GET OUT: Once You Go Black

Director: Jordan Peele
Writer: Jordan Peele
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel, Lil Rel Howery
Runtime: 104 mins.
2017

Get Out is a horror thriller (with a dash of comedy) about Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black man in his twenties who is being dragged to the suburbs so that he can meet the family of Rose (Allison Williams), his white girlfriend. Despite the anxieties programmed into him by a whole life of discrimination, he trusts her dubious assurance that her family is not prejudiced in the least. For their part, Rose's parents Missy (Catherine Keener) and Dean (Bradley Whitford) go out of their way to reassure Chris about that exact thing. Yet between the white parents who doth protest too much and the black servants who doth protest too little, Chris quickly realizes that there is something deeply wrong with this estate, and that he must, at all costs, get out.

Spoilers ahead.

IT COMES AT NIGHT: Home Sick

Director: Trey Edward Shults
Writer: Trey Edward Shults
Cast: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough
Runtime: 91 mins.
2017

There's misleading advertising, which is frustrating but understandable. Creatives typically have no sway over what marketing does with their work. After all it is marketing's job to make a thing seem as appealing as possible, regardless of quality or content.

Then there's false advertising. In 2002, Warner Bros. released a trailer for their new family-aimed comedy, Kangaroo Jack, which heavily featured a computer animated kangaroo with a Hawaaian shirt and sunglasses. This kangaroo saw fit to rap at the audience. A great many 90's kids sought the acquaintance of this rapping kangaroo.

To the chagrin of all, the film consisted entirely of two idiots chasing a legitimate kangaroo across the Australian outback. The film was paced like settling bricks and contained what even child me recognized to be an overabundance of fart jokes. Still I waited for the kangaroo to anthropomorphize itself, but all of the rapping kangaroo content was restricted to one measly dehydrated dream sequence.*

*The counterexample to all this is the woman who sued Drive for false advertising. The advertisements promised a slick action thriller, but the movie itself was a lugubrious meditation on masculinity and violence. I side with Drive in this example, but I side with the audience in the Kangaroo Jack example. I don't know whether there's a distinction to be made between types of false advertising, or if I just like Drive far more than I like Kangaroo Jack. If there is a distinction, it might be between a marketing department that probably didn't know how to advertise the film it had (Drive), and a marketing department that went to great lengths to occlude the actual content of their film (Kangaroo Jack).

My point is that It Comes at Night comes dangerously close to Kangaroo Jacking us. The film has been marketed and heralded as a new indie horror contender among the likes of The Witch, The Babadook, or It Follows. Yet It Comes at Night is not such a horror film.

KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE - A Juvenile Product of the Working Class

Director: Matthew Vaughn
Writers: Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn
Cast: Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Julianne Moore, Colin Firth, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, Jeff Bridges, Edward Holcroft, Hanna Alström, Elton John
Runtime: 141 mins.
2017

Matthew Vaughn is known as a director who doesn't return for sequels. It's easy to see why after Kingsman: The Golden Circle. All of the familiar Kingsman elements are back: edgy humor, slick aesthetic, zippy action, quirky characters, a maniac villain at the helm of a world-threatening plot. The issue is that none of them congeal into anything of note. Every aspect of the film feels like it has reported dutifully to the set, ready but not enthusiastic about another day's work.

At 141 minutes, we're talking about a long time of feeling nothing in particular. The Golden Circle's problems issue outward from the script. Goldman and Vaughn are longtime writing partners, but their heart wasn't in this one. Kingsman: The Secret Service had a great structure to hang its narrative on: no-name kid gets recruited into a secret agent training program and while trying to prove himself gets tangled up in a larger plot. The Golden Circle has no such elegant structure, instead opting for the scattershot approach. Over here we have a secret agent trying to figure out who killed his organization, over here we have a crazy villain abusing her henchman somewhere in the jungle, over here we have the American version of the Kingsmen, over here we have a romance and fidelity plot, over here Harry (Colin Firth) is alive but suffering memory loss. These vignettes cut between each other without any cross-pollination for so long that you begin to wonder why you should care about any thread in particular. So much of it feels tacked on, especially the gutless Harry subplot that apparently exists just to rekindle the most resonant central relationship from the first movie. Instead we spend a lot of pointless time listening to a brain damaged Harry talk about butterflies.

