Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: Jason Bourne

I have repeatedly gone on the record as a huge fan of the Bourne series. The Bourne Identity was a landmark action movie; one that changed how fight scenes are choreographed and shot throughout all of cinema. When they needed to prove that James Bond wasn’t a Cold War relic, they did it by making him more like Jason Bourne. The Bourne Ultimatum won three Academy Awards and deserved every one of them; it’s a stunning example of the genre. The Bourne movies always seemed like they were two steps ahead of the action game in the same way their protagonist was two steps ahead of his pursuers but something has happened in this nine-year layoff. Now Jason Bourne feels a step behind.

There isn’t anything wrong with the Bourne formula— I still quite enjoy globetrotting and big set pieces filled with any combination of fighting, car chases, and explosions. The final sequence in Las Vegas is as good as any other climax this franchise has had. Neither Athens nor Berlin feel very special as exotic locales, and going back to London again after it was featured in Ultimatum feels a little lazy, but there’s only so many countries out there and we are on the fifth movie here. Tommy Lee Jones is here to be the token evil old white guy and that’s all fine. The real problem is that because this is the paradigm now, what once felt fresh is now cliché and this is all evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Matt Damon did a round of press where he seemed very proud that he only has about 25 lines of dialogue in Jason Bourne, and what a mistake that was. Bourne isn’t an emotionally expressive character, so if he isn’t telling you how much he cares about things it’s easy to assume he just doesn’t. If we let everyone else in the movie tell us how important things are or how emotionally devastating these revelations are, then we start to empathize with those characters more than the titular one. It’s easy to assume everything is rolling off his back as he stumbles through more and more of the plot. Even when they go to the tired trope of fridging a prominent supporting cast member (for the second time in three movies if we’re counting) it doesn’t seem to have an impact that lasts longer than the scene directly after the one it happens in.

There’s a big story going on in Jason Bourne, but I’m pretty sure Bourne himself has no idea it’s going on. There’s some big conspiracy between Jones and his CIA influence on a social media platform run by stereotypical tech mogul Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed) and while Bourne comes in to possession of files that could expose the program we never see him read them, mention them, or seemingly have any interest in present-day CIA operations. Bourne is consumed with evidence that his father (a character that has had zero footprint on this series to date) might have been killed as part of a cover-up. The bad guys spend the entire film scrambling to cover-up and protect a program that the good guy has no knowledge of or interest in. It feels like the two sides are brought together solely by contrived coincidences and in a saner world never would they come in to conflict.

I want to believe that the Bourne franchise is bigger than this misstep. The biggest problems are narrative and let’s be honest, no one is seeing these films for their tight, coherent storylines. It needs to be a little better than this, but this is a slight stumble not a tumbling fall. Paul Greengrass, if he chooses to stick around, can recover from this and make a better movie. They left so many plot threads to continue on, from Ahmed’s character not coming close to having a character arc, to the surprise emergence of Alicia Vikander emerging as the most compelling entity in the whole film. In fact, if they decided to move away from Damon again, I would much rather watch a movie about Vikander’s morally ambiguous CIA character than I would like to have Jeremy Renner back. We’re 15 years in to the Bourne era, and while Jason Bourne is not the genre-defining pipe bomb its predecessors were, I’m not ready to write the whole venture off yet.

Box Office Democracy: Star Trek Beyond

Box Office Democracy: Star Trek Beyond

I can clearly remember the moment that guaranteed that I would never be a Star Trek in the same way I am a fan of so many other science fiction properties. I got a very bad cold in summer camp when I was nine years-old and was put in the infirmary, the only place in the camp that had television. I don’t remember if I choose the programming or if someone else did but I watched an entire evening of Deep Space Nine a feverish miserable mess (so feverish that it could have only been one episode as far as I know) and I’ve never quite gotten over that association enough to enjoy the show as an adult. Unlike Star Wars, DC, Marvel, Firefly, Buffy, et al I have no connection to the Star Trek franchise past enjoying a few of their cinematic efforts and enjoying others less. Star Trek Beyond is in the latter camp, a fine sci-fi action movie I guess but one with thinner characters than I’d prefer and action sequences that, while pleasing, seem a bit like nonsense.

