ARRIVAL: It's About Time

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writer: Eric Heisserer
Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg
Runtime: 116 mins.
2016

Director Denis Villeneuve, a rising awards darling whose work consistently elevates the scripts that he chooses, specializes in atmosphere. Villeneuve's movies creep forward, slowing down the onscreen activity, forcing us to occupy the experience of his characters. In a feat of uncommon wizardry, Villeneuve's movies become increasingly riveting as the pacing slows. Arrival is not only the perfect movie to reap the benefits of Villeneuve's talents, but Eric Heisserer provides him with a screenplay that he need not elevate because it's exactly as good as he is.

After a series of impressionistic flashbacks establish the main character, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), the film jumps straight to the point. Aliens have come to Earth in the form of twelve pitch black ovoid vessels that hover silently above twelve apparently unrelated parts of the world. Louise, being one of the planet's great linguistic minds, has been summoned by the American military, as embodied by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker). Her goal, a challenge that stretches across the entirety of the film's 116 minute runtime, is to learn how to communicate with the aliens well enough to pose the all-important question: Why have they come?

OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL - Most Improved

Director: Mike Flanagan
Writers: Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard
Cast: Annalise Basso, Elizabeth Reaser, Lulu Wilson, Henry Thomas, Parker Mack
Runtime: 99 mins.
2016

Movie sequels have problems. Books and video games can often equal or even improve upon their predecessors, but a follow-up to a film typically signals a death knell. I suspect it has something to do with the purity and rigorous structure of cinematic storytelling, though there is a precedent for films that improve upon the formula offered by their franchise starter. Movies like The Dark Knight, The Godfather Part II, or even Final Destination 2 started with something special, and made it better.

I've been racking my brain; I cannot think of a single instance of an awful movie that made a great sequel. That's why, as far as I'm concerned, Ouija: Origin of Evil is an unprecedented historical event.

I've found a graphic that maps sequel quality as against the quality of the original, measured by Rotten Tomato scores. It's a flawed metric, but as good as any for making some sort of objective data set. Here's the chart. I've marked in red where Ouija: Origin of Evil would land if included.

Here's a link to the chart if you want the bigger version. That's a Rotten Tomatoes net improvement of 75%. The only movie that even comes close is The Wrath of Khan, and that differential is 42%.

OUIJA: Bored Game

Director: Stiles White
Writers: Stiles White, Juliet Snowden
Cast: Olivia Cooke, Ana Coto, Daren Kagasoff, Bianca A. Santos, Douglas Smith, Shelley Hennig, Sierra Heuermann
Runtime: 89 mins.
2014

Ouija is a movie in which you get to watch characters floss on two separate occasions. Ouija is also rare in that 80% of its title is comprised of vowels. I'm stretching for interesting factoids, but I've quickly run dry. There are probably about twenty collective seconds of good movie in here somewhere?

Ouija belongs to the unfortunate pantheon of films based on board games, so the creative team should be given a bit of leeway for being shackled to that premise. It's unclear whether director Stiles White and co-writer Juliet Snowden shat out the quickest most slapdash film that would still satisfy their corporate overlords, or whether they were actively trying to subvert their thankless task by crafting the most unappealingly cliched movie they could muster. Either way Ouija amounts to a feature length toy commercial, even going so far as having a character toss out the plasticine line, "They sell these things at toy stores," as if it were pertinent to the spooky situation. Indeed, the game is so lazily mythologized that the characters rattle off the sacred rulebook by memory, and are punished mightily for breaking them.

DOCTOR STRANGE: Misery Acquaints a Man with Strange Bedfellows

Director: Scott Derrickson
Writers: Jon Spaihts, Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams
115 mins.
2016

The Marvel juggernaut has become such an entrenched cultural institution that any commentary comes with baggage. Part of me loves the cavalcade of colorful superheroism that hits our multiplexes several times a year, and part of me is disturbed by Marvel's safe and easy placating approach, a dilemma I wrote about at some length a few weeks ago. Doctor Strange is yet another perfect embodiment of that dynamic. We have yet another endearing story with incredible atmosphere hobbled by safe narrative choices and tepid drama.

Doctor Strange is about a white man. The whitest of white men, Benedict Cumberbatch. After suffering a crippling accident that precludes him from going any further in his career as a hotshot surgeon, he has lost his sense of purpose. His journey in search of healing leads him to one Ancient One, as portrayed by Tilda Swinton, and this whitest of white women proceeds to instruct this whitest of white men on the practical value of Eastern mysticism.

