Category: Box Office Democracy

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: 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.

Box Office Democracy: Deadpool

Deadpool is a good superhero movie that people are going to convince themselves was an excellent superhero movie. It’s got a couple good action beats, it feels like a cohesive part of a larger universe without being overly constrained, it has a serviceable (and age appropriate) love story, and it’s clever… but not quite as clever as it thinks it is. You can wink at the camera and tell me that you know that you’re doing all of the usual genre clichés, but that doesn’t make the clichés any less boring. I wanted Deadpool to be a movie that broke the mold, but instead it just spends a lot of time telling you it’s better than the mold and not showing you.

Ryan Reynolds is kind of a fiat movie star; he’s handsome and famous but if you look at his credits it doesn’t seem like an impressive career. I have very few distinct memories of Ryan Reynolds performances but I do remember leaving Green Lantern and thinking, “This movie was kinda bad but it wasn’t Ryan Reynolds’s fault.” These are not the kind of ringing endorsements that careers are built on, but Reynolds feels like the perfect choice to play Wade Wilson. He’s funny and charming and the self-deprecation feels a little more real because he isn’t an A-list actor in his own right. The only other actor I could even imagine playing this part with the same zeal is James Franco, and that’s an objectively worse choice (although think of all the Spider-Man 3 jokes we could have gotten). Everything that doesn’t work about Deadpool is saved by Reynolds’s overwhelming performance, and all the things that work are pushed to even greater heights.

The rest of the cast fine but there are precious few standouts among them. I’m fond of Morena Baccarin but this part, even as the female lead, is small and gives her very little room to show anything. Gina Carano is the most imposing woman working in film this side of Gwendoline Christie and she looks like a million bucks in this, her second consecutive feature film that’s barely asked her to talk. T.J. Miller plays a comic relief character in a movie full of comic relief characters, and while he hits every punchline I never wished he was on screen more often. Ed Skrein might do the movie the biggest disservice as the main villain Ajax, as he’s just so unbelievably boring that while I want Deadpool to get his revenge I wish he could do it without having to hear another generic British bad guy deliver generic bad guy dialogue. Brianna Hildebrand seems like she could be a breakout star if she’s given enough chances to play Negasonic Teenage Warhead, although she’s certainly not in the next X-Men movie, would likely feel shoehorned in to any sequels in this franchise, and might simply never get another chance.

So I’m generally fond of the acting in Deadpool, and the action is a solid B+ (even if three of the top five moments were given away for free in the trailer) but where it fails to deliver for me is in the story. This is the same origin story then damsel in distress formula I’ve seen a thousand times. I was tempted to use hyperbole and say a million but I’m confident it has actually been at least a thousand times by this point. Deadpool loves to show how it knows that it’s a movie and how familiar it is with all these tropes but it isn’t brave enough to actually break out of them in any way. I’m sick of origin stories and telling me I’m going to see one doesn’t make it better. I’m slightly less sick of hostage girlfriends but only because a lot of movies don’t bother to develop enough characters to have compelling alternative hostages. It’s also disappointing that for all the snark they have about the genre that they direct none of it at the sexualized violence the genre is often bogged down in and even contributes some for itself. Deadpool is going to get credit for being clever and subversive and it’s only doing those things at a four out of ten and for it to feel real I need them to aim much higher.

I’m happy that Deadpool exists and I enjoyed watching it (when I wasn’t groaning at the idea of watching another person get experimented on until they develop super powers) but it isn’t there yet, and I hope the praise it’s getting doesn’t make it sit on its laurels. There’s a spark of great potential here and I’m instantly more excited for Deadpool 2 than I am for any superhero movie that isn’t Civil War because it could actually be something unique and clever. Deadpool is a great first step but I need them to keep going.

 

Box Office Democracy: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I wanted more out of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Or less, much much less would have been fine too. The amount I got was entirely insufficient.