Good science fiction either needs to get the audience very invested in the world, the science, and the process or invested in the characters to the point where none of that really matters. Star Trek Beyond fails to do either of those things, I’m not sure where my affection for these characters is supposed to come from besides the fact that they have very famous names and are on Team Earth and the universe feels vry shallow for a decades old property and the science is basically magic. We get scenes where characters I’m not super invested in are confronted with gigantic problems and then solve them by saying a bunch of big words I don’t understand and then they hit some buttons and poof the problem is over. This feels like it describes 90% of the conflict in the film. I’m being unfair to characters like Kirk and Spock who had a lot of time in the previous two films to get some earned affection but there’s a fair amount of Scottie action in here and none of that feels earned at all.

If a reboot is supposed to be a fresh start, to begin again without all the encumbrances of the original series, how far can you get in to the new thing before it’s just as difficult for outsiders as the original? We’re a mere seven years and three films in to the new Star Trek canon but with Star Trek Beyond we might be getting there. There’s very little here for people new even to this small corner of the franchise and some of it even seems to be relying on familiarity with the orginal series. Bones McCoy has been a criminally underused character in the first two entries in this franchise and while I’m glad to see him thrust in to a larger role this time around I can’t imagine his prickly friendship with Spock feeling even the least bit earned if you’ve only seen the 2009 Star Trek and Into Darkness. This no longer feels like a fresh, interesting, new take on Star Trek but more an acknowledgment that the original cast is far too old to do the action movies they want to make with these characters. Unless you never thought this was a fresh interesting take in which case I don’t know what this movie has to offer you at all.

The heartbreaking thing about this movie coming just a bit short is that it tarnishes the stellar reputation of Justin Lin who, prior to this film, was on run of genre-defining action movies with the Fast & Furious films before failing to impress here. I can see him trying to put his style on the film in moments especially in the scenes that prominently feature 20th and 21st century music but it isn’t enough. The moments that feel like him feel out of place amidst the rest of the film and the more traditional stuff often feel hollow and lacking in follow-through, where his frenetic pace may have saved him before here all of Lin’s missteps have a seemingly unlimited amount of time to breathe.

I don’t want do go in to other people’s fandoms and tell them how their beloved things ought to be. While I was a big fan of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot and thought Into Darkness totally acceptable action movie that I enjoyed watching once and have never been tempted to watch again. Star Trek Beyond I found considerably less enjoyable, it feels like uninspired technobabbly science fiction far too often and at rare moments seems to be playing directly to clichés lampooned in Galaxy Quest ones that probably needed to be permanently retired after being exposed so expertly. Maybe this is the Star Trek movie that will please the die-hard fans but I just couldn’t get in to it.

 

Box Office Democracy: The Secret Life of Pets

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how at this point in my life I’m through being cool.

I’m 32 years old, I’m engaged to the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, and I just closed on a house. I don’t need to do things anymore because I think they make me look cool. I’m going to use clip-on sunglasses, wear flip-flops despite my giant feet looking goofy in them, and I’ll wear shorts after dark if it’s a warm evening and I feel like it. If something I like happens to be cool then that’s a great coincidence, but otherwise I’m willing to wear wrestling shirts and play needlessly complicated board games.

By the same token I’m willing to say that I wholeheartedly enjoyed The Secret Life of Pets despite it being a bit shallow from a narrative perspective, and despite the fact that at this point in Minion-mania Illumination Entertainment might be the least cool movie studio on the planet.

The Secret Life of Pets is a pretty standard hero’s journey story, plucky everydog Max (Louis C.K.) has his idyllic life disrupted by newcomer Duke (Eric Stonestreet) and the two eventually get lost in New York and a ragtag group of other pets come together to save them. It’s not the most original story in the world, but it’s a perfectly strong framework to hang 90 minutes of reliable pet humor. Dogs are earnest and dumb, cats are aloof and egotistical, and birds are surprisingly clever. I suppose a megalomaniacal rabbit and an army of neglected pets bent on the subjugation of human life is a little new, but no one strained under the narrative weight here. What shines is the jokes and more importantly, the execution.

