Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

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It’s really easy to dismiss a film by calling it nonsense, and this particular pitfall is one I feel I fall into too many times. I’ve cried nonsense on the plots of so many films over the course of my years reviewing films when I really meant muddled or confusing or pointless that now when I need it most I worry it won’t be taken seriously. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is nonsense in the purest form of the word; the movie has nothing resembling coherence or reason and it is a constant struggle just to understand what the hell is happening, let alone why it’s happening. I understand why these characters need to run away from bad things, but just about nothing else about the entire film. I derided the first Maze Runner film for being cliché and boring but it’s so much better to be boring than to be utterly incomprehensible.

You would think that by picking up directly where the last film left off The Scorch Trials could have some sense of narrative continuity, but you would be completely wrong. This film starts with the idea that everything we knew in the first movie was wrong but never bothers to explain what’s right. There’s some disease out there and for some reason it turns people in to zombies. The lab where they’re researching this disease has some weird shrimp monsters in glass tubes but no one acknowledges them in a serious way and they’re never spoken of or seen again. The outside world is one of sandstorms and powerful lightning storms but I can’t imagine that was caused by the zombie shrimp virus. The city they visit (or cities— it’s very hard to tell visually and the narrative gives no clues) is completely trashed with skyscrapers collapsing and fallen bridges, but none of that seems like zombies or sandstorms would cause it. The movie feels like the sets and locations were made with a paint-by-numbers set of post-apocalyptic clichés, and I could probably abide by it if they dedicated any time at all to justifying any of it. It wouldn’t even be that hard to slide this exposition when you consider all of the primary antagonists have amnesia, a disease practically invented to provide opportunities for simple things to be explained.

There’s also a stunning lack of consistency in the simple facts of the world. The kids travel by days on foot apparently risking dehydration and death by exposure to get from this ruined city to a secluded rebel outpost at the base of a far-off mountain. Then when things in the base go wrong two characters run around an underground tunnel for less than ten minutes before being deposited back out in to a giant city that we definitely couldn’t see in any of the establishing shots of that camp. When they leave this new city a few minutes later, they do it in a truck on a paved road. Civilization returned to this part of the world quickly in the maximum three days these events took place in. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like my intelligence has been insulted so much by a movie, and I saw the Twilight film where the whole climax was a dream twice.

For two movies in all the characters are remarkably thin. I couldn’t come up with descriptions for any of them that last more than a sentence or contain more than two adjectives. I suppose Minho is the brave one and Thomas is the reckless hero. Newt has an English accent and Aris has a weird name. I think Frypan is supposed to be the strong one but I might be wrong. Teresa has almost nothing to do in this movie and barely speaks until it’s almost over but they still expect me to believe she and Thomas have some special connection, maybe by the time this is all over it will be somewhat believable. Patricia Clarkson is suitably menacing in her slightly expanded part as the series’ apparent big bad, but she’s starting to sort of fade in to the scenery as the famous older blond actress playing the big bad has become the new fad among the YA movie swarm. Giancarlo Esposito is a treasure and he gets the most real acting to do in this and while he crushes it I sincerely hope he gets better opportunities soon or that this paid enormously well. Alan Tudyk is featured in a very small role and while he’s utterly transfixing it seems as if the direction offered him was “take everything you’ve ever seen a junkie do on film and do all of it on every line” and it’s awfully strange to see.

While trying to figure out how much of what I didn’t get in this film came from some struggle to adapt the book into the film I read a summary of the book and discovered it basically has nothing to do with the movie they made. Some of the characters are the same and the second act seems to hit a few of the same beats but what are we even doing here at this point? Why make a film so unfaithful to the source material and also so staggeringly terrible? Who is being pleased by this film? Surely not the fans of the book and certainly not the poor audience members with no affinity for this franchise at all. The Scorch Trials is a failure as a film and a failure as an adaptation and it seems like somewhere, with enough effort, they could have gotten one of these things right.

