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Why so serious, 'Joker'?

10/4/2019

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There is an inescapable question eclipsing the intended impact of Todd Phillips’ Joker. Could you even imagine thinking such a serious film about this clown man needed to exist? Joker, no matter how unconventional an iteration, cannot be divorced from the foundational stakes. This is all idiotic fun. A film about the Joker can be taken seriously, but there is something patently absurd about the mere notion of this character in any context. Joker’s relentless push to conjure some reality to the contrary never produces a rational argument. Instead, it leaves something pretty and grim reverberating with the same question: Could you imagine? 

It’s not as though some unforgivably bad film has been made here. Joker has a lovely palette. Joaquin Phoenix hands in his usual committed performance. A couple of eyebrow-arching ideas bob to the surface. These are the standards to which comic book films are held, and usually garner more credit than their mediocre consumability warrants. But the film doesn’t hit on any level beyond its cruelty. There is no substantial satire. It’s not a compelling character piece. Its notions of social good and dissent and the "correct" order of things are hopelessly jumbled. Yet somewhere beyond all of these components there is an existential crisis traceable back to the written page.

Joker will draw a great many comparisons to Taxi Driver as well as The King of Comedy, and the film’s textures are an unmistakable paean to Scorsese’s filthiest New York. Though in the film’s brief stints of clarity it felt more like Nightcrawler: a portrait of a sociopath telling his own hero story. Like, don’t we all believe the weeping violins are for us? Or, there was potential for Joker as some radioactive dye dropped into a broken world to expose the extent of its profound flaws. In these moments, something as compelling as Joker’s visuals began to emerge. Then in an ass-showing monologue delivered at the zero hour, any potential for these readings was punted into outer space.

Phillips and company try to assemble the pieces of Joker’s oft-invoked Very Bad Day and desperately weave it into some passable semblance of reality. In doing so, the audience is left with a series of lousy turns for Arthur Fleck (the chrysalis of our soon-to-be Clown Prince of Crime), and a perverse misunderstanding of mental health crises. Where there is a reasonable argument to say, "hey, my guy, you’re thinking way too hard about this — it’s all make ‘em up!" consider this review’s foundational complaint a full-throated agreement. This is a story about a mentally ill guy in grease paint destined to fight a mentally ill billionaire in a bat costume. Oh, plus the major metropolitan area perpetually at risk because of their slap fights. Pathos? Psychodrama? A parable for these cursed times? Again, with yelling, could you even…

Though Joker is angling for this fight. Phillips not only makes repeated efforts to make his world the “real” world, he insists on inviting in our contemporary world. In doing so, the film demands to be evaluated on those merits. Joker wants to blame a failing social welfare system as part of Arthur’s problems, yet it is more generous with its depiction of the billionaire class than the downtrodden citizens pushing back. Arthur as Joker insists he’s not political, calls for civility, yet mewls that no one gets to decide what’s funny in response to his deliberately vicious non-joke. And in the greatest emblem of this film’s edgelord intellect, as perfectly captured by Glen Weld of NPR:

Arthur suffers one of his many onscreen beatings at the hands (and feet) of a bunch of Wall Street bros on the subway, who taunt him by singing "Send In The Clowns." Nearly in its entirety...we're supposed to buy that a straight finance bro would be off-book on the second and third verses of a Sondheim number?

The problem isn’t this films depiction of Arthur's descent into Joker, which I do not believe was designed to evince sympathy. The controversy is not in the baseless moral panic. The fundamental ill at the center of Joker is it’s no fun. So self-serious, flooded with caricature versions of real-world traumas, it renders itself inert. When we arrive at our pearl-strewn climax in crime alley, Joker insists we acknowledge the table which has been laid. A very serious world where Bruce Wayne — in response to the Joker uprisings of ‘81 where his dumbass dad took him to the movies in a part of town embroiled in protest — uses his inherited billions to fight social ills with extralegal vigilantism while dressed as a bat. The discourse, our cultural relationship with these characters, this sub-average film surrounded by so much bang and clamor; if Joker proves anything, we continue to insist that the joke is on us.

—Monte Monreal 
 

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A six-year-old's take on the slapstick stop-motion magic of "Missing Link"

4/12/2019

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What do kids think? My presumptions are probably about as spot on as my guess of what a dog has going on behind the eyes. To get a better idea of what a child might think of Missing Link, the latest stop-motion animated bit of eye candy from Laikia, I sat down for a couple of cheeseburgers and a convo with one of my younger roommates (my six-year-old daughter) to see what she thought of the movie, which I forced her along for. (She’s more of a My Little Pony person.)

