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.

WONDER WOMAN: What a Wonderful World

Director: Patty Jenkins
Writers: Allan Heinberg, Zack Snyder, Jason Fuchs
Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Neilsen, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Lucy Davis, Elena Anaya
Runtime: 141 mins.
2017

Ever since 2016 kindly reminded us that seething racism, sexism, and class inequality are still the primary forces behind America, folks have been searching desperately for heroes. It makes sense that those hopes would be hung to Wonder Woman and all that it represents, as it is embarrassingly the first female-helmed superhero movie in the current decade-long era of superhero movies. Superheroes are the pop cinematic genre of our time, so the importance of this moment cannot be understated. This was further amplified by the hiring of Patty Jenkins as director. The frequency of hiring women for movies of this magnitude is just about zero. We see this evidenced in the career of Jenkins herself, who directed a killer first feature in Monster, then was left to molder in televisionland where she's been quietly doing tremendous work for a decade and a half.

I remember coming in contact with two thinkpieces in close succession: One argued that Wonder Woman is bad because Gal Gadot didn't have visible body hair, and the other argued that Wonder Woman is good because Gadot's thigh juggled while she was running. As discourse becomes increasingly compartmentalized on social media, we tend to double down on partisanship. A thing must be either good or evil, acceptable or unacceptable, easily characterized or dismissed in 140 characters. Yet we do a disservice to art when we eradicate nuance in favor of easily digestible political capital. Every work of art is political, yet it exists in the political sphere in myriad and complex ways.

Representation in Wonder Woman is boundary-pushing in a lot of the ways that count. Simply putting a woman at the helm of an action movie means that we get to see Wonder Woman shot and framed iconically, a treatment usually reserved for our Indiana Joneses and Spider-Mans. Too often women in action movies are vacant sex symbols, or characters who can be summed up as beautiful but dangerous. Diana, however, has a distinctive personality and value system--one that the film is structured around.

ALIEN: COVENANT - King David

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Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: John Logan, Dante Harper, Jack Paglen, Michael Green
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
Runtime: 122 mins.
2017

Can one consider Alien: Covenant in a vacuum? Half of the movie is a dogged continuation of the slapdash philosophical noodling that Ridley Scott brought to the franchise with Prometheus, and the other half is a herky-jerky course correction towards a more classic Alien styling. This is indicated first and foremost by the title, which hearkens desperately back to the original run of films. It is also indicated by Scott himself, this quote about the backlash to Prometheus coming to mind:

. . . we discovered from it that [the fans] were really frustrated. They want to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: Wow, OK, I'm wrong. The fans, in a funny kind of way--they're not the final word--but they are the reflection of your doubts about something, and then you realize 'I was wrong' or 'I was right.' I think that's where it comes in. I think you're not sensible if you don't actually take [the fans' reaction] into account.

It is strange to see Scott make such a boneheaded remark. Not only is it a shocking misunderstanding of his own work, but it's a misrepresentation of audiences' very valid complaints about Prometheus, of which lack of Xenomorph tended to be low on the list. I can only really grok this comment by assuming that Scott was being defensive and a bit petty about unfavorable responses to a passion project.

That pettiness worms its way into the DNA of Covenant, which trots out Xenomorphs with dutiful regularity. The now entirely CGI Xenomorphs (or Neomorphs, I think this iteration is called) are gratuitous. It's not that they don't fit the plot per se. It's that these Aliens swagger through the film like slasher villains. In fact, the Alien-heavy half of the movie behaves very much like a schlocky slasher, right down to the utterly disposable characters who make baffling choices and ultimately get dispatched whilst having sex in the shower.

PROMETHEUS: Dumpster Fire from the Gods

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Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, Sean Harris, Rafe Spall, Emul Elliott, Benedict Wong, Kate Dickie
Runtime: 124 mins.
2012

Unless you're specifically writing a comparative piece, a critic must strive to engage with a film as a standalone artifact. Drawing parallels and making value judgments based on other films is a slippery slope. It can lead one to commit the cardinal sin of criticism--not approaching the art on its own terms. It is with that in mind that I have been frustrated by my tendency to see the Alien sequels through the prism of their progenitor, Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien.

On the other hand, it may be that such purity of critical lens is unattainable. What else is a franchise but a demand that you consider a certain work in conjunction with others? There are countless ways to sequelize a property, but one thing they all have in common is a link, however obvious or obscure, to the original.* Although one wants to respect the agency of a sequel, its ability to tell a coherent story is often predicated on some narrative or thematic information that cannot be found in the domain of its own runtime.

