Mad Max: Fury Road

I regularly fantasize about what it would be like to see older films knowing nothing about them going in. To watch Jaws, the greatest movie ever made (yep, you heard it here), in the cinema, opening night, knowing nothing more than the poster; to imagine such an experience genuinely makes me excited. Giddy, even. Such an experience is so hard to achieve today. The internet, for all of its undisputed merit, has unfortunately sucked dry a lot of the mystery of cinema. While I don't know for myself whether or not a film is good, enough links have popped up in my news feeds to let me know what the world thinks before I've gotten a chance. Not only that, but shocking, or controversial, or just plain good moments are being discussed hours after the first screenings have come and gone. An article titled "Let's talk about THAT MOMENT" calls itself spoiler-free, but that's a load of shit. For me, it's ruining movie magic in a way, and it's something I've wrestled with for a while. I made a huge effort to avoid advertising for Mad Max: Fury Road. Like Jaws, I've fantasized about a virginal viewing of the Mad Max films. How could you not? To hear Nightrider soliloquise, "I'm a fuel-injected suicide machine. I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller!", to this day is still amazing, but imagine if you hadn't already seen it in fifteen Bert Newton-hosted countdown specials. Imagine if you were seeing that anarchic madness fresh, for the first time. That's what I tried to capture with Mad Max: Fury Road, hoping upon all hope that technological advancements of visual effects wouldn't change the series that I loved for its adherence to practicality. And early on, there is a scene in which a convoy of cars modified into war machines is advancing on our hero. Gorgeous camera pans swoop around real cars driving through a real desert, while thick, combat percussion scores the journey, and I think to myself how awesome it would be if that drumming was coming from people within the scene. Lo and behold, the camera swoops behind a truck to reveal four rows of war drummers beating in perfect time to the soundtrack. I couldn't believe it. But the camera didn't stop moving. It continued to pan around, and a guitar hook started to fade in. "No way," I whispered, completely and utterly dumbstruck. At the front of the truck, amongst a wall of speakers, a blindfolded, red-jumpsuited, demonic looking fella was strapped up in a bungee cord, playing a double-necked guitar that, as the solo reached its apex, spewed fire. A flame-throwing guitar player and war drummers scoring their own battle. Not only was George Miller hip to the idea, he knew exactly how to one-up it. I began to weep. I'm not kidding. Mad Max: Fury Road engaged me on a level I can't even imagine beginning to describe, but it's my job, so I'm going to try. Get ready, folks, I'm about to gush.

Mad Max: Fury Road finishes with a quote. It reads, "Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves? - The First History of Man." Coming at the tail end of what has just transpired, and in light of the rhetoric of the Mad Max franchise in general, it certainly has an immediate tonal resonance, but when I searched for the source at home, I found that there wasn't one. It was made up for the film. I was surprised at first, until I gave it some thought, and came to the clarifying realisation of one of my favourite things about this film: it has a thoroughly rich, well-developed backstory and overarching universe, and it's offering up none of it. The movie is a two-hour car chase (genuinely), and as such, there's no time for wheel-spin, no time for overwrought expository dialogue. You are placed into a moment of time in this universe, in which everyone already knows everything, and it leaves the blank filling up to you. But you do fill in the blanks, because the work has been done to ensure that none of it seems improvised. Everything makes sense, even if you're not sure why. Which makes it all the more disappointing to me that George Miller is offering up this backstory freely when asked. I don't want to know where the Doof Warrior (Iota, the aforementioned pyro-guitarist) came from. I don't want to know what a single shred of Immortan Joe's (motherfucking Hugh Keays-Byrne) appearance represents. The film gives you enough to go with, because everything that happens, happens because the characters understand their place in the world to advance the plot, not to show a fish out of water how the world works. When Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) tells Max Rockatanksy (Tom Hardy) that what they share is a need for redemption, I don't find myself pining for a comic series to tell me what she meant by that. I want to fill in the blanks for myself. I may sound redundant at this point, my stressing on the importance of practicality over digital wizardry again and again, but cars actually crashing into other cars makes the world feel real, and when a world feels real, you feel like you're in it; a part of it. And I stress this a bunch, too, but semiotics isn't just some pseudo-psychoanalytical bullshit word every uni student seems to know. Our ability to assign meaning and resonance to otherwise foreign imagery is the real deal, and it's what makes something like Mad Max: Fury Road work so effectively while effectively telling us nothing. Immortan Joe's Warboys shoot spray paint into their mouths before a fight, and we get it. Huffing paint gets you high, ergo, in a world slavishly devoted to chrome, it gets you good and ready for a fight. Or maybe that's nothing more than my interpretation. That's what's so wonderful about fully developing a universe and offering up none of it: it's entirely coherent, and entirely up for debate. Ask David Lynch. I still don't know what the fuck Ben's deal is in Blue Velvet; every time I watch it, I come away with a new understanding. But that's what's so wonderful about revisiting it; with my attention on one new cryptic detail, everything old is new again.

Speaking of old and new, I want to talk about how Max Rockatansky is like the heroes of old, in that in Mad Max: Fury Road, he isn't a hero. In fact, he kind of sucks. He spends the entirety of the film's first act strapped to the front of a car, with a needle in his neck feeding blood into a dying, hopped-up Warboy. He spends a good chunk of the film's second act in chains, trying to remove a metal brace strapped around his mouth. Even in the film's final act, when he's good and ready for a fight, the dispatch of the film's villain doesn't even happen at his hands; the duty to chillingly shout, "Remember me?" and tear off the mask connected to Joe's flesh left to Furiosa. In fact, his one moment of heroic glory, in which he appears to effectively destroy an entire vehicle of murderers who have a lot of guns, happens off-screen. The reason this is so wonderful is summed up just before it happens. The car is approaching, and Furiosa is trying to work out what to do, while also trying to get their truck unstuck from the mud. Max says he'll take care of the approaching vehicle. Furiosa looks at Max like he's insane. "What if you're not back before we get the engines running?" Max looks back at her with the same face. "...you keep moving," he mumbles, and walks into the fog. Max exists in a world distilled to such wanton cruelty, cruelty that the demons haunting him remind him of, literally, that he has adapted to a single instinct: survival. When he joins Furiosa's cause, it's not because he sees it as the right thing to do, but because he sees it as his best chance to not die. If that means saving the lives of a few people in the process, then so be it. Except he's not really there to save anybody's life, he's just along for the ride, trying to stay alive like them. Going back to the aforementioned scene, when the car first approaches, Max attempts to snipe its searchlight with only two rounds in the chamber. He doesn't even come close to a hit with the first one, and gives the gun to Furiosa to do the job for him with their last chance. Even in the bridge between the film's second and third acts, when the trademark "hero stays behind while the group presses on" story beat arrives, a five-second visit from his ghosts leads him to say, "Nah, fuck this" and deliver an idea to Furiosa and her crew. Not a plan, mind you, an idea. The reason this is so great is because it understands the lesson modern action films have forgotten: a hero is not someone who acts heroically. A hero is someone we can recognise, someone who is like us, someone who would be terrified and selfish and every bad quality we would all possess in a situation like this, so that when the hero has their moment of redemption, it allows us to feel like we can, too. In Man of Steel, Superman spends the whole film talking about how conflicted he feels, whilst never once demonstrating that conflict. A hero shouldn't have to say that they're conflicted, a hero should emanate that from the moment they're on screen. Max does. Every dick move, every animalistic grunt, every weak allowance of amicability he allows his companions to see, the aforementioned moment when he sees a caravan of people advancing to certain death, and tells them that there may be another way, his willingness to give blood so that Furiosa won't die as he finally tells her, "My name is Max", right down to disappearing into the crowd after he knows the job is done, contributes to his, and our, journey to becoming a real hero.

