Tag: movie reviews

Terrible Reviews: Deadpool

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I can’t say I was dying to see Deadpool. It wasn’t even necessarily on my list of films to check out when they hit DVD. But it was Valentine’s Day weekend, my wife and I had the kids out of the house for a few days, and we needed something to do in public that made us feel like adults.

Short of going bar-hopping and ending with our heads in the gutters, there’s not a ton of stuff for a couple of crazy kids like my wife and I to do without driving to downtown Atlanta, which is not a thing we undertake unless we must. We decided to check out the latest Marvel offering instead. The reasoning went thusly:

(One of us, can’t remember who): I guess we could go to a movie.

Wife: What’s out that’s worth seeing?

Me: I dunno. I’ve heard interesting things about Deadpool.

Wife: What’s that?

Me: The new Marvel superhero movie. It’s about a guy who basically can’t die or something, I think.

Wife: Who’s in it?

Me: Ryan Reynolds.

Wife: SURE WE CAN SEE THAT

And so we ended up in a packed house the day before Valentine’s Day seeing the most buzzworthy film since Star Wars. And we really should have done some more research first. Not because we couldn’t handle the film, but because we weren’t properly prepared for it. You know how you like to have an idea that it’s fifteen degrees out before you crack the front door? Not because you can’t handle a blast of cold air to the privates or anything like that (what, you don’t open your front door naked in the morning?), but you want to know what you’re stepping into.

Deadpool is not for the faint of heart.

Here’s a film that knows exactly what it is, and exactly what it’s trying to do. It’s raunchy, irreverent, self-aware, and it pulls no punches. There’s gratuitous and excessive filthy language. There’s boobs and butts and … let’s just say unconventional sex. There’s straight-up murder perpetrated by the “hero” (though he does disclaim himself as “not a hero” pretty immediately). And I have no problem with any of those things! I just wasn’t prepared for it as I bought the ticket — I hadn’t even known it was rated R.

Which is entirely my own fault. And I do have some thoughts about Marvel suddenly releasing such a balls-to-the-wall, potentially offensive movie like this, when most of its product lives squarely in the PG-13 arena, but that’s a post for another time. For today, we’re here for the review, so let’s dive in.

This is the part where the review gets spoilery, so be forewarned. I’ll also disclaim that I know nothing about the character or the story outside of the film. I don’t read comic books. So if I’m missing out on some of the inside jokes … well, whatever.

What’s Good:

The writing and the central construct. Deadpool (the character) knows he’s starring in a movie. He regularly breaks the fourth wall to speak with the audience. He knows our expectations for the superhero movie we’re watching and he takes great joy in subverting those expectations. This little device could easily turn campy were it a thing the film simply dabbled in, but the writers don’t dabble — they throw us into the ocean. The film pretends to be about a guy who finds himself imbued with superpowers who must then go on to right a great injustice and save his girl into the mix, but it’s really about the sharp-witted protagonist taking us on a wild ride and messing with us every step of the way. It’s different, it’s fresh, and it works.

Feminism! One of the film’s central heroes is a young recruit at the X-Men academy (yeah, it’s a crossover, I didn’t know that either). She’s not gorgeous, she’s not troubled and fighting for revenge, she’s not that blightedly cliched Strong Female Character. She’s a grouchy teenager who’s a lot more interested in her phone than in saving the world; she just also happens to kick a serious amount of ass when she jolly well decides to feel like it. Likewise, one of the antagonists sort of fits into the same mold. Essentially she’s a lab assistant to the big bad, which lends itself to a certain set of traits by default. She’s nastyish and unsettling, but it’s not like, “oh, this is a woman who’s filling the role of a sadistic torturer,” rather it’s just “That character is messed up … I wonder what horrible thing she’s going to do next.” And then she ends up beating the hell out of a dude made of metal — with her fists.

So many films looking to get good female characters in there (as well they should) feel the need to justify every aspect of the character. This is why she’s strong, this is why she’s not afraid of men, this is where she still gets together with her girlfriends to get good and sloshed on a weeknight after she’s done saving the world. And that’s fine — but it often comes across as too much. Paper Towns was a good (or rather, abominable) example of this. They worked so hard to make the central female compelling and interesting that it all felt forced and ridiculous, ultimately stretching my credulity until I wanted to use the DVD as a drink coaster rather than finish the second half of the film. (I still finished the movie, though, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment.) The women of Deadpool — with one notable exception — just are who they are, and that makes them so much more compelling.