Box Office Democracy: The Visit

the-visit-1139445It’s frustrating watching a movie where the direction is so far and away better than the script it’s stuck with. This is an infinitely more frustrating problem when the director and the writer are the same person but such is the case with M. Night Shyamalan’s latest effort The Visit. It’s a fine movie, it’s definitely a scary movie, and it’s sometimes a funny movie but not as often as it wants to be but it sort of feels like a bunch of great parts struggling to make a coherent sum. Despite these frustrations The Visit is a credible start to the fall horror movie season and a kind of fitting latest entries into the catalogue of one of Hollywood’s most maddening auteurs.

The story of The Visit is rather simple and I don’t mean that as a slight, the more complicated your horror movie plot gets the closer you are to becoming the later Nightmare on Elm Street films. Two teenagers (young teenagers it should be noted not slasher movie teens) go to visit their estranged grandparents and then thing literally start going bump in the night. The kids try to play detective and are generally bad at being detectives because they’re kids but it helps the film bounce from tense set piece to tense set piece which is good fun. All of the solutions to problems seem to fall from the sky instead of developing but I’m willing to let that go for an effective scary time.

I’m not entirely sure what’s so intrinsically terrifying about The Visit but whatever it is it works for me. Maybe it’s the empathy I feel for children being sent to a strange house, I never much cared to stay with relatives, the space always felt a little uneasy. Maybe it’s just a general fear of strangers or unease around the elderly, especially older people who are clearly not doing as well. It might just be as simple as dark places and sudden noises, the Paranormal Activity special if you will. I’m not 100% sure why but I haven’t been as uncomfortable watching a scary movie in a theater in years. The last movie that made me so uneasy, that made me watch the movies through the corners of my eyes as I stared at the wall of the theater was Mama two and a half years ago. I can’t put my finger on why The Visit was so scary but it was dreadfully so, perhaps so much that I struggle to recommend it.

The Visit is, through and through, an M. Night Shyamalan movie and I firmly believe the hate has gone too far on Shyamalan in the last few years. It’s been a while since he’s put out a good movie but that’s a deficiency of M. Night Shyamalan the screenwriter and not M. Night Shyamalan the director. Shyamalan is an excellent visual storyteller and he consistently gets solid performances out of his actors (with the exception of himself) and The Visit is no exception in that regard. It might be a little too cute to have Rebecca as an aspiring filmmaker call out the techniques Shyamalan will later use to attempt to terrify the audience but I can forgive a couple slightly flat jokes if it otherwise delivers and The Visit does. I also quite enjoyed Shyamalan playing with audience expectations with regards to plot twists. I know that one is coming (really the narrative here demands it as something must be amiss) but because it’s Shyamalan I’m looking at everything, grasping at every straw, so when the twist in this movie is a little simpler I didn’t see it coming at all. It’s good work from a good filmmaker and it’s probably time to stop demanding he constantly live up to the excellence of The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, that isn’t going to happen.

And so the cycle continues. The Visit quadrupled its budget at the box office this weekend so, barring catastrophe, Shyamalan will be back with another movie in a year or so and we’ll all be back here again with jokes about twist endings and how disappointed we all were with Lady in the Water and, unless it’s another After Earth, it’ll probably be a well-directed film that doesn’t quite have a script up to that effort. Hollywood really is out of new ideas.

Box Office Democracy: Hand of God

Hand Of God, with Ron Perlman and Dana DelanyHand of God is a perfectly enjoyable TV show that has fallen in to the same trap that dozens of other shows in the last decade have fallen in to: it isn’t the high art it thinks it is. This isn’t The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or The Wire. It doesn’t reach the depths of John from Cincinnati or The Leftovers because it has a dynamite cast and a clever premise but it isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is. It wants to be a spellbinding mystery but it just isn’t that well crafted. Hand of God is a marvelous show to get lost in but if you look to closely you’ll see how poorly tended the forest is.

