The best thing about This Is Spinal Tap is that the musicians that were the focus of the mockumentary were actually pretty fucking good. Conversely, the best thing about American Movie is that the filmmaker who is the focus of the documentary knows so much about good films. He just can't make one. If these people were total morons, there wouldn't be any fun to the films. Watching dumb people fail is sad. Watching just-slightly-out-of-touch people fail is hilarious. Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi know this. The New Zealander vampires that are the focus of mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows are good at what they do. Or at least, they were. The comedy of the film stems from their resistance to fully adapt to the changing world. They plead with bouncers to invite them into the clubs rather than just demand a cover charge, but end up having to concede with the struggling pub down the road that is begging anybody to come in. When introduced to Google, one of them asks if he can find a really nice scarf he lost in the 1700s. Comedy also comes from the characters' very matter-of-fact attitude towards their existence. One casually discusses the social faux pas of being a Nazi Vampire post WWII ("I don't know if you know this, but we lost"). The housemates who have been living together for hundreds of years bicker about having to keep the place clean ("We're fucking vampires! We don't do dishes!"). Zombies aren't slow, shambling mindless killing machines, they're just really boring people that eat flesh. Honestly, I'm struggling to find things to talk about with this flick. I don't want to keep talking about funny scenes, because they're far better experienced by watching the movie. Your capacity to enjoy it is wholly dependent on your taste. It's silly, but it's whip-fucking-smart, and this sort of humour is totally my thing. A man is mauled by a werewolf, and the police are clueless. "There have been a string of wild dog attacks, occurring each month. It's got the people pretty scared. We've managed to apprehend one of the perpetrators," a cop says as she brings over an adorable retriever. "Unfortunately, he will have to be put down." Another cop walks the dog over to the mangled body, points at it and says irritably, "Look at what you did." I lost my shit. If you don't lose yours, then bah humbug to you.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
People are going to say Michael Bay ruined Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, even though his role as producer was probably not to have much of a creative hand at all, but to throw a few stacks of cash at it and get back to making the new Budweiser commercial called Transformers 4: Age of Extinction. People are going to say it ruined their beloved childhood franchise, even though the franchise never had any artistic integrity. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has only ever existed to sell toys. The only iteration of it that ever existed for something more was the comic it was born from, and even then, that was more of a parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil and Sin City than anything else. TMNT Inc. has only ever wanted you to buy the action figure, so getting all up in arms because you don't like someone's delivery of it is like getting mad at Coke for not bringing Lemon Coke back the way you remember it (but those fuckers really didn't bring it back the way I remember it). And if I'm going to buy the action figure, what I require is a group of fun-loving turtles eating pizza, getting goofy and kicking some butt. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles gave me exactly what I wanted. Yes, the plot is beyond moronic, but it has no less intellectual depth than any of the iterations to precede it. Yes, a fart joke probably will have you rolling your eyes, but try not to forget that this is primarily aimed at children. Or at least, it seems that way about 60% of the time. The movie has one big speed bump: Shredder. He looks like someone duct-taped a bunch of kitchen knives to his arms for one, but the more prevalent hang-up is that he's just so fucking brutal. Which is really the only part of this film that feels like a Michael Bay movie. One of my biggest issues with his handling of the Transformers franchise, apart from, you know, everything about them, is that the fight scenes often amount to not much more than the heroes getting the shit kicked through them, begging the question: Who is this fun for? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' second act concludes with Master Splinter being beaten to within an inch of his life by Shredder. Slow-motion masturbatory angled shots show Shredder's fist connecting with the frail rat over and over, and I once again found myself asking: Who is this fun for? Wouldn't the children be a little disturbed? I know I was. The same goes for the final fight: the Turtles getting kicked in the stomach repeatedly until they just happen to win. Luckily, the movie makes the same mistake most superhero reboots are making these days of not bothering to develop the villain, which in this case turns out to be a blessing. Whenever Shredder isn't on-screen, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a lighthearted, well-produced, masses-satisfying good time at the movies. The term "popcorn movie" has been bastardised in my opinion. We've become too accepting of the demographic-targeting flicks that get peddled out to us year after year. We go and see Transformers 7: The College Years and tell ourselves it's because we've seen all the others and it'll do until something better comes along. It's time we stopped. We don't have to see it to hold us off until something better comes along. Go do something else. There's so much great media out there that is bold, and different, and challenging, and worth experiencing right now. And when you're in the mood for something light to pass the time, aim a little higher and see something like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Cowabunga, dudes. Cowabunga.
