Reviewing Jane: I Love You, Most Arf-ently

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: David Winning
Cast: Cindy Busby, Ryan Paevey, Elizabeth McLaughlin
Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes
MPAA Rating: TV-G

After almost two centuries of comfortable, quiet general admiration of her work, the world spontaneously decided to go absolutely nuts over Jane Austen in the mid-1990's. Not that I mean to discount her massive importance in the literary sphere, but it was honestly a little inexplicable and random how it happened. However, now that it's here, it certainly doesn't show signs of stopping anytime soon. As recently as two years ago, there were no fewer than four of said adaptations within a matter of months!

Of course, the Hallmark Channel had to get in on this enduring trend, so they got their grubby little hands on one of the many many many Jane Austen reinterpretations (see: fanfiction) that have been published in the intervening decades, and thus Unleashing Mr. Darcy was born.

Don't get too excited. That title is just a dog show pun, he's not gonna become like the Incredible Hulk or anything.

The plot of this movie should be pretty familiar at this point, but as with any modernization of a classic novel, it's always interesting to see how characters get chopped and screwed, remixed, and decontextualized, much like the same year's Before the Fall. Of course, given how the back of the DVD credits the illustrious "Jane Austin" for its source material, maybe the changes happened just because they didn't actually read Pride and Prejudice that closely (more evidence to the fact: There is a character named Mr. Bingley, but he shows up as a featured extra for one scene, and the guy who falls for the older sister is in fact somebody completely different).

Nevertheless, have a plot this movie does, as brutally simplistic as it might be. High school history teacher/dog show contestant Elizabeth Scott (Cindy Busby) has been suspended from her job after Grant Markham (Ken Tremblett), who is - and I quote - "a lobbyist for Wall Street," attempted to bribe her to give his lacrosse jock son a bette grade. His wife is on the Board, so Elizabeth certainly has a right to distrust rich people, wouldn't you think?

Enter Donovan Darcy (Ryan Paevey), a dog show judge whose brusque and businesslike treatment of Elizabeth's dog Bliss. He's unbearably sexy (though only shirtless in one scene, because Hallmark likes to waste my time), but she finds his behavior and wealth distasteful. Unfortunately they are thrown together quite a lot when she take a job as a dog handler for her friend Gabrielle (Elizabeth McLaughlin). Thus begins a "romance" where Donovan acts out a hilariously transparent female fantasy - at one point he literally pays her to play with puppies - and Lizzy snipes at him constantly. Seriously, she is so mean for zero reason.

The biggest obstacle to their burgeoning love - other than how horrifically brutal she treats him - is his aunt Violet (Frances Fisher), who dearly wants to force him to marry his best friend's sister Felicity (Courtney Richter).

Their relationship makes no sense, but you can't just go around trying to get cousins to marry each other anymore, so I DO get why they changed this particular part.

I always think watching a Hallmark movie will be a hilarious good time, but then I remember that I'm confusing it with Lifetime. The soapy drama and sublimated sexual fervor of the latter makes for some highly stimulating trash. Hallmark, unfortunately, is only committed to toothless, run-of-the-mill trash, which just isn't the same.

There are a few spurts of campy fun - mostly whenever Frances Fisher is onscreen, turning up to devour the scenery and crank the drama up to 11 in her cream-colored turtleneck - but Unleashing Mr. Darcy is mostly a repetitive slog that fails to recreate anything remotely recognizable as human behavior. Seriously, I can't get over how brutal this Lizzy is to this Darcy. The proportions are all off: She's more Lizzy Borden than Lizzy Bennett. His offenses are too slight to deserve a movie's worth of disdain, and her constant mockery of him completely ignores every action he's ever performed.

She's attempting to push back against a wholly imaginary straw-man character she has created in her head, to the point that the movie feels less like a romance and more like a psychosexual horror film about a paranoid schizophrenic.

Actually, that's not a bad idea... Fetch my script-writing pen!

And obviously, with the exception of Frances Fisher, the acting just isn't up to snuff. Cindy Busby fails to find a character in the ball of simpering aggression that is Lizzy Scott, and all the women around her seem to have been directed to talk... As slowly... As possible. Paevey is perfectly fine, as the Darcy role pretty much requires any actor to glower sexily and be completely impenetrable. As far as that goes, he does the job, although nearly every line out of his mouth comes at a machine gun pace, as if he's making up for the time we lost with everybody else. And as for the dogs? They're cute I guess. I'm not a dog person, and clearly neither is anybody else in the movie given their stiff, reluctant handling of the poor creatures. It's OK though, because the movie forgets it was ever about dogs about 35 minutes in.

