Movie I Didn’t Like As Much As Everyone Else: Star Wars: Rogue One
Movies I Liked More Than I Should:
Going Rogue in the Star Wars universe means killing everyone within one “episode,” vice slowly, over three. The problem is that there are far too many new characters introduced at once to grow to care about any of them. The dialogue remains drab and there is no intellectual horsepower behind anything. At least Vader got his groove back. In fact, a 2 hour, fully-suited Vader lightsaber tantrum where he curb stomps the galaxy might be just what Rogue Two needs to be. I'm sick of the good guys winning every movie and yet still somehow coming out behind. Let's go full Star Wars: Suicide Squad.
Movies I Liked More Than I Should:
- Ben Hur – So much to dislike. The dialogue is tell-me-don’t-show-me. Morgan Freeman keeps waiting for Charleton Heston to show up…or any other actor that anyone has ever heard of. The actor playing Messala is so wooden that Charleton Heston out-acts him in absentia. The costumes and sensibility appear to have been pulled off the discount rack at H&M. Jesus is played by the Love Actually boytoy who mysteriously gave up on Laura Linney after she had a family emergency, leaving the audience to ponder why Jesus left her hanging. There’s a ludicrous happy ending replete with unlistenable cheesy pop end song. I don’t care. The chariot scene is outstanding, and, in its humble way, I was moved by the Jesus stuff in a way that Mel Gibson’s blood-soaked The Passion never accomplished.
- The Accountant – An autistic male power fantasy
MOVIE I WANTED TO LIKE MORE THAN I DID: Nice Guys. Nice movies finish last.
2016’s most bizarre cinematic moments:
- 10 Cloverfield Lane. John Goodman: “Problem-solving puts me in a musical mood.” Commence shaking that ass.
- Matthew McConaughey lives out every well-meaning white actor’s dream of saving the South from slavery and Jim Crow by cobbling together a ragtag band of women, children, and runaway slaves in Free State of Jones.
- The Jungle Book. A semi-serious movie with real suffering…and 70's-acid trip variety show musical numbers performed by CGI guest stars.
- The Lobster, an over-reviewed absurdist Scandinavian thought experiment. Scandinavians commit suicide a lot, on account of the long darkness. When they don’t, they play Trivial Pursuit and make absurdist thought experiments.
Biggest Disappointments:
- Superman vs. Batman succeeded at being a children’s movie about crashing toys together. Unfortunately, the fans are now adults.
- Star Trek Beyond – Tepidly wanders where every action sci-fi movie has gone before.
Overused Plot Device I’m Most Sick Of: The Acceptance Hour
You’ll note “The
Acceptance Hour” most frequently high concept comedy.
The notion is this – you have 10 minutes of movie based on your pitch. You have
20 minutes of shabby sex farce to add. That leaves an hour of exposition filler
to hang the jokes on. Lacking any real ideas, you reflexively pull the
Acceptance Hour off the shelf. The Acceptance Hour is the stock framework about
how we are all worthwhile, and if we accept each other and embrace tolerance
and diversity, we can all work together for the common good. It is the modern
equivalent of Campbell’s stages of myth, and hence its greatest sin against art
is not in being wrong, but in being dull.
The problem
with the acceptance orthodoxy isn’t the behaviors it seeks to regulate so much
as the thought it seeks to suppress. For the ideology of acceptance, tolerance,
diversity is the idea to end all ideas. We are all fine and good, no one may be
judged but those who judge, and anyone with an idea of the good best not
advance it too forcefully, for fear of offending. It seeks to suffocate the
romantic soul in the wetblanket of, “And your perspective is valid
too.” This is the death of the mind.
Biggest
Missed Opportunity: The Birth of a Nation
Its achievement, beyond its compelling lead performance, is to turn the namesake original on its head by pointing the proper historical fingers
at who was raping who. Pity all the attention was paid on the director and lead's alleged past sexual misdeeds, as it undermined an important, if brutal history lesson. But this film fails otherwise to cleverly play off of the crudely
effective propaganda of the original by eschewing any references to it but the title in favor of a relatively faithful rendering of Nat Turner's abortive revolt.
Biggest
Cinematic Hate Crime: Tarzan
Navigates
troubled source material identity politics by steering directly for the Heart
of Darkness .Continental in outlook,
it has a Teutonic wit, Wagnerian dialogue, and Victorian creativity.
Most
Difficult Watch: Knight of
Cups.
Terrence Malick pulls his usual trick of carefully constructing an overwrought literary framework for something interesting and then sparsely decorating it with beautiful
imagery and procedurally-generated poetry voice over. In essence, an exceptionally
well-cast screen saver.
Most Groan-Worthy
Remake:
- Sing Street – There’s a beautiful moment in The Commitments when the band is falling apart and their spiritual mentor turns to their defeated manager and says, “This way it’s poetry.” Sing Street removes the poetry for a happy ending. And you can't make a movie about the soul of music if the music sucks.
Most Absurd
Effort to Make the Government Out to be the Bad Guy: Sully
In an era of
bitterly contested identity politics, the most acceptable villain is the
government. It’s the only one that won’t complain, and never we mind if it
breeds several generations of conspiracy mongers who instinctively assume that the
government is out to get them. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Don’t
believe me?: let’s start listing movies set in contemporary times and their
villains. Ghostbusters? Check. Central Intelligence? Check. 13 Hours? Check. The
Brothers Grimsby? Check. Jason Bourne Again? Need we even watch to know? Even Paw Patrol falls victim to this trap.
The most
absurd extremity of this phenomenon this year goes to Sully, in which a 30
minute docudrama in need of a villain more dastardly than
a flock of birds invents a sinister conspiracy against
heroism at the National Transportation Safety Board. Long overlooked thanks to
years of the CIA framing its best agent and then trying to kill him, the NTSB
finally gets the spotlight shined on its cruel campaign to frame a hero pilot
for a crime he necessarily commited. Thankfully, justice prevails and the NTSB returns to the bitter reaches of the bureaucratic swamp, plotting against truth, air bags, and the American way.
Most Obvious
Casting of US Government As Bad Guy: Suicide Squad
Fine, the bad guys are the good guys. In that case, make the villain the most unimpeachable good guy imaginable, not a 3rd rate bureaucratic hack and her generic supervillain witch accomplice. Heaven forbid we have any fun at the movies.
Most
Egregious Positive Potrayal of the Chinese Government: Arrival
Unlike the
US government, the Chinese government by Hollywood’s lights is at worst a
quirky state-run milk producer with a few non-commercial functions, and more often, the unlikely authoritarian hero. This is all
a sordid effort to shoehorn every plot into something that makes jealously
protective Chinese plutocrats willing to provide access to their massive, rigorously-censored market. Perhaps the cruelest silver-screen dagger in the back of the famous Tianenmen protestor was Arrival, if only because it sets you up to believe it was a film ready to take a stand. For much of the
movie, the Chinese government drives the conflict, antagonizing our alien
visitors and accelerating the world towards war. My Red Dawn hackles started to
rise. “What's that in my gonads? The rising chant of Wolverines?” I wondered. No. No. None of that. The benevolent Chinese
general has a change of heart because he loves his dying wife. World united, Utopian future secured.
Most Egregious British Royalist Nonsense: The BFG.
Queen Elizabeth defeats supernatural bullying with a few cups of tea and a battalion of Tommies.
Actual Worst Portrayal of Government: Eye in the Sky
In which the War on Terror is reduced to a series of inane conversations portraying government officials universally as buck-passing cowards. If only they would just send in their best agent to get the job done, and then try to kill him! Which they still kind of do in this movie anyway...but only after very long, very earnest, very British deliberation.
Adam Sandler
Award for Shockingly Unfunny Comedy: The Boss, starring Melissa McCarthy
The annual
animated film everyone loves that I don’t: Kubo and the Two Strings
Bizarrest
Re-Casting of the Same Actor, Same Role, Different Show: The Infiltrator –
Bryan Cranston plays Walter White again.
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