality, but I think I can blame two movies in particular: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 for igniting the remake boom, and Scream for rendering it basically impossible to make a straightforward slasher ever again. By virtue of being a remake, a movie openly challenges the original film with the unspoken claim that it will either be better or at least satisfyingly different. When it is neither, it doubles down on disappointment. And Silent Night is neither in a spectacularly unpleasant way.

This movie is just plain vicious. In addition to being callously exploitative (a topless woman runs around for what feels like hours before being fed into a wood chipper; while slasher movies are best known for boobs and blood, titillation and mutilation are actually pretty rarely in the same frame save for the sleazier entries – The Prowler, Bloody Moon, etc.), it’s horribly misguided.

Horror films always need to walk on eggshells when it comes to killing a child, and while certain slashers have succeeded (SNDN among them), the death of a minor here is despicably prolonged, involving electrocuting her with a cattle prod until she stars foaming at the mouth before finishing her off. It is at this point where the over-the-top violence of Silent Night crosses the line. Hell, it throws a tarp over the line hoping you won’t notice, and dashes right on over it. Its obscene, boundary-free eagerness for butchery is vaguely sickening.

And I’m someone who watched Maniac without batting an eye.

I will, however, give Silent Night points for its occasional doses of pure, inexplicable lunacy.  There’s certainly a whiff of bad-good charm around Malcolm McDowell’s flagrant disinterest in the project, but by far my favorite scene belongs to the pre-slaughtered 13-year-old- girl and her mom. The spoiled little brat knocks her mother’s heart medication to the floor (!) and demands “F**k church! I want to go to the mall!” instantly becoming the most compellingly unlikeable child this side of Veruca Salt. She’s awesome. And then of course we have a whole scene lit with red and green emergency lights like it’s a Saw holiday special, and then there’s the fact that every time Jaime King walks through her impossibly idyllic small town, greeting everyone she sees and smiling at the whirl of Christmas activity, you expect her to burst into song à la Belle in Beauty and the Beast.

As you well know, I am a sucker for crazy camp, so this goes a long way toward helping me survive the dismal disarray of the rest of the film. And to be fair, there is some incredible gore that would be a real treat if Silent Night hadn’t poisoned the well by frontloading its most distasteful killings. A gushing leg wound and a head split by an axe are two particularly convincing Grand Guignol effects of the highest order.

The movie would at least be a passable horror roller coaster if it weren’t for the out-of-control tone that nose dives into torture porny grunge every chance it gets. Or the story that aimlessly wanders around, sloughing off subplots like a snake shedding its skin. Or the anonymous killer performer that lumbers around like a plumber who just soiled his pants. Ugh, what a waste. I’m terribly disappointed to end our Christmas in July segment like this, but Silent Night is just another abortive holiday thriller with enough potential energy to keep me on the hook, but not enough ambition and drive to do anything with it.

TL;DR: Silent Night is a thoroughly unpleasant, mean-spirited watch.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1094
Reviews In This Series
Silent Night, Deadly Night (Sellier Jr., 1984)
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Harry, 1987)
Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (Hellman, 1989)
Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation (Yuzna, 1990)
Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker (Kitrosser, 1991)
Silent Night (Miller, 2012)

Trouble In Paradise

Year: 2016

Director: Jake Szymanski

Cast: Zac Efron, Adam Devine, Anna Kendrick

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Zac Efron is killing it this year. He’s starred in no fewer than three R-Rated comedies in 2016 (four, if The Disaster Artist is ever set free from the James Franco vault), and with heartthrobs like him, quantity is always more important than quality. Which is great news, because the only semi-decent movie he’s been in all year is Neighbors 2. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates isn’t as flagrantly despicable as Dirty Grandpa, but there’s no universe where I’d call it a “good” movie.

I mean, come on! He only takes his shirt off ONCE!

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates takes place in a world where the phrase “wedding date” is used in casual conversation waaaaaay more frequently than our own. Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave Stangle (Zac Efron) are brothers who love themselves a good debauch. When their parents (Stephen Root and Stephanie Faracy) force them to bring dates to their sister Jeanie’s (Sugar Lyn Beard) Hawaii wedding in order to curtail their antics, they put out a Craigslist ad looking for nice girls to bring so they don’t ruin the wedding. The ad goes viral (this part actually happened in real life) and they end up on Wendy Williams, where they catch the eye of local girls-about-town Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) and Alice (Anna Kendrick).

