THE WITCH: Toil and Trouble

Director: Robert Eggers
Writer: Robert Eggers
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson
Runtime: 92 mins
2016

I saw The Witch with a mostly full crowd. They talked, texted, and laughed through it. At the end the lights came up and people started grumbling.

"I want my money back."

"I couldn't even understand what they were saying."

"That was one of the worst movies I've ever seen."

Meanwhile my friends and I sat transfixed and slowly recovering from a soulwrenching cinematic experience. We remained shaken through dinner, and when I got home I felt uneasy turning out the lights for bed.

How could we have possibly had such a disparate experience from all the people around us?

DEADPOOL: Funny or Die

Director: Tim Miller
Writers: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Ed Skrein, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, Stefan Kapicic
Runtime: 108 mins.
2016

I have mixed feelings about Deadpool. The character immediately gripped me when I first discovered him in high school. As a friend recently put it, "He defeated a bad guy with a thought bubble. That's the greatest."

The structure of my personality has always been particularly susceptible to metafiction. "Metafiction" is shorthand for any work of art that is within the work of art aware of itself as a work of art. Basically, it's when the characters are allowed to talk back to the reader. The way form can dominate content in metanarrative has great appeal to folks with a structure-heavy mindset. Deadpool was one of my first exposures to blatant metafiction, and it was revelatory. The character was actively recognizing the formal context in which he was placed! He was bringing subtext to the level of text! He was making jokes about the audience's relation to fictionalized characters! It struck me as smart and very, very funny.

After digging into metafiction for my college English thesis, I've come to realize that the most important part of metafiction is not how clever or creative it is, but how well it is able to ground itself in real emotional truth. Vulnerability is the key to any meaningful narrative, and metafiction more than other genres can easily be too clever for its own good. By constantly referencing itself, a story can get caught up in irony to the point that it ceases to say anything more than "Look at how smart I am!"

Please.

Please look at how smart I am.

HAIL, CAESAR!: Das Capitol

Directors: Ethan and Joel Coen
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Veronica Osorio, Heather Goldenhersh, Alison Pill, Max Baker
Runtime: 106 mins.
2016

Hail, Caesar! is a dumb movie about dumb movies. As such, it never reaches the level of profundity of the Coen Bros.' long list of masterpieces, or even the escalating zaniness of their former comedic output like The Big Lebowski. If one were forced to rank their oeuvre, Hail, Caesar! has got to come in pretty low on the list, but the good news is that it doesn't aspire to be at the tippy top. I suspect that if seasoned filmmakers like the Coens tried to make their best-movie-ever every time they set anything to film, they would get burned out fast. Hail, Caeser! is clearly a screw around movie for everyone involved, and it ends up being a passionate and glorious one at that.

If you were to be so inclined to suggest that this movie has a plot, it would surround the activities of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a 1950's Hollywood fixer whose job it is to keep the aptly named Capitol Pictures up and running. He's not a creative, he just keeps the creatives functioning like cogs in a well-oiled machine. He has received an offer for a more stable job with reasonable work hours and far less stress, and this offer occupies his mind during the events of the film, which amount to a particularly trying few days for Mannix. His big movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) has been kidnapped by a group of shady communists who call themselves The Future, the media is circling like vultures, and there are a laundry list of other on-and-off-set troubles that Mannix must aggressively manage. In the end, is the creation of Hollywood blockbuster films worth all the trouble?

THE REVENANT: A Dish Served Cold

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writers: Mark L. Smith, Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Leondardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck
Runtime: 156 mins.
2015

Iñárritu has done it again. Following hot on the heels of his Best Picture win with Birdman, he has crafted yet another arthouse film that has thrust its way into mainstream consciousness. The Revenant has garnered a ton of buzz, topped the box office, and snagged a whole bunch of Oscar nominations. However, and I promise you I'm not simply being contrarian when I say this: The Revenant is a narrative failure. It's a bad story told haphazardly, yet in the most stylistically impressive way imaginable. It's all the more disappointing because it was close to being so much better.

Let's ignore the buzz surrounding the movie for a while. All that business about how difficult it was to film, and how Leo DiCaprio almost got killed a dozen times over--that'll come up later. For now let's just look at the film. Much of the runtime follows a scout for a party of trappers named Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio). He gets into arguments with fellow trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) about how best to get back to safety in the wake of a brutal Native American raid. Then he gets destroyed by a bear. Glass appears to be slowly dying, so team captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) elects three men to stay behind and take care of him: Glass's half-Indian son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), the young and goodhearted Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and the aforementioned greedy bastard Fitzgerald. The raiding party could come back at any point, so Fitzgerald goes ahead and tries to kill Glass, then kills Hawk instead and hides the body so that he and Bridger can move on, leaving Glass in a shallow grave. But Fitzgerald underestimates Glass's ability to crawl long distances.

TOP TEN 2015

Other Top Ten Lists.

