Thursday, January 12, 2017

Riske Business: In Case You Missed Them (Holiday Movie Edition)

by Adam Riske
My take on a half dozen holiday releases still in theaters, ranked least favorite to favorite.

Assassin’s Creed – I’m not one of those people who cross their fingers hoping video game movies are good. I’m in the camp that looks forward to them being kind of bad, especially during this part of the year ( "prestige" season). It’s comforting at this point because it’s a genre that delivers the “goods” (“bads” may be more appropriate) with consistency. So for the first 30 minutes of Assassin’s Creed, I was sitting in the theater thinking “people are being too hard on this,” but then I gear-shifted and fell comfortably into the consensus. The movie gets more and more nonsensical as it progresses but not in a fun way; more in a dull way where you can’t even enjoy the movie on its own terms. Michael Fassbender cares and that sustained me for a while plus some of the 15th century Spain action set-pieces are interesting to look at (it’s a neat visual, the way they introduce you into that setting each time Fassbender’s character enters the virtual reality) but a parade of characters where you barely know their names, let alone character motivations, ultimately make Assassin’s Creed a slog.
Passengers – Like Assassin’s Creed, Passengers is a movie that starts intriguingly but falls apart by the ending. At the beginning, the movie is interesting because you’re exploring this transport vessel along with Chris Pratt, so there’s a sense of discovery. Plus, the production design of this ship is really something; it’s the best thing in the movie. The movie then shifts gears and focuses on the Pratt-Jennifer Lawrence relationship and it suffers a bit for a number of reasons I can’t get into without spoilers. Let’s just say it is problematic and pretty sexist, too. A lot of it has to do with portraying its sole female character as less than equal to her male counterpart and being more important to service a man’s needs/be witness to his “greatness” than have her own agency. After playing such strong characters in the past in movies like Winter’s Bone, Joy or The Hunger Games, I'm surprised Jennifer Lawrence chose to play somewhat of a thinly realized damsel in distress. By the third act, Passengers has a choice to explore the icky moral quandary it sets itself up with head-on or cop out and finish with an arbitrary action climax. It chooses the latter and nets out as a bad movie because of it. The movie is almost worth seeing, though, for Andy Garcia’s role. It’s incredible how brief it is.

Why Him? – This movie made me laugh just enough to not dislike it. Why Him? comes from director John Hamburg, who’s a veteran of a handful of Ben Stiller comedies and who previously directed I Love You, Man. Coincidentally, I caught I Love You, Man on cable again recently and I still really enjoy that movie. Why Him? is not as good, and I think a reason why is because it’s more set-piece driven and less about character interaction with smart writing and funny people delivering those lines. I’m not trying to bag on James Franco or Bryan Cranston (I like both in general and both in Why Him?), but they don’t have any special chemistry to make the movie memorable. It’s fine and disposable. It feels like a lot of Judd Apatow productions from a few years ago, where there’s some raunchy behavior, a lot of sweetness but ultimately the movie is easy to forget. This is a movie made to fill out a DVD 4-pack.
Hidden Figures – A movie I liked but wanted to enjoy a lot more. Hidden Figures has an amazing story to tell made more exceptional because it tells a…well… hidden story from history that is fascinating and should have gotten the press it deserved at the time. What’s disappointing is that the film tells that story in a very movie-ish way. At times Hidden Figures feels inauthentic (more certain shots than sequences) – too sanitized and sermonizing, like something you would produce with the intention of showing to middle school students on “movie day” (it’s rated PG and that doesn’t work to its benefit). Some characters feel like types instead of people. “Lesson” is underlined a lot in this movie. The best sequences are the ones with Taraji P. Henson at work in Kevin Costner’s managed think tank, because it goes into the most detail about the work and skill involved in some of the missions. This is a movie that does NASA a lot better than Civil Rights in my humble opinion. The performances carried me through, but I’d be remiss to not admit that I think I’m giving this movie more of a pass than I should because I’m sympathetic to its subject matter. Hidden Figures may be a victim of expectations for me more than anything else. If this came out in January without a lot of buzz, it would probably feel less disappointing. This time of year is weird anyways. If it’s an Oscar hopeful and it’s not at least really good, it somehow feels like a frustration.

