Gone Girl Gender Issues - GGG in the worst way

So the voting’s done, and the Academy Awards were handed out with great ceremony and very little decent humor (I couldn’t believe NPH was unfunny so often). No laurels were laid at the feet of Gillian Flynn, who was robbed of a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for some exceptional self-editing, much less given to David Fincher, who’s quickly become one of the best American directors of the last 40 years or so. My race to cover the big 2014 films before the Oscar winners were announced is over, and I’m happy to have had a little break – or, at least, as much break as I’m going to get, given present circumstances. It’s nice to know that I (and DJ) took great pains to talk about the year in film, and that I don’t have to push myself to do more when I have only so many hours in the day.

But the awards scarcely matter when it comes to Gone Girl. It made a big splash in the box office, received great critical acclaim, and it fostered many metric tons of conversation. Just look at my dear friend Sati, who wrote seven posts which were dedicated to GG (as well as other posts, some of which were or weren’t focused on it exclusively). Although I like the review I wrote for Fincher’s movie, there are still some other issues I wish to address regarding that picture, and the time to discuss the roles played by its leads is now.

Hang the f—k on, please. I’m about to get all word-y.

The only thing I won't argue is that their one problem is Amy's insanity.

Amy Dunne (played by Rosemund “Hot Yoga” Pike) is a fantastic fictional character. She’s a very damaged and untrustworthy human being, but she’s also far more complex, intelligent, and fascinating than many filmic women of late, and certainly more so than Ben Affleck’s Nick Dunne. As an easy “great film” reference, let’s just say: she plays a woman with a Salieri-type personality, but with the gifts that Mozart has, whereas Ben plays a guy with a Mozart-style personality, but with Salieri’s level of talent.

My attitude does not depend on the quality of the actors, mind you – it’s in the writing and the specific roles assigned to each person in this twisty story. Amy is active, gifted, and f’ed up, while Nick is reactive, embarrassingly unskilled, and an objectively terrible person in the absence of lifelong trauma. For me, then, one of the big issues is when I read other people describing Amy as “fierce” (one of the lousiest and lamest popular words since “epic”) and “unbelievable” (as in “strong”).

I have to concede the point that both of those words do apply to Amazing Amy, literally. As a cold-blooded murderer, she is “fierce”, and I cannot believe her personality or behavior, so the actual meanings of those words hold up. The problem is when folks make this sound like Amy is a strong and empowered woman – that’s when it all falls apart.

I Understand Rachel Dolezal

And when I say that I understand Rachel Dolezal, I don't mean that I necessarily approve or that I've engaged in behavior that may be seen as deceitful or culturally/ethnically insensitive.

I'm not even talking from the perspective of a Latino who:
-(I think) looks like a total white boy, has been guessed to be everything from Italian to Indian to Syrian to Greek and more,
-who's got both white and black ancestry,
-who's been subject to discrimination from Latinos, and Blacks, and Whites who have all mistook me for White, White, and as a Latino/Not Pureblooded White, respectively.

No, I understand Dolezal because obviously movies are to blame here.

And by "movies" I mean "a specific era of movies.'

See, watching films like Tootsie, and especially C. Thomas Howell's Soul Man must have given her false expectations. In a decade full of crazy pictures, the concepts at play in those works stand out as being extra, super-super cray-cray.

Great Moments In... Awful Scripting

Here's the offending segment - what I think is the most comically-stupid, unintentional rhyming dialogue ever. I don't know screenwriting, but I do know that you're supposed to read dialogue out loud at some point to hear if it sounds bad.

Even forgetting what poor, perfunctory, plot-driving lines these are - and please note, none of these words convey anything about the characters saying them - the overuse of "-sion" sounds (especially "-ation") should've stood out to even a semi-attentive writer. The emphases are mine:

INT. NABOO PALACE - THRONE ROOM
...
The hologram of PALPATINE sputters and fades away.

AMIDALA : Senator Palpatine?!? (turns to Panaka) What's happening?

