TOP TEN 2015

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This Christmas, a holiday season inundated with an insurmountable flood of Star Wars merchandise, I heard my nephew describe one of his toys as a "Lego Movie Lego Set." In other words, this is a toy set based on a film adaptation of that same brand of toy set. Setting aside the meta-awareness that The Lego Movie brought to the conversation, that playset throws into stark reality the perpetual cycle of film and merchandise, forever feeding off of each other.

Before my second viewing of The Force Awakens, a ticket purchase that I felt some vague guilt about, there was a big screen commercial that by all appearances advertised neither a film nor a product, but rather urged its audience to talk to more people about Star Wars and watch more Youtube videos about Star Wars. We've gone beyond advertising products, and are now advertising cultural monopolies--the utter domination of discourse.

Culture is eating itself. 2015 exists at the nexus of rampant reboot/remake/requel culture. Movies that make significant money are almost never original properties anymore. That being the case, production companies have delved deep into their reservoirs to try to dredge up old properties that still carry with them a modicum of brand recognition. Thus we get the crushing inevitability of a nostalgia-pillaging Jurassic Park sequel. A wretched Fantastic Four cobbled together out of sheer corporate obligation. A new Terminator movie that nobody liked, the third Terminator movie in a row that was meant to kick off a subsequently aborted trilogy. A trilogy of failed trilogies. And on the horizon, a Die Hard remake, a Labyrinth remake, a Memento remake, and cinematic universes for Marvel, DC, Ghostbusters, Avatar, Transformers, Hasbro, the Universal Monsters, and The Fast and the Furious, among others.

The cart is firmly before the horse.

THE GIFT: That Keeps on Giving

Director: Joel Edgerton
Writer: Joel Edgerton
Cast: Rebecca Hall, Jason Bateman, Joel Edgerton
Runtime: 108 mins.
2015

The Gift is an incredibly functional movie, accomplishing everything it set out to accomplish by using every tool at its disposal. Edgerton's directorial debut sees him attempting the triple crown--writing, directing, starring--and he nails each of those three roles. The Gift is lean and mean, with no wasted moment. So I can't say it's the movie's fault that it doesn't contain the spark necessary to vault into the pantheon of Instant Classic the way Nightcrawler did for me last year. I'm not the first to make that comparison, but it's a fruitful one; Nightcrawler may be messier than The Gift, but that movie's frequent high points court transcendence. The Gift is just more subdued, which is a choice rather than a flaw.

Perhaps a more generous comparison to establish is that The Gift is a far more subtle version of Fatal Attraction. The movie follows a loving couple who have just moved to a gorgeous hillside home in California. While out and about they encounter one of the husband's childhood acquaintances, Gordo (Joel Edgerton). Simon (Jason Bateman) doesn't recognize him right away, but later informs his wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall) that Gordo was something of a weirdo back in school. Thus it's no surprise that Simon rapidly becomes uneasy when Gordo keeps showing up at their house unprompted, butting in on meals and leaving gifts that eventually take a sinister turn.

FANTASTIC FOUR: Journey to Turdworld

Director: Josh Trank

Writers: Jeremy Slater, Simon Kinberg, Josh Trank
Cast: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey
Runtime: 100 mins.
2015

Nobody wants to hang around in Turdworld. A jaunt to Turdworld might be acceptable. Even a journey through it. But when your entire film is a journey, and the sole destination is Turdworld, the audience has a right to feel both robbed and insulted.

Turdworld is both a metaphor and my personal name for the other-dimensional planet which is the setting for the significant setpieces of Fantastic Four. Ever since his boy genius youth, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been pursuing experiments involving the transmission of matter to and from somewhere else. He's had the help of his blue collar buddy Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), but it isn't until an older scientist (Reg E. Cathey) and his daughter (Kate Mara) stumble upon Richards' work that he receives the funding and support he needs to fully bring his dream to reality. The daughter, Sue Storm, helps out, as do her slacker brother, Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), and the defunct former-boy-genius-attached-to-the-project, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Some of them use the machine to transmit themselves to Turdworld, and as a result they are horribly mutated. Then they try to fix their mutation? I don't know, the movie functionally stops happening at that point.