Tag Archives: mild disagreement

Sunday Review: Scream 4

Posted on April 18, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Editor’s Note:  Hey, guess what?  There are spoilers in this!  It is all Susan’s fault.  But if you don’t wanna know who the killer is, turn back now!

Geoff:
So, we’re now to the fourth of the Scream films, if you can believe it. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and Deputy (now Sheriff) Dewey (David Arquette) are all still alive and well and once again being haunted by a new round of dual killers dressed as the now-iconic Ghostface. The entire franchise of fourth-wall-breaking (and perhaps fifth and sixth walls … I wish I had more time to think about this and put it together in my head) films had gotten steadily more conventional and hammy and less clever in the first through third movies, and while this one has some pretty enjoyable moments, I feel like it was pulled from the oven before it was completely cooked. (But that might be because I’m asking too much of the film.)

In this one, Sidney returns to Woodsboro on the tenth anniversary of the original murders she survived to promote her new book about being a survivor (again and again). Unfortunately, someone decides yet once more to start picking off teens, this time concentrating on Sidney’s younger cousin (Emma Roberts) and her cohort while Sidney, Gale, and Dewey attempt to keep as many people alive as possible and solve the whodunit.

I’ve always enjoyed Wes Craven horror films more than others because they’re at least about thrills and hiding and running and jumps rather than straightforward gross-out gore, and the guy’s done this so long that he knows how to move a camera during a chase scene and how to block a shot to induce jumps and etc. If you’ve seen the first three movies, though, you might find yourself yearning for a set-piece as good as the original’s final house-party scene or the sequel’s silent, incredibly tense attack-and-chase scene in a college sound studio. They’re just so skillfully done, and in this film there are some jumps, but the chases and tension are brief, fleeting. There’s rarely even a moment that you think whoever’s in the crosshairs in a given scene might have even a chance of making it out alive.

Still, there are some fun, clever jokes, both at the beginning and the end, and it was interesting to watch the incredibly self-conscious series try to think about the horror film landscape of today as compared to a decade ago. I just wish it had gone further with it, played with it a little bit more, I guess, both in the execution of its scenes and the discourse it was trying to have with itself.

Susan:
Well, Geoff, you can blame this on either my terrible taste in movies or the fact that I haven’t seen the first three Scream films, but I really, really liked this thing.

I especially liked that even when I thought I knew what was going on, the movie’s insistence on laying out all the rules for me and then breaking some of them but following some of them kept me overthinking it and underthinking it at the same time!  Maybe that happens in all of them?  But luckily, I had a mother who discouraged our watching of scary things, which means this reboot feels fresh to me.  It made me want to go back and watch the first three, and I can’t remember ever having a desire to watch them before.  GOOD WORK, HOLLYWOOD.

Also David Arquette and Courtney Cox are back together!!!  And Neve Campbell is there!!  And people are using land lines!!  I mean, HEY THE 90s REMEMBER THEM??  Watching this movie was like putting on a flannel shirt and a pair of Doc Marten boots and a baby-doll tee and being impressed by Yahoo! Mail.  You get to jump at the scary things and squirm in your seat because of anticipation and tension, instead of gross-out discomfort.  You say it felt unbaked to you, but I thought it was near perfect.  Simple, easy, predictable enough, and fun.

Also:  LADY VILLAN!!  Right??  I mean, did that happen in one of the earlier ones too?  Because that was a pretty bomb-ass twist, I thought.  I never, ever suspected her.  In fact, except for the dude with the camera, the two killers would have been my last picks.  And that’s the fun, right?  It’s supposed to be the people you least suspect, but not the people you’re aware that you least suspect, but just the people that you legitimately don’t suspect.  UGH SO COOL.

I dunno, Geoff, I think sometimes it’s hard to review horror flicks with you because I’m just so late getting to the genre and I still think all the things about them are super neat, whereas you are a jaded old man.  But whatever, I think this flick’s totally good enough.

The novice/pro divide deepens after the cut…

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Wednesday Review: Sucker Punch

Posted on April 6, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Geoff:
Have studios just given up on telling a good story? Do screenwriters see all the CGI and whiz-bang going across the screen and just no longer care? I wish I could be there for the conversations studio execs and filmmakers had about Sucker Punch and other effects-driven films like it because for the life of me I can’t conceive what sort of narrative merit they might attribute to them. It creates films that are neither distinctive in story nor even distinctive in the way they tell a familiar story, which I could also have fun with and enjoy.

