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 HATEFUL EIGHT: America's Secret Sin

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Demian Bichir, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Channing Tatum
Runtime: 187 mins.
2015

I take pains to keep my reviews here as substantive as possible while providing the fewest number of plot and story details I can get away with. The lowest form of film criticism is by-the-numbers plot recap. I admire film reviews that can give me an idea of the movie while skirting any information that might influence my experience of the story.

However, I don't feel like I can give a proper review of The Hateful Eight, one of Tarantino's more controversial works, without digging into heavy spoilers. So I'm going to split this post into Spoiler and Non-Spoiler sections.

THE BIG SHORT: Bubble Trouble

Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Adam McKay, Charles Randolph
Cast: Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt
Runtime: 130 mins.
2015

I've invented an adage. It goes like this: I don't care what a movie is about.

That's not to say content isn't important. I also don't mean to imply that I don't have preferences. If someone were to ask me to choose between a movie about a high concept sci-fi adventure and a story about the trials and tribulations of ballerinas, given only that information I would pick the former. And yet, there are very few high concept sci-fi adventures that I prefer over Black Swan. The lesson I've learned over time is to never dismiss a movie based on its subject matter. If I've heard good things about a movie from trusted resources, or if I trust the people who worked on it, I will see it regardless of the subject matter, even if the subject matter is of no interest to me. The great thing about great movies is that they will make you interested in their subject matter.

The Big Short is about the housing bubble, and subsequent financial crisis, that crippled the American (and world) economy in 2007. More specifically, it is about the men who predicted, and thereby profited from, that very crisis. Some of the best jokes in the movie are about the disconnect between the moviegoing audience and the topic. Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett, our narrator, who tries to guide us through the narrative while acknowledging the eye-glazing dullness of the subject matter. Not only that, but the sheer boring factor of banking and finance is integral to the plot and themes of The Big Short. How did nobody see the housing crisis coming? They were too disinterested to look.

JOY: Dull Dolls

Director: David O. Russell
Writers: David O. Russell, Annie Mumolo
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rossellini, Dascha Polanco, Elisabeth Rohm
Runtime: 124 mins.
2015

I've heard time and time again that early career David O. Russell is better. My favorite of his has been The Fighter, the earliest of the four movies I have seen. I enjoyed the film, a boxing movie with a weird quirky spin. The dialogue was off kilter and the side characters were kooky; I still remember being thrown off kilter by the way the movie framed the weird cabal of sisters. It had a great original energy to it. Silver Linings Playbook maintained that energy, but situated it in a widely accessible package. The edges of psychological illness, that movie's subject matter, are smoothed over in a palatable and appealing way. Next was American Hustle, to which I gave a primarily positive review back in the day, but even then my major problem with the film was the lackluster convenience of the ending. It felt like Russell spent the whole movie setting up dominoes, then calmly placed them back in the box without ever knocking them over.

Now we've arrived at Joy, the culmination of a trend that has been brewing in Russell's work for years. After the critics and the public alike fell for Silver Linings Playbook, Russell has been catering to those crowds. These films aren't passion projects. They are what he thinks people want to see. This is a baseless claim of course, but I bring it up as an illustration for my feelings about Joy as a whole: it is a movie utterly devoid of passion.