The casting for Secret Life of Pets is impeccable, and while I usually want to resist the trend of hiring mainstream actors to do voice work (is it even a trend at this point? It’s basically a cultural norm) I can’t deny that the performances here are top notch. C.K. and Stonestreet are good enough, the former is doing a generic enough good guy persona and the latter a performance that’s 98% bumbling goofball the supporting cast is where the real gems are. Jenny Slate is a revelation as the lovesick Pomeranian who live across the street from Mac and leads the effort to return him home. She’s spunky and funny but most importantly really genuine. Slate has been bubbling just below the audience consciousness line for a while, and I hope that she can finally start breaking through with efforts like this. Albert Brooks is a legend for good reason, but I never knew I always wanted him to play a hawk with an honesty problem. He steals every scene he’s in and, most importantly, sounds nothing like Marlin from when I saw him a couple weeks back. Kevin Hart has spent the last couple years slowly winning my heart and he deserves all of that love here. It’s his trademark big over-the-top character I’ll probably see four times this year but it consistently got the biggest laughs in the theater.

There’s a moment in the second act where I thought Secret Life of Pets was finally going to try for a big emotional moment, to step above what I expect from Illumination and join the Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks upper echelon in animated storytelling. They start talking about Duke’s original owner and the life they had together and when they return to find said owner, the current occupant of the house (a cat) tells Duke that his owner has passed away. They are clearly trying to pull at the heartstrings with this revelation but the moment gets no time to breathe, feels a little out of nowhere when it comes up, and is never even referenced again. I wanted a bigger moment, I wanted to know what Duke’s original owner called him, I wanted something bigger. If you’re going to go for it commit all the way and if you aren’t going to make a real effort maybe that time would be better served with a couple more good jokes.

Box Office Democracy: “The Purge: Election Year”

I firmly believe that all media is political, that you cannot separate the political component from a cultural artifact anymore than you could strip out narrative or theme. I usually try to only be at about a six out of 10 in terms of political content when writing these reviews because I worry that I might come off as too singularly focused and, if I’m being completely honest, because I’m concerned that my analysis is not nearly sophisticated enough to be my leading edge. I’m throwing that out of the window for The Purge: Election Year partly because it is such an aggressive political piece and partially because other than the political content it isn’t offering much beyond the established Purge formula. If you’re the kind of person who desires no politics in their media criticism I can tell you that The Purge: Election Year is very similar in tone and pace to The Purge: Anarchy and while it has a lot of additional world building it isn’t moving heaven and earth to get there. If you want a fun thriller with a complex if not entirely unpredictable narrative, this is a good choice. I also urge you to stop reading here because from here on out I intend to only engage with the political content.

My main critique of the first Purge movie was that it gestured to some bigger political issues, but was really nothing more than a monster in a house movie. The daughter character is there to raise questions about the fairness of the Purge, but every other character tells her to keep it to herself. At this point it seems they’ve heard this critique and Election Year is much more comfortable engaging in politics and having a clearer point of view on contemporary issues. The ruling party, The New Founding Fathers of America, is a right wing party that has wrapped itself in religion and firmly believes that there is no point in trying to create income equality and is trying to murder the poor. They also hire an army of Neo-Nazis decked out in patches of the Confederate flag and white power slogans to murder their political enemies. I’m sure when they were writing this, it seemed a little more dystopian and far-fetched than it does on a weekend when a major party political candidate posted an image from a Neo-Nazi web forum on his official Twitter account. It’s no coincidence that the last round of advertising I saw for this film features the slogan “Keep America Great”, and it’s nice to see this series engaging with issues instead of pushing it aside for the sake of simpler thrills.

While I appreciate the willingness to go to a more political place, I picked up on some attempts to draw equivalencies between both sides of the issue of purging and I’m not entirely sure that’s appropriate. I want nuanced and complicated characters on both sides of the equation, but I also want it underlined that the people fighting to stop the night of unregulated murder that disproportionately targets their community are much more morally right than their opponents… and I’m not sure the movie always agrees with me there. There is a resistance group, introduced in the last film, composed of almost exclusively people of color that run a hospital on Purge night but that also want to engage in a political assassination to influence the election. I thought the movie made it seem like this assassination attempt was just as evil as the attempt of the ruling party to assassinate the candidate opposed to the purge, and I don’t think there is a moral equivalency here. Trying to stop the Purge is a cousin of self-defense, and while it isn’t a lofty political ideal to kill your opponents I understand why they thought that was their only option. It’s worth noting at this point that my fiancée, a scholar with extensive training in media and representation, does not think that they were saying both groups were similarly bad.

