Reviewing Jane: Facts Are Such Horrid Things!

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 2016

Director: Whit Stillman

Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Chloë Sevigny, Xavier Samuel

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The thing about Jane Austen is that she only wrote six novels. That doesn't provide a lot of material for the endless adaptation machine, even given the way Pride and Prejudice greases the gears. So the only thing shocking about the fact that filmmakers began to dig through her assorted unpublished short works was that it took until 2016 for it to happen.

Love & Friendship, from director Whit Stillman (who directed 1990's Metropolitan, a loose adaptation of Mansfield Park that will arrive on the pages of this here blog sooner than later), was adapted from Austen's 50-page novella "Lady Susan," written by Austen most likely in her early 20's, shortly before she began drafting what would become her first published novel: Sense and Sensibility. One other thing about "Lady Susan": It's f**king awesome.

It's like RuPaul's Drag Race crossed with Breaking Bad and I'm not the slightest bit kidding.

I'm fairly convinced that Jane Austen is the inventor of the female antihero, because Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) is one badass broad. A widow of some ill-repute who has just finished seducing the married Lord Manwaring (Lochlann O'Mearáin, who I do believe is Irish) away from his wife (Jennifer Murray) with no intention of returning his affections, she decides to shake the spot and take up residence at Churchill, the country residence of her former sister-in-law Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell, who is familiar with Austen work considering she played Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and her husband Charles (Justin Edwards).

Her plans to seduce Catherine's rich, handsome, and stupid brother Reginald De Courcy (Xavier Samuel) are challenged by the unexpected appearance of her neglected daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark, who was also in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as Georgiana Darcy), Frederica's foolish and unwanted suitor Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), and Mr. Johnson (Stephen Fry), the interfering husband of Susan's best friend and confidante Alicia (Chloë Sevigny). Like all Jane Austen works, the cast list is longer than a slasher movie, but trust me this all makes sense.

All you need to know for now is that Lady Susan orchestrates some Heath Ledger Joker levels of manipulation and subterfuge to get what she wants, any way she can.

That's why her hair is so big. It's full of secrets.

As much as I do enjoy the plot of "Lady Susan," probably the biggest challenge in adapting it is that the novella was epistolary: presenting the plot in the form of a series of letters sent between various characters. Love & Friendship can't entirely shake the constraints of that form of storytelling, and the way it finds ways to unite characters who are separated by distance (especially Mrs. Johnson and Lady Susan, who almost never speak face to face in the source material) are sometimes jarring and distracting, taking time away from the main thrust of the plot. 

However, Love & Friendship also does its best to embrace that epistolary format, and a scene where a husband is reading a letter aloud to his wife, the words appearing on the screen as he speaks them, is one of the most delightful of the film. There's a certain sense of formal daring to a lot of this movie, actually, at least in most of its early moments. For one thing, the characters are all introduced with their own title card, with a pithy descriptor introducing their function to the plot, which is a hell of a lot of fun. This playful meta humor doesn't travel very far past the opening thirty minutes, but it's strong enough that you're still thinking about it when the credits roll.

Beyond that, the filmmaking isn't particularly stunning, save for the way it spins a remarkably small budget into some sumptuous gowns, drawing rooms, and hats that never cease to bring joy.

Honestly, the criminally insane hats are one of the main reasons I'm doing this marathon.

Fortunately for any filmmaker without a lot of money, the crux of any Jane Austen adaptation is the dialogue and the actors, and both of these are perfectly prepared in Love & Friendship. Kate Beckinsale obviously gets the best, most bitingly sardonic lines as she outmaneuvers the dozen pawns in her game of love and lust, but the ensemble she is surrounded with is certainly up to snuff. The clear standout is Tom Bennett, who takes his character as written and tears him right off the page, bringing him to life with a clamoring of clipped Britishisms and awkward mumbles that will have you giggling so hard you can barely breathe.

The cast is a well-oiled machine, talking past one another at a swift rate that sweeps you up in their emotional interplay. The only two dark spots are Chloë Sevigny, who has trouble justifying her American accent and presence in general (the character is just a sounding board for Lady Susan and a vehicle for narrative drama who doesn't have much agency herself) in scenes that were already a bit wobbly, and Jenn Murray who is certainly funny but whose hysterical jilted wife schtick is far too shrill and hyperbolic for the genteel comedy-of-manners tone that the film has built up around it.

Austen is funny but she's QUIET, my dear.

But in spite of its occasional flaws, Love & Friendship is still one of the best, truest Austen adaptations out there. No Austen movie is a faithful resurrection of the author without an enormous dollop of biting, satirical humor, and this movie is a chock-full barrel of literary laffs. And there's one thing I've started to notice in these Austen adaptations. Obviously, dancing and balls appear in some form or another in all of her works, but if a film can lift up the obligatory dance number to something other than people fumbling around in period costume to fulfill a requirement, I count it as a success.

Take the dance sequence in Pride and Prejudice, which beautifully isolates Lizzy and Darcy by removing everyone else in the room during a moment of true connection. That's the high-water mark by which I measure these things, but Love & Friendship comes pretty damn close with a line dance that dizzyingly highlights the confused passing-along of lovers and friends that has happened since Lady Susan came into their lives. It's almost a ballet of Midsummer Night's Dream, cementing in a dozen lovesick character dynamics with just two minutes of physical movement.