Spoiler warning: Six-year-olds don’t care about the concept of spoilers, which is just one of the ways they’re superior to adults. But that’s a subject for another time. Just know that some things she calls out are from the last half of the film, but I steer her away from anything that would likely ruin your spoiler-sensitive viewing experience.

What did you think of the movie?
What movie?

The movie we saw today.
Lost Link?

Missing Link.
Yeah! Missing Link!

Right. What did you think of that movie? What would you tell people about it?
That was the scariest movie, so don’t you dare go to that!

Really? That’s a quote for a movie poster if I’ve ever heard one.
Well, it was a little scary, but really exciting. And I think it’s good. I think that the ending is really nice, but the first part of it is kind of scary. The second part’s really nice, so I think actually … It’s a good movie, and I think other people should watch it.

That might be a bit too long for a poster quote.
What?

Let’s talk about what Missing Link is about.
So this Yaki person wanted to go and…

Wait. What?
What?

What’s a “Yaki”?
The Yaki guy — Link.

I think “Yeti” is what you mean, but he was actually a Sasquat--
This Yaki guy wanted to go to his cousins because he thought they were his cousins. And a girl and a boy decided to come with him and they … [cheeseburger chewing] … they kind of went far away and they got trapped in an area, but they came out because the Yaki throwed the boy up and he crashed, and then he throwed the girl up and she went over it and she climbed on and she got something to get out of the place because they were trapping them for the Yetis they thought were … and then they like ... Oh! [very excited now] They went across the bridge and the bad guys were waiting and they destroyed the bridge and…

Whoa, kid. Let’s leave some points of the plot untouched.
The good guys were safe and they went back home.

Or not.
In the very end, they got like a mermaid-dinosaur picture or something.

A fossil. You’re just really going for it, huh?
And the man I was talking about, he was so excited. And it was the end, and it was really good. The end.

Let’s talk about how the movie looked. Most cartoons you watch are made with computers now. And they use them here, for sure, but this one is also made with little models, like toys they pose made out of Play-Doh. That won’t matter to some people — likely the same savages who see no difference between Keuring and a real cup of coffee. The people at Laika go the extremely hard-to-brew animation route, prioritizing art and tradition over convenience. And it gives all their movies such a beautiful and unique look.
I liked it.

I find that stuff super inspiring, both from a creative and a work ethic standpoint. It’s that JFK-going-to-the-moon pep talk — doing it not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. Not that it’s even remotely similar, but I recently started using paper for my to-do list and am amazed how often I hear “Why? Just use your phone.” I mean, why should I do anything other than everything on my phone, huh? Just plop a rib-eye in my smart microwave and listen to an algorithm-created playlist while I mindlessly swipe through pictures on my phone. That’s totally the future I dreamed of.
Are you mad, Dad?

No. What did you think when you get a time-lapse glimpse of the work the crew did on one scene in the closing credits? Wasn’t that cool? These people have a surgical attention to detail and such patience. I can barely be bothered to re-read this blog post for simple speling mistaks.
Yeah … Remember when that guy ate cow poop! Hahahahaha!

Yeah, he thought they were cookies. Classic.
Cause the girl said don’t talk about the chicken.

Yeah, because the old woman didn’t realize she had a chicken on her head.
She never knowed? Then she realized? Did she ever realize?

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In stitches: 'Phantom Thread'

1/12/2018

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With no prior knowledge, would you be convinced Boogie Nights and Phantom Thread were hatched from the same imagination?

Viewed back-to-back, a voluble, cocaine-throttled melodrama set against a delicate romance as black comedy; the connection would appear tenuous at best. Boogie Nights is so fastidiously structured, a quality that bears little resemblance to the harried pornographers at the center. Phantom Thread is moody and frayed, hardly befitting the subject of a haute couture dressmaker and his impeccable creations. Where they seem worlds apart—an emblem of his arc as a filmmaker—I’d argue that Anderson has been steadfast in one quality, an ongoing attempt to decipher just how all these misfits find their way home.

It’s been 21 years since Hard Eight, and on this, his eighth feature length film, Paul Thomas Anderson is making his warmest, most generous work to date. To describe Phantom Thread as welcoming wouldn’t be wholly accurate, but the film isn’t guarded. His older work is driven by scope and narrative. Strategized to the point where elements felt at arm’s length, like something wild displayed under glass vitrines.

Now, the bombast has been replaced with character studies and disjointed vignettes, something more unfinished, but soulful and resonant. Anderson’s still manages to play all of his favored cards—lush visuals, fascination with creators, moments that are utterly ludicrous—but the notable absence of his familiar California environs signals a subtle renegotiation of his auteuristic patterns. Much like Jonny Greenwood’s score, the opening shimmer of expected drone gives way to something far different, an elegant, piano-driven soundtrack.