There’s a lot of top-notch acting on Hand of God and I’m not entirely sure if I mean from series lead Ron Perlman. Perlman chews the scenery as is his wont and it works, he’s a very convincing man having a psychotic break but it’s the rest of the cast that does most of the heavy lifting, perhaps because they have to ground this insanity. Dana Delany is the standout; she gives a tour de force performance where seemingly every episode has her pushing at some new corner of her character but in a way where the myriad personality revelations feel organic and not contrived, and this is a show that knows its way around contrived. Andre Royo is a delight as always, but I’m not sure it was the perfect directorial note to tell him to play the mayor of a small city the same way he played Bubbles. Camryn Manheim has a two-episode arc as a psychiatrist that is just so perfect and the exact energy the show needed and I sincerely hope she’s brought back if the series continues.

The thematic content in Hand of God all worked for me. Pernell Harris (Perlman) is a judge in a small town who starts to get what he believes are divine hallucinations after the attempted suicide of his son and he believes he has to use these to solve the sexual assault of his daughter-in-law. Pernell gets drawn in to an evangelical born-again church that has cropped up in his town and all of the ways they tie the various plot lines in to these religious narratives was effective for me. It’s not a groundbreaking piece of theological discourse or anything but it’s fun to watch and to talk about with other people watching, especially when the alternatives are some of the grislier aspects of the show. “Do you think those were really divine visions?” is a fun question to ask, “what do you think happened with that parking lot murder?” is not.

Where Hand of God falls apart is the story. It’s clear that the show wants to be a sweeping mystery that people discuss how clever it is; it wants to be Scandal at a confessional but is missing the complexity. Unless I miscounted, all but one of the series regulars has a big secret related to the central mystery and most of them are pretty obvious. There are no red herrings, everything just leads linearly to the next thing and the only way to not be ahead of the plot is to just not be paying enough attention. It’s an awkward feeling when the show thinks it’s making a big revelation and the audience watching look at each other and shrug. I’m interested in some of the loose threads they left for a potential season two so it’s not as if this is a total loss, but every thread that wasn’t loose was tied in to a too perfect bow for my taste.

Box Office Democracy: American Ultra

American Ultra would have been the coolest movie in the world in 1996. It has the lovable loser slacker protagonist with a quirky hobby and a mundane job, it has plenty of sudden graphic violence, and it even has a plot that’s a metaphor for parental issues.

Unfortunately, the last 19 years haven’t been particularly kind to these tropes, and this movie that would have easily swept the Independent Spirit Awards two decades ago instead feels less special and more tired. It doesn’t sink the movie, it’s still frequently a blast and features one of the most best ensemble supporting cast I may have ever seen but this is a movie that in another era could have been a home run and it’s disappointing to see it just be a long double.

While not a fantastic reflection on the originality of the film, American Ultra lends itself very handily to mash-up comparisons. It’s Chasing Amy meets A History of Violence, it’s Slackers crossed with The Bourne Identity, it’s SubUrbia having a baby with The Transporter. Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) is a stoner convenience store clerk who draws an ambitious if nonsensical comic book in his spare time. Unbeknownst to Mike he is an old CIA asset that due to a power struggle within the agency has been targeted for termination. When the CIA assassins come to kill him Mike discovers he’s an amazing killer. The ensuing chaotic escalation of this operation ends up bringing everyone in Mike’s life in to the orbit of this violent struggle especially his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) who is the cliché suspiciously-attractive girlfriend of a total loser. There are enough clever twists and fun tweaks to the formula here to make the film exciting but maybe they go a little too far as there are all these vestigial bits of plot hanging off the edges like threads that they forgot to weave in to the main fabric of the story.