So Love & Friendship might not be the best of these out there, but it's certainly top-tier Austen. It's fizzy and engaging, with a highly satisfying portrayal of one of her best characters holding court at the center of everything. What's not to like?

TL;DR: Love & Friendship is a funny, charming bit of Jane Austen apocrypha.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1283

Census Bloodbath: Animal House Of Death

Year: 1982

Director: Michael Miller

Cast: Gerrit Graham, Michael Lerner, Fred McCarren

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Historically, slasher parodies haven't exactly been great. Student Bodies and Pandemonium have their moments, but they're too close to the material, having come out smack dab in the middle of the slasher golden age. It took a more delicate satirical bent and years of distance for anything successful to come from the genre, in the form of 1996's Scream and 2006's Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. 

Nevertheless, I was still hopeful when I threw on National Lampoon's Class Reunion. National Lampoon movies aren't always gems in the cinema firmament, but it's at least at trusted comedy brand reasonably fresh off their mega-hit Animal House. And hey, the script was an early entry by none other than John Hughes, King of the 80's Teen!

Yeah, this seems... squarely in his wheelhouse.

There's such a thin wisp of a plot here, it would take an expert paleontologist to excavate it, so let's just Meet the Meat, the attendees of Lizzie Borden High's ten-year reunion of the Class of 1972: Bob Spinnaker (cult fave Gerrit Graham of Phantom of the Paradise and Child's Play 2), the organizer of the event and a spineless coward who wants to seem completely cool, collected, and elegant; Gary Nash (Fred McCarren), a kind but bland man who absolutely nobody remembers; Bunny Packard (Miriam Flynn, who held a recurring role in the Vacation movies, but most importantly played Maa the sheep in Babe), the poisonously chipper Nametag Chairperson; the lecherous boor Hubert Downs (Stephen Furst); the shrill blind girl Iris Augen (Mews Small), and her name is possibly the subtlest joke in the movie - Augen is German for "eyes"; and Delores Salk (Zane Buzby), who sold her soul to the devil to cure a physical disability.

This class is sporadically hunted by the crazed killer Walter Baylor (Blackie Dammett), who was the victim of a cruel prank back in high school that led him to be institutionalized. He dresses in a paper bag and schoolgirl outfit and kills very few of them, mostly offscreen, in uncreative ways.

You know, like how slasher movies do.

There are a lot of comedy movies out there that are just a loose string of sketches helps together by frayed scraps of plot. And those movies can be successful, if those sketches are funny. But Class Reunion is not only not funny, it even lacks the structure to maintain a joke for more than thirty seconds. Rather than sketches, it's composed of shards of comedy shrapnel that clatter onto the ground, spraying in all directions. These bits can be loosely categorized into a couple underwhelming categories. 

First, there's the gags that have aged impossibly harshly, like a trans joke that thinks it's high-larious to put a man with a mustache in a wig. End of joke. (I wouldn't go so far as to say a trans joke wouldn't happen today, because I'm not that optimistic about the state of things at the moment, but we certainly have enough of a baseline understanding in 2018 that it at least wouldn't happen in the same way.)

Second, we have the random detours into scenes that just shouldn't take place in a slasher movie, ha ha! Isn't it inherently funny that three women randomly start singing a full production number of "Stop in the Name of Love" for two full minutes? Prepare your knees for the slapping of a lifetime when a dime store Cheech and Chong wander their way through every other scene in a stoney baloney haze! These scenes sure are random, but they forgot to actually put any jokes in them.

Third and finally (well not quite final, but I'm tired of thinking too hard about these gags), we have the random horror tropes that have been thrown into a bag and dumped across the screen. Now this isn't exactly unfamiliar territory, because I've seen more than my fair share of _____ Movie entries in the mid-2000's. But I will always maintain that a parody is keener and sharper if you dig deep into traps and clichés of the specific subgenre your story is rooted in. The virginal Final Girl in Student Bodies wearing a button on her bra that says "No!" will always be funnier than the characters here who can breathe fire because of the Devil (?) and the one who's just a vampire for no particular reason. It's too unfocused, and its inconsistencies make every aspect of its attempted parody fall flat.

Not that this film also needed a Comic Relief Blind Person, but we can't go around expecting TOO much from National Lampoon.

Before we go further, I should admit that I did laugh a couple of times. No parody this chronologically close to Airplane! could fail to have at least one bizarre linguistic misunderstanding ("I'm really wet!" "Where?"), which always get me. Plus, there's one (and only one) line that seems aware of what a slasher movie actually is: "You can't go out there! You're a girl! You'll twist your ankles!" 

There's also no arguing against the fact that Miriam Flynn as Bunny Packard is singularly terrific. She plays what is essentially the peppy Camryn Manheim character from Romy and Michele, only with a strong undercurrent of insincere, passive-aggressive snarkiness that she wields like a charming dagger. She's the only character with more than one layer, and each of them is an amazing bit of comic performance that this movie doesn't deserve one bit.

But here's the fact I keep being forced to reckon with. National Lampoon's Class Reunion doesn't seem to have seen any slasher movies or have any particular desire to be one. It pulls its punches every chance it gets, only show one of its paltry four deaths onscreen, and patiently refusing to kill characters that directly wander into stalk-'n-slash setups, like the blind girl who follows her seeing-eye dog into the school's dark hallways, wanders around for an excruciatingly long time, at one point even encounters the killer, and then returns to the rest of the movie unharmed. It's not like this shrill, insensitive character was so necessary to the comic material that we couldn't get rid of her!

