Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: Passengers

One of the easier ways of showing that you’re a sophisticated consumer of entertainment is to lament that nothing ever changes in Hollywood.  It’s true that the entertainment machine doesn’t particularly care about artistry as much as it cares about profit, and that the easiest way to make that profit is by giving people what they’ve already enjoyed, but that doesn’t mean things don’t change.  A movie released today isn’t like a movie released 30 years ago, or 20 years ago, or even 10.  Passengers is a movie that was written in 2007 and took nine years to produce… and in that time it’s become as much of a time capsule as the frozen people the movie is about.  Passengers wants to be about the far future but instead is a relic of the past.

I’m just going to go full on in to spoilers from here on out.  I think you should probably skip Passengers but if you want to go and if you want to be surprised this is your exit.  Thanks.

I could never get over the fact that our main character Jim (Chris Pratt) essentially murders the other lead Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) when he purposely wakes her up from suspended animation to spend whatever portion of the 90 year journey they survive through.  I get that we’re supposed to feel Jim’s desperation and later in the movie they slap an analogy about how a person that’s drowning will pull other people down with them, but it never satisfied me.  The catalyst for the entire events of the movie is an incredibly selfish act.  They try to wave it away with rationalizations and by giving them a big thing to fight against and the characters get over it, but I never did.  Our main character is an obsessive stalker who escalates until he irreparably changes her life without her knowledge or consent.  I would watch this as a thriller or a horror movie but it falls flat as a quirky romance.

After the story fails to hook you, Passengers doesn’t have a lot to offer.  The looming menace lingers on the edge of the story so gingerly that it feels like it’s afraid to pull focus, so when it becomes the big deal in the third act it seems thrown together.  We go from little glitches and malfunctions to one catastrophic breakfast to the whole ship is going to explode right now.  It felt like they knew they needed a big third act and that they couldn’t make it come out of nowhere, but they never much cared to make it all make sense.

Perhaps it’s just because the rest of the movie never quite clicked for me, but I felt like I had so much time to nitpick the lazy construction of the universe.  Why would an essentially unmanned ship filled with people in suspended animation not simply fly around the giant asteroid field?  Why is this ship not programmed to wake up a mechanic or something when systems start to fail?  Why are the crew members we see older men?  If you consider that a round trip takes 250 years and the crew is only out of suspended animation for a few months on either side wouldn’t that mean that after a few voyages they would be thousands of years old?  250 years ago we were riding horses and lighting candles, how are these technologies relevant enough to do multiple centuries-long voyages?  Why was the observatory programmed to give facts about a part of the journey that no one would be awake for?  Every movie has these problems, no script will ever be tight enough to escape silly questions, but Passengers was slow enough and irritating enough that I spent a lot of time sitting there in the dark asking how any of it made sense.

I keep coming back to the idea that it took nine years to make this movie.  Maybe in 2007 I would have found this movie cute or romantic or even non-horrifying.  I’m much more weary of romance stories starting with fucked up behavior than I was then.  I’ve simply gotten used to a higher caliber of Hollywood science fiction over the last few years.  Passengers is a movie that I’m not sure anyone is asking for, so it lingers like an unwanted guest.  It’s overstayed its welcome and it needs to go.

Box Office Democracy: Rogue One

It’s very clear that barring some sort of production-related catastrophe, we will get a Star Wars movie every December until they stop being profitable.  For the foreseeable future it seems that on the even years we will get “Star Wars Stories”— little asides not directly connected to the main movies but providing some backstory or context or simply fleshing out the edges of a galactic civil war.  Rogue One is the week or two directly before the original Star Wars and showcases the work that had to happen to get Luke Skywalker in position to fire a torpedo into an exhaust port.  It isn’t as flashy or grandiose as what we’ve seen before, but they’ve made a grisly little space war film here.  Well, as little a movie as you can make for $200 million anyway.

