THE MATRIX: RESURRECTIONS - Wake Up

Director: Lana Wachowski
Writers: Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksander Hemon
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Jessica Henwick, Neil Patrick Harris, Jada Pinkett Smith
Runtime: 148 mins.
2021

The Matrix is what so much art strives for and so little accomplishes: iconic. The Wachowski sisters blended gun-fu, Hong Kong-style wirework, existentialist philosophy, anticapitalist realism, sci-fi apocalyptica, trans allegory, seething cynicism, and bleeding heart sentimentality into a tight package. The film's sickly green cyberpunk visual aesthetic dominated our collective imagination for years.

No surprise that The Matrix: Resurrections is worse in every way. The narrative is chunky and rambling. The 'real world' political stakes are unclear about what exactly has shifted for machine/human relations in the last 60 years. The recasting of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) features a decent performance hemmed in by lackluster writing, and the recasting of Agent Smith features decent writing hemmed in by a lackluster performance (Jonathan Groff tries to play up the smarm, but Hugo Weaving he is not). The city of Io feels like an empty knockoff of Zion. The script's technobabble combines with imperfect sound mixing to create a dizzying array of garbled phrases. Worst of all, the action is shoddy. You could chalk this up to an aging cast (Keanu spends much of the movie doing CGI hand blasts rather than kung-fu), but even the young actors' combat is edited to hell. Besides, Keanu certainly seems capable of skilled and beautiful action choreography right over there in the John Wick franchise.

Yet we must evaluate art on its own merits, rather than compare it to a checklist of our expectations. The Matrix: Resurrections is a poor Matrix sequel, because it focuses on being an unexpectedly rich Matrix reboot.

The Matrix fandom has spent the last week griping about their unfulfilled checklists. The real kicker is that Lana Wachowski (directing this franchise entry without her sister) has made a film that shares their affection and even many of their critiques. It also has the gall to suggest that perhaps this anger is entitled, misplaced. Wachowski has made an anti-reboot reboot, one that respects the legacy of this story while also showing how it can be twisted into something ugly. Resurrections is furious about the ways stories get corrupted and co-opted. "That's what the Matrix does," says Bugs (Jessica Henwick), Neo's enthusiastic young guide. "It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that's important to us."

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 3 - Transference

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Touch

The elder Crane siblings, least affected by the supernatural, are committed to the idea that they can control their environment. The two youngest siblings are forced to be more reactive. They do not shape the world around them, they are shaped. Theo, a consummate middle child, exists between these two paths. She is sensitive, stricken by the world around her, yet still she strives to exert control over her thoughts, feelings, experiences. She has the power and the burden of touch.

The opening stinger sees Theo sleeping peacefully while a pallid arm wraps around her. She assumes it's Nelly, but when she flips around there is no one to be seen. "Whose hand was I holding?" she asks.

This is the first review in which I will venture to critique showrunner Mike Flanagan. His style of connecting dialogue beats with overarching themes can be on the nose. Usually that neatness is a strength, sometimes it goes too far. The scene I just described is visually clear-- Theo's certainty that her sister is behind her, the jarring absence of anyone at all, her consternation at this discovery. Did we really need to make this actor sell the line, "Whose hand was I holding?" like it's an episode of R.L. Stine's Are You Afraid of the Dark? It turns a serviceably spooky moment into a lame zinger.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 2 - Perversion

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Open Casket

Episode 1 of "Hill House" shows us a man who, like so many men before him, sublimates his anxiety about death by claiming ownership over his narrative. Steve makes his family's baggage digestible for the world so that he can elude his own psychic heartburn. Lucky for him this sublimating process involves becoming a best-selling author. We all bear this burden of grappling with our childhood fixations, be they positive or negative. The world pressures us to transform these haunts into something that will make us money. Episode 2 shows us Shirley's trajectory into her own career: funeral home director.

Unlike Steve's impulse to to pin his childhood into the pages of a book like a butterfly, Shirley's primary directive has always been to help. Her nurturing soul is put to the test when she imprints on an abandoned litter of kittens in a shed. There are five kittens, just as there are five siblings. But life is fragile, and it isn't long until one of the kittens wiggles its last.