Sucker Punch itself is structured less with a plot and more with a bulleted list, but here’s the rundown: The film starts out with a confusingly shot/edited/acted scene in which (apparently) the female lead (Emily Browning) shoots her younger sister while trying to take out her abusive stepfather (I think? None of this is confirmed through dialogue because the whole scene’s cut to music–in fact, probably nine-tenths of the film are cut to music) who was waiting for the mother of the main character and her sister to die so that he could inherit her money. Enraged over the attempted murder and after being left out of the mother’s will, the stepfather sends the main character to an all-female mental asylum, where the guy who at first seems to be the caretaker (Oscar Isaac) finally at least gives the main character a moniker: Baby Doll (an appropriately and creepily infantile name because bleached, pig-tailed Emily Browning really pretty much does look and sound like a borderline minor made of porcelain). Just as she’s about to be lobotomized, Baby Doll lapses into some kind of fantasy version of the asylum in which it’s actually a gentleman’s club where the confined women are now confined dancers (as if this would somehow be preferable to anyone but someone looking to be titillated by the situation), and here we meet the other women: sisters Rocket (Jena Malone) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), the ironically brown-haired Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung), who for some reason gets a regular name. Within this fantasy, the seeming caretaker is the vicious club manager, and the asylum’s psychologist (Carla Gugino, whom I normally love, but who here gets shit to do) is a kindly but obedient trainer for the dancers, so the girl’s scheme to make an escape, which plan they come to thanks to Babydoll’s steampunk battle fantasies that she goes into while dancing some sort of amazing trance-dance (that we never see, probably because it would only look lame by comparison to the reactions from other characters). In these fantasies within the main fantasy, some guy who’s supposed to seem wise tells Babydoll she’ll need a map, fire, a knife, a key, and … wait for it … a mystery item to escape. The wise man actually just says, “It’s a mystery.” The writers don’t even try to be coy or offer any intrigue by having him say something like, “You’ll know it when you see it.” The dancers thus set about getting these items one by one while defeating monsters and defusing bombs in the steampunk fantasy scenes that really have pretty much no dramatic tension except ever so slightly for the procurement of the knife.

Do you know some of the dancers will die? Yes. Does it feel perfunctory when they do? Yes. Will the mystery item be found? Yes. Will it feel perfunctory and lame when it is? Dear God, yes. I know we’re trying to not give away the endings here so much these days, but it, too, feels perfunctory despite a surprise cameo by Jon Hamm. The film is just an autopilot protostory with neat effects and lots of scantily clad women. It’s clearly catering to a specific audience but I feel like even the 14-to-34-year-old male crowd might lose interest with this one.

Susan:
THIS IS FASCINATING.  I actually found myself leaving the theater COMPLETELY AMBIVALENT.  I assumed you would love the thing, since you suggested we watch it, and I could talk about how terrible it was.  BUT YOU THOUGHT IT WAS TERRIBLE!!  Now I don’t know what to do, because I’m way too ambivalent to argue that is was unequivocally good.

In the spirit of the film, let’s do some moral algebra via bulleted lists.

Pros:
–The action sequences were pretty good, except for when the CGI was bad.
–The layered plot was actually more interesting than the plot I expected going into it.  True, none of the layers really made sense, and the reasons for there being layers were never really explained, but the movie also didn’t seem to want me to care.  I feel like the movie intended to be a live-action video game, and so I can’t really fault it for being just that.
–Jon Hamm.  I mean, not to abuse the sandwich-eating thing, but seriously, give the man a sandwich and I will buy my ticket.

Cons:
–It is exhausting as a real live woman living in the world to watch any film where the female characters are under the constant threat of sexual violence.  The movie kept doing this thing where the club boss dude would say threatening things, and you would think maybe they were about murder, but then you would realize they were about rape or sexual assault or something.  And then at the end you find out that duder’s been raping the girls at the nuthouse the whole time or something.  And also at the beginning Baby Doll gets almost raped and then her sister gets almost raped (or maybe raped? It’s unclear), and at some point you just think, Jesus.  This is walking a fine line between sad story about oppressed girls and rape-porn. I mean, if there is even a line between those two things.
–The movie said that BabyDoll was 20 but she’s wearing little girl pajamas and her sister is like 6 so…what?  Let’s stop blurring the line between women and girls, what say.
–ALL THE GIRLS WERE CRYING ALL THE FUCKING TIME.  It was like Country Strong, where we are asked to believe that we are looking at really powerful, strong female characters, but they are just crying every time anything happens.  Sometimes when it’s appropriate, but sometimes just like…because.  I don’t know.  Yes, strong women can cry, as can men, but I didn’t like the oscillation between kicking everyone’s ass all over the place in dream world and crying their eyes out backstage in the OTHER dream world.  Also Vanessa Hudgens: Go away.

