PROXY: A Dead Baby Joke

In which our protagonists turn out to be antagonists and our antagonists turn out to be antagonists.

Director: Zack Parker
Writers: Kevin Donner, Zack Parker
Cast: Alexia Rasmussen, Alexa Havins, Kristina Klebe, Joe Swanberg
Runtime: 120 mins.
2013

Proxy is fundamentally deceptive. It's the kind of movie that makes you hate everybody, then tricks you into hating them for all new reasons that subsequently turn out not to be true. It tries to be high-minded and succeeds in being low-brow. It's a massive crock of M. Night Shyamalan plot twists, if Shyamalan turned out to be a teenager and also a sadist. It's like wandering through a winding maze full of cupboards, and behind each cupboard is a punch in the face. Proxy is deliberately designed to be a face-punching labyrinth.

So why, instead of just being hateful, is it also boring?

THE LEGO MOVIE: Everything Is Meta

In which we behold Will Ferrell's face with a sense of awe.

Directors: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Writers: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Cast: Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Ferrell, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Will Arnett, Charlie Day, Alison Brie, Nick Offerman
Runtime: 100 mins.
2014

There are three types of movie watchers. (Okay, there are a million types of movie watchers, but I'm trying to construct a framework here.) Thoughtless movie watchers, Thoughtful movie watchers, and Thoughtfilled movie watchers.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Thoughtless movie watchers. Most folks watch movies this way. Passive entertainment to be digested and promptly set aside. They're the kinds of folks who think that another Transformers movie sounds pretty good, why not. Or another Marvel movie. Or another Liam Neeson action thriller. Or another kids' movie based on a familiar property. If it strikes them as good and comfortable, they'll see it. You could get into ethical/political arguments about this type of filmgoer, and whether they should be more thoughtful about the ramifications of their choice of media consumption (the studio system gets screwed up by the popularity of movies like Transformers and ends up churning out more crap like it--not to mention the dangerous sexism and racism and political sentiments those movies espouse, etc. etc.). But that's another argument for another time. Thoughtless movie watchers are fine. They would enjoy a movie like the movie I'm writing about today.

For Thoughtful movie watchers, passive digestion isn't enough. They bring a critical eye to their consumption, and tend to appreciate films more on the level of craft. They're careful about what movies they spend their time and money on, and they want to discuss them after the fact. They go crazy with writing self-important movie reviews to post on a blog nobody reads. They are the kinds of people who would be immediately suspicious about everything surrounding a movie like The Lego Movie, which has Corporate Cash Grab written all over its cylindrical yellow face. They would be primed to dismiss the movie as capitalist tripe and move on to the next Scorsese or Tarantino film. Until they started hearing glowing reviews for The Lego Movie pour in, which would pique their curiosity. They couldn't help but investigate the hype, and they would watch The Lego Movie, wary but cautiously open-minded. And once they acclimated themselves to the strange animation style and gag-heavy energy of the beginning of the film, they would be totally on board.

Thoughtfilled movie watchers are a different matter. They are the folks who are trying to be critical and thoughtful about movies, but are unwilling or unprepared to approach a film on its own terms. Instead, their heads are filled with mountains of preconceptions and assumptions about media that they have not yet digested, and as a result their perspective will often be skewed. Like the Thoughtless movie watchers, they will give you a weird look whenever you talk about a movie that is somehow foreign or off-kilter to their sensibilities (although the look from the Thoughtless movie watchers will contain more confusion, and that of the Thoughtfilled will contain more condescension). Like the Thoughtful movie watchers, these folks will come to the conclusion that The Lego Movie is a Corporate Cash Grab immediately after it enters their radar. They might even look down on the ignorant masses who will no doubt flock to the theaters to throw their money at such a ploy. They will avoid this movie if they can, reviews be damned. And if they happen to see the movie, they will cynically pick it apart as well as they can, because no movie based on a kid's toy property could possibly be an intelligent, unique, energetic, engaging, worthwhile, socially conscious piece of cinema. Right?

RIGHT????