To navigate her grief, her parents stage a modest funeral. She asks to see the dead creature in the box. After a few heartfelt words, Shirley is alarmed to see the kitten's throat move-- breath? She picks it up to her parents' distress and insists that it's alive actually, it's alive! This fantasy collapses when the kitten's lips part to reveal a large bug working its way out of the esophagus.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 1 - Nachträglichkeit

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Steven Sees a Ghost

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

So begins Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel, and so begins Mike Flanagan's 2018 miniseries adaptation. It's a sublime passage, one that struck me immediately upon opening the book. The words "absolute reality" evoke existential angst; the interjection "not sane" is too eager to isolate the sentence subject; what is not said about the house takes on a sinister bearing. Flanagan-- longtime horror film director, first time television showrunner-- is wise to replicate the paragraph in voiceover, despite the show having very little at all to do with the book.

In fact, the context of the passage is uprooted quite violently. What was once the musing of an omniscient narrator becomes a quotable line from a book of schlocky nonfiction written by the nominal protagonist of episode 1. Steven Crane, one of five children to experience a terrifying childhood in Hill House, has grown up to exploit that violence by channeling it into the aforementioned best-selling book (itself called The Haunting of Hill House). This, predictably, drives a wedge between him and the rest of his folks. "I need to help my family," he opines, gesturing towards his wife. "We are your family," his sister responds.

ETERNALS: Live and Let Die

Other Marvel Movie Reviews Here.

Director: Chloé Zhao

Writers: Chloé Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, Kaz Firpo

Cast: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Ma Dong-seok, Harish Patel, Bill Skarsgård

Runtime: 156 mins.

2021

The marketing is sweaty to insist that this is Marvel's Eternals, and with good reason; the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe adapts material less familiar to the general audience than anything that came before. The source for Chloé Zhao's movie is a Jack Kirby experiment in vibrant, phantasmagorical cosmic comic imagery meant to tickle our thirst for the incomprehensible. The movie is incomprehensible in a more pedestrian way. The greatest loss between original and adaptation is the otherworldly imagery, which has been replaced by sunwashed wastelands and underlit forests.

Thank the multiple gods for Arishem, the singular blast of successful imagery in the film. Arishem is a Celestial, an elder god that maintains the glue of the universe. He is a sort of dispatcher for the Eternals, humanoid immortals who occupy developing planets and do battle with the nasty nasty Deviants (which look like tentacle dogs or whatever). Whenever the Eternals are speaking with Arishem, the physical world peels away as if tissue paper, revealing an enormous cherry red being too immense to visualize all at once. Whenever the Eternals aren't speaking with Arishem, they tend to be sitting around doing not much of anything or maybe watching a war happen. Their spokesperson contacts Arishem at semi-random intervals. Eventually, around two hours in, Arishem uses a Powerpoint Presentation to unveil the basic stakes. This is the plot.

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH - Shapeless

Other Reviews in this Holiday Tradition.

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Writer: Tommy Lee Wallace
Cast: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O'Herlihy
Runtime: 98 mins.
1982

The opening sequence of Tommy Lee Wallace's Halloween III is auspicious enough. A bedraggled man flees from unknown pursuers into a junkyard. His peril is punctuated by a barbed synthetic score composed by Alan Howarth and John Carpenter himself. (The score, one of the finest aspects of the film, is the only creative contribution of series progenitor Carpenter.) Then the first death happens. A besuited villain gets crushed by a slow rolling car; his body goes herkyjerk for a second, then limp. It's an embarrassingly awkward moment, foreshadowing many more fun special effects to come that are framed in such a way as to suck that fun right out.

To be fair, subsequent plot developments recontextualize the stiltedness of that death, but not in a way that improves things.

You see, the fleeing man's attending doctor and attending daughter can't shake the sense that something is very wrong after he gets his skull crushed while sedated in a hospital bed. They team up to navigate a hapless concoction of a plot that more or less goes as follows... in an Irish company town (?) there exists the Silver Shamrock factory, a producer of children's Halloween masks. Head of company Conal Cochran has made it his ghoul* to sell as many masks as possible, which are hugely popular despite being offered in only three varieties: Pumpkin, Skeleton, and Witch (??). The twist is, these masks are equipped with an electronic chip (???) that shoots lasers into children's heads (????) when triggered by a special Halloween night advertisement that apparently kids are really excited about watching (?????). This laser beam turns the maskwearer's insides into poisonous snakes and bugs (??????). Conal has accomplished this by stealing one of the Stonehenge stones (???????) and using its power to bolster ancient druidic and planetary alignment energies (????????). He does all this with the help of a small army of human-passing automatons, which he just sort of had already (?????????).