While both Eisenberg and Stewart are quite good— in fact, both seem to be trying very hard to shake of the notion that they are budget-friendly versions of bigger stars— the real winning performances in American Ultra come from the supporting cast. Topher Grace chews scenery hard as the smarmy evil CIA supervisor and I’ve seen him do this douchebag performance so well so many times I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not like that in real life and that’s probably the mark of an exceptional performance (or an exceptional jerk in real life, but I hope not). Connie Britton usually acting across from Grace does a great job bringing a grounded energy to those scenes, but when she’s doing scenes with any other characters she switches gears and becomes the scene stealing performer we know she is. Walton Goggins is a terrifying presence as the CIA lunatic killer Laugher turning in a performance that is 100% chilling nightmare fodder. The cast is so embarrassingly deep that Tony Hale and John Leguizamo, both national treasures and utter delights in this film, feel criminally underused but there just isn’t room for more of them.

By the time I’m writing this it’s pretty apparent American Ultra didn’t find its audience. We’ve even gotten the 2015 signature move of the underperforming movie and someone involved in the production has taken to Twitter to complain about the results of their labors. It’s a shame, this movie deserves better and I hope that eventually people discover this movie on Netflix or wherever because it deserves to be seen and to be appreciated. Not because it’s screamingly original or clever but because it’s an example of exceptional execution and the good work a solid cast can do to carry a middling script. American Ultra is a film that deserves better than it got from America this weekend and better than it got from whoever came up with this terrible non-descriptive title.

Box Office Democracy: Straight Outta Compton

When I saw the first trailer for Straight Outta Compton I leaned over to my girlfriend and said, “Oh my God, are they making the story of N.W.A into a white savior movie?” and she looked back at me with fear in her eyes. It was a bad trailer, rather an unrepresentative one, which made it look like a movie about Jerry Heller trying to get the police and the music establishment to treat his clients with respect. That would have been a terrible movie, a tragic misrepresentation of the struggles that really took place. The movie we got is a powerful touchstone piece in documenting and dramatizing the rise of West Coast gangster rap.

I wish Straight Outta Compton felt as old as it is. That we could look at the events of this movie, now a quarter of a century gone, and think of them as the past when instead it feels like the present. The world they show us to contextualize the writing of “Fuck tha Police” feels very much like the world we see so very often on the news or in our own communities. The anger and the despair and the hopelessness of the situation feels so current and relevant and it only magnifies these feelings to know we’ve accomplished so little in the intervening years when it comes to policing minority populations. These are powerful scenes, the most affecting ones that I can remember seeing on the topic and if this movie does nothing but inspire this feeling of discontent in a few more people it will be a remarkable success.

Luckily, it does a few more things very well. The acting is generally superb; especially O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s work pretending to be his own father, a task that I have to imagine is one of the strangest tasks an actor would ever have to attempt. Corey Hawkins does a good job of playing Dr. Dre with the quiet rage I’ve always associated with him and showing it build, ebb, and flow in a natural manner. It’s an inexperienced cast and that inexperience sometimes shines through but they generally do great work. I was quite impressed with the scope of the picture, it starts as an N.W.A piece but then branches out through everyone’s respective solo careers and it helps to illustrate how influential these men were in launching other enterprises and helping along the careers of so many others. It stops short of getting into Ice Cube playing a police captain in the 21 Jump Street franchise and the irony therein but I suppose it was already a long film. Straight Outta Compton also does its part in establishing that Suge Knight is a real-life cartoon supervillain and I think that is an important detail to share with future generations that might watch this movie.

There’s a problem with the way Straight Outta Compton handles its female characters. Most of the women on screen in this film are some manner of groupie, party girl, or otherwise objectified woman with barely any lines. The exceptions are wives and mothers and while it’s nice to have that change of pace that isn’t really a less sexist depiction. Every woman is either a Madonna or a whore with nowhere in between. This is an accurate reflection of how bad the gangster rap movement was for the status of black women but one would hope that time and perspective might lend itself to a more nuanced look back. I don’t need the characters in the film to say or do things differently than they really happened but it would have been nice to get some indication that the filmmakers know this kind of conduct is wrong or damaging.