CAPTAIN PANAKA turns to his SARGEANT

CAPT. PANAKA : Check the transmission generators...
BIBBLE : A malfunction?
CAPT. PANAKA : It could be the Federation jamming us. Your Highness.
BIBBLE : A communications disruption can only mean one thing. Invasion.

Recommended: The 100

A bit of Lost, a large helping of Lord of the Flies, then sprinkle in some Lockout: these are the ingredients of CW’s surprise hit, The 100. I guess I was guaranteed to watch this program no matter what – for one thing, I have a life-long love of sci-fi in any form, be it in a novel, televised, or on film. For another, many aspects here are reminiscent of the first Fallout game, for which I clearly have a vast, abiding affection.

But, as with most CW shows, I approached it warily; this series had to work to earn my respect and trust, or else I’d stop watching by the fourth episode and never look back. Instead, I was confused at how The 100's makers crafted a story so multifaceted and entertaining that I was hooked. Quality is the skepticism-killer, after all...

What we have here is a case of love at first watch, and it’s easy to see why. After a world-ending nuclear war, humankind only survives through the descendants of multinational astronauts. Aboard the Ark, a mega-station of conjoined ships, our civilization waits for the aftereffects of the nuclear holocaust to fade away so they can return. Due to limited resources, however, all crimes are punishable by being blown out of an airlock; only offenders under 18 are spared, forced to stay in space-jail until reassessment at the age of majority.

In the future, a girl's diary/poems will include etchings and a CGI PowerPoint presentation.

The series’ lead, Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor), is one of those teens. This beautiful, smart pre-med was tossed into jail because she knew too much – her dad realized that the Ark couldn’t support life for much longer, and his desire to inform the public resulted in his death as well as Clarke’s incarceration. But, with resources dwindling even more quickly, the Ark’s Chancellor, Jaha (Isiah Washington), has decided on a (semi-)risky move: send their 100 teenaged prisoners to Earth to see if the planet is habitable, one century ahead of when it should be safe.

This is how Ms. Griffin finds herself surrounded by strangers, strapped into a seat, as Jaha’s recorded message explains their purpose and their goal. These 100 kids must see if they can live, then access the real-life fallout shelter called Mt. Weather for the food and supplies that the 3000-ish people above them will need to repopulate the Earth.

aNoES Depp Death Diorama

I've already written about my love of a certain scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's one of the best-executed and most iconic moments in all of horror film history, one which I love to pieces. And, last October, one of my favorite websites posted about a fan who paid into an Indiegogo campaign to have this scene remade on the cheap. I must admit, this is a fine re-creation of a seminal sequence, one made slightly less painful because of the way that it's been constructed.

Watch now, and please enjoy the cardboard reenactment of the death of Johnny Depp's first cinematic role. In any medium, it's just glorious:

This death scene truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

The Machine

The Machine is an excellent English sci-fi film that popped up on Netflix Streaming near the end of last year, sadly without a theatrical release. I enjoyed writer/director Caradog W. James’ focused and thoughtful thriller, which took $1.5M and turned James’ story into a beautiful-looking, atmospheric tale about medical experimentation, the connections people form with each other, and the development of artificial intelligence. It’s not a perfect film at all, but it does everything it does well, and displays true artistry in its performances and writing. I also think it’s 1000 times more of a sci-fi film than Ex Machina will ever be, but I’ll leave that discussion for my upcoming EM review.

In the near future, Vincent McCarthy (Toby Stephens) is unhappy, but hopeful, despite England’s tenuous cold war with China. This scientific genius has a well-funded, well-intended project with Thompson (Denis Lawson), a Ministry of Defense bigwig: a plan to help injured soldiers recover use of their limbs and brains with computerized implants. As the film’s start conveys, that’s a difficult, painful process.

Flash forward a bit and Vincent is putting three computers through the Turing Test, which determines whether a machine can respond well enough to convince a human that it's a human, too. None of the computers pass, but he sees great potential in the device developed by Ava (Caity Lotz). McCarthy then convinces Ava to join him by offering unlimited financial support. The idea is that, together, they can jointly complete his new project: an android run by a true AI that is bolstered by scans of a person’s brain.

