QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO: In the Mouth of Mallardness

It's March, time for Post-Credit Coda's annual tradition of highlighting female directorial voices. The endless sea of dude directors can be disheartening, but diversity means seeking out the voices that you want to hear more of in the world. It's also a surefire way to keep one's perspective from stagnation.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Sally Cruikshank
Writer: Sally Cruikshank
Cast: Sally Cruikshank, Kim Deitch
Runtime: 10 mins.
1975

First take ten minutes to watch this film on youtube.

Animation is one of the most painstakingly difficult artistic mediums to produce. It takes either tremendous resources or tremendous dedication, usually both. There have been more than a few studios and creatives whose career was demolished by an expensive animated flop. Plenty more animation projects have been artistically compromised by the encroaching necessity of cutting corners. The result is a lot of safe, unobjectionable animation. A handful of children's films a year with cookie cutter messaging that fit squarely in the dominant tastes of the time. This makes animation the site of enormous untapped potential.

In 1973, a young animator named Sally Cruikshank graduated from Smith and moved on to the San Francisco Art Institute. While working at a commercial-film company called Snazelle films, its president essentially gave her free rein to work on whatever project she wanted while churning out a commercial here or there. The project she chose spanned two years and gobbled up $6,000 of independently financed money. Cruikshank herself produced every illustration and her then boyfriend Kim Deitch provided the color. They would also voice the two main characters. The result was Quasi at the Quackadero, a ten minute psychedelic comedy about some talking ducks and their day visit to a surreal carnival. To call the film a labor of love would be an understatement.

A WRINKLE IN TIME: You Get a Star, You Get a Star, Everybody Gets a Star

It's March, time for Post-Credit Coda's annual tradition of highlighting female directorial voices. The endless sea of dude directors can be disheartening, but diversity means seeking out the voices that you want to hear more of in the world. It's also a surefire way to keep one's perspective from stagnation.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ava DuVernay
Writers: Jennifer Lee, Jeff Stockwell
Cast: Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, Chris Pine, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Zach Galifianakis, Michael Peña
Runtime: 109 mins.
2018

The primary reason A Wrinkle in Time is such a colossal disappointment is that the script makes the least interesting choices at every turn. Agency is stripped from characters and purpose is siphoned out of the universe until all that remains is a vague progression of spectacle loosely bound together by trite, non-specific plot proclamations. Any potentially interesting ideas present in the film are more alluded to and forgotten than actually used to good effect. The narrative offers us intriguing elements, then breezes right on past them. It's an exercise in intellectual and imaginative futility.

It's such a shame because the auspicious elements are there, just for a second, peeking their heads out long enough to indicate what could have been. The film anchors us in the perspective of Meg Murry (Storm Reid), a talented child who has fallen into a social and academic funk ever since her scientist father Mr. Murry (Chris Pine) disappeared five years ago. Little does she know that she is about to go on an interplanetary journey of self-discovery, as her genius younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) has made friendly contact with three space witches: beings of pure energy who wish to fight the forces of evil by helping Meg and Charles Wallace find their missing father, who has been held hostage in the far reaches of space.

THE BAD BATCH: It'll Cost You an Arm and a Leg

It's March, time for Post-Credit Coda's annual tradition of highlighting female directorial voices. The endless sea of dude directors can be disheartening, but diversity means seeking out the voices that you want to hear more of in the world. It's also a surefire way to keep one's perspective from stagnation.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour
Cast: Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Jayda Fink, Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, Yolonda Ross
Runtime: 118 mins.
2017

The Bad Batch is the second film by Ana Lily Amirpour, who now bears the distinction of being the first repeat director in this series. Two years ago I reviewed her debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which I absolutely adored. Now that her follow-up is out, we can begin speculating about Amirpour's signature voice. And oh boy, does she have a signature voice.