Sin Titty 2: A Dame to Kill For
Sin City is almost 10 years old. Back then, we were still moderately impressed by CG being used to create a comic-book effect, Robert Rodriguez wasn't using his backyard to make movies and Frank Miller was regarded as one of the greatest comic-book writers of all time, not that racist fuckhead in the fedora. I liked Sin City a lot. I'm a big fan of noir, hyper-violence and boobies, and Sin City delivered in spades. But I didn't feel like it was a world that I at all had to revisit. The film as a whole felt like one conclusive speech on the noir genre, and anything following that would be a needless retread of worn ground. Enter Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For. Once again operating as an anthology of interweaving stories, get ready to be treated to two hours of the same characters doing the same things, making the same points, ending up at the same conclusions. Except the cat's out of the bag this time around. We get it: Sin City either turns good people into bad people or dead people. Unless you're a woman, in which case you're either pure evil or a punching bag. Nothing new is said about this universe. Hell, one of the stories doesn't even involve any of the others. It's just there until it's over. It's the wrong movie at the wrong time as well. In a culture that is finally starting to wake up to the rampant misogyny in our media, putting out a movie full of characters that hate women isn't the wisest move (yes, I'm aware sexism is a regular trope of the noir genre I recently praised). It's your dad trying to fit in at your birthday party; the cinematic equivalent of Channing Tatum thinking he's only cool if he one-straps his backpack, parks in a handicapped zone and calls a kid he finds uncool gay. It's a curious beast though, because the only character in this film that receives a shred of what could be considered a character arc is a woman. It may be obvious that the at-first terrified and helpless Eva Green will wind up being the baddest of the bad, but in a film that either expects you to instantly remember a character's motivations from the first film or just declares "Fuck it", it's refreshing to watch a hint of development. Then again, she's naked the entire film, which is not even slightly an exaggeration. Now, I'm not one to decry two hours of nude Eva Green, but what does it say of your movie when you're only willing to let a woman have some depth if she's got her tits out? What does it say of your movie when the most I got out of it was relief that there's still one person with some say in Hollywood that cares about Mickey Rourke? What does it say of your movie when your sixty-five million dollar production only makes two on its opening day? Go home, Sin City 2. You're drunk.
Gone Girl
The most interesting thing about Gone Girl is that in any other film, the big twist would come in the last five minutes. Here, it comes in the first 30, and the following 150 is an examination of how these people then deal with that information. I'll continue that thought in a bit. There's a scene very early in the film that takes place the day after Nick Dunne's (Ben Affleck) wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears. He's trying to collect himself to make a press statement when Amy's parents arrive. Her mother says she only got ten minutes sleep, a statement that would normally indicate the lack of sleep was due to distress. When she gets up in front of the cameras, though, and pulls palm cards from her pocket, a different picture is painted. Nick barely managed to speak for 15 seconds, and was so all over the place that he smiled for the cameras beside the photo of his missing wife. Amy's parents immediately switch to stoic gazes as soon as the flash bulbs are pointed their way. Her mum didn't sleep due to worry, but preparation. They were ready for this. They're playing a role. We live in an age where people are more interested in living vicariously through other people's scandals than focusing on sorting out their own shit. And honestly, when such a large percentage of our media is inviting them to do just that, who could blame them? So if a nation is being invited to invade someone else's life through their TVs, PCs and smart phones, they're going to want the biggest bang for their buck. And who's going to look more villainous in the aforementioned situation? The husband acting irrationally because the situation he is in is eliciting irrational behaviour? Or the parents executing their roles with almost cinematic precision? Over time, Nick comes to realise this. When he's next in front of the camera, his behaviour is calculated, to send a message to the people he needs on his side: us. We don't want reality. Reality is boring. We want to be someone else, to play a role. That is what Gone Girl is about at its core: who we are is rarely who we want to be. Most of us come to terms with that, make peace with the reality of our situation. Some of us don't. Some of us see meeting a new person as a chance to be a new person. But what happens when you like the person you're pretending to be more than the person you are? What happens when the person you're with only knows the person you're pretending to be and comes to love that person? What do you do? What happens when time takes its toll and you