It’s a cute idea mashing up this drama about early 19th century romance, class, and all that comes with it with a zombie movie, but in an hour and 45 minutes it doesn’t get enough time to do either thing proper amounts of justice and so none of it seems to matter. Either this is a serious thing and it needed more time, space, and gravity; or this is a silly joke and it needed to be a 20-minute sketch on the Internet. As released, it seems insubstantial and empty.

I have no compelling reason to think what I really want is more of the manners drama. I don’t watch Downton Abbey, I haven’t read the book Pride and Prejudice, I don’t even really like watching BBC America for more than a couple hours at a time. The surface-level telling of this side of the story is about what I want. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies makes me think I could deliver a sixth grade book report on the original novel and be laughed out of any serious discussion. For example, I looked up the Wikipedia article on George Wickham to see how radically the character was changed for the zombified version of the story and practically couldn’t understand any of what it was talking about. It’s like getting the Cliff’s Notes version of the story and it’s hard not to feel a little bit cheated by that.

The zombie story also feels underdeveloped. The film starts with a good action beat and hits a few horror beats early on but then they mostly fade away. After this early burst of action the whole thing fades to the background. There’s an action beat in a cellar in the second act that I couldn’t make heads or tails of because there was no light, it never seemed like scaring me with zombies was even a remote priority until the third act.

There are gestures towards a larger plot, like when a zombie comes and talks to Elizabeth and tries to warn her of something before being blown away, and numerous allusions to the Four Horsemen of the Zombie Apocalypse, but nothing ever comes from either of these things. The Horsemen are glimpsed on screen twice but never interact with anyone. I suppose they serve to kind of underline the markings for a third act twist but this is such a dramatic device to have no direct payoff. I got the distinct sense that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was telling only the third best zombie story going on in this universe in this time period.

This is going to sound insincere after three paragraphs of being so intensely critical but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies isn’t completely unsatisfying. It might be formed from two underdeveloped halves but there are compelling things about the whole. Seeing a zombie outbreak in a pre-modern society is a refreshing take on a done-to-death genre and simply seeing cannons and muskets being used to fight undead swarms has a certain charm to it after seeing a thousand shotguns. The juxtaposition of the prim and proper pre-Victorian England with the ruthlessness of a never-ending swarm of undead is quite funny (the first few times) and the some of the characters follow this path to the absurd conclusion to remarkable affect (Matt Smith and Lena Headey are particularly notable examples). I’m just not sure this is a punch line worthy of an entire movie. When I saw the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the shelf of my local bookstore I thought nothing about reading it would be as amusing as looking at the image on the cover, and they adapted it in to a movie that by the end is struggling to be as compelling as the poster.

Box Office Democracy: Kung Fu Panda 3

Kung Fu Panda 3

I had no interest in seeing either of the first two Kung Fu Panda movies. I thought they were a place for a brand of Jack Black shtick that I had grown tired of by the time 2008 got here (for the record: peak Jack Black was 2003’s School of Rock). I had a strong idea of what these movies were, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. As far as Kung Fu Panda 3 is concerned, I was wrong. This is a charming movie, a funny movie, sometimes even a touching movie. I regretted nothing about my time spent watching Kung Fu Panda 3, and it’s the first movie of 2016 to make me feel that way.

Kung Fu Panda 3 tells a story I was happy to hear told. Po (Black) is told he needs to start teaching the rest of his action team (voiced by a perplexing mix of stars from Angelina Jolie to David Cross to Jackie Chan) and he’s terrible at it so he needs to find his inner self just as his long lost father returns and an unbeatable opponent returns from beyond the grave. It’s not the most intricate story, and there were things set up that never got paid off to my satisfaction— like a pivotal character always nervously saying he was “sent by the universe” sounds more like an evasion than the actual eventual truth. This isn’t a movie that wants to be deep; it’s a movie that wants to be fake deep and it does a fine job at that. It keeps the jokes apart from the fight scenes and provided some touching moments between Po and his biological father (Bryan Cranston) and his adoptive father (James Hong) that get to some real places.