The heroes of Amirpour's films are compromised women. They are furious avengers, power and fury viciously channeled through femininity and flung back at a world that refuses to accept them as they are. They are like femme fatales, if noir were told from their perspective rather than the detective's. They exist in Bad worlds, blasted worlds, but their steely resolve makes them the baddest of the bad. They move through their environment like wraiths, wreathed in silence. Their world is gorgeously framed, a twisted reflection of their tortured inner life. They rarely speak, instead opting to let violence do the talking. Above all else, they are achingly gorgeous, and blisteringly cool. Every aspect of the film bends around their attitude. The camera slinks through its environment, as if coiled to pounce. The shots stretch on into existential oblivion. These are the hallmarks of an Amirpour film.

Oscars Results 2018

Here I am, late to the party. In truth, I had forgotten all about the Oscars until the night they were happening. As such, this post represents both my predictions and my commentary of the results, and you'll have to do your best to trust that I did not fudge the numbers!

My prediction success rate was 63% (15/24), not too bad. In some ways it was a baffling year to predict. Very few of this year's candidates lit my world on fire, but there are certainly gems amongst them.

Below are the results, and some discussion about each category.

Top Ten 2017

Other Top Ten Lists.

With the release of The Disaster Artist came a preponderance of articles heralding The Room as "The Worst Movie Ever Made." That specific phraseology troubles me for several reasons. The first (and least important) is that it's simply not true. Part of the charm of The Room is the baseline competency which serves to highlight its deranged aspects by contrast. It's clear that Wiseau threw a decent amount of money at the thing, and that there were at least a handful of bored but capable professionals working on it. There is an endless wealth of bad cinema out there. Using any criteria you could think of, I guarantee I could find a "worse" movie than The Room. It's arguably the most famous bad movie ever made, but it is not the worst.

The second thing I take issue with is our culture's continued insistence on extremes, binaries, polemics. Something is either good or evil, smart or dumb, best or worst. "The Room: One of the Many Bad Movies Ever Made" just isn't as eye-catching a title. Clickbait preys upon the easily beguiled. The sooner we can move toward a place of nuance and admit that things can be many-layered and multifaceted rather than singular and objective, the sooner we can properly converse with each other.

Finally, I hate that calling The Room the worst movie ever made is totally in violation of the spirit of the thing. The dopamine rush that comes with being a part of a consensus feels good, but we shouldn't be watching bad movies to fit in. Everyone's favorite movie, favorite bad movie, and least favorite movie should all be deeply personal, not adherent to some sort of quasi-objective regulating groupthink. Every time someone is ashamed to admit their favorite, or sheepishly refers to their preferred media as "guilty pleasures," we have lost an opportunity for empathy and celebration.

This is why top ten lists are heinous. They are so often used as a tool to exert critical supremacy over the taste of others, either by the author or by a reader. The audience consumes a list and fires back accusations of, "What, no _____???" The author gets defensive and feels the need to tear down other art to legitimate the art that they chose to feature. The cycle repeats.

Top ten lists are bankrupt for the same reason awards shows are bankrupt: It is ultimately absurd to compare different works of art based on an often arbitrary set of standards. The act of wielding one film to cheapen the impact of another is so counterproductive to the reason these lists were created to begin with.

Yet I still make top ten lists for two reasons. When top ten lists are made with openness and love, the year-end proliferation of them functions as a celebration of incredible art. Not only that, but we learn about each other. It reveals a lot about the critic-as-person to see their ten preferred films. It should be invigorating to step into another perspective, not frustrating. Reading a top ten list is a time to open yourself up to new ways of experiencing the world--something that the best movies do better than anything.

The other reason is more selfish. For me, making top ten lists is a lot of fun. There are tough calls to make, sometimes agonizing; it reminds me of the tournaments I used to wage with my favorite action figures. I love them all, but someone needs to come out on top. The act of culling--or to put it more generously, curating--can be engaging the way puzzles are engaging. Putting together a top ten list is a feat of trying to fit each piece into its truest or most aesthetically pleasing place.