The music biopic is a genre that feels perpetually stale, and Straight Outta Compton is definitely not a stale film. It has all the little issues that biographical films will always have, character and event compression makes for some moments that feel as fantastical as people commanding ants through a metal helmet but there’s a passion and an energy I haven’t felt in one of these films in a long time, maybe ever. This is an important band who did important things at an important time and it’s important to remember their struggle and try to contextualize it for people who weren’t there or who couldn’t pay it the proper attention. If not for this movie there was a real danger that Ice Cube and Dr. Dre would be remembered by the next generation as an actor and a headphone mogul and if this movie keeps their other work in our collective consciousness it is doing our culture a great service.

Box Office Democracy: “Fantastic Four”

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Fantastic Four is a bad movie. Don’t go see it if you want an enjoyable 100 minutes in a theater and probably don’t see it for an ironic “so bad I want to make fun of it” kind of way either. It’s a lifeless bad, an entropic bad, a movie so bad it makes me question if there’s even a good movie based on this team to be made. Only the depths of history save Fantastic Four from being the worst superhero movie of all time (it might not even be the worst movie named Fantastic Four) but it’s certainly the worst superhero of this generation and is a top contender for worst film of the year.

Perhaps it isn’t possible to make a good Fantastic Four with the constraints that a non-Marvel studio would put on it. They need to make the principal characters young so they’re more relatable to young people, but then you have a team full of cut-rate Peter Parkers with none of the family-based charm that makes the FF work in the comics. You need to do an origin story but you also need to get Doctor Doom in there because he’s literally the only villain that anyone’s ever heard of so you end up shoehorning that character into a story that doesn’t involve him or he becomes some kind of vestigial Fantastic Fifth. There’s also an unwillingness to use the iconic costumes or codenames that aren’t The Thing, which takes a team with so much history and turns them in to a bunch of generic off-brand versions of themselves.

It’s become quite clear over the weekend that there were some serious behind the scenes squabbles over the making of this movie and it’s certainly apparent in the product given to us on the screen. After the four main characters get their super powers they are held as scientific experiments, a predicament from which Reed escapes and the remaining three are left behind. This creates a great deal of mistrust from Ben Grimm who feels abandoned but throws himself headfirst in to working as a secret weapon of the military. One such military operation is taking Reed back in to custody. When they bring Reed back Johnny is quick to embrace him, Sue feels guilty at being part of the operation that brought him back in and Ben still feels anger. Then Doctor Doom shows up and starts killing a lot of people and it feels like this is going to be the impetus for the four of them to put their differences aside and work together to stop this larger evil a few scenes later in the movie but instead this one confrontation is it. They fight Doom and at the end they seem to be the best of friends even though nothing really changed for all of them, they don’t talk, there aren’t even meaningful glances or anything. Reed goes from missing for an entire year to barking orders that everyone follows in what must have been hours. I bet there was a version of this movie that feels more complete but we’ll never see it and with the right NDAs we might never even know but this is the rare movie that’s boring at 100 minutes but might have been appreciably better at 120 minutes.

I don’t know where this property goes from here. There’s already word from Fox that their announced Fantastic Four sequel might get scrapped in favor of a Deadpool sequel. Oddly, not announcing sequels for movies that haven’t been released yet doesn’t seem to be an option at all. Perhaps this time Fox has finally stumbled so badly with the franchise that they’ll be willing to work out a deal that returns the characters to Marvel and we start seeing a slow rollout of Latverian mentions in Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’m not interested in seeing this version of these characters again and I’m sure as hell not excited to sit through another origin story in four years time. I want this to eventually be gotten right but maybe it doesn’t matter, there are enough super hero movies out there without another iteration of the FF taking up all of our time.