Surprise surprise, The Lego Movie defies all expectations and somehow manages to be all those positive qualities I just mentioned. And you know what? I think my theory might be wrong in this case. Unlike other movies like this, I honestly believe that if you managed to sit a Thoughtfilled movie watcher down in front of this movie, they would be converted by the end. That's the unprecedented power of The Lego Movie.

NEBRASKA: Recollect Your Winnings

In which we learn that it's not important whether you win or lose, but how much you talk about winning.

Director: Alexander Payne

Writer: Bob Nelson

Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Bob Odenkirk

Runtime: 115 mins.

2013

Nebraska is more than the sum of its parts. Part of that is that I'm not partial to parts of its parts. But on whole, the whole of it takes hold of some holes at the center of the "wholesome" American experience, while offering a viewing porthole into ill-represented parts of said experience.

In other words, I like the movie more for what it goes for rather than how it goes.

Nebraska follows everyman David Grant (Will Forte), whose life is settling into a vacant sense of normalcy only interrupted by the escapades of his father, Woody (Bruce Dern). David's mother Kate (June Squibb) repeatedly calls upon him to retrieve Woody, who keeps trying to walk all the way to Nebraska from his home in Montana. He wants to go there because he has received a letter in the mail declaring him the winner of one million dollars! Of course it's a scam, but there is no convincing Woody, who is stubborn and shows early signs of dementia. Eventually David decides that the only way to lay this problem to rest is to take a road trip to Nebraska to claim the false prize. He sees it as an opportunity to spend some time with the father who was often drunk, usually vacant, and always emotionally distant. So they go, and things happen along the way.

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES: The Cone Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree

In which we still don't learn how to spell Synecdoteeodcee, New York.

Director: Derek Cianfrance
Writers: Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, and Darius Marder
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Dane DeHaan, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, Emory Cohen
Runtime: 140 mins.
2012

The Place Beyond the Pines strives to be epic with every fiber of its being. In a lot of ways, it fails. Yet it remains a textbook case of how much mileage a movie can gain from a strong start. In fact, I have to admit that I was sold from the very first shot:

We open to blackness, with an undercurrent of indistinct noise. As the title cards pass before us, we hear a new sound: a crisp, repetitive clinking noise that is vaguely reminiscent of the clanking of train cars steadily passing by. When we finally cut to our first image, we see the tattooed torso of Luke (Ryan Gosling), his hands expertly snapping a butterfly knife as he paces back and forth in a small trailer. His body language is restless, the click-clacking of the knife metronomic. He suddenly embeds the knife in a wall and leaves the trailer. The continuous shot... continues... as we follow him, a colorful fairground opening out before us, the previously dulled sounds of carnivalesque carousing now raucous and all-encompassing. The camera trails behind Luke, in a manner familiar to anybody who watched The Wrestler, or Breaking Bad. Luke passes fluorescent rides and games, pink and blue lights illuminating the night. He takes a turn into a darker, more subdued part of the fairground and heads for a tent. When he enters the tent, we are met with the sounds of revving engines, cheering fans, and an incomprehensible announcer. He heads for two other motorcyclists, and joins them on a third cycle of his own. The mounting of the cycle is the first moment we see Luke's face, a brief glimpse before he dons his helmet. Then the cyclists enter the steel cage, a metal sphere barely big enough to accommodate the three of them. The crowd erupts as the cyclists each begin circumnavigating the inside of the sphere, weaving in and out of each other's paths in daredevil fashion. The first shot ends.

Everything that is good and right about The Place Beyond the Pines is encompassed in that first shot, from the cycle of violence as represented by the click-clacking butterfly knife, to the visual coupling of Luke's identity with his motorcycle, to the long trailer-to-tent trudge that evokes an inevitable symbolic march towards danger and destruction. It's all there, and it's beautiful.

The movie never stops being beautiful, but it never recaptures the precision and economy of storytelling that the first shot offers.

THE IMPOSSIBLE: It's Tsuna-me, Not Tsuna-you

In which Ewan McGregor kisses things for 50% of his screentime.

