PG-13 for dinosaurs eating people. There's some language and some crude, sexual humor bordering on harassment. But for the most part, it's an exercise in watching people getting torn apart in creative ways. It is less violent, at least on-screen, than Jurassic Park. But that doesn't change the fact that it is still an obscenely violent movie that I let me kids watch on the reg. PG-13. DIRECTOR: Colin Trevorrow Despite the fact that I've confirmed this a whole bunch of times, I'm pretty sure that I've written about this movie before. I know that I've seen it since having started this blog. But apparently, I can't find any evidence of having written about it, so I watched it again to ensure that I can safely say that I've written about every movie that I've seen for the past five years. This is my life. I can't say it isn't. One of the side effects of having a blog where you have to watch movies critically is the harsh reality that a movie you like might not be the quality film you want it to be. I really like Jurassic World. It's the second best in the Jurassic line, although a distant second from Jurassic Park. Every other Jurassic movie pales from the first two. There's a lot of love behind this movie. It clearly adores the OG Jurassic Park so much that it even has a character vocalize that the original park was "legit". It also delivers on a promise that we were never really given. After all, Jurassic Park sells the notion that this park was going to be opened to the public. The test run was clearly meant to be experienced by the masses and, consequently, the chaos would grow exponentially. Cool. I love it. The Lost World: Jurassic Park really dangled that in our noses more, implying that the new Jurassic Park was going to be in the heart of San Diego. It is the eternal threat that never actually came. So watching a very populated Jurassic World gives me this feeling of, "Now that's what I was waiting for." And in terms of spectacle and fun, it totally delivers. I always considered the OG Jurassic Park to be a perfect balancing act that offers a smart corporate thriller mixed with a really good sci-fi disaster movie. None of the other films in the franchise really even got close. Sure, they all dabbled (with the exception of Jurassic Park III) with the evil corporation inGen and their attempts to monetize these animals for inhumane use. But that first movie is just so tight and Jurassic World doesn't really even try to be that tight of a movie. I knows what most people want: dinosaurs eating people with the John Williams Jurassic Park theme behind it. And, really, stuffing as many potential deaths into a movie worked, despite the fact that it really shouldn't have in any way. Usually, bigger doesn't equal better. But in the case of Jurassic World, with its militarization of nostalgia and action, it works. But then my brain had to go and screw it all up. I mean, I'm still going to enjoy it because my heart likes what it likes. I mean, one of my favorite movies is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and that movie is problematic as heck. There's something cathartic about the Jurassic franchise. This is a problem that we keep causing ourselves. Michael Crichton stressed the importance of how man will do anything for entertainment, even spit in the face of God in the name of science. So when things go bad, it is our own fault. We built the Tower of Babel and we keep on learning the lesson from that action. But Jurassic World, for all of its attachment to the past and nostalgia, kind of brings in a weird message that I don't know really works. Part of it comes from the fact that we just can't keep having raptors escape and fences go down. There needs to be something even scarier out there. And that's where the message of the Indominus Rex kind of screws things up. It's interesting to think that Colin Trevorrow almost directed the last Star Wars movie following the very gutsy The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi made and lost fans on the notion that we should dispose of the past and accept new things. It's this giant allegory for the death of nostalgia. Jurassic World takes the opposite approach. If anything, it criticizes anything new. The Indominus Rex is the new threat to the parkgoers. It's an abomination, more so than the cloned dinosaurs because the Indominus Rex represents the artificial or the false. The movie teases itself with self-referential comments on the absurdity of the name and the hubris of its creators constantly. Trevorrow isn't trying to hide that notion. It's central to the story. And, at first, it seems like man has to face his own creation one-on-one. That is, until the dinosaurs are called to be the response to the problem. Dan Harmon made this whole bit on Harmontown where he accurately predicted a substantial chunk of Jurassic World. He kind of guessed that the heroes of the story would be the villains of the old story: the raptors. The thing is: the movie actually sells this as the dumbest idea possible. Hoskins, the human villain of the piece, keeps trying to show off that the