ATOMIC BLONDE: Blondes Have More Gun

Director: David Leitch
Writer: Kurt Johnstad
Cast: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Eddie Marsas, John Goodman, Toby Jones, Sofia Boutella
Runtime: 115 mins.
2017

In 2014, two career stuntmen, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, teamed up to make a movie about a retired assassin who seeks violent retribution for the murder of his dog. That film was John Wick, and its stylized yet brutally functional brand of gun-fu was a shot in the arm for the western action movie landscape, which hadn't experienced a proper paradigm shift since the Bourne films in the early 2000s. We're presently seeing the results of that impact, with John Wick clones already seeping down the pipeline. First to the party, though, were Leitch and Stahelski themselves. Stahelski stuck around to take the John Wick franchise to its next entry, John Wick: Chapter 2. Meanwhile, David Leitch split off to direct Atomic Blonde.

The two films function well as complementary variations on the John Wick formula. In John Wick: Chapter 2, Stahelski amps up the mythic, larger-than-life elements from the original and fills his movie with wall-to-wall action. Leitch instead opts to ground Atomic Blonde in a spy narrative that's more subdued, patient, and convoluted.

In fact, Atomic Blonde is patient to a fault. The story is foregrounded, yet largely inconsequential. Maybe even a bit dull, with its cluttery frame narrative and perfunctory number of twists and turns. It is a shoddy scaffolding for Leitch's masterful action choreography, which made me realize something remarkable: Atomic Blonde is a rare film in that it seems to exist almost entirely for the purpose of one scene, a scene that arrives towards the end of the movie.

BRIGSBY BEAR: Does a Brigsby Shit in the Woods?

Director: Dave McCary
Writers: Kevin Costello, Kyle Mooney
Cast: Kyle Mooney, Mark Hamill, Jane Adams, Greg Kinnear, Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins, Ryan Simpkins, Alexa Demie, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Claire Danes
Runtime: 97 mins.
2017

For a while, my favorite youtube videos were Kyle Mooney's series of incomprehensible interviews. Kyle would show up at public events with a cameraman and a microphone, and he would speak nonsense at people until they responded in some way. He was the master of the empty signifier, rolling out fragmented sentiments in such a way that they gave the impression of meaning while being entirely inscrutable. It was a deft manipulation of the cultural logic surrounding interviews, and the real fun of it was seeing how the passersby would choose to engage.

Kyle has since graduated to SNL--sort of. As I understand it he mostly does the digital content. In the meanwhile, he's used his newfound semifame to bankroll a passion project called Brigsby Bear, a uniquely white male film about living in a nostalgic fantasy land. You see, James (Kyle Mooney) was abducted as a child by Ted (Mark Hamill) and April Mitchum (Jane Adams). James grew up in a bunker, convinced that the outside world was an apocalyptic desert. His only access to culture was Brigsby Bear, a very 90's television show about a magical bear out to save the universe. When the police raid the bunker and he discovers that everything he believed was a lie--including Brigsby Bear, which was secretly crafted by his captor Ted--he must figure out how to adjust to living with his birth parents. Ultimately, he works through his latent trauma by writing and filming the finale to Brigsby Bear with the help of his sister (Ryan Simpkins) and some new friends.

I was an easy mark for this film. I wanted to love it, expected to love it, but I couldn't. The first sign of trouble was the inciting incident. Up until the raid, Brigsby Bear casts a casually menacing vibe over the innocence of Mooney's experience. Brandon Tonner-Connolly's production design, both within the Brigsby Bear show and inside the bunker, is stellar. All of this evaporates the moment James is thrust into our world. The visuals, the tone, and the dialogue all become pedestrian.