Popcorn Kernels: Q1 Review Purge

On account of the fact that my computer was out of commission all weekend, and I'm not feeling particularly inspired by any of the films I watched therein, let's break tradition and knock out some mini-reviews of three recent 2018 efforts.

Isle of Dogs

Year: 2018

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

In the not-too-distant future, all dogs have been exiled to an island off the coast of Japan due to a suspicious outbreak of disease, and one young man takes a fateful flight over the water to rescue his dog with the help of a group of mangy strays.

I was honestly very surprised with how much I enjoyed Wes Anderson's previous animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox. His fussy, twee aesthetic worked very well with the arch, British storytelling style of Roald Dahl's children's books. Unfortunately, it does not work quite so well with whatever Isle of Dogs is: an uncategorizable, scatterbrained mélange of post-apocalyptic gross-out humor, stunted emotional baggage, and wild misuse of Japanese-influenced design.

I will let other, more qualified, mouths speak on the specific impact of Wes Anderson's choice to set this story in Japan, but I will say one thing. The main character, whose name is Atari (strike one, dude), has a skin tone so yellow that it would a bowl of banana pudding jealous. Not only is it a bizarre, off-putting visual choice, it seems incredibly racially insensitive to boot, which is just... well, not great. This character is the entire lynchpin of the story, forcing you to contend with his questionable stereotyping for the entire run time. It's like if Mickey Rooney was the starring role in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

And whether or not this was Anderson's intention, because it probably was, the human characters on the mainland are underdeveloped in the extreme. I get that the dogs are the whole point of this story and it should focus on them as characters, but the amount of time we're forced to hop back and forth between the drama on the Isle with the cavalcade of stunted personalities who only get two or three minutes of screen time is intensely distracting.

The cast is reminiscent of a Valentine's Day movie, with way too many stars crammed in to give some characters enough time to actually make an impression, especially Scarlett Johansson's show dog Nutmeg and Greta Gerwig's American exchange student Tracy Walker. But these are female characters who are awarded to our male heroes for doing important things, so that's a very important role, y'know? Ugh.

It's hard not to get bogged down in politics, because Isle of Dogs kind of beckons in criticism. But look. It's fine. The dogs are amusing, the fussy sets are engagingly weird and gross, and it's a decent way to occupy 100 minutes. Is it worth sifting through all the morally and socially dubious messaging? Probably not. Just watch Fantastic Mr. Fox again. But I had a decent theater experience with this one, at the end of the day.

Rating: 6/10

Blockers

Year: 2018

Director: Kay Cannon

Cast: Leslie Mann, Ike Barinholtz, John Cena

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When three teenage girls make a pact to lose their virginity on prom night, their parents set out to make sure this doesn't happen.

As an ardent fan of the American Pie franchise, I must say that I'm glad the raunchy high school comedy hasn't given up the ghost quite yet. And while Blockers could never be the proper spiritual successor to that franchise due to the fact that the parents squirrel away as much screen time as the kids, it's as close as we're getting in 2018 and I'll take it.

Honestly, I don't mean to complain. I do like the parents. Presumably thanks to a Kay Cannon touch-up, the script isn't as reductive and sex-phobic as the trailer and synopsis made it seem. The parents all have their own warring motivations for preventing their children from having sex, and it stems from character flaws rather than a prudish morality play. Plus, I've long admired John Cena's comic acting (the fact that 2018 allows for a sentence like this to be written, says a great deal about the state of the world that I'm not ready to reflect on) and Ike Barinholtz always deserves a bigger platform. 

Then there's Leslie Mann, who is indispensible here. Her clingy mother routine isn't anything new (we've seen it as recently as Cheryl Hines in the also surprisingly terrific A Bad Moms Christmas), but she gives us some of the films most sterling perfect comic moments, especially a tearful goodbye scene that is a spine-tingling triumph of physical acting.

But still, you can't help but feel robbed of time with the film's three young stars, who shine bright enough to have led this movie all on their lonesome. Kathryn Newton is saddled with the most boring of the characters, but she maintains an easy chemistry with the other two: Gideon Adlon, who leads a sweet, surprisingly-transgressive-for-its-normalcy queer storyline and Geraldine Viswanathan, who is a pure magnetic presence the likes of which I haven't seen in a good long time.

