Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: “Captain America: Civil War”

Captain America vs. Iron Man by Alex Ross after Jack Kirby from Tales of Suspense #58

I hesitate a little sitting down to write a rave review of Captain America: Civil War because a year ago I wrote a rave review for Avengers: Age of Ultron, and when I rewatched that to make sure I was all set for this new installment I found it rather tedious. Are these, perhaps, movies that trick us into liking them with their big action scenes, clever dialogue, and sweeping scores— but only really play in a big theater with a bucket of popcorn? Are there no legs to these films? Will we be as embarrassed of them in 20 years as we are of Batman Returns now? The correct answer to these questions is a resounding “who cares?” It doesn’t matter if these are immortal treasures, the Casablancas or French Connections of our time, only that they’re fun to watch now and they are, perhaps the most fun this side of Fast & Furious, and we should cherish and celebrate them even if they might be a bit fleeting.

I was the perfect age to be completely enamored with the Civil War comic book series. I was finishing up my junior year of college and I could not get enough of any super hero comic book with a political allegory thrown in. If you wanted to have someone talk your ear off about how Margaret Thatcher influenced British comics in the 80s with not even a whiff of proper context I was your guy. Civil War the comic felt timely and provocative while Civil War the movie feels decidedly less so. We seem less concerned these days about government surveillance and intrusion in to our lives. There was probably a good pivot to be made to police militarization and violence, especially when Captain America learns that the order is to kill Bucky on sight, but there’s seemingly no interest in exploring this and it’s hard to blame them when Marvel is interested in making a billion dollars, not in being provocative.

They’re going to earn that billion dollars, too. Civil War is a crisp, effective, action movie that provides ample fan service without feeling overdone. Early in the film I thought I was completely worn out by super hero action sequences, and then they get to the big signature set piece where all the heroes fight each other and I was completely riveted. It helps that their big dramatic fight scene has a brand-new wisecracking Spider-Man and a welcome returning Ant-Man to keep things light and glib and just the utter opposite of Snyder-esque. The final fight scene has that overwrought gritty feeling creeping in, but by that point the stakes have been jacked up so many times that I was willing to forgive it. It’s a dark violent fight but it’s so well directed and the cramped environment makes it feel immediate, imposing, and fresh. Civil War has some fantastic character moments but it needs to live and die by its action sequences, and with the exception of one that felt lifted from The Bourne Identity it consistently hit the mark.

I’m beginning to wonder if the Marvel Cinematic Universe is starting to strain under the weight of its own continuity. The scenes between Vision and Scarlet Witch were generally charming but they mostly felt like they were setting things up for future movies rather than relating directly to the action at hand. Similarly, I was thrilled to see Chadwick Boseman debut as Black Panther and while he’s a riveting presence (and an A+ costume) it felt like they were saving all the good bits for his solo movie, and while I’m excited to see it that movie comes out in two years, I paid for this ticket now. I understand that this is bigger than any one movie, but I want these events to feel important and self-contained and not just part of some endless march to Thanos or whatever the endgame after that is. Comic book movies should be evocative of their source material, but should avoid the more glaring pitfalls of sequential storytelling with excessive continuity when they can.

I like so much of what they put on the screen in Captain America: Civil War and most of my complaints seem to be about the things they didn’t do or problems outside the scope of a movie like this, and while I do think a more timely, more self-contained film would have been more enjoyable it doesn’t take away from how good it is now. We are looking down the barrel of a rough summer when it comes to standard-fare action movies, and when I’m sitting through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows I’m not going to be thinking about how Civil War dropped too many hints— I’m going to miss how it could stage a compelling grandiose action scene and how none of the characters looked like expressionless CGI blobs. Civil War is as good as superhero action films get, or at least as good as they get with no Hulk.

Seriously, I feel Hulk-starved at this point.

