JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 - Corpses Are Red, Violence Is Blue

Director: Chad Stahelski
Writer: Derek Kolstad
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ruby Rose, Common, Ian McShane, Claudia Gerini, Lance Reddick, Laurence Fishburne, Tobias Segal, John Leguizamo
Runtime: 122 mins.
2017

I never got around to reviewing John Wick, which is an awful shame because it was one of my favorite movies of 2014. I'll spend a few words on it now, namely that it featured the best choreographed action I believe I have ever seen in an American film. What's doubly astounding is that one of the few American films that belongs in the same conversation, speaking purely from a choreographic standpoint, is that other famous Keanu Reeves/Laurence Fishburne movie. And The Matrix only half counts as an American film when you take into account the considerable debt it owes to anime and wuxia.

Anyhow, in addition to being an unparalleled balletic accomplishment, John Wick also told an economical revenge story with a nice wrinkle of genre subversion. For once, the woman doesn't get fridged. John Wick's beloved wife dies, but at the hands of the cruel unfeeling universe. It is the thoughtless murder of John Wick's dog, a symbol of his lost love, that sends Wick on a murderous warpath.

Add to all that a slowly unfolding mythology centering around a shady but rules-based organization of trained assassins, and you have a special film.

It would be folly to hope for John Wick: Chapter 2 to be comparable to the first given the history of action movie sequels, or to feel fresh and exciting given the nature of sequels in general. Yet I am here to tell you that John Wick: Chapter 2 is somehow better than the first in almost every way.

Oscar Results 2017

The Oscars happened! My predictions stacked up... decently I guess? I correctly guessed 13/24, for a success ratio of 54%. Way worse than last year. But on the bright side, I had a 6/22 or 27% success rate for candidates I thought ought to have won, which is sadly higher than I expected.

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

Oscar Predictions 2017

Last year I decided not to do one of these posts, but then almost all my predictions were right, and you can't prove otherwise. Below I've listed the categories, candidates, who I suspect will win, and who I think ought to win out of the nominees provided. I'm way less certain about my picks this year. I'll check back with you all in a couple days to talk about how things go down.

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE: Orphan Black

Director: Chris McKay
Writers: Seth Grahame-Smith, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Jared Stern, John Whittington
Cast: Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson, Ralph Fiennes, Siri, Zach Galifianakis, Jenny Slate, Ellie Kemper, Jason Mantzoukas, Conan O'Brien, Doug Benson, Billy Dee Williams, Zoё Kravitz, Kate Micucci, Riki Lindhome, Eddie Izzard, Seth Green, Jemaine Clement, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Adam Devine, Hector Elizondo, Mariah Carey, Chris McKay
Runtime: 104 mins.
2017

The Lego Batman Movie, as well as its forefather The Lego Movie, are fundamentally postmodern in their construction. There are hundreds of definitions of modernism, and postmodernism, and the difference between them, but this washed up English major is going to try to lay out his understanding. Modernism flourished as a response to realism. The modernists realized that it was impossible to write things as they were, or as they could be, because art must always be a false construction. Artifice. So rather than pursue the unachievable ideal of accurate representation, the modernists embraced the quirks of their artistic medium. They sought to tell stories using somewhat traditional narrative structure, but with a hearty helping of formal playfulness. William Faulkner could write a chapter from the perspective of a corpse. Henry James could tell stories about ambiguity using ambiguous characters and ambiguous language. And in the great modernist tome of Ulysses, James Joyce could swap out protagonists, engage in varying levels of stream of consciousness, drown you in referentiality, and break your brain in a myriad of other ways.

RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER - Residual Evil

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Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Iain Glen, Ali Larter, Shawn Roberts, Eoin Macken, Fraser James, Ruby Rose, William Levy, Rola, Ever Anderson
Runtime: 106 mins.
2017

So soon into 2017 and already we have a veritable lock for worst movie of the year. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter makes me furious. Not just because it's bad. All these movies are bad. Rather, the specific way in which it is bad feels like a slap in the face, especially as this is the only movie in the franchise that I had the misfortune of paying for a movie ticket to see.

First off, the Resident Evil movies have always had a bad habit of letting important storytelling moments happen offscreen between movies, but The Final Chapter takes this trend to unacceptable levels. Up until this point, the continuity of these films has been lazy and nonsensical, but in a twisted sense consistent. For whatever reason, Anderson suddenly decides to jettison all that.

The previous film ends with (spoiler alert) Alice being brought to the nation's capital to team up with Wesker (Shawn Roberts). She brings Becky (her surrogate daughter), the gun for hire Ada Wong, and a newly reformed Jill Valentine. Once she arrives, Wesker gives her back her powers and tells her that he has use for her--she is the only one who can combat the infected hoards that threaten the last pockets of humanity. Pan out to various monstrosities laying siege to (if memory serves) the Lincoln Memorial building. Or maybe it's the White House.