So I mean, I thought it was a fun movie to watch, but I also couldn’t decide whether I should hate it or not.  I think overall I probably should have.  But it’s a movie, and I want to give it a little extra space anyway.

The hemming and hawing continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Posted on September 27, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Geoff:
Oliver Stone’s sequel to his ’80s ode to Reagan-era greed is slick, well-acted, and quite timely. In fact, the whole thing’s basically a fictionalized re-hash of the last 6-8 years as the U.S. approaches the housing bubble and then watches it pop. The whole thing is interesting on a general level, but the characters lost me a bit, and the plot gets convoluted in a way that’s difficult to care about toward the end.

Here’s the breakdown. Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is a money-hungry Wall Street trader with a green-tinged idealism, as evidenced by his interest in alternative energy sources, but he’s still out to make the cash, just like everyone else. Winnie (Carey Mulligan) is his live-in girlfriend and then fiancee who also happens to be the daughter of one Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), whom you may remember from the first film as the smug asshole who carried the message that “Greed Is Good.” Gekko just got out of prison for white-collar crime, and now he’s using Jake as a way to get closer to his daughter again, or so it seems. Turns out he maybe just wants the $100 million he left for her in a Swiss bank account, or maybe he really does care about her, too, but is still ultimately greedy. The ending seems to favor the latter idea. Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, there’s also an entire other plot in which Jake is taking on Bretton James (James Brolin), head honcho for Churchill Schwartz, which is a fictional stand-in for Goldman Sachs. That whole story basically puts a two-dimensionally human face on Goldman Sachs’ interactions with other banks during the time of the crisis and how they basically got away with robbery of the Federal Reserve.

Again, the movie’s well made, but I felt pretty overwhelmingly meh by the whole thing, especially with the maudlin ending, when Gordon Gekko grows a heart because he learns his daughter’s pregnant. It just didn’t feel right, like doing a sequel to Apocalypse Now in which Colonel Kurtz is somehow still alive and now a compassionate human being.

Susan:
I mean, overall, sure.  This movie was pretty boring, in the same way that the original Wall Street was pretty boring.  Do you like to listen to people talk in financial jargon for two hours or so?  No?  Then you are probably going to find this movie pretty lame.  HOWEVER.  We need to talk about some really important pros:

1) Shia LaBeouf cuddling shirtless under a down comforter with his girlfriend within the first 10 minutes/Shia LaBeouf walking around his fancy loft apartment in boxer briefs toward the end.  Some people don’t think Shia is the most attractive actor out there, but those people are stupid and wrong.  Thank you for existing, Mr. LaBeouf, and thank you for getting him out of his clothes, Mr. Stone.

2) VISUAL BUBBLE METAPHORS!  Do you want to watch bubbles float toward the sky for roughly 30 seconds longer than is interesting right before something important happens?  Because that is going to happen all the time.  GUYS.  THOSE ACTUAL BUBBLES ARE JUST LIKE THE METAPHORICAL BUBBLES THAT HAPPEN IN THE STOCK MARKET.  I personally am a huge fan of ham-handed metaphors in my big-budget popcorn flicks, and this film did not disappoint.

3) Charlie Sheen’s plastic surgery!  Bud Fox, Sheen’s character from the original film, shows up for like a minute and a half or something, but he’s on screen long enough to see that in the last twenty years or so he’s gotten his face stretched in some interesting ways and also has a crazy look in his eye now that makes me uncomfortable.  It’s like visual proof that everything Denise Richards said about him was true.  There is nothing I love like a celebrity trainwreck.

So yeah, this movie wasn’t the most exciting or even interesting film ever, but it is so glossy and pretty and full of big eyed people getting teary!  UGH SO MUCH PRETTY.  So many good sweaters.  So much nice furniture.  It was the cinematic equivalent of walking through an IKEA on a weekday morning.

The exchange of half-hearted responses continues after the cut…

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