1. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) - January 1st
I wrote my review for Three Billboards here. It's an absolutely fantastic movie with stellar acting and writing that'll likely get Oscar nominations for both. I highly recommend seeing it. - 9/10
2. Collateral (2004) - January 2nd
I haven't seen much of Michael Mann's work. I watched Public Enemies back when it was released, largely because Johnny Depp's name still carried some weight (although, funnily enough, my favourite scene from that movie doesn't contain him), and I watched Manhunter last year after a friend lent me Hannibal and I gained a brief interest in seeing the movies based on the Red Dragon story. Public Enemies is very good, and Manhunter is good (despite its badly shot and edited climax), but both films were stylistically muted. Collateral is much the same. It's got a great deal of adherence to reality for an action-thriller: when I hear people talk of this film, they always points to a scene in which Tom Cruise disarms a man in the correct fashion. Admittedly, stuff like that is cool to see, but the way scenes like this are shot very basically. I can see a beauty in this, shooting for realism to let the action speak for itself. At the same time, the experience is a little flat; any effort to apply music to a scene or take in shots of the city feel unmotivated. It's as if they thought the scenes of a cabby driving a hitman around needed to be puffed up to make them seem as exciting or meaningful as the action scenes, so they half-heartedly put a grunge soundtrack over shots of bad guys in cars thoughtfully looking out the window. It's a shame, too, because scenes like the club scenes do stand out despite their almost clinical lack of style, the actions do speak heavily for themselves without need for over-emphasis by camera movements or editing. The writing is solid; not much more than you'd expect from an action thriller, but some decent commentary on how carelessly we treat death when we're not personally attached to it, and some dialogue that's held up by charismatic performances, particularly from Jamie Foxx. The movie successfully ramps up the tension with a couple of twists and turns in its final act that managed to pull me right back in to the movie. Overall, it's a very good movie, but for a lot of it Michael Mann continues to not suit me personally. - 7/10
3. Pitch Perfect 3 (2017) - January 3rd
Another movie that I reviewed, which can be found here. It's an inoffensive piece that has allows its character to have a bit of fun, but rarely has any actually conflict and doesn't know if it wants to stay relatively grounded or turn itself up to eleven. - 5/10
4. Jeepers Creepers (2001) - January 4th
It's only January 4th and I'm already tempted to do a horror binge. Jeepers Creepers actually starts pretty well, with an aesthetic and setting similar to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and probably the sequels, but I haven't seen those yet). The chemistry between the two leads is fine (and I can never hate Justin Long), but the writing sometimes feels as if it was written for 10-year-olds rather than adult siblings. The horror, however, is really effective. The image of our main characters being chased down by a normal truck with the apparent visage of a monster is really memorable, and for a while the movie is pretty capable at creating tension with its air of mystery and occasionally gruesome imagery; a couple dozen people sewed to a ceiling is, once again, pretty damn memorable. The effects are a little hokey, but not much worse than you'd expect from a low-budget movie made in the early 2000s. I also appreciate the slightly slow build of the horror, not always immediately jumping to the jump scare and sometimes letting a scare be momentarily diagetic. It's not much, but considering I only recently went through the entire Friday the 13th series, it's a heck of a lot better than the type of horror I've seen recently... at least until the movie changes tactics. After the first act does a good job of setting up the mystery, the second act plants the seed of a cheap exposition dump that'll essentially pull back the curtain on all the suspense and turn in to a weaksauce creature feature; the movie then forgets about it for a little while to go back to being decently suspenseful and pretty funny once again, but eventually follows through on its exposition dump, and it's at this point that the promise of the movie begins a steady decline. Obviously a monster has to have some detail beyond "scary thing that will kill you" revealed, but like all things there are several ways of doing this and an exposition dump from a psychic woman is not only incredibly contrived and has only the most meagre of set-ups, but also dissolves almost all of the intrigue in the movie when we learn that it's specifically attracted to fear. The only thing left is that it's specifically attracted to the main characters because they have "something" it wants, which could have been a satisfying mystery but because of its hamfisted inclusion and ultimately quick resolution, it's all wasted. There's not much else to say about the film, it's a decent Texas Chainsaw imitation that turns in to a pretty bad (insert vampire movie here) knock-off . It's got the early 2000s aesthetic that I still can't quite put my finger on, but that's an ongoing realisation about no movie in particular. - 5/10
5. The Guard (2011) - January 5th
John Michael McDonagh is a talented writer, and after watching one of his more recent films, Calvary, at the end of last year, as well as seeing his brother's Three Billboards earlier this week, this was a no-brainer. The story is fairly familiar, save for its location: a mismatched buddy cop comedy about investigating drug dealers, only it's set in a small Irish town. Brendan Gleeson is sublime as ever, playing to memorable strengths as a crusty and unorthodox police officer with a heart of gold, and Don Cheadle respectably holds his own as the kind but straight-laced FBI Agent brought in on investigation. The two, and indeed everyone in the movie, keep the tropes from getting cliche with McDonagh's fantastic dialogue, fast-spoken and smart, with a hint of self-awareness. A montage of Gleeson 'suiting up' except he's getting in to prim and proper police uniform is a great example of McDonagh's awareness of our expectations; as well as little things like Gleeson getting puffed out on his way to the final shootout. Just about every line has something sly or snarky, and toes that line of dark and humour that makes these sorts of movies great to watch. The film is very very good, a humorously cynical tone and lots of clever and slightly offensive dialogue that's easy on plot for the sake of more character. - 7.5/10
6. Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016) - January 6th
Quick pro-tip: don't watch a bad movie just because you like everyone in it. I know, it's obvious, and I've told myself dozens of times, and yet here I am watching a bad comedy because I watched the Jon Hamm Black Mirror episode yesterday. This was bad, but the kind of bad that's not too offensive and will be gone from my mind by tomorrow, a comedy that's not funny but doesn't try to be offensively unfunny to compensate, only gets painfully awkward a couple of times, and is otherwise easy to look at because the filmmakers were smart enough to include Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot. It's a shame, too, because the idea is outrageous enough to be funny, but every glimpse of humour in the film fails to get a laugh just by how stale it all it, even if it's ultimately wholesome. - 4/10
7. An American in Paris (1951) - January 7th
I wanted to finish the week off with a classic, and as I mentioned in my top 10 of last year's movies, Gene Kelly is perfect, so here we are. Plus, it's another Best Picture winner I can knock off the list. As a piece of art, it reminded me of both the nature of time changing out perspective, and how easy it is for me to fall in to the trap of making surface-level criticism that, regardless of how shallow or deep my thoughts on a movie go, don't really say anything. Each of these is a factor that crops up when considering new and old film, the first comes up every time, the second came up because my initial thoughts on this film reminded me of my review of Pitch Perfect 3. This is hardly the place to get in to the first in detail, so I'll leave it for now. The second, however, is perplexing to myself. Watching this film, I initially saw the plot as flimsy and just an excuse to have some good music numbers. This is true, but also what I said when I summarised my thoughts on PP3. That said, PP3 is a movie I gave a 5/10, whereas with this film, an 8/10 was more appropriate. The reasons are there, of course: they may both be flimsy plots used as excuses to show musical numbers, but An American in Paris' musical numbers are better choreographed, capable of being more elaborate or doing just as much with something simple, and with 66 less years of film and dance to use as a reference. Its plot, too, while light, at least contains real tension, drama, and doesn't go off the rails in the final act. The dialogue is smooth, the colour contrast really pops, it's altogether excellent, if flawed, all things that PP3 really isn't. The point is, these films couldn't be more different in terms of quality in several areas, but my surface-level words about both films were all too similar. It's a mark on me, I need to edit my writing more, work on diversifying my vocabulary and sentence structure so that I don't fall in to making all my reviews sound samey, but at the same time balance it by not lose trace of my own voice in the writing. I won't ramble further, but it's something for me to think about. As for the movie itself, my thoughts on the film are there in rough terms, but here's some more detail: Gene Kelly is perfect, even when the characters he plays aren't. His dance numbers are beautifully choreographed to great music, and his acting is as wonderfully classic Hollywood as ever (that is to say, cheesy, but in the theatrical way). The opening is really forced and artificial in retrospect, and the plot is definitely a little off-colour to the point of it being uncomfortable from a contemporary perspective, but the writing itself has all it needs for a more dramatic story, and the dialogue is excellent where it counts. Sometimes it's just the clever light montage of describing a gal while her dance number and colour scheme changes with each adjective, others it's talking about the qualities of different music genres, then there's the smooth conversations and tidbits of meta dialogue; it's all very well done. - 8/10
Re-watches.
I don't just watch new movies, I re-watch films, sometimes if they're easy and sometimes if they had significant impact, and sometimes if I feel that discussion I've read around the film has called in to question how I see a film. It's the holidays, so I have a lot more time on my hands as well. Anyway, here's the movies I decided to re-watch, for better or worse.
1. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) - January 2nd
I've always been a sort-of fan of the Resident Evil movie series. They're mediocre at their best and terrible at their worst, but a handful of factors always left a place in my heart for them, and for Paul W.S. Anderson films in general. Despite all of the ways I find his technical and writing skills to be lacking, he always seems to genuinely care about what he's making. The series hit its peak for me personally at the fourth entry in the series, Resident Evil: Afterlife, where the ridiculousness of the series became so intense that the pain I felt at all the bad things in the series turned to joy, mainly due to the hammiest of performances by Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker, who chewed the scenery with a smug grin while dressed like he's in a matrix movie, before literally doing bullet time tricks. Along with the scene of Alice and Claire fighting the executioner, where the term 'restraint' had no meaning to the slow-motion effects guy on the movie, these scenes have essentially defined why I still love these bad movies. Their complete lack of pretence and, despite ineptitude, a discernible style, made them at least consistently entertaining so long as I didn't think about them. That became harder to do in Resident Evil: Retribution, because the series tried to be more and failed. Giving Alice a pseudo-daughter to make her even more Ripley-like didn't end up doing anything for her character or the story in any way, a fact that's even more obvious in The Final Chapter considering she died and yet is never mourned over or even spoken of. Retribution fell down lower than the rest of the series because it made a half-hearted attempt to make the series' main character two-dimensional and failed. It was easy to be complacent with the series when it only tried to be a zombie movie with a lot of style, but the cracks in the skin started to appear when the series' atrophied body tried to stretch out of its slump of a niche. This ends up being the key problem with The Final Chapter as well.