These things just keep happening. Time dilates excruciatingly slowly for an 80 minute movie, returning again and again to subplots that go nowhere and kills that don't turn out to be kills. It skips from scene to scene with alacrity, rushing as if it has somewhere to go, which it patently does not. It's a scatterbrained wreck of a movie, and is by far the worst slasher spoof I've ever seen, which is saying something because I've sat through a lot of the godforsaken things.

Killer: Walter Baylor (Blackie Dammett)

Final Girl: N/A - the movie doesn't even get this right

Best Kill: Not F**king Applicable

Sign of the Times: The word "feminist" is understood to be an insult.

Scariest Moment: The annoying Hubert reveals that he wasn't actually killed when he was hit in the head with a hammer, and continues to be in the rest of the movie.

Weirdest Moment: When the vampire character talks, he flexes his entire scalp.

Champion Dialogue: "My father didn't spend all that money to keep me out of Vietnam so I could die here in my own high school!"

Body Count: 4

1. Milt is garroted.
2. Mrs. Tabazooski is killed offscreen, presumably with a chainsaw.
3. Jeff and
4. Cindy are killed so far offscreen it's not even implied what weapon was used. 

TL;DR: National Lampoon's Class Reunion is an execrable example of post-Airplane parody doldrums.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1283

Reviewing Jane: What Are Men To Rocks And Mountains?

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 2005
Director: Joe Wright
Cast: Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Rosamund Pike
Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

Pride and Prejudice is, without a doubt, the cornerstone of Jane Austen's brief but powerful writing career. Almost inevitably the biggest hit from an artist is never actually their best work, but while I haven't finished my readings yet (Emma and Persuasion, here we come!), I feel confident enough to say that the people aren't exactly wrong. There are other books I have enjoyed just as much, but there's no denying the magnetic pull of the Bennett family and their exploits.

The novel's fame has led to no dearth of adaptations, so prepare to spend a lot of time in Darcy territory. But there's no better place to start than the definitive film version of the story, the 2005 Keira Knightley vehicle from a pre-Atonement Joe Wright. The Colin Firth miniseries is generally hailed as the magnum Austen opus (more on that later), but this ain't no TV blog, is it?

Movies rule! Suck it!

I'm pretty sure the basic plot of Pride and Prejudice courses through the blood of Anglo pop culture, but how about a little refresher? Mr. and Mrs. Bennett (Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn) have five unmarried daughters to wrangle. In descending order: Jane (Rosamund Pike), the fairest, who lacks the ability to find a single fault in another human being; Lizzy (Keira Knightley), a clever and sarcastic girl who doesn't take life and love too seriously; Mary (Talulah Riley), the plainest daughter who thus feels the need to be smarter than everyone else; Kitty (Carey Mulligan, who we've already crossed paths with in Northanger Abbey), a giggly flirt; and Lydia (Jena Malone), the giggliest and flirtiest of them all.

When the wealthy twink Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods) arrives in town, he immediately falls for Jane. The friend he has dragged with him, the taciturn Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), falls less immediately in love with Lizzy, upon whom he makes a terrible impression with his prideful disdain of her looks and her family. Thus begins a genteel comedy of errors where these two crazy kids just can't seem to get it together.

It doesn't help that he refuses to undo the buttons on his collar until like two hours into the movie.

The thing they don't tell you in high school is how hilarious Jane Austen's work is. They think that for a work of literature to be important, it has to be serious, but that chokes out everything that's most elegant and essential to the woman's work, which was a delicate satire of human behavior that is so universal that it rings true even outside the context of the prim, unrecognizable society of Regency England. Thankfully, Pride and Prejudice does not commit the sin of ignoring that humor.

I wouldn't be so insane as to call this film a comedy, but the actors and screenwriter really do capture the jovial, winking quality of the narrative that pulses beneath the romantic drama. The awkward fumbling of feelings that can sometimes feel dry on the page comes to savage, remarkable life here from top to bottom.

First in line to be commended should be Simon Woods, whose Bingley is a stammering, gleeful idiot that captures the heart immediately. But let us not forget Tom Hollander as the obsequious, oblivious Mr. Collins, a role he imbues with a constantly jarring intensity. But hey, there are leads in this movie, and I'm busy complimenting the supporting roles, as I am generally wont to do. Let me just say this: There is a reason Knightley is the definitive Lizzy Bennett and Macfadyen is not the definitive Darcy. I'm not knocking him (a scene where he can't figure out whether to sit or stand alone earns him my esteem), but Knightley floats across the top of this movie like an angel, delivering her dialogue with grace and wit that perfectly represents the way that every teen girl views themselves.

That said, I could do without QUITE as much brown in her wardrobe, but what are you gonna do?

Although Joe Wright obviously has spent a lot of time bringing these characters to life, he also cares about much more than merely delivering Jane's reliable ol' dialogue to audiences for the umpteenth time. He wants to craft a piece of cinema and while sometimes that eagerness spills over into bizarre excess like the rapid zoom that highlights an awkward moment in the Pemberley household, his vision is generally lush and stunning.

If Pride and Prejudice was just landscape and manor home photography without a single living creature in sight, it would be a pretty great movie. The dewy, romantic glow of England has never been more palpable. But there are people in this movie, and he shoots them so well! His Steadicam never fails to rove across the bustling halls of whatever estate our characters are occupying at the moment, sending viewers deep into his vision of the period with long, uninterrupted takes of life being lived. He also makes certain bold choices that burn themselves into the memory, most effectively a dance sequence that busts realism wide open to isolate Lizzy and Darcy and their sudden, yearning connection.