Here's the thing, though, the really dirty secret: Max isn't the hero of this movie, Furiosa is. Now, at this point, I could talk about a whole bunch of things. I could talk about the Bechdel Test, and about how Mad Max: Fury Road passes it, proving how ridiculously fucking easy it is to do so without harming any preconceived notions of what constitutes entertainment for gender. I could talk about this dopey bullshit, and the other edge of the sword I have to fall on when I so vehemently stress the need for every opinion to have the right to be heard. Instead, I want to talk about feminism, and about how this movie is feminist not in the way the word has been twisted, but as it actually is: equal. I mentioned earlier that Max is often useless in this movie, and that Furiosa often does the job for him. When a conflict arises, she has an answer, and as I've also mentioned earlier, the villain has a direct emotional relationship to her, and he is hers to kill. But here's the actual dirty secret: Furiosa isn't the hero of this movie, no-one is. The goal of our protagonists is to get a truck carrying a group of women that Immortan Joe had enslaved to bear his children to the place that Furiosa grew up. Every man and woman on board is capable, and not one of them needs another to survive. What they need is each other's help to stay together. And it's here that George Miller really nails it. Feminism isn't about reversing or abolishing the rights or privileges of men, it's simply about leveling the fucking playing field, and Mad Max: Fury Road understands that no better than in its willingness to kill old ladies. This is a cold, hostile wasteland that has no time to set aside ground rules for what's culturally acceptable or not. There is only the fight for survival, and if you're in it, that means you have as much chance of dying as you do surviving. Nobody is incapable of fighting. With the honed skills that anyone with the perseverance and discipline to do so can achieve, everyone on the truck fights and dies for their cause, including the men, including the women. Max's uselessness in a fight isn't there to communicate him as somewhat lesser than his female counterparts, because as the movie comes to communicate, he's no more or less capable than anyone around him. Max needs Furiosa to shoot the car's light, and Furiosa needs Max to give her his blood when she's dying. Even the motive of the film's antagonist isn't saying anything particularly condemning of gender politics. Immortan Joe has picked these women, whom he sees as the most aesthetically perfect, to bear his children and continue his legacy. He sees them as objects, but only in the exact same way he sees the city of people he holds at ransom with his hand on the water supply as objects. In this world, there's no time for something as inane and stupid as the idea that different chromosomes equals different rights. There is only alive and dead, the fight and who wins it. That's feminism.

There's a moment in Mad Max: Fury Road that made me make a noise I can't even begin to describe. Warboys sway back and forth on long poles attached to the back of cars, to pick up and pass anyone they need to. One of them grabs Max, and on the back swing, comes so close to the ground that Max's hair brushes against the rocky surface of the road. A groan lurched from me, out of a pure, visceral, gut reaction to what I was seeing. I can't remember the last time an action movie elicited that sort of reaction from me. Actually, you know what? For the first time, I'm going to admit hyperbole (whilst still committing hyperbole). I can remember the last time a movie elicited that sort of reaction from me. It was any movie that had real people doing real stunts. I can preach, and have preached (even in this review), about how practical will forever beat digital, but there's no greater argument than a film like Mad Max: Fury Road. Visual effects are at their best when you can't separate the real from the fake, and it brought me such joy to find out that CGI, for the most part, was only used to enhance that which was real. And make no mistake, real isn't synonymous with boring, or safe. The shit that goes down in this flick, and all of Miller's masterpieces before it, is unbelievable. Hell, Guy Norris, Miller's long-time go-to stunt coordinator, retired after one particular coordinated crash because nothing from then on could possibly be as amazing, or as purely fucking dangerous, as that one. Mad Max: Fury Road stands, and exists, on its own, as it well should, but in a lot of ways, it seems to be looking back and commenting on all of the action films of the last ten years. While its series has a history, and a lineage, it bears no requirement that you are aware of any of it. It's not a sequel, or a prequel, or a reboot. It is simply another chapter in this character's life. There are no references to what came before it, what will come after it, what's behind or on the horizon; it exists in the now for this very moment. I think a lot of people are confusing quality with consistency when it comes to Marvel. Human beings are inherent problem solvers, so being given the opportunity to connect two dots will always elicit a positive reaction. But, as I've covered already, losing sight of the now to focus on the upcoming will result in a disappointing retrospective, unless something changes that, and soon. I sincerely hope everyone's paying attention to Mad Max: Fury Road. It's fast, and frenetic, and really, really, fucking exciting, but it has something to say, and it knows exactly when it needs to be said. A lot of people die, but it doesn't revel or glorify the violence, choosing to direct its focus to the colliding chunks of metal rather than the people within them. It gives you bizarre characters in a cruel world and allows you to feel like you could be them. It looks back on the action movies of old, and steadfastly steers them into the new. Jurassic World doesn't need to get hit with another potshot, but fuck you, Jurassic World. Dinosaurs are still amazing, and so are car crashes. You will be forgotten, Mad Max: Fury Road will not.

Jurassic World

I don't need to be another voice on the Internet telling you that Steven Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece Jurassic Park is much better than it is often given credit for. There are plenty of voices on the Internet that have done it better than I could. But seriously, Jurassic Park is really fucking good. It still looks amazing as far as special effects go, and it's a summer blockbuster that respects your intelligence and follows through with its themes. It shows immense restraint with the tools at its disposal, because it knows all of the lights (read: scary dinosaurs) don't count for shit if there aren't three-dimensional people there to be affected by them. For how can you, the audience, be affected if you have nothing to relate to? It's a movie that actually warrants the buzz phrase, "You'll laugh, you'll gasp, you'll cry, it'll change your life." The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park 3, not so much, but what they still had going for them was the understanding that there is an inherent awe to these animals; these humongous beasts that once occupied the space in which we now reside. They also don't attempt to decry or skew Jurassic Park's message that the man-made existence of these creatures is inherently wrong, and that a time will never come when they are entirely in our control. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park, idiot hunters and philanthropists think they can capture and bring dinosaurs back to North America, slaughter being the penalty for their hubris. In Jurassic Park 3, journeys to the island are an illegal tourist attraction that rarely go right. Jurassic World has had a long development cycle, changing names and those involved multiple times, and warning flags have been going up with each passing year, none-so-much as the idiotic title that either indicates a globe-trotting journey in which dinosaurs have left the island, or a point in history in which a corporate group has found a way to keep the dinosaurs in check long enough to trademark the shit out of a piece of land and cut the ceremonial ribbon. Honestly, after seeing Jurassic World, I think I may have preferred the former, because while I wasn't expecting to walk out of the theater ready to kick Spielberg off his pedestal (let's not forget The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park 3), I most definitely was not expecting to walk out feeling like Jurassic World hated me for loving Jurassic Park. 

That's not hyperbole, and it's not me reading too far into it (though, let's be honest, it might be): Jurassic World has an open contempt for its audience, whomever you may be. Are you, like me, still desperately in love with the film you remember seeing for the first time in 1993? Fuck you. Are you someone who thinks of Jurassic Park as a film that shows its age, and are more interested in seeing what newer, cooler things Hollywood can think of? Fuck you too. There's a scene early in the film that demonstrates this. Jurassic World's operations manager, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), drops by the control booth to see how things are going. Resident hipster Lowery (Jake Johnson), sporting a moustache and a desk covered in dinosaur toys, has just bought a new shirt off eBay for a ridiculous sum of money: a Jurassic Park t-shirt. He's supposed to represent me and all of you like me; the 'fans' of the original, the "everything was cooler back then, man" generation. Claire tells him never to wear it to work again, because heaven help him if he reminds anyone of a time when things really were cooler. This is just before she debuts, and I quote, "Verizon presents the Indominus Rex." Lowery rolls his eyes at the name and quips, "What's next? The Dorito-saurus?" before promptly being told to shut up if he wants to keep getting paid. Outside in the park, the John Hammond memorial building is preceded by Samsung, everyone drives a Mercedes, there's a Starbucks on every corner, along with Pandora and Margaritaville. I've covered this before in my The Secret Life of Walter Mitty review, but the artifice of name dropping corporations to comment on corporate sponsorship is that money still needs to be exchanged for the mention and display of them. To make matters worse, it seems like Jurassic World thinks you'll be fine with it if it just acknowledges its existence with a sly wink. Because it thinks that'll be enough for a fucking moron like you.