What we’re getting in Rogue One that we haven’t gotten before in Star Wars is a grittier look at the Rebellion war effort fighting against the Empire.  In the seven films we’ve gotten so far, all of the characters are larger than life heroes who are largely above the fray of the day-to-day war.  Han, Luke, and Leia are so far above the fray for 90% of the original trilogy they only operate at the highest levels.  Rogue One gives us characters who operate at the lower levels of the war.  Our main character is Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a fugitive/criminal sort of forcefully conscripted in to the Rebel Alliance to assist intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his reprogrammed Imperial assault droid (Alan Tudyk) on a rather convoluted mission (there are six steps and they probably could have gotten away with three) to get the plans to the Death Star.  Along the way they pick up a defecting Imperial pilot (Riz Ahmed), a wannabe Jedi (Donnie Yen), and his mercenary protector (Jiang Wen) to make up a ragtag band of resistance fighters.  There are times when they feel a little bit like the assortment of Star Wars characters you would put together for a tabletop RPG, but the supporting characters absolutely work.

The main characters are a little rougher.  Its hard to suss out what Cassian or Jyn really want out of the events of the movie besides a vague desire to do what the plot demands.  Jyn wants to be reunited with her father but she doesn’t do very much to make it happen, nor does she react particularly emotionally when it doesn’t work out.  Cassian is just a soldier who wants what a soldier wants and never has any time for deeper motivations.  The most egregious example of poor character work comes in the form of Orson Krennic, the film’s primary antagonist.  I believe that he’s evil and should be stopped based solely on the fact that he devoted his life to building the Death Star, but he doesn’t spend the movie doing anything particularly evil, rather he spends it trying to ensure he gets credit for his work from his superiors.  That isn’t jump-off-the-screen evil, and it means he gets overshadowed by every other prominent Imperial in the film.  These three principles just needed clearer goals and a bigger push.

There’s some stunning work being done in the visual effects department for this movie.  The space battles seem more dynamic than anything I’ve seen on screen, better than The Force Awakens mostly because it’s trying to do something altogether different than anything I’ve seen in a Star Wars film before.  The interplay between the war in orbit and the mission on the ground made everything feel a little more real, an odd thing too say about a movie about space battles and lasers that emulate atomic bombings.  An effect that did not go over as well was the digital way they make actors look like actors from the older movies.  They do it a few times and it never looked quite right— the attempt to recreate Peter Cushing failed completely for me.  It was firmly in the uncanny valley, and I spent an entire scene featuring him just thinking about how oddly his upper lip was moving.  George Lucas would have been endlessly trashed for a stunt like this, and it’s only that Disney hasn’t burned through all the good will yet that saves them from the same critique.  Parts get recast all the time, they can do it here too.

I’m excited to see Star Wars “go wide” like this, to start exploring stories and ideas that would have been shuffled off in to the Expanded Universe a decade ago and putting them on the big screen.  Rogue One feels a bit like a novel and there’s some good and bad with that (the main characters feel tailor-made to not ruffle any existing continuity)  but it’s ambitious and different and that good far outweighs the occasional fit of mundanity.  I want to see other kinds of movies in this setting; from this kind of war movie to perhaps more ambitious science fiction and quieter character pieces.  We might never get any of that but right now it all seems possible— and Rogue One is lighting the way.

Box Office Democracy: La La Land

I like musicals and I think it’s a shame that the film musical is mostly a relic of the past, dusted off a couple times a decade for a big revival and then set in the back of the closet for a few more years.  La La Land is a generally competent film that I just can’t make myself stomach.  It’s well-made, the script is good, and the chemistry between Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling is frankly delightful.  But it’s not a movie I liked.  It’s so convinced that it’s fresh and wonderful just for being a big Hollywood musical that they didn’t bother to make a good musical, or a compelling love story, or to cast more than three people.  La La Land is cuter than it is good, and I’m just not feeling like loving a cute movie right now.

La La Land is the kind of self-congratulatory nonsense that Hollywood loves to reward with gold statues and is invariably met with countless articles about how out of touch the entertainment industry is.  This is a movie about a struggling actress and her boyfriend, a jazz pianist obsessed with doing things the old-fashioned way.  These aren’t particularly relatable characters, and I say that as someone who lives in Los Angeles and knows a fair number of struggling actors.  It’s the Hollywood that exists in movies and, honestly, mostly older movies at that.  It is, however, the kind of Hollywood that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences loves to believe exists and will happily shower awards on movies that depict it as such.  I’m sure that’s just a happy accident.