*This was actually a typo but it seemed fitting.

Best of the 2010s: 11 - 20

Check out the entire series here.

Red: the color of passion, the color of blood, the color of lust, the color of bloodlust. Sex is always intertwined with death, as love is only meaningful if it cannot endure forever. Students of Christianity might disagree, but damn if the Greek pantheon of gods weren't dissatisfied with their eternal bonds of marriage.

I digress... as far as the visible spectrum, you can't make a much bolder statement in cinema than splashing the screen with red. Unless you're Dario Argento, these moments of red are best as emphasis, a carving out of a passionate event. Red can be a shade of lipstick, a sea of blood, or even meaningful in its greyscale absence. Breakthroughs of ardor in these films tend to be powerful nexuses, a way to escape the bonds of oppression or banality-- if only for a time.

Best of the 2010s: 21 - 30

Check out the entire series here.

Film often gets singled out as the most subjective art form. Dialogue and narration reveal a character's thoughts. Cinematography unlocks their aesthetic and the impact of environment. Close up shots of skilled performers access microgestural, repressive, and unconscious functions that aren't so easy to put into words. Editing sets the rhythm and music drags us through the emotional complexity of the moment. Given that all these tools so powerfully engender empathy for the subjects at hand, cinema is in a unique position to teach us about oppression. How does it work, why does it work, and what does it do to its victims?

Oppression is an abstract and flexible concept that can take many forms. Structural oppression manifests differently for race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, species. These ten films feature struggles amongst those categories, sometimes multiple at a time. Forging that bond of empathy helps us understand the oft invisible machinations of oppressive forces, and perhaps more importantly, it helps us learn how to fight back.

Best of the 2010s: 31 - 40

Check out the entire series here.

Not every arc features steady growth that culminates in transcendence. Not every narrative is shaped like a peak. Great works of art strive to push forward forever into newness, though it is important to examine the ways our lives morph in cycles.

Repetition. Iteration. The myth of eternal return. Cycles can be plot contrivances that force us to recognize patterns, cycles can be thematic recurrences that weave a tapestry of grander truth, cycles can be an exploration of the neverending cascade of trauma. They can be the drag of a cigarette or the thrill of an encore. What's important to understand is that no two cycles are the same, for a repeated gesture takes on new meaning every time it manifests.

THE SUICIDE SQUAD: Gunn's Gambit

Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, John Cena, Daniela Melchior, David Dastmalchian, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, Viola Davis, Alice Braga, Peter Capaldi, Julio Cesar Ruiz, Jai Courtney, Pete Davidson, Nathan Fillion, Jennifer Holland, Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn, Flula Borg, Steve Agee, Mayling Ng, Taika Waititi
Runtime: 132 mins.
2021

In 2014 Disney released James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy, which reminded everyone that superhero movies are supposed to be fun. The film was a smash hit and the smash caused ripples.

2016 rolls around, and competitors Warner Bros. are sitting on a brand new superhero flick called Suicide Squad. Unfortunately, what should have been designed from the ground up as a Fun Movie was instead given to David Ayer, a director known for his grim tone and hypermasculine sensibilities. This Suicide Squad sprung from the Zack Snyderian tradition of morose, overly self-serious stories of tortured heroism that had been the DC model since 2013's Man of Steel, itself a poor facsimile of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy.

So DC and Warner Bros. had a problem. Their gritty shared universe was crumbling, whereas Guardians just gave Marvel's franchise a shot in the arm. The solution? Marketing, of course. Warner hired trailer editing company Trailer Park to create a Suicide Squad teaser trailer that promised the same team-up fun that audiences loved in Guardians and craved from Batman v. Superman. You may remember the result, a poppy peppy teaser set to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Although early promo images and a disastrous Joker design put audiences off, this trailer piqued quite a bit of interest.