The hard-drinking duo fake being respectable so they can econ their way into an all-expenses-paid Hawaii vacation. Antics ensue and they’re at least a little less racist and homophobic than Dirty Grandpa.

So there’s that.

Obviously, that’s a high bar for offensiveness, so Mike and Dave still has plenty of room to muck about in frivolous bigotry and general stereotyping. I will say this: The stereotypes they use here are some deep cuts, so your average moviegoer won’t’ have as much of a problem with them as I do, but that doesn’t make them any less ill-advised. We get a predatory lesbian, a black side character who only acts as a hype man for the white people’s antics, a genuinely baffling cross-dressing sequence that would have been stale in the 90’s, and Kumail Nanjiani’s first truly bothersome Indian role. But they do depict an interracial wedding and restrict themselves to only one joke about it, so they get a gold star for that, I guess.

Honestly, I’d be able to overlook these patches of cliché crassness if there was anything else in the movie to latch onto. The comedy is a relaxing, genial sort that keeps you comfortably above the boredom line without actually reaching for any big laughs. While it’s certainly diverting, it’s far from memorable. It’s not bad, it just immediately slips from your mind like a fistful of sardines.

The comedy here does what every establishing shot shows: coasts. All four of the leads here are charismatic young stars and that counts for a lot, but they lean heavily on their established personas to do all the work here. Devine is the sputtering, half-improvised jackass. Efron chugs along with his surprisingly sharp comic timing and his baby doll eyes that never seem to focus on anything. His mouth and body move, but his eyes just stare vacantly into the middle distance like he’s having an apocalyptic premonition. It’s kind of frightening. And then of course there’s Plaza with her sardonic bravado. Only Kendrick is creating any sort of character here, but the role is a meek little dishrag that doesn’t bring anything particularly interesting to the table.

It’s like if you put a chipmunk’s brain in a human body.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is just too easygoing. It lets its performers noodle around while the spinning plates of the plot fall to the floor one by one and shatter into a million pieces, using exhausted clichés to rush through an ill-thought-out scenario (of course Zac Efron dreams of being a graphic novel artist). The central conceit (bad girls faking being good girls) loses gas long before the midpoint, sputtering and stalling after about two and a half scenes (in fact, this slippery conceit is eerily similar to Efron’s earlier easily-distracted opus That Awkward Moment). If Charles Lindbergh had tried to fly across the Atlantic using Mike and Dave, he would have crashed in the New York Harbor.* And then the final 20 minutes pretend we’ve been watching an actual story the whole time and drown us in a deluge of unearned character development.

Oh, and did I mention this film indulges in some of the most frustrating trends of modern comedy? We get some of that alarmingly violent slapstick that non-Paul Feigs love to dole out on Melissa McCarthy. Then there’s a lovely selection of half-hearted post-Hangover gross-out body humor. Oh, and then there’s a dash of sitcom setups just for bland flavor (they don’t realizes their microphones are on! What a pickle!). And the film’s occasional feints toward absurdism wither make less than no sense or completely dismantle a character (The script never does manage to establish whether Dave is a drooling idiot or the vastly more intelligent straight man for his brother’s antics. Maybe it’s both, come to think of it.) Like I said, it’s enjoyable enough, but it’s just so unambitious.

So, all in all, Mike an Dave Need Wedding Dates isn’t, like, a deplorable waste of your time. Just a milquetoast one. And it’s still the second best Efron comedy of the year, so if you loved Dirty Grandpa, have at it. You have my blessing, though I mostly feel like cursing that I spent money on this.

*This has nothing to do with Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, but it’s far more interesting. I was doing a spot of research on Lindbergh, and a glance at the list of his children led me through a mind-boggling array of discoveries. After fathering six children by his wife, it was discovered on his deathbed that he had seven more children spread between three secret families. Two of his secret European brides were SISTERS. He didn’t cross the Atlantic to break records, he just wanted to get some. It’s like an American Pie prequel up in here.

TL;DR: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is mildly amusing, so it's never a chore, but it fails entirely to impress.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1067