The Not-So-Good:

(Lack of) Feminism! While the film’s peripheral women are outstanding, the central woman is a big swing-and-a-miss. She falls into the “Cool Girl” trap as outlined in Gone Girl: she’s that too-perfect combination of everything guys want. She’s quick with a geek-culture reference, down-to-earth enough to knock back beers with the guys, and just freaky enough in the sack to make you a little uncomfortable. Ryan Reynolds’s character remarks at one point something to the effect of: “did I create you with a computer?” This is maybe a little bit self-referential on the part of the writers, but still. The film’s climax happens because she essentially gets stuffed into a fridge. For a film which seems so savvy about the genres it’s toying with, the character is a bland disappointment.

Where’d that character go? The aforementioned bad ass sidekick woman literally just disappears from the film in its closing moments. One moment she’s fighting with the X-Men, then she gets beaten while Deadpool is up finishing off the Big Bad, and the next moment the film is over and my wife and I looked at each other and said, “but what happened to what’s-her-name?” (I saw the movie a week ago, okay? I’ve forgotten ninety percent of it.) It’s not like she vanished in a ooh-I-wonder-what-she’s-going-to-do-in-the-sequel way, it’s more like the filmmakers forgot to resolve this character in any way whatsoever. An unfortunately jarring note at the end of the film.

It’s Kinda Boring. To be fair, the film is much more about the wise-cracking, fourth-wall-breaking, not-your-average-superhero taking you on a ride than it is about the “superhero story” itself. Problem is, the film is still centered around that “superhero story.” Average guy acquires superpowers. Superpowers are awesome but they kinda ruin the guy’s social life. Superhero must find a way to balance superpowers with the life he wants to lead, and oh yeah, has to deal with a villain who threatens to ruin his personal life further. The tropes are stretched awfully thin, and again, in a film which really delivers in some other areas, for the plot to be so picked-over is a disappointment.

The Verdict:

Shortcomings aside, the movie is a hell of a lot of fun. It’s witty and sharp, and pokes fun at itself and its entire genre with hilarious abandon. If you like superhero movies, and you can stomach the f-word in large quantities and more than a few dick jokes and other perversions, it’s worth checking out.

Just don’t take your kids.

To the best of my knowledge, all images above are the property of 20th Century Fox.

Terrible Reviews: Paper Towns

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Usually I disclaim that I call these Terrible Reviews because I am by no means qualified as a film reviewer, and thus my reviews are likely to be terrible. However, this time, I feel pretty confident in telling you that this film has earned a terrible review.

First of all, this is one of so many novels which was a book first, and the transition from book to film is always fraught with difficulty. You can’t hope to translate the nuances of language from the page to the screen and have that warm, fuzzy feeling carry over with them. And to be fair, I haven’t read John Green’s Paper Towns prior to seeing the film, as I did with The Fault in our Stars. That said, I might have read TFIOS after having viewed the film, but I don’t think I’m going to bother reading Paper Towns at all.

**Also, edited after the fact: For some reason, I ended up having a lot to say about this movie. I don’t know why; maybe it’s because I felt so removed from the narrative that I had time to think about what it was that was removing me from the narrative. Anyway, read on at your peril.**

This is the part where I warn you that there are spoilers ahead. If you’re one of those who cares about such things, you might want to look away, perhaps at the slowly mounting list of things to be done around the house before Thanksgiving.

I’m going to go ahead and acknowledge that I am not the target audience for this film. I’m not a high schooler, and I’m not a romantic, and I’m double definitely not a hopelessly romantic high schooler. I’m thirty and change, jaded and grumpy. So this film is on its face Not For Me.

But here’s a film which features a bland-as-butcher-paper protagonist pining after a quirky-as-pineapples-in-pink-tutus imaginary female love interest with some really frankly hard-to-swallow-even-based-on-a-pretty-substantial-willful-suspension-of-disbelief events driving the story, though to say the story is “driven” is a metaphor I’m going to unpack in a minute. It’s not so much “driven” as it stalls out halfway up the hill and coasts backwards while you try like hell to figure out how to get out without shredding your face or breaking any limbs.

Now, maybe I’m just too old. It hurts my soul to say that, but I fully appreciate the possibility that Paper Towns might be the Breakfast Club of this generation, and I just don’t get it. But I don’t think so. I think the reason The Breakfast Club was so important for my generation (and still is, I humbly think) was because just about anybody watching it could see himself in one of the characters. I don’t feel that happening here. In fact, I don’t know if anybody can particularly see himself in these characters. But enough pining for my own lost childhood. Let’s dive in.

The Good.

The film’s central message — that nobody really knows who they are, and everybody is doing their best to figure it out — is one that I can get down with. My writings here at the blarg over the past (almost) two years are evidence of my selfsame quest. There’s an existential doubt there that the film communicates well, though I’ll point out that other films do it better (The Breakfast Club, not to beat a dead horse).