The biggest problem I have with La La Land is it isn’t a very good musical.  They cast actors who can sort of sing and kind of dance instead of getting any dedicated singers or dancers in leading roles.  John Legend is in the movie but he only gets one number and it isn’t a naturally occurring number, it’s a musical performance within the movie.  Aside from an opening non-sequitur and an early ensemble number, everyone but Gosling and Stone get locked out of musical numbers for the rest of the way.  It hardly feels like a magical world where everyone breaks into song, and more of a look at two people who break in to song while the rest of the world looks on.

By “the rest of the world” I really mean a shockingly sparse cast of extras.  I live in Los Angeles, but I certainly don’t live in the Los Angeles depicted in La La Land.  That Los Angeles is a place where a couple can always be alone wherever they are and whatever they’re doing.  If they’re hanging out in Griffith Park there’s no one to be seen, if they’re going to a revival movie theater playing Rebel Without a Cause there’s barely five other people in the house, and if they’re breaking in to the observatory there’s not even a security guard there.  I’m not saying that scenes need to be a realistic level of crowded, but between no crowds and a sparse supporting cast the world in this movie feels so sparse.  You could set La La Land on an arctic research lab and you’d only have to change some dialogue about what LA really cares about.

The most damning thing I can say about La La Land is that I saw that movie two days ago and I could barely hum you the tune of any of the songs (I think I have one of them but it might just be “Blue Skies” by Irving Berlin) but I’m still singing “You’re Welcome” from Moana at basically any opportunity.  It’s a movie that seems to be hitting with a lot of people I know but I just stay in the theater thinking about how this would have been a better movie if they made it back when they really cared about making a good musical.  La La Land isn’t West Side Story, it isn’t even Newsies.  It’s a novelty, it’s a love letter to an Los Angeles that only existed in 40 year old movies, and it feels like a cynical attempt to get Oscar attention.  There’s a version of La La Land I would have liked, but this one is too low effort and too calculated for me.  Maybe next time.

Box Office Democracy: Moana

It’s getting a little boring to talk about how consistently excellent Disney Animation’s features output has gotten.  Moana is the eighth movie Disney Animation has released since 2008 that I would recommend to anyone without any qualification.  It’s a great movie, a fun movie, and I enjoyed every minute of watching it.  It’s a safe movie, there aren’t a lot of chances taken beyond having a non-white cast, and while I’d certainly enjoy seeing Disney take some big chances on these movies, the princesses are the cash cows and I get why they can’t branch out too far.

I found the story in Moana to be perfectly charming.  The titular character (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho, a young girl with a stunning signing voice) is the daughter of the chief of a Polynesian tribe who wants to abandon the static nature of island life and push out beyond the reef, something forbidden by cultural tradition.  Like most movies about an adolescent stuck in one place, Moana ends up off the island— in this case searching for the cure to the decay that plagues her island.  She meets the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson who is doing his best with the singing but I wouldn’t hold your breath for his solo album) an arrogant, prickly, kind of guy obsessed with his own glory and reputation.  The two struggle to get along, eventually get along and save they day.  There’s also a surprisingly good subplot about restoring the sailing traditions of the ancestors to Moana’s people who had become island-bound out of fear.

I’m always thankful when Disney puts out a princess movie and the primary thrust isn’t a love story.  Not because I don’t think there’s a place for love stories, but because young girls get a lot of media about how boys should be the center of their universes and it’s nice to see something else.  Moana turns it all the way up, there isn’t even a male character in her age bracket, and she never seems to have any interest in anything but leading her people and participating in the plot.  I’m beyond thrilled they didn’t insert any trace of romance in to the relationship between Moana and Maui as there’s absolutely no way that wouldn’t have been the creepiest thing in a movie in some time.  I’m sure the internet is already filled with art and fiction on the topic, but I’m thankful Disney didn’t do anything to lead those people on.

