STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI: Toxic Masculinity

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Director: Rian Johnson
Writer: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, Benicio Del Toro, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Frank Oz, Lupita Nyong'o
Runtime: 152 mins.
2017

Spoilers throughout, though this was the second largest opening weekend of all time so I guess you've seen it?

I'm going to start by establishing some crucial context, because I'm about to be combative and I want folks to understand exactly how I mean to be combative.

A primary role of the critic is to provide a perspective and a platform that allows people to further engage and play with the art they consume. The role of the critic is NOT to decide whether a piece of art is good or bad. Any critic who believes this about himself (and I say "himself" because the ones who believe this tend to be men) is full of shit. Nobody should ever presume to tell you that your experience is wrong. Yet despite the inherent subjectivity of art, I maintain that it's not all relative. What this means is that we can have substantial discussions not only about our own experience, but about whether a work of art works or doesn't work within the context of itself. So basically, I would be a fool to ever suggest that someone should or shouldn't like something, but I could disagree about an argument they put forward concerning how the movie functions.

Which brings us to the explosive cultural phenomena shitstorm the recent release of Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. You've probably noticed that The Last Jedi has been widely divisive in a totally different way than its predecessor. The responses to The Force Awakens tended to fall into two categories: effusive praise and shrugging acceptance (of which I fell in the latter). But The Last Jedi has caused a stunning outpouring of hate, buffeted by an equal and opposite outpouring of love.

To play my hand, I liked The Last Jedi. A lot. Probably more than any Star Wars movie since Empire. And yet I very soon discovered that the internets have been aflood with fans expressing hatred, anger, disgust, sadness, and crushing disappointment. It reached epidemic proportions when fans expressed their ire by descending upon Rotten Tomatoes to torpedo the film's score, currently at 93% for critics and 55% for audiences. This swing of 38 percentage points is not unheard of. The unprecedented part is that for a blockbuster like Star Wars, the disparity between audiences and critics always goes in the opposite direction. So what's going on here?

STAR WARS: EPISODE V - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: A Force to Be Reckoned With

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Director: Irvin Kershner
Writers: Leigh Brackett, Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas
Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, Frank Oz
Runtime: 124 mins.
1980

With the possible exception of Rogue One, The Empire Strikes Back is the last Star Wars film to actively try something new. In the thirty-seven years since its release, the most successful film franchise of all time has completely failed to match Empire's innovation. Maybe part of the problem is that Empire was so successful at shaping the identity of Star Wars that everything thereafter necessarily returned to the same well.

That's the double-edged sword of making something iconic: forging a memorable identity for your property also means putting it in a box. And it doesn't get more iconic than The Empire Strikes Back. Consider how many aspects of it have been canonized and remixed over and over again in the form of video games, merchandise, books, other movies. Empire defined a generation.

It's easy to see why, looking back from our perch in the middle of the newest Star Wars trilogy. Empire is the best kind of sequel in that it expands on its predecessor with seeming effortlessness, something no other Star Wars movie has managed. Everything in Empire feels more epic, grander than before. Yet it accomplishes this without artificially inflating stakes by doing something dumb like giving our heroes a newer, bigger Death Star to tangle with (they'll save that trick for Episode VI... and Episode VII).

LADY BIRD: Coming of Age

Director: Greta Gerwig
Writer: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Beanie Feldstein, Lucas Hedges, Timothee Chalamet, Tracy Letts, Jordan Rodrigues, Odeya Rush
Runtime: 94 mins.
2017

Of all its best qualities, I am most taken by Lady Bird's fantastically subtle exploration of empathy. It's a coming of age story, after all. Not only do these types of narratives pit young people against the growing urgency of external pressures like economic struggles and repressive gender roles, but they also force these young people to come to terms with the monsters inside themselves. Kids are sociopaths in a most general sense: it is impossible for them to see or feel outside of their own experience. The function of the coming of age story is to represent a character slowly emerging from solipsism into a cold social reality, as well as a warm interpersonal one.

Lady Bird does all this in a way that feels true rather than forced, which is probably the highest compliment one can give a story like this. Writer/director Greta Gerwig makes a point of eschewing cliches, or at least setting them up in order to subvert them. People's lives don't change in clean moments of catharsis. Rather, their experience shifts gradually, around the edges of their life, until one day some event throws into stark relief the long-developing tectonic shifts that have been happening all along.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: Minor League

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, Joss Whedon, Zack Snyder
Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Ciarán Hinds, Amber Heard
Runtime: 120 mins.
2017

PRODUCTION

Warner Bros. and DC have been trying to cobble together a Justice League film for a decade. The twists and turns of that saga are numerous yet not terribly worth enumerating. This particular intellectual property has been a potential cash cow that Warner Bros. has been trying unsuccessfully to exploit for quite a while now.

The production of the Justice League that is currently wallowing at your local cineplex, however, began in April 2016 (though the film had been in the works for at least two years before that). With significant reshoots taking place in May 2017, that makes Justice League one of the more prolonged film productions of all time. The reshoots were in large part a course correction imposed on the film due to near-universal revulsion of its predecessor, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Clocking in at $25 million, Justice League's reshoots were around four times as expensive as a typical blockbuster's reshoots would be. In fact, Justice League was one of the most expensive film ever made, coming in at an estimated $300 million, although we can't know for sure because Warner Bros. conspicuously refuses to release the numbers.

Although Zack Snyder directed the lion's share of the film, Joss Whedon was brought on in an uncredited directorial capacity after Snyder had to leave production due to a family tragedy. So what we have is one of the lengthiest and most expensive film shoots of all time, accosted by course corrections, and containing the watered down visions of two very different directors.

If there is one perfect anecdote that sums up the haphazard slapdashery of the Justice League production, it is that of Henry Cavill's mustache. The unanticipated and Superman-heavy reshoots of this May ended up coinciding with the shooting of another of Cavill's upcoming movies, Mission Impossible 6, in which his character will be sporting quite a fashionable mustache. The MI6 shoot required Cavill to keep his mustache, but he also needed to portray Superman, so Warner Bros.' solution was to erase his mustache with some quick and sloppy CGI, making this a likely candidate for Most Expensive Mustache of All Time.

THOR: RAGNAROK - Rok and Roll

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Director: Taika Waititi
Writers: Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Jeff Goldblum, Tessa Thompson, Karl Urban, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, Taika Waititi
Runtime: 130 mins.
2017

The Marvel Cinematic Universe here enters its 17th entry, and for at least the last ten of those it hasn't been able to shake a particular debate: Are all Marvel movies the same?

For my part, I tend to be impressed by the malleability of Marvel's formula. Ever since the anonymous Thor: The Dark World, every new film has very explicitly staked a claim to its own genre identity. The Winter Soldier is a political thriller, Guardians of the Galaxy is a space opera comedy, Ant-Man is a heist movie, Iron Man 3 is a Shane Black movie. These movies have gotten to a comfortable enough place that they can take aesthetic risks, and visually each film seems more differentiated than the last, a trend that is set to continue if the entrancing footage from Black Panther is any indication.

That being said, there are commonalities between the films that are worth paying attention to. Cameos, post-credit scenes, regrettable forgettable set-ups for future movies, weak villains, generic CGI portal-based action climaxes. By themselves these surface-level resemblances do not make the franchise samey, but they are interconnected with some deep tissue storytelling tendencies that I suspect are the major factor in making audiences feel like they are watching something they've seen before. Chief among these are a lack of consequence and character arcs that slyly cut corners in order to perpetually sustain the regressive status quo.

Ragnarok is very much a Marvel movie in that it yet again features all these issues in some measure. Despite being played by one of the most talented actors in film, Hela (Cate Blanchett) is somehow yet another underwhelming villain. The climax is trying its hardest to enliven the cliches, and it is admittedly badass eye candy, but remains a CGI throwdown with faceless villains and portal macguffins. The themes and character motivations are present throughout, but often occluded. Fortunately, just like Guardians of the Galaxy before it, Marvel found a director uniquely suited to exploit the shortcomings of the Marvel model.

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.