Box Office Democracy: Keanu

Keanu is a lot of things, it’s a very funny comedy, it’s a sharp piece of social satire, and it’s a telling mirror held up to the tropes of the contemporary action movie, but what it isn’t is the movie they advertise it as, a movie about a cute kitten. I understand the urge to run those advertisements—if the internet has proved one thing, it’s that there’s no end to human cruelty; but if it’s proved two, it’s that people love cute cats so much—but it seems to be a great way to end up with a theater full of people who are not getting the movie experience they thought they were getting. While it’s very easy to Monday morning quarterback these kind of decisions, it’s now clear that this wasn’t the secret to untold box office millions, and the actual content in Keanu is excellent and should have been given a chance to stand on its own.

The similarities between Keanu and John Wick are reportedly coincidental, but they’ve clearly leaned in to it by naming their film after Keanu Reeves and calling on him for a cameo voice role. On the surface the movies have a lot in common, people are inspired to gratuitous amounts of violence over the grief the feel over losing a newly acquired pet, but the comparison dries up quickly after that. John Wick is this sublimely misanthropic movie about how the good in the world is a facade and how we can never escape our baser instincts, and Keanu is full of redemptive arcs for all but the most sinister characters, everyone has a chance at a better life and there’s a feeling of hope. Maybe this is the difference between a live kitten and a dead dog but it’s probably a bit more than that.

On the face of things, Keanu is a lot like any comedy you’ve seen for your entire life— but there’s something deeper lurking underneath. Rell (Jordan Peele) is struggling to recover from a breakup and is looking to find his joie de vivre again while his more together friend Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) is more together but needs to find a way to advocate for his own needs and find time for himself. I’m sure these exact characters to this point have existed thousands of times in the history of film and thousands more on TV sitcoms, but they’re effective character shorthands. What Keanu uses these shorthand characters for is to discuss black masculinity, a topic I am wholly incapable of discussing in any sort of authoritative manner. I can say that when Rell tells Cameron that he sounds like “Richard Pryor doing an impression of a white guy” I laughed because I got the reference, but I can’t speak to the truthfulness of these observations. I urge you to seek out more insightful thoughts on this topic from black cultural critics or even from Key & Peele themselves in their interview for Sharp Magazine. I enjoyed it, I think it’s important; I’m too white to get further involved.

I very much enjoyed Key & Peele when it was on Comedy Central, so it’s no real surprise that I found Keanu generally hilarious. In particular, there’s a bit where Clarence has to convince a car full of young gangsters that George Michael is a black musician making music that speaks to their lives and situations that was easily the strongest bit in the whole film. It was cut with a remarkably weak scene with Anna Faris playing herself as a set of drug clichés that felt indulgent and overly long. It’s generally well paced and consistently funny and, perhaps most importantly, has the good taste to wrap up the movie before it gets boring. Keanu passes one of the most important tests a comedy can pass: I would 100% stop and watch it if I saw it was on cable.

Box Office Democracy: “The Huntsman: Winter’s War”

In my first year of reviewing movies I ranked Snow White and the Huntsman as the ninth worst movie of 2012 and by that time news had come out that neither star Kristen Stewart nor director Rupert Shane would be returning for the sequel, and I predicted that it would probably be a better movie. I was right, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a better movie, and it still isn’t a very good movie.   Freed from trying to retell a more famous story, there are some interesting choices made in the script— but it’s all overwhelmed by the crushing clichés of high fantasy. At its lowest points Huntsman is the slickest Lord of the Rings fan-film you’ve ever seen; at its highest it’s a kind of cute romantic comedy starring Nick Frost.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War wraps around the first movie with a little bit of an origin story and then the kind of sequel where you barely need to bring any of the cast back. The story now revolves around a previously unmentioned northern kingdom ruled by Freya (Emily Blunt) the ice witch sister of the evil queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) from the first film. Freya has a plotline so similar to Elsa in Frozen that it feels like the script was written by lawyers, everything feels just distinct enough while still constantly threatening to break in to a chorus of “Let it Go” at any moment. Freya, it conveniently turns out, raised and trained a whole army of Huntsmen (and Huntswomen) and her sociologically fascinating but completely implausible ban on the very concept of love ends up driving away Eric (Chris Hemsworth) and starting him on his journey that leads him to the first movie. We then skip ahead to after and Eric with one of the eight dwarfs from the first movie (Nick Frost) plus a new dwarf (Rob Brydon) end up on a convoluted quest to rescue the evil magic mirror to save the completely absent Snow White and save the world, I guess. Sara (Jessica Chastain) is Eric’s presumed dead wife who saves his life at a miraculous moment, and then just a bunch of fantasy junk happens until they have to wrap it up.