The action scenes were better than I expected them to be, but I’ve since realized that was a low bar to get over. Dreamworks typically does good work but their action is usually more frenetic than it is good, I suspect it’s hard to get any material that would look as good as humans doing it just because of how their art style tends toward flatter character designs. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the fight scenes particularly because of how they used the individual animals to different effect. A crane did not fight like and alligator did not fight like a panda. The disappointing exceptions were Master Monkey, who is probably just a bit too person-like to have a distinct style, and Master Tigress, who was also just too much like a human to be exciting. Again, not having seen the previous two entries in this series perhaps none of this was new, fresh, or exciting but it was sort of a delight for me.

It feels weird having to say this, or that it feels like a point of recognition, but I appreciated that no one in this movie was doing an accent. There’s a long shameful tradition in Hollywood of over the top accents, and I’m so glad we’re past that here. It feels generally culturally sensitive, although mostly by being so generic about everything that it’s impossible to feel it being specific enough to be offensive. I did not care for their depiction of dumplings being quite so big though— where are these animals getting dumplings that are universally the size of bao?

If this review were itself a movie made for children I would be learning an important lesson about judging a book by its cover, but it isn’t and I’m not. Instead, I think I’m learning a lesson about the ever-improving work coming out of Dreamworks as they move away from being “the House That Shrek Built” and towards being the people that brought you How to Train Your Dragon. It also might be a lesson about coming back to Jack Black after so many years away, he might not be as stale as I thought although I feel for the parents who had to deal with their children responding to everything they were told this weekend with “chitty chitty chat chat” emulating the climax of this film. Kung Fu Panda 3 is a good movie. Although, it is possible that after Norm of the North, any competent animated movie was going to seem like Citizen Kane. It’s probably actually a good movie.

Box Office Democracy: The 5th Wave

The 5th Wave is a great trailer and a mediocre movie. There are some big ideas and ambitious visuals but they all made the advertisements and don’t take up much more room in the actual movie. What we get for the price of our ticket is a lot of watching characters move around the woods alone or in small groups. It almost never feels like the big action is happening on screen. It’s the kind of book adaptation where I’m sure the novel is a much more satisfying experience and am not sure why anyone bothered to make the film.

I want to talk more about the plot (and that will need to be behind a spoiler warning) and while I feel like I need to get some discussion of the non-plot aspects of this movie, they’re all just sort of there. The acting is not exceptional but by no means bad; I hope we get a bigger focus on some of the other kids if this turns into the franchise it so desperately wants to be. The visual effects, while used sparingly, are totally passable. There’s a palpable sense of dread several times during the film and I’m sure that’s the whole point of the endeavor, but looking back on it a day later I can remember only one such moment clearly. Honestly, my biggest technical complaint is that the quarantine zone looks a little sparsely populated, like they decided they could skimp on extras or something. The 5th Wave is technically sound and thoroughly inoffensive.

From here on I want to talk about the details of the plot and while I found it a bit predictable, you might not— so be warned.

The plan of the alien invaders felt distinctly like the result of a planning meeting you would see on a Saturday Night Live sketch. The aliens start their invasion with an Electromagnetic Pulse that permanently destroys all the technology on earth (and the awesome plane crash you see in the trailer), then they cause a series of massive earthquakes that also cause gigantic tsunamis and kill a bunch of people, and then they have this super version of the bird flu that kills most of the people that contract it. Up until this point these have been some ambitious plans that seem designed to eliminate the population in a relatively efficient manner. From there the plan becomes a convoluted mess: the aliens are going to assume human form, they’re going to tell the humans that they can assume human form to get them to turn against each other, they’re going to completely take over the military and train an army of child soldiers to think that other humans are really aliens so the child soldiers will kill the remaining humans. How is that their best plan? It seems just monstrously inefficient. It’s like the aliens spent their entire invasion budget on the earthquakes and the virus and just had to wing it. It leads to maybe one good Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment but I correctly predicted 100% of the aliens sitting in the theater so it wasn’t a slam-dunk. The more The 5th Wave told me what it was about, the less interesting it became.