And quick aside here, if there is one plot point of this our 21st century that has continued to delight and surprise, it’s Jonny’s second life as superb film scorer. Where it once seemed like Anderson’s calling card would be his stock company of players in front of the camera, these days it feels like Greenwood and editor Dylan Tichenor are the glue holding together his cinematic universe. But the setting, the score, the small stakes, all of it adds up to a work definable his own, but it feels like Anderson is comfortable doing less. Not cutting corners, but allowing substance to speak—and occasionally mumble—for itself.

Beyond the director, this picture belongs to three people, Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, Vicky Krieps as Alma, and Lesley Manville as Cyril Woodcock. The film is part parable, part romance, and bound together by humor I wouldn’t call treacly, but compare to treacle as it’s black, oozing, and weirdly sweet. Phantom Thread takes all of this and sashays its way through toxic masculinity, the myth of the burdened creative, and plain old inexplicable love. All without lingering to long, or pinning some finite answer on any of the above. But what gives the characters, and by extension the actors, such great strength are the power dynamics.  

Less a thruple then they are acid, neutral, and base, Reynolds, sister Cyril, and muse/lover/pincushion Alma are engaged in their own little thrall. Centered around Reynolds and his renowned fashion house, House of Woodcock (apparently Daniel Day-Lewis chose the name), their love of self, love of each other, and love of the label collide on a sliding scale of staid glances to outright perturbation. As this dance lurches on, we eventually work our way to much darker designs. Though, show me a love without a sinister streak, and I’ll show you a love afraid to truly be itself. Also, without betraying too much, when her moment arrives, I want you to consider: does Alma merely do in a second what Reynolds has done across months?

The performances by Vicky Krieps and Daniel Day-Lewis will be much ballyhooed, and deservedly so, but I want to take a moment to shoutout to Lesley Manville. Both pillar and fulcrum, Manville plays her part with such effortless poise, she is low-key the MVP of this film. Though the story does belong to Alma and Reynolds, and this is where the concept of bespoke dressmaking warms me as narrative *ahem* thread.

“You can sew almost anything into the canvas of a coat,” is a line used in the trailer and spoken early in the film by Reynolds, and have you ever considered the internal life of a piece of clothing? We place a premium on the exterior, but if you consider the sourcing of things as ubiquitous as thread to more elegant pieces like a bolt of 17th-century Polish lace mentioned in the film, there is a far-ranging experience inside each article of clothing.

Consider your tracks of stitches, the nonsense of your particular seams, the odd shape of your neckline. Each element of a piece of clothing—independent of the other—is a kind of cacophony, but when assembled through attention and effort, something remarkable emerges, a fit for no one other than you. This notion of fit, no matter how unexpected, therein lies the touching hope at the core of Anderson's work. Save Daniel Plainview who is as feckless as American capitalism, Anderson loves to at least launch a trajectory of redemption for his characters. And for the once enfant terrible who is now husband and father to four children, perhaps this is the personal message sewn within Phantom Thread. Your fit, in defiance of all logic and convention, is out there.

—Monte Monreal

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Superheroes, they're NOT just like us! Why “Thor: Ragnarok” is the funniest (and best) Marvel movie to date

11/3/2017

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Surrounded by such easily accessible excesses in our lives, it can be tough to know when to tap out—when to say “enough.” “Maybe it was a bad idea to marathon Stranger Things until 3 a.m.” “Perhaps spending my morning reading plot synopses for every film in the Saw series out of morbid curiosity wasn’t the best use of time.” “Why’d I have that third taco?” Etc.

When you’re drinking from the firehose, you end up feeling hosed—and can find your thirst replaced with a sense of drowning.

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That’s where I’ve found myself with superhero movies. Like others who grew up squandering their allowances on Toy Biz X-Men figures and Kenner Batman toys, when Iron Man came and rocket-blasted my adult-sized Superman socks off, I was thrilled with the prospect of a decades-long run of shared comic-book universe films following the colorfully costumed do-gooders of my youth. But then I realized for every Iron Man, there must be an Iron Man 2; for every Guardians of the Galaxy, I’d have to power my way through an Age of Ultron.

The biannual conveyor belt never stops, and after a years-long force-fed binge of superhero schlock, I had become numb to any sense of joy I once derived from seeing the heroes of my childhood comics and cards come to life on the big screen by the time the third Iron Man landed around in 2013.

Enter stage right, Thor: Ragnarok.

