Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: It Follows

Much like the slow moving menace that stalks its protagonists, It Follows had a slow, steady walk to being a cult horror hit. The kind of movie, if recent surprise successes in the genre are any indication, could lead to a rush of imitators looking to get a piece of quick horror cash. It Follows is refreshing in how different it is than the mainstream of the genre these days but it is also so arrestingly scary that it easily ranks among the least comfortable movie going experiences I’ve ever had. It’s also maddeningly opaque with how it dispenses exposition or even meaning to the events of the film.

Horror films in recent years have fallen in to a predictable pattern and I don’t just mean they’re overwhelmingly about demonic possession hitting young families. The way they choose to scare you always feels like the same jump scare. The music shifts to a faster tempo and the camera movements get slower and then something comes out of nowhere and is accompanied by a big string hit on the soundtrack. It’s effective but it’s boring and worse than that it’s obvious. I know nothing of consequence will happen in a movie like Annabelle until the last 10 minutes. It Follows has a different, more of a throwback, style of generating tension. They still kick the score in to high gear, they might even do it more but the tension comes from static shots, from first person perspectives of some flowers or the morning sky. Most of the time nothing happens and it doesn’t matter; I’m still zipping up my hoodie and looking at the ground. It gives all of the effect with none of the cheapness that comes with a cheap thrill for a child’s toy falling out of a closet. It feels more earned even if it might not actually be.

I hate when movies hold my hand too much, when they keep telling me things that would be so easy to show me. It Follows certainly doesn’t tell when it could show but also doesn’t tell when it refuses to show. There’s a very brief explanation of the rules for the monster in this film and then we never get any more information. We never get any why or any how. We’re just given a menace that slowly walks toward its victim and then kills them in a nondescript way that leaves a terribly mangled corpse. Then at the climax that stops and we get a suddenly much more clever whatever it is capable of evading the trap that our heroes have set with no indication that the trap would be successful. When the film ends, as all horror movies do, by teasing us with the possibility that the danger is still out there it isn’t the least bit surprising because I had no sense that this thing could be defeated as easily as they dispatch it in the previous scene. I was plenty scared in the moment but it’s the kind of movie that unravels as you pull at the threads in the hours and days that follow.

I want more horror movies to be like It Follows but I know that even by wishing that I am destroying the chances it will ever happen. Horror is so reactive I’m sure there have been dozens of conversations in Hollywood over the past month or so about how to capture this lightning in a bottle and get three movies just like it out by this time next year. None of them will get it right though, they’ll take the wrong things. Maybe one studio will think the secret is teenagers, or the speed of the ghost, or the techno-throwback music. The way studios saw Paranormal Activity and thought everyone wanted a bunch of found footage movies. What I want more of is the earnestness and the experimentation and even the flailing attempts at finding an underlying philosophy that give It Follows its charms. Oh well, see you all back here next year for a harsh review of Stuff Will Eventually Get You.

Box Office Democracy TV Special: Daredevil

While the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an unqualified success, I don’t think I’m alone when I say that the Marvel Televisual Universe is much more of a mixed bag. While I hear Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has gotten much better since a rocky start but I’ll never know because I decided I would never care about any of those characters over a year ago. Agent Carter had me completely captivated for two episodes until it started to feel like Mad Men meets an exceptionally long episode of Scooby-Doo. Daredevil has none of this blandness; it doesn’t feel like anything else in the Marvel stable or anything on TV at all, really. It’s a dark, violent, abrupt show that begs you to binge watch it and then gives you bad dreams as a punishment.

Daredevil feels more like an extended Christopher Nolan Batman film than it does anything else in the Marvel canon. This world of organized crime, corrupt police and brutal fight scenes feels much more like Nolan’s Gotham City than any of the slick worlds we’ve seen in the rest of the Marvel universe. There’s a signature scene at the end of episode two where a long take down of a criminal gang is done in one take and it’s a wonder to behold. It lays down what the aesthetic of the entire show will be in that sequence and it seems to serve to hook the audience or inform them that maybe this show won’t be for them. It’s different than anything I’ve ever seen on a super hero TV show or, honestly, maybe anywhere. It feels like HBO-level action but with considerably less swearing and no nudity. (more…)

Box Office Democracy: Ex Machina

I didn’t expect too much from Ex Machina walking in to the film. I had seen the trailer every week for what feels like months, a perk of patronizing one of the few theaters that participated in the limited engagement I suppose, but I wasn’t terribly impressed. It looked like a competent but pedestrian sci-fi thriller with a second act twist I was reasonably sure I had figured out in advance. I was wrong about all of those things. I was wrong about the twist, I was wrong about the film being pedestrian, and the film is so far beyond pedestrian I’m ashamed at the thought. Ex Machina is one of the most compelling, gripping, transfixing movie I have seen in quite some time.   It’s such a fascinating movie to talk about that I’m crestfallen that it is in such a limited release that I will likely have to wait weeks to talk about it with anyone. I want to stand on street corners and bully passersby to go buy tickets, more people need to see this movie.