Also, there’s a decentish road trip sequence which captures nicely the soul-crushing monotony that a supposed romp across the country actually entails. I don’t know, however, if the filmmakers’ intention was to serve up a boring cross country jaunt. Further, again, so many other films tackle the romanticization of the road trip, and do it so much better.

In seriousness, the protagonist’s sense of doubt is pretty real, I would say, in upper-middle class, white America. He’s on a fast track to college and a career that he feels pretty confidently is the “thing he should be doing,” but his encounter with The Girl is the monkey wrench in the machine. His growing certainty that there’s something more and that maybe he’s been looking at his life in the wrong way is a sentiment that will echo with impending graduates. Again, though, this is not a new idea … again, it’s done (better, I think) in The Breakfast Club.

Then there’s the concept, which is actually pretty fascinating: the “paper town” being a fictional place that exists only on a map. It’s kind of a lovely metaphor for the lead female’s grail-quest to figure out who she really is; the only place she can find herself is in a place that literally doesn’t exist.

The Bad.

Oh, boy. Okay. I just sang the protagonist’s praises so that I could decry him here, because he is as compelling a central character as a slowly melting ice sculpture of a pile of cow dung. He’s not charismatic, but he’s not a wallflower. He’s not dashing, but he’s not  better off wearing a paper bag on his head. He’s not a jock, but he’s not a glasses-and-suspenders clad nerd. He’s a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but not even a heaping scoop with the bursting bits of vanilla beans that explode on your tongue; he’s the factory-made processed stuff flavored with chemicals derived from chemicals that were probably used to condition car bumpers or something. It’s hard to root for him or even to care about his struggle, because in the first place, he’s just so very lacking in flavor, but also because the stakes couldn’t be lower. Regardless of how this little love story plays out, he’s gonna be fine.

Then, there’s the girl. She might as well be wearing a big neon sign that says “I am that girl who’s not like the other girls.” She’s “delightfully” quirky and “refreshingly” blunt in her no-nonsense, no B.S., no rules approach to the world. My wife actually put her finger on it: “She’s the Cool Girl that the protagonist laments in Gone Girl.” If you didn’t read / see that one (you should, if only to see Neil Patrick Harris get his throat slashed open in one of the most genuinely fargoed-up things I’ve ever seen on film), Cool Girl an invented construct of male-centric media, a female who genuinely likes “manly” things and eschews “girly” things. She doesn’t play by “girly” rules but she is still quintessentially feminine, working her wiles upon the men in her life unintentionally through her cuteness and coolness, and remaining oblivious to how much these men want and desire her. Okay, maybe I overexplained that one a bit, but this is the character. She laments the entire town she lives in as being “made of paper,” the people and places made of flimsy, immaterial dreams and aspirations.

The problem is that as vanilla as the boy is, the girl is off-the-wall to the same degree. They are light and dark, oil and water, peanut butter and whatever the opposite of jelly is. If he’s too boring to care about, she’s too ludicrously constructed to believe. She traveled with a carnival for three weeks as an eleven year old? She routinely runs away and her parents don’t call the cops? She defaces property, going so far as to leave her name and signature at the crime scenes, and nobody ever presses charges against her? She somehow has connections that allow her to traipse around executive boardrooms in bank buildings? In what effing universe is even a single one of these things possible?

Now, apparently, it has been said that author John Green constructed these two characters to sort of spoof the roles that they, admittedly, take up to eleven. And I can see that… but I don’t see what the end is for all those means. If you’re spoofing the roles, why isn’t the story funnier? (The film has its funny moments, but it’s not a comedy.) If you’re just leaning on the trope, what’s the point? I seriously can’t figure out if the explanation that they are designed to be caricatures holds water, and that’s a problem if you view films critically, as I do.

We just won’t even mention the cardboard cut-outs that make up the rest of the cast. Or the fact that for each of the three “outcast” guys at the core of the film, there’s a perfect dream-girl who thinks he’s dreamy when they get to know each other. Or that there are conveniently six seats in the minivan that they trek across country in. (One seat never gets filled; ooh, symbolism.)

The WTF.