Which presented another problem: the trailer Warner Bros. released bore no resemblance to David Ayer's somber work-in-progress. So WB did something unprecedented. They hired Trailer Park, the trailer editing company, to re-cut the film itself so that it would more closely resemble their teaser. No cut of this film was going to be good, but the version we got focused on meager glimmers of style at the expense of substance.

Suicide Squad got panned hard, but salvaged quite a bit of money from the Hot Topic crowd. Meanwhile, back at Marvel, James Gunn reprised his success with another Guardians of the Galaxy movie, fully expecting to work on part 3 in a few years. Then, in 2018, Disney fired him from his own franchise.

INSIDE: Mal Content

Director: Bo Burnham
Writer: Bo Burnham
Cast: Bo Burnham
Runtime: 87 mins.
2021

You can tell when a work of screen art is cheaply made. Shot in a warehouse, corners cut on sound and lights, repeated locations, reduced scope. This phenomenon in an otherwise well-produced TV show is called a 'bottle episode,' the result of other more spectacular episodes going overbudget. The funny thing is, these episodes' narrowed scope often emphasize character dynamics and intimate moments, thus creating better television than more souped-up stories.

Bo Burnham quit performing live comedy because he started having panic attacks onstage. After taking years away from the public spotlight to work on himself, he finally felt well enough to book a new comedy tour. Then COVID hit.

Ripped away from his audience as if the punch line of a cruel cosmic joke, Burnham decided to make a bottle special. He wrote, performed, filmed, and edited the entirety of Inside by himself, in one single room. All great artists understand that obstacles lead to greater opportunities, and quarantine becomes something of a dare for Burnham. How do I create something visually and emotionally engaging using the bare minimum? How do I manipulate a single location to fit the jumpy whims of sketch and song? How do I not go insane working on a project alone for months and months and months?

Best of the 2010s: 41 - 50

Check out the entire series here.

Once the Ordeal is completed, what is at the end? Transformation... enlightenment... synthesis... we can umbrella these things under the term Transcendence. Frustrating art often features hours of wheel spinning, static scenarios that offer no real character development. The best art knows that the ending is the conceit, and for good or for ill the characters will not walk away from the ending unchanged.

I choose the term Transcendence in part for its religious connotation. Navigating Fantasy, Self-Destruction, Commitment, and Ordeal can be seen as simple A to B to C plot progression. Yet there is something undefinable, something ethereal, at play in the culmination of any journey. These ten films are stunning examples of stories whose characters who emerge from their trials having exceeded the realm of what they had previously thought possible. Like the characters involved, these works may aid you on your way to another plane of consciousness.

Best of the 2010s: 51 - 60

Check out the entire series here.

The ordeal. What better way to test a hero's commitment than to run them ragged? An ordeal can be mental, physical, or spiritual, but it must reveal a character's interiority. How do they respond to strenuous circumstances? What is their fear response? Do they feel trapped? Determined? Or has a long life of ordeals worn them through?

The form of the ordeal refracts the needs of the protagonists. If a character seeks meaning in life, their ordeal may situate them as a cog in a narrative beyond their control. If a character seeks control, their ordeal may require perfection. If a character seeks perfection their ordeal may require surrender, surrender requires vulnerability, vulnerability requires violence. When a subject and an obstacle strike against each other, an entirely new being is formed.

A QUIET PLACE PART II: Aural Sects

Director: John Krasinski
Writer: John Krasinski
Cast: Millicent Simmons, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Noah Jupe, Djimon Hounsou
Runtime: 97 mins.
2021

The out of nowhere barn-burning success of A Quiet Place was the moment that people began to see director and lead John Krasinski as something more than 'that guy from The Office.' Krasinski has since used that recognition to position himself as a bastion of conservative values in Hollywood while staunchly denying that he is doing so. The actor campaigned for Elizabeth Warren in 2012 (herself a former Republican), but his recent roles are either heroic men at the locus of the American military-industrial complex, or A Quiet Place, which many took to be a paean for 'traditional family values.'*

*It's worth mentioning that the indistinguishability between conservative and liberal values in Krasinski's career may have less to do with him being good at hiding his politics and more to do with the frequent indistinguishability of conservative and liberal values. (pro-military, pro-police, pro-heroic individualism)

This not-so-subtly features into the opening scene of A Quiet Place Part II, which exists only to feature Krasinski despite his character's death in the previous film. Krasinski's Lee is always the first to be suspicious and the first to take action-- and he is absolutely justified in his paranoia-- a model for the 'governments and aliens are coming to take my guns' crowd. The tone-setting scene also makes a big goddamn deal of highlighting his positive relationship with a local Black cop, who pointedly gets the Big Hero Moment of the prologue.