That said, there's a handful of other issues that should be addressed first, some of which occur due to the film's key issue of trying and failing wildly to be more. The first is the soft reboot of the series that comes with this movie. The series has often done this, but what makes The Final Chapter so egregious is the extent to which it re-writes the series. There were no real retcons between Resident Evil and Apocalypse, they essentially just contextualised the final scene of the first movie within the second. Between Apocalypse and Extinction, they time-skipped enough so that they wouldn't have to explain the details of everything that happened between the two films. From Extinction to Afterlife, they ignored the fact that the T-virus also dried up rivers and lakes, and then kept the setting as far away from any water that wasn't the ocean as possible. Less a deletion of the previous film's lore and more a side-stepping of it. They also somewhat failed to payoff on the set-up of hundreds of super-powered Alice clones saving the world, but the movie would have been over in ten minutes if they had succeeded. Finally, from Afterlife to Retribution, they time-skipped again so as to not have to come up with all the details of how the end of the last movie connects to the start of this one. It's messy, and largely awful storytelling, building up expectation of payoff in order to keep people coming back from the next one but then never actually resolve the build-up on screen. I've seen replicated by a lot of long-running series, including Sherlock and Red vs Blue for seasons 11-13. It's bad because we aren't seeing what was promised. It gets worse in the move from Retribution to The Final Chapter because, not only do we not get what was promised, we are told that half of what happened in the previous movies didn't happen or don't matter, and that we shouldn't care because we were lied to. It's not just a failure to keep a promise, it's an admittance that the promise was a lie. It's easy to feel alright about the fact that I don't really care about any of the events in the series when it appears that the makers at least care about their work, but when the creators essentially come out and say that they don't care either, it becomes nigh impossible to enjoy the film for what the other films were. It's bad enough when the film opens by telling you that not only will it not show you the epic battle the previous movie set up but that the battle was also a trap, a lie set up by the bad guy who became a good guy but was secretly always a bad guy. It's that much worse when before getting to that point, the movie tries its damnedest to make you forget what little plot and lore the previous films had altogether. The film ignores the fact that the Red Queen was the last movie's villain in order to make a terrible attempt at symmetry, despite the fact that her good version, the White Queen, exists out in the world somewhere (the film also ignores the fact that the red queen died in the first movie, but Retribution did that too, so it's a mark against that movie, not The Final Chapter). The film ignores the fact that the creator of the T-virus appeared in Apocalypse, as did his daughter. The film handwaves all hope of badassery by telling you that most of what you heard in Retribution was a lie, and that Alice will not, in fact, be getting her powers back. The film ignores the dynamics of Extinction, making Isaac's Wesker's superior instead of the other way around. The film does all this so that it can hamfistedly insert its corpo-religious metaphor and awkward triple character symmetry in to the story (although that symmetry does produce the best line in the movie, "the Trinity of Bitches"). It may also be financially motivated; Iain Glen is probably a bigger box office draw now thanks to Game of Thrones. All of this is worsened by the fact that the film doesn't wipe the slate clean. It doesn't ignore all previous entries in the series to have this one last hurrah free of messy lore, it just picks and chooses the lore it likes and ignores the rest, despite the fact that some of these ideas come from the same movie, let alone the same series. It's not just bad storytelling, it's awful storytelling built upon a foundation of bad storytelling, and it's trying to play Jenga with its foundation, removing the pieces it doesn't want while trying to stay steady on the shaky remains.
The other most painful aspect of this film is its editing, especially in action sequences. The series' action sequences were never particularly amazing, but they always had a strong sense of style: you could always count on the series to use long takes that would take advantage of Anderson's propensity for slow motion and use of actual 3D cameras. Someone needed to tell him that not every single second of a slow-motion shot had to be slow-motion from time to time, but the entire lack of restraint was like watching a kid play with new toys for the first time: as if Anderson wanted to see what every single shot looked like in slow motion and liked them all so much that he didn't want to leave a single one out. I mentioned the fight with Wesker and the fight with the Executioner before for good reason. As silly and overproduced as they are, it's the closest the movies get to being good by virtue of being as over the top as possible, the sort of schlocky approach that makes movies like Crank such a joy to watch. Unfortunately, all of this is dropped in The Final Chapter, for much, much worse. The action scenes in The Final Chapter drop all previous sense of style: no more slow-motion, no more long shots made longer by said slow motion, no native 3D. Instead, we get a hell of a lot of cutting and no slow motion. There's flashes of this style working: a couple of shots in Alice's fight with a bunch of faceless soldiers looks less terrible than the rest of the movie. However, for the most part it's simply awful, physically painful to lay my eyes upon. One fight is particularly atrocious: Alice takes on some new monster in a lab, and at one point I lost count of how many cuts were taking place in a single second. She rapid fires a pair of pistols, and we get a cut for every single bullet fired and every single time a shot connects, it's the sort of scene that requires an epilepsy warning beforehand. I understand the conceit, that if you show a shot twice the audience will connect two shots together and make it one hit, but the audience needs time to register what they're seeing on screen in order for any of what happens on screen to make sense.