The gentle thrum of mediocrity that is Unleashing Mr. Darcy might not provide the dramatic heights I was hoping for, but at least there are a few satisfying filmmaking lows. Between the classroom set that is clearly a Hallmark Channel office conference room tot he fact that roomfuls of white people feel compelled to clap every time Lizzy and Darcy kiss. This isn't the worst way to while away the time riffing with some friends, though there's obviously much better material to do this with. But if you have the same Venn diagram of Jane Austen fandom and bad movie love as I do, you might as well see if it captures your interest. It's short as hell, at least.

TL;DR: Unleashing Mr. Darcy is a tragically mediocre feature, but that's only right given that it's a Hallmark TV movie.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1063
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 & 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)

And I Pity Any Girl Who Isn't Me Today

Year: 2018

Director: Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein

Cast: Amy Schumer, Rory Scovel, Michelle Williams

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Maybe I just shouldn't watch trailers anymore. I had to be dragged to see Blockers, a movie I really liked but which seemed at first glance like a reductive, sex-negative trawl through a slurry of wasted time and anal insertion jokes. And now we have I Feel Pretty, which seemed like a grotesque gauntlet of Amy Schumer body-shaming. It's not not that, but it's likewise much better than it has any right to be. Go figure, I guess.

There's still no way in hell anybody is getting me to watch Super Troupers 2 though.

So, in I Feel Pretty, Renee (Amy Schumer) works for the beauty company Lily LeClaire. Specifically, the web department. She doesn't even get to have her office in the company's glorious high rise, most likely because she's not a wafer-thin model who would break her diet by drinking a full bottle of water. When CEO Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams) begrudgingly agrees to develop a diffusion line for lower-end stores like Target or Kohl's, she realizes she needs a consultant who's a "regular" girl.

Meanwhile, Renee hasn't had the confidence to apply for an open receptionist position in the main office. Until... she hits her head during a spin class and suddenly sees herself as unspeakably hot. With her newfound confidence, she gets the job, she gets herself a guy (Rory Scovel), and she learns that the true beauty is the friends she made along the way or whatever.

Look, I enjoyed it, but it's not sticking around in my brain any longer than it needs to.

Now I'm just warning you right here, this is gonna be a real short review. In the rich tradition of modern comedy movies, I Feel Pretty is almost totally devoid of any filmmaking beyond setting up a camera, blasting the set with lights, and rolling as soon as the stars can be coerced from their trailers. At the very least we're not buried beneath a pile of endless improvisational riffing, but as far as having actual "movie" qualities to discuss, I Feel Pretty is just as shallow as its fashionplate characters.

And while I Feel Pretty is funny, what more can you really say than that? There are jokes. More of them made me laugh than didn't. A lot of this is thanks to the cast. Amy Schumer can be abrasive, but she does always deliver, and Rory Scovel is an excellent foil for her in one of his first major film roles (he's been kicking around TV and the comedy scene for some time now, and he deserves every scrap of rom-com love interest he can get his hands on). Michelle Williams tries to steal the show and nails her character's tics and cartoonish squeak of a voice, but she is in almost exactly the same role as Tilda Swinton in that other Schumer feature Trainwreck, and nobody can do Tilda like Tilda.

Plus, it's cheating if you share a scene with Naomi Campbell, because an unplugged toaster would look charismatic and Oscar-worthy next to her.

It's a good thing the laughs keep coming too, because the concept here gets extremely wonky at times. It's never entirely clear what exactly is going on in Renee's head, let alone how exactly everyone else in her life has managed to tiptoe around her delusions. At times, it even forgets about the central conceit entirely, merely opting to run Renee through a truncated version of Anne Hathaway's arc in Devil Wears Prada.

But honestly, the further it can get from that gimmick and the more character-centric comedy it can squeeze in, the better. This is a solid enough romantic comedy that it could stand up on its own without the weird metaphysical/psychosexual(?) plot it tangles itself up in. If this was Trainwreck Part 2 it would be just as funny, so maybe it didn't need to happen this way. Nevertheless, it did, and it's totally fine. We'll just have to leave it at that, I suppose.