I wasn’t. No. I have become wary even of critical acclaim after too many just-OK films got labeled must-sees. “Dude... Logan,” you may have heard. “It’s actually good. Like, it might get a Best Picture nomination—and it should!” (It won’t, and it shouldn’t.) “Captain America: Civil War has a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes,” you may have read. (What? No. Why?) Heck, even the The Dark Knight, the would-be Citizen Kane of comic-book movies, only seems like such a beaut' because it’s surrounded by its plain-looking entourage of superhero film friends.


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Wild horses: A four-year-old's take on "My Little Pony: The Movie"

10/5/2017

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Today, in theaters around the world, fans will return to a revered, unforgettable universe that holds a special place in the hearts of millions—a visionary universe created in the early ’80s but brought back to the big screen today, facing at least some skepticism. Can a new, perhaps uncalled for, entry in the series live up to fans’ impossibly high expectations? Is it yet another in a never-ending line of nostalgia-powered cash grabs?

To find out, I took my four-year-old daughter to watch today’s other big new release, My Little Pony: The Movie. What follows is our conversation about the movie over a couple bowls of cereal.

Spoiler warning: Turns out children don’t understand the concept of spoilers, so tread cautiously if you don’t want to hear one key (though totally obvious if you’ve seen a trailer or have even the faintest familiarity with the world of Equestria) plot point from the final bit of the movie.

What was your favorite part of My Little Pony: The Movie?
Well... all of it.

Fair. Not sure what else I could have expected. Who was your favorite character?
All of the ponies. Oh! Except for Tempest… Except for Tempest. I only like the nice ponies. Tempest is a bad guy. She wants to take the good ponies' magic, but then she gets friendly by Twilight [as in Twilight Sparkle, the series' purple protagonist a.k.a. the Princess of Friendship] and Twilight teaches her a lesson.

Wow. Spoilers, kiddo.
What?

Never mind. So, Tempest Shadow is a new pony voiced by Emily Blunt. She’s cynical on the whole “friendship is magic” bit, which is basically the 24/7 focus for the Mane Six, the six key ponies of MLP. This, and the fact that she wants to steal the pony princesses’ powers for her own evil purposes, puts them at odds. The bulk of the story is Tempest pursuing Twilight and her friends, which results in some tense close calls. Did you think it was scary? Is it too scary for little kids?
No. It was so funny. I was just like staring at it.

You were entranced by the screen. I tried to give you some popcorn—I even put some in your hand--and you just let it fall out to the floor
I was like… I couldn’t see you. I didn’t want to miss any part—sorry. Maybe next time when we go to another Pony movie can you pleasssse give me popcorn and I promise I’ll remember to eat it?
​

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Send in the murder-clowns: "It" (mostly) floats

9/8/2017

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“Finally, it’s acceptable for children to be murdered in movies again!”

“If there’s one thing about the recent state of film that we can all agree on, it’s that the lack of kid-killing has been a real bummer. Then here it comes and makes everything right.”

“Did you say ‘it’ or It?”

“Does it matter? Whoa, Rob. Better yet: Does It matter? Get it?

“Yep…”

“Now whenever I say ‘it’ I’m going to wonder if I’m unintentionally saying something clever about the movie.”

“It only ever happens unintentionally, Eric.”

​“I want to point out that I agreed to see this movie with you because, (A) I thought it was going to be terrible, and (B) the last movie we saw together, Her, also had a single-syllabled pronoun title, and the idea of only seeing pronoun-titled movies together was mildly amusing to me.”

“Oh yeah. That was good.”

“That? Haven’t seen it, but I’ll put it on the pronoun-titled movie IMDB list I’m going to whip up when I get home.”

“Can’t wait to not read that list of like… four movies. But, now that you mention it, I’m going to make a list of ’80s movies where they kill kids.”

“Pretty sure you’re going to end up on some kind of list yourself for that.”

“Back in the day, you could have a kid die in the cold open and still get a PG rating.”

​“Yeah, what a time to be a child! As children of the ’80s, it’s amazing we didn’t turn out to be serial killers.”

​“And then came the Dakota Fanning-ization of American cinema …

“True. Wait. Why are we blaming Dakota? Were you pulling for Sean Penn to go Of Mice and Men on her at the end of I Am Sam? Dark, dude. Maybe the ’80s did mess us up...”

“I’m not sure what changed. Did it take blockbusters like Hunger Games to re-normalize kid-killing this for the modern era? Maybe real life is just so awful now that people are like, ‘Fine. Dead kids, whatever.’ Either way, dead kids are squarely in Stephen King’s wheelhouse, and It may be the most famous example of that.”