Oh yeah, and the movie is funny too. I almost forgot. It's raunchy without being exploitative, that manages a terrific balancing act of six character arcs that all get their moments to shine. Just like Game Night, it's proof that scripts are actually pretty f**king valuable to comedy movies, Judd Apatow be damned. However, unlike Game Night, it doesn't offer a particularly unique aesthetic. Like most modern comedies, it's lit, shot, and cut well enough that it doesn't get in the way of the timing of the humor, but the energy of Blockers isn't coming from the filmmaking itself. Nevertheless, it's a movie I'd highly recommend, and certainly in the top 5 movies of the year so far, which is not something I thought I'd be saying at all.

Rating: 7/10

Truth or Dare?

Year: 2018

Director: Jeff Wadlow

Cast: Lucy Hale, Tyler Posey, Violett Beane

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A group of teens on a Mexican spring break vacation stumble into a possessed game of truth or dare, where if they don't play they die in horrifying ways.

Truth or Dare isn't a film for me, at least demographically. I am a person who ditched class to go see Ouija in theaters, but let's not focus on that right now. And as much as I am a staunch defender of PG-13 horror and the potential that it has, the fact is, it still isn't for me. Would I have loved it if it was R-rated? No, probably not, but it just feels like it's operating at a level that I can't really reach anymore, even though the teens in the audience will probably love it.

There really is a lot to like about Truth or Dare. The characters and their conflicts are simply etched out, but interconnect in meaningful, narratively satisfying ways. The Final Destination-esque machinations of the game itself are delightful to watch unspool, and never ever boring. And Lucy Hale is a smart, capable performer who knows what she's doing with a script.

But the fact remains that, in my eyes, Truth or Dare pulled a lot of its punches. You'll never get on my good side by being progressive enough to include a gay character, but too gunshy to show more than half a second of him kissing a dude before demurely cutting away to something else and never mentioning it again. And then using his closeted sexuality to drum up drama for a dare, but completely excising the scene where's he's forced to come out to his father or die - which would have been the most flat-out horrifying scene in the movie, which is a little starved for genuine terror. At every turn this movie renders the character shallow, making him basically just a piece of set dressing.

While I do like the way the others characters are constructed, a lot of the movie is treated like that kid (who is played by a 32-year-old actor, naturally). The kills are noncommittal, the stakes of the game seem to ebb and flow as the narrative needs them to, and they don't even seem aware of the implications of their white characters stomping around Mexico destroying property and - in an early scene - physically assaulting a local with impunity.

This movie could have been much better. What it is is mostly entertaining, but its potential is so present and obvious that the fact that it didn't capitalize on it is even more frustrating than if it had never been there in the first place.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1470

Reviewing Jane: A Quick Succession Of Busy Nothings

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: 1999

Director: Patricia Rozema

Cast: Frances O'Connor, Jonny Lee Miller, Alessandro Nivola

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Mansfield Park has been described quite rightly as Jane Austen's most controversial novel, though not for the steamingly erotic reasons the marketing of the 1999 film would seem to suggest (and don't get your hopes up folks, suggestion is all there is). Mansfield Park is essentially a morality play, Austen's most po-faced and didactic work in her entire short career. The way it enforces the etiquette and strictures of Regency society can be punishing to modern readers, and requires a lot more context than most of her other work. It is not a novel for the impatient, so adapting a film from the story necessarily required a lot of adjusting and rearranging. Let's see how they did!

So far, so busty.

Mansfield Park tells the story of Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor), a poor young woman who was sent at the age of 10 to live with her rich relations: the tyrannical imperialist Sir Thomas Bertram (the playwright Harold Pinter), the lazy opium addict Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan), and their children, the entitled drunkard Tom (James Purefoy), the well-mannered nice guy Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller), and prissy, boy-crazy daughters Maria (Victoria Hamilton) and Julia (Justine Waddell). In the book, Fanny Price is a bland, passive character who is tossed around by these careless, larger-than-life personalities.

That didn't really work for making her the protagonist of a movie, so they have her a personality, and that personality was literally Jane Austen's. In a montage they show Fanny writing most of Austen's juvenilia (her early, posthumously published work), and they force her into the "anachronistically modern girl sarcastically fighting against the foibles of her time" mode in which most portrayals of Austen or her most beloved character Lizzy Bennett can usually be found. This completely and utterly destroys any reason this particular story had to exist, but whatever. Their lives get tangled up in lusty and romantic twists and turns when the seductive brother and sister Henry (Alessandro Nivola) and Mary Crawford (Embeth Davidtz) come to visit. Drama ensues.

They're certainly dressed for it.