raptors can be these perfect soldiers. They can take down the Indominus Rex and everyone immediatealy reacts like they should. The stress that this a terrible idea. This leads to all kinds of people being killed, including Hoskins himself. But the thing that no one really talks about is: Hoskins was right? I mean, it was the raptors, the T-Rex, and the Mosasaurus that take down the Indominus Rex. Yeah, it didn't work exactly like Hoskins said. But he was right. Those raptors are the reason that the heroes of the film escape. Sure, the way that the Mosasaurus saves the day seems completely beyond the suspension of disbelief. After all, if the Mosasaurus could jump out of its tank and grab something huge on land, how is he not constantly eating park-goers? (Note: this is the first watch of the movie where I thought of that.) But the biggest takeaway is the allegory that comes out of that. Jurassic World relishes in the visiting of Jurassic Park. Don't get me wrong, I'm right there beside you, Jurassic World. Those scenes tend to be my favorite because I am such a massive Jurassic Park fan. But by having the original dinosaurs, not souped up in any way, just take out the "something new", isn't that an attack on the notion of offering something new? I will always love Jurassic Park as one of my favorite movies. It's my comfort film. But the reason that I keep watching these movies is that I want to be offered something new. I want the mythology to expand, not to be retread. And the only reason that I don't throw Jurassic World on the ash-heap is that it appeals to my baser nature of enjoying things I like. I had the same reaction to The Force Awakens. A lot of people really didn't like that movie because it was such a retread of Star Wars. I acknowledged it and still liked it. But it didn't mean as much to me like a new film really would have. (The irony, of course, is that I didn't necessarily love The Last Jedi at the time. Now, The Last Jedi is simply an okay movie.) I want the humans to take down the Indominus Rex. I really get tired of the T-Rex solving a lot of the problems in the Jurassic Park movies. With Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom in mind, I'm seeing the same thing happen with the raptors as the deus ex machinae. I don't have a problem with Clare's shoes. I don't have a problem with whiny kids. I don't even have a problem --although I really should --with Owen's weird regressive attitude towards workplace sexual harassment. I just don't love the message of nostalgia over innovation. It's a hard line I'll take.
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Rated R for sexuality, violence, language and racism. I'm sure that this might be a criticism from some, but Live by Night tries to do everything. So while there isn't necessarily too much violence or too much sexuality, there is some. There's some drug use and some nudity. Again, I almost forgot about that because there are so many moments of inappropriateness where none of them are huge, but they are there. So keep in mind, this is just an R-rated movie all around without necessarily being offensive.
DIRECTOR: Ben Affleck I'm caffeinated. I found this absolutely perfect playlist (that most of the world has probably been listening to forever) for writing that isn't at all distracting and makes me feel like a real author. There's no reason that I shouldn't be able to get this done mid-morning. I got all of my work done before the day started. Really, I'm optimistic (except for the fact that I just remembered one thing on my To-Do list that hasn't gotten touched yet). This is another entry in the long line of movies that is good to go into with a lowered sense of expectation. I remember watching the trailer for Live by Night and thinking that it didn't really appeal to me, which was a bummer because I think Ben Affleck is a remarkably talented director. He really had a rollercoaster of a career. I know that he is pretty unlikable for the things in his personal life that keep on popping up and I know that my wife is very personally defensive of Jennifer Garner. I don't know the guy and part of me might be talking from a place of ignorance or privilege, but I keep viewing him more of an artist than as a dude. Again, I can't imagine what it must be like being a celebrity. But I never saw someone who redefined himself more as an artist than Affleck. Affleck went from being the joke of Gigli to being one of those directors that can absolutely capture suspense and characters in an epic way. So when I found out that most film fans weren't exactly enamored by Live by Night, I oddly felt vindicated that I wasn't excited by the trailer. Maybe it was just that prohibition setting and the fact that I've never really been drawn to gangster films that made it happen, but I put Live by Night behind me. But then I thought I would eventually give Affleck the benefit of the doubt. He's really impressed me in the past with Gone Baby Gone and The Town. Sure, he's got his schtick. He loves the Boston criminal who kind of represents the everyman. I get that. He makes the bad