In the same way Jurassic World denounces corporate sponsorship while happily taking money for it, it approaches shameless reboots of old movies with the same sneering spitefulness. I'm tempted to cite the prime example of this as John William's iconic score making its triumphant return as a child runs through a Hilton hotel room, camera tracking along before exiting out the window to a glory shot of the park with not a single fucking dinosaur in sight, but I can get a little more analytical than that. Let's return to the reveal of the Indominus Rex. You're not going to find that name in your science books, kids. It seems focus testing has revealed that people are bored with dinosaurs, now that the initial excitement of their resurrection has died down. And like any live-action adaptation of a Hanna-Barbera property (and because genetic experimentation and modification is totally ducky), the words scarier, bigger, and cooler got thrown into a blender and out popped the Indominus Rex, a super dinosaur that inevitably escapes and punishes everyone who thought creating it was a good idea. What a clever skewering of audience's current reactions to summer blockbusters, right? Except it's using this as a solution to a problem that I don't think exists. Claire claims that people aren't wowed by dinosaurs anymore, and Lowery agrees, effectively making the argument for both of the aforementioned audience members. But I respectfully disagree with that sentiment. I made an argument that supports this back in May when I reviewed Godzilla, a film that understood the reason Jurassic Park still looks better than most big-budget productions is because it knew where the camera had to be, and knew when practical effects would work better, to instill a sense of awe. When the dinosaurs are first revealed in Jurassic Park, consider where the camera sits. It's not right there in the thick of the action. It's far away from it, so as to display the scale of these animals, but also to hide its falsity. When the camera is up close, we're looking at animatronics, so that the characters can react to something they can actually see. Compare the reactions of the children in the T-Rex attack on the Jeep to the reactions of the children in the Indominus Rex attack on the big hamster ball. It's painfully aware which one seems more realistic, because there was something on set that was real. And when the third act all-out brawl hits, the magic camera swoops, dips and soars around the monsters as they tear through each other, with zero consideration for the fact that this shit looks fake. And you can call me a grumpy old man and ask me how we can't be using these advances in technology to make action scenes look better. My response is that maybe if we can't make the majority of the scene feel real, we shouldn't be making it in the first place.

While we're on that final fight, let's talk about its rhetoric. The chips are well and truly down at this point. The Indominus Rex has led a trail of carnage and destruction from the back end of the park to the front gates. Everyone has had a go at taking it down, including a pack of Velociratpors, to no avail. How are you supposed to destroy a monster that seems to grow every superpower as soon as it needs it (heat-signature masking, intelligence, camouflage and part-raptor are those that we hear of)? Claire has an epiphany, sprints off to a big gate with a flare in hand and demands that Lowery open the door. In a shot that, granted, is pretty fucking great, she lights the flare and creates a bright red beacon that gets reflected in two distant eyes high above her. The familiar face of the Tyrannosaurus Rex lumbers out of the darkness, and Claire leads it back to the Indominus Rex to do its duty and save the day just like it did in the first film. Now, this would be a nice, if hamfisted, throwback to the legacy of these films if it weren't also completely undermining the point of the T-Rex saving the day in the first place. In Jurassic Park, the T-Rex technically saves the day. Alan, Ellie, Lex, and Tim are cornered by the velociraptors, and in the moment before death, the Teus-Rex Machina swoops out of nowhere to attack the raptors and create a diversion for the humans to bail. In doing so, it proves Ian Malcom's chaos theory. How could the T-Rex have gotten into the building without making a sound? How could it have gotten in at all? How could it have known the perfect moment to make itself known? It's convenient, but it's still chaos. It's not there to save them, it's there to be an animal. They didn't bring it there, it simply found a way (sorry). In Jurassic World, Claire enlists the T-Rex to do its duty. This is a foe big and bad enough that the T-Rex even needs to share a look with a Velociraptor to communicate, "Yes, we will lay down our differences to tackle the greater evil." On top of that, this mightiest of allegiances still isn't enough, and it's not until the Indominus Rex is tackled close enough to the water's edge to be within range of the Mosasaur (big underwater dinosaur) to do its duty of jumping out of the water and pulling things in, that the day is truly saved. But remember that the battle doesn't really end in Jurassic Park. It's never explicitly stated that the T-Rex kills each Velociraptor. In a way, it feels like the humans are bailing from a fight that will go on forever. The heroes and villains were only technical, and interchangeable, because they were based on our need to prescribe higher meaning to simple animal nature. Jurassic World thinks that's about as dumb as you are, too.

There's a scene about halfway through Jurassic World that sums up my feelings for it pretty well. The aviary has been destroyed, and a flock of Pteradons are descending on the park. Magic cameras swoop among the carnage, as people are lifted and thrown about. Claire's assistant, Zara (Katie McGrath), was assigned to look after the aforementioned irritating children, who she subsequently lost sight of, and has now found again. She runs toward them, and is picked up by a Pteradon. What follows is a 45-second scene of torture, as the magic camera follows Zara being thrown between dinosaurs, dunked repeatedly into water, screaming in terror and pain the entire time, before being eaten along with the Pteradon by the aforementioned big underwater dinosaur of narrative convenience. This is a death scene that seems particularly cruel in a film with a body count higher than any Jurassic Park before it. Why? Well, there's a few reasons. First, it's included in a list of the bizarre gender politics this film seems to have, but that could be an essay in its own right. Read this to get an understanding. It seems to be trying to echo the death of Gennaro, the lawyer in Jurassic Park, whose contemptuous negligence of the children led to him being eaten on a toilet. But Gennaro deserved it in a way. What's Zara's crime? Spending too much time on her phone, and not being interesting enough to warrant surviving. You could say it's instead trying to invoke the death of Eddie in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, in which he's torn in half whilst trying to save the rest of the heroes, but in that instance, his death was reflected on the faces of those heroes, who are devastated by their loss. In Jurassic World, Zara is scooped up and removed from the action, to the point that none of the main characters witness her demise. On top of that, her death is immediately followed by the film's two heroes experiencing a personal victory and admitting their feelings for each other with a hug and a kiss. Even the film's human villain, Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) is granted the respect of an off-screen death, making the glorification of Zara's seem all the more troubling. So we have an exploitative torture scene that serves to insult the memories its invoking, whilst also delivering a cooler, more exciting technical experience that shames you for thinking this is what you wanted. Its narrative inconsistencies serve this bizarre motivation as well. The voice of reason adamantly stresses that dinosaurs cannot be controlled, that the bond he and them share is out of mutual respect. This aligns and even evolves, to a point, the argument of Jurassic Park, until the script decides the dinosaurs can in fact be controlled, and are. John Hammond's replacement, Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), echoes his former by endorsing his oft-used phrase, "Spare no expense", until the thought of terminating the Indominus Rex comes up, at which point he says it's too expensive. Jurassic World denounces corporate sponsorship and shameless reboots, while doing nothing to be anything other than that. You can ask me why I so vehemently denounce this film while giving Jurassic Park 3 a pass. The difference between the two is that Jurassic Park 3 isn't trying to comment on Jurassic Park. It just wants to be the goofy fun time that it is. Jurassic World, on the other hand, has something to say, and it's that you're a fucking idiot for thinking that you wanted this. It's wrong, though. It came to that conclusion by assuming that we couldn't still be wowed by the techniques of that which came before it. Godzilla proved that not to be the case, as did Mad Max: Fury Road. But hey, maybe it isn't wrong. Maybe I am. It's certainly not struggling to fill seats. Maybe what people want from movies really is changing. All I really know is that if you put Chris Pratt in the lead role of your film, and drain all of his charisma and wit to the point that in a 2400 word essay, I don't feel the need to mention his name once, and people still rush to see it, then maybe we've entered an age where people appreciate a film that hates them.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I think I like the idea of Avengers: Age of Ultron more than I like Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's certainly not economical on ambition: not only does it seek to further develop the dysfunctional team dynamic that was introduced in The Avengers (a team of six, mind), it seeks to destroy the family while adding to it, bring in secondary characters from the family member's standalone flicks, and set in motion the events of subsequent films. The ingredients are right: Marvel continues to hold its "never bad" standard, it's the longest of the franchise at 135 minutes and back on board is one of the best at somehow managing to make huge ensemble pieces feel whole and equal, Joss Whedon. But, and I say this in every sense of the phrase, it's not enough. The ingredients don't mix together well enough to save it from buckling in on itself, and there's simply not enough time to do everything that needs to get done done well. Now, everything does get done - every point is made and every arc is arced, but unless you're paying the strictest of attention, you're going to miss some shit. If you don't really let it resonate when Tony Stark makes a throwaway comment about wanting a permanent vacation, then his bailing on the team at the end of the film ain't gonna make much sense. The info is there, but there's simply not enough time to dwell on any of it before the next story beat comes rushing around the corner. None of this is to say that I didn't like Avengers: Age of Ultron. Like Jackie Brown to Quentin Tarantino, a not-so-great Joss Whedon film is still better than most. But I stand strong by the sentiment that began this paragraph. When I speak fondly of Avengers: Age of Ultron, it will not be for a good film, but for the moments in the film that were good.