We do really need to dig deep into the character of Fanny Price. She's the moral center of the book, and while there's no denying that she's a boring stick in the mud, there's literally no point to the story if she's not boring. She's supposed to be the steady center amidst the chaos of youthful licentiousness and adult hypocrisy whirling around her. By making her interesting, the story loses its lynchpin and the wheels rattle off, sending it all crashing to the ground.

It doesn't help that the other changes made to the material are entirely superficial, like adding a fresh coat of paint to a wall that's full of sledgehammer holes. As I already mentioned, this film was billed as a sexy, steamy romance, that element mostly relegated to a pair of scenes that require an extremely  liberal reading of the source material to mutate Mary Crawford and Fanny's relationship into a bizarrely sublimated lesbian affair. It's nonsense that exists only to be provocative, and it barely succeeds at that because of the way it pulls its punches, demurely hiding behind its implication.

The other major embellishment on the source material is the addition of a much more prevalent angle on slavery. In the book, it is only mentioned Sir Thomas Bertram has property in the South American colony of Antigua, though readers at the time would probably be aware he held slaves. But that fact is drawn into the light here, making his slave-driving an important facet of the narrative and the drama between his character and Fanny Price. Unfortunately, Mansfield Park completely fails to make any point about slavery and the way the family profits from it. It's just one more ingredient to some overbuild melodrama, and the big conflict about it (involving some way-too graphic depictions of rape and torture) is resolved offscreen, so it's obvious once again that the filmmakers were too shy to actually go through with their bold reinterpretations.

I mean, what's the point when we could be watching straight white people almost kiss?

Really, Mansfield Park is a thorough waste of time. But there's at least a spark of what the film could have been. It's still funny, as almost any Jane Austen adaptation has to be - at least briefly. The standout character is the same as the novel: Sheila Gish's manipulative, self-indulgent Aunt Norris. Her pert little reactions to hugely tragic situations are amusing to be sure, and any scene with her in it seems to perk up a bit, even visually speaking. She is present for most of the visually creative moments Mansfield has to offer. In fact, perhaps the best is a smash cut to the death of Mr. Norris, as described by Fanny in a letter to her sister (these letters, which are presented by Frances O'Connor speaking directly to the camera, are the only other times that the movie actually tries to accomplish something stylistically unique).

These sequences are few and far between, but the movie has the gall to end on a beautiful series of tableaux that gently break the fourth wall as we follow each of the characters' fates in the epilogue. When Mansfield Park actually uses the medium of cinema to breathe life into one of Austen's most lifeless novels, it accomplishes a great deal, but unfortunately they're mostly content to have the narrative crumble around them just like the walls of the titular manse.

The romance here isn't even compelling. Whereas in the novel, we see Fanny pining for her cousin throughout the entire story (gross), here her more active character causes him to pine for her, which deflates every scrap of drama that is supposed to be created by his fervent, blind interest in Mary Crawford. I'm not here to complain that they changed details from the novel. This is what movies do. But did they have to change the detail that fundamentally fuels the entire romantic conflict? It's monumentally fatiguing. Every choice that was made in this adaptation was the wrong one, and the budget doesn't provide for sets and costumes lush enough to redeem it by at least allowing you to sink into cozy period domesticity.

I obviously have a lot of patience with these things, so please don't take my warning lightly. Don't waste your time with this one.

TL;DR: Mansfield Park is a waste of time, embellishing a book that's not that interesting in a way that makes it even less interest.

Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1140
Other Films Based on Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park (Rozema, 1999)

Mansfield Park (MacDonald, 2007)

Silent As The Grave

Year: 2018

Director: John Krasinski

Cast: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds 

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A Quiet Place might seem like a unique entry in the horror genre, but there's a lot of precedent for it in the Blumhouse Productions canon. They've already played with huge swaths of silence dominating the sound design in the Mike Flanagan home invasion thriller Hush, and they've already given a shot at the horror genre to a former comedian director with last year's explosively successful Get Out. But why not let others in on the fun? Platinum Dunes and Paramount have had a phenomenally successful opening weekend, and let's not begrudge them of earning that off the back of a movie that isn't lowest-common-denominator garbage.

Pictured: the weekend box office once A Quiet Place hit theaters.

In A Quiet Place, which was co-written, directed, and performed by The Office star John Krasinski, the world has been overrun by hideous demon monsters that in a matter of months turned the entire Earth into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. These monsters are blind, and they hunt by sound, so the tiny remainder of the population is forced into hiding, being as quiet as possible in order to survive.