Again, I fear that maybe I’m just too old, but here are a few questions I found myself asking during the film:

  1. What parents — when called by their high-school child during hour 7 of an at-least-72-hour road trip — simply allow the thing to go off without raising a fuss?
  2. How does a 17- or 18-year-old girl manage to simply disappear while still apparently having her cell phone? (She explains to the protagonist, as if he were a simpleton, that she speaks to her sister every day.)
  3. Is she trying to be found or isn’t she? She leaves all these “clues” behind, but the hero tracks her down on some seriously flukey and frankly nonsensical coincidences and good fortune. If you’re trying to be found, you have to do better than hoping that the finder will find an atlas (an ATLAS, of all things, in the age of google) in your ex-boyfriend’s house. If you’re NOT trying to be found, what’s the goldfingered point of leaving behind addresses of your secret hideouts and cryptic messages that point to your secret location?
  4. Do none of these kids have parents? Seriously, there are five kids on this multi-day road trip, and apparently all of them just went for it and left their parents flapping in the breeze. NOBODY had parents who called the cops?
  5. How did “the gang” just barely make it back for prom riding directly there in a van, but the hero manages to derp around town for a few hours, find the girl, sit down to a lengthy milkshake and conversation with her, have his heart broken, then take a BUS home and still make it to prom in time to share a dance?

I have a pretty forgiving suspension of disbelief, but this isn’t some tacky, there-are-no-rules farce like a National Lampoon flick. The story seems to want to be taken seriously. Yet there are these tremendous gaps in the story that can’t be filled by any amount of audience-goodwill spackle. It asks too much of its audience. Or maybe I’m too old.

Maybe it’s poking fun at a genre of romantic comedy, coming-of-age stories, but I don’t see what point it’s trying to make, if so. Maybe it’s trying to follow the tropes of those genres only to buck our expectations at the end, but again, it’s not particularly original in doing so, and it’s no payoff when the “surprise” ending comes. It’s kind of like a whoopee cushion that the prankee discovers without sitting on it, then he picks it up and makes the fart noise anyway. It’s just weird.

Then there’s the pacing. My god, the pacing. Snails could outrun the narrative of this thing; in fact, there are sequences in the second half of the film where you see a map of the eastern seaboard with the classic dotted line creeping off the gang’s progress. In the scale, it positively creeps. I remember thinking, yep, that’s about how fast this feels. The central conflict (Cool Girl has disappeared) doesn’t begin until almost the halfway point of the movie; the first half is all taken up with the girl committing felonies (sorry, “pranks”) against a host of people who have wronged her. It’s fun, but my wife and I found ourselves looking at each other to ask, “exactly where is all this going?”

Back to the Redbox first thing in the morning, that’s where.

The Verdict.

Okay, so maybe I haven’t been particularly impartial throughout this film, but frankly, I’m disappointed. I’m a big fan of John Green. I’m especially fond of his youtube channels — Mental Floss and the Crash Course series are both educational fun worth checking out — and I dug The Fault in Our Stars even though I didn’t fawn over it like, I feel, much of its audience did. (Again, I’m not the target demographic, but I will maintain that much like with The Notebook, TFIOS illustrates that the line between “stalker” and “persistent love interest” shifts wildly depending on how good-looking the pursuer is.)

In short, this effort feels hollow. Formulaic. As immaterial and fleeting as paper. Perhaps, then, the film is spoofing itself: It takes characters who don’t matter on a love story that isn’t real, toward a romantic payoff that does not exist. A Paper Romance.

Or maybe it’s just a bad movie.

All that said, John Green does have a knack for a nicely turned phrase, so I’m willing to bet the book is a fair bit better than the movie. For me, though, the movie was bad enough to make me seriously skeptical about the strength of the source material.

Sorry, JG. Maybe I’ll give it a try again on your next novel.

To the best of my knowledge, all images are copyright of Fox 2000 pictures, and based on source material by John Green.

Terrible Reviews: The Martian

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I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly, I was so excited to see this movie. I’m not a particularly big Matt Damon fan, though I like him well enough. I tend not to love “realistic” Sci-Fi — that is, science fiction stories that burden themselves overmuch with being “scientifically accurate”. (Give me The Matrix, give me Star Wars.) I was also a little dubious about the prospect of a film which was essentially Cast Away in space.

Still, I was pumped to see it. I heard good things, and there’s just SOMETHING ABOUT MARS this year; between the recent discovery of water (or water-like substances), the discussion of Mars One, and the recent announcements of NASA actually going for a Mars mission, I bought into the hype like your jerk of a brother buying up all the red spaces on Monopoly.

And man, oh man, does it deliver. The film is funny, intense, heartbreaking, funny, clever, sad, funny, and also, believe it or not in a science fiction movie, funny. The main character is an astronaut/botanist with a sardonic streak as wide and deep as the Marianas trench, and Matt Damon plays that up in hilarious deadpan to keep what could be a tedious or ultimately depressing movie … not exactly light and fluffy, but … let’s put it this way. The tension in this film is sharp enough to slice through steel. Yet, throughout much of the movie, I found myself smiling thanks to the levity provided by the main character.