There’s one more unsettling bit in here (as long as we’re drawing parallels to modern politics from a movie made by a studio famous for caring only about keeping costs down and making as many movies as they can). There’s a B story about a deli and the owner trying to protect it on Purge night when his insurance is cancelled at the last minute and the crazy aggressive local girl who is nursing a grudge over a shoplifting incident. I very much want the intent behind this plot to be about how marginalized communities are often turned against each other to fight over scraps instead of fighting against the systems that serve to oppress them. However, the much easier parallel to draw from that is one about “black-on-black violence” and if that’s legitimizing that nonsense to their audience then there’s some actual evil going on here.

I appreciate that with The Purge: Election Year, the franchise is starting to engage with the social issues at the root of their premise. All good science fiction should aspire to engage with contemporary issues and hold a mirror up to the places that could be doing better. At its best moments Election Year is doing a great job at that, and in other places it feels like it is trying to hard to please everyone to have a strong enough perspective on some things. I’m thrilled that there’s the space to have these observations and actual conversations about a Purge movie and I’m excited to see where (if?) things go from here, an enthusiasm I did not have the first time around.

Box Office Democracy: Independence Day: Resurgence

Independence Day: Resurgence is inexcusably boring, the kind of movie script I would expect if you went to one of those experimental Google A.I. routines and asked them to make a summer blockbuster. None of the ideas feel clever or new but instead a naïve attempt to maximize potential profits.  It’s a disaster movie mixtape with a couple alien cliché deep cuts thrown in to appear hip. Resurgence tries so hard to traffic in the positive memories we have of the original Independence Day and while it’s occasionally evocative enough to stir that up, it so much more often completely fails to not only carry the weight of the first movie but to even be a coherent film.

The original Independence Day was particularly relatable because we were offered so many different slices of life. We saw the goofy scientist and his nebbishy father, we saw the air force pilot and his exotic dancer wife, and, yes, we saw the President of the United States and his family but we also saw the trailer parks and the end of the world parties. We got a world that felt lived in. Every principal character in Resurgence is either a holdover character from the first film, now renowned for their work saving the earth, one of their children who are uniformly top fighter pilots, or a spectacularly important global political figure. There’s no relating to any of these people because so few people actually travel in these circles. The problem seems to come from the world being way more science-fiction-y than the original film and there seems to be no desire to explore how things have changed in any respect besides anti-alien war machines. The world feels so much less lived in and so it’s much harder to care when they start wrecking things.

Along with being unrelatable, none of the characters have narrative arcs at all. With the exception of being sad about loved ones being killed or mad that alien invaders are back, none of the characters have any kind of emotional growth. None of them have to change the way they interact with the world to solve the problem of the alien invasion, they just sort of do the same things over and over again and eventually it works and the day is saved. There’s a certain catharsis to seeing a bunch of alien ships explode and everything but there’s no meaningful character work happening here so there’s nothing but hollow victories.

Independence Day: Resurgence is set in a world where all of humanity has come together in harmony after the monumental alien attacks of 20 years ago. This new one world government is composed mainly of American and Chinese people and I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that these are the two largest markets for movies these days. No other nations are represented in any significant way at all unless you count the African warlord of a nameless country who seems to exist only to provide a vague sense of menace and have a kind of racist interaction with a minor character toward the end of the film. One of the three big disaster sequences also takes place in China, which is either an attempt to underscore the stakes for all of the main players (including the Chinese fighter pilot) or more transparent pandering to the Chinese market, and I’m betting heavily on the latter.

I could go on and on with things that were boring or lazy about Independence Day: Resurgence. The alien queen looks suspiciously like the one in Alien vs. Predator. Two different plotlines have separate bumbling nerdy guy characters, I assume because they couldn’t figure out a way to combine them, and they both get external validation of their masculinity to close out their stories. Jeff Goldblum is carted around from place to place to react to things in his inimitable way and they rely on his charm being so strong that we don’t notice that he doesn’t ever do anything in the film; he could be replaced by a handsome coat rack. The mysterious object that can save the world is stunningly poorly designed and could quite accurately be described as a mecha-Pac-Man. The third movie basically announced in the closing moments of this one is a hundred times more compelling conceptually but still isn’t a movie I want to go see after this wretched chapter. The original Independence Day was an iconic disaster film that shaped a decade of blockbusters, but Resurgence is an emotionless husk, an exoskeleton with no alien pilot, gracelessly going through the motions.