Case in point: during the film's second act, the team takes a pretty significant beating at the hands of the titular Ultron. They need to lay low for a bit, and hide out in Hawkeye's secret farm with his wife and kids. Introductions are occurring, and Thor accidentally stands on a Lego house. Slightly embarrassed, he uses his humongous Asgardian boots to sweep the shattered plastic under a coffee table. Seconds later, a young girl approaches him and looks up, way up, into his eyes. Thor looks down at the child, then up and around, and a look washes over his face - a look that begs the question, "What the fuck am I doing here?" He turns, walks outside and flies away. It's a pretty heavy moment, and further proof that even the silliest character can achieve gravitas if written the right way. But what surrounds the moment, and the context for Thor coming to this realisation, is entirely unnecessary for this film. In the aforementioned beatdown by Ultron, two new characters are further developed. They're Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, the sibling totally-but-not-legally-allowed-to-be-called mutants, and as Agent Hill puts it, "He's fast and she's weird." As Quicksilver dashes around a shipyard keeping everybody's attention, Scarlet Witch sneaks up behind Earth's Mightiest Heroes and plants inside them their greatest fears. Iron Man is absent, but he already got the treatment in the film's opening: a vision of a team and world annihilated at his fault, an annihilation that he survives. Black Widow is taken back to her childhood of being trained to be a ruthless, unfeeling killer, including being sterilised. "One less thing to worry about," she says in an emotional gut punch of a scene. Bruce Banner is convinced that Hulk is needed, and sets to destroying Johannesburg. Captain America sees what scares him most: the war being over and him going home. It's genuinely chilling, the latter especially. But what does Thor get? A vision of the next Thor movie. Sure, there are throwaway lines that indicate Thor's fear is abandoning his home to the point that an outside force is able to invade and destroy, but the prevalent point made is that this is what Thor 3 is going to be about. When Thor leaves the farmhouse, it's simultaneously because the ever-tenuous familial bond he has to our world has been broken again,  but also because there needs to be another quick tease of what's to come for the son of Odin. So he goes and sits in a magic dream pool, has a cryptic conversation with Stringer Bell, never references it again for the rest of the movie, and shows back up half an hour later as the literal Deus Ex Machina to help Tony Stark bring to life something representative of the very thing he previously held him against the wall for having the nerve to suggest should exist.

The problem here is that nothing feels whole, or complete. The theme is persistent, and is concluded: everyone is obsessed with consequences both predictable and unforeseen. The film's villain is born of Tony Stark's continued emotional fallout from the amount of death that wore his name, and his introduction to an evil that no earthly power could hope to contest. An opportunity to make an artificial intelligence whose sole mission is world peace backfires when the thing with free will and unlimited intelligence immediately learns the Internet in full straight after being born. It's not surprising that something immediately introduced to everything ever would gravitate most towards the amount of conflict in humanity's short history, and the Old Testament, and conclude that evolution by way of extinction is the best course of action. Seems like that's something Tony might be a little embarrassed about, and would garner at least a, "Hey, yeah, sorry about that." But for the film's duration, his sole emotional reaction to his creative kerfuffle is a giggle. What the fuck, right? Well, here's the thing: if this film had any breathing room at all, you would come to know that Tony is fucking devastated by his actions, but he's not about to show that to anyone but himself, and he's not about to let a single consequence affect the mission. The movie doesn't have breathing room, though. His one moment in the film he could have had to drop a bit of self-reflection, he has to do that in tandem with Nick Fury (who must have been waiting in that barn for fucking hours), which further serves to undermine understanding him because, as I've just stipulated, Tony doesn't open up to nobody but Tony. The end result is a guy who wasn't supposed to have a character arc not having enough time to explain that he wasn't supposed to have a character arc and rather than coming off as persistent at all costs to a worthy cause, he instead just appears to act out against everyone but himself like a cold, fucking jerk.

The same lack of development spreads across every character in the film, except for, bizarrely enough, Hawkeye. Who'd have thought the only character with a satisfying character arc in the fucking Avengers sequel was going to be the loser with the arrows? But it's all there. He is mortally wounded in the film's opening, leading to many lines at his expense about his uselessness in the team. His home life is brought into question at around the same time, successfully peppering the right amount of foreshadowing to the aforementioned second act half-time in the farmhouse where we meet the Hawkeye household. As really the only moment in the film where the characters get to just stop and talk about their feelings and shit, Hawkeye has a moment with his wife where they discuss the notion that his place in the team doesn't make much sense. "You don't think they need me?" he asks. "Actually, I think they do," she replies. "They're gods, and they need someone to keep them down to earth." But this human element of the team is exactly that: human. It's a job that comes with a death clock. Hawkeye understands, and promises that once this Ultron business is closed, it's time to retire. And when that fight comes, and Scarlet Witch cowers in an abandoned home as a young child exposed to and asked to fight in a war would, Hawkeye is the one that gets to deliver a knockout speech. "The city is flying, we're fighting an army of robots, and I have a bow and arrow. None of this makes sense. But I'm going back out there because it's my job. Okay? ... If you step out that door, you're an Avenger." He's basically wearing a sign the entire film saying, "I'm the character that sits enough between primary and secondary that my death would not affect any of the surrounding franchises, but would be considered an emotionally affecting event." And when he's sitting in the escape pod, and sees the child trapped underneath rubble ahead of him, and sighs because he knows he's going back out there, and when Ultron approaches in the helicopter showering machine gun fire in their path, and he shields the young boy with his back, you're ready for the uncharacteristically obvious trademark Whedon death. But that's when he hits you. Quicksilver zips into the line of fire just in time to catch about fifty bullets in his chest. "Bet you didn't see that coming," he mutters before falling to the ground. You're right, Quicksilver, I didn't, but your death (a true hero's death) is supposed to have an impact. This is supposed to be the bittersweet period to Hawkeye's character arc. This is the only character that he actively hates in the film, the one who mortally wounds him in the film's opening and the one he not-so-jovially threatened to kill just minutes prior. But it simply can't resonate, because Quicksilver's entire screen time amounts to roughly 10 minutes total. Whedon does his best - his all-too-fleeting moments on screen aren't wasted, and he knows the two best ways to show the impact of his death are to reflect it in the agony on his twin sister's face and through Hawkeye lying beside his dead body and saying, "Long day", and they do hit, but it's all too hollow. You simply didn't know Quicksilver well enough to care that he's now gone (not to mention his death seems a little convenient given the aforementioned legal trouble surrounding his existence in another franchise).