I feel like a crazy person typing all that up. There’s just an insane amount of idea bloat in this film and it struggles to find a focus.

Some of that struggle for focus is the result of not having a clear protagonist. Going strictly by the screenplay writing books it’s Freya, because it is the change in her attitude that allows the climax of the movie to happen, but she’s practically a Bond villain in terms of her scheming for the rest of the film and it’s hard to feel particularly invested in the well-being of someone who keeps a room full of people turned into ice sculptures. In terms of screen time (and billing) it’s Eric, but he doesn’t change his attitude one iota through the film— he’s right about pretty much everything all the time and is super capable and has no need to improve, he’s Aragorn with an axe. It’s probably supposed to be Sara, she has a clear narrative arc and she has the biggest impact on the events of the film but they try so hard to obfuscate her actions and intentions that it’s hard to connect with her. That along with the stilted narrative structure leaves the movie feeling like a series of vignettes and not like a cohesive narrative.

I did genuinely enjoy the love story between Nick Frost’s dwarf and Alexandra Roach’s. It was cute, and it felt clever, and most importantly… it didn’t feel like it was shaken out of the fantasy magic eight ball like every other piece of Winter’s War. It was the only thing that felt genuine or surprising. This was a movie full of twists and every one of them was telegraphed so far in advance and the one that might have been surprising was shown in its entirety in the trailer for the movie. That simple, silly love story was the only thing I liked, the only thing I will remember fondly in this overplotted mess, but it deserves to be recognized. If the next movie just takes those two characters I’d be first in line for more; otherwise, please put this series out of its misery.

Box Office Democracy: Midnight Special

Midnight Special

At the theater I see most of my movies at, they sometimes run interviews with filmmakers after the credits. These are never particularly hard-hitting affairs, usually filled with variations on the question “just how is it you came to do such brilliant work on this movie” and so on. After Midnight Special, they ran an interview with writer/director Jeff Nichols where they asked him what it was like to be a writer who only wrote films he was going to direct and a director who only directed films he wrote. Putting aside that this isn’t nearly as uncommon as this interviewer seems to think, it kind of brought in to focus the nagging problem I had during the film; it’s a wonderfully directed movie and only an okay script. There are fantastic, compelling acting performances holding up a script that thinks it’s too clever for context, and a third act that feels utterly without consequence. A movie can go a long way on gritty atmosphere, tension, and a pervasive sense of intrigue, but it can’t quite get all the way to the finish line— and so Midnight Special is a frustrating good instead of a dizzying great.

Midnight Special is about a boy, Alton, with some kind of powers. They’re never made particularly clear, which becomes awfully convenient when they need him to do just about everything to make the story come together in the end. It’s also about his parents who love Alton so much that they’ll give up their lives and endanger innocent people to rescue him from a cult that might not have his interests at heart, but when it becomes clear they might not see their child again they never once tell him they love him or that they’ll miss him. It’s all tight-lipped stoicism and meaningful glances. It’s also about a manhunt to find him both by the government and by two agents of this cult, but the methods of the pursuers are vague and the cultists seem to give up very easily considering they think the boy will bring about biblical judgment. Midnight Special is a movie where nothing feels particularly weighty because nothing makes all that much sense.

There’s a pleasing depth to the world of Midnight Special, and while they drop us right in to the middle of the action it all feels lived in and real. The problem comes in because, while I don’t want more exposition per se, I can’t help but wonder if some of the stories we don’t see on screen aren’t more interesting than the one we’re seeing. The story of an established rural Texas cult refocusing itself around a precocious young boy and rewriting their scriptures, or the story of the NSA discovering that said precocious cult child is spilling national secrets, or even a 20-minute short about how the world would react to whatever the hell happened at the end of that movie. A movie should always try to leave the audience wanting more but Midnight Special left me wanting something completely different and something I’ll never be offered, and that’s slightly less pleasant.