Director: J. A. Bayona

Writer: Sergio G. Sánchez

Cast: Naomi Watts, Tom Holland, Ewan McGregor, Samuel Joslin, Oaklee Pendergast

Runtime: 114 mins.

2012

Before I start the review, I should give you a comprehensive recap of this movie. Pay attention, it's going to be complicated:

This "true story" follows a British family vacationing in Thailand during the tsunami of Christmas 2004, and their efforts to find each other in the aftermath of the disaster.

That's about it. Now onto the review!

DUMMY: Hollywood's Hand Up Ventriloquism's Butt

In which a ventriloquist's dummy is creepy for one scene and a ventriloquist is creepy for most.

Director: Greg Pritikin

Writer: Greg Pritikin

Cast: Adrien Brody, Milla Jovovich, Vera Farmiga, Illeana Douglas, Jessica Walter, Ron Liebman, Jared Harris

Runtime: 91 mins.

2002

More than anything, Dummy feels like a movie that is unstuck from reality. Temporally speaking, there is little to suggest that the movie was released in 2002. The protagonist is the sort of bumbling man-child living-with-his-parents figure to whom we've grown accustomed in the late 00s and early 10s, but Brody plays the character with a docile earnestness that feels more at home in the 50s. The broad, almost interesting yet still firmly conservative nature of the comedy feels more at home in the 90s, when that sort of thing proliferated. The punk rock sensibilities and screw-the-man attitude displayed by Milla Jovovich's character (and sometimes the movie's tone) are ripped straight from the 80s, while some of the outfits--namely those of Illeana Douglas's character--make you want to sigh, "That's the 70s for you." Cover all this over with a simultaneous love for old-fashioned 20s (or 50s) showmanship and 30s (or 60s) deconstruction of said showmanship, and you get what amounts to a weird niche 2002 comedy picture about an awkward fellow and the dummy that he uses to try to get laid, though the movie would never be so courageous as to put it in those terms.

You can call me out on my awfully vague characterizations of decades that I didn't live through, but the point stands that Dummy suffers from what you could call a confused identity.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: Hooked on a Feeling

Director: James Gunn
Writers: James Gunn, Nicole Perlman
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, John C. Reilly, Glenn Close, Benicio Del Toro, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Gunn
Runtime: 121 mins.
2014

First the numbers.

Guardians of the Galaxy grossed $94 million in its opening weekend. The only 2014 movies to have bigger opening weekends were Transformers: Age of Extinction at $100 million and Captain America: The Winter Soldier at $95 million. More notable is the fact that Guardians managed to accomplish these numbers in August; compared to the triad of May-June-July, August box office numbers are usually slight. In fact, Guardians shattered the previous August opening weekend record, which belonged to The Bourne Ultimatum at $69.3 million. That's a solid $25 million margin.

Perhaps most notable of all, Guardians managed to achieve these astronomical numbers despite not being a sequel or a well-known property. Ticket buyers generally flock to the familiar. Take a look at all the other movies mentioned in the previous paragraph: The Winter Soldier, Ultimatum, and Age of Extinction are the second, third, and fourth movies of their respective franchises. Not only that, but two of them feature well-known protagonists who have achieved widespread cultural penetration over the course of decades, and the third features the protagonist of a series of very popular Ludlum novels. My point is that this cume represents an unprecedented level of financial success for a movie starring characters that almost nobody (including myself) had heard of a year ago. Even The Amazing Spider-Man 2 made less opening weekend cash despite featuring one of the most recognizable characters in pop culture. Part of that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand, and part of it is Disney's (impressive) marketing campaign. But I have to believe that a lot of this bottled magic has to do with the movie itself. Guardians of the Galaxy has energy, and it has soul; these qualities bleed through the advertisements, critical acclaim, and word-of-mouth.

So now that we are finished parsing the soulless numbers, let's talk about soul.

SUPER: A Superhero ExtravaGunnza!

Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, Michael Rooker, Nathan Fillion
Runtime: 96 mins.
2010

Super was dead in the water.