The narrative clusterfuck that is Avengers: Age of Ultron left me with a thought: when are we going to be able to point to one of these movies and say, "Yeah, that was the one. That's when it all paid off." It seems to be Marvel's mantra now to ensure that every film has multiple threads leading to the next set of films. This isn't necessarily a problem, until it encroaches upon the film's ability to exist in its own right, which is exactly what happens here. After seeing the first Avengers, I assumed that the individual character's movies would have all the tags, so that the team-up movies could be the staples - the ones where it all comes together and concludes that phase. Not to say I get the business of this better than the money-pool divers that are Disney, but I'd be willing to have a guess that there's a sizable chunk of Avengers: Age of Ultron's audience whose last Marvel movie was Avengers Assemble. They don't give a shit about the individuals' stories, so why the fuck are the individuals' stories showing up here to the point that it affects the coherency of the core narrative? What's just as bad is how difficult it's becoming to continually refresh the memory bank of where we're at with each new installment of the cinematic universe. This isn't comics. These movies aren't month to month, but year to year. So much of my understanding of this film hasn't come from multiple viewings, but from people on the internet. And this isn't even thematic resonance or artistic intent I'm searching for, the things that make mandatory multiple viewings acceptable, I'm just trying to work out what fucking happened. It may sound like I'm getting all worked up over a movie that's just stuffed a bit too full, but this is indicative of a much larger problem. Avengers: Age of Ultron has already made a literal metric fuck-ton of dollars, with no signs that it's going to slow down any time soon. Disney is steadily gaining control of everything we see at Summer, and if these figures are anything to go by, a narrative clusterfuck is going to be the blueprint for all future releases. And the worst part, the really insidious shit of it all, is that the film really isn't even as bad as I make it out to be. I've mentioned in previous reviews, including the start of this one, that Disney has this almost endearing mantra to never be bad - in that regardless of how short of totally amazing they fall, they must never make a truly rank piece of shit. Avengers: Age of Ultron, for one, deserves credit for being a superhero movie that actively and repeatedly shows the good guys saving people. Almost certainly a response to Man of Steel, there are multiple scenes in which wanton destruction of architecture is only done once the area is clear of human folk, and the climactic battle is about saving the people on the floating city first, and beating the shit out of the villain second. That should be commended. For two, it has some wonderful character moments that I haven't already mentioned: everyone trying to pick up Thor's hammer, Vision having a quiet moment with Thor after just being born in which he looks at the Asgardian, and his cape, nods and grows one of his own, Thor patronisingly telling War Machine that his less-interesting superhero story was, "Very good", Thor quietly telling Tony that his girlfriend is better -- you know what? Let's just call it every bit with Thor that wasn't a precursor to Thor 3: Party Hardy. And it's these truly brilliant small touches that can anesthetise an audience into believing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But if Gestalt is what Marvel has always been going for, they've fucked it up this time. I truly hope that they recognise this unsustainable system before it's too late, but if the zeroes in their bank accounts are anything to go by, that may not be the case. Like it or not, we're entering the future of cinema - the Age of Wheelspin - where a film willingly sacrifices the coherency of its narrative to let you know what's just around the corner, where the next five years have already been mapped out to ensure you can't get off the train, and where everyone behind the camera is too good at their job to allow these hot messes to clearly not be worth your time. And it's working. For all of my ranting, I'm just as much a part of the problem as you, and I know that. But I'll be there to see everything that's coming, because even if at the back of my mind, I'm scared it never will, I just gotta see how it ends.

"I'M SO CONFLICTED AND GORGEOUS."

Chappie

I don't know what to say about Chappie, but I do know what to say about Neill Blomkamp. I love that Neill Blomkamp gets to keep making movies, even though, out of three, I've yet to see one that I would actively say is 'good'. But what the fuck does good mean? There's no greater rationale for the argument that it doesn't mean jack shit than Neill Blomkamp's filmography. His Metacritic score isn't the best you'll ever see, especially for Elysium and the aforementioned, and yet I dare you to tell me that each of them aren't really fucking fascinating to watch. District 9 was an intense, visceral alien flick that was kind-of-not-but-totally-was about Apartheid. Elysium was a big, dumb hammer to the head of Universal Health Care that had the first villain to genuinely scare me since The Dark Knight. And now we have Chappie, a story that borrows liberally from Big Hero 6 in the way that Big Hero 6 borrowed liberally from The Iron Giant, in the way that The Iron Giant borrowed liberally from *batteries not included, in the way that *batteries not included borrowed liberally from Short Circuit, that is also about the implications of a robotic police force (Robocop), the moral line that gets blurred as we approach sentient artificial intelligence (her), and the very real ways that childhood indoctrination can occur (take your pick). It's equal parts a harrowing and heartwarming tale of growing up in a cruel world, a real world story with intermittent documentary footage, a crime film with the inevitable all-out three-way gang fight, a corporate espionage thriller, and a feature-length advertisement for a hip-hop, performance art duo. To me, it doesn't eclipse the sheer originality of District 9, but in a lot of ways, it's better than all of the best parts of Elysium, and worse than all of its worst. But like I've said already, that doesn't, and shouldn't, matter. Really, the best thing I can say about Chappie is that I have no fucking idea what to say about it.

Seriously, I have no idea where to start. I guess if the impetus of this essay is that Chappie is fascinating, I should go through all of the things that left me so fascinated. So let's start at the end, where Chappie quietly drops the idea before stepping back and refusing to argue the point that if we find a way to transfer our minds into robot bodies, we should do it. Let's back up a bit. Slumdog Millionaire (Dev Patel) is an engineer at a robotics company, who has created a legacy for himself in a line of efficient, obedient police robots. But Slumdog dreams of more; he's on the cusp of creating a robot that can, as he says, "look at a piece of art, and tell you if they like it." Big boss Alien: Resurrection (Sigourney Weaver) gives him the thumbs down to a robot with feelings, as any CEO making a mint from gunbots would. Like that would stop someone on the brink of playing God, though. Slumdog steals a decommissioned robot on the scrap heap, who caught a rocket launcher to the chest in the film's opening moments. Neglecting the fact that the battery fused to the chest plate effectively makes the unit nonchargeable (read: mortal), Slumdog gives the robot sentience, and Chappie is born. For the first few days of his five day lifespan, he learns from his various parental figures about what it means to be human, for better and, mostly, worse. Eventually, he finds out that things die, including him, and he doesn't accept that. Utilising a VR headset and six PS4s, Chappie learns the whole Internet in seconds and works out a way to transfer his consciousness into ASCII art on a TV screen. He does a copy of his soul. The core conflict of the film's final act, or one of its three or four core conflicts, becomes finding a new body for Chappie before the battery goes dead. But then Slumdog catches a bullet in the stomach, and with only one spare robot body, Chappie does a soul copy on Slumdog and transfers his entire being into the bucket of bolts. Slumdog then performs a wireless transfer of Chappie's soul into one of the many dead robots on the streets of Johannesburg (big blanket virus, don't ask), and the two literally run off into the sunset together, happily ever immortal. I don't think I need to offer any needlessly verbose deconstructions of the implications to this conclusion, suffice to say that it's dangerous, terrifying, and kind of brilliant in its courage to have this happen, and present it as a happy ending, with zero follow-up on the potential consequences. Blomkamp has said he plans for this to be part one of a trilogy, but I think it's ballsier to leave it at this. The film opens with stock interview footage of people saying that Chappie rocked the world, and its up to us to work out how, and whether their statement was foreboding or celebratory.