Michael Shannon was seemingly created to be in movies like Midnight Special. He’s quiet, he’s intense, and he can convey an incredible amount of information with his expressions. He’s needed in this movie because while the information might seem thin or a little nonsensical, he can instantly ground it by wordlessly conveying to the audience what it means to his character and how we’re supposed to feel in the audience. He isn’t angry at Alton when the crashed satellite destroys the gas station, he’s afraid— stuff like that. Joel Edgerton and Kirsten Dunst are also very good and they’re acting against the type I have for them in my head, which is nice. They both feel like such substantial presences on the screen and while that might seem like damning with faint praise, it isn’t— their tiniest reaction or mannerism feels gigantic in this film.

I’m unhappy to admit that I was probably wrong about Adam Driver. I didn’t like him for a long time and it seems like he’s a real actor. I didn’t like him in Girls, I still don’t understand why people think he’s so incredibly good-looking, but he was good in The Force Awakens and he’s great here in Midnight Special. He’s firmly in my McConaughey Zone for actors that are going to take me a while to get past their so-so starts to appreciate their good work, but at least the newest inductee has a name I don’t have to look up every time I need to write it down.

It’s great for science fiction that Midnight Special exists. It’s a nice, slower, less special effects intensive kind of sci-fi that has a really good vibe (Alton reading 1980s Superman and Teen Titans comics in the back of the car was an especially nice touch). It’s an emotional film and its an effectively tense film but it never feels particularly clever; it’s a well-decorated house that’s collapsing into a sinkhole. It’s the kind of movie I would stick with if I ran across it on cable but would be not paying attention at all by the end.

Box Office Democracy: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

It’s easy to kick a studio while they’re down, and a little of that seems to be happening with the reactions to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Warner Bros. has struggled mightily in bringing their heroes to the screen in recent years (recent decades if we don’t count Christopher Nolan’s work) and there’s an attempt to pile on. If Batman v Superman were a Marvel Studios film I suspect it would be getting more positive coverage as people dug to find the good things and used them to redeem the things that don’t work; instead people are endlessly picking at the numerous mistakes. Don’t get confused, Batman v Superman is an awful movie and Zack Snyder should be stopped at all costs but in the hands of literally any other director I could believe there was a salvageable property here and there’s time to right this ship.

Superman as depicted in Batman v Superman isn’t fun to watch, nor does he feel faithful to the character. I’ll be honest: I stopped reading comics on a weekly basis in the winter of 2012 and I haven’t been keeping up since then, so maybe Superman has become an extremely violent, petulant baby in that time— but I sort of doubt it. The Superman in this film is terrifying to consider. He’s quick to anger and never particularly nice to anyone that isn’t Lois Lane; more like Miracleman than Superman. The only never ending battle on display in this film is the one Warner Bros. fights for Superman to appear cool, but they’ve succeeded in creating a character that would only seem cool to an edgy teenager or the 90s comics industry. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be rooting for Batman or Superman when they come to blows, but I’m almost certainly not supposed to be thinking Lex Luthor is right about everything— and yet that’s just where I was for 80% of this movie.

The non-Superman characters were mostly pretty good. Ben Affleck should release a video where he makes it very clear he’s addressing all the people who doubted he could be a credible Batman, drop the mic, and then walk away. He’s a great Batman; I’m ready to put him in the upper echelon with Bale and Keaton (and Kilmer but let’s not get sidetracked) after seeing this movie. He’s believable physically, and he captures that kind of arrogant paranoia that I think Batman should embody. The scenes with Wonder Woman in costume are a giddy rush, and they represent her so well in the fight scenes without any clunky exposition or holding anybody’s hand. We all know who Wonder Woman is, we’ve been alive in the world. The scenes before she puts on the costume are less good; they kind of play her like an off-brand Selina Kyle, but they might have been going for an air of mystery and were betrayed by the PR team. Jesse Eisenberg has the most off-beat take of any established character, and while there isn’t a strong comic book foundation to what he’s doing, it does feel like what a billionaire megalomaniacal industrialist would look like in the modern start-up culture and he’s so unsettlingly creepy that I’m going to give him a pass.