“To be clear though, killing animals on film is still totally unacceptable, unless used as the impetus for Keanu to go on a totally justified killing spree. I remember there was some internet outrage—shocker!—about It being ‘remade’ like the TV miniseries/made-for-TV movie was some sort of masterpiece. But all I can remember is Tim Curry being terrifying and then the giant stupid spider at the end.”

“It doesn’t hold up well.”

“Besides dead kids, what else did you like about this iteration, or should I say, It-eration, of It?”

“All around, the performances from the kids were great. I’m not sure why it took Netflix making cult hit Stranger Things for studios to realize that you can (and should) cast child actors who look and behave like real humans, but I’m all on board with that. It even has that one wiener kid from Stranger Things, 14-year-old Finn Wolfhard.”

“That’s his real name? Oh my god, I need that to be my name. He’s funny and super likable here as a foul-mouthed kid, but I was most impressed with Sophia Lillis’ acting. She plays Bev, the lone girl in this gang of geeks and has the nostalgic look down pat—big-time Molly Ringwald vibes. But her performance really sells how equal parts wonderful and crappy it is to be a teenager in this limbo between childhood and adulthood, where you fully understand and are dealing with heavy stuff but are largely powerless to do anything about it.”

“Going back to Stranger Things for a second: Beyond the whole ’80s nostalgia thing, It takes a lot of cues from the show, both tonally and thematically. I can’t really delve too far into that comparison without dropping spoilers, but both are built around the ‘otherworldly creature versus gang of tween boys and one girl’ genre, and they both feature old-school BMX bikes, ruthless bullies, and lax supervision by adults, who are either evil, loony, or clueless.”

“The adults and bullies in this movie suck! And I mean that as a compliment to their performances. I think It would have worked even better if it focused on the coming-of-age story even more: Wonder Years with a small side of demon clown. It touches on how adults mess kids up and could have even made a stronger connection between the kids’ fears in the film and what they’re dealing with in their lives. Or maybe even what is actually happening to them versus how their minds perceive it as some sort of coping mechanism. Like, Bev’s dad is a scumbag and maintenance worker of sorts who looks like he could and might be spending time in the sewer doing unsavory things to kids. Now, it’s not like I wanted some dumb new twist for the sake of twists where it turns out Pennywise is just an adult snatching up kids and the children see him as a clown to cope with it, but I thought there might be some parallel there to each of the kids’ perception of Pennywise and the things they’re dealing with at home and school, but it’s never fully baked. Hell, maybe that’s stupid, but so is the idea of an inter-dimensional creature who takes the appearance of a clown and wakes up every 20-something years to eat kids in Maine.”

“Speaking of, let’s talk about the clown in the room: Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown.”

“Tim Curry’s are some big clown shoes to fill.”

“I think Skarsgård turns in a pretty solid performance, and he wisely avoids attempting to mimic Curry’s raspy-voiced, creepy-old-man take on the dancing clown. And it must have been tempting to go that route, considering how Curry was really the only aspect of the original miniseries worth remembering. While Curry’s Pennywise calls to mind a sadistic New Jersey tollbooth operator in pancake makeup, Skarsgård lands somewhere between Gollum and a B-minus version of Heath Ledger’s Joker, alternating between wacky and demonic at the drop of a blood-stained fright wig. (And I mean that as a compliment!).”

“Yeah, Skarsgård makes it his own. He gets a ton of screen time, too—maybe too much, especially in those poorly thought-out and executed visual scares where he seemingly teleports toward the camera. We see him so much it raises some questions about the rules of what Pennywise can and can’t do. At times he seems all-powerful and at others he seems to be able to barely hold his own against a few kids.”

“Yeah, it feels kinda funny to bring up things like internal logic in a discussion about a movie starring a demon clown, but it never really feels like the ‘mythology’ of Pennywise is fully defined … but I’m sure we’ll get to that in the (SPOILER ALERT) … SEQUEL!!!”

“Ugh, I literally turned to you and swore when I realized that’s what we were doing here. Let’s talk other things that It doesn’t do so well.”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage: WTF?”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage was way jarring. The tone pulls a complete 360 from one second to the next. I hurt my neck whipping around so fast to look and see if you were seeing this train wreck too. As surprisingly not terrible as It is overall, I think this is the most turn-to-face-your-friend-and-give-a-WTF-expression neck twists I’ve had in a movie since Suicide Squad.”

“Despite being down to clown, I have to acknowledge that at least 85% of this movie was goofy as hell. Also, Pennywise’s last line made me laugh out loud, and I don’t think that’s what they were going for.”