The 5th Wave is the inevitable result of plugging every Young Adult novel that girls like into the Hollywood machine and releasing whatever comes out of the other end. It’s not good enough to be The Hunger Games, fresh enough to be Twilight, indecipherable enough to be The Maze Runner, or whatever Divergent is. It doesn’t seem to have a place except to just be a kind of YA wallpaper. There are germs of good ideas here and characters I wouldn’t be completely opposed to seeing more of if this takes off and becomes a franchise but I also wouldn’t remember or care if it just fades away an becomes nothing. The 5th Wave is the unfortunate symbol of progress, as a new thing becomes just another thing.

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ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Bottom 6 Movies of 2015

comicmixsix600-550x121-5283243As much as I loved my top 6 movies, I loathe these movies. The competition for worst movie of 2015 was so fierce I had to leave off The Last Witch Hunter, a movie so bad it made me dislike Vin Diesel, Hollywood’s most perfect man. That said, none of these movie are even close to as bad as that wretched animated Oz sequel from 2014, I won’t even name that movie for fear that the parade of angry Kickstarter backers will find me again.  

  1. Fantastic Four – There are a lot of good reasons to make a movie that costs $120 million but it’s quite apparent that spite isn’t one of them. Fantastic Four is a movie that only exists so Fox retains the rights to the franchise presumably so they can sell them back to Marvel for some insane price, because they clearly have no interest in making a good movie. Fantastic Four is a stunningly boring movie considering it’s supposed to be about dimensional rifts, super powers, and existential threats. The movie we got was directionless and drab, and you’ll never convince me that the ending wasn’t hastily written on the back of a napkin on a late day of reshoots.
  1. Tomorrowland – I’m aware that historically Disney theme park attractions have not made good movies— for every Pirates of the Caribbean there has been The Haunted Mansion, The Country Bears, and even a Tower of Terror. A good ride is pretty self-contained and probably shouldn’t leave the audience wanting a lot of extra backstory. Tomorrowland is a movie that is nothing but endless interminable backstory waiting for a moment of satisfying action that never comes. That a movie this boring came from the collaboration of Brad Bird and George Clooney is a crime against the entire film industry and I hope we’re free of this lazy style of creative malfeasance once and for all. (We are certainly not.)
  1. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials – Holy cow, what a batch of hot nonsense this movie was. I’m generally okay with a sequel being a little hard to understand for people who haven’t seen the original movie; it lets the movie push some boundaries in exchange for not having to retread the same expositional grounds. What I’m not okay with is being completely lost while watching the sequel to a movie I saw the first time around. The Scorch Trials was a series of flimsily connected events that I never saw the narrative thread for. Why were there alien fish monsters in glass tubes? Why was the desert filled with zombies? Where were they ever going? Why did it take days and days to get from the city to the forest and 20 minutes to get back? The Scorch Trials has no interest in answering any of these questions and it’s only surprising performances by Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Tudyk, and some truly awful pieces of filmmaking keeping this from being much higher on this list.
  1. Home/Minions – Good children’s movies are some of my favorite things to watch but similarly I hold a special enmity for the bad ones that feel like cheap attempts to get easy money from parents who need two hours of relief. Home is a movie with nothing new to say and no interesting way to say it. The main character is Sheldon Cooper turned one notch higher and a little girl separated from her mother that never quite makes you feel badly for her. Pixar made me cry for the personification of human emotions and the plight of a dinosaur farmer this year but Home couldn’t even get me a little sad for the ruined life of a small child. That’s not an ok way to tell a story.

    While Home is a bad movie, Minions is the expression of a bad system. Minions exists to make money and sell toys and the quality of the movie is a distant afterthought. Minions is a commercial broken up with borrowed bits of slapstick (none more recent than Honey, I Blew Up the Kid) but is counting on the notion that none of their target audience has seen it before. I had more fun riding the tie-in ride at Universal Studios than I did sitting through Minions, but I suppose I didn’t have to sit and watch the ride for 91 minutes.

