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.

WHIPLASH: Crack That Whip

In which the protagonist's task is more challenging than getting pictures of Spider-Man.

Director: Damien Chazelle
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Miles Teller, J. K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist
107 mins.
2014

When you're young, movies have a direct line into your soul. They're like a flu shot--sometimes shocking, sometimes painful, inserting themselves into your body and altering your nervous system. Whether a child enjoys a movie or hates it is not necessarily beholden to quality or craft. Sometimes the things that make or break viewing experiences for kids can be a familiar image, or a character who talks a certain way, or the fact that the main character has a cat. This is why children can so easily watch movies with a sense of wonder, or a sense of terror, or a sense of unlimited empathy. It's also why children sometimes attach themselves to complete dreck.

As we stuff more and more movies into our craw, that sense of wonder gets calloused. We grow harder to please. We recognize obvious sentiment as obvious sentiment; tropes and cliches finally register as we see them for the seventh or twentieth time. We acquire expectations. We watch movies with our third eye open and wary. We criticize.

I just now made up that opaque reference to a third eye so let me try to explain it. One eye open picks out colors and shapes. Two eyes open situate those shapes in three-dimensional space. It would make sense that having a third eye open would situate physical objects in a greater contextual fabric, a fourth dimension if you will. That which is seen becomes important within the tapestry of time--it becomes historical, cultural, social. That third eye is our critical awareness, our consciousness of meanings and implications.

All of this speculation is totally irrelevant to Whiplash, because all I want to say about it is this: