Towards the end of Andre 3000's masterpiece, Hey Ya!, he says, "Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance." He wrote a beautifully tragic song about the pitfalls of modern love and hid it behind a criminally infectious groove to prove the point that people only hear what they want to hear, but to also communicate that even if he may want more from his audience, he knows his place. The Raid knew its place. A showcase for an Indonesian martial art known as Pencak Silat, it was perhaps the best film about video games made to this day. One dude makes his way to the top of one tower to take down one man, with guns for the grunts, machetes for the mini bosses and two fists for the big boss, whilst showing off all the super cool stuff his training has taught him to do. That's it. One of the only criticisms that could be drawn from it was that the poorly written expository scenes at the beginning, middle and end were a bit boring. The Raid 2 does what every shit sequel does: tries to give you more of everything. That means bigger, crazier and bloodier fight scenes that go above and beyond the physical limitations of the first, but unfortunately, it also means a dipshitted expansion of a universe you don't give a fuck about, which leaves you snoring come the action scenes. And it's a shame, too, because some of the fight scenes are really good. While director Gareth Evans kind of exhausted all the cool shit you can do with a knife, a leg and a fist in the first film, he finds a whole bunch of new ways to make you go, "Oooh! Aaah! Ecch!" with a shiv brawl in a slippery mud pit, a cramped 1 vs. 4 fist fight in a speeding car and a hallway fight with a baseball bat and two hammers, not to mention the final fight: a fifteen minute one on one in a kitchen that starts as a test of various fighting stances and finishes with the two of them cutting each other open using tiny sickles. It all comes too late, though, on the tail of a story too dumb to realise it's not welcome. The various assassins have interesting eccentricities to them, and look really good posed all cool in the well-composed shots, but they each fall flat on their face when it comes time to talk. You only have to look so far as the complete and total lack of dialogue in the fight scenes to realise you're watching two movies here, and one of them sucks. I would have had a much better time with The Raid 2 if it was just an anthology of fight scenes, with brief bookends to introduce the new challenger and his or her unique quirk. I would have left the cinema nothing but impressed, but more importantly, with enough time to go home and catch an episode or two of Twin Peaks before bed.
The Lego Movie
I don't know about you, but I hated instruction manuals for my Lego. I could never follow them right, the wing of my ship would somehow always end up a space or two to the right of where it was supposed to be and I'd always end up forcing a brick where it shouldn't go to try and gain some semblance of the picture on the box. Inevitably, every single time, I'd take a hammer to my work and build whatever the fuck I wanted. And yeah, it looked like total arse, a far cry from the perfectly symmetrical constructive bliss on the box, but it was mine. And I could break it down at any moment and start all over again. I like to think there's a lot of people like me. The Lego Movie certainly does. It becomes pretty apparent early on in the flick that you're watching the visual representation of a child playing with his Lego. The writing perfectly captures the play time dialogue you used to make, adding gloriously innocent depth and excitement to what is a bunch of pegged pieces of plastic stuck to a mat. It makes it all the more heartbreaking when the reveal comes that this isn't the child's Lego. It's his dad's: a man who always followed the instructions, who created perfect little universes that didn't stray a single brick from the box, who glued his pieces to the board so that there can never be any irregularities or innovations. Because he's afraid. Afraid that if he tries to be creative, he'll fail. Afraid that if he goes against the instructions, he'll be ridiculed. But that's the beauty of Lego: you can't fail. If it looks bad, just pull it apart and try it again. Pull it apart anyway! The possibilities are endless. The Lego hero stares up at the Lego villain, as the scene is mirrored with the child looking up at his father, and he says, "You don't have to be the bad guy. You are the most talented, most interesting, and most extraordinary person in the universe. And you are capable of amazing things." Jesus, I cried buckets. In that moment, The Lego Movie became everything and more that The Secret Life of Walter Mitty wanted to be. Walter Mitty dumped a naive, dopey, corporate-sponsored denouncement of corporations and proclamation of individualism in front of you and impatiently tapped its foot waiting for you to be changed forever. Bizarrely (or perhaps not), the children's movie that's about toys is the one with intelligence and subtlety. Lego paid for The Lego Movie, and Lego is going to sell a lot of boxes in the coming months. But they're not trying to pull the wool over your eyes. The hero of The Lego Movie spends the whole film wishing he could be as independent and creatively unchained as the people that surround him, who can build a vehicle in seconds without a shred of instruction, but he realises, when all of this freedom isn't helping to save the day, that they also need a plan, and that requires unification which means, God help them, following the instructions. You need freedom and creative expression, but sometimes you need rules too. You shouldn't try to denounce corporations, because you can't. Instead, you should accept them and allow them to work with you and in turn, for you. And it's once you understand the rules that you can see how far they'll bend. Lego could have cashed out on this movie and made one big advertisement. There's no way people weren't going to see it. But they knew that people buy Lego with the thought at the back of their mind that maybe they can maybe make something amazing with this. Why not give them the thumbs up? Lego swallowed fear and accepted some humility for the sake of a good story with a beautiful message, and in that way, they became the good guys. It's still an advertisement, but in all the right ways. Take the toy out of the box. Who cares if it may be worth something? It's a toy. Play with it.
Noah
Kevin Smith was once talking about his wordy biblical epic Dogma, and the negative criticism it received from the Catholic church. He endured protests and the occasional death threat for, as he so eloquently put it, "A movie with a fucking rubber poop monster in it." Jokes aside, the point he was making is that when it comes to alternate depictions of religious material, people are really quick to jump on the attack without first getting a firm grasp on what it is they're attacking. Dogma was a story about the importance of faith as a concept, whatever that may be in, and the dangers of organised religion in the wrong hands. Noah is a similar film. It too has it's "rubber poop monster" in the form of The Watchers: banished angels encased in stone and filth for helping humanity after their banishment from Eden, or as I like to call them: giant rock lobsters. The presence of these rock lobsters within the first thirty seconds of the film and the following sense of prevailing fantasy that bubbles underneath the surface should serve as a solid indicator that this is just a story and, as a result, negate the need for any sort of boycotting. Let's be honest, though, that's not going to happen. The thing people often forget about a story like Noah is that it is, at it's core, just a story. It never really happened, or at least, certainly not to the extent that scripture dictates, because logic dictates. What matters in the story, wherever you may read it, and in the film is the message that it's sending. Early on in the flick, Noah seems like the hero. Earth is a desolate wasteland and the majority of humanity has decided to sook in the corner and blame God for being hungry. Noah's got the right idea; he knows it's our fault we're in this mess. We ate the forbidden fruit (read: fucked the planet) and we're paying the price. When he receives the vision that leads him to believe the world is about to be drowned, he doesn't ask "Why?", he acts to prepare nature for its second shot. You almost believe God really was talking to him, until he begins to get it into his head that God believes humanity is beyond redemption and isn't after a planetary repopulation, leading Noah to plan the death of him and everyone else on the ark. That's when you start to remember that his actions are the result of his interpretation of the pictures he sees when he sleeps. When his grandfather Methuselah cures their adoptive daughter Ila of her barrenness, allowing her to fall pregnant, he sees it as direct defiance of God's will, and vows to kill the baby should it be a girl (if it's a boy, it gets to live only to die as the last man on Earth). He's contrasted with the self-proclaimed King of Earth, Tubal-Cain, who starts the movie as a villainous, slimy murderer out to prolong humanity's sinful behaviour. But as Noah begins to become a more tyrannical and didactic patriarch, Tubal-Cain's actions too begin to shift, into the behaviour of a man who believes humanity deserves to survive, regardless of how they have chosen to be. In an attempt to explain his motivations to his family, Noah tells the story of Genesis. When Noah gets to humanity, he speaks of Cain's murder of Abel, and that it ran down the ages, resulting in people's inherent compulsion to kill one another. Despite my gripe that such a drive is the result of one icon, no arguments here. Where his rationale begins to lose us is when he draws the conclusion that because humans are a bit fucked in the head, they don't deserve another go at it. After a failed escape attempt, Ila has twins on the ark, both girls, and Noah approaches them with a knife. He can't bring himself to murder newborns, and looking up at the sky, he says, "I cannot do this." Soon, they find land, and Noah ostracises himself from his family because he believes he has failed God but more importantly, his family. Ila puts forth the notion that maybe he needs to pull his head out of his arse and realise that he saw good in a species he previously could not and that he chose to give humanity another chance. I don't know about you, but I choose to believe humanity still has a shot. We just need to stop putting power in the hands of those that believe the pictures in their dreams are more important than yours. Oh, and if you don't care about any of this, you should at least see Noah because Darren Aranofsky has once again made a hugely entertaining, big-budget epic with the attitude of an experimental film student that fucking blew my mind on a technical level over and over again. If you still don't care, you must be stupid.
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