Box Office Democracy: Finding Dory

I am too big a fan of Pixar to be reasonably objective at this point. On this very website I wrote a rave review of The Good Dinosaur, a movie I seem to be almost completely alone on the island of people who think that was an unqualified masterpiece. I’ve given more than one passionate defense of Cars as a well-intentioned movie with a nice message about the virtue of small town America. I’m even polite enough to pretend that Cars 2 never existed. I’m a Pixar team player all the way. But I’m just not sure I’m a big fan of Finding Dory.

It’s not a bad movie, that’s not what’s wrong here, not by a long shot. It’s funny, it’s momentarily very moving, and the design work is exciting and dynamic. What it doesn’t feel is particularly original. They hit a lot of characters again, not for deeper dives (sorry) into the characters or even for fresh jokes, but to do basically the same joke over again. There’s also a couple sea lions introduced that feel an awful lot like the pelican from the first movie crossed with the seagulls, to say nothing of another luminescent predator in a dark environment coming around. I might be expecting too much from one-note characters in a children’s movie but I expect more from this studio, and I expect more from a successor to such a resounding triumph of filmmaking as Finding Nemo.

The problem I have with Finding Dory would likely be fixed with some higher stakes. Finding Nemo is a movie filled with life and death peril at every turn. Marlin and Dory are crossing the ocean and interacting with sharks and jellyfish and everything else dangerous out there. Nemo is in a fish tank waiting to be taken home by a little girl who murders every fish she gets her hands on. Those are some real life-or-death stakes. Everything feels less important this time around. Dory wants to find her family but she looks for them exclusively in a relatively safe environment. Marlin and Nemo are in pursuit but the biggest peril they ever seem to be in is when they’re trapped in a tank with a particularly boring oyster. It all just feels too breezy and light to ever feel like anyone is in any real danger and at that point, so why are we bothering to hear this story? Writer/director Andrew Stanton has two Oscars for Best Animated Feature and four nominations for screenplays so it’s hard to believe he doesn’t understand all of this much better than I do it’s just strange to see Stanton in particular and Pixar in general put out such a relatively empty film.

It might seem hollow after all those complaints, but I quite enjoyed getting to spend a little more time with Dory and Marlin. The original film was a favorite of mine and is singlehandedly responsible for my general appreciation of Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks. Both are really good in this movie, DeGeneres is obviously fantastic, her performance both resembles her real world comedic style and is so in tune with the character she can really nail the quieter moments. Brooks gives a more subtle performance, Marlin says something early in the film and having him try and minimize what he said while clearly being filled with regret and needing to make amends is so subtle and so relatable. I got a little crabby with the plot but the performances and the direction are second to none.

Finding Dory is a B+/A- movie from a company I have grown accustomed to giving an easy A every time. There’s nothing wrong with it, I walked out of the theater completely delighted with the movie— but it doesn’t feel like it’s entirely living up to the standard that Disney and Pixar have set over the last few years. It would be hard to make the case that Finding Dory is a better movie than Frozen, or Inside Out, or Zootopia. Finding Dory is a far sight better than The Angry Birds movie, but that’s like saying that the worst team in the NBA would probably wreck your local college team: true, but not really the point.

Box Office Democracy: The Conjuring 2

There’s a lot of charm in The Conjuring 2, maybe more than it should considering it takes place in a grey house, on a grey street, in a part of London that seemingly thunderstorms every night. For some reason this family felt more natural, more caring than the families one typically sees in these horror movies— everyone is believed, everyone tries their best to maximize each other’s safety. There’s a sing-along number and a dance and that might just be about maximizing the value of paying for an Elvis song but it’s very sweet in a genre that sometimes feels as if it is just trying to maximize the unpleasantness it can dish out. I’m still far too easily scared by horror movies to consider myself a real fan but this was a nice movie, a movie I don’t regret sitting through.