Perspective: 2017 in Review

Other Years in Review.

This was not my most productive year of film criticism. As always there are several reasons; I had a busy and artistically active middle of the year, for one. I barely caught any movies during that period, let alone had the stamina to write about them.

Beyond that, though, there were many times throughout the year when I struggled to find purpose in my writing. In a year of cultural upheaval, sending out rarefied opinions about art into the void felt especially inessential. Trying to confront one’s privilege involves listening, and it’s hard to listen while speaking. There were even moments in which I questioned my motivations and considered putting this project to bed.

Yet for all that, I continue to receive lovely encouragement from folks in my life that would be wrong to dismiss. So I have ended up spending a lot of time considering the role of the critic. What is film criticism beyond building up or tearing down the art we consume?

All this crystallized in the cultural impact of the new Star Wars movie. The vehement backlash smacked of outrage for all the wrong reasons, making clear an important truth. If we spend all our time listening, the most misguided voices will always be the loudest. Futile or not, criticism is an opportunity for action in at least one key sense: it provides a platform for discourse. And when criticism is well done, that discourse sets healthy terms like rigorous argumentation and a baseline of empathy.

Perspective is crucial to explore, and it cannot be boiled down to “well this is what I think and you can’t tell me I’m wrong!” I hope that this platform will be generative, not destructive, and only ever combative for the right reasons. It may feel indulgent to air my thoughts for all to see, but it’s a way to actively engage with the art I care about. I will try to keep improving and learning with each passing year.

Anyway, here are some stats:

This year Post-Credit Coda featured a total of 42 blog posts, including 39 movie reviews, 23 reviews of 2017 films, 1 top ten list, and 2 Oscars posts.

Of the 39 movie reviews, the average score was a 7.3 out of 10.

The highest score was a perfect 10, the first since 2015, for Alien.

The lowest score, a measly 2, belongs to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.

The breakdown is as follows:

Score - Number of Movies with that Score

10 - 1
9/9.5 - 10
8/8.5 - 8
7/7.5 - 8
6/6.5 - 6
5/5.5 - 2
4/4.5 - 1
3/3.5 - 2
2/2.5 - 1
1/1.5 - 0
0/0.5 - 0

The total number of hits for this year: 90,115. The total number of hits for each 2017 post adds up to 13,166.

Of the 42 eligible posts, the average number of hits per post was 313.

The highest number of hits: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter with 749.

The lowest number of hits*: Justice League with 95. (hahaha)

*not posted in the past day

I'll see you next year.

THE SHAPE OF WATER: Fish Love

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
Cast: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones
Runtime: 123 mins.
2017

Guillermo del Toro's American movies have tended to be feasts of design and concept that leave lingering questions in terms of execution. His strengths as a filmmaker are specific and his weaknesses are vague. Every time he puts out a movie, though, it's worth paying attention; it's clear the man is a visionary.

With The Shape of Water, it's especially difficult to ding the movie for being worse-executed than its peers, because as far as I can tell it has no peers. Shape is, after all, a comic drama romance sci-fi horror fairy tale thriller. Some of those categories might be a stretch, but perhaps Shape is ill-used by categorization in general. The plot involves a mute cleaning woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) who befriends a Creature from the Black Lagoon-esque fish monster who has been contained in the facility where she works. As usual, though, del Toro has little interest in foregrounding the plot, so neither will we.

DUNKIRK: Stress/Disorder

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Barry Keoghan, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy
Runtime: 106 mins.
2017

Dunkirk begins with a ticking clock. British soldiers pick through rubble as demoralizing fliers float down from the sky. The quietude is suddenly ripped asunder by the deafening pop of gunshots from unknown assailants. A young boy's companions fall away one by one; these shots are the starting pistol for a narrative that will not stop. Nor will the clock.