TL;DR: I Feel Pretty is a surprisingly decent, if conceptually inconsistent movie.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 705

Census Flashback: Blue Collar Criminals

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Overboard, a gender-swapped remake of the Kurt Russell/Goldie Hawn vehicle about a handyman who lies to a rich woman after she gets amnesia, this week I’ll be seeing what other hijinks blue collar workers can get up to in the 1988 French-Canadian not-so classic The Carpenter.

Year: 1988

Director: David Wellington

Cast: Wings Hauser, Lynne Adams, Pierre Lenoir

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Among the slasher fan community, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the Canadians were damn good at making slasher films. Many established classics like Happy Birthday to Me and My Bloody Valentine came from the Great White North, but I'm here to tell you what I've learned from my many adventures through the subgenre, which is that we might want to localize even further because French Canadian slashers are where it's at.

The two Québécois slashers I have stumbled across have left a lasting impression, immediately rising above the muck of the hundreds of garden variety slashers. First was Visiting Hours, an uncharacteristically character-based hospital slasher that interacted directly with the idea of violence and misogyny and horror in a manner simultaneously horrifying and thoughtful. Now we have The Carpenter, which I cannot wait to talk to you about, so let's get started with that sweet sweet plot!

It's not often you get to use the phrase "a Wings Hauser vehicle."

The Carpenter finds its lead Alice Jarrett (Lynne Adams) in the middle of a nervous breakdown, busily slicing up all her husband's suits with a pair of fabric scissors. She is hospitalized and when she's released, she finds out that her husband Martin Jarrette [sic - this is literally how the credits spell it, incomprehensibly] (Pierre Lenoir) has bought a brand new fixer-upper house in the country. She loves it at first, but begins to feel trapped when she realizes that Martin won't let her do anything, from picking out wallpaper to making her own decisions regarding her medication.

There is a team of construction workers remodeling the house during the day, but she discovers one sleepless night that there's an extra carpenter (Wings Hauser) who works late hours, all through the night. He doesn't seem to be working for the other crew, and whenever anyone threatens Alice's well-being, he has an annoying tendency to murder them with construction tools. Nevertheless, she begins to fall in love with him, being the one man who can actually see her worth. Thus begins a twisted tale of romance, revenge, and people being drilled in the f**king throat.

It's the Gone with the Wind of the 1980's.

As I hope you can see from the synopsis, The Carpenter is very much about the women's sphere becoming a sort of prison, and the quasi-feminist subtext of the plot is front and center throughout the film's entire run time. I'm not kidding when I say it reminded me a great deal of Rosemary's Baby, although I think it goes without saying that the general filmmaking quality can't touch that film. But who gives a crap about filmmaking quality? This is Census Bloodbath we're talking about!

The Carpenter doesn't cast as much doubt on Alice for potentially hallucinating the Carpenter as I thought it might, which would mirror the way society dismisses women's genuine concerns as "hysteria." But it's still unmistakably about a woman who's trapped between two forms of equally toxic masculinity: one who is keeping her trapped in this house, and one who more or less literally is the house (it later becomes clear that the Carpenter is the ghost of the man who originally built the house, and was a bit of an obsessive about doing all the work himself).

This came out the same year as Cheerleader Camp, so let's just say I'm surprised to find any subtext at all, let alone such a rich vein.

But in addition to its political subtext, which you know I'm an easy lay for, The Carpenter has more uncanny, eerie imagery per pound than the rest of the films in the year put together. The film has a perfectly dreamlike quality that hadn't been captured in North American filmmaking since the first Nightmare on Elm Street four years earlier. Take the opening scene. After a slow motion shot of a buzz saw descending onto a piece of wood which is treated with the cinematic reverence of the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we're treated to an absolutely silent scene of Alice's ennui as represented by a truly alarming number of dissolves between different angles on her face. When she finally takes the scissors to her husband's suits, it's a welcome relief to being trapped with her depression for what feels like an eternity, and the rapid cuts of fabric being slashed in different directions is physically satisfying with an intensity that just shouldn't be there.

It's like The Carpenter has harnessed its own filmmaking incompetence to plunge the viewers into a reality entirely unrecognizable as their own. Seriously, that many fades would probably get you a D in a film school project, but in here it just works. The film is full of elements like this that gently suggest a world gone horribly wrong around the fringes of the story we're watching. For example, not more than ten minutes later, when Alice is being released from the hospital, she and her husband check out while in the background an old woman covered in blood is being gently daubed with a washcloth. It's quietly menacing in a way that's truly hypnotic.