Unfortunately, Ava is more than a little into civil disobedience, which doesn’t go over well at MoD research bases. While a crippled soldier demonstrates his new super-strong arms, he whispers to her that he’s being mistreated. Ava investigates, Thompson decides she has to go, and Vincent gets roughed up in the same attack that kills his newest assistant. The UK’s equivalent of OSHA must f--king hate this base.

Honest Trailers: Cinderella

Really, there's nothing more to say than that this is hysterical, and the lyrics are great.

Year-End Wrap-up 2014: Insanely Belated Edition

Well, we’ve come to an extra-confusing time here, because I’m writing my annual review for 2014 in June of the following year. For those of you who are just tuning in, I suggest clicking on the “Site Update” tag at the end of this post or on the far right of the screen; that should fill you in on what I’ve been up to and why this post is appearing now. For all those people who have been keeping up, and know that I’ve been slowly reviewing the “best” and/or “biggest” pictures from last year at a leisurely pace, then just keep reading.

2014 was a terrible year in my own life, and yet it produced a lot of great films. More importantly, it’s the first time in a long while (since before this blog even started) that I truly kept current with theatrical releases. I saw more high-profile movies for 2014 than in any year before the turn of the century – I’ve been in and out of theaters so much from last Spring to now...

Having reviewed all the movies that I was excited for or felt I “had” to see, it’s time for me to weigh in. Please note that no one ever suggested I change the ridiculous categories that I use (every year, I ask readers if I should), so this will be nothing like a Top 10 list.

Best New Movie (that I actually saw) - This is the most difficult call that I’ve ever made, as 2014 was exceptional. The result of all my viewing is that I’m thoroughly-confused as to which is “the best.” And so, I can only say that my favorite films are Wild, Grand Budapest Hotel, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Babadook, and Under the Skin. If you like, you can tell all your friends that for once in my life, I accepted taking a total f--king copout.

Wild was the most moving, to me. Grand Budapest was the funniest, and may have had the best story. Only Lovers had the best characters and – I think – maybe the best setting and premise. Babadook was a fantastically-scary story, an excellent theatrical experience with a fresh, rich horror tale driving the narrative. Under the Skin was wonderful, partly for being so challenging and different, and partly for the exceptional audio and visual elements.

Rest assured, other movies came close to the mark. Birdman was amazing, joined by Whiplash, The Lego Movie (this links to DJ's review, I never got to do a double dip for it), and Two Days, One Night as all being able to stake a claim to having an outstanding combination of story, acting, direction, character, and script, in addition to displaying superb visual and audio craftsmanship. That’s what “the best film” is, right? I can’t just choose Edge of Tomorrow because I enjoyed the holy hell out of it - this is a laurel that speaks to the power of film, and pure action films shouldn’t make that list very often.

S--t, now this is starting to sound like a Top 10 list. In any case, it’s hard for me to declare a true winner among all those fine and varied entries. I guess I could narrow it down to Budapest, Under the Skin, and Wild, but I’d be hard-pressed to whittle it down from there - and removing one or two just makes me want to add Whiplash and Birdman (especially Birdman).

Best Out-of-the-Blue Release - Three independent documentaries nearly snagged the title, namely Citizenfour (which I very nearly reviewed for this site), Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, and Red Obsession. However, my personal favorite has to be Coherence.

Wolfcop and Space Milkshake - B-Movies are the Best

Space Milkshake - is a B-sci-fi/horror movie that knows what it is and revels in its genre conventions. I mean, really, everyone who’s seen a sci-fi film that involves a mutating rubber duck, raise your hand. Oh, it’s just me? Then, everyone who wants to see a sci-fi film that involves a mutating rubber duck, raise your hand.

Okay, good, we’re all on the same page here.

Space Milkshake is about a futuristic spaceship full of garbage-men and –women whose job it is destroy debris that might interfere with space-traffic around Earth. Captain Anton Balvenie is a self-centered sometimes-jerk who’s mired in the petty/unhappy phase of a relationship with his frustrated, fed-up first officer, Valentina. The young technician Tilda mostly just works and keeps to herself, which frustrates their newest arrival – Jimmy, a talkative guy whose first time in space is being ruined by the attitude problem of his new coworkers.