That's a legitimately cool set-up, and it felt like the plot was escalating appropriately towards its final installment.

Then The Final Chapter begins. DC is a desolate wasteland with a monster here or there, Alice wakes up alone, her friends and daughter are never spoken of, and we never find out what happened. Instead all we get is some tossed out, oblique reference to DC being a trap for Alice set up by Wesker (why?), and an assertion that he "pretended" to give her her powers back. For the first time in the franchise, it seems like Anderson's heart just isn't in it.

RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION - Fifth Time's the Charm

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Worth noting: this is one of the best taglines I have ever seen.

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez, Aryana Engineer, Bingbing Li, Boris Kodjoe, Johann Urb, Oded Fehr, Shawn Roberts
Runtime: 96 mins.
2012

I actually... kind of like this one? Lest you think it anything but utter trash, I should point out that the number of dead characters who make an appearance in this movie is at least four. Five if you count the big ax guy (there are two this time). This is indeed a Paul W.S. Anderson movie through and through, sense be damned. But it might be good despite itself? Then again, I have probably developed Stockholm syndrome after being held captive by my resolve to review the entirety of this miserable franchise.

The film opens with Alice (Milla Jovovich) floating up through the water. In time, we realize that we are seeing the aftermath of the final shot of the previous film, in which a brainwashed Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) leads a fleet of battlecopters to destroy Alice and the other survivors. Except it's reversed and in slow motion. This is a neat little visual feast to kick off the proceedings. Pointless, perhaps, and ruined by Anderson's insistence on watching it in forward motion immediately afterwards, but ingratiating nonetheless. It's a neat way to slip us back into the series' gonzo mentality.

RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE - All Abored

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Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller, Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts
Runtime: 97 mins.
2010

Resident Evil: Afterlife is Paul W.S. Anderson's triumphant return to the director's chair after a two film hiatus. It sucks. Anything from Apocalypse or Extinction that one could vaguely construe as a step up for the franchise has been stricken from the record. Instead we have a narrative that doesn't progress so much as it meanders, and a cast that seems suitably bored with the wheel-spinning.

Attempts at reconstructing the plot strike me as fruitless, but we'll give it a go nonetheless. The film opens with Alice leading an army of Alices deep into an Umbrella base of operations in order to try to stamp out Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), high-ranking Umbrella member and author of much of Alice's pain. In a bombastic firefight that conveniently kills off all of Alice's clones but not Alice, she defeats Wesker only to have him escape. From there, having a bit of time on her hands, she decides to venture up to Alaska where her companions from Extinction supposedly went to find a safe haven known as Arcadia. When she gets there she finds nothing in particular, except her old friend Claire (Ali Larter) who attacks her for no reason, and also can't remember why she's there. Afterwards they wander down to... was it New York?... because of another signal. They find more survivors on the roof of a prison surrounded by zombies, so Alice lands her plane on the roof. Then they tiddlywink around for a while and argue about stuff. Also, it turns out Arcadia is a ship that is in the nearby harbor. They eventually make it over there but it's a trap, and they have to fight Wesker again in a finale that is overlit to all hell.

This is like Resident Evil's version of a road trip movie. The first half is inconceivably dull. Anderson gives Alice nothing to do but drone on in her video diary, explaining and re-explaining why she's flying where she's flying in monologues that would embarrass a fifth grade thespian. Not to mention that Afterlife has a serious problem with the core tenet of drama: cause and effect. Typically one wants to string together plot elements with either a "therefore" or a "but," yet Afterlife is a perpetual string of "and then"s. Alice does this, and then she does this, and then she goes here, and then this happens. It's like watching somebody's vacation photo slideshow.

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION - Just Deserts

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Director: Russell Mulcahy
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Ali Larter, Iain Glen, Ashanti, Christopher Egan, Spencer Locke, Mike Epps
Runtime: 94 mins.
2007

I want to begin this post by once again pointing out the most absurd trend in the Resident Evil film series: this is the third Resident Evil film in which Milla Jovovich's Alice is introduced by waking up naked somewhere. Against all odds, Resident Evil: Extinction ups the ante on this pattern by having the film end with about twenty Alices waking up naked. Of course, there's no reason to pretend that these films are anything but pure entertainment exploitation. I just can't tell if it's comic or tragic that the series protagonist's most prominent character trait is waking up naked and confused.

I can't lay the blame for that at Extinction's feet, exactly, as the opening sequence of the film is a shot-for-shot recreation of the opening sequence of Resident Evil. One could call it homage, or perhaps deconstruction if one were feeling generous. I'll opt for the latter because it is the best sequence of the movie, capped by a legitimately unnerving shot of a trench filled with corpses of Alice, all wearing the same red dress. You see, the Umbrella Corporation is experimenting on and disposing of Alice clones in what feels like a commentary on the perceived disposability of leading actresses in Hollywood. It's a tremendous upending of previously existing iconography. Of course the rest of the movie has very little to do with it.