guy look really good and there's a talent to that. If I had to be critical, Live by Night, despite its setting, is kind of his comfortable place. We keep seeing a variation of the same protagonist time and again. But for a guy who went into this movie expecting him to drop the ball, there was something comforting in him presenting borderline the same movie over again. Normally, I applaud risks. But in this case, I went in to see a Ben Affleck crime drama and that's exactly what I got. It's not perfect. Out of the movies I mentioned, Live by Night might be the weakest of the group. But even the weakest of the group is extremely watchable. It's biggest fault is that it is trying to do too much, which really muddles the message. Joe is not a good human being. When a protagonist goes beyond being an antihero and is a straight up bad guy, the character has to be criticized. Joe is selfish. He's juxtaposed by his inherently good father, who has flaws of his own. We see that he's been out for himself. Apparently, he's a terrible getaway driver and serves three years in prison. But he never really has that redemptive past. I'm probably going to be talking about all the many beats that this movie presents, but it fails to do one thing: make Joe redemptive. He does good things, that's for sure. But he isn't at all a redemptive character. Instead, the film presents the Joe as the least evil amongst a world pervaded by evil. That's a really muddy message. If anything, Joe's big transformation isn't from bad to good, but from cocky to slightly humble. I almost feel like Affleck can't help but imbue his characters with a little bit of cockiness, so that might not actually be a character trait. But he is betrayed by a woman that becomes his central character trait. He is thrown deeper into the world of sin because his girlfriend was killed and he took the noble path of still defending her beyond her transgression. But that thrust into revenge somehow heals him a bit? He goes from being this small time crook to being the head of bootlegging in Florida. I don't know why this makes him a better person because he still does awful, awful things. But it is the love of a woman that tempers him. It's odd that Affleck chooses to actually have the revenge of Emma happen in a montage. But okay, that's a choice. It's through Joe's dealing with the various shadier characters in the underworld that we realize that Joe must be the one we support. Now, I am starting to lose the focus of this blog because I have too much to say (I swear, I'm a decent English teacher). But I want to talk about the most messed up element of this movie. Remember, I'm one of the few people who probably really likes this movie, but I have to talk about Joe versus the KKK. Joe, a bad guy, runs into a problem with the KKK. Joe, being Catholic, Irish, and married to a Black woman, has drawn the attention of the more base elements of the KKK. He tries working with them to resolve the problems peacefully, but is stymied by the fact that they are greedy racists. Okay. But there's a moment where Joe confronts the Grand Wizard of the Klan to keep a leash on his underlings and the Grand Wizard makes a really uncomfortable point that the movie should be looking at far deeper. The Klan never sees themselves as the bad guy. We view them as the bad guys of the narratives because they're the bad guys objectively. But the Klan views themselves as the last line of defense from the crime and degradation that comes with the blurring of cultural lines. So, doesn't that make the Klan right? The reason that they are attacking Joe is that the Irish Catholic is coming in and bringing crime with him. The Klan has taken it upon themselves to rid their home of crime. Yeah, they find that Joe is married to a Black Hispanic woman and they throw that against him too. But Joe really probably wouldn't have been on their radars if it hadn't been for the fact that he's a crime boss. From their perspectives, Joe is justifying all the years of bigotry and hatred that they have espoused. He's Exhibit A for the prosecution. Yet, we still root for Joe, despite the bloodbath that he leaves in his wake. He still is the tragic character. Emotionally, Joe is cathartic. He is someone we can emotionally relate to, despite the fact that --I hope --none of us are crime bosses. But Joe as an antihero is extremely problematic. We want him to win simply because he's a charming white male who exudes charisma. So storytelling-wise, this is a really fun story that has a lot of content to cover. I enjoyed it because I went into it with very low expectations. But at the end of the day, intellectually, this movie has a lot to be desired. Not rated, and I have to say that I'm stymied on this one. It is a horror movie...kind of. There are deaths. But most of the movie is even beyond tame. It's an almost completely sedate film. Horrible things happen and the reactions are almost lithium fueled. It's really hard to even place this on the MPAA rating. I'd say R for intended audience, but PG-13 for content. Either way, I don't have that decision to make.