The action-drama-comedy was released concurrently with the Mark Millar adaptation Kick-Ass, a movie with a suspiciously similar premise. Super's critical reception was decidedly mixed, with many critics dismantling its erratic tone, meandering plot, and a whopper of a weird performance by Ellen Page. The film only made a few hundred thousand, trailing in the wake of the $48 million gross of Kick-Ass. Many viewers expressed confusion, discomfort, or dismissal towards the film. Scratch that--only a few viewers expressed those things. This film didn't have many viewers in the first place.

Yet here we are four years later, and director James Gunn is about to release Guardians of the Galaxy, sure to be one of the biggest films of the year. How does a director transition from directing a flop of a superhero film that couldn't crack half a million to directing a Marvel movie that is sure to make hundreds of millions of dollars to widespread critical acclaim?

Maybe the secret is in Super. Let's find it.

OBVIOUS CHILD: Laughing Ladies

Director: Gillian Robespierre
Writer: Gillian Robespierre
Cast: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffman, Gave Liedman, David Cross, Richard Kind, Polly Draper
Runtime: 84 mins.
2014

"It was nice to be able to enjoy a comedy movie all the way through without once feeling uncomfortable about its treatment of women."

So said one of the friends with whom I saw Obvious Child. Can you imagine that? If every single comedy film you watched made you feel not only uncomfortable, but personally attacked? As if the movie is having a joke at your expense, and you're not invited to laugh? You would have to go into every comedy film with a certain amount of trepidation, or at least wariness. You would feel like you need to become expert at shrugging it off so as not to be the wet blanket of the post-movie discussion of best lines and funniest moments; you would fail at shrugging it off.

I'm not saying that's how it is for everybody, but it's the status quo for a whole lot of women who watch comedies. Luckily there are exceptions. And if I feel like Obvious Child is a breath of fresh air, I can't even conceive how fresh and funny it must feel to its female audience.

SNOWPIERCER: Crazy Train

Director: Bong Joon-ho
Writers: Bong Joon-ho, Kelly Masterson
Cast: Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Ko Ah-sung, John Hurt, Ed Harris, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer
Runtime: 126 mins.
2014 (2013 in South Korea)

In the online film community that I haunt, there has been a lot of rumbling about people going to the wrong movies. Or rather, that rumbling always exists, it has just been exacerbated recently by a few factors. Between the movie you came here to read about, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and the excellent Edge of Tomorrow (as well as the much-hyped forthcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Mockingjay: Part 1), 2014 is turning out to be a banner year for mainstream sci-fi films--and yet, everybody and their reluctant mother is going to see the predictably steaming pile that is Transformers: Age of Indistinction.

That is why my goal in writing this particular review is to mobilize you to get out and go see Snowpiercer, a film that you likely haven't heard anything about, except perhaps snippets here and there: whispers in dark alleys, notes passed under restroom stalls, covert communiqués exchanged away from the watchful eyes of the Transformers marketing campaign.

In the world of Snowpiercer, the Earth has succumbed to a new ice age, brought about by humanity futzing with the atmosphere in an effort to counteract global warming. Now everything is dead. Cue the Snowpiercer, a massive train that contains the only remaining human life. It operates as a self-contained ecosystem that circles the entire globe once per year. All is not well on the so-called Rattling Ark, however. Our protagonists live in squalor in the tail of the train, cut off from the relative comfort and prosperity of the front-dwellers by a series of gates and armed guards. The gates only open once per day, for about four seconds, to allow the delivery of the nasty looking protein blocks that sustain the lives of the tailies. Guess what, though? Our hero, Curtis (Chris Evans), is planning a revolution! If our ragtag band of misfits can unite in order to press forward, and if they can wrest control of the Eternal Engine (that which sustains all life on the train) from the industrial despot Wilford, then they will have all the bargaining chips necessary to upset the established order.

But that's just the beginning. What sounds like a familiar plot opens out and contorts in all manner of unexpected ways--without ever leaving the cramped confines of the train.