Disney has made some fine animated musicals in their time and Moana is no exception.  “How Far I’ll Go” and “You’re Welcome” are songs you’ll definitely find yourself humming the week after the movie.  “Shiny” is an almost Bowie-esque number that might not burn up the charts on Radio Disney (if Radio Disney is still a thing) but it will absolutely be a favorite of the Hot Topic set in your local mall— if not now, then in five years.  The songs are written by Lin-Manuel Miranda in a deal I have to believe he signed before Hamilton became the cultural force that it is.  Not because the work feels phoned-in or amateurish, but it doesn’t feel like the follow-up anyone would pick after penning the most popular Broadway show in recent memory.  This is the benefit of Disney’s famous frugalness when it comes to talent, sometimes you pick someone just before they become the biggest name in their field.

Moana is a great movie, but in the context of the eight year Disney Revival we’re in the midst of it can’t help but feel a little boring.  It’s not as thought-provoking as Zootopia was earlier in the year, neither will it be the cultural phenomenon that Frozen was.  It’s definitely unfair to mark a movie down for not being a cultural phenomenon, but isn’t it fair to ask a studio that has made eight smash hits in eight years to be a little more interesting?  Isn’t it worth the risk of stumbling and releasing a clunky movie to potentially make something fantastic?  As a film critic I want the answer to be yes but I see that the people in charge of these things would rather make the safe good movie and make all the money.

Box Office Democracy: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

It’s hard to tell either Warner Bros. or J.K. Rowling that they should refuse to make any more money off the Harry Potter franchise. If they can pack people in to theme parks and sell out a theater in London for over a year in advance, why shouldn’t they put out more movies? They didn’t stop making James Bond or Star Trek movies just because they ran out of books or the original cast members didn’t want to do it anymore. That said, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a good movie where I can sort of feel its hand in my pocket. This isn’t a labor of love and while I could lie to myself about that being true with other Harry Potter movies, I can’t convince myself quite as much this time.

The story in Fantastic Beasts is more or less Harry Potter with a twist. There’s a magical calamity, in this case Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) loses a bunch of magical creatures in New York City, and while a good-hearted but misguided authority figure, disgraced Auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) tries to punish our hero for this misunderstanding they discover a much larger plot involving an immensely powerful evil wizard, this time German pseudo-Nazi Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp). This outline vaguely describes the first five Harry Potter films if you substitute the names and add in a few scenes set in classrooms. I’m not knocking it, it’s an established formula because it works, but it never quite feels like we’re reinventing the wheel. The fun of the movie comes from Jacob Kowalski (Dan Folger) the Muggle (No-Maj in America apparently) baker who happens to switch briefcases with Newt early in the film and is drawn into the whole adventure. His point of view on the events of the film as a true outsider is what feels fresh and exciting and that it brings a bunch of good physical comedy along with it is a fun bonus. Similarly, Tina’s sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) is a sheltered functionary in the magical bureaucracy starting to realize a lot of what she’s been told is lies— a character I don’t remember seeing in the first seven Harry Potter films. Seeing prejudice against non-wizards confronted directly instead of through philosophical discussions is more affecting.

I found myself struggling to care about Newt or Tina. They aren’t particularly likeable or interesting beyond being the lead characters of a movie. Newt felt like a blank slate; unless he was in a scene with Jacob he just reflected the tone of the scene or gave some exposition about some beast or another. It doesn’t help that I find Eddie Redmayne sort of boring as a human being, he’s like the personification of bland England. Tina is a character who deeply cares about one thing (saving the children from the New Salem Society) that is pushed to the periphery of the movie until very late and the rest of the time she’s just the character who wants the main characters to have less fun. She’s like if they replaced Hermoine with Molly Weasley in the main Harry Potter films. By contrast, the supporting characters, Jacob and Queenie, are infinitely more interesting. Jacob has this ambition to escape his mundane life and then he’s offered this glimpse in to an immeasurably more interesting world. Queenie is a telepath who is falling for the first non-wizard she’s ever spent any time with. Their stories are so much more compelling, I would watch a TV show about the two of them running Jacob’s bakery every week.

