THE WITCH: Toil and Trouble

Director: Robert Eggers
Writer: Robert Eggers
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson
Runtime: 92 mins
2016

I saw The Witch with a mostly full crowd. They talked, texted, and laughed through it. At the end the lights came up and people started grumbling.

"I want my money back."

"I couldn't even understand what they were saying."

"That was one of the worst movies I've ever seen."

Meanwhile my friends and I sat transfixed and slowly recovering from a soulwrenching cinematic experience. We remained shaken through dinner, and when I got home I felt uneasy turning out the lights for bed.

How could we have possibly had such a disparate experience from all the people around us?

DEADPOOL: Funny or Die

Director: Tim Miller
Writers: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Ed Skrein, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, Stefan Kapicic
Runtime: 108 mins.
2016

I have mixed feelings about Deadpool. The character immediately gripped me when I first discovered him in high school. As a friend recently put it, "He defeated a bad guy with a thought bubble. That's the greatest."

The structure of my personality has always been particularly susceptible to metafiction. "Metafiction" is shorthand for any work of art that is within the work of art aware of itself as a work of art. Basically, it's when the characters are allowed to talk back to the reader. The way form can dominate content in metanarrative has great appeal to folks with a structure-heavy mindset. Deadpool was one of my first exposures to blatant metafiction, and it was revelatory. The character was actively recognizing the formal context in which he was placed! He was bringing subtext to the level of text! He was making jokes about the audience's relation to fictionalized characters! It struck me as smart and very, very funny.

After digging into metafiction for my college English thesis, I've come to realize that the most important part of metafiction is not how clever or creative it is, but how well it is able to ground itself in real emotional truth. Vulnerability is the key to any meaningful narrative, and metafiction more than other genres can easily be too clever for its own good. By constantly referencing itself, a story can get caught up in irony to the point that it ceases to say anything more than "Look at how smart I am!"

Please.

Please look at how smart I am.

HAIL, CAESAR!: Das Capitol

Directors: Ethan and Joel Coen
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Veronica Osorio, Heather Goldenhersh, Alison Pill, Max Baker
Runtime: 106 mins.
2016

Hail, Caesar! is a dumb movie about dumb movies. As such, it never reaches the level of profundity of the Coen Bros.' long list of masterpieces, or even the escalating zaniness of their former comedic output like The Big Lebowski. If one were forced to rank their oeuvre, Hail, Caesar! has got to come in pretty low on the list, but the good news is that it doesn't aspire to be at the tippy top. I suspect that if seasoned filmmakers like the Coens tried to make their best-movie-ever every time they set anything to film, they would get burned out fast. Hail, Caeser! is clearly a screw around movie for everyone involved, and it ends up being a passionate and glorious one at that.

If you were to be so inclined to suggest that this movie has a plot, it would surround the activities of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a 1950's Hollywood fixer whose job it is to keep the aptly named Capitol Pictures up and running. He's not a creative, he just keeps the creatives functioning like cogs in a well-oiled machine. He has received an offer for a more stable job with reasonable work hours and far less stress, and this offer occupies his mind during the events of the film, which amount to a particularly trying few days for Mannix. His big movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) has been kidnapped by a group of shady communists who call themselves The Future, the media is circling like vultures, and there are a laundry list of other on-and-off-set troubles that Mannix must aggressively manage. In the end, is the creation of Hollywood blockbuster films worth all the trouble?

THE REVENANT: A Dish Served Cold

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writers: Mark L. Smith, Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Leondardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck
Runtime: 156 mins.
2015

Iñárritu has done it again. Following hot on the heels of his Best Picture win with Birdman, he has crafted yet another arthouse film that has thrust its way into mainstream consciousness. The Revenant has garnered a ton of buzz, topped the box office, and snagged a whole bunch of Oscar nominations. However, and I promise you I'm not simply being contrarian when I say this: The Revenant is a narrative failure. It's a bad story told haphazardly, yet in the most stylistically impressive way imaginable. It's all the more disappointing because it was close to being so much better.

Let's ignore the buzz surrounding the movie for a while. All that business about how difficult it was to film, and how Leo DiCaprio almost got killed a dozen times over--that'll come up later. For now let's just look at the film. Much of the runtime follows a scout for a party of trappers named Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio). He gets into arguments with fellow trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) about how best to get back to safety in the wake of a brutal Native American raid. Then he gets destroyed by a bear. Glass appears to be slowly dying, so team captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) elects three men to stay behind and take care of him: Glass's half-Indian son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), the young and goodhearted Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and the aforementioned greedy bastard Fitzgerald. The raiding party could come back at any point, so Fitzgerald goes ahead and tries to kill Glass, then kills Hawk instead and hides the body so that he and Bridger can move on, leaving Glass in a shallow grave. But Fitzgerald underestimates Glass's ability to crawl long distances.