Box Office Democracy: “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation”

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Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is a very good spy action movie. It expands and builds on the previous entries in the series although sometimes in ways I’m not entirely sure are necessary but it’s consistently compelling and visually interesting, often funny, it checks every box I would put on a hypothetical action movie checklist. Unfortunately I think the landscape for these movies have changed and being very good might not cut it anymore. Movies need to either push the genre in new or interesting directions (like a Mad Max: Fury Road) or be so consistently excellent the movie becomes a non-stop delight to sit and watch (the approach taken by the last three Fast & Furious movies) or it feels lacking to me. Tom Cruise isn’t enough by himself and Tom Cruise: Movie Superstar is all that is being offered here.

Let’s not take anything away from Tom Cruise as a movie star, because he is a phenomenal one and this is a stunning showcase for him. He is charming and magnetic and because he’s willing to do his own insane stunts the movie looks more authentic. It’s not a very active improvement, though; it’s more like appreciating how it doesn’t look like bad CGI than being particularly amazing in its own right. Tom Cruise is good in a way that makes me think “Tom Cruise is amazing” but not in a way that makes me thing “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is an amazing movie” and that’s a problem. He’s appealing in the role but he never makes me think anything about the character, I know I’m watching Ethan Hunt but I never ascribe any character traits to him, he’s a stunningly blank character for the lead of a fifth movie in the series.

The plots haven’t advanced very far along in five movies either. For Rogue Nation the Impossible Mission Force is disgraced in the eyes of the government and Ethan and his team must work to stop the bad guys with no official support for their actions. This is exactly the same premise of the last entry in the franchise. All they did this time was change the particulars; it isn’t about stopping a nuclear missile, it’s about shutting down a criminal anti-IMF, and the force of government resistance are represented by Alec Baldwin who plays his part as director of the CIA and I can only imagine his process was deciding he was going to play Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock and the director would have to fight him for every bit of seriousness. This is not intended as a complaint; it works quite well. There are also some legacy problems due to the longevity of the series. In a world where good and evil intelligence operatives have been able to do perfect face masks to pose as others for almost 20 years, you would figure no important people on earth would have sensitive conversations without blood tests or some such. As it is you just spend the entire movie waiting for that iconic face pulling off shot and this time around I saw it coming a mile away. It hurts the credibility of the movie.

I’ve complained a lot here and while I think the film deserves it I want to emphasize that it was a perfectly enjoyable way to spend 2 hours and 20 minutes on a hot summer day. It’s fun to watch, the action spectacle is as good as Hollywood is capable of doing. Rogue Nation crosses the globe to incredible exotic locales and it’s fun to see motorcycle chases through Morocco. The supporting cast is a hoot and a half, Simon Pegg is delightful, Ving Rhames is wonderfully gruff and while he sometimes feels like he’s acting on autopilot it’s never distracting. Rogue Nation is a very good movie but I want it to be excellent, these days the genre almost demands it and it just isn’t there yet. I hope the inevitable sixth movie can push it in that direction, and with the track record of this franchise I wouldn’t rule it out.

Box Office Democracy: Pixels

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I remember rather clearly the first time I saw the trailer for Pixels. It has a cool introduction about sending examples of 1982 culture in to space and then it quickly moves on to some quick shots of the attack and then the coup de grace of the giant Pac-Man crashing through midtown Manhattan eating a fire truck. For the first minute of the trailer it looked like a movie I would like and then they revealed that Adam Sandler was the star of the movie and all of my interest vanished. I know the kind of movies Adam Sandler makes and they aren’t clever or original, they’re outdated and formulaic. This wouldn’t be a fun deconstruction of old arcade games like Wreck-It Ralph or even a fun action movie like The Last Starfighter. The best-case scenario for Pixels was as the home of a spectacular fart joke. It wasn’t.