Okay, let’s get into it…

The Good.

Pretty much everything.

No, seriously. The set design is brilliant: the surface of the alien planet is every bit as stark and hopeless as you could imagine; the living quarters on said planet as utilitarian and cramped as they would almost certainly have to be. The acting is superb: Matt Damon’s performance is of course top-notch, and I found myself swinging wildly between elation and despair right with him. There’s a particularly powerful moment when (no spoilers) he experiences a brutal setback, calmly approaches the terminal to log what has happened, utters a single syllable, and then the entire facade cracks and he flies into a paroxysm of rage and panic. An instant later, he recovers himself and gets back to work. It’s all believable and utterly sympathetic. Even the token unlikable bossman pulling the strings of the operation (Jeff Daniels, and what a turn he’s made from his Dumb and Dumber days, by the way) becomes sympathetic along the way, despite being at odds with most of his team for most of the film.

Also, for a sci-fi movie, the film does a remarkably good job of steering away from the science. You know, obviously, that a tremendous amount of science is happening offscreen, but you never feel inundated with it or hamstrung by your inability to comprehend it (I’m looking at you, Apollo 13, with your 02 stirrers and your gimbals and your other such witch science). It’s almost as if the science is a pleasant rose garden in front of a mansion — you can stop and appreciate it if you like, but the real action is the house itself.

And finally, the moment (SERIOUS spoilers here, jump ahead if you’re in doubt) when Watney blasts off from the alien surface to rendezvous with the passing rescue ship… I’ve been invested in stories and characters before, but it has been a long time since my heart has pounded like that during the climax of a film. There are too many things to count which could go wrong, and each try-fail cycle dovetails with the next like the tightening of the screws on a torture victim. There’s a perilous launch, which Watney might not survive. He does, but he blacks out. He escapes the planet’s gravity, but is nowhere near high enough for the rescue ship to catch him. They manage to lower their altitude, but only at the expense of blowing up part of their ship. And on and on and on. Masterful.

The Bad.

Um… maybe… science?

Okay, so there are some scientific faux pas present in the film. Making it not 100% scientifically accurate. The (SPOILERS OMG LOOK AWAY) dust storm on the planet’s surface, for example, wouldn’t happen, at least not with the effects that it has in the film. There’s the problem of cosmic radiation frying anybody who’s exposed for any significant period of time. There’s the frankly laughable (SPOILER HELP) plastic tarp covering the hole in the side of the habitation unit on Mars after the explosion.

But these are, with the exception of the tarp, easy to overlook. Without the dust storm, and without a magical nonexistent solution for the radiation, you don’t have a movie. The tarp … well. I guess every good film gets a pass on one or two ridiculous contrivances. The truth is, I’m having a hard time finding anything bad to say about this movie.

The Head-Scratch Worthy.

Maybe this is just me, but from the halfway point of the film onward, there’s a real head-scratcher. A previously unknown character basically comes up with the day-saving maneuver that sends the Martian astronauts back out to collect Watney, and this he concocts in a half-asleep daze while receiving a brief from one of his superiors. He goes in, pitches it to the head of NASA, and suddenly he’s like the lead mathematician on the project.

It’s not a bad device, but it feels like a stretch. We’re supposed to believe that despite the (presumably) well-staffed teams of experts at NASA working overtime trying to find ways to bring Watney home, none of them had this kid’s idea first? And, given the crew’s decision to basically mutiny toward the end of the film, why not let one of them come up with the idea? Again, maybe it’s me overthinking the elements of story, but it felt like a somewhat hollow method to drum up another character.

That said, at least they didn’t get another white guy to play this part. Yay for diversity!

The Verdict.

The truth is, I only wrote a couple of paragraphs for the other two categories because I could have gone on and on and on about what was good in this movie, and I wanted to give the illusion of parity. The fact is, this movie was fantastic. Think Apollo 13 meets Cast Away but without all the technical jargon of the former and without the knocking-your-own-rotted-tooth-out-with-an-ice-skate squickiness of the latter, not that either of those two things kept either of those two films from being excellent movies. This movie is awesome if you’re a science aficionado like myself, and it was good enough for my wife, who hates sci-fi, to enjoy as well.

The only thing that remains to be seen is how prophetic it is, which might — might! — happen in my lifetime.

If you haven’t seen it, go see it.

You will never look at poop or potatoes the same way again.

All images are obviously not my property. To the best of my knowledge, they are owned by 20th Century Fox.