It's heavy shit, and it's as awkward with its delivery as that which came before it, but like District 9 and Elysium, it's hellbent on making sure you don't leave thinking you had a bad time. This go around, it's enlisted the help of Die Antwoord (Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser) to liven things up. To the uninitiated, Die Antwoord is a hip-hop group started by Watkin Jones and Anri du Toit, designed to be performance art satirising the lower middle class lifestyle prevalent in areas of post-Apartheid South Africa. They've been playing characters for years, and in Chappie, they continue the trend, playing themselves in the not-too-distant future, in which their music careers have tanked, and they've resolved to a life of crime, hiding in an abandoned factory while listening to their old albums, and eventually acting as surrogate parents to a sentient robot. It's fucking bizarre to watch as someone who knows Die Antwoord, I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like for someone who doesn't. They blend in well with Blomkamp's universe however - his films certainly weren't devoid of kooky characters before this. And speaking of, Russell Coight (Hugh Jackman) is the most ocker-inest Aussie villain you've seen this side of Uluru. If Die Antwoord and, to an extent, Chappie, are exaggerated caricatures of South African culture, Russell Coight is the Australian equivalent. He sports a mullet, a button up polo shirt and the shortest shorts you've ever seen, he threatens co-workers with pistols and fires at them before laughing, showing them the empty chamber, and exclaiming that no-one in the office can take a joke, and he literally utters the phrase, "Cross as a frog in a sock." I don't even know what the fuck that means. The only thing missing to make him more of an Australian stereotype that Australians don't identify with is a can of Fosters and a kangaroo for a car. This is not to sound like someone who can dish out it, but can't take it - his character is unbelievably entertaining in spite of his limited screen-time. And as per usual for a Neill Blomkamp film, there's an eccentric crime kingpin popping in occasionally, this time sporting a haircut not unlike Dennis Hopper in Super Mario Brothers, who is subtitled even though he only speaks Afrikaans once or twice, talking perfectly clear English for the rest of the film.

It's credit to how batshit crazy this movie is though that, in spite of the animated personalities on display, the most compelling of them all is the robot. People are going nuts for the quality of the motion capture, which once again serves to show how much Neill Blomkamp can do with so little. The motion capture isn't good - it's actually pretty cheap - but what's being motion-captured is a robot that behaves like a dog, full of jerky, erratic movement. And shitty mo-cap gets really good results if what you're after is jerky, erratic movement. An equal amount of credit should go to Sharlto Copley, who knocks it right out of the park as-per-fucking-usual. Watching him develop from a timid child emulating He-Man on the TV, to allowing himself to be brainwashed by Ninja into a crotch-grabbing, car-jacking gangsta, all with an adorably stunted vocabulary and syntax, is as good as it sounds, and Copley sells it beautifully. It should not be understated how easy it would be for this performance to tip over into the dreaded realm of "too much", but Copley deftly walks the line by committing to exactly what the role calls for in the moment. I genuinely wonder if he isn't, in time, going to be recognised as a critically successful Nicolas Cage (which totally sucks, Nicolas Cage is fearless and should be held in exactly the same regard as Daniel Day-Lewis). The fact that a montage in which Chappie steals cars from rich yuppies, believing them to have been stolen from "Daddy"(Ninja), can be equally parts hilarious ("You're a bad man! Don't steal cars from Daddy!" as he throws the driver across the road), and terrifying as parallels are inevitably drawn between what impressionable Chappie believes, and how something similar probably gets told to children in this situation, is testament almost purely to Copley's ability to sell it. But credit needs to go to Neill Blomkamp as well, for without him and his writing partner Terri Tatchell, District 9 would not have come to be and, by proxy, neither would have Elysium or Chappie. We come back to what I said about the man when I started this: you cannot say that his movies are not interesting to watch. Forget good and bad. Seeing a Neill Blomkamp movie is an experience only akin to his prior films. And they're fucking technical marvels. Say what you will about the quality of his storytelling, but his ability to squeeze every dollar out of a modest budget and turn out a beautiful product will keep this dude in the game for a long time. It's just a big ol' bonus that I happen to love everything he does, flaws and all. I don't think anyone should have any reservations about what he's about to do with the Alien franchise. As someone who thought Alien 3 was a flawed masterpiece and had a shit-hot good, dumb time with Alien: Resurrection, I don't think there's anybody better suited to the job today. If Michael Bay strived to achieve half with his stupidly large budgets that Neill Blomkamp achieves with his stupidly small budgets, the term "popcorn movie" would be in a far better place. Until that day, I'll keep singing his praises.

Holiday Movie Guide 3: The College Years

Big Hero 6

Early into Big Hero 6, young Hiro is introduced to his brother Satoshi's new invention, a personal healthcare robot called Baymax. After assessing and treating Hiro's wound, having just had a piece of sticky tape torn off his arm by his brother, Baymax asks the following question: "Are you satisfied with your care?" Hiro says something to the tune of, "What does that matter?", to which Baymax replies, "I cannot deactivate until you say that you are satisfied with your care." It's at this point that I began to tear up and mentally gave Big Hero 6 a big "fuck you." Because I'd seen this movie before. It came out in 1999, and it was called The Iron Giant. In that film, a young boy finds a robot out in the middle of the forest that tries to follow him home, leading him to demand, "You stay. I go. No following." In the film's climax, the government has launched a nuclear bomb at the boy's city to destroy the robot, because they don't understand it and therefore fear it. The robot has come to the realisation that he needs to sacrifice himself by flying into the bomb to save the people responsible for it. Hogarth begs him not to go. The robot bends down to him, and says, "You stay. I go. No following." And, sure enough, in Big Hero 6's final moments, Hiro and Baymax find themselves in a situation in which the robot has to sacrifice his life so that the boy may live, and the only way to ensure this is for the boy to say that he is satisfied with his care. He has to be the one to order the death of his friend. Not only his friend, but his big brother, who dies in an explosion early in the film. His big brother who was established as his protector, the person he could rely on to rescue him no matter what. As Hiro grieves, Baymax continues to insist that, "Satoshi is here", something Hiro dismisses as the robot being unable to comprehend death. It turns out he was talking literally, as just when Hiro needs it most, Baymax loads video recordings of his brother iterating on the robot's design. But, "Satoshi is here", means more than that, I think. Satoshi, Hiro's great protector, becomes reincarnated in Baymax, an artificial intelligence designed explicitly to protect people. When Hiro realises he needs to let Baymax deactivate in order to save the day, he says through tears. "I can't lose you too." He's not just watching his friend die, he's watching his brother die again. This is fucking powerful stuff, and it's kind of amazing Disney have pulled it off in a movie so bloated with other stories. You see, it's a super hero origin movie as well, a sub-genre notorious for an underdeveloped villain being the necessary result of needing to establish a universe and motive for the hero to be born in. But not only is Big Hero 6 trying to be a super hero origin movie, it's also trying to be a super hero team origin movie. All of the hip-cat scientists Satoshi works with have cool establishing moments in the beginning of the film that foreshadow their super abilities come the time for Avengers to Assemble. But there simply isn't enough time in one movie to fully flesh out a hero, a team and a villain. It's necessary to get all of this out of the way in one movie, however. If the first film was about the origin of the hero and formation of the team with no villain, it wouldn't work. If the second film was about the formation of the team with another underdeveloped villain, it wouldn't work. Disney understood that a couple of elements were going to get let down with this flick, and mercifully, they made the right choice to hammer home on the relationship between Hiro and his AI brother. In the amount of time that every member of the team is developed, the same amount of time is given to Hiro and Baymax flying around San Fransokyo (don't ask, but it looks so fucking cool), in which, among other things, Baymax is fascinated with the texture of a rope attached to a flying weather vane, delicately running his fingers along its surface. Disney knew there would be stinky parts to this movie, but they've done the absolute best job of handling it. The Iron Giant has found its spiritual successor. Fucking Disney, I swear to God.