inevitably, powerlessly, start to slip back into the person you are? What happens when you start to find out the person you love, the person that you're a different person for, turns out to also be a different person from the person that you love? Do you feel betrayed, even though you're guilty of the same betrayal? What happens when your entire life has been built upon being someone the world wants, regardless of the fact that it's anything but who you know yourself to be? Such an existential dilemma weighs heavy on the mind. But are the actions you take a result of insanity, or exhaustion? What if you've been doing this for so long, that you're unable to remember who you really are? What if the real you is whoever you need to be in that moment? But more importantly, what do you do when the most important person in your life finds this out? Do you know them well enough to know what they'll do? Or are they just like you? That's about as much as I can say without totally ruining Gone Girl's surprises. David Fincher has made yet another technically flawless film, that brings a disturbing coldness in its perfection. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it is 100% mine. Rosamund Pike fucking owns her role, as does Ben Affleck, as does Tyler Perry bizarrely. As does everybody. Fincher's work post-Fight Club has been stellar (Zodiac is my personal favourite), but up until now, none have approached recapturing the truly disturbing depths that a human being is willing to go to for what they want. What they think they want. What they think they need. Which is rarely what they deserve. Cheers, Dave.
Annabelle
The best thing I can say about Annabelle is that it's not trying to be a shameless cash-in on the success of The Conjuring. Where its former was a love letter to the haunted house flicks of the late 70s and early 80s, it is a love letter to the demonic possession and devil worship flicks of the late 60s and early 70s, and the film is very different as a result. But the worst thing I can say about Annabelle is one of the worst things one can say about a horror movie: it's predictable. I'm tempted to just link to my review of The Conjuring and label Annabelle as "The Opposite", but that's not entirely fair. I have genuine respect for it for not being a typical lazy second instalment, even if it doesn't really work. Additionally, as it's helmed by the Director of Photography for The Conjuring and Insidious, the film looks fucking amazing. There are some scenes that work solely because of its shot compositions. But a pretty face doesn't help you if you're fucking boring or crazy, and Annabelle is a bit of both. The key to you being affected by a horror movie is your willingness to suspend your disbelief; to accept that this is taking place in an alternate universe where logic does not exist. Annabelle breaks this right out the gate by having the gall to suggest that anyone in their right mind would want that fucking freaky doll on their shelf. Its second crime is spending way too long throwing bad dialogue at you to make you care about its characters. The Conjuring almost didn't need a set up: this family is whole and loving, therefore I care. Annabelle didn't need to be any different, and yet there is scene after scene establishing that this couple loves each other, but are under some strain, but everything will be okay after the baby is born, but the husband is away a lot at medical school, and on and on and on. If you can't continue to develop the audience's love for the characters during the spooky scenes, then you need to reassess your characters. It's also disappointing to see the genuine progression of the horror genre in The Conjuring by having the father immediately receptive of his family's terror scrapped here for the usual "the house is just going bumpies, quit worrying" shit. When you know why a scene exists and roughly how it's going to end, you've lost your audience, an especially damning trait for a horror movie. So imagine my surprise when the film suddenly makes the revelation that the doll may not be possessed by the ghost of a girl, but by the ghost of a girl who was possessed by fucking Satan. This leads to two amazing scenes: one involving a basement floor and the other involving one of the only times in the film that the doll moves "independently". I won't spoil them, but they hint at what the film could have been. When you start dealing with Satanic Cults and devil monsters, you start to delve into the silly. Here's the thing, though: if you grab that silliness by both of the proverbial horns, you will lose the serious dread and terror of The Conjuring, but in turn, you could gain the fun-loving haunted house ride that is Insidious, a brilliant film for different reasons. Annabelle is caught in the middle, and winds up being not very good at either. I'm loathe to keep comparing, but it loses almost all of The Conjuring's love for subtlety and silence, and it's also got some seriously stale and kind of offensive tropes (I thought film was done with the benevolent, wise, slightly magic black woman whose purpose is to provide exposition and then die for the white protagonists). Annabelle isn't a total piece of shit, but it also isn't very interesting. And I think the only thing worse than a bad movie is a good movie falling short of its potential. Humph.