The scene is electric with tension, and probably the best filmed sequence of the movie, despite adding nothing of import to the story beyond a chance to see Our Hero Lee again. In effect the whole movie takes its shape from Lee's absence. The major new character is Cillian Murphy's Emmett, who is positioned as a father figure to Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and a husband surrogate to Evelyn (Emily Blunt) not because they share any chemistry, but because he is an Adult Man. Indeed, Emmett is compelled to regularly express his impotence in comparison to the late Lee, something that everybody seems to agree upon.

Best of the 2010s: 61 - 70

Check out the entire series here.

In certain moments of clarity, our self-destructive urges can be operationalized to accomplish great things. One word for this is commitment-- the trait of our finest heroes, and our most reviled villains. 

Full throttle commitment can take root at any level of our hierarchy of needs: commitment to survival, commitment to a loved one, commitment to a great work, commitment to having the most fun you can possibly have. Cinema is a psychologically external medium, meaning that although we are rarely party to the inner thoughts of our subjects, we see the results of their interiority play out. This often takes the form of spectacular tension as the subject does battle with their environment to accomplish their goals. These ten films show what can become possible when a person gives it all they got.

Best of the 2010s: 71 - 80

Check out the entire series here.

Economists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and political pundits will all tell you that we as human animals will always act in our best interest. All behavior that shows otherwise is categorized as 'error.' Yet this understanding of human action couldn't be further from the truth. Fortunately we have art to pick up on what many 'harder' lines of study have overlooked.

The seductive destruction of being human. We feel it in our bones every time we ask, why on earth did I...? One name for this unconscious unraveling is death drive. Thanatos. "The goal of all life is death." Film is an excellent medium to explore this self-destruction as an aspect of the human unconscious. It can be frustrating to watch characters screw up again and again in such obvious ways. "Turn the lights on!" we scream at horror movies, "Don't go through that door!" The best films contextualize what seems like senseless sabotage by showing us the raggedy contradictions of the human psyche. We destroy ourselves because we have something to prove, or because we don't know who we are. We destroy ourselves to be different, or to conform. We destroy ourselves for hatred, or for love. Some of the most complex work we can do with ourselves involves exploring the incongruity between our conscious desire and that pesky unconscious drive.

Best of the 2010s: 81 - 90

Check out the entire series here.

The turning of the decade saw exacerbated mass disaster. Global pandemic, unquenchable fires, rising oceans, economic collapse, political decrepitude-- integrated aspects of our wretched reality. Movies provided an escape. The play of sound, light, and movement on the big screen embeds us in the realm of fantasy, where we can explore grand ideas and even grander emotions. The bigness unique to cinema is both a monument to the very capitalist excess that has brought us to the brink of destruction, and a monument to the stubborn human creative impulse to stave off destruction.

Film can be escapist, but maybe I don't actually believe what I said about film providing 'an escape.' The fantasies of the big screen are never just fantasies, after all. They are figments that often confront us with the unknowable Real that we are stuck in, and that is stuck in us. Film, as a synthesis of visual art, music, and theatre, has immense power over our unconscious minds. Maybe the very fantastical escape we seek can shock us into remaking our reality.

These ten films wade into the realm of fantasy, then demonstrate the lasting consequences of such a sojourn. Whether that fantasy involves a reflection of the self, a telepathic mindscape, the battleground of politics, or the omnipresent specters of patriarchy and white supremacy, the best stories agree that you cannot turn away from your deepest held fantasies unscathed.

Best of the 2010s: 91 - 100

Check out the entire series here.