I'm not sure what motivated the complete stylistic turnaround, but a lot of the retcons seem entirely motivated by this movie's new agenda, a poor attempt, once again, to try and be more than a bad zombie series. Changing the details of who made the T-virus and who his daughter is in order to twist it so that Alice is a clone of Alicia in theory ties up the whole cloning schtick introduced in Extinction, clears up why the T-virus bonds with her, and gives her some meaningful connection to everything in the series, but it's all so awkwardly inserted in retrospect. Alice becomes destined to stop the T-virus rather than having that responsibility thrust upon her, but the end of this goal isn't apparent. It basically re-writes her backstory and a lot of the previous entries in the series just to make her closer to the film series' lore, but she was already so close because of the events of the series that it simply makes no sense outside of having a twist that would have been neat had they not had to ignore half the series to make it happen. Once again, it's telling the audience that not only does nothing matter, but they're not even going to pretend anymore that it does. The other key aspect of the film that tries and fails to be more than what the film series is, is the way the film re-orients everything that happened in the previous films to have a religious angle. Now, on its own the idea isn't bad, in fact it's actually one of the more interesting ideas in the story, but it essentially adds new and extremely overt dimensions to a pre-existing character that had no appearance or even an indication of an appearance in previous movies. The juxtaposition is really cool too, having religion work alongside a big corporations to turn everybody in to zombies is a pretty decent and cynical metaphor. Once again, however, it's not what is down, but how its done. The film barely gives any thought to this angle when its presented, essentially touching on ideas of penitence and parallels to the biblical flood but never doing anything with them. Isaac's religious tendencies were the impetus for all that's happened in the series, so the only takeaway from this angle seems to be that big corporations are bad, a mainstay theme of the series since the start, but also that religion is bad, and that together, the tenets of these things can exploit one another to be worse. The series essentially re-writes itself just to force in the message that corporations and religion are bad, or at least can be used for evil, half of which was already said by all of the previous entries in the series. It's such a forced message pushed by forced retcons and it goes essentially nowhere beyond "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we told our audiences that we've figured out that both corporations and religion exploit people?"
The movie is everything that was bad about the series compounded by the fact that it forgoes everything that made the series watchable in favour of weakly suggested claptrap in a failed attempt to actually be about something. - still 3/10
2. Escape from L.A. (1996) - January 2nd
Not much thought about this one, other that it's not as good as Escape From New York, but is still decent; the movie was my dad's choice. Carpenter is one of my favourite directors of all time, always just clever enough that his complete lack of subtlety is its own form of subtlety. His work always features undertones of comedic self-awareness, a recognition of how everything in his films are exaggerated for effect, a sort of sardonic laugh at dystopia as a given rather than a possibility. Stuff like Escape From New York, They Live, Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing are my favourite examples of this. Escape From L.A. is strong when its emulating these films, or even satirising them for a nice double-layer, becoming a bit of a tableau of his earlier work, but outside of its world-weary opening and hilariously chilling ending we get a bunch of fast-moving action that is fine, but not spectacular, nor as brimming with social satire, rather just trying to be as silly as possible for a good laugh. Escape From New York was great because it was the first of its kind and good at what it did, L.A. is not the first of its kind doesn't do what it does as well. - still 6/10
3. Kung Fury (2015) - January 2nd
Alright, I know this isn't technically a feature film, but it's also the greatest piece of art I've ever laid eyes on. From the name of the studio that made it (Laser Unicorns) to the way everything looks like it's on an overused video tape, to the way the film opens with a thug flipping a police car by kicking a skateboard underneath it, to just... literally everything about it, Kung Fury is a perfect mish-mash of 80s greatness. The way the film depicts "MIAMI 1985" as a dystopian future when it was made in 2015, the fact that the film literally turns in to a G.I. Joe -esque Saturday morning cartoon at one point, the fact that a Tyrannosaurus Rex shows up to kill nazis and teach us helpful life lessons (this one's my favourite, seriously who wouldn't want a T-Rex giving them helpful advice in their daily life?), the fact that there are characters named "Triceracop" and "Barbarianna", the synthiest of synth wave soundtracks since Tron: Legacy, the very concept of a time travelling Hitler shooting someone through a phone line, and the fact that "Kung Fuhrer" might be one of the most stupidly funny puns I've ever heard. The film is utter utter cheese, condensed in to a tight thirty minutes of complete nonsense and neon. I cannot stress enough how much I love this movie. - 10/10
4. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) - January 3rd