I generally find Zack Snyder’s work to be unappealing visually, and Batman v Superman is no exception. Things are too slick, slow motion is used too much, only a handful of scenes take place in daylight. Gotham City and Metropolis look the same because there’s no room for points of contrast. I suppose Gotham’s abandoned docks are supposed to feel seedy and give the city a dilapidated edge but Metropolis has a crashed alien ship taking up a huge part of their downtown so there’s no contrast there. The contrast between Superman and Batman should be reflected in every part of their environment and instead everything takes place on the same dreary streets and rooftops.

The common refrain after seeing a movie like this is that it “destroys their childhood” of the viewer, and that’s always nonsense. No one from Warner is going to break down my door and set any of my trade paperbacks on fire or draw a bunch of bloodstains in the margins or anything like that. However, superhero movies are trading on nostalgia. If they can’t get a dyed in the wool DC Comics person like me to feel a connection to this film (and if you go back and read paragraph three of this review I desperately want to feel this connection) then I can’t imagine who does. They’ve made a misanthropic film, an ugly film, and worst of all they made a Zack Snyder film.

Box Office Democracy: The Divergent Series: Allegiant

In my review of the last entry in the Divergent series, Insurgent, I praised the franchise for its restraint in not breaking up the last part of their series into two movies and it seems I have to apologize for giving out bad information. They are breaking up their last book, they just had the sense to give the parts different names to throw people like me off the scent. Allegiant is half a book and is perhaps an even smaller fraction of a real movie. It’s airy and insubstantial and at its best moments it’s a pale imitation of more successful movies in this and other franchises. Hopefully the plummeting box office numbers are enough to dissuade other book adaptation series from making the same mistake.

Allegiant picks up right where Insurgent left off, sort of. Insurgent ends with a recorded message urging the citizens of Chicago to go out and join the rest of the world; Allegiant begins with armed soldiers telling those same citizens not to go out. It’s a pattern the movie holds the whole time, we know there’s something interesting on the verge of happening but they are going to make us wait as long as possible for it to actually happen. Tris spends most of the film in the thrall of David, the charismatic leader of the mysterious cabal of scientists/super soldiers that run the whole Chicago experiment, and Four doesn’t trust him. This dynamic is told to us over and over again throughout the second act of he film. It seems every scene is bookended by Four telling Tris he doesn’t trust David and Tris telling Four that he doesn’t understand the great work he’s doing. Meanwhile, the efforts David goes to make Tris susceptible to his agenda is the kind of buttering up that would seem trite in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Tris is way less of a factor in this installment and it hurts the narrative. She spends two-thirds of the movie in the thrall of David and then rushes to join the plot at the end. She isn’t helpless, she kicks more than her fair share of ass, but she isn’t moving anything forward by herself, she just does what she’s told by other people. This is supposed to be a series about Tris and this movie reveals nothing about her character except that she learned nothing about trusting suspicious adults after being fooled time and again in the first two installments.

Setting aside Tris, the other characters also appear to be in a holding pattern. Four is brooding and distrustful of authority. Peter, who appeared to betray Tris and Four in the last film only for it to be an elaborate ruse, actually betrays them this time and it’s only surprising in how sublimely lazy it is to repeat the same arc with a slightly different payoff. Christina doesn’t so much repeat her arc from the last movie as she does act like none of the events ever happened, or she really got over the death of her boyfriend in the 15 minutes between the two movies. These are supporting characters, they don’t need complete arcs in every movie or anything like that, but if they aren’t going to do new or interesting things why are we even bothering to have them on screen?

Allegiant seems to be on the verge of flopping and I hope it’s being seen as an indictment of this book-splitting nonsense. Allegiant barely did half the business Insurgent did in the first weekend and, anecdotally, at my local theater it was given one of their marquee theaters and when I saw it this weekend there were only three or four other groups for a weekend show in Hollywood. The last two installments of The Hunger Games were the weakest performing entries in that franchise. These books aren’t Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and they shouldn’t pretend they are for a shot at double the movie tickets. Barring some insanely intricate storytelling coming up in Ascendant, the series’ finale, there’s no way they couldn’t have cut out some of the slow-paced dredge in this movie and made it one cohesive movie.