DIRECTOR: Jessica Hausner I never thought I would be in a position to take requests. I straight up got a request for this movie and I never would have heard of it had it not been for the request. I'm curious about what spawned this request. How did someone stumble across this? Were they perusing Hulu and saw this movie starring Ben Whishaw? Because that's the potential narrative of how I would have discovered this. Or maybe I'm so out of the loop that I used to be in that this is the movie that all my film nerd friends are into. Regardless, I'm going to approach this movie completely without context and try to break down what exactly I watched. I don't know, man. Part of me wants to say that this is Little Shop of Horrors. The other part of me is leaning harder into Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I can safely say that plant-based horror is actually a thing. But this is a movie that almost uncelebrates the films that came before it. While plotwise, there are a lot of beats that come from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the movie almost seems ashamed of the horror tropes that came before it. It simultaneously celebrates and fears the way horror movies are made. Because this is a quiet movie. As much as this is a question about behavior and fearing change, the movie is almost shielded by its direction. The movie uses this absolutely bananas color palate, often focusing with contrasting colors against a sanitized whiteness. There are stark reds and intense purples while actors are giving their most quiet performances imaginable. The movie dares the audience to sleep during it because it can't be bothered to have big emotions. Part of me thinks that this is a reaction to the A24 horror movement with its attached artsiness to monstrous situations. I do think that the direction and the action seems a little artificial and stylized, simply for the sake of being so. But it mostly does work. Some movies are okay with being quiet and personal and Hausner probably used this opportunity to sell that idea. The reason that Invasion of the Body Snatchers matters so much is that it served as allegory. Yeah, it was an allegory for something that I genuinely hated, the fear of Communism. (This has been debated and I ask that people read the liner notes to the Criterion edition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers LaserDisc for more. You know you have that thing laying around and have been meaning to read it.) When Body Snatchers asked people to question the loyalty of their neighbors, the allegory gained this importance. (I can't stress enough that this message is gross, but I also appreciate art stepping out of the entertainment realm.) While Little Joe has the same story, the question about the allegiances of others, I don't really have the crisp and clear allegory. I suppose, like I tried supposing with Body Snatchers, that we could be talking about the rise of Q and Trump movement. Yeah, it's British, but this is happening worldwide in some form or another. We have become distrustful of one another and we need an understanding for what created this. But this is where Little Joe might actually have legs as something independent of its forefathers. Let's pretend the allegory for the rise of militant conservatism next door is the message. That's actually pretty rad. But let's say that it is that. The idea that this didn't come from the stars actually matters. When Body Snatchers say that an alien menace has invaded us, it becomes both xenophobic / critical of the other. Someone else has done this. But Little Joe stresses that the protagonist was initially the advocate for the creation of this flower. Alice, with Chris, spat in the face of God with science and have destroyed humanity. (Mind you, I adore that there is no actual conclusive result stating that the flower is the cause of these changes in behavior. I really like that, BTW.) But if that is the case, instead of blaming the other, it is a criticism of the self. That tends to be the case with the science-gone-wrong trope. If we were to unpack that allegory, it is actually pretty damning of the liberal left. Let's take a look at that. Again, I am still processing this theory and I don't necessarily agree with anything that unravels from this deep dive. The creation of the Little Joe flower was done with the best of intentions. It was a dangerous move to mess with the status quo to make the world a better place through the creation of odorous flowers. But by forcing nature to take an alternate turn from the way it was going (even though the attempt to make Little Joe was aiming to undo genetic manipulation), this parasitical creature was created that would potential erase free will. With a 2019 release, the movie would have been a commentary on the rise of extreme conservatism in the wake of a progressive era. I will say that I've subscribed to the notion that extremism has been bred in America --and the West as a whole --in attempts to balance out the extremism of the previous regime. Clinton led to Bush. Bush led to Obama. Obama led to Trump. With the use of science as the origins to the creation of Little Joe, I can't help but it is a reproach of our culture. We did this to ourselves. But