I love getting to show friends great movies, and Dr. Strangelove is honestly the greatest movie of all time, a statement I don't make lightly and understand just how much competition there is. The film manages to be perfect satire: of Cold War paranoia, of that era's jingoism, of the foils of humanity that allow such an event to even be a possibility, even the power of corporations. The fact that all of it is presented through Kubrick's obsessive realism, trying compulsively to cover every possibility as thoroughly as possible, makes all of this chillingly believable, which in turn makes the satire that much funnier. The way people try to maintain a sense of calm in this utter madness and chaos is absolutely hilarious: the president of the United States talking to the leader of the USSR over the phone, bickering like he's talking to his mother, the sheer insanity of Lionel Mandrake trying to convince a soldier to allow him to make a simple telephone call with the world hanging in the balance, it's all so stressful, which brings such dark humour to every seen as the film gets crazier and crazier. While all of these are factors that make the movie great, what makes me call it the greatest is its bizarre applicability: the idea that, when I first watched the movie in 2016, 52 years after the movie first released, it was still disturbingly relatable. As a final note, a character representing American Cold War jingoism at its most extreme being called 'Buck' Turgidson, a literal dick-swinging name, is still one of the most inspired ideas I've ever seen put to film. - 10/10
Published January 7th, 2018
Another movie that I reviewed, which can be found here. It's an inoffensive piece that has allows its character to have a bit of fun, but rarely has any actually conflict and doesn't know if it wants to stay relatively grounded or turn itself up to eleven. - 5/10
4. Jeepers Creepers (2001) - January 4th
It's only January 4th and I'm already tempted to do a horror binge. Jeepers Creepers actually starts pretty well, with an aesthetic and setting similar to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and probably the sequels, but I haven't seen those yet). The chemistry between the two leads is fine (and I can never hate Justin Long), but the writing sometimes feels as if it was written for 10-year-olds rather than adult siblings. The horror, however, is really effective. The image of our main characters being chased down by a normal truck with the apparent visage of a monster is really memorable, and for a while the movie is pretty capable at creating tension with its air of mystery and occasionally gruesome imagery; a couple dozen people sewed to a ceiling is, once again, pretty damn memorable. The effects are a little hokey, but not much worse than you'd expect from a low-budget movie made in the early 2000s. I also appreciate the slightly slow build of the horror, not always immediately jumping to the jump scare and sometimes letting a scare be momentarily diagetic. It's not much, but considering I only recently went through the entire Friday the 13th series, it's a heck of a lot better than the type of horror I've seen recently... at least until the movie changes tactics. After the first act does a good job of setting up the mystery, the second act plants the seed of a cheap exposition dump that'll essentially pull back the curtain on all the suspense and turn in to a weaksauce creature feature; the movie then forgets about it for a little while to go back to being decently suspenseful and pretty funny once again, but eventually follows through on its exposition dump, and it's at this point that the promise of the movie begins a steady decline. Obviously a monster has to have some detail beyond "scary thing that will kill you" revealed, but like all things there are several ways of doing this and an exposition dump from a psychic woman is not only incredibly contrived and has only the most meagre of set-ups, but also dissolves almost all of the intrigue in the movie when we learn that it's specifically attracted to fear. The only thing left is that it's specifically attracted to the main characters because they have "something" it wants, which could have been a satisfying mystery but because of its hamfisted inclusion and ultimately quick resolution, it's all wasted. There's not much else to say about the film, it's a decent Texas Chainsaw imitation that turns in to a pretty bad (insert vampire movie here) knock-off . It's got the early 2000s aesthetic that I still can't quite put my finger on, but that's an ongoing realisation about no movie in particular. - 5/10
5. The Guard (2011) - January 5th
John Michael McDonagh is a talented writer, and after watching one of his more recent films, Calvary, at the end of last year, as well as seeing his brother's Three Billboards earlier this week, this was a no-brainer. The story is fairly familiar, save for its location: a mismatched buddy cop comedy about investigating drug dealers, only it's set in a small Irish town. Brendan Gleeson is sublime as ever, playing to memorable strengths as a crusty and unorthodox police officer with a heart of gold, and Don Cheadle respectably holds his own as the kind but straight-laced FBI Agent brought in on investigation. The two, and indeed everyone in the movie, keep the tropes from getting cliche with McDonagh's fantastic dialogue, fast-spoken and smart, with a hint of self-awareness. A montage of Gleeson 'suiting up' except he's getting in to prim and proper police uniform is a great example of McDonagh's awareness of our expectations; as well as little things like Gleeson getting puffed out on his way to the final shootout. Just about every line has something sly or snarky, and toes that line of dark and humour that makes these sorts of movies great to watch. The film is very very good, a humorously cynical tone and lots of clever and slightly offensive dialogue that's easy on plot for the sake of more character. - 7.5/10
6. Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016) - January 6th