The ongoing shock of this global pandemic has affected us all in ways beyond our reckoning. What we do understand can't be communicated without cliche. We're too close. The implications need time to unravel. It's not just the big stuff; there are microtectonic shifts proliferating in our personhood that are nearly undetectable.

I lost the ability to watch new movies in a movie theatre, something that I held precious without even realizing it. For the first time in half a decade, I didn't feel like I watched enough new films in 2020 to put together a proper Top Ten List. To make right by that failing, I will here offer the ten film and film-like works that stuck with me the most from the year 2020.

10) The Platform - a limited allegory with an appealingly grisly design sense
9) The Old Guard - mediocre liberal propaganda dressed up in excellent stuntwork and fight choreography
8) Sonic the Hedgehog - a crap movie with crap effects and a crap plot salvaged entirely by an Oscar-worthy performance by Jim Carrey as the evil Doctor Robotnik
7) Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm - a return to form with an actual emotional core, and a matured political outlook to boot
6) Birds of Prey - an extremely colorful performance showcase for a bunch of cool folks
5) Invisible Man - although ultimately a bit hampered by its genre trappings, Elisabeth Moss's devastating performance and some wildly good suspense scenes make this a standout remake
4) Mank - Fincher takes his late father's story of a writer who takes another man's life story and makes it into a story taken by Orson Welles... all in lovely black and white
3) Opal - this formally experimental musical-horror youtube short is an impeccable stand-in for all of the amazing artistic work being done on that platform
2) Palm Springs - I could not have expected Andy Samberg's breakout existential drama/comedy to be so goddamn good on a molecular level, but the writing directing and acting are all exactly on point
1) "Fargo" S4E9: East/West - it's not a movie, but this sublime apex of a sublime season of television is rife with cinematic references, none more prominent than The Wizard of Oz

The upside is that the lack I experienced in 2020 spawned this project, a celebration of the riches of times past. Below are the first ten entries in my Top 100 Films of the 2010s list. I've seen hundreds of movies worth recognizing released between 2010 and 2019, so whittling that down to 100 standouts was long, arduous work. This was a labor of love all too long in the making.

These particular ten may have prominent flaws. They may not stick the landing the way better films do. They may be a bit awkward and gangly. But they are ten worthwhile examples of the riches this past decade had to offer us.

MORTAL KOMBAT: Soul Sucked

Director: Simon McQuoid
Writers: Greg Russo, Dave Callaham, Oren Uziel
Cast: Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Joe Taslim, Mehcad Brooks, Matilda Kimber, Laura Brent, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada, Chin Han, Ludi Lin, Max Huang, Sisi Stringer, Mel Jarnson, Nathan Jones, Daniel Nelson
Runtime: 110 mins.
2021

In the course of researching this movie I stumbled upon this hilarious little article about fan-favorite four-armed monstrosity Goro and how expensive he was to create. Here's the crux--

"He's extremely integral to the plot," [producer] Garner said. "He is a beloved character. He's awesome. He's obviously somebody that I would love to have in every movie. He's also really expensive. Not going to lie. He's really expensive. So again, if somebody wants to give me a billion dollars to go make a Goro movie, I'll make a Goro movie. I'll love that. Every second of him is a lot of money. Every second was like my house. So you got to use him sparingly, you got to be smart about how you use him. It's not that we don't love him, it's not that he's not hugely important. It's just practically, he's so damn expensive."

This quote provides a uniquely forthcoming depiction of the deranged way in which some producers approach filmmaking. The commodification mindset evident here penetrates every aspect of the production: the characters, the visuals, the story. Mortal Kombat is the sallow progeny of a deranged, unfocused video game series and an entirely cynical production process. It shows.

TRANSCENDENCE: Turding Test

Director: Wally Pfister
Writer: Jack Paglen
Cast: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara, Cole Hauser, Morgan Freeman
Runtime: 119 mins.
2014

Transcendence was clearly positioned as a buoyancy project for frequent Christopher Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister to break into directing with some high concept philosophical sci-fi. Transcendence was also clearly positioned as a solvency project for decomposing megastar Johnny Depp to remain in the public imagination without putting too much effort in. I doubt either of them got much of what they wanted out of this project.

Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is a famous scientist who gets poisoned by an anti-tech terrorist movement, so his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and friend Max (Paul Bettany) attempt to graft his consciousness to their burgeoning Artificial Intelligence project. It works, but as digi-Will starts to amass power, many folks become slightly irked by the idea of an AI overlord. This is all so much less interesting than it sounds.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly where Transcendence goes wrong, which often indicates bad direction. The film seems committed to only exploring its ideas with the most facile surface probings. IIf a movie doesn't thrive on its ideas, you have the meat and potatoes of human drama to fall back on, another aspect that Transcendence fumbles. How are we to care about how human digi-Will is or isn't if the original human Will was basically a walking corpse already? Most of Depp's work in this movie is as a monotonous floating head, which is perhaps a blessing because the actor doesn't seem invested at all. The character is theoretically charismatic, but Depp can barely muster a sickly smirk through his wine hangover. Pfister lacks the grace to mask any of this, or maybe he doesn't care. One thing that can be said about this film is that there are some somewhat lovely visuals, which probably indicates that the director's former line of work was his correct one.

If you want a deeper dive into the dumb as a doorstop world of Transcendence, I guested on a podcast with Jenna Kuerzi to talk about the film in great detail. Check out our episode of Depp Impact here.

0.5 / 5  BLOBS

GODZILLA VS. KONG: Darwin Some Darlose Some

Director: Adam Wingard
Writers: Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields, Eric Pearson, Max Borenstein
Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Julian Dennison, Lance Reddick, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, Kaylee Hottle
Runtime: 113 mins.
2021

Godzilla vs. Kong is the capper to Legendary Entertainment's 'MonsterVerse' quadrilogy that began in 2014 with Gareth Edwards' Godzilla. That film, imperfect as it was, had a real artistic vision guiding it. Godzilla uses impressive CGI, restrained pacing, and painstakingly careful cinematography to capture the sublime terror of a godlike creature. The opening minutes of Godzilla vs. Kong unwittingly demonstrate the folly of jamming this iconography into a shared universe model. Kong casually lumbers around the jungle with no sense of suspense, reveal, or scale. It gets immediately worse once the first lines of dialogue kick in. Bored actors immediately inform us that they need to protect Kong because Godzilla is coming and, wouldn't you know it, two Alpha Predators (tm) are bound to fight.

This is one of the worst, most dully written movies I have seen in a while, stacked to the brim with talented actors pumping out insipid exposition while standing awkwardly around neutral spaces. These shambling bodies can barely be called characters-- everyone is given between zero and one piece of characterization that ranges from 'cares about Kong' to 'used to have a wife.' This is partially owing to the caked up shared universe mythology being ported in from previous lazy films. The result is a slate of new and recurring characters doing absolutely nothing.

MONEYBALL: Beane Counter

This review was requested by Don Rebel. Many thanks to Don for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Bennett Miller
Writers: Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, Reed Diamond, Brent Jennings
Runtime: 133 mins.
2011

It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life.
-Mickey Mantle

Moneyball is not the best baseball movie out there, but it may be the most interesting. That's because it's not about a player, a team, an important game, a magical season, or a comeback victory-- though it contains those elements. Moneyball is about an idea.

The film follows the true story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), General Manager of the Oakland A's, and picks up in the final hour of their 2001 season. Against all odds the A's have made it to the American League Divisional Series against the New York Yankees in a classic story of David vs. Goliath. Only, Goliath wins. We learn in short order that the magical season the A's cobbled together with luck, skill, and spunk, is not destined to be repeated. All of their rising stars (Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, Jason Isringhausen) will be unceremoniously snatched up by teams that can afford their rising star paychecks. In the midst of this prologue's suffocating sense of deflation and disappointment, we see the all-important insert card: 

$114,457,768 vs. $39,722,689

These are the budgets of the respective teams, and their prominence in the prologue signals to us the themes that the film will insist upon over and over again: it all comes down to money, and baseball is an unfair game.

UNHhhh

This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

UNHhhh is an internet program in which two Drag Queens talk to each other about stuff. There are as of this writing 143 episode of UNHhhh. Using advanced "Random Number Generator" technology, I selected five arbitrary episodes to analyze. Here's that.