Fantastic Beasts is supposed to be the first in a five movie series, and that fills me with apprehension. The second movie is supposed to take place in Paris and if the story is that Newt’s case full of magic animals gets broken open unleashing calamity there I’m going to be pretty bored with it. There seems to be less potential with Newt and Tina than there was with Harry, Ron, and Hermoine for continued adventures because instead of a lifelong vendetta and the turmoil of maturity, we have a box with a greedy platypus. I loved that platypus but it isn’t enough. I intend to give Rowling a chance because she hasn’t let me down yet, but I’m nervous about it. Fantastic Beasts is a load of fun but I hope it doesn’t get, please forgive this pun, too long of a leash.

Box Office Democracy: Arrival

I went in to the theater knowing less about what Arrival was and what it was about than any movie in recent memory. I had skimmed the first few sentences of the Wikipedia page but only knew the absolute broadest strokes. I was beyond pleasantly surprised; I can’t recall being so enthralled by a movie that was so far off my radar since Drive. Arrival is the best kind of science fiction that provides us with some fantastic things and concepts, but what it really tells is a mundane story through a fresh lens fantastically well.

Arrival has the kind of plot that sounds boring in summary— a linguistics professor is called to translate the language of a visiting alien— but ends up working well. The movie got me thinking about linguistics and the intricacies of language more than I have since I decided not to take an introductory level class in the subject back in college. There’s an inherent tension involved in any alien encounter, and something about the way the score does string hits that kind of sound like the way the aliens talk gives even the safest moments a hint of looming doom. There’s this overlay of global tension, that other countries might attack their local aliens and that this will spark a war for some reason, but none of that ever feels terribly compelling. I care about the characters they’re making me care about; I don’t care about vague threats that never make much sense.

There’s a turn in the story— I don’t want to call it a twist; there’s a massive shift in perspective in the third act. I usually don’t care about spoilers but I won’t give this away because I appreciated that I came in to Arrival with very little idea what the movie was about. The third act is brilliant, it’s clever, it’s suitably science-fiction-y, and it puts the whole film in to sharper focus. (This might be getting too close to what it is but I’ll never pass up a chance to give Zack Snyder grief: Arrival makes Watchmen look terrible.)

There aren’t enough good things to say about Amy Adams and the job she does here. She nails the big moments like being afraid of the aliens the first time she meets them and the big moments of grief and sadness, but the bigger moments seem easy. The small moments are what set the whole film apart. There’s a moment where she struggles with her hazmat suit the first time she has it on, the weight and the cumbersome nature seem to be smothering her and it communicates how awkward and massive that moment must have felt in a way that slack-jawed awe never would. There’s this need to lace so many touching moments with a sense of bittersweet inevitability in retrospect and it’s there, and it’s heartbreaking, and it’s beautiful. Forest Whitaker is excellent and Jeremy Renner does some of the best work I’ve ever seen from him, but Amy Adams is special in this film.

Arrival is an incredible science fiction film. Easily the best entry in the genre since Ex Machina although they’re nothing alike so there’s very little basis for comparison. With six weeks of allegedly top notch movies still to come, Arrival is comfortably on top of my list for best film of the year. It’s a haunting film that commands attention when on the screen, but more importantly infests your thoughts for days after.

Box Office Democracy: Doctor Strange

I assume at some point in the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe we’re going to come across a threat that unites every character in one movie to fight against it in some budget-busting assembly of talent. I am starting to dread this moment because between Tony Stark, Peter Quill, Scott Lang, and now Stephen Strange, I can’t imagine anything could ever get done between giving all four of them chances to show how little they care about anything that happens in favor of getting in some quip or another. Ironic detachment has become the house style in the MCU, and I’m not sure why Doctor Strange was my breaking point but it was. I’m sick of people saving the world by not caring about it.