There’s nothing in Pixels that feels substantial enough to criticize. The plot is a mess and full of contradictions starting with the premise that aliens recreated video games down to glitches in the 1982 code of Galaga (a crucial plot point for Sandler to prove his credentials early in the film) from a video tape of children playing the game. The aliens communicate through the images of 80s pop culture icons and it’s a nice device, one of the only things that feel that way in the whole film, but other than some exposition thrown in the third act we never learn anything about this menace other than they attack using video games. The movie pretends to venerate this bygone era of arcade gaming but then makes choices that anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the subject matter knows are complete bunk like cheat codes in Pac-Man or Q*bert, famous for his garbled voice and word balloons filled with symbols, giving extensive exposition in English. It feels like everything about the movie was hammered out over lunch one day and no one ever thought about it again. I almost feel stupid complaining about it because I’ve already thought about it more than everyone who worked on the movie.

All of the characters in Pixels are paper-thin nothings but the women seem to get a particularly short end of the stick. The female lead (Michelle Monaghan) is a Lieutenant Colonel and in charge of some nebulous DARPA team but all of her character traits are defined by men she is attracted to (Sandler), she was cheated on by her husband, and she doesn’t want her son to be harmed. She might even do better than Jane Krakowski who plays the First Lady of the United States who doesn’t understand that her husband is busy with his job and demands he make time for ludicrous public dates in some kind of effort to become some shrew singularity. There’s the ideal virtual woman of video games (Ashley Benson) who doesn’t talk even when brought to life by these aliens even when other characters that never talked in their games talk. None of these characters in a vacuum would be that big of a deal but when they’re all like this and even the off-screen female characters are treated poorly (slutty pilates instructor, ex-wife who has an affair with fertility doctor) it adds up to a sour taste in the mouth. Luckily it doesn’t linger because nothing in this film is capable of holding the minds o the audience for more than a few minutes,

Pixels is similarly unkind to nerdy men, a demographic in far less peril in film but one that deserves better than this movie. These characters are all just aspects of the sexless loser nerd stereotype that has persisted for 30 years and should feel outdated at this point. The movie installs a central principle of its anchor relationship that nerds are better kissers because they appreciate it more. The movie wants to play on this nostalgia for pop culture icons and is then spectacularly unkind to the people who would feel most warmly about it. When The Big Bang Theory is doing dramatically better at characterization than your feature film it’s time to scrap the whole thing and move on.

I wish I thought Adam Sandler cared that this is a bad movie. He’s made so many bad movies in a row, produced so many bad movies in a row, that I have to believe he’s either completely insane and believes these movies are fantastic or he knows they’re good enough to get paid, get to the next one, and keep supporting whatever golden yacht lifestyle he lives. I wish he made better movies, selfishly, so I wouldn’t feel compelled to go see these wretched things to review them. We’ve all heard the stories coming out of his next film, The Furious Six, and we can probably guess this isn’t getting any better. Adam Sandler can do better than this, he has before, and I wish he cared enough to do better again.

Box Office Democracy: Ant-Man

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Ant-Man is the latest anticipated failure from Marvel Studios, the film that will finally break the spell that Marvel has on box offices and show that they can make films that people don’t like and that don’t make very much money, a Cars 2 if you will.

This isn’t that movie.

Ant-Man is totally charming and breathes fresh air in to the parts of the superhero formula that are beginning to feel particularly stale with some fun heist elements and a killer supporting cast. Besides, Doctor Strange feels more like the Marvel failure movie, right? All the pressure is on you, Benedict Cumberbatch; how long can all these people be fooled by your pasty charms?

Taken at the very broadest strokes, Ant-Man is the first Iron Man movie repackaged. New and potentially dangerous technology invented by a wise benevolent scientist with a bit of an attitude is turned in to a weapon for evil by his unscrupulous bald business partner and action comedy ensues. Where Ant-Man veers off the path is by splitting their Tony Stark into two parts: Michael Douglas plays the genius scientist Hank Pym, an elderly version of the Stark superego, and Paul Rudd is the hunky wisecracker safecracker Scott Lang, Tony’s id but with better hair and tighter clothes. There’s nothing groundbreaking, clever, or even particularly surprising to be found in the plot but it all works well enough and Rudd’s charm is capable of saving scenes that otherwise would be pretty insufferable. (For further reference, see most of This is 40.)