It does serve to showcase the ways in which Extinction is undoubtedly the best of the series thusfar. For one, this is the first Resident Evil to not look like a bat crapped it out. The recreation of the Resident Evil scenario is actually eerie in a way that it failed to be the first time around. Then the film transitions to the massive wasteland that is post-apocalyptic Earth. Of course, by the end of the movie we're so damned tired of all the sand, but at first it feels revivifying after two films of dark dankness.

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE - Zombearable

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Director: Alexander Witt
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Thomas Kretschmann, Sophie Vavasseur, Razaaq Adoti, Jared Harris, Mike Epps, Sandrine Holt, Matthew G. Taylor, Iain Glen
Runtime: 94 mins.
2004

Operating purely on a sliding scale, as one must in situations of desperation, it must be said that Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a pleasant surprise. Although he wrote every entry, this is one of the two Resident Evil films that Paul W.S. Anderson did not direct. Instead that honor falls to Alexander Witt, a career second unit director. Although much of the action is still a mess of post-Bourne quick cut nonsense (perhaps Witt couldn't snag any good second unit directors for himself), the rest of the film features a basic clarity that Resident Evil lacked. Somebody up top seems to have put two or three seconds of thought into the creative decisions, which is refreshing. Emblematic of this shift is a pair of stories about the two films: For Apocalypse, the actors who were to portray zombies attended a zombie boot camp of sorts, where they were trained to act as "zen" zombies or "liquid" zombies. The equivalent anecdote for Resident Evil is that Anderson told the actors to "move however they thought a zombie would."

Whether or not it has to do with personnel shifts, Apocalypse is better than its predecessor in every way. First and foremost among these improvements are clear narrative goals and character motivations. In classic video game sequel fashion, the shape of the thing is much the same, but expanded to fit in a much larger contained area. For the scene is now Raccoon City, post-outbreak. The city is quarantined by the Umbrella Corporation, who are feverishly trying to clean up their mess as a major metropolis goes all to hell. After meeting our various heroes in various over-the-top situations, they are brought together by the mysterious hand of Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris), an Umbrella scientist who only wishes to save his daughter from the quarantined area. He offers Alice (Milla Jovovich) and company information in exchange for his daughter's safety; he can tell them how to escape Raccoon City before they are devoured by the dead--or before Umbrella drops a nuke on the whole mess and calls it a day.

RESIDENT EVIL: Alice in Blunderland

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Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy, Martin Crewes, Colin Salmon
Runtime: 100 mins.
2002

In the 21st century, large metallic objects make crashing noises just by being looked at.
-Roger Ebert, Resident Evil review

Fifteen years and millions of dollars later, the Resident Evil franchise is still pumping out installments. That makes it all the more difficult to imagine what a George A. Romero-directed Resident Evil would have looked like. He was the first choice, and he even wrote his own treatment for the film that Sony and Capcom passed on because, as far as I've read, it kept so close to the story of the games that fans would pass judgment on its accuracy. More likely the script was bad. Though that sure didn't stop Sony from slamming Anderson's script into production.

Although I don't have illusions that Romero would have made a good film, I'm sure it would have been far more interesting than the Resident Evil that we ended up with. Not being a gamer himself, he apparently had an assistant play through the game and record the footage so that he knew enough to write the adaptation. His approach was, according to him, a more cinematic departure from the source material--exactly the thing video game adaptations need to do if we ever want one that is serviceable.

No surprise that Anderson's adaptation is the gamiest of game movies. Among other traits it shares with 2000-era video games are its amnesia-ridden protagonist, endless identical nondescript hallways, mindless shoot-em-up style combat, frequent plot stoppage for the sake of exposition dumps, adherence to Boss Fight structure, complete lack of characterization across the board, and a nonsense story meant to pad out the runtime.

HIDDEN FIGURES: Black Wives Matter

Director: Theodore Melfi
Writers: Allison Schroeder, Theodore Melfi
Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Mahershala Ali
Runtime: 127 mins.
2016

Help me walk through a thought experiment here. Let's say that you're, like me, a white man. And let's say that we're off fishing somewhere. If I suddenly said to you, "Well here we are, two white men sitting together fishing in a pond in the year 2017," wouldn't you find it odd and off-putting? What if we were, say, two elderly Hispanic women at a monster truck rally, and I said, "Look at us--two old Hispanic ladies in the twenty-first century attending a monster truck rally in our free time," wouldn't that feel like a strange thing to say? Apparently Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, the screenwriters of Hidden Figures, do not think so, as this is their primary method for delivering exposition. Characters stare each other dead in the eyes and verbalize the traits of their relationship, as if trying to evoke a personality into existence. It would be a hammy method of characterization in an improv scene, and I would hope that Schroeder and Melfi spent more time thinking about these lines than improvisers can.