Box Office Democracy: 10 Cloverfield Lane

I am not prepared to be this afraid of John Goodman.

I don’t remember a time in my life before the Roseanne show. It was a staple growing up, even if I didn’t start watching it regularly until the last few seasons. John Goodman is a lovable funnyman, and no amount of playing shady characters in Coen Brothers movies was ever going to shake me of that conviction. I was not prepared for the sheer mesmerizing terror that was Goodman’s performance in 10 Cloverfield Lane, a role I never would have expected for him but one that he embodies so totally and perfectly that pushes everything to another level. This is the kind of performance that should win awards but never will because every award-giving body has decided to become self-parody at this point and only send home statues for ludicrous acting clichés.

There’s such a pervasive feeling of menace coming off of Goodman in this film and it is honestly incredible. He spends 80% of the time playing Howard as a quiet, almost nervous, man and so his violent outbursts feel so much bigger because of the contrast. There’s also something to be said for the way the sets are laid out and the film is shot, it makes his physical presence feel so much bigger, like a tiger in a subway tunnel a perpetual threat with no way around it. Howard ebbs and flows from genial host to quiet threat to barely contained rage to completely uncontrolled like some kind of inscrutable tide on an alien planet. 10 Cloverfield Lane would be tense even reading the screenplay, but the way Goodman dominates every frame he’s in turns everything up even higher and makes for some unbelievable tension.

I don’t want to underrate John Gallagher Jr’s contribution to this film (he does fine work and has a devastating monologue) but Mary Elizabeth Winstead is the other half of this film. She plays opposite this dominating presence and holds her own. Where Howard is imposing dangerous force, Michelle is calculating and clever. She doesn’t always know what’s going on but she’s always looking for the next thing, the way out, she never lets herself get too complacent. The two feel like equals in an asymmetrical game of chess, but so too does Winstead feel like the equal of Goodman, and that is the highest praise I can give an actor this week.

It’s hard to praise anything else about the movie because it all just seems to serve these performances. It’s well shot, but it isn’t particularly dynamic or new feeling. The script is a fine effort and has enough levels that I was arguing about character motivations on the car ride home, but there isn’t that much that happens. It has the kind of score that seemingly every remotely scary movie has these days saved by a couple great needle drops on the soundtrack. It’s a sign of good filmmaking that these things fade in to the background, there’s more craft in appearing to do nothing than in being as flashy as possible.

The billion-dollar question for Bad Robot and Paramount here is “Does this make Cloverfield in to a credible anthology horror series?” and the answer seems to be a solid maybe. I’ve seen so many social media posts this weekend comparing the twist ending in 10 Cloverfield Lane to The Twilight Zone, and while that’s not giving the former enough credit and grossly oversimplifying the latter it would need to be the model. If they’re all going to be as compelling as 10 Cloverfield Lane, I would happily watch a movie under this umbrella every few years. If they’re going to be more like the original I’m dramatically less interested and there’s the problem; I do not trust the people at Bad Robot to make enough good movies in a row without a prominent franchise to prop them up. I hope they can prove me wrong.

Box Office Democracy: Zootopia

I’m sure everyone has the movie they watched almost every day when they were little. Mine was Ghostbusters and I’ve been wondering how much that was because I liked the movie (I still do) or because my parents had so much influence at that point in my life that they could essentially force me to like whatever they wanted. Maybe kids don’t work like that, but if they do I hope I can make mine like a movie like Zootopia. If I’m going to watch a movie untold hundreds of times out of a love-fueled obligation I hope it’s something as sweet, funny, and complex as Zootopia. If my future child instead prefers the work of Adam Sandler I hear you can abandon a kid at a fire station, no questions asked.