Ex Machina is the first directorial effort from veteran screenwriter Alex Garland and it’s almost unbelievable how skilled he is as a novice. While he is working with a small cast the performances he gets from his actors are uniformly excellent. Oscar Isaac has been fantastic in every film I’ve seen him in but he’s on another level here as Nathan. Nathan is a character that needs to have a quiet menace about him and Isaac oozes it from every pore. He commands all attention when he’s on screen in much the way I imagine it would be to share a room with a predatory cat. Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander make for a fascinating on-screen duo as the software engineer Caleb and the artificial intelligence (Ava) he has come to test and I suspect that their performances will feel even more special on repeat viewings once the viewer understands the whole story.

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Box Office Democracy: Furious 7

 

Justin Lin was the architect of the most dramatic film franchise turnarounds in my lifetime. When he signed on to make a third Fast & Furious movie the franchise was a laughing stock (I heard more jokes about the name 2 Fast 2 Furious than any movie before or since). He would, over the course of four films, turn the franchise in to the best original action movie franchise of the modern era. Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6 are the best action films of this decade and it isn’t particularly close. The mid-credits scene of Fast & Furious 6 revealing Jason Statham as the villain for the next installment was one of the happiest moments I’ve ever had in a movie theater.   If I knew anything in the world of cinema I knew Furious 7 would be a fantastic movie and that I needed to wait on the edge of my seat for it to come and deliver another transcendent action movie experience.

Then Paul Walker died.

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Box Office Democracy: Home

  • News
  • April 1, 2015

The epigraph on the second episode of the HBO series The Wire reads “You cannot lose if you do not play” which is a quote that really epitomizes the world view of the more entrenched characters on that show, they don’t believe in making waves, even to make things better, because they prefer the stability of the status quo. I worry that the people responsible for Home saw that quote and took it to heart in all the wrong ways because they have produced one of the safest, least ambitious movies I’ve ever seen. Home is less a piece of art and more a survey of focus groups and Q ratings with a heavy influence from a room full of executives free-associating with the phrase “what do kids think is funny?” written on a white board.

When I reviewed The Imitation Game I criticized Benedict Cumberbatch for a performance that I thought was one-third Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory and if only I could go back in time and tell myself to savor that performance. Jim Parsons plays the lead, an alien named Oh, and plays it in a way that if it weren’t for his screwy alien grammar you could probably convince me was recompiled dialogue directly from his show. It’s not that that character can’t work or that I never find it funny, far from it honestly, but if I wanted to hear Jim Parsons take things too literally, not understand typical human behavior, and embarrass himself in front of people he thinks are far beneath him I could do it at home on my television for free. There’s very little new he’s bringing to the table as an actor except for an accelerated story arc and way of speaking that feels like the Boovs learned English from lolcats.

Rihanna stars opposite Parsons as the infuriatingly named Gratuity “Tip” Tucci, a name I sincerely hope no one in the real world has because it’s just terrible. It helps that they cast Jennifer Lopez as her mom because it sort of seems within the realm of possibility that she would name her kid something like that. Rihanna does a passable job as a voice artist but she doesn’t do anything that ever lets you forget it’s Rihanna talking. It becomes especially unsettling when she turns on a radio at one point to teach Oh about music and it plays a Rihanna song, sung in basically the same voice the character talks in and no one brings it up or cares. Hiring honest-to-goodness voice actors would go a long way. Steve Martin is delightful in a rather small part as the leader of the aliens and I have now mentioned all but one of the credited voice actors in the movie in this paragraph.

Home simply feels like a movie with no effort exerted at any point. The script is good enough, funny but not really funny, passably suspenseful and emotional but not memorable in any way, uplifting but with no clear moral. The animation is at about the baseline for a modern animated film, it helps a lot that they remove all the humans from earth early in the film as it explains away their painfully static backgrounds. One of their big deal set pieces animation-wise is a swimming scene through the ocean at night, so it’s never quite as delightful as a Pixar film or even the other, more ambitious Dreamworks Animation projects like How to Train Your Dragon but it’s not the dreck that was the Ice Age franchise or anything. Home is a movie that a child would sit through happily and probably wouldn’t love enough to demand all of the toys afterward. There’s a place for movies like this but it’s the same kind of place as October horror movies and low-tier summer action movies. It’s a movie that wants to find an audience not by being special but just by showing up.