*With the rare and deranged exception of something like Troll 2, a "sequel" that has no discernible connection to Troll, including a complete absence of trolls.

What emerges is a difficult balancing act of acknowledging the expectations that come with being a part of a larger franchise without being bewitched by them. Then there is the additional can of worms of whether a sequel retroactively changes the meaning of an original. (It certainly does in our cultural consciousness, though perhaps it need not for certain critical endeavors.)

Believe it or not, all this discourse is germane to discussion of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's return to the franchise he birthed thirty-three years previous. One of the more interesting aspects of this return is the tortured relationship it has to its own standing within that franchise. On the one hand, it's clear that Scott wanted to distance Prometheus from Alien as much as possible. Where Alien was a lean thriller, Prometheus aspires to be a grand epic exploration of the Big Questions of life--with a heavy garnish of horror imagery. On the other hand, some of the most desperate-to-please moments of Prometheus involve feverish Alien references and mystique-destroying prequelicious explanations. The film even has the gall to end on a bit of fan service utterly transparent in its desire for the audience to feel a base swell of nostalgia.

ALIEN: RESURRECTION - Metastasis

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Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Writers: Joss Whedon
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Kim Flowers, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Raymond Cruz, Leland Orser
Runtime: 116 mins. (theatrical cut 109 mins.)
1997

I am here reviewing the extended edition, which this time around is a bit worse than the theatrical cut. Not enough is added to make a significant difference: two jokes that I absolutely hate and a cool but pointless altered ending, in which Ripley and Call crash land outside of a ruined Paris.

It has taken me until the final movie in the original quadrilogy to realize the Alien series' fundamental guiding principle: Each film must be a direct and biting refutation to the film that came before it. Let's recapitulate.

James Cameron's Aliens took the simple, elegant narrative of Alien and blew it up to epic proportions. We are made to believe (and convincingly so) that the unstoppable antagonist from the previous film could be defeated en masse by the love that Ellen Ripley feels for her companions.

David Fincher's ALIEN CUBED took that love and crumpled it into a dirty little wad before incinerating it and stomping on the ashes. Then it paraded around town with those ashes just to make sure everyone understood how pathetic they were. Having no time for Cameron's sentimentalism, Fincher dumps his audience into a broken world where everyone and everything you love are dead, and there is no longer the slightest reason to remain alive. Killing Hicks and Newt offscreen remains a colossal refutation to Cameron's happy ending (one that a lot of people hated and Cameron himself called a slap in the face), but the film only doubles down from there by corrupting Ripley's body and forcing her to choose death over misery.

Now we are come to Alien: Resurrection, a movie that finds its own bizarre way to exist as the antithesis to ALIEN CUBED. For A:R not only half-assedly undoes the grandiosity of Ripley's sacrificial gesture that culminated the themes of ALIEN CUBED and, in some ways, the entire franchise; it does so flippantly. Had I been tasked with designing the antithesis to Fincher's film I certainly wouldn't have come up with this, but I can't offhand think of any inversion that would be more emblematically discordant.

ALIEN³: Hell Hath No Fury

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Director: David Fincher
Writers: Vincent Ward, David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S. Dutton, Paul McGann, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Lance Henrisken
Runtime: 145 mins. (114 mins. theatrical)
1992

Rather than the theatrical cut of Alien³, I watched (and will be reviewing) the "assembly cut" first released in 2003. For most films, the only difference between the theatrical and extended cut is that the latter is a bit shaggier, but for Alien³ it makes all the difference. After an endless mire of pre-production, dozens of abandoned scripts, and millions of wasted dollars, Alien³ was always going to be a hot mess. It's just that the theatrical cut, cobbled together after David Fincher stormed off the project, is hotter and messier than it needs to be. All manner of connective tissue is stricken from the theatrical version, including a stellar opening sequence that sets the mood and establishes the world. The assembly cut, even with the added bulk of thirty-odd extra minutes, flows smoother than the original. Their final scores would be notably disparate.

Were I to go into the details of Alien³'s notoriously hapless production cycle, this review would turn into quite an extensive history lesson. Suffice it to say that unlike Aliens, in which Fox delayed production so that James Cameron could make The Terminator, Alien³ is a case study in bureaucratic obstruction. Creatives were fired, factions were split, actors were artistically manhandled*--all manner of horsey nonsense.

*As Ralph Brown tells it, his character Aaron was originally supposed to be savvy and resourceful, but his intelligence got nerfed in the rewrites. When he complained about playing a dummy, the writers gave his character the disparaging nickname "85," after Aaron's officially reported IQ.