The Conjuring 2 is based on a true story. They very much want you to know that. They tell you before the movie, they tell you again after and then they spend the first section of the credits showing pictures of the real life people and events next to pictures from the movie. The real life incident is widely considered to be a hoax and learning that really diminished the movie for me. (That feels a little strange to say. I know that nothing in most movies has really happened. Crimson Peak is complete hogwash.) Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers bear no real resemblance to any actual people. The realities of fiction never impede on my enjoyment there, but I think there’s something about being sold very hard on the idea that this is a true story, that this ghost is real that to find out that it’s fairly documented as not real kind of leaves me with a sense of “what did we do all that for then?” that’s pervasive and inescapable.

Between Saw, Insidious, and now The Conjuring, James Wan is responsible for three of the biggest horror franchises of the 21st century, and he’s an undoubted master of his craft. The main demon is a fantastic piece of design work, but what stands out is this stunning sequence early in the film where the demon is a shadow and then manifests through a painting of itself and it sounds kind of basic in text but it’s a series of arresting visuals, the true work of a master. The flip side of this is I am so familiar with Wan’s work at this point that his less ambitious sequences are starting to feel a little paint-by-number. I know that the fire truck is coming back out of the tent. I know that the zoetrope is going to be used to set up a larger scare. I know the ways Wan likes to be scary and when he plays with it it’s amazing, but when he falls back on it it’s starting to feel tired.

I’ve never seen a modern demonic possession movie that I thought had a stand out performance and this is no exception. Madison Wolfe does a good job playing a creepy possessed child, but I’ve seen that so many times that I’m starting to suspect it might be easy. Isn’t every child in the world a little creepy? And the effects seem to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting (heavy levitating?) these days anyway. James Wan horror movies seem to be Patrick Wilson’s entire career at this point, and he’s gotten good at blustery confidence followed by sheer terror in the third act but there’s nothing new in this performance. There’s nothing cringe-y or terrible— it’s just kind of there. The actors feel like they’re just part of the set, the real star is the camera work, the editing, and the sound design.

I’m often unhappy seeing horror movies for work but I didn’t get that this time. We’re probably reaching the end of this phase of James Wan’s career, he wasn’t permanently lured away from horror with Furious 7 but Aquaman is calling… and I have to imagine at some point the prestige of more “mainstream” films will pull him away forever. The Conjuring 2 feels a lot like what I imagine seeing The Rolling Stones is like; they play the hits and while there are probably moments of unexpected delight, what you’re mostly there for is a sense of comfort and familiarity. I feel that nostalgia for Wan’s horror movies at this point and while I didn’t particularly like them, I respect the level of craft and the place in the horror canon. I lost this particular war but I don’t particularly mind the peace.

Box Office Democracy: X-Men: Apocalypse

The X-Men movies have a fairly high average quality for a franchise going in to its sixth entry. In fact, with the exception of a Brett Ratner directed monstrosity of bloat and pettiness, there isn’t a truly bad film to be found in the bunch. For a stretch of my college career I would have told you X2 was the best superhero movie ever made. I would have been wrong— Unbreakable was a lot better and Spider-Man 2 has held up better over the years if we’re talking strictly licensed fare. But this is a franchise that means something to me so it’s a shame to see them start to slip a little bit. Not that X-Men: Apocalypse is a bad movie or anything, but it’s a frustrating one in many respects and one that could be pointed to some years down the road as the beginning of the end of X-Men as a quality, bankable, brand.

I’m not certain when it became the decree from on high that every X-Men film had to be a period piece but with three in a row and a fourth on the way that definitely seems to be the way things are going. It felt revolutionary with First Class, these characters are timeless in their way and putting them in some historical context is a great way to show off the multi-faceted nature of the material (it’s also a great way to not have to pay some of your more expensive actors but that’s neither here nor there). Days of Future Past was also fun; the time-travelling Wolverine made it all feel a bit more earned, plus it was a great excuse to retcon away some of the worst bits of X-Men: The Last Stand that no one cared for. Now it’s starting to feel a bit unnecessary with another movie another decade later. I’m no longer feeling like these are timeless characters and instead they’re starting to feel dated; like the X-Men are nothing but a nostalgia act. The best X-Men comics I’ve ever read have felt cutting edge, like they were happening six months from now not thirty years in the past. I get that all storytelling eventually feels dated, but at this point I would much prefer them working and reworking things so that older stories felt new instead of constantly telling me how old and quaint the X-Men are.