“Also, without spoiling anything, at least one of the kids definitely kills someone and seems to face no consequences for it. Still, I think It was more good than bad—even if some of the scares fall flat—and it will probably hold up much better than the old miniseries. There are some really strong elements: the acting, the score (which is always at 11), and some smaller pieces, like the children’s TV show on in the background throughout the movie and the projector scene, which sounds dumb on paper and starts out feeling like a Japanese horror film cliché but actually ends up being pretty creepy. Your final thoughts?”
​

“I’d say that aside from the acting, the thing that keeps It afloat (get it?!) is its pacing. Pacing is critical in horror, and it’s so easy to screw up, especially when your source material is a 1,000-plus-page novel. This was perhaps the greatest undoing of the 1990 miniseries, which ran for a plodding 192 minutes and spanned over two VHS tapes. But the new version sticks to a much more effective tempo, and despite several digressions into some pretty silly territory, you never really feel bored. It’s almost like the filmmakers realized that a movie about a demonic clown doesn’t need a ton of slow-burning setup.”

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"xXx: The Return of Xander Cage" is high-octane, low-brow escapist fun

1/20/2017

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January 20, 2017: Today’s the day. Just take a deep breath. Is this real? It... it can’t be, right? How could this happen — something so absurd, so improbable it almost seems we’re living in a parody of reality? A new xXx movie? Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

​You know how it goes: You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. And really, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is arriving just as we absolutely need it. (Note: Please mind the preferred style little “x," big “X," little “x," which is used to in this instance to indicate extra extremeness.)

I’ll even go so far as to say I suspect the makers of xXx: TROXC may have somehow known what the outcome of the presidential election was going to be back when it was still in production, and they knew that we as a nation would need some sweet release from this day — and a reminder of one thing that really makes America great: blissfully brainless big-budget blockbusters.
​

xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is that. It’s a big, stupid movie that understands the golden rule of action movies in a post-Fast Five world: if you’re going to be a big, stupid movie you better damn well try and be the biggest, stupidest movie you can be. And while it fails to deliver the fun factor of that series, it’s still an entertaining dose of high-octane, purposefully low-brow escapism that makes the Fast and Furious films seem firmly grounded in reality.

xXx: The Return of Xander Cage doubles down on absurdity; it sees your "ramping a car off a bridge" and raises you "Vin Diesel skiing through the jungle.” And fighting absurdity with absurdity is exactly what I needed on a day like today. I went into the theater in a bad mood and left forgetting my worries, if for just a short while. xXx is a Red Bull-chugging, nipple-tattooed mental palate cleanser on a motorcycle ramping over the woes of reality.

After being replaced in the second xXx film by Ice Cube, Vin Diesel is back as Xander Cage, hater of sleeves and sayer of the word “suit” as an insult. He’s joined by and goes up against a team that includes the delightful blind kind-of Jedi guy from Rogue One (Donnie Yen), Game of Thrones' Sandor “The Hound” Clegane (Rory McCann), Ong-Bak bad-ass Tony Jaa, and a few other familiar faces as they try to save/destroy the world.

As an escape xXx is nice, but it’s far from perfect — shocker, I know. For all the mindless fun it delivers, it still suffers from being a pretty terrible film. The spine-jolting bumps that snatch some of the fun out of this rollercoaster attraction come thanks to editing that seems to have been done by a hamster on speed. The camerawork and jarring quick cuts feel as dated as xXx’s ink. If you were longing for Bourne Identity-era jumps that force a brain-strain to connect the dots between each second of footage, you’re in for a skateboard bomb down nostalgia hill. For everyone else, xXx: TROXC can be impossible to follow at times in the thick of the action. You’ll often be struggling to process the last (potentially?) cool thing you may or may not have just seen as another one comes flying your way. It's confusing at times and also a shame, as I feel we miss out on some of the insane and dazzling displays of physicality Yen and Jaa have to offer.


We also get some oversights that seem to have been left in as a joke they’re so blatantly bad. Scenes jump from sunny to rainy and midnight to midday within seconds.

xXx has little respect for the laws of physics, best practices in editing, or women: I don’t think a single female character was introduced without a slow body pan from hips to head. Sure, the movie and its cast are meant to be eye-candy, I get that, but a leering, lingering shot of someone’s crotch still feels a little icky.

Then again, if we’re focusing on what’s wrong with xXx, we're missing the bigger, dumber picture. You could fill a notebook taking inventory of all the missteps it makes and all the reasons xXx: The Return of Xander Cage doesn’t make sense — even compared to other similarly silly movies. I mean, dirt-bikes racing on the ocean? Can you believe this crap? True, the world of xXx, like our own, doesn’t make sense, but at least it’s over in about 90 minutes. 

(Side note: You totally thought the motorcycles on the ocean bit was going to be the film’s climax, right? Turns out it’s only like half-way through the movie!)