So it is quite an achievement, and a great testament to the talents of then-undiscovered visionary David Fincher, that Alien³ (the assembly cut, mind you) is compelling and worthwhile in a number of ways. This is as good a time as any to admit something dastardly. Although by any and every objective standard Cameron's Aliens is the superior sequel, I prefer what Fincher is up to in Alien³. Specifically, I'm a fan of Alien³'s most controversial and besmirched decision: the immediate, ruthless, offscreen deaths of Aliens heroes Hicks and Newt. The chipper happy ending of Aliens, though perfectly earned, has always struck me as dissonant with the heartless fatalism of Alien. The extermination of Aliens's happy ending is an inspired statement of intent, both setting the tone for Alien³ and kicking off Ripley's darkest arc.

ALIENS: One Bad Mother

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Director: James Cameron
Writers: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, William Hope, Jenette Goldstein, Al Matthews
153 mins. (137 mins. theatrical)
1986

This is a review for the director's cut of Aliens which adds about sixteen minutes of footage. Although the pacing is bogged down by unnecessary pre-alien footage of the functional colony, the cut includes some worthwhile backstory about Ripley's daughter and a really excellent sequence involving remote turrets, so in terms of quality it's basically a wash.

As far as I'm concerned, the decades-old Alien vs. Aliens debate is clear-cut. When dozens of aliens can become cannon fodder, albeit terrifying cannon fodder, the mystique of the original is lost. Indeed, it is immediately apparent that Aliens is playing a different, and in my opinion inferior, game altogether when Ripley has a jump scare dream sequence involving a chestburster. Alien would have featured nothing so gauche as that.

Yet the more I think about it, the more I realize that it was genius of Cameron to shape the sequel this way. By shifting the genre and hyping up the tone, Aliens hews closer to his particular directorial strengths. This was the right choice; there would have been no way to improve upon the mastery of Alien had Cameron tried to replicate Scott's opus.

ALIEN: The Perfect Organism

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Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto
Runtime: 117 mins.
1979

As the quote from Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon goes, "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" There is some certain truth to that, insofar as the blistering originality of Alien comes from being at the nexus of a myriad of influences while not being beholden to any single one.

O'Bannon got the germ of his idea after working with John Carpenter on Dark Star. The texture of the story snapped into place while working with several artists on the infamously scrapped Jodorowski's Dune. One of those artists was H. R. Giger, whose psychosexual monstrosities left their mark on O'Bannon long before Giger was himself signed on to design the alien. The script went through incremental development, gaining the alien's reproductive cycle from co-writer Ronald Shusett, and reluctantly picking up the android subplot from studio writers David Giler and Walter Hill. The title of the script was blessedly changed from Star Beast to Alien. Ultimately, the crux of the film fell into place when a wet behind the ears Ridley Scott signed on to direct.

Alien is arguably Scott's crowning achievement. There is a strict purity to its elements, from O'Bannon and co.'s script, to Giger's ruthless creature design, to Derek Vanlint's creeping cinematography, and so on. Yet a director's job is to tie elements together into a greater whole, and Scott does exactly that. Alien is a bereft sexual nightmare full of foreboding, menace, and isolation.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2: Leggo My Ego

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Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Kurt Russell, Elizabeth Debicki, Sylvester Stallone, Sean Gunn, Chris Sullivan
Runtime: 136 mins.
2017

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has lower highs and higher lows than its predecessor. It fixes some of the more obvious problems of Guardians, like painful expository dialogue, a few ugly underlit sequences, and a plot shamelessly centered around feverish MacGuffin-chasing. Vol. 2 is more visually arresting all around, and its villain is tied intimately to our protagonist. On the other hand, Vol. 2 struggles with the law of diminishing returns. It is impossible to replicate the joy of discovering all these bizarre and instantly endearing characters, so writer/director Gunn is tasked with keeping said characters fresh and interesting. Much like Age of Ultron, which similarly has a lot of interesting stuff going on but feels overstuffed and undercooked, Vol. 2 cannot quite capture the woozy highs of the first film.

There is one exception to this. I'm referring to the opening sequence with Baby Groot dancing to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" while the obligatory opening action sequence happens out of focus in the background. This is Gunnian subversion at its finest, trading off an indulgent CGI-fest for an expression of pure joy. The sequence is well-staged in one long, fluid cut that follows Baby Groot through adorable piecemeal interactions with each of the main characters. The film never recaptures the elation of its opening minutes, but the prevalent sense of fun is what makes Vol. 2 far more watchable than much of its ilk.