It’s bad enough that Jimmy is greeted by his new boss curtly ordering him to fix a half-dozen different machines, but Tilda won’t even speak to him. It’s pretty clear that Jimmy won’t be able to glamorize life on a space station that uses lasers and spacepods to clear the paths of interplanetary travel. But then an unexpected cargo craft arrives, and Anton goes out on a salvage mission – and suddenly, there’s no radio communications from Earth. Hell, there isn’t even any trash orbiting Earth!

I’m not nostalgic for the 80’s and 90’s, but I have had many conversations lately about the fact that good or entertaining b-movies seem few and far between now. I feel a pang deep inside of me when I browse the horror and sci-fi offerings of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Youtube’s free film selection. Most of them are CGI fests with bad writing and/or acting, and they don’t have an enjoyable sense of tone, and they don’t do anything new.

Seriously, one of the most rewarding experiences as a film goer is getting to see good actors that you know star in low-budget ventures that make a strong effort to tell a good story – when you add the tone and mood of B-movies (think Black Dynamite, From Dusk Til Dawn), you create a possibility to have ungodly amounts of fun. And that’s exactly what you get with SM.

Valentina unloads on a truly unappreciative boyfriend.

Two Days, One Night Review

In Two Days, One Night, the Dardenne brothers have a story that any audience will find compelling: a woman in Belgium must get coworkers to vote for her job or their €1000 bonus. Even if the economy didn't resemble a dystopian nightmare, we can all put ourselves in her shoes, and it's terrifying.

So we follow our lead, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), as she uses her weekend to sway nine of the people who already voted in favor of the bonus. She has to track down her fellow employees to ask for their support, and she has no idea if she can influence any of them. But she also has two kids, a husband who works as a cook, and a mortgage that can't be paid without her salary.

Cotillard is an impeccable actress. She has a mastery over her expressions and her voice. Everything she does, every feeling she emotes, seems genuine. And, in Sandra, she gets a chance to show what she can do. Her work in Two Days is brilliant, and her Best Actress Oscar nomination was well-deserved.

As the film progresses, we get context for Sandra's problems and the pills we see her take now and then: the poor woman is just returning from sick leave for depression. This is the worst possible time for her to experience something as scary and emotionally crushing as the loss of a job.

Recommended: Brooklyn Nine-Nine

I think I pretty much stopped following sitcoms after Seinfeld ended. It’s not like there weren’t some great options, but I never tuned in to The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or Community. I will correct that someday, but I wasn't inclined to watch them live. Instead, my situation comedy diet was fed by animated series, like Archer, or BBC programs (sorry, programmes), like Coupling, Hyperdrive, and Spaced. I didn’t even see the superlative Arrested Development until just before the Netflix eps premiered. But my drought ended a year and a half ago, when I tried out Fox’s great series, Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

BN-N is a sitcom centered on the crazy characters who work in Brooklyn’s 99th police precinct. You have Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg), an arrogant man-child who’s a highly-successful detective despite often acting as dumb as a bag of rocks. Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) is a fellow detective, a kind and helpful brown-nosing, OCD-addled overachiever. Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) is the moody, rough cop on the edge who eschews feelings, gentleness, or anything that prevents her from catching punks. And Sgt. Terence Jeffords (Terry Crews) is the confident, energetic, competent health nut who’s on desk duty after a troubling incident. It’s an odd combination of fringe characters who, behavioral flaws aside, genuinely care about keeping the peace and stopping crime.

These four people are joined by a few others who you also wouldn’t imagine working in law enforcement. Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) is a soft-hearted geeky detective with a romantic longing for Rosa and a man-crush on Jake. The precinct’s secretary, Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti), is a walking distraction; she's a space cadet who only offers snide insults and pithy responses. Last, we have Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher), the uptight, nearly-emotionless figure who tries to wrangle these knuckleheads. When this cast comes together, you have nothing less than a brilliant, hysterical, nuclear-powered comedy machine.