This Christmas, a holiday season inundated with an insurmountable flood of Star Wars merchandise, I heard my nephew describe one of his toys as a "Lego Movie Lego Set." In other words, this is a toy set based on a film adaptation of that same brand of toy set. Setting aside the meta-awareness that The Lego Movie brought to the conversation, that playset throws into stark reality the perpetual cycle of film and merchandise, forever feeding off of each other.

Before my second viewing of The Force Awakens, a ticket purchase that I felt some vague guilt about, there was a big screen commercial that by all appearances advertised neither a film nor a product, but rather urged its audience to talk to more people about Star Wars and watch more Youtube videos about Star Wars. We've gone beyond advertising products, and are now advertising cultural monopolies--the utter domination of discourse.

Culture is eating itself. 2015 exists at the nexus of rampant reboot/remake/requel culture. Movies that make significant money are almost never original properties anymore. That being the case, production companies have delved deep into their reservoirs to try to dredge up old properties that still carry with them a modicum of brand recognition. Thus we get the crushing inevitability of a nostalgia-pillaging Jurassic Park sequel. A wretched Fantastic Four cobbled together out of sheer corporate obligation. A new Terminator movie that nobody liked, the third Terminator movie in a row that was meant to kick off a subsequently aborted trilogy. A trilogy of failed trilogies. And on the horizon, a Die Hard remake, a Labyrinth remake, a Memento remake, and cinematic universes for Marvel, DC, Ghostbusters, Avatar, Transformers, Hasbro, the Universal Monsters, and The Fast and the Furious, among others.

The cart is firmly before the horse.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT: America's Secret Sin

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Demian Bichir, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Channing Tatum
Runtime: 187 mins.
2015

I take pains to keep my reviews here as substantive as possible while providing the fewest number of plot and story details I can get away with. The lowest form of film criticism is by-the-numbers plot recap. I admire film reviews that can give me an idea of the movie while skirting any information that might influence my experience of the story.

However, I don't feel like I can give a proper review of The Hateful Eight, one of Tarantino's more controversial works, without digging into heavy spoilers. So I'm going to split this post into Spoiler and Non-Spoiler sections.

THE BIG SHORT: Bubble Trouble

Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Adam McKay, Charles Randolph
Cast: Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt
Runtime: 130 mins.
2015

I've invented an adage. It goes like this: I don't care what a movie is about.

That's not to say content isn't important. I also don't mean to imply that I don't have preferences. If someone were to ask me to choose between a movie about a high concept sci-fi adventure and a story about the trials and tribulations of ballerinas, given only that information I would pick the former. And yet, there are very few high concept sci-fi adventures that I prefer over Black Swan. The lesson I've learned over time is to never dismiss a movie based on its subject matter. If I've heard good things about a movie from trusted resources, or if I trust the people who worked on it, I will see it regardless of the subject matter, even if the subject matter is of no interest to me. The great thing about great movies is that they will make you interested in their subject matter.

The Big Short is about the housing bubble, and subsequent financial crisis, that crippled the American (and world) economy in 2007. More specifically, it is about the men who predicted, and thereby profited from, that very crisis. Some of the best jokes in the movie are about the disconnect between the moviegoing audience and the topic. Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett, our narrator, who tries to guide us through the narrative while acknowledging the eye-glazing dullness of the subject matter. Not only that, but the sheer boring factor of banking and finance is integral to the plot and themes of The Big Short. How did nobody see the housing crisis coming? They were too disinterested to look.

JOY: Dull Dolls

Director: David O. Russell
Writers: David O. Russell, Annie Mumolo
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rossellini, Dascha Polanco, Elisabeth Rohm
Runtime: 124 mins.
2015

I've heard time and time again that early career David O. Russell is better. My favorite of his has been The Fighter, the earliest of the four movies I have seen. I enjoyed the film, a boxing movie with a weird quirky spin. The dialogue was off kilter and the side characters were kooky; I still remember being thrown off kilter by the way the movie framed the weird cabal of sisters. It had a great original energy to it. Silver Linings Playbook maintained that energy, but situated it in a widely accessible package. The edges of psychological illness, that movie's subject matter, are smoothed over in a palatable and appealing way. Next was American Hustle, to which I gave a primarily positive review back in the day, but even then my major problem with the film was the lackluster convenience of the ending. It felt like Russell spent the whole movie setting up dominoes, then calmly placed them back in the box without ever knocking them over.

Now we've arrived at Joy, the culmination of a trend that has been brewing in Russell's work for years. After the critics and the public alike fell for Silver Linings Playbook, Russell has been catering to those crowds. These films aren't passion projects. They are what he thinks people want to see. This is a baseless claim of course, but I bring it up as an illustration for my feelings about Joy as a whole: it is a movie utterly devoid of passion.