It’s tempting to say Zootopia is a non-traditional Disney effort but perhaps that’s not accurate anymore. The last Disney Animation (read: not Pixar) film was Big Hero 6 and we’re only three feature films removed from Wreck-It Ralph so maybe it’s the princess-style of movie that is becoming the aberration but this still seems so fresh. If you look back on the years Disney was struggling in this field it was because they weren’t taking enough risks. Although it might be helplessly naive to think a movie about talking animals (in a year where that is certainly the trend) co-directed by Byron Howard (responsible for Bolt and Tangled) and Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph) is all that risky.

Zootopia is a neo-noir cop drama and I’m not even kidding. Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is an idealistic young cop with no support from the system who teams with con man with a heart of gold Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) to tackle a missing person case that exposes institutional corruption that goes straight to the very top of this nebulously defined animal society. It’s basically Chinatown with a bunch of cute animals. It isn’t the most complex mystery or anything but the mystery is never the most important part of a noir film, it’s about seeing the characters struggle. Zootopia is also an effective, hilarious, buddy comedy but who didn’t expect that from this team.

I’m proud of how well Zootopia handles the important real world issues without making them too blunt. Judy is the first rabbit member of the police force and no one trusts her because she’s a diversity hire, no one trusts Nick because he’s a fox and foxes are sneaky, predatory animals are a feared minority with an undercurrent of tension they could go “savage at any moment. All of these obviously share traits with things we experience all the time but they all resist being translated one-to-one with any groups, and it helps the story immensely because it lets it all feel more fictional. You could see any number of struggles in this film if you wanted to and it makes it a powerful teaching tool without feeling overwrought or too fixed in time. There are so many wonderful moments of quiet vulnerability in this area played fantastically by Goodwin and Bateman and I assume a small army of animation staff.

Zootopia was the kind of movie that was always going to have to earn its acclaim. The pitch line of “It’s about a world where animals walk around like humans and a bunny becomes a cop to team up with a fox” was never going to be exciting in the way “A video game bad guy decides he wants to be a good guy” is. Fortunately it’s a brilliant film; easily the equal of Wreck-It Ralph or Inside Out or whatever animated film has tickled your fancy this decade. The only problem Zootopia faces as it marches in to history is being lost in this exquisite renaissance of animated films we’ve lucked in to in recent years, and it might not be as commercially viable as Frozen or as daring as Big Hero 6. It deserves to be a treasured classic, and if I have to show it to my future child a thousand times to get it there, I will.

Box Office Democracy: Triple 9

Triple 9 is a throwback to a different time. It’s the gritty kind of crime movie that seems to have been pushed out of the spotlight by slicker movies like the Fast & Furious franchise and by a run of bizarrely gritty cop films like End of Watch. Triple 9 feels more like a Training Day when it’s working and a bit like Smokin’ Aces when it isn’t. Triple 9 has a relentlessly tense script and a talented enough cast to round out a lot of the rough edges. The throwback element that didn’t work for me is that Triple 9 is an alarmingly racist movie. It’s also a very misogynistic movie, but it’s much harder to get to an alarming level with that what with the rest of pop culture.

Every non-white character in Triple 9 that has a name I remember six hours after walking out of the theater was a bad person. It’s a movie about corrupt cops that rob banks so there’s a fair amount of moral ambiguity expected, but it becomes a little much. Every Mexican character is evil and almost all of them are tattooed gang members who hang around in packs and menace the decent people of the world. The most telling thing is that the white people in Triple 9 are universally morally superior. Casey Affleck is the good cop, Woody Harrelson fights his demons but gets the bad guys, and Aaron Paul is the bank robber who’s conscience gets in the way and stops him from doing the really bad things. The exception is Kate Winslet as the ruthless mob boss but they go so far out of their way to establish that she’s the head of a Jewish mob that it still feels a little slimy.

Triple 9 is also relentless in objectifying women. With the exception of Winslet and Michelle Ang every actress in the movie is either a sex object, set dressing, or both. This is in the grand tradition of gritty crime films going back to the golden age of cinema: this is a movie about men and their masculine struggles. There are dozens of moments in the movie that come back to this but the one that stood out to me was when Teresa Palmer comforts Affleck when he’s struggling with his police work she walks away to reveal she was bottomless so we get a look at her butt. It didn’t reveal anything about her character or add anything to the script— it just seemed to indicate that the filmmakers thought so little of me as a viewer that I needed some naked flesh to draw me back in after two minutes of talking with no gunshots or explosions.