Quick pro-tip: don't watch a bad movie just because you like everyone in it. I know, it's obvious, and I've told myself dozens of times, and yet here I am watching a bad comedy because I watched the Jon Hamm Black Mirror episode yesterday. This was bad, but the kind of bad that's not too offensive and will be gone from my mind by tomorrow, a comedy that's not funny but doesn't try to be offensively unfunny to compensate, only gets painfully awkward a couple of times, and is otherwise easy to look at because the filmmakers were smart enough to include Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot. It's a shame, too, because the idea is outrageous enough to be funny, but every glimpse of humour in the film fails to get a laugh just by how stale it all it, even if it's ultimately wholesome. - 4/10
7. An American in Paris (1951) - January 7th
I wanted to finish the week off with a classic, and as I mentioned in my top 10 of last year's movies, Gene Kelly is perfect, so here we are. Plus, it's another Best Picture winner I can knock off the list. As a piece of art, it reminded me of both the nature of time changing out perspective, and how easy it is for me to fall in to the trap of making surface-level criticism that, regardless of how shallow or deep my thoughts on a movie go, don't really say anything. Each of these is a factor that crops up when considering new and old film, the first comes up every time, the second came up because my initial thoughts on this film reminded me of my review of Pitch Perfect 3. This is hardly the place to get in to the first in detail, so I'll leave it for now. The second, however, is perplexing to myself. Watching this film, I initially saw the plot as flimsy and just an excuse to have some good music numbers. This is true, but also what I said when I summarised my thoughts on PP3. That said, PP3 is a movie I gave a 5/10, whereas with this film, an 8/10 was more appropriate. The reasons are there, of course: they may both be flimsy plots used as excuses to show musical numbers, but An American in Paris' musical numbers are better choreographed, capable of being more elaborate or doing just as much with something simple, and with 66 less years of film and dance to use as a reference. Its plot, too, while light, at least contains real tension, drama, and doesn't go off the rails in the final act. The dialogue is smooth, the colour contrast really pops, it's altogether excellent, if flawed, all things that PP3 really isn't. The point is, these films couldn't be more different in terms of quality in several areas, but my surface-level words about both films were all too similar. It's a mark on me, I need to edit my writing more, work on diversifying my vocabulary and sentence structure so that I don't fall in to making all my reviews sound samey, but at the same time balance it by not lose trace of my own voice in the writing. I won't ramble further, but it's something for me to think about. As for the movie itself, my thoughts on the film are there in rough terms, but here's some more detail: Gene Kelly is perfect, even when the characters he plays aren't. His dance numbers are beautifully choreographed to great music, and his acting is as wonderfully classic Hollywood as ever (that is to say, cheesy, but in the theatrical way). The opening is really forced and artificial in retrospect, and the plot is definitely a little off-colour to the point of it being uncomfortable from a contemporary perspective, but the writing itself has all it needs for a more dramatic story, and the dialogue is excellent where it counts. Sometimes it's just the clever light montage of describing a gal while her dance number and colour scheme changes with each adjective, others it's talking about the qualities of different music genres, then there's the smooth conversations and tidbits of meta dialogue; it's all very well done. - 8/10
Re-watches.
I don't just watch new movies, I re-watch films, sometimes if they're easy and sometimes if they had significant impact, and sometimes if I feel that discussion I've read around the film has called in to question how I see a film. It's the holidays, so I have a lot more time on my hands as well. Anyway, here's the movies I decided to re-watch, for better or worse.
1. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) - January 2nd
I've always been a sort-of fan of the Resident Evil movie series. They're mediocre at their best and terrible at their worst, but a handful of factors always left a place in my heart for them, and for Paul W.S. Anderson films in general. Despite all of the ways I find his technical and writing skills to be lacking, he always seems to genuinely care about what he's making. The series hit its peak for me personally at the fourth entry in the series, Resident Evil: Afterlife, where the ridiculousness of the series became so intense that the pain I felt at all the bad things in the series turned to joy, mainly due to the hammiest of performances by Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker, who chewed the scenery with a smug grin while dressed like he's in a matrix movie, before literally doing bullet time tricks. Along with the scene of Alice and Claire fighting the executioner, where the term 'restraint' had no meaning to the slow-motion effects guy on the movie, these scenes have essentially defined why I still love these bad movies. Their complete lack of pretence and, despite ineptitude, a discernible style, made them at least consistently entertaining so long as I didn't think about them. That became harder to do in Resident Evil: Retribution, because the series tried to be more and failed. Giving Alice a pseudo-daughter to make her even more Ripley-like didn't end up doing anything for her character or the story in any way, a fact that's even more obvious in The Final Chapter considering she died and yet is never mourned over or even spoken of. Retribution fell down lower than the rest of the series because it made a half-hearted attempt to make the series' main character two-dimensional and failed. It was easy to be complacent with the series when it only tried to be a zombie movie with a lot of style, but the cracks in the skin started to appear when the series' atrophied body tried to stretch out of its slump of a niche. This ends up being the key problem with The Final Chapter as well.