again, it might not even be an allegory. Unlike the Communism thing with Body Snatchers, it doesn't exactly wear its message on its sleeve. As much as I like the read that I just gave Little Joe, I also only give it a modicum of validity. I like imbuing stories, particularly science fiction stories, with meaning. For all I know, I'm probably wrong. So that leaves me a movie that dances outside of my logic and reason. So I can then appreciate the movie for one thing: the fact that it doesn't quite give me the answer. With other plant horror films, we have a clear answer with what is going on. Perhaps the other characters aren't let in on the dramatic irony, but the audience knows that the pod people come from outer space. Hausman really goes out of her way to stress that we don't know what is going on with the changes in behavior. At one point, it really seems like she was going to tell us. Joe and Selma mess with Alice and confirm her worst suspicions, only to cast greater doubt on the true nature of everyone's change in behavior. Yeah, it really seems like the plants are messing with everyone. The data that came from the interviews is particularly damning. The escalation of violent / suicidal behavior at the biotech firm is horrifying. But all of this is the world of cinema. We see what we want to see. For all we all know, the message of the film is that people change and that we don't necessarily like change. The smartest thing that the movie did was never tell me that the plants were doing this the whole time. That's a work of genius. But in terms of liking the movie, I don't know if it did what it was supposed to. There's not a ton of people that I would recommend this to, despite the fact that it was recommended to me. It was like a decent episode of The Twilight Zone that went a little too long for me. I like me some Twilight Zone and will totally watch whatever I can, but I don't know if I would sell individual episodes as a whole meal. I think a lot of it comes from the stylization of it. Yeah, I like stylized storytelling, but the style seemed just there for the sake of being stylized. That makes a pretty picture, but it also makes it a forgettable movie. Rated R for a genocidal amount of death. Yeah, it's gunplay, which is somehow more acceptable than knife violence or bludgeoning. But this is still an extremely gory movie. Like, so many people die and they die horrible deaths. I kind of want to look up the kill count of this movie just to see how absurd that number gets. (It's 307 deaths.)
DIRECTOR: John Woo Do you know how close I got to not writing today. It was really close. Heck, if Weebly does that thing where it wipes out all of my text, there's a real chance that I save this for tomorrow and just call it a day. I had a ton of grading today, so I was thinking that I would just take it easy after I hit my goal. But no. I have to be productive as the day is long. So I made myself a cup of tea and I'm going to knock this one out. This one was one of the early days of Criterion. Criterion had already earned its reputation from its time with Laserdisc. It was already the arthouse home video release studio. But those early days, they had to accept a lot more than they would later. It's the reason that I have Ghostbusters on Criterion Laserdisc. I'm proud of that statement, by the way. But there ended up being this nice little sweet spot that Criterion is only starting to return to today. Those early days kind of lacked the pretention that some of those films got once they hit 100+. I'm not saying those movies aren't awesome, but the early days had stuff like Armageddon, RoboCop, and the Hong Kong films of John Woo. I had seen The Killer on LaserDisc. I don't have The Killer on Criterion DVD yet. But I did see that Hard Boiled was actually a reasonably priced OOP DVD, and it was one that I was missing. It sounds like I'm going to be really sweet on this movie, but I don't really think that I can be. See, people preach John Woo before he came to America. While I agree that some of his American releases are quite weak, especially Mission: Impossible 2, I don't know if I find the same love that people have for the Hong Kong stuff. I mean, I wasn't floored by The Killer. It was fine, I guess. But Hard Boiled flustered me in the sense that I wasn't sure if the movie had too much story or too little story. The final takeaway is that the movie had too little story, but pretended that the story was rich and complicated. This is unfair of me, to a certain concern. There are smart people who could write a tome on Hard Boiled and the Hong Kong gun-fu of John Woo. I read the little pamphlet that came with it (before Criterion started releasing whole books of essays with their home releases). I mean, it sounded way smarter than anything than I have ever written here. But a lot of that comes from an understanding of cultural and historical context given to the movie in 1992. For those people who remembered, I took a film noir class in grad school. We talked about the Hard-Boiled subgenre a bit in that and I can't deny that cultural and historical background really does give the movies in this genre more meat. They are way more than hardened cop films featuring protagonist swimming