I understand that if we accept the premise that every X-Men movie has to be a period piece, that recastings will have to be a constant part of the franchise (although all the people from First Class sure don’t look 20 years older but whatever) and I generally like the new blood. Sophie Turner is a great young Jean Grey, although it’s certainly possible the casting is trading on some good will borrowed from Game of Thrones. My only critique of Tye Sheridan as Cyclops is he’s a bit of an emo stick-in-the-mud, but that’s also my critique of Cyclops the comic book character so maybe he’s actually perfect. My only real beef is with casting Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse. You have one of the most charismatic actors in Hollywood riding a hell of a run and you put him in a big suit under a ton of makeup and have him just recite dialogue that would have felt cliché in comics 15 years ago. It’s a staggering waste of an incredible talent. Even my fiancée, a dyed-in-the-wool Isaac fangirl, didn’t even recognize him in the movie until I pointed him out.

It’s not the kind of thing I like to complain about, but I was quite struck with how much the final battle looked like it was taking place in a studio lot. I know that they can’t actually film in a destroyed Cairo or anything but a bunch of people in costumes with no bystanders and some generic looking rubble looks a bit too much like a SyFy channel original movie for my taste. I don’t even know how to fix it and I’m sure I’ve seen a dozen action sequences shot in lots this year alone, but something about this one had me thinking the tour tram could drive by the background at any moment.

I know I’ve crapped on this movie a bit here but I want to emphasize that the stuff the works works so well. Michael Fassbender is amazing as Magneto, displaying a tortured depth to the character that honestly surpasses Ian McKellen’s wonderful but more scenery-chewing effort. Jennifer Lawrence has made Mystique into a character more interesting than her comic book counterpart, and while I’m not entirely sure it lines up narratively with all her other appearances she carries the film through all its bumpy stretches. All of the stuff that’s been working since the reboot still works… it’s just the connective tissue is getting worse and the formula feels a bit more tired. This series needs a kick in the ass, and not in the way a film set ten more years in the future is going to do. Maybe the next Wolverine will be great though.

Box Office Democracy: The Angry Birds Movie

Last month I started hearing some buzz that The Angry Birds Movie was the next Lego Movie, a license that everyone thought would make a garbage movie that instead made for a critical darling and a smash hit (if animated movies aren’t your thing, Iron Man was the same scenario way back when). I didn’t think it was possible because the trailer was so insufferable it became my least favorite part of seeing any kids’ movie the last few months, but I went in to the movie with my eyes open. The Angry Birds Movie is so bad that I want to believe all the good things I heard were part of some sort of insidious astroturfing campaign to buoy a terrible movie. It almost certainly isn’t true, but it’s vastly preferable to believing that actual people enjoyed this lazy tie-in movie that missed its moment by almost half a decade.

There’s a persistent problem among mediocre children’s movies of either severely lacking in plot or feeling like the three acts are completely separate entities with no connective tissue.  Angry Birds dodges those particular critiques, but does so by throwing just so much plot at the screen and hoping anything sticks. There’s an anger management class, there’s an invasion of pigs, there’s the search to find a legendary hero, there’s even some light municipal corruption. Because of all this, there’s almost no way to figure out what the thematic message of the film is. I’m not sure if a kid watching this movie is supposed to be wary of outsiders or appreciating the value of being angry. There’s even a compelling case to be made for both believing in and not believing in the value of idols. It’s all over the map. What it does do effectively is deliver a ton of crude jokes, and judging from the reactions of the kids in my screening the more a joke could relate to poop or pee, the more laughs it would get from this crowd.