Fences –Denzel Washington would get my vote for Best Actor of the year because he’s terrific in Fences and it features THE MOST acting. Dude acts his face off in Fences (as well as Viola Davis, who is almost always great except for Suicide Squad…that movie takes down everything), and as a moviegoer who enjoys watching acting maybe more than any other facet of the medium, this was a real treat. I’ve heard criticism that Washington doesn’t “open up” the movie Fences so it still feels stage-bound, but I’m perfectly fine with that. I don’t get out to see live theater as much as I would like, so seeing something that’s more like a play was a unique experience for me which I enjoyed. If for no other reason, I appreciate Fences because it is my introduction to the writing of August Wilson (and probably is for a lot of people) and for that I feel fortunate. Fences is a tough movie, tougher than something like Manchester By the Sea imho, because it’s a much angrier movie and without all the gallows humor. It’s an experience that got under my skin, similar to how the Brad Pitt sequences in The Tree of Life are because they feel so authentic and suffocating. Despite the dialogue being poetic, the emotions and situations are messy and ugly, with lead characters that have the capacity to be much more than one single type.
A Monster Calls – This movie is a doozy and the reason I wanted to write this article, which is to shine a light on how good A Monster Calls is. I’m usually not one who’s easily taken in by creatures teaching children lessons in movies, but I found this movie so moving in a few ways. First, it’s a beautiful portrait about the bond between mothers and their children. Second, it deals with grief in an interesting way, because it’s about how disease affects the people around the afflicted. It’s a brave movie that acknowledges that our feelings and thoughts in these times can be murky and surprising, to the point where we feel we need to punish ourselves for daring to think them. The movie is also an amazing representation of how difficult it is to talk about grief and the isolation that comes from that (e.g. we don’t want to upset the person who is sick, we feel our feelings shouldn’t have equal weight to their well-being, we don’t know what to say, etc.) and how we need movies/stories/parables to help process how we’re feeling and find some measure of peace. I might be sounding so hyper-specific that it makes no sense to you reading this, but that’s just a residual effect of how much this movie hit me personally. A Monster Calls certainly would have been in my top 5 of 2016 had I seen it in time and it’s my exploding heart movie of the year. It really bums me out it’s not doing better in theaters due to how crowded the marketplace is right now. Go see it.

Have you seen any of these films? What were your thoughts?

19 comments:

  1. I've only seen Fences, but I loved it, and next to John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane, Denzel probably gave my favorite performance of the Year. Denzel can do almost no wrong.

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  2. Yeah it's nice to see him get a role he can really flex his acting muscles in after 2 Guns, The Equalizer and The Magnificent Seven. He was especially muted I thought in M7.

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    1. Indeed. I guess nobody knows better what Denzel is capable of or how to use him better than Denzel himself. He made a great casting decision there, haha. :)

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  3. I quite liked Passengers, and thought it took its ethical questions about as far as they could go within the limits established by the script. Yes, what he did was wrong, but if he'd just taken a long spacewalk with no suit instead, the movie would have been a thirty-minute short. And yes, the third-act action beats derived from plot contrivance rather than internal character work, but what else was she going to do - keep on avoiding him entirely the rest of their lives?

    I'd also like to observe, for the record, that this one movie has more ethical wrestling than all three nuTrek flicks put together. And, unlike the horrendous Beyond, I didn't feel like the movie hated me and wanted me to be miserable from start to finish.

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    1. SPOILERS FOR PASSENGERS


      I would have liked Passengers better if they took more time with the ethical question or just her reaction to what he did. I'm fine that they went there (I agree btw with your point about the spacewalk...SOMETHING needs to happen after that) but cutting off the fallout of the BIG REVEAL for an action climax I think is a mistake. It's a cynical decision to make the movie more palatable like Titanic.

      I think there's a lot of things other than not avoiding him that she could have done like - a) accepting his offer to go back to sleep b) killing him because she's still mad etc.

      As for Star Trek Beyond, I had the polar opposite reaction but I'm not going to say you're wrong for feeling the way you did.

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    2. I thought the first half of Passengers was very interesting, driven by the exploration of the ship and Pratt's moral/ethical dilemma. I think the tree was pretty much turning point at which the movie that I was emotionally invested in began to turn silly at an alarming rate, right up to the end.


      SPOILERS FOR PASSENGERS

      You make a good point about cramming in an action-packed climax and undercutting the fallout of probably the most interesting concept that Passengers has to offer.

      I was pulling for a much darker ending, that I knew I would never get.
      My ending: Pratt perishes on his saviour mission and J-Law languishes alone for a year or so, eventually popping the seal on a boy-toy, finally gaining an understanding of why Pratt did what he did.