I’ve spent two paragraphs talking about some serious, constantly distracting, issues I had with Triple 9 but it was also an outstanding crime caper film. I was consistently on the edge of my seat, and that isn’t a phrase I like using but I was literally sitting forward in my chair a lot of the time. I am usually pretty good at seeing twists coming particularly in heist films and I was genuinely surprised at some of the turns they threw out in Triple 9. The main characters were deep and complex and the acting was incredible, particularly from perpetually underrated treasure Chiwetel Ejiofor. In another time this could have been a big summer blockbuster and with a slightly less weird script we might even be talking award nominations, but that time is gone— this isn’t the kind of movie people want anymore and it just feels so antiquated even with all the sleek filmmaking.

Box Office Democracy: The Witch

I will never love The Witch but I absolutely respect it. It’s a horror movie without jump scares, without the score leading you to every moment; instead it’s a slow build and a more psychological form of terror. It feels earned, and that goes a long way in a landscape bogged down by a wave of films going for the cheapest scares available. I’m never going to be the kind of person who genuinely loves horror movies, I just don’t like being scared that much in these ways, but I appreciate the craft here and hope (likely in vain) that this is a step towards a better path.

In the end credits the makers of The Witch claim that the film was compiled from contemporary reports, diaries, and official records and that the majority of the dialogue is from those real sources. While that’s a chilling credit after the grisly events depicted it’s completely believable. Most of the dialogue is about 16th century farm life and has no supernatural elements at all. It’s 85% a very slow movie about farm calamities and parental favoritism intercut with brief moments of disturbing supernatural terror.

It might seem lazy to compare this movie to The Blair Witch Project but they have more in common than just witches and long amounts of time spent in the woods. I remember people asking me what was so scary about The Blair Witch Project and saying things like “well, there’s a lot of noises in the night and they get scared and then once they found all these men made of sticks” and no one who hadn’t seen the movie understood a damn thing I was talking about. The same thing applies here as I sit thinking of specific imagery to try and sell how scary this movie is, and I come up with things like “they keep showing this one rabbit with really intense eyes” and “you wouldn’t believe how smug this one goat looked” or even “there was a three second shot of a baby and a knife but nothing happened” and none of it comes across. I promise you that’s the scariest rabbit I’ve ever seen on film, but what’s the point? The Witch creates tension by making you care about the characters and then showing how afraid they can be. That and some damn fine rabbit casting.

The human casting isn’t bad either. Aside from some small parts on Game of Thrones this entire cast was unknown to me but I came away very impressed. The period dialogue and thick accents would trip up any cast but even with mostly child actors it all sounded authentic to me. I’m sure it doesn’t actually pass muster with any expert but that’s not the point. Anya Taylor-Joy seems to have literally emerged from nowhere to completely carry this movie as oldest daughter Thomasin. She has to convey a broad range of emotions with a thick language and dialogue gap to cross but she nails it. I was afraid for her, I was sad for her, I raged against the injustice of the societal machine on her behalf, and it was her quiet presence that gets the film through its rather out there climax. Harvey Scrimshaw also impresses doing an outstanding job acting out the struggle of coming of age in a repressive society despite looking like he’s no older than 11, and while I’m sure he’s actually older there’s nothing about him on the internet, leading me to believe all the young people in this movie were grown in a lab solely to make this movie.

It’s hard to give a solid recommendation on The Witch. I almost walked out of the theater I was so uncomfortable in the tail end of the second act even going so far as giving my fiancée instructions if she didn’t want to leave with me. I’m glad I didn’t because none of what I thought was going to happen did, and I quite enjoyed the climax, but it’s hard to shake that feeling. I’ll probably never watch The Witch again but it’s nice to see a filmmaker like Robert Eggers pushing the boundaries of the genre even if it sort of feels like we’re pushing in the direction that leads back to where we’ve been before. Anything that leads away from the Blumhouse style is fine with me.

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