The series is, at heart, a send-up of 70’s-era cop films and TV shows, and you can see that in nothing more than the opening credit sequence. It’s at least as funny as Police Squad!, but it’s a show that takes full advantage of all the changes television has experienced in the past few decades. The plotlines matter less than the comedy and the characters, there’s a decent amount of serialization - in spite of the self-contained nature of each episode - and the cast is gloriously-diverse. Seriously, one of my favorite aspects of BN-N is that it’s an NYC-based program with a true-to-life mix of genders and ethnicities.

I never write up sitcoms, aside from Hyperdrive. Much as with that Nick Frost series, I’m doing so now partly to write about something different, and partly because I want to promote this show as much as possible. As a class-clown-type, I have a lifelong love of comedy, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine has an amazing knack for making me laugh, hard and often. So why does this series work so well?

Great Moments In... Awkward, Bulls--t Lines

Armageddon is one of those action films that miraculously becomes an acceptable guilty pleasure because it's so full of garbage and stupid, senseless, lowest-common-denominator fan-pleasing moments that are completely insane or full of it.

One of the most insane comes at the very end of the film, and if you've been spared the movie experience of watching Armageddon, I want to understand how stupid this film is: Steve Buscemi's character - who, btw, is called "Rockhound" - gets his longtime coworker Max (Ken Hudson Campbell) killed, and the "drama" of watching a guy catch on fire and then be shot out into space is actually played for a joke. Twice.

Long story short, Bruce Willis' character, Harry Stamper, takes a space shuttle to an asteroid and later sacrifices himself to save the world. For, um, I guess sentimental reasons, NASA allows his daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler) to sit in the command room so she can... uh, watch the action and speak to the two passengers who matter most to her: Harry, her dad, and A.J., her boyfriend (Ben Affleck). Well, nearly everyone sent on this mission has known her since she was a kid, but, since this is a movie, those are the only two people that she really cares about.

Post #900: Inherent Vice Review - Fumbling Face-First into the Fumes of the Past

No matter how impressed I’ve been by so many of 2014’s films, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is very much a standout. PTA is one of America’s best directors, and - unlike Wes Anderson, who writes and directs his own stories - this picture is based on a recent novel by one of America’s most renowned writers, Thomas Pynchon. Much more importantly, however, Inherent Vice is an adventure in anachronism and unreliable narration.

The story: Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is a scruffy-looking private investigator who lives in 1970’s Los Angeles. This long-time drug-user knows the town, and he understands the competing, equally-iniquitous systems of crime and law enforcement - but he’s also aware that he’s killed so many brain cells that he can’t always trust what he says or hears. So imagine his shock when Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), an old flame, enters his home and says that she’s in trouble.

Shasta tells Doc that she has a boyfriend/sugar-daddy: Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), the biggest real estate developer in town. What's wrong now is that Mickey’s wife, along with the wife’s lover, want to involve Shasta in a plot to have Wolfmann declared insane so they can keep all his wealth for themselves. Despite Larry’s distrust, he can’t turn his ex away, even if it forces him to go face-to-face with a deadly Neo-Nazi biker (Keith Jardine), a shockingly open-minded member of the militant black movement (Michael K. Williams (The Wire's Omar!)), and Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) - a detective who loves to hate hippies.

It feels like an age since I featured this trailer.

So, for once, I find myself at a slight loss because I still haven’t seen The Big Lebowski. I’ll catch the movie eventually, but I suspect that it may be the best possible comparison. As a result, I can only say that Inherent Vice is sort of like a Dashiell Hammett story filtered through the style of Hunter S. Thompson. Basically, it’s The Maltese Falcon meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Doc struggles through a labyrinth of seemingly-unconnected people, using any trick he can to draw his next clue out of them - and, throughout this search, he faces as much resistance from law enforcement as he does from the figures that are engaged in violently-illegal activities...

But how can you trust the clues when you’re not even sure what’s really being experienced by the PI who pieces them together?