We follow the survival story of the Abbott family: a beardy, overprotective father (Krasinski), a pregnant mother (Emily Blunt, his real life wife, and this sure must have been fun for them to make), a deaf daughter (Millicent Simmonds), and a nervous, wimpy son (Noah Jupe). They get names in the credits but we don't ever hear them in the movie, so why bother?

All you need to know about him is that he is Jim and he does NOT know how to shush.

A Quiet Place is essentially a silent film: basically without any scrap of dialogue other than American Sign Language, only with all the lush sound design you'd typically expect from a monster movie. It's a fun experiment, and there's a lot to recommend it. 

First and foremost is obviously the aforementioned soundscape, which builds quivering tension through absolute silence. And when loud noises come cracking across your ears, it's not just to accentuate a jump scare. The sounds are scary not because of what they are, but what they mean. You might jolt because of the noise, but the fact that the sound is the very thing that immediately exposes the characters to danger doesn't allow you to relax, like any other horror movie shock gag. The way A Quiet Place sustains tension in its monster sequences is completely beyond reproach, constantly adding layer after layer of visual and aural complication to some immensely intense moments.

Plus, there are a handful of pretty stunning visual elements to accent this sound. Krasinski's use of red light (either from the emergency bulbs strung across their property or various other sources) bathes the frame in jagged streaks of color that crack open the aesthetic of the movie and give you something completely new and sleek to marvel at. These are the moments where the filmmaking really comes alive, because otherwise its presentation is pretty standard.

And, of course, you can't ignore the monsters. They're handled in exactly the right way. You get brief glimpses of them early on that make them even more terrifying because you can't quite make out their exact shape except that they're big and spindly and not friendly. But when you eventually see more of them, you can appreciate the fact that their design is still f**king uncanny and frightening. There are a couple extreme close-ups that are a little dodgy, but that's maybe ten seconds out of many many minutes of monster-fied terror.

But, in a way, isn't the true monster the fact that John Krasinski hasn't had a leading movie role until now?

Speaking of Krasinski, he has assembled a cast here that completely works. You're not gonna be blown away by any particular showcase moment (except for maybe one scene of Emily Blunt actually using her voice, with a hoarseness that belies years of disuse and neglect of her vocal cords), but they're all effective at drawing you into the terror, especially the kids who have no right being as good as they are.

Unfortunately, the characters themselves don't entirely serve the performers bringing them to life. The world of A Quiet Place is captivating and unique, but these archetypes are nothing we haven't seen before in a million post-apocalyptic movies or hell, even family dramas. They're rough sketches of human beings that are meant to draw up emotion because of what they represent rather than what they are, and the fact that they lean on pretty rigidly structured gender roles isn't really the format to get me on their side. Also the fact that there are an alarming amount of parallels to the characterizations in Signs are really not designed for my particular brand of entertainment.

This fact also doesn't help the slow pace of the first act, where we spend the most time with these people going about their daily lives. Their personalities are so empty and basic that their interactions aren't particularly engaging, and the way Krasinski chooses to linger in certain setup scenes can feel a little punishing.

But hey, it does It Comes at Night way better than that movie ever did, so that's a big plus in my book. I'll take a generic but effective horror movie any day. I feel like I was promised a new classic and I didn't get that, but what A Quiet Place is is still pretty neat. I've been parading around convinced that it was a Blumhouse picture for a good couple months now, and I was shocked to realize that I was wrong, because it feels exactly like their model: cheap, simple, and not always remarkable, but usually solid and reliable as popcorn entertainment. I hate being wrong, but that's really not a bad thing, I daresay.

TL;DR: A Quiet Place is a fun experimental horror flick that's a teensy bit more run-of-the-mill than I wanted it to be.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1020

Reviewing Jane: Think Only Of The Past As Its Remembrance Gives You Pleasure

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: 1940

Director: Robert Z. Leonard

Cast: Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, Mary Boland

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

It's probably hard to believe, but the current elite status that Jane Austen holds in popular culture hasn't always existed. Sure, she was a well-known enough author that she was certainly read by scholars and taught in schools, but the Austenite fervor that warps the minds of the heroines of Austenland or The Jane Austen Book Club is a product of the 90's, and the boom of Austen adaptations that came in the wake of the massively popular BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice.

So this entry will be one of the very few points that our marathon will dip into a point outside of recent memory. Although TV miniseries versions of Austen's work have been around since the beginning of time (the first recorded one seems to be a 1938 UK production of Pride and Prejudice made during the advent of television that was - obviously - sparsely viewed), only two feature length adaptations floated their way across the cinema landscape before the 1980's: a TV movie of Emma in 1948, and the topic we'll be discussing today: the Best Art Direction Oscar-winning Pride and Prejudice, from 1940.