This uncanny element sinks deep into the fabric of the film, even infecting the minor characters, from a neurotic paint shop owner to a one-scene sheriff with a manic laugh (played by Ron Lea, who had a small part in Happy Birthday to Me). By the time the Carpenter indulges in a terribly cartoony gimmick in his second scene (as Alice talks to him, every time it cuts back to his side of the conversation he's working on something else, whether it's sawing a 2x4, splitting a brick, or even painting a birdhouse - he's like f**king Bugs Bunny) it makes perfect sense and just serves to underscore the bizarre atmosphere with which the film is already deeply permeated.

After 70 minutes of this, if you're in a receptive mood, once you get to the point where Alice sits in front of a paint can shaker slowly weeping as red paint is splattered across her face, you will be utterly transfixed and horrified.

Basically I'm saying The Carpenter is what would happen if Suspiria was remade by Canadians.

Is all of this good? Even now I'm not sure. But it sure is weird, and that's good enough for me. I don't want to give the impression that this is a masterpiece work of art. Take the soundscape, which is very frequently patchy and cuts out roughly in the transitions between scenes. But it also uses the repetitive noises of carpentry to layer over almost every scene and highlight just how off-kilter and insane Alice's perception is starting to be. Is it mediocre? Is it genius? I say it's both.

The only part where The Carpenter slightly fails in my eyes is as an actual slasher, which is a bit of a disappointment. The pacing is a bit mellow, which works for the uncanny atmosphere which is so fascinating, but the kills are few and far between, accompanied by very low rent post-Freddy quips. They're not groaner puns like so many Freddy rip-offs, but they barely make any impression at all because of it. And the gore is undeniably weak, looking like a Monty Python sketch in its best moments. So if you're coming to The Carpenter for a satisfying hack-n-slash adventure, you're not going to be satisfied.

This is one of those movies where I'm not sure I can recommend it. Maybe it was only meant for me and the exact mood I was in the day I watched it. But I dearly, desperately want someone else to see what I saw. It's a film I haven't stopped thinking about in the days since I watched it, and those just don't come around quite as often as I'd like these days.

Killer: The Carpenter (Wings Hauser)

Final Girl: Alice Jarrett (Lynne Adams)

Best Kill: The Black Knight-esque death Roland is doled out, which sees him lose both arms in quick succession.

Sign of the Times: There's an extended scene of Laura Bell slowly easing herself into pants that could easily fit three of her side by side.

Scariest Moment: When Alice walks into the paint shop to apply for a job, the manager is using two brushes as drumsticks as she approaches and keeps pounding as he stares off into space.

Weirdest Moment: In what may or may not be a dream sequence (the way things shake out, I'm going with "not"), the Carpenter unzips his pants and we hear the sound of a drill buzzing.

Champion Dialogue: "Mister! That is a lady you're smacking around!"

Body Count: 5

1. Roland has his arms cut off with a buzz saw.
2. Barns has his face sanded off.
3. Landis is drilled in the throat.
4. Laura Bell is shot with a nail gun.
5. Martin Jarrett has his head squished with a vise.

TL;DR: The Carpenter is a completely uncanny mess that had me transfixed from start to finish.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1604

Reviewing Jane: I Do Suspect That She Is Not Really Necessary To My Happiness

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: 1996

Director: Douglas McGrath

Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Toni Collette, Alan Cumming

Run Time: 2 hours 1 minute

MPAA Rating: PG

The last novel published during Jane Austen's lifetime was Emma, and it is respected by many critics as her best work. The book presents a flawed heroine making constant mistakes in judgment until she finally improves herself enough to stumble ass-backwards into a relationship she miraculously hasn't managed to ruin. It's a fun, flirty story and it makes perfect sense why high school movie dynamo Amy Heckerling decided to update it into a little movie called Clueless (more on that later) in 1995.

What makes less sense is why the powers that be decided that the world deserved another adaptation of Emma just a year later, but considering that it's the most prominent straight adaptation of the source material, why not start with this one?

Pictured: Toni Collette looking at the call sheet and realizing that she's not gonna get to meet Alicia Silverstone.