In short, Pride and Prejudice is a beautiful work of cinema, a lovingly thorough work of adaptation (he restages several scenes from the novel and truncates others, but the full breadth of the story and its emotional impact are entirely present), and a vivid resurrection of Austen's trademark humor that never for one second feels stuffy or dry. Really the only reason I'm marking the movie a little lower than this review would lead you to believe is the fact that I hated Darcy's hair, and couldn't convince myself that Lizzy would find him attractive during the first half of the movie.

Come on, this is a romantic comedy. We can afford to be a little petty with our lovers. It's still a good movie, leave me alone.

TL;DR: Pride and Prejudice is a valuable cinematic interpretation of one of literature's most deservedly enduring novels.
Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1055
Other Films Based on Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (Leonard, 1940)

Pride and Prejudice (miniseries - Langton, 1995)
Bridget Jones's Diary (Maguire, 2001)
Pride & Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (Black, 2003)
Bride & Prejudice (Chadha, 2004)
Pride and Prejudice (Wright, 2005)
Unleashing Mr. Darcy (Winning, 2016)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Steers, 2016)
Before the Fall (Geisler, 2016)
Marrying Mr. Darcy (Monroe, 2018)
Christmas at Pemberley Manor (Theys, 2018)

Pride, Prejudice, and Mistletoe (McBrearty, 2018)

Pride & Prejudice: Atlanta (Baraka, 2019)

(Don't You) Forget About The 80's

Year: 2018

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn

Run Time: 2 hours 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Of all the properties that exist out there in this wide world of ours, Ready Player One was probably the one most begging for the Steven Spielberg treatment. A parade of nostalgia triggers for people who grew up in the 80's, who could be a better match than the man who shepherded so many of those childhoods with his visionary blockbusters? Unfortunately, that man doesn't exist anymore. Who we got is the guy who made The Post and Lincoln and The BFG. And I didn't want to do this to you, but let me remind you that Bridge of Spies is a thing that happened.

Now can you relate to people who want to escape their own reality?

In Ready Player One, we meet our hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) in a futuristic Columbus, Ohio trailer park in the gently dystopian future of 2045. Famines and poverty have caused many people to want to shrink back from the real world, so they've become obsessed with the virtual reality open-world game of the OASIS. When the game's creator Jim Halliday (Mark Rylance) dies, he reveals that has he created an Easter Egg hunt, where the first person to find all three of the keys he has hidden throughout the OASIS will become the sole proprietor of the entire game.

This business model clearly has some glaring flaws, the biggest being the fact that the wicked company IOI has hired expert drones, led by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), to crack the codes as quickly and efficiently as possible and thus own the biggest tech resource on the planet. But only the true fanboys and girls know enough about Halliday's past and his favorite old movies and video games to be able to get to the heart of the hunt. As the two factions get closer and closer to the finish line, Wade, under his online alias Parzival, must team up with other players, including his crush Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe, a casting decision the movie doesn't want you to know at first, but the marketing has already blown to ribbons), and the prominent Japanese players Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao).

And the true key to the heart of America, pop culture references. 

It's no use beating around the bush. The novel Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (the screenwriter behind the execrable Star Wars-fellating road comedy Fanboys), is hot garbage. It's an incoherent, blithering mass of pop culture references that is mostly just a list of obscure anime and John Hughes movies masquerading as an adventure plot. It's an insufferable piece that beats the drum of nostalgia so fiercely that it rips right through the very fabric of art.

Ready Player One the movie is a massive improvement, because it almost completely throws away everything the book was working with. Some of this is due to necessity: you can't turn this crap into a movie. And you can't keep a plot moving when every challenge involves sitting down and playing an Atari game for hours. Other improvements are the invention of the filmmakers, like the fact that the egg hunt relies on the players being able to dig into Halliday's past and uncover more about his character, rather than random 80's detritus like his top 10 favorite music cues from Tron or whatever.

I can't say there were a lot of decisions in the making of either the book or the movie that were truly great, but that character exploration is certainly one of them. I'm not sure I'm loving what Mark Rylance is putting down with his performance here (it's very nebbish and Mark Zuckerberg-y, with a certain scatterbrained, naïve charm, but it slips into feeling like a monologue from Dexter's Laboratory a little too often for my liking - although the way this illustrates the difference between the real life version of him and his in-game avatar is truly special), but converting Halliday into an actual character - rather than a Willy Wonka who makes Monty Python references instead of chocolate bars - was a genius move.

That hairpiece not so much, but you can't have everything.

One area however where the film truly fails is the character of Art3mis. It shouldn't have been hard to make her not a Manic Pixie Virtual Reality Girl, but they actually made her role even more reductive and pointless. More reductive and pointless than something in an Ernest Cline novel. Let that sink in. Whereas in the book she was just as knowledgable about 80's trivia as the rest of the egg hunters, to the point that she was incredibly famous in the OASIS (a girl who knows pop culture? I'm quivering already), here she only exists to gasp with delight whenever Wade explains things to her, then reward herself to him as the ultimate prize.

Her position as ego-booster to this nerdy dweeb is demonstrated in this unwatchable scene where he throws on a Bee Gee's track and she grins, complimenting him on being "old school." Girl, this is the OASIS! People give lectures on the biographies of Atari programmers and treat Buckaroo Banzai like it's a cornerstone of world cinema. Everything is old school!