That said, there's a handful of other issues that should be addressed first, some of which occur due to the film's key issue of trying and failing wildly to be more. The first is the soft reboot of the series that comes with this movie. The series has often done this, but what makes The Final Chapter so egregious is the extent to which it re-writes the series. There were no real retcons between Resident Evil and Apocalypse, they essentially just contextualised the final scene of the first movie within the second. Between Apocalypse and Extinction, they time-skipped enough so that they wouldn't have to explain the details of everything that happened between the two films. From Extinction to Afterlife, they ignored the fact that the T-virus also dried up rivers and lakes, and then kept the setting as far away from any water that wasn't the ocean as possible. Less a deletion of the previous film's lore and more a side-stepping of it. They also somewhat failed to payoff on the set-up of hundreds of super-powered Alice clones saving the world, but the movie would have been over in ten minutes if they had succeeded. Finally, from Afterlife to Retribution, they time-skipped again so as to not have to come up with all the details of how the end of the last movie connects to the start of this one. It's messy, and largely awful storytelling, building up expectation of payoff in order to keep people coming back from the next one but then never actually resolve the build-up on screen. I've seen replicated by a lot of long-running series, including Sherlock and Red vs Blue for seasons 11-13. It's bad because we aren't seeing what was promised. It gets worse in the move from Retribution to The Final Chapter because, not only do we not get what was promised, we are told that half of what happened in the previous movies didn't happen or don't matter, and that we shouldn't care because we were lied to. It's not just a failure to keep a promise, it's an admittance that the promise was a lie. It's easy to feel alright about the fact that I don't really care about any of the events in the series when it appears that the makers at least care about their work, but when the creators essentially come out and say that they don't care either, it becomes nigh impossible to enjoy the film for what the other films were. It's bad enough when the film opens by telling you that not only will it not show you the epic battle the previous movie set up but that the battle was also a trap, a lie set up by the bad guy who became a good guy but was secretly always a bad guy. It's that much worse when before getting to that point, the movie tries its damnedest to make you forget what little plot and lore the previous films had altogether. The film ignores the fact that the Red Queen was the last movie's villain in order to make a terrible attempt at symmetry, despite the fact that her good version, the White Queen, exists out in the world somewhere (the film also ignores the fact that the red queen died in the first movie, but Retribution did that too, so it's a mark against that movie, not The Final Chapter). The film ignores the fact that the creator of the T-virus appeared in Apocalypse, as did his daughter. The film handwaves all hope of badassery by telling you that most of what you heard in Retribution was a lie, and that Alice will not, in fact, be getting her powers back. The film ignores the dynamics of Extinction, making Isaac's Wesker's superior instead of the other way around. The film does all this so that it can hamfistedly insert its corpo-religious metaphor and awkward triple character symmetry in to the story (although that symmetry does produce the best line in the movie, "the Trinity of Bitches"). It may also be financially motivated; Iain Glen is probably a bigger box office draw now thanks to Game of Thrones. All of this is worsened by the fact that the film doesn't wipe the slate clean. It doesn't ignore all previous entries in the series to have this one last hurrah free of messy lore, it just picks and chooses the lore it likes and ignores the rest, despite the fact that some of these ideas come from the same movie, let alone the same series. It's not just bad storytelling, it's awful storytelling built upon a foundation of bad storytelling, and it's trying to play Jenga with its foundation, removing the pieces it doesn't want while trying to stay steady on the shaky remains.
The other most painful aspect of this film is its editing, especially in action sequences. The series' action sequences were never particularly amazing, but they always had a strong sense of style: you could always count on the series to use long takes that would take advantage of Anderson's propensity for slow motion and use of actual 3D cameras. Someone needed to tell him that not every single second of a slow-motion shot had to be slow-motion from time to time, but the entire lack of restraint was like watching a kid play with new toys for the first time: as if Anderson wanted to see what every single shot looked like in slow motion and liked them all so much that he didn't want to leave a single one out. I mentioned the fight with Wesker and the fight with the Executioner before for good reason. As silly and overproduced as they are, it's the closest the movies get to being good by virtue of being as over the top as possible, the sort of schlocky approach that makes movies like Crank such a joy to watch. Unfortunately, all of this is dropped in The Final Chapter, for much, much worse. The action scenes in The Final Chapter drop all previous sense of style: no more slow-motion, no more long shots made longer by said slow motion, no native 3D. Instead, we get a hell of a lot of cutting and no slow motion. There's flashes of this style working: a couple of shots in Alice's fight with a bunch of faceless soldiers looks less terrible than the rest of the movie. However, for the most part it's simply awful, physically painful to lay my eyes upon. One fight is particularly atrocious: Alice takes on some new monster in a lab, and at one point I lost count of how many cuts were taking place in a single second. She rapid fires a pair of pistols, and we get a cut for every single bullet fired and every single time a shot connects, it's the sort of scene that requires an epilepsy warning beforehand. I understand the conceit, that if you show a shot twice the audience will connect two shots together and make it one hit, but the audience needs time to register what they're seeing on screen in order for any of what happens on screen to make sense.