So, the plot of Emma. Gosh, this section really does feel futile when we're talking about centuries-old, world renowned literature, dunnit? We'll go fast, don't worry. Emma Woodhouse (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a rich young woman with no designs to marry but plenty of designs to matchmake her friend Harriet Smith (Toni Collette) into relationships with men who are entirely too good for her, including the local revered Mr. Elton (Alan Cumming) and the son-in-law of her former governess Frank Churchill (Ewan McGregor).

All the while, she is endlessly harangued by her moralizing brother-in-law Mr. Knightley (Jeremy Northam), and of course they fall in love because that's just how gender politics worked in the Regency era.

Pictured: Romance!

When you're adapting Jane Austen, there is pretty much one of three ways you can go about it. The first is the Clueless route, translating the novel into a modern story. The second is to highlight the period-based character comedy that Austen always wove into her stories, much like the 1940 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The third is to completely ignore that essential aspect of Austen's work, assuming that because it's old it must be "important," and presenting it with po-faced seriousness.

To be fair, Emma does indulge in a little bit of the second, but if we're going to stick this in a category, it's the latter all the way. Here we're treated to two hours of stuffy, bone-dry material posturing as British and genteel even though its director and lead are American. The acting, at least from the non-leads, is very Masterpiece Theater, but not even at the level of Northanger Abbey, which actually was a Masterpiece production, because that movie at least hired actually talented, actually British people.

Although, I must say, Gwyneth Paltrow at least isn't bad here. I'm not here to defend any American's fake British accent, but I drew great delight her two-faced approach to the townspeople she deems beneath her - which is compounded by an internal monologue that didn't appear quite enough for me to remember that this was a thing the movie was doing and thus was tremendously confusing, but still funny.

And as much as nobody here seems aware that Jane Austen is a comedy writer, there are genuinely funny moments that sneak through from time to time. A montage of Emma trying not to think about Mr. Knightley is actually funny and cinematically engaging, the only time both of those elements combine in the film, which generally has very little use for either of them.

It's mostly just lifestyle porn destined for a future Pinterest board.

Unfortunately, for the most part, Emma can't help but be that dreaded word: boring. The film is also inept in a few major ways that prevent it from accomplishing anything more. First, the staging is completely bananas, shoehorning random activities into every dialogue scene, staging moments while people do things like set up for a barn dance, shoot arrows, or pick strawberries. It should feel nice to get some fresh air away from the drawing-room bound drama that Austen usually works with, but the sheer abundance of random hustle and bustle is intensely distracting.

But even more distracting is the fact that this movie just isn't shot very well. The lighting designer seems to have a blind spot, that blind spot being the entire foreground. The second any character steps toward the camera, a shadow falls over them like an alien craft is passing overhead. And the lighting in Emma's mansion is even more whack, sending rectangles of light shooting off in random directions to highlight exactly the objects in the room that aren't key to understanding the scene.

It's bad, people. I don't know who let this happen on such a major Hollywood scale, but they shouldn't be allowed near human eyes. But that's the only thing in the movie that's legitimately, actively terrible. Everything else is just bland and unremarkable. The best that I can say about Emma is that it's true to the source material, but beyond that it has absolutely nothing to offer. It's like listening to an audiobook starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and if you're into that that's totally fine. It's just not really adding anything to the world of Jane Austen, so it's a good one to skip if you're not as inclined to be thorough as I am.

TL;DR: Emma is a perfectly fine literary adaptation, but one just wishes it didn't take itself quite so seriously.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 944
Other Films Based on Emma
Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
Emma (McGrath, 1996)
Emma (Lawrence, 1996)
Aisha (Ojha, 2010)
Emma. (de Wilde, 2020)

Marvel's Contract Negotiations: The Movie!

Year: 2018

Director: Joe & Anthony Russo

Cast: C'mon

Run Time: 2 hours 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

So, the time has come. More or less the entirety of modern cinema has led to this, the culmination of ten years of multi-million dollar blockbuster filmmaking. People online have made fun of Marvel's comment about Avengers: Infinity War being the most ambitious crossover event in cinema history, but people online don't have a great track record of thinking things through. Marvel is right. Infinity War is an act of pure Hollywood hubris, cramming as many successful properties into one punch-kicking chunk as humanly possible. It was either going to be the best movie ever made or a fully incomprehensible hash.