The supporting cast is what saves this movie from some rather poorly thought out subplots. Lang is supposed to be doing all of this dangerous stuff to stay out of jail and reconnect with his young daughter and those interactions and the ones with the cops determined to put him back in jail are the kind of things that most movies turn in to the worst kind of crap but Ant-Man fills that part of the movie with Judy Greer, Bobby Cannavale, and Wood Harris… and I can’t be mad at having to watch those actors. Similarly the movie revolves around a heist and includes Lang’s old criminal buddies whoa re there to provide comic relief and while David Dastmalchian doing “generic foreigner” is rather grating, Tip Harris is quite good as the getaway driver and Michael Pena steals every scene he’s in as Lang’s closest criminal confidant. Seriously, forget the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe— I would much rather watch Cannavale, Harris, Dastmalchain, Harris, and Pena play cops and robbers than see whatever part Rudd has to play in Civil War.

That’s the tragedy of the Marvel movie set up though, isn’t it? The things I liked about Ant-Man were in the fringes and not so much in the Ant-Man parts, which were fine, but kind of whatever and because of the way these movies are scheduled I know there’s not even an opening for a sequel until the winter of 2019. I suppose if this were some revelatory breakout hit they might be able to get it in a little sooner but it wasn’t and they won’t and so I’m more or less stuck waiting more than four years and two installments of Avengers to get back to the good stuff here. These are good problems for Marvel to have, too much good stuff in their movies to get back to in a reasonable amount of time, but it puts a weird kind of pressure on the other films. If there are parts of Inhumans or Captain Marvel that are particularly bad I’ll be sitting there thinking “this is where we could have gotten more Ant-Man, but no” and that’s not entirely fair. And I’ll definitely be thinking it while watching Cumberbatch screw up Stephen Strange who should absolutely not have a British accent.

Box Office Democracy: Minions

minions-4303690Minions has been taunting me for weeks. As part of the promotional campaign for this movie Universal decided to cover the old Cinerama dome on Sunset Boulevard with inflatable versions of the films stars reaching for a giant banana. It’s a cute enough gimmick I suppose but I go to the gym in a building directly behind the dome so for about an hour a week three times a week the view from my gym has been dominated by massive inflatable Minion asses. If the exercise bikes I prefer somehow became untethered I would pedal myself directly in to the backside of a five story Minion.

After seeing the film I think I got most of the experience just watching them endlessly reach for that banana, as that’s about as much story as the movie Minions actually bothers with.

The Minions, as characters, are empty vessels. Their personalities only extend one adjective deep before you get to the common Minion traits like hungry or covetous. In a way this has led to the success of the characters as they are whatever the viewer imagines them to be (this is why they’re so perplexingly meme-able) but there’s no actual character underneath. Each scene is driven either by external factors or an often-nonsensical want. Sometimes Bob is really emotionally invested in the safety of his teddy bear but when that isn’t driving him through a scene it’s never even pictured. I feel like I’m asking too much of a silly little kids move that is such a transparent cash grab but when the characters don’t resonate the actions have no stakes and I just can’t laugh at these jokes past the first fifteen minutes. Something has to make you care about the story and it never happens.

The humor of Minions is not for me but I don’t think it wants to be. This is slapstick humor for a generation who don’t have Saturday morning cartoons to watch. People fall over, people het hit with stuff, people slip and fall, all the hits really. There’s nothing wrong with this per se; it’s been the foundation of comedy for all of recorded history but there’s precious little new ground to break and I’m not sure I think Minions is even trying.

There’s no effort apparent throughout Minions but honestly, why would there be? This is a franchise born from another successful franchise, it’s sold countless t-shirts and toys and even has a theme park ride, and everything from here on out is found money for Universal. It’s a monster that feeds on its own popularity and nothing we can say or do will stop it. Or it’s just a silly kids movie and I should really just relax.

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