against a torrent of existential dread. But I don't know if Hard Boiled, the movie, necessarily has that intellect behind it. I just savaged The Band Wagon not that long ago for its deeply upsetting themes of philistinism. But I now realized what great / fun musicals have in common with the action genre. While there are high art musicals and there is high art action, both genres are propped up by the notion of spectacle. It's that wow factor, forcing audiences to ask how something on that scale was executed perfectly. Perhaps different gender stereotypes might react to these stunts differently. A well-choreographed fight scene and a well-choreographed tap number do the same things for me. (I'm very secure, as you can tell by the fact that I constantly state it insecurely.) But, in my head, there also has to be a balance. Hard Boiled is first and foremost a stunt spectacular. Like the beginning of Police Story, Woo decides to cram as many insane stunts into a single sequence as possible. But it works better in Police Story for me because Police Story, until the final act, has a light and comedic tone to the film. Hard Boiled rarely tries telling jokes. Okay, that's not fair. A lot of people say that Hard Boiled is darkly and sadistically comic. I don't know if I agree with that one too much. Sure, the baby stuff is pretty great, but the movie really wants to stress that Tequila is a hardened cop. His name / nickname is actually Tequila, after all. We aren't given another name, so I have to refer to him as Tequila for the rest of this blog entry. But there's nothing at all tongue-in-cheek with Hard Boiled. If anything, it delights in being grim and bleak. Honestly, because it was 1992, it reads more like a Zack Snyder DC movie because everything in the early '90s was intense and raw. And there's where the movie loses me. It throws all of this spectacle at me and expects me to take it seriously. And there's a point where the movie becomes...not fun. It gains that fun again with the baby sequence. But there is only so much death that you can handle before it becomes just filler. When action is the final goal, it just somehow becomes vapid. A fireworks spectacle can go on too long. The same kind of happens with Hard Boiled. Yeah, that stuntwork is genuinely very impressive. But when I find myself getting bored by people being mowed down by gunfire, something really went wrong. I know that Woo doesn't use his patented doves sequences in this one, but everything else feels just boring after a certain point. And the thing that really bums me out is the treatment of women in these stories. I know, I'm really White Knighting yet again and I don't ever want to end up like Joss Whedon in 2021, but my goodness. Between Police Story and this, I can't help but wonder what the Hong Kong market wants out of the female character in action movies. With Police Story and its sequel, the girl was obsessed with the relationship over safety. She knew that she was dating a police officer, yet would regularly come across as shrewish because he was a jerk, yet we still related to him more than anything else. But this one, Teresa, Tequila's girlfriend, seems to hate him because she gets more flowers from someone else. When she is thrown into the fight, she instantly has to take the maternal role of taking care of the babies in the hospital? That's a bit on the nose, isn't it, movie? I mean, she thankfully has a moment where she fights a bad guy off. But it is the process of saving a bunch of adorable babies. I suppose I should talk about the central theme. There's this story about an undercover cop who might be a saint or he might have been corrupted by a life of pretending to be a Triad. That's a cool notion, if I wasn't completely spoiled by The Departed. The movie focuses on Tequila because it's Chow Yun-Fat. Okay, but the story needed to be from Tony's perspective. Tony is the one who has the story that needed to be told. We never really get a lot of clarity on Tony's perspective because he's just allowed to talk about his frustrations versus having to see him experience them. Tequila actually has a surprisingly little investment in the case. Yeah, one of his fellow police officers dies while on a sting operation, but that would eventually be dwarfed by the hospital shoot out. But Tony actually makes sense to be the protagonist. He just keeps going through so much, but doesn't actually get to feel anything in the story because the movie is drowning in action. In the last ten, fifteen minutes, he accidentally kills a cop. He verbalizes his grief for the next two minutes and it seems like this is going to be his crisis of character. But that never really comes up again. Instead, the movie just keeps throwing tropes at the screen and buries these tropes under mounds of action. Sometimes breathing out is a smart movie. I prefer depth, not width. While every single stunt looks rad in this movie, you could have had a quarter of the death, still had an impressive action movie, and developed some storylines. Instead, a lot of this seems like cool for cool's sake, and that's one of my least favorite things. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
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