Unfortunately, because the world doesn't live in binaries like we want it to, Infinity War lands somewhere in between. But honestly, that's the best case scenario, because it could have been so much worse and frankly we as a species don't deserve the glory of what would have happened if they threaded that needle.

But we DO deserve Danai Gurira and Chris Evans' beard being in as many movies as possible, so at least we're getting that started.

Oh boy. This is the part where we recap the plot of the movie. Wish me luck. 

Umm... remember all the Marvel movies since 2008? Well, you'd better. Every character you've ever known and loved and a bunch of characters who you assume are from the ones you didn't see are in danger, because the big purple Jay Leno alien known as Thanos (Josh Brolin) is finally ready to bedazzle his Polly Pocket glove with the sparkly Infinity stones that have been cropping up oh so often lately. Once he collects them all, he can send in the box tops to receive his prize: the death of half the population of the universe.

Turns out, people don't like that idea, so pretty much everyone who has a superpower or who looks good in a leather catsuit have assembled to prevent this catastrophe on as many fronts as possible. Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Rocket (Bradley Cooper voice, Sean Gunn mocap), and Groot (Vin Diesel) search for a mythical god-killing weapon. Meanwhile the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy - Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) - head to cut off Thanos at the site of some Infinity Stone or other. 

Meanwhile meanwhile, Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) has disappointed girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) by hopping onto the ship of Thanos' right-hand monster Ebony Maw (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) to save Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with stowaway Spider-Man (Tom Holland).

Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, Vision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) are trying to bone in peace, but he's got a big ol' Infinity Stone in his head so he must be evacuated to Wakanda by war criminals Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) into the custody of Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and also Hulk is there (Mark Ruffalo).

Did I miss anything? Oh yes, 45% of the cast. Well, I tried. I really did.

I'm getting why Thanos wants to destroy half of these people. It would really make things easier to follow.

Much like the screenwriters of Infinity War, I really don't know where to start. There's a lot of good in Infinity War and a lot of bad, but they're all hopelessly entangled. Maybe we should start with Thanos, who has been lurking in the background of this franchise since the end credits tease in 2012's Avengers. The movie really wants to have a sympathetic villain, but doesn't quite stick the landing. Maybe it's the fact that it's easier to relate to someone who doesn't look like a CGI gummy bear. Maybe they cashed in their small supply of Good Villain points to make Killmonger back in February. Maybe it's just the fact that every time the script shifts to its serious tone, the gears start to grind a little bit. I'm going to assume it's all the above, but let's discuss the latter.

The screenplay, from the writers behind your favorite Marvel entries including Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor: The Dark World, is kind of a mess. Whenever it attempts to get profound (as any apocalyptic movie is tempted to do), it adopts a clownish grimace and forces its characters through a gauntlet of the most maudlin, overwrought monologues yet known to man. Combined with the barbaric clunkiness of the exposition every time that rears its ugly head, a lot of sequences in this movie are just punishing to watch.

A scene where you can see exactly where it's going within seconds drags out its overheated drama for full minutes, jam-packed with explanatory dialogue that finds endless ways to rephrase "you say that things are THIS way... But they're THAT way!" Infinity War never cuts to the chase, and its complicated labyrinth of life-or-death contrivances, arbitrary ticking clock action sequences, and bizarre character motivations isn't smoothed out by how painful and empty the emotional scenes are.

But it's hard to drum up stakes when you know that there are going to be 18 more of these movies in the next, like, three months. Especially when the punches are as hyperbolically pulled as this one. The Marvel films have always had a problem with balancing the power levels of its various characters, but Thanos is so perilously overpowered that when he stoops to the level of a punchfight, you wonder why he doesn't just crush these people like ants. His strength and ability wax and wane exactly as the plot needs them to, and that almost completely neuters his ability to be an impressive villain. He's literally upstaged by his sidekick Ebony Maw, who has a crazy frightening countenance, a startlingly powerful telekinetic ability, and a much more mustache-twistingly eeevil approach to his work.

The fact that the movie doesn't realize how freaking terrifying he is just goes to show that you shouldn't add characters willy nilly when you're stuck with the ones you've been teasing for a decade.