If only any of the people making this movie had an actual woman to consult with.

But enough about characters. This movie is meant to be a visual spectacle, and I guess that's what it is. The unreality of the OASIS prevents the CGI technicians from having to go out of their way to make things seem realistic, which is both a blessing and a curse. It allows things to become stylized in an interesting way (the OASIS' interface and item screens are actually pretty intuitive and fun extrapolations from modern gameplay), but it too frequently becomes a maelstrom of unintelligible pixels flying around in muddy clumps of mottled color. Also, I'm not really even sure what Steven Spielberg had to do on set, because a good 75% of the movie is literally just a cartoon. This explains why he was able to make an entire The Post while this film was still in production.

The only time where the visuals truly come alive and work within the story's pop culture milieu to create something unique and spectacular is a scene that turns The Shining into an interactive minigame, delightfully combining old film stock with 3D CGI in an impressive feat of creativity that easily trumps the analogous moment in the book.

Unfortunately, aside from that scene, not a lot in Ready Player One is anything more than basically watchable. The run time never feels punishing thankfully, but you don't feel fully swept up into the world of the film. Maybe it's the endless, frustrating expository dialogue. Maybe it's the lame plot points involving Post-It notes. Maybe it's the odious cameo from an autopilot T. J. Miller. Maybe its Alan Silvestri's shallow John Williams impression on the soundtrack. But there's a lot here that just doesn't click.

Ready Player One might be a massive improvement on the source material, but that novel was so dire that even taking leaps and bounds above it leaves you in a very average, unimpressive place. That said, it's still the best movie Spielberg has turned out in years, unless The BFG was a secret masterpiece, because I surely haven't gotten around to seeing that one.

TL;DR: Ready Player One is a gleaming popcorn movie, but it can't escape the deep, deadly flaws of its source material.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1275

I've Got A Rumbly In My Tombly

Year: 2018

Director: Roar Uthaug 

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Daniel Wu, Walton Goggins

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

So, video games are here to stay, huh? As the format progresses and games like The Last of Us or Far Cry 4 get more and more cinematic with their gameplay-integrated storytelling, it's no surprise that Hollywood is taking another crack at converting them into movies. Of course, the game they chose is the one where the chick with pointy boobs jumps a whole bunch, but you can't expect them to ever entirely get with the times.

We ran out of Hunger Games movies, so why not?

So, in Tomb Raider, we are introduced once more to Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander, the second Oscar-Winning actress to think it was a great idea to immediately sign onto a Tomb Raider project), the daughter of the prominent businessman Richard Croft (Dominic West). He's in the same business as Bruce Wayne, which is... business. You know, companies and stuff. Look, he's rich, OK? And seven years ago, he disappeared.

While Lara refuses to sign his death notice and thus can't receive her inheritance, she spends her time training in MMA (to what end I don't know, other than that it's fun - she doesn't seem to care about any competitions or anything) and delivering food on her bike. Eventually her dad's executor gives her a frustratingly simple riddle that could be solved by anyone who's read at least one Encyclopedia Brown book, which he hilariously fails to understand. This allows her access to her dad's inner sanctum, where she discovers that in addition to being Bruce Wayne, he's secretly also been Indiana Jones this whole time.

She follows his trail to the island of Yamatai, enlisting Chinese boatsman Lu Res (Daniel Wu) to help her. There, she finds the villainous slave-driver Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), whose employers want him to open the tomb on the island, where a mythical Japanese death queen is supposedly buried, hidden behind protective layers of traps and puzzles. Unfortunately, she has brought her father's research directly into his hands, so it quickly becomes a race against time to prevent him from opening the tomb, oh no!

Spoilers: In Tomb Raider, a tomb gets raided.

Literally the only thing that was exciting to me going into Tomb Raider was that it was the big Hollywood crossover of Norwegian genre director Roar Uthaug. A prominent member of the school of Norway filmmakers who consumed ample amounts of American B-movies, then regurgitated those tropes in a much better way than U.S. filmmakers have been able to do for ages, Uthaug has proved his worth beyond a doubt with the delightful 2006 slasher Cold Prey. He also helmed the 2015 disaster movie The Wave, which I have unfortunately yet to see but have heard good things about.

Unfortunately, the last time this happened, it was with Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola, and he gave us Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. I personally haven't seen it, so I can't share any opinions (honestly, I feel like I'd love it), but that movie didn't exactly set the world on fire. At least that, as a manic horror-comedy, had a chance to show off the guy's personality. Tomb Raider is the exact sort of carefully shepherded intellectual property that will bury any director worth his salt in an immobilizing mound of script notes. And guess what happened? 

Exactly that. That's what happened.

One thing I can say with respect to my beloved Uthaug is that his action scenes do have a certain zippy energy, especially an early sequence involving an urban bike chase. The second best action sequence involves a rusted-out plane pulling a Lost World by dangling off a cliff, and that scene extends the tension for much longer than should be satisfying without feeling drawn-out or boring, even if it's a bit derivative. The combat scenes suffer a lot from the pulled punches of that toothless, bloodless PG-13 rating, but the adventures sequences are mostly satisfying, even if they have all the emotional resonance of tapping X to double jump.