Box Office Democracy: The Divergent Series: Insurgent

There’s a murkiness to The Divergent Series that is utterly baffling. Does it want to be The Hunger Games? While the obvious answer to that question would be “yes” I’m growing less and less sure by the moment. It feels like there was a meeting at some point during the production process where it was decided that they probably couldn’t reach the popularity or, frankly, the quality of The Hunger Games but that they could probably make a great deal of money by making a comparable product. Divergent is the result of that cynical take on filmmaking. Where Catching Fire brought in a new director and turned that franchise from a quick cash-in to a legitimate statement piece of media, Insurgent seems content to collapse under the weight of its own narrative and slouch toward the end of the series confident that it won’t be abandoned by an audience that craves this material.

It seems like Insurgent is trying to live and die on the performance of Shailene Woodley and, honestly, that wasn’t a bad bet to make. Woodley’s performance as Tris is easily the best in the film. Her personal struggles are captivating and her chemistry with co-star Theo James (playing Four) is the only believable relationship depicted in the entire film. While Woodley’s performance is a credit to the film it simply isn’t enough to hide what often seems like a lack of effort. I can’t understand why the second entry in a franchise that will make so much money has such lackluster sets, there’s a trial scene that appears to just be on a soundstage painted black with a metal frame set up. Most of the scenes leading up to the climax take place in a slightly fancier white box. It lacks so much in terms of effort and ambition from a design perspective and often from a directing perspective as the other performances in this film did not get nearly the attention they seemingly gave when coaxing such a transfixing job from Woodley.

I’m heading in to spoiler territory from here on so if you’ve gotten this far but prefer to remain pure it’s time to browse away.

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Box Office Democracy: “Run All Night”

Box Office Democracy: “Run All Night”

When exactly did we decide Liam Neeson is the new paragon of action movies? I’m not even sure I can name the second biggest star in action movies right now in terms of output or cultural cachet. If someone anywhere in the world right now is making a joke about a hypothetical action movie I bet it stars Neeson. Run All Night is Neeson’s second collaboration with director Jaume Collet-Serra after last year’s Non-Stop, which was widely derided as “Taken on a plane”. They’re back this time hopefully not in an attempt to prove their incredible creative range as Run All Night is essentially Taken but if the child was a boy instead of a girl; it is not a lot of fun.

It has been suggested to me recently that the reason I don’t connect well with the Taken films is because they’re primarily aimed at women. That Bryan Mills is supposed to be a troubled but infallible sexualized fatherly hero saving a woman facing the oversized version of everyday fears. Run All Night is a clear attempt to bring this formula to a male audience. Gone are the imperiled female characters, in fact gone are almost any women with speaking parts, replaced with a son (played by Joel Kinnaman) who is marked for death after a mafia misunderstanding. Where Taken is violent and abrupt it is a PG-13 style of violence where people crumple quickly and the camera never lingers too long, conversely Run All Night is a gleeful R with all of the blood and the long strangling scenes that rating allows for. One strong advantage Run All Night has is a strong antagonist in Ed Harris. His version of the aging gangster kingpin is not the most original but Harris is much too good for this material and consistently knocks it out of the park. His scenes are the best in the movie and it speaks to his ability of an actor that he can be such a compelling character but I never felt drawn to root for him, that can be a fine line.

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Box Office Democracy: Chappie

Chappie is an amazingly frustrating movie, perhaps singular in its ability to vex me. I enjoyed so much of it while I was watching it, director Neill Blomkamp is quite good at evoking an emotional response, but in the days since I’ve seen Chappie I have grown steadily angrier at it. It’s a movie that’s so tone deaf to the world around it and so unnecessarily. All of the pieces of this movie I enjoyed could have been contained in a framework that was not so brashly ignorant of the important issues it brings up only to causally discard.

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Box Office Democracy: Rosewater

[[[Rosewater]]] is a movie that Jon Stewart basically had to make after The Daily Show played a major role in the imprisonments of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari. It works really well as an apology and as an effort to further Bahari’s mission to increase the visibility of journalists who have become political prisoners. Unfortunately, it’s not a particularly good piece of filmmaking.

Stewart is quite green and it shows in almost every facet of the movie. The performances he gets from his actors aren’t quite up to the level of the material he’s trying to create. The movie lumbers along at times where they should move faster and speeds through moments I would love to see breathe more. It doesn’t feel like a student effort, that would be a bridge way too far, but it does feel like a movie by a director that’s learning as he goes.

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Box Office Democracy: “Focus”

As a movie critic I believe I am obligated by law to review Focus through the lens of what it means for Will Smith’s career: if we have finally reached the end of the dark ages after almost eight years of films that were both critical and financial mixed bags. I might even tell you that we are back at the peak of the mountain we haven’t seen since I Am Legend and that we have our unquestioned biggest movie star in the world returned to us from the exile of After Earth and Men In Black 3. This isn’t that triumphant return; Will Smith is good but not extraordinary in a movie that will never be a blockbuster nor is it a critical darling. Focus is a perfectly serviceable crime movie that feels confined by a lack of ambition and, perhaps, a lack of budget.

It’s hard to classify Focus, because it is honestly unlike any crime movie I’ve ever seen before. (more…)

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