Whatever your thoughts on the original xXx (and hopefully you haven’t spent too much time over the past 13 years pondering it), xXx: The Return of Xander Cage could be just what you’re looking for this weekend. You can walk into a dark room and forget about the dark place outside the theater doors. It might not be productive, but sometimes we all need a little reprieve from reality. The real world will still be there waiting when you're done — still as deeply flawed and heart-breaking and beautiful as it ever was.

—Eric Pulsifer
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Scorsese's “Silence” is a tense, slow-burning meditation on defiance

1/18/2017

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Compared to those who came before us, we are generally fortunate to know little in the way of pain or suffering. We modern peoples of this first world are a bafflingly blessed tribe, among whom I may as well be chief. While watching Martin Scorsese’s Silence, my 32 oz. plastic cup runneth (ranneth?) over with a fine boozy porter next to a neon-yellow bag of Sour Patch Kids. Paradise isn’t an abstract concept but a place I live in day in and day out — not in an afterlife I hope awaits. The unshakable faith I have is that everything is now and will always be all right, which should mostly be true, until it isn’t.

In the meantime, we’ve got Silence, a long-in-the-works passion project of Scorsese's that offers a glimpse at the very real pain and suffering of Christians in 17th century Japan, a nation violently pushing back against Western influence.

When the biggest attack against the faith in our time is the “War on Christmas,” it can be easy to forget how rough some Christians have had it in the past. In the Japan of
Silence we see government-led torture and elaborate executions ripped from the Romans’ playbook, with displays of inventive, dehumanizing brutality that would make Mel Gibson flinch.


Silence follows two young Portuguese priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) as they sneak into this “we’re-all-good-on-priests-over-here” Japan to locate their mentor (Liam Neeson), who is rumored to have given up the faith after being tortured. In Japan, the priests have their own faith tested as they see firsthand the suffering followers are forced to endure on behalf of the gospel their predecessors have brought to this land.

I should interject here to say I recognize a movie about faith — or worse, that second-most cringe-inducing of “C” words in some non-God-fearing circles, “Christianity” — may trigger a gag reflex in more militant atheists or anti-theists, but don’t let the idea of a Scorsese movie about God (which this isn’t really, by the way) keep you from giving Silence a chance. After all, this is a Martin Scorsese project, not a Kirk Cameron one.

The silence of God is the eponymous silence here, but Silence is focused on earthly beings rather than spiritual ones — specifically how the createes deal with the creator’s silence in the face of inhumane abuse and worse.
​

Trying to make sense of the senseless is the heavy and oft-explored heart of most human existential crises, and senselessness abounds in Silence.

Silence poses an intriguing moral dilemma for its priestly protagonists: Is it a greater sin to deny God or to refuse to deny God at the expense of others? The denial here is in the form of stepping on a simple stone tablet likeness of Jesus, a simple act that the Japanese inquisitors say can even be done in insincerity.

To talk too much of the dilemma and how it builds would be to spoil the difficult places it goes, but don’t shy away from Silence for fear of it being torture porn. While it can be at times difficult to watch, it never feels gratuitous.

What it is is slow but taut and building in intensity — a quiet film, but not a boring one. Also, for a movie about silence with minimal dialogue and lingering shots of trembling hands passing crucifixes or stone tablets in the sand, Silence isn't actually all that silent. The constant cacophony of cricket chirps and insect chatter is an unsettling soundtrack throughout that fills the swampy Japan of Silence (actually filmed in Taiwan) with a sense of dread.
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​Even if we can’t fully relate and wouldn’t hesitate to step on an image of any man or deity to spare ourselves and others from pain, we can feel the struggle for people whose entire lives are built on a foundation of that faith through the shaken patchy-bearded faces of the unwavering Driver and looking-for-assurance Garfield and their followers. Though it’s simple enough to shout for the Christians here to “trample” and end their suffering, their spirit of defiance is inspirational — even if it seems pointless and at times blurs the line between faith and pride or vanity. Whatever your personal beliefs, I find it impossible not to root for people who refuse to yield to power or brute force.

Worth mentioning are Silence's final scenes, a coda that is a deviation from the heralded source material and feel unnecessary — they offer a resolution that feels tacked on and deprives the film of what could have been a more ambiguous, uncomfortable closing, for better or worse.

It probably wouldn’t have taken a vision from the almighty to predict that a film about Portuguese missionaries in old-time Japan wasn’t likely to set the box office on fire, and you may be one in those ranks who feels little desire to sit through Scorsese's heavy, plodding passion project — but, for the faithful and faithless alike, Silence shows the best and worst humans are capable of and succeeds at being a film about preachers that doesn’t feel preachy.