This arid, emotionless state of affairs isn't helped by the cast, which is like 800 pounds of sexy glowering shoved into a five pound bag. Whether it's because they're finally grown tired of their characters or if they just feel like they don't have to try too hard considering they'll only get like five minutes of screentime, a lot of our team roster here is on autopilot. Much like the script, these performances are leaning hard on the assumption that you already know and love these characters and they don't have to try too hard to earn your trust.

Robert Downey, Jr. has obviously getting tired of playing Iron Man for some time, and Chris Evans has literally been fatigued by the lifestyle he's had to live to keep Captain America afloat, but their disinterest is front and center here. Mark Ruffalo also seems to have lost his hold on what exactly Hulk is doing in these movies, and some of the one-scene reappearances from actors like Idris Elba are clearly catnapping. And Gwyneth Paltrow is practically comatose.

Luckily, this isn't an actors' movie. This is a posing in tight shirts movie, and that more than does the trick. And a lot of material is patched up by the people who really are pulling their weight, usually the newer additions to the franchise. The Guardians of the Galaxy, fresh off their sequel, are still packing a comic punch that keeps the lighter tone in the air, Danai Gurira from Black Panther owns the screen with just a twitch of her lip, and Chris Hemsworth is still harnessing the Kiwi magic that made Tho: Ragnarok so special. Plus, Tom Holland is flat out great, giving me the only scene that actually impacted my emotions in any way at all.

Even though the Iron-Spidey suit is... questionable.

OK, finally we've transitioned into the good parts of the movie, of which there are quite a lot. In an infinite universe all things are possible, and there's no universe as big as the MCU, so there was always going to be just as much good as bad. Or... almost as much.

The action scenes aren't all spectacular, but they're definitely engaging popcorn cinema, and one fight that brings back the magical aesthetics of Doctor Strange is a decadent visual feast, reminiscent of Dumbledore and Voldemort's showstopping battle in the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Aesthetically, the film comes alive for a lot of its spacefaring adventures, painting worlds and landscapes we've never seen before with candy colors that are drunk on the visual potential of comic books. Not every setting is perfect (a climactic battle is staged in a location where everything is a different shade of "rust"), but there's a lot of big budget whimsy to be had here.

And when the script does shift to its lighter tones, the comedy pretty much always works. Obviously laughs are in the mouth of the beholder, but over the past few days since I saw this movie my mind has been irresistibly drawn back to a lot of the one-liners, of which I have retained a much higher quantity and with greater accuracy than even most straight-up comedy films I like. Again, the best of these are delivered by the actors who are actually trying, but everybody gets a shot at a line or two that undeniably works.

And... fine. Not all the melodrama is bad. I wish I could talk about it without spoiling it, but I can't, so I'll suffice it to say that a metanarrative decision on the parts of the filmmakers really drives home the emotional impact of an event in the third act, retroactively making it feel much more brutal than it felt, at least to me, in the moment. Ask me in the comments if you want more detail on that.

Anyway, there's really a lot wrong here, but I'm going to err on the side of enjoying popcorn cinema and forgive some of its sins in favor of the parts I did really like, at least on a shallow entertainment level. The sheer amount of balls they manage to juggle is impressive, and while it doesn't feel seamless, it's at least comprehensible, which it almost certainly didn't seem like it was going to be.

TL;DR: Avengers: Infinity War is surprisingly legible and certainly fun, but emotionally unavailable due to its jam-packed story.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1764

Reviews In This Series

Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)

Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)

Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016)

Black Panther (Coogler, 2018)

Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

Reviewing Jane: Follies And Nonsense, Whims And Inconsistencies Do Divert Me, I Own, And I Laugh At Them Whenever I Can

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: Byrum Geisler

Cast: Ethan Sharrett, Chase Conner, Brandi Price 

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The only thing shocking about the fact that they made a gay version of Pride and Prejudice is that it took until freaking 2016 to do it. This is homophobia at work, ladies and gentlemen. (For the record, I'm aware that there is a long history of queer Austen adaptations in theatre, but this ain't no blog about plays, is it?) That movie was called Before the Fall, and it is just as low budget and awkward as the gay cinema I came to know and love as a fresh-out-the-closet teen. So at least some things never change.

That and the fact that gay casting directors ALWAYS know how to cast a hot romantic lead. This is the first Darcy where I haven't had to squint real hard to find particularly appealing.

The interesting thing about Before the Fall is that in its update of the source material, it doesn't just gender-swap Lizzy Bennet. There's a lot of elements that are shifted around here, and it's actually kind of fun to see where they ended up, even if they were changed just for the sake of being different rather than any sort of narrative need.