While a lot of this must have gone over the heads of the target audience, there was a fair amount of dark content in this movie that was rather striking. The movie is, ultimately, about this gang of pigs coming to this island full of birds and stealing all their eggs. Eggs are only treated as a foodstuff by the pigs and are expressly considered as unborn children by the birds so it’s a little strange to have a children’s movie be about fetal cannibalism. There’s also a joke where the main character calls a background character a pedophile for his tendency to offer hugs to people. This is a character who runs a business as a “hug trader” which, while it would be strange in the real world, doesn’t seem out of whack with the other things on this idyllic island full of birds that only feel happy. The Angry Birds Movie is an easy-going kids movie 90% of the time, but there’s a dark cynicism underneath that I found unappealing and grating.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of this film is that the climax of the film is just a film adaptation of the gameplay of the mobile game. The birds set up a slingshot and fire themselves at the pig city and wreck the place. All the birds that are from the game have their powers regardless of if they’ve done anything suggesting they had those powers before, and this goes on and on. It doesn’t feel faithful to the rest of the film in any particular way, but rather feels like either someone at the studio or someone at Rovio Entertainment insisted it had to be in there or audiences would feel cheated or wouldn’t recognize it as an adaptation of the game or some nonsense. It didn’t fell necessary, it wasn’t visually interesting or funny, and it didn’t advance the plot— it just made me groan and roll my eyes.

It’s a shame that The Angry Birds Movie came out so close on the tail of Norm of the North, because it puts such a damper on my ability to really tear in to it. While Angry Birds is a bad movie at least it’s a movie, at least it has a story, at least it has a coherent style. My entire calibration system for bad animated movies might still be out of whack, because as little as I liked Angry Birds I appreciated the little things it did right, like the one joke that made me laugh or the more interesting soundtrack choices. It’s certainly damning with faint praise to say that Angry Birds is definitely not the worst movie I’ve seen all year— but it’s head and shoulders above the bottom, a triumphant sort-of bad.

Box Office Democracy: Money Monster

If your internet life is anything like mine you probably saw one too many articles this week on Money Monster and what it meant for the election, or what it meant that George Clooney made this movie and is a Hillary supporter, or why this movie exists when The Big Short already came out. I found it completely exhausting and it wasn’t representative of what this movie actually is. Money Monster isn’t a real piece of analysis about any kind of systemic flaws in our financial system; it’s John Q but with algorithmic trading instead of health care bureaucracy and George Clooney instead of Denzel Washington. It’s a fantasy and an understandable one, but one that feel light on substance and, ultimately, a little garbled.

The big problem Money Monster has is with its casting. George Clooney is a proven commodity as the slick huckster with a heart of gold, and throwing in some Jim Cramer caricature makes it so much better. Julia Roberts is the quintessential put-upon hard-working career woman and she’s firing on all cylinders reunited with Clooney to do a slightly less sexually charged version of their shtick from Ocean’s Eleven. Clooney and Roberts are fantastic but they pull focus from the character the movie should be about, the guy who is so angry with the injustice of the financial system he needs to take hostages, Kyle Bludwell. Kyle is played by English actor Jack O’Connell, who you might know from his turn on the British drama Skins or his medium-sized part in 300: Rise of an Empire, but who you probably don’t remember from anything. He does a good job and is honestly acting his ass off at certain points in this film, but even in those big moments it’s hard not be transfixed by the bigger stars on the screen. It makes Kyle’s rage about the injustices of our system and the lack of accountability seem like the less important problems than the dining habits of a TV host, and that seems antithetical to the movie’s message.

If we ignore the central political issue, and it sort of feels like the film wants us to, there’s perfectly good filmmaking in here. The studio hostage scenes are tense and it especially does a good job focusing on the fear and menace that the gun represents. The mystery elements feel sufficiently twisty and surprising, although my fiancée pointed out in the car home that it all really gets solved by one person asking one question to the right regulatory body and maybe it all would have come out without the events of the film but I can let that go. There are even some good moments of levity, which can be hard to balance with a film that wants to be on the edge of overwrought all the time. It’s nice to see Jodie Foster back directing features and she gets good work out of her actors, it’s just a shame to see the parts add up to less than a coherent whole.

There’s no way anyone in Hollywood sat in their office and said, “we’re going to make a movie about the financial crisis and we’re going to cast George Clooney and Julia Roberts and it’ll get middling reviews and open in third place in mid-May.” That’s just not how anything works. The previews we saw before this movie were prestige films with festival accolades and pre-made awards pitches, and it was like seeing the potential Money Monster was going to fail to live up to. This could have been a powerful statement on any number of topics, but instead was okay with being a good thriller and an offbeat character piece. Money Monster wants to be a big and important movie but it doesn’t get there, it doesn’t have a strong enough point of view or clarity of vision.

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