I'm being glib, but the racial politics of Doctor Strange aren't great. When your story about the power of Eastern cultures has three white people as its central figures--Mr. Strange, Ms. One, and Mr. Kaecilius, the rogue villain--it's clear that you're not fully or properly engaging with the subject matter. Marvel made some strong moves with genderbending and pivoting certain characters' roles, but they try to cover over the whiteness of their movie with a few lampshading lines of dialogue, and that's not good enough.

HALLOWEEN: Who Is It That Wears the Mask?

Director: John Carpenter
Writers: John Carpenter, Debra Hill
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, Nancy Kyes, P. J. Soles, Charles Cyphers, Kyle Richards, Tony Moran
Runtime: 91 mins.
1978

Halloween is, adjusted for inflation, one of the most profitable indie movies of all time. Made on a shoestring budget of $300,000, it's the film that shot horror great John Carpenter into the mainstream consciousness. Boy is it apparent how cheap it is, too.

One could hardly blame low budget horror for looking like low budget horror. It's just funny to note the ridiculous inconsistencies that rear their head in every other scene. It's supposed to be Halloween, yet every street full of lush greenery. Except for the arbitrary scene when they sprung for a bunch of dead brown leaves to blow down the sidewalk in a half-assed attempt at seasonal atmosphere. The screenplay also shows the shabbiness of a cheap, rushed production. Any cursory scrutiny will reveal plot chasms and incomprehensible timelines for what ought to be a rather straightforward set-up: a couple of teenagers stuck babysitting instead of going out to enjoy the Halloween festivities, and the monstrous killer who stalks them.

FINAL DESTINATION 5: Bridge over Troubled Waters

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Steven Quale
Writer: Eric Heisserer
Cast: Nicholas D'Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, Ellen Wroe, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, P. J. Byrne, Arlen Escarpeta, David Koechner, Courtney B. Vance, Tony Todd
Runtime: 92 mins.
2011

Final Destination 5 begins with one of the truly ugly credit sequences of our time. Computer-generated objects hurtle towards the screen, shattering it over and over again as if that pesky fourth wall just didn't know when to quit. The film ends much the same way, with a much snazzier supercut of every death in the storied franchise. As much as is possible, FD5 has a great respect for the franchise it has inherited, and with that respect comes attentiveness, both to what has worked in the past and what hasn't. Thus FD5 is in some ways the most functional entry.

It is also the first to exist outside the dueling paradigms of James Wong and David R. Ellis. Not since Final Destination 2 has an entirely new creative team taken the reins on one of these movies. This time the helmsman is Steven Quale, making his mainstream directorial debut after a handful of high profile second unit directing gigs scattered over a decade. Writing the script is Eric Heisserer, a horror journeyman who most recently wrote Lights Out and is signed on to adapt Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. With this fresh blood comes a clear-eyed perspective not brought to the proceedings since, again, Final Destination 2. We spend a surprising amount of time getting to know the characters before their work-related bus trip turns disastrous on an enormous suspension bridge. A few of these characters actually have rudimentary arcs before their timely deaths, an astounding development for a Final Destination entry, especially this late in the game.

THE FINAL DESTINATION: NAStyCAR Race

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: David R. Ellis
Writer: Eric Bress
Cast: Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Haley Webb, Mykelti Williamson, Krista Allen, Andrew Fiscella, Justin Welborn, Stephanie Honore, Lara Grice, Jackson Walker
Runtime: 82 mins.
2009

One would be forgiven for thinking The Final Destination to be the ultimate entry in the franchise, purely on the basis of its misleading title. This is not the case. In fact, despite its arbitrary jettisoning of the numbered sequel naming convention, this feels more like a run-of-the-mill numbered sequel than any other entry in the series. Very little is decisive or definitive about this particular entry.

That's not to say there's nothing unique about it. In a strange departure, this is the first Final Destination movie with an inciting incident that does not involve the paranoia of riding in a mechanical vehicle. Rather, our heroes are observing others riding in mechanical vehicles at some sort of stock car race. If we were to be generous, we would suggest that the film is establishing its theme of audiences and the act of watching. If we were being less generous, we would suggest that this is Death's most rushed and contrived initiating disaster yet.