I'm not sure what motivated the complete stylistic turnaround, but a lot of the retcons seem entirely motivated by this movie's new agenda, a poor attempt, once again, to try and be more than a bad zombie series. Changing the details of who made the T-virus and who his daughter is in order to twist it so that Alice is a clone of Alicia in theory ties up the whole cloning schtick introduced in Extinction, clears up why the T-virus bonds with her, and gives her some meaningful connection to everything in the series, but it's all so awkwardly inserted in retrospect. Alice becomes destined to stop the T-virus rather than having that responsibility thrust upon her, but the end of this goal isn't apparent. It basically re-writes her backstory and a lot of the previous entries in the series just to make her closer to the film series' lore, but she was already so close because of the events of the series that it simply makes no sense outside of having a twist that would have been neat had they not had to ignore half the series to make it happen. Once again, it's telling the audience that not only does nothing matter, but they're not even going to pretend anymore that it does. The other key aspect of the film that tries and fails to be more than what the film series is, is the way the film re-orients everything that happened in the previous films to have a religious angle. Now, on its own the idea isn't bad, in fact it's actually one of the more interesting ideas in the story, but it essentially adds new and extremely overt dimensions to a pre-existing character that had no appearance or even an indication of an appearance in previous movies. The juxtaposition is really cool too, having religion work alongside a big corporations to turn everybody in to zombies is a pretty decent and cynical metaphor. Once again, however, it's not what is down, but how its done. The film barely gives any thought to this angle when its presented, essentially touching on ideas of penitence and parallels to the biblical flood but never doing anything with them. Isaac's religious tendencies were the impetus for all that's happened in the series, so the only takeaway from this angle seems to be that big corporations are bad, a mainstay theme of the series since the start, but also that religion is bad, and that together, the tenets of these things can exploit one another to be worse. The series essentially re-writes itself just to force in the message that corporations and religion are bad, or at least can be used for evil, half of which was already said by all of the previous entries in the series. It's such a forced message pushed by forced retcons and it goes essentially nowhere beyond "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we told our audiences that we've figured out that both corporations and religion exploit people?"
The movie is everything that was bad about the series compounded by the fact that it forgoes everything that made the series watchable in favour of weakly suggested claptrap in a failed attempt to actually be about something. - still 3/10
2. Escape from L.A. (1996) - January 2nd
Not much thought about this one, other that it's not as good as Escape From New York, but is still decent; the movie was my dad's choice. Carpenter is one of my favourite directors of all time, always just clever enough that his complete lack of subtlety is its own form of subtlety. His work always features undertones of comedic self-awareness, a recognition of how everything in his films are exaggerated for effect, a sort of sardonic laugh at dystopia as a given rather than a possibility. Stuff like Escape From New York, They Live, Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing are my favourite examples of this. Escape From L.A. is strong when its emulating these films, or even satirising them for a nice double-layer, becoming a bit of a tableau of his earlier work, but outside of its world-weary opening and hilariously chilling ending we get a bunch of fast-moving action that is fine, but not spectacular, nor as brimming with social satire, rather just trying to be as silly as possible for a good laugh. Escape From New York was great because it was the first of its kind and good at what it did, L.A. is not the first of its kind doesn't do what it does as well. - still 6/10
3. Kung Fury (2015) - January 2nd
Alright, I know this isn't technically a feature film, but it's also the greatest piece of art I've ever laid eyes on. From the name of the studio that made it (Laser Unicorns) to the way everything looks like it's on an overused video tape, to the way the film opens with a thug flipping a police car by kicking a skateboard underneath it, to just... literally everything about it, Kung Fury is a perfect mish-mash of 80s greatness. The way the film depicts "MIAMI 1985" as a dystopian future when it was made in 2015, the fact that the film literally turns in to a G.I. Joe -esque Saturday morning cartoon at one point, the fact that a Tyrannosaurus Rex shows up to kill nazis and teach us helpful life lessons (this one's my favourite, seriously who wouldn't want a T-Rex giving them helpful advice in their daily life?), the fact that there are characters named "Triceracop" and "Barbarianna", the synthiest of synth wave soundtracks since Tron: Legacy, the very concept of a time travelling Hitler shooting someone through a phone line, and the fact that "Kung Fuhrer" might be one of the most stupidly funny puns I've ever heard. The film is utter utter cheese, condensed in to a tight thirty minutes of complete nonsense and neon. I cannot stress enough how much I love this movie. - 10/10
4. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) - January 3rd
I love getting to show friends great movies, and Dr. Strangelove is honestly the greatest movie of all time, a statement I don't make lightly and understand just how much competition there is. The film manages to be perfect satire: of Cold War paranoia, of that era's jingoism, of the foils of humanity that allow such an event to even be a possibility, even the power of corporations. The fact that all of it is presented through Kubrick's obsessive realism, trying compulsively to cover every possibility as thoroughly as possible, makes all of this chillingly believable, which in turn makes the satire that much funnier. The way people try to maintain a sense of calm in this utter madness and chaos is absolutely hilarious: the president of the United States talking to the leader of the USSR over the phone, bickering like he's talking to his mother, the sheer insanity of Lionel Mandrake trying to convince a soldier to allow him to make a simple telephone call with the world hanging in the balance, it's all so stressful, which brings such dark humour to every seen as the film gets crazier and crazier. While all of these are factors that make the movie great, what makes me call it the greatest is its bizarre applicability: the idea that, when I first watched the movie in 2016, 52 years after the movie first released, it was still disturbingly relatable. As a final note, a character representing American Cold War jingoism at its most extreme being called 'Buck' Turgidson, a literal dick-swinging name, is still one of the most inspired ideas I've ever seen put to film. - 10/10
Published January 7th, 2018
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