Rejuvenation: 2015 in Review

Other Years in Review

2015 has seen a rather pronounced arc for Post-Credit Coda, though I suppose change isn't to be unexpected in a year when one moves residences twice. The first few months saw the blog in much the same shape as it was last year, occasionally pumping out a review when inspiration or inclination struck. That changed in the summer months, when a few of my popcorn movie reviews pulled more hits than I was typically accustomed to. I followed that up with a retrospective on the Jurassic Park movies. I'm not sure what combination of words or images I used in the Jurassic Park review to entice search engines to send traffic my way, but there has been a steady stream of clicks on that post ever since.

This encouragement prompted me to make some of the changes I had wanted to make for months. I detailed them in my Post-Credit Coda Revamped! post, and they amounted to: a new archive, a set design scheme, and a push for more big series events. My interest in this endeavor of amateur film criticism was rejuvenated and I started pumping out the posts.

I quite enjoyed my massive Spielberg Retrospective, but by the end of the Pixar business I was utterly burnt out. I even had a Tarantino series planned, but neither my desire nor my capacity were on board for that one. Obligation can lead to productivity, so long as it doesn't verge on oppression.

Unlike last year, I have no goals for Post-Credit Coda heading into 2016. Now that I've settled on a format I like, maybe it's time to buckle down, keep refining my craft, keep figuring out my goals, and put together some reasonable retrospectives.

Above all, I hope I continue to learn. If anything, this blog may someday represent a sort of personal archaeological dig into my development as a cinefile. Everyone needs a hobby.

Let's look at some year-long statistics!

This year Post-Credit Coda featured a total of 73 blog posts, including 66 movie reviews, 21 reviews of 2015 films, 1 top fifteen list, 1 guest review, 1 editorial, 1 television experiment, and 1 fluff piece written by Nicolas Cage.

Of the 66 movie reviews (exactly double last year's count!), the average score was a solid 8 out of 10.

The highest score, a perfect 10, belongs to four movies: Mad Max: Fury Road, Why Don't You Play in Hell?, Toy Story, and Finding Nemo.

The lowest score, an asinine 1.5, belongs to Left Behind.

The breakdown is as follows:

Score - Number of Movies with that Score

10 - 4
9/9.5 - 21
8/8.5 - 22
7/7.5 - 5
6/6.5 - 8
5/5.5 - 4
4/4.5 - 0
3/3.5 - 0
2/2.5 - 1
1/1.5 - 1
0/0.5 - 0

The total number of hits for this year: 14,004. The total number of hits for each specific post adds up to 7,784.

Of the 73 eligible posts, the average number of hits per post was 107.

The highest number of hits: Jurassic Park with 1725.

The lowest number of hits: Amistad and Munich with 20.

Great year everybody! Catch you later.

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS - May the Force Bewitch You

More Star Wars Reviews.

Director: J. J. Abrams
Writers: Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, Michael Arndt
Cast: Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong'o, Andy Serkis, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, Mark Hamill
Runtime: 135 mins.
2015

Thus the tang of the prequels is washed from our mouths.

Sixteen years ago the whole world was anticipating the revival of the Star Wars franchise. The Phantom Menace was perhaps the most widely anticipated movie of all time. Star Wars fans had assumed for years that they would never have another new experience in their beloved fantasy world, yet here Lucas was returning to his old stomping grounds. He had a new story to tell, and his audience anticipated it with bated breath and open arms. Then the movie was released...

Many people walked out of that theater shellshocked, having realized from the moment of the opening crawl that something was very rotten in Denmark. Some people walked out thinking they had seen something good, already preparing their defenses via a psyche suffering from heavy cognitive dissonance. Few people walked out satisfied in any meaningful way.

The prequels wrapped up and Star Wars was dead yet again, leaving fans with a decades-spanning case of blue balls. It seemed impossible to conceive of being excited about another Star Wars revival after Lucas's last debacle--and yet, here we are, staring down the barrel of a Star Wars movie that has become the new most anticipated film of all time. This franchise is a titan that will not die.

The excitement did not spring up overnight, to be sure. A great deal of work was put into refurbishing the franchise's image by a great number of talented people (the marketing push for The Force Awakens has been one of the most skillful and massive advertising assaults ever). At the pinnacle of all this was J. J. Abrams, a man with an unparalleled love for Star Wars whose entire career seems to have built to this point. From the first bits of Star Wars information that came down the pipeline, Abrams and co. actively, if not explicitly, disavowed the prequels and promised a return to form. J. J. convinced us all that he understood why Star Wars became such a cultural phenomenon in the first place, and he reassured us that we were all in good hands.

All of that turned out to be true to a fault. The great failing of The Force Awakens is its unforgivable similarity to the original trilogy, A New Hope in particular. Yes, the movie is a return to form, but it accomplishes this by replicating large swathes of the originals. This goes deeper than winky and noddy homages to the original trilogy, though there are plenty of those. I'm talking about a lack of imagination on the structural level. Yet again a droid is secretly given documents of incredible importance. Yet again our characters walk into a shady cantina with aliens playing snappy music in the background. Yet again, and this is the most egregious example, our plot centers around the destruction of a massive planet-killing weapon.