But yeah, pretty much everything else is as dispiritingly average as it's possible to be. The puzzles are alternately overexplained within an inch of their lives or leave us entirely absent from the solving process (also, maybe if people learned to watch their feet and not step on obvious triggering floor panels, the whole thing could have wrapped up much quicker), the villains' motivations are malnourished, and SPOILERS [the plot introduces a rage zombie plot thread out of nowhere that makes me actively root against Lara Croft, because I would love the sequel to this to be a 28 Days Later movie].

The acting isn't even remarkable, not that it really could be. Vikander does her best, at least anchoring the movie onto what feels like an actual human being and not a pile of 0's and 1's in a tank top. I especially love the way she doesn't play Lara as particularly butch. Her mid-fight screams and grunts are girlish and feminine. She's still tough, but she doesn't have to be so in a traditionally masculine milieu. 

As for the rest of the ensemble... I love Walton Goggins, but he gets nothing to do here except glare directly at the camera. Plus, I could never really get a bead on what Daniel Wu was doing. And just when I was starting to get familiar with his sort of peculiar characterization, he starts to vanish from the film for twenty minutes at a time so more white people can step on floor panels like f**king idiots. Honestly, the entire film is stolen by a not-especially-hilarious cameo from Nick Frost that is still far and away the best thing in the movie.

That's not where you really want to be with your Hollywood blockbuster, but at least it's not soul-suckingly terrible, because we all know the way most video game adaptations swing. Unfortunately, there's absolutely no reason to see this movie. Though, if you do get dragged to it, you won't suffer. It's just utterly milquetoast, and slides right through the back of your head the millisecond it enters your eyes.

TL;DR: Tomb Raider is a thoroughly generic bit of popcorn cinema fare, and my affection for the director doesn't change how unimpressive it is.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1065

Reviewing Jane: Oh! Who Can Ever Be Tired Of Bath?

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 1987

Director: Giles Foster

Cast: Katharine Schlesinger, Peter Firth, Robert Hardy 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes 

Did you think I could leave you with just one adaptation of Jane Austen's first novel Northanger Abbey? No, this marathon is moving thirty years backward and hopping the channels to hit the 1987 BBC production of the very same story. You'd think things would be pretty much the same, but you would be so, so wrong.

For one thing, the hats are even more out of control.

Once again, as though we're caught in a Groundhog Day time loop, we see young novel-obsessed Catherine Morland (Katharine Schlesinger who, weirdly, played the title character in the miniseries of The Diary of Anne Frank) get invited to spend some weeks in the town of bath with her affluent neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Allen (Geoffrey Chater and the incomparably named Googie Withers). In spite of the lust of John Thorpe (Jonathan Coy of that other abbey, known as Downton) and the attentions of his sister Isabella (Cassie Stuart), who is pursuing Catherine's brother James (Philip Bird), she falls in love with Henry Tilney (Peter Firth, no relation to that other Austen paramour).

During a stay at Tilney's family home at Northanger Abbey, she learns that his father (Robert Hardy, who played Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies, but unsurprisingly also appeared in Sense and Sensibility, because there's always gotta be an Austen crossover) is a cruel tyrant who rules over his children with an iron fist. How can they possibly get married now?

And - more importantly - why would she WANT to marry this man who looks like a melting wax figure of Ed Sheeran?

The thing that's perhaps most striking about this iteration of Northanger Abbey is just how 80's the whole thing is. Considering that it's a period piece set in Regency England, I figured nothing but the film stock would betray it as thirty years apart from the Felicity Jones version, but I was sorely incorrect in that assumption. For huge swaths of this movie, it's basically a Bonnie Tyler video, complete with flowing nightgowns, a few cubic acres of smoke, and electric guitars rattling around on the soundtrack. 

Now, I know I just made this movie sound awesome, but don't be fooled. I love any artifacts from the 80's, especially if they're incongruously sneaking into a Jane Austen tale (the fluffy mullet that threatens to devour Catherine's younger brother's head and the sexy saxophone music that accompanies a lakeside stroll are both just as bizarre and delightful), but they're not present in nearly high enough quantities to prevent this from being anything other than a stuffy television drama made before the BBC got cool.

Maybe I'm just impossible to please, but whereas the 2007 version was much too sexed-up and ribald, this version is so stiff and genteel that even an Austen character would think it was putting on airs. The high humor of the novel is completely lost on the filmmakers here, who reimagine the story as a stone-faced drama, save for one clever line from Mr. Tilney himself. But if you strip Northanger of its humor, you steal away everything that made it special, for there certainly isn't a plot worth a damn anywhere to be found.

Literally the entire conflict of the first volume is whether or not Catherine is going to go on a walk.

And the trouble is, they don't really even seem to be trying to find anything worth exploring in the narrative machinations. Even though this version of Northanger does find a way to incorporate Catherine's fantasies into the third act in a way that actually drives the plot, it still completely fails to set up and pay off the central dramatic setpiece of the second volume, in which Catherine discovers a stack of receipts in the back of a wardrobe (it's riveting stuff on paper, I promise).

It certainly doesn't help that the two lovers here are epically ill-matched. Tilney, as I have previously observed, isn't exactly a dreamboat, and Katharine Schlesinger seems to have decided to draw on Pamela Springsteen from the Sleepaway Camp sequels as her acting inspiration. She shrieks every line with her eyes bugged out as wide as humanly possible. This romance between what is essentially a minor Fraggle Rock character and a block of wood isn't the stuff of legend, nosireebob. Their leaden flirtations form empty pockets of air that fill the movie with shovelfuls of passionless nothing.