Here's what we're dealing with. Ben Bennett (Ethan Sharrett) is an attorney in small town Virginia who accidentally insults the client of his coworker George Wickham (Jonathan Horvath). That client is Lee Darcy (Chase Conner), an alcoholic who pushed his girlfriend during an argument about the fact that they haven't had sex in a year. We're treated to a truly bizarre flashback about Darcy's dad working a gas station attendant while his son waits in the car, so we know that the man has been struggling with his sexuality.

Cut to several months later, when Nature Preserve board member Chuck Bingley (Jason Mac, who is unspeakably hot and should have been cast as Ben Bennett, but whatcha gonna do) brings Darcy - now in recovery - to a welcome party at Ben's. Over the course of a truly insane amount of hiking trips, the two are thrown into a tumultuous acquaintance that affects their lives forever, as well as those of Darcy's shrill, homophobic girlfriend Cathy Burge (Carol Marie Rinn) and Ben's BFF Jane Gardiner (Brandi Price), who falls for Bingley immediately and treats us to the film's only sex scene which is between two straight people for reasons that are entirely impossible to fathom.

Who invited you people? You have twenty of your own movies!

So basically, not only is there a gay element, but Darcy and Lizzy/Ben have essentially swapped personalities. Ben is the rich one whose pride is harming their relationship, and Darcy is the poor sap who is prejudiced against him thanks to an overheard comment. Does this alter the dynamics of the story in any way? OK, no it doesn't, but I feel like it should. We're too many degrees away from the source material for that to matter though.

Before the Fall is merely a lark. It plays with the toolbox provided by Jane Austen in ways that are fun to spot if you're as deep into her work as I am, but not entirely worthy of their own feature length motion picture. And some of the narrative wrinkles they add send the story down rabbit holes it can never quite recover from. Giving Darcy a girlfriend was a huge mistake (first of all, with the way their relationship makes them feel trapped, the filmmakers should have at least committed and made them husband and wife, otherwise it doesn't make a whole lot of sense), and leads to a lot of nasty little accidental subtext that implies that it's not abuse if it's not a felony, and that Cathy is the true villain in all of this because she's a shrill, hysterical woman. Painting her with a brush of homophobia and bitterness doesn't absolve Darcy of pushing her to the ground, which is a thing we see happen. In slow motion. Repeated three times like it's The f**king Graduate.

This is probably the right time to mention that the filmmaking itself isn't superb, but expecting any sort of technical brilliance from a hyper-indie gay film is like eating at Taco Bell and expecting not to spend an hour in the bathroom afterward. Shots awkwardly cut off people at the neck, the comic relief moments provided by two execrable gay stereotypes have the pacing of a drunken turtle, and the acting is a little underwhelming. This is pretty par for the course, honestly. 

Although, unusually, one thing Before the Fall does pull out all the stops on is its nature cinematography. If this were just a travelogue of Virginian hiking trails, it would be an unimpeachable masterpiece. The color scheme and gentle autumnal tranquility of any exterior shot sends you plunging into a perfectly serene mood, and that atmosphere does wonders for the mostly inane story playing out within its confines.

Forget these white doofuses, look at that beautiful lake!

So all in all, Before the Fall isn't a complete and total waste of time, just most of one. It's a gay film that neuters the sexuality of its leads, fails to understand its source material and the implications of the diversions it takes, and fails to drum up any sort of chemistry between the two leads in the first place. I know nothing about the ages or actual sexualities of Sharrett or Conner, so I won't blame either of those things, but Ben is presented as unbearably milquetoast and all of Conner's generally fine smoldering glances right off his impenetrable armor of blandness. 

This could be the fault of a script that fails to justify why anyone would particularly want to fall in love with him, and has Darcy's transition into a romantic lead take literally the entire movie. This could be the fault of an editor who has no idea how to drum up tension, even in scenes where characters are literally yelling at each other. This could be the fault of a complete and total misunderstanding of human relationships, and especially the blossoming of homosexual thought and feeling. It doesn't matter what the reason is, though. It's a weak little trifle any way you slice it, and there's no one ingredient that could have improved the listless mush of a story we're presented with here.

TL;DR: Before the Fall is a predictably mediocre effort, but it's more engaging than one might expect.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1128

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)

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