It’s not that Benedict Cumberbatch is the problem with Doctor Strange. I found him surprisingly acceptable playing a native New Yorker. He isn’t bad at doing pithy dialogue and this might be projection on my part because he’s English but he’s masterful at appearing above it all. He does a good job climbing over the mountain of unlikability the script puts in his path. Honestly, I’m not sure at what part of “arrogant doctor crashes his supercar while rejecting pleas from sick people to get help” is supposed to make us think he’s a good guy, but his subsequent petulant rejection of all of the advice of his doctors so he can regain the use of his hands so he can go back to being a jerk of a surgeon doesn’t do it either. Stephen Strange is an unlikable crater in the middle of Doctor Strange, but Benedict Cumberbatch is just reading the words off the page.

I don’t like Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One. I don’t like that she’s playing an Asian man and even though they go out of the way to say she’s Celtic, there’s nothing she does in the entire film that isn’t out of the mystical Asian man playbook. I think it’s cowardly that Marvel changed the character from Tibetan so that they could have an easier time accessing the Chinese film market. All the talk of censorship I’ve seen in media these past few years— we get actual government intervention in a movie, and so few people seem to notice.

The rest of the cast is great. Chiwitel Ejiofor is too good an actor for the small part this movie asks of him. He wrestles with his morality over the course of this film and you can see the conflict on his face and in his posture in a way you just don’t see in genre films. He’s deserving of more, and I trust if we get a sequel we’ll get more of him. Benedict Wong is also excellent in a small part. He has a great physicality in a movie dominated by bodies skinnier than a life dedicated to martial arts would suggest. He is the focus for much of the humor in the second act and he carries it well. Mads Mikkelsen wouldn’t have been my first choice for a magical martial arts bad guy but I’m thrilled to have been proven wrong. Because of the magic roots (and the liberal use of stunt doubles) it’s not like he has to carry any of the difficult work himself, and it gives us a gifted actor skilled at playing menaces to carry the heavy weight a villain must shoulder in a superhero film. The best part of the entire film is a quick comedic exchange between Cumberbatch and Mikkelsen, and I’m not sure anyone but Mikkelsen could have made it work.

The story is as predictably lifeless as one would expect from a superhero origin story these days. Bad thing happens, person gets extraordinary power, some sort of betrayal requires that power to be directed against evil, and then there’s a new status quo. I’ve seen this movie dozens of times now and there’s nothing new or exciting about the way it’s written up here. The been-there-done-that feeling also extends to the special effects. I’ve read rave reviews of the visual effects and while they’re nice, there’s nothing here I haven’t seen in Inception or The Matrix franchise. While they’ve turned those visual concepts up to 11 this time out it didn’t particularly impress me; I’m not looking for more and bigger with effects as much as I am smarter and more effective. Doctor Strange looks like someone put a kaleidoscope in front of the projector after it had already been shot rather than having a coherent design.

It must seem like I didn’t like Doctor Strange and that honestly isn’t true. Marvel Studios has gotten very good at making these films and it’s almost impossible to sit through one and not be entertained. I’m just starting to see the strings a little more, the same old things, and the clichés that dominate these movies particularly the origin stories. I had a good time watching the movie but it’s not fresh like Iron Man was; it feels more like watching a movie where a police officer has only one day until retirement. Perhaps as we get in to a round of sequels we’ll see a lot less of this, but until then I’m going to be writing a lot more reviews complaining about a movie that’s honestly above average.

Box Office Democracy: Black Mirror: Season Three

I had very little idea what Black Mirror was before it was assigned to me this week. I was reasonably sure it was something a little spooky because of the way people talked about it on social media and from context clues I was pretty sure it was a TV show. That was all I knew and it was kind of refreshing.  I did know that people had a very high opinion of Black Mirror and maybe that damaged it in my mind. Black Mirror is a good anthology series with a few solid episodes but there’s a distracting sense of self-importance creeping in from the edges that is ruinous when the episodes aren’t rock solid.