In general, the acting is even worse than the 2007 film (I take back every mean thing I said about Felicity Jones, whose clumsy grip on the character at least means she has her hands on it at all). Only Googie Withers makes something more of her character than her 2007 counterpart. She's actually quite delightful, because she actually understands the ironies of the shallow busybody character as written.

All hail Googie Withers and her impressive ability not to have her neck snap under the weight of all that nonsense on her head.

The only elements that are actually intriguing (other than the costume and set design, which is pretty commendable across the board) are the ones that actively break the movie from its reverie, like the Bonnie Tyler music video moments or the dream sequence where Mrs. Allen shoves a needle through her finger! Seriously, the f**k?! Northanger Abbey takes some intensely weird detours on the way to the conclusion of its run-of-the-mill literary TV movie.

And I haven't even mentioned the French aristocrat lady's little African servant who forces Catherine to watch him to cartwheels on the Northanger lawn. Nor should I, because it has nothing to do with anything, but I'll always take a little dash of weird to liven up an occasion.

OK, let's be nice for a second. Visually, there's more at play here than the 2007 film, and the director actually seems to wake up from time to time. I loved a moment that cross-cuts between a conversation about General Tilney and the man himself spinning a coin in an imposing shot that belies his power over everything in his home. And a metaphor involving a canary is a little blunt, but at least it's something.

A straight-faced Northanger is something that exactly nobody needed, but at least there's enough going on along the fringes that it doesn't make you long for the more extravagant pleasures of the Regency era, like playing cards for eight hours, staring at a fire, or falling deathly ill for a couple weeks.

TL;DR: Northanger Abbey is a humorless, arid approach to one of Jane Austen's least consequential novels.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1143
Other Films Based on Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey (Foster, 1987)
Ruby in Paradise (Nunez, 1993)
Northanger Abbey (Jones, 2007)

Somebody Get An Iron

Year: 2018

Director: Ava DuVernay

Cast: Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon 

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I, like most people who were once children, have definitely read Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, really enjoyed it, and remember almost nothing about it. So you don't have to take my review with a grain of salt. I won't call this film a bastardization of the book. It hasn't ruined my childhood. Because, for all I know, this is the most faithful adaptation ever conceived. I literally don't remember.

I recall there being a character named Charles Wallace, and there's one of those in the movie, so it passes the test.

So, here's the plot of A Wrinkle in Time, which you probably don't remember even if you saw the movie today: young girl Meg (Storm Reid) is still wracked with grief over the disappearance of her scientist father (Chris Pine) four years ago. He disappeared right after adopting her younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe). And her mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) doesn't do all that much, but you can't just not mention Gugu Mbatha-Raw if she's in a movie.

Charles Wallace introduces Meg to three weird mystical women named Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), a scatterbrained woman who doesn't appreciate Meg's distrust and closed-off emotions, Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), who only speaks in literary quotes, and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), who seems to be the ringleader and is hilariously 30 feet tall for the first third of the movie. Who these women are married to, I'll never know. Anyway, they know how to bend time and space to travel thousands of light years in a split second, and in order to rescue their dad, who is being held captive by an evil force spreading darkness throughout the universe, the kids must team up with the women and their random useless neighbor Calvin (Levi Miller) to go on a cross-universe adventure.

At the very least, I'm glad this movie finally allowed Oprah to show us her true form.

A Wrinkle in Time is whimsical as f**k, and that's actually one of its rawest strengths. Director Ava DuVernay (whose previous works are well-respected but certainly in no way implied that this is the type of movie she had the capacity to make) definitely has a vision and is pursuing it full-bore. The costuming is like watching a full season of RuPaul's Drag Race condensed into 100 minutes, blasting a glitter cannon into your face every six minutes or so. There is no moderation in the design elements of Wrinkle in Time whatsoever, and between the fact that Oprah's bejeweled eyebrows change between every scene, the glorious, intricate hairpieces they slam onto Mindy Kalings scalp, and the rumpled pillowcase Reese Witherspoon seems to be dressed in, it's a sumptuous visual feast that pulses with energy.

Kids will certainly relate to this film, because that energy is exactly as empty and ephemeral as the sugar rush they'll be getting from their fistfuls of Skittles they got at the concession stand. A Wrinkle in Time jams you through its plot with a total lack of focus and broad, brittle dialogue meant to force you down the narrative track like bumpers on a bowling lane. Even though the world they inhabit is a free-flowing mass of sparkly fabrics, the characters and their arcs are stilted and strange, and the script frequently dips into being actively unbearable (the theme of the film is presented via a cootie catcher, for one thing, but this high-fantasy movie also relies on a radio news report for important exposition, which is the laziest way to do just about anything).

The plotting is equally messy, which to be fair is probably due to the highly metaphysical, internal nature of the original book, but still. The third act just turns into a video game where every rule we've seen established is instantly broken and most of the conflicts are converted into music videos for one of the many atrocious pop songs that are sticking out of the movie like razor blades in the face of a Hellraiser Cenobite.

Mindy's face when she read the script for the first time.

Luckily, the movie doesn't really rely on its script to carry things. Unluckily, it mostly just relies on kids going "whoooooooaaaaa," at a big heap of CGI nonsense flying around. For as much personality as the Misses bring to the film, the worlds they visit are too-similar, slickly designed landscapes so smooth and digital that your eye slides right off them.