-Eric Pulsifer
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Is "Keanu" paws-itively purr-fect or a laugh litter box?

4/29/2016

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I find myself not watching so many new comedies these days — not for lack of wanting a chuckle, but for fear of schlepping through another 90-minute laugh-barren wasteland filled with tired tropes and half-baked jokes. Maybe I’m missing out by sitting it out, but when the biggest comedies of the past year include Daddy’s Home, Vacation, and Pixels, I feel fine being the crotchety old man blindly griping that they don’t make them like they used to. 

But the old boob tube is still a decent source for giggles, and the freshly ended run of sketch comedy show Key & Peele on Comedy Central leads us to Keanu — part buddy comedy, part save-the-girl, or rather, save-the-cat quest with funny guys Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. It’s John Wick meets… well, Key & Peele. (Though it’s worth noting the makers of Keanu say there’s no relation to the feline-free bipedal Keanu’s epic revenge flick. Perhaps a pairing of Keanu and baby animals was a discovery destined to happen or a classic example of multiple discovery — like calculus or Dante’s Peak and Volcano.)

No surprise for anyone who’s watched their eponymous show, Key and Peele play off each other perfectly — Key as a George Michaels-loving, minivan-driving dad and Peele as an easy-going movie-obsessed stoner. Their long-refined chemistry gives a sense of sync that seems symbiotic or hive minded. 

While the concept may grow a little stale by the final frames, the overall experience manages to feel like more than a watered down sketch thanks to the simple fact that’s this duo is funny. Bits that would barely classify as a joke work thanks to their delivery and cartoonish reactions — a high-pitched scream at the end of a car chase or a panicked, whispered aside between the pair as they get too deep in the criminal underworld on this quest for their snatched away kitty. 

Whatever faults it might have as a film, Keanu delivers loads of laughs. It’s been some time since I laughed so hard and so much in the theater. If it’s a good time you seek, this kitty’s got claws.

—Eric Pulsifer

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Charlie Kaufman's "Anomalisa" is a beautiful look at what pulls our strings

1/15/2016

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There’s something unsettling about being alone in your empty hotel room, sterile and soulless. Perhaps it comes from knowing there are thousands just like yours — their beds tightly made up just like yours, with minibars stocked just like yours, and with occupants flipping through an unappealing selection of on-demand movies just like yours. It’s a fragment of an unseen infinite mirror world of temporary business-casual coffins equipped with inoffensive art, cheap coffee makers, faux-leather ice buckets, and tiny soaps. Maybe that feeling of existential dread is why the Gideons folks have those thousands of Bibles tucked away in those thousands of bedside table drawers.

It’s this setting where the bullk of Charlie Kaufman’s (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Anomalisa takes place. It’s a story about love and loneliness — both in solitude and in a crowd — told through the stop-motion animation of highly detailed life-like puppets. The film follows a day in the life of Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a man who at times is literally falling apart.

Watching Michael and the other puppets of the miniature world of Anomalisa move and interact so like the life-sized counterparts they perfectly mimic is reason enough to see Anomalisa. But the real puppet master is Kaufman, whose writing (paired with outstanding performances from the vocal cast) makes Anomalisa more than just an animated novelty or technical accomplishment.

We see the puppets' seams, but the real, uncomfortable beauty of Anomalisa is how clearly it sees our own seams. It takes us deep through the cracks into the dark and unseen mechanics that pull our own strings.

Besides the cerebral deep dive you'd expect from Kaufman, Anomalisa packs a surprising number of laughs per minute, many of the biggest at the expense of the city of Cincinnati.

If you’re even remotely familiar with what Anomalisa is, you’ve probably read plenty of praising pull quotes about why you should see it, but I’ll caution up front that the less you know about Anomalisa going in the better. Your spoiler barometer might be calibrated differently than my own, but still: The thing that’s not quite right in the world of Anomalisa doesn’t make itself immediately apparent (unless some jerk critic spoiled it for you ahead of time), but as it gradually does, it’s a wonderful Kaufman-esque moment that I'd have hated having revealed to me beforehand. (After you’ve seen the movie, give the name of the hotel Michael stays at a Google for insight into Michael’s mind.)

In the way that different types of art seem to be able to poke and prod at our emotions in different ways, there’s something about trading the real for the surreal with puppets that makes Anomalisa perhaps better suited to examine the human condition than flesh-and-blood thespians.

Anomalisa is an imaginative new voice that sings out from the droning rabble-rabble of the crowd of forgettable clones we typically meet from our their theater seat. It’s a small story, but one that will have a big impact on the viewer long after the credits roll.

—Eric Pulsifer
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