It's also a nominee for Best Ridiculous Hats in this particular marathon, but there's some stiff competition.

Please tell me you know the plot by now. In old-timey England (this particular adaptation, led by - of all people - screenwriter Aldous Huxley, who is perhaps best known for the classic dystopian novel Brave New World, seems to transplant the setting from the Regency era to the Victorian era, but the hats and the accents are pretty much the same if you ask me), Lizzy Bennett (Greer Garson) is the second eldest daughter of the five unmarried Bennett sisters. When her older sister Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan, who played another famous Jane in the 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man) falls in love with new neighbor Mr. Bingley (Bruce Lester), Lizzy must contend with his haughty and supercilious friend Mr. Darcy (Laurence Olivier) as they enter a will-they won't-they relationship based on mutual distrust and prejudice.

So romantic!

1940 sure was a different time for filmmaking, and the ways in which this Pride and Prejudice is different from, say, the 2005 incarnation, are endless and fascinating. Cinema under the production code had a sort of old-fashioned gentility that you'd think would lend itself to Jane Austen's work, but the tropes and performance styles that the era brought with it make for an incredibly strange concoction.

To that point, the two leads here are excruciatingly miscast. Greer Garson is nearly twice as old as her character (Lizzy Bennett is no older than 21, and Garson was 36 when she starred in the film), but that wouldn't matter if she understood the role one tiny bit. She gives exactly the performance that one would expect from a glamorous movie star of the time, with all the elegant posturing, mincing gait, and overenunciated dialogue that would imply. She's not chewing the scenery at all. She's swallowing it whole. While anyone who has read the book would know that young Miss Bennett is (to use an odious, but popular term) "not like the other girls," Garson plays her like Queen Victoria herself. It's a complete obliteration of the character as written, and makes for a dazzlingly uncompelling protagonist.

Someone who would seem to agree with me is Olivier himself, whose active disdain for the project soaks through every scene he's in. And this is no mere speculation. During my brief period of research on this movie, I discovered no fewer than a half dozen quotes, all colorfully displaying his disdain for the film and practically every decision made on set. He never gets a foothold on the character, and plays him like any generically handsome leading man. So we have an aristocratic Lizzy and an apathetic Darcy forming a huge black hole in the center of the movie where their romance should be. It's nothing less than tragic.

Well, I guess it's technically a black-and-white hole.

Although literally the whole reason this story is being told - the romance - is such a dud, there is enough material working around the sidelines that this Pride and Prejudice is far from a bust. If any other work of 19th century literature had been reworked as a broad romantic comedy, it might have been jarring, but this approach draws out the inherent character-based humor in Austen's work, and the raucous personalities that bounce off of Lizzy during her journey to true love are all splendid.

At the top of the heap is Mary Boland as Mrs. Bennett. She is third-billed for a freaking reason, because she is the glue that holds this entire movie together. The character gets a lot more screen time than any other adaptation I've seen (and I'm already on my way to seeing a medically unhealthy number of these), and her portrayal of the woman as a conniving, meddlesome puppetmaster pulling the heartstrings of her children is a triumph of classic rom-com confection.

She walks into every scene like she owns the place, and her lively, amusing energy is irresistible. Her transparent desperation is so overheated that there's literally a carriage race within the first twenty minutes of the movie. That kind of setpiece isn't exactly common in Austen movies, and she is the only reason Pride and Prejudice generates the off-kilter, cheerful adrenaline that it does.

Mama sure does have a reason to be proud.

There are other characters worth looking at here (would-be cousin-husband Mr. Collins is especially pompous and obnoxious here, and younger sisters Kitty, Lydia, and Mary get their due; the former two as giggling tipsy maniacs, the latter as the uptight, try-hard geek she was always meant to be), but if this movie was a one-woman show with Mary Boland, it might just be the best comedy of the 40's.

Part of the reason these characters are allowed to sparkle so much more than other adaptations is Aldous Huxley's script, which restages many major scenes, embellishes some, and truncates others in the best combination possible. His additions to the script are clever and amusing, while still effortlessly fitting into Austen's tone and vernacular. The only damage he does is to make the bourgeois badass Lady Catherine more of a toothless goofball, but that would have required making the film even longer, and I don't think anybody particularly wants that.

All in all, Pride and Prejudice is a reasonably good time. The cheery library music and chewy British accents that remind you of nothing more than Georgia King in Austenland make for a mostly sweet walk through cinema history, and the fact that its terrible leads don't damn the movie to an early grave means that everything else here is working at full steam.