The acting is fine at least. Charles Wallace is strangely wiggly in his physicality when push comes to shove, but let's not hang around insulting children. Kaling and Winfrey are absolutely satisfying, even if they don't push themselves particularly hard, and Witherspoon certainly gets across the airy inhumanity of her character, though her performance slips into manic a little too often for my liking.

Although A Wrinkle in Time is mostly forgettable, it's anything but anonymous. Whatever the movie's faults are, they are entirely its own, and to that point, if you're in the right mood some of those faults can be strengths (funnily enough, that idea is actually a major plot point). I for one was captivated by the completely strange presentation of Meg's school bully, who hangs out of her window at a 45 degree angle to spy on her at home. And the way Levi Miller exits a doorframe, milking it for every ounce of emotional weight it's worth and then some, squeezing out every last drop of screen time he can possibly glean, is a fascinating trainwreck of a scene.

All in all, I didn't hate it, but A Wrinkle in Time is a huge, flabby disappointment. That's the way these things go sometimes.

TL;DR: A Wrinkle in Time is ambitious, but entirely too messy and bland to be satisfying.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 987

What Would Bryan Bertino Do?

Year: 2018

Director: Johannes Roberts

Cast: Christina Hendricks, Bailee Madison, Martin Henderson

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Honestly, the most surprising thing about The Strangers: Prey at Night is the fact that the 2008 home invasion shocker The Strangers didn't get a sequel immediately. As I pointed out in my review, it's not a movie that I love, but it wholly deserves its modern classic status and those instantly iconic villain masks should have already launched a sprawling franchise that we're just starting to get sick of by this point. But here we are. It's been 10 years, and now we're at the point where we can say, "wait, really?"

The times, how they change.

In Prey at Night (which - by the way - is a title I just can't abide. Is it a pun? On what?), a family is traveling to their uncle's secluded trailer park on the way to dropping off delinquent teen daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) at a correctional boarding school. Mother Cindy (Christina Hendricks) and father Mike (Martin Henderson) have their doubts about their decision, and brother Luke (Lewis Pullman) is just along for the ride.

As you might imagine, they never make it to that school because a trio of masked strangers descend on the park with flashing knives and an aim to wipe this family off the face of the Earth.

But not before repeating as many scenes from the original as possible.

Prey at Night is one of those "is it a sequel or is it a remake?" situations, and the answer is yes. It's a sequel to The Strangers. And it's a remake of every John Carpenter movie ever made. Director Johannes Roberts made a conscious effort to channel as much of the style and substance of 80's horror as it's possible to do in 2018 (turns out, it's very possible). Prey at Night grafts the score from The Fog onto the cinematography of Halloween onto a showdown from Christine - with some Scream and Texas Chain Saw sprinkled in for flavor. Sure, 80's pastiche in modern horror is about as uncommon as people shouting "who's there?!" but injecting it into this grim franchise is especially jarring and doubly refreshing.

You won't catch me complaining about synths being liberally slathered over a movie, and though this score (by Becoming Jane composer Adrian Johnston, for some reason) is by all accounts almost note-for-note The Fog, at least that great score is finally applied to a movie that's not boring as sin. Although, I do have my breaking point. The many 80's pop needle drops - provided by the male killer's obsessive, Baby Driver-esque need to have the radio playing while perpetrating murders - just don't do anything for me (save for one major scene involving just a splash of Bonnie Tyler, who makes any scene better).

The cinematography is also slick, fog-filled candy. It might be a little too reliant on dubiously long establishing shots and sluggish zooms, but its excellent, judicious use of swooping crane shots and dashes of neon are a starling improvement from last year's Roberts' feature 47 Meters Down, which had the most painfully ugly color scheme I'd seen in over a decade.

I could swim in the colors of this movie anytime.

Love the aesthetic of Prey at Night though I do, it's still just as flawed as the original film, in strangely similar ways considering how very different the movies are as a whole. The only true liability here is the Kiwi actor Martin Henderson, who attempts to hide his accent Walking Dead-style behind a Southern drawl that only draws more attention to how out of place he is in this cast, but oh what a liability. Any scene he shares with his son loses emotional impact by the ton, as their attempts at igniting hysteria mostly just look like they're working on their Beavis and Butthead impressions.

There's also the problem that these characters are complete, eye-gouging idiots. The decisions they make rarely resemble an action any human being has taken in recorded history, and the way they're forced through a litany of horror clichés doesn't even make them particularly interesting stupid decisions.

But Prey at Night has a secret weapon. I don't know how much weight this will carry with hardcore fans of the original film, but at the very least it's is certainly less of a dour slog. The audience I was with almost immediately got swept up in rooting for the protagonists, and there are a lot of moments that elicit cheers or groans. It's a roller coaster ride that pumps up the adrenaline more than a grim boot of misery stomping into your throat over and over again.

That's definitely more my style... But it's not really a Strangers movie, ya dig? If you loved the original, you might actually want to turn back before buying a ticket. That's probably not the sphere a sequel should exist in, but it's the truth. It's fun on its own terms, and those masks are still entirely terrifying, but they're completely different, equally fine movies.

TL;DR: The Strangers: Prey at Night is a stylistic triumph, although it's just as flawed as the original - in very similar ways, which is surprising given how different it is.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 888
Reviews In This Series
The Strangers (Bertino, 2008)
The Strangers: Prey at Night (Roberts, 2018)