The thematic through line for Black Mirror is the danger of modern technology, particularly technology popular with young people in the real world. We see the dangers of an exaggerated version of Klout, the perils of advanced virtual and augmented reality systems, even an episode about call-out culture. When these hit they feel like prescient warnings, but when they miss they feel like an old person yelling at kids for enjoying a thing they don’t understand. I enjoy meditations on how we can tell what’s real when computers start inputting signals directly to our brains, but I’m quite over being lectured about looking at my phone too much by any media— especially a streaming content provider like Netflix. The strongest two episodes, “San Junipero” and “ Hated in the Nation”, let the technological ruminations fade to the background and focus on just being strong stories instead and they’re much stronger for it. “Hated in the Nation” is a fun feature-length mystery thriller with a side of sci-fi and it stands head and shoulders above the rest because it isn’t there to lecture but to generate suspense.

Maybe I’ve seen one too many episodes of The Twilight Zone, but I also found the twists to be a tad facile. I could have written a summary of the first episode after the first ten minutes and would consistently only be surprised if they did a second twist (it’s very hard to nail a double twist). Storytelling isn’t about twists and predictable isn’t the end of the world but there were two out of these six episodes that seemed to have nothing going on except setting up a twist (“Playtest” and “Men Against Fire”) and when those don’t land the whole episode falls apart. It’s the unfortunate cliché of the sci-fi anthology that everything needs to have some kind of gotcha ending and the genre needs to grow out of it.

This might not be the place for this critique, but as I’m not a TV critic I’m not sure I’ll get another chance to talk about it. I might be getting very tired of the way people act in English dramas. Perhaps I’ve been taken in by an epidemic of overacting in American television, but in all but the most heightened moments everyone seems so dispassionate in Black Mirror and in most English shows I can call to mind right now I feel the same way. Either I’m supposed to believe England is a country full of people who have an almost sarcastic disconnection from their day-to-day lives except in moments of extreme stress, or this is some kind of artistic meme— and if it’s the latter, I just don’t care for it much anymore. If it’s the former, I guess it’s an okay representation and I hope the country of England gets better soon.

I want there to be more anthology programming on TV. I hate seeing a TV cast that is temporarily or permanently bored with their show, and that constant churn makes sure that even in a weak moment that everyone at least gives a shit. Unfortunately I haven’t particularly clicked with any of the attempts to revive the format, and Black Mirror is almost certainly going to continue this trend. If I was given a very specific recommendation, I could see myself returning for an episode or two— but I’m not going to be on the edge of my seat whenever season four launches. I like my science fiction a little less preachy and old fashioned. I’m happy Black Mirror exists for the people who want it, I’m a fervent supporter of anything that isn’t a family sitcom or a police drama, but it’s just not my cup of tea.

Box Office Democracy: Keeping Up with the Joneses

Keeping Up with the Joneses is a comedy that isn’t very funny. It isn’t bad, or offensive, or sloppy, nor does it suffer from a lack of effort or energy. It just doesn’t hit with enough punchlines to be worth spending money and sitting still for most of two hours. Most of the jokes seem to have started with the premise “wouldn’t it be funny if people actually lived in the suburbs” without any twist or an examination of why such a thing might be funny. It is actually funny when Jon Hamm has to save Zach Galifianakis from the venomous bite of a disembodied snake head, it is not funny to keep hearing the word “grillbot” over and over again. This movie has too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former.

It’s not a problem of chemistry, it’s a delight seeing these actors share the screen. Hamm and Galafianakis are very good together. Honestly, Jon Hamm is good in everything, I don’t understand why he isn’t constantly working; he’s a gifted comic actor and has leading man looks. What does Chris Pratt have that Jon Hamm doesn’t? Nothing. But I digress. Isla Fisher does a fine job meshing with the cast although I want more from her than “fussy, carping, suburban housewife” but if these are the roles she’s being offered she’s doing good work. Gal Godot is somewhat less charming and doesn’t appear to be as good a fit but I’m more than willing to write that off as a more businesslike character not meshing well with the stable of wacky characters the rest of the movie offers. The actors don’t fail this movie; the movie fails the actors.