      Also, Andy Garcia was indeed a revelation.

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    3. That totally mirrors my reaction. I hoped for Pratts character to die out there without the rope and watching Lawrence enduring the same things Pratt endured before waking her up. That would have been a bold choice. But sadly they choose to go for action and some laughably neat coincidences to end it.
      For poor Andy Garcia, I hope he got a big check for his 23 seconds.

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  4. Saw A Monster Calls on Tuesday with a friend who had recently gone through a similar experience as the boy in the film. Afterwords he kept talking about how amazed he was at the time the movie was willing to spend depicting how horrible the process of losing someone is. What amazes me the most about A Monster Calls is how much it earns the measure of peace the boy finally experiences; how it takes so much complexity and is able to find a truth that I don't think I've seen laid so bare onscreen before. I think everyone should see this movie.

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    1. It's so good that I started crying again while I was writing about it.

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    2. Darn, I want to see this but it's already left my city - I see Monster Trucks is playing though - close enough?

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    3. Paramount took a $115M write-off on that movie months before it was released. That's confidence, bro.

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  5. I left Passengers feeling like my skin was crawling, but I can't deny how incredibly thought provoking it was with reeaally unpleasant ethical questions. I really think it's good, but I'm super conflicted about it. That being said, I truly can't understand how anyone could call it sexist against women. If anything, it seems a little sexist against men.

    SPOILERS FOR PASSENGERS

    Think about it. It's about a man so desperate to be saved by a woman that he does something horrible and spends the rest of his movie begging a woman for forgiveness and approval. I'm not offended of course (as I do think straight men really need women), but I find the idea that it's sexist against women very odd. I remember wondering as I left the theater having seen this and the trailer for 50 Shades Darker, why are there all these romance films lately where the man is a monster?

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    1. Daniel...you're the best so don't take any of this as a disagreement.

      Have you seen Fifty Shades of Grey? If you don't walk away thinking that guy is a monster then I don't know what else to say.

      As for Passengers I think it's sexist because if it weren't predominately about Pratt wanted to have sex with Jennifer Lawrence he would have woken up anyone else. Also, he's like a "Mary Sue" who's good at everything and she's a writer who can't do anything on the ship without Pratt coaching her how to do it. Plus the fact that he woke up a writer basically only gives her one thing to write about: him.

      You may disagree but to say anyone couldn't read that as sexist against women is what I can't understand.

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    2. Sorry meant to say "don't take this as anything other than a disagreement"

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    3. It's all good Adam! Anyway, what I was saying was I completely agree that the 50 Shades guy IS a monster and that's why I said "why are there all these new romance movies where the man is a monster?" Thank God for Gosling in La La Land.
      Also, one thing I suppose I didn't make clear is YES I think Chris Pratt's character is horrible, I just didn't read the movie as being on his side. It seemed pretty clear that the movie was showing he made a horrible mistake and even he knows that and feels like garbage for it. Therefore while Pratt could be read as being sexist, I don't think the movie was. I also don't see any problem with the characters having different talents where Pratt is a mechanic and JLaw is not. And she doesn't just write about him, she writes about the both of them, which I also don't see a problem with.

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    4. Should he have woken up a fellow mechanic, if he was so isolation-crazed he needed to wake someone up? Yeah, sure, but he was crazed at that point - like the guy says, a drowning person, in their desperation, will try to grab onto others, even if it puts them in danger, not out of malice, but out of sheer animal instinct.

      Anyhow, I respect the movie for taking a real chance on a genuinely thorny story, and am discouraged by the general pillorying and meager box office it's gotten. Compare this to (for example) Inception, which was narratively and visually daring, but completely ignored the ethical wrongs of invading someone's mind in order to sabotage their company in favor of Nintendo 64 Goldeneye-homaging shootouts with brain NPCs. (And if one wants to talk sexism... there's plenty to dig into in that one, IMO.) Sure, that hallway fight was amazing, but I'll take Passengers over Inception any day. :)

      (I'm not trying to box Riske or anyone else into a corner with the above paragraph, just making an observation.)

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    5. I'm glad you liked Passengers. I tap out.

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    6. haha I agree with a lot of that El Gaithe, but I must separate myself from that Inception comment. Inception is far better to me, but hey as P-Broms says, "the world is a rainbow."

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    7. I felt like if I disagreed with you, El Gaith, any more about Passengers that 2001: A Space Odyssey would be next :-)

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