St. Vincent

As the credits roll for St. Vincent, a fixed camera documents Bill Murray sitting on his shitty deck chair. He's got his headphones on, listening to a cassette tape of Bob Dylan's Shelter from the Storm on his Walkman, singing along out of key and time as he waters his dead pot plant with a garden hose. Eventually, he gets sick of having to hold it, so he just inserts the hose into the pot plant far enough that it sticks. This works for about 30 seconds before the water pressure forces the hose out of the container and onto the ground. He casually looks down at it, still singing along, and hops up to move over to the sun lounger in the middle of the dirt patch he calls his backyard. The camera swaps to a static top-down angle and he lies down and continues to ramble along to the song until it finishes and the screen fades to black. It's far and away the standout moment of St. Vincent, and in being so, it kind of proves the realisation I had about halfway into the film. St. Vincent is a bad movie; it's a poorly written quirky indie dramedy that panders to its audience in all of the worst ways and sacrifices moments of real emotion to the almighty God of convenient story beats. But it's also got Bill Murray in it, and for some reason, he seems to care enough about the source material to try and elevate it out of the mucky muck it wallows in. So, in the end, St. Vincent is a bad movie that I really liked, mainly because, as the credits showed, I'll watch Bill Murray do pretty much anything. This is not to discredit the few moments in which the film actually got somewhere with its material. There's a subplot involving Murray's cantankerous, gambling-addicted drunk showing another side of himself when he visits his wife who is in a home, suffering from dementia. So as not to freak her out when he drops by, he dresses up like a doctor, and offers no indication that he's her husband. In one of their scenes, he makes her laugh and she calls him by his real name. Recognising a potential breakthrough, he turns and says, "It's me! It's Vin!" For a brief second, she looks like she sees him, before the disease kicks back in and she gets lost once more, and all Vincent can do is look away and cry. In another subplot of the film, he suffers from a stroke, and when we next see him conscious, half of his face is paralysed. The people who care for him show up for a visit as he's undergoing speech therapy. Being an old man asked to say the word "dog", which is displayed with a picture on a card, can't be too dignifying an experience, and Vincent is trying to get the words out that he wants the nurse out of his room, but can barely enunciate. In a fit of defeated rage, he tips his table over and shouts. Let me remind you that this is Bill Murray we're watching here, a man whose warm and inviting legacy has left many people feeling like he's a grandfather to us all, and we're seeing him break. It is hard as hell to watch, because it's so daring. But don't worry, the movie's too scared to get too real for too long. The subplot that ties those two subplots together (I don't think the movie even has a main one) is that Vincent is running out of money. A loan shark is breathing down his neck with vague threats of violence and the home his wife is in needs the money he promised them months ago. But, rather than get real, the movie decides instead to have Vincent have the stroke in front of the loan shark, leading him to believe he's dead and therefore in no need to repay the debt, to have his paralysed face and immobility healed in a neat little montage, and to erase the necessity to have him pay his wife's bills by having her die. But, offensive to the audience as this is, it never rings truly hollow, because, as I said, Bill Murray seems to give a shit. And he doesn't deserve all of the credit, either. Melissa McCarthy, whose star-stealing performance in Bridesmaids deserved better than the roles for her that followed, knocks it out of the fucking park as the mother going through a rough divorce whose son finds a father figure in the titular next door neighbour. One scene has her detailing just how shit her life currently is to a Catholic school teacher played by the equally out-of-the-fucking-park-knocker, Chris O'Dowd. It's a really poorly-written monologue, but McCarthy's delivery of it, just the sheer fact that she gives a fuck, elevates it far beyond what it deserves. That's a sentiment that runs through the whole film; it deserves far less than what it has. But it's lucky enough to have a cast that try to make it more than what it is. And, above all of that, it has Bill Murray. One actor should never be enough to recommend a film, but there will always be an exception to a rule, and that exception is Bill Murray.

The Imitation Game

There's nothing expressly bad about The Imitation Game. It's well-crafted, professionally acted and it tells a story that is worth being told. But there's nothing expressly good about it, either, and I think that stems from its seeming unwillingness to really commit to any of its themes. There's a scene about two-thirds of the way through the film when brilliant mathematician Alan Turing and his team have cracked the Enigma code, which was garbled, but freely accessible, radio broadcasts detailing all German positions and plans during World War II. They're staring at a board of the position of every German plane and ship for that day, and one of them realises an imminent attack on an Allied Forces boat. What becomes a frantic race to notify the ship becomes a slow realisation that sending the ship off course to avoid the attack would be far too conspicuous, and could easily lead the Germans to believe that someone has cracked Enigma. To make matters worse, one of the mathematicians recognises the ship as the one his brother his currently stationed on. He begs the room to make one exception, but he and they all know that simply isn't possible. "We're not God," he says to Alan through tears. "Yes, we are," Alan replies. Good shit, right? The sort of shit you'd want this movie to double down on and really explore, right? Well, fuck you. This scene is followed by a quick series of moments explaining that they used statistical probability to choose which attacks to avoid or intercept, and which to leave alone. It's almost like there...isn't any sort of moral quandary here, which certainly isn't the case. It's just that the film is too afraid to lock into any of its ideas. Even the plot that it locks onto more than the others, a focus on Turing's homosexuality and subsequent persecution for such, pulls its punches where it needs to swing hard and fast the most. A lot of people don't realise it was illegal to be gay in the UK until 1967, and in spite of everything Turing did for his country, he was found guilty of being an abomination and, instead of going to prison and being unable to work, he accepted chemical castration as his punishment. The movie lightly suggests that the chemicals began to fuck with his ability to think straight, but the word to focus on here is lightly. It lightly suggests the chemicals began to fuck with his ability to think straight. It lightly condemns the abhorrent and nauseating treatment this hero found himself subject to. The string of events is powerful, but only if you put them together yourself, because the movie seems terrified that you might have an opinion on the matter, or that it might affect your opinion on the matter. It's not just here that it drops the ball, though. It's terrified that an in-depth examination into the machinations of Turing's machine would put the audience to sleep, relegating its explanation to a handful of stock-standard "Eureka!" moments. I wanted to walk out of the theater knowing pretty well how the machine worked. I walked out with a vague idea that it was the genesis for the modern computer. I mean, this was a story kept hidden by MI6 for decades. If it's coming out of hiding, you should want to tell it the best fucking way you can. Hit hard with Turing's persecution for being nothing more than a human being. Go deep into how brilliant his mind was. Turn over every rock involved with the notion that the knowledge provided by his machine led his team to pass judgement on who lived and who died every day until the war ended. Hell, there's even a subplot involving the fact that the only mind comparable to Turing's was a woman's, whose brilliance was looked over by everybody for not having a doodle, and the movie does nothing beyond say, "Yeah, ain't that fucked up?" before moving right along. I've said this before, but it doesn't ring any truer than right now: the only thing worse than a film that you hate is a film that you feel nothing for, and the only thing worse than a film that you feel nothing for is a film that you feel nothing for that could have been great. The Imitation Game is what it is, and there's nothing sadder than that.

Birdman

Birdman opens in the dressing room of Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton), an actor who used to be a household name for playing a superhero that has since disappeared into obscurity. He's one day away from beginning previews of a Broadway adaptation of a beloved book that he's writing, directing and starring in. As he talks to his daughter on Skype, my eyes trailed to a piece of paper stuck to his mirror. It read, "A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing." There are a lot of things that can be said about Birdman. It can be said that the fact that the film has been made to look like its been done entirely in one take is obviously not honest and is indicative of a movie desperately trying to dazzle you with technical brilliance and shy you away from thinking this is a compensation for lack of depth. On the other hand, it can be said that the "one-take" aesthetic enhances the idea that Riggan is a man putting everything on the line in a desperate attempt to be relevant again, and it's leaving him feeling like it could all come crashing down at a moment's notice, with one tiny mistake, but he can't go at a pace any slower than what he's currently going at. It can be said that the film's ambiguous narrative that constantly blurs lines between time and reality doesn't really amount to anything revelatory, and only serves to distract you from the fact that this is a film about a self-obsessed jerk talking to himself for two hours. On the other hand, it can be said that the film requires that ambiguous blend of fiction and reality because it's a very intimate depiction of a man at wit's end experiencing an existential crisis that is manifesting itself in the form of a character he used to play. It can be said that Riggan's rant to a critic who is planning on writing an awful review for the play before she's even seen it, in which he takes her to task for never bothering to talk about the technical craft or intent in a piece of art, instead getting bogged down in buzz-words and references to other works is hypocritical when the film itself can't go a single scene without a shameless pop culture reference to someone like Justin Bieber. On the other hand, it can be said that that's the point. Birdman isn't for everybody. The aforementioned one-take aesthetic, coupled with its fondness for Extreme Close-Ups and an all-jazz-drumming soundtrack makes for a very intense, frenetic two hours. But Birdman isn't trying to be for everybody. Birdman is just Birdman, and that's maybe the greatest praise I can give it. It's interesting that the movie I saw before this, on the same day, was The Imitation Game, a movie that certainly wants you to think that it is what it is, but is really a false, half-hearted version of what it could be. But that's just my opinion, right? Well, that's the beauty of Birdman. It's completely aware of itself, from its aforementioned condemnation of and conviction to cultural references, to casting Michael Keaton, a man whose career evaporated after he stopped playing a superhero, as a character whose career evaporated after he stopped playing a superhero, to casting Edward Norton, a man notorious for being brilliant, but difficult to work with, as a character who is notorious for being brilliant, but difficult to work with. Any criticism you may have for the film, the film has already covered it during the film, which is appropriate when you consider that this entire thing is about a man who can't get out of his own head. And even though it doesn't care if you like it or not, it still tries to cater to everybody. People with any understanding or respect for the craft of film-making, people who appreciate dark, complicated, and unresolved character drama, and people who are sitting down to a movie called Birdman and are expecting to laugh will all be catered to. But every one of those people will also be challenged. Riggan spends the entire film trying to reconcile whether or not he's capable of being good, as an actor and a person. In the end, he realises the only way to win the respect and legacy he so desperately desires is to take the scene where his character kills himself to end the play, and to actually kill himself to end the play. Except he manages to survive by only shooting off his nose, in a move that earns him legendary status and unprecedented praise from critics and public alike. Except he didn't shoot off his nose, because when he removes the bandages, he just looks like he's been punched in the face. But he's happy. And then he hops out onto the windowsill of his hospital room and flies away into the sunrise. That's Birdman. I fucking loved Birdman, but who cares what I think? Birdman will still be Birdman, and frankly, there's nothing better than that.