Dunkirk is everything Christopher Nolan has been working towards for the past twenty years, the magnum opus of his career. Who would have thought that a director who so adores high concept sci-fi would find his ultimate muse in World War II history? For Dunkirk is a culmination, the purest and most precise version of Nolan's creative mechanism. Accused of cold, systematic, unfeeling narratives--he has made a film about the cold, systematic, unfeeling nature of large scale military efforts. Accused (justifiably) of fridging women to motivate his protagonists--he has excised all women to create a hell of masculinity, and done away with all personal motivations beyond that of survival. Accused of hamfisted exposition and sloppy plotting--he has made a film in which the plot and dialogue only matter insofar as they allow the viewer to understand the magnitude of danger weighing on any given moment.

MOTHER!: Wife Material

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brian Gleeson, Domhnall Gleeson, Kristen Wiig
Runtime: 121 mins.
2017

A man and a woman make a home together. Their labors do not fall equally. The man is the worker, the breadwinner, the tortured genius, the star, the hero, the subject. The woman works too, but it is a labor of love. She is the caretaker, the homemaker, the bearer of life, the vessel of inspiration, the enabler, the sustenance, the muse, the object.

These are the brigade of gender norms that make up the steel trap of the perfectly titled mother!. In this movie director Darren Aronofsky has created a... fairy tale? allegory? parable? domestic drama?... about the infinite patriarchal cycle of husband and wife. This is the kind of film to achieve an F on Cinemascore, and it has very knowingly earned its ghastly marks. I can only imagine the revolting experience mother! must have been for those more literal minded folks looking for a good scare. To give you some idea of the level of abstraction at play, the script eschews character names in favor of titles: Mother, Him, Man, Woman, Cupbearer, Consoler, Whisperer, Zealot, Defiler, Lingerer, Devotee, Novitiate, Herald.

As with every aspect of mother!, the curious naming conceit is not merely meant to inflame. Every choice has a clear, ringing purpose. In this case, not only does the namelessness boost what is being represented into a more conceptual space, but it eradicates the humanity of the film's characters, replacing identity with a mythic social role.

STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI: Toxic Masculinity

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Rian Johnson
Writer: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, Benicio Del Toro, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Frank Oz, Lupita Nyong'o
Runtime: 152 mins.
2017

Spoilers throughout, though this was the second largest opening weekend of all time so I guess you've seen it?

I'm going to start by establishing some crucial context, because I'm about to be combative and I want folks to understand exactly how I mean to be combative.

A primary role of the critic is to provide a perspective and a platform that allows people to further engage and play with the art they consume. The role of the critic is NOT to decide whether a piece of art is good or bad. Any critic who believes this about himself (and I say "himself" because the ones who believe this tend to be men) is full of shit. Nobody should ever presume to tell you that your experience is wrong. Yet despite the inherent subjectivity of art, I maintain that it's not all relative. What this means is that we can have substantial discussions not only about our own experience, but about whether a work of art works or doesn't work within the context of itself. So basically, I would be a fool to ever suggest that someone should or shouldn't like something, but I could disagree about an argument they put forward concerning how the movie functions.

Which brings us to the explosive cultural phenomena shitstorm the recent release of Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. You've probably noticed that The Last Jedi has been widely divisive in a totally different way than its predecessor. The responses to The Force Awakens tended to fall into two categories: effusive praise and shrugging acceptance (of which I fell in the latter). But The Last Jedi has caused a stunning outpouring of hate, buffeted by an equal and opposite outpouring of love.

To play my hand, I liked The Last Jedi. A lot. Probably more than any Star Wars movie since Empire. And yet I very soon discovered that the internets have been aflood with fans expressing hatred, anger, disgust, sadness, and crushing disappointment. It reached epidemic proportions when fans expressed their ire by descending upon Rotten Tomatoes to torpedo the film's score, currently at 93% for critics and 55% for audiences. This swing of 38 percentage points is not unheard of. The unprecedented part is that for a blockbuster like Star Wars, the disparity between audiences and critics always goes in the opposite direction. So what's going on here?