The Cult of Star Wars - Diversity and Disney's Galactic Empire

Preface

A couple weeks ago, Red Letter Media dropped a bomb on Youtube: Plinkett's review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. For those of you not in the know, Plinkett is a fictitious facetious centenarian serial killer sociopath who also reviews movies. He skewers films with structural analysis buffered by short skits of him doing or saying over-the-top awful things. Sometimes it's entertaining, sometimes it's simply gross.

The reason any of this is important is that four years ago, Plinkett released a series of videos ripping the prequel trilogy to shreds. These videos were funny and insightful enough to be catapulted into mainstream consciousness. The highest trafficked video now sits at almost seven and a half million views. Everybody in the nerd community was talking about these things. The videos did their part to shape the landscape of online film criticism for better or for worse.

Part of their appeal was the methodical way Plinkett dissected the prequels. He took his time and delivered hours of criticism about what exactly went wrong. For that reason I think Star Wars fans found the analysis cathartic in a way. Released seven years after Revenge of the Sith, folks were finally ready to view the prequel abominations with a clear head and a sense of humor.

So Plinkett has selected this moment to share his views on The Force Awakens--sufficient time for the post-release hype to settle down, but not yet distracted by Rogue One. After all, it's not like he could have waited until the trilogy was finished for his analysis. They're going to be making these movies until you die.

In much the same way that the original Star Wars trilogy was a breath of fresh air that invigorated and reshaped the industry and The Force Awakens was a pandering and ultimately unsatisfying remix of that formula, Plinkett's new video feels like a hollow imitation of his culturally resonant videos from four years ago. You can take a peek at it here, though I will caution that it is long and not terribly fruitful.

The video is crippled by baffling structural choices. Although it purports to be a Force Awakens review, precious little of its runtime is dedicated to The Force Awakens, and even that is hardly substantive. Most of the video insists on revisiting the prequels, ostensibly to explore how the cultural discussion on them has shifted in recent years. It ends up feeling redundant. Plinkett continually brings up the importance of his original videos apropos of nothing, a narcissistic move that is arguably in character, but isn't really germane to the discussion at hand.

But the worst of it comes an hour and twenty-six minutes in, when Plinkett tackles diversity.

FINAL DESTINATION 3: Loop-Die-Loop

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: James Wong
Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong
Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche, Alexz Johnson, Sam Easton, Jesse Moss, Gina Holden, Texas Battle, Chelan Simmons, Crystal Lowe, Amanda Crew
Runtime: 93 mins.
2006

After Final Destination 2 did all the good work of elevating the franchise, embracing a consistent tone, expanding the mythology, and adding a layer of meta-commentary, Final Destination 3 does the work of dismantling all that progress in favor of sexist reductive schlock. It was fun while it lasted.

Final Destination 3 is still fun in the way that a franchise about death invisibly hunting teenagers through Rube Goldberg machines must be fun, but this entry sure squeezes a lot of air out of the premise. Final Destination 3's initiating incident takes place on a roller coaster. Straight off the bat the movie lets us know we will not be caring about any of these characters. It also makes a needlessly big and complicated deal of who is sitting where on the coaster, for shaggy plot purposes. Then it hits us with the most ridiculous coaster-gone-wrong sequence that one could possibly imagine. Again, there is fun to be had with the inflated nonsense, but the sequence disrespects the dread surrounding FD1's plane crash, or the intricacy of FD2's car pile-up.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION: A Revolting Development

Director: Nate Parker
Writers: Nate Parker, Jean McGianni Celestin
Cast: Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Penelope Ann Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, Mark Boone Junior, Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Dwight Henry, Aja Naomi King
Runtime: 120 mins.
2016

Sometimes it's impossible, or at least unethical, to discuss a movie without its cultural context. First of all there's the title, a blatant reference to D. W. Griffith's 1915 opus Birth of a Nation, a historically important film that functions as a glorified argument in favor of the KKK and slavery. This mirrored title is a thematic inversion, a statement of intent, and also a cheeky way to generate buzz.

Awards buzz, specifically. The anticipation for this film has come with the built-in assumption that it would be in some capacity as Oscar contender, as it is the sprawling biopic of Nat Turner, historical leader of a famous slave revolt in the early nineteenth century. And the Oscars only seem to pay attention to black films if they're about slavery.