TL;DR: Pride and Prejudice is a surprisingly amusing romantic comedy, but the leads are woefully miscast.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1193
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 (Theys, 2018)
Pride, Prejudice, and Mistletoe (McBrearty, 2018)

Pride & Prejudice: Atlanta (Baraka, 2019)

Teen Homicide (Don't Do It)

Year: 2018

Director: Cory Finley

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Olivia Cooke, Anton Yelchin

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When you bill a film as the second coming of Heathers, you know I'll be first in line. Unfortunately, you can bill a film as whatever the hell you want. The advertisers weren't lying. Thoroughbreds is a pitch black high school comedy about murder, after all. But we should all know by now not to violate the cardinal rule of reminding audiences of a movie much better than your own.

Come to think of it, you're reminding me of The Witch too. Stop it!

In Thoroughbreds, well-to-do teenager Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) is paid off by the mother of the only slightly less well-to-do Amanda (Olivia Cooke, who also held a starring role in Ready Player One, so this is a pretty big month for her) to host a tutoring session in the hopes that they'll become friends. This actually works, but probably not in the way mom was planning. It turns out that Amanda is an emotion-free sociopath, and Lily takes advantage of her total lack of conscience to plan a murder. 

She wants to take out a hit on her evil stepdad (evil is a malleable term here: we see him being generally disagreeable, but her perception of him is certainly skewed) Mark (Paul Sparks). They eventually draw in strung-out drug dealer Tim (Anton Yelchin, in what would seem to be his final role) to help with the plan.

He's the only one in the movie whose income is below like 10 figures.

Thoroughbreds is the writing and directorial debut of playwright Cory Finley, and it shows. It has all the limitations of setting and cast that a low budget debut would traditionally display, but it's also restricted to an absurdly small range of motion per scene, a pretty obvious holdover from the fact that this movie was originally written as a stage play. It's a static motion picture, and it never throws off the shackles of its theatrical origins. There's nothing wrong with a lot of scenes that are just two or three people talking to each other, but it's not presented with any particular cinematic flair. It's like eating a Pop Tart without any frosting. It's still a Pop Tart, but there's something so fundamental missing that it's not the same experience at all.

Now the script is pretty solid, of course. It's not as richly comedic as I was hoping, but there are certain dark situations and dialogue beats that raise a worthy chuckle. And the ideas it raises about emotion/the lack thereof in the teenage population, or how easy it is for wealthy people to toy with the poor are fun to chew on. 

It does tend to slip a bit too often into an over-literary mindset (this film is divided into chapters for absolutely no reason, other than to seem impressive and Smart), and the closing monologue leaves a lot to be desired - its attack on social media and technological advancements seems ripped from a completely different movie, because it has absolutely zero foundation in the story we've been watching. I don't think there's more than 90 seconds of actually even seeing a iPhone onscreen in the entire movie.

Look at these teens, so absorbed in their Chapsnats, not engaging with the real world, not going to Applebee's...

Everything in Thoroughbreds is kind of uneven in this way. Take the sound design, which sometimes creates incredible feats of audio, like the scene where the whirring of Mark's exercise machine keeps his stepdaughter awake. The noise builds and builds until she finally snaps, and you believe it. But most of the rest of the soundtrack is occupied with a truly unhinged score that sounds like composer Erik Friedlander is snapping rubber bands underwater. It's manic as hell, and while I secretly kind of like it, it's deeply distracting from the quiet dialogue-based story we're meant to be watching.

And then there are the two teen girls who lead the film. They're unequivocally great, and the fact that there are two teen girls bearing the entire weight of this movie on their backs is something tremendously fun and inspiring. Unfortunately, Anton Yelchin, who I like very much, seems to be acting in a completely different movie. He's being pushed into a cartoon character that would have worked in a film like Fright Night or even the bizarre Only Lovers Left Alive (he sure did make his share of vampire movies, didn't he?), but glances right off the grounded, intentionally flat performances of his co-stars.

Altogether I'm pretty sure I liked Thoroughbreds, but I'm absolutely certain that it takes someone of a very particular bent to love it, and I'm definitely not there. This movie makes me continue to be excited to follow the careers of Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, who I have seen and enjoyed in many previous genre efforts, but Cory Finley really needs to knock it out of the park next time to earn my trust.

TL;DR: Thoroughbreds has a solid dark comedy nugget at its center, but it's too stagebound to really do anything exciting with it.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 871

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)