  1. Hot Pursuit – Hot Pursuit is a comedy that has neither a clever plot nor any funny jokes. I’m tempted to just stop there and move on to the next entry on this list because there’s really nothing else a comedy could give you after it fails at that but Hot Pursuit just kept on failing. Almost every character was completely unbelievable as a human being that exists on the planet earth and the only one that felt real was Sofia Vergara’s character and that’s not because it’s actually realistic but because she plays this exact same character so often that I’ve come to accept it as truth in some kind of bizarre pop culture Stockholm syndrome. Hot Pursuit felt like torture to watch at 87 minutes, long and that was despite shelling out extra money that week to see it in a theater with reclining seats and waiter service. Booze and a brownie sundae couldn’t save Hot Pursuit, and it’s a rare movie those won’t help at least a little.
  1. Pixels – There’s a time when I would consider Pixels a special kind of bad but it isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of bad that Happy Madison puts out on a consistent basis. In 16 years they’ve put out one mediocre movie (Funny People) and 37 pieces of unwatchable garbage. They share similar casts and similar jokes and never aspire to be anything even remotely substantive. I don’t think every movie needs to be some profound meditation on the human condition, but they could at least give me a new dick joke or something. Pixels is a cynical movie that seems to hate its target audience. It doesn’t treat its subject matter seriously. It makes Wreck-It Ralph look like Citizen Kane. It was excruciating to watch and I’m quite happy I’ll never have to watch it ever again.

Box Office Democracy: The Big Short

I probably don’t need to explain bubble economies to anyone reading this website.

In the mid-90s following a boom period, fueled by the idea that all comic books were guaranteed to increase in value, the comic book industry suffered a collapse that closed two-thirds of comic book stores nationwide. If it weren’t for their bankability as movie and TV properties, it might have forever pushed comic books to the fringes of the American consciousness. I don’t need to explain the volatility of an inflated market to a comic book fan, but if you’d like to see why the financial collapse of 2008 was the same kind of thing magnified 1000x by greed and fraud, I think you’d enjoy The Big Short.

My degree is in economics and I’ve always felt I had a good handle on the 2008 collapse (in fact, despite some of the claims in the film it wasn’t the complete surprise it’s portrayed as) but I’ve struggled to explain it to people, and The Big Short does an amazing job making complicated topics accessible. Director Adam McKay doesn’t hesitate to have characters break the fourth wall to explain the more complicated financial terms, and even brings in celebrity guests to do little vignettes demonstrating more complicated concepts providing clever and offbeat opportunities to bury some clunky exposition. That along with some healthy repetition makes the whole thing easy to understand. The Big Short is a masterful breakdown of a terrible time that I sincerely hope makes filmgoers good and angry.

Everyone in The Big Short seems to be acting as if they think every scene could end up on their Oscar reel. It’s good, but it’s good in that way where you can kind of see how much effort is going in to the performances. Steve Carell is hitting his accent just as hard as he can, and his righteous indignation burns smoldering hot. Christian Bale is playing is playing a character with Asperger’s, and his commitment to nail all the associated eccentricities is admirable but sometimes the seams show. Ryan Gosling is charming and funny and gets a higher laugh per line ratio than anyone else, and honestly probably speaks more than he has in his last three movies combined. It feels a little strange to want to ding a movie for everyone acting so well, but there was such a strong feeling of effort that was just a touch off-putting in an otherwise excellent film.

I suppose I was also a little uncomfortable with the insistence of playing so many of these characters as heroes for their role in the financial collapse. While none of them created the bubble or did anything specifically unethical, there doesn’t seem to be a herculean effort undertaken to stop it. They see something wrong, some of them make a token effort to stop it and then they make staggering amounts of money off of being right. Even Brad Pitt who seems inserted in to the movie solely to provide indignation on behalf of those who will be hurt when the economy collapses, doesn’t do anything to stop anything. If this is supposed to be a real takedown of the excesses of the system that almost destroyed the world less than a decade ago I wish it were a little harsher on the people who were simply willing to claim a slight moral high ground while pocketing nine figure sums for their trouble.

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