There’s just no spark to the plot in Keeping Up with the Jonses. They spend the first half of the movie alternating between showing how pathetic Jeff and Karen’s (Galifianakis and Fisher) lives are and the detective game about figuring out the Joneses are spies— of which all the funny moments are in the trailer. The second half is a bland spy comedy, which probably would have worked for me at some point, but the genre has fleshed out well in the last decade or so and it’s hard to see Joneses as anything less than a feeble shadow of Spy. The plot is limp, and the jokes fail to connect time and again until you get the cinematic equivalent of flop sweat, and the audience is sort of nervously chuckling trying to push the whole thing forward. I’m not saying there are no genuine laughs in here, but they’re embarrassingly too few.

The secret joy of reviewing movies is seeing bad movies and getting to dunk on them. Good movies are boring to write about unless they’re sublimely terrific at one thing or another, but bad movies are an endless font of fun negative adjectives. I don’t want to slam Keeping Up with the Joneses because I feel like everyone involved suffered enough by just having to show up for work and deliver lines they knew weren’t funny.   This isn’t some cosmic malfeasance against the art of cinema, this is just a bunch of talented people (and I should include director Greg Mottola in here as well) working off a script that has a crummy premise and misses way more than it hits when it comes to being funny, the prime directive of any comedy. The worst part is it’s a pleasant enough movie when you don’t realize you haven’t laughed in a while and the stakes of the movie feel meaningless. It would be a great cinematic white noise machine or something, but it isn’t a successful movie.

Box Office Democracy: The Accountant

Movies like The Accountant used to be a dime a dozen, or at least they felt like that, a simple action movie with a low-A-list or high-B-list actor just filling time in the schedule. Now it feels like all of these movies have become franchise entries instead, a safer attempt at the same money as star power has become less important and licenses have become king. The Accountant is a by-the-books action movie with a gimmick, the main character is supposed to have Asperger syndrome, and it relies on that gimmick and the charm of the cast. It’s an exceptionally charming cast, and it’s capable of pushing a rather cliché movie through all of the rougher parts. I like The Accountant despite the things it does badly and, maybe a little bit, because of them.

I’ve seen some variation of The Accountant’s story a million times. A criminal with a heart of gold (Ben Affleck) gets in over his head with what is supposed to be a simple job. An innocent girl (Anna Kendrick) gets wrapped up in a world she has no place in and must be saved by said criminal. The twists and turns are supposed to keep you guessing as to whom the real bad guy is but it ends up being the person with the highest billing that isn’t the protagonist or the love interest (I don’t want to give it away but you can read a movie poster). A young cop (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) tries to bring the criminal to justice but struggles with the shades of grey around who the real bad guy is. I’m not mad, I like this story, but maybe this one wraps up a little too neatly as everyone in every flashback wraps around to be an important part of the present day. There’s also a kind of inexplicable moment where the back-story, previously told through flashbacks gradually handed out throughout the movie, is dumped out in a giant bit of narrated exposition at the end of the second act as if they realized they had run out of time for their previous framing devices.

It’s a little strange that the gimmick of this movie is that Ben Affleck is playing a neuroatypical character. I don’t know if this is an accurate depiction of Asperger’s or an offensive one. I am reasonably sure that most people with any form of autism are not master assassins, so it’s all kind of abstract at that point. It feels like grabbing a tiger by the tail to suggest that the way to make your special needs child function in a normal society is through an intensely abusive upbringing that turns them in to an assassin, but maybe it’s enough that all of the autistic people in the film are depicted as functioning reasonably self-sufficient adults. The Accountant might be ahead of its time now, but it feels like it’s in dire danger of seeming very regressive a decade down the line.

Then again, maybe The Accountant isn’t meant to stand up to the judgment of the ages. This is The Transporter or Kiss of the Dragon more than it’s a Die Hard; a movie to bridge the gap between bigger releases and to take advantage of the lead actor bulking up to play Batman. I had a great time watching The Accountant— the action was fun and as original as you’re going to get for a movie made at this level of effort. The plot wasn’t any great puzzle or anything, but I had a good time pulling at the threads and unraveling it in my brain. I would watch eagerly watch a sequel and sigh and roll my eyes if they stretched it in to a trilogy. Not every movie can be Citizen Kane and not every action movie can be Crank 2: High Voltage but the world needs new movies all the time, and The Accountant adds up to a solid film.

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