American Sniper

Much of the public had already made up its mind about American Sniper before I got a chance to sit down to it. Being one of the few American productions to address the Iraq war, directed by the politically outspoken Clint Eastwood no less, it was always going to garner a lot of attention. And, for the most part, people's reservations on what the movie was going to be weren't going to change after they saw it. A lot of people assumed it was going to be the "Ooh-rah"-inest, "America, fuck yeah!" propaganda-fueled, Islamaphobic recruitment film of the decade, and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing to them, they were able to walk out of the theater thinking they were right. Celebrities have tweeted their distaste and support for the flick in equal measure, allowing these people to feel further validated in their steadfast notion of what this movie is. Personally, I didn't know what to expect of American Sniper. Apart from knowing there was a scene where a Cabbage Patch Kid was used as a baby, I didn't have much to go by. I'd heard a bit of what people had thought of it, and I'd seen the stellar trailer for it. Going by the trailer alone, I was expecting a film that dissected the psychological impact that a war in which the enemy wears the same clothes as the innocents can have on a person. The movie that I saw was kind of about that, but it was a little more complicated than that. And it's that complication that it locks onto, resulting in a film that's not enjoyable in the slightest, because it isn't supposed to be. Like the conflict it covers, it's complicated. Telling the true-enough story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who accumulated around 160 kills during his services, the film uses him as a vessel to look at what war has always done to those who fight in it, and the ways in which we see and react to such a person. The movie opens with Kyle perched with his sniper rifle, looking at an Iraqi woman and child moving towards an American tank. The mother hands the child a grenade, and the child begins to run towards the tank. As the music intensifies, and Kyle's finger goes towards the trigger, the movie hard cuts to a handful of scenes about his childhood, in which we see two children being taught by their God-fearing father that there are three types of people in the world: wolves, sheep, and sheep dogs, and that he'll beat the shit out of them if they don't grow up to be anything other than sheep dogs. From there, it's a relatively swift series of scenes that show the young Texan grow up, enlist, find a girl, and head out to war following the events of September 11, 2001, all leading back around to that opening scene. Kyle pulls the trigger, and ends the boy's life. The mother screams in pain and rushes to her son, picks up the grenade and attempts to throw it. Kyle takes her down too. His spotter commends him. "Get the fuck off me," Kyle replies. This didn't happen when I saw the movie, but I've been told by people I trust that the theater broke into applause at the sight of seeing a Middle Eastern woman and child gunned down by a Caucasian soldier. The very thought of that makes me nauseous, but let me run with it to try and understand it. It's their reaction to a movie they feel is giving them the reason to. Except I don't think it is. Watching American Sniper reminded me more than a little of Starship Troopers. Stay with me, here. Starship Troopers was initially hailed and condemned for being a jingoistic, nationalistic, dogmatic piece of trash that painted a future where the world's government was simply "America". What people only realised in later years was that the film was a complete act of satire - a scathing, stone-faced critique of the way Paul Verhoeven saw the country. In a lot of ways, I see American Sniper as a similar beast. It's not satire, but it's asking you to at least think about what it's saying as opposed to what it's showing. If you didn't know, Chris Kyle was murdered by a wounded veteran, probably due to the PTSD he was suffering from. The film ends with real footage of his funeral procession, a humongous-scale event that drew countless people out of the woodwork to commemorate a hero. And it's there that the word is finally used - hero. And sure, going by what we see, we're looking at a hero, but let's think about what's being said. This was a complicated conflict, and it remains so to this day. Imagine being in it. Kyle desperately searches for the evil he can prescribe purpose to, a Hitler or a Ho Chi Minh that he can call a villain, and finds it in a psycho with a penchant for drilling children's heads, and a merciless sniper whose skill matches his own. It's such a movie thing to do, but that's the point: movies like this have clearly defined notions of good and evil, and Kyle needs this. From here, Kyle spends each tour hunting them only to have them slip through his fingers over and over, and no amount of ally deaths that he caused or level-headed pleas from his wife to let go of the confusion and focus on what matters will stop him, because he claims his country still needs defending. But there's no hiding it by the end: this is a man so full of confused rage with nowhere to direct it but at the one thing he can call bad. It destroys him. A soldier he rescued tries to thank him at an auto shop back home, and Kyle can't even look him in the eye. He's arguing with his wife while driving down the freeway, and a tailgating van behind him leads him to believe he's in a car chase. The only thing that saves him in the end is visiting and rehabilitating wounded veterans. What a selfless act of heroism, right? That's what you see, but think about what you're being told. The only way he can return to his normal life is to sink himself straight back into the horrors of war, to look upon the result of something it's all to easy to call evil and to face it every day until it eventually kills him. Chris Kyle enjoyed killing those he did. He called them "savages". Think of that what you will. But if you think American Sniper is justifying your world view, think again. You don't get one side of a coin without the other. And while the film might support the conflict in Iraq, it doesn't support the way we're talking about it. We called Chris Kyle a hero, but it's not that easy. It's a little more complicated than that.

Dumb and Dumber To

The big mystery of Dumb and Dumber To is why it isn't funny when it's a carbon copy of its predecessor. It's not like this can't work; Home Alone 2 taught us that it can actually work pretty well. Why is it then that seeing all of these jokes that made us laugh twenty years ago and still make us laugh don't work in this context? The answer is actually rather simple: it's the heart, or lack thereof. Dumb and Dumber was, at its core, a sweet-natured flick about two best friends supporting each other no matter what. Anyone who got hurt deserved it, and nobody did anything deliberately to hurt another's feelings. Dumb and Dumber To has such a strong disdain for everyone in it that there's rarely a moment when it isn't trying to pull humour from someone else's pain. Don't get me wrong, now: comedy comes from pain, but there has to be a point to it. One of Dumb and Dumber To's few funny moments occurs with the return of the Mutt Cutts van. Harry and Lloyd fly over a hill in a recreation of the shot in the first film, slow-mo close ups documenting their joy at having their old friend back, before the front of the van nosedives into the road and they wreck it. So, that's comedy coming from pain, but what's the point? That you the audience are fucking idiots for thinking you might have wanted this. The closest thing I could possibly describe as enjoying this movie was taking mental note of how much the six (fucking six) writers must love Breaking Bad, Empire of the Sun, Jeff Daniel's butt crack and cruel jokes towards anyone that isn't a white, straight, physically and mentally able man. Dumb and Dumber To has no heart. It's not laughing with you, but at you. It's an ugly fucking turd.